are not merely empowered to separate us from discerning fact and fiction. They separate us from debate; civic discourse; meaningful conflict; From coalition-building; compromise; concession. They separate us from each other.
Communities seem quaint
Common ground, a shifting place
Quicksand beneath one’s feet
We are all swamp things now
The eyes ogle, waiting for us to falter — for sport
Our shelf lives grow ever shorter
While billionaires transfuse the blood of the young
The youth don’t want my mid-life crisis
It bores them so
My tone grates on America’s next greats
Ideologies wage the fifth world war out on the vast placeless social media savannah
Faux fantastical beasts feast upon felled paper tigers
One can only hope the most outsized egos
Are the biggest dinosaurs
When the meteor comes
Without the doing of some thing brand inappropriate
Something unmonetizable
Unclickable
Untraceable
Untradeable
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If i don't rend the cloth of this Culture Fit soon
i will die
Like the coral
Like two-thirds of the wild
Like the humans on the edge of a rising shoreline
In a ceaseless world
With iceless poles
And icy proles
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As the planet heats,
Civilization chills;
Swallowing our red or our blue pills;
Interned into camps of grievers and shills
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Grieve i do and for the West
Our president the Bigly Best!
We'll come and go at his behest
Put down your Freedom of Info Requests
Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
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Joe Walsh got his balls out, and his musket too
The Lefties dream of Saskatoon
We're all gonna get that Change real soon
You'll see when fascism hits High Noon
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We'll finish tearing ourselves apart
In the streets and in the dark
Can no longer recreate in this park
Leslie Knope didn't fit the part
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She had the mighty audacity
To take purview over Benghazi
Once Bush and Blair left Qaddafi
Those GOP goons would never get off me
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My God, all the emails
The Chaffetz' anemic security details
At least we're swaddled by all this retail
Black Friday's never been so beyond the pale
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Pale as a ghost
White as a sheet
Our New Balance host
Circle jerks its meat
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Of all the PUAs and all the Teas
Even the most mundane of these
See the female as a tease
Hang the browns up in the trees
We're all strange fruit upon our knees
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Ain't no more reason to appease
Already done killed off all them bees
Turnt up the thermostat a few degrees
TVs blaring back our postmodern sleaze
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Found ourselves a favorite scapegoat
And a good long length of real strong rope
The corruption will be all excised
By the 'tubes chock full of Russian spies
This revolution will be televised
As America just dies and dies
The creator of the also excellent Century of the Self film series released his latest film in October, 2016. Dubbed HyperNormalisation, it offers both a history lesson of the complicated relationship between the West, the Middle East, and Russia, as well as an unflinching look at the roles played by technology, surveillance, and the media on our modern condition of general confusion, destabilization, and surrealism.
Russian aggression is mercurial — it’s getting harder to tell anymore who is being paid to push pro-Russian messages, and who has just been sadly taken in by them. For all this braggadocio (braggadocious, even!) about “building a wall” to keep supposed Mexican rapists out (although net migration has been falling with our southern neighbor for some time and is now net negative), no matter what the outcome of next Tuesday’s election, the “borders” around the internet will remain difficult — if not impossible — to police for the foreseeable future.
This all makes our breathless, behind-closed-doors hand-wringing over Soviet Communist influence over the population in the 1960s seem like child’s play. No need to train up a double agent over a lifetime and infiltrate the corridors of state power anymore — just fire up Twitter (or Medium).
The Cold War is thawing
It thus probably shouldn’t be as shocking as it has been to find the pro-Russian lovefest coming just as hard from the far-left as it has from the far-right. It stems from a good place (for the most part): a heartfelt desire for peace and the youthful misunderstanding of how difficult (read: impossible) that has been to achieve throughout history. Still, we always want to believe we’ve cracked the nut — that Mutually Assured Destruction now keeps us safe from all the power-hungry demons of the world.
Unfortunately, the Cold War is thawing. With the Russian economy reportedly in dire straits thanks to fragile over-reliance on oil and gas production combined with the precipitous drop in oil prices over the past 18 months, Putin is in a state. A state of keeping the angry ailing Russian classes distracted by the drums of war, while aiming to keep the pampered, self-absorbed American classes distracted from the drums of war. So far to great success — at least on the latter front. It’s hard to speak to the former, although all the paid trollsdo seem mighty angry.
Since we can barely pull our heads out of our navels in the U.S. to remember there’s a whole other world outside of our Big Orange Terror Bubble (which is by turns understandable and deeply concerning), I wanted to record here a timeline of Russian aggression events in the lead-up to where we are today (re-purposed from this post with some additional backstory on the Green Party candidate’s Jill Stein involvement with Putin):
2008 — Putin invades Georgia, an event regarded as the first European war of the 21st century
Perhaps history will one day show that the deepest destruction wrought by globalization was not the disintegration of America’s manufacturing sector, nor its incentivization of capital flight, but its damage to the last pillars of an aging democratic architecture slowly corroded by neoliberal economic policies in fashion since the Reagan years.
Regardless of whether or not you agree that slashing spending, fiscal austerity, balanced budgets, and a low federal deficit are good ideas, the fact remains that the Republican Party does not generally live up to its aims of expense reduction and small government.
As hard as it is to believe, there are still some people who think that Reagan cut the size of government, although Reagan was a big spender and laid the groundwork for the immense national debt we live with today.
Then there was Ol’ Dubya with his two disgraceful wars, TARP bailout, auto bailouts, fiscal stimulus, and tax cuts. Not to mention yanking the election out from under Al Gore’s popular win via a leg up from Florida governor brother Jeb.
Turns out, not even gridlock is a decent strategy for preventing escalating expenditures, under the theory that not getting anything done would prevent the government from growing. Apparently not:
Total gridlock is the worst outcome, where impact to the budget is concerned. Total Democratic control of the White House and Congress is the most fiscally responsible since the presidency of Richard Nixon. So the idea of Republican leanness is a fallacy whether you believe that’s a worthy goal or not — and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest the tide is turning toward a wider appreciation of John Maynard Keynes’ approach to sensible fiscal spending when there is unemployment (puts idle resources to work and reduces government welfare expense; gives people a sense of purpose; builds community), if it is accomplished by debt financing (i.e., issuing Treasury Bonds — allowing individuals, pension funds, and so on to invest in the United States as sort of national asset class) and is used to build goods and structures that benefit the public at large: infrastructure, research and development, public resources, public health services, job training, paid volunteer work, parks and public spaces, etc.
Keynesian and Classical theory have oft been at odds, but are better understood now as complements: in a healthy, roaring economy, government should take its boots off the throttle and avoid tipping over into the kind of speculatory gamesmanship that got us into hot water in 2007-8. But in a depression or recession, or when the economy is recovering sluggishly, it should be a goto solution to start thinking about where to apply government funds (i.e. our money!) to things that need doing anyway; services that invest in our economy’s greatest resource: its citizens; programs that position us for the future by having the luxury to think ahead boldly.
Although the economy has recovered nicely for some — especially those in higher tax brackets — it has clearly left a number of Americans behind. It’s only added to a trend that had already started in the 70s, when inequality began widening in the U.S. The populist white nationalist ire unleashed in the 2016 presidential election was something perhaps few saw coming, even though in hindsight the far right has been whipping their base into a frenzy for years — arguably since Reagan, if not with Nixon. That means there’s still a healthy place for government spending, especially in areas we already know we’re in sore need of a boost: roads and bridges, a public health care option, basic research, advanced manufacturing, the pivot to a renewable energy economy, to name a few. Luckily, that’s what Hillary Clinton wants to do:
Use the revenue from closing corporate loopholes and cracking down on tax inversions to invest in small business, long-term growth, R&D, advanced manufacturing, and job training
Manufacturing Renaissance Tax Credit: to help revitalize communities hit hardest by the collapse of manufacturing
Create an American Parks Trust Fund to invest in the country’s natural preserves
Restore and refresh more than 3000 city parks within 10 years
Create a new Water Innovation Lab and a Western Water Partnership to help manage our water challenges over the coming decades
Become the world’s clean energy superpower: install more than half a billion solar panels by the end of term 1; generate enough renewable energy to power every home in American within 10 years; create a grant and award-based Clean Energy Challenge with states, cities, and rural communities; Solar X-Prize; tax incentives for renewables; foster energy innovation
Help build the new tech economy on Main Street: create a lifelong learning system more geared towards 21st-century jobs; invest in STEM education; invest in science and tech R&D; help ensure benefits are flexible and travel with workers, not their employers; commit to 100% of households with broadband access by 2020; deploying the 5G wireless network; building free wi-fi infrastructure in punlic places and transport hubs; launch digital community projects to improve connectivity more affordably
Public health initiatives: substance abuse treatment and prevention; expand mental health services; services for autism spectrum disorder; reduction of co-pays and deductibles; reduce the cost of prescription drugs; double funding for community health centers
Expand the role of national service, both paid and volunteer, with expansions of programs like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, and the creation of a National Service Reserve for millions of Americans to contribute volunteer time to local challenges in their own communities
#ImWithHer by the way: Her plan plans to finance itself by making wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share in taxes, and would not appreciably add to the deficit beyond any existing projections from the OMB;but here’s the best explainer I have found about why we should seriously loosen our collars over the national debt. There is no reason to pay it down; and indeed, it would be dangerous and deleterious to even try to, because we’d be starving the economy of the circulation it needs to keep operating and growing:💰money💰.
I still see a lot of denialism on this point about the DNC email hacks from the far-left (or the alt-left, depending on your favored terminology), which is a bit devastating to see as it essentially parrots the pro-Russian ideology of the far-right (both the alt-right and the neo-libertarian flavors). Green Party candidate Jill Stein is an especially pernicious promoter of this myth that Vladimir Putin is a poor, innocent, peaceful world leader who is being bullied by NATO (when in fact, Russia has been the aggressor since its annexation of Crimea in 2014).
DNC email hacks forensic evidence
Two separate Russian-affiliated adversaries were behind the attacks, according to a post-mortem by cyber-security firm CrowdStrike when the news of the intrusion first broke in early June, 2016. This has since been confirmed by other independent security firms including Fidelis, Mandiant, SecureWorks, and ThreatConnect as well as corroborated by analysis from Ars Technica and Edward Snowden.
At this point the US intelligence community is confident enough to formally accuse Russia of involvement in the hacks, and are currently investigating other breaches of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois as well as in Florida — the key battleground state from the 2000 election that handed GWB an unfortunate victory. Elsewhere, there is ample evidence of Putin’s extensive disinformation campaign being waged online (including several experiences I have myself witnessed), which is the continuation of a long through line of wielding propaganda as a tool from the former head of the KGB.
A RussiaGate Bestiary: Principal actors and related extras in the 2016 election scandal
The Russian Mafia State: How the former USSR has become a sclerotic kleptocracy under the rule of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who vowed revenge on the West after his station in Dresden, East Germany was overrun by angry citizens during the month leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Be careful of our barnacled, crusty cynicism and the cavalier rabbit hole it could lead us down — away from the longest-running success story in human rights.
Democracy works only if political leaders put the common good ahead of personal interest. There is zero evidence Trump would even be equipped to deliver on this, should the interest in it ever be made to enter his mind.
Clinton restored the stature of American diplomacy around the world. Trump asked Russia to find her hacked emails and interfere with the US presidential election.
Mike Flynn leading chants of “lock her up!” from the RNC podium was a test for tolerance of persecution of political opponents. We don’t do that in this country. At least, not in modern times we haven’t.
Each new boundary pushed is a test for when we’ll snap, or when the base will have finally gone too far. We haven’t hit it yet. They’re snarling; out for blood.
Increase availability and provide tax credit for quality childcare
Getting paid sick leave laws on the books
Wage equality
Raising the minimum wage — “If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it.”
Lowering cost of community college to free
Asks companies to provide more job training, hire more veterans
Bi-partisan infrastructure plan to attract businesses / industries
Trade deals in Asia, Europe — “95 percent of the world’s customers live outside our borders, and we can’t close ourselves off from those opportunities.”
Precision Medicine Initiative — pursuing cures for cancer, diabetes; personalized health information
Free, open, and fast Internet
Colonizing space — “not just to visit, but to stay.”
Closing corporate tax loopholes brokered by lobbyists
