Reality is?

Who wins, Who loses

Here's a clearly laid example of how corporatocracy is sucking the life blood out of our country and our society. They care for nothing but more money.  You know that money has to come from somewhere . That would be you.
These cartels have no patriotism or desire for survival of anyone but themselves.  The very thing explained in this short film is happening in far more than oil.  That giant sucking sound you hear is coming from Banksters and Corporations.

Imaginal Cells

It takes those imaginal cells to change things. While most are dreaming about the past, which was never as good as they think it was. Imaginal cells are leading the way to the future. New life out of the old.

Best Real Headline

Poll: Santorum comes from behind in Alabama three-way

Over The Edge And Hit Their Heads On The Rocks Below

Rick Santorum is comfortable mixing religion and politics.

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in an interview from Michigan on ABC's "This Week."

"The First Amendment means the free exercise of religion and that means bringing people and their faith into the public square."

Really Rickster, so the Muslims should be welcomed to bring their faith into the public square? I should be able to bring mine, which is neither of the others, into the public square?  Or is that reserved for only Christians?  Do you know what Sharia law is Ricky?

"Sharia, or Islamic law, influences the legal code in most Muslim countries. Sharia governs personal status law, a set of regulations that pertain to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody."

Yes Rick it is Religious law, doled out by religious experts. You are lobbying for a Christian version of Sharia law. You may be surprised to find that most of the country , even those with strong faith, do not believe in Dominionism or you and your Talibangelicals.

I've said this before and I'll repeat it here, the righties are going to out conservative themselves this year with radical right wing ideology and old hackneyed ideas.

Oil is going up again so you can be sure Pavlovs dogs are going to be hollering drill baby drill. They are completely unaware that supply and demand  no longer control our markets.  They seem to think the little more oil we have left in the US would make a price difference. 

...Brockwell says gasoline exports, on a four week average, are now running 600,000 barrels a day compared to 200,000 barrels per day a year ago. He says this is the equivalent of three of the largest refineries in the US exporting most of their gasoline production.

Demand is low:

 Feb 17 (Reuters) - U.S. crude oil demand plunged in January, dragged down by weak heating oil use, the American Petroleum Institute said on Friday. Demand for gasoline fell 0.2 percent to 8.398 million bpd in January, an nine-year low for the month.

And US oil production is higher than it has been in years.

 Yet the prices go up, up, up.

 It's not based on supply and demand. 
...Meiffren notes that Exxon-Mobil chief executive officer Rex Tillerson said Wall Street speculators are driving up the price of oil by 40 percent.

 As is nearly always the case now, Wall St. is robbing you blind. Don't expect the right to figure this out though. Most of them are too busy defending tax breaks for the plutocrats and their cohorts and insisting that they have so few regulations that they can do what ever they want. ..Oh and replying with the Pavlovian drill bayb drill.

We need new free/renewable  energy NOW. Don't expect the right to have any ideas besides natural gas(not renewable or free) ,or we need more oil until we get to that point.  I've been hearing that same  "until"  line for well over a decade now. When are we going to stand up and do it!? The technology and brains are there, we only need a national will to do so. There are a multitude of good reasons to do it, not the least national security.  Theres also independence from power companies and self sustainability(something the right always pontificates on).
Of course when our plutocrats spend big money delaying progress so they can squeeze every ounce of profit out of oil, that could a be long time and many hardships more.

I could write reams on so many things going on right now but I just wanted to point out how tired, hackneyed and left behind the right wing knee jerk reactionaries have become.   It rarely seems even worth pointing out anymore.  They have become totally irrelevant. They are down to cheerleading, bombast and longing for yesterday.
Maybe someday they will figure out who is really running things and who is the real authoritarian power they should be fighting. That would be great  cuz then we could band together and get our country back from the plutocrats. Unfortunately watching the worship of them as the beacons of capitalism makes me think I shouldn't be holding my breath.
The future happens and they cant stop it forever. They are going to have a hard time letting go of the old paradigm. It's going to be ugly for them for a while and they will lash out even more.
For those of us anxious for a brighter future instead of longing for the past its going to be an exciting time. Welcome to the future!

Imagine And Create

Terence McKenna

Quotes Of The Year

2012 is going to be a big year all over the world. But before we move on lets look back on 2011

Memorable Quotes

Not meant to be a factual statement." - Jon Kyl's April press release responding to questions about his claim on the Senate floor that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood's activities are abortion

"I put an asterisk on my support... One position that I’m concerned about shifting the cost burden to senior citizens. Seniors are saying, look, I’m not in a positon to be able to handle that. I also share that real fear, that’s why I put that asterisk out there." -- Michele Bachmann on her vote for the Ryan Medicare Budget.

"So let me say on the record, any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood." - Newt Gingrich flip-flopping on Ryan Budget

"Corporations are people, my friend." Mitt Romney at the Iowa State Fair

"Oops." - Rick Perry not able to remember the third cabinet department he would eliminate at a GOP debate

"And when they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I'm going to say, you know, I don't know. Do you know?" - Herman Cain

"Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil we don’t have to buy from a foreign source." - Rick Perry

Happy Thanksgiving

Here's something to listen to if you get some extra time over the holiday.

It's A Fearmongering Clown Circus!

Remember how proud these very same people were when the Teaparty was disrupting townhalls by shouting down anyone who disagreed with them? Remember what great patriots they were for trying to take their country back?  Well suddenly they are now victims of anti freedom loving people.

This may cause them to think twice about pushing us off the streets and inside.

I've got to tell you I rarely watch the foxnewsdrama videos. To much drama and not enough news for me. However, I watched this one to see what his defense could be. You can tell its been awhile since I watched foxnewsdrama because what they were going to say should have been clear as day. its the same as always, fear mongering.
The difference is this time it was hilarious. The fear mongering is so blatant. First Sean was counting on his fingers all the evil people foxnewsdrama has found at #Occupy. Then later counting on his fingers all the terrible crimes and moral turpitude that had taken place. Not a word about their complaints or issues except to say they just cant figure out what they are. Not a word about the teachers and the councilpeople and the elderly and the war veterans and others who take part. Its only about the socialist commie pinkos raping people on the way to their mission to destroy america.
Alert Rachel Maddow: All of foxnewsdrama is an art project.

Why The Debate Is Over

I quit taking the right seriously along time ago. I finally became totally disinterested in what they had to say around a year ago. Being the kind of person I am the latter was very tough to do. I'm a seeker. I crave new and interesting ideas and thoughts. Things that can be integrated, in part or in whole, to a bigger understanding of the reality that surrounds me day to day.

Unfortunately what passes for conservative thought these days offers me nothing.

I have been interested in and following politics and our social organization from a young age. I have listened to conservative thought for 40 years now. The only thing that changes is that it gets more and more extreme all the time. I'm not talking about the political right, I’m talking about the rank and file populous right. The politicians on both sides,to one extent or another, are there for money not to make society function. The rank and file are the people that count.

Those that were on the rightwing fringe back when I first started following current affairs closely are now the thinking of the so called conservative mainstream. The thinking never changes, regardless of circumstances. It just gets more extreme. There's nothing new or inspiring or adaptive. As a matter of fact the culture of fear and suspicion that surrounds the right is far from inspiring, its damaging. I want nothing to do with that.  I have no room for argument when it comes to things like that.

Regardless of the issue there is no point in debating the rightwing kneejerk reactionary.

Here's a simple analogy. They will tell you the sky is green. You will observe and study it and after a time decide that while it may be possible for the sky to be green the vast majority of the time it is blue or white or gray. Still, no matter what you say they will continue to push the point that the sky is green. They will get a study from the Hoover Institute that was published in the Washington Post that proves fer sher ,fer sher that the sky really is green. Then they think they win. They aren't interested in growing in understanding. They just came for the brawl. Its pointless.

While it's all basically irrelevant to me, occasionally they come up with something that just sets new markers, if you know what I mean.

That came this week with the whole “Obama says Americans are lazy” bit. The out of context part of that is its own issue and not really notable. It happens all the time.

My amazement is the fact that these people would dare look someone in the eye and condemn them for calling Americans lazy. Pardon me but , Holy Shit! These are the very same people who have been filling my eyes and ears on a daily basis that the problem with America is all the lazy bums who wont work and blah de da de da de da. It's not a thread in their beliefs it is, at the core, a part of the very essence of their message! On a daily basis for 40 years now I have heard ad nausem about all the lazy bums who wouldn't pull their bootstraps ruining America. Now they find it insulting if someone else is even imagined to say the same thing!!?

The cognitive dissonance has reached a new high. The nerve of them. Bite me.

Competition can be a good thing. Unfortunately it has been turned into something very negative.

The mantra is “destroy” the competition. Why would you want to do something like that? I work in a highly competitive industry. Its competitive both industry wise and on an individual basis. I know me some competition. My idea of competition however is “I'm going to make you better”. Then when you get really good you are going to make me better. Why would I want to destroy something that makes me better?

That is not the way the vast majority of people are taught to perceive it anymore.

This concept has passed on to our political picture. The mantra now is to destroy the competition. I have no way to have a political dialogue with people who's intent coming in is to destroy me. There is nothing there that allows me to grow or get better. As a matter of fact, it seems to me a sane person would avoid something that had a harmful effect or intent. This kind of competition is a war, that isn't growth for both of us as proper competition should be. Why is everything a war now? It's extremism writ large. Or I just live in some alternate universe? I have no respect or time for it. This kind of thing holds true for many things in our society today. From individualism to capitalism to religion/spirituality and more. It's been stripped of all its beauty and only the ugliness remains.

For the vast majority of people this is no longer the land of opportunity, the place where hard work counts. Workers are a liability not an asset. What is necessary to get ahead in 2011 is far different than it was in 1953. And it goes way beyond education. To pretend it is still 1953 is wasting my time. This paradigm(age) is dead. It's a stinking rotting corpse. Let it die and build a new one.
Here's what I would like to talk about: It's a new day.
What kind of world would you like to create?
I want one that includes us all.

It's a Fox And Friends World

Congressman Joe Walsh(no not the musician, the deadbeat dad) shows just how far our society has sunk. In this video clip Walsh sounds like some wingnut talkshow caller and not an aware, informed person representing the people.

First of all does he expect us to be unaware of the fact that the corporations and banksters control our government?
Second of all does he expect us to believe that our government took down the economies of most of europe?
No that was international banksters that did that.
Did Joe Walsh notice that right before the world economies fell off a cliff that the international banksters all over the very same places were crashing. It would tend to make the two seem related somehow wouldn't it?
He and the right wing reactionaries just look completely unaware of the reality that surrounds them to me. Just say government is the problem with everything. That should be deep enough.
The story of what happened is not a secret yet some seem to want to deny reality. Barney Franks tanked the Greek economy or something. The film "Inside Job" is worth viewing if you STILL don't know what happened. Look up what they say and I think you will find oodles of confirmation.

The government did not force the banks or rating agencies to commit fraud, and the government did not make them suck up huge profits from those fraudulent sub prime loans. As a matter of fact, what they did with their freedom to invest should be all the proof that is needed for more regulation not less.  Nope the free market believers think that the less rules the better. Many of them apparently think none would be ideal.
I wonder if there were no rules who would win? Hmmmmmm , I'm thinking it would be the biggest and ones with the most power(money) in society.  A  kind of an aristocratic corporatocracy. Nope, I'm not for that.

OWS

Matt Taibbi starts this piece with this: I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

I had no such problem. As a matter of fact, as anyone who knows me will tell you,  I have been screaming most of this from the rooftops for many years now. Often times to the detriment of my personal and professional life.  When I saw that there were millions of others popping up all around the country  it gave me one of the best feelings I ever experienced.  
While Matt may not have understood at the beginning he gets it now and wrote an excellent piece that you can read in its entirety here.  Here's the gist of the matter:


This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left. The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me....trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes.
..modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money.

..We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something.
...People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes.  

Its not 1953 anymore and this isn't the land of opportunity where hard work always pays off. It's now luck and cronyism that are the linchpins to success.Why is George Clooney, just as an example, fabulously rich and people that work just as hard and as many hours are not? Why is it that CEOs are worth 2 to 4 hundred times the pay of the median worker in his company? And that ratio has been rising for 30 years with no sign of abatement. No ,you cant have all there is, there's others here too, and many of us are sick of a system that depletes our national resources and makes us debt slaves to our corporate masters just to survive.
Many probably have a far different perspective on the reality of the world in which we live. Fine you go on and have it. I've watched this all my life and no wingnut rationality is going to move me to drop what I see to be real in my own experience. Thats what many on the right that want to continue to debate this dont seem to get. My days of debting the right are done. They don't express the reality of the dream of the world I seek or have found in my everyday life.

Solyndra

Every once in a while I must venture into wingnut world just to keep a grip on the world at large. It's a scary enterprise which I rarely have the stomach for anymore.
It seems one of the latest rages on the right is the Solyndra debacle.  I must admit that I have only some knowledge of the story but I think I have enough to make a few points. First  is it a shady deal. I don't know but I'll say should it be its something that shouldn't be happening. It surely went wrong and turned out to be a bad investment.  I have no issue with that point.  What I have an issue with is the undertone that says this is a repudiation of alternative energy and pushing it as a society through our government.
There is a long, probably boring, argument that I could make in favor of the government assisting in advancing society at a rate that exceeds corporate confidence.  That businesses often fail and that is a slight on private enterprise as much as it is the government. I would rather make another point though.

I think many people aren't aware that giant corporations are fined for government fraud all the time and STILL have government contracts. You'd think intentionally cheating the government out of its money would be a bad thing but most say nothing.  Nope but Solyndra is worth weeks of coverage.
Actual, confirmed corporate fraud is happening on a regular basis. Even just with the ones who are getting caught.  Here is the latest one.

Oracle will pay the General Services Administration (GSA) more than $199.5 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the vendor of overcharging the federal government for software and services......Paul Frascella filed suit against the company in 2007 claiming that Oracle was not providing the government discounts that were as low as some other customers were receiving, even though the company said it was. "Because of these allegedly fraudulent dealings, the United States alleges that it accepted lower discounts and ultimately paid far more than it should have for Oracle products," according to the DOJ. 



Thats right they were suppose to give their big customer, the government, best price. But hey, its the government. You know how it goes. Everybody is for cutting government spending as long as it isn't theirs.
Yes Solyndra as a company was a mistake and a failure. To use Solyndra as any kind of club against free/alternative energy is making it obvious that you have no interest in changing the status quo.
Don't think the rest of the world is going to wait for us to catch up.
What is so objectionable about a big push to start making individuals self sustainable? That is the goal.  Here's an argument that may have universal appeal.
Our enemies can't take down the power grid. If each home is equipped with their own free/alternative energy system it would be impossible to disable the country at anything near the rate it could be done now.
Unfortunately bubba seems to think it impossible to push forward and all that modern technology is jus dreamin',apparently content and anxious for his 5 dollar gas. "Hey you socialist pinko you're destroying my freedom for 5 dollar gas, I want my damn five dollar gas, shut up!"

Like I said, it's stomach churning.

Oops

A little footage that Fox Newsdrama decided not to air. Damned liberal media!