Two things that can kill the “Occupy” movement

October 19, 2011

Nothing lasts forever, and protest movements against the power structure are particularly hard to sustain. Movements of any substance are incredibly difficult to even begin, at least at a level that will have any important impact. If such a movement does gather the critical mass and solidarity to make actual ripples in the mainstream media, then challenges are quickly mounted, both by the power structure and of course the media itself. The opposition to “Occupy Wall Street” is emerging in full force. The “Occupy” movement is huge, and right now it’s only getting bigger. But it’s unclear to me whether it could really lead to systemic change, or whether it might only be “the thing that leads to the thing” [...]

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Down Wit’ O.P.P. (Other Peoples’ Posts)

September 2, 2011
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Or, as I might say if I subtitled posts: “How the Tea Party is Like an Awesome but Confused – or Possibly Brain-Injured – Running Back.” My intent for this site is to have mainly original commentary, written by me alone, and when I link to other articles, I hope to be able to enhance it with additional personal insight or synthesis. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with being, to some extent, an aggregator of interesting and important content; it’s just not what I want to do, as enough people are doing it well already. I put a lot of thought into writing and editing of my posts, which is why there are so few of them, and [...]

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Ron Paul, Blowback, and Open Discussion of U.S. Foreign Policy

August 23, 2011
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Ron Paul is an old coot with outmoded ideas about abortions, guns, and probably some other stuff. He reads Ayn Rand and there is at least some past evidence he might be a racist. He speaks of the “Free Market” as if it’s an actual thing (Ha!). And as a few of my Facebook friends pointed out, he’s got two first names, which is another pretty big strike against him. But he is strongly anti-war, and I believe that issue supersedes the other ones. The biggest contributor to world unrest is U.S. interference abroad. It’s always cast as promoting Democracy, which if you’re paying attention at all, you know is complete bullshit. Whenever the U.S. becomes involved in a foreign [...]

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Ten Minutes of Your Time

August 9, 2011
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A lot of my conversations, if they turn toward politics, result in me trying to outline for someone the ways in which our media culture indoctrinates us and prevents us from getting accurate information. If they become convinced I am right — and they usually do, because they probably know it deep down to begin with — their response, inevitably is: But how do we fix it? Obviously, it’s a deeply rooted problem, and I don’t like to seem flippant, but the reality is that we have to spend a little time educating ourselves, and then educating each other. I responded to one such query yesterday with a link to an article, What Can We Do About the Great American [...]

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Obama’s Crimes of Non-passion

August 8, 2011
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While Drew Westen’s recent opinion piece published by the New York Times – What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – makes some good points, I found it to be naive overall. My decision to post about this today is not to be critical of Dr. Westen; he does in fact seem to have a good grasp on what’s wrong with our country from a constituent’s point of view, as well as an awareness of the decaying cultural underpinnings which have allowed our problems to perpetuate. Rather, I wanted to highlight his piece because it’s a perfect example of the deep denial in which the Left has taken to cloaking itself lately. The first three of four pages are spent making some [...]

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Oops!…We Did it Again

July 21, 2011
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Yes. We. Did. But what exactly did we do? We elected another “leader” who has put the best interests of the American people, and the economic and ecological future of the world, at the bottom of his priority list. Glenn Greenwald has an Op-Ed piece in The Guardian today which is worth reading. He offers some specifics about how Obama’s actions since taking office amount to a betrayal of the American voters. But more broadly and importantly, he provides surgical insight into the underlying reasons our system of politics, combined with a corporate-supported media and campaign finance mayhem, is failing us so miserably. He doesn’t mention those last two things specifically, but they are ever-present specters haunting the foundation of [...]

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Thinking Outside the Box: Could Michele Bachmann Save the World?

July 19, 2011
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Michele Bachmann is a bigot and a hypocrite. She’s culturally inept and politically unsophisticated: Her thinking on many social issues (abortion and gay marriage, for starters) fall well outside the mainstream of Western Civilization, and she is demonstrably lacking in a fundamental understanding of the legal and historical framework underpinning the nation she was somehow elected to serve. She’s what I like to call a dumbass, or, in other parlance, a Republican. But it may well be that Bachmann, or some Republican like her, holds the key to the survival of our existence as we know it. Or, at least somewhat as we know it, because it’s pretty clear to anyone watching closely that “as we know it” is careening [...]

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