What Revenge Is

What is revenge ? The pursuit of self-gratification based on the desire to harm someone else. Note: it has nothing to do with self-protection. At its core, revenge is a motivation that is nearly indistinguishable from the motivation of a criminal act, expect it may be more deliberated and calculated. This is why cultures based on revenge are incredibly violent to live in.

Goodbye Court Justice

The ruling class and body politic has gotten a taste of the extra-judicial process, and they like it. We will see more of it until this rotten system collapses in its own corruption and violent ignorance.

Authoritarianism and Crime

Authoritarian societies are often quite safe and crime is almost non-existent. Of course, the criminal may be the personified day-to-day operation of the government. The reason being is that sociopaths are attracted to and promoted within the technocratic stations of government as a pre-requisite for keeping order.

When viewed this way, Saudi Arabia's low private crime rate is an waste product of oppression.

Raise Wages, Damnit

For those who keep saying that education is the answer to inequality.

According to a report earlier this month by Bloomberg News, 70 percent of all job gains in the past six months were in four sectors—restaurants and hotels, health care, retail trade, and temporary employment—where low wages prevail.(1)

It's a classic case of of bad math, looking at differences in education and assuming that if everyone is educated the same there will be no inequality(!) In fact  most jobs in the future U.S. economy will not require a higher education.

Ultimately, it has to come down to higher wages for working class jobs. Not pretending that an economy can be made up entirely of software engineers and project managers.

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1'US slowdown intensifies global economic crisis', WSWS

The Degeneration of the American Body Politic

Would Truman have gone around bragging about assassinating Hitler or Himmler ? Or based his re-election on it ?

The Sliming of Trayvon Martin

Truly our media is an unctous group of squirmy types in need of verbal squashing. They are busily conflating a guy walking down the street, minding his business, with the petty crimes of other black men which he had nothing to do with. Let's remind ourselves. Zimmerman is a sick fuck who started a fight with someone for no reason or cause. Someone who had never talked to him, harmed him, or caused him any trouble whatsoever. When he found out he was going to get his ass kicked, he shot him like any coward. In reality, it is Trayvon Martin who "stood his ground".

Schools Are Failing To Teach, and Other Nonsense

News flash, schools have mostly never taught anything that well, yet they are important precisely because they do many thing with mediocrity that would not get dealt with otherwise. Historically, most genuine learning comes from parents, friends, and the rest from self-study. And you can delve into the deep learning you crave by flipping on a computer and stepping away from the T.V. Or pick up a book. But don't ask schools to do things they have never done or act as a miracle cure for a society in regression.

Padilla and Torture

If you agree with torture for the guilty, or marginally guilty, then you have to agree with it for a few innocents as well. This isn't the movies, where you can play cheerleader as the cops rough up a guy who robbed a liquor store in the opening scene. In real life, suspects are suspects, and more than a few have nothing to do with whatever they are arrested for.

Blogging Anonymously

A good starting point for why I am and will remain anonymous. I don't do this for careerism or for google ad cents.

I have to say that the idea of being anonymous was not very familiar to me at the beginning, I didn't understand why would people do something or write something without putting their names on it, I thought it was only out of fear or security risks. The truth is, I am convinced now that it is more than this. Yes, there is a security aspect, but also it is a statement that you make when you write or act in anonymity, it is a statement to take away personal dynamics and concentrate on the idea that is being expressed. In this world, where your personal life is taken into account to "judge" your views, anonymity protects your ideas from being looked at from an angle that you didn't want: personally.(1)

p.s. The one caveat to blogging anonymously is there has to be certain lines of personal attack you cannot cross, because it's not a fair fight. Public figures are OK to scorn, and any of the bloated meritocracy, etc. Less public figures or private individuals should be given clearance.

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1'Talking Personal Blogspot'

Why Immigrate to the U.S.

Mexico is not that poor a country, actually far wealthier per capita than a BRIC giant like India. The U.S. in the best of times is not a pleasant place to be working class in, with a scarcity of subsidies for things like education and public transport, plus a brutally low minimum wage.
There is much less reason to immigrate to a country with chronically high unemployment, a weak safety net, and tepid growth. Most of the world is really still booming. It's not just Mexicans who are finding grass greener on their own side of the fence.

Enough With Being Anti-Wall Street as a Substitute of Left Analysis

Note that the criticisms of finance made by Pen could fit neatly into an anti-Wall Street polemic. I never liked the focus on Wall Street within Occupy, attacks on finance have traditionally been made more by the Right than the Left, and have to do with the dog whistle anti-semitism that long held sway in Europe.

The problem is capitalism and how it functions, not one aspect of capitalism. In fascism, it is the finance sector that is nationalized ('national socialism') so that ruling class factions in other sectors can hold more sway. In Nazi Germany this meant the BMW's, Mercedes' and Bayer's.

Don't Expect the Euro to Last

Pen's strong showing in the French election is just another reminder that there is very little appetite for integration within the general population of Europe. This means both integration between nations, and integration or acceptance between cultures that exist within each nation. Even the Left Front candidate Melenchon spent an inordinate amount of time bashing Anglo-Saxons.

Union Power

A retail sales job advertised on craigslist:

These positions are seasonal, hourly, minimum wage, union positions.

The Horrors of Maoism

Life expectancy under Mao increased from 39 years (yes, true) to around 66 years in the mid-seventies. China was more or less the poorest country in the world when Mao and the CCP took over, and the poverty one sees from his time in office is a reflection of the disaster that was inherited -- a country ridden with drugs, gangs, and widespread disease and ignorance.

 Since Deng's reforms, China's life expectancy has not matched the increases seen in the rest of the world. All this is information readily attainable from the UN website. As Chinese capitalism has grown richer, a large segment of its population has grown poorer. Sounds almost Marxian.

If there ever was a major Leftist leader in need of a second look, it is Mao.

Shameless Liberals

I see there is an 'Occupy Handbook' coming out mostly written by people who never got pepper sprayed, beaten, or molested by our Sacred Police. They were never at a single meeting or protest.

This is just shameless and corrupt profiteering.

The Evolutionary Process as Divine

Evolution has given the world both roaches and humans in abundance. Nature is brutal place and there is very little that is pleasant or particularly balanced about it.

The Barbarism of American Society

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Getting Rich to Do What You Love

I read that Sergey Brin might retire from Google so he can learn the blue guitar to a more accomplished degree.

It seems most rich people , or people, spend their entire lives making enough (or trying to make enough) so they can have enough security to do what they love.

It doesn't really work that way. You have to stay deep within any artistic endeavor without interruption to understand it and learn it. Why not just do what you love and then let the chips fall where they may ?

OAS Collapses

Unprecedented Latin American opposition to U.S. sanctions on Cuba left President Barack Obama isolated at a summit on Sunday and illustrated Washington's declining influence in a region being aggressively courted by China.(1)

Even a country like Colombia is seeing the writing on the wall. The "declining influence" of the U.S. has as much to do with the rise of the Brazil power as with China.

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1'Latin America rebels against Obama over Cuba' - Reuters

Music and Class

The good thing about music is that one can plainly hear the dominant role of the working classes when it comes to innovation and new creative directions. I suspect the working classes hold a similar role in other genres, but it is more obscured due to the fact the affect is less visceral and immediate.

Less Tenure = More Grade Inflation

The destruction of tenure can only mean more grade inflation, which is mostly going to benefit kids with influential and rich parents. It's the not the reason for movements to end tenure, which has to do with gashing wages and keeping professors even more on the political leash (though most of them are happy to be on it anyhow). But it's sort of a nice side benefit for rich parents who have kids that are obnoxious and not too bright.

Work More for Less -- Charter Schools

The basic premise of the charter school movement is to keep kids in school longer and make teachers work longer hours for less pay. When the U.S. economy is functioning in its normal dysfunctional way, there is a general shortage of math and science teachers. A factoid I read somewhere stated that 50% of new math teachers in 2008 California were on waiver, i.e. non-credentialed. This corresponds to what I saw on the ground.

The point being, the entire charter school movement is based on, and can only function, in a deeply depressed economy when there is a short-term surplus of core subjects teachers. Unless people believe that top teachers like to work for less money and longer hours. The entire charter school movement is going to fall apart spetacularly.

The Beginning of the End for China

If the Chinese government gives up state control of its banking system then it's over. The country will disembowled much like it was when the British forced it open and stuffed opium down its people's throat.

Being Poor in America

Is very expensive. This is an awful country to be poor in. Looking at monthly passes for public transport, the insurance and fees for every little thing, unaffordable public education. The omnipresent police looking to ticket you for any minor infraction.

The legal and cultural norms of the U.S. are based around the notion that it is a middle class nation. It isn't.

Nature as Perfection

In the subtext of many discussions about nature, there is a view of it as a reflection of perfection coming from a kind of evolutionary-based intelligent design. Therefore, we as humans should leave nature alone, because -- for instance -- the weak should be culled to maintain some sort of evolutionary prescribed balance. In this view, the evolutionary process is able to find a perfect balance for each species living in harmony with its environs.

This seems to be a political view, and one that is reactionary at heart. For humans since their beginning have altered nature, and generally in a way that has improved human life immeasurably. Nature unaltered renders a life that is short and brutish, to paraphrase.

Obama and the Supremes

What Obama did today was a flagrant attempt to undermine the independence of the judicial branch. The three branches of government are equal under the U.S. constitution, designed so by the framers to prevent the rise of a dictator or a Caesar.

The imperial presidency has coalesced under Obama in a way that is far more damaging than anything Bush attempted or sought.

Why Bin Laden Was Able to Live in Nice Houses For Ten Years

The answer isn't conspiratorial. It's that the U.S. was too busy torturing people to find evidence and do detective work. Torture is a singularly awful way to get information. It's entire purpose is either wanton revenge or to intimidate political opposition. And yes, more than a few of our detainees were completely innocent people picked because their names sounded like someone else, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.