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Commentary

1-27-14

Gordon's Age 75 Rant

(at what point is it OK to vent some spleen?)

As this thing winds down, the notion that we mellow out as we age becomes questionable. Somehow the more civil high road sounds a bit passive. Going out kicking and screaming may be what fate decrees. Satisfactory verbal crystalization of recurring unsolved themes or quandaries residing in the attic for years and decades likely provides comfort in the approach to life's end.

The big pisser in the big picture is that we have been taken for a ride by prior and contemporary humans.  The legacy of this historical trail, now generally considered culture, essentially written in stone, gives us human-created concepts that the mainstream takes as empirical, objective reality, such as God, Love, Money, Authority, and Goodness (the pretentious ability to declare good in music, art, food, taste, life, just as if our declarations were objective rather than subjective reality).

We lack the guts to face how irrational our sacred cows are, and how much they affect our lives as cultural institutions, so we cling desperately, defensively to them as we busy ourselves in distractions such as mainstream news worry-mongering; am I being "given" true love or just that 80% stuff; am I sufficiently impressing my peers with how devout my worship is; etc, as we pretend to own the proper tools for rational analysis while the fundamentals of intellectual integrity remain unaddressed as pride and insecurity-fear decree. We subconsciously absorb authoritarian influence and institutional status quo inertia to become folded into the crease of common lock-step social convention conformity. This renders hollow, energy expenditure on anything that does not introspectively address our inability to honor our individual minds as sacred, sovereign, wholly-owned private entities free of external authority and capable of independent, original, audacious analysis, synthesis, and hypothesizing based simply on personal observation and experience.

Adoption of existing sectarian institutions as your own requires no mental effort. To abstain from thinking (eclectically choosing or creating alternatives) is simply mindless.

1-28-14

2-10-14

Of the big five sacred cows mentioned above, the human-created concepts that the mainstream takes as bedrock real, the drum-beat execution of the Money and Authority creations are the stalwarts that provide the illusion that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government exist as a reflection of the will of the electorate in the USA. This democracy charade continues as the Financial Oligarchy - Global Fear and War Machine pull their strings relatively invisibly. We can exercsise our freedom to choose a jingoist hegemony under the name of either Democrat or Republican. What greater choice could anyone want? Right? Which millionaire lawyer should we send to Washington this time?

4-19-14

Can an obedience oriented education system be replaced by one that inspires original initiative?

4-19-14

While the threat and practice of violence/killing remains the tool of choice used to authenticate authority by regimes such as USA, Britain, Israel, N.Korea, Zimbabwe, can we find a way to make them moot, cure the authoritarian hegemony-jingo disease, and find a way to actual human civility and democracy?

ON A DARKER NOTE . . . .

4-22-14

Are you open to the moment?

Did age 4 achievement expectations usurp childish liberties, obligate behavioral conventions too early, and pygmalion you into a parent-pride/gratification machine?

ON A LIGHTER NOTE . . . .

6-1-14

BACK TO THE DEMONS . . . .

7-4-14

The concepts and practice of dogma and indoctrination are based in authoritarian bossiness and intimidation. _________________________________________________________________

If you find comfort and needed structure in having others provide rules for you, then

religion, sports, and the military are places you may like to hold sacred.

There is a universally held yet unspoken phenomenon regarding the presumption of a democratic process in the consequence of prayer. We are sometimes asked to participate in a coordinated effort using the power of prayer. The greater the participation in the number of prayers for a certain outcome, the greater the likelihood the desired outcome will occur. A prayer is like a vote. For this to work, the popularity or universality of a prayer effort is what determines the outcome; it inadvertently overrides and rules over the will of God. God's judgement and basis for good and right is usurped externally by the will of the people who pray. i.e., If the prayer central switchboard receives just 3 more prayers in favor, then a mandate will decree favorable intervention by God. Is this how it works?

7-25-14

Authority is just a concept invented and practiced by bully types. As long as the subjects remain fearful and/or oblivious to the game, it remains durable.

12-13-14

AN AMERICAN PRAYER - A WISH FOR THE NEW YEAR

Let us reconfigure our national identity and work to atone for our war-machine jingoism and clear the stench from our noses that results from our historical ill doings in Afganistan, Iraq, Cuba, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, AND for ignoring the plight of Palestinians in their diaspora condition at the hands of Israelis.

12-31-14

1-1-15

We are in that awkward pre coming-out period where the charade of democracy continues while everyone just outside the mainstream perimeter is clear on the current reality of plutocratic oligarchy that has been gaining authority since the November 22, 1963 coup d' etat following the January 17, 1961 Eisenhower warning.

Now only the gullible-naive cling to the traditional Walt Disney - Easter Bunny American Democracy model we all once owned, that cherished state of dreams always elusive that is roundly pummelled by forces now out of the gate and running free.

1-14-15

We live in a land where respect and trust have been automatically granted for character qualities present in those who appear to possess or manifest authority, wealth, and influence. So it is understanable that our country's government would evolve to what it is today which can be described as what Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism, and Wikipedia describes as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics. In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through the distractions of excess consumerism and sensationalism.

3-15-15

a lawyer once said:

It grieves me to say it but the freer you are of legal structure in your life, the freer your life is.

3-21-15

It could be said that the basic or fundamental elements we encounter in life are Love, God, Money and Death.

LOVE

Do you promise to love, honor, and cherish till death do us part?

Is love given as a commodity, a matter of choice, like flipping a switch on, or are love feelings elicited by others? Only half of all marriages end in death. Do we really know what we are promising? Can we really deliver it as an act of will?

GOD

Are we still clinging to belief in a mystical supernatural power (superstition) that allows us to defeat death with afterlife?

MONEY

In September 2008 Treasury Secretary Paulson begged congress for $700 billion of public funds to use to bail out troubled banks operating outside the law. At the same time, the Federal Reserve secretly committed several trillion dollars to domestic and foreign banks for the same purpose without any government approval. So how does this money thing work?

DEATH

Metal coffins, embalming and preservation of our dead thwarts reason and a natural process of microbial action which enables return to the earth of no longer functioning bodies. Do our preservation efforts represent an intelligent land use process? Should it cost thousands of dollars to put away each dead body?

Capitalism's exploitation zeal, the war machine juggernaut, convention conformity, tradition, political status quo have produced the world we now inhabit that contains unseemly levels of environmental disrespect, annihilation of fellow creatures and biodiversity, genocide, war, hunger, poverty, and suffering.

To overcome the challenges we face in negotiating just our fundamental issues so that we can elevate to grander efforts, we must first defeat intimidation by self-expressed authority, dogma, social engineering, and existing trends by questioning conventional wisdom, by encouraging original inclinations instead of obedience in our youth, and give logic, untempered by sentimentality and emotion, a chance as an outlook foundation, a starting point to transform to a better world.

4-18-15

Humanity's laws are what a certain few want them to be.

Govern the humans lest they become wayward.

5-24-15

MEMORIAL DAY MESSAGE

On this Memorial Day 2015 it is a disheartening obomanation to hear talk of those who have died to keep us free, while the painful truth as I see it is that our freedom is not in the equation. Stupefying numbers of good and decent and innocent soldiers have been killed sacrificing normal life and breath in wretched circumstance while invading foreign borders at the hands of drum beating politicians like Johnson, Nixon, the Clintons, the Bushes, and now Obama with U. S. Congress backing who have fed billions of dollars to greedy capitalist banksters and industrialists who drive and perpetuate the politically conservative war machine.

Will we, can we wake up and stop this madness?

5-26-15

Have you ever let anyone wash your brain? If so did you come out of it spreading word of the glory of the American Dream? Did it happen when you were young and impressionable?

Filter what you allow in with skepticism and caution. If you don't, pretty stories may render you immune to recognition of truths freely obtainable by observation and experience.

7-2-15

We live in a culture where the mainstream honors the notion that the acquision of capital not only defines success in life but also trumps (supplants?) concern for the common good. The primary disease that sickens our culture is in the high correlation in the culture's members of these elements:

1) religious or sectarian fervor and loyality

2) fanaticism in sports fans - in nationalism - in war mongering

3) capitalism

The first two are obvious because of the presence of fundamental mindlessness. Number three is included because qualities of deception, the preponderance of Type A personalities, aggression, exploitation, stinginess combat (picture a sea of brokers at a stock exchange feeding frenzy), game-the-system mentality, one-upmanship are primary components of capitalism practitioners.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the results of the Mark Pittman / Bloomberg L.P. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System lawsuit reveals stunning details which illustrate how capitalism's excesses as manifest in the outstanding potential worldwide claims of credit default swaps (CDS) totaling nearly the equivalent of global GDP ($75 trillion) and how with their inherent domino effect of accumulating losses provides the means for capitalism's gamesmanship to destroy the world economy.

With the rapid worldwide CDS proliferation ($62 trillion at the end of 2007) we can see that our greed-fallibility contagion is not limited to capitalism's stalwart practioners, USA, Britain, and Israel.

The new World Trade Center tower is completed and ready to go.

Do you think it is really airplane-proof this time?

You must qualify your question. Do you mean with demolition explosives in place or without?

But that involves false flag implications of the history making September 11, 2001 event.

Yes. It is a pivotal distinction in the unfolding of our future.

But wait. My entire belief system is going to be uprooted if I allow that line of thinking. My conventional government-issue belief system, THAT'S ALL I'VE GOT. Please let me stay in denial just a few more years.

7-22-15