Optimism, Confidence, and Self-Aggrandizement

A short biography on Bob Dole has come into my possession. It is by a very good writer, Richard Ben Cramer, and it is called "The Faith to Endure." As I was glancing at this title I thought of another title, that of the recent Mitt Romney book: I think it was called "No Apologies." The titles struck me as being somehow similar to one another. Then my mind linked all of this to this one front page feature I saw in USA Today. It was all about optimism and how Americans are congenitally optimistic, etc.

All strikes me as somehow the same thing.

Tobacco Pentagon Virus

"The Pentagon is backing a plan to use tobacco plants to make H1N1 vaccine.." WSJ, Wed. Feb. 24th, 2010

That's on the frontpage in the sidebar part or the part off to the left in the paper, consisting of brief news "flashes."

When I read something like that, my thoughts tend to be of all kinds of ominous things like: which country we will now invade to corner the market on tobac? Will we not have to invade some other country to gain access to their "tobacco markets"? Is that what's next?

Attacking people to subjugate their political systems is one thing. Are going to attack in order to get their plants now? Blood for tobacco?

Breaking News from Af

I like Afghanistan. I owned a book about it years before it became a popular countries for hot news breaking dispatches, but the latest WSJ dispatch from Af relates that Hamid Karzai has kicked (over or kicked) out the independent elections board.

A real good move, buster. Or does that sound insulting? To say to a president? Possibly I would not get far in Af politics, but, at any rate, it says in this prestigious paper called the Wall Street J that Hamid K -- his father was assasinated but nevertheless I seem to have never heard a good word about him from any informed source -- not the ones that I trust, anyway -- and who mainly seems to think we will like his hat or his green whatever that he wears (honestly, all that I do remember is green) that he was photographed in...

Alright. Sorry. That is a run-on sentence. The point is: persons are very shall we say individual, or non-affiliated, in Afghanistan. Individual or wild or independent or regional or tribal---whatever. It is known as more of a collection of feuding warlords or something. Now here comes K. and he says he is unifying the whole thing.

Oh all right; but, historically shpreeking that's no easy trick.

Man, pol blogs are sure easy to write.

-j.S.

p.s. - right. but the way to do it is by kicking out the independent election overseers. Oh right. So that is the first step towards unifying Afghanistan? What OTHER evidence does Karzai have that "today Afghans are ready to take over the leading role in every aspect of governance........" That's Hamid Karzai's spokesman, Hamid Elmi, reports the WSJ. What does that sound like? Smooth. It sounds too smooth. It sounds like somebody went to an American university and learned how to talk. To learn how to talk like elites. Like he learned how to talk the talk. Karzai is a dignified, proud-looking person, who wants to form a government of Afghanistan. But can he? (and I still say this shit is easy to right) ...So he mastered the American language, big deal. (I'm still reeling from this brilliant insight of mine. Can I please take over America now?)

View (From the Other Side of the Screen)

Real-Time transcription of T.V.-watching by Jack Silverman

It's called Breaking News. That's what it says on the screen. In the middle of the morning CNBC brings us some kind of public meeting between the nation's assorted political expertologists.
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The politicians on T.V. are worried about something going wrong. They appear to be Vigilant. Apparently vigilantly watching the economy.
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Here are Bernanke; and, various Congressmen. I'd like to see the private meetings and not just the televised ones. The Fed is a controller of interest rates and money supply. Abstractions. Which, we believe, matter.
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What we see.
Various members of the legislature declaim their profundities. Bernanke. Well-trimmed beard. B. replies to a bald-headed congressman. We see nothing on the screen - no words I mean - to identify him; to clarify. Which is he? Dem. or R.?
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The philosophy followed by the Fed -- and others -- is that the fundamental choice is between easing and tightening credit.

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------------....-------- ......... Tightening or Easing: what's it gonna be?

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It's as tricky as a three-cornered hat.

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Repub's don't care about content. They care about posturing. But they don't even know it themselves. It's not that Democrats don't posture. Andrew J. invented it (the first president to use marketing techniques). The R's tried to corner the market on decency and sobriety and straightness --- they've been out-cornered by reality itself.

Now we see 'em in their pink ties... (btw, I had wrote more, but I decided to cut it off here)
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MSNBC WEBSITE

"...announcement [that Sunnis have quit election, etc.] raises the likelihood that the results of the vote will be called into question. U.S. and United Nations diplomats have expressed fears that a Sunni boycott that hands victory to Shiites would throw the results of the election into doubt. In turn, that could open the door to a new round of violence" [this quote is from msnbc]

Naa...

Violence is how Iraq works

"Violence"? Come on! They stoppped counting at 500,000 dead Iraqi civilians. There is practically no one left standing in the entire country! So the Sunnis are boycotting the election. Boo hoo. Let them boycott. That's how Iraq works. They work by violence, not elections. Come on, msnbc. You are awfully easy to reply to, you know that? Ha ha ha. This is all part of an ongoing Iraqi process.

We all know what Iraq's main concern is ---- to limit or end the violence. That is important. Violence and elections go hand-in-hand, and I do not mean just in an election season. But ongoing, year upon year, there is no qualitative difference between elections and violence in Iraq. It is all wound up in the same fabric.

Will guys like Brown be able to replace the Republican Jokes?

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Here is a somewhat belated entry about the victory of soon-to-be Sen. Brown of Mass. I admit it. I'm hoping to see the new Republicans. For example, I would rather have folksy Huckabee than connected rich wombat Womney, although this is only a sentimental projection of my feelings, as Huckabee would certainly be incompetent.

I do not really find such a victory as Brown's all that hard to understand. Then again, maybe this is because I am better than I know at the political game. I am pretty good at political thinking. Such a genius. Or am I too just a Silly Wabbit? Here's my brilliant post, then, for today, that I wrote already but then forgot to POST~~~!!! (silly wabbit!!!):

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People don't like Democrats. What we may have, and we should, is a new kind of Republican. We need this because Joke Republicans are insufficient for a great country.

Untitled

As I enter the BP convenience store -- it is the store connected with the pumps where you pour gasoline -- I think that they are like fascists here and that the persons running the BP do not want the customers to have personal contact. I think that the operators of the gas station do not want the human beings to socialize. Of course, there is a lot of truth to these observations of American society. I experience it that way and I imagine the clerk barking out to customers: "you are not allowed to interact!!" I do not like the world. I am disturbed by it.
But yet I am not sure that the BP store is intentionally reducing human social interaction. I'm going a little bit too far? Maybe the Pope smokes dope, too, it's not impossible. It's a relationship --- between the BP store and the customers.
And (a slightly different query) what is the relationship that involves both capitalism on the one hand, and sociality on the other?
Sociality first of all is not against the law --- you could not outlaw it --- it is not something under the purview of the law at all. Sociality is not regulated by law, and neither can the law can induce it, or create it where it is not. That is not really what law does.
Social contact is not under the purview of law because it is more up to the persons themselves. Socializing is your own choice. Isn't it? It is more something people do on their own. But my theory is this.
It is that this however is not to say that white people do not need a little help socializing. Oh there I go being controversial. But they are just too cut off from one another; and capitalism helped them get that human contact, in a round about fashion. There are the known attempts to regulate socialization. But these attempts to control human sociality are authoritarian, and they are extremes. Of these, first we come to fascism (or I could also call it the fascistic kind of authoritarianism), which attempts to regiment people and regards social behavior as a weakness; then the other main method is what we call socialism, which goes the opposite way and promises utopia trying to force or induce cooperation. But at any rate, both wind up in the losers' circle, as far as I am concerned. They are authoritarian, with the caveat that the left does dress itself up in the sily dress of a kind of fancy talk. They might have a more compelling silkier dress with lots of fancy theory. It's a fancier version of fascism. I'd better truncate this discussion at risk of becoming a fancy Dan myself.
Social interaction in most cases needs to be improved. Obviously the BP is not doing that. It is questionable that the state is the one to do it, either. On the other hand there must be something someone can do to keep us from being so isolated and alone.

How would one preserve the peace?
How would one preserve the freedom?

The human system is always a hard thing to understand. We normally live in it --- rather than it being the case that we “understand” it. That is to say that the kind of understanding that is relevant is participatory rather than being judgmental. We do not necessarily understand it and we do not necessarily have access to any kind of an aerial snapshot or theory about life, because we are of it and “in” it.

I am interested in the overall society. I am interested in how the persons that normally interact with and relate to one another, and who make up what we call society, can simply do so without killing one another. So how do you do that? The alternatives on society's plate for regulating (a word substitution might be "governing") the situation are quite limited.

Go to my economics blog; you could perhaps get a few hints there.

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Jack says:

America is a concept that should be shared with the world;

Not a "confidential memo" Palin sends to her spoiled brats.

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Always Two Groups

Life the way we know it could be called our collective experience. We know all about Western civilization, meaning all of the white societies. Confining ourself to just those, and to this collective experience, what can we say about these societies? What can we say about those societies we can definitively testify about, the white ones? White societies -- when you study history -- are all divided into two groups. That is so. It could be more, too, I know, but let's basically say two, for simplicity, OK? At any rate, there's a basic division that is always there, although in the U. S. we have something unique --- a tendency to deny it. As if we are all "equal." The truth is that there are these two (or could be more) classes of person in all the human societies we know about -- the ones we know intimately. I can tell you what they are, but just think for yourself, OK? Is that hard? It must be very scary.

Think about your experience of life and YOU can be the expert instead of me.

We don't need to get anthropological. Our societies that we know all have something in common and this is that there is an official group and a low-income group. One gets into the record books, as it were. There is a record of "the Romans," not the slaves, who, come to think of it, would be called Romans, too. But the name of a slave is only recorded once in awhile. The system is not set up to record their existence. But we know they do exist -- this other group exists, and we know it quite well, but it is one that everyone ignores. They are as if part of the woodwork. Something like that. So one group is "famous." The other is not even official -- officially included in our cultural discourse. As if they are totally unknown.

But I am not saying excluded. That would be something different.

They are not important enough. So, I couldn't say excluded. They are ignored, not excluded. They are not important enough spend that much time on. Persons are too much of a reality to be excluded. Anyways, the lower classes have an important role. Therefore: your society has to include everyone but some are relegated to the lower class.

It is that they are not usually important enough to be written about. Oh yeah, I know about "Children of Sanchez," by Oscar Lewis. So that's why I am not in college. And the next volume he wrote was "Pedro Martinez," which I recently purchased. Used.

Still, I am basically right about this. And: How can we pretend everyone is equal when they are not?