A Death In Dystopia

'The fracking struggle involves most of the giant corporations of the country, not just business and industrial corporations, but also law corporations and insurance corporations.

The whole corporate class and its vast usurping structures of governance and propaganda are behind fracking. The reasons are clear: the corporate class is committed to endless more. The fuel for endless more is constantly expanding energy.

So people opposing fracking for oil and gas and water are standing up not just to a few giant energy corporations, but to the entire corporate class, and to their vast corporate state, just like the anti-nukers of yore.

In New York, people are already organized in hundreds of groups. We think this legislation will help unify anti-frackers, so that one day in the not too distant, the State of New York will declare fracking, corporate frackers, and fracking-related activities to be Class C felonies.'
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the quote above is taken from an INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD GROSSMAN. the name probably doesn't ring a bell for any of u, even though he participated in three sequential workshops at the New York Green Fest gathering in Western New York 10 years ago this month that some of u attended, as did i. i probably didn't attend those particular workshops and even if i did i wouldn't have remembered the presenter's name. the only reason it was brought to my attention now is that by a convoluted process of research and curiosity i happened across this interview and just read it in it's entirety (link below).

it's great; in it he gets near the heart of american dystopia in his analysis of the fundamental flaws of it's founding and governance, citing, for example, how in many respects it was/is based upon the english monarchy/oligarchy form of government which the american revolution ostensibly overthrew. iow, how the american revolution, rather than being radical, was a case of replacing a distant dictatorship of elites with a nearby, 'homegrown' dictatorship of elites.

here's another excerpt from the interview:

'The authors of the US Constitution included no language in that plan of governance requiring the United States to remove all barriers to human liberty – to maximize liberty throughout the land.

They did craft language requiring the United States to remove all barriers to commerce – to maximize production and commerce throughout the land. To impose a national economy on communities throughout the land.

They certainly understood the concept of a strong, centralized federal government swimming in the preemption and prerogative authority of kings.'
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RICHARD GROSSMAN gave this interview in october 2011, just a couple months after speaking at western ny green gathering 2011. he was an author or co-author of a couple of books and a lecturer best known for his work challenging the legality of corporate authority. at this time, he was working on yet another book in this vein, but i doubt it was ever finished or published, as he died just a month later, nov. 22, 2011, the anniversary of jfk's assassination.

my point? death's a part of dystopia. it's the natural endpoint for all dreams, and dreamers.

https://ratical.org/corporations/CCRivRG1011.html

Controlled Media Bias And The Duped Masses

just saw this news 'teaser' (very short description of what could be the lead story tonite in wetm's local newscast):

big drug bust in steuben county! 19 arrested. why many of them might be walking free, tonite at 11!

having become a conspiracy buff and learned of things like cia control of corporate mass media, i'm very sensitive now to how the 'news' is perpetual slanted by the way in which it's framed. quite subtly but definitively slanted to promote establishment sacred cows like the 'war on drugs'.

have u ever seen a newscast or story which slants in favor of ending drug prohibition? from lamestream corporate media? occasionally they allow someone to editorialize this opinion, but it's always disputed at the same time. more often, corporate media reporting related to the drug war, like this current local 'drug bust', takes for granted that 'drugs' are bad and prohibition is good or necessary. it's in their typical language, like this teaser which implies that some of these alleged drug dealers might be getting off on some legal technicality, instead of being convicted and incarcerated, which it's strongly implied is where they belong. as if this society of the world's leading incarceration state needs to tighten up it's 'soft on crime' legal system and incarcerate more sheeple for victimless crimes like selling 'drugs' to willing buyers.

i've never seen any tv newscast anchor who didn't appear to be completely in favor of the war on drugs, or for that matter against any establishment holy cow, like militarism, imperialism,  capitalism, or established dogmatic puritanical patriarchal religions. can this be by chance? of course not. anyone who gets to be prominent in corporate media can't have or disclose any radical ideas. (s)he must toe the establishment line always.

this includes the expression of dismissive contempt towards 'conspiracy theories' and 'conspiracy theorists'. how can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a very powerful and exclusive elite element of society could successfully conspire to consistently dupe the public with propaganda and misinformation with regards to a whole host of matters? how can a 'free and open democracy' that includes many 'highly educated' individuals be so duped? is it possible that some much derided and seemingly outlandish 'conspiracy theories' are true?

Even My Dreams Are Frustrating

dream this a.m.: i'm somewhere, i think a library. i see not one, not 2, but 3 young women, all pretty and petite, small perky breasts just the way i like them. we're all together in a close space, in the entrance vestibule, as one of them is sweeping the floor, another leaving, one goes to hold a door open for the other 2, as i do the same with the other door, and also to get closer to them. i want desperately to say something, break the ice, let them know with more than my eyes that i'm very interested in and attracted to them, but just as in surreal life, i can't think of anything other than the truth, which i know is just too blunt and unacceptable in this dystopian, puritanical, repressed world, so the moment passes.

i wake up, get up, as it's time to shut all the windows and doors in my house as the summer morning quickly heats up, gotta keep that heat out, keep it as cool as possible in this early summer heat wave. also gotta pee. then, with the dream still fresh in my mind, i sit down to write this, and share my thoughts on the matter, even if no one cares or is sympathetic.

here i am in my 60s, still dreaming about and lusting for scandalously young women, still feeling oh so frustrated by an inability to successfully approach them and try to spark up a relationship. the only difference is as i've gotten older i've come to surrealize just how repressive and stupid attitudes towards sex and libido are in this dystopian culture, to understand how time is running out on me, my libido, my life, and how i'm increasingly likely to die having never fully lived, or having lived all my life with this ever-present, nagging, frustrated desire, at first, confused and ashamed, later increasingly resentful and angry over how things are. do they have to be this way? hell no, i learned that in those moments, especially in the relative freedom of mexican bars and in it's 'red zones' where prostitution is 'tolerated', where there's loads of women seeking attention (and of course, dinero) from men, where shy and repressed men like me can cut the bullshit, be direct, and get what we want, if we have the dinero. nothing like it in the u.s., except i suppose in some (of the mostly bigger) cities where if one is flush with cash, one can pay an exorbitant price for the pleasure of an expensive escort's companionship, or make an arrangement to be someone's 'sugar daddy', as i wish i could do...

i wonder how much time i have left, before this avenue of ultimate pleasure and fleeting satisfaction is no longer available to me. a decade perhaps, maybe 2, certainly not much more than that. i do the best i can to comfort myself with the knowledge that this world is dystopian to all, and some have or have had it much worse, for example slaves. imagine having been or being a slave, constantly yearning to be free, knowing in one's heart that one's subjugation is unjust... the world is unjust, the sheeple in it largely stupid, the laws and attitudes we live by both stupid and unjust... and yet, conservative christians love to argue that we have 'free will'. how fucking full of shit can they possibly be? completely, it seems.

Racism

The centennial of the Tulsa race massacre this week in the news has me pondering racism in my own family.

My paternal grand parents arrived in America around 1910 from Ukraine. I can't imagine they were racist then, as i don't believe they'd had any prior experience with non-white sheeple. I know they were working class and they moved several times between several different states for over 10 years before they managed to scrape up enough money to purchase a piece of rocky hilly land to farm in upstate NY. While they were doing this they were having kids on a frequent basis as was the lot of working sheeple in those benighted times before the pill was invented and before even more primitive means of contraception were popularized and made accessible thanks largely to the struggle of Margaret Sanger and her allies... and i imagine my grandfather had to work at various hard jobs, like coal mining in southern West Virginia, where my father was born, and in the factories of Detroit, where one of my uncles was born.

I imagine it must have been during this period that he was exposed to America's virulent racism, which must have been fueled in part by the fact that the working class was in competition with each other for jobs. I never got to know my grandparents, as i was very young when they died, but grand dad probably became very racist and passed it on to his kids, who in turn passed it on to their kids, and so on, such that at family reunions i've attended, 'nigger' was a fairly frequently used word. Partly due to this, i've stopped going to these reunions.

I wish i could go back in time and witness whatever events occurred that turned my grandfather (and for all i know, maybe my grandmother too) and/or some of my uncles into racists (my father was racist but not as virulently so). Regardless, just knowing that they became so makes me think less of them, for i think at it's base racism is indicative of a sort of ignorance that belies stupidity or a lack of independent critical thinking and sensitivity or compassion towards others. Perhaps it's indicative of a sort of callousness which was/is actually useful to working class sheeple in a capitalist society, struggling mightily to make a living in a culture of ruthless competition for economic survival.

p. 464 Of BRIGHT GREEN LIES

i've been reading derrick jensen's most recent book on and off for the past few weeks. not terribly enthused about it because 1) i'm already well familiar with the ruse that is 'green' energy from watching PLANET OF THE HUMANS, reading Ozzie Zehner's book, and other sources, and 2) it's so flocking depressing, how global industrial civilization is destroying life on this planet, how little is being done to stop or even slow the destruction, and last but certainly not least, how willfully or hopelessly clueless the vast majority of humans are to this existential crisis. Which brings me to my brief and bitter points, taken from p. 464 of BRIGHT GREEN LIES

First, there's this observation from Derrick: 'i'm increasingly convinced that within this culture the primary use of human intelligence is to try to rationalize whatever behavior we already wanted to do.'

i'm on board with that. i'm just blunter, less nuanced, and more vulgar in stating that sheeple generally have shit fer brains, and there's no cure for stupid-crazy. Which reminds me of something else i wanted to bring up: in the previous chapter Derrick writes about (sur)real solutions, basically that everyone who knows and cares to must do their part to preserve wildlife and end industrial civilization, insisting there's still reason for hope, claiming (dubiously?) that given a chance to re-wild, earth's topsoils can quickly regain health and sequester enough carbon to save us. Here he's being a BRIGHT GREEN OPTIMIST i disagree with...

Second, there's a quote from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and supposedly the world's richest man to the effect that we should continue growing our energy use and population, showing he's as clueless as they come, and that when it comes to topics that are relevant to our survival, there's probably little correlation between being 'successful' financially and having a clue, which certainly is discouraging, not that it's news to me or to u. Just another reason to be overwhelmingly pessimistic, convinced we're dystopian and doomed.

Memorial Day THIS

As usual, I'm relying on the writing and speaking of someone with superior skills in these areas to express my own general thoughts regarding the subject of Memorial Day, which of course is related to war and militarism. That someone in this case is David Swanson. If you've never heard of him, well, I hadn't either before this year. One can chalk up such obscurity to the fact of living in a dystopian world, one in which radical advocates for peace and justice generally toil in obscurity.

The 2 links below are to a fairly lengthy essay by Swanson titled Memorial Day THIS and to a fairly lengthy talk he gave to a peace and justice group. Both are excellent. The paragraph below is an excerpt from the essay.

President John F. Kennedy wrote in a letter to a friend something he would never have put in a speech: “War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”

http://warisacrime.org/2018/05/29/memorial-day-this/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akP4cp2ZSQY

Freedom Riders

60 years ago this month one of the more notable events of the civil rights struggle, the freedom rides, began. It was conceived by the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE), led by James Farmer, and involved black and white volunteers who boarded Greyhound and Trailways buses bound for deep south destinations, for the purpose of desegregating public facilities there, which supreme court decisions had already decreed, but had yet to be implemented.

History as taught in school, mostly devoid of details and context, tends to be dry and boring. A recently published book by one of only 2 current survivors from the original group of 12 freedom riders provides an abundance of details and context regarding the horrid reality of growing up poor and black in the jim crow south, and the unfathomable courage the freedom riders had to possess as they confronted the entrenched brutality of racism.

This book by Charles Person, titled BUSES ARE A COMIN', is great! Among it's many revelations is a bit of the story of an unsung American hero named James Peck, a white man born to great wealth and privilege who chose to put his life on the line repeatedly for his beliefs, for peace, justice, and racial equality.

https://www.amazon.com/Buses-Are-Comin-Memoir-Freedom-ebook/dp/B087ZXZ299

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Peck_(pacifist)