After a brief hiatus of not giving a fuck, my mind has acquired enough bullshit for another blog post. This one is an almost entirely true account of my recent experience taking an SSRI antidepressant.

    

Psst, here's a clue: You own your vote. And you don't owe it to anybody or any party. John McSame and Barack Obama don't own your vote. So feel free to give it of your own accord to an independent or third party candidate if you wish. This idea that such candidates "take votes away" from Repugnican and Demoncratic candidates is condescending bullshit promulgated by the major parties and their corporate media lackeys to intimidate you into thinking you are wasting your vote or doing something somehow illegitimate by voting for candidates outside of the two party autocracy. Of course, if you want more war, vote for McCain. If you want higher taxes vote for Obama. But if you are fed up and really want change, you'll have to look somewhere else.

    

The multiplicity of world religions is not like various trails leading up to the peak of the same mountain. The multiplicity of world religions is like a group of nearsighted toddlers wandering in a thick fog.

    

I've just finished Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips (c. 2008, Viking). Phillips' earlier book, American Theocracy, was the book that got me alarmed about America's staggering debt - public, corporate, and private - now revealing itself to be the crisis Phillips said it was. This book updates and elaborates Phillips' alarm about debt, written in the wake of the popping of the housing bubble which began, more or less, in mid-2007.

Phillips might rankle free market purists with his criticism of blind faith in markets and suggestions that the financial markets are under-regulated. However, he recognizes that the actions of government, especially one of our favorite foes, the Federal Reserve, are complicit in the trouble. As an example:


As in some other books, such as Naomi Klein's, The Shock Doctrine, criticism of "capitalism" and "free markets" is often more properly criticism of "corporatism", or in Phillips' own terms here, "financial mercantilism".

Anyway, this is another of those books sounding the alarm about the decline of the American Empire, which is all the more infuriating to read in a presidential election year because the shit heads we have for major party candidates won't talk about this stuff. They all remember Reagan's optimism defeating Carter's malaise and feel obliged to tell us that, "America's best days are ahead of us," even if they themselves are not stupid enough to be unaware of the shit we are in for. If they are that stupid, it's another reason, beside their dishonesty, that they are unfit to govern.

    

Lots of people are pissing and moaning that this president, or the next, should do something about the price of gas at the pump. The fact is that there is little a president can do about the price of oil. Currently, world-wide demand for oil is increasing faster than the development of new oil resources. Simple economics tells us that demand increasing relative to supply will drive up the price. The president and the Congress may be able to play around with the tax code but they can't repeal the laws of economics. I offer a proposal whereby this or the next president really can address the underlying cause of the rising price of oil and make gasoline more affordable for Americans. The video explains all.

    

Found this in my online bank statement this afternoon. Can't wait to see how the gummint squeezes this back out of my ass. But for now, hey, thank you Chinese for the six hundred bucks.

    

I am unperturbed that Obama joined Jeremiah Wright's church twenty years ago. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it really was Wright's now controversial opinions and point of view that attracted Obama to the man. As a young man, by Obama's accounting, after having been raised by his white mother and white grandmother, he struggled to come to grips with his black identity and African heritage. For a young social activist in search of black roots on the South Side of Chicago in the 1980's to be attracted to Wright with his oppositional stance to the dominant culture and his all purpose "racism is the reason" explanation for the problems they struggled with every day would hardly be surprising. It was a point of view very much in vogue.

(I myself imbibed this viewpoint in any number of consciousness raising seminars in my own mostly white church that was trying to become more open and welcoming of a greater diversity of people. I gladly embraced guilt and sorrow for the sins of this nation against its black citizens, even though my own ancestors were in Ireland during the antebellum period, and none of them ever lived south of the Mason-Dixon line after they got here. I never felt particularly aggrieved for the miseries they suffered at the hands of their British oppressors generations ago, but I unquestioningly agreed that black people today were justified in nurturing grievances for offenses they never directly experienced. I'm not saying black Americans today don't encounter vestiges of racism. But this ain't the days of slavery or Jim Crow. But I digress.)

I am unperturbed that Obama maintained a personal friendship with Wright for twenty years. It is hardly unusual to maintain friendships with people whose points of view diverge from one's own after the emotional bonds of friendship have set.

I am unperturbed that Obama stayed in Wright's church for twenty years. Once one establishes a relationship with a church one may stay for any number of reasons. The opinions the pastor expresses in his/her sermons need not be high on the list of reasons. This is a church that engages in a number of very worthwhile ministries - feeding the hungry, tutoring school children, providing job training for adults, aiding the sick, etc. Whatever the illusions and anachronisms of Wright's ideology may be, his church does much that is worthy of commendation and support. For a progressive black politician with a political base in that community to maintain membership in such a church makes a lot of sense.

What does perturb me is that Obama expects me to believe that he has recently been taken by surprise by Wright's ideology and opinions. This is just political bullshit. Wright called it just right. Obama has to do what politicians do. Too bad this unbelievable claim comes from the man who is running for President on a platform of saving us from the cesspool of Washington politics. Not that anyone with half a brain should actually believe Obama is going to change the the spots of that political leopard.

I myself am likely to vote for the Libertarian candidate. It remains to be seen who that will be. The Libertarian Party convention is at the end of this month. If the nominee is former Repugnican Congressman Bob Barr, that means I will get to vote for a politician who stood on the floor of the House of Representatives denouncing abortion as murder, yet signed the check that paid the doctor who performed an abortion for his wife. I'll get to vote for a politician who pandered to the family values crowd, yet plead the Fifth during his divorce proceedings when asked if he was having an affair. Oh well, maybe I should just move integrity further down my list of qualities I'd like to see in a presidential candidate. To Bob Barr's credit, since leaving Congress he has revisited and revised some of his past positions. I'm not against people changing their minds. And he seems to have a fervor for protecting personal liberty and privacy and reigning in the presidency and penning it up within the powers enumerated in the Constitution. See, I'm trying to talk myself into believing I could vote for the guy if he gets the nomination. Personally, I prefer George Phillies.

Of course if I'm looking for a candidate with conviction there's always the Christian supremacist, gay hating Chuck Baldwin heading the Constitution Party ticket. I could vote for him, then go home and slit my wrists.

    

You know what I hate about Youtube? Every time I log into my account there, those fuckers tell me I don't have any friends. Anyway, my latest video is up. This time I expose the truth Congress doesn't want you to know about this month's tax rebate.

    

I voted for Ron Paul in the Illinois February 5th presidential primary. I nearly choked to death asking for a Republican ballot. I had never voted for any goddamn fucking Republican for any office before in my life. After voting, I felt like I  needed a long hot shower. I felt great about voting for Ron Paul. But I felt all icky about voting as a fucking Republican. I hope I never have to do that again. Blech!

Anyway, one of my longest time dearest friends asked me how my politics had become so eccentric. Eccentric? Fuck yeah. From the point of view of the left-liberal orthodoxy I had clung to for so many years I had become as eccentric as hell. Personal liberty, inalienable rights, small government, enumerated powers, free markets and a constrained view of what a national government can accomplish. Woohoo. So, why not become a Republican? Um, perhaps you missed that earlier sentence fragment: Personal liberty, inalienable rights, small government, enumerated powers, free markets and a constrained view of what a national government can accomplish. What the fuck does any of that have to do with being a Republican? Oh, yeah, they put that stuff in their platform every four years and hope you don't notice that they're a bunch of fucking big government statists in real life. Fuck the Republicans. Except Ron Paul. Wish he'd ditch those bastards, but that's his business. He says he couldn't get elected in his congressional district if he weren't a Republican. Fine. That's up to him. But I'm sure as fuck not going to become a goddamn Republican. I may have gotten eccentric, but I haven't lost my fucking mind.

Well, the fine folks who gave us the Ron Paul money bombs have given the idea a new twist: The Ron Paul Book Bomb. Cool. I'll spring thirteen bucks for the book at Amazon.com and see if I can't help give it a boost up the charts. Based on other things I've read by Ron Paul, I expect the compositional style will be mediocre. But the ideas will have me wallowing in my eccentricity. Should be a fun read. If you wanna get politically eccentric, I expect this book will make a good place to start.

    

Remember the Ron Paul campaign for president? If you're not a political junkie who was paying attention back before the voting even started in January, you might have missed it. In case you saw one of the Repugnican debates, Ron Paul was the little white haired guy who would get laughed at by the other candidates when he would say something outrageous like, for instance, the truth. It was during such moments that I came to regard John McCain as the complete and utter fucking asshole that I now consider him to be - once again demonstrating that the major parties are incapable of delivering nominees that are worthy of governing.

Unfortunately, the official Ron Paul campaign was not ready for prime time. I ordered a couple of yard signs from them mid-December. They arrived barely in time to be in my front yard for the February 5th primary here in Illinois. The fact that Ron Paul got such attention as he did from the media - not nearly enough, was not from a lack of energetic, creative grassroots support. In fact, it was that support that generated more coverage of the Paul campaign than it would have otherwise gotten. It was some young geniuses unaffiliated with the campaign who organized the record setting, headline grabbing Money Bombs of November and December. And it was the same group, with financial support from lots and lots of supporters, who got an advertising blimp airborne in record time to promote the Paul candidacy over the Mid-Atlantic and South Eastern United States in the early primary season.

With Ron Paul's presidential aspirations fading, this same group of liberty lovers has launched a new venture to channel the grassroots energy generated by the Ron Paul candidacy into an information medium that will provide an alternative to the corporatist-statist propaganda machines that currently dominate the national media. There is no Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner financing this effort, so the beginnings are modest. But the ambitions are admirable and, for my money, worth supporting. Microsoft was started in a garage. Yahoo and Google began in dorm rooms. CNN was hardly taken seriously until Bernie Shaw reported on the first bombing of Iraq from under his bed in a Baghdad hotel room. Break the Matrix is in its infancy which only makes it all the more exciting to get on board.

So tell the corporatist-statist media to go fuck itself. And go have some fun while you secure your free and prosperous future in a rejuvenated republic. End the empire. Revive the Constitution. Break the Matrix!