we are the people publius warned us against

"...that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy..." john locke. the fundamental constitutions of carolina. 1669_________ "measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." james madison. federalist X._______"on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the white house will be adorned by a downright moron." h.l.mencken in 1920________john locke was the philosophical godfather to the framers of the constitution and madison, hamilton, and jay worked mightily to limit the franchise to the "better" sort...it is important to note that the constitution is about limiting rights, not guaranteeing them and that the first ten amendments were a rider tossed in at the last minute to make the whole thing more palatable to the state's righters...i had thought of bush the junior as the preeminent moron in the white house...this may need revision..the jury is still out on the bafflement that emanates from whoretown...is this idiocy or just a lack of a filter? we have time to find out...however we will need to know soon...the unquiet grave of reaganism is stirring and there is no telling where that could end...mencken was prescient in his statements...there have been many unenlightened tools of special interests in the executive branch...there seems and endless supply...some are better schooled in the arts of camouflage than others having absorbed more of their ivy league educations than others..others have been transparent in their ineptitude or malevolence...whichever is ensconced in the executive mansion you can be assured that if you work for an hourly wage you can be sure their interests are in direct opposition to yours...we are more numerous...that "interested and overbearing majority"...yet they find ways to keep us from realizing it..and we bite...every time...why they "love the uneducated"...time to smarten up people...this foolishness has gone on long enough.

advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

"and it is important to realise that its [totalitarianism] control of thought is not only negative, but positive. it not only forbids you to express, even to think, certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. and, as far as possible, it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. the totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions." george orwell. from literature and totalitarianism_______________________________"all things not forbidden are compulsory". t.h. white. from the once and future king_____________________________i hear a lot of calls to "resist" don trump...which is fine as far as it goes but i am inclined to think he is just another mouthpiece/bit player in an ongoing corporate agenda that is focused on creating control through debt peonage and, in and of himself, not that important...ridding the white house of him won't alter that agenda one scintilla...you can bemoan the passing of barry obama but the trans-pacific partnership was moving along on his watch and that was no friend of anyone who works for an hourly wage...and hillary wouldn't have been less venal...just less obvious..the header is another orwell quote and it demonstrates that the corporate agenda is the totalitarian agenda...we are branded...divided..made to compete for the privilege of going into debt ( and so creating wealth ) for material goods that we are manipulated into desiring...totalitarian control need not be overt and it has been with us in a highly refined system that is so enculturated we hardly notice for a long while...and it takes a great deal of strength, work, and disregard for the prevailing cultural norms to see what is, to borrow from orewell again, what is "in front of your nose"...the current administration is just one more act in the play publius drafted long ago.

hypocrisy is a common weapon of power

"a successful claim to [imperial]power also rested on behind-the-scenes manoeuvers, on the support of key interest groups, on being groomed for the part, and on the careful manipulation of opinion." from "spqr: a history of ancient rome_____________"what the bolsheviks were up to words cannot describe. one time someone brought a newspaper from town. inside a photo. grain growing high in the fields. and the...text said that the cities were going hungry, that there were lines for bread night and day because the peasants were lazy, they didn't want to harvest the crops, and everything was rotting in the field. the hatred toward the peasants was great, and yet it was after all the peasants themselves who were dying of hunger." branislawa kamieloska on the ukrainian famine of the 1930s from "imperium"______“I turn on the T.V., open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos! Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.” don trump_________"in our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." george orwell_____________"post-truth", "alternative facts", "fake news"...the "special vocabulary" of the current era continues to expand and distort...it is different but, in the end, it is still the "mass of lies" and no less the "evasions" of orwell's day...from the not so crypto-fascist right to the censorious, politically correct liberals everyone is indulging in distortions and outright untruths to enhance and expand their views...the media? from the new york times and wall street journal to breitbart and fox they all have an editorial policy that pander to their advertisers and the world view of their core readers who want nothing more than reinforcement of bias...no one is "objective" ( and, frankly, i am uncertain if that exists anywhere except, perhaps, in terms of the force of gravity... a ten story fall will injure or kill rightist, leftist, or centerist without regard to opinion or status )and everyone has an agenda..so..who to believe? no one...if it is going to be cast as an orwellian age then let us be orwellian in the terms of his writing and intellect...he was good at exposing hypocrisy and just because he wrote about a dystopian future doesn't mean he wanted to live it..his writing ( and i mean that beyond animal farm and 1984...he was a prolific writer and a good journalist ) looked to go beyond the distortions and the special vocabularies and dig into what was actually going on...he was widely read and intellectually skeptical...and he wrote in the most straightforward and clear language he could muster to make it plain what he thought...we could do with a bit more straightforwardness in this behavioral sink we have tumbled into...coming clean will take some serious linguistic analysis...no one in power likes clear thought...it raises too many questions...we need george now...but no the dystopian george...that person has been hugely misrepresented...what we need is the clear headed and unflinching semantic analyst that george was...even when it came to his own language use.

murum versus limites

"the erection of a [roman] limites sets in motion a play of social forces which are bound to end disastrously for the the builders. a policy of non-intercourse with the barbarians beyond is quite impracticable. whatever the imperial government may decide, the interests of traders, pioneers, adventurers, and so forth will inevitably draw them beyond the frontier." arnold toynbee. a study in history. the photo of the remains of hadrian's is one of what's left, not what was...the wall was anywhere from nine to twenty feet wide and eleven to twenty feet tall depending on what was available locally to build with...some of it was stone...some turf..all of it was built to the fortifaction specifications of the roman legions and it was found not o be economically viable to maintain and defend it...it was not cost effective...on hadrian's death the new emperor, antonius pius, promptly abandoned it and began construction of a wall shoter than the seventy three mile length of hadrian's in the scottish lowlands about a hundred miles north...this too proved impractical and antonius' successor, marcus aurelius abandoned it and returned to hadrian's wall as the defended border...latin for wall is murum which is what these were physically...they were also the more abstract limites, a demarcation of the the limits of empire ( the term was also applied to the internal boundaries between roman provinces )...from the gulf of mexico tot he pacific the us/mexican border is 1954 miles i have found estimates of it's construction costs ( not manning and patrolling it ) anywhere from $15 billion to $49 billion...one wonders about the economic viability of that for what it is proposed to do which is essentially stop central and south american peoples from demographically reclaiming territories lost by mexico in the 1845-48 mexican american war...you can put economics aside...this is about revanchism pure and simple and the animus it engenders in nativists...a boondoggle at best one wonders whether a modern hadrian's wall would be more efficacious than the original...i would invite you to look at the map of mexico and the u s with attention to the coastlines...immigrants driven to water by a wall suddenly, and possibly exponentially, increase the costs involved in securing an abstraction as ephemeral as a national border...lots of coves and inlets to make land in...and with the defacto cubanization of south florida safe havens for immigrant landings are entirely possible...seems a better idea to me to embrace the inevitable and make peace with demographic change..the benefits may outweigh the costs.

circus

"...that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy..." john locke, from the fundamental constitutions of carolina____________"...they have directed the president be chosen by select bodies of electors to be deputed by the people for that express purpose: and they have committed the appointment of senators to the state legislatures. this mode has, in such cases, vastly the advantage of elections by the people in their collective capacity where the activity of party zeal, taking advantage of the supineness, the ignorance, and the hopes and fears of the unwary and uninterested, often places men in office by votes of a small proportion of the electors." federalist LXIV [john jay]_____ in other words when you turn the election into a circus there's a chance one of the clowns might win...john locke was the philosophical godfather of the constitution and jay was certainly not very confident of the "voice of the people" being used in anything resembling an intelligent manner as he sought bravely to limit the franchise...and the political season of 2016 may be a sort of vindication for him on that point...then again, the election results can only be as good as the caliber of candidates that are distilled out of the herd of whore politicians...even a cursory examination of the crop of characters the voters were burdened with last year should have been a indication that something was very wrong and that the results would end in a trip to the white house for the most venal...the current residents of the white house are at least transparent in their venality as they hawk the family brand shamelessly...the clinton venality was just as avaricious but kept under somewhat tighter cover...still it is illumination to remember that the clintons and trumps have been on very friendly terms for some time and the president ( pro tem ) publicly declared his respect for "that woman" after the electoral dust had settled...in short the elite is who have won here..it is the way the system is intended to work...anyone expecting anything but a corporate agenda with, perhaps, some populist cosmetics is delusional...wealth is in as much control as they ever were and talk is cheap...especially political verbiage...there is nothing new here...nothing at all.

a nest of vipers

"he divided the people in this way to ensure the voting power was under the control not of the rabble but of the wealthy, and he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power, a principle we should always stand by in politics" cicero on servius tullius. "...there quickly formed various rival factions that held divergent views, spied on each other, and held each other in contempt. a mixture of scorn and contempt became the prevailing mood within the party." albert speer "one of the national security council staffers on the asian trip was navy yeoman charles radford, the spy planted by the joint chiefs. the sailor, ostensibly a stenographer, had been copying nsc documents and kissinger's memos for ten months...working at night and searching his burn bags, sending white house paper to the pentagon each morning." president nixon:alone in the white house. richard reeves._____________________________________ ___ the president calls mccain a "loser" and suddenly unsecured servers and android phones are acceptable, not treason...the president's supreme court nominee takes exception to the president's comments about the judiciary...it seems obvious i will have to start paying closer attention to all of this...it will be a long four years...there will be blowback and unexpected moments...there are always uncontrolled variables...expect consequences.