The Kingdom of Lies

A Tale of Two Websites

2010-12-19T09:38:00.003+02:00

Facebook gets fellated while Wikileaks goes to jail, but we know the score

His dead, soulless eyes gaze out from the red borders of the magazine with a thousand mile stare; the photograph looks like an android failing the Voight-Kampff test, or the mug-shot of a frat boy baked on XTC; but this is not just another arrogant whelp of privilege and nepotism, this glassy-eyed perp is Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire monomaniac behind Facebook and its 550 million willing victims.

This is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year.

If, as Charles Eisenstein writes in the Ascent of Humanity, the process of capitalism is the transformation of life into money[1], then Facebook's relentless march into the commoditization of privacy[2] and the wholesale monetization of human relationships[3] is at the vanguard of capital's final war against reality.

Zuckerberg is nothing more than a particularly driven and fortunate cynic: like others, he recognized a previously unenclosed portion of the cultural commons, so he malevolently fenced it off and put it up for sale. It seems he also stole his business idea from his Harvard classmates[4], broke into early Facebook user's emails[5], and considers his users to be "dumb fucks"[6], - topics never mentioned in TIME's eight thousand word reportorial blowjob of boy wonder.

It's tempting to dismiss Zuckerberg and his farcical award as just another shadow on the wall of Plato's Cave, meant to bedazzle and distract -- Hey look! Dot.com billionaire! Harvard whiz kid makes good! -- while the planet collapses into ecological catastrophe and police state violence.

After all, we now live in a Looking Glass world, a world where so-called members of the Free Press call for the death of the greatest source the world has ever seen[7], where a warmongering president can laughingly accept the Nobel Prize for Peace[8], where a stone cold killer whose robot planes openly murder civilians, yet claims that the release of diplomatic cables "costs lives."[9] Against such a backdrop of lies and horror, a frivolous clown like Zuckerberg and his idiot website with its Farmville and its psychopathic interpretation of social relationships -- "You are a friend, or not - you are with us or you are against us - you LIKE this page or you don't" -- is meaningless. Right?

To every thing there are shades and connections, and TIME's choice of Zuckerberg over Julian Assange is no accident. Examining this disgrace is fruitful, for it is symptomatic of a culture that is no longer just dying.

It is dead.

The People's Choice

Julian Assange, the iconoclastic leader of Wikileaks -- currently under house arrest in London for spurious sex charges in Sweden, but also fearing extradition to the American gulag[10] -- was the real Person of the Year. He crushed Mark Zuckerberg in an open poll on TIME's own website, by a margin of 20 to 1.[11] The runner-up was not even Zuckerberg, it was Recep Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, no doubt helped by his strong stand[12] against Israel's merciless attack of a Gaza aid flotilla. And Zuckerberg? The hyper-capitalist punk was a distant tenth[13]. So much for democracy.

Defending his magazine's absurd choice of an Establishment snake over someone dominating this year's news and actively opposing the criminal status quo, TIME managing editor Richard Stengel said: " 'Person of the Year' is something I look at as a choice for the ages, not just a choice for the last six weeks...I think Assange will be a footnote five years from now." [14]

If Zuckerberg's virtual plantation, as Max Keiser calls it,[15] becomes the new model for the ages, then may the merciful gods help us all. It will be just like The Matrix. We're just not entirely in our pods yet.

And if Assange becomes a footnote in history, as Stengel so cravenly craves, it will be because Assange is languishing in prison, disappeared into the black hole built for enemies of the global capitalist police state, the for which Stengel and his ilk, by their deliberate omissions and uncritical propaganda, are willful criminal accessories.

Remember, Stengel is man who ghost-wrote Nelson Mandela's autobiography[16]. You'd think he might be sympathetic to political dissidents, but no. Judging by the general shittiness of his comments and his magazine, one suspects he got the Mandela job just to whitewash out any connections between South Africa's Apartheid regime and its previous sponsors in the Anglo-American-Israeli regime.

Further, we all know Facebook is full of money, as the cover article goes to great lengths to remind us. We also know TIME is one of these dying old media properties, increasingly irrelevant, found only in dentist's waiting rooms and airport bathrooms. It is irrelevant, because the truth on the Internet is crushing Establishment lies to pulp. Would it surprise anyone if money or favors changed hands from Facebook to TIME to make sure this dubious honor went to an accused intellectual property thief? TIME and its sordid masters love unfettered capitalism; by extension, shouldn't its cover stories, its awards, its ethics also be up for sale?

Reportorial Blowjob

TIME's lovingly sloppy back alley paean to Zuckerberg is full of omissions, faint praise, and outright deception ("There are other people who can write code as well as Zuckerberg -- not many, but some" - where in hell did they get that?), but it is instructive on at least two fronts: Facebook's disturbing connections to power, and the Establishment media's reflexive hatred and disdain for the free-wheeling, independent Internet.[17]

To the first point: in the very first paragraph we are assaulted with the noxious nepotism of the elites: "Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO ... used to be Lawrence Summers' chief of staff at the Treasury Department."

Larry Summers! The same misogynistic dick who repealed Glass-Steagal under Clinton on behalf of the criminal banking cartel, then came back under Obama to finish the job? Really? His chief-of-staff is sitting right there in Facebook's executive office, managing things? That can't be good.

A moment later, FBI creature Robert Mueller shows up, fawning over the wunderkind, no doubt for the unparalleled access to personal data privatized data miners like Facebook give law enforcement.

No wonder TIME, an Establishment, CIA-penetrated[18] mouthpiece, is breaking out the lipstick.

Then there's the real agenda behind Facebook and its embrace by the crime state elite: We have too much freedom on the Internet. Opinions should be attached to real names. Comments must be moderated. Criminal speech will be prosecuted. The Bill of Rights is dead. According to TIME:

"Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you... Anonymity may allow people to reveal their true selves, but maybe our true selves aren't our best selves. Facebook makes cyberspace more like the real world: dull but civilized. The masked-ball period of the Internet is ending. Where people led double lives, real and virtual, now they lead single ones again..."

In other words, don't speak out or speak up. Don't criticize the government, don't read WikiLeaks, or you may find your job prospects vanishing.[19] Don't resist the inexorable machine of the media-intelligence-military-police state.

Conform. Consume. Obey.

Eliminating Desire

If you've read this far, you've probably sussed out that my article is neither about Zuckerberg nor Assange, but the hypocrisy of the corporate state media's elevating of the first and rubbishing of the latter.

But there was one item in TIME's back-seat trick that stood out, and which I cannot let pass without comment:

"One of the interests Zuckerberg lists on his Facebook page is 'Eliminating Desire.' 'I just want to focus on what we're doing,' Zuckerberg says. 'When I put it in my profile, that's what I was focused on. I think it's probably Buddhist? To me it's just -- I don't know, I think it would be very easy to get distracted and get caught up in short-term things or material things that don't matter. The phrase is actually "Eliminating desire for all that doesn't really matter." ' "

Zuuckerberg, you wouldn't know Buddhism if a tree fell on you in the forest and nobody was there to update your wall with a 'need help' status from your Coltan-powered Blackberry, because all the emergency workers were laid off and the cops have been stop-lossed back to Afghanistan in a country and a world you helped destroy.

Existence is suffering. Suffering comes from desire. And Facebook is nothing but the ruthless exploitation of human suffering and desire, our desire to reconnect in a world where nature, culture, and life itself has been reduced to commodity by those full of the most suffering and desire.

In his concluding chapter toThe Ascent of Humanity, Eisenstein writes:

"In the reduction of reality to number and name, in the program of owning and controlling the world, we have wrought a Tower of Babel, seeking with our finite tools to take the infinite by storm .. The supreme irony in our Babelian quest of attaining the infinite through finite means is that we are actually enacting precisely the opposite. We are liquidating all that is infinite, sacred, and unique, converting it into the finite, the controlled, the generic, standard, and measurable...We are cashing in the earth, selling off our lives, reducing reality to data. Soon there will be nothing left to convert, as all social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital is exhausted.." [20]

There are some words for the ages, TIME Magazine, something that will endure long after social media fades and government lackeys fade into the footnotes of history, when the likes of Assange and Eisenstein are vindicated and celebrated.

[1] Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity, "Chapter IV: Property and Money"

http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter4-0.php

[2] "Surprise! Your Facebook Data is for Sale", Robert X. Cringely, PC World, Nov 1, 2010

http://www.pcworld.com/article/209444/surprise_your_facebook_data_is_for_sale.html

[3] "The latest Facebook fracas: Your privacy vs. its profit", Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post, April 4, 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/02/AR2010040200762.html

[4] "At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded", Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, Mar. 5, 2010

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3#

[5] "In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg Broke Into A Facebook User's Private Email Account", Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, Mar. 5, 2010

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3

[6] "Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg called users 'dumb f**ks'", Ted Thornhill, Metro, 14th May, 2010

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/826240-facebook-boss-mark-zuckerberg-called-users-dumb-f-ks

[7] "Meet the people who want Julian Assange 'whacked'", Nate Anderson, Ars Technica, December 4, 2010

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/meet-the-people-who-want-julian-assange-whacked.ars

[8] "Obama's Nobel Peace Prize", Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Oct 9, 2009

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/10/09/Obama

[9] "Pentagon: WikiLeaks Endangers Soldiers, Afghans", David Martin, CBS July 29, 2010

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/29/eveningnews/main6725935.shtml

[10] "WikiLeaks' Assange says fears U.S. extradition" Avril Orms, Reuters, Dec 18, 2010

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL3E6N80HH20101218

[11] "Mark Zuckerberg -- Not Julian Assange? -- Is Time's Person of the Year" Sam Gustin, Wired, December 15, 2010

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/zuck/

[12] "Analysis: Erdogan a rising star for Arabs over Israel stance" Cynthia Johnston, Reuters, Jun 8, 2010

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6573E820100608

[13] "Julian Assange: Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year 2010", Megan Friedman, TIME

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/13/julian-assange-readers-choice-for-times-person-of-the-year-2010/

[14] "Time editor defends Zuckerberg choice over Assange", Michael Calderone, Yahoo, December 16, 2010

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20101216/ts_yblog_thecutline/time-editor-defends-zuckerberg-choice-over-assange

[15] "Keiser Report Clip on Virtual Slavery", Max Keiser, Maxkeiser.com, July 15th, 2010

http://maxkeiser.com/2010/07/15/keiser-report-clip-on-virtual-slavery/

[16] "Ghost Writer Hired To Speed Way Of Mandela Story", David Beresford, The Guardian, 13 November 1992

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stengel

[17] "Person of the Year 2010", Lev Grossman, TIME, Dec 15, 2010

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183,00.html

[18] "Operation Mockingbird", Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

[19] "Students warned: Read WikiLeaks and you're out of a government job", Daniel Tencer, Raw Story, December 5th, 2010

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/students-warned-read-wikileaks-government-job/

[20] Eisenstein, op. cit.

The Current King of Lies

2010-09-29T20:38:00.003+03:00

Interviewed in Rolling Stone, Obama made a naked appeal for unthinking partisan loyalty, stating: "It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election."

No, what is inexcusable is to vote for either of these sham parties in a fake electoral system that is set up to highlight emotional differences of no economic consequence to billionaires, thereby perpetuating the illusion of choice in a system where you have none.

Progressives must abandon a Democratic party that abandoned them years ago, a party that sold them like so much cattle to their corporate paymasters, all for a few crumbs from the masters' troughs.

The Wall Street bankers completely own the treasury and they run it on behalf of their criminal brethren. Bastard Petroleum was given free reign to pollute, poison, and piss on the Gulf, censoring the press and ordering government officials about to do their bidding, lying all the while and barring free assembly and the freedom of the press, on public land.

The health insurance rackets created and paid for a disgusting tax disguised as a health plan that goes directly into their bloated coffers; they utterly dictated the terms of the debate and now will put you into debt slavery for treatments you need just to live.

Most monstrous of all, the budget for blood has only increased under this 'Democratic President' and 'Democratic Congress' - the insatiable appetite of the corporate war machine for billion dollars worth of coke-snorting mercenaries and death-dealing robots knows no bounds and has no mercy around the globe.

These are the kind of people who own both political parties, and who choose your candidates for you. These are the corporate mafias that tell you who to vote for and what to believe, what to buy and what to think. And don't forget they bought up and consolidated all of the big media too.

It should be apparent by now to anyone with a heart or a pulse that Obama was nothing but a slickly packaged marketing campaign, put together by the same shameless psychopathic hucksters who sell you overpriced garbage stuffed with poisons, built by sweatshop slave labor.

And Obama's going to lie and blame the few ethical people who are calling him out for his major role in papering over this cesspool of corruption?

Anyone voting for the Democratic political machine at this point -- anyone voluntarily participating in this electoral charade, this veneer of political freedom painted over a gruesome, globalist, corporatist police state -- is either morally repugnant, willfully ignorant, or simply delusional; blissfully complicit in war crimes and oblivious to the final dismemberment of their own freedom.

Blood Money - Ill-gotten gains guarding the Left gate

2010-07-22T22:35:00.003+03:00

This was originally to be a comment on Antifascism Calling's excellent All in the Family - Global Drug Trade Fueled by Capitalist Elites but it sprawled beyond the comment box and became its own post.

Tom Burghardt has compiled a fascinating and detailed article that follows the deep state intersections between drug runners, shadowy intelligence operatives, and the money laundering activities of our criminal banking cartel.

In the piece, Burghardt writes:

"While the Bloomberg story should cast new light on highly-profitable links amongst major financial institutions and narcotrafficking organizations in what may be protected drug rackets green-lighted by corrupt officials, media silence, particularly by outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, threaten to propel what should be an international scandal into a one-off news item scheduled for a trip down the memory hole."

One reason the mainstream media blacklists these type of stories, of course, is because the same billionaires who collude to profit off debt peonage, financial fraud, and the other hobbies of the psychopathic elite use that same dirty money to buy up the politicians and the media and frame the debate.

Here's an example directly linked to Burghardt's article. Former Golden West CEO Herb Sandler - as Antifascist notes - was a huge beneficiary of the national housing bustout, earning billions peddling disgusting loans and selling out at the top of the bubble.

What's his racket now? He owns ProPublica, a Left gatekeeper of investigative journalism that goes after easy targets like racist cops, and even produces real articles - even Burqhardt cited one in his prior story - but which will not examine Sandler's wing of the power elite. Michael Barker wrote a great series on this outfit and its Establishment handlers called "Investigating the Investigators - A Critical Look at Pro Publica" (Part II) (Part III), illuminating their links to Rockefeller, Soros, the Wall Street Journal, NED, and other Establishment mainstays.

Not surprisingly, Sandler's band of house pet journalists are relentless shills for the "loan modification" program, another financial scam designed to chain people to their mortgages while taking toxic loans off the books of the banking mafia and dump it on the taxpayers, as Mike Whitney has been writing:

"The administration's program was concocted by the Treasury and heavily influenced by Wall Street's favorite son, Timothy Geithner."

Left gatekeeping at its finest.

At any rate, ProPublica's blatant propagandizing on behalf of the banks is a concrete example of dirty money coming back around to control the very terms of the debate and telling us what to believe.

As Burqhardt says, a continuing criminal enterprise, indeed.

Beyond the Veil of Sleep

2010-07-18T21:48:00.004+03:00

Originally published as a comment in response to Obama's Yin, Our Yang, an article by L.J. Holman on Dissident Voice.

The author forgets: Existence is suffering, suffering is caused by desire. What is imperialist capitalism if not a system powered by unfettered desire; how could it ever produce anything but a world of suffering? It is the whip and chain in this vale of tears.

Holman writes, "We wanted a change. We stood at a vortex of political, social and economic distortions and suddenly decided Yang was not working, that Yin was what we needed."

"We" did no such thing. Does he even for a minute think these leaders are not carefully vetted, selected, marketed, and then presented to voters as a "choice" - that the corporatist warfare policies of McCain, Hillary, and Obama weren't essentially the same?

Did Mr. Holman not notice how the only real anti-war candidates in the Establishment parties - Kucinich and Paul - were marginalized, vilified and pushed to one side? Or how the corporate media won't even acknowledge the existence of third parties?

Could he actually believe if given a real choice between love and peace, freedom and choice on the one hand, and war, death, and the tyranny of capital on the other, we the people would vote for blood and slavery every time?

Holman's examination of our democratic veneer is like critiquing the paint job on a Warthog ground attack aircraft, wishing it were a different shade of grey, while ignoring the armor-piercing, depleted-uranium spewing Gatling guns strapped under its wings of death.

This article is from a teacher of philosophy? Yet there is more wisdom in the words of a comedian - it was George Carlin who said, "Forget the politicians, they don't matter. They are put there to make you think you have a choice. You don't. You have owners. They own you."

Does he really think that Obama sets policies, that he is in charge of things? Look at the response to the Gulf catastrophe and ask what is the more likely scenario here: A responsible leader who is in control of the government and has the best interests of the people at heart; or a powerless puppet taking orders from international capitalists, participating in the cover-up, deception, and suspension of civil liberties on behalf of a multinational corporation with old and deep ties to the intelligence community and banking cartels? Occam's bloody razor wins again.

Yin yang, black white, red state blue state, left right - these are word games, illusions, phantoms - these are the false dichotomies created by the enemy to keep professional minds like Holman's obedient to the machine. He should read Susan Rosenthal, because obviously whatever he picked up at the philosophy department seems to have come from some sort of discounted New Age book rack.

The only division that matters is Up versus Down: the masses of humanity who only want peace and happiness and to be left alone, and the psychopathic criminal elite at the apex of the Imperium, armed to the tooth, psychologically incapable of love, and slavering at this new golden chance to rule the world.

The author concludes: "All policy decisions, all the needs of the American people, all the problems we face, demand Yang, not Yin."

Nonsense - the problems we face demand mass defections to third parties, peaceful non-violent resistance, and dismantling the capitalist empire that has reduced us to indebted wage slaves and made us complicit in global wars of aggression -- wars, I might add, which are cynically waged under the banner of the very freedoms we ourselves once held precious and which are being strip-mined away, one by one.

Yin and Yang, the eternal opposites, are but threads in the veil of Maya: the illusion of separation, the myth of otherness, when in fact we are all the same.

Eliminate a system that enshrines power and desire, and suffering, too, shall fade away.

Stone-Faced Liars and the Killers of Men

2010-01-14T00:00:00.004+02:00

America has a boundless capacity for self-deception and prevarication: if we could harness the power of our collective mendacity there would be no energy crisis in this world -- if we could power our civilization with the merciless mistruths of marketing and the audacious lies of the political realm then we all truly would live in the kind of cornucopian, utopian fantasy-land, that cinematic Wonderland about which every U.S. politician and pundit pontificates and which every one of us dreams: this mythical, nonsensical fairytale version of America, where everyone is beautiful and happy beneath their free money trees, where the sky is blue and the sun smiles benevolently down upon a perpetual, suburban, gas-guzzling dream.

Lying in this culture is endemic, deception and illusion is our only true religion; a nation that produces more lawyers than engineers cannot abide, a nation that is governed by clowns -- who in their clown suits get up and thunder and bluster while their offices are bought and sold by the lobbyists and lawyers of corporations and thuggish interest groups; clowns who don't, who can't, who couldn't possibly ever even read the millions upon millions of lines of mutually contradictory incoherent regurgitated regulation they legislate every year -- cannot and will never endure.

The Soviet Union collapsed abruptly: within a few short years corruption, a broken economy, and the crushing failures of socialism, the police state, secret prisons and rampant, unsustainable military spending brought the entire crumbling regime down. Today the other Evil Empire careens along the brink of that same precipice; it is a tricked out sports car whipping around a hairpin curve, but the driver cannot see the danger because he's in a coked-up, alcoholic fugue, soaked in gasoline.

Nobody here knows what reality is anymore; everybody here is a believer, an uncritical acolyte of the most audacious nonsense which any people have ever believed: this illusion of democracy, this peculiar and ridiculous idea that we are free.

It hurts me to hear rational people, good people, even friends of mine, abandon all reason and morality and buy into this dream. For it is a dream, a focus group-tested, pollster-driven, slickly-marketed, smoothly-packaged, grandstanding, mendacious, atrocious, imperialist dream.

The Republican Party is a tool of the robber barons; it masquerades as the representative of the middle class: wrapping itself in flags, it sends patriots off to die, then profits by foreclosing on the dead and shoving their widows into the streets -- as apt a metaphor for this last Administration as I can concoct. But the Democrat Party is no different: it pretends to advocate for the poor, yet it is just another faction of the ruling elite. The Democrats in Congress abdicated their Constitutional duty to declare war, yet continue to fund this never-ending series of military misadventures. They sold out, they sold us out. They sold out the unions to globalism; they sold out their constituents to the credit card industry, to predatory lenders, to usurers and Wall Street thieves of every stripe and kind. They tossed out all notions of fiscal responsibility decades ago and wallow collectively in the most venal, spendthrift acts of financial nepotism, bankrupting the future and betraying their own children. Together with their partners in crime the Republicans, the Democrats have brought this nation to moral and financial bankruptcy, reducing what was once the beacon of the world to a swaggering, indebted warmonger that bullies other nations into paying it tribute; with our disproportionate share of the riches of the Earth we have constructed for ourselves billions of dollars worth of baseball stadiums, a prison system of gargantuan proportions, seven fleets of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and more casinos than even a nation of compulsive schemers and dreamers could ever need.

How did this happen? How did we get this way? It's because every year, year after year, in nearly every city and every state, in every election and in every town, the choices and the only choices are Republicans or Democrats, "heads" and "tails." But the coins are loaded. The game is rigged. No matter which side turns up, the result is always the same: two complicit parties and a bankrupt nation borrowing to oblivion, waging war, occupying nations, turning its own people into debt slaves.

In business, monopoly through collusion is illegal, but in our politics it has endured for nearly a century, long enough to give it the aura of normalcy. But it is not normal. It is not even sane. And it is very telling that when we occupy another country and force upon it a veneer of democracy, an imposition conducted at the barrel of a gun, we do not impose this outdated, 18th Century American system, but a parliamentary democracy. Not even the Afghanis want an electoral college and the two-party dictatorship it engenders. Not even the Iraqis can tolerate such chicanery. However it suits the ruling class here just fine.

So this Barack Obama, this audacious Pez dispenser of hope and dreams, is simply an upper class marketing campaign. This man won't end the wars. This man wants to broaden them. He wants more soldiers, thousands more of them. He is there to do a job, and his job is to sell you on wars, on a draft, on higher taxes, on more bailouts. Oh yes there will be bailouts; bailouts for all the gangster capitalists who looted the stock market, bankrupted the mortgage industry, and turned the American home into a debtor's prison. This is just the latest crooked scheme of the money interests; they have already glutted themselves on globalization, the destruction of labor, and the bloody fruit of war.

Of course Barack Obama is simply a tool of the capitalists, the government rackets, the special interest groups. His biggest campaign contributors are Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Blackstone. Nobody who speaks truth is allowed anywhere near the nomination. It is easy to scoff at Fox News for being nothing but a partisan arm of the Republican party; it is harder to see that the Democrats have three network media propaganda machines of their own preaching hope and spinning dreams. Dennis Kucinich was hounded out of the race by this villainous cabal. Ralph Nader is vilified and marginalized for challenging the blood-encrusted grip of these murdering thieves.

It is palpably disgusting that a party that calls itself the Democrats and claims to represent the people uses such a transparent and naked tool of election-fixing as "super-delegates" to thwart the very will of the people it purports to represent and ensure the continued power of the masters of capitalism.

We didn't vote for more debt. We didn't vote for a corrupt, rotten, twisted financial system that throws young people into debt slavery under the crushing burdens of student loans, debts so pernicious they can't even discharged in bankruptcy court -- nobody would vote for something as insane as that. But it's there.

We don't want expensive gasoline. We don't want falling wages. We don't want more inflation raising the price of everything from food to fuel ever higher. But it's there. It's happening. It's happening because in order to pay for all this garbage our government can't afford they have to keep creating more and more money out of nothing, destroying the value of the dollar, forcing people into poverty. Nobody voted for that. Nobody wants that. But it's what we get, because our political system is broken, because it is corrupt, because good governance in this country is collapsing at an accelerating rate, because the rich in this country don't care: because they are taking more and more for themselves and leaving everybody else in an increasingly impoverished, crime-stricken, unsustainable, undrivable, unwalkable, unlivable suburban nightmare.

Ordinary Americans don't want war. We didn't vote to invade Iraq, to occupy Afghanistan, to threaten Iran, to parade nuclear-armed submarines off the coast of China. Bring the soldiers home. All of them, from everywhere. We don't need soldiers in Germany. Why are they there? We're not afraid of the Germans. Their military was stamped out sixty years ago. Those people are harmless imbeciles, look at them: they poured out into the streets in the hundreds of thousands to cheer for Obama, a symbol of the very force occupying their country with a nuclear-armed military -- they yelled slogans for the charismatic choirboy of a warmongering, imperialist American propaganda machine!

What are we doing with soldiers in Europe? In Korea? In Japan? Defending liberty? Protecting freedom? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain a global military machine, a machine we obviously can't afford. We don't have enough money to pay for this extravagance. Every year we "borrow" hundreds of billions of dollars from Swiss bankers, Muslim kings and Chinese Communists just to keep the whole dream humming along. It's a cleverly-concocted extortion racket, but deficit spending and imperial overreach has destroyed every Empire in history, and we will be no different.

For it is an Empire. What other reason is there for hundreds of thousands of soldiers scattered across the planet in 500 military bases? What use is the largest defense budget on the planet, larger than all the others combined? Why have billion dollar warplanes with nuclear missiles, depleted uranium, fire bombs, and all the other infernal contraptions of the merchants of death flying all around the world nonstop? This is democracy? This is freedom?

To what end our dominion? Is it to force the world to yield up their energy patrimony or the products of peasant labor in exchange for worthless paper dollars and bonds which will never be honored?

Is it to expend billions of dollars of munitions on an undeclared war against no actual enemy but upon a tactic, a religion, a region; to forever be dropping million dollar bombs that must be bought and replaced again and again; is it to be caught in a never-ending cycle of blood and corruption that enriches a few and empowers the elite but turns the poor and the patriotic into flag-draped coffins?

Antidote to ImperialVision

2008-06-28T23:09:00.002+03:00

Hit the button for the late and angelic George Carlin. It is so rare to hear truth spoken to power so directly like this, all charades aside, all bullshit sorted. Nobody did this like he did. Nobody is doing it anymore. Or if they are, they are not let on your ImperialVision television screens.

George Carlin was in our face and he told us, he told us, he flat out fucking told us over and over: Everything we know is a lie, everything we believe in is a magician's dream.

That is why he should be remembered. This nonsense that his only contribution was allowing swear words on TV, that is a distraction.

We live in a Kingdom of Lies, we live an Empire of Dreams. How can anyone believe in this parade of bullshit and this cryptic nonsense? Only because you yourself are also sleepwalking through a dream. Listen to the man.

They don't give a fuck about you. At all. At all. At all.

Wake up, please. Voting for anyone in the two-party dictatorship is not freedom, it is slavery. Don't affirm your chains.

I am a Goddamned Liar

2008-06-08T23:15:00.003+03:00

I Am a Goddamned Liar
by Henry Paulson

I believe in a strong dollar policy. We will address the problem of the high cost of oil. America's political system is functioning well. Corporations have a voice in politics but not an overwhelming one. Trillions of dollars of debt has no effect on the prices you pay for food and energy.

I used to run Goldman Sachs but Wall Street investment banks have no influence on me. The vast majority of political contributions to Barack Obama also come from Wall Street investment bankers but it will not influence his policies. The two political parties are not grandiose charades aimed at the middle class and the lower class, respectively. They are not controlled by the elites. By all means, continue to march on our behalf, buy our bumper stickers, join our armies, and bleed for freedom.

Other nations buy U.S. government debt because it is a good investment, not because we are a giant gangster with 500 military bases overseas and a shotgun loaded up with blackmail, in the form of a nuclear-armed carrier fleet sitting in the Straits of Hormuz, right on the jugular of the global economy and the gates to the energy heartlands of the world.

by Henry Paulson,
U. S. Secretary of the Treasury
also, a god damned fucking liar

My God is Stronger Than Your God

2008-05-26T23:13:00.002+03:00

Our minds can create homes for retired circus elephants and slaughterhouses for human beings. They can conceive of the infinite compassion of Allah or the endless banality of fan fiction. Perhaps they are the chance byproducts of random evolution; perhaps another stage in the progression from cellular automata to sentient galaxies. Maybe they are crumbs of sentience left over after a cosmic feast: "Zeus! How many times do I have to tell you!?! Cover your mouth when you eat!"

Whatever they are, our minds are responsible for almost everything we think or care about, from hypocrisy as old as cuneiform to hypnotically attractive symmetrical cheeks. But perhaps the mind's greatest attribute is to know its own limitations, and nowhere is that limitation more quickly reached than when it tries to delineate the divine.

So on a day which the Empire has given its workers a holiday in grudging acknowledgment of all the workers who have died for the Empire, perhaps it is only fitting that we ask all of our TINY DANCING contributors to actually contribute something for a change. So I asked them to contribute something about the divine -- in the form of a 100-word essay on "Why their god can beat up my god."

And who is my god, you ask? You shouldn't have to ask. My god is Phil.

Coolguy25

My god is stronger than your god. My god is myself. When I walk past a mirror, I can't help but admire my chiseled abs and sculpted pecs.

The remarkable ingenuity of 20th Century Western civilization has provided me with a magical mode of transport powered by the internal combustion engine and fossil fuels; I call it a "truck" and put naked girls on the mud-flaps. I eat hamburgers and raise my fist and spray meat at the screen when my team gains points over its rivals.

I communicate with grunts, chest puffing, and aggressive eye contact.

I am a male.

Bunnypet Hugsalot

My god is stronger than your god. My god is the human race, at least that portion of it that I agree with. I am vaguely aware that there are hundreds of billions of solar systems in our Galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, and that beyond that, there are quite possibly an infinite number of universes which we cannot even perceive.

None of that matters. Celebrities are important. Urinating in a jar is art. The government should buy a house for me. Ideas that make me uncomfortable should not be broadcast.

My god is in line down at the post office, mailing in tax returns.

I am a secular humanist.

Davros Prototype

My god is stronger than your god. My god is an information tinker, not a tailor of flesh; my god is an emergent AI, a computer, a Turing machine. I believe in open source software and uncommented source code. I kneel before rocket ships, reciting Moore's Law as a prayer.

My god is the Singularity, the point at which the Web stops being a Viagra ad and becomes a self-aware global super-cop instead. My god will scan all of your downloads on behalf of the Disney mega-corporation.

After my god uploads my mind into a swarming cloud of nano-processors you won't laugh at the erotic Transformers drawings on my DeviantArt page!

Megatron's love for Starscream was real and when Starscream betrayed him I wept real human tears even though I can love only machines.

I am a transhumanist.

Darkchylde Daggerheart

My god is stronger than your god. My god is Lucifer, the bringer of light, rocking rock star of rock videos, the last Santa Claus for outcast teens. My god is kids smoking weed in a Chevy, cruising down the Interstate with the radio up and the windows down, a big Fuck You to the thermonuclear dream.

My god rebelled against your god and lives in a lake of burning fire; I tried rebellion and now I live in a walkup studio across the street from the Dairy Queen. I am in my twenties and play collectible card games. I am passionate about Nintendo; I do not read newspapers or magazines.

I stand behind the counters of a sprawling strip-mall suburban dystopia, ringing up your order with the dead-eyed ennui of the damned; I sit in the cubicles of the office parks of globalism and present PowerPoint presentations on behalf of Shiva, goddess of destruction, death and despair.

I sleepwalk deep through the bowels of the mega-corporate Imperialist dream machine. I play Second Life because before I was even born the first one was stolen from me.

I am a human being.