The culture of addiction

The dose makes it medicine or poison

The  following is a PDF file with a few observations on the Culture of Addiction. (Apologies for the PDF…)

USSA

 

No6ody is the Kink in a Demoncrazy

I have forgotten much, and I knew but little, so eye am more fit to drool than some other recent Pres-a-dents and their Vice Pressagainsts. It must be my dooty to select myself for one of those governbent orifices. Since real voting occurs primarily when people spend currency, if no6ody is elected Kink no harm will be done. Also, no6ody runs for poli-tickle offices long after the selection is over, so vhote for me in 2012.
But I would not like you to vhote for me: –> no6ody . But I’d like it even less if you voted for a corppolitician. So, if you vhote, don’t spe1l my name right. Instead, please vhote for nobody, pleas. Thank you. [[I’m also too embarrassed to act-surreally try to win, because eye mite, and eye would not be noughtthing bought a zero no6ody no more.]]
No6ody has to ask for money because it’s traditional. But when eye do, eye get is $₤ips of Pa¥p€r. Since ‘Citizens United’ really means ‘Corporations Untied’ in NewSpeak, so eye have hired No6ody, incorpse-orated (which is a huge dumber of people) to collect my money for me. If you want to contribute, then give your money to real people, for it will get to me eventually. Eye will also accept previously used paperbags to make disguises out of so no6ody can remain a zero.

IF eye am selected, eye will do what no6ody does:
eye will not play with the corpse-orations, especially the biggest and bank$ter-icky-ist ones, for they have no soul.
The death penalty will be applied to all limited-liability corporations, so anyone intentionally selling defective products or engaging in reckless business practices can have all their assets sued off. If this doesn’t work or cannot get thru Con-gress, eye will declare that limited-liability corps are ‘enemy combatants’ and eye will recite no6ody’s ‘poetry’ at them (cruise missiles are too expensive). eye will also declare that various wea1%thy people, members of Con-gress, and teh Supine Courp are all ‘enemy combatants’ and thereby mandatory consumers of no6ody’s Vo9on ‘poetry’ until the NDAA is revoked.
More than two million presidential pardons need to be handed out, especially in the secret prisons. Yesterday.
All drugs will be legalized, or eye will pardon anyone convicted of drug use. eye would encourage free-market drug dens for those taking the heavy-duty stuff. [I’d open one, so you could trust no6ody with your brain when you’re out of your mind.]
Prisons, military, currency management, and other ‘natural’ monopolies are government business and can not be sold to the highest bidder. The mass media will be available to all humans who wish to use it, not just wea1%thy people. I’d call it ‘teh internetz.’
Fractional reserve banking is illegal. End of story.
The Goover Mint will pay most of the salaries of the lowest-paid 90% or so of ‘defense contractor’ employees for a year or two, but eye will ask them to find some public service to perform instead of supplying wargasmic toys. It’s time to till the soil–metaphorically and literally.

My eye-deal. Not.

This has nothing to do with anything else on this page. Really.

 

This is Lacedaemon!

Suddenly I feel like a Helot…

Is this Lacedaemon? (Lacedaemon was the nation, Sparta was the chief city.)

Even in this less-than-literate age, most people have heard of Sparta, even though it declined before there was a Jesus. TPTB seem to like Sparta. There’s even a word for it–laconophilia. Even Adolf Hitler praised the Spartans: “The subjugation of 350,000 Helots by 6,000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans.” What attraction does this ancient city-state hold for TPTB?  Count the ways…

Sparta, from it’s beginning, was a slave state. Every citizen was given a plot of land to own as long as he lived, and the land (and the slaves tied to it who did all the farmwork, called ‘helots’) would revert back to the state once the citizen died. This rather communistic idea was quickly abandoned, and Sparta always had huge inequalities in wealth distribution that grew as time passed. The government was always a secretive oligarchy–so secretive that the constitution of Sparta may never have been written down.

Sparta was always a militarist state, and its citizens were its soldiers. Full citizens of Sparta were forbidden to have anything to do with business, according to Xenophon. Sparta was not known for its libraries, temples, or philosophers, but for its total dedication to military affairs. Aristotle describes the kingship at Sparta as “a kind of unlimited and perpetual generalship,” as the king had few other duties.

A secret society for the young, the future citizen-soldiers, called the Krypteia (from the Greek word meaning ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’) ruthlessly eliminated any Helots that were considered objectionable, with a few random murders thrown in to keep the rest of the Helots in fear–a kind of state terror. Every year, the oligarchy declared war on the Helots so Spartan citizens could kill them without committing murder according to their laws.

The educational system was limited to what they thought made good soldiers. Real learning was banned. Plutarch: “They learned to read and write for purely practical reasons; but all other forms of education they banned from the country, books and treatises being included in this quite as much as men. All their education was directed toward prompt obedience to authority, stout endurance of hardship, and victory or death in battle.” On the plus side, this ‘education’ included women as well, unique among the Greeks at the time.

Spartan leaders encouraged citizens to have children, but all children were judged by government representatives, and if they were deemed unfit to live, the children were thrown off of Mount Taygetos. They had rather primitive ideas of eugenics, but such ideas were firmly entrenched. The founder of Sparta, Lycurgus, is reputed to have said “that the female should practice bodily exercise no less than the male sex,” and to say that a man should think it shame to be seen going in to his wife, or coming out from her. When married people meet in this way, they must feel stronger desire for the company of one another…and produce more robust offspring.” This extended to the Helots, but in reverse. The Krypteia often targeted ‘superior’ Helots working in their fields. Occasionally, things got even worse for the the Helots. Thucydides states: “The helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high spirited and the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished.”

Spartan citizens were constitutionally not allowed to use gold and silver coins, but instead were to use iron bars as currency. Spartan ‘fiat’ money was nearly worthless, troublesome to use in quantity, and not worth hoarding or stealing. [Link to a proposed bill to make U. S. coins out of steel (a durable kind of iron). Euro coins are already made of steel. Perhaps vending machines will stop accepting coins altogether, taking currency and credit-cards… changing over to cc-only, free video surveillance, for your protection, no extra charge. [BTW, the weaklypeedonya currently has this idiotic thing posted: “(…) archeology has not produced evidence of this currency, and it is more likely that Sparta simply used currencies minted elsewhere.” LOL! As if that could happen to a dominant state. Also, iron RUSTS. That’s one reason why glod and sliver are useful as money.] Wealth, for most citizens, was land ‘ownership.’ Such wealth was easily tracked by the Spartan oligarchy.

Perhaps because of their warlike education, the Spartans were reputed by many to be terse in their speech, saying little. [140 character limit of Twitter, cell phone texting, etc] Do U no Y ? Ignorance is Strength.

There is a well-known passage in Thucydides which runs thus: “Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted, and nothing left but the temples and the ground-plan, distant ages would be very unwilling to believe that the power of the Lacedaemonians was at all equal to their fame. Their city is not built continuously, and has no splendid temples or other edifices; it rather resembles a group of villages, like the ancient towns of Hellas, and would therefore make a poor show.”

 

It is what it is

The first time you see it, you don’t recognise it. Perhaps it was something designed so stupidly that it could not be an accident. Somebody says something like ‘planned obsolescence ‘ or ‘made in China,’ which implies permission-to-exist for such a stupid process that produces such a stupid thing. But there was probably nothing you could do, and all the Somebodies you know don’t seem to care–so you don’t. You don’t think much about it… but your eyes have been trained, and they don’t stop seeing. Soon you will see ‘it’ again. You will encounter an illiterate high school student, or see massive bankster fraud go unpunished, or war-whores pounding public pulpits, and you find that you can’t stop thinking about ‘it.’ ‘It’ is everywhere. ‘It’ is in wars that can’t be won, in the sweatshop factories producing goods that quickly turn into garbage, in the poisoned land and polluted water.  You can see that innocent people die when the bombs fall, and that people and the planet are treated cruelly in order to maximize the income of some already rich men, and that ‘the system’ seems to spread stupidity among all the nearly-hairless hapless talking apes. And then you see ‘it,’ one day, finally, and you know ‘it’ has been there all along.

PDF warning: farce-ist governbents and what to do about them