fever in the funk house

... Work and work for love and sex
Ain't you hungry for success, success, success, success
Does it matter? (Shattered) Does it matter?...
M. Jagger | K. Richards

It may be the wrong time to make a new entry here, or not.  Comments are still rolling along on the last one, I'm enjoying them, but we hardly talk about the posts, we always stray.  Therefore, I appreciate it when someone refers to the post in their comment, although that in no way negates the amazing things passing across our horizon having little to do with anything posted on this page that come around on each post's comment page.  I know I am just as guilty of going off topic as you are.  Our interests are remarkably varied and who can deny the abundance of things that require group discussion, especially in the Revealing?  A perfect example of what I mean would be Susanah's "home school or unschool" dilemma, or our Rasta's mastery of survival on his rain-riddled Jamaican property. This so called "blog" in more than a few ways is a mystery to me.  It almost self-sustains.  In the past, when comments slowed to a halt, I took it as a sign it was time to speak up.  Now, I don't know.  It is just a feeling that those who lurk and never break into the conversation would like to see something in this space, more than links to other blogs, more than changing art and photos.  And by this time, the other feeling that interferes with the first, I've learned that this is the wrong time of day to do what I find myself doing.  I have routines, like taking Bernie out, taking a treat to Chip the Appaloosa, bringing wheelbarrows of logs to the deck for easy reach as evening temperature drop and drop ... however, that gets solved in the same manner as always, I'm going to skip and jump around.  It may all turn out incomprehensibly off the wall as each new paragraph has nothing to do with the last, since I will likely recall  something important while pulling Bernie the Basset, translated bred  to be a bunny hunter, away from his intended prey.  I usually come to you late at night after the house is sleeping.  Today, I'm taking advantage of the last few mild days of fall before the snow descends and Arctic parkas must be snapped and zipped before stepping into the fog.  Besides, there is just too much to nail down in one post.  Its too much.  Overkill kills.  Life is now some low budget late night Halloween horror flick where the dude's head spins and his eyeballs fall in and out on springs as Darth inflicts perfectly legal steroidal blows drawing blood, prolapsing organs.

Charles is right again when he says what we have here is special.  Do you know how comfy it is to be able to say "my hard drive meltdown" and have everyone know what I mean?  BTW, our beloved bolanath is in that Vanilla Sky free fall at this time as well, but he assures me he has it under control for a soft landing.  Techology has its flaws.  Every now and then one of us crashes hard and it disrupts everything in our routines.  Then we gotta scramble and think and rework our values - again.  I still have not completely recovered having lost my very tidy painting system by way of the dog chewed printer cord, the loss of photoshop, hundreds of important links and only the Creator knows how many people's email addresses were fried.  But when we want something badly enough, we make do.  We workaround.  All of life is a workaround.  Tedious, laughable, infuriating, but bolstered by a barrier I refuse to cross which is that of regret over our personal tragedies, losses, unfortuate circumstances which are usually unfortunate only to us.  When that waste of energy creeps up, its best to concentrate on Haiti and Pakistan and earthquakes and floods and cholera and the idiocy of abundant medical supplies locked up only released to victims by having an official review of the paperwork generated by a healthy caseworker who takes no for an answer.  Lunacy.  Heartbreaking.  Are these things by design?  I don't know.  I only know from a few experiences with people who do casework and all of them were amazingly negligent personalities who resolved nothing.

The local and distant voting brawls are in crescendo this week.  I'm getting at least two pounds of glossy coated stock squeezed into the rural gangbox daily.  The printers and paper manufacturers and shippers are making a killing off this stuff.  My tip to them in order to further enrich themselves would be to haunt municipal dumps and recycle the trash. 

The only one I actually opened was one from the Meg Whitman circular file stack because she included photos of herself as a youth.  She was actually a beautiful young woman, you could see dreams in her eyes portrayed as a person of high integrity and inviolate truths.  And now, look what happened.  It is beyond sad that someone running for office is so desperate they resort to advertising their gubanatorial potential through depictions of a blond bombshell representative-self that no longer exists.  Is that how we got Arnold?  Mister muscle moviestar?  Is that how we got Obama?  When its all said and done is it just all (secretly) about physical appearances?  This is too gauche to mention, isn't it.  And Sarah Palin, murderer of wildlife?  This is what I meant about politicians being celebrities, they've managed to edge over the celebrities of tinseltown, it is fairly recent, likely by way of course, with shows like the repulsive, loud and painful Cops and broke municipalities scarfing at the stockyard auctions.  Rulers must rule or they are not rulers at all and will be subject, like everyone else, including wealthy actors/actresses, to the rules.  Sorry to bring that up, all the pillars of our old social order crumbled.  Every once in a while a ruler crosses the line into being ruled as a show there isn't really any discrimination to it, but you'll notice these marks victims are all back in action in the semi-elusive time frame of the short memory media as if no one really toe-tapped in the men's room or made love to someone not his lawful wife on a powerboat gliding over Bahamian waters.  Such Monkey Business is just another part of the new normal.  If you pay attention you'll see what I mean.  In the days of real rulers, people were drawn and quartered for less.  Now, in the new normal, astounding heights of real wrongdoing are on display every single day and the rulers of every stripe show themselves affected fundamentally with a necrotic case of double standards.  Why would anybody want to be a ruler?  Why would anyone spend billions on becoming a ruler?  It means they have completely lost their humility which explains a lot about the rules and the new rules they so love to create in showing their possession of ruling power.  Rules which change Nothing for the incessant flow of our collective humanity funneled into the pockets of those rulers breathing-in that rarified oxygen wafting across the pinnacle of civilization's most magnificent achievements.  No my friends, we live in Nancy Grace world these days, our new normal sponsored by Mussolini's nightmares and Jim Jones final hours.  I predict a drug will be introduced at some time in the not too distant future that wipes out memory, although the overload of media might well be that drug.  It bears all the hallmarks ... one trick to overcome the soma (In "Brave New World" (1932), the name of a state-dispensed narcotic producing euphoria and hallucination.) is go right to the last paragraph where it says something like the informant-turned-criminal cooperated with instructions.  Another would be to ask yourself "Does it physically hurt your own head when a protester's head is smashed by boot-stompings against the pavement?" 

A particularly irksome flaw in technology's short lifespan beyond the breakability of plastic parts and overheating CPU fans is the immediacy with which it outdates itself.  In spite of all the claims and rave reviews and beta tests and glowing comparisons to competitor products, it still isn't enough.  It must spawn new versions or become obsolete as unrealistic growth projections demand more - even though targeted consumer blocks are broke and looking towards hyperinflation.  We saw this interestingly with the extinction of XP (gone for good alert), replaced by Vista replaced by WIN7 while Chrome advertises on our websearches.  We saw this with the VCR.  We see this with cell phones as videocams and qwerty keyboards for those who can't text fast enough before their thoughts evaporate.  You might notice that the people associated with these advances are morphing into celebrity personalities worthy of headlines and entire sections in the media.  HP boss come lately caught in sexual harrassment allegations, oh, Meg Whitman would never do that.  We are to think she is the rare irreplaceable, ruler in waiting.

Its all too much to cast the Indigenous Grandmother's healing Net of Light over all of them and our remaining resources, although its certainly worth trying.  I have found through various efforts the best time to do it is when you begin meditation.  Actually, it takes you  into meditation as you are in tune with one love, one heart, relaxed in limb and wide open in mind.  Its best to do it in darkness, moonlight is good as are stars whether you are outdoors or inside.  There is something about the dark that allows the trillions of tiny lights within the net you are envisioning that illuminates and throws down negative forces, falseness, paltry and petty cancers of the soul, the growing void of living, loving, innocent bounty thriving on this planet.  The Net seems to work for everything you direct it toward, healing, compassion and overstanding.

And now, I hear the beginning of rumblings as the males ask in their various approaches, guinea pig wheeks, dog paws, nosings at the ankle, the Fireteacher peering into the fridge, "What's for dinner?"  I say a grace tonight for all those who have nothing to eat.

... end transmission ...

Post title from Exile on Main Street, Jagger | Richards

As the world implodes

First up, I read that the mood swinging BofA has decided to go ahead and displace more families swaggeringly confident they are in the right to do so. Their long legal arms must have assured them they've got it covered. We'll soon find out how as this latest 911 works its way through the courts. Between you and me, I've known all along there was something fishy going on because there was a chart published in the LA Times made by Realtytrac that showed all the homes in foreclosure with the typically horizontal red line zigging up a little and zagging down a little until year 2007 where that red line went straight up through the top of the chart - off the charts indeed. I saved it and looked for it many times since, but it was lost in the hard drive meltdown from last year and appears to be deleted from media archives. The past week's staggering revelations about the legalities of the paperwork on property ownership renewed my study of the situation and discovered the problems coincide with the advent of MERS. Shocking. Not. Of course you know about MERS.

From Wiki:
... MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) ... is a privately held company that operates an electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States.[1]

MERS role in facilitating mortgage trading was relatively uncontroversial in its early days a decade ago but continued fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis has put MERS at the center of several legal challenges disputing the company's right to initiate foreclosures. Should these challenges succeed, the US banking industry could face a renewed need for capitalization.[4] ...

Right away, you get the picture, technology (progress, growth, electronic TRACKING) eavesdrops again, without warrants. Corporations don't need warrants? When personhood doesn't need a warrant, perhaps they can just make some citizens arrests? Hey, its not really spying, naw. An elephantine disaster has re-emerged that We the People must be responsible for cleaning up, no one has said this but that is the only way it will ever be resolved exactly as everything else is resolved, the burden of proof and the burdens of the poor pitted against huge could-care-less giants require WE have to stand over their shoulders and physically point out what is wrong with this and what to do about it and do it. We the People do not have an in house crack legal team waiting in our backyard sheds. Now all these human beings affected by this disaster are on the bandwidth all the time desperately looking for answers when the answer was there all along. While MERS is not Angelo Mozilo, MERS part in this crisis is telling: Suddenly there rose on the horizon a roster of all the humans in houses and malls. Now when you want to be very, very wealthy, all you have to do is buy the lists and pick a few obvious marks. Start with unemployed, non-English speakers and so forth. And when that kind of marksmanship runs dry, why you can switch right over to CRE of which the entire landscape of North America has been filled-in as convenience services for all the barrel-tiled gated communities with central vacs in every room.

Does anyone recall how excited the real estate industry was when they'd been trawling the populace for more potential home purchasers and proudly announced their new targets were to be single mothers and illegal immigrants? For so many, it was love at first site.

While I'm at it, I credit Charles for his introduction to MERS. Its so perfect a tool for the Bankers it could go down in history as important as the Pasteurization of cows' milk. It is where we are going with everything, and in this I include the preferred customer discount card readers, credit card records, electronic medical records, etc., all of which give rise to yes, identity theft because as nice an employee as Joe Schmoe appears, you never really know who you are dealing with until its too late and as with Robo Signers, former burger flippers, it was too late on the grandest scale ever. And you thought Choicepoint was something. Wake up. Ice Nine time.

Many blogs and real news sites are working this one, so visit them and get informed. I'm not a news site really and the whole thing tends to nauseate me. When are they going to bloody knock off this shit? It is a miracle of God I am not in that world at all. What l've read and seen is replayed over and over every bi-monthly trip into a tiny, but densely populated area for supplies and still it brings on nausea. I see it live playing out among the people, many of whom think problem solving consists of forgetting about the problem and driving faster and more dangerously to get nowhere.The weirdest are usually in front of the box store which has taken to putting a quick-sale section in their oversize and empty parking lot. There wandering in a daze, are the snaggle toothed in flip flops with curlers and their daughters and vacuous husbands arms loaded with dollar plastic junk and family size bags of potato chips. Guess they're not cutting back. For people who have been poor all their lives, nothing has changed, however, inflation followed by hyperinflation will change all that. Where will they go? Some of the farmers sold their livestock because they could no longer afford the feed. When people get raw to the bone, when there is nothing left to sell, then we are in Migrant Mother territory with a company store where you can owe your soul. Yes, I will paint it. Now these new Okies, formerly home owning innocents caught in someones idea of oneupsmanship, could be anybody from anywhere so all the rules still apply. I.e.; some still won't get it. Order will have to be maintained, so Darth and Erik will have their people on the scene just in case you were romanticizing about freedom at last.

What is going on in France, in its 6th day, are some very angry human beings gathering and holding signs in large numbers because the retirement age is being raised meaning delayed expectations. It is interesting these protesters are being labeled as dock and refinery workers and any article you read soothingly explains in the ending paragraphs they have many ships waiting to offload plenty of fuel oil, yet, planes are diverted from landing and many gas stations dry. Hmmmm. It wouldn't be that some of the protesters are fuel oil people and some of them are everybody else that sees trying to survive on reduced pensions with severely limited fuel supplies spells the end of any creature comfort no matter how small?

... Fuel shortage fears

Since September 27, strikes against pension and port reforms at oil depots in the south of the country have left 63 oil, gas and chemical tankers waiting off the Mediterranean coast, Marseille port authorities said. ...
Strikes put pressure on petrol and diesel supplies across the country, notably when supplies to Paris's regional and international airports were cut on Friday, but the pipelines running south from Le Havre were reportedly working again by late on Saturday. ...
Christine Lagarde, the economy minister, urged people not to panic over petrol supplies, as the country had ample stocks for now. ..."We have reserves," she told France's RTL radio, adding supply problems had affected 230 petrol stations out of a total 13,000 in the country. "People mustn't panic."...
Police were able to break up blockades at three fuel depots in southern France, easing some of the pressure at petrol stations, but that has not eased fears of a fuel shortage.
"People are panic buying. We’ve seen long lines of motorists queuing at filling stations," Al Jazeera's Harry Smith, reporting from Paris, said. ...
Lorry drivers are heavyweights in the realm of French protest movements and have announced their intention to join the protests. ...
Maxime Dumont, the head of the CFDT union's lorry drivers' section, said drivers could block fuel depots and food warehouses and clog roads by driving slowly.
Trash collectors in Marseille have also joined in the strikes, burning rubbish in the streets. ...

They could be us. In the not too distant future. One thing we do not have in common with the Great Depression is the end of easy oil. I am convinced everything that is a crisis and the reason it is mushrooming is because we are past peak, which some would compare to our Saigon moment, but again, it is not comparable as we are witness to the slow death of humanity/integrity, lost in an electronic detour on the way to self-extinction. Worse, all along we knew it did not have to be that way. There was a better way, just not corrupt enough to satisfy the representative-selves of the courtiers currying the King's favor, the King's representative-self, of course, being under the delusion he was high born. High-born. Heh. That will make lots of difference when we're all gone.

... These are the big fish

Who always try to eat down the small fish,

just the small fish.
I tell you what: they would do anything
To materialize their every wish....

from Guiltiness by Bob Marley | Exodus LP

an evening in the Revealing

It is disturbing to see what is happening with the elections coming up on my geographic horizon.  The subscription TV which the fireteacher pays good money for out of his hard-earned chipster cheque is showing Arnie Terminator/Twins flicks through the night, every night.  Hey dudes, where's my Battle of Algiers, my Wild Pacific, my Spike Lee post-Katrina documentary?  No question over which side the satellite hovers.  How much did THAT cost?

And just where was Arnold while Georgio Armani Angelo Mozilo displaced the citizenry of our nation, quickly bleeding across the oceans destroying the peace of mind of westernized peoples worldwide?  (Think on that name: country-wide for a minute, ah such grandiose fantasies of pre-Elizabethan professional executioners have nothing on what heights are reached in our new millennium. (In fact, the Elizabethan age was one followed by many years of peace and prosperity, it is well known the Virgin Queen loved her people more than herself.)  It wasn't so long ago we had Gray Davis as governor who apparently bombed with the populace despite Enron's miserable  meatless ending.  The press ran Gray through the shredder under pressure from the you-know-whos. The press runs everybody through the shredder now since its their job to shred regardless of pressure. You see, they learned their lessons well.  For shame.  The truth is nobody can run this place, or any place, definitely not Meg Whitman, heh, just wait till she meets up with the local fruits & nuts overpopulating the west coast or worse, has to balance the state budget, the classic gubernatorial demise.  As soon as budget time rolls around, the shredder starts humming and it hums along through years and years of tears.  And, yes, Whitman's already denying her personal nannygate, exposed by none other than her X'd illegal immigrant housekeeper, but what really got me was something she said quite a while ago which was "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman."  She really said it.  Everything that came after that might as well have fallen on deaf ears, the blow was struck, the character naked for all to see and mind you, do we really want more X or "on leave to serve at the pleasure" CEOs in government?  No thanks, Meg, I won't be voting.  I will be among the millions all of you and yours lost with your expensive press-released, personhooded campaigns blessed by our highest court.  We have been burned so many times in state and national elections why ask for it outright?  Hey, gimme more idyllic penury huh?  And a little less room to just be, why don't ya? Fruits and nuts don't eat.  Yes, I know, voting is my Constitutional right to exercise so I exercise my right to protest by withholding.  The question is:  Do we prefer a candidate who lies all through the campaign or one who lies all though his/her tenure in office?  That's like saying we have a choice, isn't it, paper or plastic...
Oh well, nina, you could vote for Brown, right?  No.  His aide (um hmm) called Meg a whore.  I guess its the dirty politicking, the displays of concealed corruption and vast amounts of money spent on self promotion all the while attempting to hide one's true character.  All that money could be put to SUCH good use on improvement of the state and country and our species' survival.  For shame, again.  Are these people human beings or holograms or socio-hybrid aliens?  You tell me.

On my sojourns through God's Kingdom lately, the landscape is littered with peeling, weather-beaten campaign signs.  I try to get away from it and go deeper, farther and leave it behind where the neighboring mountains appear grey-green at the base, a lighter green-grey behind it and a higher, pale lavender grey-green ridge in the far distance.  Mist rises from the base of the far lavender ridge graduating to deeper grey at the top where it meets the clouds.  The mist means fog is coming on which means summer is over, winter opened its window and frost lies on the ground at dawn.  Its just a quick slide into wood gathering, stacking, hauling into the fireplace from there, although we never got started so early before.  I keep my eye on it.  First snow is always on Thanksgiving, but this year it could happen any day.  The Elk began bugling at the end of August.  That never happened so early before either.  Actually, this is a wonderful thing because the cold, wet night air (humidity) limits the probability of wildfires.  Lastly, as was the case in 2009, the Juncos are late by many weeks. The weather conditions must be just right for them to make the journey south and apparently, it is not.  I think in my mind its the air quality.  The belching filth of big agra is easily mistaken for fog coming through the passes.  Indeed, it is that surreal.  It was not always that way.  I remember.  I made notes in my Smithsonian guides.

The housing, foreclosure, low - if any - new home sales crisis reminds me of the GOM crisis.  The blowout preventer was broken as it was broken in the market crisis, or the credit crisis, or the ... etc..  Sort of like 911 too, each crisis militarily industrializes afterwards.  We keep having 911 disasters with eternal effects upending the previous story.  We know from reading stories there must be an ending somewhere, but there isn't.  Most everyone is still living the old story whether they are an unrepentant shopaholic or a Nigerian child selling sodapop in the mud to the pipeline police.  Even when attempts are made to reform corruption, the corrupt make the new story instantly throwing everyone and everything into deeper, darker, more terrifying and uncertain futures and still the story goes on.  The ever-changing, ever-enlarging story is a way of life now, as if the anomalies of the present are all that ever was or will be.

The courts are already backlogged, imagine what sheaths of complaint are hitting the desks today from all those who were foreclosed and evicted or threatened with the process, and all those who bought those foreclosed dwellings, ahem, illegally?  What a scene: the angry millions forcing their ways through the McMansion doors demanding their homes back from alarmed young couples feeding baby number one in the breakfast nook?  What are they gonna do in this economy, double up? Oh why not, they'll learn to get along just like we do, but they won't be happy about it until they win their lawsuits.  As we watch an entire new industry is being born, the graduation of Robo Signers to Paper Seekers tasked with unwrapping all the CDOs and sifting through xeroxes of xeroxes to find something that is probably lying under the mattress in Polanski's chalet if it actually exists, legitimate titles of home ownership and legitimate titles to commercial properties that is, not the mattress.  We only know one thing for sure at this point and that is: Everyone has again stepped on yet another rung of the Apocalypse ladder where nothing is what it seemed and all hell is breaking loose from the shylocks to the cowboys on bar stools looking for love in all the wrong places. There's a big range in between consisting of the colorful variety of Planetary Citizens.

There are many things I can handle as weird and strange as some things are, because I am not in that world. It does not concern me or the immediate members of this existence.  The man, me, the Guinea Pig, the Dogs, these are the beings whose interests are my interests.  The relatives and our children are the collective ribbons that complete the package.

Have you ever thought about being a survivor from a shipwreck, floating on a very small section of what is left of the lifeboat's hull, whom out of all those faces treading water would you reach for? 

On the other hand, when it comes to causing deliberate pain to our people in the larger sense, it burns, it scathes, it maims for life and kills as it does all victims whether they know what is happening or not and this is not acceptable.  One day its a feeling, then its a blurb at a news site, by evening the blurbs have their own wiki page.  And then, like the dark season, suddenly its upon us full steam ahead and we rearrange our existence again.  Suffering can be very good when you can, if you can, compare it to other states yet that also is being denied wherever possible.


Cufflinks photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images N.A.: Angelo Mozilo, founder and former CEO, Countrywide Financial Corporation, testifying during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing ... examining the compensation and retirement packages granted to the CEOs of corporations deeply involved in the current mortgage crisis.

What's goin on

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today ...
1971 | Marvin Gaye | Obie Benson

Finally, it has come to this we think and yet, its not over, not by a long shot. The mess, the turmoil, has a long way to go. A few things need attention while the thunderstorm and hail are flung across the passes and traffic slows to a dead halt on the interstates ...

Browsing the welcome news (we all have welcome news, you might have seen this), I was amused by an article dated today concerning a GOP senate candidate's statement made four years ago and wondered as you will too, why bring up this paranoid's delusion now? Of course, its election dirt, but its more. It reads as a thinly disguised attempt to take us further into 1984 where we are always at war. If this is so, it needs to be nipped in the bud immediately because we are going to need strong friends and soon. The paranoid's delusion is just that, a delusion, and a rather perfect illustration of reactionary thinking. What's wrong with these people, anyway? We wouldn't be reluctant witness to provocateurs' antics if our Laureate community organizer and his handlers could organize their way to real solutions, but alas ... personalities earn fame and fortune spotlit by media's public relations-compliant analysis, pressing and pushing to no avail. Economic relationships are stuck for life regardless of who occupies what office, and where, unless (there's always an unless) one party is suspected to be profiting more than the other. Profiting greatly.  In the end, in our bottom line, in our litmus test, it means nothing we don't already know. Tit for tat. Where's the change, dude? The whole place is still sliding on thin ice.

You'll want to follow up that piece, whichever one you chose among the roster of corporate feeds, with something of genuine substance, although its the blog author who provides great insight to the ironies contained in certain documents which are purportedly the agenda for the upcoming G-20. You will find the opinions fascinating. You may even find confirmation for your secret thoughts on this issue contained within. Gonzalo's take on his material is most entertaining. It would make a great film. Someday, I would like to see a dream roundtable discussion between Charles Hugh Smith, James Kunstler and Gonzalo Lira on just about anything. If wishes grew on trees ... Oh, the poor public. They have no idea. The new statistic for our beleaguered livestock is three out of four Americans will be obese (not merely overweight) by 2020. Do I need to repeat that? Has it sunk in? Good. The cattle would rather scrape lemon drops off the bottom of the BGH-GMO barrel than figure out what's going on.

None of the above will mean anything to you if you don't see the links.

The cattle better figure it out soon because it is no longer in the hands of some mythical great overseer. Mentally repeat the past and ask yourself what are you going to do when disaster snarls its way into your living room? Who is prepared when they don't know what is brewing in the witch's den? Personally, I have a prejudice against knowing too much because MSM details generally obscure the point, among other travesties. What has happened is we have no one looking out for us, we are viewed as too shallow, too spoiled through over-abundance, too oblivious and too corrupt for salvation. The humanity has been wrung out of the human. Where does one begin to repair all that has happened and all that is to come? How can we heal while wallowing in a national cesspool of denial? Yes, it is shocking. It is an impasse like none other, ever.

Mister Kunstler's essay today is his best one since I've been reading him, easily a few years by now. Oh, I know, he doesn't keep his house all that clean, there are plenty of repeat trolls nosing around, but once in a while there will be a comment so worthy of a larger audience it is like a rainbow breaking the storm. (I've taken the liberty  to correct punctuation where I find it and understand in the heat of the moment how such things happen.)

This one is from conchscooter:

"Can you spell quitclaim? The reason those famous "23 states" keeps getting brought up on this issue is that these are judicial foreclosure states. That would be states that require a judge to sign off on a foreclosure order.
However if challenged (and the title companies are doing just that)the banks not only can't produce the pen-and-ink mortgage agreement, they have had those lackeys sign off that the original documents were "lost." They weren't lost they were transferred without the benefit of being properly recorded to investment trusts.
That means the mortgages are not properly recorded and can therefore be challenged.
If you buy a foreclosed property you will not get title insurance because in those judicial foreclosure states the banks had no legal right to sell a property in which they had no legal standing.
This is a state issue and is going to have a more revolutionary impact on this lawless state of ours than any number of survivalists with guns.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself why banks are stopping foreclosure in judicial foreclosure states...No one else has asked themselves why and what happens next. Not even Jim Kunstler, which is disappointing, but he got closer than most."

And here's one from eightm: 

Another AX: WORK
Take a look at all of those skyscrapers in New York City, Tokyo, Seoul, etc. What do you think all of those office workers actually "do" ? Do you really think they are actually producing anything ? Are they needed for anything except being a place holder - a figment of imaginary labor - work, to justify billions of dollars of money transfers amongst the already and only ever going to be rich ? The truth is work in general is no longer needed, is destined to become obsolete no matter what anyone says or thinks or desires.

The calculation is easy to do: there are 200 million office workers worldwide, information workers, "knowledge" workers, research workers, "innovation", and research and development and all of the other mega Bull Shit terms and expressions the modern economist love to talk about. So exactly what are they discovering - improving - creating ? Absolutely nothing except billions of dollars being robbed from the poor. But let's look at it for what it really is: out of 200 million workers I would fathom that only 1 out of 1,000 are creating anything, are really producing anything of lasting value, any real optimization, any real improvement, any real result, any real serialization of work as something that accumulates. But this is OK, the other 199 million are just running around in circles, they are essentially spinning their wheels, they are mostly just killing time and creating and solving imaginary problems, and playing the status game, office politics game, and creating useless meetings and every conceivable way to pretend to actually be working and doing something.
But those 200,000 that are actually optimizing, that are improving the little work processes that are left to do, those guys there are setting the stage to eliminate at least each 100 jobs as a minimum. For what is all of this research, optimization, innovation worth if it doesn't cut costs, which in the end really means cut jobs ? And cut costs they will, no matter how inefficient they are because it is only natural that processes can slowly be improved and optimized. So 200,000 workers (the only ones that are actually serializing work, accumulating lasting results) will eventually each cut 100 jobs, so another 200 million unemployed workers will appear in the near future.
So the future of work is actually no work, hundreds of millions of unemployed, mass poverty, eventually starvation, thanks to the capitalists, success model of rich robbing everything from the poor. We need free salaries, and cheap rents since there will no longer be any possible work in the future. We need to get rid of the competition mentality, the me better than you idea, the idea of "earning" what you need, we need equality and everything must be furnished for free since automation and technology have essentially killed all possible work and will kill all work in the future.
You don't understand: you won't be choosing "capitalism" or whatever, the forces at play are going all in the same direction no matter what you or anyone wants. Optimization, automation, Chinese or South Korean scientists - engineers automating factories, creating production shortcuts, etc. etc. This will trickle through and translate into less costs which means somewhere and somehow less money to workers or less work. No matter what, this world is going towards the end of work, work is no longer needed, I know many people for one reason or another have no work, have nothing to do, even if they wanted to, because the modern production process is all geared towards the elimination of work. We better get this straight and not buy all the BS justifications of the economists that say more productivity, more research etc. will create new jobs. And in fact these are exactly the items that are eliminating work. More productivity and more research will kill jobs, not create new jobs, unless you consider dog walking a new "kind of job", a new "service job"...
No matter where and how many people can build houses or cut the lawns (valid only in the US, most countries don't have houses with lawns to cut, etc.) there is not enough work for too many people. We have huge excess capacity in all productive endeavors, Spain and the US, just to name 2 even very different countries built way too many homes and now have a glut of homes, the US may have 15 million empty homes, all of Europe from Lisbon to Moscow may have even more, they did all the right things, they built all the homes they could, but the system cannot support them without free salaries to millions of families that could use them.
The right wing thugs like to pretend there are these magical solutions, "technology destroys jobs but creates more jobs than destroyed", or "go somewhere else where they are looking for your manpower", etc to put the blame on the unemployed, to put the blame on the victim and not on the system: we live in automatic economies, work is disappearing at an alarming rate, there is no magical solution. We need free salaries and cheap rents, government owned, because the government is the people, the government is the nation as a whole, is the only real value, the collectivity, the individual is an egotistical criminal that wants to rob from the poor, wants to beat up the weak and kick them out of work. A central government that gives what the people need, and a progressive government that will use all the excess productive capacity for progress, the future, like space exploration, millions of skyscrapers, a society where the common good, and not the individual good is cherished. Exploration of the solar system and then the stars and planets, thousands of rockets, the future of humanity, a future of science and discovery, of an advanced civilization that puts all of its energy to use for progress, for the advancement of everyone, to share with everyone, to go higher and higher and further and further. Capitalism is a stone age system for violent - ancient apes that like to fight and have huge egos.
But this is exactly how the system is being set up to be ... (Please see link above for the rest of eightm's comment.)

Shall we ask eightm where the free salaries will come from?  Ah, sweetheart, don't even think about Treasury's presses.

What does all this say as a whole picture? It means we are fubar and need to either pull up stakes or batten down the hatches for our remaining lifetimes. That's right, sail under bare poles from this moment forward.

Who remembers the ISG, the Iraq Study Group, asking for solutions from the American citizens?  And did not BP ask for the public's solutions to the blowout?  And was Saudi Arabia's' offer of assistance not refused? Of course, Bush strummed his three chord riff, his only riff, during Katrina at a California's power photo-op rather than ask for solutions because he just didn't give a damn.  All along the signs and omens were blinking neon truths which for the most part have been taken for granted.  You saw it. The Fema trailers for those who qualified were reported to be cancer incubators.  And now there's Corexit - a solution not supplied by the public who was cluesless as to what on Earth could be done short of a walking evacuation, but where to?  With what?

Nothing is like it was and will never be like it was again. We've outgrown our childhoods and cannot go back. The people are unhappy and complaining and running into brick walls with every action they attempt to accomplish seemingly simple tasks. Simultaneously, it is a continuing joy to communicate with each other in our small, caring communities. I know lots of readers are worried about Visible this week, but he will survive his situation and resurrect into more than he already is. Tell me who among us has not been there? Let us trust each others' journeys through our own power to survive these times with our love and understanding. We ARE on our own, but we are not alone.  I will pass along a secret I shared with a friend just this morning: When your broken heart needs repair and you find yourself in the dark, swirling abyss, falling, falling, faster and faster, do-something-good-for-someone-else.   It is amazing how one small good deed turns it around.  This is where we are, just taking it day by day, usually hour by hour.  Baby steps and good deeds.

Art: 
L.A. Postcard | 18" x 24" watercolor on Arches
Woof!  Woof! Creole translation: Oua! Oua! | 18* x 24* watercolor on Arches

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