Well, here we go. Re-enter the Cold War. Your humble author is all for this. In fact, your humble author wants it to turn Hot. Let’s launch enough nukes to destroy all human life on this planet. Kind of like a very successful chemotherapy on the planetary body. Kill the cancer — the thing that grows without bound — the thing that eats all, self-justified, self-satisfied, and that procreates, procreates, procreates. Metastasizes.

Alternatively, let’s agree to pretend we don’t have nuclear weapons. Hell, the U.S. pumps out more tanks than the Pentagon requests, because, well — jobs! So you want to talk economics? Let’s talk pure economics. Let’s pretend nukes don’t exist, and let’s have a rigorous conventional war. Let’s destroy mountains of metal, and mountainscapes of flesh. Blow ‘em up. Blow ‘em the fuck up.

Let’s turn a bunch of adolescent and just-post-adolescent human primate meat into nitrogen, by having it shot to fuck on conventional war-fields. Shoot those motherfuckers right in the head. They deserve it, anyhow, for selling their meat to the glorious vanguard of fighting-for-the-glory-of-investors-in-military-corporations.

So we need a fucking huge conventional war. We do. It will create tons of jobs worldwide — fuck who gives a fuck who wins — let’s just start creating armaments! Think of the jobs, y’all! Build that shit. Build it fast. JOBS. Also: let the kids fighting for the glory of investors get shredded to meat. Fertilizer. This world is overpopulated as fuck. Kill them. Let them dissolve into the soil, and those of us smart enough not to get bullets put through our heads by fighting conventional metal-through-your-head wars will benefit. Supply of labor goes down, price of labor goes up. That’s wages folks. Wages. Bullet, meat. Meat, bullet.

Had never heard of this analyst — Mike Lofgren — ’til I saw him on Moyers. However, he blew me away: the most insightful connect-the-dots-view-from-30,000-feet analysis of the horrible rot at the root of our socioeconomic structure. A twenty minute interview to provide a great deal of clarity — recommended, recommended, recommended.

Conservatives want to believe the rot is government, with its corruption, overreach, taxation, and foreign policy; liberals want to believe the rot is corporations, with their corruption, lobbying, outsourcing, and nihilistic profit motive leading to illegal and recklessly dangerous behaviors. Thing is, *they’re the exact same thing.* Our government *is* the corporations, and our corporations *are* our government. (Coincidentally, Mussolini himself would define the current United States as a shining example of a fascist state.)

The premise in the Lofgren interview is that Government, Incorporated uses its tax power to take money from us morlocks, and then redistribute it to the corporations, particularly those with a military manufacturing bent, in outrageously bad deals to engorge their coffers. For instance: for the entirety of the Afghan war, it cost — wait for it — *four hundred dollars* to put *one gallon* of gasoline in the field. And our private contractors were more than happy to oblige for the dozen or so years this fee was available.

Our current Government, Incorporated has shoved a blood-letting spear into our side. As the body — the nation — exsanguinates towards death, a few terrible dickhead assholes sit at the bottom of the let, licking and slurping up the iron and nutrients as the blood flows into their mouths. Fuck Government, Inc. Fuck it to hell. Oh, by the way, NSA, hello! Hope you are having a good one!

http://billmoyers.com/episode/the-deep-state-hiding-in-plain-sight/

Thoughts on our completely rotten, fucked-beyond-repair economic/corporate/consumer system in this hell-hole-of-a-crooked-casino we call a “nation,” part two: New York is considering a law that would require a “kill switch” in smart phones. So if you get your shit jacked, you can “cancel it,” like a credit card. Shit just doesn’t work anymore. Idea is if you deprive it of black market value, you kill the incentive to (sometimes violently) steal it. Like they did with car stereos in the 1990s, which worked. Simple economics, incentives and all that, right?

But HANG THE FUCK ON, hang . . . the . . . fuck . . . on. The cell phone manufacturers *oppose* this. They fucking OPPOSE it! They, after all, will *lose money selling you fucking replacements.* Read: the cell phone manufacturers *want* you to (sometimes violently) get *accosted and robbed.* Fuck . . . this . . . decaying shithole. — Dear Father Profit Motive, thou great a priori economic engine in heaven, please bring a merciful asteroid upon us devilish monkeys, post haste; I will pay you 750 basis points in interest. Amen, Father —

By the way, anyone looking to buy a slightly used Samsung Galaxy S3, Apple iPhone 4S, or Google Nexus 4 I happen to have hanging around?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-lawmakers-call-for-smartphone-kill-switch/

Being an American consumer is so satisfying, isn’t it? You pay for two services — your ISP, with its putatively beefy broadband capacity, and Netflix, to stream content over the wires for which you have already paid. But thanks to yet another terrible federal court decision, this one ending net neutrality, you get to watch a spinning ‘buffering’ circle, because the two services — again, both of which you have paid for — are hashing out their new profit model behind the scenes, in the wake of the court decision.

One restricts throughput speed on the other as negotiating leverage — something that has nothing to do with you, the paying consumer — yet you get the pleasure of dealing with the degraded service. Again, of two services for which you’ve paid, and for reasons that have nothing to do with technical limitations. Watching spinning circles on your television screen as your bank account gets auto-debited monthly.

It’s like buying a car and filling the tank with gas, but thanks to a new legal framework giving the car manufacturers leverage over the oil companies, the car manufacturer activates software in your car dropping your gas mileage to 5 MPG, until the oil companies give in to extortion. And you get the pleasure of driving a car at 5 MPG until that happens, even though you have paid for a car that was advertised as getting 30 MPG.

The American political economy is wholly broken. We consumers suffer the consequences in the form of shitty and unreliable services, inflated prices, poor or non-existent customer service, shitty products, planned obsolescence, arbitration clauses to deny legal redress, toxic chemicals in our goods, and genetic modifications without longitudinal studies as to possible harm in our food.

Who can we preemptively bomb to fix this?