brainpan

with [the federal ACA legislation that the insurance companies' lawyers/lobbyists wrote to mandate everyone in the nation to buy into a broken healthcare paradigm in a broken financial paradigm] there really isn't any excuse for not having health insurance

conscientious objection

what gives the author the right to blanketly declare the lives of the middle class to be souless, meaningless, and that their jobs are bullshit?

Well, that's what modern life is under the TINA regime[1]. A whole society of people who've sold out every heroic ideal humans have ever conceived, in order to live as cells inside corporate organs of a hyper-capitalistic organism that would collapse if it stopped expanding. Money is god (it's about equal in power to law, at least), and money is created in a Ponzi between central banks and governments, and between private financial corporations and private enterprises/individuals, all on the promise that there will be even more money next year to pay back the debts of this year, and give "good enough or better" returns on large capital pools invested. We consume natural resources in an unsustainable way in exchange for this money, and for a cellular role in the organs and the organism, and it will last in this way until the last day comes, when we starve to death on our own planetary stripmine.

We could be taking a new course right now, to live in idealistic ways, in sustainable ways, in heroic ways. But we all just quit that notion before we start, because it's just too hard, and we distract ourselves with the greatest media spectacle of entertaining diversions and political issues every conceived.

Welcome to life in hell. You can get defensive and self-righteous when people point out the mass hypocrisy and delusion and error in all our lives, but it doesn't change the truth that we are all living in an awful state, as cowards and lapdogs of the hyper-capitalist system that gives us life today, even as it guarantees death in the future.

I figure that a not-yet born post-human super-predator will take the best of human intelligence and anti-entropic principles and incorporate them, and destroy the rest. Or some already-existing higher powers will swoop in at some point in the future to harvest the best of our anti-entropic principles, and destroy the rest of us.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative

first sentence:

"I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but ... my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were)."

Is she serious? Hardcore. That stuff will "make pure LSD seem like Ginger Beer..."

Outside of the rhetorical zone, outside of the we-can-believe-any-feel-good-idealistic-high-minded-righteous-principles-we-want-as-long-as-we're-just-talking-comfortably zone, this is not true.

You know how politicians have a certain style of rhetoric they use when addressing the public? How when they go on talk shows or try to speak about some platform/policy they are tendering to the public, there's this whole pretense of them actually believing in not only that the policy being tendered could work after you elect them and people like them, but also they have these "American" ethics/values, or even sometimes universal ethics, which form their motivation for wanting to be in politics, and wanting to enact policy?

I'm asking if you notice the gulf between how politicians speak, and what motives they give you the impression they have, versus how they really feel on the inside. One can say I don't knows how they feel on the inside, yet we've been lied to so many times, and we have seen contradictions between their public rhetoric and their private motivations in the past, that we should actually be considered gullible / abused-victim battered-wives if we take the rhetoric and policy prescriptions for, say, the 2016 elections at face value. I can safely predict that these candidates are pushing policies with a pretense of justice and ethics, yet they are for all literal definitions lying about what they say they believe.

I used the sort of politicians you vote for as an example that you should already understand. It shouldn't be controversial that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are actually speaking words from behind a more-electable "persona" that is actually a lie. They effectively "pander" to us by talking about doing things "for America" and "for Americans". We've seen their lies in the past contradicted by their actual actions.

Anyway, military and civilian contractors in positions of power in the government need to be understood in this light.

"In what way are people who work for the NSA not American?"

Simple. No one who is not self-deceived, or deceived by others, works in that way. They are self-interested for the most part. They don't want to help everyone in America; there are millions of people in America they despise. The higher the stakes, the less altruistic they are. Give up your "hard-earned" money in taxes? In private charity? Too high of stakes. They be more likely to help other Americans if the others were "the sort of Americans" they prefer, and they prefer to leave the sort of individuals they don't like, or don't know and don't trust, to fend for themselves.

That applies to low-level workers, and it applies also applies to individuals at high levels of power. The fact that individuals at high levels have to use political-style fake rhetoric and personas to be appointed to their contracts and their stations does not mean they actually believe it. What truly motivates them is usually selfish things: attaining more wealth, ownership, control, more agency to mold their personal worlds to their will (cars, country clubs, whatever), and more agency to mold their greater civilization to their will (forcing other people to exist in ways that are more pleasing, or convenient to the powerful).

You see, there is no America, in reality. The reality that people fundamentally care about, will care about over the deceptive rhetoric when the chips are down, and that the military serves to exist, is wealth, power, and control.

We exist in a planetary civilizaion, but we presently pretend that old national civilizations are what motivate us, even as we take action year-in-and-year-out to further along the globalness of our order: we try to globalize/standardize our finance and governance system over every single individual person in every old nation.

So it's global power that motivates the ones in power, and building and preserving their own individual status in the global order that is what they are really beholden to.

That is why things like "Homeland Security" and NSA domestic information gathering exist: though the people with their hands on the levers of power here say it's to "protect America," they actually don't love all of America. "When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other, you'll see." They can't possibly save all of Americans, and they're building a lockdown-safe domestic order that will treat non-conforming Americans just as poorly as they treat non-conforming non-nationals.

They are working to protect themselves from violence, not the "Americans" they pander to. You will be protected precisely to the degree that you endorse and support the global regime, and you will be oppressed precisely to the degree that you resist and combat it.

Their professed "to protect America" motive is just a fork-tongued, or sugar-coated, rhetorical device that does not comport to the reality in their own heads when they put their heads down on their silk pillows at night. They are protecting their global economic and political order: corporate power, corporate governance, financialization, ueber alles.

Except that since 2008, we've been experiencing an historically unprecedented flow of newly-created fiat money by way of bonds -> TBTF European and US banks -> central banks (and central banks don't need to have money in their accounts to buy something with bank transfer).

It's a massive flow of some of the cheapest capital available being pumped regularly into government treasuries and private financial institutions, with central banks (for whom losses are meaningless) holding more and more of the bonded debt continuously, every year.

Then, whether or not a government program like the "Working Group On Financial Markets" ('pluge protection team') prevents cascading selloffs in equity positions, or whether it's simply the self-reinforced cycle of buying-2x%-up-on-a-x%-drop asset trading algorithms that have enough cash this month because of the central banks, and don't have to sell down their equity positions because last months positions are neutral-to-good, there's enough breathing room to trade up again this month, and a reliable "Federal Reserve put" backstopping everyone.

This is happening because we live in a new state of financial fantasy ever since everyone went bankrupt in 2008. Now they just keep printing money and sharing it amongst elite government (military) powers and private equity/asset controlling powers.

Few in the private sector would be solvent if they actually had to take losses on their assets back in 2008, in an environment where liquidity could not match obligations, and everyone would have to sell. It's the same for the public balance sheets, who need profits in the private sector to have any money at all, and who usually overspend and oblige themselves to more debt than they can pay down even if good times lasted forever.

Debt is money, and debt is an asset. Who cares if there's always more debt than money?

We're just all continuously bull-shitting-out money from the central banks, to the elite capital/government institutions, down to the middle- and upper-class. And to the U.S. war machine, which has a magic credit card with no limit, but which would have gone bankrupt in anything like a real market.

One reason they have to do this is to keep baby boomers' retirement "assets" worth something, in a situation where they all are going to want to cash out of 50 year's of liquidity-draining investments over a 20 year period, which will be quite a liquidity-draining effect on the equity markets. But that's a whole 'nother long discussion.

The West bullshits itself pretty hardcore over the television, and on the internet, and in their suburbs, and at their corporate workplaces. But it's the bullshit financial markets (and the fantasy-land equity market valuations) that is the both the biggest pile of bullshit of all, and is the power source which keeps the rest of the bullshit from collapsing.

But, hey, go ahead, tell yourself these are "conservatively" priced markets. You're a great citizen.