When they take Social Security to avoid paying back their debt…

… then, will you get to the streets?

Or has Ageism and Generationism, where you allow the media and popular personalities to invent alienating, divisive, downright insulting generalizations about *all* old folks, also removed our sense of empathy for those soon to retire?

While many of us may have a few decades left until we hit that age, if the fascists manage steal SSI – a fully funded program that we make possible ourselves, socially – in order to avoid paying back the debts owed to it from the LAST TIME they took money from it for balancing THEIR budget, our future surprise will be a large, bleak surprise.

Or perhaps none of us will be allowed to retire, which is what the right-wing and centrist liberals are doing as they jack up the retirement age again and again. Food for thought, for your future.

#GeneralAction now!

Do the wealthy care about you?

The rich care about you, and all the trials and tribulations of your working-class life in exactly the same measure the average American cares about the homeless encampments growing in every city in the country. They have their jokes and memes about your complaints about not being able to afford food and healthcare, too.

Many people will be utterly shocked to find this out, just after their dreams of never working again and getting rich off other people falls apart under this economy, as they  were always going to.

Do you want to fight, or fold?

This nation once fought a terrible civil war over the concept of human chattel slavery in which poor, working class white males from the North and the South gathered into armies and killed 850,000 of each other on behalf of wealthy, slave-holding plantation owners, who enjoyed a very low, low bottom line on their labor costs and depended on the economics of this production system to allow them not to work, to profit, and to dominate early American life.

After that war, many things happened, including the contrived resurgence of confederate monuments and civil war-era ideologies across many areas in the early 1900s, including those on either side of the conflict, intentionally stirred up by Jim Crow segregationists, anti-unionists, and racists seeking political power and economic advantages over workers.

In this country, we’ve had major, variously successful and unsuccessful fights over even basic civil rights for groups including women, children, immigrants and native non-whites, indigenous groups, freed slaves, LGBTQ folks, sex workers, and all workers, and these fights continue to this day, often backsliding and causing more dysfunction and suffering.

The basic elements of these fights look like exploited, alienated workers, renters, and community members on one side, and more entitled, established, or wealthy, typically mostly white people on the other, who don’t want to deal with the problems they themselves haven’t experienced or might not even believe in. Some of these white people, thanks to Christian Dominionism and various unscientific totalitarian concepts handed to them by their “god”, even believe that black/dark skinned People belong at the bottom of a divinely mandated hierarchy, with whites governing blacks for all time.

Today, this is of course no different, with minimum wage and overall wages stagnating for 40 years, women still earning less than men but displacing men in the workforce en masse, a horrifying upward wealth redistribution system called ‘Trickle Down’ that has destroyed the workers, the worst, most expensive healthcare system in the world that is currently literally letting people die, a globe-spanning military empire with over 900 forward military bases, Christian activists infiltrating all levels of our constitutionally secular government, and rampant, high-level fascism and imperialism, including all the associated racism, sexism, classism, and all the abject, in-your-face propaganda narratives you can expect with something like this.

What will we do? Will we sit down calmly and take this? Will we wait and see just how bad this previously pro-slavery regime can get if we do nothing to help the workers?

Or will we see the essential dialectical relationship between what and who came before, what our – The People’s – tumultuous US history shows us about the parasites on top of this economy, and then will we perhaps begin to see the struggles of all those who precede us as our own struggle, and tap into that fierce spirit to empower us against what lies ahead?

Will we #GeneralAction and #GeneralStrike, at least, against an empire that always angles back around toward violating human rights, starting global conflicts, performing coups, reducing the value of your labor, and attempting to profit 1% of the population while 99% of us fight one another for crumbs and against the paralyzing ideological issues the Divide and Conquer doctrine brings us?

What will we do?

Cuban embassy in Washington attacked? Internet awash with propaganda? Just another day…

The US media, for a little while anyway, missed that a crazed Texas man from Mexico with ties to extremist Christian sects traveled to Washington, D.C. and shot up an embassy with an AK-47 or replica AK — the communist’s favorite rifle — in an attempt to murder Cuban diplomats inside. The man also claims, without evidence, to be from Cuba.

The man, who hears voices, was found in possession of cocaine, is considered non-compliant by his psych doctors, is connected to an anti-communist religious sect that preaches in Cuba, and claims that since he went to Cuba to preach to them that a “Cuban organized crime group” is stalking him…. was taken in without incident after firing over 30 rounds while shouting “I’m a Yankee!” at 2am.

When you go searching for information about that attack, the first page of any search you run which is remotely to do with Cuba returns to you a page flooded with blogs, articles, and literal propaganda statements about ‘Havana Syndrome‘, a fake mystery illness that befell American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba just after the fascist oligarch Donald Trump and his extremist backers took… the Whitehouse.

Oddly Google and Bing find a several-year old propaganda narrative about sound tech being used against US diplomats by secret Cuban agents in Cuba to be just as relevant as the current real news stories about a Texas man shooting up an embassy “so he could get them before they got him.”  If you are into search technology, understand SEO, etc, you know how this came to be.

Just after the imperialist, fascist, late-capitalist Trump state’s propaganda narrative against communist Cuba in 2016, which Obama had just re-engaged with diplomatic relations before leaving office in 2015, Rex Tillerson kicked out 15 Cuban diplomats, claiming “Cuba can’t keep US diplomats safe, so theirs have to leave the US”, beginning a re-chilling of relations between US and Cuba — as intended of course.

And here we are, years into a literal fascist regime in the US whose president attempts to create unrest and violence via social media, with yet another “lone wolf” or “mentally ill person” attacking the ideological targets presented for them to fixate upon by the US oligarchy and its galaxy of propaganda narratives, systems, pet media orgs, and brand managers galore.

Oh, those mentally ill lone-wolf shooters, always carrying out precisely the aims of the worst elements of our fascist, capitalist state, attacking the socialists, the humanist luminaries, the leftist storytellers, the most vulnerable — the victims — and the like. They have to die before we all become commie, don’t they.

No, #generalaction isn’t a neoliberal campaign strategy, nor were Marches for Causes

And other absurdities, intentionally failure-oriented activism strategies, silly commentary, yadda yadda.

Today, the intrepid Record Correcting Blue Wave accounts that we’ve all been promised began raging across the social sphere, right on someone’s mark. Today was probably the start of their pay cycle and hourly or per-word billing requirements.

So far, I’ve been told – shouted at – that the DNC had nothing to do with removing all other candidates from the NY primary and handing it to Biden, despite most mainstream outlets covering precisely that story.

I’ve been screamed at about the fakeness of Tara Reide’s story from the same people who agreed Al Franken should give up without a fight against basic inappropriate touching/commenting allegations. Official charges have been filed against Biden. None were suitable against Franken, whose career is over.

And now? Now I’ve been told that #generalaction is to get rid of Trump and get Biden or Clinton into the Whitehouse. Not to make life better for the majority of the people living in and under poverty in the US, who’ve been here all along. Not to demand socialized Healthcare like the rest of the advanced world. Not to demand an end to endless non-defensive wars or nasty crime & punishment policies that disproportionately affect African Americans and minorities, no. Nothing like that. This is just another March for a Cause to these folks, isn’t it.

These neoliberals appear to want to appropriate ALL class struggle and symbols of class struggle as their own, similar to how they appropriate the property in poor communities, displace the poor, appropriate their aesthetics, and then art-wash themselves and the walls of their ill-gotten new homes into feeling OK with it all. And they appropriate this major class activity — the idea of not taking it anymore and striking generally together as a group of oppressed workers — on behalf of the current racist, demented, old white guy who wants to “keep things exactly the way they are now”. The same guy who has failed to qualify for numerous other presidential bids because of controversy and bad politics, and is about to answer to rape charges!

Strange days, friends. Do you see the sudden surge in Blue Wave accounts and their “Biden is a sure thing” point of view? Don’t allow yourself to be brow-beaten into supporting this… terrible human being, and conservative Republican in Democrat’s clothes. #generalaction is for all of us, not just the sheltered neoliberal class and their just-deep-enough pockets.

Apps are not Real, Personal Computing is Dead for Most of You.

Don’t let anyone try to convince you ‘apps’ are real. Are you ready to give up the “personal” in your personal computing environment? You may have already.

What is an app? It is a collection of program files, potentially some dlls, file systems, and data files, among other things, and they are designed to run on computers. Some people call those computers “devices”, or “phones”, and imagine that “apps” run on “devices” rather than the core, basic truth — programs run on computers. Personal computers.

Why bother with this seemingly pointless distinction?

An app is a program, and nothing has changed inside that context except the heavily modified philosophical expectations on privacy, integrity, honesty, and economic exploitation that occurred during the rise of the Smartphone. Huge numbers of non-technical, non tech-cultured, totally NOT savvy users embraced them 100% and enshrined them in their lives in a way that made them indispensable, and corporate tech shops pounced on this amazing opportunity.

Now we have behavior that mimics malware, adware, some viruses and backdoors, and intrusive data-miners are embedded in mainstream software and hardware, even at the *ISP level!*. We have ‘apps’ that you pay for, and then you pay some more, and still more for digital assets that run out of “time” every couple days, forcing you to buy more and more, contributing to a worse and worse labor environment for the contract workers who make it all possible.

When you call program files for personal computers ‘apps for devices’, you are helping the industry along as it obfuscates the truth of the foundational philosophies and fundamental integrity of the Old Internet and computing technologies, including even Open Source.

You are saying “Shut up and take mah money!!” (and my elections, and my freedom, and my future mobility and stability), and they have heard you. They heard you clearly, and voices like mine were drowned out because of the potential for grotesquely high profits.

Apps are not real.

These NeoLiberals…

These NeoLiberals you see today are not the Left.

The media have convinced you of this, and they began thinking this way around the time of the Powell Memo, aka The Strategy Against Liberalism. It was always a Strategy Against the Left.

The NeoLiberals you see today would have found a way around fighting a Civil War over slavery, and it would never have happened. They would have found a way to compromise with at least some of the “way of life” of the slaver class, in the hopes that the economic damage to this wonderful economy wouldn’t be too bad.

The Left are the group who would fight to free those slaves, or the other various systemically marginalized groups that are getting the business end of our NeoFeudal Capitalist Hellscape today.

Know your political and ideological spectrum. Know your true allies, and your true enemies, and see what our struggle really looks like.

Scheduled Obsolescence? Feature or Bug?

When the capitalists have their way at the late-stage marketplace and their business plans come to fruition, it looks very much like online multiplayer gaming, if you were to compare aspects of material and immaterial(real-world and virtual) capitalist production systems and their exploitative economics, durability, lifespan, etc.

For example, everyone’s favorite cellphone game, Pokemon Go, which has economic aspects that many other games also have, expects you to buy items that “break” after 3 uses, forcing to buy another. As the game progresses and your “trainer” gains levels, catching Pokemon does not get *easier*, but instead becomes harder, leading to using more “special items” that allow you to capture them. When did RPG-type games, where your character skill develops over time, begin to introduce reverse development?

Some games have weapons or items that you buy — which you genuinely need for completion — that are time-limited and “break” after so many uses.

Others simply make you use a special item to get more “game time”, to continue playing, and if you play that game like a normal game, you spend exponentially more money just achieving average daily use.

Still others feature “clothing” items that “E-Sports” gamers happened to be wearing when they won a competition, and those clothing items are fast approaching (think PUBG) the cost of real-world items, despite requiring EXPONENTIALLY less labor to create and replicate. Also the artist workforces used to generate these caches of digital assets are temporary and contracted, and companies typically lay them all off after completion of their tasks.

How does all of this relate to real-world production systems that pump out real goods 24/7? How does this relate to scheduled obsolescence in material goods?

If we go back in time, we find the Phoebus Cartel, a loose-knit group of early lightbulb manufacturers who met and decided that bulbs should have strictly limited lifespan so these business owners could continue to profit for the long term. How would you profit from a bulb that lasts 70 years? (and counting?)

Later we see textiles and durable goods of all manner, built with intentional (always accidental or cost-saving measure if something bad happened) flaws, sewn with fewer and fewer threads, forged with less metal or cheaper alloys, etc etc.

We see INTENTIONAL obsolescence under capitalism, at every level, which has of course led to oligarchy, environmental catastrophe, human health risks and surging levels of environmentally-caused disease, etc, and has brought us all precisely where we are today.

If you want to know the true will of the capitalist, look inside the growing markets of digital assets in online gaming. See how they “expire” after 2 days, or less, and require new purchases. The economics of this are *perfect* for the lazy, parasitic capitalist, who will use their expertise to design a bulletproof, self-sustaining wealth generation system of this kind if you allow it. Think about how this relates to real-world goods, materialism, over-consumption, and of course oligarchy and political consolidation that comes from wealth generation systems of these kind.

Ask yourself, is this a feature of a bug within capitalism? Are the other bugs features, too?