Moral Systems: More on Haidt and Some Old School Stuff

Recently I wrote about Jonathan Haidt and his ideas surrounding his "social intuitionist model." He's been studying the deep psychology of morality for around 25 years. Early on he realized that moral values and decisions are based on emotions at the deepest level; environmental aspects came later: opinions derived from learning, experience in the world, etc. But the trick is: we're not aware of this. I think there's an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, if only in cognitive neurolinguistics alone, that supports this idea. (Will this ever filter down to Joe and Josephine Twelve Pack?) We think we're "right" and spent a lot of time being lawyers trying to prove our case, and when we're talking with people who have a different set of values, we're bound to not make sense to them, as they do not make sense to us. (I confess most of the time I listen to conservatives and think I understand them, but that if all of their ideas reigned, our species would end quicker than if all "liberal" ideas reigned. There's my confession for a Sunday, from a Mystical Agnostic Libertarian Socialist.)

The data set he used to come to his conclusions is largely based on an extensive questionnaire, and you can add Haidt's and his colleagues' data set by going to Your Morals.org. I'm about 70% done. This jit is extensive! But so far I'm being too dry about this. Here's a good one for us to ponder:

Remember when Andres Serrano came out with his work of art titled Piss Christ? He was being deliberately shocking, of course. Liberals tended to support his right to express himself freely, but conservatives tended to see Serrano's work as an affront to all they held dear. Now here's a question for liberals: what about an artwork that had a little statue of Martin Luther King submerged in the artist's own urine? When interviewed the artist said he just thought "the Left" had made too much of MLK's contribution to history, that the Rev was "overrated" and a "sacred cow ripe for hamburger meat."? Do you still feel the same way about "free expression"?

I like this one even more, and it's directly from Haidt and colleagues:

Mark and Julie are brother and sister. ("Ut-ohhhh...I think I see where this is going!") They go on vacation from the US to the south of France and have a wonderful time. One night, while drinking wine in Provence, one thing leads to another and they have sex. They use two different types of contraception. They really enjoy it, but afterwards decide to never do it again. The experience, they both agree, made them even closer. They swear each other to undying secrecy and indeed, they never tell anyone.

Here's the Q: was doing what they did okay? If not, why?

Now, I confess that when I first read this scenario, I only needed about three seconds to say to myself, "I see nothing wrong with what they did." Haidt says most people don't think it's okay, they often forget the two forms of contraception. When reminded they say, "Oh yea." And they're still not okay with it, and try to find a reason why. Haidt calls Qs like this "moral dumbfounding."

Haidt says liberals have a harder time with this one than conservatives, which I find puzzling. Then, in one interview - the one from The Believer - (see near the end) he says liberals highly value Avoiding Doing Harm to others. Incest usually means some harm has been done, so "liberals" try to find "the victim" to justify why it's wrong. Haidt identifies himself as a liberal - or he did up until around two years ago, more on this later - so he knows; because he's an insider/expert on morality he knows there's no victim, so he says it's a trick question. He seems smug to me there, in 2005.

I wonder if "liberals" really do try to find victims more than conservatives. I don't know. I'm dubious. But maybe he's right.

Okay, so Haidt and colleagues have decided there are Six core moral values in which moral systems are built: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. (Earlier he had four, but he asserts coherent systems can be built on combinations of all Six, or four, and he even uses a Chomskyan term, "grammatical," in a sense very reminiscent of Noam's idea that there are countless possible sound-patterns and syntaxes, but only a few are/were used in the real world of humans speaking the world's languages.)

[An aside: 20th century conservative and champion of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Mortimer Adler, got together with a few tweedy friends and eventually decided there were 102 Great Ideas in the Western Tradition. I think maybe I'm morbidly fascinated about how intellectuals make their models, reify them, then move in, fall in love with their own models - Robert Anton Wilson called this "modeltheism" - and then push their models on all of us, in attempt to Enlighten us all.]

I like that, in a recent interview, Haidt says that there are no universal human moral values that are right; they are a social construction, and the proof being the very fact there are many moral systems in the world. And they're all right in their own way.

Here's where I part ways with Haidt: his data set is self-selecting. But worse than that, the Six seem arbitrary to me. But worse than that, even if we grant him his Six, he conveniently builds an edifice in which all the values are good, right, true and equal. He's in, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would put it: Mediocristan: he can use his data and a whole world can be built out of it - which he admits moral system are anyway: they're "castles in the air that are nevertheless 'real' castles, and we live in them," to paraphrase one of his lines. He can plot his values in some Bell Curvey-way and then come up with "insights" that help him build his intellectual capital. But it gets more and more puzzling to me from there on in...There's some horrible Platonicity in Haidt's scheme, as I see it.

Haidt was always a liberal, and really hated the George W. Bush administration, and he also says he despises the "current" Republican party. And yet, in looking at all his data and writing his latest book, he realizes that conservatives (I really wonder who these people are?) are playing all Six, while liberals only play Two of the Six: Care and Fairness. This is absurd to me on so many levels that this blogspew would be far too long if I enumerated why this is just...well...okay, I'll say it: stupid. Why? Read on. (I vehemently assert that I admire the attempt, though.)

Another huge problem for me with Haidt's system is it's synchronic. It doesn't explain history very well. I'm not sure he wanted it too. I think Haidt honestly and earnestly wants "liberals" and "conservatives" to  try to understand each other. One of his best lines, for me, is that he hopes liberals and conservatives will stop hating each other and see each other as part of a yin-yang. Bless him for this peaceful thought, for whatever it's worth.

I must amend something from the above paragraph, and it sheds light on another problem in Haidt's thinking here: if we're talking about deep, evolutionary time, clearly Haidt addresses this. He's read The Selfish Gene. He's well-versed in Evolutionary Psychology. And he defends religion against the "New Atheists" of Dawkins himself, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: religion, although there's quite a downside to it, evolved so that larger groups of non-immediately-blood related people could co-operate and attain bigger goals. Okay: but the thrust of the book is about the fierce, ugly acrimony in Unistat today between Haidt's abstract "conservatives" and "liberals." The problem is: the partisan ugliness is fairly recent. Let's say 1980. Or 1960, to be charitable. This is why I leveled the charge of synchronic...I'm not so sure his evolutionary psychology is fully baked with the ingredients of the artificial construct of Pick Six Core Moral Values and then tabulated questionnaire data-world Haidt dwells in.

Anyway, Haidt was furious with W's administration, but now that Obama's in, time to collate his data and come to a better understanding.

But he goes to Occupy Wall Street's Zucotti Park and becomes a liberal scold, telling them "conservatives believe in equality before the law." (What???) Why? Because Obama's in now? Just HOW has Obama made that much of a difference from Bush?

Haidt had recently realized that "conservatives" are playing on all Six, and "liberals" on only Two, or maybe Three. He observes the Occupiers have no sense of Hierarchy, which is derived from one of the Big Six, Authority. Is Haidt even paying attention to what's going on in the world? Whether it was Liberals or Conservatives, they allowed the bankers, and the rich to plunder the economy. Obama has not made significant amends to the banking rules that allowed this to happen. People's lives are ruined; many are desperate. What a time to realize you're not a liberal! Especially when a long-term study by U. of Georgia and NYU scholars showed that the current Republicans are the most conservative in 100 years.

The Occupiers - as good liberal types - want Fairness, one of Haidt's Six. But if you've got your degree from a fine institution and can't find a job and your student loan debt is massive, how are you going to exercise your Liberty? And in doing the right things - working hard, delaying gratification so you can get your degree and go out and work hard, contribute Loyally to the country you love - how are you supposed to value Authority, when the Authorities have looted the treasury, stacked the deck in their favor, and pepper-sprayed you because you're trying to exercise your rights (Liberty) under the Constitution? (To those who watched OWS on TV and didn't actually hang out and talk with at least twenty or hundred people at rallies, and really listened, I can honestly report that, in my experience, about a third of the OWSers I talked to were thoughtful, patriotic, and brilliant young people. Another third were well-meaning but seemed - for lack of a better word - "lost" to me. Another third were Street People. And while I'm parenthetically ranting, furthermore, as an American, I'm disgusted that we allow so many of our fellow Americans to live like that..."disgust" is highly correlated with "conservative" values, according to some non-Haidt studies on social morality, but I wildly digress...)

This bit about "conservatives" playing with a full Six and "liberals" not seems ridiculous to me. The OWSers that were astute are not crazy about the Democratic party, but they see the Dems (and I concur) as less harmful than the Republicans, who seem to value whatever the Billionaire Class favors.

                            Gordon Rattray-Taylor. I'll be getting to him shortly, below.

Haidt seems to not see how Congress and the Presidency are bought. (Where's the Sanctity there?) Does he pay attention to stories about how the Conservative Supreme Court has ruled that  police can strip search anyone for any reason? That the Unistat Prez - whether under the "conservative" Bush or the "liberal" Obama - can kill, detain without due process, and torture whoever they want, all while talking about "transparency" yet becoming more and more opaque every day? Does he ever read stuff like THIS? What about this article, which I found via my colleague Annabel Lee at Double Dip Politics: is accurate, current knowledge about how the world works not a core moral value? I suspect he doesn't. Hell, I hope he doesn't or he's probably just another tool who believes that information "is" liberal. What world does Haidt live in, where, right when the country implodes, he writes a book extolling "conservative"s' morality of Authority, Loyalty, and Liberty, and he tells his wife "I can't call myself a liberal anymore." He's a "centrist."???

Oh yea: in passing Haidt says "libertarians" are totally different from liberals and conservatives. But I guess I'll have to get hold of his book to see if he says anything substantive about libertarians. My experience with libertarians is that they are smarter, but more disparate concerning The Six. I know libertarians who don't seem to care all that much about Three (Sanctity [unless you're talking about The Market or Mother Nature], Authority, or Loyalty; but they differ in very interesting ways about the Other Three (Care, Fairness, and Liberty). If anyone can flesh out Haidt on libertarians for me (perhaps you have the money to just buy the new book; I have to wait on a library list), I'd be grateful to hear it.

Someone once said you can't be neutral on a moving train. I have no idea what it means, brass tacks, to be a "centrist" in this world, 2012 Unistat. I think you have to live in Mediocristan to understand it. Richard Nixon would be an extreme "liberal" today. Haidt must be making some good money, or wants to please those who can make things even better for him. (<----That's me being a dick, blowing off steam. I apologize. That was below the belt. But I can't wait to hear him talk about how Romney's got a point on some topic, that strict Authority really is important, if you want all your taste buds firing on all cylinders or all your rods and cones seeing the ultra-violets when others can't, or the graphic equalizer in your brain is giving vent to the whole audio-political spectrum of values...)

Now: all I've blathered on here is subject to the same proto-sociology of knowledge contained in Max Weber's quote that "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun." But I can also take a page from Weber's student, Karl Mannheim, who said that knowledge will take on certain shapes for people depending on their socioeconomic status. I'm going Old School on Haidt here: he's doing really well as a Public Intellectual. I think he's honestly trying to solve a Very Hard Problem. And from what I can see from here, he's not helping things much. Now Haidt would say to me, "You admit you haven't read my new book. And I understand you're a struggling freelancer. Your politics and values reflect that..." Etc.

I bet I would like Jonathan Haidt if I met him. I would ask him what he made of studies like this one, which make a lot of sense to me. Or UC Berkeley's Jennifer Stellar and her colleagues' findings as explained in this article. Or, how do you explain the very many historical examples of people like Arianna Huffington and David Horowitz? Are the self-indentified "conservatives" who answered Haidt and Co's Qs roughly the same people Monbiot is talking about here?

Is the Daily Show's studio audience - packed with liberals - response to Elon Musk's response to a question about Musk's futuristic thinking (Internet, sustainable energy, and space exploration) solely due to their "liberalism," or are they maybe glad to hear something from someone who's a neophile towards scientific research? And this is something virtually non of their "leaders" mention, or if they do, it's really lip service?

Earlier I hinted that I preferred my Grand Narratives concerning Big Ideas to be diachronic, and explain things within a historical perspective. I'm biased this way.

Recently I re-read the introduction to a sleeper of a book - Gordon Rattray-Taylor's 1954 gem Sex In History. Rattray-Taylor says when he reads scads of history books the historians very often present a maddening epistemological problem, and one is "influence." Historians will explain that something changed because someone was influenced by someone else or some cultural event, or whatever. But, as Rattray-Taylor writes, "He seems to feel that the development of a trend has been 'explained' if it can be shown that the people concerned came under the influence of some similar trend elsewhere. Thus, historians have laboured to show that the appearance of a school of lyric poetry in twelfth-century Provence was due to the influence of Arabic poetry of a similar kind." Similarly maddening for Rattray-Taylor was the explanation of people coming under the "spirit of the times,"without explaining why  they came under the Spirit.

As you might have guessed from the title of the book, Rattray-Taylor's proffered explanation - which to me is just as great as Haidt's and I happen to like it more, and I do think these things are comparable and should be compared and contrasted and played with and pondered and possibly incorporated into a yet newer vision - is summed up by Robert Anton Wilson on a basic chart based on Rattray-Taylor's book, in Wilson's Ishtar Rising. 


Rattray-Taylor saw a yin-yang/pendulum-like cycle of oscillations in history's values, based on attitudes that emanate from deeper attitudes towards sex, and he's influenced a tad by Freud, but also other Germanic thinkers who came after Siggy. I will copy the chart out here, and then bid the blogspew adieu because, once again I've typed far, far too much and if you're reading this now I bet you're the only one who stuck with my harangue, but anyhoo:

Patrist (anal)                                                                      

1. Restrictive attitude toward sex                     
2. Limitation of freedom for women
3. Women seen as inferior, sinful
4. Chastity more valued than welfare
5. Politically authoritarian
6. Conservative: against innovation
7. Distrust of research, inquiry
8. Inhibition, fear of spontaneity
9. Deep fear of homosexuality
10. Sex differences maximized (dress)
11. Asceticism, fear of pleasure
12. Father-religion

Matrist (oral)

1. Permissive attitude toward sex
2. Freedom for women
3. Women accorded high status
4. Welfare more valued than chastity
5. Politically democratic
6. Progressive: revolutionary
7. No distrust of research
8. Spontaneity: exhibition
9. Deep fear of incest
10. Sex differences minimized (dress)
11. Hedonism, pleasure welcomed
12. Mother-religion

These are Idealized Types, of course. Most of us fall somewhere in between these polarized pairs of values, which I suspect can be plotted on a vast continuum. - the OG

Rushkoff/Lakoff/Markoff: A Take-Off

[First let the OG pre-empt any wiseacres in the peanut gallery by admitting he's a "jackoff." Now: let's see if any of you can come up with a better one. And on with the show!]:


Douglas Rushkoff's Plan To Save The 1% From Themselves
It's RIGHT HERE.
The video (sorry about the mersh) pretty much covers the article, but the article spells out a bit more. It's basically a precis of Rushkoff's vastly underrated (so far) and avant book Life, Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back and it's guerrilla ontological (note the cluelessness of the commenters on the CNN website), counterintuitive, astoundingly well-informed about the history of capitalism (for Rushkoff, no 1776 Adam Smith, but medieval landlords as the 1%; Rushkoff really surpasses Noam Chomsky here, methinks. Noam never put together a narrative about do-nothing/create-nothing aristocratic "wealth" like Doug does here and in his book), speaks to the diffuse and legion brain trust of the Occupy movement, and...might be a tad too sly and witty for many people to "get."

What I like so much about Rushkoff is his considered and nuanced ideas about value versus money. I find it stupefying how many otherwise intelligent and well-read people accept that some corporation "must" pay its CEOs $45million bonuses, or they will lose the "best talent." You mean there isn't someone out there who could do a better "job" for half that? Okay? Now: I say there's a person who can "perform" just as well if not better for half of that. Let me then iterate this idea five or six more times. It's a con-game! They produce ZERO wealth!

(And in these pig-iron days, there are some egregious glaring examples that are far worse than not creating value, but just sucking money from everyone else while ruining lives. For example, see Matt Taibbi's piece on Bank of America.)

Some of you will think I'm wrong here, but please, as an exercize, take a week and think about it from Rushkoff's and my POV, and if you still think some asshole making "executive" decisions and fucking up and losing the company money or making some, probably by laying people off, undercutting competition, getting lucky because the true innovators and scientists made a breakthrough, or dumping pollution on poor people's heads, then fine. I have looked at the Harvard MBA stuff: there is some technical minutiae that needs to be met according to the rules of the Game, but executive "decisions" that net hundreds of millions of dollars? I cannot buy it. Look at how many of these Type-A fuckwads lose their company money...and they still give themselves massive bonuses, 'cuz it's written in the "rules" that they can! (CEOs often write the rules, having so many cowed by their "expertise.") There's no WAY in hell the CEO's "skill" or "knowledge" is worth thousands of times more than the guys driving the fork lifts over in the warehouse. What a con!

But I still say: read Life, Inc. (And lemme give a shout-out to the greatest generalist of the last 150 years, Buckminster Fuller, and his GRUNCH of Giants, where he shows how, the non-value-creating landlords and aristocracy and CEOs are history's "Great Pirates" who traditionally hired the truly talented and then absconded with the wealth/value the "wizards" created for them. Fuller and Rushkoff complement each other very well here...)

A bit of a tangent: In my university town, the chancellor of U.C. Berkeley just announced his last day will be December 31st, 2012. He makes $450,000 a year in salary. I wonder how he created value? Let's compare that to the 24 year old "adjunct professor" who just got her Master's and is working towards her PhD. She's - I'm not kidding here - getting roughly what a manager at Burger King gets. With no benefits. She's teaching the freshman and sophomore "Intro to Whatever" classes. Tuition has skyrocketed; the protesting kids aren't stupid. Our adjunct is working her ass off, and her student loans are massive, and will remain massive through her defense of her PhD. And if she gets that PhD, she gets kicked to the curb as far as being an adjunct. Because now she's worth more, with a PhD. But then no one will hire her, because the economy sucks. Meanwhile, we get stories like this one... I wonder how she and her boy-toy created value?

Professor George Lakoff On "The Santorum Strategy"
Read it HERE.
Lakoff is a tenured professor at Berkeley who's created more than enough value for me than I can possibly repay him for. Well, I buy his books. And I spend a lot of time clarifying his ideas in comment sections on the Internet, because many otherwise smart people seem to have just as tough a time understanding his ideas as they do Rushkoff's. This same piece ran on Huffington Post and I felt compelled to clarify the cognitive linguistic basis of neural networks and metaphorical thought there. Hell, George can't explain all that in his role as Public Intellectual. And I confess to being a major student of Lakoff's, though I haven't taken a class with the guy. I have attended enough of his talks that he seemed to think I was one of his old grad students once, but I digress...

If anyone reading this wants to quibble, or even cavil, on one or more points Lakoff makes in this article, let's get it going in the comments section. Of all the academic ideas about semantics out there, Lakoff's (and many of his brilliant colleagues, like Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, Eleanor Rosch, and hell, I'll mention old Charles Fillmore) ideas make the most sense to me, by far. Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky never did account for why poor people who hear "death tax" want to vote against it, etc. (But I think I went over this in all those Chomsky Problem blogs, eh?)

Three things that I want to point out that didn't show in this piece, and which readers seemed to have a tough time with:

1.) It takes self-discipline and practice to frame your values in your own way, and not in the phrases you've heard or read in the media. When you begin to practice this, you will - I hope - begin to understand how overwhelmingly regressive the corporate mainstream media has been in Unistat, throughout your life. That it's a "liberal" media qualifies as much of a Goebbels-esque Big Lie as anything that might compete with it.

2.) Lakoff and a few others have shown that the Right is at least 30 years ahead of the liberals, progressives, libertarian socialists, and thoughtful rank and file small "d" democrats in using knowledge about language, imagery and the unconscious to sway minds of the electorate. Lakoff says it pretty much started with the Powell Memo, and it's only been in the last ten years that non-right wingers have begun to devise ways to frame their messages. All along it's been the Right using knowledge from the history of PR and advertising on the electorate, while the "Left," valuing their university educations, has assumed the electorate are rational actors, products of the 18th century Enlightenment, and that they will respond to reasonable discourse. And they were wrong. In so many ways. For much more on this history, see Lakoff's Moral Politics and/or The Political Mind. And, for extra credit, see this recent, timely, witty and articulate blog post on fear and the activation of semantic frames.

3.) Many non-right wingers want Lakoff to tell them what to say. I've argued countless times with folks online and face-to-face that Lakoff has made suggestions in his short books on freedom and how you ought not think of an elephant, but he's really an academic. People want Lakoff to step up and be "the Frank Luntz for the Left." I've seen this many times. Lakoff is an academic. A damned good one. I have some problems with him, but as you can probably tell, I think he's really important. He's one of the great cognitive neurolinguists in the world, and he's always been a passionate political animal, but he's more of a cognitive scientist/professor than a hired gun like Frank Luntz. On the surface Lakoff looks to people like the Bizarro World Frank Luntz, but that's not Lakoff's role. He really wants YOU to be the Left's Frank Luntz.

John Markoff On A Silicon Valley Start-Up
Markoff, one of my favorite journalists covering computers and the hi-tech industry in general - see especially his signal contribution to the history of the 1960s counterculture and how it influenced computers and the Internet, What the Dormouse Said -  has published an article that dovetails with my recent blogspew on life extension.

See this article on the recent very rapid acceleration of genomic sequencing techniques and what it might mean for knowledge about how to extend human lifespans.

The gist: over the past six months, there's been a ten-fold increase in genome sequencing, with performance from new techniques coming in tandem with a dwindling cost, to the point where it looks like, very soon, mapping your own genome will cost around what a blood test does now.

This has potential implications for startling discoveries that could apply to human health, concomitant with a bewildering array of problems with ethics, information sharing, the right to not know if your genes have a nasty turn in store for you, what to do when you know but can't do anything at present about your disease, how insurance will come into play, etc, etc, et freakin' cetera!

Caveat: Markoff, covering a start-up, is one smart reporter, but these freaks with multiple PhDs in computers/biology and medicine, or "bioinformatics" might be making the story look rosier than they know it really is, because they want investors at some point.

Still, this stuff seems like it could really have a huge impact, but it's impossible to forecast, it seems to me. But even if it's half as good as these guys make their new techniques out to be, it's exciting. The very idea of a personalized medicine based on your unique genome. The idea of industrial digital cameras that "read" small sequences of DNA.

What Markoff doesn't point out is that one way we're going to learn a lot with this cheap and very fast technology: we sequence hundred or thousands of genomes and see what they have in common. For example: take ten thousand people with an autoimmune disease like lupus, and see what they all have in common, then zero in on those commonalities. Or similarly: sequence 3000 genomes from people who are 85 and still healthy, active, running around, writing cello sonatas or still making inroads on the neurobiology of memory. (See Kandel, Erik) There's no way we can NOT learn valuable stuff in this way!

The two huge problems with all this knowledge that loom large for any layperson like myself and my Dear Readers is still 1.) how to interpret the data, and furthermore, 2.) how to interpret it in light of the explosion of new knowledge about epigenetics, and the complex role of RNA, and DNA methylation, and the dizzyingly dense difficulty that has certain genes activating due to inner and outer environmental triggers, and other genes turning far-flung genes off, etc. It's still a hard problem, but it seems like the information detonations, with more scientists working on these Hard Problems than ever before in the history of the planet...well...stay tuned.

Here's 5 minutes of John Markoff talking about psychedelic culture and the rise of computer technology:

UC Davis Fascist Cop's Nonchalant Pepper-Spray: A Boon to Agit-Prop Artists

Here's a photo - you've already seen it - I copped from Time:

Here's one of my favorite uses of the image so far, Normal Rockwell-style, just in time for Turkey Day and the entire family!:

The above was done by the artist Bob Staake, who has done covers for the New Yorker. I found this at Boing Boing.


This image of the vile cop has truly gone viral, and there's no end to playful images of this embarrassment to UC Davis's administration and police authority throughout Unistat.

Here's one for Philip K. Dick fans. You know his mind-expanding paranoid and wonderfully weird novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said? Here's one version of the paperback art. You may even own this version:

Okay, here's a very recent update, only the title has been changed to Flow Your Tears, the Policeman Said:

Hat-tip: Ted Hand's intelligent blog Philip K. Dick and Religion.

It seems there is no end to this stuff, for example look HERE.


HERE are a few more. I like this first one (click to make larger):

George Lakoff and Metaphorical Framing for Occupy, u.s.w.

I just found out Professor Lakoff had back surgery recently, and is getting around with a cane. I hope he makes a full recovery; he's one of the most important thinkers in Unistat, maybe the world, as far as I'm concerned. He's a tremendous thinker, a sweet guy, and Noam Chomsky's bete noir.

Right now, Lakoff is concerned that the Occupy movement doesn't know how to adequately frame their desires, wants, demands. (Hint: He thinks they should frame their patriotism.) But he has very recently contributed an essay addressing this very issue, which I highly recommend for my Dear Readers.

[Any readers who want to understand Lakoff's cognitive neurolinguistics on a deep level might want to get hold of the book he co-wrote with philosopher Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. The same approach, but with a more laser-like focus on the Unistat political scene is Lakoff's Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Also see his political-neuroscience book The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. (That book has been reissued in paperback with a different subtitle.) For a very deep and epic heavy sled-run on the neuroscience underpinning all of this stuff, see Jerome Feldman's From Molecule To Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language.]

Lakoff acknowledges forerunners of the thought-is-constituted-in-metaphors schema, but says only his (and Feldman's and many of their colleagues) are truly "scientific." The forerunners Lakoff has mentioned (in The Political Mind, first published in 2008) are Charles Fillmore, Erving Goffman, Ernst Cassirer and I.A. Richards (I wrote about Richards HERE); going back a bit further, Nietzsche (I wrote something as the OG HERE on Fred N). Going back the furthest, Lakoff tips his hat to Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). In earlier work, Lakoff has acknowledged the influence upon cognitive neurolinguistics such eminent thinkers as Wittgenstein, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Lofti Zadeh.

                                  Maverick sociologist Erving Goffman, author of The Presentation of Self 
                                             in Everyday Life and many other mindblowing and readable books. His 
                                             central metaphor was All the World's A Stage. We assume roles, act our 
                                             parts, depending on the social situation, or framework we find ourselves in.

Keeping in mind Lakoff's recent essay for Occupy Writers, indulge me a bit and consider the use of language in class warfare (Marxist terminology is something Lakoff shies away from). A few blogs ago I pointed out that when budget slashing that would harm the non-rich the Republicans frame this as "reform." But when anyone suggests that the tax rates for the wealthy go back to the level they were in 1999, it is "class warfare."

Reading Lakoff and his influences my main model for why and how we are in this MESS we're in now is because the party that serves the 1% have a longer history of study and implementation of the most scientific uses of cognitive neurolinguistics...but they started to use knowledge about these largely unconscious processes far before Lakoff was studying the stuff, and it certainly wasn't called "cognitive neurolinguistics; rather is was called "advertising" or "Public Relations," or as the mandarin journalist Walter Lippmann called it, taming the Bewildered Herd.

The right-wing think tanks have been studying what amounts to Advertising and then applying it to politics; they've been doing it for a long time. Meanwhile the other parties that seek more parity? They speak in the patois of the educated, rational person. Indeed, they think like 18th century Enlightenment people, who believed in disembodied Reason, that if people could only know their self-interest they would Do The Right Thing, and that emotion has its place in life, but it really only gets in the way of Reason. They are the "egg heads" that a majority loathe, and tune out.

And now, with an explosion of neuroscientific knowledge, we know this is all wrong. Republicans speak using the patois of Reason also, but they do so with an idea that, as one of the founders of Unsitat, John Jay said, the owners of the country ought to run it. The best people have the most money. That sort of thing.

Lakoff has been at pains over the past 12-15 years trying to get the educated class to understand that most of the electorate are not primarily Rational Beings as Chomsky thinks, but bi-conceptual political beings: they are largely responsive to Strict Father frames of political language (see his book Moral Politics), or Two-Parent Co-Nurturing frames. Both frames are built on sets of metaphors that are physically instantiated in neural circuits. Probably everyone reading this, no matter what your political persuasion, can understand both frames, because we have experienced them over and over in our lives. This is a definition of Lakoff's "bi-conceptual." But one of those two frames tends to govern our political/economic/social thought more than the other, because of our life-experience, most of which was processed at unconscious levels. Lakoff has also been trying to get liberals to understand that the "conservatives" are way ahead in using this knowledge, and it's probably the main reason that so many of the so-called 99% vote for the interests of the 1%...

Lakoff thinks it's time the 99% wake up to frames, metaphors, and just generally using language and imagery to activate the neural circuits that articulate the values of equality, fairness, nurturing, and that aspect of freedom from.

If "The Empire never ended," it has largely been because those who best manipulate the symbols have been able to manipulate the land, capital, wealth, laws, rulers, etc.  So another way of framing Lakoff's "frames" is language as class warfare. Or Robert Anton Wilson's description of what Vico's linguistic theories were: "transpersonal linguistics." Or a rather blunt way to frame it: language as the tried-and-true Mind Control device?

This is, to me, the locus of the most radical aspect in our political world now. And it probably always has been. But now, as long as things are as bad as they are that people want to pitch tents in the hearts of the metropolises and get beaten by cops, it's probably about time more of them knew this stuff. Spread the word!

Anyway... Vico seemed to know all this, before the year 1750. More on that soon.

Here's Lakoff on conscious use of metaphors - framing - and how natural it is. 5 minutes:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Book Burner

While I seriously doubt Bloomberg consciously told his top goons to make sure their whole library was destroyed, he's still responsible for, as of this moment and according to the librarians of OWS, 2000 to 4000 missing books. The intent is not the same as the short clip at the end of this post, but seems rather ironic in a few ways nonetheless. And Bloomberg's book destruction seems more from overweening political arrogance, power, and negligence. Still: he's the one who must answer for this, and I hope he does.

But even if he does, for the OG at least, and possibly the Reader, Bloomberg will never be able to completely wash the smell of burned books out of his own name. There's no evidence that I have seen that he ordered the destruction of books, but as of this moment or until we hear he's apologized and made restitution, I see him as on the moral level of book burners. If you think that's too harsh, feel free to say so in the comments. "Mistakes were made?" "A breakdown in communication?" What?

He should have no trouble making amends. He's worth $19,500,000,000, according to Forbes. Jeez, talk about the 1%!

Here: have a look at the catalog prior-Bloomberg's default-biblioclasm, or libricide. Luxuriate in the list of texts; note the catalog dates for each item.

CAUTION: DIZZYING LEVEL OF IRONY AHEAD (in links):
Eight days before the confiscation and ruin of a library - including the destruction of at least one copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - Bloomberg attended a gala event for the NY Public Library.

Two days after the destruction of the library, Common Cause rallied to the defense of the OWS library and its librarians and called for billionaire Bloomberg to open his wallet and buy back those books.

Until Rich Uncle Pennybags Bloomberg makes restitution for what he's responsible for destroying, he's in the set of people which include the burners of the Library at Alexandria, the ReverendTerry Jones, Anthony Comstock, the Nazis, the US government/FDA/AMA who succeeded in having Wilhelm Reich's books burned only 11 years after the Nazis were defeated, because supposedly Americans believed in Free Speech and that book burning was anathema to a Free World.

Some other links to articles about this heinous incident are here, here (note there how many library accessories are also broken, trashed, or missing), here, and here (NB the quote from the artist who told a reporter, "I watched the stuff thrown into sanitation trucks and just crushed.")
General Wiki on burning books.
Nazis and book burning Wiki.
Some good links there...

Enjoy your books! Have you read Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, by Herman Melville? Life, Inc by Rushkoff? Thomas Paine? How about Haig Bosmajian?

I wrote on the topic of book destruction and Baez's book on the history of that here. Skip ahead to the part after the pic of the stack of unburnt books...

The absurdity of this all! Dig this 27-second clip of Nazis burning books, etc. The person who put the clip up decided to include the tune, "Fly Me To The Moon." When I watched this clip earlier today, a pop-up ad appeared for investing in gold. Satire has been outpaced by "real life"?

Language and Class Warfare, and a Poet

Demanding that the tax rate for the richest return to 1999 levels: "class warfare."
Those working on behalf of the richest wanting to slash Medicare and Social Security: "reform."

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass (rhymes with "grass"), reading his poem "The Problem of Describing Color" (He announces it as "difficulty" but in his book Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 it appears as "problem," page 9.) 84 seconds long. Do you have 84 seconds for poetry?:

On November 10, when UC Berkeley students peacefully protested Occupy-style, Hass, 70 years old, was holding hands with people on both sides of him and campus police jabbed him in the ribs with a baton. As far as I know, he's okay, physically.

What was that line from Orwell? Something like "When I see the police beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask what side I'm on."

Speaking of which: video of an Iraq war vet being beaten by police in Oakland on November 2nd.

Watching Occupy-like actions from Madrid on YouTube, police rioting, beating protesters indiscriminately, a colleague noted something a commenter wrote below:

"Class warfare: the rich are now rich enough to pay half the population to kill the other half of the population."

Addendum: Hass recently published an I Was There editorial in the NYT, HERE.

#OWS and Origins, My Delusion, Taking Pulse of Zeitgeist

I've known possibly too much about the problems Unistat has fallen into for, oh, about 23 years now. And in a consciously unrelated event, after reading about the practical purposes of having a blog from fellow writers, I started one on May 6 of this year. At the time, what I saw in national politics was utterly dismal, and if anything, politicians were talking about making things worse (in their special language). If they were talking about solving problems at all.

I never thought I'd write about the all-but-hopeless political situation on this blog, but events led me to feel compelled to. It seemed only left-ish online magazines and blogs were talking about the same political problems I'd seen and cared about, and they were addressing possible solutions in a way that made sense to me, or at least seemed legitimate. There was virtually nothing in the corporate media.

So I wrote for awhile about what a sham I thought the Economics game was. (See here, and there, and over there, up on that branch, down here in this bog.) I could do another 15 like that, easily, but then the Intergalactic Committee for Legitimate Generalists might revoke my license, and you really don't want that, do you? I know I don't want that.

I'll have to space out my Potshots from here on in.

Along those lines - of politics and economics and money and slander and vituperation and Who Gets What (which reminds me of a funny line from Timothy Leary, who said the only honest way to talk about politics with someone else is when you're both down on all fours) - I started writing about what I thought were Missing Public Discussions. The ideas were, as I saw them, being discussed only in far-flung hamlets of Internet, and not on, say, the Six O'Clock Newshour with Pretty Blonde and Good Hair. (See here, here, here, here, and a few other places, for example.)

Now here's the funny thing: I did most - if not all of those - before Occupy Wall Street hit the news. Suddenly, most of those discussions started to show up in "public."

Naturally, I thought I caused it all. I was the Tipping Point or something. Maybe the groundswell was building, people were angry, desperate, scared, at wit's end...then the Overweening Generalist showed up and straw/camel's back...BLAMMO!: We had ourselves a Movement, buckaroo.

                                          The Great Canadians at AdBusters came up with this one

Now, I really didn't believe I had anything to do with it. It was a felicitous delusion. I had simply tapped into the zeitgeist. Those ideas were in the air. Part of the basic job description of the relatively unattached, free-floating intellectual is to articulate what's not being said yet.

But there was a primitive part of my brain that I think we all have which has to do with causality, observing that first this happens, then that happens, so this first must have "caused" that. It's a very primitive circuit and it no doubt did well by us for at least a million years. Which made me laff. My primate brain at work! There were millions of others articulating those ideas. And I'm glad we're talking about them. Very glad. (The discussions about automation replacing many jobs forever, what does work "mean" now?, what are alternate ways we can exchange value now?...these discussions still seem in the remote vanguard. But they will appear, as things accelerate toward some sort of - hopefully benign - eschaton.) The real work can finally begin, at any rate.

Now I've seen a few Origin stories about OWS, and I'll link to two of them here and here. These timelines/narrative of origin help sober me up...

49 million in poverty in Unistat, the richest country in the world...and we only have a little over 300 million. I find that disgusting and shameful. This should lead the Six O'Clock News every night in a sane society. But we do not have a sane society. We currently have something like a kleptocratic-plutocratic oligarchy that likes to call itself a democratic republic. We have to change that. And as long as money is in politics in the way it is now, not much will change. So we have to change that.

I was planning a long Missing Public Discussion on Ending Corporate Personhood, and one on Publicly Financed Elections, but then the Occupy movement started, I went down to the ones in Oakland and Berkeley, and those ideas were on the minds of most.

(This blog and its writer are overweening in their chauvinism. They seem to only care about Unistat's economic worries. Yes, it's true, the OG is ethnocentric and self-centered. But we DO care about England, and follow what's going on there. We DO care about the Euro and Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. And we're trying to imagine the mindset of the Germans right now. We are greatly concerned about our cousins to the Great White North. All of us want to end the War on Certain People Who Use Certain Drugs, if only to stop the headless corpses on playgrounds in Mexico. We care about South American, Malaysia, Indonesia, and maybe especially Japan. I'm sorry to all our brothers and sisters in countries I haven't named. Believe it or not, we do care! But even an overweening generalist has his limitations, if only of space.)

A recent poll of 1005 people (not a very large sample, granted) had Occupy at a 35% favorable rating, with Wall Street and corporations at 16%. The Tea Party was at 16%, too. There are polls galore out there to Google or Bing or Yahoo. Things are moving fast. Things are exciting. Maybe at times a bit too exciting, but hey, you go with what brung ya. (<-----what the hell does that even mean?)

There was my delusional episode. There are timelines of origins in the links I provided above. But I think the second President of Unistat had the better perspective on these moments in history.

John Adams, long out of office, in 1815 received a letter from Dr. J. Morse asking for information about the American Revolution, its origins, causes and course. This information was to be used for a history of that period. And Adams wrote back:

A history of military operations...is not a history of the American Revolution, any more than the Marquis  of Quincy's military history of Louis XIV...is a history of the reign of that monarch. The revolution was in the minds and the hearts of the people, and in the union of the colonies; both of which were substantially effected before hostilities commenced.


In subsequent years Adams uttered variations of this. The Revolution took place in the minds and hearts of the people 15 years before a shot was fired.

Let us hope for a relatively peaceful adjustment. The revolution is now borderless. I fear for what hopes and dreams we were allowed to legitimately carry within us until December of 2000, September of 2001, March of 2003, August of 2008...whenever my Dear Reader thinks we truly began to be loose our tether.  But let's not give up hope; we need to preserve capitalism for its tremendous dynamic, creative force, but we need rules in place, and those rules enforced. We need a safety net...or what are our values? The values of Las Vegas?

I personally don't know anyone who wants that. Carry on!

Reinstall Glass-Steagall

Among the many reforms made by FDR in the desperate attempt to assuage the suffering of the Great Depression was what's commonly called the Glass-Steagall Act, which was germinated in 1933 and went into effect in 1934. Probably the major cause of the Crash was rampant speculation, and Glass-Steagall put into effect the FDIC and separated the commercial banking operations and the securities biz.

And, when the dust cleared after WWII it worked pretty well, until 1999.

In listening to the brain trusts (this is a diffuse network, but I define them as the ones who, when you wander around an Occupy site, are mentally equipped to explain in depth what's needed to happen to revive the world economy, if not the Unistat economy, for example, see the video at the end of this post), you will hear calls to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or the "Financial Modernization Act". What was that? Isn't "modernization" good? (Yet another way words hypnotize us. Or are supposed to hypnotize us.)

It was the move sponsored by three Republicans to effectively get rid of Glass-Steagall. If you listen to this partisan d-bag (Max Keiser, first couple minutes), his assholic simple-minded message is that the Democrats deserve most of the blame and caused the problems actuated by the demise of Glass-Steagall. True, it was repealed under Clinton, but let's not pretend the three guys whose names are on the bill were not Republicans! Just who was supposed to be the targeted audience of dipshit Keiser's tired old line that the Republicans are the adults who understand money and the Democrats don't? This is really offensive, and I'm calling this asshole out, right here. Gramm (R-Texas). Leach (R-Iowa). Bliley (R-Virginia). Then the Hillbilly With a Perpetual Hard-on (D-Arkansas) signed it into law. There's plenty of bought-off blame to go around. We want to fix the problems, alleviate the sufferings and injustices and level the playing fields.

Oh yea: Check out North Dakota Democrat Byron "The Seer" Dorgan (3 mins):

Sidebar Here: What is it about North Dakota and their stark, staring SANE banking practices? HERE's a 2009 article from Mother Jones that lends some decent insight.

Dorgan (U.S. Senate, 1992-2011) deserves more credit for his fiscal responsibility.
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On the other hand, the "Gramm" in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that got rid of Glass-Steagall? That's one Phil Gramm, a U.S. Senator from Texas from 1985-2002. A Texas Republican "economist" who became a politician. Hey, what could go wrong there?

He made Time mag's "25 People To Blame For The Financial Crisis." Another, more nuanced analysis of Gramm's yeoman work for the 1% is HERE.

Righteously rubbing yet more salt into Gramm's deservedly tarnished cred, see #4 on THIS LIST of the 10 worst capitalists who helped bring on the economic collapse of 2008.
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During the S&L debacle of the late 1980s, early 1990s, possibly the one thing that kept that mess from being far worse was the Glass-Steagall laws, which were still in place. The idea that, less than ten years later no lessons were learned and the law was gutted, should be something culturally memorable, aye?
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This idea - gaining a lot of traction in Occupy encampments - of repealing Gramm-Leach-Bliley and reinstating Glass-Steagall is something more tangible (than "Make The Banksters Pay!") that can be done. It's possible, ladies and germs!

Sorry to point out that the corporate media haven't seemed to want to touch this (do you still wonder why?), but let's make the Missing Public Discussion about H.R.1489, The Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011, sponsored by Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), a tad less Missing. You can follow the progress of the bill HERE. As you follow along, note what I predict will be the Usual Suspects fighting tooth and nail so that the bill dies, or becomes inert, de-fanged. This too, should be no surprise. But if we pressure our Congressentities enough and talk about the bill enough, maybe, just maybe we can get this bit of elephant out of the room, leave us a bit more breathing space. It's a long road to hoe, and we know it. But we gotta, right?

Two Occupy manifestoes of clamor for reinstating Glass-Steagall provisions (proto-pro H.R. 1489 statements?) are HERE and HERE.

Has deregulation ever been a good idea? I'm willing to listen to arguments for deregulations in the comments section, but by and large I agree with Double Dip Politics.

YES on H.R. 1489, the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011!
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Here's yet another dirty, stoned hippie from Occupy Wall Street, patiently explaining to the cops what the repeal of Glass-Steagall wrought:

#Occupy Everywhere as of the Morning of October 27th: The Banker Question

With the police actions of the last 48 hours, I fear the movement has already reached a tipping point. Has the worm turned? Are we heading towards mass violence? Who among us actually believes that what happened - as seems to still be ongoing as I write this - in Oakland will make things better? We seem to be very very sophisticated but poorly wired robots who learn nothing from history, much less how to fix our own wiring (which I actually think we are capable of doing, at least theoretically).
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What's going unsaid?

What is the function of a banker, really? Why are they allowed to function as more than a civil servant? Someone please answer that question for me.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for my "money" (ha!) one of the most interesting philosophers alive, on October 18, was on Bloomberg TV, afraid that it's "too late," that violent class warfare will now open like a running sore (my words, not Nassim's), that banks really should be more like public utilities, and that the gross bonuses and salaries bankers are paid is absurd, and that this needs to be fixed ASAP. It gets wildly interesting - for me - when Nassim starts explaining a part of Hammurabi's Code and how we ought to model banker's behavior. You need to devote about 14 minutes of your time here, but you might find it worthwhile; I know I did. Here it is:

Some of the take-away points regarding bankers:

BANK BONUSES
• "They caused the crisis, we know that. Last year, they had a record bonus. This is not something that is rational."
• "They are hijacking the American economy then saying that you need to pay us bonuses'."
• "The core of this situation is a problem concerning bank compensation."
• "The only information you get from bank earnings is the compensation. Only valuable information you can get from [bank earnings] is how much they pay themselves."
• "Anything above zero is too much money....if we bail you out, you should not be paid a bonus."
• "If you are a banker, and we will bail you someday, then you cannot earn more than a civil servant of a corresponding rank."

Occupy Ideas From a Dead Kennedy, OR: WWJD?

Jello Biafra is as fiery as ever, and I give this idea-loaded rant-spiel a 10, even though I can't dance to it, on account of a strained achilles and subsequent stoned, just like inability right now, man situation. The stamina alone is impressive. Jello, to whatever degree you appreciate his ideas, seems to me a classic talker. It's not just me: he's been included on all sorts of collections of "counterculture" speaker-artists (The most spellbinding one I've ever heard was/is Terence McKenna, on multiple occasions; the trippiest - to me - was/is Buckminster Fuller. My favorite all-around talker is/was Robert Anton Wilson. Not that you'd asked.) and poets and just all-around interesting people to listen to who are not in the corporate media mainstream. Jello's barbed sneers, snotty-attitude punk intellectual stance, and a lurking lunacy amid the solid-Left political ideas make him not only an influential non-Marxist left thinker, but a captivating "What is this Fearless One going to say next?" guerrilla-artist-performer. His overall rhetorical profile fascinates me.

Just another articulate punk. Enjoy, even though the "free trade" agreements Jello's railing against have basically been "rammed through" already. (Oh yea: And you must think about whether you want to say "Barackstar" now instead of "Obama."):

One of the most articulate people I've talked to at Occupy Berkeley is a guy named Lars, who has to return to Afghanistan in two weeks. He's really thoughtful and extremely well-read. I asked him, "How did you get caught up in the military?" He said he was like most poor American kids: no hope, a 1.74 GPA in high school. He later read very many books on his own. He taught himself how to learn, how to think, how to question his own assumptions.

He's been a cop too. I mentioned the cognitive dissonance most cops must feel when they're assigned to police protesters in the streets, like Occupy. Lars: "Most cops are not critical thinkers." But he concurred that there is some notable dissonance.

Aside from the wildly disparate issues we encounter at an Occupy meeting or rally (abolish the Fed, end the War on Some People Who Use Certain Drugs, make the bankers "pay," Medicare for all, slash the war budget, end oil subsidies, massively re-regulate the banks, Monsanto is Sheer Evil, end the Tar Sands pipeline deal, forgive the $1 trillion in student loans, Unistat out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and everywhere else, etc, etc, etc. Today I saw a hand-made placard that read I'll Believe a Corporation is a Person When Texas Executes One), Lars and I think the primary problem is to get money out of politics as much as possible, and we are totally stunned that billionaires have been allowed to buy Congress and the Presidency. (And just about everything else.) This is so out in the open as to almost be invisible to some people.

We allowed this to happen. I think we first have to own that we allowed our system to be bought. When you look at it, it's true and at the same time completely insane. Or to me it is...

Anway, I like Lars. He's a great guy, and I hope he gets out of this next 10 month tour safe and sane.

But getting back to the mentality of sombunall police-critters: some of us will likely have a run-in with a few over the next few months, and let's hope they aren't the most virulent types, like Jello sings about in this golden oldie.

And now, on to some roots rock:

Occupy Wall Street: I Am Not Moving (A Short Film)

7 minutes, 12 seconds. A minor masterpiece of in-your-face immanent critique, expiration date as of yet unknown.

The quote after Hillary Clinton, "Hypocrisy has its own elegant symmetry," was from Julie Metz's Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, which the OG has not read.

But he appreciates the line.

Not sure how applicable this warhorse is, but I'll trot it out nonetheless: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately." - Ben Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence

I'd Rather Not Write About the Federal Reserve (three more vids - two [?] from Occupy - early October, 2011)

I have my reasons. One reason: I went through a period of reading about the Fed's history, the conspiracy theories about it, what some ballsy economists have said about it, etc. I find very many educated people I talk to know little or nothing about it. (Part of our paideuma?)

I'd say Google "Federal Reserve history" and "Federal Reserve conspiracy theories" and just read and read and watch vids. Then Wiki it and note the books on it, maybe read one or three over the next few months...if that's your thing. The best book I've read on the subject, so far, is William Greider's Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. HERE's an article by Greider from 2009 on the topic.

I have other reasons for not writing about the Fed, and they're related to writing about Ezra Pound on banking: it's an oddly dicey thing, requiring too many caveats; there's too much baggage, and you're climbing onto a vehicle with a ton of unsavory characters, most of them who still seem to have a point, but...Oh anyway. If you want to weigh in on the Fed, go ahead. In the comments section. Set me straight!
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Speaking of the Fed, the closest thing to a Mario Savio for the Occupy Wall Street movement - that I've seen - is this young guy (first video, below), a Ron Paul supporter. I think Ron Paul's particular ideas of laissez faire are probably wrong, or I simply find too many faults with them, given my non-privileged vantage point and current understanding about how people "really" act. I do think Ron Paul has the sanest foreign policy ideas of any of the candidates running, including Obama.

This fiery young guy I find gripping, and you're not going to see this on corporate TV. (The person who titled it chose to put Beck and Rush in the title, but they are not mentioned by the young firebrand):

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Compare this to the tenor or Mario Savio's now 47 year-old "machine speech," from the Berkeley FSM:

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This third video I found fittingly October-Halloweenish creeeeepy. The production values seem oddly high. It's Free Speech in my book, and enthralling. It's purportedly from "Anonymous," and the text fascinates me. I'm captivated by the history of extreme speech, and avidly collect books filled with what almost all citizens would find "outrageous" speech/texts/ideas. Those who've studied the antisemitic and notorious hoax  The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion will recognize some tropes here. I see up-to-date left-wing anarchist tropes here, too. I see some riffs that remind me of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.  I'd guess the writer(s) of this text were influenced by Georges Sorel, although that's a preliminary guess. According to the Wiki link I gave for Mario Savio, above, Anonymous has sampled from Savio, too. (It all comes full circle!)

I daresay I agree with the general thrust of the message; there are many who will want to shy away from some of the more inflammatory rhetoric, delivered in a diabolically "cool" style, almost cartoonishly suave, with hip middle-eastern quasi-qawwali music swirling around in the background. Rather than an impassioned speech like the one from the young New Yorker above, who is thoroughly steeped in 20th century populist rhetoric about monetary reform and the 2008 bank bailouts, this one seems more aptly placed as conspiracy rhetoric. One group alone is the problem...They cause Everything Bad...

I confess a marked squeamishness about the violent undertones, which at times percolate to the surface of the text. Especially "frontier justice." That's what interests me most about this video, uploaded to YT the first week of October, 2011: the sorts of rhetorical flourishes used. This one has some doozies. And I don't understand it: did they get a trained actor to deliver the text? It's a marvelously well-chosen speaking voice for this sort of rhetoric, and there's the now-familiar Anonymous V For Vendetta mask...

Which brings up another point: Anonymous seems to me to leave themselves open to a particular sort of Agent Provocateur: what's to stop the Far Right from adopting the same masks and calling themselves Anonymous? How would the original "Anonymous" group defend themselves?

Another thing we will not see on TV, to say the least!:

Does anyone think I've been irresponsible for including this on my blog? Speak now, free-speechers!

A Few Occupy Wall Street-Related Vids

Keith Olbermann reads what seems to be the first official statement from Occupy Wall Street, HERE.


Not exactly a bunch of hippies, or doctrinaire SDS types (although I bet there's a handful there). Here's a fairly "lamestream media" insider - who's on Fox sometimes! - who talks about her personal revelations about Occupy Wall Street. Not even a Weather Underground person in sight. (Yet? I hope not. I hope it doesn't get to that point, but who among us thinks it almost inevitable? Aye...That's a Q that deserves some pondering.) This viddy is just over 6 minutes:

This one's 1:28secs. Make sure you wait till around 1:00, for what I will caption, "If they have no bread, let them eat cake!"

Actor Mark Ruffalo, from Olbermann's show on Oct 5th. He's not the most articulate actor-activist, but he's emotionally engage here. 7 mins:

Finally, what would the OG be without Noam weighing in? From two days ago, 5 mins:

Occupy Wall Street/the 99%ers/ Missing Public Discussions/A Broad 10-Point Plan!

Buncha hippies? NOT! Check out this.

So far, the mainstream corporate media doesn't seem to know how to spin this story. They tried the They're a Bunch of Hippies thing. They tried Some of Them Have Legit Gripes, But Others Seem to Have Been Misinformed Radiohead Was Going to Appear. Oh, there have been a few other spins. If you're a talking head at CNN or ABC News, someone who flunked out of acting school and are reading what's on the teleprompter, what would you say?

You wouldn't be reading this blog, that's for sure.

The "gotcha" criticism seems to be that there's no coherent reason behind the massively growing protest. Which is bullshit. There are more and more coherent manifestoes flowing out of the movement. The two major themes are: hopelessness and rampant corporate unaccountability. And a third: everyone wants hopelessness to stop and they want banks and corporations to answer for what they've done.

True, many of the protesters have specific issues and grievances for which they seek redress. The truth is: things are so fucked up in the world's richest country that a lot of us have wondered most about not why the massive protests, but why did it take so long to get going?

And I'm with them. The 99ers, that is.

Here are a few items which I consider No-Brainers which should be done Yesterday, or Decades Ago, if not Tomorrow or Next Tuesday After Lunch or ASAP:

1.) Get rid of the Bush Tax Cuts. Are you fucking KIDDING ME? The economy is getting worse and worse, every REAL economic look shows that if you get rid of the Bush cuts and make the rich pay what they did under neo-liberal Bill Clinton - about a 4-6% "raise" in rate - then you start to heal, albeit slowly. But the Republicans, who never met a billionaire they didn't love and want to go to the barricades for (figuratively speaking) can't even do that. No: they think the Poor should pay more! And Obama has been relatively invertebrate on this, considering the stakes, the justice in the situation...And it's NOT a "raise" of taxes on the rich, either! The NeoCons said cutting taxes on the wealthy would create jobs. It didn't. It never has. It never will. It's exactly what Dumya's  daddy (AKA Bush 41) called Reagan's idea for cutting taxes on the rich: "voodoo economics." That's the only thing a guy named Bush ever said that made sense to me. When you hear a talking head say that making the rich pay more taxes will "hurt the economy," it has about the same philosophical status now as the question from the medieval period: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? In other words: it's like Church dogma. To put it plainly, it's unadulterated bullshit.

On second thought, the Angel question seems far more interesting. The tax cuts for the rich is just stale, dead, moronic. It's for morons. The only rich people who create jobs are that tiny minority who gamble and fund start-ups. Read more HERE.

Letting corporations pay next to nothing (after taking advantage of loopholes) was a very popular idea in Europe between 1922 and 1945, which is a polite way of saying it's a fascist idea.

2.) Cut war spending in half. At least! Unistat has let the "Military Industrial Complex" that Eisenhower warned us about get completely out of control. We spend as much if not more on war than all other countries of the world COMBINED. And there is a company in almost every single congressional district, and many have guaranteed cost-overrun contracts, and political sway in their district. No politician, Democrat or Republican, wants to be on the local branch of the Pentagon-tentacle's bad side. We must let these technicians keep their jobs, but there must be far less spending on junk and weaponry and killingry and illth, and more on wealth: better materials, more efficient energy systems, better mass transit systems, smarter ways to ephemeralize (i.e, doing more with less) the use of natural resources, especially in our cities. Use the massive cuts to fund rebuilding of the infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals).

The Pentagon system and its massive waste was mostly a way to subsidize high-tech industry; this was always very inefficient. (How did Japan recover after 1945, and by 1965 become a serious competitor? They gave massive amounts to the corporations/zaibatsu to make things humans actually wanted to buy. They didn't first scare their citizenry that a Russian bear was gonna get 'em and stare at them long enough until they turned into horrendous zombie commies, and then went on to build weapons for megadeath/trash in an effort to keep the economy afloat!) And we're seeing the results of that, now. No intercontinental ballistic missile is going to save us from some dedicated nutjobs with a dirty bomb that works in downtown NYC, Chicago, LA. We need to be smarter.

This one's going to be difficult, because it's an elephant in the room problem.

3.) This goes along with number two above: government, in conjunction with universities, our allies in other countries, private industry, and those former defense contractors need to wage a Manhattan Project for renewable energy. I have too much to say on this, so will save it for a future post, but let this suffice.

4.) Publicly financed elections. If you get enough signatures to qualify, you're on the ballot and will receive equal time on TV and radio as all the other candidates. Also: every candidate gets to appear in the debates. We want to hear as many ideas as possible, even if they're "crazy" ideas. The airwaves are owned by We, the People. Not corporations. Basically, we must get money out of politics as much as possible. The rich will always be there, trying for special favors, buying their way in. We can lessen this greatly.

4a.) It may need a Constitutional amendment, but we must get rid of corporate personhood.

5.) Fer crissakes and in the name of anything and everything that one would consider "holy": End the War on Certain People Who Use Certain Drugs. It's a waste in every sense.

6.) Medicare For All. I've read many studies that indicate we will pay less per person and have healthcare at least as good as those who are insured now have it. But it will be for everyone, and it's in line with what we say we hold as a value.

7.) Big bankers go to jail. You want me to name names, and why they should be behind bars? There are a few guys who really ought not be too big to fail.

8.) The NeoCons who lied their way into a $3 trillion war in Iraq, and tortured, etc: need to be tried for Crimes Against Humanity. None of these people are too big to jail. Or let's see them have their day in court.

9.) Expose the Bush-Cheney Halliburton/Blackwater/gargantuanly bloated Dept.of Homeland Security and their privateering offshoots. Those should be government jobs, held by Americans, beholden to the American people. "Of" and "by" the people, remember? You don't take my taxes, give it to private corporations, and have them spy on me in the name of "national security." And there are so many of these little spy agencies now that none of them know what the others are doing. That's fucking sick and wrong in so many ways...Read William Arkin and  Dana Priest on this.

10.) We need to start a long, serious discussion about the future and jobs. Collectively, we have developed a world in which drudgery in work has increasingly been eliminated by cybernetic automation. There will be no jobs, even for healthy, young, very-well-educated people. Are jobs a way of life? Or is "life" about something other than working a job, any job? We need to talk about Negative Income Taxes, Guaranteed Annual Wages, Government-Subsidized Low-Wage Jobs, Universal Basic Incomes, etc.

Okay, there's a Magical, Mythical Ten. One for each finger. If you don't like me for bringing up one of these ideas - or all of them - I have a special finger, just for you.

And oh yea: I've been a low or no-paid intellectual drone for a long time, but I do read in an exceedingly high number of corners of social "reality." With the 99%ers on the streets and growing, I think I know enough of that part of the corporate American Mind that is fascist to predict that we will in time find out there are/were at least one group who sought to round up every one of the Bad People who protest, because they are "leeches" or "un-American," this last epithet being one of the most ironic terms I see widely used. In fact, I'm not waiting so much to see who it was that wanted these people/me and my wider circle of friends eliminated; I want to see how much money and traction they had. And who was bankrolling 'em...Let us now reflect on Joe Hill, not mourning, but organizing.

Who knows? Maybe the fascists will succeed. If so, I hope you've enjoyed the OG, and I'll see you in the camps!

Have a pleasant day.