Hunter S. Thompson

"It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die... all we know for sure is that Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix--a clean well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except for the ones who know in their hearts what is missing...And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con Dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get..."

Thompson, Hunter S. Author's Note. Generation of Swine,Gonzo Papers
Volume 2, Tales of Shame and Degredation in the '80's.
By Thompson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 11. Print.

Tightening the Screws on us

Here's a bonus post of some rants I've come up with through the years.

Lie #1: We must globalize or get left behind. Eventually, globalization will be complete and we will have the benefit of lower priced goods etc. Any arguments to this concept (and the offshoring of jobs) and we will label you as a dirty protectionist. You are interfering with the free market, and basically socialist.

Truth: We have surrendered our quality of life - that was earned on the backs of hardworking American labor and the service men and women since the birth of the nation. We have simply handed our quality of life over to other countries, to allow them to industrialize and gain rates of consumption which have already been shown to be unsustainable globally. (Think about the price of oil lately).

If the government wanted to globalize and take away all of our jobs, I say fine. Jobs suck anyway. Take a page from Kyosaki and turn us all into business owners. Charge a tariff for all the goods and services that are no longer produced here, and then send every United States citizen a monthly check. No this would not be entitlement, buddy. This would be smart business, earned income. Let someone else do all the dirty manufacturing, I'll sit around and write my blog all day and go cash the check that I earned by moving the production to a place where the unit labor costs are dirt cheap.

Lie #2: Technology will lead to massive productivity gains. The future is limitless. Every man, woman, and child, will eventually have so much free time on their hands that this may well cause its own crisis - therefore we must be prepared to create recreation plans for this coming wave of ennui.

Truth: Like regular productivity, gains from which are supposed to allow business to increase wages without causing inflation, productivity gains from technology have been skimmed like fat off the surface of a crock pot. The American worker sees no significant wage gain - definitely not enough to keep their hard-earned pennies in the bank or in their wallet from shrinking in purchasing power due to inflation of the money supply by the US Treasury.

If anything, this globalization and increase in technology has actually made our lives far less worth living. We are forced to buy ever cheaper (and more dangerous) products, and household goods from third world countries. Look at the country of origin on the next "USA" t-shirt you buy. Mine was made in El Salvador. The toothpaste will kill you, if the tomatoes and the jalapenos don't do the trick first.

Electronics are made on assembly lines, and it is pretty well known that a good portion of them will be lemons - that is - will be defective shortly after you bring them home. Most of the products we buy are significantly lower quality than they used to be when they were made in the USA and providing jobs to Americans. This is yet another way that we are screwed by inflation (as if this transfer tax had not taken enough of a bite out of our savings and earnings).

And to really smear our faces in our own...the US government has the gaul to use our tax dollars to bail out the banks and finance industry, who they were supposed to be overseeing, after they did absolutely nothing to stop the gigantic real estate bubble now busted, which is ruining the lives of countless people. Goldman Sachs runs this country. Paulson just got permission to basically use a blank check to bailout Fannie and Freddie, even to buy their common stock. Then they decide to start enforcing laws against naked short selling on certain financial companies.

*I wish the government would compensate me for my stock losses in the Tech bust.
*I wish the government would step in when a stock I own was going down the tubes.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, if this isn't protectionism, then I guess I don't know what the hell is. Haven' t had much of a chance to look into this new housing relief bill, but the concept that was floated around before of trying to make the lenders refinance underwater mortgages would invalidate contract law and be very bad for business.

But, I guess it doesn't matter. There will be plenty of jobs for us and our children serving coffee to our land barons in the future.

Spread too thin


In the time we live in we are pulled in many different directions. The technology that was supposed to make our lives simpler, and better has instead betrayed us. We find ourselves slaves to cell phones, computers, television, i-pods and all manner of time wasting devices. Yet we still have less vacation time than any other industrialized nation.

(Not to mention the fact that as this technology becomes cheaper and cheaper as newer and newer devices and technology come out, it provides a perfect disguise for the transfer tax, the robbing and fleecing of savers, [especially including the ever dependable backbone of the country, the middle class] better known as Inflation. This is the money illusion hard at work, although this is a topic for another blog. The bottom line is that inflation benefits borrowers and penalizes lenders. It hurts savers and encourages taking on debt.)

I find that our Being is likewise over-extended, pulled in too many different directions. Our sense of presence has evaporated until being becomes nothing but a vapor, a gas. There are too many things placing a claim on our existence, which is virtually a Heideggerian definition of what Stress is. (A much superior definition of stress, overcoming all of the inherent absurdity, juggling, and inconsistency of the cartesian subject-objects, and hence modern medical and psychological views of stress)

Is there a way to cause this evaporating, ever expanding, center of ourselves to condense? Or must we always live in the manic, ever-expanding-without-limit razor's edge of the universe? Hurtling at light speed towards the nothing, or as someone may call it, Running to Stand Still.

It seems to me that the best moments in life occur not while we sprint ahead in a manic fog of confusion, chasing some illusion of progress (which may or may not be tied to a now defunct idea of the American Dream), but in those rare, quiet moments when we can afford to offer ourselves to others in a meaningful exchange, take the time to actively listen, to cultivate & grow as persons.