When Waking Is Bad Poetry (A Blog Can Be Too,...)

I'm having a hard time blogging this morning, which is really unlike me. I mean, Pastor Rick Warren's son killed himself "after an evening spent with his parents". 

The jokes write themselves. 

And yet, instead, I'm still feeling all unsettled and angst-y. 

I'm writing a post to try and shake it off.

I'm really getting into this music producer named King Britt after listening to his album Adventures In Lo-Fi. He's got a good ear, and then there's this:

"Inspired loosely by John Sayles 'Brother From Another Planet', Adventures in Lo-Fi asks its listeners to look around their immediate community critically and to do the same musically."

A guy could risk being labeled "no fun" for that shit. 

From what I've seen, especially when it concerns women, "critically" is practically a fighting word. 

My impression is few ever look at anything "critically," and I suspect it's because the cultists have convinced them "critically" is a bad word. The late Pasha P183 didn't think so, though:

"Put simply, I want to teach people in this country to tell lies from the truth and to tell bad from good. This is what our people still cannot do."

 Pretty fucking simple, that one. Too bad he's dead.

Unbeknownst to me, we had a little seeing-eye-to-eye action going there.

He was talking about Russians, not Americans, but now it's the human condition, I guess. People getting pushed around so much (the bullies call it "nudging") they barely know what to think about anything:

Last summer, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration instituted a new set of guidelines for city hospitals, which were aimed at encouraging women to breastfeed.   

If Bloomberg’s policy wonks expected warm, fuzzy accolades for their efforts, they were wrong. What they got was white-hot rage from women fed up with hearing that their decision to feed their babies with infant formula was ‘second best’. 

The interesting point here is not the relentless obnoxiousness of the Bloomberg administration in its quest to transform New Yorkers from their sassy food-loving selves into svelte, cycling locavores. No, it’s the reaction to a policy intended to promote breastfeeding,… 

It,...created a great deal of righteous indignation among women, both because they had been treated like failures by healthcare workers, other mothers and even nosey strangers simply because they decided to formula feed, and because - this is where the rage became visceral – most had bought into it themselves. They had blamed themselves and felt frightened for their children and often gone through a sort of living hell, for essentially no real reason at all.

"Gone through," yes, but also creating a living hell - for everybody else. 

"For essentially no real reason at all." 

That's what our society's partially based on now - massive misinformation and the unseen tragedies that result from it. It's pretty hard for me to see much else. 

I know too much now.

Part of that is knowing life never really had to be this way - but it was - and it shows.

I'm comforted only because it's horrors unfold in waves,...

 

Here Comes The Cultism!!!! (Part I)

"Obama's nearly trillion-dollar plan will not merely repair bridges, fill potholes and fix up schools; it will also impose a utopian vision based on the belief that an economy is a thing to be planned from above. But this is an arrogant conceit. No one can possibly know enough to redesign something as complex as 'an economy,' which really is people engaging in exchanges to achieve their goals. Planning it means planning them."

-- John Stossel, who obviously hasn't read TMR's post on Obama's love for cultish "nudging," at ABC News.

Cruel To Be Kind (You Know You Want It, Baby!)

"...Left to our own devices, we tend to make bad, uninformed choices,...authors, Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein — experts in what is known as ‘behavioural economics’ — suggest the solution lies in establishing a ‘default option’: presumed consent.

...All of this is pure misanthropy. Thaler and Sunstein generously concede that ‘humans are not exactly lemmings’, but add that we are ‘easily influenced by the statements and deeds of others’. In this Frankenstein-like process, they argue, we normally act due to our ‘automative response’ to many situations in an unconscious manner, before we apparently realise we’re doing it. So the ‘trick’ is to recognise how people are able unconsciously to recognise and respond to the many hidden clues, stimuli and social norms present in the world around us, and ultimately can have a positive effect on our behaviour. The clue for any government, or anyone else wishing to influence human behaviour, is therefore is to create the necessary conditions so as to ‘nudge’ us in the right direction in the choices we make."

-- Martyn Perks, reviewing what sounds like the ultimate cult how-to manual, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" (which "has many fans across the political spectrum, including the US president-elect, Barack Obama") on Sp!ked.