joel/is/blogging/now

Tonight I went with a friend to see the new Oliver Stone film, W.

I give Oliver Stone a lot of credit for JFK. That film was creepily compelling, and I thought it was cinematically good. It made me curious, and it got me thinking, reading, and expanding my understanding of American political history and reality. JFK was well-researched, and (at least for a Hollywood movie) somewhat radical in its perspective.

W would've been kinda funny as a 2-minute Saturday Night Live skit. At 2+ hours, though, it was a real chore to watch. Cheezy caricature is not sufficient to carry a feature film that runs more than 2 hours.

I wanted to like this film. I wanted to find it compelling and/or at least funny. It just wasn't.

I also think the film was off the mark in its interpretation of recent history and the characters in the Bush administration. It made them look stupider than I think they actually are. Many people see Bush as stupid and/or incompetent. But I believe he has been remarkably effective in executing his agenda, which was primarily about looting the country and undermining the constitution. All the talk about liberty, democracy and patriotism is just a smokescreen.

The Bush portrayed in W is an insecure, redneck buffoon. My understanding of him is darker.

Politix


For months, I've been saying that I can predict with approximately 100% accuracy who will win the next US presidential election. It's less impressive to offer any predictions this close to the scheduled election, assuming it actually happens, but I will nevertheless offer a prediction now.

But first, just to make the point, I am going to predict who will win the next Super Bowl, also with something approaching 100% accuracy.

Are you ready?

Are you sure? I don't want to ruin the drama for anyone.

OK, here goes.

The next Super Bowl will be won by...

A football team.

In greater detail, that means a squadron of steroid-amped, well-paid professional athletes wearing plastic helmets, spiked shoes, bulky body armor, and gaily-colored tights, working for corporate owners who profit from the curious mental association made by many thousands of fans and a team which they somehow imagine to be "theirs," even though they don't own it, don't profit from it, and are not involved in its training or management. (Moreover, in most cases they don't know and are not known by any of the players, who are recruited from far-flung regions of the world based to their technical skills, to train and play mostly in similarly far-flung cities.)

That's who will win. Of course I know I'm disappointing many readers with this prediction. I realize that most people who take an interest in Super Bowl predictions also concern themselves with which symbols the particular squadron will be wearing on their helmets and jerseys. I'm sorry to say have no idea at all about that. It's not something I pay attention to at all. I can't see why I should.

But I am virtually certain that the winners will not be a soccer team, a baseball team, a military unit, or a junior high school choir. They don't let those groups play in the Super Bowl. Only football teams.

Moving on to American politics, I have also known since February or March who would win the next presidential election, assuming there is one.

Are you ready?

Are you sure? I don't want to ruin the drama for anyone.

OK, here goes.

The next US presidential election will be won by:

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations who

- supports the strengthening of the American military empire (which already spends more money on its military than all other nations combined),
- says the USA needs more and "Homeland Security" to protect itself from terrorist attack,
- subscribes to the official stories on 9/11, the threat of al Quaida and the Osama bin Laden bogeyman,
- has not one word of criticism or question on the US Government's unconstitutional delegation of its authority over the coining of US currency to a private banking cartel, or on that cartel's similarly unconstitutional issuance of fiat money without any backing by any reserve (on which it charges interest and turns a profit), or for the domination of the industrialized world by the network of interlinked central banks in general via the various fiat currencies which they control,
- says nothing about repealing the so-called Patriot Act,
- does not favor immediate withdrawal from Iraq,
- does not question the need for any of the vast and incredibly expensive ring of US military bases around the world,
- is not talking about criminal charges or reparations for the orgy of astronomical frauds perpetrated against the American taxpayer by contractors in Iraq, or in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, etc.,
- does not question the United States' fervent political, military, and economic support for Israel in any way,
- does not criticize the erosion of the US "checks-and-balances" constitutional system by an ever-more-powerful and tyrannical executive branch,
- is completely silent on the logistical chokehold which the two-party system has achieved over the American government and political reality, and how that system subverts democracy,
- says nothing about the possibility of abolishing the income tax (or its collection agency, the IRS), even though the United States somehow got through its first 135 years with little or no income taxes,
- does not talk about any let-up in the crippling abuses of the "drug war," much less any end to the drug war itself, or the de-criminalization of drug use, or any of the other so-called victimless crimes,
- promises "change" and "reform,"
- says the United States needs to be more energy independent,
- says that education, ethics, sound fiscal policy, climate change, family, faith, bipartisan "reaching across the aisle," improved healthcare, immigration reform, stablizing Social Security, tax reform, and better veterans' benefits will all be top priorities for their administration (but don't be holding your breath).

In more recent weeks, we can also add that it will be someone who supported the official fiction of the Paulson bailout bill, the monumental, fraudulent money-and-power grab that was recently rammed through the now hapless and impotent Congress, using tactics similar to those used to secure the so-called Patriot Act and the Iraq War resolution, and giving a whole new raft of unchecked regulatory powers to the executive branch and the Federal Reserve.

So that's what you're going to get, and this has been known for a long time. As for name, color, hairstyle, or gender, that has been a more open question this year than ever before. But who gives a %&$#* what the wrappers look like, when the candy bars that are supposed to be on the inside turn out to be nearly identical dog turds?

Earlier in the curent presidential campaign process, there were some notable candidates who differed from some of the above criteria, people like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, or even Mike Huckabee. These candidates can be generally referred to as "fringe weirdos," because that's what the corporate-controlled media makes them into for deviating from the very narrow set of specifications outlined above. But in my opinion, these guys may owe their lives to their weirdness. If any of them had JFK charisma, they'd be much more of a threat to the powers that be, and then they might need to be assassinated, rather than simply being politically marginalized.

Yes, there are differences between Obama, McCain, and Hillary Clinton that can appear to be significant when we focus in on them with a microscope and magnify them 5000 times their actual size... just as it seems significant to football fans, under all those lights and with all those TV cameras and spectators focusing on the action, when the ball moves 20 yards in one direction or the other... but nobody stops to question the rules of the game itself, or the purpose or the point, or who benefits and who suffers, or why the fans focus their attention there instead of on the guys with their hands in our pockets and the gun at our backs.

Oh but ain't that America, for you and me
Ain't that America, someting to see baby
Ain't that America, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

-John Mellencamp

Economix

Meanwhile, the world economic system is in turmoil, and the stock markets have gone straight to hell. The Dow Jones Industrial average had its worst week ever in terms of both points and percentages, bringing it to a fearsome 40% decline from its peak just one year ago.

Here's a more meaningful and less rhetorical prediction: I think the global panic mostly peaked today, and things won't go down much further from here. We are at or near the bottom of the current toxic shock. The panicked selloff continued today, but I actually started buying stock. I didn't have much cash left in my stock account to work with, but I spent it. If my predictions come true, at least I'll able to say I picked up some stock on the ground floor. If not... well, I'm sure it will recover by 2020. (-:

DON'T PANIC!

Well, they passed the bill.

Complete swindle, total theft. A major, shock-and-awe power & money grab.

The Congress was told this was a sudden emergency, and something had to be done immediately. But this was a manufactured and orchestrated "crisis" that was months and years in the planning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOlYa0G0erg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc

America will never learn. In fact, this may have actually been America's last chance to notice the lessons of its past. To quote Martin Luther King, "I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop." From the mountaintop, I see an overclass, addicted to money and power, bent on totalitarian control. I'm not exaggerating, or kidding. To the average American, this sounds like crazy, paranoid, fringe thinking. It is fringe, and it is a little paranoid, but it's not crazy.

The US Constitution has been under a long, relentless siege almost since the day it was signed, and it has gradually been subverted more and more as the decades have gone by. It was mostly already done by the time George W Bush took office, but the dismantling of the constitutional republic accelerated markedly under the current administration, and I think sometime in the last 8 years, the nation crossed an invisible line, and may have reached a point of no return.

The tidal wave is coming. I see the shape of it. The ingredients: Subversion of the constitution and of the ostensible industrialized democracies of the world in general, largely through the mechanisms of the central banks which control almost all global currencies. Empire. Totalitarian capitalism. Training the masses to embrace hypocrisy as functional truth, along the lines of what George Orwell called "doublethink." The so-called Climate change. Population explosion. Environmental strain trending inexorably toward collapse. Global political crisis. But the overclass, evil as they seem to be, are not stupid. They see this crisis coming, better than most of you do. They are preparing for it. They have a highly-developed strategy, one which has been unfolding according to plan for many years. I think they may very well succeed in saving the planet for humanity, or rather a fraction thereof. They are the shepherds. You are the sheep. They own you, or they think that they do. They are shearing you now. They will slaughter you later. If this all sounds like crackpot paranoia to you, I'll wager it's only because you have been following your natural predisposition to focus in on the close-at-hand concerns of your one tiny little life, and you have not spent so much time in sober contemplation of the global trends. Good luck with that.