Supercenter Nation

Another New Leaky Wiki Article:

US to Launch Bankers into Outer Space

Don’t miss the last part, a break down of how the tax burden shifts to people who actually work for a living, instead of leveraging their careers to exploit capital gains tax rates.

Recently posted at the Leaky Wiki:

Tennessee Legislature Ratifies Controversial New Chemistry Curriculum

When pseudo-journalists like Michelle Malkin and Ann-she-who-shall-not-be-named jump on the controversy bandwagon, I tend to think it’s simply for the sake of selling books to people who harbor deep hatred in their hearts. And right now we are seeing a veritable dog piling of conservatives on the shocker-du-jour, Sandra Fluke. But it’s not always simply to shock and appall.

I recently had a revelation. When you take the time to torture you mind with the logic that stems from attacking a non-political citizen speaking on behalf of every women’s rights everywhere, you discover that many conservatives simply cannot see past Sandra Fluke acting entirely on behalf of herself. Take Megyn Kelly, the Queen Bitch* of Fox News, who explained how she never had anyone pay for her contraceptive, so why should Sandra Fluke get a free handout? After all, she’s a wealthy pre-law student, right? More telling is  the insipid, despicable Gary McCoy justifying the above “comic”:

“here we had a 30 year old woman’s rights advocate, who will make on average $160,000/year after graduation, stating that she had to spend $3,000 over the last two years on birth control, when a trip to her local Planned Parenthood would keep her supplied for free. Or for a few bucks more a day, any local drug store would meet her needs. And on top of it, she thinks that a Jesuit university, which she enrolled in knowing full well that their private insurance doesn’t pay for contraceptives, as it goes against their religious morals, should abandon their beliefs just so she can advance the Obama health care plan, for which she also advocates.”

Notice how the idea that she is testifying before congress on behalf of OTHER women is completely lost on this moron. Nope, she’s asking for something for her! Gasp! And she wants YOU to pay for it with your tax dollars! That’s not fair, now is it? Indeed, when the Senate voted on March 1st to forgive employers for having to pay for any healthcare that they could take moral objection to, 100% of Republicans voted in favor. $100K liver transplant to save your life? Well, let’s take a look at if you’ve consumed any alcohol on that liver, shall we? Heck, you don’t even have to take moral exception to alcohol, perhaps you had premarital sex on that liver. My point is, of course this law would be exploited to save on paying out on health insurance. Fortunately, it was defeated in what should is the single most embarrassing Republican proposal of the last 20 years. Couching this argument in this notion that government is “forcing” its agenda on religious groups is just as absurd as stating an employer should be exempt from having their delivery drivers obey seat belt laws on moral grounds (maybe they think Jesus will come down and stop the accident, I’m not one to judge). Actually, this example is less absurd, as employees are not typically paid to have sex at work.

Conservatives quite literally cannot frame an argument altruistically, they simply lack the capacity for caring about others (despite the sanctimonious posturing on abortion issues). They cannot accept that poor women, without access to healthcare, maybe shouldn’t be having unwanted pregnancies, that, you know, lead to abortion and stuff?

Because they act entirely in their own best interests, they expect that everybody else in the world is doing the same.

And this is what resides at the root of conservative ideology. No health care? Well, that’s your fault for not having a better job (again I cite Megyn Kelly, who took a remarkably altruistic bend towards maternity leave, until we discover that she isn’t advocating for maternity leave for all women, just those like her with a “nice employer that gives her paid maternity leave.”) Smoke pot? Well, I don’t, so you can go to jail. Homosexual? Well, I’m not, so I should work to limit the rights and opportunities you have. Left handed? I’m right handed, you should pay higher taxes. I’ll just leave race aside for the sake of good taste, but I will mention in passing that Newt Gingrich called Barak Obama the “Foodstamp President” while campaigning in South Carolina earlier this year, kind of a double-whammy there. Do you happen to be on welfare? Well, I’m not, so I can subject you to humiliating drug tests. Well, what if you, Mr. Congressman, had to take a drug test? Hell no you can’t! The objection is not on logical grounds, but simply in defense of themselves. Which is why all of these parody bills calling for strict regulations on men’s reproductive medicines such as Viagra are lost on them.

Of course they’d expect people to come after their boner pills, that’s what politics is, limiting the freedoms of everybody who isn’t you, usually for monetary reasons. All this boner bill does is show them the system is working, especially when they are just as comically defeated, reinforcing the white-male hegemony these politicians are blatantly seeking to preserve. And when you discover some ex-congressman is now working for the same corporation they awarded contracts to when in office, this isn’t hypocrisy, it’s exactly what they think they should be doing with their lives. Getting themselves and their friends rich, at the expense of everyone else. When they attack others for doing the same, again, it isn’t hypocrisy, it’s business as usual.

For the longest time, I was reluctant to recognize this unabashed selfishness because conservatives identify themselves as Christian, which has as its central pillar compassion and selflessness. Nope, I was wrong again. That’s been subverted by those seeking the cognitive dissonant embrace of morally justified greed. I must warn those with sensitive stomachs, this entire ideology will make you sick. You have been warned before clicking. Okay, here it is. And for an erudite explanation of how such a vulgar distention of biblical doctrine can occur, read Bill McKibben’s seminal Harper’s article here.

Further evidence of my point is seen in the greatest generic attack against liberalism of all—that it “only wants to give your hard earned money away to the poor.” Even this argument is couched in selfishness, a lack of understanding that we should have all of society’s best interests in mind, to provide a social safety net for things like the prevention of the spread of disease and educating children. The bifurcation of Liberal and Conservative ideology literally resides on this distinction. Again, the famous aphorism that “if you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain” assumes that liberalism is compassion, conservatism is, well, the intelligence to know better. From here, of course, there is a gradient of degree, along which you can have too much social welfare or too little.

*I only called Megyn Kelly “Queen Bitch” here for two reasons. One, to make the point that conservatives are quick to justify “slutgate” by citing examples of liberal-identified people using derogatory terms for conservative women (Bill Maher vs. Sarah Palin, for example), hence making it somehow okay for everybody everywhere to use whatever derogatory term for whatever women the please. Gary McCoy himself mentions how “it struck me as deliciously ironic that many of the tolerant, compassionate liberals who took issue with my supposedly portraying Miss Fluke as a ‘slut’ and ‘prostitute’, and with my lack of civility, did so by calling me every vulgar name in the book and making death threats against me.” As in, Sandra Fluke speaks on behalf of women’s rights, you call her a slut, we call you an asshole for calling her a slut, and now the scales are balanced! Oh, and two, because Megyn Kelly is such a bitch.

I often marvel at the manufactured needs that corporations so effortlessly instill upon the unwitting public conscious. Products seemingly frivolous become essential. My favorite part of air travel involves gawking at the superfluity of products in the quixotic SkyMall catalog. I will occasionally turn to my wife, grab her attention from what is usually the serious fiction I myself should be reading and implore her with the necessity of purchasing a magic wand television remote, marshmallow shooter, or ultrasonic pest repeller. She doesn’t find this funny and doesn’t think I’m entirely joking. And the thing is, neither do I. After all, while I kind of know I probably don’t mostly need a device that “attacks the auditory and nervous center of rodents,” I can’t exactly admit that my life wouldn’t be markedly improved by one.

The Costco Ad I got in the mail just a couple days ago.

Inspiring need where there was none before requires tricky marketing, if not outright psychological treachery. And we are all too familiar with the myriad tricks of Advertizing and Public Relations, tricks one can earn an entire college degree mastering without, apparently, obliterating one’s dignity or resigned oneself to sociopathy. You often see an appeal to status, beauty, longevity, virility and sex appeal, but these pale in comparison to good old fear mongering. Why take unnecessary risks with the lives of yourself and your loved ones when this product can insure that in the event of such-and-such a hypothetical catastrophe, you will be protected, prepared, or otherwise comfortable more so than without? This is all good and well when it comes to cell-phones-for-tweens and emergency road flare kits for your SUV—let’s not forget the quintessential survival vehicle for our desperate modern age.

But here’s the thing—Costco is offering for the low price of $42.99 “Emergency Garden Seeds,” capable of sowing a one-acre emergency, yes, emergency garden.

You don't plant them, silly, you save them for when you need a garden, stat.

Imagine yourself, if you will, in your backyard, pitch black of night, the city in a blackout, no light save the faint splash of red and blue flashing police lights, a maddening din of sirens all around, maybe an unsettling, low-decibel roar of some nightmarish catastrophe burning at an untold distance, and there you are, huffing and puffing, as you scramble around your lawn…frantically planting seed after seed into your well manicured suburban lawn.

Okay, the term “emergency” notwithstanding, perhaps this is marketed to the hyper-paranoid or otherwise safety-conscious Costco patron. Not taking into account the 5-year shelf life and the presumption that one isn’t to plant these seeds, rather, hang onto them, dispose of, and repurchase. Barring, that is, an incident of such magnitude that returning the product would be out of the question as the whole of society has collapsed to the point you have resorted to planting an emergency frickin’ garden. There still remains, however, one small predicament of what one shall eat whilst waiting five to eighteen months for the proper season to arrive, or, you know, your seeds to germinate and transform themselves into a veritable cornucopia of produce hopefully conducive to your local climate, pest issues, bands of wandering pillagers, and radioactive zombies potentially interfering with your emergency harvest. (Though they prefer human brains, you are bound to lose at least some cauliflower to the occasional, confused zombie now and again. They don’t eat it, just masticate it for a while, and you could probably boil off the zombie virus, but what’s the point?)

Not to worry, Right above this product in the catalog, one can find a single $159.99 product that contains “three #10 cans of chunk chicken, three #10 cans of ground beef. 288 total servings.” Don’t worry if you’re not hungry at the moment, it has “up to a 25 year shelf life if sealed.” And as if a sense of comic absurdity was not lost on the marketing department at Costco, they look like ice cream tubs. And I imagine whatever chemical and mechanical process involved in preserving raw meet for 25 years (included in the product title: “With Gamma Seal”), it not doubt has taken on a consistency not unlike ice cream. Meaty, meaty, ice cream. But honestly, why not opt for the palette and save 10%? And be sure to pick up the six #10 cans of emergency dehydrated cheese while you are at it.

Now, unless this is really just some secret product cluster meant for aspiring cult leaders to stow themselves and their beloved disciples away in the wilderness with, then I have to presume ordinary American families are purchasing these products out of a genuine concern that the shit is going to hit the fan and hit it for a VERY long time. Let’s look at some of the product reviews, shall we?

Of the powered cheese, Jendoe writes, “Cannot comment on the taste as these are part of our earthquake kit.” Okay, fair enough, we’ll check back in with Jendoe when the Big One hits and its time to break out grilled cheese for the kids.

Of the seeds, garden4life writes, “Nowhere does it mention if these seeds are Heirloom. If not, then they will only produce one time. It is very important to purchase seeds that will produce year after year. Our very lives may depend on it!”

Wisco12 believes that size matters when it comes to seeds and writes, “Haven’t opened the package yet, however I was disappointed when I saw the size of the container. Quite smaller than it looked on the website. Not sure if I’d recommend yet or not.” Thanks, Wisco12, for taking the time to write a review and let us know even you yourself have no faith in its merit. After all, its entirely possible that plants, you know, grow.

The most common reviews are fives stars and relate the same sentiment as Zebopper, “We purchased these seeds to put away in case of an emergency. I haven’t opened them, and frankly, I hope I never need them!” PT Barnum would be proud.

And when the reviews are not charmingly gullible, they contain an element of sobering paranoia. Rosie21 writes, “Feel blessed that I’m able to purchase this product and hopefully plant it soon in my land so I can eventually live of my land. Unfortunately it looks like were all gonna eventually go back to the basics. Blessed and fortunate are we for having the knowledge of what’s coming and getting prepared : )”

Virginaa’s comments are also typical, “I’m interested in being prepared for whatever calamity might befall us. And if nothing happens and my preparations are for naught, so much the better. Everyone talks about growing gardens if the situation gets bad. My concern was always ‘but where will we get the seeds?’ I now know where I will get my seeds: from the back of my closet.”

the last page of the catalog

These products, ridiculous though they are, are themselves a product of our collective awareness of immanent and widespread catastrophe. In 1898, H.G. Wells published War of the Worlds, itself an intractable treatise on the immutability of theBritish Empire. And prior to WWI, the notion of an invading force actually reaching so far into England as the outskirts of London itself was so unthinkable a notion that in order for the Martians to have any degree of plausibility they would have to take a few days to march their Heat Rays through the hamlets and hedgerows on giant legs—let’s not forget, lighter-than-air-travel was far too preposterous for even the wildest speculative fiction, war with intelligent life on Mars, on the other hand, was all but an inevitability.

However, since mechanized warfare was introduced in World War I, and certainly since atomic warfare in World War II, the whole of human civilization has been forced to live with immanent and perpetual threat of instant, vaporizing annihilation. And I’m not the first to take notice of it. American Southern Gothic writer William Faulker, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, said, “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” This question of blowupability pre-occupies our collective unconsciousness, so much so that we cannot help but wonder if serious long-term planning for future prosperity is simply naïve and doomed to disappointing failure once catastrophe at last arrives.

William Faulkner

Science, itself responsible for the technological advancement that have contributed to this universal sense of nihilism, ahs also contributed inspiring innovations such as the Moon Landing and Vaccination that just maybe we will have a future worth living in after all. But since, well, pretty much since the Moon Landing, their has been a steady tide of anti-scientism sweeping public sentiment here in America, two favorite targets of which are the Moon Landing and Vaccination. And who wouldn’t be severely disappointed to find that the best and brightest minds at NASA were not mathematicians and physicists, but special effects filmmakers and choreographers? Below, you can listen to a moribund Neil Stephenson blame Science Fiction writers for a lack of inspiration in the sciences, which has lead to a tide of anti-scientist sentiment, but before you cry foul on his exercise in technological relativism, I should warn you that he is going to end up sharing his plan to “foster direct collaboration with science fiction writers and researchers, engineers, and scientists” to team up and, for one, build a carbon fiber building twenty times the height of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which we could then launch space ships.

Stephenson’s techno-optimism notwithstanding, we find ourselves in an increasingly myopic civilization, where short-term and instant gratification reigns supreme. We have lived through and apparently learned no lessons from a credit bubble of such magnitude as Stephenson’s would-be real-lifeTowerofBabel. I will leave you then with this–that because of this paralyzing fear of the future, our entire American economy has devoted itself to financial markets that divine ever-shortening market shorts, trading stocks and commodities on an automated, computerized algorithm of micro-transactions. Our best and brightest minds have devoted their careers to this aim, all intended to assure the investor of being protected via leverage and “hedging” in the event of catastrophe. Not unlike an insurance policy based upon a closet containing tubs of emergency magical beans.

Bill Moyers Essay: Who Shipwrecked Our Economy? from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Bill Moyers pulls no punches as he describes the sorry state of our political machinery and the logical consequences of multi-billionaires manipulating and directing our elections.

Here is the article he cites in the clip.

Not to diminish the content, its a worthy read, but this is the main point:

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is leading that race, but only because he has more billionaires on his side than anyone else.

We have entered into a whole new kind of politics in America, one where the grassroots will of the people can finally be done away with. The Super Rich no longer need wait for a local hero to emerge from sheer populism and governance well done. They can now pick their horses well in advance, and insure nobody hears a single peep about anyone but their preferential stars. We have proven, in the last twelve months, that this firehose of cash can simply be turned from one politician to the next and their popularity will rise accordingly in the polls, regardless of the content of their politics or platform. I try to come up with answers for why this is the case and can only assume that the “average” voter, with zero political acumen or interest, assumes (at least subconsciously) that the politician plastered all over their world in the form of advertisements simply must be the best choice, otherwise, why else would he/she have such advertisement expenditures? An assumption is made that other people have individually united to create a common cause, which may have been true to some extent in the past. But now, living in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision, we are able to see well-funded politicians that nobody really wants elected.

But we will be asked to vote for them anyway.

We have entered an age where those representing us will be politicians that will no doubt understand their entire political career has been born on the backs of a select few, and without these Super PAC donors, they’d be unelectable. Who then do you imagine they will best serve if and when they are elected?

One, they’ll create debt slavery for the youngest generation:

Heather McGhee on the Millennial Generation from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Reminds me of what has ruined the music recording industry. Instead of talented musicians dominating the pop charts, we have pre-fabricated, pretentious facades, the sons and daughters of wealthy recording industry executives (such as the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashley, and to an extent, Hanna Montana). Sheer nepotism, in other words, because they have removed the necessity of “talent” or “musicianship” from the equation. Or worse, people like Fred Durst, willing to change genre from a Vanilla Ice impersonator to rage-rock metalhead and believe the entire premise of writing, recording, and producing music is for the end result of wealth and wealth alone. After all, this “talent” is something than can be sub-contracted out, not unlike the sub-contracting of personality for our empty-suit politicians, to be created within boardrooms and focus groups, marketed and repackaged for our consumption in a world where all authenticity has been drown out completely.

However, we have other alternatives for our listening tastes than what comes from MTV and the mega-corp record labels. We have Indie music, we have the magic of the Internet as a free, open, balanced avenue of exposure (for now, but get ready for that to be undermined by the Plutocrats’ Ponies.) In music we have these options, in National politics, especially Presidential Elections, we do not. We are waking up to discover we have a choice between two mass-marketed corporate monstrosities, because otherwise, individually, our tastes and aspirations are too divergent, to fractured to unite in anyway competitive with the ponies of the plutocrats.

Wow, looks like the mushrooms in my short story Harvest could turn out to be real! Apparently, a Yale Expeditionary Rain forest team has discovered a species of fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, that has an enzyme that actually breaks down plastic as a primary food source! Anaerobically, at that!

Wouldn’t that be a boon for the ever-growing sea of synthetic, immutable plastics slowly drowning our world, not to mention, our oceans?

Here’s the article.

Recently, GOP Republican candidate Mitt Romney released his tax records, revealing to citizens, foremost, that he pays less than half of what they do in taxes. But there is another story here. It begins with Mitt’s apparently necessary explanation of how proud he is, that he “won’t apologize for being successful”, and derides the “divisiveness” of the 99% Occupy movement.

Never before do I recall a Presidential Nominee including with his obligatory tax return an explanation that includes, “Hey I’m rich and there’s nothing wrong with it.” Yes, Mitt, there is nothing wrong with it. American people have for a long time been respectful of members of the Severely Upper Class. But now this raises the question—do we as a nation want to be represented by such? Do we want our Flagship Citizen to be the sort of citizen so out of touch with the daily lives of the average American family? And, for another conversation, do we find it fair that people earning this kind of money, people who enjoy an income that affords surplus discretionary spending roughly 10,000 times greater than the average American Family’s surplus money after paying for necessities (2009 Consumer Expenditures Survey), taxed at half (14%) the majority of taxpayers? This is where the Romney 500 comes into play.

The average American family income was $46,326 in 2009 (US Census Bureau). That is roughly 500 times less than Mitt Romney’s $23 million earned in both 2010 and 2009 respectively. Since consumer prices are not scaled to income, we can still create a comparison table to see the RELATIVE price of a few consumer items were they to be purchased by you, and then what it would cost Mitt Romney if he was earning the same money as the average American Family.

Yes, Ron Paul has some antiquated ideas, and yes, the United States is almost TOO entrenched as a quasi-Imperialist nation to simply rip out the roots and let the World turn into whatever place it would be without American Unilateralism. Yes, the Neoconservative establishment would not let a Ron Paul administration get its way with a policy of non-intervention. Yes, the Neoconservative establishment probably will not let Ron Paul get the party’s nomination even if he swept all the upcoming primaries.

Yes, his Libertarian idealism goes as far as undermining civil rights, affirmative action, and other non-discriminatory laws.

But you have to admit–Ron Paul is a stark reminder of how America could have been, should have been, were it not for the direction we’ve taken in the 20th century since Woodrow Wilson.

On a recent podcast, James Howard Kunstler begins with the claim that America has lost the “potency and capacity of men to be able to accomplish things and feel like men, to feel like adults.”

Fake Warrior Culture

We are compulsively sending our youth to college in order to free them from the shackles of manual or “unskilled labor” and then turning around and chastising them for being unwilling to accept just this sort of work. Not that the soul-sucking, lifeless, corporate sinecure is any more appealing, given that the elephant in the room of every corporate workplace is the fact that 99% of the workers don’t really need to be there and really aren’t adding anything of value to the world.

It’s a tough pill to swallow–I must admit. Being 23-24 years old, directly out of college and eager to put your skills and passions to work. Descending the social ladder in order to work with one’s hands, to accept those manual labor positions, to produce something, while this satisfies a certain preternatural desire to create and be productive, these jobs, the very jobs that this generation’s parents likely held with a middle-class salary no less, are now performed by inexpensive migrant workers. And the reason why we haven’t done anything to reform illegal immigration in this country is because we want these jobs to be occupied by cheap migrant labor. Why? Because it adds addition rungs to the social ladder, it lowers prices, satisfies markets, and gives college graduates the opportunity  to gain upward mobility.

So what about college degrees that afford one the ability to find the same satisfaction, but in a “professional” capacity? Well, students have been increasingly discouraged from such paths.

The childhood aspirations of “doctor”, or “fireman”, “astronaut” have been supplanted with one singular, abstract desire that has nothing to do with the means, but the ends, that is, the acquisition of MONEY. What do college students want to be when they graduate? Rich. And what better way to get there than by the study of “business”? Hence, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of college graduates receiving bachelor degrees in Business, to say nothing of the “MBA” scourge sweeping graduate programs across America. And I thought we already had too many business majors when I was graduating undergrad college in 1998! But the numbers have increased dramatically since then:

*National Center for Education Statistics

So where do the youth turn in a society where value creation is the least-valued place on the socioeconomic ladder? What does one do to find fulfillment when one’s job asks only that one not put their best creative and experiential faculties to use? Where one is handed their share of wealth in exchange for participating in this theater? Well, “Fake Warrior Culture” is one word for it.

And why not? It is a sensible if not healthy way for men, especially young men, to compensate for what their society has deprived them.

Full Episode: James Howard Kunstler discusses what he sees as the manifestations of an identity crisis in young American men.

I should mention in closing that Jim also touches on a theme in Supercenter, one that video games can allow people “affecting as warrior by sitting on a sofa and punching a console and shedding a lot of blood on a screen.” The creative, inspired, problem-solving potential of a generation is being poured into video game consoles, a temporary boost in dopamine levels and satisfaction of the need to be productive, the only result.