AMERICA is a "GUN NATION"

     Cultures specialize. It's just the nature of life.  Think France....think Architecture.  Think India....think Religion. Think China....think Social Order.  Think Saudi Arabia....think oil.  Think America....think Guns.  Americans may have, in our envied past,  thought of ourselves as Christians, Well Educated, Wealthy, Innovators, Libertarians, etc. Many of these assesments are of course accurate....but, we American's have, in our modern expression, so identified ourselves as the "Gun Nation", that no alternate identify holds sway.  We are the "Gun People", for better or for worse.  We might as well start weapon training in grammer school, because we are not going to alter our main national trait. Muslims are still going to support Jihad, Jews are still going to pray in Jersuselum, American Blacks are still going to dominate the NBA, and Americans are still going to keep on shooting ourselves.  It's the way we roll....own it!     

What, me care!

      At 80, I live in a culture where virtually no one knows Alfred E Neumann.  Generations past laughter at Mad Magazine's "fuck up" hero in the same way we laughed at the primitive sensibilities of our cherished "cowboys and indians". They were culture markers illuminating how 'not' to play being human. Back in the day, we noted and generally adhered.  Alas, today these counter-functional icons are, in updated style, still with us, but.....now these "fuckup-heros" pattern the chosen life strategies of 50% of the population, i.e., "the homies"

     The almost equal ridiculous "secular woke left" make their living assigning ICD-10 Codes to these Alfred E. behavioral norms mostly to fulfill their egotistical need to advertise their sophistication/virtue/compassion. Sadly this "counter-stupid" signalling yields equally stupid behaviors. Today I heard Robert Reich say that "150 million Americans don't want to work because it's too oppressive."  "What, me care"

Humpty Dumpty and the Entropy Eggs

This weekend I amplified the natural entropy of my material space by delivering scrambled eggs to aged Rosehouse Residents. The much increased randomness of the two dozen eggs was partially offset by the decline in the rate of entropy within the bodies of those who ate breakfast and thereby temporally increased their cellular order.  Yes, I know that we will loose the entropy battle just as did the eggs.

Monitizing “WOKE” in the Advent Season

Yes, starving puppies push our compassion button every day, but add some blowing snow and with an "O Holy Night" background track and we the anxious and fearful middle class Americans can't wait to offer up their Visa Cards. Maybe this is an ok wealth redistribution mechanism, but....how well would this monitizing strategy work if the MSNBC's of the world flashed on our screens the compensation received by the "non-profits" CEO. Of course with some diligence any prospective doner can find this information. Virtually non do. Accordingly in practice the result is very much like pornography, we can't define it but we know it wrong when we see it. 

Liberalism...on the down low

     Liberalism was a wager of titanic proportions, a wager that ancient norms of behavior could be abolished in the name of a new form of liberation and that the conquest of nature would supply the fuel that would permit near-infinite choices. Accordingly, a liberal dominated culture can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods and satisfactions, and thus by constantly expanding humanity’s conquest and mastery of nature.

     The twin outcomes of this effort, the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources, make inevitable an inquiry into what comes after liberalism.  True perhaps, but while we linger, our market liberalism has spawned a wave of “expressivism” where life is about recreating reality according to our subjective will.