The fruitless search for self

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create; a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

So wrote Hunter S. Thompson as he reflected on the rise and fall of LSD as a viable door of perception. Dropping acid in the sixties was often an act of rebellion against ubiquitous materialism and consumerism. Like religion, it was used as a tool to apprehend something transcendently meaningful. It satisfied an age-old psychological urge by helping create the impression that some force is indeed tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

These days LSD is largely out of fashion. The kinds of people who would’ve taken acid in the sixties today resort to weed, meth, and other drugs whose chief effect is not “consciousness expansion,” but consciousness numbing. Rather than actively seek a path to illusory enlightenment, the chief aim of drug use today is mere psychological aloofness. Of course, smoking endless bales of marijuana is hardly a prerequisite for entry into the counterculture, which today is characterized by a fair amount of nonchalant douchebaggery in the form of nihilistic hipsters who seek meaning—but only ironically—through half-baked art house performances of topless body painting and male go-go dancing set to the theme song of Golden Girls, all while the audience samples fine artisanal cheeses.

But enough about the skin-tight jeans faction. How has the rest of America been coping with the constant cacophony of chaotic commercialism? To answer this, one need only consult the latest list of bestselling nonfiction paperbacks. Here is a sampling of titles.

Heaven is for Real. “A boy’s encounter with Jesus and the angels.”

Have a Little Faith. “A suburban rabbi and a Detroit pastor teach lessons about the comfort of belief.”

Drive. “A look at what truly motivates us, and how we can use that knowledge to work smarter and live better.”

90 Minutes in Heaven. “A minister on the otherworldly experience he had after an accident.”

Eat, Pray, Love. “A writer’s journey in search of self takes her to Italy, India and Indonesia.”

The Checklist Manifesto. “The power of a simple idea to manage the increasing complexity of life.”

If the popularity of these books is any indication, the search for self is not only underway, but profitable. Indeed, “self,” not space, may very well be the final frontier. But the average American’s self, like space, is a vast expanse of nothingness containing just a few if any fleeting flashes of supernova-like brilliance that must ultimately give way to destitute black holes capable of only consumption, not creation. Hence the insatiable consumerism and the path of devastation it leaves in its wake. This realization is what awaits all honest seekers of self. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—very few will arrive at this point. Indeed, humans may have even developed an internal survival mechanism to prevent such a realization from occurring. At least, people in the United States seem to have. It is difficult to imagine America producing a Camus, for example, for the plain fact that his ideas threaten the American dogma that one must exist for something else—god, spouse, children, society, etc.—instead of existing for existence’s sake.

Like the cockeyed acid heads before them, today’s group of self-seekers assumes that some cosmic manager is minding the store. With science’s destruction of faith-based explanations for natural phenomena virtually complete, and the creeping absurdism that accompanies it, we can now perceive the rise of a one-size-fits-all “spirituality” that is slowly encroaching upon the territory of Old Time Religion. Of course, the die-hards will remain, praising Jebus and whatnot until their dying breath. But as for the rest, they will become increasingly receptive to the gobbledygook preached by Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins, Mitch Albom, and other garbage salesmen who incorporate a elusive spiritualism that on one hand satisfies the American need for religious mumbo-jumbo, while on the other is so vague that it can appeal to anyone who thinks there has to be something “out there.”

But there is nothing out there—nothing that can possibly be ascertained by our mortal minds, anyway. And not only is there no one tending the light at the end of the tunnel, there is no light at all.

On the Afghan response to the Florida BBQur'an

“A believer wounded by the nonbelievers. A nonbeliever wounded by the believers.”

Cited in Le Devoir

During his first year in office, President Barack Obama justified his decision to send an additional 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan by declaring, “We’re in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer.” Recalling the perpetrators of the September 11^th attacks, he said,

As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda – a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world’s great religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents….

[S]hortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies, and pledged to better coordinate our military and civilian effort.

Islam-inspired extremism, then, is the enemy thus defined. Fast forward to April Fool’s Day last week, when over one thousand rioters in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif were certainly not fooling when they killed seven United Nations employees and beheaded two of them. This was the mob justice meted out in response to the burning of a Qur’an by a pastor in Florida, quite obviously a development with which the UN workers had nothing to do. Clearly, Obama is right to be concerned about “al Qaeda and its extremist allies,” but what is particularly instructive about this savagery is that it occurred in a city that is under the control of the US-backed government led by the corrupt Hamid Karzai, who according to a New York Times article, actually helped incite the rioters:

Both Afghan and international news media had initially played down or ignored the actions of [Terry] Jones, the Florida pastor. On Thursday, however, President Karzai made a speech and issued statements condemning the Koran burning and calling for the arrest of Mr. Jones for his actions. On Friday, that theme was picked up in mosques throughout Afghanistan.

“Karzai brought this issue back to life, and he has to take some responsibility for starting this up,” said a prominent Afghan businessman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution if he was identified as a critic of the president.

If it’s extremists President Obama is after, he need look no further than the Karzai government he supports; not to mention the depravedly excitable people of Mazar-i-Sharif, who represent not an insubstantial faction of religious zealots who are not in an officially designated terrorist organization. With citizens of a US-allied government like these, who needs al Qaeda?

- Max

Paul Ryan's proposes neoliberal junta budget

“We’re gonna get ridda your Medicare and you’re gonna like it. Capisce?”

I just finished perusing the Republican budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. It was unveiled at a news conference today by Wall Street bailer-outer Paul Ryan and about fifteen House Republicans; and with the exception of one woman, all were white men over the age of 40.

The GOP proposal is like something you’d find being advanced by a 1980s Latin American military junta hoping to win favor with the IMF and World Bank in order to obtain loans. The budget plan calls for $6.2 trillion in cuts over the next ten years, but still wouldn’t lead to a balanced budget until the late 2030s. Part of the reason is its insane call for huge permanent tax cuts for individuals and corporations, including drastically lowering both the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25% from 35%. The proposal would eliminate the 2010 health care reform law. Naturally, the Pentagon’s budget is barely touched, and the GOP proposal has essentially deferred to Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ budgetary recommendations. Most of egregious of all, however, is that the GOP plan eliminates Medicare. Of course, that’s not the word Republicans are using. They’re saying they’re saving Medicare by reforming it, but Republicans want to save Medicare in the same sense that Lieutenant Calley saved My Lai village by ordering it destroyed.

Here’s the crux of the GOP’s plan to eliminate Medicare:

Starting in 2022, new Medicare beneficiaries will be enrolled in the same kind of health care program that members of Congress enjoy. Future Medicare recipients will be able to choose from a list of guaranteed coverage options, and they will be given the ability to choose a plan that works best for them. This is not a voucher program, but rather a premium-support model. A Medicare premium-support payment would be paid, by Medicare, to the plan chosen by the beneficiary, subsidizing its cost.

The premium-support model would operate similar to the way the Medicare prescription-drug benefit program works today. The Medicare premium-support payment would be adjusted so that wealthier beneficiaries would receive a lower subsidy, the sick would receive a higher payment if their conditions worsened, and lower-income seniors would receive additional assistance to cover out-of-pocket costs.

This is interesting considering how similar it is to what Republicans call Obamacare. In the same budget proposal, Republicans are advocating the repeal of the president’s health care law with its sliding scale government subsidies allocated based on personal income levels, while simultaneously calling for the implementation of the same general plan for people who turn 65 after 2021. Even though this is the kind of idea that Republicans find worthy of the “socialist” epithet, they’re pushing this approach because it is much less socialistic than the current single-payer Medicare system.

What is surprising about the GOP’s proposed abolition of Medicare as we know it, is the brazen manner in which it’s being presented. Medicare is a very popular government program, even more so than private health insurance, which is remarkable considering that its only customers are people over 65—a demographic that can sometimes be difficult to please. Furthermore, everyone who is under the age of fifty-five right now would be affected by this change, which will have the surely anticipated effect of increasing out-of-pocket expenses. This is because there is nothing to prevent private health insurance premiums from continuing to rise at a rate that outpaces wage growth or inflation. Will the GOP’s premium-support model contain provisions for adjusting subsidies based on premium increases or will it be subject to a cost of living adjustment scheme that lags behind these hikes? Most likely the latter, since the whole point of “reforming” Medicare is for the government to spend less on it, and for the citizens to spend more. Even if this reality does not explicitly enter the minds of Americans under 55, they are still going to have some serious questions about gutting a program that has done well by their parents and other elderly loved ones. Frankly, I anticipate that the GOP’s Medicare proposal will be rebuked by the electorate with extreme prejudice.

On a related note, Ryan’s budget also contains a long-sought wet dream of the American right, federal tort reform. In this case, tort reform means placing a cap on damages rewarded by juries in medical malpractice lawsuits. By implementing a ceiling on damages, so the argument goes, malpractice insurers won’t have to pay out as much money in lawsuits, meaning the insurers could lower the premiums they charge doctors and hospitals, meaning the doctors and hospitals could lower what they charge to HMOs for providing those HMOs’ customers with care, meaning the HMOs could lower premiums for their customers, i.e., the American people. Notice that the American people are last in this wondrous chain of trickle down tort reform. Of all the entities in this relationship, patients are likely to benefit the least simply by virtue of being the furthest removed from where the reform is being initiated. That is, of course, unless you’ve been the victim of medical malpractice, in which case you’d be right in the thick of it, as you’d be unable to reap the kinds of damages you would have been under various state laws, which brings me to my next point.

Not a day goes by when some prominent Republican doesn’t decry increasing encroachments by the federal government on states’ rights and individual liberty. And yet one of the key proposals in Republican health care reform has been the enactment of a federal tort reform law that would supersede state laws pertaining to medical malpractice. I’m not quite sure how conservatives square that one.

As if these proposals weren’t bad enough, we come to Ryan’s not-so surprising take on the Pentagon’s budget, which defers to the Obama administration’s insistence that the decades-long boondoggle for military contractors is maintained:

Reflects $178 billion in savings identified by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, reinvesting $100 billion in higher military priorities and dedicating the rest to deficit reduction.

Nice try, but that’s not $178 billion in savings. It’s $78 billion in savings. Spending $100 billion on weapons programs X, Y and Z instead of A, B and C because you deemed the latter projects wasteful doesn’t mean you saved $100 billion; it just means you spent that money, but more wisely (you think). Of course, this is the Pentagon we’re talking about, which has seen it appropriate to spend more than the GDP of Australia to build thousands of F-35 fighter jets to fight al Qaeda’s nonexistent air force.

Obviously the Republicans don’t expect all or even most of their ideas to make it into whatever FY 2012 budget finally gets passed. Nonetheless, they are hoping to frame and control the nature of the budget debate. By putting Medicare essentially on the chopping block in their budget, the GOP wants this proposal germinate into something that they hope will soon become “mainstream,” or at least be seen as a viable policy prescription.

As far as the Obama administration’s response to this plan goes, anything short of derisive laughter, mockery, and criticism will not do. When it comes to Medicare and Social Security, the electorate is on the side of the Democrats, who historically have enacted and protected these programs. Whenever the Republicans win an election, they always seem to overreach. Whether it was George W. Bush after the 2004 election proposing the privatization of Social Security, the unpopular gutting of labor unions in Wisconsin, or the proposed elimination of Medicare, Republican economic policy is starkly at odds with what Americans want. Sure, the GOP can cite polls saying people want them to crackdown on wasteful spending or some other vague idea that virtually everyone can get on board with, but once you get into the specifics, once you start asking people if they want their Medicare or Social Security or unemployment benefits messed with, that’s when the GOP hits serious resistance. This budget proposal is no different and is pure folly, and if there is a shutdown of the government, Obama will be able to point to the GOP Medicare proposal and tell Americans that the Republicans are after their Medicare and soon their Social Security.

That’s assuming Obama doesn’t cave once again, but at this point who the hell knows?

- Max

Muslim savages behead UN workers in Afghanistan in response to Koran burning in Florida

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Stirred up by a trio of angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.

The dead included at least seven United Nations workers — five Nepalese guards and two Europeans, one of them a woman. None were Americans. Early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, said at least two of the dead had been beheaded…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, confirming the attack.

New York Times

Once again Islam’s theocrackpots have held up their “religion of peace” for all to see. What does it say about the level of fanaticism when the desecration of a Koran by redneck pastor Terry Jones, (who last year threatened to, but ultimately did not burn the Koran) thousands of miles away can whip up a mob up into a homicidal frenzy to the point where its members feel justified in targeting anyone who appears to be from the West?

Here’s one fascist trying to explain the situation:

A prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Qyamudin Kashaf, the acting head of the Ulema Council of Afghanistan and a Karzai appointee, also called for American authorities to arrest and try Mr. Jones in the Koran burning.

The Ulema Council recently met to discuss the Koran burning, Mullah Kashaf said in a telephone interview. “We expressed our deep concerns about this act, and we were expecting the violence that we are witnessing now,” he said. “Unless they try [Terry Jones] and give him the highest possible punishment, we will witness violence and protests not only in Afghanistan but in the entire world.”

So it isn’t these infantile Muslim sadists, with their uncanny inability to handle news of an isolated incident of blasphemy in some faraway land, who have the problem. It’s the United States, with its freedom of speech and expression. It’s because Terry Jones and every other American has the right to physically and verbally trash the Koran, the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, or Tuesdays with Morrie from now until the First Amendment is repealed.

Of course some liberals will be inclined to condemn not just the murderers themselves, but Terry Jones as well. Not me. While Jones’s religion is also bunk, and I have no doubt that he is probably one of the most ignorant hayseeds in the hemisphere, the man has a right to do what he did. Only a true miscreant would take such umbrage as to say he has blood on his hands. The collective psychosis on display in Mazar-I-Sharif is a display of barbarism that can only be explained by the irrational devotion to Islam.

Fuck the Koran, fuck Mohammed, and fuck Islam, which is a heinous, evil abomination.

- Max