banking with criminals

banks have never been a service...they were and are for-profit buisnesses that pretend to offer services while charging fees ( hidden and some so blatant they smack you in the face) and interest to pay out divideneds to shareholders...we all know this and it is why banks have drawn populist wrath since alex hamilton sold the common man down the river and institutionalized the interests of wealth as the national interest...i, for one, bank with a nest of criminal extorters who are so avaricious that nothing is too low for them to stoop to...usurous interest rates, new and exciting (for shareholders) atm fees, and salespeople disguised as bankers who try to sell me some goofy derivitve product whenever i stray into the lobby ( which isn't often anymore...i have compromised pricniple by taking to the drive-up window so i don't have to listen to the bastards) a message for j p morgan chase bankers: i do not need overdraft potection because 1) i know what is in my account...i check alot, 2) i make a concerted effort to live within my means so i don't fucking overdraft my account...even in these difficult times i am solvent...so back-off morons and shut the fuck up i don't want the products of dubious benefit ( except for shareholders) that you are being forced ( it is a job, after all, and doubtlessly some find harassing customers a bit tedious...those folks wouldn't make it working for a collection agency either...another class of economic thug) to shove in my weary face every time i make a goddamned deposit...i am a customer and for the next six years they hold the mortgage on my house so i will not be subject to the new atm fee...yet...if the pilot program in texas goes well i may have to cut up debit card just like i did the credit cards lo these many years ago....another reason to live as far as possible outside the consumerist utopia and make the bastards take cash when i go there.

12-25-2010

okay...what was a rumination on the transitory nature of life turned into a self-absorbed pity party...i realized that almost as soon as i posted it and came back to delete it ( once again forgetting has not ended) and damned if someone hadn't read it already and so i feel obligated to own up to writing it...much of my adult life has been a search for some sort of permanence to anchor my addictive self to and offset the extremes i can go to...what passes for permanent isn't...always slips away...transitory...like happiness...so...no more whining about it...none of this will last...none of us lasts...i have known this since i was ten and life insists on reminding me...THAT is what wearies me so...beckett was correct...i can't go on, i'll go on.

memory

little by little bits and pieces of what my friend left behind her are disappearing from the cyberworld...the end of forgetting that the n y times hyped not that long ago is fallacious...i am not surprised...nothing anthropogenic is any more eternal than we are...it is still a depressing thought to carry into the bullshit of the holiday season...i feel a deep pariah streak coming on...fuck all this

tucholsky

The Embryo Speaks.
By Kurt Tucholsky
(1927)

They all take care of me: Church, State, Doctors, and Judges.

I should grow and thrive, I should slumber nine months long; I should not worry about a thing-they all wish me well. They protect me, they watch over me. God have mercy if my parents do something to me; then they will all be there. Whoever touches me will be punished; my mother lands in prison, my father right behind; the doctor who did it must cease to be a doctor, the midwife who helped is locked up- I am a precious item.

They all take care of me; Church, State, Doctors, and Judges.

Nine months long.

But when nine months are over, I have to see for myself what becomes of me. Tuberculosis? No doctor will help me. Nothing to eat? No milk? No state will help me. Torment and misery? The church will comfort me but that does not fill my stomach. And if I have no bread to break or bite and I steal: the judge is right there t lock me up.

Fifty years of my life no one will care about me, no one. I have to help myself. Nine months long they kill themselves, if someone wants to kill me. You tell me: isn't that a strange way to look out for the welfare of another?

disconnected?

on the way to work yesterday i heard stephen hawking on the bbc...he's flogging a new book that's gotten some attention because he says something to the effect that god isn't necessary to explain the universe...but that's not what i want to address...he also said that becaouse philosphers had not kept up with developments in physics and molecular biology their discussions about humans and their place in the universe are dated and disconnected...well...life still seems like a nietzschian struggle at times and steve seems a bit biased and a bit ungreatful...let's touch on a couple of scientific precepts...ockham's razor states, " entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily." this has been reduced to the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the most correct and is a fundamental tenet of most scientists i know ( a limited sampling admittedly...but unanamous among them)...but willam of oakham was a fourteenth century monk writing a critique of scholasticism, not a scientist...a religious philosopher writing about theological issues...he didn't believe there were natural laws because god, in his omnipotence, could change them on a whim...a borrowed idea...which is okay...we all do it...but credit the philosphical source...scientists credit carl popper with the concept of falsifiability..holding that to be valid there must be some objective way to test the fact of an idea ( or hypothesis) in order to provide proof...okay again, but karl wasn't writing about science...he was writing about marxism, and for reasons opaque to me, freudian analysis...philosophers writing about political and social philosophy and expressing ideas well suited to science...seems to me that old steve is being a bit sloppy in his popularization of science.

hey buddy! those are MY seeds

there are quite a number of "volunteer" corn plants in the beanfields of northwest indiana...monsanto has been going after farmers when their transgenetic canola pollen gets loose and floats across the fields of canada nd the dakotas..infecting the canola crops they don't own...they aren't very pleased that some of the seeds are escaping while the crop is being transported for shipment and showing up as weeds along the roadside ditches either...so how are they going to feel at bayer or monsanto or pioneer when they discover an unlicensed, illegal second generation of their corn ( won't call dense yellow number two maize on a bet ) growing in a beanfield in the middle of nowheresville indiana? the timerity of it all!! somebody call the seed police!!!

ngo junk mail

in 2007 i had a need to belong and so i set about joining things like the bertrand russell society...the dada network...an unfortunate group of existentialist thinkers on yahoo...all kinds of stuff ( i was also new to the internet and was wild with abandon)...among other things i shipped thirty-five bucks off to amensty international...not a bad thing i suppose...a bit impulsive perhaps..but nothing ethically damning...then 2008 rolled around and the "recession" took its toll on my income and my attitude...changes had to be made and disgressional expenditures had to be prioritized...there was school...and through that i was hipped to the idea of micro lending by mik stokely in the anthro department( thanks mik!)...that wasn't going to be abandoned, economic stabillity ( not obscene wealth) fulfills a human need and a right in my book...neither was contributing to local food pantries...alas amensty found its way onto the expendable list and went by the wayside...doubly alas amnesty didn't agree and since my membership lapsed i have received monthly mailings of all sorts of stuff like address labels, pens,quarterly financial reports, and now christmas cards...all of this leads me to wonder exactly how much of my intiial membership fee amnesty has used up in trying to get me to fork over more lucre...postage, trinket importing, printing all the stuff they cram in there with the graft that is supposed to shame me into re-upping...surely they've used up that thirty-five bucks in three years and just who have they gotten out of camp x-ray or some cia balck prison since then? are they an ngo watchdog keeping tabs on human rights violations or an importer doing buisness? it has certainly sown doubts in m y mind about rejoining...and they aren't the only ones...credo wants me to express my support for progressive causes by buying a cell-phone plan...technologically advanced they use way more emails than mailings...but that means i get them weekly instead of monthly...i can't help but think that liberals have been infiltrated by bunko artists and low level capitalists...sure kiva asks for my support, but only when i make a loan or if they need a vote in some contest for corporate funding...they don't send me stuff to try to guilt me into making loans...it all very shady and it taints the issues ( in my opinion, mind you) with a seedy sort of capitalist manipulation...i could go on...doctors without borders isn't shy about asking for donations and neither are a lot of others...it is, perhaps, the carnival side-show barker facet of it that chills me...i will pick my own causes and i will back my beliefs with hard-earned cash given to people who use it to HELP others...not promote their own organization...it's my momey after all.