things are extra tight this month since OTher Cousin isn’t charging
the latino church rent until they get the legal okay to operate. if
you throw something in the donation plate i bet providence or kharma
will smile on you and i’ll send you a big lip smacky kiss.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

—

thanks for the offer of a free bumper sticker with your new logo, but i’ll pass.
see, i’m slightly pissed off that you spent gawd only knows how many
hours and dollars designing a sticker and not a solid economic
recovery plan.and it’s not that i’m sticker adverse. i lived in newt
gingrich’s district in the 90s. the kid’s daycare was next door to his
home office. i was also in the land of bob barr.and i drove my little
red toyota around with democratic stickers covering the bumper. scary
southern white dudes like to scream at 24 year old me and my kid when
i was pumping gas or loading groceries. but that was under bill
clinton, and i had a middle class income and could afford a car and a
home and daycare. so the occasional red faced fuckwad was just the
price i paid for backing a party that made my life better. there is no
trade off for this new sticker and as a consolation prize it bites.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

so we are beginning year two of the home school/unschool experiment. i
got a stack of computer programming and math books from ruthie and i
just ordered physics, chemisty and algebra books from ye old amazon.
so math and science are covered. kid finally picked a topic for
history, the great depression. i think it’s perfect. we’ve got english
covered with steinbeck. there’s tons of economics stuff. there’s
environmental stuff with the dustbowls. but what i need are
recomendations, books and movies easily digestible by a very literate
15 year old. both fiction and non fiction. and if anyone wants to send
stuff our way, drop me an email.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

You can take my Hitachi Magic Wand when you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

so it’s fall in the tropics, which means 85 degree weather and the
constant threat of hurricaines. ugh.
i love real fall. i love crunchy leaves and fuzzy sweaters and knee
high boots. i love the misty grey sky shot through with red and gold
leaves. i love a little nip in the air, enough to want a scarf but not
a real jacket.
so friends and blog readers, tell me about your fall. please. pretty please.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

I’ve typed this same post so many times that I’m surprised I haven’t developed a Pavlovian nausea response to just thinking about it. But here I go again.

When a label or a symbol becomes more important than the thing or qualities that it is supposed to represent, there is a problem. A serious problem. Just about every lefty can give you numerous examples of the right failing on that, like making flag burning illegal in a country that is supposed to be based on freedom or calling yourself a Christian while being rabidly in favor of the death penalty. Or people trying to stop a community center being built in the land of religious freedom. But the lefties aren’t immune. Especially now.

I see alot of “my party, right or wrong”, from the Democrats and those who still vote for them. I want to know, really, what makes them declare themselves as liberals or progressives or Democrats. What do they think that means? I used to think that the Dems were the party of everyone else, those of us who didn’t get born with possibilities but were working to make more possibilities for everyone. When I saw, perhaps a few elections too late for some and perhaps a few elections too early for others, that my party wasn’t the party of possibility but the party of slightly less heinous than the other guys, I had to abandon the label. But I’m okay with that. The label no longer gave me a sense of belonging to something better. And oh do I want something better. I dream of a world that might look a bit like heaven if I believed in god. But I don’t. So I am going to have to make it right here instead of suffering till judgment day.

What would I label myself now? I would say progressive, in that I believe the only way for human beings to survive is to move forward. I would say expansive, because rights should be an ever growing, adapting, evolving thing. There are abuses committed in the world on a daily basis that we don’t even have a name for yet because others are so large and glaring as to absorb all the light. I would say communal, because the best things about human evolution have always involved cooperation, starting with language. We can’t go forward one by one.

But none of that is in a party platform. Instead we have compromises and half truths and blatant lies and sacrifice (on our part) without reciprocation. Democracy is broken, and the elites rotate in front of us like conveyor belt sushi. Sure, they may be slightly different from each other, but it’s all the same basic ingredients.

I could beg and plead, argue and debate and wait for the masses to “wise up”. But they won’t. They never have. People in general will tolerate a whole lot of abuse and most will never bite the hand that whips them. All changes for the better have always started with a handful of people who could imagine a better world. Imagine how very different things would be if Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin couldn’t shrug off the label of “British” to forge a new American identity.

That’s the fear. The loss of identity that comes with forward thinking and label changing. That’s what makes Democrats whinge about how “the other guys are so much worse”. They are people who cannot imagine a world that is so much better. Perhaps they deserve a wee bit of pity, but only a little. We don’t actually need them. (And I have found that a little look of disdain works much better than all the logic in the universe at just getting the fear mongers to shut up.)

*I freely acknowledge that the founding fathers’ idea of a new American identity were limited to white men only, and for most only land-owning white men. Doesn’t mean democracy is a bad idea, just that the world should be more democratic.

Oh the whiners, the wingers, the “bitch just wants my money”ers. You’ve all heard them. Women just trap men with surprise pregnancies so they can get those big child support bucks and the courts are just stacked against the poor dudely types.
You all know I love to debunk the MRA mythology. First and foremost, 70 percent of all child support cases in the country are in arrears. That means that 70 percent of all non custodial parents, mostly dudes, aren’t paying support on time. In many states, over 50 percent of child support cases haven’t had a single payment made in the last 12 months. (Numbers are from the US census, go forth and google).

But what about the “all the courts are stacked against the dads” myth?

Just a minute ago I was looking at my own child support case online (current back support owed is over $46,000) and ran across this little bit of info:
For those of you who can’t read the screen shot, that would be 5 resources for dads to 1 (one, uno, singular) for moms.

MRAs, full of shit. They just don’t want to take care of their kids.

So I’m reading ecconned and I’ve been thinking about propaganda. Corrente had a great piece on “The Fear” that desperate last act of the fauxgressives to make us vote D, or else the republicans will happen and the world will be worse off. Or not.

Yves Smith points out that in economics the neoclassical theory has been that even though it only works in a perfect world, working at second best with all the complications that are stripped out of the theoretical model will still get you to a perfect system. But that’s a load of crap. It not only won’t get you to a perfect system, but you will end up way more fucked up than you would have been if you just kept bartering with your neighbors. (It’s the A-Prime/C-Prime theorem by Diedre McCloskey. You should read it even though it’s a pdf. It will help you understand this post and a lot of other shit too.

But what if that same nice theory, doesn’t work in real life thing is true of our political system. What if we’ve been striving for second best democracy, only to end up with kleptocracy because second best democracy isn’t really democratic at all?

So if the idea is that we can’t have a perfect democracy (too many people for us to vote on every single little issue, have reps do that for us instead blah blah blah) we can have near perfect. Except near perfect is anything but. With democracy, we are supposed to have representation of everyone, unlike the previous system where only those acting in the king’s best interest were represented. But we still have a king (or kings) class. It’s just now they don’t have to worry about any actual governing because the people have the illusion that they are doing that themselves, what with the voting and the choice between the king’s rep who wears blue ties or the king’s rep who wears red ties. But make no mistake, both are working for the king. But you know, we do get to vote so it is technically democratic. We have democracy within the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it.

Anyways, I just cleaned out the mod que (so sorry peeps! I can’t check the que on my phone and this is literally the first time I’ve been in front of a real compy in months) and it was full of screaming obamabots who think I am just as bad as a tea partier because I won’t bow to the supreme leader. I have to wonder what those self-labeling liberals would say if they realized that they are the political equivalent of NAFTA champions and people who want to kill the epa and end public schools.

Anyways, it’s a working theory. Not quite fleshed out. Feel free to fill in the blanks and check my work. I do find that the realization that this kind of democracy doesn’t work actually doesn’t make me any less democratic. Actually, I’m becoming more radical about it. Fuck elections. We should just draw social security numbers out of a hat every few years and choose our reps that way. Everybody goes in the hat. Everybody gets a chance to serve. But I haven’t figured out how we would kill the bureaucrat class that would pop up as the power behind the peeps if we did that. We still need their technical skills, but they would become the entrenched power players.