Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

NUMBER ONE: The Nobel Peace of the Dead Prize

Today on Democracy Now! a discussion about the five wars the United States is now conducting.

And a musical number from another decade:

MEANWHILE a murder of malcontents maligns the malevolence manifest in modern mediocracy, (misnamed meritocracy,) or mayhaps, merely malingers, merrily mocking the moribund monks who marvel at the masters’ megalomaniacal might.

Now segregated from the general blogroll in the sidebar here at The Stump, the Malcontents are a group of friends with a penchant for borderline incestuous cross-promotion of memes and inside jokes, and known to regurgitate quotes from The Big Lebowski when cornered. I FUCK YOU! YOU CANNOT HURT ME! I BELIEVE IN NOSSING! [See also.]

WE AREN’T HYSTERICALSERIOUS ENOUGH in our response to the Nigerian Christmas would-be terrorist plane bomber. So says Donald Douglas, partisan windbag.

In another of his posts, Douglas characterizes the event as a “threat of potentially catastrophic proportions.” He mentions, among other things, the lack of a “screening system or requirement in place at international airports that will detect explosives.”

Perhaps this type of screening at airports simply isn’t feasible. Surely a cost-benefit analysis, a pragmatic calculation which shouldn’t be that hard to understand for self proclaimed fiscal conservatives. It goes something like this:

[If the video doesn't work here, it can be viewed on YouTube]
UPDATE: If the video doesn’t work here and comes up as “blocked” on YouTube, it can be downloaded here. Fair use, motherfuckers!

When such a screening process proves unfeasible, new rules are implemented instead. No walking about the plane, or covering up with a blanket for the last hour of a flight. Really? No watching live television news on board? Come on, you authorities aren’t even trying anymore in your attempts to prove you’re doing something to protect the traveling public.

In all seriousness, impractical fantasy response, and absurd actual response to this (failed!) attack aside, why respond at all? Terrorism ain’t nothin’ to be afraid of it’s so rare. You don’t worry this much about lightening strikes or shark attacks, do you? If you’re really really risk averse, you can easily avoid international terrorist attacks by religious radicals by staying home.

There’s the solution: personal responsibility. Crying to the Daddy State to protect you from every conceivable harm is absurd. Familiarize yourself with the latest terrorist tactics. Decide how you would choose to respond to them in the unlikely event, and train your body and mind in those responses. Demand that the authorities report the nature of the threats we face so that the public is as informed as is possible. (If the existing protocol for dealing with hijackers, for example, were to go along with their demands and allow the experts to do the negotiating, and intelligence comes in that says terrorists may try to use hijacked planes as missiles, change the protocol! And publicize the change so the people know what they might be up against.)

That said, in all fairness, Donald Douglas isn’t a hand-wringing Daddy State type. He’s deeper than that! (more…)

IT CAN’T BE over-exaggerated how freeing it is to renounce faith in high school Civics class mythology, and stop following national “politics” as if it were something people exert meaningful control over. At least, we’ve tried to stop following it, or to do so with a clearer head, and limiting our occasional remarks to the nature of the beast, as opposed to issuing calls to action. The latest spectacle our overlords have regaled us with, so called heath care reform, has provided ample opportunity to take note of folks weighing in doing just that.

Political activist and blogger Jane Hamsher is taking flack from every direction, (say it ain’t so, Blue Gal!), mainly for this, among other things.

Look, if Washington DC deserves anything at all from The People, it’s more defeatism. (See also the defeatists!) Hamsher has come round to the defeatist health care position that we have advocated right here in this space. And for good reason!

We only point this out because we love you.

Hail Krampus! Io Saturnalia! Thank goodness for the solstice! Have a great long weekend, everybody!

PLEASE TURN TO PAGE 246 in your songbook, to Saint Steven’s hymn, Shoplifters of the World Unite.

Man Bites God

Father Jones, 42, was discussing Mary and the birth of Jesus when he went on to the subject of how poor and vulnerable people cope in the run-up to Christmas.

‘My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,’ he told his stunned congregation at St Lawrence and St Hilda in York.

‘I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

‘I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

‘I would ask them not to take any more than they need. I offer the advice with a heavy heart. Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift. [Daily Mail]

Concerned, friendly atheist, Hemant Mehta, zooms past the myriad moral issues that result in modern-day people finding themselves poor, vulnerable, struggling to make ends meet and running out of options. He zeroes in instead on the hairsplitting he groks the priest is engaging in:

Because burglary is very different from shoplifting? [Mehta]

Well, when you really look at it, yes. Yes it is.

Burglary is personal. The victim feels that their home, their personal space has been violated. If the victim is also struggling to get along in lean times, they are harmed in their need for the stolen effects.

Shoplifting from a large national business, as the priest specifies, is not personal because a large national business is not a person. What’s more, being large, it is more able to absorb petty losses to shoplifting.

This priest, religious context aside, offers sound, pragmatic advice for people who find themselves languishing toward the left end of our graphical diagram of human nature, that is, people that could be said to be ethically justified in the use of force for self preservation.

“I would ask them not to take any more than they need,” is sound, pragmatic advice for everyone, in a general sense. Especially for those who approach life in society with deference to subsistence.

Books that Changed Me: A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz

HERE IS A FANTASTIC PIECE of literature. It’s been featured previously in this space. The novel manages to hit upon all of the recurring themes rattling around inside Your Montag’s head, and clinging tenuously to the pages of this blog.

Question Everything:

“People always complain about having no shoes until they see a man with no feet, then they complain about not having an electric wheelchair. Why? What makes them automatically transfer themselves from one dull system to another, and why is free will utilized only on details and not on the broad outlines–not ‘Should I work?’ but ‘Where should I work?’ and not ‘Should I start a family?’ but ‘When should I start a family?’ Why is it that we don’t suddenly swap countries so that everyone in France moves to Ethiopia and everyone in Ethiopia moves to Britain and everyone in Britain moves to the Caribbean and so on until we have finally shared the earth like we were supposed to and shed ourselves of our shameful, selfish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical loyalty to dirt? Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?” [290-291]

What if you had the wherewithal, the freedom and the means, to choose a life outside of the spectacle? How might such a life change you?

(more…)

[Cross posted at Reading the Spectacle]

The internet is a medium of the spectacle. When you read Reading the Spectacle you are, in a sense, literally reading the spectacle.

“In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught.”

One might say the internet is a less alienated form of communication, in that amateur creators of free content are afforded the freedom to publish their work in a free to inexpensive forum, relatively free from the constraints of commercial and/or political interests, (though this doesn’t mean entities like Google or deviantART or YouTube won’t exploit the display of such work for spectacular commerce with context-sensitive smart advertising.) Even so, the internet isn’t going to remain as free as it is forever.

REMEMBER this post? (One of our self-proclaimed greatest hits!) Even in our criticism, we bought into the larger lie.

Well, as it turns out, we’ve now got information — new shit has come to light. Or one might say, new questions have been raised, and the (Obama!) administration is doing everything it can to prevent new shit from coming to light.

How do you like Obama now?

THIS ISN’T SO MUCH a blog post as it is a series of block quotes that needed to be collected in one place.

The Wall Street Journal:

As traders and investment bankers near the finish line of what looks like a boom year for pay, some are spending money like the financial crisis never happened. From $15,000-a-week Caribbean getaways to art auctions to $200,000 platinum wristwatches that automatically adjust for leap years, signs of the good life are returning. [WSJ]

Alice Schroeder:

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank. [Schroeder]

LENIN’S TOMB:

… There is a staggering amount of spare capacity in the economy. Existing productive resources lie unused, while social needs are unmet, because there is no profitable means by which such resources might be used. Companies are not investing, and are not hiring. The banks are still not lending, preferring to hoard funds against future shocks, because their managers do not believe there are sufficient profitable investment opportunities in the economy. This situation is actually absurd. We have, collectively, all the means we require to house, feed, educate and employ the population, but we may not dispose of those means because there is no profit in doing so. [LENIN]

Samuel Gompers (circa 1892):

“Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?” [Gompers]

WSJ via ladypoverty, Alice Schroeder via Corrente, LENIN via, well, me, Samuel Gompers via Anakin.