Social Extinction

Jello Biafra. That name evokes reactions, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not with his effusive declarations. He got your attention. That’s all the matters.

I saw him at a Ralph Nader rally in Long Beach in 2000. He is very well-spoken and over-the-top. He’s great! More Liberals can stand to lose those sticks that are lodged firmly up their asses and act with the panache and defiance that Biafra does. Conservatives…? Well, by definition they have every manner of long, cylindrical objects shoved up their asses, so there’s no use trying to fix that.

Jello is a wild man. He’s a crazy fuck! He’s my favorite ideologue of any stripe even though I disagree with many of his opinions.

Here he is at the Coachella music festival yesterday.

What in the hell is going on in Massachusetts?
Gunfire, two suspects, a carjacked Mercedes, explosives tossed out the window.

Los Angeles seems civilized in comparison.

Ivy League blue-blooded Massachusetts is the last place I figured to pin such upheaval on.

Now the question remains. WTF Massachusetts.

Is this all part of an underlying tumult or all the nuts joining in the anarchistic fray?

I love some of the photos circulating with shady, swarthy men of dubious character lingering moments before the Boston Bombs exploded the other day.

Beyond being a matter of serious business, which it obviously should be, it’s also the stuff of comic fodder.

For instance, this random marathon photo shows two of the “suspects.” Is this not the perfect Halloween duo costume idea for 2013? We’re two wild and “Arabic-looking” guys!

NY Post

And there is this cute profiling/sleuthing graphic from Infowars.

This is me!

1: ALONE Of course. When am I not alone? Even in large crowds I make sure to be alone and apart as much as possible. My physical separation is striking, and I’m sure, very noticeable to concerned authorities and vigilant do-gooders.

2: BROWN What do you think? Mexicans, by nature, are the epitome of “brown.”

3: Black backpack I have a black backpack and I can frequently be spotted with it. Sometimes I carry a heavy load and the distended bag can be construed as containing a pressure cooker. In fact, I’ve thought of carrying a pressure cooker around before we need permits to buy even those. That would freak folks out.

4: Not watching I am always alienated from my environment and I try to avoid acknowledging it. I pride myself on not looking more than 3 people in the eye during my work commutes. And marathons are surely the most boring events ever. They rank up there with the scintillating world of spectator golf. At such an exciting event, my eyes would most likely be anywhere but on the course. Yawn.

After a night of uneasy dreams, I awoke to a world where my social hang-ups made me suspicious.

This is bullshit.

Let Kevin Curtis go.

What has he done wrong? Who has he harmed?

Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, was arrested Wednesday at his home in Corinth, near the Tennessee state line about 50 miles north of Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo.

For allegedly mailing Ricin granules to His Holiness Barack and some other inbred RW Southern politician? Oh Heavens.

Is the legal system designed to deter, or to punish?

This is his Elvis performance. Don’t all Southern White boys have one?

If you send obvious poison to the President in an envelope, you can be generally confident that it will never reach its target. The only true, dangerous assassins are those who spring from dark theaters or grassy knolls. These are men who intend to kill.

Men who send lethal toxins via the (very outdated, archaic) US mail have no intention of killing.

They want attention in a world that pays no attention to anyone who doesn’t join the consumerist, conformist, ambitionist chorus. Let Kevin Curtis go. He’s had his 15 minutes. His day in the sun.

Kevin is just a guy and guys are fucked in 2013 America.

If we’re going to throw legal “books” around, let’s implicate, try and arrest, every single rotten institutionalized enemy who calls D.C. his or her employment address.

Kevin Curtis hasn’t done a fraction of the damage elected officials have with their meddlesome toxic bureaucracy.

The “toxireaucracy” as I just named it.

There is that strange breed of person for whom it is never too soon.

This is the same person who finds deranged humor in all that is civilized and instinctively sacred.

This is the person for whom it is never too soon. What is wrong with these people?? A great stain of horror and pain blots our collective soul brought in a shocking flash of random carnage, and this person immediately launches into that sharply offensive stance and emits a fountain of alienating humor that others can’t identify with, much less understand.

We are a demented, pathetic group. We can be found anonymously trashing sacred cows all over the internet. We perch anxiously on the heels of disasters and the only difference between us and the typical ambulance-chasing lawyer is that we don’t care to turn the disaster into a vehicle of financial profitability as much as we seek a token glimmer of visceral fame our meme or spontaneous joke may invoke once it makes the global cyber-rounds.

It’s never too soon. Boston? Bah, never too soon.

What do Hitler and the Boston Marathon runners have in common? None of them could manage to finish off a race.

Terribly guilt-ridden humor. Why can’t we take anything seriously? Why can’t we at least act sorrowful and commiserate like the rest of the “normals” who make dramatic and ostentatious displays of sympathy? People die, blood is spilled, and we laugh, we scorn, we look for opportunities to laugh. And amuse.

Is it because we have no heart?

Are we unable to come to terms with human pain, and thus seek to escape it by mocking it?

We are awful and wait for no one.

Photogenic guy meme

We are a despicable bunch, but are we evil? Some, many, would probably concur. But we are not. I don’t believe we are evil. I don’t believe we are heartless or psychopathic. For we realize that some things are painful and “off-limits” but still, we go there. We are the kids who couldn’t abide by self-conscious (and self-important) adult rules. We perpetually flaunted disobedience, not because we enjoyed disobedience per se, but because grave conformity made us laugh, tempted us with its uptight pretension. We are the kids who would get scolded and literally laugh in our scolder’s face. I did this a few times. It was involuntary, but it happens! We are distasteful people.

The world is burning and we look for the closest can of gasoline. We try to formulate fire jokes, we “cleverize” disaster.

I think it’s because we lack empathy. We are unable to close that normal “connection” with others. We are able to connect with those close to us, but beyond that, we are devoid of any sort of kinship. But we are not psychopaths, for we do not seek to inflict pain or suffering. Quite the contrary. We are keen to the vivid blade sharpness of suffering, but because we are so awed and tormented by it, we seek to trivialize it in the most minute and inappropriate behaviors that are sure to abandon any vestige of outward humanity.

We feast on the intimate disconnectedness of modern humanity. We respond to this lack of intimacy with cold, ruthless dehumanization. However, if something of this sort were to happen to a loved one, we would experience the anger and retributive ire that normal people experience even when countrymen thousands of miles away are assaulted. But there are those of us who just can’t summon the passion it takes to embrace the plight of strangers we do not know, regardless of how “similar” they are to us. We are neighbors to no one. We are estranged from the normal cares of mankind. We cannot find a way to invest our emotions to isolated matters of collective gravity that don’t concern us directly.

It’s awful. We are fully aware of the vile nature of our remorseless humor.

But the alternative is just as distasteful. We can never bring ourselves to display societal expected and scripted behavior. While others may force it, we cannot even do that. Whereas in the distant past we subdued this private little purgatory for the sake of existing inconspicuously with others, the internet has unleashed the demons. The demons have always existed but now they come out to play.

It’s 2013. Everything is bigger, vaster, broader, more inflated.

Frames of reference are haywire.

The common fantasy dictated for many generations was that the label of “millionaire” was the ultimate citation of one’s wealth and unbridled prosperity.

Somewhere along the way, during the past 20 years, the flowery aspiration to become a millionaire took a tumble, and whereas being a millionaire once inferred an unflinching life of excess, it now turned into simply a drab moniker for an easy, common and wealthy life that was by no means spectacular, lavish, or wildly elite. Millionaires are everywhere now, it would seem.

Now we speak of “billionaires” as the nouveau monetary fashion statement which separate the have-a-lots from the haves. Billionaires now stand apart as that uniquely “privileged” group that society ostensibly mimics.

“Everyone” wants to be a billionaire. The media and pop culture idolize the new “billionairism” and uphold it as the penultimate form of success and independence. And thus, all subsequent sickening explorations of human shallowness now focus on the attainment of billions as the express fruition of what this Western life is all about. I’m not sure what sickens me more: the news media’s adulation of billionairism, or the simplistic, unsatisfied American public’s half-brained fascination with billionairism! It’s one very disgusting self-engulfing circle of wealth idolatry. The news media spends much time wondering about the lives of billionaires while wondering (on the reader’s behalf) how it is a billionaire becomes one, and ultimately, what can we do to become billionaires too! The problem with this style of thinking is that it cheapens the concept of wealth to such a degree that it inculcates a mentality among the peasants that billionairism is attainable simply because there is present in our heart an inkling and desire that we can become billionaires as well.

The other day I was reminded of the Cult of Billionairism when I saw this article on CNBC, “Are Billionaires Just Smarter Than Everyone Else?” What pooey. As if there is a one-stop solution that will halt our life of meandering mediocrity. As if billionairism is just a couple of strategic and quick-witted moves away. As if billionaires can be so easily defined and demarcated with such a predictable formula that anyone can evoke if they wish to be filthy rich as well.

I am bothered by this article and all it represents because 1) it reflects a glorification of wealth as the only means to happiness, and 2) it stresses success as the pure harbinger of material satisfaction. People are dim-witted. They eat this crap up. They do not bother wondering how they will be happy because they have bought into the Western money-obsessive paradigm, to the degree than they have lost any healthy sense of skepticism when considering massive personal wealth. In fact, cynicism is seen by many American materialists as a sort of quasi-socialism and rebellion that disqualifies membership in the billionaire club. Cynicism is a bad word if you’re striving to be successful for it denotes, in the eyes of money-hungry urchins, defeatism.

Curiously, when all is said and done, the bottom line is that billionaires are essentially split along intellectual lines just like the rest of society. Some billionaires are very intelligent (the only delineation the research built upon was college alumni association as a proxy for IQ) and some are average, and the very intelligent ones are products of the new information society whereas the older breed is a product of the nuts and bolt manufacturing and creation sector of yore.. Ultimately, billionaires are typically a more intelligent breed, but not to the degree in which we can state that intelligence is the sole precursor to wealth.

Even among billionaires, however, there are wide variations in brainpower. Billionaires who made their fortunes from investments and technology were far more likely to be in the top one percent of brains; 69 percent and 63 percent of them were brain-one-percenters. Billionaires who made their money in fashion and retail, as well as food and beverage, were less brainy: with 25 percent and 23 percent of them in the brain elite, respectively.

I suspect many billionaires were “lucky” in the respect they chose their parents wisely or they struck that unique gold vein that trumped all other similar veins for a long period of time by which to establish their own proprietary cash cow that no one else could undercut due to institutionalization of the product over time. I would hedge my definition of luck here because obviously, the genetic billionaire legacy is pure luck, however those who discovered that special lucrative niche were lucky but also supremely motivated to turn their luck into a fortune. Good luck abounds but still, not everyone transforms it into billions of dollars.

More than anything, billionaires, at the onset of their trajectory, were willing to invest their life in this avenue of monetary escape.

Personally, I don’t understand why anyone wants to be a billionaire. Or more specifically, who would want to devote their life to that?

Now, if someone was to offer me a billion dollars while demanding absolutely nothing in return, of course I would take the money. I’m not an idiot! However, I cannot fathom a situation where I would be personally driven to work towards the attainment of so much money. I don’t give a crap about billions of dollars. I barely give a crap about thousands. The work, time and commitment required to make billions of dollars is noxious to me. My life is too short and meaningless to spend it on trivial and fruitless excursions into prosperity. Yay, I have found a way to earn billions of dollars! Now my life is structured around the maintenance of that fortune. Furthermore, especially in the case of magical sums of money that perpetuate themself merely by their financial self-replicating mass, thus removing you (the billionaire) from further personal investment in the collection of money, most people cannot just walk away. Billionaires don’t simply “stop” the minute they earn that much money. It becomes an addiction and a sick competition.

Money is slavery and possession of money is absolute slavery regardless of your lifestyle. Under the spell of billions of dollars, there is no independence. I don’t care how much someone can claim “financial independence,” this is just a mealy-mouthed way of saying “independence from worry about money.” Not freedom from worry. Your identity is so interwoven with your fortune that one cannot exist without the other.

Some might accuse me of sour grapes. This is not even close. I do not begrudge anyone for their wealth. I don’t care if someone chooses to spend their life becoming wealthy. I don’t dislike rich people simply because they are rich or that they prioritize money. I rather appreciate many of the finer things in life, from a distance, which is about as close as I am allowed. I would never key a Lambo or piss on a Beverly Hills lawn. That is their world, this is mine. I’m happy, just as they are happy.

I need less, and thus require less. Happiness is mine, just as satisfaction is yours. I just don’t need anyone telling me that the only route to happiness is paved in banknotes.

There is that moment when.

It may happen violently, or in the quiet solitude of your bedroom slumber when you find you don’t have power or breath to yell for help. The moon lingers in the dark sky outside the window, the last image your setting life witnesses before the…final…heartbeat.

That moment when you cross the line.

In all death, there is that moment. It is brief, in some case, incomprehensibly brief, even in the quantum sense. It is gone as quickly as it began from the mortal perspective. There is that moment when your life crosses the bridge into death, the moment that biological physics still prop up the incongruousness of your physical habitat before it can know that the forces residing are gone and before it can dutifully relinquish hold of those forces.

It’s the moment when.

The structural impudence of your physical body obeys gravity and mechanics and the flickering life signal, ebbing, dying, has left the body faster than it can collapse. This is the moment when.

That moment is a fraction of a blink, of a heartbeat. It’s the moment life leaves your body, but your plodding, physical form is unable to keep pace with the speed of light, the speed of life.

It’s that moment two divergent paths of reality exiting your life split and run closely, but not quite, parallel, so that their effects still weakly interact, similar to how the sound of a distant explosion trails weakly on the heels of the visible white ignition which reached you moments before.

It’s that moment before your body joins the frozen lands of mortality, your soulless shell.

It’s that zombie, fugue moment, the fleeting moment it takes your dead body to be dead.

That zombie moment.

I am beginning to really dislike the word “stereotype.” Not for what it is, but for the way it’s misused. I dislike how social crusaders distort the word and in turn, mar the accurate definition for gullible society and thus lead the mass of idiots down the wormhole of incomprehensibility and collective “offense.”

The two guys on this panel seem pretty realistic about the Mexican Barbie and allegations it is “stereotypical,” but Miller ricochets off on her feminist/racial tangent. The allegations that are cited as reasons the doll is stereotypical are dumb. Facts and patterns are not stereotypical. Pointing out the unspoken truths we know about group is stereotypical. The Mexican Barbie has a Chihuahua. Big deal. Chihuahua’s are a dog breed originating in Mexico. How is that a stereotype as opposed to a fact? Now if the Barbie came with a Hometown Buffet coupon booklet or if Mattel also released a “Barbie Low-rider Monte Carlo,” then it might be argued these are stereotypical because they are not exclusively Mexican props and are only intertwined with the Mexican persona in our communal knowledge (ie, unofficial observations). Stereotypes exist when we presume to predict a person’s behavior based on unofficial life observation we’ve made of the group they originate from. In fact, I would argue that “stereotypes” are not really bad or good. They simply are. Stereotypes are often true.

Rather, I disagree with the Stephanie Millerian social crusading treatment of the word to connote and infer that even factual truths must not be uttered or acknowledged. I’m surprised Miller didn’t take offense to the fact that the doll has black hair. Stereotype!

Actually, Stephanie Miller is a stereotype. Man-jawed, socially responsible, over-bearing no-nonsense wench.

Charmingly, perhaps malevolently, in the URL, they are referred to as “fatcat” reports, a shortened hybrid of “fatality/catastrophe.” Published by the US Department of Labor, they are a horrendous summary of weekly on-the-job accidental deaths, hence the presence of the OSHA monikers. The description of said reports, referred to as the Weekly Reports of Fatalities, Catastrophes, and Other Events, is stated thus:

This table provides links to weekly summaries of fatalities and catastrophes resulting in the hospitalization of three or more workers. Employers must report these incidents to OSHA within eight hours. The summaries below include only preliminary information, as reported to OSHA Area Offices or to States which operate OSHA-approved State Plans. OSHA investigates all work-related fatalities and catastrophes. Once an OSHA investigation is complete, the summary report will be updated with a webpage link to the corresponding inspection, which will list citation information.

A weekly listing of reports dating back to October, 2012, follows For those interested in older incidents of workplace mayhem, there is also another area called the Fatalities and Catastrophe Archive page.

A quick perusal of random OSHA-reported accidents will let you read countless battles of man vs machinery, and the outcomes always favors the machine. You’ll read brief summaries of workers getting pressed, flattened, dropped, electrocuted, baked…the manners of occupational death are endless. You will learn that falling from a six-foot ladder can have fatal consequences, and you will witness the catastrophic damage that tree limbs and runaway tractors can create, and who would have guessed so many people are crushed to death on the job in the course of a regular week?

This is fodder for the demented. Who can find entertainment value in this stuff? Besides me.

When we think of occupational death, dramatic failures of good sense and rampaging steel machinery turned on its operators with bloody, meaty results, comes to mind. Reading the summaries is disconcerting because the dearth of specifics leads a sick mind like my own to ruminate on the incident in question, and further, to create a small narrative in order to fill in the back story, however inaccurate it might be. Bolstered by my bleak imagination, the back story is always gruesomely vivid and unfailingly horrifying.

The one fatality which caught my eye and provided an endless mysterious imaginary narrative regards the real estate agent in Indiana who, while showing a house to prospective buyers, was killed when the simple light switch she flicked on triggered a gas-driven ball of fire that burned her lethally.

Click to enlarge

Holy crap!

I’ve heard of this but I’ve always suspected it was an exaggerated urban myth. What crappy luck the poor lady had. I wonder if her customers still bought the house, or at least asked for a continuation of the tour from another unscathed real estate agent? Those people are typically so money-hungry and ruthlessly aggressive, I can very well imagine a back-up was waiting to continue the sale once the charred realtor was taken away. I wonder if an incident like this might put a damper on house-hunting for a while. “Honey, let’s just stay in this apartment a litte longer…”

And the date. That damned date! Who the hell wants to receive a call like that on April Fool’s Day? This is the last day of the year you’d want your sense of tragedy hinging on a fluke event.