is a long march away from integrity and toward survivability. The two are, after all, mutually exclusive. To have integrity is to be dead. To be alive is to be a selfish asshole.

So much the better, I suppose.

Americans are the stupidest motofotos on the face of the earth. We have been running record budget deficits for the entirety of the Bush administration. The CBO says that the deficit for the next fiscal year will be $490 billion if everything works out okay. $490,000,000,000.00.

And we are still having a “national dialogue” on “whether or not” we should end the war in Iraq that is costing us $200 million a day. $200,000,000.00 every day.

Last year, the US paid $406 billion in interest on our national debt. $406,000,000,000.00.

That is our annual interest payment right now, and we are increasing our debt, borrowing money to fund a $200,000,000.00 a day war, which means that our interest payments are going to keep getting higher and higher. Much higher and higher. We do not have the money for this war.

Last year every man, woman, and child who pays taxes in this country personally paid $2,400.00 in interest on our debt. Do you have that kind of money to spare? Don’t forget, paying interest doesn’t pay off any of the actual debt, like the $490,000,000,000.00 that we’re adding to the debt this year (see above) of the $200,000,000.00 we’re spending every day in Iraq.

If we don’t increase our debt any more at all, our national debt is already nearly $10 trillion. $10,000,000,000,000.00. That is $60,000.00 for every man, woman, and child that pays taxes in this country. That is how much you, as an American Taxpayer, owe to the rest of the world already. Can you afford to pay it? Don’t forget, you will also owe accumulating interest as you pay it off. It is another mortgage.

And that’s not all. Now, the demand curve for worldwide oil shows that oil prices will continue to remain high, even as our economy slips and our ability to bring money in becomes weaker. What if other countries stop investing in us? What’s to keep them lending? We don’t pay much interest in comparison to, say, Europe (we can’t afford to pay more interest!) so it makes investors more money to go with the Euro… Not to mention many of them may start to doubt that the U.S. will actually be able to pay them back if push comes to shove. But we can’t afford to lose our investors… because of course we’re $500 billion short every year in running our government. We need to borrow the money or our country will shut down.

Basically, anyone who actually “thinks” about whether we should be in Iraq or not as they go to vote this year is a damn fucking fool who is going to be shocked, shocked, shocked when we stumble into a second great depression next presidential cycle or when we slip into hyperinflation and they find themselves at the store with their $20,000 weekly paycheck faced with $80,000 loaves of bread and $240,000 gallons of milk.

Stupid, stupid Americans. And stupid, stupid candidates for even “having a debate” about whether we should be in Iraq. If you can’t afford something, you can’t afford it. Middle class Americans know better than to go out and take a $14 million personal loan to buy a mansion with their $40,000 plumber’s income. Why exactly do they not understand the same thing when it comes to running the country and the economy?

since the last day like this

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there is no hate or anger in me these days, just despair

Yet another one.

—

I could run my hands over a smooth river stone for the rest of my live and never become bored.

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Remorse is for the weak.

for the record,

for the first time in a while:

Life sucks. And humans suck twice as much.

On any given day,
gray,
cloudy,
filled with rain,
the roads can take you there.

Ten miles or
twenty,
winding, in wind-swept
solitude, hands on wheel,
you drive.

Along the coast,
you pass hauntings,
ghosts of peoples’ pasts,
docks, boats, footprints,
and voices hung in air.

At length you are at the shore,
final edge of the sea;
around you seagulls, unsatsfied,
call out your name in foreign tongues.
“Are you still alive?”

You pause,
waves lapping at your feet,
smelling the salt air.
You bend; you collect a rock;
you skip it.

You wonder.

where they draw lines in the sand trying to get you to cross them. They get so focused on trying to show you up that they forget to wonder how they’ll feel if you actually do cross them. I’ve done it to others. Others have done it to me. It’s one of the most counterproductive things that can be done, and it’s human nature, a common habit.

It always pays, before drawing a line in the sand to embarrass someone, to wonder whether you’ll be very upset if they actually surprise you and cross the line that you’ve drawn, especially if you’ve drawn it hastily and angrily.

No sense in goading people into doing things they otherwise might not have done, especially if they’re things you’d rather not see happen. It’s like world leaders saying to each other “Go ahead, launch the bomb, you coward!” expecting to be able to follow it up with “I know you wouldn’t do it—you’re weak!” but instead finding themselves in the midst of a nuclear winter.

The old story.

“Dammit why are you so qualified?” on Thanksgiving, and “Why the fuck are you so lazy?” on Christmas. “Wow, you have a lot of degrees and experience!” on St. Patrick’s Day and “Jesus you are a layabout!” on April Fool.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just lucky and people keep giving me stuff.

You can’t escape yourself.

I guess I’m the stealth worker/stealth achiever. I apparently never earned a thing.

I am frustrated enough to be tempted to break my phone in half.

Presumably I am more mature than before and won’t…

Just everything.

—

I am as unwilling to sacrifice today for tomorrow as I am unwilling to sacrifice tomorrow for today.

—

All anyone has ever wanted in the world is to be heard.

—

Life = not so amazingly cool.

—

Receeding. Recession. Distance. Memory. Fading. Haze. Recollection. Loss. Immediacy. Overshadowing. Invisibility. Forgotten.

lead to a shared conflict. Right now life is a mess and nobody is happy.

Rocky.

Thoughts.

Self.

Trust.

Familiarity.

Risk.

Danger.

What separates rich from poor is the ability to maintain (while still feeding oneself) a reservoir of available and readily deployable mental capital with which to have interesting thoughts and productive internal strategy sessions.

—

I used to blog. Insightfully, even.

—

Life for the rest of us is about paying for things that we need to have in order to be able to keep paying for things. It’s certainly not about “being who we are” or “knowing what we think.” These things are the province of the rich, who will—regrettably—likely not find themselves against the wall anytime soon.

…who would you rather see representing the U.S. abroad and/or trying to get the U.S. out of the damned mess that Bush started in Iraq? The contestants can be seen below. I wonder if you can spot the difference in their capability levels by observing both of them on recent trips to visit the Middle East:

-versus-

of everything.

to change the name of this blog to “refugee blog” to reflect our state of continually being on the run, an extralegal cross-border, cross-species family, for the forseeable future.

Hurrah for the hateful bile of humanity.

—

It is inevitable that humanity will eat itself in a fit of seriousness and probity.