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For the true money-maker, a constancy of growth forms its own reason for being. Sustaining a percentage increase over an unspecified time period becomes the only focus, the only sign of life for those who succeed at it. This single-mindedness is not mindlessness, but a focus--the pitch of which drives anyone of lesser crystallization into a subsidiary position socially.

It isn't a problem of an "architecture" that worked (without reaching a penultimate point), but rather a condition of success--where the concentrated talents of leadership within an unspecified region has built a fief within the society at large.

California is special in this respect. Its physical charms attract an especially focused group of people who oeprate within a society so devoid of necessity, and largely following a rumour of success (as opposed to an ability to succeed). The lesser group, being the larger, feel an entitlement that reflects the overarching arrogance of those whose entitlement truly is earned--albeit earned at the cost of those less motivated.

Government interventions in this millieu are invariably bad--they create sensations of entitlement, reduce motivation and initiative, and all to often are subject to manipulation by those who have secured their fief.

Lest we forget, there's a real role played by locale, environment, access, philosophical and moral stimulation--as those in the fief reduce access to the same, those outside the fief diminish in capacity and capability in an inverse percentage to that profit so essential to the single-mindedly successful.

In this information age, we are inundated by truths
In seeking to find an essential to grasp, we distillate those truths
To the best of our ability, each distillation overlaid by the onset of additonal truth

There's no real indication of which truths are true, especially given the plethora of information
And there's no essential to grasp, or to measure the distillate, and so
Truth becomes that convenient moment of enticement or repulsion
In any measure strong enough to momentarily block the access of information.

Like it or not, we're having a lot more dialogue on race--usually incidentally, than we have had in a while.

Its a good thing, this airing out of dirty linen, a refresh of the human psyche for the future--we are going to that future together, so it might as well be cooperatively.

The parallel situation is those who use the tangible facets of said dialogue to increase the value of their own, or silence their critics. It is a shameful fact that those whose power derives from demogaguery are so easy in their use of racial assumptions and divides to innoculate their competition.

I've heard it said (and in some cases seen it evidenced) that the British live lives of "quiet desperation."

I've listened to both sides of the pond ruminate on the qualities of the other, and in distilling the rhetoric, I would say the only difference for an American is that he lives a life of "raucous desperation."

It is my understanding that one of the fundamental precepts of capitalism is the principle of "private property." This condition has been held up as the antithesis of community property promulgated by socialist treatises, and has remained durable throughout many changes in political tendencies.

So long as private property remains private whether it is profitable or loss-making, balance is retained. A venture of any risk/reward, is and should be a free market operation. Hence, when the government considers that property which is not profitable should become public, simultaneously retaining the privacy and immediacy of profitable property, the conditions of an injustice and an imbalance are allowed to exist and actively encouraged by the executive.

Where do the courts stand...with a rubber stamp in hand? The philosophical misnomer is substantial, and the barefaced revelation that ours is a plutocracy with a democratic veneer should be the wake up call for citizens of any leaning that their opinion requires airing and enforcement.

Gun control is stupid. The concept that by eliminating weapons, society eliminates the crime is so absurd it beggars comprehension.

Guns are inanimate objects, last time I checked. It requires an active effect from a decision-making agent to operate, and even thus, only is effective through careful and considered activity.

This same argument also works against so-called 'temporary insanity.' If you can kill, you are not insane enough to escape consequence--even where passions are overarching.

"The power to ban crime, unexpressed, commands crime."

"The problem with the death penalty is that there is no way to mete justice to the dead."

Justice is a fallacy, where the state requires its citizens to abdicate their power of protection in favour of civic force--as civic force is never immediate, never pro-active, and seldom engaged. Terms of division, such as "justice" versus "vigilantism" only serve to demonstrate the need of the statist elements to secure their prime position as arbiters of things relevant to what should be the purlieus of the citizen--including the directives that propel the same state to exist and to seek to extend its existence indefinitely and in despite of its constituents...it is a shame of modern "democracy" that citizen apathy grants so much room for abuse to the state.

The first solid sign of the decay of any society is the regular sound of people saying "I'm just doing my job..."

"And will boredom overcome a people who, having fought for leisure, are afflicted by their victory?"

One of those days...so mach bad news! Enjoy the collected, concentrated human lunacy of the planet. Exposed! All the irrational mongering for this and that you can stomach, and then some more...

What goes on on this silly ball of mud and slush? All that drinking millions of years of collected and recycled dinosaur urine getting us down? We've got murder, mayhem, and Islam...we have apathy, greed, and Christianity...we have brutality, selfishness, and Judaism...we have insecurity, incompetence, and Buddhism...you name it, we have it, and its solution--final, or ongoing, and yes, ongoing is so much more profitable.

I loathe ignorant people, which means I loathe people. And why, dear conscience, did I ever move my person into this dismal suburb? There is no other god here than money. But where will I go that is different?

Poverty is a problem. It must be solved by the impoverished. Top-down assistance is assistance, but that word never meant 'solution.' Rather than welfare, if wealthier nations want to obviate the problem, they must work to creating opportunities. Poverty is not evil, nor is it the fault of the wealthy; blame is incorrect, victimology is misleading, and quick-fixes are quick but not necessarily fixes, except maybe in the sense that a dose of heroin is a fix.

There is a certain pleasure in mediocrity, knowing that I don't have to fight to prove my worth at the 'top' of some imaginary hierarchy. Are we goats, that we must vie for some useless position at the pinnacle of whatever object we might see?

And how then can I deny that I too have looked and seen a lofty point, and wished to be the one sitting there; for the acclaim and desire of those beneath me. Is this some validation of my person, some means of alleviating the insecurity of having been born just a man? What awful concepts will the will of society create--each growing less worthwhile as society furthers its degradation and assumption?

Superheroes and Heroes

And we need superheroes, since we abdicated the viable man--no commoner may save the world we have devised.

Shame on us, thinking that simple men couldn't create, and that simple men cannot preserve--yet what must be preserved is a thing already senescent, being no longer in the process of creation--necessarily dying.

What of these young idealists who stand around our bank fortress with sheets full of propaganda--Will they change something, do they believe they will change something, what purpose do they have--is it presumption that makes them think they will have an effect on the suffering of others?

Sterility

Or something odd, something a bit different, something exotic. Stimulated by alternatives--I seek to reinvent myself through association with something new (association can mean intercourse, can't it?)

Are you an elitist bureaucrat? Have you allowed your lifestyle, here with slickness and wealth, to influence the way you envision the poverty-stricken? As if in being so, their condition is a result of their existence. A choice perhaps, just as your own choices led to your success? And how that success makes for a model of behaviour? One which sees you working in tandem with the like-minded to establish patterns of behaviour--parameters, as it were, that are boundaries to the poverty-stricken, keeping them from attaining betterment?

Is it better to be bourgeois and strive for the bourgeoiseeing of the plebes and proles? Or is it better to allow the division of humanity to exist in its current state and allow people to graduate between the levels, rather than redefining the levels themselves, or solidifying the position of someone in their level, a freeze of immobility economically through bureaucratic intervention?

Denial

The favour of the bureaucrats, why desire it? And the ridicule of people, for their proclivity to denial? In denying the obvious, people are not creating a new reality, but denying the reality of this one. This one--is it mine?

How strangely I feel, sitting now in this bungalow, on the edge of an impoverished city--fingering my WorldBank ID.