Friday, June 24, 2016

U.K. exits European Union

With all the political savvy of a clothes pin, I can hardly claim the right to comment on the United Kingdom's vote to divorce itself from the European Union. I thought yesterday's vote would be to remain part of the union. In the event, voters signed the divorce papers and from where I sit, it feels like war... again. But as I say, my sense of the growing divide between wealth and poverty, the rise of feudalism, and the bureaucrat-instilled fear may be ill-informed and perhaps mediocrity will not necessarily prevail.

Still, with real estate tycoon Donald Trump strutting the American political hallways and spouting uninformed bullying gibberish,  perhaps it is time for those who work for a living to reclaim some larger portion of the economic pie. "If," the Somali security officer once said, "you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you."

The rise of mediocrity. The enthroning of self-referential ignorance. All hail, Israel.

I think I should return to clipping the sheets to the laundry line.

1 comment:

  1. Human population doubled over the last 40 years. I can see it on the highways and in the growth of towns from when i was young until now. I can only conclude that the result is the doubling of stupidity over the last 40 years, which will double again in the next 30 or so.

    I read a study when i was young, done by doctor Calhoun, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun) where he put too many rats in a cage and watched them exhibit an extraordinary variety of mental illness in response. Ultimately they killed and ate each other.

    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink:

    Calhoun had phrased much of his work in anthropomorphic terms, in a way that made his ideas highly accessible to a lay audience.[7] Tom Wolfe wrote about the concept in his article "Oh Rotten Gotham! Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink", later to be made into the last chapter of The Pump House Gang.[10] Lewis Mumford also referenced Calhoun's work in his The City in History,[11] stating that

    “No small part of this ugly barbarization has been due to sheer physical congestion: a diagnosis now partly confirmed with scientific experiments with rats – for when they are placed in equally congested quarters, they exhibit the same symptoms of stress, alienation, hostility, sexual perversion, parental incompetence, and rabid violence that we now find in the Megalopolis.[12]”

    Calhoun's work has been referenced in comic books, including Batman and 2000 AD.[10]

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