Keeping My Head Above Water, Modern Times Edition

Often, my gutter-crawling through politics and the history of revolutions, government, racism, and nastiness, leave me so sad and angry that I don’t know what to do. Add on top of it my leg hurting and the clot-buster drugs, which seem to be making me a bit stupid and low-energy, and I’ve got a real motivational crisis. Oh, yeah, and looming over it all is my certainty that species extinction and the collapse of civilization is hurtling toward us at an accelerating rate. “Why bother?” doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable question; trying anything at all seems to be an act of denial.

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Hot House Flowers

One of the side-effects of the recent focus on police shootings in the US, is that outside agencies are starting to track and publish statistics about the police. Those attempts uncover additional layers of horror; under the shit, there’s more shit.

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Another Dead Oligarch: Bernie Madoff

Madoff made it his life’s work to demonstrate the folly of having insiders within an industry (securities exchange) regulate it. Madoff served with distinction on a number of organizations that purported to be helping make the stock market less scammy – little did they know. And Madoff rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous (whose pockets he was picking, while he was doing it) and politicians (whose pockets he was lining, with the money he picked elsewhere).

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