Crikey's Guy Rundle reports that the Ron Paul era is coming to an end - The storm blows in the crazies to GOP-land.

Tossed palms at the street corners, the fraying and fading porches of Californian bungalows stretching back for kilometres, a low grey sky, and a foul tropical wind … St Petersburg has seen better days.

The city across the bay from Tampa was a product of the Florida land boom of the ’20s, sprawling across the peninsula, grid block after grid block. The boom laid down houses in their tens of thousands, bungalows with Japanese-style roofs and stone pillars, suggesting a new order of healthful nature, exotica, painted yellows and pinks and browns. Shops and garages at each corner, in art deco style — curved lines like cruise liners and seaplane wings, round windows, cherry-red light fittings, the streamlined and moderne, the past’s idea of the future. The city was the place to be in the ’20s. Then the Depression hit, and it’s been going quietly downhill ever since.

Some bungalows have been lovingly restored; others, houses that would give no change from a cool million in Melbourne or Sydney, rot away in the sea air. The shops on the boulevard have long glass display frontages, half-empty, or crowded with faded haberdashery and handicrafts. They make one tired merely by looking at them. At every intersection, they’ve punched in a shopping centre of the current style — dull-brown, slab-tilt, every sign — Walmart, Goodwill, Payless Shoes — general issue, undifferentiated, monopoly capital leaching away the sole virtue of the market, its exuberance. People drive up and haul away, as if at depots.

Today it’s bottled water. They’re coming out of the Walmart, loaded into carts, on palettes, going into the back of SUVs. The shelves near the registers are cleared of batteries, and torches are gone. Hurricane Isaac is coming, has hit the Florida Keys by now, and cities to the north are battening down. Tampa has already been entirely disrupted for the convention, the city criss-crossed with street-closures, concrete bollards pulled across, cyclone fencing around police stations. Casualty departments have been rehearsing decontamination scenarios. Everything has been oriented to the big gig at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, the hot centre of the city for three days.

In Tropicana Field, St Petersburg’s forlorn sports stadium, the opening party of the convention is going ahead tonight, but the convention proper has been put back a day to start Tuesday, in case Isaac — currently heading towards New Orleans — adopts the style of the moment and takes a sudden right turn and hits us with full force two. Delicious irony.

Should the Republicans fail to gain Florida — and hence lose the election — it will be because the Democrats managed to turn out the Jewish vote on the east coast. Was someone in the National Weather Service having a sly laugh when they named it such? Why did they not simply call it Barack and have done with it?

Last time the Republicans gathered, in the unlikely province of St Paul, Minnesota, they were pumped. The Democrats had held their convention, but they’d lost the news cycle almost immediately as the Republicans had announced their vice-presidential choice the day after, and Sarah Palin had set the country aflame, for a moment trumping the Obamamania. The financial crisis had not yet hit, and John McCain had not yet made a fool of himself by announcing that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to sort it all out. Palin had not yet been, well, Sarah Palin, and the tales of a frontier state governor who could shoot a moose, and sold the governor’s jet on eBay had sent a shiver up the backs of the great and good.

That was a long long time ago, and the part is older and a little wiser, at least as far as VP choice is concerned. They have as their candidate Mitt Romney, a man who excites no one, not even Mitt Romney. To appease the base, but purportedly avoid the bad craziness of the Palin trip, they have chosen Paul Ryan, a thoroughly competent, highly intelligent, utterly lunatic Ayn Randian manorexic from Wisconsin. That may or may not work — Ryan has already been implicated in the Todd Akin “r-pe doesn’t cause pregnancy” scandal. Nevertheless, he’s not the type to say that he understands NAFTA because he can see Canada from Milwaukee, and that’s why he’s there.

But that doesn’t make for much of a party, and the gathering at Tropicana was, well, not subdued — the Republicans are too batshit crazy to be subdued — but lacking a certain genuine zest of yesteryear. “I cannot believe that the American people will re-elect a man who knows nothing about what America is,” said Jim, a huge man, near spherical, in a blue blazer and tan slacks. He was from Iowa, from whose name he removed the sole vowel, rendering it as “Ow”, like a cry of pain. He was angry with the media, which had been grudgingly admitted. His wife, Maeve, a delicately boned woman in a lace dress, was more conciliatory.

“You’re from Australia? Do you know about Barack Obama and what’s he done?” She peeked out from behind her husband, orbiting him like a moon. Did they think Romney would win? “Yessir, but it’s a battle,” said Jim. Maeve: “What with the liberal media …”

They had no doubt that Romney would win, but there was no swagger in their voice. In 2008, they could not believe that Obama would win. Hardly an extreme judgement — after all, in early 2008, the Democrats didn’t believe that Obama could win. Now that he was the President, that fact was a little harder to ignore. They had a candidate they liked better than John McCain, who had troubling inclinations towards bipartisanship, and a veep candidate they loved, a man who wanted to reduce government share of GDP spending to 3.75% (from around 24%, itself one of the lowest figures in the OECD).

Yet they had no air about them that commonsense and sanity would be restored. They were waiting to find out what their country would become — or in their minds, if it would exist at all after January 2013.The feeling spread across the vast St Petersburg-Tampa conurbation today, for over at the other corner, at the University of South Florida, Ron Paul was holding a one-day counter-convention, a second instalment on the “Paulapalooza” event he had held in Minneapolis in ‘08. This one was a little more subdued, if only because, in true form, there had been a split in the Ron Paul forces — with his more outre group staging a two-day “Festival of Paul” beforehand, at the fairgrounds, in which radical right-wing libertarianism mingled with heavy metal and the hardcore paranoia of the John Birch Society.

Paul skipped the fairgrounds fiasco — showing a circumspection he has not always displayed — and the split was significant, for it showed that the weird mix of boring Austrian economics and counter-cultural brouhaha that Paul’s supporters had pioneered, was coming apart at the seams. The crazies and the comb-overs were drifting back apart.

Paul himself is retiring, and his son Rand, a Kentucky senator, is taking over the family franchise. But he has nothing of Paul’s wiry charisma, and he is angling for a long career at the heart of the Republican Party, so he is toning down the one thing that has given the movement a broad appeal — Ron Paul’s uncompromising opposition to foreign adventures, and a US empire. Whether the Republicans win or lose in November, the Paul movement has peaked, and has started to fade.

Should the party win, many Paulites will happily fold into a fudged-up right-wing Romney era, satisfied that they have seen off an alien presence. The others will simply spin off into space, or into whatever bizarre movement endtimes American culture can come up with next.

But one way or another, the storm is coming in. You come out of an air-conditioned building, feeling like an iceberg lettuce, and into the hot wind twisting between the bungalows. There will be no relief, even should the storm come. The heat will not break, and so the whole city is held in suspension, but with no suggestion of what might end it, of what could.

Or of what would stop the slow wearing away, the flaking of paint, the salt air eating into the frame, that is now so all-pervasive in America as to be barely recognised.

It's a shame this will probably be Ron Paul's last campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, as he has a unique ability to generate intelligent commentary from non-partisan political observers that all the other drones lack entirely. Salon has an interesting take from David Sirota, noting "Some of Paul's stances are odious. But our racist drug war and Islamophobic invasions are equally offensive" - Our selective stance on bigotry.

If they have any value at all anymore, presidential election campaigns at least remain larger-than-life mirrors reflecting back painful truths about our society. As evidence, ponder the two-sided debate over Republican candidate Ron Paul and bigotry.

One camp cites Paul’s hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it: This part of Paul’s record proves that he represents “the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe … the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings.”

The other camp tends to acknowledge those ugly truths about Paul, but then points out that the Texas congressman has been one of the only politicians 1) fighting surveillance, indefinite detention and due-process-free assassination policies almost exclusively aimed at minorities; 2) opposing wars that often seem motivated by rank Islamophobia; and 3) railing against the bigotry of a drug war that disproportionately targets people of color. Summarizing this part of Paul’s record, the Atlantic Monthly’s Conor Friedersdorf has written: “When it comes to America’s most racist or racially fraught policies” affecting the world today, “Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them (while) his opponents are often on the wrong side.”

So which side is right? Both of them, and thanks to that powerful oxymoron, Paul has become a mirror reflecting back our own problematic biases. Specifically, his candidacy is showing that the conventional definition of intolerable bigotry is disturbingly narrow — and embarrassingly selective.

This reality is best demonstrated by those voters who say they detest Paul not because of his extreme economic ideas, but because they feel his record represents an unacceptable form of racism. These folks will likely tell you that their alleged commitment to policies promoting racial equality has moved them to support Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, politicians who, of course, support bigoted civil liberties atrocities, Islamophobic foreign invasions and a racist drug war.

In making such a choice, then, these voters are tacitly embracing the definition of unacceptable bigotry as only hate speech (Paul’s newsletters) and opposition to civil rights laws (Paul’s odious position), but not also various forms of institutional bigotry that their favored candidates support and that Paul has fought to end. Incredibly, this selective definition asks us to ignore many of the most destructive tenets of what legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s celebrated book calls “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, as the reaction to Paul proves, it is precisely this definition that pervades so much of American society.

To be clear: Noting this hypocrisy is not meant to urge a vote for Paul (I’m not a Paul supporter), nor does it absolve those Paul fans who wholly ignore the objectionable parts of their candidate’s record on race. Instead, it is simply meant to argue that if we’re going to have a long overdue discussion about bigotry, then let’s have an honest conversation about all forms of bigotry — not our current talking-points-driven screamfest that rightly criticizes one kind of prejudice but wrongly tolerates other forms of prejudice that are often just as destructive.

Time for a bit of tinfoil - while I think Ron Paul's competing for the Republican candidacy is a good thing by and large (as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, at the very least it forces liberals to look into the mirror) there are a few unfortunate aspects to his platform - though the possibility of him being a freemason isn't one that is commonly cited (not that I have a view about whether or not freemasons are good or evil - by and large I mostly view conspiracy theories about freemasons as coming from paleocon catholics continuing their endless war - where the fundamentalist protestants and their derivative sects like the "crank" libertarians represented by Paul stand with regard to the masons has never been clear to me - though they seem to be pretty chummy with the paleocons).

The Secret Sun blog has a look at Paul's masonic links - Ron Paul: Race, Ritual and the Scottish Rite.

Well, the Clownshow's back in town and from the looks of things it going to be clownier than ever before. We have a Wall Street underling in the White House who is attacked regularly by his opposition party as a "socialist," even though intelligent (read: non-racist) conservatives acknowledge he's governing as a classic Rockefeller Republican (with all that implies for parapolitics watchers, I might add).

On the other side of the aisle the GOP leadership has put its hopes in a candidate who may well have been manufactured in Skynet's Terminator factory and is instinctively loathed by 75% of his own party. So much so that he got the scare of his life from an overgrown altar boy (with all that implies for parapolitics watchers, I might add).

Then there's the Great White Hope of the Libertarian/Neo-Confederate alliance, Ron Paul. No one is quite acknowledging it (except his son, judging from his facial expression last night), but Paul needed to win last night more than anyone else and was in fact polling as such.

Paul's mystique is built on being the supposed champion of the Silent Majority and coming in a weak third to the two of the lamest candidates in living memory-- and in a caucus where Independents and Democrats could register as Republicans and vote-- doesn't exactly bolster that image.

But caucuses aren't primaries and apparently they tend to winnow out the enthusiastic but impatient. A lot of his support on the ground were his version of Deadheads- true believers from out of state hitching a ride on the campaign trail. Most of the younger voters are attracted to Paul's antiwar and anti-Prohibition policies while tending to ignore his more problematic domestic agenda.

Even so, I'm not going to try to argue with Paul's Deadheads anymore. Why? Because I now understand the very sophisticated coded messages he's sending out there (more than they do, perhaps) and I think I better understand the powerful emotional response they instill now.

I was actually hoping he'd win so he could do maximum damage to the duopoly and expose the Clownshow for what it really is. Maybe he still will, but I feel a corner has turned. The soda's lost its fizz.

For all his talk of reason, Paul is hitting a bruised and disoriented Middle America -- particularly the white working class-- with a powerful, symbolically-charged emotional stew promising a return to antebellum Southern folkways and an America better described in the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution.

I certainly understand why this is so seductive in these days of Globalism and multiculturalism, even if I don't agree with it. But the fact remains that he's sending a different coded message to his fellow initiates.

I didn't vote in 2008 and I don't plan to vote in this election either so I have no clown in this show. And besides, what's much more fascinating to me is Ron Paul's almost compulsive display of high initiate secret society symbolism. Which is to say that although other bloggers have claimed that Paul is a Mason --including some Masons themselves-- he has denied it (kind of). But that hasn't exactly stopped speculation on the issue.

All I can say for sure is that if walks like a duck, talks like a duck and performs high initiate ritual like a duck....

Now, the controversy that's dogged Paul has been his newsletters, and to a lesser extent his deep and longstanding ties to extreme right sects like the Christian Reconstructionists and the Neo-Confederate underground.

In the first place, Republican criticism of the Ron Paul Newsletters is pretty rich given the language in them is identical to what's heard on the AM talk radio circuit that GOP lawmakers and power brokers work every hour of every day.

Even so, the fanatical support Paul has in the White Nationalist community the question has been raised if Paul himself is racist. I think this is the wrong question. What people are really asking if Paul himself is a bigot or a hater. I don't think he is.

I think Paul sees himself in a long tradition of paternalist Southern conservatives who understand the way the world really works, son, and think everything will return to its idyllic, antebellum state once that pesky, outside-agitatin' Federal Government with its sissy talk about "civil rights" is done away with for good.

In this, Paul falls smack dab into the old/new (Masonic) hierarchy of the South, which believes passionately in natural orders, natural laws and especially, natural hierarchies. Unfortunately, working class whites don't figure much higher than blacks in this natural order.

But of course the Masons-- Scottish Rite Masons, to be precise-- were at the top of the plantation Pyramid.

What Northern liberals never understood is that the Masonic Dixiecrats (who enriched themselves with New Deal millions and then turned around and shattered the New Deal coalition) were not drooling, foaming, bloviating racists as you might see in a Hollywood movie.

What they really hated were do-gooders and busybody outsiders who don't understand "the natural order of things." ...

Continuing on the tinfoil trail, Rigorous Intuition had a rare post late last year including some peak oil doomerism as part of some rambling pontifications about the gulf oil spill, transhumanism, the possibility of our world being naught but a computer simulation, the aquatic ape theory mingled with thoughts about anarchist biological science and some primitivist-like ruminations about civilisation and empire - We Are The Monsters We've Been Waiting For.

They may be our Most Terrible Lizards, but they wouldn't be called the best and the brightest by even the hindmost fart-catcher in Abaddon's human centipede. They can turn blood into gold, playing Last Days' alchemists in the booming catastrophe and collapse sectors, but don't confuse the management of an habituated massacre with a meritocracy. They're the eschaton of open jaws at the close of the food chain, but for no other reason than a cold heart doesn't dwell upon the cruelty of its bite. We're the 99 and they're the One Percenters, and like the outlaw bikers who share the patch, they run the drugs and guns and kill for their club. They're the Killer Elite, but don't call them elite. No. Apparently, and with ironic perversity, that's me and my numerous tribe; over-educated beyond utility at the end of the Age of Useless Things.

And I mean that: the end of things. Capital has exhausted its first fuels, and now it's the creation of poverty, not of wealth, that makes the world go 'round. And naturally, when it's down to your own body, setting it alight before it's taken from you to stoke the engines of the Great Machine becomes the final impudence. Depending upon whether your nation is an appetizer or an entree on the globalists' menu, and how well the kitchen prepares its living parts, such an act may lead to revolution or a passing LULZ.It can go either way.

Over-educated, I mean that too. But it's not a sour boast after half a life being schooled for self-aware obsolescence. If you feel dumber for having watched Jersey Shore, then you too already know more than is good for you. America's public schools are made to fail on a budget comparable with the cost of air conditioning its imperial guard in Central Asia, with assets peeled off to private charters, and teachers discarded upon their broken unions. University, North America's new high school, is corporate funded and corporate branded and humanities' starved, with a deliberately crushing debt load upon students that corrals the choices of the less privileged towards machinery-sustaining, practical careers. The study of subjects that have not been sufficiently monetized and the accrual of empathetic knowledge are sniffed at as elitist pursuits, even as the student is financially wrecked by their mastery. ...

It occurred to me last year, when the Gulf of Mexico began coughing up its lungs courtesy of Deep Water Horizon, how it's one of the attenuated consolations of life in Evening's Empire that BP's sole, unmitigated success was to hold up a camera to the ocean's injury so we could all together view another viral FAIL video. I can haz desolation!

Because you know, this is what we're good at. I mean, this is all we can do now. And from lackadaisical blogger to Spectator-in-Chief ("I want to know whose ass to kick"), gazing upon from afar with approbation, from the Mississippi Delta to Fukushima and the next sideshow horror, is about as good as we get. And even then, not for long. Gulf seafood is contaminated but officially safe. Japanese school children are passing radioactive piss but it's not a concern unless they continue to eat radioactive produce and drink irradiated water. Half-waking observation, and the dialing down of our expectations of "normal," are for the most part the extent of our response, and we seem to have lost the means and the imagination to do anything but. Perhaps that's what the mass, deranged mind of the Internet has taken from us, by taking us into itself. And perhaps that's even why it exists.

In other words: if our wired brains are experiencing more read/write errors than the factory warranty led us to expect, I don't believe it's all down to depleted Serotonin and Aspartame. (Though, lest we forget, there is that, too.) We know well enough now, by study and experience, how the Web's interruption system impairs focus, and compounds the cognitive switching cost of our online distractions. ...

Steve Wozniak, a few weeks ago as I write this, said "we lost the battle to the machines long ago. We're going to become the pets, the dogs of the house." He said this optimistically. "Why are we going to need ourselves so much in the future? We're just going to have the easy life." Optimism and, if you can still stop and really think about it, a dash of madness.

"Once we have machines doing our high-level thinking," he continued, "there's so little need for ourselves and you can't ever undo it - you can never turn them off." ...

Anyway, what was I saying? Something about the Gulf.

Obama's best advice to Americans during that particular obscenity was that they should shop, swim and pray: one of those crystalline moments that said, yes, this President too is a Celebrity Apprentice to the Criminals Without Borders. Such a stand-up effort won't be forgotten when he leaves his office - an internship, really - and is initiated into Big Money, of which his presidency is merely a rite of passage: a pledge's gofer'ing for the inviolate fraternity of laundered capital. For Democratic presidents and Labour prime ministers, if they actually entered politics with even modest virtue and tepid vision for the public good, they have been richly rewarded for their abandonment. The sudden good fortunes of Clinton and Blair: this is what it profit a man. (By contrast, Jimmy Carter's post-presidency is perhaps an extended act of atonement to win back his soul.) Can there remain any doubt as to which career path Obama means to follow? Bill Clinton has earned more than $65 million dollars since leaving office for motivational "power within" speeches before business executives and similar peers who can afford him. Just imagine Obama's speeches. And his appearance fees. The American presidency is now just something that looks good on a resume, which can lead to a cash-for-life revenue stream.

And BP? Corporations in America may be persons under the law, but they're never persons of colour. If they were, so many would have been shot, hung, gassed or given the chair years ago.

There were many things Martin Luther had wrong. "Strong beer is the milk of the old" wasn't one of them. Another wasn't his revulsion at the Medieval Church's practice of selling indulgences: the tidy revenue stream of peddling Get out of Purgatory Free cards. A posthumous entitlement program for the wealthy dead, and an invitation to sin boldly for those who could afford it. (The poor, as ever, could pay only in the currency of their blood, sweat and souls.) Of course, this turned the teaching of Jesus of its head - rich man, eye of a needle, and all that - but no matter: the Church has made a custom of perp-walking its Christs in a parade of upside-down clowns for two millenia.

Luther's rejection of the selling of indulgences sparked the Reformation, but the practice hasn't stopped; it's merely been secularized. BP paid - or more accurately, promised to pay - an indulgence of $20 billion over four years to cover damages incurred by the sin of Deep Water Horizon. Not even enough to make 2010 a losing year for the company if the amount had been paid as a lump sum. In fact, its stock "surged" on the news that it had just bought its way out of purgatory on the cheap. "The fear was that the government was going to do something so drastic as to effectively push the company into bankruptcy," said oil and gas analyst Brian Gibbons. "Now they can come out of the meeting and say they have held BP accountable and hold up a $20 billion escrow account." That was last year. (Ancient history, and nobody studies history anymore.) This year, the company's bringing unabashed motherfucker back: BP now wants to stop payments based on future losses, saying "there is no basis to assume that claimants, with very limited exceptions, will incur a future loss related to the oil spill." BP points to returning tourists and the reopened federal fishing grounds, and points away from the fish so sickened by diseases and infections and environmental stresses that LSU Oceanographer Jim Cowan says, "I've never seen anything like this. At all. Ever."

And here's where the Medieval Church had it over on us. The rich could only buy their way out of Purgatory, not Hell. Purgatory was the place of temporal punishment, even if it were to last a million years. Hell was forever. And Hell for BP - break it up, bankruptcy, nationalization - was never a serious threat in an era of Too Big to Damn. Unlike, or God help me so it seems, the whole bloody natural world and its profitless life.

But what can you do, Mr President? You're only the titular head of a country that manufactures nothing anymore but weaponry, consent, and high fructose corn syrup. We'll miss our old world like we'll miss our old brains, but the longer it goes on, and the worse it gets, the more we'll become accustomed to it. Like the erasure of a hegemon's great cities to disasters natural and unnatural, its middle class, perhaps even its living memory of peacetime. That's the catastrophe of hope. ...

The tides of aborted dolphins. The acidification of our oceans and the jellification of its life. The neurotoxicants stunting our children's brains. The nanoparticles "unexpectedly" entering the food chain. The vanishing bees. The excellent chance we'll have pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere by the end of this century that the planet will inexorably warm by 24 degrees, assuring a runaway greenhouse, and the recreation of conditions unseen here since the Hadean Era.

Peak oil, peak soil, peak water, peak food. (And if these play on your mind as at least abstract terrors, then congratulations: you too enjoy more leisure and learning than can possibly profit you at this time, in this culture.) Fondest, most desperate hopes aside, the exigencies of collapse are not calling forth the best behavior from those accustomed to bleeding every stone white. On the contrary, environmental policy, even the most egregiously half-assed, is the first out the window when "shared sacrifices" demand that the vested interests of capital defenistrate the public good. So the ground is fracked and the tap waters flame, and rather than saving what remains of the Amazon, we burn it into becoming the world's greatest emitter of methane.

Not a problem.

If the Singularity is near enough, then the transhumanists may yet have their abiotic rapture. And I'll hand it to them, there's a dark logic to it: perhaps the only way to successfully adapt to a murdered planet is to kill yourself.

"If you draw the timelines," said futurologist Ian Pearson, "realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem." Pearson is sometimes credited with the invention of that fouler of distinction between home and office, text messaging. And given how all the futurist fantasies of increased leisure time have panned out, no one should take comfort in the prospect that death itself need not encumber job performance. Even though pensionable age and benefits continue to be rolled back vindictively, there was always at least the promise of the peace of the grave.

And the dying planet? Those who would destroy it in order to save it are readying its zombie makeover with one word, or rather, prefix: nano.

"Emerging nanotechnology capabilities promise a profound impact on the environment," writes Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near. "This includes the creation of new manufacturing and processing technologies that will dramatically reduce undesirable emissions, as well as remediating the prior impact of industrial-age pollution." Kurzweil concedes there is the "downside" of introducing innumerable nano-particles, creating "new forms of toxins and other unanticipated interactions with the environment and life." But Singularitans embrace the risk because there's no other way forward. And they have to move forward, and not relinquish one victory of science over the natural world. After all, that's progress. ...

Since transhumanists are capable of recognizing the grave risks inherent to their God project - Kurzweil's "downside" of new toxins and unforeseen consequences - Zimmerman asks why they rush towards its culmination. “One answer,” he writes, “is that Earth’s biosphere is imperiled…. Technological posthumans would not be biologically based…thereby saving self-conscious life from extinction.”

And that seems to be the answer to so many questions, including those implied by the just smile and blow me sureties of our insatiable overclass. The Singularity may be near, but the end of our hospitable Earth is nearer, and all life forms requiring a temperate clime and low-toxic environment must rapidly adapt or die to our new and endless emergency. Unfortunately for us, the multiple maniacs driving the extinction are still crazy-rich, and are daily securing still more crazy for themselves. All we have are our overwhelming numbers, though as the crises inevitably crashes the population we may not even survive the century with that advantage. Our billions merely present the illusion of too big to fail. But the fact is, in the miserly new world, we're far too many to thrive.

At the Foresight Institute's 2002 "Brainstorming-Planning-Actionfest & Nanoschmoozathon," Leon Fuerth, former National Security Advisor to Al Gore, contended that "The majority of Americans will not simply sit still while some elite strips off their personalities and uploads themselves into their cyberspace paradise. They will have something to say about that. There will be vehement debate about that in this country."

First of all, has Fuerth paid attention to the state of vehement debate in his country?

Norway's terror attacks notoriously reminded Glenn Beck of Hitler. Not because mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik acted like a Nazi, but because his young victims were. ("Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.") A supposedly transformative president normalizes the criminal perversions of his predecessor and appears to have the fight in him only to beat the legacy of FDR into an unrecognizable pulp. Do Americans have nothing to say about that? I know Fuerth spoke nearly a decade ago, but I remember 2002, and that wasn't a stellar year for policy debate and the public square either. Though of course, like so much else, it's only gotten worse since.

John Steinbeck accounted for the failure of socialism in America by the underclass regarding itself not as the exploited poor but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Silly beggars. But they didn't come by that idea all by themselves. That's the conditioning of decades of political animal husbandry, and the dulling engorgement of mass instruction masquerading as entertainment.

The dimming of culture and diminution of the Western mind perpetuates society's preposterous illusions. If - oh, I dunno - Ted Williams, the homeless "golden throat" pitch-perfect for selling useless shit can make it (whatever that means, and however fleeting), then maybe we can go viral too. The truly accomplished, the acutely gifted, the deeply wise only prick the insecurities of the idiot class, and that's no way to keep the idiots useful, mollified and self-medicated. Especially since there are so many of them, and more every graduating cohort. A good thing, not coincidentally, for the monied few, who mean to separate the fools from their nickels and dimes. ("I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid," explained John Stuart Mill. "I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.") ...

That the warlike chimpanzee - an animal which might just as soon bite off your face as blow you a kiss if you look at one the wrong way - is considered our closest relation, both Spencer and America's post-American sideshow of Objectivist cruelty would seem to be vindicated. And if self-interest is the only law, and I got mine holds illimitable dominion over all, then maybe we should do our children a favour and stop teaching them to share and start instructing them to steal. Monkey see, monkey do.

But it's not true. In fact, the chimp isn't our only closest relative. There's one other, precisely as close to us, and that example may be more instructive to those still seeking a better myth to live by.

Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and brutally take their enemies' lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a sort of picnic. It ends with adults from different groups grooming each other while the chldren play. Thus far, lethal aggression among bonobos is unheard of.

Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy

Bonobos were first catalogued by Western science in 1929, which is shockingly late for a large mammal. Even more surprising is the scant attention they have received since, despite our close relation, their shrinking numbers, and their matriarchal, egalitarian and orgiastic societies. (They're smart, too: "the bonobos...defied expectations by beating the group of chimpanzees in intelligence tests, because the chimps were too busy fighting among themselves for dominance.") We needn't romantisize them as the Great Ape Hope to believe bonobos have at least as much to teach us about ourselves as the over-familiar chimp. Perhaps more so if, as de Waal speculates, "the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees, and could most closely resemble our common ancestor."

Herbert Spencer could have made the chimpanzee Exhibit A in his case for Social Darwinism. But if the species had been known to naturalist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, he might have called the bonobo as witness for the defense of his Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution: "The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history."

And not just humanity. According to Kropotkin, who founded his research upon the fruits of his exploration of climatically-stressed Siberia,

As soon as we study animals -- not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains -- we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

Kropotkin was well-aware of the risks in the willful misuse of Darwin, and warned his readers against "the economists who know of natural science but a few words borrowed from second-hand vulgarizers," who "raised the 'pitiless' struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well." On the contrary,

man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle -- has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.

And in common with the bonobo, Kropotkin is today little known, little studied and representative of an endangered order. ...

The chief predicate of civilization - empire - is growth, which visits mad, bloody mad violence upon all that would impede its advance. In what's often called progress, though better called conquest, the movement of civilization is towards subjugating the natural realm and converting its life and riches to dead, base elements to fuel itself. Bound and determined to feast, madness calls to madness, and opportunistic, privileged sociopaths rise to maintain the consuming machinery of the sociopathologarchy, not sparing a thought to the consequences, other than perhaps a nod to bleeding hearts who want to make the machine sustainable.

To control creatures of conscience, a system without conscience needs to dull the capacity for empathy in the great mass of its unreflective subjects and provide crumbs of comfort for the balance. And so it sustains itself by exploiting our worst and our weakest attributes: desperate selfishness ("college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago"), and desperate hope ("I didn't say change you can believe in tomorrow"). It diminishes attachments to the Earth, and creates euphemisms like oil and gas - poultry and pork - that foster alienation towards the objects of our consumption. Nevertheless, fossil fuel deposits remain giant graveyards, and we're still drowning in its undead biology. ...

Tricorned tea partiers may snap the safety off their loaded Bibles when they hear someone conflating "libertine" and "libertarian," suggesting they are at least as much the children of the Divine Marquis as of Paul Revere. And yet it's a doctrine of devils, acclaiming merciless ego and self-interest over solidarity and renunciation of excess. It's not by chance that, in this perhaps gravest economic crisis, and with historic cognitive dissonance, America's populist revolution is radically individualist rather than collectivist, championing the Survival of the Fittest rather than a philosophy of Mutual Aid, and preaches the upside-down Gospel of Social Darwinism while denying legitimacy to Darwin's actual teachings.

The Tea Party may be a sideshow, but its fun house mirror still reflects the pernicious, egoistic spirit of the age, even in science, especially in transhumanism.

Glenn Greenwald has a post on why Ron Paul's contention for the Republican presidential nomination is a good thing - Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies.

As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obsfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.

This would all be bad enough if “election season” were confined to a few months the way it is in most civilized countries. But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.

Then there’s the full-scale sacrifice of intellectual honesty and political independence at the altar of tongue-wagging partisan loyalty. The very same people who in 2004 wildly cheered John Kerry — husband of the billionaire heiress-widow Teresa Heinz Kerry — spent all of 2008 mocking John McCain’s wealthy life courtesy of his millionaire heiress wife and will spend 2012 depicting Mitt Romney’s wealth as proof of his insularity; conversely, the same people who relentlessly mocked Kerry in 2004 as a kept girly-man and gigolo for living off his wife’s wealth spent 2008 venerating McCain as the Paragon of Manly Honor.

That combat experience is an important presidential trait was insisted upon in 2004 by the very same people who vehemently denied it in 2008, and vice-versa. Long-time associations with controversial figures and inflammatory statements from decades ago either matter or they don’t depending on whom it hurts, etc. etc. During election season, even the pretense of consistency is proudly dispensed with; listening to these empty electioneering screeching matches for any period of time can generate the desire to jump off the nearest bridge to escape it.

Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?) or grievance (you’re helping Mitt Romney by talking about this!!). The premise takes hold for a full 18 months — increasing each day in intensity until Election Day — that every discussion of the President’s actions must be driven solely by one’s preference for election outcomes (if you support the President’s re-election, then why criticize him?).

Worse still is the embrace of George W. Bush’s with-us-or-against-us mentality as the prism through which all political discussions are filtered. It’s literally impossible to discuss any of the candidates’ positions without having the simple-minded — who see all political issues exclusively as a Manichean struggle between the Big Bad Democrats and Good Kind Republicans or vice-versa — misapprehend “I agree with Candidate X’s position on Y” as “I support Candidate X for President” or “I disagree with Candidate X’s position on Y” as “I oppose Candidate X for President.” Even worse are the lying partisan enforcers who, like the Inquisitor Generals searching for any inkling of heresy, purposely distort any discrete praise for the Enemy as a general endorsement.

So potent is this poison that no inoculation against it exists. No matter how expressly you repudiate the distortions in advance, they will freely flow. Hence: I’m about to discuss the candidacies of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, and no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite. But since it’s always inadvisable to refrain from expressing ideas in deference to the confusion and deceit of the lowest elements, I’m going to proceed to make a couple of important points about both candidacies even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted.

* * * * *

The Ron Paul candidacy, for so many reasons, spawns pervasive political confusion — both unintended and deliberate. Yesterday, The Nation‘s long-time liberal publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wrote this on Twitter: ...


That’s fairly remarkable: here’s the Publisher of The Nation praising Ron Paul not on ancillary political topics but central ones (“ending preemptive wars & challenging bipartisan elite consensus” on foreign policy), and going even further and expressing general happiness that he’s in the presidential race. Despite this observation, Katrina vanden Heuvel — needless to say — does not support and will never vote for Ron Paul (indeed, in subsequent tweets, she condemned his newsletters as “despicable”). But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient. ...

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored. ...

I wish there were someone who did not have Ron Paul’s substantial baggage to achieve this. Before Paul announced his candidacy, I expressed hope in an Out Magazine profile that Gary Johnson would run for President and be the standard-bearer for these views, in the process scrambling bipartisan stasis on these questions. I did that not because I was endorsing his candidacy (as some low-level Democratic Party operative dishonestly tried to claim), but because, as a popular two-term Governor of New Mexico free of Paul’s disturbing history and associations, he seemed to me well-suited to force these debates to be had. But alas, Paul decided to run again, and Johnson — for reasons still very unclear — was forcibly excluded from media debates and rendered a non-person. Since then, Paul’s handling of the very legitimate questions surrounding those rancid newsletters has been disappointing in the extreme, and that has only served to obscure these vital debates and severely dilute the discourse-enhancing benefits of his candidacy.

* * * * *

Still, for better or worse, Paul — alone among the national figures in both parties — is able and willing to advocate views that Americans urgently need to hear. That he is doing so within the Republican Party makes it all the more significant. This is why Paul has been the chosen ally of key liberal House members such as Alan Grayson (on Fed transparency and corruption), Barney Frank (to arrest the excesses of the Drug War) and Dennis Kucinich (on a wide array of foreign policy and civil liberties issues). Just judge for yourself: consider some of what Ron Paul is advocating on vital issues — not secondary issues, but ones progressives have long insisted are paramount — and ask how else these debates will be had and who else will advocate these views ...

Crikey has some thoughts on Wikileaks’ latest dump of US diplomatic cables in this editorial - A wizard of Oz moment.

One of the regular criticisms of WikiLeaks when it and its media partners began releasing US diplomatic cables was of the "chilling effect" the release would have not merely on the willingness of people across the world to speak frankly with US diplomats, but on the very art of diplomacy itself. Foreign policy, we were told, is special, and different, and the practice of such a high art couldn't be done transparently. Stopping wars, brokering treaties and handling the fine nuances of interstate relations needs to be done behind closed doors.

What WikiLeaks has done, however, is reveal foreign policy as no different to any other kind of bureaucratic game playing, and driven by the same tawdry commercial imperatives that drive so much domestic policy.

It is clear, for example, that the prosecution of the interests of American pharmaceutical companies was a key priority for the State Department. One analyst, James Love, has found literally hundreds of cables devoted to the issue of ensuring exclusivity for US drug company products, even when US diplomats themselves acknowledged that lower prices for pharamceuticals were important for access to life-saving medicine in developing countries. The lives and health of citizens in developing countries was clearly a lower priority than the commercial interests of US companies.

It is clear, too, that the State Department aggressively pushed the interests of the GM crops industry, particularly in developing countries, where "biotechnology outreach programs" were established to influence decision-makers in favour of US companies such as Monsanto. And in developed countries, particularly in Europe, diplomats aggressively responded to any perceived threats to GM crop companies, calling for "retaliation" to ensure the Europeans understood there were "real costs" in refusing to do things the Monsanto way.

The WikiLeaks material also confirms what was already apparent from the conduct of the US in trying to negotiate international treaties relating to copyright: it aggressively pushes the interests of the US copyright industry in trying to convince other countries to impose draconian restrictions on any perceived threats to the movie and music industries. The cables, for example, reveal that litigation against Australian ISP iiNet by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft was actually the beginning of a concerted campaign by the American copyright industry's chief lobbying body, the MPAA (which wanted its involvement in the issue to be kept quiet). The campaign was to use a successful attack on iiNet to attack ISPs in a number of Commonwealth countries, with iiNet selected because the MPAA was intimidated by the size and legal resources of Telstra.

All three industries, it it known from other contexts, have strong links with the US government, with lobbyists and executives engaged in a revolving door between US government positions and industry positions.

WikiLeaks has in effect provided a Wizard of Oz moment, showing much diplomacy is anything but high-minded statecraft, ostensibly so delicate it can only be undertaken in private. Instead, it has demonstrated, in closely-written detail, the extent to which foreign policy is merely the grubbiest domestic policy given the gloss of international diplomacy.

Rixstep points to a Ron Paul speech on the subject matter of one of the cables - But why should we so fear the truth?. Not really news but interesting to see it confirmed again.

'How did the 20 year war get started?' asks the Texan. Turns out US gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait in 1990 - then turned on him when he did with a massive propaganda campaign. No longer hearsay or rumour: Ron Paul dug it up in a WikiLeaks Cablegate release. The US government lied to the citizenry.

The Economist has a column wondering why nut-job Republican presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann is getting lots of positive media coverage while her more principled and far more experienced competitor Ron Paul gets ignored (as in every other election he’ll continue to get no coverage unless he toes the Fox party line and gives up on half of his libertarian ideals) - Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann: Manufacturing irrelevance.

This passage from the text "Ron Paul is a goofily avuncular non-comformist ideologue who speaks unutterable truths about American foreign policy and delivers incessant indignant harangues about the monetary system that approximately no one in the media understands. I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand." is a classic.

It turned out that I was not wrong to wonder if Ms Bachmann would really pull it off. It was a squeaker. Mr Paul fell short by less than 1% of the vote. But, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Ms Bachmann scored a legitimising media boost from her victory while Mr Paul's near-win scored him bupkis. Even Jon Stewart says so!

But wait! If Jon Stewart is pointedly chastising the media for ignoring Ron Paul, and Jon Stewart is himself part of the media, is the media really ignoring Ron Paul? It is, yes. The subject of Ron Paul remains as willfully overlooked as an American war crime, even as the question of the justice of Ron Paul-neglect has become a white hot topic. Even Mr Stewart's amusing segment, which persuasively makes the case that much of the media has in fact conspired to slight Mr Paul, is not about Mr Paul so much as whether there is too little in the media about Mr Paul. And the generous Mr Stewart is at odds with the prevailing opinion that the media's present pattern of Ron Paul non-coverage gets it just about right. Here's Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Here's Steve Kornacki at Salon. Here's Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune. Here's Dan Amira at New York. They speak with one voice: Mr Paul is a marginal candidate with a proven base of highly-motivated supporters who turn out in droves for mock-electoral trifles, but he lacks the the broader base of support necessary to qualify as a contender worth covering.

Though I think there's something to this line of thought, I also think there's something insidiously circular about it. Perhaps the best way to grasp this complaint is to compare Mr Paul's coverage to Ms Bachmann's. Both serve in the House of Representatives, though Mr Paul's record of service is decades longer. Both are significant figures within the populist tea-party movement. Real Clear Politics's average of recent national polls puts Ms Bachmann and Mr Paul at 9.6% and 8.8% of the Republican vote, respectively. Of course, poll results aren't independent of press coverage. Ms Bachmann, for reasons known only to the gods, has been lavished with media attention, even before dipping a toe in the presidential water. Yet she remains at least as unviable a candidate as Mr Paul is said to be. Indeed, had the media hivemind determined early on to treat Ms Bachmann as a badly underqualified tenderfoot legislator who was for a time the tea-party flavour of the month, chances are she'd be noshing deep-dish with Herman Cain at 5%. And had the hivemind resolved to treat Mr Paul as a conservative elder statesmen whose memorable 2008 run for the GOP nomination prepared the ideological ground for the tea-party movement and helped get his son elected to the senate, he very well might look like a "top-tier" candidate in this election season's weak Republican field.

None of this implies that Mr Paul deserves Ms Bachmann's ridiculous level of coverage. He doesn't. Rather, I think Ms Bachmann deserves to be treated like the unprepared also-ran she is. If a Ron Paul victory in Ames would have unmasked the straw poll as a colourful but politically irrelevant spectacle, Michele Bachmann's victory ought to have done the same. But it didn't because the MSM likes Michele Bachmann; it made Michele Bachmann. She's a photogenic embodiment of a certain polarising brand of conservatism that makes good copy and great TV. By contrast, Ron Paul is a goofily avuncular non-comformist ideologue who speaks unutterable truths about American foreign policy and delivers incessant indignant harangues about the monetary system that approximately no one in the media understands. I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand. So Ron Paul's a proven loser we can neglect with a clear conscience, while it is a matter of great public interest whether or not Michele Bachmann actually attended a family reunion, because, you see, the winner of the Ames straw poll is a real up-and-comer who's pulling down a fearsome 10% in national polls, right up there with non-candidates Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin. Right up there with Ron Paul.

Crikey has a look at the upset Republican victory in MAssachusetts over the anointed heir to Ted Kennedy - The GOP: They’re baaack. It looks like any hope Obama had of making any real changes has disappeared entirely (not that he appeared to be trying particularly hard).

“The upset of the century,” claims George Stephanopoulos of the loss of the Kennedy ancestral seat of Massachusetts in the US Senate. As I write, it is almost certainly lost. With it goes the Democrats filibuster-proof control of the Senate and, despite protestations, health-care reform. The market is already viewing Big Pharma and managed care as winners, while health-care stocks that have risen in expectation of reform look shaky. Wait until the deluge.

But again the great divide is evident. While the mainstream media is busy inventing all manner of reasons for this unthinkable defeat — I expect the poor weather will soon join the list — the net-roots sees this as a simple rejection of the political class that rules the US. Which is why the mainstream media can’t see what’s happening as it, of course, is the ruling political class.

The Kennedy heir Martha Coakley is already ducking bricks, including abuse for forcing President Obama from his desk to pound the Boston flesh when he should be saving Haiti and seeing the health-care package through. But, on the later count, there can be no package without that Senate seat. And the criticism of Coakley is thin. She is but an Attorney-General who was seemingly the right woman for the Kennedy mantle — cut from the cloth of the established establishment — the perfect loser in the current environment of a pox on all your parties. I suspect Kennedy himself might have had trouble holding his seat.

Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck — a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park.

It wasn’t a huge issue but it played well — the message presumably was that sophisticated people from places such as Boston were not represented by folks who drove trucks. Kennedy sure didn’t drive a truck.

The shell-shocked mainstream media better get used to it, for there are many shocks to come. That the Republicans had the sense to see “truck” and “Wall Street” and bring the two to one was clever indeed. But I suspect the election was long lost. The scattered polls —  the ones with the little dots that seem the best gauges — already had Brown well ahead. Ten percent and climbing.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican of the grand old party tradition, explained what was happening in a speech he gave this week outlining what he thought of the current political and economic system. I saw no mention of it in the US MSM but it sure made the internet rounds.

The Ron Paul speech mentioned above has had plenty of attention around the blogs, with Jesse's Cafe Americain being but one example quoting the speech - Ron Paul: "Prepare for Revolutionary Changes in the Not-too-distant Future.”.

“Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It's surreal; it's just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.

We have broken from reality--a psychotic Nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.

We're now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people's money, exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars--spent on a failed welfare/warfare state; an epidemic of cronyism; unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth.

A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper. Yet, cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and Detroit.

We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed, as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century.

We assume that by keeping the already-known torture pictures from the public's eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant.

The sad part of all this is that we have forgotten what made America great, good, and prosperous. We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding, and confidence in liberty. The status quo cannot be maintained, considering the current conditions. Violence and lost liberty will result without some revolutionary thinking.

We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering. The good news is the reversal is achievable through peaceful and intellectual means and, fortunately, the number of those who care are growing exponentially.

Of course, it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I'm seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.”

I thought the Ron Paul campaign had given up a while back and his supporters had retreated to Paulville but apparently not - according to the New York Times, the campaign isn't over yet - Its not a campaign, its a mission.

Mr. Paul was supposed to be a memory by now. But in the Oregon primary last week, he won 15 percent of the vote, and the campaign appears to be growing into something beyond a conventional protest campaign. Some supporters have helped turn the outspoken congressman’s campaign into a colorful, loud sideshow with their guerrilla marketing tactics — self-penned Ron Paul anthems on YouTube, a Ron Paul blimp, T-shirts that portray Mr. Paul as a world-historical icon like Che Guevara.

Attendance at Ron Paul campaign stops has nearly returned to pre-Super Tuesday levels. A group of supporters recently announced plans to start Paulville, a gated community in West Texas, where believers can pursue the candidate’s libertarian ideals as a cooperative lifestyle. Ron Paul’s book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto,” rocketed to No. 1 on a New York Times best-seller list on May 18 (it has since dropped). Supporters are starting to discuss creating yippie-ish disruptions at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September to gain visibility for the movement.

Many supporters say that such gestures are not the final gasp of a failed political campaign, but a spark for a “revolution.” And Mr. Paul encourages such talk. When he speaks or writes of revolution, the congressman means it in the 1776 sense, except that the oppressors now live in Washington, not London. The candidate wants to turn back what he sees as 200 years of creeping expansion of federal power, dissolve the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, return to the gold standard, bring the troops home, not just from Iraq, but from everywhere — and yes, legalize pot, at least for medical purposes.

This message has hit home — not only with some traditional libertarians, but also among a small but passionate group of young voters who came of age after Sept. 11, during the debates about the Iraq war, the Patriot Act and Abu Ghraib. For them, the Ron Paul message has the feel not of 1776, but of 1968, when an unpopular war raged abroad, and a subculture of disenfranchised young people embraced an unorthodox philosophy built around a utopian ideal of freedom.

Of course, Ron Paul is a lot closer to Barry Goldwater than to Eugene McCarthy. But his young supporters, many of whom call themselves former liberals, said the peacenik left shares much with the libertarian right. ...

Mr. Paul’s voters tend to be younger and angrier than most Republicans. Exit polls in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan by Edison/Mitofsky showed that Mr. Paul’s voters tended to strongly disapprove of the Iraq war, and hold a far more negative opinion of the Bush administration than other Republican voters do. In Michigan, where Mr. Paul received 6 percent of the vote, 34 percent of Paul voters were under 30, compared with 13 percent of voters there over all. (Mr. Paul is also, largely, a guy thing. In the New Hampshire primary, where the candidate received 8 percent of the vote, his support was 77 percent male, according to exit polls.) ...

Some supporters are as quick as Dylan fans from the 60s to label mainstream politicians as sell-outs and compromisers. They cherish their candidate’s outspokenness.

“Man, I’ve straight hated politics, I’ve just never liked the authority,” explained Tommy Rayome, 19, a “musician-slash-cook-slash-whatever” from Lexington, Ky., who was one of more than 600 people who showed up at last week’s Ron Paul signing at a Borders bookstore in Louisville.

Mr. Rayome, whose unkempt ash curls cascaded from a knit Rasta cap, wore an enameled American flag pin on his faded maroon T-shirt. He said that he fell for Mr. Paul almost instantly after his roommate, also a supporter, described the candidate’s lack of hypocrisy. (In Congress, Mr. Paul is known as Dr. No, for his staunch refusal to vote for any bill he thinks might expand government power.) “I said, ‘All right, I like him,’ ” Mr. Rayome recalled. “He’s a terrible politician, so he’s the best.” ...

In this passionate support, some political observers hear echoes not from 1968, but from 1964 — when Barry Goldwater lost the presidential election but won a fervent following.

The youthful zeal of the Paul movement “does recall the early Goldwater movement, which was also jam-packed with people dropping out of graduate school, college, maybe even high school, to devote themselves 24/7 to what they called the ‘revolution,’ ” said Rick Perlstein, author of “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” (Hill and Wang, 2002).

And such movements don’t always stay in the margins forever, he said, adding that the young supporters who stumped for Goldwater’s failed presidential bid helped lay the seeds for the Reagan revolution 16 years later.

The figure at the center of the tempest looks like an unlikely political idol. Waiting in an empty green room at the Palace Theater before taking the stage, Mr. Paul looked slender, stooped, slightly sad. But that image dissolves when he begins to speak about the unlikely sense of community spawned by his traditional libertarianism.

“It does bring people together, people who were totally apathetic,” he said in an interview afterward. “They’re very diverse. But they understand the issue of freedom. There’s a reason for this. If you’re free to live your life as you choose and spend your money as you wish, you’re not competitive with other people, you don’t tell people how to live.”

Ron Paul has pretty much slipped off the (internet news) radar since the John "Bomb bomb Iran" McCain clinched the Republican nomination but his supporters are still coming up with some novel ideas - the latest of which seems to be an intentional community for Libertarians in West Texas called "Paulville". I suspect this would be a little different to your average eco-village or hippie commune, but it will be fun to watch how it turns out (hat tip Dave M for the link).

The goal of Paulville.org it to establish gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty.

The process is forming a co-op of people buying shares in the community and these people would be granted land use at a minimum of 1 acre per share, for as long as they homesteaded the land. The community would be privately held by the co-op to establish private property for the general community thus preserving the community is 100% freedom and liberty lovers. The community votes on all community efforts, such as utilities etc. However no one is forced to consume these utilities and or pay for them, AKA people can be off grid on their share of land. This is in line with the ideals that you're free to live your life the way you want and not be forced to do or pay for other people's life styles you may not agree with.

These communities are not for the faint at heard they will start as undeveloped land in non city locals, as this is the way to secure large tracts of land needed for these efforts.

Grist has a roundup of links on the environmental policies of Iowa primary winners Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. I was glad to see that Rudy "il duce" Giuliani failed miserably and that Ron Paul got a respectable 10% (Peak Energy's other favourite pro-freedom candidate Dennis Kucinich didn't run and asked his supporters to vote for Obama)

Mike Huckabee is the projected winner of the Iowa GOP caucuses, a surprising victory that puts him at the front of the pack in the Republican presidential race -- at least until the New Hampshire primary next week. Huckabee is one of just two GOP candidates who support a cap-and-trade system to fight climate change (McCain is the other), although Huckabee hasn't come out in support of any specific emission targets. In an interview with Grist earlier this year, Huckabee stressed the connection between his Christian faith and his desire to protect the environment. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama is the projected winner. Like all of the other Democratic candidates, he's got a strong, ambitious plan to tackle climate and energy issues, which he described in an interview with Grist this summer. For a thorough look at the winners' green stances, check out Grist's fact sheets on Huckabee and Obama

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As Australian politics is likely to be slow going for the next few months, I'll continue following the primaries on and off - especially while Paul and Kucinich remain in the race - and then give it a rest until the election itself draws closer, at which point I'll probably be heaping abuse (I suspect mostly on the Republican candidate) on whoever diverges from my standard policy prescriptions regarding energy and the environment (not to mention gratuitous resource wars).

Some quick links :

* Salon says "If Obama wins in November, a political miracle will have happened: We will have gone from following an authoritarian fool to electing a progressive black president, without missing a beat".

In November 2004, American voters reelected the worst president in modern history. That election did more than blight the political hopes of half the people in this country, it raised serious questions about America's very identity. What kind of country could possibly reelect a president as manifestly unfit for office as George W. Bush? Why would millions of Americans again endorse an ignorant, incompetent leader who launched a disastrous and pointless war, presided over an administration based on secrets and lies, trampled the Constitution, ran up a ruinous debt, ignored the global environmental crisis, approved torture and secret prisons, and destroyed America's moral standing in the world?

* USA Today quotes Ron Paul being interview by Jay Leno - "A good friend of mine that I talk to all the time on foreign policy is Dennis, Dennis Kucinich, because he understands civil liberties".
* The Huffington Post says "Fox News' Snub of Paul Could Trigger New Hampshire 'Blowback'"
* Yahoo reports Kucinich has filed a complaint about exclusion from ABC debate.
* AlterNet reports that "The GOP doesn't want Paul messing up their private party with an anti-war message that's resonating, so they fixed the show and excluded him".
* Alternet has another report on Fox - "Fox News Gone Wild: Attempts to Sabotage Ron Paul Campaign, Ambush Obama".
* Reuters reports Barry Goldwater Jr is campaigning for Ron Paul in NH.
* After Downing Street has a statement from Kucinich on Edwards and Obama.
* World Net Daily reports that Howard Stern has endorsed Ron Paul.
* Instant Goodness speculates that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich may be a Possible Independent Presidential Ticket?.
* OpEd News reports "81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as "Premier")". I'm betting Dick Cheney will be a surprise winner of the Republican primary.

Rigorous Intuition has almost ceased to function now, but Jeff has briefly emerged from hiding to put up a particularly demoralising piece of tinfoil - " Where do we go now but nowhere ?".

The genius of the Christian Hell isn't the suffering; it's the suffering in perpetuity.

Most faiths that incorporate into their theologies a place of punishment make it a way station where the souls can be purged of wickedness or impurities or bad karma before they can resume their progress, not a place of torment for the eternally damned. In such underworld afterlifes, the suffering may be great but it has an end and a rehabilitative purpose. In the Christian Hell, the suffering is without end and wholly punitive. Think of it as differing philosophies of incarceration. If nobody gets out of here alive, nobody gets out of there dead or alive.

I can't help it. Hell is what I think about when I think about the Iowa Caucuses. When I think of Hillary or Obama and Mitt or Huck I see only Titanic's deck chairs being rearranged on the bottom of the ocean. The familiar vain hope of another election cycle has turned desperate and evangelical, as though Hell were still only where we might end up, Ron Paul forbid. And Paul's millenarians, who regard him as America's latest last chance, keep doomsday watch against the blue helmets and detention camps of some imagined mongrel-socialist "New World Order." But that's to miss the more profound disorder, and the passing of each tipping point that locks us into its deeper circles.

It could have been another inside joke of the archly ironic universal mind that found Arlen Specter in Rawalpindi when Benazir Bhutto was struck down by her own magic bullet. If nothing else it does have good comic timing, but we've all seen its routine before and heard all the punchlines. Ever since the Roman Republic cut down the Gracchi brothers you'd think the assassination of another patrician reformer should cease to astonish, and perhaps at last it has. We've been living this hell long enough we should expect it, as Bhutto herself almost certainly did.

Our dying oceans incubate slime and bloom strange with jellyfish, North America's birds are disappearing on the order of tens of millions, and amphibians the world over are tumbling to extinction. It's 2008, the "Year of the Frog" to "generate public awareness and understanding of the amphibian extinction crisis which represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity." But to too many, 2008 will be a triumph of sorts simply because Bush and Cheney will be out of office by its end. "Change" and "Hope" are great vote multipliers, but to imagine that merely outlasting a term limit could be something like a victory is to misunderstand the meaning of public office in a deep criminal state, and to misapprehend our intractable circumstance whose closest analogy may be damnation.

The Existentialist Cowboy has some more about the Bhutto assassination in "Bhutto Knew Too Much About Bin Laden, 911, the CIA".

The Huffington Post has a good little article on Ron Paul's views on energy policy (get out of the way of alternative energy) and his neoconservative foes in the Republican party who prefer to fight endless wars over oil.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) recently gained fame for breaking one-day online donation records, but he's still considered an underdog by many because of his single-digit polling and arguably radical views on a variety of issues. For one thing, he supports an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, a position that seems more at home with the Democrats these days. So why is he up there, debate after debate, standing out from the likes of Huckabee and Romney and McCain? Why isn't he trying to fit in if he wants to win the primary? Is he even a Republican?

He told me he is--just not the same kind as the rest of them.

"I think their definitions are different," he said. "Today, the Party has been taken over by a group called neoconservatives, and I don't believe they're really conservative. I think they're really liberal in the modern sense of the word--they're big spenders, they believe in entitlements, they believe in military adventurism."

Paul certainly doesn't believe in "military adventurism." He articulated an anti-preemption stance, geard toward avoiding another inextricable, Iraq-like conflict in the future. And unlike some politicians, he usually acts in accordance with his stated philosophy. For example, he was one of only six Republicans in the House to vote against the Iraq War Resolution.

"The traditional conservative--which the Republicans used to be--did not advocate aggressive war, usually got our country out of the wars such as after Korea and Vietnam..." he said. "We've done exactly the opposite. And because I'm a strict constitutionalist, this has separated me from the other candidates."

Some have called Ron Paul an isolationist, in part because of his views on foreign aid and the use of military force. He strongly disagreed with the association.

"I'm the last thing from an isolationist," he said. "An isolationist is a protectionist--they want to build walls around their country. They may want to bring troops home, but they also want to close the door for trade and travel and the spreading of ideas, and that's quite different. The Founders, I think, had it right when they said, 'Trade with people, be friends with people, but don't get involved in their internal affairs and don't get involved in entangling alliances,' and you'd be a lot less likely to fight people that you're trading with than if you have protectionist measures and sanctions on countries [like] we do today."

He added: "The same individuals who claim I might be an isolationist are the ones who are putting sanctions on countries like Iran and Iraq and Sudan, and yet the trade might stop us from fighting. I, for instance, think we should be trading with Castro, rather than putting sanctions on Castro, because it didn't do any good--after 40 or 50 years, it hasn't helped us a bit."

Finally, Paul believes that the United States should not be entirely dependent on other nations for its energy.

"I think the most important thing is to let the market set the price of energy and get out of the way of alternative energy," he said. "We've been interfering with the development of nuclear energy for 30 or 40 years. We don't develop any new nuclear power plants, but then at the same time we take money and we subsidize alternative fuels such as ethanol, which nobody's ever proven is an economically feasible alternative. So the most important thing is to recognize that the government bureaucrats and politicians have no idea what is the best alternative fuel, but if the market pushes the price of oil up, then people are going to say, 'Hey, they're running out of oil! And oil is now $200 a barrel, we better do something,' and the market's going to come up with the best alternative."

These goals may seem ambitious, but Paul is conservative about what he could accomplish unilaterally, stressing that he would need to rely on congressional support that a mandate, in the form of his successful election to the presidency, would grant him.

"You could [unilaterally] change the foreign policy and bring troops home and save a lot of money. And you could start repealing executive orders that have been so onerous. And you could refuse to enforce laws that are put on the books through regulations and by court orders or executive orders. So you could be discreet in what you enforce, but to really, really have the big changes, yes, you have to work and develop a consensus on what you're trying to do."