Hall of lame

As all things pass, so they become lame. And so here therewith we present the Wide World of Lameness:

Thomas Spinoza - for creating a downtown for dickheads, kicking our real downtown while it lays dying, and not bothering to deal honestly with his associates, so that the spectre of foreclosure now graces this monstrous blight on the south suburbs

Conan O'Brian - for pretending to be a comedian

Ben Silverman - for playing a lot of high winded dickhead games, yet doing nothing to save the network of which he was president from being drowned in the bathtub (seems that the name "Silverman" has a poor track record at the Crap Network)

Sarah Palin - no comment necessary, her entire life is a cacaphony of lameness

Drew Carey - for plumbing the depths of lameness, by lowering the greatest game show in history to the bottom rung of depravity and despair

General Hospital - because only the most brilliant of minds could turn a time honored medically oriented series into a low rent version of the Sopranos

Jack Wagner - because who knew that to be "Wagner'd" could be such a life changing experience

Piyush "Bobby" Jindal - for high crimes and dickheadery, namely promising flashy "change" and then proceeding to mulch tax dollars with abandon, satisfying his innate bureaucrat urge

Our Leader (aka BO) - for raping the Amerikan people every which way and that, and condemning us to the certain death of economic dessication and medical fascism.

Way to go, people. You folks have done wonders to make our society the thriving cesspool it is to-day. Believe it!

Weekends suck

Especially if you are an obese loser existing on the fringes of even marginal society, who is regarded universally as a nuisance and threat by familiar and stranger alike.

The ghetto exists to contain such souls, to preserve them separate from the larger society which loathes and mistrusts them for good reason. For the social deviants are an unproductive force on the larger commonweal, whose existence stunts and atrophies the good work of the productive many for which basic human skills do not pose such challenge as with the morally comatose.

Though one might think that a person such as myself, fitting the description above to a "T", would preach social tolerance and comity, the fact is that a dedication to the moral right trumps any sympathies of mine toward the weak and lazy. Those who put little into life and expect others to bow to their every whim are condemned to obtain from life only the bare crumbs as moral recompense for the misery which they inflict upon others and themselves.

Trailer court follies

For the latest chapter in the decline and fall of the Murican empire, look no further than the evaporation of the educated from our landscape.

So now it is official: nearly half of to-day's urban youth on average, and not too many more of their suburban and rural brethren, fail to graduate high school, fail to obtain basic skills necessary to survival in a modern technological society.

For a good majority of the remainder, graduation occurs but is only a non-event, an anticlimax - they remain mal-educated, ignorant, the products of social promotion, holders of a worthless and hollow credential made empty by the dogs of government fiat.

It is clear that ever decreasing levels of achievement and increasing intellectual squalor only serves to depress our economic performance and productivity and debases our once envied way of life.  Where once competence could be counted upon in the world of commerce, incompetence and sloth reign supreme. It has become a truism of everyday life that the vast majority of the employees of the various massive corporate enterprises, and thus by extension their employers (most service sector), cannot be counted upon to provide a product or service effectively, efficiently, or with any degree of courtesy. Workflows and processes must be revised and devolved to match the minimum competencies (if that) of a workforce which has hardly demonstrated any sort of allegiance to the work ethic. 

A generation has it writ upon their faces "DO NOT CARE" unless it concerns some form of gross orgiastic self-engorgment, generally involving either bodily parts or controlled substances.

Why the sudden embrace of the existence of subsidy, sloth, parasitism, and moral decay amongst the young thug set? Why do able bodied people reject achievement and meaning in their lives for the counterfeit pleasures of substance abuse, sexual excess, et al.?

Because given the choices posed to them, the youth will always take the easy way out. His mindset is fixated on short term indulgences as opposed to long term reward for diligent effort. It is the consistent mentality of the untrained, immature mind.

Formerly this process was understood by civilization, and much effort was expended amongst society's adults to place restraints on youthful behavior in order to restrict the natural inherent tendency toward the pursuit of instant gratification and endless leisure. The structures imposed by social institutions would shape the young person's mind and character, ultimately orienting it toward the pursuit of productive work as the brain matured and the individual came to accept the societal norms of work and effort which are demanded of us all.

But these restrictions have dissolved in the face of a State that provides eternal subsidy for all mistakes and penalizes those who pursue productive paths as the parasitical classes make permanent hosts of the wealth generators. The bonds of family, friends, schools have evaporated to be incompletely replaced by an impersonal and distant god-State.

And when traits of behavior are not learned during the formative years, they remain unlearnt perpetually and can only be belatedly taught only at great expense of effort, usually resulting in futility and failure to correct the destructive habits of subsidy. When the pursuit of perpetual gratification becomes the focus of existence, like a narcotic it cannot be neither continued nor withdrawn easily without the gravest of consequences.

The future of the uneducated masses appears bleak indeed. Illiteracy, illegitimacy, parasitism, and personal chaos ensure that the failure class will be of little use to society in their future lives, and ensure a lifetime of welfarism for each. Assured of rendering but only marginal contributions to the economy (if that), this lost generation will find itself ill-equipped to compete with the rising economies and advanced training of countries in distant lands formerly best known for the frequency of famines and despotic regimes. The tables will soon be reversed as the current crisis of civilizational devolution reaches its inevitable denouement, with these things becoming a fact of life here as the vast majority select the life of subsidy over productive effort, thus relegating anything approaching an advanced industrial economy in this country to the dustbin of history. The remaining semi-productive activities on these shores will increasingly be restricted to those areas which service the nauseatingly eternal belly of subsidy - fast food, drugs, guns, and social welfare services. All of this will be accordingly dumbed down to fit the feeble abilities and barely extant expectations of the ascendant trailer court class.

As the Far East assumes predominance in world economic affairs on the basis of its productive economy, the Lost World of Amerika will degenerate into a destitute mobocracy, filled with filthy, slimy creatures hardly worthy of being described as people, their grimy hands outstretched in a permanent pose of perpetual need to their now-totalitarian government and to the rest of the world. The global masses will but shake their heads, extend a few words of pity, and be on about their business, happy to leave the comatose masses to their degeneracy of mutual slaughter and self-immolation.

As Ayn Rand stated, the mind is the key tool of the human being which enables him to rise above the other animals. Nature did not endow the 'naked ape' with particularly exceptional strength, natural protections of a physical sort, or swiftness of speed. The evolutionary advance that elevated Homo sapiens to predominance in the natural world was the careful use of his intellect and stored knowledge, passed on through the generations via education.

To abandon this advantage is to fall back into the barbarous state of the animal kingdom from whence we came. And for this, this is precisely what will happen. To live as animals is to exist as animals. And it ends as we shall die like animals for our betrayal of ourselves.

Such is the ultimate outcome of the worship of death - the civic religion of our age.

More capitol lunacy, and other stuff

The legislature blackens my mornings with their antics, as dutifully reported by the pretend journalists over at WJBO radio. But no matter about that triviality, for the offenses of our solons are putrid beyond all hell.

Each day brings more potential depredations upon our lives and our freedoms. No talk is uttered of retrenchment, of living within one's means, of permanently doing less with less. Instead the cry is about "evil" budget cuts to public "education" and the protection of bureaucratic privilege, i.e. civil service merit increases.

Hey folks, guess what? I haven't received a pay increase in five years. Between inflation and taxes, that's tantamount to a shrinking income. Yet I'm not up in arms, declaring with fatted lips that I am "owed" an income increase by society, for whose "benefit" my "services" are performed. Unlike our capitol critter friends, regular folks understand that a dollar earned is equivalent to value produced for that dollar.

For those with hands outstretched in perpetual need, (apologies to EON Productions) being handed the world on a silver platter is not enough. The vacuum pit of subsidy demands more, and always delivers less in return.

Gotta love it.

--

More corpses litter the retail boneyard as the depression grinds on to its bitter conclusion.

But I ask, what about SearsKmart??

A few years back Kmart was bankrupt and on the ropes, a failed merchandiser, about two hair breaths' length from complete evaporation. Sears was healthier but hardly any better, a shell of its former glory akin to Montgomery Ward in its last days.

When these two failed firms were combined, I noted at the time that it was the equivalent of propping up two rotten sheaths of wheat, to keep each other from collapsing into ash.

So in an age of retail death, when formerly indomitable soulless national corporate conglomerates crash and burn on a daily basis, what lies in store for this reprehensible combination?

Failure and more failure, most likely. But it thankfully will have few repurcussions here. The Capital Region has only two Sears stores which are generally mostly empty whenever I visit; and one lone Kmart straggler store in an outlying exurb, rendering the Stick essentially Kmartfrei. (Though there are many dead boxes which litter the suburban landscape here that formerly housed the retailer.) Wise souls here conduct their retail business at the House of Sam (Walton, that is).

--

One last question, because inquiring minds want to know:

Will "the new GM" be similar to "the new NBC" circa 1979 and to-day?

Because I wouldn't want to go there with a 100 foot pole, if you know what I mean.

(Sorry, couldn't resist kicking a failure while it's down, and likely unable to get up again.)

Online dating sucks

For an urban dwelling, atomized person as isolated as myself, it is suggested that online dating should be used as a venue for meeting other single individuals and arranging for social encounters and possible relationships. Seems to me to be far less effective and more extortionary (in the financial sense) than the old fashioned method from yore of organizing singles' "get togethers" where unattached people can meet face to face. But online romance is the best alternative which our declining age offers us.

In some ways, the online route is superior. For losers such as myself who have the eternal knack for off-putting virtually everyone we cross paths with (save trailer court rabble and underclass incompetents), the lack of direct communication can be a blessing. It is not that one should misrepresent oneself in this manner. However, the online medium serves as a buffer from instant rejection.

Yet overall it is a far inferior method. There are certain arrangements and conventions involved which, if not mastered perfectly, can doom all online pursuits and lead to failure and fruitless efforts. In many ways, online dating etiquette is an outgrowth of knowing basic social skills. If you have absolutely no knowledge, experience, or skill in this area, no amount of training can bring any onling dating endeavors past the point of fishing from a dry hole. A very dry, unforgiving hole.

So for people like me who frittered away our childhood memorizing encyclopedia articles in isolation instead of obtaining a basic social skills education through substative human interaction, more doors are closed and more walls pose themselves insurmountable in our face.

True loners spend their entire existences virtually alone, interacting with others only for functional ends. There are no connections made, no relationships forged. Indeed, the concept of close relationships and human interaction is virtually as alien to the loner as life in space. Their lives turn inward, toward whatever petty interests amuse them. External intrusions, no matter on what level they are desired, are ultimately perceived as foreign and alien intrusions into a hermetically sealed lifestyle.

Social situations of the 'normal' sort are so alien to me, it is like attempting to interpret a foreign culture - at least that is the analogy that sprouts to mind whenever I encounter such a situation. That is how out of the loop folks like me are.

So if we cannot cut it in the real world, then how is online dating supposed to be any different for us? When the time inevitably comes to meet person to person (supposing it ever comes to that), what happens then?

In my online dating experience, it is apparent that 99.5% of all attempts to 'outreach' and connect are fishing down dry holes. For every interest notification sent, about 1 in 1,000 are reciprocated. For every reciprocation and response to same, about 10% (at most) are additionally reciprocated. Beyond that, the chances for further connection are so infinitesimal as to be unmeasurable.

I suppose for most folks, online dating is generally quite fruitful and active, and great benefits and even lasting relationships come of it. Socially balanced individuals find online dating to be useful - otherwise online websites would not exist, much less be so popular amongst the unattached. For the loser who demonstrates no ability to communicate effectively in real life without eliciting extremely negative reactions from the people around him, it is no surprise that online chatting should be no different.

If you don't know how to talk to people, you aren't going to be able to compose a message that will grab the attention of the opposite sex or otherwise make them interested in you. If you agonize over every word, every syllable, when writing a message or a response to a message via an online dating service, that's a very good sign that you are absolute shit at the business.

I would suggest for the social isolate not to waste one's money on online dating services. You are too fundamentally flawed for it to be much of use for you. If you are really, really determined to do the online dating thing, I would first suggest radically altering your personality, outlook on life, and general comportment around other people before even contemplating such a move.

Overall, the social isolate is too flawed to exist in civilized society. That should not amount to an abridgment of his civil rights or denial of opportunities based on merit and/or native talent. For the social isolate, that is all he will likely receive out of life. You get out of life only what you put into it. Lazy, indolent personalities eat shit and breathe lifelong misery, as they rightly should in a morally proper regime.

(I apologize for going off topic somewhat. But what's stopped me before?)

Anyway, take your personal situation into consideration and seriously consider the odds that you will find happiness or companionship via the online route, before parting with your hard earned money. They don't call it discretionary spending for nothing.

The jig is up

Currently I am caught in a long term fatal vise which is certain to lead to personal ruin.

It may not be to-day, or to-morrow. It may not be next week, next month, next year, or even five years from now. But the day is inevitable when my supreme incompetence becomes exposed and explodes into a political embarrassment for certain persons in high places. And then when that day comes will the blade fall.

It could even fall for a less pressing reason. My innumerable life failures have traditionally been predicated by extremely trivial and outright stupid things.

My enemies skulk serpentlike behind my back, speaking in hushed whispers, plotting the chain of events which will lead to my certain downfall. They know which weaknesses to exploit, which screws to turn, which incidents to document, which behaviors to record for later criticism.

I am that easy a mark. Words do not describe how so far out of my league I currently play.

I have the mentality of a small child amongst grown men, rank immaturity amongst those for which the business of life is business, with no time to tolerate idiotic diversions. This makes me one of the walking dead.

This state of affairs cannot last much longer.

I feel the chill of agents of destruction in the air. My enemies are more restless than usual. A plot is up, and thick. There are secret movements being made in dark, unseen places on high to ensure my demise.

And when they have me where they want me, broken and destitute, what say I to them?

I caused this entire mess myself. I cannot compete with my intellectual, moral, and mental betters. They know how to function in the adult world. I am still a child waiting for my permanent subsidy from some angel of salvation.

Well guess what? The angel of salvation is a fiction. I have worn out my welcome from one subsidizer to the next. The last subsidy game in town is the State. And now it too has reached its limit of patience.

So barrenness and destitution awaits me. My deserved fate, as an unmigitated, unapologetic, complete and total failure and ruin.

I am worth more dead than alive.

Failure: incompetence as key

In this second installment in our Failure series, we will explore how incompetence breeds failure and especially how incompetence is born and bred by the State power.

You all know Mr. Incompetent, in one way or another. You all know the type of person who lazes about the office, with an unpleasant personality and an entitlement complex a mile long and an inch deep. Or more likely, he doesn't work at all, preferring to slouch all day, collect a subsidy check, and play loud music all night long, thus disturbing your sleep if you are unfortunate enough to reside next door to him. But incompetence does not always render itself so highly visible. The most destructive incompetence can be concealed under quite innocuous guises.

Incompetents are extremely self absorbed and thus sometimes lose sight of their responsibilities, the results of which ends up affecting others negatively. They may or may not be narcissists, but that is only relevant when it comes time to assign blame in the wake of failure. Incompetents are not necessarily malevolent. Oftentimes they do not mean to cause problems due to their self focus. Incompetence is a natural result of the drift in their thoughts toward items other than the task at hand. They may be consumed with worries about important personal issues (such as finances, always a worry in these difficult times), or perhaps they are afflicted with autism spectrum disorders which render it more difficult for them to focus on something other than the self. No matter what the cause, excessive introspection, aka minor incompetence, leads to a lack of focus on the task at hand and is highly likely to lead to mistakes, errors, and careless sloppiness in performance of tasks, thus breeding incompetence.

Lack of focus means that data may be entered incorrectly, or details may be misremembered or forgotten completely, or small but crucial steps may be skipped, or items may be misplaced or mistakenly destroyed. This is the basis for systemic failure down the road.

Then there is major incompetence. Major incompetents have, for lack of a better expression, a moral comportment that does not lend itself to ease of use in larger society. For them, incompetence and failure are byproducts of deliberate gross negligence caused by egregious self-indulgence. These folks include your standard issue subsidy seekers, welfare moochers, pathological narcissists, resource hustlers, and loss-socializers. Many of these folks are drawn to government as a source of sustenance, whether vocationally or otherwise, since government by definition does not disappear or otherwise suffer ill effect due to the consequences of failure. Indeed, unlike anything observed in private industry and contrary to every moral law imaginable, the State sector uses each and every one of its numerous failures as an excuse to aggrandize even more power and resources for itself! 

This, of course, explains the reason for the existence of that multiplicity of incompetent souls which populate and staff the State apparatus. A system built on a foundation of incompetence, and where the proper consequences of incompetence are non-existent, is virtually guaranteed to fail, every single time. And in a system of falsely begotten privilege where the greatest unearned benefits percolate to the top, it can be assured that the most aggressive major incompetent hustlers will rise to the occasion to seize them.

Major incompetents are deftly able when it comes to self-benefit and obtaining what they want. It is in the remainder of life, in performing responsibilities which benefit others, that they fail so dramatically. And with greater responsibilities, the potential for failure only rises and the scale of failure increases accordingly. The Imperial bureaucracy is liberally peppered with examples past and present of this phenomenon (see "heck of a job").

It is clear that the State harbors much incompetence and failure in the world. Due to the special architecture of public power which insulates those in its service from accountability and responsibility, it is clear that even if all State actors performed their jobs with at least a basic level of competence, the State would inevitably fail. In short, the mechanics of socialism require a sort of god-king who will know the unknowable, who will comprehend all parameters that in larger society are the responsibilities of many diverse actors who may never encounter each other. Such is the fantasy of the idolators of the State throughout history - to identify this superman who will be able to perform this unperformable task and finally fulfill the most cherished wish of all loafers through the ages: to obtain prosperity without the expenditure of effort.

With parameters this impossible to meet, is it any wonder that State incompetence and failure occur with all too frequent regularity? Is it any wonder that those god-kings in whom we place our hopes to perform economic miracles always fail to satisfy, while only serving to impoverish us in the meantime?

Such is the impact of incompetence on all of us. The next installment will go further in depth in researching the link between the State and failure.

Failure: definitions and causes

In this series of essays, I will attempt to dissect the composition of the causes and consequences of failure in our society. Namely, what produces failures, what is the character of those failures, and what are the negative social consequences of those failures. In later essays, I will also try to present solutions to the results of failure in our society and suggestions for minimizing the influence of failure producing forces.

What is failure? A question with an obvious answer, it would seem. Failure is the antithesis of success. At its simplest, failure is any result or outcome which is the opposite of what is defined as "success" in a given situation: generally that outcome which was not planned, anticipated, or desired by the failing party. Yet as with everything, this is more complex that this mere statement of fact.

Some failures are obvious, conforming every way to the basic definition: a man's advances are rejected by a woman, government performs a "service" poorly, a Wall Street Ponzi scheme implodes, a contestant or team loses a game.  These negative outcomes can manifest themselves in wide ranging forms, from minor annoyances to life-or-death situations.

Yet there are hidden, insidious failures that populate everyday life sight unseen. Small failures such as this may not be visible immediately, but they almost always contribute to greater failure. Every large, spectacular failure is almost always caused by a cascading series of smaller failures which collectively push the situation inexorably toward ultimate failure. For instance, a team may make bad plays or commit errors during a game that gives the opponent the winning edge, or small mistakes may be made during a development project in terms of calculation or merely forgetting needed details which renders failure certain as mistakes are built into the system that cause cascading collapse down the line with use. (This is a textbook definition of how computer bugs come to exist.)

Failure is not always an active process. Often failure occurs not due to incompetent actions, but because actions which were needed or required did not occur. Attention to detail is neglected, which by itself may not cause evident failure but almost always contributes to greater failure. For instance, if a freeway HOV lane gate left open in the morning for inbound traffic was not closed to accommodate the outbound direction of traffic flow in the evening, traffic would be able to enter the HOV lane in the "wrong" direction and risk a head on collision. (This type of failure actually happened in Pittsburgh some years ago; the party responsible was convicted of murder; a very just outcome, as we will explain in later entries.)

Highly related to failure is incompetence. It is not always directly true that incompetence breeds failure, as even the best operators in a given field have their "off" days. However, incompetence is a major cause of failure in today's world, even more so as the number of incompetent individuals continue their seemingly inexorable increase. It would not be completely fair to state that incompetence is the cause of all failure in the world, but we can at least offer this truism of situational ethics:

Incompetence, when present, inevitably breeds failure.

To understand failure is to understand incompetence. In many ways, as we explore failure, we are also exploring the deepest mechanics of incompetence.

Except for natural processes untouched by man (such as landslides in remote mountain locations), very few failures in the world are not somehow anthropogenic (man made) by origin. While natural forces may be instigators of failure, insofar as these forces work on the man-made environment and impact that environment negatively, man is the cause of these failures. We care very little if the natural forces generated by a hurricane levels a natural area inhabited only by wildlife; we care substantially if the same forces undermine man-made flood protection bulwarks and cause wind-borne storm surge to inundate a major city.

Thereby, failure can almost always be traced to the incompetent actions of some person or persons responsible for that aspect of a system or a situation which failed. The ethics of how to properly punish those who commit incompetent actions, and what deterrents should be installed to hopefully prevent future failures, is the moral quandary of the ages, the source of the greatest dilemmas pondered by our solons and great thinkers.

I have explained the basis of incompetence in this post. Some points of this article and related items bear summation here:

Incompetents, at heart, are lazy and shiftless individuals who believe they are "superior" to others. Even if they claim to feel strongly otherwise, the fact is that people who lack respect for their jobs or for other people will generally have little respect for anything else that does not provide immediate gratification to them.

Incompetents are possessed of weak character and slippery morals. Their main goal in life is to achieve for themselves a situation where they can live in comfort without commiserate expenditure of effort or skill. This generally means that they are drawn to subsidy for their means of survival.

Incompetents believe that they are always right, that they rank above everyone else, and that they are consequently above the rules of life, including that rule which states that able bodied adults must support themselves. No amount of cajoling or bluster can convince an incompetent to abandon his morally sketchy ways.

Incompetence is a character trait that is decided upon early in life. A child makes a moral choice at a young age whether to attack life via mooching or via productive activity. (It is unknown whether this decision is influenced primarily by environmental factors or by the inherent "tenor" of a person's soul. I tend to favor the latter explanation.) It goes without saying that incompetence stems from the "moocher" personality. This decision shapes all later moral character and is the key which separates "good" people from "bad" people. Once this decision is made, it is virtually impossible to change, as it would entail a change in fundamental personality and sense of self which is wrapped around the core character. However, with extraordinary willpower this can be accomplished, and there are many stories of reformed individuals who have successfully made the transition from scumbag to valued contributor to society.

In the next installment of this series, we will review how incompetent actions cause failures in work, in play, and in life in general.