buried by the blues

Absolved forever into the darkest shades,
I'll vanish from the light to the still-calling me
Enslaved forever or buried by the blues?
Wear your wounds like a soldier; and let your ghosts run loose

Exploding waves, you wish you could belong
A piper at the gates to steal you from the dawn
No suicide could ever change your fate
Fold your hands in reply beneath the trembling rain

Against the night, you will rise and set your body free
Frontier of light, you desire to let your body sleep
Away from the static and noise
Away from the bombs and the war

-- Stephen McBean (Black Mountain) 2010

profound political disunity

[A] nation ruled by Imperial kleptocrats is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together.  The public sees the value system at the top is [to] maximize personal profit by whatever means available (e.g., complicity, corruption, monopoly, and rentier rackets), and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.  But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top 0.1% and their army of technocrats and enablers; so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic....

When the system is rigged, "democracy" is just another public-relations screen to mask the unsavory reality of Oligarchy....  The conventional markers of democracy -- elections and elected representatives -- exist, but they are mere facades; the mechanisms of setting the course of the nation are corrupt, and the power lies outside the public's reach.  History has shown that democratic elections don't guarantee an uncorrupt, functional government. Rather, democracy has become the public-relations stamp of approval for corrupt governance that runs roughshod over individual liberty while centralizing the power to enforce consent, silence critics, and maintain the status quo....

-- Charles Hugh Smith (Of Two Minds blog)