surf progression

The idea that you can improve never goes away....  Surfing's evolved.  The boards have evolved.  I'm actually stronger now, and I have more control over my technique.  But I have too many injuries.   It's super frustrating because there are some days I don't want to surf because I'm in pain.  But I still feel, at this age right now, my best surfing is still ahead of me. 

I grew up idolizing Tom Curren.  I wanted to surf like him.  I wanted to hold my arms like him.  Then at some point I realized I'm not Tom Curren.  I have a different approach.  I think differently.  And if you're trying to be someone else, you're not offering the world what you have.  
 
-- Kelly Slater (11x World Champion) 2017

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)

Trumped

[Donald Trump] is now fully at war with the mainstream media and the national security apparatchiks of the Deep State — and nothing could be more conducive to exposing the folly of Washington's imperial adventures abroad and its fiscal bankruptcy at home.... [T]he "Trump is soft on Russia" meme is nothing more than the desperate attempt of the Deep State to protect its dirty secret that America has no real enemies that can militarily threaten the homeland.... The ruling elites are determined to take the Donald down, and whether they succeed or not, it is extremely probable that Washington will grind to a halt — Watergate era style — by early spring....

[E]conomic recovery and the restoration of honest democracy in America depend upon a plunge in the wildly inflated stock market. It is that event which would finally discredit the monetary central planners at the Fed, destroy the insidious regime of Bubble Finance they have created, [and expose] the financial fraud which has permitted the Imperial City to fund the nation's bloated Warfare State and Welfare State with reckless abandon. Fiscal rectitude will only return when a thundering financial trauma demonstrates to the American public that a money printing central bank is its mortal enemy and that the Fed's charter to buy government debt and rig interest rates and stock prices must be forever revoked.

-- David Stockman (The Daily Reckoning) Feb. 21, 2017

Russian Distraction

[T]he demonization of Russia [is] a way more idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s since there is no longer any ideological conflict between us, and all the evidence indicates that the current state of bad relations is America’s fault -- in particular, our sponsorship of the state failure in Ukraine and our avid deployment of NATO forces in war games on Russia’s border....

Rather, the Evil Russia meme seems a projection of our country’s own insecurities and contradictions. For instance, we seem to think that keeping Syria viciously destabilized is preferable to allowing its legitimate government to restore some kind of order there. Russia has been on the scene attempting to prop up the Assad government, while we are on the scene there doing everything possible to keep a variety of contestants in a state of incessant war. U.S. policy in Syria has been both incoherent and tragically damaging to the Syrians.

Russians stood aside while the U.S. smashed up Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We demonstrated adequately that shoving sovereign nations into civic failure is not the best way to resolve geopolitical tensions. Why would it be such a bad thing for the U.S. to stand aside in Syria and see if the Russians can rescue that country from failure? Because they might keep a naval base there on the Mediterranean? We have scores of military bases around the region.

It’s actually pretty easy to understand why the Russians might be paranoid about America’s intentions. We use NATO to run threatening military maneuvers near Russia’s borders. We provoked Ukraine — formerly a province of the Soviet state — to become a nearly failed state, and then we complained foolishly about the Russian annexation of Crimea — also a former territory of the Soviet state and of imperial Russia going back centuries. We slapped sanctions on Russia, making it difficult for them to participate in international banking and commerce.

What’s really comical is the idea that Russia is using the Internet to mess with our affairs — as if the USA has no cyber-warfare ambitions or ongoing operations against them (and others, such as hacking Angela Merkel’s personal phone). News flash: every country with access to the Internet is in full hacking mode around the clock against every other country so engaged. Everybody’s doing it.

-- James Howard Kunstler (The Daily Reckoning ) Oct. 29, 2016

Not Me

Who's gonna fight?  Not Me!
Who thinks it right?  Not Me!
"The threat of war is a passing phase."
Try telling that to a waiting grave.
They say the bunkers will be safe.
They're not big enough for the human race.

Who's having fun?  Not Me!
Gonna carry a gun?  Not Me!
I've got to fight; I got no choice.
They'll never hear my fucking voice.
Deafened in the deathly noise
Created by their brand new toys.

Who's gonna die?  Not Me!
I'll tell you why....
I won't do whatever they say
Even if it means getting put away.
That's what I think -- OK?
You've got to react -- it's the only way.

Subhumans, 1983

American Corporatocracy

One little-remarked consequence of central banks' policies of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing is the unrivaled dominance of mobile global capital.  The source of corporate political power is the ability to borrow essentially unlimited sums for next to nothing: what I have long termed free money for financiers.  Armed with central-bank supplied unlimited credit, global capital can outbid local residents and businesses. Over time, profitable enterprises and assets end up in corporate hands....

The same dynamic — the unparalleled power of cheap credit — then funds corporate dominance of the political process.  As corporations buy up productive assets, they consolidate these assets into cartels and quasi-monopolies that can be protected from competition by lobbying and campaign contributions.  Governments come and go, candidates come and go, and political movements come and go, but the Corporatocracy remains in charge. 

-- Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds blog (edited)