Opmtimism: If you want to change the status quo you have to change your status quo...

The confluence of the failed filibuster of Alito, "stuff at work," and a waxing of my capability to Buddhist-blog, led me recently to think of the above.

If you want things different in your life, you will have to make them different, or the cylce of cause and effect remains "on autopilot."

Sure there's folks in places of power about to do mean, nasty things. But the world's seen it before. As I noted previously, this type of meanness and nastiness sows the seeds of its own destruction, if only because others can gain an advantage from the meanness and nastiness of folks like that.

Looked at this way, it's easy not to be afraid, not to be angry.

With patience and constancy, and with the attitude of a frog waiting opportunistically for its meal, the good guys will prevail.

The previously-referred-to-rightie-colleague told me that Exxon-Mobil "earned" their record oil profits recently, which is the same thing as saying I earned my capital gains achieved in that commodity because I thought Bush would enrich oil companies at the expense of the little guy, and was proven right in spades. It was no special effort on my part to see this, not compared to some of the theoretical work I've done lately.

Is this taking which is not given? No, I don't think so, I think it was, as Henry Hill would say, a "gimme," except there was no coercion on my part; OTOH, the Folks Who Voted for Bush were sold a bill of goods, so to speak. But I sure as hell didn't "earn" the money in the sense that I worked my butt off for it.

It's easy to bet on the decline of the US; anybody can see it; look at the investment capital flows. The "Federalists" who want to return the US to an earlier time never quite figured out or don't care that that earlier time, prior to McKinley, was when the US was weak politically and most people were poor and some were enslaved, or nearly so.

People will have to change the status quo, if they want the status quo to change.

The Alito thing was a good start, actually. Attacking the latter day Yellow Journalism Media is starting to have an effect too.

At the very least, I'll be able to retire comfortably if Bush continues this nonsense; but I fear that I'll be living outside the US, and when I visit I'll be like those Japanese I used to see on 5th Avenue in the 1980s & 90s, who didn't think twice about scarfing up what other Americans consider luxury items. Not that I'd actually do that; I was raised austere and have an admittedly egotistical visceral reaction to guady trappings of wealth that is more thinking the purchaser of a luxury what-not was a greater fool than a beautiful person. But hell, everythings going to be real cheap in the US soon, at least in foreign hard-currency.