Tag Archives: politics

Different Blokes for Different Folks

Since we’re on a roll posting about the differences between liberals and conservatives (or is it conservatives and liberals) I thought I’d go at it from a slightly different tack. This treatise (getting a big head are we?) is based on only one concept, how each faction (more like each segment) defines power and its use.

Politics is about power. It always has been and always will be. Government is power in a practical public sense. Government forms, secures and enforces public policy, which power to do so is given to it, in a democracy, by the people, through their constitutional right to vote. (One of these days we’ll look into the difference between constitutional rights and god given rights) (Are you tired of these not so clever parenthetical asides yet?)(OK I’ll stop).

So it follows that one difference between liberals and conservatives would be a difference of opinion about what power really is and who truly wields it. Since goal 1 of the politician is gaining office, i.e. political power, and goal 1A is maintaining it, differences in the perception of power inform a great deal of what politicians are about, both in theory and practice. Starting with how they wage campaigns, all the way through how they formulate policy and propose legislation, their ideas about power are an important aspect of their ideology and it’s promotion.

I reference no science here. I know of no studies or research on the subject of political power and it’s party specific dynamics, although I’m sure there must be some. Unlike other nameless actors in the media play, I have no desire to claim my opinions are science. These are solely my opinions, forged through observation of both the say and the do on the bridge between hypothesis and action. Because of the apparent death and rigor mortis of non partisan cooperation in Washington, and many state houses as well, I’m sure my opinions can only be speculative and not viable. I wish they were. And, as you will see, unfortunately, I am horribly biased as well.

The primary conservative vision of power is the acquisition and application of money. Money is the thing they value most. It gets them the things they want. Money has traditionally been the standard used to confer social status onto the wealthy. This status imparts important things to the rich person, things they need to imagine they are happy. Other people, often poor people who also value money above all, look up to the wealthy and aspire to be wealthy. They covet what the wealthy have and what they can get. They gladly hand over their socioeconomic and political power to the wealthy, feeling the rich have proven their ability to wield that power, based on the benchmark of their ability to accumulate wealth. These folk see the wealthy as superior but their egos tell them they are also superior and will someday be wealthy themselves, thus proving their superiority. In essence they worship the rich. This worship can easily give the wealthy a false sense of superiority and cause them to resent those who criticize them. They feel they are above criticism and scrutiny. They need the worship to give them a feeling of self worth. They are frightened people who are scared of change, of losing their status and the power they value that goes with it.

Conservatives also value the power of authority. This comes primarily from their belief that a hierarchy of authority, whether through the power of money or of wisdom or tenure, keeps society disciplined and morally in line. People who need discipline and need an external source of ideas, also display worship of authority and think their leaders as superior. They follow unfailingly those arbiters of the acceptable, whether familial, religious, political etc., because, once again, the authorities have proven their moral superiority. They depend on their leaders to tell them how to live. They are happy to abrogate their power, the power to discover their own set of values, to the authority figures and their prefab values. They are also scared, frightened of doing wrong out of wrong thinking. They don’t trust themselves to grow and progress any further than their ancestors did. They wait patiently, until they have their own families and own status in the community. They are then handed the power of authority, power they can wield themselves, over their own particular fiefdom.

It is not difficult for conservatives to accept authoritarian rule. They accept that the wealthy, or those who the wealthy support, are best suited to rule. They come from a system where dissent is discouraged; because reliance on rules protects the people from themselves. They harbor the idea that if they work hard enough and play by the rules, they will attain the power of wealth and authority for themselves. However, all the time, they are aware that the real way to attain power is to ignore the rules until you have enough power to discard them. But only those with authority have the luxury to do that with impunity.

So conservatives are mostly rich people afraid of losing what they have plus poor people who are scared of failure and desperate for success. They feed off each other, providing what the other needs most. They want everybody to submit to their values, not only because they are completely certain they are right about everything but because they have doubts, deep inside, that they might just be wrong. These doubts need to be buried even deeper in order for them to function. Seeing others who have different values makes them question that righteousness, and they can’t have that. If they can get everybody to accept their vision and their values, then those doubts disappear.

Finally, conservatives believe that power and wealth are finite and scarce. Because of this they are perpetually haunted by fear. Fear of not not being good enough to get their share of the pie, and fear of not being good enough to keep others from taking the share they have. In the struggle to accumulate and keep as much of the scare commodity of power it’s every man for himself. So in essence conservatives are motivated by getting and keeping power, in the form of money and authority. Their politics reflects this world view.

As you may imagine, liberals have quite a different vision of power. To them power is collective. it comes from the bottom up and not the top down. Power is people. It is attained through finding the ever changing nature of the greater good, nurturing and maintaining it for everyone, with equal opportunity for a life of meaning and peace of mind. Liberals worship the balance between the welfare of the self and the welfare of society. Power is not the finite, scarce commodity of money, to be competitively gathered, through any means, and hoarded for no good purpose other than to gloat. Power is limitless and abundant, and comes in many forms, with money being only one among many. Power is accumulated not individually through competition, but collectively through cooperation.

This is not to say the liberal does not value money. Money has real value and purpose. The accumulation of it is not so much proof of an individual’s superiority but more so an application of an individual’s gifts and skill. The power of money is not in using it to get what one wants but to assure everyone gets what they need.

Liberals are more inclined to recognize and respect the value of all people, regardless of economic or social standing. They respect authority rather than worship it. Neither do they worship those who have money and keep it for themselves but rather those who have money and happily give some of it back to the government and the people, so that together we create more of the abundance that gives us the comfort of knowing there is enough for all.

Liberals view the authority of leadership not as a rigid hierarchy of dominance but as a means to make and enforce rules that benefit all. Instead of quanta of the unchallenged influence of authority, through which a young adult can only ascend by the consent of one who must then descend, the liberal youth is simply given the tools to ascend on their own terms, without depending on the failure of others for their success. For the liberal, leadership is about managing abundance instead of doling out scarcity. It is about hope instead of fear.

So liberals are people from all walks of life who value themselves and, thus, others. The essence of how the liberal sees the world is in the individual and collective, giving to back and forth to each other the abundant, diverse wealth created by the power of skill and caring, of everyone working together. This is the model for their politics.

I cannot with good conscience claim that liberal politics in today’s America consistently and accurately reflect liberal values. Neither can I honestly claim that all conservatives reflect such narrow and self serving values. But when so many say the difference between liberals and conservatives is in the succinct opinion that liberals are about people and conservatives are about money, I can’t argue with that in principal.

When asked to explain the difference was between liberals and conservatives with one question, the cognitive linguist Dr. George Lakoff, to paraphrase, asked, if your baby cries in the night do you pick it up. The conservative, who is rigid, insists the baby learn to submit to the power of authority, the power of those who think they know what is best for them. They let them cry themselves to sleep. On the other hand, the liberal, who is caring, surrenders to the power of the child to express its needs, accepting that everyone, even a baby, has the power to ask for what they need. They listen to the child, and without fear of making them weak, pick them up and soothe them.

My question to describe the difference is, “if I told you someone was bankrupt, would you say it was more about morals or about money”? Maybe not the best question, but that is where I see the difference. With one definition comes the fear of being bereft of the power of money, and of being dependent on others. With the other comes the sadness of seeing someone not only hurt themselves but others.

Speaks to me.

Who Has the Power? ( And How Did They Get It?)

Please be advised that this post presupposes that science has value and can legitimately shed light on at least several things in this universe. This is no longer a given.

Lately there seems to be something of a rush to discover and reveal the real differences between Conservatives and Liberals. It’s a mean and meme world out there and there are plenty of pundits with a need to chime in on every tweety youtube trender that comes along, regardless of whether they know anything about it or not. Thus the recent spate of “Here’s the secret handshake of science” journalism that probably comes from certain so-called experts’ need to separate themselves from the glutted pack of a thousand points of sites. And there are plenty of new studies out there for these limelight addicts to reference.

We have the brain activity explanation, complete with those graphs and GIFs of brainwaves that folks are fond of displaying in their articles and on their blogs. Oft times well meaning but inadequately informed journalists will look to graphs to help flesh out their stories, especially if they are pretty. (The graphs that is). The brain wave explanations are so au courant and impressive but as with most speculative science those brain waves are subject to the classic query, “Nature or Nurture”. And, also as usual, I believe it’s some of both.

There is then the genetic proclivity explanation, with a different, more structural look at the brain. They often talk in science-ese, a bizarre language they use to keep us confused enough that they can keep their jobs. They talk about how this or that lobe or area of the brain is larger or smaller, or more or less developed. It gives them reason to declare that there are genetic proclivities towards certain influences and behaviors that predict our political tendencies. I think there is some merit to this point of view, but it is not a complete explanation. The fact that tradition shows us that most national elections, when push comes to shove, are decided by a relatively small margin. This balance references the fact that many brain functions have a binary, on or off, function. More on this later.

My particular preferred explanation for all this terminally intellectual stuff comes through the branch of Cognitive Science that is Cognitive Linguistics. It is on this subject that I will wax poetic, seemingly for the next several days.

Because our brain does not primarily use words to communicate with itself, but only to communicate with others, the development of language says everything about how humans communicate thoughts, ideas and concepts. The study of the brain and how it works speaks to us about the relationship between brain function and the way we use words. The science shows us that words can actually, physically change the brain. For me this reconciles other research being done by cognitive linguists about the influence of our brains on our politics, with the aforementioned purely physical reasons.

Cognitive science is a big deal these days. My opinion is that it grew simultaneously with and parallel to the quest to unlock the human genome. Curiosity is the engine behind scientific discovery, and as the technology to study and research both the physical functions of the brain and the body’s cellular level programming became more and more advanced, so did the drive to uncover the secrets of these heretofore mysterious and vitally important body parts.

What science is discovering is that the existence, outside of us, of a transcendent mind, which houses truth and reason, that we tap into to various degrees, to access universal meaning and conceptual reality, is a falsehood. Rationalists be damned, we are discovering that all human function is embodied in the brain. Not only does the brain control our typing and eyesight but our thinking and feeling.

One may ask, if all human thought is controlled by the individual brain and not an external static source, how is it that we have nearly universal acceptance of certain concepts. In essence that acceptance comes through experience and communication. Our thoughts are more pictorial than verbal. In fact, verbal communication is a limited, imperfect brain function, informed by the differences in individual human thought more so than any concrete construct. Agreement on the collective nature of things and ideas begged the question of what symbols to use to adequately and consistently communicate about things and ideas, between the ever larger sociopolitical and socioeconomic groups that evolved over time. Language became more and more important the larger the number of people we needed to talk to.

Words connect us with the pictures our brains use to simplify complex situations, concepts and functioning physical systems. Words are the triggers that bring entire groups of things and ideas into consciousness, from the unconscious, in one instantaneous moment. These verbally supported thought pictures define both what is and isn’t part of the communication at hand. For example, when one says the word “hospital” we immediately call up the words that trigger pictures of doctors and nurses and gurneys and IVs. Just that one word calls into our conscious minds an entire complex idea. The word also immediately references what is not in a hospital, i.e. a motorcycle or football. It cements a clear definition of the concept in our brain. Our brains do this as a shortcut. The brain processes millions of bits of information a second, and has an incredible amount of information in storage. In order to function quickly and efficiently it has to compress information dramatically in order to do this.

You may have heard the phrase ‘words have power’. This is more true than any of us ever imagined. Cognitive linguists are finding that words and the collective acceptance of their meaning cannot only influence people’s conceptualizations, but can actually change the brain. The brain learns and constantly changes to reflect that learning. Wanna learn how to hit a curveball? The more curveballs you try to hit the brain better remembers the group of complex physical responses that bring to the task both success and failure. Eventually it builds an express lane that more efficiently sets that entire process in motion the instant the eye sees what it recognizes as a curveball. We get better at hitting the curveball. The brain, over time, has learned how to make that entire quantum of processes respond more quickly and accurately, by physically changing its structure. The repetition has worn a “deeper’ neural pathway in the brain, from the seeing of the ball to the hitting of it. This better worn groove speeds up the process and enhances its effectiveness.

The desire for accomplishment and knowledge which leads to changing the brain does not only apply to physical performance but to conceptualization as well. If we are constantly exposed to a pervasive mental or emotional stimulus the brain learns which picture to call up, into the conscious mind, that the word, or grouped word metaphor, triggers. When dealing with a word that can have several meanings, repetition of the word trigger that points to the preferred definition determines which neural pathway becomes dominant. This now dominant pathway points us to that desired definition to the exclusion of others.

The brain can only assign one picture at a time to any given word. This is where the battle originates. Two opposing forces that support different meanings associated with a word, meanings called contested concepts, will fight over which meaning takes hold in the unconscious minds of the masses. The unconscious mind is where the meanings of words live. We could never hold the meanings of the several thousands words we know and use in our conscious minds minds all at the same time. The fight is over which picture comes into consciousness when the word is used and sets off the trigger. Establishing which meaning of the word is dominant is important because, as one address can’t be used for two homes at the same time, one word can’t point to two pictures at the same time. Their is a reason different definitions for a word in the dictionary are numbered. Pickle can’t mean a tasty, if salty, treat and a predicament concurrently.

Conservatives learned and accepted these ideas, putting their own frames around the pictures much earlier than liberals. They have gotten the jump on them in many areas of defining political ideas. In fact, to this day, many liberals consider as cheating the selling of the meanings of words to the public through repetition, by claiming opinion is truth, and by asserting their victimhood, etc.. They say manipulating the meanings of words is propaganda and against their principles. It is, of course, a type of propaganda, and as such is underhanded and vile, but we are in the middle of a war of words, a battle for the political hearts and minds of America. In war if you use inferior weapons, no matter how much you are loathe to use the better ones, you will almost always lose. And liberals are losing. Frankly, contests for the meanings of words take place every day in all disciplines. The irony here is that liberals often accuse conservatives of being more concerned with ideological purity than serving the people when, in this case, it is they who are being ideologically pure to their own detriment.

As usual I have gone way off the reservation here, but there is a method to my madness. People often read the end of articles first, to see what passes for a summary. So I often put the salient points toward the end. Maybe not the wisest thing to do, but I have never been accused of being particularly wise.

I have to put the difference between liberals and conservatives in here somewhere. So here are my salient points. All the folks who love to blame brain structure or brain wave activity or genetics for people’s political philosophies seem to forget that willful manipulation can actually change the brain. In some cases, to varying degrees, they are mistaking the effects for the causes. This often happens when one is looking to support a particular position and only delves as deep as the level where their evidence lives. It doesn’t mean their science is bad, it just means it’s incomplete and, thus, often inaccurate.

Earlier I mentioned that I feel genetics does play a role in a person’s values, fears, and perceptions, things that help forge our politics. I used the example of how close virtually all national level general elections are. But I’m not convinced that the ideological split is right down the middle. Few genetic proclivities, although based in binary sources, are exclusively black or white, on or off. On a dualist continuum there is not one exact place where X suddenly turns into Y but a gradual change from one value to its opposite. If you over-generalize, which for our purposes isn’t all that bad, one can claim that the division of dominance can be divided into thirds. X is dominant over 1/3 of the graph, Y dominates another third, and the hybrid Z, the gray, is prevalent in the middle third. One can see this is fairly true in political choice, as polls show, most often, on nearly any issue, that one third are conservative, one third are liberal and one third will not admit to being either.

This is where the framing of the pictures comes in. Electoral politics is the battle for that middle third. It is inaccurate to call these people moderates. They cannot honestly claim to be truly conservative or liberal because they find truth in elements of both philosophies. But when they are asked to choose, as in an election which only has two choices, they have been shown to choose by turning inward to their feelings about a candidate rather than his/her stance on the issues. So the definitions of the words used to describe candidates and their issues becomes vitally important. This is because the picture a candidate’s or party’s words elicit can influence a person’s feelings in a much different way than the speaker intends, based on the dominant definitions of the words that are triggered in that listener’s brain.

So, convincing that middle third to accept your definitions becomes the goal behind the goal. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this. Public opinion normally moves up and down in somewhat of a sine wave over time, but that doesn’t mean a skilled politician can’t manipulate the public’s feelings, to sell approval of their politics and not their opponent’s, regardless of prevailing trends. They can. in essence, be all things to all people. This duplicitous nature, normally attributed to all politicians often comes from their forked tongued efforts to appeal to all of the Z side of the triangle, and win the votes of everybody except that hard core one third of the other team.

In many ways elections are about using power to keep power. One particular application of political power is, to my mind, the reason why so many incumbents get reelected over and over again, even in the face of a predominantly negative feeling among voters that “we need to throw all the bums out”. This is the power of the incumbency. It is is reflected in the voting booth, where, faced with a choice between the lesser of two evils, a choice we are faced with much too often, we will vote for the incompetent idiot we know over the incompetent idiot we don’t know. That power can come from just a word, a familiar name. The familiarity doesn’t even need to be with an known individual. Here in Scandahoovian country, just having your name end in “son” can get you elected. This phenomenon is a type of scientifically explainable preference as well, just of a different kind.

Yes, there is a great deal of science in how a person behaves politically. But as long as humans use the imperfection of language to communicate the feelings of meanings, there will be a direct and imperfect relationship between the two. We can agree that red is red much easier than freedom is freedom, because the physical evidence of color that we all share allows for little contest in the meaning of red. Imperfection opens the door for falsehood. If the truth is not completely true then lies can appear to have an element of truth. And the political philosophy salesman only needs to get his foot in the door. He only has to establish plausibility to persuade. The meanings of words are one of the best tools he has in his tool belt.

It’s a shame our brains have to use our consciousness as a communications go between. Things could be so much clearer if we could just plug it to each other directly.

Maybe that’s why there is such a deep, ingrained fear in the human psyche that robots will eventually supplant us on top of the food chain. In fact, they don’t even need food.

The Zillionth Only Correct Opinion

Many alleged pundits have weighed in with their opinions of the whys and wherefores of the booty kicking taken by the Democrats this election cycle. As a would be has been, I feel it imperative I post my opinions on this issue onto my beloved blog. Even though no one ever reads this blog I do this simply for my own self aggrandizement.

The Democratic party is an urban party. Lots of people know this. It is why it has been so easy for Republicans to gerrymander. They are able to cram Democrats into gerrymandered districts for geographic reasons that appear logical and make “common sense”. The sheer numbers of urban and inner suburban voters vs. Rural and exurban voters has kept the Democrats viable and mostly dominant in urban districts, but in deep trouble in other districts. Nationally they are strong but locally they are weak.

The Northeast, West Coast and Northern tier of Midwestern states have more urban centers and/or philosophically progressive populations than the South and West. The Democrats are creeping into Mid Atlantic coastal states, because of their increased urban populations, and into the southwestern border states because of their increased minority populations. The exception is Arizona, which has large numbers of Conservative retirees. These states are getting more purple. The Republicans are making headway into states without a preponderance of urban centers, but who have progressively minded citizens. They are also working their way into states with large and devastated urban centers with rampant unemployment and strife. They flip these progressively inclined rural voters and desperate urban voters through fear, turning those states purple. Thus we have our swing states, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. Developing swing states include Texas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan. All of these states display some level of those divisive factors.

I believe the emotionally based electoral decisions of these voters are clearly informed. Rural voters hate welfare and they hate both perceived urban elitists and destitute city folk. I feel urban and minority voters hate Republicans for their essentially backwards looking conservatism and their embrace of social and economic biases. The bizarre thing about this hatred is that it originates in the exact same unequivocal American value that “all men are created equal”. But the concept of equality in America is vigorously contested. The equality rationale of the rural voter is because everyone is equal everyone should pull their own weight, by working hard. For them inequality is other people getting stuff for not working, when they themselves are working hard. For disgruntled urban workers equality is everyone having a job. Inequality for them is there being no jobs available for them, when others have jobs. Minorities see equality as equal rights. Inequality to them is others enjoying rights that they deserve, but do not have. Urban voters see equality as everyone being able to be who they are regardless of any social factor. Inequality for them is people who demand they have biblical social values and rigid, conformist gender identities. Of course these reasons are over generalized and there are certainly other factors and multitudes of crossover contempt at hand here, which I have not addressed.

I have thought about this a great deal, as you may have guessed. It is my contention that people get hung up in their particular vision of reality. They need to expand their appreciation of the complexity and diversity of the many issues that define us, as a people and a nation. The existence of a country that is concurrently homogeneous and culturally diverse seems contradictory and impossible. However, I see America as less a melting pot than a pot of rich soup. There is one overriding essence, a distinct and definitive flavor. But there are also the distinct individual flavors of the various ingredients. The oneness of the soup depends on the inclusion of all the ingredients.

We need to be taught that these issues, plus many others, are intertwined and interconnected, with each one influencing others. We also need to be be made painfully aware that there are cheaters and fraud in everything that involves money or privilege, and the fraud people see, in their anger, isn’t true for everyone they despise, just the few who would cheat at anything. We must accept that there are exceptions to all rules, but the exceptions don’t destroy the rules. There will be people who break your rules just as you may have broken theirs. It’s easy to point your focus at the salient exemplar, the Willie Horton, the welfare Cadillac mom. It’s harder to shine light on the stand up, play by the rules, good neighbor, who doesn’t care to be in the spotlight in the first place.

We could all do well to open ourselves to a larger sociopolitical universe. Rural voters could realize that not everyone on SNAP is a drug addict who doesn’t want to work and just sucks at the government teat. Disgruntled urban workers need to know that it is not government alone that has abandoned them and their crumbling cities. They need to know that a cruel combination of natural and contrived economic factors has left them nearly helpless. Minorities need to be aware that they are not the only Americans whose rights are being trampled. They could be more powerful and effective working together with other social justice activists, instead of staying trapped in their issue silo, sequestered from potential allies. Urban voters have to understand that, yes, they are elitists in many ways and there are more ways to skin a cat than they think. They must consider whether their brand of liberalism has a positive or negative impact on the nation as a whole. They need to develop empathy for the rest of the country, instead of judging them. Finally, I think we must somehow overcome the subtle yet incredibly effective propaganda that has kept the American people divided against itself. The joy of knowing truth has been replaced with fear inflamed by lies. The power of knowledge has given way to despair born of confusion. The art and psychology of persuasion has been honed to a fine point, and it cuts indiscriminately.

I believe nearly everyone, on both the left and right, thinks our nation is failing and our Democratic Constitutional Republic is in real existential danger. Where our great divide is, our unbridgeable gulf, is in our perceptions of the cause of this epic fail. To me it is simple. The right thinks government is the cause and the left thinks it’s wealthy oligarchs. The right thinks we are becoming a Socialist Dictatorship and the left says we are already an Oligarchy. I think the reality is a collusion of these factors, rather than one or the other. This is how we are pitted against ourselves. As long as we blame each other we do not notice the real villain at work, and we are unable to use our united power.

From my seat in the stands, albeit the nosebleed section, I see a nation where Plutocrats rule us from on high and remain hidden from us through the interference run for them by their minions. The focal point, the big boy that nobody trusts is Wall Street. The Plutocrats don’t trust it because of its volatility and entrepreneurial vitality. They can’t control it enough to assure themselves the massive earnings they crave. However the Plutocracy controls the capital that fuels Wall Street enough that, using the profit generated from that capital, the market can virtually purchase government, all three branches to a greater or lesser degree. Government doesn’t trust Wall Street either but it is nearly powerless to affect it’s stranglehold on the economy, or its ability to buy and influence government. Government though does have the power to dictate what hoops the people have to jump through to relate to and live in society. Since a plutocratic government does not exist for the people we do not like it no matter which party is in power. After a few years of very little getting done (they are allowed to get a few things done just to make us think they care) we get weary and elect the other bunch, getting tired of them in turn and electing the other guys again, ad nauseum.

Government, being the face of what is seen by the public, is what causes the ire of the conservative base. Progressives see Wall Street owning government and despise the corporations. The plutocrats are insulated by both the corporations and the government, from discovery. Very few of us ever see their machinations, their joy of being our puppeteers, their orgasms of manipulation. This hidden application of total power is by design. So the plutocrats control the corporations, who control the available money, which controls government, which controls the people. We are left to call each other names in the comments of thousands of blogs and more thousands of social media posts, while the big bosses of the big bosses do their damage and then laugh out loud over a Dirty Vodka Martini at the nineteenth hole.

Our task as citizens is daunting but not impossible. I dare say it will be left to our children and children’s children to complete it. First we must take over the government, all 3 branches, by electing courageous men and women, who will resist the temptation and influence of Wall Street, and break corporate control of government. We the people can then force these legislators, through our collective will, to change enough laws that we the people have power once again. Then, armed with renewed strength, and here is the difficult part, we must invade and infiltrate corporate boards and vote the Plutocrats’ lackeys out of power. This will require a sophisticated and perfectly coordinated effort by people with a combination of business expertise, unshakeable progressive values, and most crucially, superior skills in espionage and callous disregard for anyone’s welfare, including their own. I don’t believe anyone with that particular combination of characteristics is in a position of power today, but I have faith there will be many in the near future.

I also have faith in our children. Through evolution they are revealing daily just how dramatically they exceed us. They have knowledge and power we do not even understand, and they know love in a way we have lost from centuries of forgetting how. There is no other way to win back America for Americans. It must needs be cruel and vicious. They have been cruel and vicious for decades. I’m not saying it is the right thing to do. It is the only thing to do. Through taking over the corporations we can use that power the Plutocrats fear, that spirit of progress, to defy their will and cut off the head of the beast. Their amassed insane wealth will then be meaningless. Having nothing of value they will be powerless, and they may as well liquidate all their money into hundred dollar bills, buy a fleet of obsolete luxury liners, load them up, and dump it all into the ocean. It may be preposterous, it may be ridiculous, but this, dear friends, is my dream.

A Quarantine of Empathy

It’s getting close to election time. Because this year’s election is very important for America and will directly affect American’s lives, I will be posting some of my feelings about how political decisions permeate every aspect of the American lifestyle, and how America’s, and American’s, perceptions of reality affect the world.

Today’s commentary is about some of the societal and political reactions to the current viral (both meanings) issue of Ebola. It is my contention that while we were aware of a real and significant outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, this, to a majority of Americans, was a problem for Africa and not for us. Yes, it was bad, but since it wasn’t hurting any Americans, except for those martyrs who went there to help, it wasn’t that big a deal, compared to the Secret Service, their prostitutes and their being asleep at the White House wheel. That is, it wasn’t until Ebola came to America. Then a whole lot of Americans suddenly totally and completely freaked out and went ballistic about this perceived existential threat to the entire nation. This mania was all over one case (now two cases.) Of course there have been nearly 9,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths in Africa, but our two cases now made this a serious issue for the entire US, when it was previously just a sad situation for West Africans alone. Selective concern and a shamefully tardy response.

It pains me to see widespread panic among Americans of all stripes. It reveals the sad truth that we only accept the version of the truth we think is true, rather than the truth that actually is true. It shows that neither government nor science is no longer respected or believed in by so many of us. It highlights the unfortunate circumstance that propaganda driven paranoia is the new norm in our society. It tells us our veneer of confidence in the power of technology is more precarious than we think. But I digress.

The reaction from certain of our political leaders has been to complain vociferously about how there is no leadership at the top, guiding our efforts to stop the spread of this deadly disease here in America. What does it say about these people when so many of them have purposely, for purely political reasons, obstructed and refused to approve our President’s appointee for the position of Surgeon General? How could most of these so called public servants gut the budgets of the very organizations that have the expertise and resources to keep us safe from these threats? What colossal hypocrisy they display. And how can we continue to give countenance to the continued acceptance of this kind of duplicitous and devious people as our political leaders? If we continue to be so egoistic as to only really care about our own safety, and not that of others, and keep manning the bridge of the ship of state with these heartless cowards, then perhaps we deserve to be hated by animals such as ISIS, as barbaric as they are.

Thank God for sunsets. They save me from the void of permanent depression.

Frustration Thy Name is Legion

I’m confused.

Did President Obama have our diplomats in Benghazi murdered to keep us from finding out about the IRS targeting conservatives or did he have the CIA create Hurricane Sandy so we would forget about Benghazi or did he have those kids in Connecticut killed so we would stop blaming him for the hurricane or did he hire those Russian kids to bomb the marathon to make us forget about gun control or did he bribe Snowden to leak NSA spying info so we wouldn’t remember how we killed the Russian kids to cover up that they were Obama’s patsies or did he pay off the jury to acquit George Zimmerman to make us forget how he spied on everyone or did he purposefully screw up the Obamacare website to make us forget Benghazi, again, or did he sign a ton of executives orders like a tyrant to make us forget how awful Obamacare is, again, or did he hire kids from Central America to invade the USA to make us forget Benghazi AND how awful Obamacare is or did he give ISIS the weapons to form their caliphate to make us forget whatever it is we’re not supposed to remember or did he really pay Hamas to fire rockets at Israel, knowing they would in turn eventually invade Gaza and help us forget that he is a treasonous dictator or did he just have the Air Force shoot down the commercial airliner over Ukraine to make Putin look bad and make everybody forget all the horrible stuff he has ever done in his entire life to fulfill his lifelong goal of hatefully killing America, including never deporting anyone and not finding that airplane in the middle of the Indian Ocean?

Wow, I just know Lenin and Hitler and Saul Alinsky and Charles Manson and Bill Ayers and Satan, (who is probably Bill Ayers anyway) are having a beer together in hell and praising their demonic Kenyan love child for destroying America forever. Except for that Charles Manson and Bill Ayers aren’t dead yet I’m sure all of that is true because Mark Levin appeared to me in a dream and told me so.

Actually the reality is much more insidious. Our President is working in league with former Vice President Dick Cheney. Strange but true. His foreign policy is leading us to pine for the return of the Neo-cons and their Plan for a New American Century. That little trick of calling him the worst president in his lifetime (which means the worst President in history) shouldn’t fool anyone.

Yes folks, what we need is a cleansing dose of military backed world dominance. Just throw a little more money at the Pentagon and we can once again enforce that elusive concept known as American national security interests, with massive destructive power, at will. Of course we all know how @70 years of that has worked out. I mean we haven’t had any Brave American soldiers killed or maimed for nearly a week now. Maybe.

Perhaps the current concurrent crises in the Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine will delay us initiating the Crusades 2.0 we have been so joyously hurling ourselves toward. That would be a consolation prize of dubious but little value. Perhaps some high roller somewhere took a ton of money on Brazil and bought off Colombia to injure Neymar and then bought off the home side, Black Sox style, to blow the match with Germany. Of course that cheat will be using his new found riches to back that cute corporation who sat behind him in biology, way back in middle school, in her quest to become the first corporation to be elected to congress (at least officially).

So excuse me, as I’m off to find some closely held religious beliefs I can use to enable me to break laws I find inconvenient, while letting sinners do whatever they please, providing they buy what I’m selling and they aren’t women who work for me.

Not only am I confused but my reasons for being frustrated are legion.