A racist religious bigot and my response…

I received this asking what my thought was on the matter…

Subject: Fw: Fwd: Time IS LIKE A RIVER

Subject:  Time IS LIKE A RIVER

This is just awful to have to accept this new order of life in the USA.

Worth pondering and sending on to others….

TIME IS LIKE A RIVER

Time is like a river. You cannot touch the water twice, because the flow that has passed will never pass again.

Franklin Graham was speaking at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida a few weeks back when he said America will not come back. He wrote:

The American Dream ended (on November 6th, 2012 ) in Ohio . The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.

A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays , Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, The Media, Hollywood , uninformed young people, the “forever needy,” the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other “fellow travelers” have ended Norman Rockwell ‘s America . The Cocker Spaniel is off the front porch… The Pit Bull is in the back yard. The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky ‘s “Rules for Radicals” and Chicago shyster, David Axelrod , along with international Socialist George Soros will be pulling the strings on their beige puppet to bring us Act 2 of the New World Order.

Our side ran two candidates who couldn’t even win their own home states, and Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing “post Sandy ” tribute that elevated the “Commander-in-Chief” to Mother Teresa status. (Aside: with the way the polls were run, he didn’t need any help!) People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will never again comment on or concern myself with the afore mentioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.

You will never again out-vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take Zealots, not moderates & shy not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.

Those who come after us will have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to “white guilt” and political correctness… An American Veteran……… Semper-Fi

Got the guts to pass it on? You betcha!!!!!

…and my response…

I find the ignorance, sexism, racism and bigotry inherent with such deluded thought is dangerous, counter to a productive and healthy future. This is the type of thinking that is the birth of such institutions as right wing National Socialists Parties that formalize fascism and bring it to fruition. Often through subversive suggestions of violence that lead to actual violence – and regularly to the rape, murder, torture, and related horrors that white people have ushered upon minorities in America since shortly after our arrival here.

I find statements like this email that was forwarded grossly ignoring the violence committed against the natives (i.e. the Indians) of North America and ignores the ongoing violence and system institutionalized violence and oppression of minorities here. From red-lining, to Jim Crow laws, to other such nonsense I’m surprised honestly that black persons of America haven’t risen up even more and committed MORE violence against white America. I’m shocked that latinos haven’t stood against, rallied, and destroyed white control of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities. Meanwhile the black, Latino, and other individuals slave away at the behest of abusive power dynamics that the white Americans sit atop in this country. White Americans ignore and pretends there is no such things as white privilege. In the meantime talking themselves up while this country was built on the backs of what was entirely minority populations for most of the existence of this nation. Meanwhile the minority populates are left with little, having been overwhelmed by western European styles of capitalism, etc and little to go on for generations. White Americans did a lot of building this nation, but our neglect and unbiased, unconscious, and related cognitive dissonance around our racist declarations of self-made men is disingenuous at best and outright insulting to many of those that did much of the work to build this country.

Now we stand at a time where white man on the continent isn’t always the vast majority, is losing a little bit of our political power, is ceding some to women as women of all races take more control of their place in our society, white man has an ebbing influence of strength and every racist, bigot, and angry person clings to the likes of Trump and Franklin Graham in their shortsighted, public school limited and skewed history education. Many of this old guard follow complete fabrications, false data and ramble on about nonsense as in the previous email. Their America is falling apart, their America is slowly dying. Good riddance to their America, I barely want to live in the one that exists let alone their hate filled, racist, bigot filled idea of what an ideal America is.

The new America will have less wealth, and less white influence, and overall will have more transparency over time and more openly socialist practices. We’ve already had many socialist practices so they aren’t so new (most purported and created by Republicans which is a perverse irony: i.e. Interstate System, corporate welfare, etc). We’ll have children that are more open to being friends with the Indian kid, the black kid, the Latino kid, and they won’t immediately assume – as any open and freshly minded child would be. They’re not born racist. These children are our future, even as we’ve built and will leave then a sick and dying planet. They’ll be the ones who truly have to take hold and right this ship – called Earth – if they want to and their offspring want to survive into the future. There is no mars or the moon to run off to, there is no second planet. We’re on this one and we’ll have to make do. As the population continues to increase however, people are forced to deal with the reality that we’re all from one, we are a human species. Being black or white or whatever is a completely naive and ignorant delineation. The sooner we realize that, accept that we have to develop technology to live cleaner, better, more open and transparent lives, the better off we and our children and children’s children will be.

Personally, I see children today, in Scandinavia, Portland, San Francisco, and New York (the places I’ve visited recently) and realize that the future does look brighter than it sometimes seems on a day to day basis. But seeing the old guard of the racist, bigot filled demographic lose their political power makes me realize we, humanity, our children’s children, i.e. my children and your grandchildren and others’ grandchildren and children of today – might have a great and happy future in spite of all the horrors the current, immediately previous, and past generations have visited upon them.

That’s what I think of that letter from Franklin Graham. Considering the United States fought a war against bigots and racists like Franklin Graham, he can’t lose his power fast enough. It’s a shame people like that even spew their hatred outward and have it embodied in words puked up by people like Franklin Graham. They are indeed sick and horrid people, the people moving the world forward today really don’t need this kind of thing, it is a waste of our resources and time.

That is all.

Guns? Suicides? Why Can’t People Actually Derive Logically From Statistics?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state

Note: The District of Columbia and Louisiana (i.e. New Orleans) have the highest murder rates by a multiplier of 2x-10x higher than any other state. Both of these two areas have a city, which has the highest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States

Note: Suicide Rate, Japan’s is more than 2x the US’s at 26 per 100k vs. our 11 per 100k. Again valuable derived information can be found by this extreme lack of correlation. Remember, Japan basically has zero guns, the United States has tons. Japan is greater than 2x our suicide rate yet they have nowhere near as many lethal options to commit these actions. I’ll lay it out simply, that provides proof that having or not having guns to commit suicide is not the key to decreasing said incidents, but instead changing one’s cultural characteristics is the key. In other words, banning guns is very likely to have almost no affect on suicides over the long term if the United States can’t fix it’s cultural issue, the same is obviously true for Japan, since they’ve already banned firearms and as far as I know from the data, there are zero suicides by firearm. If there are any in Japan, it is such a small number they don’t even differentiate the mechanism used.

Needless to say, the statistics and single data points the anti-gunners, and the pro-gunners use are often nefariously used at best and often completely irrelevant without looking at more data points around culture, habits, behaviors and other indicators within social groups. Until we as a nation learn to do that and mold our society into something more closely that we actually want, we won’t get very good results by screaming about gun crimes and guns and the horror of the tools we employ.

Strangely enough, this goes the same for the automobile vs. any other mode of transport argument. Until we realize the costs, the REAL costs, we’ll keep making absurdly stupid as hell policy decisions around these things.

Life Has Improved…

Buying power is decreasing these days, but for people who really pushed away from the typical average American way of life, things are good. Buying ability continues to drop, slowly but steadily. Many of told many others that this would happen. They’ve often been laughed, scoffed and shunned by the majority.

I’m sitting here though, not living like an average American in many ways, unless you consider the average American of about 1790 or 1820. An American who was involved, building a town or city, building a new country and a new world for themselves. Some of us are striving to do this, in spite of the shrinking majority that wants to maintain the average American way of life, that has only really existed since about 1955.

There are millions of us for every few million that are against us, for now. We’re the millions that are seeking out organic food and healthier alternatives to the chemically laced science experiments of the last several decades. We’re looking for a return of the good ideas and obliteration of the bad ideas. We’re looking for greater community and less dependence on other countries, outside hand outs, and a greater inward looking solution to our problems. Because really, those outside hands and those others that are supposed to help, they just fuck up all the time. Over and over they want to push their agenda and we want to be rid of their planned cookie cutter lifestyles.

We’re the generation guard at this point. The next generation will be even more demanding of the removal of this faux science of chemicals and petrol powered community destroyers. We want to know each other again and not to push apart, to separate, to hide like cowards in cul-de-sacs.

We want to build our cities, our world, and our lives up again. In the here and now, that’s really our only option since our immediate “greatest generation” has screwed up our entire economic system, broken our justice system, and laid in a path of conservative destruction of close minded bullshit built on a false history and false pretenses.

It’s a simple request, we’re here now. We will hopefully win. The alternative is a step back to a much darker part of history and a hopeless future.

I Read a Story…

…over on Jillian’s Blog about a drunk driving incident, fortunately no one was killed. It however brought up an incident that I saw in New Orleans years ago. I wrote about it in the comments section and have copied it here,

I approached an intersection that approached an on ramp where someone, intoxicated, had stomped the gas into the floorboard to make the light – trying to get onto the Interstate. They’d hit the car (which was progressing under a green light now) square in the drivers side at about 50mph, almost killing the driver. Instead the driver of that car laid in the car dying, blood pooled around everywhere while some others around called the emergency crew. The drunk driver was however immediately punished by fate. They had been flung through the window, being severely cut and bones broken. That however was the easy part of this incident. The driver at that speed broke through the windshield and then flew forward making it over the car that was impacted in the side. There was a “dragons tail” of blood from there all the way to were this person had stopped flying forward. There sat their corpse. Absolutely horrible scene. Both innocent and guilty dead. The innocent suffering the most… as it took about an hour for them to die as others tried to save them.

Horrible story, but to take note. Stay safe, stay of sound mind when driving. Don’t kill people, that’s not cool. Please don’t operate anything over 5 mph when intoxicated, hell, one shouldn’t even walk too fast when drunk! Find a good couch, relax, enjoy one’s altered reality. 🙂

Seriously, I can’t say it enough. America sucks for drinking, it is absolutely the reverse of logical about it unless you live in a major urban center (i.e. Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, you get the idea). One has to be extra careful in this country about driving out to drink… simply, if you’re in control of a car you shouldn’t drink ANYTHING (cept water and such).

Guns Are for Old People…

Funny, so many interests are focused around the older, more fearful citizens of the country.

Gun ownership for instance, is vastly higher among the older rural middle class than urbanites.  Funny were the crime happens.    hmmmmm.  Make yourself prey, the crazies will attack.  However the suburbs are the new crime zone…   how strange and awkward for those conservative Republican enclaves of the suburbs. They’re like the hypocrites of the party.  😦

However most progress and wealth is NOT created in the rural world, it is almost solely focused in urban areas.  Even the suburbs provide a moderate middle class generation of wealth, and often are a net loss to urban and rural workers. How perverse really, that the suburbs are labeled the “American Way”.

Funny when one looks at the various numbers, statistics, correlations, actual causation, and other numbers.

It really makes registered Democrats and registered Republicans seem like a bunch of cranky, unyielding, nut cases…

 

…even though the media would have us all think the “middle of the road” people are the crazies.  WTF?!?!

A Retort, With Real Problems That Need Solutions

This is in response to a blog entry at cdcstudios 9.0.  Oh dear, I don’t usually comment on political things these days, but WTF. Might as well, I have an hour or so.

First I’ll bring out a point. An economic fact is that politicians really can’t create jobs. They’re horrible at it. At least honest, truthful, prideful jobs that Americans want. Hell, that people anywhere want. The Soviet Union was a PERFECT example of this. They created lots of jobs. But jobs that people didn’t really care about. Japan also does this, and because of their social and cultural rigidity (along with a host of other reasons) they have a vastly higher suicide rate than the United States has even during a recession. Politicians are the LAST people we should look for the create “jobs”. Politically created jobs do not sustain an economy, they eventually are short lived and often cause more damage to the sustainability of the economy than good (unless you believe in Keynsian economics, which even then he stated the Government should have limited efforts in attempting to put people to work, as the economy is a vastly superior “thing” to create jobs than the Government).

Now dont’ get me wrong, I think Boehner and the Republicans are generally a bunch of douche bags. At least the vast majority of them. They also have no message these days and are growingly confused about themselves. However, the Democrats are just as guilty of this nonsense. They promise change and deliver continued mediocrity.

The fact is at the core of so many things, there are root problems in our system right now. It could be we may NOT recover from this recession. We may never see less than 8-10% unemployment again in our life times.

Now you also however point out the Bush Tax Cuts. They haven’t done anything to increase or decrease the job count. It’s mostly bullshit to argue this or that about the tax cuts. All it means it he rich get to pretend they have a lot more money than they do. Notice I said pretend, most of this wealth is fictitious and a lot of people that scream about the rich don’t realize that it’s a theoretical game. It’s not like it could be magically redistributed to everyone in the population. Right now, if it started to flow back into the economy (i.e. the rich started investing heavily in labor and other lower income jobs to fill out that unemployment gap) the currency would drop even further against competitors.

We’d ALL be screwed in that case. Ya see, one might blame the rich, or say it is unfair that they’re only paying 28% now instead of 33% in income tax. But the fact is, we’re all in this together and they’re are a few primary parties that are to be held accountable for setting all of this imbalance in place.

You may not realize it, but it is in LARGE part the responsibility of the Democrats AND Republicans.

The instability of the dollar, the decreasing value of the dollar, and the core way we operate our economy on this fiat currency is the root of this entire problem. We encourage unsustainable promises to the population such as home ownership, a car or two in every garage, easy child rearing, and all sorts of other nonsense that is absolutey NOT sustainable at our current rate of consumption. Our currency is suffering for it and other countries that have propped it up will push for the rich and poor gap to GROW just by beginning the process of dumping our currency. China for instance, has already set themselves up to rid their economy of a Trillion (yup, a TRILLION) dollars in Government Backed Bonds!! That means there will be a massive payout to the Chinese from the Government. The Government doesn’t have the money to pay them back, so that will have to come from an incursion of more inflation and larger debt incurred on our backs.

We won’t get a say in it either because the Feds are setup to work in collusion with the Federal Reserve to push the inflation up. The Federal Reserve is there to protect our currency, but they’ve lost a lot of the tools to do so (such as a REAL item to back the currency, it is nothing but fiat now. No gold, no silver).

That leaves us with a conflicted system. With less and less investors looking to us as a growing value opportunity. The country continues to move into the future demanding the world provide us with 25% or so of the world’s petro energy while we only make up a small portion of the world’s population (15% or so?) Our demand continues to increase while our mitigation of its use has not. We aren’t building transit nor are we building or zoning our cities more intelligently. Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are about the only cities that have and are acting to mitigate the problems.

I know you like to think that this tax cut is a big impactor to the overall economy, but rest assured it is NOT. The greatest threat, and I can promise you this, is that the wealthy that DO want to invest in this country are starting more and more to look to just leave. The US is burning its bridges with people who can do something about this economy. Let’s take a few examples:

Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) – You may love or hate Microsoft, but they wanted to tack a tax, regulations, and other fees, costs, etc onto Microsoft and indviduals in Steve Ballmers position. Most of the time all you will read about and see is the bullshit in the papers, which is highly hyperbolic. Always check your premise. Ballmer has fought this moves because it will in fact cost Washington & other states were Microsoft has a presence around a thousand jobs. These are high paying and good middle class jobs. Almost entirely the responsibility of the Government, Democrat AND Republican for stopping this expansion of jobs.

Bezos (Amazon CEO) – Again, another company that is continuously fighting with states over their byzantine and draconian tax laws and regulations. The states (and feds) have prevented the company from hiring hundreds and expanding business that would require many more hundreds of jobs. These are high paying and good middle class jobs. Almost entirely the responsibility of the Government, Democrat AND Republican for stopping this expansion of jobs.

BNSF, UP, and other Railroads – Multiple companies that employ a combined total somewhere around 90k Americans in blue collar work. Work we’re desperately short of in this country today. They’re always under continued pressure from the Government, are HEAVILY regulated, and the feds + states recently have threatened to re-regulate them. During the 70s the freight railroads suffered heavily. Hundreds of dozens of jobs lost with dozens of thousands of track miles lost. All because of ridiculous and draconian regulation. The 80s saw those regulations wiped out and a massive stabilization of the railroads. Which now employ, very productively, thousands of Americans to move products around the country in one of the cleanest modes of transport in the country.

Gore (the company, not the X-VP) is one of the most open companies in the world. With great practices, management, leadership, and otherwise. They’ve also been stymied multiple times from the Government from expanding their employment because of the “pull of politics”.

The USDA has stymied further advances around Organic Food. (http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/organic-hydroponics-460110?src=rss) that could lead to further jobs in farming better, higher quality food, etc.

The list of interference from the State & Feds is massive. The “Taxes” the rich have to pay are not a problem, if paid or not paid. They’re still paying them. Even as it is the bottom 9% income earners of the top 10% income earners (be sure to read that correctly, it always tongue ties me to say it) still pay the vast bulk of taxes for an income spread. The top 1% still pay a massive amount albeit it is a smaller percentage of their overall income.

Think about it for a minute. It isn’t a matter of these taxes. The fact is, the Government is in the way of job creation on a number of fronts and when they can help encourage job growth they often screw it up. Both Republicans and Democrats. We need empowered local leaders, real leaders, and the State & Fed leaders need to focus on foreign issues, foreign trade, and encouraging job growth in the market. NOT in Government jobs.

The solution isn’t to add to Government, or go after the wealthy for more money. The solution is the enable the Government to work with what it has (which is still about 30% of GDP of the RICHEST COUNTRY ON EARTH). If they can’t make do with what they have to help the country progress, then we’re in deep shit, because our currency is only going to continue to inflate at a higher and higher rate of speed until the Government learns to live within the budget. The Government needs to learn it must truly serve the populace to keep peace here, not particularly abroad. It needs to not play corporatist favorites and focus on truly getting shit done here in the country.

• We need infrastructure exceeding hundreds of billions.
• We need to stabilize our school system (not spend more particularly, but figure out that it isn’t training industry labor anymore and do something about it).
• We need to stop the militarization of states and the nation as a whole.
• We need to find community and societal zoning that is positive for us as humans and NOT focus around mass separation by automotive style transport.
• We need to realize that immigrants aren’t our enemies.
• We need to realize that we as a nation have a great deal to offer ourselves that is NOT commercialized consumption of every gadget on earth.
• We need to realize that we can create art, music, and often have led the world in progressing genres and artistic stylings, if we’re not careful we’ll lose that.
• We need to realize that we do have a way to live clean, sustainable economic and environmental lives.
• We need to realize the answers are in each one of us and not the politicians we elect in our representative Government.

Drinking in the US vs. Europe

Some might think that the US would have a lower drinking problem then western europe.  Some might think that Europe would have less of a drinking problem then the US.

They’re both wrong.  Alcoholism and alcohol dependency generally affect about 1 out of 20 people.  Sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, but it never varies much from the 1 in 20 ratio.

After thorough research I’ve found that the US & Europe have about the same problem with alcohol.  The difference is the US has draconian laws & nationalized state control of it in most areas of the country.  The other irony is that in some of the strictist states they have a higher ratio of alcoholism and in others that have less strict rules they have a lower ratio of alcoholism.  Then in other states they have the complete opposite ratio!

The logical deduction, is that the US laws and draconian regulations around alcohol amount to nothing more than wasted effort, time, and economic activity.  All those laws & regulations do is steal more money from the hands of the taxpayers – for no more or no less effect than the freedoms that Europeans enjoy every single day in their nations!

…and we call ourselves free.  Americans, at least those that support the liqueur laws as they exist, should be ashamed and embarrassed of the stupidity that they perpetuate.  I suppose the world is still flat to some people too.

Just in case your too lazy to Google for the information yourself, click here.  Cheers!  …oh, and bottoms up!

The Solutions Are Easy

I’ve really got no fix here.

I watch the traffic lined up after a concert.  Humanity has more than a few solutions to traffic problems, but we insist on consuming 25+ square feet each and making traffic jams.  Screw the solutions, we’ll be idiots instead.

I’ve seen someone mainline heroin and OD, only to know they lay dead a short time later.  There’s a solution for that too.  It starts well before the simple idea of don’t do drugs and strangely it has nothing to do with drugs.  Again, humanity throws band aids at the severe laceration when the solution is right before our eyes.  Again, humanity chooses to move forward in ignorance, using excuses like the “drug war”.

We’ve seen poverty of untold degrees right amidst our civil and developed nations.  Just take the Mississippi Delta as an example.  We have untold number of solutions to this problem, yet we can’t seem to truly implement any of them.  Again, refusal to deal with the root of the problem persists the problem itself, often in even more intense ways.

Starvation, a problem that again, so many solutions exist.  But the root isn’t resolved, instead we throw a few fish here or there, but heaven forbid we teach anyone to actually fish.

All these metaphors.  But if I actually stated easy solutions to these problems, people would just argue endlessly about their validity.  As is reality.

Oh well.  Cheers.

News Flash – The United States of America is NOT a Democracy – Never has Been

The US has never been, never will be, and as the founding fathers pointed out should not even play with the idea of a democracy. The US is a Republic, plain and simple. Always has been, probably won’t be too much longer, if one can consider it that now.

#justsayin