Good Word of Mouth

Posted by XperDunn on May 22, 2013

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 8:52 PM

(paintings by Correggio)

I’ve been stumped for writings lately—maybe I’ve finally run dry of grumpy-old-man-op-ed essays—who knows? I’d actually like that, I think… I only write those things because I want to expel the bile that festers at my brain when I see intentional stupidity and intentional harm. I’m no cynic—the people that own everything are intentionally making our lives worse—intentionally widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

What’s worse is, we help them do this—every time we take a paycheck to look away—supporting a family is no excuse, it only makes it worse, since we are destroying the society they will inherit, while we collaborate in the name of ‘supporting them’. What is the answer? When an entire town is centered around a military complex, what do we do with those townspeople when The Base gets abandoned due to budget cuts? Do we keep it open for the sake of the town? That only sounds correct to the townspeople, god bless’em. Does the government simply walk away, and leave the gutted town to turn ghost in their wake? That sounds wrong to everybody. So, we see at once that simple solutions are not to be had. What do we do?

Do we go out and protest in public? To me, that always seemed like giving too much power to the opponent—telling them to act, instead of us acting on our own initiative—though I suppose the media attention (if you could catch it, and for as long as it lasts) would be valuable. We’d have to come off as the ‘good guys’ on camera, though—and pissed-off people rarely look like ‘good guys’, at first glance.

Sensible people might point out an obvious solution—enact a program of decommissioning an entire ‘economic zone’, not just the Base it once supported. Find (or Found) businesses that are a good match with the town’s focal skill sets. In areas where closing the Base means total evacuation (say mid-desert, like) then enact a program to place the townspeople in other towns still operating as theirs once did. It would still be a breakup of the community, but it doesn’t have to be an economic disaster as well. Letting a whole town full of people go dead broke will cost a lot more, in the long run, than helping them transition to new homes and new jobs.

But all you sensible people out there know the chances of that course of action—none to little. So let’s think about political solutions that approximate the sensible solution. The last two days in Oklahoma have seen recording-breaking tornados (in both size and wind-speed) that devastated communities in Tornado Alley. So we liberals may enjoy the very bleak comfort of saying ‘I told you so’ to the climate-change-deniers, but down in Okie country the praying has been non-stop—the people there have put their faith in the lord—and so cannot be harmed. That explains why they would choose live in an area called ‘Tornado Alley’.

I just know we could be doing all of this stuff so much better if there were better people in politics—but I’m damned if I’m gonna spend time with those nut-jobs. That’s why we need young people in politics—we used to insist on old people because our elders tended to know more than the rest of us. I’m getting into ‘old guy’ territory myself these days—and I can assure you, the people my age and older are as likely to be swamped by the Future Shock Wave that is remaking the globe as they are to have depths of wisdom–which applied to an earlier, pre-internet age—and so may no longer have any relevance to our present times, anyhow!

Only the young guys and gals can even appreciate these new fulcrums of power, and the consequences of blindly trying to do business in the past. Plus, younger men and women are less ‘free for the purchasing’ than old cronies whose lives have always been defined by business. Today’s global business is a threat to humanity—soon, a tiny group of uber-bankers will own the entire world—and us with it, since we’ll all need to make a living.

In the old days, when America and Big Business were synonymous, the famously quoted ‘business of America—was Business’. But that is no longer true. The business of International Mega-Corporations is ‘Business’—the business of we Americans has become ‘fighting a rearguard action against global corporate culture in an attempt to resume control of our own government’. That’s the new business of America.

I’m tired of being proud of my country—it’s that right-or-wrong business—there is so much wrong with our society, our industry, our quality of life, and our Freedom from Fear—and then up pops these Tea Party people-Doh! You know, if the Cold War was still ongoing, I’d be sure that the Tea Party was a fifth-column action to make a nonsense-of-shouting out of what were once the Founding Documents, to turn Freedom of Expression on its head by using it as a shield against those who accuse them of hate-speech—and using Freedom of Religion to suggest that it implies their particular faith is the Default Faith for the whole country.

Their ignorance is epic—but that’s OK, cuz they don’t hold much stock in all the edjicashun nonsense, no how. They are a tremendous threat to our nation. They are the pawns of folks like the Koch Bros. and they even act against their own self-interest—when that runs counter to whatever mind-boink of a narrative cheerleaders like Sarah Palin are feeding them through the mass media they all despise so indignantly—it’s pure stupid, and hold the rest, out there in Tea Party land.

So I’ll be happy to be proud of my country when we start taking it back from the private interests of the super wealthy. I think we should start by refusing to respond to any TV or internet advertising—let’s all agree that we’ll only vote for a candidate when someone we trust gives that candidate a good reference. We should all unite in refusing any electioneering from anyone we don’t know and respect. Word of mouth will be the only criteria that we will base our decision on. And we disqualify all of the incumbents just to make it a clean start. (If we lose a good congressperson, we’ll come to re-elect that person, in time—but we must sand the floor before we slap on the new paint.)

A total re-boot of federal representation via word-of-mouth may result in something more democratic than the moneychangers we endure today—but even if it doesn’t work, they’ll do no less than the last decade of blockage -and- it’ll keep the crooks busy enough to slow their insatiable greed.

Word of Mouth Only! Word of Mouth Only!

Chant it with me now—

Word of Mouth Only! Word of Mouth Only!

The End of Terror (Monday, April 15, 2013 6:40 PM)

Posted by XperDunn on April 15, 2013

Well, I’m very upset. I have friends in Boston and I’ve always been interested in their annual Marathon. So the explosions and the casualties and the fatalities and the finding more devices—it’s all different from any previous terrorist attack, foreign or domestic. At least, it’s different than any I’ve seen on the news. And I suppose your high-end terrorist pig wants that, just as he/she/they want the international scope of a Boston Marathon incident, hosting scores of visiting foreigners with a passion for endurance running.

At the moment, CNN is saying “two dead and hundreds injured, many critical”. I expect those numbers to change in two or three days. There was an interesting governmental spokesperson pointing out that, considering the density of the crowd and the ease of movement afforded to people carrying backpacks and other luggage around a mile-wide ‘street fair’-type mob, there were incredibly light casualties, ‘relatively speaking’—and then went on to add (at length) that she wasn’t minimizing the pain and even death of the victims—it’s difficulty to make such ‘relative’ comments without enraging the more immediately-involved’s families and friends.

But she had a point. The nation is big. The attack at the Boston Marathon has all the earmarks of a PR ‘stunt’—as opposed to an all-out strike such as 9/11. To shut the nation down would be an over-reaction—even shutting down cell-service in the Boston area (preventing, hopefully, any further remote-detonation signals) will have to be a brief, emergency measure—as the possibility of further explosions begins to dwindle, the inconvenience and grief of losing communication services in a major city will grow larger.

But there’s one thing I’m sure of—I am not terrified. The shock has worn off—the bloom is off the terrorist’s rose. By now, we are all well-aware that there are people in the world sick enough to perpetrate these things. The death and the pain wound our hearts—we feel immense sadness over the victims and their survivors, the wounded and maimed and their families—but we are not afraid.

And another thing I feel is confidence—by now, I’ve developed (we all have) an awareness of just how powerful our country’s counter-terrorist forces are in tracking and killing these hate groups and individual psychopaths.

We grieve. We feel horrible—such needless, pointless violence against such innocent, happy people. But we are not afraid now. We will never be afraid again—we’ve given all the ground we are going to give on this subject and we are well on the way to taking it back and then some.

Whether there are crazed gunmen in schools, domestic extremists, or ‘al-qaeda’ cells, America has gotten over you all. Soon we won’t even report this stuff on the news—well, the attacks will be reported—but no one is going to waste time on asking these monsters about their goals or motivations or anything else they have to say. They will simply be brought to whatever justice they receive.

Judging from the recent, frequent reports of these public bombings around the world, the countries that had traditionally harbored these extremists are making them very unwelcome of late. Afghanis, Pakistanis, Iraqis—their people are as fed up with this insane destruction as we are here in the USA. And high time, too.

So, sorry, terrorists—you will no longer be called terrorists because you are the creators of terror—you will be called terrorists because you are terrible people—and nobody wants you around.

Back to Welfare (or How To Fix Public Education)

Posted by XperDunn on April 8, 2013

Ah, the myth of the man-month, all over again. “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering” by Fred Brooks, [“..First published in 1975 (ISBN 0-201-00650-2), reprinted in 1982, and republished in an anniversary edition with four extra chapters in 1995 (ISBN 0-201-83595-9), including a reprint of the essay “No Silver Bullet” with commentary by the author.]”–Wikipedia.

Brooks’ Law has been around a long time. However, Brooks’ book is jovially described as the ‘Project Managers Bible’, oft-quoted, but almost never followed. There are good reasons for not following the rational approach described therein—for one thing, it concerns group efforts in a business environment. Ask anyone with experience in such things and they will tell you, “Sure—in group efforts (or team efforts) there is nothing rational involved—it’s all about their feelings and relationships (and their hierarchy, corporate-wise).”

Like office staff during a prolonged period of ‘downsizing’, members of a ‘group effort’ assume a herd aspect—everyone looks to everyone else, ignoring their specific efforts while focused on the much more important mob-moods of the group as a whole. But the vagaries of corporate dysfunction and corporate survival are not my theme for today.

Today, in examining the exhaustive world of Insolvency, I’m going over ground that’s been gone over before—but is very worthwhile in reviewing and reminding us of key facts. Part of the Poverty problem is the enormous effort required to be poor and alive at the same time.

Let’s enumerate. Point One—if you cannot afford a car, you are forced to either walk or take mass transit, often for long distances, on a daily basis. This applies not just to the commute to a job (yes, many poor people have jobs—they’re just not good jobs) but to shopping, medical emergencies, parent-teacher meetings, etc. Commuting is, however, where it hurts the most—the likelihood of being late is magnified by the number of factors outside of the control of the worker—missed busses and trains, inclement weather, and heavy traffic on a street that must be walked across, etc. And this results in either docked pay or diminished perceived value as an employee—or both. In short, the lack of a car can be costly in effort, man-hours, reputation, and straight-up paychecks. And it makes certain destinations virtually unreachable.

Point Two—if you cannot afford a house, you must find a friend to let you stay on the couch—or find a homeless shelter. Either way, you are subject to all the disadvantages of not owning a home—you cannot accumulate appliances, furniture, or foodstuffs; you cannot give a home phone number or mailing address; and you can end up spending too much time exposed to the elements—which can lead to…

Point Three—if you cannot afford a doctor and you are sick or injured, you must spend a minimum of one whole working day at an Emergency Room—and then get less-than-competent health care at the end of it. Infection is more likely to find people who have no Band-Aids or Purell.

I could go on to Point Thirty-Three with this stuff—but I’ll spare you the rest—in truth, it makes me very tired to think about Poverty. So many people—so much injustice and unfairness—thinking how it would affect me, in my disabled state, if I were all alone, I can’t help but see it as a sort of hell on earth.

I can only surmise that the many angry voices on the Internet, that despise the poor and the hungry, are the voices of like-minded folk—with the important difference that they fear that hell-on-earth for themselves and, rather than empathize with today’s victims, simply wish to distance themselves from such a horrible condition. That fear makes them angry and such people want to insist that the monster could never catch them—thus their characterization of the poor as ‘lazy’ and ‘un-enterprising’. But they are no safer for all their hexing.

None of us are safe. That is why it makes a tremendous amount of sense to ameliorate the horrors of Poverty. It could happen to me tomorrow—then wouldn’t I feel like an idiot for trying to stop government aid to my new demographic? We should be making Poverty an embarrassment rather than a frightening wasteland. We should be making Poverty so easy to bear that the only damage it inflicts is the wounding of one’s pride.

But please understand me—I’m not saying we should taunt the poor—that isn’t it at all. No, I’m saying that poverty should hold no fear for our lives, for our health, for our daily bread. I’m saying it should be easy to be poor, easy to care for our children when we’re poor, and easy to get medical treatment for us and our families when we’re poor. We should be tempted by Poverty—it should call to us when we are down and make us think, “O, forget all this trouble—I’m just gonna give up.”

Without such a safety-net system of support, none of us are safe, none of us can rest easy—the poor suffer, and the rest of us worry about becoming poor. It’s too primitive this way—and what is a civilization anyway, if not a collective effort to improve quality of life for everyone?

I remember the ‘Welfare state’ of yesteryear—how it became a black hole of government expense. But that was not caused by an army of ‘lazy good-for-nothings’, people who chose welfare over honest labor—even in those easier times, no one went on Welfare just to avoid working. No, the true cause of the arterial spurt of cash that Welfare became was corruption, not overuse.

Plus, no one thought Welfare through—it was an attempt to end the poverty of inner cities and depressed rural areas—when someone has lived hand to mouth for a lifetime—and then is handed money—that person doesn’t have any natural propensity for changing into someone new—no. When Welfare was instituted, there was no concomitant effort to guide those people towards a different way of life—so when they got money, they spent it as they always had. The idea that they would simply march straight into a bank and start a savings account, try to use some of the money to get a better education, and generally start doing things the way prosperous people were used to doing them—that is one big assumption.

It showed our ignorance of social dynamics and, more importantly, it revealed government’s (any government’s) weak side: envisioning what will happen tomorrow. Mixed up in there, too, was a lot of prejudice, condescension, and miserliness. And the Misers ultimately won out. The media painted it thus: calls for rooting out the corruption and illicit scams in the Welfare system were followed by pronouncements that it couldn’t be fixed, we should just trash the whole thing. And that’s what we did.

A few years later, NYC (and many other places) noticed a new problem in the streets—homelessness. Coincidence? You tell me. Then we had years of debate over how to solve the homeless crisis. No one suggested anything as old and shabby as Welfare—we’d already tried it, hadn’t we? Well, not really.

Let me say this—if we tasked our armed forces with a war on domestic poverty, we wouldn’t be that far off. As I see it, much of the perpetuation of poverty is due to businesspersons that create an economic niche within the plight of the poor—slumlords, high-interest-loans, overpriced merchandise targeting customers who can’t afford the extra time and the extra distance travelled to reach an honorable establishment. It is a microcosm of how most of the world is eternally being ripped off by the rich—but I’m going to stay on task here—back to Poverty.

So there are businesses which prey on the poor—but there are the gangs, too. Modern gangs control many under-served, depressed areas—and our world’s largest penal system contains an inexhaustible supply of replacements for all the gangs. Between street gangs, our prison system, and organized crime, huge swathes of the ‘land of the free’ are so ‘law of the jungle’ that they actually could be perceived as foreign countries—thus my suggestion that the military take point on this issue.

If our armed forces can get rid of the thieves and tin-pot dictators of the Mid-East, rebuild the infrastructure, train and educate the native populations to the point where they can govern themselves—why can’t we do that at home? I say bring back Welfare, and enforce it with heavy armament! Then, when people stop starving and freezing, perhaps, the public education system can be fixed.

New Dole

Posted by XperDunn on March 8, 2013

Nice little stormlet—nothing that carries a mortality rate—just school closings and slips on the ice (Nana’s still in a wrist-cast from a week or so ago). It keeps Claire home, though she’s still working in her office all day. I just feel better when she’s around—especially in dicey weather. I’m one of those unfortunate souls for whom the thought of the offspring strikes more bells of alarm than happiness. I love them both so much—but my love is constituted of more than a small percentage of worry and dread, plus all the more kindly affections. So my first thought is always, “Gee, I miss the boy—I hope those Binghamton winters haven’t put him in jeopardy”—so you see, before I even get to the thought of, “I should call him and say hello.”—I’m already worried that he’s in danger. He’s the worst example, because it includes the knowledge that he’s far too far away for me to come immediately to his aid. But daughter has her own special ‘dreading’s, i.e. life in the Big Apple, nighttime streets—her fiancé is always nearby, and she is no slouch when it comes to standing up for herself, either—but she’s so dainty—even in my reduced fitness I can easily lift her up.

So, I appreciate these storms especially—the TV is full of “Don’t leave home today if you can possibly avoid travel.” And the snow just sits because everyone knows it’ll be 50 degrees F for the next few days afterward. It’s a cozy storm. I thank the wheel for being protected from the cold and wind. (It just blew open the door I leave cracked to disperse my smoke—and made me do one of those cartoon-leaning-into-the-wind moves before I could get it closed!) I’m all too aware of how many people are without proper shelter or warm food and drink.

I had a thought while watching CSPAN. What if we created a New Dole, a stipend that worked out to the same net amount as someone making $30,000 per annum. Now, that’s a lot more comfortable than many of the livings being earned by people who are working three jobs and struggling to buy their kids’ school supplies—but it isn’t the life of Riley, either—it still demands a financial scrupling that most upper-middle-class would think of as being ‘poverty’. So it isn’t quite madness, but it is a great deal more generous than what we have now. What actions would follow?

Firstly, a lot of workers would walk quietly away from the slave-labor conditions of their present lifestyle. A large increase in families claiming relief would occur. The amount spent by the Fed to relieve these families would increase drastically. And so, for the moment, it would appear that it hurts, rather than helps us with reducing the Deficit. But what would follow almost immediately?

There would be a dearth of labor on the market—a lot of hard work will have been left deserted. The companies that paid them a slave wage (or part-time, no-benefits minimum wage, if you prefer) would still need their work to be done—but now they will be forced to pay someone a decent wage to do a respectable, full-time job. Outsourcing has its limits—just ask the new Dragon Lady in charge of Google about how much can and can’t be done ‘remotely’. Plus, manufacturing in America is enjoying a resurgence—so we merely have to ‘out-quality’ third-world-slave-labor’s production parameters, and we see an immense potential for employment.

Roosevelt was right about the ‘Fear itself’. Everyone in this economy who is enjoying a comfortable life-style (and that is a surprising majority of us) is scared to death of falling off their own perches. I know, because it is my great fear, too. But we have good reason to fear poverty so much—we treat poor people just a little better than we treat shelter pets. And we appear to have the same rubric in place, as well: ‘We try to save as many as we can, but we only have so much money’. That’s not good enough. That’s a Hell on Earth, and no wonder everyone is permanently panicked about being thrown onto that same trash-heap!

Our unemployment should be a negative value. It should indicate how much we would appreciate having a few more workers than are already busy as bees and happily employed. One thing we should not be doing is borrowing efficiency tips from regimes that put a lower value on human life, and dignity, than we do. We should continue the American tradition of surprising the world demonstrating how much more powerful humane principals are than the so-called ‘hard-nosed business’ perspective. We must take a step back from Fiscal Fascism and distribute our resources in ways that best serve the people. We fought for two decades over the question of foreign involvement—and we still stick ourselves in the middle of things, only citing a ‘War on Terror, rather than ‘Soviet Expansionism’.

Either way, we should recognize the similar threat presented by corporate lobbyists. We try to avoid ‘foreign entanglements’ with little success, but at least we recognize that as a problem. Industrial and financial lobbyists represent ‘foreign value-systems’ that attempt, piece by piece, to slide into place a ‘near enough’, removing the actual ethic for one more conducive to Business than Humanity. And they should be even more urgently avoided.

I hear proponents of Business shouting about how ‘money is the bottom line and you can’t operate in the real world without winning at the money contest’! I hear them, I do. Can’t argue the point, but it doesn’t work that simply. There is the question of how you aim your money-guns. Do we aim them at our competitors, play their game? Our do we try to be ‘American’ (as I’ve always thought it) and point the weapon at the ills of our society? We should beat our opponents by making them slobber with envy at what our nation’s quality of life has become while they were still Mesmerized by the money-changers. Just like we did to the Soviets.

Being rich would become passé. (How do you say ‘thank you’ to MS Word for automatically sticking that accent over the ‘e’ in passé? There, it just did it again! Sorry, what were we talking about?, O yeah…)

The new cool would become living without stress. A nice job, pleasant workplace environment, challenging work (but not overmuch, unless that was how you liked it.) and a nice place, with two bathrooms. We could replace ‘supply and demand’ with ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’. I suggest that we reverse ‘planned obsolescence’ and ‘go green’ by making as many products as possible last a lifetime or more. Now, the sales department isn’t going to see much good in that—but I don’t see too much good in sales, so we’re even.

We could measure the value of these products as a function of point-of-purchase profit, but with added valuation for the lack of resources required to make new ones every year or two and the reduction in waste products that need composting or recycling. Eternally-rising corporate profits sound good to the owners and managers of the single company, but as a part of the entire economy—maybe not so much.

A great deal of our hi-tech civilization’s energy and resources are spent on inertial running-in-place—every single company has to keep growing or die. We should look at new business models that minimize idle-time costs and look towards products that are manufactured and maintained only occasionally. Tomorrow’s factories will not be predicated on maximum output, but on minimum down-time expense and custom-quality products.

Now, I’m sure this all sounds very Socialist. I am only reacting to the reality I think I’ve gleaned from the media and books and the people around me. I’m no researcher with a huge bibliography to back up my ideas. I’m not even a college graduate (but that didn’t prevent my kids from getting their degrees). I’m just saying—what we’re doing isn’t working. It is causing pain, fear, and stress—it is filthifying our ecosystem—it is using up resources that cannot be replaced once they’re gone—and it keeps even those of us who are snug and satisfied in our cozy, comfy houses living in a state of terror that has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I personally also feel guilty about all the people that are already in a place I’m petrified about being damned to.

Fear and guilt do not fit into my idea of the ‘pursuit of happiness’. People argue that government is too big or too small—that’s nothing—what are our goals? And how is the government helping us to reach our goals? It isn’t all about money. Well, it is—but only because of the way it’s set up. We can beat Money, we can tame it, and make it ‘user-transparent’ for all practical purposes.

Just as guns are great tools when used properly, but deadly when misused—money has the capacity to moderate our march towards happiness at the double-step, smoothing the knots of trading one thing for another. We must bend it to our will—not let it continue to make some people dictators and others starved and suffering—that is only what we have foolishly allowed it to become. Just as we try to moderate national arguments with the UN, we should implement a UM that seeks to keep everyone on earth reasonably housed, well-fed and educated (and, if its not too much trouble of course, free internet).

Just as the Hague has a World Court judging international or humanitarian crimes, we need a World Accountant that finds people with just way too much money, and takes half of it—with the promise to return some of it if the person can actually spend the remaining half in their own lifetime. Then the WA would contribute to the UM in its quest to end poverty everywhere on Earth.

And it all starts with our New Dole, a latter-day Emancipation Proclamation that allows everyone to live in relative security and comfort, thus forcing business owners to revalue the salary paid to a working soul. The business advocates don’t want Obama’s new minimum-wage-increase because it will hurt business? Well then, do my idea—it won’t hurt business at all—unless you call forcing them to treat their employees like human beings ‘hurting’ them. A new paradigm beckons us towards a new American Dream—our we could just stick with the seven-billion-man rat-knot that we’re already squirming in.

Absence of Justice

Posted by XperDunn on March 2, 2013

I find it so difficult to accomplish goals nowadays—the fatigue, the distraction, the swiss-cheese of my memory…It’s kinda like Mississippi having only last month completed their official State ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery—only I’m in their league in neither lag time nor significance of mission. I guess you have to be a government to screw up to that high a degree.

How sad the waste time passed. It has finally come to me (these mills grind slowly…) that the entitled, the wealthy, and the powerful see their cardinal mission as the maintenance of status quo. What all the rest of us want (and our numbers grow, as the aforementioned 0.1% of ‘Dynasts’ shrinks to an even more measly few) is change, substantial change. The Dynasts are careful to couch these things in general terms such as ‘the economy will collapse’ or ‘our military defense will lose its primacy’ or ‘chronic mass unemployment’—but in truth that is only the background to the personal nightmare currently premiering in brains near them, nationwide—the loss of personal power, wealth, security, shelter, food, health, ending ultimately with themselves and their families being at the mercy of the same winds of capitalism, desperation, and pain that storm across the landscape of the rest of us ‘regular people’.

We want big change—they want no change—or, if absolutely necessary, a little, tiny change. They set the odds because they run the table—many of our problems are worsened by misguided argument in the media, which only moves the issue further away from its substance.

We talk about the unlimited sexual assaults by our fighting men and boys, against our fighting women and girls. And they want to talk about ‘under-reporting’, ‘counseling’, and ‘prosecutions’—when what should be the prime issue—why are these men being trained in boot camps and in exercises about how to fight, without covering the important topic of “Don’t rape anyone, but for god’s sake, if you have to, at least don’t rape your own!” Is this something the military is too bashful to talk about in public? Is it so very hard to include, along with say field-drills or gun-cleaning, a few words about how sick and disgusting and sad it is that women who dare to put their lives in the hands of their military leaders—to serve their country—end up being targeted for sexual assault by their own fellow soldiers?

What the hell?

We want to know what the big deal is with increased taxes on people that make more than a million dollars a year—are you kidding me? We got tens of millions without jobs, homes, or even food—and these fat cats want to discuss how ‘business will be hurt’ if our heavy players have to part with more cash flow! I call BS on that one—total BS. It’s time to stop worrying about what would hurt business, and start worrying about what we can do to stop business from hurting people.

It’s time we saw some limits placed on industrial and financial lobbyists—it’s time we created more jobs by increasing the number of regulators watching over every bank, investment house, and trading market. If the derivatives are too complicated for anyone to understand them, then make them against the law—is that some big intuitive leap?

If the NRA lobby pushed through legislation to stop the CDC from recording or reporting any data on gun-related death and injury stats, then let’s take away their permission to be lobbyists—and overturn that bill and any other law that specifically suppresses significant research collection and publication—how is such a law not deemed unconstitutional in the first place? Doesn’t our freedom of speech include the right for our government institutions to freely collect and share health-related data?

Who are these bums on Capitol Hill? Someone please explain how the correct answer could be, “Let’em burn; we’ll start over from the ashes.” Not even in session, lazy bastards, and blaming the ‘advent of sequestration’ on the President. Five years now I’ve been waiting for these closet-red-necked pussies to give our president the respect he deserves—but they’re still trying suck the life out of our country, while pointing at Obama. As if it maybe might work, eventually. Not according to the polls, not for a while now—is it only the Republicans themselves who are convinced of something the whole danged rest of the country has seen through—and been wise to for some time?

Big movie coming out “A Place At The Table” about hunger in America—the tens of millions, largely children, of the greatest food-producing nation in the world that go without enough food to keep them alive. I give up. Starvation? For crying out loud—why isn’t starvation included in any of these political debates over the National Budget—are the Hungry a frickin’ side-issue? What are we?

Okay, enough out of me. The media will continue to emphasize the sensational, diverting attention from the actual substances of our problems—that way, we get to enjoy our empire’s decline on TV, instead of actually pushing back at the darkness that weighs so heavily on us all.

Just think, if we employed one person, and told them their job was to make sure this little girl got three squares a day—then we’d have one more unemployed with a new job, and one less starving child. There, that’s a recovery plan. It’d work great—so much to do, so many people busy, so many kids overeating for the first time in their lives—but you know those suits and talking-head-pundits and power-grabbers would tear it to shreds, and make the tearing to shreds of it last as long as possible. That way, they get us all busy arguing over what a stupid idea it is—you know, distracted—the way they like us.

S’always Somepin

Posted by XperDunn on December 28, 2012

two points, actually. One: The NRA is one sick-assed concept of an association; and Two: The House Republicans are a bunch of no-good sons-o-whatever.

Since the later would appear to have priority, let’s begin with the GOP Representatives—they include a hard-core, tea-bag-stifled bunch of tax-nothings (magical economics?), a large number of scared-to-admit-it moderates who think it might actually make sense to set our federal financial house in order (especially when that self-legislated implosion of non-decisions-from-the-past is about to go BOOM). Then there are the vanguards—those so enameled by media-coverage, and those ensorcelled by power into irrationality—that nothing they can say or do will result in anything but delay.

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I’ve been kept from my keyboard a couple of days since I started simmering over this, so I’ve retreated from the full boil I had going just before Xmas. But I still want to point out that these officials are elected to represent the will of their electors, the people. Only those forty tea-baggers have the excuse that they were elected by ignorant fools. The other three-hundred-something House members have only the tissue-thin armor of being Dems or Reps, Red or Blue—and at this point, that still doesn’t free them to defy stark reality, or to accept an avoidable wounding of those people who voted them into office.

But that vanguard—well, give me two days with flashes blinding me every time I walk to my car and people shouting at me, and I’ll lose touch with reality myself. The President can’t do anything to help these legislators—because he still feels obligated to produce sensible results as a part of holding his office. And he knows that his name will be attached to this time in history, whether the House GOPs destroy our economy or not. He has to do what he said he would, come hell or high water.

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Plus, there is some evidence that this whole, protracted nonsense over taxes really only amounts to a barely significant fraction of the total being addressed. This gives rise, in me at least, to conspiracy-theory-like paranoia. How do I reconcile my optimistic attitude towards our nation with clear evidence of civilization becoming some monstrous distortion of all our vague notions of freedom, equality, and patriotism. This distortion has but one root cause—ignorance, not just in the young products of public schooling, but in individuals with responsibility for how we run our government and our businesses.

I’m an educated guy. I ain’t no genius, but I can carry on a conversation, OK? So when I see shifty-eyed, mealy-mouthed scam artists behind podiums with a sign over them that says “POTUS” (Thank God that one’s over for now.) or the Pentagon, or the House Of Representatives, or the Senate, or Mayor of AnyCity, USA, or Governor—it makes me mad. It isn’t so much that they are clearly egotistical or of dubious character—I can live with some of that—but that they are ignorant boobs who have no right to be a part of an adult discussion on the issues.

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I’ve told myself not to lean too hard on the evangelical types—there are many quite-mundane morons whose ignorance side-steps religion altogether. The only real beef I have with the former, that isn’t shared by the later, is a willingness to believe in things like ‘the end of the world’ as an ‘appointment’-event, or that harm, in the present, is not as important as quality-of-‘afterlife’, whatever that is.

Still, the down-to-earth idiots are just as dangerous in their insistence on confusing value with worth. These guys (and gals) will see themselves Chair-persons of the most powerful banks and corporations on Earth, even if it takes the destruction of the human race, either before or after the destruction of our very Earth.

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But whatever your (or their) poison, stupidity-wise, there are none so dangerous as those whose job it is to write our laws. Elected ignorance is no joke—but what can we do when we have legitimized ignorance by voting it into office?

Which brings me nicely around to Point One: the NRA—they seem to think that controlling who can or can’t own a firearm is as bad as deciding who is smart enough to vote and who isn’t. I see their point—it is a fact that most of these tragedies end in suicide by bullet or bullets. They are first exposures of the lethal psychosis that these mass-murderers never give a doctor a chance to diagnose. And with the highest frequency psychotic breaks occurring in otherwise normal adolescents and young adults, or in recently-returned service-people, it is also a fact that no legislation against those already diagnosed as mentally ill or mentally challenged, owning a gun would have prevented even one of these horrific incidents.

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Personally, I’m anti-gun. I feel that in such a fragile civilization as ours, people should be encouraged to trust each other, not to defend against each other. ‘Being prepared to fire back’ is a mindset that nearly begs for its own fulfillment. The idea that armed citizens of the fifty states could win an argument with the federal government is charmingly quaint. It’s also a good premise for an action movie. But either way, it is still fiction.

But a regular person wanting to own a gun, for whatever reason, seems like an important part of our heritage. If only the founding fathers had specified ‘flintlocks’ instead of ‘arms’—then folks could still hunt, still protect their home or family in an emergency, but there wouldn’t be any debates over magazine size or semi-auto vs. auto—it’d just be Flintlocks. Just one problem—Old Father George had some cannon, too. Damn! It’s always something.

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Missed It By That Much…

Posted by XperDunn on December 23, 2012

Everyone has always focused on the Boomers, as they now transfer into their sixties. But few regard those of us who ‘just missed’ the era of the college protest, LSD, hippies, and civil disobedience. Some of us were close, but we were really the younger siblings of the boomers. We looked up to their idealism, their experimentation, their thirst for civil liberty (and every other kind of liberty) and their rejection of corporatism and environmental abuse.

We lived ‘lives of what was left’—we experimented, but it wasn’t new; we protested, but it had lost its visibility; we were tempted to follow our elder, cooler siblings into communes and rogue armies, but heard about the psycho Manson and the victimized Hearst before we had a chance to see it with innocent eyes.

And so, what we are most familiar with is disappointment. The old media of networks and newspapers reported on all the latest wildness going on with young adults while we were still old children. Janis, Morrison, Hendrix—all dead just a year or so before we were old enough to attend a concert. On the first day of Woodstock, a VW bug stopped by our front lawn and asked if I wanted to catch a ride upstate with them—being fifteen and broke, I said no. So now Woodstock is a big part of my past—but definitely not in the same sense as those who were three or four years older and attended the event.

For us the boom generation was the spoiled generation—they got to break in all the newest ‘toys’ of modern life: drugs, counter-cultures, sexual freedom, and birth control—while we were of an age formed more by cable TV, personal computers, AIDS, and the Internet. We harvested the wreckage of their dreams: side-affects, addiction, STDs, the pharmaceutical industry, the music industry, the cancelling of our space program, the death of cruising due to an oil shortage, lung cancer, no-smoking laws, the DEA, mass media, post-modern cinema, shooting sprees, and policing the world instead of supporting or assisting it.

While the world still changes, even faster now than then, it seems like they were the favored children, granted the 20^th century’s explosion of innovation and liberty—the last to ever grab for all the gusto without any nagging concern for the inevitable consequences. And if it all turned to sand and slipped through their fingers, they did hold it in their hands—we just stood by and watched each new wonder become an old problem.

Yes, we lived more safely—their trailblazing did spring a few traps that we were then forewarned against, but safety isn’t what young people look for.

And the true, the real, our broadened understanding of what is and what has come before—all these still ring-out as free-er attitudes and a greater sophistication of attitude than those of before, the whole of the rest of history, who saw the world with a superficiality that can never return. We will not go back to accepting segregation. We will not go back to willful gender-inequality. We will never give up the separation of church and state, or the Miranda rights decisions of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, or the protections against bullying parents that abuse both spouse and offspring—physically, mentally, or sexually.

These levels of decency are, as always, a matter of location, regime, and economy. What is taken for granted here in Westchester County would seem a fantasy of impossible enlightenment to citizens of places where warlords continue to press-gang their children ‘soldiers’. But the world as a whole heads towards the advances made in the developed countries, especially the USA. Thus, when some aspect of our thinking goes deep enough to allow acceptance of the formerly unacceptable, it is a global benchmark—and a big part of the reason many of the world’s citizens still dream of coming here to live lives of freedom and dignity.

The victories of the sixties and seventies weren’t the sensationalized behavior of protesters and hippy communes and acid-trippers—these things all paled with the passage of time. But the freedom-conscious thinking of that era helped to end institutionalized segregation, par-for-the-course misogyny, and the shunning of the disabled, the mentally challenged, and the impoverished.

This makes me happy. This is much more enjoyable than getting a police-baton upside the head—so I hold no true grudge against the boomers, I just enjoy complaining. And besides, when does one ever stop resenting ones older siblings for being older?

I’ve Looked At Greed From Both Sides Now – (Cont’d)

Posted by XperDunn on December 7, 2012

Friday, December 07, 2012 1:55 PM

I’ve Looked At Greed From Both Sides Now – (Cont’d)

(Or — “Hey, There Are More Than Two Sides To This Stuff”)

But I meant to go on—producing these vanity, xmas-card music-CDs is so distracting I keep losing my train of thought.

I wanted also to explore the ‘in the mood’ aspect of society. To be cheery and charitable during the yule season is the video-image ideal, nearly from the week of Thanksgiving to New Years. A friend and I spoke of it recently, we both had the ‘tall corn’ gene, apparently, and neither of us ever got tired of ‘wishes come true’, miracles, reconciliations, homecomings—all the happiest of happy endings. Hey—I say, “If other people can enjoy horror movies, action flics, ‘war-of-the-worlds’es , and other apocalyptic explosions of use in soothing the suppressed rage of the human animal forced to live in a cultural strait-jacket—the viewer, that is—then we more-sappy sapiens have just as much license to rot our brains in our own way, even if it includes Christmas movies.

But I sidetracked myself. Yes, Christmas Time, the most ethereal aspect of the season, is not a fixed thing, it isn’t a specific day, a specific agenda, or any special gathering of folks together in celebration of anything specific—other than the shared understanding that for about three weeks, we will obligate ourselves to look strangers at the mall right in the eye, with a bit of potential smiling, remaining uncommitted until the waters have been tested. Will the stranger be in the head-space of Christmas Time? Or will the stranger have annoying relatives on the mind and very little time left on the parking meter while turning back for the one thing they came for, forgotten amongst the shopping?

And these are modern, sophisticated times—nobody disses someone who hasn’t the time to smile—we’ve all been there ourselves, and you have to roll with the punches. So, you cancel the burgeoning-smile status and allow yourself, for a minute, the luxury of downcast eyes. When and if your spirit picks back up again, you raise your eyes and try again….

Thus we see that gladsomeness comes and goes, and none of us can be our best selves on a permanent basis. There are indications that having some small amount of personal privacy, at least once in a while, is necessary to avoid mental illness. Our moods are fragile—they find rest in a shared mood, and they are quickly cancelled with the appearance of someone in emotional distress. Whatever happy mood one is in, such an appearance will blow it away like a puff of smoke. It is odd that such a wrenching-away from one’s own state of mind is considered not an attack but a responsibility innocently imposed by someone else’s upset—that is to say, ‘you can’t yell at them for it, no matter how bummed out you are.’

So emotional distress is considered a trump card—society demands that we pay attention to people who cry or scream or yell in anger. Telling them to ‘shut the hell up’ is unacceptably cold-hearted behavior, or so we would think.

But this puts us in the wrong when dealing with businesspeople. They represent a mindless, for-profit corporation, but they can use their appearance of humanity to chivvy us into acting as if we believe they have integrity, ethical motives, and feelings—just as a real human does.

Such foolishness belongs in the same category with ‘raising taxes on the wealthy’ or ‘keeping abortion legal’. Everyone knows that we 99% (and yes, the majority of that 99%–for all of you pro-democracy nuts out there) want it to happen, but we are not surprised that it’s eternally portrayed by mass media as a noble struggle between differing opinions, never to be enacted or reconciled. We are not surprised when something that makes billionaires sad just never seems to pass into law.

When I see Speaker Boehner at the podium, blatantly supporting some stupid delay or obstacle, while our national credit-rating gets worse, instead of better, I could just spit. Just the thought of taxing the biggest of the fat cats would seem to be his worst nightmare, yet we have historically had tremendous taxes on the wealthiest. They were taxed as high as 70%–because they were rightly expected to pay the most out of their huge profits and revenues.

And this “I’m a Corporation! / I’m a person!” comes back into it. Serious, old, wrinkled, white faces mumble into the microphone about stability, or global economic forces, or economic collapse due to the Dems airy-fairy socialism. I don’t hear them say much along the lines of “Let’s just get back to those values we supported during the Bush administration.” You don’t hear that. You only hear a lot of blame thrown the Dems’ way for not fixing Bush’s car-wreck fast enough—surely those who believed in Bush’s policies could do a better job of fixing his mistakes. Or does that sound crazy? Maybe.

We give them credit for being experienced, thoughtful legislators—they dress the part, they talk real edjicated, most on’em, and they become very grave (indeed!) when they link their own probity and dignity to the continued existence of our great ‘God bless all of you, and God bless the United States.’—well, you know. You’ve heard it. You’ve seen it. You can tell these people are living in some kind of bubble that reality will never intrude upon—at least, not until they’re out of office.

Meanwhile, I am often awe-struck in the middle of my day, thinking of millions of jobless trying to survive, for years it’s been now, right? And I am so happy that my family and I are among the lucky ones who get by very comfortably, if not luxuriously. I try not to imagine what could be, if a thunderbolt happened to strike our happy lives. I try to relish life, to taste every moment of time, to always be aware of how wonderful my life is.

But sometimes I’m just not in the mood. Battle, struggle, controversy, opposition—all these aspects of life demand a different and less sensitive frame of mind. There have been times of my life when weeks went by, even months, without a happy thought or greeting—there are difficulties in life that occupy more of our lives than the rare gladness of goodwill. We must turn one off to turn on the other—but we must always be ready to change. It’s unstable—a moving target, if you will.

And so I believe that the federal government is in the best position to see to it an uninterrupted stream of aid goes to the under-served. Making the program a national one insures the best spread of the total resources, without regard for State or Local budget concerns. These fragmented attempts at aid have the same vulnerability to changing moods and changing times that we individuals have—but the Federal Education, Welfare, support-whatevers will remain stable for the much longer term. Sometimes the fact that governments are slow to change can be used as a positive thing.

Taxing the wealthy? That’s what we’ve argued over for two years now, to the extreme neglect of other, more serious issues? And we are expected to believe that the lobbyists pulling the GOP’s strings are not the sole reason for all this debate. Walk down the street. Ask each person you meet if they think we should raise taxes on the wealthy.

I dare you to keep walking until someone says ‘No’.

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I’ve Looked At Greed From Both Sides Now

Posted by XperDunn on December 6, 2012

Call them entitlements; call them social programs; call them liberal arts boondoggles; however you think of them, you don’t think of them in the same way as everyone else. Some people see our governmental infrastructure as an imposition upon them, a charity towards us (assuming you and I are both among the 99%) and a betrayal of the self-made American Dream for individualists, pioneers, and let’s face it, rich people. Others, like me (and maybe you) see our social supports and education enhancements as an investment in our quality of life.

Amidst the latest electioneering was some debate about small government. Also briefly appearing on the sound-bite battle-lines was talk of entitlements—a word aptly chosen, because it makes financial aid sound as if it were some fancy-assed dilettantism that reeked of intellectuals and leftists (you should pardon the French). And I loved that phrase, ‘small government’, imagining it in the sense of being made more responsive, efficient, and streamlined. But I’ve gathered, over time, that small government is actually code for ‘low taxes’ and ‘no financial aid for the needy’.

But without help, the ‘Have-Nots’ are being placed on an unequal footing with the ‘Haves’, and this is a problem for the land of liberty and the land of equal opportunity. Part of the importance of equal opportunity is that it ensures the government doesn’t spend money on services for the elite while taxing everyone else. Or, put another way, we don’t like taxation without representation. If federal or state government funds an institute of higher learning, that college or university should be equally available to citizens from all income-levels. If our taxes are paying fallow-farm subsidies to big farmers, they should pay out a matching amount in food stamps to help the poor keep pace with the artificially boosted value of food commodities.

So, that is number one on my list—small government is a cancer of inequality that, if unaddressed, can only grow over time and cause our ‘equality’ to become a total sham.

Beyond that, we have to look at the ethics of small government from both Pro and Con. The obvious Con is the expense of supporting people who do not contribute to the community. This is bad business, on its surface. Why should I pay taxes for something that doesn’t benefit me? I’m sure, also, that there will be cheap-skates who work the system to grab a free ride or a free lunch, or whatever. So some of my taxes are inevitably going towards a scam that pays out only for one greedy bastard! Or even (god forbid!) an organized-crime family or terrorist cell.

The not-so-obvious Pro is that we could end up taking our own place in the breadline, depending on charity for food and shelter and medicine. Our own children may one day find themselves in desperate straits, dependent on government assistance to survive. If we take this concept out to its furthest resolution, we can imagine a world in which, should you lose your job, your house, and everything you own, your quality of life won’t change a bit. Business owners would hate that, of course. They would have to offer real compensation to anyone that chose to ‘cooperate’ with them, i.e. ‘take a job’. A minimum wage enslavement would have no basis in reason—finally, bosses would have to treat with their employees like equals. Frightening, right?

But there is another Pro — peace of mind. It is far easier on the conscience to feel badly for the families in shelters than it is to feel sorry for the people one must step over to hail a cab. Even if we ignore the difference it would make to the homeless people, it would still be of benefit to us.

Plus, there’s the health angle—even in the Dark Ages, individuals in cities and villages could say “Those corpses are none of my business.” But that wouldn’t change the fact that it is dangerous to live ten yards away from a plague-victim’s bloated carcass.

In our modern settings, similarities appear—mental wards’ and criminal facilities’ overflow create an unstable environment for commerce and leisure. Central Park can only be enjoyed if the police patrols keep any homeless folks from setting up camp therein. The crime rate rises in proportion to the desperation of the less-fortunate of that community. And many poverty-stricken neighborhoods, city or country, are locked in cycles of suffering that only real dedication to healing the issue can break. And by ‘real dedication’, I’m suggesting not only serious thought and full-time personnel, but governmental oversight and financial support.

Besides, if we raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, it isn’t as if they are going to starve—they will have less cash, not NO cash. What’s the big deal? We tried that trickle-down BS for three decades, and there are fat-cats who swear it’ll still work—if we just give it a little more time. Ha! So let’s give ‘taxing the rich’ a measly year or too—then if it precipitates an even worse economic collapse than the Republicans presided over, we can always go back to relying on the super-wealthy to voluntarily create good jobs. No harm, no foul.

And, lastly, I’d like to appeal to your paranoia. The USA once had the greatest productivity, highest literacy rate, best public schools, the most innovative scientists and inventors, and we still had plenty of rich people. Working on our ethical infrastructure is no more a danger to them than is work on our transportation or communication infrastructures. It is, in fact, even more important for them. If there are only a tiny elite of high-ticket consumers, mostly every shop is going to stock the ‘brand x’ stuff; the airlines won’t have regular flights to the really ritzy vacation spots; advertisers will spend less because the market for goods just isn’t there. Pretty soon, you’re living in Syria. And have you seen the line-up on Syria’s prime-time TV broadcasts?

Our dominion over the earth has already gotten pretty threadbare. In time, we may have the worst schools, the least productive research, the stupidest citizens. In trying to keep pace with emerging nations, particularly China, we will rip the heart out of what always made us better off than they. I remember back in the eighties, Japan had set up a college devoted to replicating the experience of American students, in hopes that Japanese students could have the same innovative, inventive creativity that our college grads had. One of the things they found out was that college was too late to start. The entire childhood experience of American children was a non-stop urging to test boundaries, to criticize ideas, and to seek solutions. I wonder if they still see that in us?

But whatever lows we may have reached, it is obvious where our past strength came from—from unity, community and a respect for each other that knows no sowing of generosity will produce anything but good for all of us. We were the first country to have free public schools and in the nineteenth century we were the first country to have a majority of our citizens be literate. In a world undergoing an Industrial Revolution, that gave America a tremendous advantage.

Many pundits point out the financial, commercial reasons for doing this or not doing that—you would think that this ‘acumen’ was the only achievement of the most powerful country in the world. But we showed our greatest power in enduring a Great Depression for ten years and then conquering the world! We weren’t a nation of fat cats, then. Obviously, our greatness came from our rejection of elitism, our respect for each other as equals, and our open-minded-ness towards change.

And social programs (by whatever name) are simply an offshoot of the ideal of equality. There can be no equality between the opportunities available to rich kids and to poor kids. So, government programs that add a feather to the scales on the side of the poor—to offer them the merest inkling of opportunity—are not ‘taxation without representation’ perpetrated against the rich. They are, rather, a tenuous link between rich and poor which allows the poor to feel they’re not being completely played. The super-rich should realize that millions of unemployed citizens are filled with anger and frustration—and it would be a bad thing for us all to turn that blame (and rage) towards the millionaires….

I think the biggest problem is this insistence on black-or-white choices. A lot of what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital was, and is, true. By creating a sham model of Marx’s ideas, Communism became a dirty word. This is convenient for the rich, creating a boogey-man that makes unfettered Capitalism seem preferable, even desirable. But Capitalism has recently sidelined millions of once-productive, once-employed citizens–and that could make those unemployed thoughtful enough to realize that Capitalism, founded and maintained by a rich and powerful elite, is nearly as bad as Communism founded and maintained by a greedy and powerful elite. The good ideas that Marx had have been lumped in with all the madness of the Soviets and Red Chinese. The Chinese have seen this problem and have tried to unclench about some of the good things Capitalism has to offer. The USA, and especially its Conservatives, have unfortunately clung to their hatred of any Socialism, however beneficial to our country as a whole, because of its effects on the wealthy.

Pre-Town-Hall Jitters

Posted by XperDunn on October 16, 2012

( or “How Stupid Are We?”)

My wife and I just had an argument. I think we were arguing over her being disappointed with Obama’s loss in the first debate and my being understanding of that loss. Her point was that Obama should have called Romney out for lying throughout the debate, for reversing what few commitments he had made during the primary race, and while stumping afterwards, right up to the day of the first debate. My feeling was that Obama may have given us too much credit as an audience.

If I were to debate to an opponent who lied straight through the event, start to finish, would I choose to speak about the reality of the subject or would I spend the whole time accusing my opponent of being a liar? Should I assume that the audience knew better than to fall for a bunch of what Biden calls ‘malarkey’, or would I waste the entire evening ripping up every lie my opponent uttered? That’s not an easy call to make–especially in the USA, where the audience may shock you with its depth of ignorance and weakness of reasoning power.

Even the so-called ‘pundits’ and talking heads described the debate as a Romney ‘win’, with the caveat that he lied over and over, reversing his public views on everything. Is this a fair statement? Do I actual live in a country where liars are considered the winners of a debate, simply because they took some Ritalin® before the curtain went up? Is the president a loser simply because he overlooked all the lies of his opponent, opting instead to address the issues in an honest, substantive way?

According to the polls, yes, indeed! That’s exactly the type of country I live in. The USA has jumped the shark of free speech and gone for assessing ignorance as a respectable argument–merely another point of view, rather than a poor joke as compared to knowledgeable speakers’ statements. And this strategy may win the election for Mitt because, according to all those deep-thinking ‘undecided’s out there, Mitt CAN have it both ways.

He has warned the public for years now (as has his entire party) that Obama’s policies are destroying our country, our economy, and our way of life–and that our President must be replaced with a Republican before America goes completely to wrack and ruin. Then, at the first debate, he claimed that his policies were indistinguishable from Obama’s–with just a tweak here and there!

Can he have it both ways? Is impudence a debate ‘win’? Should we remove the President that turned around our economic landslide, and replace him with a Republican (the people that started the landslide)? Should Obama’s pro-active hunting down of global terrorism and piracy be replaced by a businessman who knows how to convert those evils into cold cash for the corporations, without unduly restricting said ‘evils’?

Tonight’s Town Hall debate should provide the answer–but I won’t be watching the two debaters–I’ll be watching the ‘towns-folk’. If the audience echoes the false memes of the GOP, accusing the President of false faults and lacks, and accepts Mitt Romney’s character as suitable for supreme leadership, then we live in a Wonderland as ludicrous as Alice’s. If they press Romney for substantive, specific answers, and accept some basic truths about the President (for example, that he has done a Herculean job of reversing our economic woes), then I shall watch the debate with great interest. But I’ll still remain more concerned over my fellow Americans’ powers of reason than the, to my eye, obvious differences between our two choices.

Xper Dunn Is Here

Aspera Ad Astra

Tag Archives: USA

The End of Terror (Monday, April 15, 2013 6:40 PM)

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S’always Somepin

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Missed It By That Much…

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I’ve Looked At Greed From Both Sides Now – (Cont’d)

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Pre-Town-Hall Jitters

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