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Monday, December 30, 2013

Why I Don't Trust Homophobes

In other words, "Thanks, faggot, for the math. Have an apple. No, not that one. Eat this one." - My guess as to what British authorities said to Alan Turing before his death by poisoned apple. Link to the Towleroad post found here.

If you think that this mindset is gone, you're delusional to the point of needing clinical assistance. Christians today know better than to say things like Phil Robertson recently uttered, unless they're in a setting of fellow bigots, homophobes, and misogynists, which he thought he was. I'd wager that he has no regrets about what he said, only to whom he said it.

Recall, also, that recent polls have shown that people claim not to harbor homophobic attitudes in a general or public setting, but will admit in private that they don't really care much for gays or what might happen to them. 

Now, combine those two things and you get a sense of what could happen and I will even go so far as to say what will happen unless a disruptive movement comes along and changes the projected course of our future history. I believe that there will be a gay holocaust, or homocaust as I've dubbed it. Look at the places today where bias and hate have sway: Sub-Saharan Africa, where a gay genocide is already underway, funded by American Fundamentalist/Dominionist/Evangelical/Extremist Christians; there's Russia where a coverup of the national homophobic zeitgeist is being carried out, at least until the Winter Olympics are over, then you can bet that there will be deaths; and right here in the US of A, where people like Phil Robertson not only exist, but they're cheered on and funded by their redneck and other hick supporters who think that he was just expressing his First Amendment rights. Which rights, many of them no doubt hold, include 'Matthew Sheparding' a few of us. And by "a few", I mean 'all'.

If you've ever visited a concentration camp and spent time reading or listening to the accompanying guides, the common thread among them is that the first internees didn't see it coming. They thought, oh, it can't happen here!  Uh huh. Visit Dachau, and as  you enter the camp and are passing through the museum on your way to the yard beyond, look carefully at the photos of the gorgeous German - not Jewish - young men who were used by the Nazis for "medical" experiments, most of whom are dead in the photos. They weren't Jewish:  They were gay.

If you think it can't happen here...  Well, I hope you're right, but I believe you're wrong.
(Also, read Sinclair Lewis's 'It Can't Happen Here', published in 1935)

Friday, December 20, 2013

The Fallacy In Conservative Logic, As Simple As Can Be

When conservatives start in on you about what they claim they have to pay for things you use, ask them if they have toll booths at the end of their driveways to pay a per-use fare for driving on public roads. If they fly, ask them if they had to go through yet another gated entry system than the rest of us who pool our resources so that whoever needs a public service, regardless that others who also pay for it don't use it, has it available when needed.

You pay for things that they use that you don't. They never mention those things. Sit for a moment and think of all the public things that are available to us as individuals, and consider those things which you or your family don't personally use. You're paying for things that others use, that you don't. We do that because we share the burden.

But you can bet your butt that anytime one of the constipated has to pay a penny for someone else's use, they're indignant to the point of secession, sedition, and...silliness.

I'm proud to say that I pitch in for others' use, because I know that others are pitching in for mine! It's this very thing that makes us a republic - that is to say, a form of government where we refuse to allow the mob to trample the individual - instead of a mob-rule pure democracy.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

It's Not Wealth Redistribution; It's Wealth Redistribution Redistribution: Get It Right!

The US needs to raise taxes on the highest income groups. We need to realize that "trickle down" economics are a failed proposition.

Wealth sympathizers will say that the ultra-wealthy deserve what they have, but it bears remembering that most of the people employed in the factories and businesses owned by these individuals earn below-living wages, and often must draw public assistance in order to survive. We all have to pitch in, and thereby tighten our own belts, in order for the ultra-wealthy to remain ultra-wealthy. This must end.

I have no problem with wealth. What I have a problem with is earning that wealth by paying employees a sub-standard wage and pocketing the difference while forcing EVERYONE ELSE to pitch in enough so that their employees can simply live.

What we need isn't wealth redistribution, it's wealth redistribution redistribution. That is, this is taking the wealth STOLEN from the paychecks of employees due to below-living wages and putting it back in those paychecks relieving EVERYONE ELSE from the necessity of doing for the needy what the greedy - the ultra-wealthy - won't.

Stop allowing the ultra-wealthy - and their syncophants - to portray forcing them to pay living wages as wealth redistribution. It's not. It's wealth redistribution redistribution. Get it right!

Friday, December 13, 2013

Observations and Conclusions About The Global Financial Cancer

Over my lifetime, I've made observations and I came to the conclusion that there is a  large, deep psychological operation afoot, using even the merely-wealthy as part of the scheme. 

Much like war, which most of us abhor and wish to avoid, we keep being thrust into these petty quarrels with each other, and to what end? In most cases, they're just pissing contests, territory markings, and he said/she saids. 

I spent almost a decade and a half in the US intelligence and special operations community, watching an American President go on TV almost every day and convincingly read his lines, as he had done in his previous career, while sitting with factual intelligence summaries in my hands disproving each and every point he would make. I totally understand Bradley Manning's motivation, even Edward Snowden's. 

The most difficult part of it all to understand is that the major players all know the truth, that is to say, the truth that was and is only being kept from the citizenry of the affected parties. If the US knows Russia's secrets and Russia knows the US's secrets and we both know that the other knows those secrets, then from whom are we keeping the secrets? 

Well, they're being kept from us, from We The People. Because if we knew the truth, if we knew that the real reason that we have war and rumors of war is to beat the drums loudly, to tattoo a martial tune and get taxpayers to pony up for it, then we'd quit believing, and when that happens, the truly wealthy - not the merely wealthy - cease having all the power and it begins to accrue to us, the people, and that won't do.

Central banks are privately owned. That is, we don't own our own currency, it's loaned to us by private, uber-wealthy families invested heavily in arms, food, transportation, and energy. Chief among those, in terms of profit, is arms, and the world's wealthiest families are invested so many different ways in so many different tiers and layers as to make an onion cry in shame. One family alone has wealth and power equal, in all likelihood, to what the rest of the world owns. It's intermarried in so many ways that it ends up marrying far-flung members to each other, consolidating and cementing power, and the wealth that comes with it. 

But when you say things like that, people have been conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to salivate and scream "conspiracy theory", doing the work of the wealthy, for the wealthy, without them having to lift a finger, or spend a dime. They're assured of their power by virtue of never having to wield it themselves, by having the people they've inculcated rise quietly and do their will. When no communication is needed, the ability to ferret the rats out is diminished.

And that's what it is, a giant rats' warren, underlying the world's economies and sucking the life out of them. Why do we have constant inflation? Because nations no longer own their own money; money has to be borrowed from central banks - like the Federal Reserve in the US - at interest, causing inflation the second it's borrowed, before it's even printed. Imagine a single family that garners even 1% of the total world's wealth. Imagine that every child born into that family becomes one of the world's wealthiest individuals immediately at partum, but who will never make a list by Forbes, or any other. 

The world's economy has a tumor, a cancer, a quiet disease that drains the life out of the weak, impoverishes people who otherwise should lead comfortable lives in a global middle class. It causes war, famine, recession, even depression. When you crash the global economy, you break the merely-wealthy, diminish the middle class, and add to the billions who can cheaply furnish your factories with labor. When everyone loses so much, the ultrawealthy still have enough to afford luxuries, making them cheaper for them because of the glut lost by the merely wealthy.

 If I have $1000 and you have $100 and I crash the economy, you still have to buy the food that I - ultimately - profit on, grown with the fertilizer I produce, reaped with the fuel that I sell, and protected with the arms that I make. If we both lose 75% of our wealth, you're down to $25, and it will take all of that for your basic needs, from me, but I'll still have enough for niceties. Then, because I raise prices and keep your wages suppressed - remember, ultimately, you work for me, so I control wages - I keep your nose to the grindstone while the kids and I go to Ibiza on the 40-meter yacht.

What do we do? Expose the connections, don't buy the propaganda from either side (because it all really comes from just one side), and barter. Think you can't barter? You can, and for more than you think. I even barter with my dentist.