"In a recent issue of Imprimis—Hillsdale College’s digest of liberty—author Michael Rectenwald described the economic goal of the Great Reset as “‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’—a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below."
"Draconian government lockdown measures destroyed businesses and eliminated competitors of corporate monopolists. These policies were a dream come true for corporate socialists."
Both of these quotes exist simultaneously within the same email.
Is it socialism for the poor or socialism for the corporate overlords? Doesn't that make it socialism for everyone?
"At the same time, too many young Americans have not been taught what socialism really means."
That's true. No one at Hillsdale, for instance, is learning what socialism is. They're learning socialism is "government does thing" or "capitalist monopolies buy influence in the government through lobbyists and use their money and influence to squash smaller competitors. They're certainly not learning that socialism is "the workers owning the means of production", better known as "what socialism actually is".
"Or the dismal history of its failures wherever it has been tried."
If socialism fails every time it's tried then why does the US have to spend trillions of dollars starting proxy wars all over the planet and embargoing other countries to kill socialism every time?
Now mention China (which is capitalist imperialism per Lenin's definition) or North Korea (which is an explicitly capitalist, hereditary absolute monarchy with an economy 100% geared toward making as much money for the Kim family as possible through legal and illegal means). Also Nazi Germany (which was a kleptocracy where high ranking Nazi officials did all they can to loot the countries they invaded and secure as much for themselves at the expense of fellow party members as possible).
That's why I say I'm not a socialist. Socialism doesn't mean anything. Everyone is a socialist, they're just socialist for different people. The right wants socialism for billionaires and the left wants socialism for the winners of the intersectional oppression olympics. Me, I'm not a socialist, I'm a communist.
You have to be a realist, I think. 1. I'm not going to vote against my own best interests. I'm not going to vote to make some rich asshole richer at my expense. A rising tide does not raise all ships when 99.99% of ships are owned by poor people and are full of holes and are taking on more water than they can pump out. I'm not going to vote to make rich people richer, I'm going to vote to take money from rich people and give it to myself because fuck you, that's why. And 2. with increasing automation and outsourcing we're going to end up with a situation where half the jobs, or more, no longer exist (we're already living in a world where there are more people than jobs, and the existence of bullshit jobs is proof of that) and at that point you have two options, you can either let the majority of the population starve to death while the 20 billionaires who own half the planet's wealth get richer, or you can pay people for existing because there are no jobs. That's it. Automation makes communism inevitable, so I might as well get in on the ground floor.
Let's not forget that while Hillsdale may not take "one penny of government money", Larry Arnn's other business took a $700,000 loan from the government that was later forgiven and he didn't complain and call it socialism and say that it rewarded irresponsible people. That's disgusting hypocrisy and I won't countenance that.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Friday, February 3, 2023
Thursday, February 20, 2020
What is History?
I've been keeping a diary since 2012, with some other bits written down earlier than that starting in 2006 (The Urban Mystic itself was started as a diary of my own mystical experiences). In preparation for writing a 365 day reflection book on various events (talking about great figures in the history of philosophy and mysticism and events like the Last Supper and the Resurrection) I've been looking back on those diaries and I was struck by just how much my recollections of events have changed over the years.
In a sense my life began in 2012 (and in another sense it began in 2006 when I was born again). Before then, in the great years like 2011, 2010, and others, I have no records, just vague memories, and, looking back on existing memories, I can see how much memory deviates from reality. Most of it is just forgetting stuff, but some of it is remembering things out of order. Who knows what really happened at that point.
It makes you wonder how accurate history really is. The oldest records of Alexander the Great are from 300 years after he died. The earliest Christian writings are from 40 years after the Resurrection, which is about as accurate as you can get until modern times. We now have primary sources and the printing press, which has allowed us to make unlimited copies to assure that the accounts of history are preserved.
We have cameras and video and now everyone is journalist. Everyone has a camera, everyone has Internet access, everyone can make unlimited copies of live events and protect them for posterity.
No longer are we reliant on official sources of news and information, now we can see events as they happen in real time and form our own opinions on events.
And yet there is the downside of this too. Technology is rapidly advancing toward the point where people can take audio and video samples and create perfect digital replicas of real people and places and create fake events that are indistinguishable from the real thing (unless you have access to the metadata). “Deep fake” they call it. We're not there yet, but we're getting there quickly.
Then there is the censorship. The corporate press and elite tech robber barons are frightened of a world where they are not the sole arbiter of truth. If a person with a smart phone can reach more people than a stuffed shirt with hair plugs and a journalism degree whose making seven figures then who needs the stuffed shirt? The gate keepers are becoming irrelevant and that frightens them, so they've turned to two tools that all tyrants employ when faced with this situation: censorship and propaganda (physical violence happens when these methods fail). Anyone who questions the official narrative is labeled as a bigot or a heretic and their material is removed from the polite web. Dangerous individuals (Facebook literally removed several accounts of people they said were “dangerous” like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones) are deplatformed, unpersoned, and slandered. They are tainted and rendered unemployable. Banks won't touch them. It is no longer necessary to execute political undesirables as they had in the Twentieth Century, now you can make sure undesirables can't get a job so they become homeless and starve and descend into suicidal despair.
Then there is the condition of living in what is called “post truth”. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Today this question is answered with another question, “Whose truth?” Different people have different truths. People can witness the same objective events and experience them as totally different subjective realities. Beliefs about reality have begun to superseded objective reality itself. Understanding this allows one to manipulate others perceptions for fun and profit. It makes writing history a nightmare, but it's great for trolling people on Twitter.
Take the shampeachment for instance. Tens of millions of people can watch the shampeachment as a great crusade against the most evil being who has ever or will ever live. They will see Trump extorting the President of Ukraine to investigate Biden's son in an attempt to destroy Biden's own presidential campaign years before he even decided to run for office, back when he said he was not going to run. Even though President Zelensky himself admits nothing of the sort happened. But we can't believe his own testimony, it's clearly Stockholm syndrome! And, of course, even though we have Biden admit on video that he deliberately extorted Ukraine to fire an ambassador in exchange for aid money, committing the very crime President Trump was accused of, that never happened either. It's a deep fake created by the “vast right-wing conspiracy”.
At the same time tens of millions of people see the shampeachment as nothing more than a purely partisan political shitshow that was an attempted soft coup that had been in the planning stages since before Trump had even been inaugurated.
Tens of millions of people are living in totally opposite alternate realities that happen to occupy the same physical space but different psychosocial spaces.
Wikipedia, a Chinese-controlled far-leftist propaganda machine, has proposed solutions to the post truth world (and the newspeak equivalents in parentheses):
1. Have the tech oligarchs design algorithms to filter out opinions that run counter to the official narrative (“filter out fake news”)
2. Have bought and paid for priests of the new secular religion make public appearances to spread propaganda because their livelihoods literally depend on it (“greater visibility of scientists and the scientific community”)
3. Government crackdowns on any dissenters through deplatforming and unpersoning, and, if you're a Bernie Bro, gulags, which “weren't all that bad.” (“stronger government involvement in combating fake news”)
4. Make people rat one another out like they did in the Soviet Union (“scrutinizing fake news”).
Roger Scruton has his own theories about post truth, so does Ken Wilber, but that's a topic for another day.
We are living in times that are both exciting and frightening. Things are changing so fast, much faster even than in the 2010s when I wrote about the World Gone Mad and how society was racing toward fundamental changes without even stopping to consider the potential consequences, that it strains the mind to even keep up. The human brain might not be large enough to handle so much information all at once, and might not be able to develop the psychological, social, economic, or political structures such a rapidly changing world requires. We may very well reach the hypothesized singularity, where technological growth trends toward infinity, or we may be reaching Calhoun's behavioral sink and the collapse of society as we reach the point where economic growth can no longer be sustained. And with things like post truth and deep fakes who knows if we'll even realize what's going on when we do reach that point.
In a sense my life began in 2012 (and in another sense it began in 2006 when I was born again). Before then, in the great years like 2011, 2010, and others, I have no records, just vague memories, and, looking back on existing memories, I can see how much memory deviates from reality. Most of it is just forgetting stuff, but some of it is remembering things out of order. Who knows what really happened at that point.
It makes you wonder how accurate history really is. The oldest records of Alexander the Great are from 300 years after he died. The earliest Christian writings are from 40 years after the Resurrection, which is about as accurate as you can get until modern times. We now have primary sources and the printing press, which has allowed us to make unlimited copies to assure that the accounts of history are preserved.
We have cameras and video and now everyone is journalist. Everyone has a camera, everyone has Internet access, everyone can make unlimited copies of live events and protect them for posterity.
No longer are we reliant on official sources of news and information, now we can see events as they happen in real time and form our own opinions on events.
And yet there is the downside of this too. Technology is rapidly advancing toward the point where people can take audio and video samples and create perfect digital replicas of real people and places and create fake events that are indistinguishable from the real thing (unless you have access to the metadata). “Deep fake” they call it. We're not there yet, but we're getting there quickly.
Then there is the censorship. The corporate press and elite tech robber barons are frightened of a world where they are not the sole arbiter of truth. If a person with a smart phone can reach more people than a stuffed shirt with hair plugs and a journalism degree whose making seven figures then who needs the stuffed shirt? The gate keepers are becoming irrelevant and that frightens them, so they've turned to two tools that all tyrants employ when faced with this situation: censorship and propaganda (physical violence happens when these methods fail). Anyone who questions the official narrative is labeled as a bigot or a heretic and their material is removed from the polite web. Dangerous individuals (Facebook literally removed several accounts of people they said were “dangerous” like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones) are deplatformed, unpersoned, and slandered. They are tainted and rendered unemployable. Banks won't touch them. It is no longer necessary to execute political undesirables as they had in the Twentieth Century, now you can make sure undesirables can't get a job so they become homeless and starve and descend into suicidal despair.
Then there is the condition of living in what is called “post truth”. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Today this question is answered with another question, “Whose truth?” Different people have different truths. People can witness the same objective events and experience them as totally different subjective realities. Beliefs about reality have begun to superseded objective reality itself. Understanding this allows one to manipulate others perceptions for fun and profit. It makes writing history a nightmare, but it's great for trolling people on Twitter.
Take the shampeachment for instance. Tens of millions of people can watch the shampeachment as a great crusade against the most evil being who has ever or will ever live. They will see Trump extorting the President of Ukraine to investigate Biden's son in an attempt to destroy Biden's own presidential campaign years before he even decided to run for office, back when he said he was not going to run. Even though President Zelensky himself admits nothing of the sort happened. But we can't believe his own testimony, it's clearly Stockholm syndrome! And, of course, even though we have Biden admit on video that he deliberately extorted Ukraine to fire an ambassador in exchange for aid money, committing the very crime President Trump was accused of, that never happened either. It's a deep fake created by the “vast right-wing conspiracy”.
At the same time tens of millions of people see the shampeachment as nothing more than a purely partisan political shitshow that was an attempted soft coup that had been in the planning stages since before Trump had even been inaugurated.
Tens of millions of people are living in totally opposite alternate realities that happen to occupy the same physical space but different psychosocial spaces.
Wikipedia, a Chinese-controlled far-leftist propaganda machine, has proposed solutions to the post truth world (and the newspeak equivalents in parentheses):
1. Have the tech oligarchs design algorithms to filter out opinions that run counter to the official narrative (“filter out fake news”)
2. Have bought and paid for priests of the new secular religion make public appearances to spread propaganda because their livelihoods literally depend on it (“greater visibility of scientists and the scientific community”)
3. Government crackdowns on any dissenters through deplatforming and unpersoning, and, if you're a Bernie Bro, gulags, which “weren't all that bad.” (“stronger government involvement in combating fake news”)
4. Make people rat one another out like they did in the Soviet Union (“scrutinizing fake news”).
Roger Scruton has his own theories about post truth, so does Ken Wilber, but that's a topic for another day.
We are living in times that are both exciting and frightening. Things are changing so fast, much faster even than in the 2010s when I wrote about the World Gone Mad and how society was racing toward fundamental changes without even stopping to consider the potential consequences, that it strains the mind to even keep up. The human brain might not be large enough to handle so much information all at once, and might not be able to develop the psychological, social, economic, or political structures such a rapidly changing world requires. We may very well reach the hypothesized singularity, where technological growth trends toward infinity, or we may be reaching Calhoun's behavioral sink and the collapse of society as we reach the point where economic growth can no longer be sustained. And with things like post truth and deep fakes who knows if we'll even realize what's going on when we do reach that point.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
A Very Brief Introduction to Political Groups
We hear a lot about the "political spectrum" and different groups like the alt-right, Antifa, and good old fashioned conservatives and liberals, but what does all that really mean, really? Using a decade and a half of first-hand experience in "the biz" I break it all down for you in the most urban way possible.
Mainstream Republicans want to bend over before leftists and accept the throbbing cock of defeat in order to look like nice people. Love me, Daddy.
Conservatives want you to die in the gutter for not pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps while they smoke cigars on a golf course and drive around in gas guzzling cars to show off how much money they can waste.
Liberals want you to live in the gutter in a deluxe cardboard box with free heroin and designated shitting streets while they party on Epstein's rape island.
LOLbertarians want the same thing as liberals but with legal weed and naked fat guy dancers.
AnCaps (sometimes called "libertarians") want you to die, but not in the gutter because that's private property. Fuck you.
AnComs (sometimes called "Antifa") want to throw piss bottles at you and LARP at being revolutionaries but will scatter to the winds if you fight back.
White (German) Supremeists (sometimes called "black pill") don't care what you do, but they want all white people to move to Montana and secede from the United States to make white people even more powerless and irrelevant because they're fucking retarded. They worship Adolf Hitler, who murdered more white people than anyone else in history. They also what to replace Christianity with either German paganism or state atheism.
Black Supremeists want to turn America into Detroit and make white people pay reparations and become slaves because "We wuz kangz and shiet!"
"Democratic" Socialists want free shit provided for by printing money because they're all trust fund babies who don't know how economics works.They also think the Nordic countries are socialist because they can't tell the difference between socialism and hyper-capitalism coupled with a welfare state.
Progressives have NO endgame. They constantly move the goalposts because they need a reason to be offended all the time.
Mainstream Republicans want to bend over before leftists and accept the throbbing cock of defeat in order to look like nice people. Love me, Daddy.
Conservatives want you to die in the gutter for not pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps while they smoke cigars on a golf course and drive around in gas guzzling cars to show off how much money they can waste.
Liberals want you to live in the gutter in a deluxe cardboard box with free heroin and designated shitting streets while they party on Epstein's rape island.
LOLbertarians want the same thing as liberals but with legal weed and naked fat guy dancers.
AnCaps (sometimes called "libertarians") want you to die, but not in the gutter because that's private property. Fuck you.
AnComs (sometimes called "Antifa") want to throw piss bottles at you and LARP at being revolutionaries but will scatter to the winds if you fight back.
White (German) Supremeists (sometimes called "black pill") don't care what you do, but they want all white people to move to Montana and secede from the United States to make white people even more powerless and irrelevant because they're fucking retarded. They worship Adolf Hitler, who murdered more white people than anyone else in history. They also what to replace Christianity with either German paganism or state atheism.
Black Supremeists want to turn America into Detroit and make white people pay reparations and become slaves because "We wuz kangz and shiet!"
"Democratic" Socialists want free shit provided for by printing money because they're all trust fund babies who don't know how economics works.They also think the Nordic countries are socialist because they can't tell the difference between socialism and hyper-capitalism coupled with a welfare state.
Progressives have NO endgame. They constantly move the goalposts because they need a reason to be offended all the time.
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
The Failure of Economics
The problem with all economic systems is money. There's not enough of it. Alternately you could say there are too many people, but I'm not going to go down the path of suggesting genocide, so let's say the problem is not enough money. I read somewhere that even if all the money in the world was divided equally among everyone that would mean everyone only gets about $5,000. And no new money would be made because everyone would be too poor to do anything. There's just not enough money in the world for 8 billion people.
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
Saturday, March 3, 2018
The Myth of "Education"
Education is bullshit. It's a bullshit feel-good panacea that educated people parade out because they've been programmed to believing that lie through the propaganda that is education. You spend enough money and get deep enough into debt purchasing a worthless education you're going to start thinking education is the solution to all the world's problems.
It also saves the educated from having to really do anything while still looking like they care. Throwing money at a problem (especially other people's money) is a convenient form of slacktivism.
When everyone has a college degree college degrees will be worthless. It's like that Zimbabwean money. If you give everyone a hundred trillion dollars there's nothing they can do with that money other than use it as toilet paper.
That's why this push for "free" college for everyone is a self-defeating idea, and the people who propose it - the policy makers, not general public - know this. They're not serious about universal education being the solution to society's problems, it's a scam.
That's the point. When everyone gets a degree then in order to stand out, in order to have an advantage in the real world you'll need to get a higher degree, meaning you'll need to get another loan and go deeper into debt. The push to get everyone into college is all about selling more debt to a population that is already bankrupt.
You have to fit into the system, or be made to fit into the system. You'd be a fool (an educated fool) to think otherwise. It's all about debt. The banks want your money and they want you to have an ego boost when they take your money and give you something largely worthless in return. Naturally these people will get defensive about their worthless product and defend it because they've allowed their sense of self-worth to be based on the possession of this worthless thing called education. Few things will crush a person's will to live more than the certain knowledge that they've wasted their youth, their money, and possibly their entire lives by being cattle for bankers who, by and large, never went to college.
Just look at that quote I have up from Richard Rose:
"Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they will bring people around to the "right" direction."
Every time some elitist, usually a Marxist, comes across someone who disagrees with their asinine, impossible, self-contradictory beliefs the Marxist will say that that person who disagrees needs to be "educated". If that's not the most terrifying Stalinist thing you've ever heard then you're painfully naive. People needing to be "educated" for "wrongthink" is straight out of Pol Pot's playbook. Believing that the problem with people who disagree with you is that those people need education and that the government needs to be empowered to provide that education has been a recipe for the worst genocides of the 20th century.
Aside from colossally expanding the debt and eliminating one's intellectual opponents, the push for more education is entirely a strategy of the elite to make the general populace more passive. Education is a modern, atheistic religion, and is defended as such. It has cathedrals, a priestly caste, sacraments, tithing, sacrifice, promises of salvation. It's a religion. And that's one of the key functions of any religion. Religion acts as a social glue. If you get everyone believing the same things you can maintain some semblance of society and a power structure. "Don't question your masters." That's the message of education.
It's no surprise that within a generation of when universal public education for children was instituted in most developed countries that the first global mechanised war broke out. Public education is based on a highly regimented Prussian military model designed to turn children into cogs in the machine of the body politic. Far from making people smarter education traps people into the same cognitive box. Education is the opposite of free thinking, it forces people to think the same thing or fear ostracism, or worse.
Education is not intelligence. Education is not problem solving ability. Education is not intellectual freedom. It's the opposite. It's a series of shackles on your mind designed to extract your wealth and make you docile.
The truth is that intelligence, real intelligence, is largely genetic (between 60% - 80%). Nothing, no school, no training program, no $40,000 piece of paper, can make you smart. People can acquire certain skills or memorise a series of facts, but that's not intelligence. A person who has an encyclopedic memory of facts doesn't necessarily have a higher level of problem solving ability.
That's not to say that there's no value at all in formal schooling. I want my doctor graduate with high marks from medical school, I want the engineer who designs the bridge I drive over to excel at engineering school, just like I want my electrician to get the proper training at electrician school. One of the big casualties in this push for universal education is the marginalisation of trade schools, you know, schools that actually teach people how to find and keep a job and succeed in the real world.
The real purpose of education, the intended purpose, is to install certain programs into the minds of young people so that they can learn skills and get a job and become productive members of society. Education gives you skills, and skills are not intelligence, but they're not supposed to be. The system of education is supposed to identify children's latent abilities and help guide them to develop those abilities to the utmost. Not everyone will place in the 99th percentile in terms of intelligence, by definition, and they don't have to be.
Everyone doesn't have to be a genius, and it's arrogance to think they should all be genii in order to make society better, or to make humans better. You're not going to make better humans through education, but if you can give people jobs that give their lives meaning then you won't have to make people better, because they'll have fewer incentives to be bad when they've got fulfilling lives.
It also saves the educated from having to really do anything while still looking like they care. Throwing money at a problem (especially other people's money) is a convenient form of slacktivism.
When everyone has a college degree college degrees will be worthless. It's like that Zimbabwean money. If you give everyone a hundred trillion dollars there's nothing they can do with that money other than use it as toilet paper.
That's why this push for "free" college for everyone is a self-defeating idea, and the people who propose it - the policy makers, not general public - know this. They're not serious about universal education being the solution to society's problems, it's a scam.
That's the point. When everyone gets a degree then in order to stand out, in order to have an advantage in the real world you'll need to get a higher degree, meaning you'll need to get another loan and go deeper into debt. The push to get everyone into college is all about selling more debt to a population that is already bankrupt.
You have to fit into the system, or be made to fit into the system. You'd be a fool (an educated fool) to think otherwise. It's all about debt. The banks want your money and they want you to have an ego boost when they take your money and give you something largely worthless in return. Naturally these people will get defensive about their worthless product and defend it because they've allowed their sense of self-worth to be based on the possession of this worthless thing called education. Few things will crush a person's will to live more than the certain knowledge that they've wasted their youth, their money, and possibly their entire lives by being cattle for bankers who, by and large, never went to college.
Just look at that quote I have up from Richard Rose:
"Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they will bring people around to the "right" direction."
Every time some elitist, usually a Marxist, comes across someone who disagrees with their asinine, impossible, self-contradictory beliefs the Marxist will say that that person who disagrees needs to be "educated". If that's not the most terrifying Stalinist thing you've ever heard then you're painfully naive. People needing to be "educated" for "wrongthink" is straight out of Pol Pot's playbook. Believing that the problem with people who disagree with you is that those people need education and that the government needs to be empowered to provide that education has been a recipe for the worst genocides of the 20th century.
Aside from colossally expanding the debt and eliminating one's intellectual opponents, the push for more education is entirely a strategy of the elite to make the general populace more passive. Education is a modern, atheistic religion, and is defended as such. It has cathedrals, a priestly caste, sacraments, tithing, sacrifice, promises of salvation. It's a religion. And that's one of the key functions of any religion. Religion acts as a social glue. If you get everyone believing the same things you can maintain some semblance of society and a power structure. "Don't question your masters." That's the message of education.
It's no surprise that within a generation of when universal public education for children was instituted in most developed countries that the first global mechanised war broke out. Public education is based on a highly regimented Prussian military model designed to turn children into cogs in the machine of the body politic. Far from making people smarter education traps people into the same cognitive box. Education is the opposite of free thinking, it forces people to think the same thing or fear ostracism, or worse.
Education is not intelligence. Education is not problem solving ability. Education is not intellectual freedom. It's the opposite. It's a series of shackles on your mind designed to extract your wealth and make you docile.
The truth is that intelligence, real intelligence, is largely genetic (between 60% - 80%). Nothing, no school, no training program, no $40,000 piece of paper, can make you smart. People can acquire certain skills or memorise a series of facts, but that's not intelligence. A person who has an encyclopedic memory of facts doesn't necessarily have a higher level of problem solving ability.
That's not to say that there's no value at all in formal schooling. I want my doctor graduate with high marks from medical school, I want the engineer who designs the bridge I drive over to excel at engineering school, just like I want my electrician to get the proper training at electrician school. One of the big casualties in this push for universal education is the marginalisation of trade schools, you know, schools that actually teach people how to find and keep a job and succeed in the real world.
The real purpose of education, the intended purpose, is to install certain programs into the minds of young people so that they can learn skills and get a job and become productive members of society. Education gives you skills, and skills are not intelligence, but they're not supposed to be. The system of education is supposed to identify children's latent abilities and help guide them to develop those abilities to the utmost. Not everyone will place in the 99th percentile in terms of intelligence, by definition, and they don't have to be.
Everyone doesn't have to be a genius, and it's arrogance to think they should all be genii in order to make society better, or to make humans better. You're not going to make better humans through education, but if you can give people jobs that give their lives meaning then you won't have to make people better, because they'll have fewer incentives to be bad when they've got fulfilling lives.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Post Economics
Here's my take on the issue of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these systems are ends in themselves, only means to an end, and that end is what I'll call "Post Economics". Post economics is a social order that has no economic system at all because people have evolved beyond the need for one. That may sound like fantasy, but there are examples of post economic societies that have existed for thousands of years. They are called monasteries.
The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.
Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.
Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.
Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.
Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.
Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.
Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.
The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.
For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.
So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.
I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.
The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.
Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.
Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.
Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.
Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.
Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.
Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.
The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.
For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.
So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.
I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
The Minimum Income
This is part two of the Kallipolis series, which began with "Only Veterans Deserve to Vote".
One thing I've never understood was brought up in one of my favourite books Generation Kill. You go all over the world and poor people are skinny, yet in America, for some unknown reason, poor people are obese. That makes no sense. Why are poor people fatter than rich people in America? How can someone living entirely off the welfare possibly purchase or otherwise acquire enough food to actually become obese? That does not make sense.
You look at these Mexicans who come over to mow lawns or put up roofs (rooves?), they are 130, 140 pounds, and it's pure muscle. They get paid one shiny penny per hour and they work themselves to death and they have zero body fat. I like that (I like their work ethic, not that they are underpaid or die early). I greatly admire the amount of work they do. More poor people should be like that. One big problem is that there aren't enough good jobs for poor people. The roads are disintegrating, inner cities look like war zones, all this construction needs to be done but there's no money to pay for it because all the money goes into the pockets of bureaucrats.
I read somewhere that at least 80% of all money spent on welfare in the US goes to pay government salaries, not to actually help poor people. If all that money were redistributed from the bloated government then every adult in the US could be given $10,000 per year. I actually recorded (I have not uploaded or even thought to edit it yet) a 50 minute video defending the idea of replacing welfare with a minimum income. 1 January everyone gets a direct deposit of $10,000 into their bank account (this makes the bankers happy because of all the new customers they get). The people who won't work wouldn't work anyway under the current system, so you're not actually losing any additional money, poor people who do work and are making slave wages are automatically lifted out of poverty, it incentivises more people to invest more because they now have more to invest, and for the people who don't need the extra money you get it back with taxes, so you don't lose anything that way either.
Yes, but how do you pay for it? Welfare spending is (one of the contributing factors in) bankrupting America. It's a sunk cost. The government is spending that money anyway. If the money is already spent it might as well be spent on something useful. But I do have some ideas on how to eliminate government spending while maintaining the minimum income.
Step One: cut the size of government by 50% over the next 10 years. As I mentioned earlier, nearly all the spending on welfare is wasted on the government itself. Get rid of everyone in the federal welfare department and have the jobs reassigned to the Treasury without hiring any additional employees. "But you've just laid off thousands of people!" Yes, but remember, with the minimum income they're still getting paid anyway.
Step Two: Stop inflating the currency. The number one reason people are poorer today is because the money is worth less. In fact, the US Dollar is almost completely worthless, having lost over 90% of its original value (The British Pound, by contrast, has lost only about 10% of its original value). People are talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but if the value of the Dollar had not been destroyed by inflation than the current $7 minimum wage would be worth about $23 an hour. Here's a real world example of inflation. 100 years ago you could take a $20 gold coin, worth exactly $20 USD, and have a finely tailored suit made. Today you can still use that same gold coin to get a finely tailored suit made, but the gold and the suit now both cost $2,000 USD. The gold coin and the suit are still worth exactly the same, the US Dollar is just worth 100 times less.
Step Three: Stop the war on drugs. Legalise and Tax. I read about 8 years ago that if weed was legalised the government could tax it and make $400 billion per year. That right there is equivalent to federal welfare spending, just with weed. You break the backs of the cartels, empty the prisons, and make a huge windfall in taxes simultaneously. That's win-win-win. That's a Charlie Sheen level of winning.
Step Four: Stop policing the world. There are 50,000 US troops in Germany and another 50,000 in Japan even though we beat them 70 years ago. Der Fuhrer is not coming back. The Reds are not going to pour through the Fulda Gap with "more tanks than God" and make it to the Rhine in a week. What the hell are we doing there?
Step Five: Stop the waste in general. SpaceX has spent about $500 million on its Dragon capsule and has already tested it and it works beautifully. The only thing holding them back is red tape. The official NASA government contract for the Orion system, which was obsolete when it was first proposed, and has not gotten off the paper yet, is $17 billion. What's wrong with this picture? The government has tried to produce a POS rocket, spent a load of time, wasted a tremendous amount of money, and hasn't made anything. The SpaceX guys see there is a huge market for commercial spaceflight design AND BUILD something that works perfectly for a fraction of the cost and they're finished already! And why is government so damn slow and why does it wast so much money? It's just like the welfare problem. People see government as a means to line their pockets because they can't do real work producing something. Government is nothing more than one giant slush fund.
I'm not saying government has no purpose. I'm not a wackjob looser utopian fanatic who brays about "the free market" solving all the world's problems. I don't want Apple to put their logo on the Moon even if they pay a trillion dollars for it. I don't want ExxonMobil to drill for oil in Yellowstone. I don't want Blackwater policing US streets (and I don't want to see the friendly-looking police I remember as a kid dressed like mercenaries with machine guns and black ski masks either). I think a world with three or four nuclear powers is a much safer world, and I see nothing wrong with bombing Iran or Saudi Arabia into submission to kill their nuclear ambitions. If a million Iranians die that's better than five billion people who would die in a nuclear war. Stopping nuclear proliferation is not policing the world, it is the calculus of survival. Nuclear weapons represent such a grave threat that they are awarded a special category. Policing the world necessarily involves nation building. Blowing up reactors and then hauling ass is not nation building, it's limited war. The government should police the streets, put out the fires, and kick ass in limited, defensive wars (keeping Iran from getting nukes is defending the US). The government should maintain protected wilderness areas and make people like BP accountable for releasing millions of tons of oil. And the government can do all this in a much more efficient way than it does now. And being efficient starts with cutting jobs and eliminating corruption. I'm not saying everyone needs to be perfectly moral, although if my only veterans get to vote scenario was adopted that would contribute greatly to the morality problem of government (not because veterans are inherently moral in themselves, but because history and moral philosophy will become a mandatory part of their training).
And I think all that can be done while implementing my minimum income system. I'd love to say more but I can no longer see the top of the page, so I'll save that for a part three.
One thing I've never understood was brought up in one of my favourite books Generation Kill. You go all over the world and poor people are skinny, yet in America, for some unknown reason, poor people are obese. That makes no sense. Why are poor people fatter than rich people in America? How can someone living entirely off the welfare possibly purchase or otherwise acquire enough food to actually become obese? That does not make sense.
You look at these Mexicans who come over to mow lawns or put up roofs (rooves?), they are 130, 140 pounds, and it's pure muscle. They get paid one shiny penny per hour and they work themselves to death and they have zero body fat. I like that (I like their work ethic, not that they are underpaid or die early). I greatly admire the amount of work they do. More poor people should be like that. One big problem is that there aren't enough good jobs for poor people. The roads are disintegrating, inner cities look like war zones, all this construction needs to be done but there's no money to pay for it because all the money goes into the pockets of bureaucrats.
I read somewhere that at least 80% of all money spent on welfare in the US goes to pay government salaries, not to actually help poor people. If all that money were redistributed from the bloated government then every adult in the US could be given $10,000 per year. I actually recorded (I have not uploaded or even thought to edit it yet) a 50 minute video defending the idea of replacing welfare with a minimum income. 1 January everyone gets a direct deposit of $10,000 into their bank account (this makes the bankers happy because of all the new customers they get). The people who won't work wouldn't work anyway under the current system, so you're not actually losing any additional money, poor people who do work and are making slave wages are automatically lifted out of poverty, it incentivises more people to invest more because they now have more to invest, and for the people who don't need the extra money you get it back with taxes, so you don't lose anything that way either.
Yes, but how do you pay for it? Welfare spending is (one of the contributing factors in) bankrupting America. It's a sunk cost. The government is spending that money anyway. If the money is already spent it might as well be spent on something useful. But I do have some ideas on how to eliminate government spending while maintaining the minimum income.
Step One: cut the size of government by 50% over the next 10 years. As I mentioned earlier, nearly all the spending on welfare is wasted on the government itself. Get rid of everyone in the federal welfare department and have the jobs reassigned to the Treasury without hiring any additional employees. "But you've just laid off thousands of people!" Yes, but remember, with the minimum income they're still getting paid anyway.
Step Two: Stop inflating the currency. The number one reason people are poorer today is because the money is worth less. In fact, the US Dollar is almost completely worthless, having lost over 90% of its original value (The British Pound, by contrast, has lost only about 10% of its original value). People are talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but if the value of the Dollar had not been destroyed by inflation than the current $7 minimum wage would be worth about $23 an hour. Here's a real world example of inflation. 100 years ago you could take a $20 gold coin, worth exactly $20 USD, and have a finely tailored suit made. Today you can still use that same gold coin to get a finely tailored suit made, but the gold and the suit now both cost $2,000 USD. The gold coin and the suit are still worth exactly the same, the US Dollar is just worth 100 times less.
Step Three: Stop the war on drugs. Legalise and Tax. I read about 8 years ago that if weed was legalised the government could tax it and make $400 billion per year. That right there is equivalent to federal welfare spending, just with weed. You break the backs of the cartels, empty the prisons, and make a huge windfall in taxes simultaneously. That's win-win-win. That's a Charlie Sheen level of winning.
Step Four: Stop policing the world. There are 50,000 US troops in Germany and another 50,000 in Japan even though we beat them 70 years ago. Der Fuhrer is not coming back. The Reds are not going to pour through the Fulda Gap with "more tanks than God" and make it to the Rhine in a week. What the hell are we doing there?
Step Five: Stop the waste in general. SpaceX has spent about $500 million on its Dragon capsule and has already tested it and it works beautifully. The only thing holding them back is red tape. The official NASA government contract for the Orion system, which was obsolete when it was first proposed, and has not gotten off the paper yet, is $17 billion. What's wrong with this picture? The government has tried to produce a POS rocket, spent a load of time, wasted a tremendous amount of money, and hasn't made anything. The SpaceX guys see there is a huge market for commercial spaceflight design AND BUILD something that works perfectly for a fraction of the cost and they're finished already! And why is government so damn slow and why does it wast so much money? It's just like the welfare problem. People see government as a means to line their pockets because they can't do real work producing something. Government is nothing more than one giant slush fund.
I'm not saying government has no purpose. I'm not a wackjob looser utopian fanatic who brays about "the free market" solving all the world's problems. I don't want Apple to put their logo on the Moon even if they pay a trillion dollars for it. I don't want ExxonMobil to drill for oil in Yellowstone. I don't want Blackwater policing US streets (and I don't want to see the friendly-looking police I remember as a kid dressed like mercenaries with machine guns and black ski masks either). I think a world with three or four nuclear powers is a much safer world, and I see nothing wrong with bombing Iran or Saudi Arabia into submission to kill their nuclear ambitions. If a million Iranians die that's better than five billion people who would die in a nuclear war. Stopping nuclear proliferation is not policing the world, it is the calculus of survival. Nuclear weapons represent such a grave threat that they are awarded a special category. Policing the world necessarily involves nation building. Blowing up reactors and then hauling ass is not nation building, it's limited war. The government should police the streets, put out the fires, and kick ass in limited, defensive wars (keeping Iran from getting nukes is defending the US). The government should maintain protected wilderness areas and make people like BP accountable for releasing millions of tons of oil. And the government can do all this in a much more efficient way than it does now. And being efficient starts with cutting jobs and eliminating corruption. I'm not saying everyone needs to be perfectly moral, although if my only veterans get to vote scenario was adopted that would contribute greatly to the morality problem of government (not because veterans are inherently moral in themselves, but because history and moral philosophy will become a mandatory part of their training).
And I think all that can be done while implementing my minimum income system. I'd love to say more but I can no longer see the top of the page, so I'll save that for a part three.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Only Veterans Deserve to Vote
I'm working out a war game scenario and I am amazed by just how many ranks there are. It got me thinking about more than just military hierarchy.
How many ranks do you need? I'm thinking there are so many mainly as a prestige thing, since many times it seems acquiring a higher rank seems automatic, just by serving for a set period of time. Well, if you haven't done anything why are you climbing to a higher rank? You haven't earned it. Okay, I can understand, you climb up one rank after your first year just to discourage desertion and reward guys for making their beds fifty thousand times and doing a million pushups and shining Sergeant's boots until he can see his own reflection, but after that, do you really need to climb rank automatically for any reason? It seems like rewarding people for nothing.
It's just like the situation with universal franchise. Anyone who knows me knows (or should know) that I hate the idea of universal franchise. Presto change-o you turn 18 and now you can vote! It doesn't matter if you can spell your own name or count to 10 or if you're an asshole or a drug addict, you get to vote just for having existed for 6,574 days. You haven't done anything to earn the privilege to vote, you haven't demonstrated the slightest competency, because that would be racialist, you have just existed, like a stone, and like a stone you can know absolutely nothing and still get to vote!
Well, why should that be? And don't think I'm waving my finger saying "I don't think those people over there I don't like shouldn't vote," no, I'm saying "I don't think I should vote, because I haven't done anything to earn it."
That's why I support the system Robert Heinlein set up in Starship Troopers where you need to serve in some federal capacity in order to vote (it wasn't just military, there were other things you could do, but it had to be equally as dangerous and important as military service). That way you have taken part in the upkeep of the society the laws of which you are deciding. You've earned it. And since you have worked for the privilege of voting you appreciate it more, and, furthermore, you understand the workings of government better. And since most of the voters are veterans they are far less likely to vote for war since they all know how horrible war is.
This solves a tremendous great big horrible problem with government as is. It solves the problem of politicians who are rich, entitled elitists who start wars for their own aggrandizement and who got into office because their parents bought them the office or so they could appease special interest groups with deep pockets. It also solves the problem of the legions of voters with below room temperature IQ's who are all living off welfare who vote for politicians who promise to give them free stuff stolen off the backs of the workers.
You see now the hyperbole of the title. Anyone who has completed their federal service can vote, not just combat veterans.
Some people might object "Oh, but that government would not be representative of everyone." To which I reply, why does it need to be? Why does the government need to represent everyone? The answer is it doesn't, and almost no one actually thinks that it does. Very few people, a few lawyers maybe, think government should represent murderers and child molesters, and that makes absolute sense. Furthermore, most people don't want the government to represent everyone, just people like them. They certainly don't want the government to represent people they disagree with. The only difference between them and me is that I'm honest and they are lying sacks of crap who hide behind phony holier-than-thou moralisms.
As I have pointed out earlier, everyone is most certainly not equal. Is Ted Bundy equal to Isaac Newton? Is a murderer equal to a steel worker or a truck driver or a Girl Scout? Is a drug addict equal to a nuclear scientist or a brain surgeon? Unequivocally no! Not everyone is equal, some people are horrible monster and some people are heroes who have saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives. Some people are much better than others and some people are much worse. Admittedly there is a large grey area between the murderers and the brain surgeons, but there is no need to delineate exactly where everyone fits in the hierarchy to see that a hierarchy does exist.
In a rational society competency is rewarded. This is what Chingis Khan did. It didn't matter whether you were the son of a king or a peasant farmer, if you were really good at the military you were given an army and if you were really good at administration you were made a government official of some kind. This is called meritocracy.
"Oh, but that's racialist/sexualist/discriminating against that group of people over there who I look down on and think they're not good enough to make it on their own!"
Most leftists tend to have a tremendously low view of "minority" groups (even when those "minorities" happen to be the majority). They think blacks or women or whoever are too incompetent to accomplish anything on their own so racial or sexual quotas like Title IX and affirmative action are needed to give the poor ex-slave a big boy hand out so he can feel good about himself in a job he couldn't have earned on his own. It is an extension of the "white man's burden" dressed up in a new suit to assuage the guilt of people who like to feel guilty because the idea of collective guilt is in vogue. It seems the louder someone cries "Racialist!" the bigger the racialist that person actually is.
Getting back to the point of a meritocracy, which is actually fair in that it focuses on equality of opportunity instead of equality of outcome (which privileges people you like more, be honest and admit it), there's a reason a few tens of thousands of Mongols conquered one fifth the world's land area and several hundred million people, because the person who got the job was best suited for the job. You can't argue with results like that. The person who serves a government office should be the person who is best suited for fulfilling the duties of that office, not the richest person or the person who makes the most phony promises. You wouldn't want your brain surgeon to be someone just picked up off the street for being the tallest or most charismatic liar, you would do a ton of online research and find the most qualified brain surgeon to remove the tumor from your head and damn the expense (I'm not here to make any arguments about healthcare).
Why shouldn't the same be true with government? You wouldn't be so damned interested in letting someone vote to take your money away, would you, but you would vote to take money away from people you don't like in a heartbeat (be honest), and that's a huge problem with the system we have in place now. People with absolutely no qualifications are voting for their own selfish interests based on the height of candidates or catchy slogans rather than voting for the greater good for society even if that means they get left out personally. The system we have now is grossly inefficient and powered almost exclusively by greed. The obvious solution is to restrict voting only to those people who have demonstrated that they know how the system of governance works, the ins and outs of bureaucracy, of organizational structures, of logistics, of getting things done. Voting and public office should be restricted to only those people who have served in some capacity at the bottom of the ladder in that very government hierarchy as the grunts and laborers. They more than anyone know how the chain of command works, how communications between departments work, and they more than anyone appreciate just how hard people at the bottom have it, so they better than anyone would look out for the welfare of those who have the least. Restricting voting does not make a less compassionate government, it makes a more compassionate government, because everyone in office got there only through struggling. No one was born into wealth or privilege, everyone has to work for it from the bottom up. It ensures the most efficient, compassionate, rational system possible, and stands the greatest chance at being free from corruption and gridlock.
How many ranks do you need? I'm thinking there are so many mainly as a prestige thing, since many times it seems acquiring a higher rank seems automatic, just by serving for a set period of time. Well, if you haven't done anything why are you climbing to a higher rank? You haven't earned it. Okay, I can understand, you climb up one rank after your first year just to discourage desertion and reward guys for making their beds fifty thousand times and doing a million pushups and shining Sergeant's boots until he can see his own reflection, but after that, do you really need to climb rank automatically for any reason? It seems like rewarding people for nothing.
It's just like the situation with universal franchise. Anyone who knows me knows (or should know) that I hate the idea of universal franchise. Presto change-o you turn 18 and now you can vote! It doesn't matter if you can spell your own name or count to 10 or if you're an asshole or a drug addict, you get to vote just for having existed for 6,574 days. You haven't done anything to earn the privilege to vote, you haven't demonstrated the slightest competency, because that would be racialist, you have just existed, like a stone, and like a stone you can know absolutely nothing and still get to vote!
Well, why should that be? And don't think I'm waving my finger saying "I don't think those people over there I don't like shouldn't vote," no, I'm saying "I don't think I should vote, because I haven't done anything to earn it."
That's why I support the system Robert Heinlein set up in Starship Troopers where you need to serve in some federal capacity in order to vote (it wasn't just military, there were other things you could do, but it had to be equally as dangerous and important as military service). That way you have taken part in the upkeep of the society the laws of which you are deciding. You've earned it. And since you have worked for the privilege of voting you appreciate it more, and, furthermore, you understand the workings of government better. And since most of the voters are veterans they are far less likely to vote for war since they all know how horrible war is.
This solves a tremendous great big horrible problem with government as is. It solves the problem of politicians who are rich, entitled elitists who start wars for their own aggrandizement and who got into office because their parents bought them the office or so they could appease special interest groups with deep pockets. It also solves the problem of the legions of voters with below room temperature IQ's who are all living off welfare who vote for politicians who promise to give them free stuff stolen off the backs of the workers.
You see now the hyperbole of the title. Anyone who has completed their federal service can vote, not just combat veterans.
Some people might object "Oh, but that government would not be representative of everyone." To which I reply, why does it need to be? Why does the government need to represent everyone? The answer is it doesn't, and almost no one actually thinks that it does. Very few people, a few lawyers maybe, think government should represent murderers and child molesters, and that makes absolute sense. Furthermore, most people don't want the government to represent everyone, just people like them. They certainly don't want the government to represent people they disagree with. The only difference between them and me is that I'm honest and they are lying sacks of crap who hide behind phony holier-than-thou moralisms.
As I have pointed out earlier, everyone is most certainly not equal. Is Ted Bundy equal to Isaac Newton? Is a murderer equal to a steel worker or a truck driver or a Girl Scout? Is a drug addict equal to a nuclear scientist or a brain surgeon? Unequivocally no! Not everyone is equal, some people are horrible monster and some people are heroes who have saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives. Some people are much better than others and some people are much worse. Admittedly there is a large grey area between the murderers and the brain surgeons, but there is no need to delineate exactly where everyone fits in the hierarchy to see that a hierarchy does exist.
In a rational society competency is rewarded. This is what Chingis Khan did. It didn't matter whether you were the son of a king or a peasant farmer, if you were really good at the military you were given an army and if you were really good at administration you were made a government official of some kind. This is called meritocracy.
"Oh, but that's racialist/sexualist/discriminating against that group of people over there who I look down on and think they're not good enough to make it on their own!"
Most leftists tend to have a tremendously low view of "minority" groups (even when those "minorities" happen to be the majority). They think blacks or women or whoever are too incompetent to accomplish anything on their own so racial or sexual quotas like Title IX and affirmative action are needed to give the poor ex-slave a big boy hand out so he can feel good about himself in a job he couldn't have earned on his own. It is an extension of the "white man's burden" dressed up in a new suit to assuage the guilt of people who like to feel guilty because the idea of collective guilt is in vogue. It seems the louder someone cries "Racialist!" the bigger the racialist that person actually is.
Getting back to the point of a meritocracy, which is actually fair in that it focuses on equality of opportunity instead of equality of outcome (which privileges people you like more, be honest and admit it), there's a reason a few tens of thousands of Mongols conquered one fifth the world's land area and several hundred million people, because the person who got the job was best suited for the job. You can't argue with results like that. The person who serves a government office should be the person who is best suited for fulfilling the duties of that office, not the richest person or the person who makes the most phony promises. You wouldn't want your brain surgeon to be someone just picked up off the street for being the tallest or most charismatic liar, you would do a ton of online research and find the most qualified brain surgeon to remove the tumor from your head and damn the expense (I'm not here to make any arguments about healthcare).
Why shouldn't the same be true with government? You wouldn't be so damned interested in letting someone vote to take your money away, would you, but you would vote to take money away from people you don't like in a heartbeat (be honest), and that's a huge problem with the system we have in place now. People with absolutely no qualifications are voting for their own selfish interests based on the height of candidates or catchy slogans rather than voting for the greater good for society even if that means they get left out personally. The system we have now is grossly inefficient and powered almost exclusively by greed. The obvious solution is to restrict voting only to those people who have demonstrated that they know how the system of governance works, the ins and outs of bureaucracy, of organizational structures, of logistics, of getting things done. Voting and public office should be restricted to only those people who have served in some capacity at the bottom of the ladder in that very government hierarchy as the grunts and laborers. They more than anyone know how the chain of command works, how communications between departments work, and they more than anyone appreciate just how hard people at the bottom have it, so they better than anyone would look out for the welfare of those who have the least. Restricting voting does not make a less compassionate government, it makes a more compassionate government, because everyone in office got there only through struggling. No one was born into wealth or privilege, everyone has to work for it from the bottom up. It ensures the most efficient, compassionate, rational system possible, and stands the greatest chance at being free from corruption and gridlock.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Why "Taxing the Rich" Doesn't Work
There are at least 7 reasons why the idea of taxing the rich and giving it to the poor does not work. I'll break them down for you below.
1. "Not Rich" Syndrome
The definition of who is "rich" is a lot like a number of other terms that belong on sliding scales. Someone who is rich is usually someone who has more money than the person making the definition. "I'm not rich, but that guy over there making $30,000, he's rich." That guy says "Rich? You must be joking! I'm just getting by, but that guy, making $80,000, now he's rich." The third guy says "I'm not rich! Those greedy bastards making $250,000, they're rich, and they should be taxed more!"
2. "Not I" Syndrome
The people who do admit they are rich usually believe they deserve some exemption to having to pay higher taxes. A leftist who wanted to raise taxes on the rich called in to The Savage Nation a few days ago and he admitted that he was, in fact, rich. However, he believed he shouldn't have to pay higher taxes, only other rich people. You see, he takes every tax exemption he can so he only pays a fraction of what a less crafty person would at his income bracket, and he believes that his genius at finding these loopholes means he is entitled to pay less. The caller wanted to raise taxes but did not want to close the loopholes that would shield him from having to pay those higher taxes! Taxes, in this instance, become a penalty for stupid people.
3. Rich People Don't Pay Taxes
The 80 people who possess half the money in the world never pay taxes anyway. Warren Buffett pays as little taxes as possible, so do the Clintons and the Bushes. The really rich people don't get money from income, so they already don't have to pay income tax – the form of tax that people who want to "tax the rich" want to increase, and they have armies of lawyers to find every single loophole to get out of paying the taxes that do apply to them. Warren Buffett always says that income tax should be raised and that his secretary pays more income tax than he does, but what he never mentions is he makes very little income. Most of the money Buffett gets is in the form of capital gains, which he conveniently does not want taxed any higher. He's distracting the public with one hand to disguise what his other hand is doing.
Remember, in the US, the IRS does not care how much you pay beyond the minimum amount you owe. You can legally give them as much money as you want over what you legally owe. If you owe $50,000, you can legally give them a million dollars and they will gladly accept it to buy a new hammer or toilet seat.
4. Corporations Don't Pay Taxes
Just like rich people, corporations (which somehow count as "people" but unborn children are just "tissues") don't pay taxes either. Corporations are to people what Superman is to man. Corporations can deduct expenses, like utilities. If you try to get off having to pay your gas bill or make a car payment you'd get your gas shut off and your car repossessed. A corporation can get a tax break. Corporations can use past losses to offset future gains. In the red last year? It doesn't matter that you've made billions, you can subtract what you didn't make from what you did and get free money from Uncle Sam! Corporations can create smaller, shell corporations in tax havens to launder money and avoid paying taxes. And the big one, corporations that are really super in the red can get bailouts if they have their hands in too many cookie jars. If a big corporation like AIG were to go bankrupt it would cause a depression, so the government can't let that happen. You see, some corporations are "too big to fail."
5. Dekulakization
Whenever taxes are raised the only people who lose more money directly are kulaks. Kulaks are the mythical "tight-fisted" independent farmers (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) who Stalin murdered out of racial hatred while claiming to fight capitalism. In American terms the kulaks are the entrepreneurs. They are the people with two mortgages on their homes to fund a business that employs a couple dozen people. On paper they may be millionaires, but very little of that money is liquid. In fact most of these modern day kulaks are in the red, but few ever speak of real world economics, and so these paper millionaires must be taxed to the point where they lose their businesses. Destroying small businesses is a death sentence for the economy, because that's where most new jobs are created. Raising taxes is like pouring cement into a car's engine.
6. Eat the Poor
The only other group of people hurt by higher taxes are poor people. Fewer businesses means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs means more unemployment, and unemployment tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor. That's not the only way poor people are hurt by higher taxes. Those tax-exempt corporate people can raise their prices if they ever get in a situation where they can't weasel their way out of having to pay a tax, thus forcing poor people to have to pay whatever the corporations owe. Sure, minimum wage might go up every few years, but it's always behind inflation, so an extra dollar an hour is really less than what you were paid five years ago because the price of commodities has gone up. It really is the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, whether taxes are increased or not.
7. To Each According to His Need
If we're going to redistribute wealth, and do it globally and do it right, chances are you won't see a dime. A billion Africans take precedent over the average poor person in America, because they are just that much poorer. Poor people in America have a car, a TV, and are obese, while poor people in Haiti literally eat cakes made from mud to eliminate hunger pangs because there's not enough food to eat a real meal every day.
And if we were to do this just in America? The people who would reap the rewards are the same people who reap them now: the welfare scam artists. Deadbeats who have ten children so they can get food stamps to pay for makeup and booze, people living together who all file separately so the household looks really super poor on paper, I've seen all types. There are people who know how to game the system to suck up as much welfare as possible, and they often live better than the people working two jobs who support them with their taxes. Do you think this would change if we just "tax the rich" more? In a country where 80% of government spending on welfare is lost in bureaucratic inefficiency and political slush funds, I don't think so.
Bonus 8th Reason: What is Fair?
Alright, you've convinced me, let's do this. Let's tax the rich. Let's make them pay their fair share. So, what is their fair share?
The problem with the definition of fairness is that it is even more nebulous than the definition of rich. That's why leftists have switched over to using the word equality, because enough people have caught onto the fairness nonsense. Leftists love to say the rich should pay their fair share, but if you ever press them to give a real world percentage they will turn irate and say you are deflecting the issue. Leftists never say anything concrete because then people would see they're idiots. It reveals the lie to get into details, so they stick to slogans that they repeat Ad nauseam, just like Rules for Radicals tells them to do. How much taxes are fair? More. It's never fair because you can always tax more, but if leftists ever said this you'd see they're not interested in fairness, only control.
1. "Not Rich" Syndrome
The definition of who is "rich" is a lot like a number of other terms that belong on sliding scales. Someone who is rich is usually someone who has more money than the person making the definition. "I'm not rich, but that guy over there making $30,000, he's rich." That guy says "Rich? You must be joking! I'm just getting by, but that guy, making $80,000, now he's rich." The third guy says "I'm not rich! Those greedy bastards making $250,000, they're rich, and they should be taxed more!"
2. "Not I" Syndrome
The people who do admit they are rich usually believe they deserve some exemption to having to pay higher taxes. A leftist who wanted to raise taxes on the rich called in to The Savage Nation a few days ago and he admitted that he was, in fact, rich. However, he believed he shouldn't have to pay higher taxes, only other rich people. You see, he takes every tax exemption he can so he only pays a fraction of what a less crafty person would at his income bracket, and he believes that his genius at finding these loopholes means he is entitled to pay less. The caller wanted to raise taxes but did not want to close the loopholes that would shield him from having to pay those higher taxes! Taxes, in this instance, become a penalty for stupid people.
3. Rich People Don't Pay Taxes
The 80 people who possess half the money in the world never pay taxes anyway. Warren Buffett pays as little taxes as possible, so do the Clintons and the Bushes. The really rich people don't get money from income, so they already don't have to pay income tax – the form of tax that people who want to "tax the rich" want to increase, and they have armies of lawyers to find every single loophole to get out of paying the taxes that do apply to them. Warren Buffett always says that income tax should be raised and that his secretary pays more income tax than he does, but what he never mentions is he makes very little income. Most of the money Buffett gets is in the form of capital gains, which he conveniently does not want taxed any higher. He's distracting the public with one hand to disguise what his other hand is doing.
Remember, in the US, the IRS does not care how much you pay beyond the minimum amount you owe. You can legally give them as much money as you want over what you legally owe. If you owe $50,000, you can legally give them a million dollars and they will gladly accept it to buy a new hammer or toilet seat.
4. Corporations Don't Pay Taxes
Just like rich people, corporations (which somehow count as "people" but unborn children are just "tissues") don't pay taxes either. Corporations are to people what Superman is to man. Corporations can deduct expenses, like utilities. If you try to get off having to pay your gas bill or make a car payment you'd get your gas shut off and your car repossessed. A corporation can get a tax break. Corporations can use past losses to offset future gains. In the red last year? It doesn't matter that you've made billions, you can subtract what you didn't make from what you did and get free money from Uncle Sam! Corporations can create smaller, shell corporations in tax havens to launder money and avoid paying taxes. And the big one, corporations that are really super in the red can get bailouts if they have their hands in too many cookie jars. If a big corporation like AIG were to go bankrupt it would cause a depression, so the government can't let that happen. You see, some corporations are "too big to fail."
5. Dekulakization
Whenever taxes are raised the only people who lose more money directly are kulaks. Kulaks are the mythical "tight-fisted" independent farmers (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) who Stalin murdered out of racial hatred while claiming to fight capitalism. In American terms the kulaks are the entrepreneurs. They are the people with two mortgages on their homes to fund a business that employs a couple dozen people. On paper they may be millionaires, but very little of that money is liquid. In fact most of these modern day kulaks are in the red, but few ever speak of real world economics, and so these paper millionaires must be taxed to the point where they lose their businesses. Destroying small businesses is a death sentence for the economy, because that's where most new jobs are created. Raising taxes is like pouring cement into a car's engine.
6. Eat the Poor
The only other group of people hurt by higher taxes are poor people. Fewer businesses means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs means more unemployment, and unemployment tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor. That's not the only way poor people are hurt by higher taxes. Those tax-exempt corporate people can raise their prices if they ever get in a situation where they can't weasel their way out of having to pay a tax, thus forcing poor people to have to pay whatever the corporations owe. Sure, minimum wage might go up every few years, but it's always behind inflation, so an extra dollar an hour is really less than what you were paid five years ago because the price of commodities has gone up. It really is the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, whether taxes are increased or not.
7. To Each According to His Need
If we're going to redistribute wealth, and do it globally and do it right, chances are you won't see a dime. A billion Africans take precedent over the average poor person in America, because they are just that much poorer. Poor people in America have a car, a TV, and are obese, while poor people in Haiti literally eat cakes made from mud to eliminate hunger pangs because there's not enough food to eat a real meal every day.
And if we were to do this just in America? The people who would reap the rewards are the same people who reap them now: the welfare scam artists. Deadbeats who have ten children so they can get food stamps to pay for makeup and booze, people living together who all file separately so the household looks really super poor on paper, I've seen all types. There are people who know how to game the system to suck up as much welfare as possible, and they often live better than the people working two jobs who support them with their taxes. Do you think this would change if we just "tax the rich" more? In a country where 80% of government spending on welfare is lost in bureaucratic inefficiency and political slush funds, I don't think so.
Bonus 8th Reason: What is Fair?
Alright, you've convinced me, let's do this. Let's tax the rich. Let's make them pay their fair share. So, what is their fair share?
The problem with the definition of fairness is that it is even more nebulous than the definition of rich. That's why leftists have switched over to using the word equality, because enough people have caught onto the fairness nonsense. Leftists love to say the rich should pay their fair share, but if you ever press them to give a real world percentage they will turn irate and say you are deflecting the issue. Leftists never say anything concrete because then people would see they're idiots. It reveals the lie to get into details, so they stick to slogans that they repeat Ad nauseam, just like Rules for Radicals tells them to do. How much taxes are fair? More. It's never fair because you can always tax more, but if leftists ever said this you'd see they're not interested in fairness, only control.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
An Hour with Camille Paglia
Literary critic Camille Paglia talks about the vacuity of contemporary culture, why the university system is broken, and how a growing focus on sex and sexual identities indicates the West is in decline. She explains that all leaders should serve in the military so they know war is hell and don't get us entangled in pointless adventures abroad, and also that the Left is totally divorced from the realities of the working class. A wonderful interview.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Richard Rose: Zen and Death
Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind the will bring people around to the "right" direction.
- Richard Rose
Richard Rose talks on everything. He talks about the four categories of mystical experiences, how society conditions us to believe lies regarding who we are and what death is, the near death experience, and the importance of finding the Truth and who we really are. We exist before we are born and continue to exist after we die. The purpose of life is finding this Truth out for ourselves through direct experience. Runs 1 hour 10 minutes.
- Richard Rose
Richard Rose talks on everything. He talks about the four categories of mystical experiences, how society conditions us to believe lies regarding who we are and what death is, the near death experience, and the importance of finding the Truth and who we really are. We exist before we are born and continue to exist after we die. The purpose of life is finding this Truth out for ourselves through direct experience. Runs 1 hour 10 minutes.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
"We Don't Need More Copyright" - Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property
"We don't need more copyright," says Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell. "Probably we could dial it back and still enjoy this great wealth of culture that's been generated, that's already in our libraries."
Bell, a self-described "intellectual property skeptic," sat down with Reason TV to discuss his new book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good."
Contemporary copyright law is a statutory privilege that inevitably contradicts our constitutional rights to free expression. The prospect of litigation scares off artists who want to create new works that exist in legal grey areas, like mashups, tributes, or parodies.
Bell's solution rests on a much simpler idea: we should emphasize common law instead of copyright. Common law -- which is to say, the established precedents that govern ordinary property, contracts, and torts -- already form the foundation of the American legal system. It provides plenty of encouragement for artists and designers to create new works, without the statutory failures of the current system.
How might the arts fare in a world without copyright protection? To a large extent, we already know the answer. Perfumes, jokes, recipes, fashion, furniture, and automobile design have never enjoyed copyright protection. Yet there's no shortage of creativity in any of these fields. Artists still find ways to make money -- sometimes a great deal of it -- in the absence of special legal protection.
After meeting with policymakers on Capitol Hill, Bell is hopeful about the prospects for reforming the Copyright Act. Legislators are starting to accept what consumers have long understood about the digital age: modern copyright law hinders the very innovation it was designed to promote.
Runs about 8:30.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
The REAL State of the Union
After Oblahblah rambled on about how great he is for hours and got a standing ovation for declaring himself dictator for life, Senator Rand Paul delivered the REAL state of the union.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Dreams of Foreign Suns
Walking around yesterday I thought about my second great love (my first being freedom), and one of the three original goals I set for my life: space travel. I got to thinking about all those books I loved reading and how the future is almost certainly not going to be like that. The future will not be like The Stars My Destination, Harvest the Fire, Starship Troopers, or The Zero Stone. The future will not be like Star Trek (except maybe Deep Space 9 which was boring and grim and I never watched more than a few episodes) or Firefly.
It has to do with a phenomenon called Dunbar's Number, and a disturbing trend seen with the rapid advancement in technology and the social order.
John Stringfellow in 1848 built a steam-powered flying machine that was the absolute apogee of steam technology. While it did fly it was not powerful enough to carry a person. On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers made what is recognised as the first piloted powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.
NASA became operational 1 October 1958. 20 February 1962, a little over three years later, John Glenn got into orbit. 12 September 1966, eight years later, Gemini 11 completed the farthest ever orbit of the earth, never to be exceeded, and successfully created artificial gravity with the Agena Target Vehicle. 20 July 1969, ten and a half years later, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally demonstrated that that light in the sky is a real place, and people can go there. 11 December 1972, Apollo 17 spent the most time on the Moon. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there, and when they left they became the last men ever to land on another celestial body, and the last to leave low Earth orbit.
The past 41 years have been spent doing high school science experiments at 200 km above sea level (and the Russians tried to see if they could kill people by keeping Valeri Polyakov in space for over 400 days. I think he was crippled for about a year after he returned).
Also in 1969 plans were drawn up for Big Gemini, which was superior to the Space Shuttle in every way, but they were scrapped. In 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched. Along with Pioneer 11, and later Voyager 1 and 2 - launched in 1977 - they demonstrated the possibility of sending unmanned spacecraft outside the solar system (as of August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first, and so far only, manmade object to leave the solar system).
NASA had plans for a Mars mission set for 1986 with a colossal football field sized NERVA nuclear rocket, that was successfully tested on the ground (they were buried underground with just the tail spouting highly radioactive jets into the air. At least two men died and had to be buried in salt mines in multi-tonne lead coffins.). The mars mission was scrapped when Congress decided killing Vietnamese people was a better allocation of the $10 billion necessary to build and launch the full size NERVA rocket. There were plans to send manned missions to the moons of Jupiter by the 1990s and Proxima Centauri by the early 2000s using nuclear rockets that were built and successfully tested in the 1960s and 70s. These too were scrapped.
The technology to go to the stars existed 40 years ago and has never been used for political reasons. Yesterday I had the feeling that, like freedom, once the initiative for space travel is lost it can never be gotten back. We will probably never land escape Earth orbit again. (Although the Chinese have plans for a colony on the Moon, let's face it, China is over. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air waiting for a stiff breeze and some common sense to knock it over. Without the hundreds of billions in government spending, building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese economy will collapse and then the hundred million surplus men will become the largest demonstration of pure anarchy in history, as, like the man who castrated himself this past week, they have nothing else to live for. It is impossible to build a civilisation on population control and sex-selective abortion that produces 9 males for every 1 female. Sure, the military may crack some skulls and force its way to the Moon, like pretty much everything the Soviets ever did, but the Chinese dreams of empire and space travel are made of gossamer and the dreams of children.)
But there's something bigger than that. A new direction society has taken that threatens the very idea of space travel. As I said earlier:
There is the interesting side question of modern Western society, indeed any extremely affluent society, as to whether it does, in fact, represent a diseased PBC and not merely an alien one. All extremely affluent societies throughout history have been plagued by extreme narcissism and apathy, which is displayed in declining fertility rate. Some societies, such as Japan, are so affluent that they are literally on the fast track to extinction because they simply stop breeding. A PBC that cannot[3] produce children above replacement rate (2.1 births/woman) has no survival value and would, by the above criterion, represent a disease. After the inevitable collapse whatever society that arises to fill the void would be made of individuals who possess viable PBCs. As I mentioned in "Affluence and Apathy", there is a healthy form of affluence, though it has never seemed common enough to prevent an entire affluent society from collapsing. It would be possible for healthy affluent to form a viable society, and so I would classify healthy affluent as alien, though it has never happened before and probably never will.
The United States is the most affluent society ever. One third of the population is obese, including poor people. And along with affluence comes extreme narcissism and apathy, but there is something more. Something that was engineered by the power elite during the Apollo program. The creation of the welfare state coincided with a fundamental shift in the perception of sex in society. Both happened together because the government was setting itself up to become the new parent. No-fault divorce, ever expanding welfare programs, and the shift away from sex for procreation to sex for fun changed the way people viewed their place in society (to be sure, people had sex for fun since the beginning, but men always wanted sons as a matter of pride and women always wanted men around to provide for their children, and in the 1970s there was a shift away from that to "we'll hold off having kids until we're 40, if ever, and just enjoy our permanent adolescence now!"). Now, with the redefinition of marriage away from providing for children to some vague conception of love/lust, the coup d'état is now complete.
The US Department of Education was created in 1979. Before that all schools were run locally, with education tailored to the needs of individual students. Since there has been a shift in a one-size-fits-all education policy, with "no child left behind." The DoE is a gigantic indoctrination program, and they're not even covert about it. Common Core is demonstrably indoctrination. School officials in Memphis provide breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner to kids, and admit that if they had rooms for beds the kids would sleep there permanently. The government sees the only role of parents to be breeding. Once the children are born, they belong to the state.
How did this all begin? Urbanisation. Cities are a statist's best friend. It has to do with a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain seems to be able to hold detailed interpersonal information on at most 150-200 people. There appears to be a correlation between the size of the neocortex of primates and the maximum number of individuals a primate can keep track of and maintain social relationships with. This is Dunbar's number. This is what kept population size limited during almost all of prehistory. (If humans have been around at least 200,000 years, and writing was invented only 5,000 years before present, then prehistory makes up 97.5% of humanity's entire time on the Earth. The earliest cities appear 12,000 years before present, 7,000 years before the start of written history, so cities make up 3.59% of the duration of prehistory. 94% of the time humans have been here was before the first city was built.)
When people live in small communities people care about one another because people can keep track of everyone living in the community. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of people this is impossible. People stop caring about the other denizens of the city, and the social structures that keeps a community together never form. The vacuum left over by the lack of a stable community is filled by the government. Private charity gives way to the welfare state, and education becomes indoctrination.
Technology isn't helping either. In 1980 the average person had 3 close friends. In 2011 the average person had 0 close friends. The advent of smart phones, social media, and people taking pictures of their sandwiches and posting them online has served to destroy human interpersonal communication faster than urbanisation ever could. People, for the most part, and especially the Millennials (the first generation to grow up totally under government indoctrination), are not connected to anyone anymore except the government.
Human sociality is necessary for space travel. Big giant space projects like the colonisation of planets require thousands of people working together, billions of dollars, and the support of entire societies. People stopped caring about space travel, and space programs died in the 1970s. Without all three elements of properly sociable, funded, and motivated people, then landing on Mars or going to the stars is impossible. We appear to have topped out: humans have developed to a certain point, but there is a definite limit to that development, and we're right about there.
Humans appear doomed to low Earth orbit. The future in space I dreamed of as a child seems like it may have evapourated along with the sex and welfare revolutions.
It has to do with a phenomenon called Dunbar's Number, and a disturbing trend seen with the rapid advancement in technology and the social order.
John Stringfellow in 1848 built a steam-powered flying machine that was the absolute apogee of steam technology. While it did fly it was not powerful enough to carry a person. On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers made what is recognised as the first piloted powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.
NASA became operational 1 October 1958. 20 February 1962, a little over three years later, John Glenn got into orbit. 12 September 1966, eight years later, Gemini 11 completed the farthest ever orbit of the earth, never to be exceeded, and successfully created artificial gravity with the Agena Target Vehicle. 20 July 1969, ten and a half years later, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally demonstrated that that light in the sky is a real place, and people can go there. 11 December 1972, Apollo 17 spent the most time on the Moon. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there, and when they left they became the last men ever to land on another celestial body, and the last to leave low Earth orbit.
The past 41 years have been spent doing high school science experiments at 200 km above sea level (and the Russians tried to see if they could kill people by keeping Valeri Polyakov in space for over 400 days. I think he was crippled for about a year after he returned).
Also in 1969 plans were drawn up for Big Gemini, which was superior to the Space Shuttle in every way, but they were scrapped. In 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched. Along with Pioneer 11, and later Voyager 1 and 2 - launched in 1977 - they demonstrated the possibility of sending unmanned spacecraft outside the solar system (as of August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first, and so far only, manmade object to leave the solar system).
NASA had plans for a Mars mission set for 1986 with a colossal football field sized NERVA nuclear rocket, that was successfully tested on the ground (they were buried underground with just the tail spouting highly radioactive jets into the air. At least two men died and had to be buried in salt mines in multi-tonne lead coffins.). The mars mission was scrapped when Congress decided killing Vietnamese people was a better allocation of the $10 billion necessary to build and launch the full size NERVA rocket. There were plans to send manned missions to the moons of Jupiter by the 1990s and Proxima Centauri by the early 2000s using nuclear rockets that were built and successfully tested in the 1960s and 70s. These too were scrapped.
The technology to go to the stars existed 40 years ago and has never been used for political reasons. Yesterday I had the feeling that, like freedom, once the initiative for space travel is lost it can never be gotten back. We will probably never land escape Earth orbit again. (Although the Chinese have plans for a colony on the Moon, let's face it, China is over. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air waiting for a stiff breeze and some common sense to knock it over. Without the hundreds of billions in government spending, building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese economy will collapse and then the hundred million surplus men will become the largest demonstration of pure anarchy in history, as, like the man who castrated himself this past week, they have nothing else to live for. It is impossible to build a civilisation on population control and sex-selective abortion that produces 9 males for every 1 female. Sure, the military may crack some skulls and force its way to the Moon, like pretty much everything the Soviets ever did, but the Chinese dreams of empire and space travel are made of gossamer and the dreams of children.)
But there's something bigger than that. A new direction society has taken that threatens the very idea of space travel. As I said earlier:
There is the interesting side question of modern Western society, indeed any extremely affluent society, as to whether it does, in fact, represent a diseased PBC and not merely an alien one. All extremely affluent societies throughout history have been plagued by extreme narcissism and apathy, which is displayed in declining fertility rate. Some societies, such as Japan, are so affluent that they are literally on the fast track to extinction because they simply stop breeding. A PBC that cannot[3] produce children above replacement rate (2.1 births/woman) has no survival value and would, by the above criterion, represent a disease. After the inevitable collapse whatever society that arises to fill the void would be made of individuals who possess viable PBCs. As I mentioned in "Affluence and Apathy", there is a healthy form of affluence, though it has never seemed common enough to prevent an entire affluent society from collapsing. It would be possible for healthy affluent to form a viable society, and so I would classify healthy affluent as alien, though it has never happened before and probably never will.
The United States is the most affluent society ever. One third of the population is obese, including poor people. And along with affluence comes extreme narcissism and apathy, but there is something more. Something that was engineered by the power elite during the Apollo program. The creation of the welfare state coincided with a fundamental shift in the perception of sex in society. Both happened together because the government was setting itself up to become the new parent. No-fault divorce, ever expanding welfare programs, and the shift away from sex for procreation to sex for fun changed the way people viewed their place in society (to be sure, people had sex for fun since the beginning, but men always wanted sons as a matter of pride and women always wanted men around to provide for their children, and in the 1970s there was a shift away from that to "we'll hold off having kids until we're 40, if ever, and just enjoy our permanent adolescence now!"). Now, with the redefinition of marriage away from providing for children to some vague conception of love/lust, the coup d'état is now complete.
The US Department of Education was created in 1979. Before that all schools were run locally, with education tailored to the needs of individual students. Since there has been a shift in a one-size-fits-all education policy, with "no child left behind." The DoE is a gigantic indoctrination program, and they're not even covert about it. Common Core is demonstrably indoctrination. School officials in Memphis provide breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner to kids, and admit that if they had rooms for beds the kids would sleep there permanently. The government sees the only role of parents to be breeding. Once the children are born, they belong to the state.
How did this all begin? Urbanisation. Cities are a statist's best friend. It has to do with a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain seems to be able to hold detailed interpersonal information on at most 150-200 people. There appears to be a correlation between the size of the neocortex of primates and the maximum number of individuals a primate can keep track of and maintain social relationships with. This is Dunbar's number. This is what kept population size limited during almost all of prehistory. (If humans have been around at least 200,000 years, and writing was invented only 5,000 years before present, then prehistory makes up 97.5% of humanity's entire time on the Earth. The earliest cities appear 12,000 years before present, 7,000 years before the start of written history, so cities make up 3.59% of the duration of prehistory. 94% of the time humans have been here was before the first city was built.)
When people live in small communities people care about one another because people can keep track of everyone living in the community. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of people this is impossible. People stop caring about the other denizens of the city, and the social structures that keeps a community together never form. The vacuum left over by the lack of a stable community is filled by the government. Private charity gives way to the welfare state, and education becomes indoctrination.
Technology isn't helping either. In 1980 the average person had 3 close friends. In 2011 the average person had 0 close friends. The advent of smart phones, social media, and people taking pictures of their sandwiches and posting them online has served to destroy human interpersonal communication faster than urbanisation ever could. People, for the most part, and especially the Millennials (the first generation to grow up totally under government indoctrination), are not connected to anyone anymore except the government.
Human sociality is necessary for space travel. Big giant space projects like the colonisation of planets require thousands of people working together, billions of dollars, and the support of entire societies. People stopped caring about space travel, and space programs died in the 1970s. Without all three elements of properly sociable, funded, and motivated people, then landing on Mars or going to the stars is impossible. We appear to have topped out: humans have developed to a certain point, but there is a definite limit to that development, and we're right about there.
Humans appear doomed to low Earth orbit. The future in space I dreamed of as a child seems like it may have evapourated along with the sex and welfare revolutions.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Why Can't We Be Friends?
From the LA Times (Why do I bother with publications that have "Times" in the title?).
Madeline Janis, some leftist broad, a writer for the Times and the national policy director of a group called the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (yeah, that name is transparent), writes a very disgusting piece about her late father.
Her father - name withheld - was 87 years old and very sick. He was a veteran and, she describes "highly educated — a psychiatrist with multiple advanced degrees in science and medicine. He was Jewish and deeply religious, donating regularly to charities helping those who struggled with life's challenges." This man is at the upper echelon of human achievement. He's very smart, well grounded, and very generous. This is not the kind of man you would expect to be treated as a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, mouth-breathing, kunckle-walking, talks with a Southern drawl, gun owning, Bible thumping, bitter clinging, brow ridged troglodyte, especially by his own daughter. Not with an introduction like that anyway.
"But he hated President Obama and thought that government was at the root of all evil."
Shame!
We do not speak ill, NO, we do not think ill of dear leader! Dear leader is your new god. Bow down and worship him.
His other sin? He not only listened to, as if that was bad enough, but liked Rush Limbaugh! AAAHHH!!!!1 The horror! I...I can't. I have to go sit down and cry for a few minutes, this is too horrible.
He also had a few Rush Limbaugh caps, which he enjoyed wearing. The humanity!
I'm sorry. I shouldn't subject you to torture like that. I'll write it in small print.
Anyway, as I said earlier, her father was old and sick and in 'Murica when a parent can no longer live alone the child throws the parent in the trash. Yep. They put a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your mouth for, what, fifteen years, and you can't return the favor when they get old. They changed your diapers when you were a baby and you can't do the same when they're an invalid. You disgust me.
So this broad was going to put her father, who she claims to love, in a home. In case you didn't know it, a home is not as good as it sounds. A home is a place where old people go to be abused, neglected, have their social security money stolen, and their prescriptions sold to teenagers who are looking for drugs. And this broad was not only going to put her father in a home, where she would not have to lift a finger to care for him, or ever have to see him again, but she whined "why can't we throw these Limbaugh caps away, which bring you so much joy in your final days? Limbaugh is a big, fat, smelly meanie. He is a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and I know if he ever met me he would hate me! WAAA! WAA!"
He wouldn't hear it.
A few days later (I'm guessing; this article is written so poorly, jumping back and forth like a leprachaun who has had a few too many and has energy to burn), she goes back and her father tells her "sweetheart, I want to tell you something."
"Nope! I don't want to talk about it!" She pouted.
He continued anyway, "I've come to the conclusion that although I really like Rush Limbaugh, I love you more. So I'm going to give up the caps."
Maybe he really loved her that much. Maybe he was dying and didn't want to argue anymore. I think it's a little of both. The point is, this man decided to be the bigger man and give up his own happiness to make his spoiled brat daughter happy by throwing out his most prized possession which she hated. Then he died.
The worst is yet to come, folks. Yes, worse than what I've already told you. She writes an article in the LA Times about the incident with her deceased father. Wait, it gets worse! She says this "our love for each other and our family helped my father and me transcend the enormous ideological divide between us. It makes me wonder if there isn't something in these experiences that might help us, as Americans, transcend our political differences."
Did I miss something? She use her father's death as an opportunity to write about her selfish, arrogant, narrow-minded political ideology and claim that Rush and all people who listen to him are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, and she has the conceit to say at the end "why can't we all just get along?" She whined until she got her way from her dying father. Yep, she beat a dying man in an argument and then writes an article about it in a major newspaper. And she claims the moral high ground!
This broad then closes with "that could be a start, at least, at reaching across the gulf of ideology to work cooperatively and respectfully to solve the challenges facing the nation."
What a bitch.
You know why we can't be friends? You know why we can't get along? Let me tell you why we can't get along.
By the way, I saved the original article just in case the LA Times takes it down so that a permanent record exists.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Trayvon Unmasked
At 7 PM on the night of 26 February 2012 in Sanford Florida, two men had an altercation in the rain that left one of them dead.
The people involved were 17 year old Trayvon Martin, black, and 29 year old George Zimmerman, Hispanic. They are the only two who know exactly what happened that night, and, unfortunately, Mr. Martin is dead so we can never have the complete story. What we do know is that someone started a fight that Mr. Zimmerman ended with a single gunshot.
The event ballooned into a media circus that lasted a year and a half until, 13 July 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second degree murder after what was very nearly a hung jury. Threats of violence, and some actual violence, erupted following the verdict. Protests were staged around the country. The President made two comments, one good, one bad. This is pretty much the most objective account of what has happened.
Now here's the part sprinkled with my analysis.
First, Sanford is a lower-middle class community with a crime problem. 18.5% of the population is below the poverty line. In 2011 the people of Sanford formed a neighborhood watch program to deal with the crime, with Zimmerman being appointed as the coordinator. George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin's father's fiancee (where he was living at the time) were renting homes in the town.
Trayvon Martin was not a kid, as many portray him. Neither was he innocent. He was not the ten year old seen in the pictures. He was a grown man, he portrayed himself as a thug on the Internet, and he was a petty criminal, having been suspended from school many times for painting graffiti and stealing jewelry. His parents were divorced. His mother sent him to live with his father because he was too much trouble for her. The night of the shooting he goes out in the rain to a 7-Eleven and call his friend Rachel Jeantel (who lacks all common sense and tact). After 18 minutes on the phone the call abruptly ends for unknown reasons. Martin was not most likely not buying candy at the 7-Eleven, he was buying ingredients for a drug popular in the hip hop gangster culture that he talked about frequently on the Internet. The drug, known as "purple drank," "lean," or "syrup" is made with cough syrup containing codeine or dextromethorphan (such as in Robitussin DM, which Martin was talking about with some friends on Facebook). He most likely was planning on mixing the Skittles and Arizona watermellon drink that he had purchased with the Robitussin to create "some fire ass lean," as one friend called it. Extended use of the cough syrup based drug is linked to liver damage and psychotic episodes.*
Next, George Zimmerman is often portrayed as "lily white", a "white-Hispanic", or as "mixed-race" by people trying to spin the case. Unsurprisingly, NONE of these same people call the President "mixed-race", "white-black", or "white" when both he and Zimmerman have one white parent. The President is 100% black and Zimmerman is white above any other races, if not entirely white. This is not because of his complexion or features. Zimmerman has dark skin and his eyes and other facial features clearly belong to someone who is not white.
According to the other wiki, "during the 18 months preceding the February 26 shooting, Zimmerman called the non-emergency police line seven times. On five of those calls, Zimmerman reported suspicious looking men in the area, but never offered the men's race without first being asked by the dispatcher." Zimmerman takes his job very seriously. I would argue too seriously. He was driving around with a gun, safety off, looking for suspicious men. 26 February he finds his sixth suspicious looking man, and this time it does not end well.
Zimmerman calls the police from his truck saying he has found yet another suspicious looking man. After four minutes he gets out of his truck to follow Martin because, as the tape indicates, Martin started running at this point. The dispatcher advises Zimmerman not to pursue Martin but he doesn't listen. Martin calls Rachel Jeantel back but his call gets disconnected again, for unknown reasosn.
Someone started the fight. When it was over Zimmerman was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head, Martin was shot in the chest and lie dead in the grass with bloody knuckles.
There were eight witnesses, of whom only two saw part of the altercation. They reported (from wiki):
A witness to the confrontation just prior to the shooting stated that Martin was on top of Zimmerman and punching him, while Zimmerman was yelling for help. This witness, who identified himself as "John", stated that "the guy on the bottom, who had a red sweater on, was yelling to me, 'Help! Help!' and I told him to stop, and I was calling 911". He went on to say that when he got upstairs and looked down, "the guy who was on the top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point."
One eye-witness statement given the night of the shooting describes "a black male, wearing a dark colored 'hoodie' on top of a white or Hispanic male who was yelling for help." The witness said that the black male was throwing punches "MMA [mixed martial arts] style." After hearing a "pop," he saw the black male "laid out on the grass." When the witness was subsequently interviewed weeks later by a different agency, the witness said he thought that the black male was either punching or pinning the lighter skinned male underneath him. He was no longer certain who was calling for help, having not seen their mouths in the dark. He was still certain that the black male had been on top of the lighter-skinned male.
The eighth witness, Jeantel, heard part of the altercation from the phone: "She then heard Martin say, "What are you following me for?" followed by a man's voice responding, "What are you doing around here?"" The phone then went silent.
What happened after that we can only speculate. Zimmerman asked Martin what he was doing out at night, then someone started the fight. Trayvon Martin was either the instigator or else he got the upper hand and had Zimmerman pinned to the ground and was whaling on him, or as Jeantel calls it "whoop ass." An audience member's mouth falls open at the revelation that Jeantel basically admitted it was Trayvon who started the fight. Foreign national Piers Morgan tried to pull her fat out of the fire by asking "if Trayvon was being attacked, would he have 'whooped ass' as you call it?" She immediately corrects him, saying that "whoop ass" cannot be conjugated to form "whooped ass". He nudged her a second time and she finally gave the answer he wanted, that yes, Trayvon was defending himself, because Android phones can't be turned off if you're the one on top in a fight.
There is a difference between beating someone to death and "whoop ass". "Whoop ass" is all fun and games, even if it leads to concussion and paralysis or death. It's the intent behind "whoop ass" that counts, and the intent is, well I don't know. Jeantel is about as clear as mud. I've understood dogs and cats better than I understand her. I don't know what the difference between "whoop ass" and a savage beating is, and according to Jeantel that misunderstanding is why Zimmerman killed Trayvon.
Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, listening to 9-1-1 recordings, testified that the person crying for help was not his son, although he later changed his story after the case. Sybrina, Trayvon's mother, testified that it was her son. A neighbor testified that it was Zimmerman. The FBI analysed the recordings and said the quality was too poor to determine whose voice it was.
As the autopsy reveals, Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he got shot. It also revealed that Martin had extensive liver damage well beyond what would be expected in a 17-year-old, further evidence that he was on a drug run the night he got shot. (*I'm not condemning recreational drug use, I'm merely illustrating that Trayvon Martin was not an innocent little boy who got shot because he was a black kid out buying candy. Also, if this drug - and potentially others - had caused this much damage to his liver it probably also caused damage to his brain, and he was likely not thinking clearly the night he went out and started a fight when he could have easily outrun Zimmerman home and called the police if he was really worried. Yet in spite of what all rational people would know is a bad idea, Martin likely started a fight with a man in the middle of the night and ended up dead.)
There is no evidence that Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin. Zimmerman has black relatives, he has worked with the black community in Sanford to get them more active in the neighborhood watch program, and he was "one of the few to take any action to protest the 2010 beating of Sherman Ware, a black homeless man, by the son of a Sanford police officer."
What do I think happened? George Zimmerman went out looking for trouble. Trayvon Martin went out possibly looking for something to burgle, if his past is any indication, and no doubt open to the possibility of a fight. Rachel Jeantel goaded Martin into starting a fight with an armed man in the middle of the night. It was Jeantel who sewed the seeds of fear or rage or whatever in Martin while they talked on the phone. "Some creepy ass cracker is following me." "He can't do that! You better whoop ass so he gets the message!" The gang culture Martin and Jeantel idolise combined with confusion and testosterone took over rational judgment and Martin and when Zimmerman asked "what are you doing here?" Martin started beating him. Zimmerman greatly underestimated Martin and, fearing for his life, took his gun and shot Martin, happening to hit him fatally.
In President Obama's first address regarding the verdict, he acted like a leader and said basically "it's a tragedy that a family lost their son but the justice system is based on evidence and, let's face it, there's no evidence to convict Zimmerman, so we should accept the verdict of 'not guilty' as a victory for our justice system, as it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to put one innocent man in prison. Now, in respect for the family let's all put this behind us."
In his second address he said (exact quote) "you know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away." He then went on to say "there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off."
Yes, I know what it's like to get nervous looks out of people as I walk by. I know what it's like for people to turn their porch lights on as I walk past their houses at night. Trayvon Martin probably couldn't have been me. I don't live in a high crime area, but I do like to go for walks at crazy hours of the night and I do often make people uncomfortable by my looks and mannerisms. No one where I live will probably shoot me, and I doubt anyone would have shot Obama either during his carefree childhood in Hawaii, or his time spent in Indonesia with his step father who owned a lot of exotic animals. I'm not saying he's lying, but he is definitely not telling the truth either when he says "Trayvon could have been me 35 years ago." Maybe during his time in Chicago, that cesspool of crime and human suffering, but not when he was 17. Obama did not move to the mainland until he was 18.
From the wiki page on Obama: "Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, 'That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.'
He started to think about black nationalism and anger toward whites in spite of the colourblindness of his peers. Fellow student Mark Hebing recalls "we didn't think about his blackness." From the same LA Times article, we have more accounts of Obama's time in Hawaii:
"His reflections about the race issue surprised all of us," said Kellie Furushima, who knew him well. "He gave no indication of feeling uncomfortable in school, and I never witnessed or heard anyone being unkind to him.
"Being in Hawaii, we had a lot of different races," classmate Vernette Ferreira Shaffer said. "People would tell ethnic jokes, but it was more about making fun of stereotypes than trying to do a cool thing."
Hanging out and working with many black people, I know they make just as many jokes (maybe more) about black stereotypes as any other group. Comedian Chris Rock in Bring the Pain even jokes about the difference between "black people" and "niggers," whom normal black people hate more than white people.
Inside all of this is the anger Obama alludes to. Black people are angry about the way they were treated during the time of slavery and Jim Crow. He says "that doesn't go away." I ask why? Yes, it's true that the slave trade was one of the worst acts of inhumanity in history, but let us not forget it was started in Africa by black people selling other black people to at first Muslims and then to white people. There is still racial tension in Africa between Negroes and Pygmies, two distinct black groups who view the other as nonhuman and have fought wars to wipe the other out. It was also whites who eventually ended slavery, beginning with groups such as the Quakers and taking off when the Methodists got behind the abolition movement, finally culminating in the deaths of over 600,000 men to put a stop to the barbarism once and for all. Immediately after the Civil War many of the Southern states, with majority black populations, elected blacks to federal office. It was not until Reconstruction ended and the white Democrats took power once again that blacks were rendered slaves in all but name until the 1950s. President Eisenhower, Republican, wanted to solve the problem by passing a host of civil rights laws, and he did go very far but was checked by Senate leader Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, who was one of the biggest racists of the time. It was only after Johnson lost face for killing kids in Vietnam that he finished what Eisenhower started, and wrongly took credit for being a civil rights leader when he wanted nothing more than to reinstitute slavery. 50 years of indoctrination in public schools have led millions to believe that the Republicans, who fought and died by the thousands for the rights of black people, are evil while the Democrats, who fought and died to keep blacks enslaved and started the KKK, are good. Truly a cosmic irony.
Why does the racial hurt never go away? When my ancestors came to America a century ago we weren't even second-class citizens and we certainly weren't white (although I'd probably be considered white today I do not self-identify as white). We had hardships, we were mistreated, and we really still aren't viewed in that good a light, and still I have no racial anger toward anyone. I don't think to myself "my ancestors were treated like shit so I'm gonna hate white people forever!" It makes no sense to hold on to anger, to give that kind of power to other people who did nothing to me, and ruin my own life in the process by destroying my own mental health. Anger causes far more harm than good, especially to one's self.
Yes, blacks suffered more than probably any other group in history except the Jews, but just about more effort was put into fixing the injustices done to blacks than to any other group. Wars were not fought and countries were not destroyed to fix other race relations or bring other people out of bondage. I would appreciate one tenth the effort done for my people.
Why does racial hurt never go away? I argue because it is useful. The power elite keep blacks as victims through soft racism such as affirmative action and race baiters such as Al Sharpton. Blacks are not good enough to compete on their own, they argue, so big daddy government must give them a hand up and take care of them just as big daddy massa did. "Massa don't want to hear that slave shit, sing him something different!"
If you take a look at just about every problem society faces today you can trace it back to people with power wanting more power, disenfranchising one group to play off another, keeping us all separated so we can't unite and defeat them. Racism has always existed and probably will always exist, but the idea of permanent racial victims exists only as a device by the elite to divide people.
Now, here's where I'm gonna get really racist, as one person has insinuated, by citing statistics. According to the FBI, 2,720 black people were murdered in 2010, 2,459 of them at the hands of another black person. Another study, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, discovered that 94% of all black murder victims were killed by other black people.
One black violent thug was shot by an Hispanic idiot wannabe hero who's painted as "lily white" by race baiters and all of a sudden there's a huge outcry and the beginnings of race riots. The nearly 3,000 other black people killed by other black people every year - not a peep. If Zimmerman was black it has been demonstrably proven over the past three decades that the event wouldn't make the news. About 13,000 people are murdered in total every year. How many of them do we ever hear about on the news? How many of them get a "Justice for Jane Doe" campaign, or two televised speeches by the President, or mass demonstrations in the streets of major cities? How many millions of black babies are killed in abortion mills every year (Planned Parenthood was founded with the specific intent of exterminating black people)? How much harm is the government and racist leaders like Al Sharpton doing to the black community? How much harm is the black community doing to itself? And in spite of all of this we barely hear anything. Whites who speak out are labeled racist and blacks who speak out are labeled Uncle Tom.
Somehow is it more real when an Hispanic (or even a white) man kills a black man than when a black man kills another black man? Is that because the power elite in the media told you so? I don't think so. I don't think it's more real when OJ got off on the death of his wife because there was reasonable doubt because OJ was a black man killing a white woman. I don't think black people should consider it more real that George Zimmerman got off on the death of Trayvon Martin because there was reasonable doubt because Zimmerman was whatever the hell race you want to call him killing a black man. Can we not look past the colour of peoples' skins and see into the content of their characters as a great man once said before he himself was murdered by a racist? Must we divide ourselves among races, playing into the elite's hands, weakening our own power, enslaving ourselves? How does any of that make sense?
It is a tragedy when anyone has to die, but it is an even bigger tragedy when we let those deaths needlessly divide us further. Al Sharpton doesn't care about Trayvon Martin, neither does President Obama, and neither do any of the people on TV who are making money by hyping the incident. Obama will never have to bury his children because of a fight with an armed man, thankfully he has Secret Service to protect them. However, he is stuck seeing things through the lens of race as the elite of his day indoctrinated him, and now that he has all the power in the world he is using it to indoctrinate others. In his ignorance he is part of the problem, a problem that uses race to divide the one human race as evil always does to secure power for itself.
I might be veering off into even more alien ground here, but here is how I see the endgame play out. Evil has no power of its own. All power comes from God, even the power that evil misuses. Just as a solar powered machine cannot be used to destroy the sun, there is nothing evil can do to to defeat God.
All the super evil people in history have eventually outstretched their limits and were murdered by their own people. Stalin, Timur, Attila, Mao, all the tyrants, however powerful, however many millions they terrorised or killed, they were eventually killed by a guard or someone who saw the opportunity to strike and put an end to someone whom everyone hated. Evil loses because it isolates itself. In alienating all possible allies and ruling entirely through fear, evil leaves itself open to that one person who inevitably arises who has nothing to lose and the perfect opening to get at the tyrant one on one. Once they are free, the people, who have been living in secret, watching every step they take against the seemingly omnipotent authorities, immediately resume their lives where they last left off as best they can.
Although the New World Order has a lot of power on the Earth, all the power they have comes from God. No matter how powerful they get they can never win. They will lose; the only question is how much damage will they cause before they are taken down? How long will it take for the world to recover? It took India a century to recover from Timur's destruction, but it recovered. Stalin did his best to destroy the Russian church, but it sprang back once it was free to do so. The unconquerable spirit of free people will be restored as soon as the peoples' burden is lifted. How badly will they destroy the world? I don't know. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because they cannot destroy our freedom, only we can surrender it. They can never destroy love. As A Course in Miracles says:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
That is why no matter how powerful they get, they can never be more powerful than you are. They have already lost. All else is just spectacle.
We should use this tragedy as a chance to unite against the evils of racism, not to add more fuel to the fire. With that I close my analysis of the Trayvon Martin case.
The people involved were 17 year old Trayvon Martin, black, and 29 year old George Zimmerman, Hispanic. They are the only two who know exactly what happened that night, and, unfortunately, Mr. Martin is dead so we can never have the complete story. What we do know is that someone started a fight that Mr. Zimmerman ended with a single gunshot.
The event ballooned into a media circus that lasted a year and a half until, 13 July 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second degree murder after what was very nearly a hung jury. Threats of violence, and some actual violence, erupted following the verdict. Protests were staged around the country. The President made two comments, one good, one bad. This is pretty much the most objective account of what has happened.
Now here's the part sprinkled with my analysis.
First, Sanford is a lower-middle class community with a crime problem. 18.5% of the population is below the poverty line. In 2011 the people of Sanford formed a neighborhood watch program to deal with the crime, with Zimmerman being appointed as the coordinator. George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin's father's fiancee (where he was living at the time) were renting homes in the town.
Trayvon Martin was not a kid, as many portray him. Neither was he innocent. He was not the ten year old seen in the pictures. He was a grown man, he portrayed himself as a thug on the Internet, and he was a petty criminal, having been suspended from school many times for painting graffiti and stealing jewelry. His parents were divorced. His mother sent him to live with his father because he was too much trouble for her. The night of the shooting he goes out in the rain to a 7-Eleven and call his friend Rachel Jeantel (who lacks all common sense and tact). After 18 minutes on the phone the call abruptly ends for unknown reasons. Martin was not most likely not buying candy at the 7-Eleven, he was buying ingredients for a drug popular in the hip hop gangster culture that he talked about frequently on the Internet. The drug, known as "purple drank," "lean," or "syrup" is made with cough syrup containing codeine or dextromethorphan (such as in Robitussin DM, which Martin was talking about with some friends on Facebook). He most likely was planning on mixing the Skittles and Arizona watermellon drink that he had purchased with the Robitussin to create "some fire ass lean," as one friend called it. Extended use of the cough syrup based drug is linked to liver damage and psychotic episodes.*
Next, George Zimmerman is often portrayed as "lily white", a "white-Hispanic", or as "mixed-race" by people trying to spin the case. Unsurprisingly, NONE of these same people call the President "mixed-race", "white-black", or "white" when both he and Zimmerman have one white parent. The President is 100% black and Zimmerman is white above any other races, if not entirely white. This is not because of his complexion or features. Zimmerman has dark skin and his eyes and other facial features clearly belong to someone who is not white.
According to the other wiki, "during the 18 months preceding the February 26 shooting, Zimmerman called the non-emergency police line seven times. On five of those calls, Zimmerman reported suspicious looking men in the area, but never offered the men's race without first being asked by the dispatcher." Zimmerman takes his job very seriously. I would argue too seriously. He was driving around with a gun, safety off, looking for suspicious men. 26 February he finds his sixth suspicious looking man, and this time it does not end well.
Zimmerman calls the police from his truck saying he has found yet another suspicious looking man. After four minutes he gets out of his truck to follow Martin because, as the tape indicates, Martin started running at this point. The dispatcher advises Zimmerman not to pursue Martin but he doesn't listen. Martin calls Rachel Jeantel back but his call gets disconnected again, for unknown reasosn.
Someone started the fight. When it was over Zimmerman was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head, Martin was shot in the chest and lie dead in the grass with bloody knuckles.
There were eight witnesses, of whom only two saw part of the altercation. They reported (from wiki):
A witness to the confrontation just prior to the shooting stated that Martin was on top of Zimmerman and punching him, while Zimmerman was yelling for help. This witness, who identified himself as "John", stated that "the guy on the bottom, who had a red sweater on, was yelling to me, 'Help! Help!' and I told him to stop, and I was calling 911". He went on to say that when he got upstairs and looked down, "the guy who was on the top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point."
One eye-witness statement given the night of the shooting describes "a black male, wearing a dark colored 'hoodie' on top of a white or Hispanic male who was yelling for help." The witness said that the black male was throwing punches "MMA [mixed martial arts] style." After hearing a "pop," he saw the black male "laid out on the grass." When the witness was subsequently interviewed weeks later by a different agency, the witness said he thought that the black male was either punching or pinning the lighter skinned male underneath him. He was no longer certain who was calling for help, having not seen their mouths in the dark. He was still certain that the black male had been on top of the lighter-skinned male.
The eighth witness, Jeantel, heard part of the altercation from the phone: "She then heard Martin say, "What are you following me for?" followed by a man's voice responding, "What are you doing around here?"" The phone then went silent.
What happened after that we can only speculate. Zimmerman asked Martin what he was doing out at night, then someone started the fight. Trayvon Martin was either the instigator or else he got the upper hand and had Zimmerman pinned to the ground and was whaling on him, or as Jeantel calls it "whoop ass." An audience member's mouth falls open at the revelation that Jeantel basically admitted it was Trayvon who started the fight. Foreign national Piers Morgan tried to pull her fat out of the fire by asking "if Trayvon was being attacked, would he have 'whooped ass' as you call it?" She immediately corrects him, saying that "whoop ass" cannot be conjugated to form "whooped ass". He nudged her a second time and she finally gave the answer he wanted, that yes, Trayvon was defending himself, because Android phones can't be turned off if you're the one on top in a fight.
There is a difference between beating someone to death and "whoop ass". "Whoop ass" is all fun and games, even if it leads to concussion and paralysis or death. It's the intent behind "whoop ass" that counts, and the intent is, well I don't know. Jeantel is about as clear as mud. I've understood dogs and cats better than I understand her. I don't know what the difference between "whoop ass" and a savage beating is, and according to Jeantel that misunderstanding is why Zimmerman killed Trayvon.
Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, listening to 9-1-1 recordings, testified that the person crying for help was not his son, although he later changed his story after the case. Sybrina, Trayvon's mother, testified that it was her son. A neighbor testified that it was Zimmerman. The FBI analysed the recordings and said the quality was too poor to determine whose voice it was.
As the autopsy reveals, Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he got shot. It also revealed that Martin had extensive liver damage well beyond what would be expected in a 17-year-old, further evidence that he was on a drug run the night he got shot. (*I'm not condemning recreational drug use, I'm merely illustrating that Trayvon Martin was not an innocent little boy who got shot because he was a black kid out buying candy. Also, if this drug - and potentially others - had caused this much damage to his liver it probably also caused damage to his brain, and he was likely not thinking clearly the night he went out and started a fight when he could have easily outrun Zimmerman home and called the police if he was really worried. Yet in spite of what all rational people would know is a bad idea, Martin likely started a fight with a man in the middle of the night and ended up dead.)
There is no evidence that Zimmerman was racially profiling Martin. Zimmerman has black relatives, he has worked with the black community in Sanford to get them more active in the neighborhood watch program, and he was "one of the few to take any action to protest the 2010 beating of Sherman Ware, a black homeless man, by the son of a Sanford police officer."
What do I think happened? George Zimmerman went out looking for trouble. Trayvon Martin went out possibly looking for something to burgle, if his past is any indication, and no doubt open to the possibility of a fight. Rachel Jeantel goaded Martin into starting a fight with an armed man in the middle of the night. It was Jeantel who sewed the seeds of fear or rage or whatever in Martin while they talked on the phone. "Some creepy ass cracker is following me." "He can't do that! You better whoop ass so he gets the message!" The gang culture Martin and Jeantel idolise combined with confusion and testosterone took over rational judgment and Martin and when Zimmerman asked "what are you doing here?" Martin started beating him. Zimmerman greatly underestimated Martin and, fearing for his life, took his gun and shot Martin, happening to hit him fatally.
In President Obama's first address regarding the verdict, he acted like a leader and said basically "it's a tragedy that a family lost their son but the justice system is based on evidence and, let's face it, there's no evidence to convict Zimmerman, so we should accept the verdict of 'not guilty' as a victory for our justice system, as it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to put one innocent man in prison. Now, in respect for the family let's all put this behind us."
In his second address he said (exact quote) "you know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away." He then went on to say "there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off."
Yes, I know what it's like to get nervous looks out of people as I walk by. I know what it's like for people to turn their porch lights on as I walk past their houses at night. Trayvon Martin probably couldn't have been me. I don't live in a high crime area, but I do like to go for walks at crazy hours of the night and I do often make people uncomfortable by my looks and mannerisms. No one where I live will probably shoot me, and I doubt anyone would have shot Obama either during his carefree childhood in Hawaii, or his time spent in Indonesia with his step father who owned a lot of exotic animals. I'm not saying he's lying, but he is definitely not telling the truth either when he says "Trayvon could have been me 35 years ago." Maybe during his time in Chicago, that cesspool of crime and human suffering, but not when he was 17. Obama did not move to the mainland until he was 18.
From the wiki page on Obama: "Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, 'That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.'
He started to think about black nationalism and anger toward whites in spite of the colourblindness of his peers. Fellow student Mark Hebing recalls "we didn't think about his blackness." From the same LA Times article, we have more accounts of Obama's time in Hawaii:
"His reflections about the race issue surprised all of us," said Kellie Furushima, who knew him well. "He gave no indication of feeling uncomfortable in school, and I never witnessed or heard anyone being unkind to him.
"Being in Hawaii, we had a lot of different races," classmate Vernette Ferreira Shaffer said. "People would tell ethnic jokes, but it was more about making fun of stereotypes than trying to do a cool thing."
Hanging out and working with many black people, I know they make just as many jokes (maybe more) about black stereotypes as any other group. Comedian Chris Rock in Bring the Pain even jokes about the difference between "black people" and "niggers," whom normal black people hate more than white people.
Inside all of this is the anger Obama alludes to. Black people are angry about the way they were treated during the time of slavery and Jim Crow. He says "that doesn't go away." I ask why? Yes, it's true that the slave trade was one of the worst acts of inhumanity in history, but let us not forget it was started in Africa by black people selling other black people to at first Muslims and then to white people. There is still racial tension in Africa between Negroes and Pygmies, two distinct black groups who view the other as nonhuman and have fought wars to wipe the other out. It was also whites who eventually ended slavery, beginning with groups such as the Quakers and taking off when the Methodists got behind the abolition movement, finally culminating in the deaths of over 600,000 men to put a stop to the barbarism once and for all. Immediately after the Civil War many of the Southern states, with majority black populations, elected blacks to federal office. It was not until Reconstruction ended and the white Democrats took power once again that blacks were rendered slaves in all but name until the 1950s. President Eisenhower, Republican, wanted to solve the problem by passing a host of civil rights laws, and he did go very far but was checked by Senate leader Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, who was one of the biggest racists of the time. It was only after Johnson lost face for killing kids in Vietnam that he finished what Eisenhower started, and wrongly took credit for being a civil rights leader when he wanted nothing more than to reinstitute slavery. 50 years of indoctrination in public schools have led millions to believe that the Republicans, who fought and died by the thousands for the rights of black people, are evil while the Democrats, who fought and died to keep blacks enslaved and started the KKK, are good. Truly a cosmic irony.
Why does the racial hurt never go away? When my ancestors came to America a century ago we weren't even second-class citizens and we certainly weren't white (although I'd probably be considered white today I do not self-identify as white). We had hardships, we were mistreated, and we really still aren't viewed in that good a light, and still I have no racial anger toward anyone. I don't think to myself "my ancestors were treated like shit so I'm gonna hate white people forever!" It makes no sense to hold on to anger, to give that kind of power to other people who did nothing to me, and ruin my own life in the process by destroying my own mental health. Anger causes far more harm than good, especially to one's self.
Yes, blacks suffered more than probably any other group in history except the Jews, but just about more effort was put into fixing the injustices done to blacks than to any other group. Wars were not fought and countries were not destroyed to fix other race relations or bring other people out of bondage. I would appreciate one tenth the effort done for my people.
Why does racial hurt never go away? I argue because it is useful. The power elite keep blacks as victims through soft racism such as affirmative action and race baiters such as Al Sharpton. Blacks are not good enough to compete on their own, they argue, so big daddy government must give them a hand up and take care of them just as big daddy massa did. "Massa don't want to hear that slave shit, sing him something different!"
If you take a look at just about every problem society faces today you can trace it back to people with power wanting more power, disenfranchising one group to play off another, keeping us all separated so we can't unite and defeat them. Racism has always existed and probably will always exist, but the idea of permanent racial victims exists only as a device by the elite to divide people.
Now, here's where I'm gonna get really racist, as one person has insinuated, by citing statistics. According to the FBI, 2,720 black people were murdered in 2010, 2,459 of them at the hands of another black person. Another study, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, discovered that 94% of all black murder victims were killed by other black people.
One black violent thug was shot by an Hispanic idiot wannabe hero who's painted as "lily white" by race baiters and all of a sudden there's a huge outcry and the beginnings of race riots. The nearly 3,000 other black people killed by other black people every year - not a peep. If Zimmerman was black it has been demonstrably proven over the past three decades that the event wouldn't make the news. About 13,000 people are murdered in total every year. How many of them do we ever hear about on the news? How many of them get a "Justice for Jane Doe" campaign, or two televised speeches by the President, or mass demonstrations in the streets of major cities? How many millions of black babies are killed in abortion mills every year (Planned Parenthood was founded with the specific intent of exterminating black people)? How much harm is the government and racist leaders like Al Sharpton doing to the black community? How much harm is the black community doing to itself? And in spite of all of this we barely hear anything. Whites who speak out are labeled racist and blacks who speak out are labeled Uncle Tom.
Somehow is it more real when an Hispanic (or even a white) man kills a black man than when a black man kills another black man? Is that because the power elite in the media told you so? I don't think so. I don't think it's more real when OJ got off on the death of his wife because there was reasonable doubt because OJ was a black man killing a white woman. I don't think black people should consider it more real that George Zimmerman got off on the death of Trayvon Martin because there was reasonable doubt because Zimmerman was whatever the hell race you want to call him killing a black man. Can we not look past the colour of peoples' skins and see into the content of their characters as a great man once said before he himself was murdered by a racist? Must we divide ourselves among races, playing into the elite's hands, weakening our own power, enslaving ourselves? How does any of that make sense?
It is a tragedy when anyone has to die, but it is an even bigger tragedy when we let those deaths needlessly divide us further. Al Sharpton doesn't care about Trayvon Martin, neither does President Obama, and neither do any of the people on TV who are making money by hyping the incident. Obama will never have to bury his children because of a fight with an armed man, thankfully he has Secret Service to protect them. However, he is stuck seeing things through the lens of race as the elite of his day indoctrinated him, and now that he has all the power in the world he is using it to indoctrinate others. In his ignorance he is part of the problem, a problem that uses race to divide the one human race as evil always does to secure power for itself.
I might be veering off into even more alien ground here, but here is how I see the endgame play out. Evil has no power of its own. All power comes from God, even the power that evil misuses. Just as a solar powered machine cannot be used to destroy the sun, there is nothing evil can do to to defeat God.
All the super evil people in history have eventually outstretched their limits and were murdered by their own people. Stalin, Timur, Attila, Mao, all the tyrants, however powerful, however many millions they terrorised or killed, they were eventually killed by a guard or someone who saw the opportunity to strike and put an end to someone whom everyone hated. Evil loses because it isolates itself. In alienating all possible allies and ruling entirely through fear, evil leaves itself open to that one person who inevitably arises who has nothing to lose and the perfect opening to get at the tyrant one on one. Once they are free, the people, who have been living in secret, watching every step they take against the seemingly omnipotent authorities, immediately resume their lives where they last left off as best they can.
Although the New World Order has a lot of power on the Earth, all the power they have comes from God. No matter how powerful they get they can never win. They will lose; the only question is how much damage will they cause before they are taken down? How long will it take for the world to recover? It took India a century to recover from Timur's destruction, but it recovered. Stalin did his best to destroy the Russian church, but it sprang back once it was free to do so. The unconquerable spirit of free people will be restored as soon as the peoples' burden is lifted. How badly will they destroy the world? I don't know. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because they cannot destroy our freedom, only we can surrender it. They can never destroy love. As A Course in Miracles says:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
That is why no matter how powerful they get, they can never be more powerful than you are. They have already lost. All else is just spectacle.
We should use this tragedy as a chance to unite against the evils of racism, not to add more fuel to the fire. With that I close my analysis of the Trayvon Martin case.
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