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Everybody Knows the Fight is Fixed, Everybody Knows the Vote was Rigged

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Greg Olear

“THE ELECTION IS RIGGED,” Donald Trump kept saying, in the last days of his campaign, when every poll on earth showed him losing to Hillary Clinton by a comfortable margin.

The President-Elect [sic] has elevating lying to an art form, but maybe, just maybe, this time he was telling the truth.

The head of the National Security Agency is on record saying Russian tampering with the election is a concern. There isn’t a scintilla of doubt as to which candidate Vladimir Putin prefers.

The Republican game-plan for winning elections hinges on making sure people of color don’t vote. This outcome is achieved by restrictive voter registration laws of the kind exposed this year in North Carolina as egregiously targeting blacks.

Investigative journalist Greg Pallast calls this “Crosscheck,” and it allows Republican overseers to invalidate voter rolls of certain voters (i.e., black ones) by nefarious methods known as “caging” and “purging.”

Republicans claim that the purpose of these laws is to prevent election fraud—individuals voting “early and often,” as the saying goes. The opposite result is achieved; by disenfranchising voters of color, the elections are fraudulent.

Babe Ruth is only the best baseball player of all time because the powers that be didn’t allow black players to play.

Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote by a million votes and counting. (Not “millions” and not “two million.” Present the facts accurately, please).

Exit polling in key swing states does not correlate with 1) pre-election polling, or 2) final vote counts in those states. While there are some reasons why this discrepancy might happen, it remains highly unusual. Here is a table, which I’ve borrowed from this helpful study by Jonathan Vankin at Heavy, which shows the razor-thin results:

FLORIDA — 29 Electoral Votes

(numbers equal percentage points)

Exit Polls: Clinton 47.7, Trump 46.4 — Clinton wins by 1.3

Actual: Clinton 47.8, Trump 49.0 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain between exit polls and actual results: 2.5

NORTH CAROLINA — 15 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.6, Trump 46.5 — Clinton wins by 2.1

Actual: Clinton 46.1, Trump 49.9 — Trump wins by 3.8

Trump gain: 5.9

PENNSYLVANIA — 20 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 50.5, Trump 46.1 — Clinton wins by 4.4

Actual: Clinton 47.6, Trump 48.8 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain: 5.6

WISCONSIN — 10 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.2, Trump 44.3 — Clinton wins by 3.9

Actual: Clinton 47.6, Trump 48.8 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain: 5.1

Vankin says: “With 270 of the 538 available required to win the presidency, Clinton fell 38 electoral votes short of victory. If the exit polls had reflected actual results in any three out of the four swing states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Clinton would be president-elect today. Also, if exit polls had been correct in Florida and only one of the other three swing states, Clinton would have won the election.”

Edward Snowden showed a video on how easy it would be to hack a voter machine, for a total budget of $30.

Maybe the pollsters, and all the experts, were not wrong. Maybe the candidate who won the most popular votes won the antediluvian Electoral College tally as well, only the votes were not counted accurately.

If so, neo-Fascist Donald Trump, the least qualified and most dangerous presidential candidate in the history of this country, is the beneficiary of a right-wing coup. He’s grabbed the highest office in the land like he grabs….well, you know.

Enough with post-mortems on why Hillary lost (she won), or whether Trump voters are all racists (they are, whether they admit it or not), and let’s expose this ultimate of grand larcenies. Democrats capitulate far too quickly, and are too eager to make nice-nice. Let’s fight this injustice, before it’s too late. Let’s make damned sure that the election results are true.

A few months of chaos and uncertainty are preferable to four years of chaos and incompetence—and, quite possibly, the death of the republic. Because that’s what’s at stake here.

Posted in Current Events | Tagged crimes, Donald Trump, election rigging, fraud, Russians, voter fraud | 1 Comment

It’s Our Flag. Own It.

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Quenby Moone

For the last three Presidential elections, my husband and I invited people over to follow the returns. The first two were joyous events as we watched a capable candidate—who happened to be black—win the election handily. This one, no matter who you wanted in office, felt different.

I turned away–I suspected that confidence in a Clinton win was misplaced–but I watched our guests, akin to watching the fans of the losing player at Wimbledon: ecstatic highs followed by mild concern, then disbelief, and finally falling into collective shock. From my perch in the kitchen, the faces of my loved ones became masks of grief, and I didn’t need see the Electoral map. “That’s a grim crew in there,” I said more than once.

I wasn’t even in the house when the second champagne bottle named “Apocalypse” (the first named “Anticipation”) was cracked. I was outside smoking cigarettes, a poisonous fume entering me as the house became covered in the fume of defeat.

But my instinct was not to sink into gloom. When I came back inside, and I saw my kin so defeated, I yelled, “We’re going fight harder. They don’t get to dictate terms! It’s our flag! We’re hitting the streets and claiming it!”

I’ve never reached for the American flag before. I respected it, respected its symbolism, but have never clung to it. But I’ve never felt such an existential threat to it, and to those who it has meaning for.

This threat is tangible for family, which descends in part from Jews who escaped pogroms and sneaked across the border. Illegal immigration is a part of my history, as is bigotry: right before the election results began rolling in, I proudly hung the American flag that belonged to my white, bigoted grandfather who served in WWI, but sealed my history in his union with my tiny Jewish immigrant grandma.

The rest of my family tree—much of which descends from this white bigot, who fathered many children by four wives (and at least one out of wedlock)—is quintessentially American: my living relatives pan black, white, multi-racial, gay, straight, active military and veterans, religious, agnostic, atheist, conservative, liberal. There is no group in which my family does not share a part.

On my paternal side, the men and women who pepper my history include an uncle who killed himself in the 70’s, most likely because he was gay. Can I allow my LBGT relatives to be forced back into some sort of secret room? No, I want them to continue marrying those they love, and raising children to be respectful of the rights of all, including those who would have them disappear from view.

I can’t pick one of the branches on this multi-crowned family tree and say it doesn’t deserve to be covered by our flag and our Constitution. My urban gay cousins are no less sewn into the Stars and Bars than my conservative, white, God-fearing cousins in the midwest. I have a Japanese aunt; I have Asian cousins. I have Latino cousins, I have black cousins.

This isn’t me reaching for some symbolic trope; this is actually my family. And since it’s not possible that my very American family is an anomaly, it’s your family too.

Three days ago, I bought a pantsuit at Goodwill for 17 bucks so that I could honor casting my vote for a qualified candidate—who happened to be female. I wore lipstick, a combo of red, white and blue, and cast my ballot even though I could have mailed it in.

My patriotism is stronger than it has ever been.

Posted in Politics | Tagged election, Flag, grab him by the ballot, never trump, patriotism, pussy votes back, quenby moone | Leave a comment

The Democrats Can’t Win If They Won’t Fight

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Sean Murphy

i. The Day After the Day After

ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THE hand-wringing and recriminations. The only time Democrats love firearms is when they enter a circular firing squad. The only time they embrace religion is when they reenact the Stations of the Cross.

Fuck that shit. Not me, not this time.

I mean, don’t misunderstand: there’s tons of blame to go around, and I dread the impending days (months? years?) of analysis, self-pity and castigation as part of the psychoanalysis liberals engage in after every excruciating setback. Since this latest one is the worst kind imaginable, it’s no surprise the predictable sites are piling up with the predictable screeds. You know, if only we tried harder to engage with good old country folk who just want to get their racist on, we’d…what, exactly? Understand their rage? Reconcile? Get them to consider voting for a Democrat?

Please give me the largest possible break, and super-size it.

First and foremost, the big lesson to be learned here is not that Hillary (or any of us) were deluded or nonchalant. I think, misleading polls aside, the reason victory seemed imminent was not because of Democratic overconfidence, but rather a genuine faith in the collective wisdom of the American people. Hillary Clinton, for all her faults (the handful of genuine ones and the myriad manufactured ones), had every reason to believe there was no way enough people—whatever their racial, misogynistic or authoritarian hang-ups might be—could pull the lever for the most spectacularly ill-suited know-nothing to con his way into contention.

And so, shame on all of us, myself very much included, for not doing more to scare the bejesus out of anyone willing to listen about what true monsters Mike Pence and Paul Ryan are. Maybe, and I know I’m going out on a limb here, it may have been useful for Team Pantsuit to make a slightly bigger thing out of Pence’s record, (still and for now) freely available online. And double-fuck the MSM for giving Hillary’s emails approximately one million times the attention they paid to Pence’s role in legislation that obliges aborted or miscarried fetuses to be either cremated or buried. The revolution, it turns out, was televised. At once explanation and epitaph, the soulless Les Moonves predicted the (final?) nail in the coffin of America’s Empire, in February of this year: “For us, economically, Donald’s place in this election is a good thing. It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. The money’s rolling in….This is fun.”

With enemies like that, why would Donald Trump need friends?

As for the execrable Ryan, can someone help me understand why (how) he’d already be calling his shot on privatizing (eradicating) Medicare before Trump is even fucking inaugurated? I know these true believers have perpetual hard-ons for all things privatization, but don’t they know this is a non-starter with seniors? Or are they sufficiently cynical and cocky to think being able to tie plundering Medicare with repealing Obamacare (you can practically envision Ryan’s crocodile tears as he solemnly announces that as much as it pains him to do this…) will give them sufficient cover? I’ll concede we liberals have turned the Chicken Little act into performance art, but once we start talking about necessary (and popular!) programs getting gutted before anyone wakes up, shit has officially gotten way too real.

Listen, I expect (and look forward to) the inevitable blowback from the diehards who’ll abandon Trump once beautiful walls aren’t built, millions of men and women aren’t magically deported, and draining the so-called swamp means infesting it with the worst sorts of insider reptiles, etc. And I’ll relish the shit show of that shit stain Reince Priebus having to lock horns each day with Bannon (and Trump)…but I guess I hoped the GOP doesn’t literally bring us back to 1898 before there’s some (thanks again, MSM!!) intelligent and organized resistance.

ii. Those who cannot remember the past…

To understand where we are, it’s imperative to review where we’ve been. In some ways, confronting the ways this is on us might prove the unkindest cut, but perhaps a full and tardy assessment will ensure we finally learn our lesson.

Certainly, it sucks to see a party whose signal accomplishment the last eight years was acting petulant and saying no like a paroxysm rendered Reductio ad absurdum, (and who all but ran in the opposite direction of the thug who hijacked their party) so smug and certain, all of a sudden. It’s not just that the Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, once again, but that this was at once predictable and preventable. My concern is—and has been for some time—the ways in which Democrats are congenitally incapable of articulating their achievements, and crafting a message that is either compelling or consistent. The shame of it is, all they have to do is tell the truth and it would set them free.

My biggest beef with Obama’s tenure (one that we’ll miss and appreciate with greater urgency in a couple of months) is, aside from his not being a more vocal and triumphant advocate about providing health care for millions of Americans, the once-in-a-generation opportunity he wasted in 2009. With a country still smoldering from the predictable catastrophe eight-plus years of free market fetishism wrought, the time was at last ripe to make a case why a no-tax/no-regulation-on-steroids approach never works. More, it was a historical occasion screaming for a straightforward yet forceful defense of Government-with-a-capital-G. This was a gift to grab from the despair: with things bottomed out due to unconstrained conservative rule, history practically pleaded with sensible leaders to reclaim the word and the concept, not to mention rebrand it.

It’s not so difficult to imagine, and this stuff practically writes itself. One speech, early in ’09, wherein Obama declared: “not only am I going to fund these projects, no American who wants to work will go without on my watch. I’m going to spend this money, because it is an investment on people, and you will be able to measure the results immediately. This is a mission on behalf of our well-being, and if you want to judge me in four years, I will take those odds. And if I’m wrong, the worst case scenario will be an early retirement where I can drive across this great nation over new roads and rebuilt bridges, and take advantage of the radically improved infrastructure that these projects made possible. I’ll walk away from the Oval Office happy and proud, because I’ll know we made a difference, and that is what I was elected to do.”

(He also could, and should, have continually invoked FDR’s famous—and quite effective—“I welcome their hatred” mic drop.)

Obama was either too credulous or (worse) haughty to believe he actually needed to make a case, and be prepared for the full-scale war the GOP declared on him the second he was elected. (His refusal to bother himself getting involved in the health care brawls all summer of 2009 is the second largest blunder of his presidency: he not only allowed the malevolent Republicans to define the narrative (wrongly), he let the Tea Party lunatics get a foothold and, with the absence of any consistent, intelligible message, determine that opposing government—instead of the Masters of the Universe, and the Republicans who serve them—was the correct, patriotic thing to do. By the time he saw the grammatically-challenged writing on the signs, it was arguably too late. Meanwhile, against all probability, the masses with their pitchforks and flames, had—for lack of a tangible target for the ire—latched on to the Fox-spewed propaganda filling the inexplicable vacuum of what passes, these days, for political discourse. Put simply, the health insurance industry and the pols they have in their pockets are cartoon villains and the Democrats still were unable to game out an effective strategy to expose them as such.

Aside from Obama’s (take your pick) naïveté, arrogance or indifference, it shouldn’t have taken him well into his second term to think about messaging. Priority number one for Democrats, effective immediately, is not rolling in the hay with Br’er Redneck, but crafting a story that’s consistent and, as no less a salesman than Henry Kissinger once said, has the added advantage of being true. Any introductory class in marketing or communications (or English Literature for that matter) will emphasize the importance of narrative; the necessity of telling the story you want to tell.

The reason this is crucial is because the Republicans already did it and, aside from a few hiccups and intrusions of reality, it’s worked swimmingly ever since. In an exploit that still resonates for its audacity, once upon a time Ronald Reagan drew a conservative line in the sand, assailing the presumption of government as a constructive agent, not by nitpicking but taking aim at its raison d’être. With a country still reeling from the apathy and cynicism of the post-Nixon nadir, he pre-empted that anger and uttered the immortal words: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And for the first time in half a century the Republicans steadily assumed control of a new storyline. It was simple as it was shameless; it was the most facile strategy fathomable, and the GOP finally had a patron saint to render it sacrosanct.

The Reagan Revolution built its momentum on a shameful vilification of America’s poor and lionized (some would say fetishized) the wealthiest percentile and transformed them into folk heroes. In less than two terms, Reaganomics and Wall Street vandalism laid waste to the working class and put us on a path where the richest of the rich were entitled, by Divine Right, to pay ever-smaller tax rates. Meanwhile, young pillagers in training, like Mitt Romney, perfected the business acumen of bankrupting companies for profit into a repugnant performance art. This reached its apotheosis when truth Trumped reality (in every sense of the word) and we ended up electing an actual Gordon Gekko, sans charisma and liquidity.

(That the media, and the Dems, got rolled so historically, by letting Trump get away without releasing his tax returns, is something we should neither forgive nor forget.)

Incidentally, and depressingly case in point: If Trump is smart, he’d insist he is going to repeal and replace Obamacare. The second he’s inaugurated, “replace” it with “TrumpCare” which is the exact same thing as Obamacare. All of his voters, and a vast majority of Republicans, will embrace it and love it. You own the narrative, you own reality.

iii. The Power of Political Narrative, Revisited

In a piece entitled The Power of Political Narrative, I wrote the following:

After the disgust and disbelief settles, one feels obliged to give props to the Republican ratfuckers. Over the last few decades while they have dabbled in the vicarious thrill of foreign occupations and the odious gutter-dwelling of racial and sexual identity politicking, the cretins behind the curtain have focused on some tactical battles in which they have more or less achieved their ends. This strategy has many moving parts, but can be boiled down to a series of inviolable commandments, the enforcement of which ensures that no one is ever off script. And make no mistake, this script is like religion—except belief is not optional.

The fifth, final and most audacious (of these commandments) involves the mantra that government does not work. It’s a neat trick in which, when Republicans take power, they spend their time ensuring this assertion is true, all while consistently expanding the size of government along with the size of the national debt. Then, like clockwork, once the people have finally seen enough, a Democrat comes in with the thankless task of cleaning up the mess, and the disloyal opposition becomes a cadre of small government deficit hawks. That this same farce was pulled off so spectacularly after our recent recession says as much, if not more, about the aforementioned media and the supine Democrats as it does about the unabashed GOP.

Of course, in Democrats’ defense, a reasonable person understands that actually attempting to govern is messy, difficult and frustrating. Particularly as our nation has become increasingly ignorant, self-absorbed and childish: we don’t want any government interference, we don’t want to pay taxes and we demand to see all of these pesky problems go away and take care of themselves. We have become a country of children who want to skip the main course and go directly to dessert, every meal, and then complain that we’ve gotten fat. And that in itself is a problem: it allows Republicans to continue to frame the idea of shared accountability and responsibility as an inherently negative or intrusive notion.

Back in 2014, as the Dems, running away from Obama’s accomplishments (obviously) and downplaying the demonstrable good Obamacare had already done (naturally), I wrote the following:

During the Tea Party shenanigans in ’09, I kept asking myself: when is Obama going to start reminding everyone that this Big Bad Government has historically been the bulwark between our people and an Industrial Revolution lifestyle? Does it need to get to the point where the Republican Party literally says “let them eat cake” before people start to realize wages are stagnating, prices are rising and the only people getting fat are the wealthiest one percent? Apparently it does.

Which brings us to today.

The Republicans have won a huge battle, to be certain. But there’s a larger war to be fought, on both literal and figurative levels. In terms of the former: life goes on; we live to fight another day, another cycle, another generation (You know, “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”). With regards to the latter: there’s a longer game the Republicans would like to win, and that involves impeding a progressive alternative by any means necessary. This is why you have to choose sides. This is why you can ill afford to let current circumstances lull you into a state of impotent rage or, worse, apathy. Because aside from the ceaseless corporate welfare they’ll fight for, their ultimate ambition is to render the actually literate and sentient amongst us fed up and indifferent. Without awareness, and with no resistance, they can more easily continue their unchecked assault on our collective well-being.

Get angry. Get involved. Do what you have to do.

Posted in Politics | Tagged 2016, Clinton, democrats, FDR, hillary, Mike Pence, Narrative, Obama, Obamacare, Pantsuit Nation, Paul Ryan, politics, Reagan, Reince Priebus, Republicans, Stephen Bannon, The Power of Political Narrative, Trump | 7 Comments

Electric Nightmare

Posted on November 13, 2016 by Hank Cherry

On election day I hung around my polling precinct interviewing and photographing voters for work. The day after the election, another editor urged me to hit the streets and do the same thing. Where people had been cautiously ebullient on the 8th, by mid-afternoon on the 9th, an oppressive heat clogged Southern California’s collective mind and it furrowed all of our brows. We voted for someone else.

That night, sirens overran the neighborhood as police fought to keep more protesters from entering the 101 Freeway in Hollywood as they’d done successfully in downtown Los Angeles. The night overflowed with helicopters, their urgent thrum punctuating an already electric nightmare.

Earlier in the day, worried parents flooded social media with the same question; how do you talk to your kids about Trump? By nightfall, the discordance of police vehicles rushing from one part of the city to the next added a hysteric undercurrent to the day’s funereal tenor. On Saturday, the next wave of protests shut down Wilshire Boulevard, to the repeated chants of Not My President.

It wasn’t just Los Angeles. New York was protesting. Baltimore and Louisville and Chicago had protests. A friend in Portland, Oregon reminded the lot of us that Reagan and Bush Secret Service members referred to that town as Little Beirut, and Little Beirut is back. Everything is a question. Nothing is an answer. But when the group of students called out to the protesters, BLACK LIVES MATTER, it was heartbreakingly clear. We have to find a better answer.

Hank Cherry

Posted in Sunday Light and Word | Tagged black lives matter, Blue States, Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump is President. Clinton Lost, Election Protests, Electric Nightmare, Hank Cherry, Henry Cherry, How Did This Happen?, Los Angeles Protests, Mass Hysteria, Mike Pence, November 2016 Protests, presidential election, Red States, Social Justice, Southern California, Sunday Light and Word, Trump, Trump Beat Clinton, Trump Fiasco, Trump is President | Leave a comment

DIE CAPITALISMOS DIE

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Danbert Nobacon

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”

The Outline of History — HG WELLS

The essay below was written in the beginning of September 2016 (the only detail I added later being the response of Julian Assange to the accusation that the Wiki-Leaks came from Russia). It does intuit that because Hilary is so truly establishment, and because the DNC establishment pulled out all the stops to have her win the primary that a grave miscalculation could be in the making, though many of us, myself included, never believed Trump could actually win on his agenda.

Easy to say now (though many of us said it back when Bernie was winning primaries) Bernie was significantly more likely to beat Trump than Hilary. Perhaps Bernie will now give guidance to an ideologically bankrupt Democratic party?

Meanwhile, the gloves are off and no mistake … if Trump and the billionaire paid for Republican controlled Congress are true to their climate-change-denying words, then we are at war for the sake of the planet and future generations. Trump’s predator-capital-drill-baby-drill ethos, will make a lot of enemies of his own supporters when he tries to green-light pipelines through their backyards. Trump’s denial of fact based science will make the US a laughing stock around the world, so world step up with us to diminish the undue and undemocratic influence that US power has on world affairs. And Trump’s misogyny, racism and xenophobia will bring a whole new era of culture wars the idiot billionaire has never even had the intelligence to even imagine.

Onward living, breathing free spirits of the planet earth, connected as we are by an atmosphere that Trump seems intent on continuing to poison.

APPLYING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

CAPITALISMOS … the capitalist universe … predator capitalism … that currently manifests itself as the neo-liberal economic experiment that has been tried and tested in practice over the past forty years and has clearly been revealed to be demonstrably failing most of us. We see it on a daily basis in our struggle to make ends meet and do more with less. There is no trickle down and there are only bombs falling from the sky on those who are used as an excuse for the perpetual war machine to perpetuate itself and there is only a vast vertical tsunami spiral of wealth being transferred upwards.

The failure of what we will call this ‘neo-liberal economic project’ (aka neo-conservative aka free trade fundamentalist economic world order) is writ large in the spiraling greenhouse gas emissions and the consequent proliferating climate crises which can be plotted on graphs. In my own locality in the fact that greenhouse gas emissions have made the wildfire season in the Eastern Washington on average 70 days longer than it was a mere forty years ago, and in two out of the last three years we have experienced devastating wild fires, one of which was stone’s throw from my home.

We see the abject failure of the project in the escalating and scientifically measurable wealth of the obscenely rich. Being generous let’s say that Rex Tillerson, the CEO of the Exxon Mobil, works a sixty hour week. He earns in excess of $40 million a year before tax (if he indeed pays any tax) and he literally makes minimum wage in the time it takes to say “minimum wage” (… beat) and again (… beat) and again … ad infinitum.

In scientific terms the experiment has been repeated over and over again over forty years and its theoretical basis—endless economic growth— is a proven false positive, for it ignores the fact that the earth is a finite planet with finite resources. Any sane person would cancel the experiment … kill the ideology …

(singing)

♬ Die-die-die-die-die-die-die-die! Die Capitalismos die! ♬

DEMOCRACY ^TMBRAND … MAKING AMERICA A JOKE AGAIN

We are a curious species, in that our greatest quality—a brain capable of imagination and empathy—can be so easily deluded into sanctioning the unsanctionable. At least four million years in the evolutionary making our sapiens’ brain is the most advanced thinking machine in the known universe. All of our art, our culture, our science and all our knowledge spring from this font, so, you may ask, why is there such a dumb shit-show of a pantomime going on parading as the so-called democratic election of the next corporate-appointed “leader of the free world ^TM“.

Why would anyone in their right mind choose a country where the cops regularly shoot-to-kill in the first instance—if the ‘suspect is black, even when they are not really even an actual suspect, but are perhaps merely shuffling in their seat to find their drivers license, or if they happen to be an autistic guy involuntarily convulsing—and ask questions later?

Who would see leadership qualities in a nation where the fundamentalist dictum of having the right to bear arms reigns so supreme that civilians are regularly gunned down by the mentally unstable and the POTUS (despite his professed best intentions) is absolutely powerless to stop this near daily carnage?

How can we believe the lawyerly aspirations of the same President who sits down each week to approve a kill-list of suspected terrorists, and then dispatches the full technological might of the most insanely over-armed military the planet has ever seen to assassinate them, knowing full well more civilians than suspected terrorists will be killed in the cross-fire?

The glib answers to such questions from the corridors of power—like Madeleine Albright’s answer when asked about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of US-led sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s— reads along the lines of “I think this is a very hard choice. We think … we think the price is worth it.”

Worth it for whom? The short answer being, it is worth it for the supreme beneficiaries of the neo-liberal project who have run the planet for the at least the past forty years and in so doing are running said planet into the ground. In contemporary vernacular it is worth if for the 1% and their lackeys.

In other words it is worth it for our power-mongers to fight a perpetual propaganda war pushing mythologies about freedom and democracy around the world, whilst simultaneously maintaining, expanding and dissimulating their program of endless economic growth, which importunes the regular sowing of carnage and imposition of war anywhere on the planet when local conditions, at home or abroad, demand the leadership qualities of the United States. In actuality there is nothing less democratic and free than being randomly killed by a bomb falling from the sky.

As evidence of how ineffectual POTUS can be in facing down the demands of the neo-liberal economic project we need look no further than Obama and the seemingly innocuous issue of labeling Genetically Modified food. Not only has Obama failed on his promise of eight years ago to make GM labeling mandatory, whilst we were all summer vacationing last month he signed S. 764, the so-called Dark Act into law, effective immediately, not least over ruling Vermont’s historic voter supported GM labeling law.

In deference to the neo-liberal power mongers at one fell swoop Obama, if successful, will undermine all the piecemeal efforts he has made to reel in the fossil fuel companies in the lame duck session after the election in an attempt to force his Trans Pacific Partnership ‘trade deal’ through Congress. The TPP as well as continuing the grand neo-liberal tradition of outsourcing American jobs, will give corporations carte blanche to get dirty fossil fuel—which needs to stay in the ground if we are to survive as a species—out of the ground and drive it through sacred native lands, across pristine endangered species habitats, and through your home if it stands in the the way of of their railroads, pipelines and coastal terminals (not least in Washington state where I live) to ship it to the Pacific Rim countries for very short sighted profit.

Note: Hilary Clinton initially voted for the TPP and only jumped ship when Bernie Sanders was inflicting a string of primary defeats against her. Her VP choice voted for it, and we know that in her neo-liberal heart she hopes it goes through without her having to dirty her hands with it.

In a world where every living being is linked by a rapidly corporate-managed deteriorating atmosphere we all have a stake, and contrary to the myth the United States upholds about itself: that it remains the essence of Government of the People, by the People, for the People, most people outside of the US, and many people within it, really do not think it capable of leading anyone. Peel back the shiny wrapper and we have the worst kind a leader imaginable: a brute bully, an oligarch and a psychopathic warmonger, but NOT I hasten to add, a natural born killer.

The current globally ruling dogma of the neo-liberal economic project perpetuates the long held, but quite false myth, that aggressive predatory competition is the defining characteristic of human nature. In actual fact, and contrary to centuries of propaganda otherwise, the human condition does not spill from the womb, imprinted with bellicosity. Rather premeditated killers are overwhelmingly made by training whether it comes in the form of abuse by those who themselves were abused, or in the form of religious, political and military instruction on how to kill fellow humans.

To my knowledge in my fifty something years, I know or have met only a handful of people who have deliberately killed people, being made up of war veterans and one psychopath who remains in jail for beating his mother to death. By a huge margin it is safe to say that most of us have not killed another human being. The evidence for this is not merely anecdotal, and would be very easy to prove empirically, that this it is how we homo sapiens are in our natural state: very social, often charitable and mostly peaceful.

How many of us wake up and think ‘oh I’ll go kill my neighbor today,’ and then actually act on the thought … for the hell of it, ‘cos he’s an asshole’ or maybe cos we just don’t like the kind of shirts he wears? Maybe he is an asshole but most of us don’t go around and murder him, but our government does this shit on a daily basis, to some of our neighbors’ citizens wherever they may reside on the planet.

Hopefully—real hope and not Obama brand Hope^TM—in the footsteps of HG Wells and every true artist who ever lived, we can take some solace in the fact that in parallel with the past forty years of the neo-liberal sown disaster and killing to keep the corporate world in the driving seat, there has been an unprecedented revolution in scientific knowledge about our own human origins and our actual human nature.

THE MAKING OF OUR VERY HUMAN BRAINS

To over-simplify and cut a very long story short … somewhere between four and seven million years ago our ancestors,’ perhaps forced by climate changes to scope out new habitats for food, found advantage in walking on two legs, and evolution began to sow skeletal changes that made this adaptation permanent and increasingly efficient. Part of the new diet our ancestors found comprised of sucking the marrow from the bones of carcasses discarded by other predators, and over time we began using rocks as tools to more easily harvest the bone marrow. Such high quality protein aided brain growth and at some point one of our ancestors stumbled upon cooked meat, fried by a lightning induced wild fire, and some even brighter sparks had the imagination and experimental capacity to realize that by taking a burning branch or a glowing ember and blowing on it, fire could be effectively tamed as a source or warmth and as a means of cooking.

Over millions of years the feedback loop of more meat leading to bigger brains, leading to more inventive ways to find meat, propelled our ancestors increasingly towards an evolutionary bottleneck. Literally. The trade off for walking on two legs meant a narrower pelvis for females, triggering an adaptation for now bigger brained babies to be born earlier so they could fit through the ergonomically narrower birth canal, meaning that more and more brain and body growth began to occur after the baby was born. Babies born more physically helpless needed much more hands on care and attention to enable them to survive childhood so they could go on to have babies of their own, and thus promulgate our species.

Our survival thus depended on the provision of intensive childcare, requiring an attendant evolutionary growth spurt in what Boyd calls “the ability to form and maintain a flexible, multi-dimensional adaptive social network.” That is, to feed the group and defend the ‘nest’ (mobile encampment) in the wild (no longer in trees, but on the ground) our ancestors had to become much more social, and evolve a “fierce egalitarianism” in order to work well in groups of 50-150 band members to protect and nurture and their young. Our survival literally relied on each other. Under these constraints we were perhaps bound to develop the more subtle forms of communication that we recognize today as language, triggering even more brain power, which all goes into making us the most social species on the planet. Even armed with our post-modern cult of the individual none of us in the twenty first century would have make it beyond the first few days of life without being entirely dependent on the intensive help of our care-givers.

In this scenario, around a campfire, lies the cradle of what we understand today as all of human culture. From the very earliest sing-song, goo-goo-ga-ga two-way (and sometimes baby initiated) conversations between mother and newborn, to our most complex adult interactions. And the physical evidence is written on our bodies for all to see, in the unique and quite beautiful adaptation of our exposed eye-whites, priming us for necessarily drawing attention to each other through the eye-contact of social engagement. In contrast the more darker-pigmented or hidden sclera of all our mammalian cousins, indicates their survival relies more on the means of camouflage, whether as predator or prey, specifically not attracting each others’ attention

Just as most mammalian young hone their locomotion skills by endless physical play, we as human children need a complex range of social play behaviors, because our survival relies on us being able to read the intentions and motivations of other humans and communicate with them accordingly. Thus, the endless ‘conversation’ going on in our own heads incorporates an animal fight or flight simulator and the more human friend or foe calculator with which we navigate our social world. In other words we are always experimenting with our uniquely human capacity facility for empathy, to run the scenarios in our brain, to put our self in someone else’s shoes to gauge how we feel about some human action or person.

Today we have a highly sophisticated art form which is built on our empathetic nature that we call theatre. And reverse engineering why we have art in the first place there is indeed a growing body of scientific thought over the last forty years that believes art was, and remains, essential to human survival because if we are bereft of art we are bereft of empathy, our most vital human quality.

The intricate and multifarious imaginary somersaults that comprise the make-belief play behavior of six year olds, pits friends against monsters, magicians against maniacs and embroils the players in fantastical conflicts. And, most of us, even those who do not regard ourselves as at all artistic or creative, still engage in similar mind-bending feats of imagination when we are asleep dreaming.

We can clearly argue that fully operational physical play behaviors are essential to the survival of a particular species and I suggest the same holds true for humans developing social play behaviors and conversely that the frustration of those play behaviors as children and adults contributes greatly to social dysfunction. The psychopath is not someone who mis-uses imagination to come up with diabolical means of doing harm to another human being, he is someone who never developed the imagination to appreciate the difference between make-belief violence and actual violence, in most cases because actual violence was administered to him as a substitute for childhood play.

On a societal level, whilst defending the nest from predators and providing food and childcare for children were paramount concerns for our hunter-gatherer forebears, declaring war on other bands of proto humans was not a first resort. At a time when the total human population of the world was no bigger than Chicago is today, it was easier to migrate using our wonderfully adapted legs, and use or spectacularly adapted brains to eek the best food out of a new situation.

That is not to say violent conflict was totally absent from hunter gatherer culture, or that there were never any territorial fights when environmental conditions put the squeeze on, but rather that our so called propensity for war, as we understand it today, is a more modern cultural invention which has generally been forced upon us by our political masters in more hierarchical times. We can say with accuracy that hierarchical social structures first developed, in the wake of the human discovery and adoption of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago, when nomadism was rapidly superseded by a settled sedentary lifestyle. The tale of the fall of man told by The Book of Genesis is about-face, for the drastic change came not from man being expelled from the Garden of Eden but him being newly bound to it, i.e. before agriculture, which is most of human history, there really were no gardens.

Agriculture meant that for the first time our ancestors were able to amass surplus food, allowing bigger social groupings to exist beyond the 50-150 sized groups of hunter-gatherers that had existed for all prior human history. Food surpluses also enabled some people to specialize in certain tasks, resulting in social stratification and the emergence of a leadership class of kings and priests. Perhaps inevitably, when one settlement’s crops failed it sometimes became easier to go ransack some neighbors’ food store than survive a winter with no food. Perhaps in these struggles the beast that became Capitalismos with its exponentially increasing distances between rich and poor, first took root.

And yet even today most of us, for most of the time remain charitable to our fellow human beings in the twenty first century. Perhaps we volunteer at the High School, (not because the neo-liberal project with its insatiable appetite to transfer public funds away from the public, has made volunteering essential to a well functioning school, but) because it is the human thing to do, allo-parenting our children into young adulthood precisely because our deep evolutionary history makes us at least as much altruistic and co-operative as we are selfish.

Of course there are competing theories as to how and when all these evolutionary and cultural changes occurred and how they interacted to make us the human beings that we are, but we are here and they did happen. And, we can safely say that they bring us much closer to the truth of human origins than the version given by The Book of Genesis.

Moreover, the deep evolutionary history of our species plainly discredits Hobbes’ persistent characterization of the lives of the poor, and by (myopic) extension, our hunter gatherer forbears as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” living uncivilized and inherently violent lives in constant fear. Hobbes’ philosophical pronouncement on the human condition was based not upon any investigation of how our ancestors actually lived but rather on the misplaced assumption that human nature consisted of the worst of what he saw around him, living in poverty stricken, inner city slums of seventeenth century London and Paris.

We can, however be forgiven for thinking that Hobbes’ fictions still inform the mainstream discourse of political life here in the US in the twenty first century. Politics as portrayed by the corporate owned mass media has been reduced to ignorance-perpetuating sound-bites employing the short hand of stock images as a substitute for real imagination. It has become a tit for tat war of who can out-do whom in the stoking narratives of fear and railing on the manufactured anger points of ordinary Americans. It is a contest to see who can hit hardest with the full might of the American military machine when duty calls.

(See Obama’s last State of The Union speech anyone?)

(And I mean come fucking on … blaming the leak of DNC e-mails to WikiLeaks—documenting the DNC’s own wrongdoing—on the Russians, is a black op straight out of Hilary’s—let’s-put-Bernie-and-his-socialists back-in-the-fucking-dungeon-and-throw-away-the-key—’this is how I am going to govern’ Playbook.)

(N.B. HRC categorically stated that 17 US intelligence agencies concurred that Russia was behind these particular WikiLeaks … Julian Assange—one of a growing number of political prisoners isolated at the behest of the US—says that the leaks did not come from Russia and that WikiLeaks have in fact published tens of thousands of leaks highly critical of Russia, but as Hilary well knows, people will barely remember her bald faced lies when she is elected, let alone ask: Why the fuck does a country need 17 intelligence agencies?)

ELECTING THE NEXT PYSCHOPATH

At our current juncture, with what on many levels can accurately be described as governance by psychopathic tendencies, we see politicians who are only too eager to forfeit the problem solving powers of the human brain for a fundamentalist belief in the over-riding evil of human nature. Perhaps that is what they see in the mirror in the morning but their assumption that we are all cut from that same cultural cloth is false.

The pathological lies of our politicians, in service of their us and them crusades against evil are scientifically measurable. 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (2014 by Charles Lewis) takes its title from The Center for Public Integrity Report published as Iraq: The War Card, which found that in the two years after 9-11 and before the invasion of Iraq by playing on our instinctive ‘defend the nest’ sensibilities, that “George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq.” Ditto Tony “I will be with you whatever” Blair and his cabal of cronies.

There was a tsunami of corporate mainstream media egging our politicians on, to war on Iraq, and whilst a trickle of bad press followed in its wake, for the beneficiaries of the neo-liberal economic project the war was and remains a wildly successful disaster capitalist venture. In the first instance for western corporations profited hugely from the multi-billion dollar business of war; in the second instance it was boomtown as a money laundering operation, funneling US tax payers money, billed as Iraq reconstruction costs, to western conglomerates like Halliburton et al; and in third instance in a feedback loop, creating the hatred that fuelled the emergence of al Qaida in Iraq and ISIS, the perpetual war machine now has a whole new generation of enemies, to justify its future military overreach.

The problem with the US election is that—having done just enough to derail Bernie Sanders— a killer-in-chief for the neoliberal economic project will now win. Both candidates lack the imagination, as Obama did, to think outside of the maintenance, expansion and deployment of the US military machine. Since our past leaders laid the ghost of Vietnam to rest, the psychopathic demonstration of the lack of basic human empathy in the corridors of power is writ large … every time the duplicitously named smart bomb plows into an Afghan wedding party, or a drone attack levels a family house in Pakistan, because it is easier for the psychopaths to destroy than it is for them to create. And we know that both Trump and Clinton are just itching to get their hands on the button. And after a black suspect was assassinated in Dallas this past July with a police robot bomb, one wonders if we will see the use of drone attacks on US citizens on US soils during the next presidency?

I am a realist and I know Trump is the worst example of keeping us mired in struggles and culture wars we thought we had pretty much won, and having to refight these battles all over again would be a disastrous distraction, but I also know what Hilary Clinton represents. She is the embodiment of the neo-liberal economic project as her husband was before before her. And Clinton is already stacking her deck with neo-liberal fundamentalists, in her choice of running mate and her campaign staff, (which basically and arrogantly says ‘fuck-off-I-will-bury-you’, to everyone who supported Bernie) In truth the political establishment in waiting lacks any imagination to get beyond ‘more of the same’ policies, and Clinton clearly represents much ‘more of the same,’ in the service of obscene wealth.

USING OUR IMAGINATION AND EMPATHY

We are then faced with an existential struggle in which our fight or flight instincts will kick in, except on a finite planet up against endless economic growth there will soon be nowhere left to run. Blind to its own scientifically guaranteed self destruction, under Clinton or Trump the project draws us ever closer to the inevitable and myriad forms of societal collapse that are already happening for many of us on our shared planet. Depending on how bad or how terribly bad it gets, cultural, and possibly biological, evolution will kick in.

True to our actual human nature, people all over the world whose lives have been infected by the neo-liberal malaise, and who are tired of having their cooperative spirit hijacked by predator capital, are instinctively aching for a simpler, more community based, more sustainable way of living, and millions of local initiatives are testament to this.

Our empathy is as alive and well as it has ever been in our urges to feed and protect and nurture our children, and many of us are realizing that to be able to continue in that very human quest, nurturing will include contesting and overthrowing the neo-liberal ideology in the near future, even whilst being basically forced to vote for it in the near present.

It is going to get ugly but if we have faith in our basic humanity, and use our imagination and empathy and our human problem solving brain power we might be able to stop it getting very ugly.

Danbert Nobacon studied children’s play in college for two years in the 1990’s whilst moonlighting in the punk rock band Chumbawamba. He very recently performed on the Rock Against the TPP tour. He is currently teaching theatre in his local Junior High and High school. And, he is half way through recording an album entitled Stardust to Darwinstuff musically embodying some of the above themes, due for release in early 2017. He would like to wholeheartedly thank all at the staff The Weeklings for airing dissenting voices over the past four years.

Posted in Current Events, Politics | Tagged Albright, Blair, Capitalismos, Clinton, DNC, empathy, Hilary, neo-liberal, Obama, TPP, Trump | 2 Comments

25 Ways Hillary Can Fix America By Wednesday

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Sean Beaudoin

After Hillary wins big she can cement her legacy as the Greatest President Ever, over the course of next 48 hours, by instituting these simple bi-partisan reforms.

1. Reinstate the Draft—Immediately enact national service upon high school graduation or turning eighteen. Young people will be given a choice of two years community/social work with a stipend, or eighteen months at full pay in a branch of the military. Community positions include working in schools, hospitals, prisons, infrastructure upkeep, green energy initiatives, and supporting low-income communities so that millennial entitlement gets its first bracing slap of citizenship and community. Also, research will begin immediately on transitioning to an All-Gay Military. Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell will become Please Ask/Crow Loudly. Hey, straights had their chance to be the world’s policeman for a hundred years and the results are mixed. Besides, the two most formidable generals in history, Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great, were both gay. And Hannibal is said to have been bi-curious while leading the elephants through the Alps. So now it’s time to give our LGBT brothers and sisters an opportunity to soldier with pride, élan, and a new appreciation for how the rest of the world feels about being bullied by a grinning jock with nukes.

2. Tax All Churches Immediately—No more reserved church parking spots. No more exemptions from property taxes. Or state taxes. Or capital gains. Only expenditures that can be proven to be truly charitable will be exempt. Otherwise, churches have to cough it up just like the rest of us. The free ride collection plate for Creflo Dollar to get himself a Lear Jet is officially over. Did you know that under the Parsonage Exemption any pastor’s home is considered part of the church, and so is also tax exempt? This rule mainly exists because prior to the metastization of broadcasting and evangelism, most pastors lived in a small room in the back of the church. Hey, have you ever seen Joel Osteen’s house?

11 million dollar home bought from donations, mainly from the poor. Pays zero yearly taxes.

The product of 11 million dollars worth of donations, mainly from the poor. Pays zero yearly taxes. Takes an additional write-off for conducting baptisms in the pool. 100% Christ-approved.

3. Declare Death to Apology Culture—A tedious shuffle to the podium seems to take place almost every day, in which an athlete or singer or reality star who did not successfully disguise a flash of prejudice of the sort that we all silently experience now and again is forced to make the perp walk by jeering internet scolds. The Very Bad Person then hits the late night talk shows and makes a self-deprecating joke or two before looking right into the camera to re-assure the masses of their purity of thought. After the commercial break, they assuage us with a few more platitudes and then, hopefully, tears. The intimation is that it’s somehow preferable to turn everyone into fearful, expert bullshitters who never reveal their biases, even in moments of stress or intoxication, than to allow them to say what they really feel. In a truly open society possible offenses can be risked and examined, instead of shoveled under some publicist’s carefully worded statement. A culture ruled by self-censorship and fear is a dying culture. Silencing as a critique of language ultimately entrenches regressive thought. Tolerance, justice, and equality are inexorable. Forced apologies and meticulously banal speech are worthless blinds that keep us from learning and evolving. It’s time to legislate the freedom to be stupid in public again, since open intellectual exchange is ultimately the only thing of value we possess.

4. Cell Phone Self-Immolation Lottery – Sure, the Samsung 7 keeps catching fire, grounding planes, singeing hipsters, and creating safety hazards worldwide. For some reason people seem to think this is a bad thing. Why not make it mandatory? From now on all manufacturers will be forced to install a small incendiary device in every 20th unit, a series of algorithms making it more likely to ignite if the phone is used in cafes, restaurants, or movie theaters. Also, a VU meter will trigger mini-conflagrations if voice decibel levels exceed a respectful whisper. Further, walking slowly/erratically while staring at a screen and holding up those behind you will cause white-hot flames to jet from the keyboard and roast fingertips like paprika-dusted kabobs. Sure, it’ll cause plummeting sales and drastic usage reductions, thereby depriving the world of clever tweets and endless poop emojis, but somehow we will soldier on.

5. Elevate Sports Czar to Cabinet Level—Pay all college athletes a regular salary. Take a percentage of shirts, hats, mugs, and other merchandise and invest it in a health insurance fund for all athletes for life. Outlaw the Washington Redskins’ logo, demand it be changed to Washington Gerrymanderers. Outlaw the Cleveland Indians’ logo, demand it be changed to Cleveland River Fires. Legalize HGH for rehab purposes. Cap pro sports salaries at 40x average fan salary divided by seat price + .9 % of owner’s Bahamian offshore account. Zero public funding for stadiums. Immediately return an NBA franchise to Seattle. No more designated hitter. Make NFL refs full-time employees. Reduce NBA season to 60 games, every team plays each other twice, once at home and once on the road. Pete Rose in Hall of Fame, gets special “Ten dimes on my team minus the points” wing. Reduce MLB season to 140 games. Discontinue NFL preseason entirely. No local areas TV blackouts. No Cialis commercials. Limit illegal blocking penalties to 88% of kicking plays. Roger Goodell retires to manage local Applebee’s, Tom Brady next commissioner. Permanently shutter the following teams: Charlotte Bobcats, Nashville Predators, Houston Texans, Tennessee Titans, Columbus Blue Jackets, Anaheim Angels, Jacksonville Jaguars, Sacramento Kings, Oklahoma City Thunder, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Tampa Bay Rays. Redistribute their players throughout respective leagues by supplemental draft. Outlaw Joe Buck. Force Curt Schilling to read three books. Ban commercial breaks before/after kickoffs. Limit NBA teams to four timeouts per game, period. Link NFL ownership/front office minority representation to a formula that reflects minority breakdown of players. And pardon Steve Bartman already, for god’s sake. Has there ever been a more heroic figure in the history of sports? The guy has been shit on by an entire city for a decade for the crime of catching a ball that twenty other people were reaching madly for. He didn’t argue, didn’t cash in, could easily have landed a slot on Celebrity Rehab or Card Sharks. Instead, the guy just kept his mouth shut and went on with his life. He should throw out the first pitch of the first Cubs game next year, officially and karmically forgiven.

Explain the difference.

6. Rescind Internet Anonymity—If a combination of free speech and an open society entitles writers and pundits to (mostly) say whatever they want in print or on television, it logically follows that random sociopaths, thirteen-year-old boys, and random sociopathic thirteen-year-old boys should be able to say (everything) they want on the internet. But is it really in their long-term interest? Or the interest of overall social progress? Do providers like Twitter and Reddit have a responsibility for curbing the worst excesses of their users, or are they taking a brave (profitable) stance by not getting involved? It’s likely that many of the present elements of both trolling and digital hyper-correctness will fail to be relevant and simply disappear once the next generation becomes so digitally isolated that the policing of opinion no longer matters. Soon apps like WinstonSmithMe and DworkinYou will automatically filter and eliminate content users don’t already 100% embrace, whether reading Salon or Drudge Report or Ulysses. In the meantime, the Clinton administration will pass a No Dick-Pic, Hitler Reference, or Ugly Slur Left Behind law, forcing anyone with an IP address to stand behind their words and opinions. You will no longer be able to connect to the internet without a verified identity. The hate can continue to flow in all its uncensored and cathartic glory, but InsideJob24 and DeplorableMike and PronounPolicewoman12 will have to own it. No more hiding.

You know nothing about the Silver Surfer!

You know less than nothing about Silver Surfer, asshole!

7. Gun Licensing—Strict ownership laws and make/model bans are politically impractical. There are more than 300 million guns in America, and they will never all be confiscated, outlawed, or reclaimed as part of a buyback program. It may be time to admit that they are here to stay. In exchange, the gun lobby should be forced to admit that their weapons protect exactly no one from tyranny. No matter how well-armed you are, or how many weekends your militia trains, the government can take whatever it wants from you, whenever it wants to. Tyranny is a part of every single facet of all of our lives and no cache of semi-autos means you are any less powerless. So it’s time to get pragmatic and adopt the Car Ownership Model. From now on, to buy a gun you have to: 1. Undergo a rigorous criminal/mental heath background check, 2. Receive thorough training on usage, care, and safe storage, 3. Buy insurance for mishandling, injury, or crimes committed while using, and 4. Apply for a license that has to be renewed every three years, to be carried on your person whenever in possession a weapon. In addition, Open Carry is now closed, everywhere and forever.

8. End Political Hero Culture —Look, being president is impossible. It was impossible for Thomas Jefferson, it was impossible for George W. Bush, and there is no way Barack Obama could have ever lived up to the expectations we emotionally grafted unto him. Our leaders fail a healthy percentage of us, all the time, on every conceivable policy and issue. Yet we continue to hold unrealistic if not childish beliefs about what the next person in line can magically accomplish. If a) every lobbyist was kicked out of Washington today, b) filibusters were severely limited, c) majority rule was re-embraced, d) election cycles were shortened to four months, e) corporate political donations were outlawed, f) FOX News was shuttered and burned in an empty field like a burlap sack full of shit, g) rote obstinacy was de-incentivized by voting out people who refuse to compromise, and h) real campaign spending limits were firmly established–then and only then could we hold our presidents culpable for the major issues that plague us. Thomas Jefferson failed to scuttle the Bill for Indian Removal, George W. Bush played golf while Katrina raged, and Obama’s Justice Department has yet to prosecute a single bank CEO or mortgage lending company for the economic collapse of 2008. It takes a full 18 months for any new president to even figure out how to deal with congress and foreign leaders and the pentagon and the press. Then they have six months to accomplish something before two years on the road campaigning for an additional term. Heroic Rule is a fantasy that denies the limits of power, and the inevitability of even the most promising candidate being deflowered by the ugliness of actual rule.

If only I’d been smarter.

9. Just Quarters—The Mint/Treasury will immediately buy back every penny nickel and dime in America. Nothing will ever cost $19.99 or $123.26 + tax ever again. All costs will come in increments of 25, 50, 75 or 00. That’s it. No more pockets full of useless change, no more fumbling at the cash register, no more jamming the condom machine with buffalo heads. The hoard of Worthless Coins will be stacked into forges, melted, and then shaped into a massive sculpture of Jeff Koons, before being sunk off the coast of Australia to replace the now-dead Great Barrier Reef.

10. Declare Evolution Officially Proven—Ever been on a cobblestone street somewhere, maybe looking down upon a Mayan ruin or Aegean column, and suddenly realize you’re ashamed to flash your passport because it’s abundantly clear the entire world thinks America is crammed to the rim with evolution deniers, like a tube sock full of butterscotch pudding, and that you’re probably one of them? Is it really possible in 2016, amidst the decoding of the pig genome, that a man who proudly dismisses evolution has an even Alf Landon-ish chance of (Mike Pence) being elected Vice President? After six months in office, when Trump unexpectedly quits out of sheer boredom + encroaching neurosyphilis and Mike Pence takes over, we will have to cease all travel due to the exhaustion of explaining in every Parisian café and Tokyo whisky bar that, yes, our leader thinks the Burgess Shale Formation is a plot thought up by Saul Alinsky. To this end, new Save Face Abroad/Please Don’t Spit in My Dim Sum legislation will now make it perfectly legal, when someone says “Evolution is just a theory,” to hit them over the head with a wooden mallet. Hey, 6000 years ago, right after the world was formed, our ancestors “debated” using Flintstone clubs and sharpened pachyderm ribs. If it was good enough for Ogg and Urk on the ancient tundra, it’s good enough for us now.

Only a benevolent, all-powerful, omni-present force with a beard could have designed this.

Only an all-powerful, omniscient force high on frankincense and decked out in multi-colored dreamcoat could have designed this.

11. Prepare For The Revolution—The combined wealth of all the millionaires in the US is $38.6 trillion dollars, almost triple our deficit. One sixth of this money is hidden in tax-free offshore accounts. This number is expected to double in the next ten years. The top 1 percent of the US controls more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth, a figure that now exceeds even the pre-Depression Carnegie baronet/industrialist era. The top tier is not just obscenely well-off, their unprecedented level of wealth and leverage goes beyond the ability to influence legislation, it dictates legislation. Anyone wondering why the Republican party risked defaulting on the nation’s loans in order to protect the 15% tax bracket must now come to terms with the fact that it has nothing to do with policy of any kind, conservative or otherwise, and everything to do with being wholly owned by the financial services and banking industries. Which should terrify you no matter where you stand on stem cells or teacher’s unions. The American economy has become increasingly dependent since the Reagan administration on the success and support of these industries, although they produce nothing tangible. We escaped the Hanoverian dynasty by leaving England and sailing to America to foment a revolution–the only revolution in the history of man that was actually successful in the long term–and yet two hundred years later we have allowed a monarchy to reestablish itself. America is now ruled by kings, a royal class of Cash Money whose succession is ensured by a belief among the serfs that with the right luck, either the lottery or coding a killer app, they too can one day join the empurpled rich. But eventually all empires collapse. Royals have their throats slit, proles slam tankards of grog while singing about worker’s rights, and lavendered bodies are dragged through the streets. Sure, it’s all hyperbole–until you wake up with the gardener squatting on your chest, about to wipe his ass with your Tag Heuer. All good things come to an end, even after centuries of buying the courts, the guns, the police, the lobbyists, the congress, the media, the army, the judiciary, the best drugs, and three-fifths of any given presidency. So, the 28th Amendment will now stipulate that it’s fine to be wealthy, even ostentatious, as long as you pay your full tax amount without any write-offs or loopholes, since paying taxes is not only patriotic, it allows for an infrastructure of the sort that most of rest of the world goes without, and institutions which keep the less-fortunate from rising up en masse with machetes, storming the topiary, and dragging the 1% to guillotines assembled in Whole Foods parking lots every twelve years.

12. Replace Easter with John Coltrane Day—No candy, no bunnies. Everyone under twelve gets a free saxophone. Cellphones go dark for 24 hours. Families assemble on their front lawns, clap simple polyrhythms, get deeply modal, and hum the melody to “A Love Supreme” over and over until dawn.

The Bible in B-Flat.

13. Representative Government 2.0—Remove super majority and pocket veto for judicial, court, and cabinet confirmations. Declare zero voting restrictions and strike down all voter ID laws. Form bipartisan committee to enact immediate nationwide redistricting. Make Gerrrymander an anachronism. Restrict all administration figures from accepting lobbyist jobs for the entirety of the following administration. Change senate rules about population/representation – California has the same number of senators for 30 million people as Wyoming does for 200,o00. Pass immediate and massive increase in funding for the Arts. Limit campaign donations to $1000 per person. Ban candidates from taking money from any company who spent more than fifty-thousand dollars on donations in the previous election. Establish real-time reporting of online contributions. Shutter all PACS and SuperPACS. Limit fundraising calls to one hour per week. Eliminate both party conventions. Change congressional motto to: Is it more important to be a good campaigner or a good legislator? Eliminate every facet of running for political office that does not adequately answer that question.

14. Nationalize Cable, $50 Flat Monthly Rate For Everything– Fuck Comcast.

15. Make Hatred of the Government Seem Even Dumber Than It Already Is—Unless you’re an 1880s anarchist bomber with a waxed mustache, or Ernst Blofeld’s estranged grandson, railing against the Feds is the single dumbest form of protest there is. Fomenting populist anger against immovable institutions is the oldest ploy in the book, a calculated distraction from the fact that all forms of governance are ultimately ineffectual, unjust, and non-representative. Regardless of your personal politics, there is no monarchy, matriarchy, oligarchy, junta, plutocracy, dictatorship, theocracy, feudal system, collectivist farm, socialist experiment, utopian colony, or anarcho-syndicalist alternative that will ever address your concerns. Hating the government is like hating your neighbor’s oxygen. Railing about tyranny while knocking back a pint of Merlot and calling for revolution may have had some traction back in the fife-and-musket days, but it’s a purely masturbatory exercise now. Those who most stridently cry for smaller government, entitlement cuts, and overall self-reliance tend to air their grievances about what government isn’t the loudest. It’s pure narcissism to delegitimize institutions that you continue to benefit from, and refuse to compromise when compromise is the only way that government functions. Like Wells Fargo and J.P Morgan, America is too large to fail, which only guarantees that it will always fail to address a large percentage of its citizen’s needs. Totally victory does not exist, yet one party refuses to accept anything less. They fawn over the brilliance of the Founding Fathers while subverting their intent whenever convenient. Unlike a shiny new law or the nomination of a preferred supreme court justice, embracing Pure Governmental Indifference will instantly make your life 66% better. Get a dog. Work on your car. Learn to make artisinal cheddar in the garage. Buy a ukulele, volunteer at the children’s hospital, start writing letters by hand. You’ll be dead soon, just like everyone else, and no matter how many quarts of spleen you vented over the years, absolutely nothing will have changed. But if you really, really need to hate, go after something accessible. Like gun lobbyists, mortgage lenders, random people named Newt, health insurance CEOs, fantasy football, pharmaceutical reps, vote suppressors, retro jug bands, people who overuse the word ‘fascist’, plastic surgeons, Dennis Miller, Escalades, and/or factory farms.

16. Change The Primary Order—Iowa is a small, almost entirely white evangelical state that Mike Huckabee won in 2008 and Rick Santorum won in 2012. Did all the massive national hype for those votes matter? Santorum won Iowa with less than 30,ooo votes, which means he took a crucial battleground state in an election that could have changed the course of America with roughly the same number of people who bought a ticket to see Flo Rida at the Des Moines Enormodome. In any given election only 1 in 4 registered Republicans in Iowa actually show up at the polls, apparently because they know how meaningless it is too. The only presidential candidates Iowans have picked correctly in the last fifty years were both George Bushes. Starting on Wednesday, the state primary order will be rotated every four years, with names pulled out of a sombrero during halftime of the Super Bowl.

Chuck Norris was right about Huckabee in Iowa too. If Walker says it, you better believe.

Chuck Norris was right about Huckabee in Iowa too. If Walker says it, you best believe, partner. Chuck also said if Obama was re-elected there would be “a thousand years of darkness.” Which, yeah, didn’t really happen. Maybe he meant “a thousand years of poorly-fitting, off-brand khakis.”

17. No More Abortion Debate—Fine, we’ll ban it. But first, every single evangelist, placard-waver, family values maven, reckless barebacker, and angry pro-life mom in America has to adopt at least two (2) children each. No exceptions. When there’s not a single child in any orphanage, juvenile detention center, or foster home across the country, the Pope will be sent a fruit basket and legislative wheels will begin to turn. In the meantime, while the senate passes No Child Left Behind II: There’s Still Space For Another Cot In Your Rec Room, the pro-life community, as part of a little-noticed legislative earmark, also has to legally embrace condom usage, mandatory sex education, and a refutation of abstinence as being anything but an early skills course on the most effective grip. Those who insist on protecting unborn children due to the dictates of a book handed down to a tiny percentage of the world’s population two thousand years ago by an omniscient god which, over the course of 800 pages, mysteriously contains no information in it except the meager knowledge particular to those people in that exact time and place, yet feel perfectly comfortable abandoning such protected children to their fate the second they’re born due to vague concerns about the deficit, entitlements, and costly school lunch programs, also have to spend four months a year volunteering in Calcutta orphanages.

18. Admit That None of Us Really Matter—It’s a virtual certainty that in a hundred years no one will remember anything you ever did, any thoughts you ever had, or emotions you ever felt. All your ideas, insights, and acquired wisdom will be gone. Every moment of singular importance may as well never have existed. All your searing embarrassments, roaring triumphs, loves and lusts and furtive little secrets will be forgotten. Almost every possession you cherished will be relegated to the dirt. And the statement of that fact is as meaningless now as it will be in the future. Because we are disposable. Because there have been more than one hundred-billion people who have lived on this planet since homo became erectus, an endless train of lives, souls, histories, ancestries, cultures, beliefs. And each one dof them thought—in the naive but perhaps cognitively necessary way humans do—that their interiority was of manifest importance. That their success was shepherded and maybe even predetermined by a higher power. That their existence was eminently worth recording and memorializing and celebrating for its uniqueness and gravity. All the way back to the end of the last ice age, fledgling human groupings were each sure that they alone lived at the height of civilization and accumulated human knowledge. They were certain their root pastes and cave drawings and flint arrowheads pushed the limits of medicine and art and warfare. They insisted their culture (with no conception that there were many cultures just like theirs around the world) was on the cusp of actualization and self-knowledge. Of the literally thousands of gods that have been prayed to since animists first worshiped stones and trees, each supplicant was sure that their belief system was superior. For millennia people lived and died and beseeched and sacrificed to Mithras, Tammuz, Orpheus, Isis, Dionysis, Julunggul and Zalmoxis. Those long-forgotten gods were just as real and fearsome and all-powerful to our ancestors as Jesus and Allah and Buddha are to us today. But our ancestors, caught in exactly the same solipsistic trough in which we’re now paralyzed, thought they alone knew how to interpret and proselytize the dictates of whatever meatball of appropriated fables and convenient edicts posed as their creator. Snake gods, sun gods, sea gods, Ishtar to Baal. A jungle full of Maya, a plains worth of Cherokee, a steppe teeming with Mongols, a Versailles full of French, a savanna elided by Masai, a inquisition clotted with Spanish. All positive. All wrong. Which means all of us have been wrong. A hundred million times over. Every plant, animal, insect, and humanoid that has ever lived has fallen back to the soil, inexorably crushed under the weight of geological history. The earliest of our ancestors, not to mention the animals they hunted and plants they ate and insects they were harassed by, comprise the subterranean biological tonnage that we now drill and use for fuel. And since almost all contemporary food is soaked with petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, it means we are literally eating the decomposed slurry of those who came before us. We are cannibals! But we’re also playing with house money, because if not for the utterly random collision of a monster asteroid with the Yucatan peninsula, the dinosaurs would never have died off, and there would’ve been no room for mammals to flourish, let alone evolve. It’s possible that we shouldn’t even be here. Who’s to say that dinosaurs weren’t the superior species, let alone the chosen people? We are, after all, grossly weak and fragile, with our plodding, unsteady legs and easily split skin, our soft teeth and poorly-protected brains. And then, of course, there’s the combined evil of our collective behavior. It’s highly likely that the main reason homo sapiens as a species rose to dominance on the planet is that we systematically killed off every possible competitor. See any Neanderthals hanging around your local J. Crew? Any Homo Habilus smoking Marlboro reds by the pinball machine? It’s because our forbears killed them off sixty thousand years ago. A systematic genocide just like any other. It’s even possible that they hunted down and ate one another. Protein was a rare commodity back in cave painting days. Which is a fine thing to think about when you’re laying in bed late at night. Ultimately, it’s vital that we recognize the lack of importance of politics, which will never be a source of happiness or comfort. The messy, inexact, and mostly unjust governance of 300 million people managed in such a way that prevents a succession of bloody revolutions or endless civil wars is the best that can be hoped for. Succor can only be found in art and literature and music, in family and friendships, and in caring for strangers. All else is delusion.

Purpose is out there, somewhere…

19. Overpopulation vs. Underappreciation—Beaches are crowded, there’s lines at the bank, you can never find a good parking space downtown, and it’s hard to get a reservation at the Olive Garden. A lot of us, let’s be honest, don’t really want to be here that much anyway, whining all the time about this or that, insisting that we’ve been wronged or deserve better in some elaborate mental construction clear only to our bored therapist and unread blogs. We wake up angry, sure we’re getting the short stick at work, in relationships, in line at the deli, while waiting to use equipment at the gym. The Lucky Ones in That Other State get all the tax breaks and free cars and $9 laptops. If you’re getting screwed, constantly and pan-orfice, why even try? Wouldn’t it be easier to give up the pain of each daily swindle and quietly expire instead? To this end, minutes after the inauguration, Hillary will erect a national system of clean, well-monitored Suicide Booths. These Spotify-equipped “transition centers,” will be placed in parks and malls and subways across the country, available to the irreparably peeved, catatonically bored, and delusionally entitled, in order to give up the ghost. Each booth will come equipped with a robotic needle and massive overdose of fine-grade Turkish heroin. When all vitals go flat-line, a chute will open in the floor and Voluntarily Inert Citizens will ride a series of assembly lines until they are collected, trucked to various ports on refrigerated flatbeds, and ultimately spread out like mulch, in combination with seeds and a fine nitrogen-rich garden booster, to fertilize the arid deserts of Western Sahara.

20. Denounce Scientology as a For-Profit Cult —By Thursday at the latest, Hillary will hold a press conference announcing that Sea Org will be permanently shuttered, to the cheers and relief of almost everyone on earth. Why do we allow the continued existence of this dangerous, vindictive, and abusive cult? Why do we allow a pyramid scam to rake in tax-free cash and buy half the buildings in L.A. and Florida? Just like Huey Lewis, who wanted a new drug, one that won’t make him sick, crash his car, or feel three-feet thick, this country needs a new, unified, mandatory religion not based on restricting shellfish, sexual repression, or the ravings of L. Ron Hubbard. Our current crop of faiths relying on variants of the Abrahamic myths are just not getting the job done, and since all our major religions are just cherry-picking one another’s conventions and rituals in a way that’s best suited to their particular geography anyway, why not meld them all into one monotheist, monolithic super-faith based on The Pantsuit? Face it, you’ll be chanting Fleetwood Mac lyrics with a beatific smile by the weekend.

Everything about this feels legitimate.

21. Begin Massive Worldwide Ocean Cleanup —Crawling out of the primordial muck led to living on land. Living on land led to lungs. Lungs led to arms and feet. Feet led to standing upright. Being upright led to reproduction and technological innovation. The wheel led to language which led to self-hatred and fear, which led to the Inquisition. Properly applied theologically inspired torture led to modern living. Modern living led to the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, which are now killing off microscopic dirt mites. Without dirt mites, nothing will grow. The bees are disappearing. Without the bees, nothing will grow. TGI Fridays is going out of business. Without fried ice cream, Zoloft loses its favorite enabler. Also, there’s a massive floating field of discarded plastic grocery bags in the North Pacific that has swelled to almost the size of Texas. Those bags are turning into trillions of nurdles, which are tiny plastic shards that will take 500,000 years to biodegrade, in which time they will comprise forty percent of the body weight of any remaining fish. Without nurdle-free fish, we will be unable to order high-grade sushi. Without high-grade sushi and large bottles of Sapporo, no hipsters will ever get laid. Without the offspring of hipsters, the platinum baby stroller business will go bankrupt. Without properly pampered young Sophias and Gretas and Justins, fine arts programs in colleges across the country will be poorly attended. Without freshmen video production majors to fill screening rooms with shaky, poorly edited films about self-cutting and Oedipal nudity, there won’t be any Edgy Art. Without Edgy Art we will be forced to leave the land and return to the dangerously-rising oceans, where we will build houses on foundations of nurdles and return to fetal states, before sinking back into the shallows from whence we came.

22. Ban Pretending to Admire Ché Guevara For Vague Political Reasons You Don’t Actually Understand—Let’s see. Ché hated gays and blacks. He burned books and had a thing for firing squads without tribunals. He was against all of bourgeoisie culture, including capitalist atrocities like music and theater, and also once said if Kruschev had managed to keep nukes in Cuba, he would happily have fired them at New York. Right on, brother. So, last week, while waiting in line at That Chain Cafe for my usual quad-Americano brewed so powerfully it tastes almost exactly like car upholstery soaked in kerosene, I saw three different people wearing Ché T-shirts, including the heavily pierced barista. It was an apparel ubiquity I haven’t seen since 1990, when every other person was wearing a Jad Fair shirt, at the time Jad Fair being a direct fuck you to Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots, yet still obscure enough to enable smirky condescension. While even the most innocuous of Che’s political dictates would likely condemn both nose rings and the wolfing of decadent pastries in a complimentary wi-fi environment, the individual ownership of a fancy red T-shirt was almost certainly punishable by death. It’s difficult to imagine that the Ernesto Guevara of universal collegiate esteem would be pleased his image now stands for profiting off silk-screens made in the factories of Mao-legacy China. Which either means socialism is a gateway to communism, just like marijuana is to acid, or that lazy iconography is indeed the thin red line keeping us all from harvesting turnips in collectivized farms across greater New Jersey. Hey, True Che principles vs. Dreamy Che revisionism is probably too much of a contradiction to expect one XXL Hanes to handle, but even the harried barista ought to be aware that chesting Che-face more or less implies: I wear, with this garment, the inherent contradiction that is modern consumer Left-ism, and by donning a mass-produced homage to murky political stances, which, ironically, this dead face would have especially despised, I reveal myself, ultimately, to have no convictions at all. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a shirt. Maybe the barista intended to wear his favorite Master Of Puppets hoodie, but his girlfriend snagged it on the way to economics class, so he grabbed Ché instead, with no investment whatsoever in certain overly-mythologized South Americans. Either way, I tipped him a nickel and my six-dollar coffee rocked. Isn’t that all that matters? On the other hand, they ran out of Nutella-blueberry scones, so I held up the line and made a scene about how there was clearly something seriously fucked with their methods of production and distribution, refusing to leave until they gave me a coupon for a free macchiato.

Would without question be the first to be shot.

Without question the first in line to be shot.

23. Subpoena Trump’s Tax Returns Under New Billionaire My Ass Law – Immediately seize and post Trump’s tax returns for the last 30 years, making it plain to the American people that he will not be allowed to lose and then go lick his wounds for a few months, firing off endless conspiracy tweets and whiny excuses until Jared Kushner founds Trump News, a channel for people who think FOX isn’t nearly regressive or cretinous enough. Since the returns will prove that Trump hasn’t paid taxes for decades, isn’t actually a billionaire, is so heavily leveraged that his lenders can’t afford to let him go under, is in the pocket of a number of Russian banks who have been propping him up for years, has whatever graft he could cobble together hidden in illegal offshore accounts, and has lied in the most cynical fashion about the amount of money (none) he donated to charity, he will immediately be placed in max security isolation in Pelican Bay. However, Elizabeth Warren, who Hillary will appoint directly to the Supreme Court without confirmation after unilaterally declaring congress has waived Advise & Consent by refusing to act, will take pity on Trump and commute his sentence. Orange Nero will be offered the choice of doing unpaid manual labor on construction sites managed by the Polish illegals he once stiffed, or becoming the executive director of the newly re-constituted ACORN.

24. Repeal Citizen’s United – It’s the obvious first move of the Clinton Administration: to completely renounce the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Robert Mercer, who between them have sunk more money into failed Republican candidates than the GNP of Brazil. Not to mention funding a torrent of disinformation about climate change, tax policy, and in the case of Mercer–directly financing Breibart (whose former editor is Trump’s campaign manager), as well as the two main Trump Super PACs. It’s not even so much the notion that money is free speech in terms of national elections, if for no other reason than they will always be awash in cash, it’s the local elections where this decision really skews the notion of representative democracy, the Koch brothers descending on state representatives and governor’s races, pouring massive amounts of money behind candidates who support their agenda. Citizen’s United is without question the most mercenary, regressive, and deeply hypocritical Supreme Court decision (with the possible except of the 2000 Scalia-led Florida recount halt) in the history of the United States. Outing this Lady Macbeth stain from the national consciousness is The Very First Thing Hillary Should do. The second is put James Comey on the last train to Clarksville.

Strangely, both Scalia and Thomas were regular attendees at Koch-Industries sponsored retreats.

25. Declare Climate Change America’s Greatest Enemy, Even More Dangerous Than Bill Ayers—

“I am not a believer in climate, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again.” —Donald Trump

The biosphere is going to collapse soon. And we (all of us, even the rich) are going to collapse with it. There’s a reason we’ve suddenly had a huge increase in monsoons and tornadoes, and that the East Coast is now sweltering hotbox from April to September. There’s also a reason the six most popular books for teenagers are about resourceful girls living in post-apocalyptic societies. Teenage girls are always the first to know everything. And if not know it, at least intuit it. There’s no doubt been a massive uptick in private archery lessons and street combat fighting classes among the nation’s affluent 16-year-olds. Subconsciously, they can smell a massive species die-off. And we should listen to them. The bottom line: there are simply too many people and not enough food. A hundred-year drought is coming. It’s already started in the mid and southwest. Oil will soon seem a luxury, but it’s water that will drive dystopian markets. Forget driving your car, how much oil will it one day require to produce a glass of clean drinking water? When the great Oil Crash comes at the tail of the great Water Crash, we will return to a society that existed fifty years before the Industrial Revolution. Which would be fine if we’d been born and lived and become inured to the hardships of that time. But to the slovenly entitled that we are now—soft and fat and unwilling to part with the least convenience—it will be impossible to adjust. There is zero hope of a sudden cinematic montage of flag-rallying where scientists and industrialists hunker down in some sort of Randian compound and find a solution. There is no solution. Very soon the atmosphere is going to turn methane-green and then we will all (from hedge-funder to dung beetle) expire. Another million years will go by and the sky will once again clear, allowing some sort of life to begin anew. The sad truth is that no one ever learns anything, and groups of people learn even less. There’s a simple mathematical equation that proves, even with perfect environmental stewardship, exactly how many people an acre of land can feed, and how sustainable that acre can be over time. There are a limited amount of acres, but we blithely continue to pumping out humans. At the height of the Roman Empire there were 250 million people on the planet. We added 300 million in the last three years alone. Every pre-Columbian society since the Sumerians has pushed their environmental usage and population levels to absolute maximum capacity, justified it with encomiums from the privileged, combined with spews of religious doggerel, and then died mystified by a series of physical events they could have easily seen coming. Civilizations with advanced political, religious, and social dynamics over millennia have again and again failed to perceive—or at least acknowledge—that their greed was turning Eden into a desert. They farmed their land out. Cut down all the trees. Failed to rotate the crops or check their population. They let comfortable rulers collude with the merchant class to enact a pretense of equitable governance, and then fucked the lower classes blind with the notion that:

All kings and pigs are equal, and even though some kings are more pig than royal, it’s their divine right to be porcine regardless.

also

Tomorrow will never come.

But it came. And almost everything representative of their collapsed civilizations is lost to archeologists and the indifference of history. Whether we care to acknowledge it or not, our brain stems are trying to warn us of something RIGHT NOW. This very second. It’s a blaring siren, a flashing light, a neon billboard: we somehow managed to survive the last ice age, but we’re not likely to make it through the next.

So make you sure to get out and vote tomorrow.

Unless, of course, you’re voting for Trump. In which case, go rent a room at your local Best Western Executive Inn, sprawl on the duvet in nothing but a cravat and socks, and sniff glue until the election’s over.

Your on-demand rental of John Wick is on me.

Sensitively enigmatic Keanu refuses to shave until you do the right thing.

Posted in Politics | Tagged #Hillary2016, Antonin Scalia, Beached, Che, Citizens United, Clearance Thomas, climate change, Clinton wins, Elbridge Gerry, election, Fermat's Last Theorem, First female president, fix america, hillary, Let's make the US a theocracy with the robed justices in charge!, non-partisan, solutions, Stone Temple Pilots, super tuesday, Trump, Trump lost before he started, Walker Texas Ranger, We Already Miss Trump, Yet Another Clinton | 5 Comments

Take the Trump/Wiener Test

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Sean Beaudoin

Here’s what mystifies me about my Republican brothers and sisters: I was lying in bed imagining a scenario wherein the coming election was actually between Anthony Wiener and Mitt Romney. On matters of policy, I probably agree with Wiener 75% of the time and Romney 8% of the time. I wrote many highly critical things about Romney in 2012 and thought he’d be a disaster as president, basically a corporatist oligarch who would have rolled back every cultural advance we’d fought for, and sold off everything else to the highest bidder. But if those two candidates were running today, I would almost certainly vote for Romney if it meant blocking Wiener from office. Anthony Wiener has proven himself to be spectacularly unfit to govern, a hypocrite and serial liar with genuine psychological problems and self-destructive sexual obsessions. Despite the fact that a Wiener presidency, even with his personal flaws, would have positive effects on climate change, immigration reform, Supreme Court nominations, and many other issues I care deeply about, I could never support him. In fact, I would advocate loudly against him if Democrats were cynically sweeping aside his transgressions just to retain power, and would consider it a matter of country over party to vote against my own self-interest.

The word “patriotism” is thrown around so blithely now, it no longer means anything. Or does it?

So my question is, why don’t Republicans, even ones who clearly loathe Trump but still intend to vote for him, feel the same way? If you take every despicable aspect of Anthony Wiener’s sexting and subsequent denials and overall personality and compare them to Trump’s sexual predation, not to mention the dozens of other deeply immoral, unethical, and genuinely unbalanced things he has said or done, there is no comparison as to who’s more unfit. Therefore, I’m asking anyone considering a vote for Donald Trump to take The Wiener Test. No, you don’t have to dump a bucket of cold water over your head, just project yourself four years into the future, at the end of the most disastrous presidency since Andrew Johnson, and ask two questions: “Did I do anything to stop this?” and “How horrible does a person have to repeatedly demonstrate themselves to be before I admit that party doctrine no longer matters?”

Posted in Politics | Tagged ace frehely, andrew johnson, Anthony Weiner, caligula, Donald Trump, ferdinand marcos, Hillary 2016, not a single dong joke, patriotism, Trump/Weiner test, vote | Leave a comment

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