“You need to have an open mind!”

I bumped into a local acquaintance at the Farmer’s Market this weekend. His latest frenzy (he’s gone through several dozen in the 8 years I’ve known him) is AI terror. Technophobia is not as new thing. Old people and uneducated people and unskilled people have been afraid of “progress” almost as long as we’ve been banging the rocks together. After he failed to create any sort of panic in his audience (me), he quickly walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “Tom, you need to have an open mind.”

There are “open minds” and there are open minds. Being open to emotional content is the path to becoming a mindless cult member. At this point in my life, I may not be able to take much of any even slightly emotional argument seriously. That “lack of charisma” problem that many Democratic candidates are curse with is nothing more than a refusal to resort to appealing to their listeners’ amygdala and aiming, instead, for their frontal cortex. One of Richard Nixon’s media advisors, Roger Ailes, wrote “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Ailes described exactly the tactics he’d use in running Fox News a couple of decades later. Screw reason, poke ‘em in the emotions and they’ll never even think about thinking for themselves. Or, as Rick Santorum once blatantly honestly said, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Nope, but they can count on most of the characters on the below-average side of the IQ curve and that will consistently be half of any population.

I have read You Are Not So Smart and listened to the audiobook and Podcast so often that I bought both versions of the book, along with You Are Now Less Dumb. I usually read a book once a decade and my library resources are more than adequate for my purposes, but not when it comes to how badly our brains work, especially under emotional impulse. When I was a young man, I fell victim to practically every sucker-the-rube scam known to humans, but I’ve tried to make a personal policy out of “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.” I’ve been burned more than a few times failing to heed that advice, but I’ve avoided disaster for most of my life believing that when it comes to con artists “forgiveness is for suckers.” I didn’t call my motorcycle column and blog “Geezer with A Grudge” for nothing.

An “open mind” is the kind of mindset that allowed Hitler to con all of the British politicians who met him into believing he was benign, in fact the ONLY important British leader who distrusted Hitler was Winston Churchill, who was also the only one who didn’t speak face-to-face with the Nazi bastard. Likewise, I prefer to obtain my own information on important subjects through READING about and studying those topics. I don’t know a lot of stuff, but the stuff I do know is regularly and largely misrepresented in the media, YouTube (especially), advertising, and in most person-to-person “communications.” That means I don’t listen to sales routines over the phone or in person; “Just give me the literature and I’ll get back to you if I’m interested” is usually enough to kill a sales pitch in the bud. I’m not real bright and it takes me time to absorb the information that usually has to be extracted from sales literature with as much effort as taking a college physics or chemistry exam. They don’t make information easy or even available, more often than not.

I’m a big believer and observe in track records, too. If you’ve been wrong almost always (Talkin’ to you Republicans.) and don’t show any evidence that you realize you were regularly on the wrong side of reality, history, morality, and decent behavior (Still talkin’ to you Republicans.) I have no interest in your opinions and doubt your ability to acquire and assemble facts that are coherent or even honest.

Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.

A Disorganized Party or Country?

This weekend, I helped campaign for a local Democrat running for the US House against one of the most corrupt, decadent, incompetent, and dishonest Republicans in the House; and that is saying something in this current pack of do-nothing right Republicans. Standing among the crowd of campaigners waiting for a parade to start, I had a variety of conversations with traditional and less traditional Democrats and was constantly reminded of Will Roger’s quote, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat." Like Rogers, in some ways I am proud of that position. Democrats don’t tend to fall in line as do their docile Republican counterparts. Democrats argue because they think, they have independent opinions, they sometimes realize the complexity of the problems the nation and their community face and the fact that some problems have many possible solutions. Those are good things.

The down side of Democratic disorder is that an awful lot of people who drift into the Democratic Party have simply wandered to that place driven by their dislike of the monotheistic Republican doctrine of worshiping the rich and powerful. Their grip on the actual issues is so base and simplistic that they might as well be Republicans. The complexity of real solutions just frustrates them and they degenerate into bickering factions easily defeated by the conservative Marching Morons.

For instance, there was a pair of conflicting groups at this rally: labor and environment. Two of the new Democratic members were from the steel workers union and they argued that the party needs to focus more on labor if it wants to win, especially in the rural north where people are backwards, uneducated, and completely dependent on outside investment for any sort of occupational or economic activity. So their big issues are the major polluting and high carbon construction projects like the Enbridge Energy Line 3 oil pipeline and the PolyMet copper mines near the Boundary Waters. It should be obvious that these are both corporate welfare projects with minimal long term employment opportunities for Minnesota and it should be even more obvious that they are both projects with the potential for massive negative environmental impact. It should be, but it isn’t to the labor faction and pressing that issue is likely to drive them back to the Republican hoards. Hearing that “we have plenty of environmental protections in place to protect the environment” from a union guy who clearly could care less about the environment, as long as he got a union wage for his part in destroying it, was pretty depressing. I know someone who was in the EPA during the short period it was allowed to actually protect the environment and I suspect the two union guys at the rally would do everything possible to avoid hearing how limited and powerless the EPA has become, even before Trump castrated it with an oil company promoter.

Rogers also said, "You've got to be optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a humorist to stay one." For sure you have to have a well-developed sense of humor, at least. With Trump and a perfectly corrupt Congress full of bought-and-paid-for Republicans and not a few equally completely owned Democrats, you’d think this would be the traditional mid-term election where the party in power loses its grip. I wouldn’t count on it. Democrats and “progressives” have shown an ability and willingness to snatch defeat from the claws of victory in all situations. Part of that comes from the “purity test” mentality and part comes from true fact that all issues are infinitely complex and hard to grasp and a bigger part comes from the fact that America is no longer anything resembling a collection of United States. Humans, as a species, have never shown much will toward creating a better future for our offspring but modern Americans clearly would eat their own children if it came to that or missing a meal. I think we should get ready to accept the possibility that this mid-term election might signal the end of this collapsing empire.

Making the Vote Count

Ever since the inbred crowd started voting in mass and gave us Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, McCain, Romney, and Bush II, I’ve argued that passing the US Citizenship Test ought to be a prerequisite for voting. Face it, if you are too stupid and uninformed to pass a test designed for people who have barely dried off their feet after getting off of the boat or crossing one of our boarder rivers or lakes, you shouldn’t be making decisions about who is running the country, your state or hometown. There are lots of on-line examples of the US Citizenship Test, try and see if you belong in a voting booth.

After Trump’s election, I’ve doubled-down on this idea. I absolutely believe a few sample questions from the Citizenship Test should be administered (automatically with randomly selected questions) before anyone casts a vote. However, after Trump I have decided that simply failing the test isn’t embarrassment enough for those morons who don’t bother to know how the country works but who think their opinions matter. Like nit-picking hanging-chads and racially–coded “purged registration lists,” I think we should do something with the idiot vote. Rather than helplessly wringing our hands after one more fraudulent Red State election count, let’s get some entertainment out of our rapidly growing idiot population.

Since the reddest states are all going to computerized voting machines my voting test system could be tacked on with almost no extra costs (Sorry Diebold and the rest of the Republican vote repressors. You’ll have to game the election system some other way.) I definitely want everyone to vote, so we’re not going to toss out anyone’s vote until we’ve had fun with it. We’re just not going to count the idiot votes for making any important decisions.

However, after the informed voters have made their selection and candidates have been chosen we’re going to do something with the idiot vote.

For every office in every election, every city, county, state, and federal final tally will include who the morons voted for. That will give us two important post-election things to consider: 1) We’ll all get to laugh at the nitwits in our midst and their pitiful attempts to participate in an informed election and 2) the so-called knowledgeable voters who made similar choices to the idiots will have an opportunity for self-reflection and, hopefully, take that moment to remove themselves from the gene pool.

#112 The Lesser of Two Evils (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Since 1968, every election in which I've voted, for every significant office, state or federal, the choices have been the selection of the lesser of two evils; Demolican or Republicrat, conservative or less conservative, Tweedly Dee or Tweedly Dumb.  Since I began my voting career writing-in my Presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, I pretty much did the same for every other office on the ballot.  Except for the rare exception of a local candidate who I know and believe might be uncorrupted enough to do some good in political office, I have written-in a candidate for almost every office for which I've voted in the last 36 years.  If I didn't write-in someone I thought could do the job, I voted for one of the alternative party candidates.  Maybe that's a wasted vote, but I don't think so. 

The only vote I feel I ever wasted was in 1996, here in Minnesota, for the office of state governor.  The race was tight, too close to call between the Demolicans or Republicrats.  An alternative party was fronting a complete political unknown, Independence Party candidate Jesse Ventura, for the office and while I thought Ventura would make a terrific governor I thought the Republicrat, Norm Coleman, would be a disaster for the state.  Coleman was a corporate welfare promoter for sports teams and crooked construction companies as the mayor of St. Paul and I thought bringing that attitude to the state government would be a disaster.  I voted for Hubert Humphrey II, the Demolican, a candidate I despised from his pitiful performance as the state auditor. 

I was disgusted with myself as I cast my vote.  I wasn't voting for someone I respected, for the first time in my life, I was voting against someone I despised.  Even more disgusting, I had a choice on the ballot.  I had a choice that I thought was better than anyone I could have written-in for the office.  Out of cowardice, fear of the more obvious evil, I voted for someone who I thought had no chance of doing the job well, but who had a chance of winning. 

As if fate was trying to teach me a lesson in civic responsibility, Jesse Ventura won.  For the first time in my life, I had a chance to vote for both someone I respected and someone who had a chance of winning and I missed it.  For a brief moment in my life, I was a conservative, a political coward, and I was rewarded for that failure when I watched Jesse's election celebration and knew that I'd had nothing to do with that success.  I never felt less of an American than the evening of Ventura's inaugural celebration.  I will never again vote for the lesser of two evils.  A recent bumper sticker reads, "Kerry sucks less."  I'm not convinced that is a terrific endorsement.  Bush, on the other hand, sucks more.  That doesn't make the choice much easier. 

I'm an American.  I don't give a damn about the "rights" of international corporations, dictators, kings and queens, the idle rich, or any other piece of worthless human crap.  The positive history of this country is all about the battle between the middle class and the inherited power class.  I'm back in the war and I don't care if we win it this year or any other election.  If I do my part, the rest is up to you.

Five Scumbags Do It Again

Five low-life, activist, corporate shills shrouded in black dresses have done their best to destroy the little that is left of democracy in the United States. These Republican-appointed scumbags have decided that corporations don't have enough say in who gets elected by owning the right wing media and most of Washington. Now, that collection of superstitious, ignorant, corrupt pinheads who control the majority of the Supreme Court have decided that corporations and unions can spend all they want buying votes and representatives.

1 Justice Anthony Kennedy - Republican President Ronald Reagan
2 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. - Republican President George W. Bush
3. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. - Republican President George W. Bush
4. Justice Antonin Scalia - Republican President Ronald Reagan
5. Justice Clarence Thomas - Republican President George H. W. Bush

The five Republican z0mbies wrote, ""The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer." If it protected individuals and pamphleteers at all that would be a triumph. "The government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether." By "altogether," these illiterate, corporate communist morons mean "in any meaningful way."

The four outnumbered dissenters, represented by Justice John Paul Stevens, called this idi0t decision a "radical change" in the law and noted that "the court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation." As if Republicans and integrity can ever be included in the same sentence without a disclaimer or negative.

I looks like we're in for a long, painful, lawless period until a couple of those scumbags retires, is exposed to sunlight, or strokes out. Since the good die young and evil seems to be eternal, it's safe to assume Thomas, Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy will live forever.

#181 Taking the Survey

One of the few moments of pleasure I get in this political season is when I receive calls and mail from the Republican Party. Somehow, that nutty group decided I was in their political sphere. Maybe, it's because I was once a McCain supporter, but that was in 2000 before McCain latched his lips to Bush and Cheney's assholes and begged for their forgiveness and approval. Since McCain turned into a Bush butt monkey, I haven't had a moment's interest in his campaign or life. Still, the Republicans send me crap several times a week. I always take the time to lick their self-addressed envelopes and plunk them in the mailbox before tossing the campaign crap into the trash. I figure that every Republican quarter I can waste in mailing that envelope back to hell (from whence it came) is a quarter they can't spend lying on television. Of course, as long as Fox exists there will always be plenty of opportunities for Republicans to lie on television.

The latest McCain mailer came with a "Critical Issues Survey Questionnaire." True to their illiterate roots, Republicans need to double-label their propaganda as a "Survey Questionnaire," in case their retarded supporters don't know that a survey is a list of questions. Since I have no faith that anyone in the Republican party is clever enough to tally the results of anything more complicated than bribes, I decided to answer the questions here in the Rat. I may skip a few because they were so obviously stupid and pandering, but I'll do my best to concentrate on McCain's questions.

1. Do you think Congress should respond to the economic slowdown with a plan of tax cuts to stimulate the economy? No. I think an economic plan is a good idea, but the rich have received enough tax cuts.

2. Do you believe our economy will grow if we cut taxes and put more money in the hands of hardworking Americans who pay taxes? Yes. Cut taxes on working Americans, crank taxes up on the deadbeat executive class and drop the hammer on the idle rich.

3. Do you think the unemployment insurance system needs to be modernized to meet the goals of helping displaced workers? Probably, but I wouldn't trust a Republican with anything that provides assistance to workers.

4. Which of the following factors do you feel is most adversely affecting the economy in your area? Insanely stupid federal and state spending. Republicans have redirected the wealth of the nation toward corporate welfare and it's not working.

5. Which of the following is the single most important economic issue facing you and your family? Insane federal spending on the Iraq invasion and corporate welfare.

6. Do you believe that reducing the federal deficit should be a top priority? Yes, that means reduce it dumbass. No more cowboy wars that Republicans don't want to pay for.

7. Do you think the government should reduce regulations and provide tax incentives to encourage small business growth? Which regulations? I think there are too few environmental regulations and no enforcement at all. I don't want a cent spent on increasing corporate wealth and I want the media reined in and returned to public property.

8. Do you feel the U.S. Tax code should be made simpler and fairer? First, why did you think "Tax" needed to be capitalized? Is this the usual Republican emphasis on Tax (unfair) and trivializing of "code" (rule of law)? Yes, the tax code should be simplified. Hell yes, it should be more fair. No, that doesn't mean creating more exemptions for Paris Hilton or Jeff Skilling.

9. Do you agree that Government should aggressively rein-in spending? What's with this odd treatment of random words as proper nouns? Why did you capitalize "Government?" Is this some simian attempt to personalize and demonize the word "government?" Are you stupid? You work for the government and you are running for the highest office in government. Yes, quit spending money on Iraq and the military. Happy now?

I've lost interest in this stupid survey questionnaire. I'm going to pick and choose my questions from here out.

1. Should America surrender in Iraq regardless of the consequences in the Middle East? No, we should waste the nation's resources and children to eternity regardless of the consequences in the Middle East. How would a dumbass who didn't listen to experts arguing against going to unprovoked war in Iraq know what consequences of either option would create?

2. Do you agree with Democrats who believe national defense spending should be slashed in order to fund domestic programs? Hell yes! If the military can't protect citizens from Saudis with box knives using our own airlines as weapons, what good are they? I say spend the money on alternative fuel research so we can bankrupt the Arab nations and send them back to pounding sand up their own asses. That's what I said in September 2001 and I still think it would have been the smart thing to do.

3. Do you support giving our law enforcement agents the tools they need to monitor terrorist communications? Yes, but only those tools and nothing more. They had that ability before 2001 and weren't competent enough to use them. More tools will only make them less competent.

4. Do you think that forcing every American into a socialized national health care system is the best way to deal with uninsured patients? Hell yes! You've enjoyed socialized health care for your whole life, McCain. Look how well it's served you. Why shouldn't working citizens have the same health care as politicians?

5. Which political part do you feel is best able to hand each of the following issues? What followed was a list of "issues," from the war in Iraq to Energy and Education. I think Republicans are incapable of handing anything other than bribery and corruption. Those weren't on McCain's list, so they left me with only the Democratic choice, which I'm not happy with either. I created my own column called "Anyone but Republican" and checked all of the boxes in that column.

Finally, one last particularly hilarious question. Are you concerned about the vast sums of campaign funds being stockpiled by the Democrats and their liberal allies? Hell no! I think Republicans shouldn't be allowed to play with money, politics, guns, or unpolluted air and water. You screw-ups have contaminated the national psyche so viciously that you ought to be deported to your nations of origin. I recommend a giant cannon we could stuff full of Republicans and aim in the general direction of Europe. Who cares where they land as long as it's too far away for them to swim back.

May 2008