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Part IV: A Conclave of Reptiles

Once again, the country descends into the fetid morass of double-talk, obfuscation, and contemptible cacophony known as election season. Right on cue, every slithering incumbent and mucilaginous political rookie is crisscrossing his/her/its respective area of operations in the hope of bamboozling the required number of dolts into scratching an “X” in their favor. It is a perfectly ridiculous exercise, founded in fanciful expectations, false hopes, and dreams of remembered greatness.

This biennial exercise in national self-delusion will take place across a vast, arid political landscape bereft of any cooling breeze of intelligent debate and denied even the barest sprinkling of intellectual honesty to settle the duplicitous dust of what passes for political discourse in this ghost of a country. Instead, the voting populace will get its usual entrée of verbal offal dressed up with the emotional condiments of their choice. Then, the farce will come to its emotional apogee on election day (oh, blessed day) when the electorate will once again squeeze out a collective turd that looks pretty much identical to the deuce they dropped two and four years earlier. The product of this national bowel movement will smell the same and you wouldn’t want to step in it, but at least it’s out of the system for a few months. At least until the sibilant whisperings of our reptilian ruling class begin to tickle our ears once again…, and again…, and again. Welcome to scatological Ground Hog Day on the Potomac.

The Definition of Insanity

As usual, the voters will return some ridiculous percentage of Senators and Representatives back to the very Congress, which they ostensibly hold in utter contempt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The All-Important Doorman

February 17, 2018

The All-Important Doorman

Picture this: A tribal leader from a distant country visits the US. He’s brought to a large apartment building in New York City. When he gets out of the car, he looks up at the great building and is quite impressed. A uniformed doorman exits the foyer and comes out on the sidewalk. The tribesman sees the gold braiding and brass buttons of his coat and immediately decides that this is a very important person. Again he looks up at the building and says to the doorman, “This is a very great home you have. You must be very important indeed.”

Of course, if we were present, we might chuckle at the tribesman’s naiveté. The owners of such a great building would never greet people at the entrance. They leave such trivial tasks to hired servants, whilst they run the real business without ever needing any direct contact with visitors as they enter the building. And, in addition, doormen come and go – they are, after all, disposable. The owners – those who control what happens in the building – retain their positions over the long term… and may remain anonymous, if they so choose.

We find this simple concept easy enough to understand, and yet we chronically have difficulty in understanding that, in most countries, the president, or prime minister, is not by any means the man who makes the big decisions in the running of the country.

We assume that, because we were allowed to vote for our leader, he must actually be our leader. But, as Mark Twain has at times been credited as saying, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Ticking a box is no longer an option’: David van Reybrouck on elections, imagination and Brexit.

November 3, 2017

‘Ticking a box is no longer an option’: David van Reybrouck on elections, imagination and Brexit.

David van Reybrouck lives in Brussels, is a pre-historic archaeologist, but works mostly as a literary writer, and as a non-fiction writer. He’s probably best known for his book ‘Congo: the epic history of a people’, for appearing in the film ‘Tomorrow’ (‘Demain’), and for his more recent book ‘Against Elections: the case for democracy’, which is a brilliant read. We met up via Skype, and talked imagination, Brexit, and reimagining how we make decisions together.

I wonder if you had any thoughts on in what ways the current way that we practice democracy in the West diminishes our imagination, maybe particularly in relation to our ability to imagine something other than business as usual?

You could say that the procedures we use today to do democracy have drastically narrowed down the scope of what is politically imaginable. To me, although I’m interested in politics, it’s become quite a bit of a boring game, really. It’s all about winning elections, trying to build a coalition, trying to run a government, or be against the government that is in power. The bickering that is going on is not very rich. The strategies that are being used for political gain and political loss are less interesting than watching the Tour De France on a boring day.

Political journalism very often has come down to a form of sports journalism, really. Like, who has made what manoeuvre and what will it bring to him or to her. The political game as it is being played these days is a pretty boring one, and a pretty predictable one, yes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dear Spain, Mainstream Media: A Majority of Catalans Want Independence (Stop Saying Otherwise)

October 24, 2017

Dear Spain, Mainstream Media: A Majority of Catalans Want Independence (Stop Saying Otherwise)

Even though 92% of voters in the Catalonia election voted for independence, mainstream media keeps repeating the lie that a majority in Catalonia were against independence. Here’s the real math.

Mainstream Media Lies

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal repeated this frequently stated lie “A majority of Catalonia’s 7.5 million inhabitants don’t support independence, recent polls show.”

Today, ABC news repeated the stale news we have heard so many times before: “Until this crisis erupted, polls showed about 70 per cent of Catalans wanted to vote in an independence referendum. But only 41 per cent were actually in favour of cutting ties with Spain.”

These media outlets all parrot each other. Lies get repeated over and over and over. The Guardian and countless other places made the statement. No one bothers to link to or even cite the date of the “recent poll”.

I believe the allegedly “recent” poll was taken in July. Regardless, it was superseded by a more recent poll.

Most Recent Poll

The most recent poll was taken October 1. The results are as posted above. Counting ballots confiscated by Madrid, the real turnout was 57%.

Some may dispute the number of confiscated ballots. Don’t blame me, blame Madrid. If Madrid did not confiscate ballots and prevent people from voting, that reporting issue would not be in play.

It’s a certainty those confiscated ballots were overwhelmingly in favor of independence. In addition to the confiscated ballots, many who wanted to vote were forced away by Madrid police.

Its likely that yes had an outright majority from the 770,000 stolen votes alone. Add in other suppressed votes and its a certainty yes had an outright majority.

Dear mainstream media, the majority of Catalonia wanted independence. Please stop your lies.

Ohio Communities Face ‘Voter Suppression’ in Push to Rein in Oil and Gas Development

September 24, 2017

Ohio Communities Face ‘Voter Suppression’ in Push to Rein in Oil and Gas Development

scrabble tiles spelling out 'vote'

“We’re losing our ability to legislate and be a check and balance on the government,” Tish O’Dell of the Ohio Community Rights Network told DeSmog on September 15.

O’Dell had just learned that yet another local ballot measure — this one in Bowling Green, Ohio — was facing a possible legal challenge. “The Bowling Green initiative is the only one that made it through all the administrative hurdles to get on [the ballot],” O’Dell said.

It is the latest in a flurry of anti-fossil fuel ballot initiatives across Ohio which have gained the required number of signatures but likely won’t appear on ballots come election day. This year, initiatives in Youngstown, Medina County, and Athens County have all been taken off the ballot.

Fracking Backlash

These ballot initiatives are a response to the surge in activity related to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and pipeline development in Ohio and would establish new county charters or amendments to city charters that elevate the communities’ governing authority over legal privileges enjoyed by the industry.

Since 2015, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, non-elected local boards of elections, and the Ohio Supreme Court have struck a total of 10 proposed county charters from Ohio ballots. Initiatives have been removed for Athens (2015, 2016, and 2017), Fulton (2015), Medina (2015, 2016, 2017), Meigs (2015, 2016), and Portage (2016) counties.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ron Paul: Vote All You Want, the Secret Government Won’t Change

September 10, 2016

Ron Paul: Vote All You Want, the Secret Government Won’t Change

(ANTIMEDIA) Former congressman Ron Paul is outspoken. When he retired from Congress, he called lawmakers psychopathic authoritarians to their faces. He’s also called Donald Trump an authoritarian and asserted Hillary Clinton could have run as a Republican. And just last week, Paul took aim at the foundational structure of American ‘democracy.’

In a recent episode of his web show, the Liberty Report, Ron Paul discussed the Department of Homeland Security’s decision last month to take a more active role in U.S. elections. Secretary Jeh Johnson said he was “considering whether elections should be classified as ‘critical infrastructure,’ affording them the same kinds of enhanced protections that the banking system and the electrical grid receive,” POLITICO reported.

The potential move came on the heels of the notorious DNC leak in July, which exposed intentions within the Democratic Party to manipulate the primary race against Senator Bernie Sanders. Politicians and the media quickly blamed the hack on Russia, failing to cite conclusive proof of their allegations yet spawning the narrative that the Kremlin and other foreign threats could compromise U.S. elections.

On his show, Paul took issue with the notion that the Department of Homeland Security, an agency riddled with incompetence and failed objectives — case in point, the TSA — is capable of securing U.S. elections.

Speaking on DHS’s decision to become more involved in the process following the DNC hack, Ron Paul offered a scathing indictment of the federal organization, arguing it will capitalize on troubling events to seize power:

“They may have false flags and they may do a lot of things, but no matter how an emergency comes up, they’re going to make use of it. And the use of it isn’t to say ‘Hey, how are we going to protect the American people?’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Brad Friedman: Why To Be Suspicious Of Every Election

May 29, 2016

Brad Friedman: Why To Be Suspicious Of Every Election

Electronic voting machines have opened up Pandora’s box

Long an ‘exporter of democracy’ to the rest of the world, there is ample evidence that the United States lacks even the most rudimentary, basic protections necessary to preserve voting integrity within its own borders.

Some of the evidence is circumstantial, some is statistical, and some is pretty direct and clear-cut. Taken together, a pattern that emerges strongly suggesting that ever since voting machines, electronic voting machines were introduced in the United States, we’ve had a string of suspect election results that frankly are not consistent with a free and fair voting outcome.

This week, we’re joined by Brad Friedman, election integrity analyst to understand better the systems and practices currently in place to collect and tally votes in America. As we gear up to elect our next president, it’s clear that numerous concerns exist about the state of ‘free and fair’ voting in our country:

Trust is different than ‘verifiable’. Trust, frankly, has no place in elections. There is no reason to ever trust anybody. We need to be able to verify all of this.

There are basically two different types of electronic voting systems that are currently used today.

One is the touchscreen system that people know about. They’ve seen those votes flipping and so forth. Those machines are, in fact, 100 percent unverifiable — period. I’ve asked the companies that make the systems many times, if they have any evidence whatsoever that any vote ever cast on one of those machines during an election, for any candidate or initiative on the ballot, if any of those votes have ever been recorded as per the voter’s intent, any evidence whatsoever. They have none — they are 100 percent unverifiable. Thankfully, many states are getting rid of those and they’re moving to paper ballots.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Voting Delusion

May 4, 2016

The Voting Delusion

This November, I heartily encourage all Americans to exercise their civic duty by going to the polls and voting for one of the dignified Presidential candidates that have amazed us this election cycle with their wisdom and compassion… not!

Unfortunately, this is not a laughing matter. A large segment of the U.S. population is now very aware of the fact that our political and economic systems have become totally corrupt. And yet these knowledgeable people still cling to the delusion that this tragic state of affairs can be changed by voting.

Every once in a while I gently attempt to discuss this topic in “polite company.” It is astonishing how ferociously these “polite” people defend the myth of the ballot box. And so I will try to disabuse these well-meaning citizens from this idealistic concept, which has been relentlessly programmed into us since grammar school. I assure you that I received the same brainwashing, and I once believed in the power and nobility of casting ballots. And indeed, voting probably did “make a difference” at one time.

But the world of power politics has changed drastically. I contend that voting is not just meaningless in our present situation, but that it is actually harmful. That is a pretty bold and provocative statement, but I will now do my best to defend this contrarian belief. I will attempt to do so in a concise but comprehensive manner.

· WHO ENCOURAGES YOU TO VOTE? – Is it the factory worker who lost his job due to NAFTA? Is it the college graduate with $25,000 in student debt and a job at Starbucks? Is it the Senior Citizen spending their supposed Golden Years working as a Walmart Greeter?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pictorial Essay: Message to the Voting Cattle

March 9, 2016

Pictorial Essay: Message to the Voting Cattle

Our own awesome ‘wip’ posted this video in another thread, and asked me to listen to it. I did, and it’s freaking fabulous. I agree with about 95% of it. It explains as well as I’ve ever heard, why I say we should all vote for Candidate Nobody.

Here is the video:

Of course, not 1 in 20 will listen to a twenty-minute video, even here. So, I transcribed it. And, added some pictures for your viewing pleasure. You should be able to read it in under ten minutes. I did this for you curs and Trump-eteers. And, to send out to my brain dead friends and family, which are Legion.

============================================

You cannot begin to imagine in how many ways the world is the opposite of what you have been taught to believe.

You see the guy who sells drugs to willing customers so he can feed his family as the scum of the earth, while you see the hypocrite who gives away stolen money in the name of government, as a saint.

You see the guy who tries to avoid been robbed by the federal thugs as a crook and a tax cheat, but see as virtuous the politician who gives away the same stolen loot to people whom it does not belong.

every-51-seconds-there-is-a-marijuana-arrest

You see the cop as a good guy when he drags a man away from his friends and family and throws him in prison for ten years for smoking a leaf [every 51 seconds in Amerika]. And you see anyone who defends himself from such barbaric fascism as the lowest form of life … a cop-killer. In reality, most drug dealers are more virtuous than any government social worker, and prostitutes have far less to be ashamed of than political whores, because they trade only with what’s rightfully theirs, and only with those who want to trade with them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote

February 27, 2016

Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote

Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote Democracy is vastly overrated.

It’s not like the consensus of a bunch of friends agreeing to see the same movie. Most often, it boils down to a kinder and gentler variety of mob rule, dressed in a coat and tie. The essence of positive values like personal liberty, wealth, opportunity, fraternity, and equality lies not in democracy, but in free minds and free markets where government becomes trivial. Democracy focuses people’s thoughts on politics, not production; on the collective, not on their own lives.

Although democracy is just one way to structure a state, the concept has reached cult status; unassailable as political dogma. It is, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, “a surrogate faith for intellectuals deprived of religion.” Most of the founders of America were more concerned with liberty than democracy. Tocqueville saw democracy and liberty as almost polar opposites.

Democracy can work when everyone concerned knows one another, shares the same values and goals, and abhors any form of coercion. It is the natural way of accomplishing things among small groups.

But once belief in democracy becomes a political ideology, it’s necessarily transformed into majority rule. And, at that point, the majority (or even a plurality, a minority, or an individual) can enforce their will on everyone else by claiming to represent the will of the people.

The only form of democracy that suits a free society is economic democracy in the laissez-faire form, where each person votes with his money for what he wants in the marketplace. Only then can every individual obtain what he wants without compromising the interests of any other person. That’s the polar opposite of the “economic democracy” of socialist pundits who have twisted the term to mean the political allocation of wealth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trust Trudeau? I’ll Wait and See

October 23, 2015

Trust Trudeau? I’ll Wait and See

Canada’s young prince promises ‘real change.’ I can’t help but be wary.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Like many Canadians, I want to trust the Liberals, but I don’t enjoy having to trust them. Photo by Mario Jean.

How are we feeling about the new Canadian Camelot? Justin Trudeau is young, movie star handsome, and projects the confident hope of his famous pedigree. All of North America seems swept up in the romance of his remarkable moment, and of course there are obvious reasons to celebrate.

Like 70 per cent of the voting public, I am savouring the end of the Stephen Harper era as one might relish being released from a Turkish prison. His insidious regime edged us toward a mean and narrow vision of Canada that was becoming almost unrecognizable.

While the Tory defeat was decisive by pundit standards, many of us hoped for more of a Mulroneyesque wipeout worthy of Harper’s jagged hubris. Alas, the Conservatives were only wounded and may re-emerge under new leadership as a political force more familiar and somewhat less toxic to our country.

Trudeau and his team no doubt ran a masterful campaign, but I fear the victorious Liberals might take the wrong lessons from Monday night. Like all political partisans, Liberal supporters are apt to confound what is good for their party with what is best for our nation.

Will they embrace meaningful changes to our antiquated voting system now that they have again hit the electoral jackpot? The Liberal party has enjoyed fully 16 “majority” governments since Confederation, while only three represented an actual majority of votes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Should everyone vote?

October 19, 2015

Should everyone vote?

It’s election time in Canada, and as usual ad campaigns on TV, radio, print, and even Facebook are urging “everyone” to vote. But is that such a good thing?

To ask it another way: Is it really a good thing to tell people who are ignorant of law (so they don’t know which proposed policies are illegal), and/or ignorant of economics (so they don’t know what the actual outcomes of proposed policies will be), and/or ignorant of political science (so they don’t know which proposed policies are politically feasible with the actual people and institutions we already have)?

If politics is serious business, shouldn’t people have more than causal understanding law, economics, and political science before voting? How are people supposed to judge platforms otherwise–by what “feels right”?

Imagine you’re on a panel to choose a team of rocket scientists to send a spaceship to Mars. But let’s say you’re ignorant of the general laws of physics, the specific laws of rocket science, and the knowledge of project management knowledge of how different teams of engineers are supposed to work together.

How would you judge which engineers to hire?

By what the engineers merely say they’ll do? That doesn’t work, since you have absolutely no framework for what is and isn’t physically possible. They might be suggesting breaking the laws of physics but you’d have no idea.

By what the engineers have done in the past isn’t a good metric either. Sure they may have sent a rocket to space before, but what if they did it really economically and wasted a lot fuel and other resources? They may have also had a rocket blow up mid flight–but what if they didn’t even expect the rocket to ignite and so it was a great feat of engineering that it went up at all?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Representation” … and “Consent”

September 22, 2015

“Representation” … and “Consent”

Democracy is an incredibly successful long con. It works because of theillusion of consent. People actually believe they are “represented.”

And so, they accept impositions that would otherwise be intolerable, if imposed on them by a king or afuhrer or generalissimo.

But when the “people” have decided… .

Except of course, they’ve done no such thing. It is all an illusion, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that deftly hides the reality that it is not the “people” who decideanything but rather a small handful of individuals who wield vast – almost unlimited – power by claiming to act on their behalf.

Which is a fine-sounding literary device but as a political actuality it is an atrocity.

Have you ever consented to anything the government does to you? Been offered the free choice to accept – or decline? And not subject to violent repercussions in the event you do decide to decline? What sort of contract is it that you’re never actually been presented with but which you’re presumed to have signed – and which you are bound by whether you’ve signed – or not?

It is very odd.

The courts have ruled that by dint of having applied for permission to travel – that is, having applied for a driver’s license – you gave given your implied consent to, well, pretty much anything the state decides to do to you. Even when in flagrant abuse of your alleged rights, as enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Yet few, if any of us, have actually consented to this abrogation of our rights.

We are simply told that we have, since we submitted (under duress) to the necessity of obtaining a driver’s license, so as to be able to travel semi-freely, under certain terms and conditions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.

In other words, if the government is not trying to stop something, it must not be very important.

On the flip side of the coin, the great historian Howard Zinn noted:

Protest always looks futile at the time it takes place, but protest mounts up.

If they thought protest is futile they wouldn’t send the police out every time there’s a demonstration. [Examples of what Zinn is talking about here, here, andhere.]

You set up a picket line somewhere of 7 people, and 12 policemen show up. They must worry about protests. Because they know that small protests lead to large ones.

We noted in 2009:

As MSNBC news correspondent Jonathan Capehart tells Dylan Ratigan, the main problem is that people aren’t making enough noise. Capehart says that the people not only have to “burn up the phone lines to Congress”, but also to hit the streets and protest in D.C.

Even though most politicians are totally corrupt, if many millions of Americans poured into the streets of D.C., a critical mass would be reached, and the politicians would start changing things in a hurry.

As [liberal] PhD economist Dean Baker points out:

The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently, the townhall meetings, dominated by people opposed to health care reform, have been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform….

A big turnout … can make a real difference.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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