Year: 2020 (Page 1 of 3)

That is all.

I’m paid to next June. I imagine that, by that time, I’ll be permanently done with this. I have to accept that 25-30% of all Americans are evil people. These are the people who know Donald is a child molester. They know he is a fraud. They know he is deep in hock to foreign interests (in particular Vladimir Putin). Yet they support him. That is because each of those individuals believes that he hates his or her outgroup most of all and will punish them for existing. A black man who supports Donald does so because the group he hates most is one of the following:

1) women
2) Hispanics or Asians
3) homosexuals
4) Muslims

Similarly, a Mexican man who supports Donald does so because he the group he hates most is one of the following:

1) women
2) blacks or Asians
3) homosexuals
4) Muslims

And so on, swapping the list around as necessary.

Caveat: some wealthy members of one of these out groups may simply be taken in by the naïve idea (proffered by right-wing propaganda organs) that the wealthy all benefit from a right-wing dominated government. In the case of the last two Republican administrations, the wealthiest far outstripped the mere multimillionaires in gains.

The remaining supporters are the profoundly gullible. There are some patriotic Americans who will support what they perceive is good leadership. They lack the curiosity and, I would argue, good citizenship to see what that really means. Instead, they opt to lazily accept the reporting of clear propaganda organs such as Fox News, OAN, and Russia Today as if they were legitimate news organizations.

Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election, I assume that the victims of the John Birch Society brainwashing will not rest until they have destroyed democracy and rational thought forever in this country. In its place, they hope to plant a permanent aristocracy of the worst sorts of people on the planet. And they will be armed with thermonuclear weapons.

Humanity is damned, at the hands of its worst members.

All of this was fixable. The sum total of reforms (a bit simplified, to be fair) is this:

1. Limit campaign donations:

• A citizen may only donate to a person for whom (s)he may vote in the next election.
• The sum total of donations must be a very small amount, allowing access to any person.

2. Limit access to lawmakers:

• Every meeting with every individual who is not a constituent must be logged and recorded as a permanent record.
• Every meeting with a constituent must be logged, but not necessarily recorded.

3. A holder of national office must divest his or her holdings:

• An exception to this is dwelling real estate or small (very small) business.
• Real property of little financial value may be retained.
• Value of previously held stocks, bonds, etc. would be directed to an anonymous and wide-ranging fund directly proportional to the standard holdings within the US citizenry.
• A non-partisan legal and fiduciary committee would review all transactions of the national officials with veto authority.

… it would be the duty of every American citizen to devote his/her life to the restoration of Constitutional government.

Let us consider the 11 states that would have stars in the Confederate flag. The first official Confederate flag was the “Stars and Bars” and not the early “Beauregard flag,” its successor, the “Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia,” or the second (“Stainless Banner”) or third (“Bloodstained Banner”) official Confederate Flag. Nevertheless, for this calculus, we will consider the listed states as having been under the “Confederate Flag” for the entire period from the official formation of the Confederacy to the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. This period, from 08 FEB 1861 to 19 APR 1865, lasted 1,521 days. For comparison, the duration from original statehood to formation of the Confederacy is considered along with the time from Lee’s surrender to now. The percentage of that total time during which these states claimed to be a part of a separate nation is shown on the right.

An insignificant fraction of total statehood of each was spent under one iteration or another of the various Confederate flags. As such, it would seem there must be some other reason for certain people to venerate this particular part of their collective history.

I wonder what that could be.