Tag Archives: Politics

Keeping It Simple in 2024

Posted on June 3, 2024 by | Comments Off on Keeping It Simple in 2024

The US Congress has been steadily forfeiting power to the Presidency for the past 2 ½ decades.  The acceleration of the self-enervation of Congress began in the wake of 911 when it cowardly voted for the formation of the Executive-Branch-led security state (the Patriot Act and all of its Bill of Rights stripping progeny), rather than do its job and get to the bottom of the Intelligence-Military-Law Enforcement sector’s treasonous failures leading to 911. Congress followed that with its forfeiture of the power to determine whether the United States goes to war or not; a power vested in Congress by the original U.S. Constitution. Current President Joe Biden (then senator) was one of the most vociferous proponents of handing that power over to George W. Bush in 2003; while Biden also served as a front-row cheerleader for the Iraq War travesty.

Since then the Presidency has been steadily gifted more and more powers; including the power of the purse, another critical existential constitutional prerogative of the Congress. U.S. politics has degenerated into an every-four-years sweepstakes, the result of which determines which branch of the Uniparty gets first dibs on the spoils wrought from U.S. citizen taxation.  In essence, we have become an autocracy with a new stand-in dictator picked every four to eight years. The administrative state is the only constant, and it loyally serves only the vast sea of blood sucking nongovernment organizations, think tanks, corporate lobbyists, arms and drug manufacturers which created and support it. Only an autocratic plutocracy remains of a once promising democratic republic experiment.

Despite all evidence to the contrary many people still associate their party as the defender and proponent of certain issues that in fact they are not. And for this reason they put up a Quixotic fight to the death to get their democrat or their republican elected to wear the crown. For example, republicans still consider themselves fiscal and monetary conservatives.  And yet, when they got their most “conservative” President in place in 2016, they encouraged Trump to far outspend all other Presidents before him – only to promptly be outdone by Biden. Example B, democrats still fancy themselves the protectors of civil liberties.  And yet, with their boy Biden in charge, the security state – led by its Censorship Industrial Complex – has rolled back First Amendment rights like never before (even in times of war).  Further, for some odd reason Americans seem to equate democrats with peace. Yet, again Biden has us on the precipice of World War III, and seems hell-bent on pushing us over the edge, see Wag the Dog? .

Neither of the leading candidates is likely to do anything but exacerbate the inflation problem, the waning global influence problem, and the Big Pharma,  Big Oil, Big Tech, Military Industrial Complex policy domination problem. There are clear lines of demarcation on the issues of immigration and abortion and several personal values issues that ought not be government issues at all. But, that is about it. The only sane way to resolve any political divisions and differences, and only democratic way, is through full access to information and healthy public debate.  And this leads to THE critical issue not receiving the attention it ought to.

Both sides are claiming that the election of the other will mark the ‘End of Democracy’.  As noted that is a misnomer and somewhat of a straw dog because the American political  machine has long-since voted and ruled against the collective interests of the populace.  What is not being directly addressed is the only black and white issue that fundamentally determines whether we continue the path toward absolute plutocratic autocracy or redirect the empire back toward the democratic republic roots that led to it becoming the world’s more influential nation.  That is, will either candidate say or do anything toward a commitment to restoration of the Bill of Rights upon which this country was founded?  It might be appropriate to refer to Elon Musk who has ponied up 44 billion dollars to help restore those rights by his purchase of Twitter and its conversion to X; making it the last major online forum unsullied by the long arm of Big Brother’s Censorship Industrial Complex. When asked why he took a multibillion dollar hit on the deal, he has repeatedly noted that without freedom of speech and the press one does not have democracy in any form, democratic republic or otherwise.  Democracy in order to survive requires first and foremost a well-informed citizenry.  And that is only possible in a society where speech and expression are not restricted by specialized interests of any kind. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made it patently clear that he is committed to restoration of the First Amendment of the Constitution. With the two wings of the Uniparty spending hundreds of millions to defame, shame, and cancel him, Kennedy’s chances remain a long-shot. Ironically, Kennedy’s participation is likely tip the scales either toward the Republican or the Democrat candidate. 

If you feel extorted into using your vote on the lesser of two evils, you are by no means alone. I believe a majority of people have felt that way over the past 10 years, at the least.  If you feel that way today, I suggest you pay attention to where the candidates go with the critical issue addressed here, restoration of the Bill of Rights, starting with the First Amendment to the Constitution.  It is the only issue that measures up to the rallying cry “we have got to save our Democracy.”   

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Weaponization of Government

Posted on May 3, 2024 by | Comments Off on Weaponization of Government

I ended the last post Censoring Science: Coerced Consensus with a clip from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claiming the Biden White House immediately after inauguration coerced Facebook to censor Kennedy. He has so far proven as much in courts. Two days after that post, the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a report backed by a plethora of documents proving the White House application of coercion to censor against virtually all major internet platforms. The report sums it up as follows:

Now, having obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of emails and other relevant nonpublic documents, the Committee and Select Subcommittee can provide a more complete picture of how and the extent to which the Biden White House coerced companies to suppress free speech.

• Big Tech Changed Their Content Moderation Policies Because of Biden White House Pressure. The Biden White House pressure campaign largely succeeded in 2021. In the weeks and months following the start of the White House pressure campaign, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon all changed their content moderation policies. The White House pressured companies to censor information that did not violate their content moderation policies at the time. The best evidence to assess why content moderation policies were changed is to review relevant email correspondence and other documents at the time of the policy change. Indeed, both Facebook and Amazon referred to the Biden White House’s efforts as “pressure.” Here is a subset of key documents first obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee pursuant to subpoena:

o In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”

o In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”

o In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”

o In August 2021, an internal Facebook email explained why the company was developing, and ultimately implementing, new content moderation policies: “[Facebook’s] Leadership asked Misinfo Policy . . . to brainstorm some additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against . . . misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”

o In September 2021, after receiving months of criticism for not censoring non-violative content, YouTube shared with the Biden White House a new “policy proposal” to censor more content criticizing the safety and efficacy of vaccines, asking for “any feedback” the White House could provide before the policy had been finalized. The White House gushed: “at first blush, seems like a great step.”

The full subcommittee report and its supporting documentation can be found here, Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government report.

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How Factchecking Became Thought Policing

Posted on April 18, 2024 by | Comments Off on How Factchecking Became Thought Policing

URGENT NOTICE: If you have not done so already, email your Senators to ‘vote no on 702’, reference: End of Right to Privacy in America?

The Poynter Principle

Reference: Meet the Censors

If the International Factchecking Network (IFNC) run out of the Poynter Institute in St Petersburg Florida was sticking to the facts it might not be posing the existential threat to our society that it currently does. Neither would the Mainstream media (MSM) in general. But, neither of them have ever let the facts get in the way of their mission. Both are fond of saying “we can disagree on how we view the facts, but we cannot disagree on what the facts are.”  The truth is, MSM and IFNC and the Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) they pimp for are really concerned with the conclusions people make and will manipulate the ‘facts’ to implant those conclusions in their minds. I witnessed Poynter and its Times do this for decades in order to smear and marginalize a group of people it took issue with, the Scientologists. Now, they practice their trade on political opponents on an international level.

Fact checking has been foisted upon us as a pseudo-scientific process for determining what our minds ought to process and ought not to. MSM and IFNC have invented the title ‘factchecker’ and incessantly used it as if it were a profession for which one took a prescribed university course of education to earn a degree.  In fact, certified IFNC factcheckers have zero credentials. Worse, in most cases they have anti-credentials. That is, their only claim to entitlement is that they are reporters. Think about it. Reporters are literally the least trusted profession in the world when it comes to facts.  A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who have a great deal of confidence in the media is 7%. That is about the same percentage of Americans who own more than 50% of its wealth. That is about right – the media, by survey, is the tool of the Plutocrats to keep the real people ignorant so that they remain in their peasant places. 

What reporters do have that hard-working honest people do not, is practiced expertise in the art of deception. They are expert at sophistry. (Sophistry: a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning. – Dictionary.com)

When you combine that trick with the sleight of hand of calling opinions, theories and ideas ‘facts’ that can be judged on an objective basis by some authority on high, an upside-down Orwellian world obtains. No longer are they banning falsehood, they are banning prohibited ways of thinking. They are controlling thought.

Let us take an example from IFNC itself to show the depth of deception with the unelected thought authorities at Poynter.

The media industry loves to shower itself with honors and credentials with which to lord over its subjects. The pinnacle of MSM self-love is the Pulitzer Prize. Poynter Institute won one in 2009 for the handiwork of its IFNC predecessor and now partner Politifact. The Prize was awarded for its fact checking work during the 2008 Presidential election. As you may recall one of the most contentious issues in debate in 2008 was whether Obama’s universal healthcare proposal would include the right to keep the plan you were already on.  An army of health care analysts claimed that under the vague campaign health care proposal of Obama it was very likely impossible that one would retain the right to choose his own doctor; and that it was very clearly impossible to confirm it without the entire proposed system set forth in detail.

Nonetheless, Politifact’s (and later IFCN) head Angie Holan decided as a matter FACT that Obama’s unlikely promise  was a ‘fact’, publishing on October 8, 2009:

“Under Barack Obama’s health care proposal, “if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it…

                     …we rate his statement True”

First realize that clearly this was not a factual dispute.  It was a matter of opinion.  And an opinion about whether someone would do what he promised despite a slim probability. But, as noted in the last post, the New Liberal Order – through IFNC – treats opinion as fact when it suits its purpose. And the NLO decided Obama was the chosen one, and so had factchecking central (Poynter’s Politifact – now IFNC) turn Obama’s promise into a fact. It was for this type of flat-out partisanship that Pulitzer awarded its prize for “factchecking.”

So wrong was Poynter’s Politifact that it became a huge campaign issue in 2012. By then everybody seemed to understand the Pulitzer-prize winning fact confirmation was fraudulent, except for its perpetrator Politifact. The political hack nature of Politifact is evidenced by the fact that it remained silent about its fraud until after the 2012 election. Only when the chosen one was back in office did they deign to acknowledge the error.  

When it no longer mattered to its political purposes, Politifact (and IFCN) head Angie Holan finally penned the article “Lie of the Year: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it’’ 

Holan had the chutzpah to call the Pulitzer-prize winning FACT verification of the year 2008 “a catchy political pitch” and a “breezy assurance”, instead of the fact it had certified. Instead of even acknowledging her and Poynter’s error (and fraudulent Pulitzer) she condemned Obama for intentional dishonesty.  Like the psychiatrist who can never lose an argument by use of the device of judging his opposition “crazy”, such is the arrogant nature of the Censorship Industrial Complex. It is never wrong, and you are never right if you do not slavishly go along with its certified narratives. Opinions (even potentially fraudulent misrepresentations) are fact when it suits their purpose.  And when they become debunked, the self-appointed judges of thought rewrite history.

In 2013, Avi Roy found and exposed these very facts in Forbes magazine. For a deeper dive into this sham, see Pants On Fire: Politifact Tries To Hide That It Rated ‘True’ Obamacare’s ‘Keep Your Health Plan’ Promise

Roy observed that “It’s more than a bit precious for Holan—a self-appointed Arbiter of the Truth—to declare as a “Lie” a statement that she herself once declared to be “True” without even acknowledging the fact that she had done so… That we can’t count on PolitiFact to even admit it was wrong tells you everything you need to know about the group.”

Indeed. And yet 11 years after the exposure, Holan and Poynter have been rewarded for dutifully calling false promises fact when it suits the New Liberal Order’s purposes. They have been granted millions of tax-exempt dollars to serve as the global Ministry of Truth and as the “certifier” of truth arbiters across the world. This is something even worse than the Peter Principle, wherein incompetence is rewarded by promotion in a bureaucracy. This is not mere incompetence. This is promotion for carrying out intentional fraud and deceit for the New Liberal Order: The Poynter Principle.

For our purposes, the event captures opinion checking in the name of fact checking. The former is in no fashion objective. It chooses ‘proper’ ways to look at things or think about things while banning others. In that regard it monitors and controls how you think, your very thought processes. It is beyond mere deception and dishonesty. The CIC through Poynter has entered the realm of thought policing and mind control.

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Meet The Censors – The Poynter Problem

Posted on April 11, 2024 by | Comments Off on Meet The Censors – The Poynter Problem

 

I ended the last regular post, What Is Wrong With Western Civilization, with the suggestion to read Jacob Siegel’s ‘Invasion of the Fact-Checkers’ in The Tablet.  In summary, Mr. Siegel details the following:

  • A “Ministry of Truth” – ala Orwell’s 1984 – has arisen and plays a large role in determining what most of the populace reads and hears.
  • The Ministry covertly operates as a sort of Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) under the euphemism “fact-checking.”
  • One of the “fact-checking” pioneers in Mainstream Media (MSM) was the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact begun in 2007.
  • In fact, the Tampa Bay Times was and is a possession of the ‘not for profit institute’ for media ‘studies’, the Poynter Institute.
  • Poltifact has morphed into Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). 
  • Not only does IFCN serve as the hub for “authoritative” determinations of what constitutes ‘truth’, it trains and certifies censors across the world – with more than 100 new Ministry of Truth branches globally, and counting.
  • The censorship efforts are funded with many millions of dollars from the plutocratic elite and your taxpayer dollars and essentially “proclaims that America’s ruling bureaucrats at the FDA,NIAID, CDC, the FBI, the CIA, the Fed – and the entire alphabet soup of government agencies – along with the ruling Democratic Party, are never wrong about anything.
  • IFCN (and its Poynter overlords) are shockingly incompetent and predictably prejudiced in ‘fact-checking’, rendering a system that amounts to global, organized political censorship.

The Censorship Industrial Complex grew out of an obscure branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).  It was originally formed to help prevent cyberattacks on traditional infrastructure such as bridges, airports, utilities, electric grids. However, in reaction to President Trump’s election in 2016, Obama’s outgoing DHS Chief designated voting systems as critical infrastructure to fall under CISA’s jurisdiction. Over the next four years CISA became a hub for coordinated government censorship efforts. The unconstitutional efforts were justified by claiming “voting infrastructure” apparently included each individual’s mind which had to be protected from disinformation, first foreign and then domestic. No joke, CIC luminaries have spoken of cleaning ‘neurological infrastructure’; that means your brain.  Clean brain = Brainwashing.

During the lead up to the ’22 mid terms DHS announced the formation of a full-blown Ministry of Truth called Disinformation Governance Board. The public outrage that engendered resulted in the Board being scuttled. Nonetheless, CISA in coordination with a number of federal agencies picked up the censorship work in earnest – recruiting and utilizing a number of non-government agencies to do the unconstitutional work it wished done. Most of the censorship work was done through cooperation of big tech platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and a dozen or so more. Tens of millions of postings by Americans were deleted, hundreds of millions of postings were partially censored by limiting their visibility and distribution. 

That there is a virtual Ministry of Truth operating ought to shock the sensibilities of anyone even vaguely familiar with the United States Bill of Rights. The idea itself is anathema to the very foundation of this country. Unfortunately, even this concern cannot be taken for granted. The most recently appointed Justice of the United States Supreme Court openly expressed dismay that the 1st Amendment to the Constitution might be used to ‘hamstring’ the US government’s censorship efforts. It was once taught in grade school that the very purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment was to not just hamstring but make impossible any efforts by the government to censor American citizens.

That the Poynter Institute was chosen to lead the censorship/propaganda efforts raises more concerns.  As we shall see, the inmates are literally running the asylum.

I have twenty years of experience dealing face to face with Poynter and its own propaganda arm, the Tampa Bay Times. Why, because Poynter and its Times have been avowed enemies of the Church of Scientology for the past 50 years.  As such, I have had occasion to deal directly with the Chairmen of the Board and Editors of both Poynter and its Times for the past forty years.  That includes Andrew Barnes (1984-2007), Paul Tash (2008-2022) and Neil Brown (2022 to the present). I have communicated with each of them. I can confidently state that the Poynter/Times board and its three continuous rulers over the past 4 decades are some of the most elitist, virtue-signaling folks I have ever encountered. They wield their newspaper and Poynter’s influence like a battle axe and do so in an arrogant fashion.  The halls of Poynter management ooze with sanctimony.

They were practiced at the arts of censorship, propaganda, shaming, and marginalizing many years before it became vogue as it is today. They treat opinion as fact when it suits their purposes, and they treat fact as opinion when it is inconvenient to their aims. They are pros at the techniques of identity politics and smear by association. That is, they condemn a class of people and continuously reinforce it with opinion dressed up like fact, label one as part of that class, then crush the person for carrying that label.  In the case of Scientology they played it both ways.  Many stories were written on the shortcomings of individual Scientologists.  Not church staff members or members of the clergy; Just persons whom they identified as believers or practitioners of the religion.  The only ‘newsworthy’ criterion was the fact of a Scientology affiliation.  Each story was sure to smear the person for being involved with Scientology and smear Scientology for having impliedly created such a creature.  A ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ set up.  It was the ‘fake news’ phenomena in practice, decades before the term was even coined.

The Poynter/Times anti-Scientology contingent’s grip on the “fact checker” censorship industrial complex is significant. IFNC is the sanctioning entity for all ‘fact-checkers’.  “Factchecker” is a newly created ‘profession’ that requires absolutely no expertise. The only requirement is a steadfast commitment to enforcing by any means necessary the approved narratives of the Neo Liberal Order. They train fact checkers to understand those narratives and in sophistry tactics which find any ‘facts’ not aligning with the narratives to be ‘false.’ 

The head of IFNC is Angie Holan.  She graduated to that position from a stint at the Times’ Politifact – the original ‘fact checker’.  It was at Politifact that she helped Poynter win a Pulitzer Prize for ‘fact checking’. Ironically, the most significant verified ‘fact’ leading to the award was later recognized to be “the lie of the year” (such a remarkable story warrants a separate post).  As a fledgling Poynter/Times acolyte, she ‘fact checked’ at least one anti-Scientology propaganda piece. The story smeared Scientology by labelling a member of the religion as a slumlord because of code violations in a rental property he had recently purchased. He was no more in violation than many other landlords, and far newer to the ranks than most. But, he was a Scientologist, so knives out.  

The story falsely claimed the individual was at an even ‘higher Scientology training level’ than a certain celebrity, who also happens to be a Scientologist, apparently for the purpose of also smearing the prominent Scientologist and garnering itself more attention for its hit piece.  The target of the piece was not a member of the Scientology clergy nor an employee of the church. He was labelled and his religion slammed because he was a member of that religion. Imagine, Jewish Slumlord Exposed?  Or, Catholic Slumlord Scandal?  Or Hindu Slumlord Shame?  It is a microcosm of the Mainstream Media’s smear modus operandi. The Scientologist is smeared and shamed for being associated with Scientology.  Scientology is smeared and shamed for the alleged acts of a believer. Prominent Scientologists are smeared by association with both.  This is critical to understanding what the CIC is now doing politically. The same tactics are applied to any political views that clash with NLO orthodoxy.  Label, smear, shame, and convict others by association. 

The reporter Ms. Holan fact checked was the then Scientology beat reporter. That’s right, the Poynter’s Times had then as it has today a beat to single out a single religion for frying whenever one of its members – no matter how lax in his or her participation or membership – commits a transgression. The reporter, Rob Farley, was all over the Clearwater community (the site of Scientology’s Florida headquarters). He ran a series of stories about the ramblings against Scientology of a homeless, jobless drug addict. The addict soon recognized for the first time in his three decades of life he could be elevated to semi-celebrity status by merely being anti-something he had no personal knowledge about. And so, at the Poynter Institutes’ behest he went in whole hog. Until, apparently overwhelmed with guilt he committed suicide. 

Where is Mr. Farley now?  He is the Deputy Managing Editor of FactCheck.org. His organization is ‘certified’ as reliable by, none other than the Angie Holan-lead International Fact-checking Network.  Deputized to censor you by the ‘very best people’ at the helm of the Poynter Institute. 

These are the people who have been designated by your government to determine what ideas are worthy of dissemination and what ideas will be suppressed. Factchecking is a euphemism for propaganda dissemination and censorship.  In our next installment we will demonstrate how Big Brother’s arbiters of truth are far more concerned with controlling your thoughts than assisting you on issues of credibility. 

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Regressive Thinking

Posted on June 26, 2016 by | 58 comments

I covered a Corpus Christi city council proceeding recently for a local newspaper and a grassroots community organization. The experience seemed to me a microcosm for a regressive political trend evident in American politics. The council debated what to do about the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s (TCEQ) finding dangerously low disinfectant levels in the city water mains for the second time in as many years. The mayor and two council members utilized all of their time attempting to target the TCEQ for allegedly overreacting to Corpus’ repeated failures to measure up to state water standards.  A fourth council member began her like-minded comments as follows, “I am not trusting of government.”

Think about that for a moment. In essence, she said to voters, “I, your elected government official do not trust the process you entrusted me to direct on your behalf.”  It is a common sentiment often expressed in myriad, if covert, ways at all levels of politics in Texas and the United States. It got me to thinking about where we are heading collectively and the kind of thinking that is leading the way.

Government is the act of governing.  Govern is defined as follows by Merriam Webster: “to control or guide the actions of (someone or something).”  You obviously govern your own body.  When you share space and resources with another or others, you establish agreements as to how that space and those resources will be shared. Roles, duties and responsibilities are assumed or assigned as means of assuring those agreements are kept. It applies to families. It applies to clans. It applies to tribes. It applies to interaction between tribes that share space and resources.

Quite obviously the more people occupying a given space and sharing a given amount of resources, the more agreements – read, governing – is required in order to maintain peace and order. Any fool – even an inbred hillbilly confined to interacting with his growing clan on an acre of land – understands that natural equation. The more people and the consequent less space and resources, the more agreement is required and the less self-centeredness is afforded. Or, the more people occupying a given space, naturally the less individual freedom of choice to ‘do as thou wilt.’

It has been observed and thoroughly documented clinically that early stages of infantile thinking begin with the assumption that the child is the center of the universe. Developing awareness of others and the fact that they share space and resources – and cooperating with others in that regard – is incident to the process of maturation. The math becomes intuitive as intelligence evolves.

It is an interesting and potentially enlightening exercise to contemplate the above-offered equation against one’s own experience and values. Think about the political ideas you have accepted or synthesized against that equation. Do some of your cherished ideas make an awful lot of sense after all? Think about the role models, ideals, and dreams you look to and harbor and how you came to accept them and where they are leading you. Do they make you – and those you share space and resources with – feel happier or more fulfilled? Were they influenced by interests, factions or ideologues working at odds to the simple, natural math? What were the purposes of those (educators, politicians, film makers, media, employers, mentors, etc.) seeding such ideation?

Think about the firmly-set ideas you may have developed over the years about certain classes of people (political, social, philosophical, religious, national, racial). Are they fair? Or are they expedient? Are they healthy for you and those with whom you share space and resources?  Have they led to evolution or have they had a regressive effect?

This essay is not a promotion for nor condemnation of any particular political faction. If you engage in the suggested exercise above earnestly, and follow up with some objective homework, I think it will become evident that political extremes – on either side of the aisle – fueled by greed are the most abundant feeders of the sort of regressive thinking addressed.

 

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Politricks

Posted on May 6, 2012 by | 203 comments

There have been a lot of respectful, round-about comments on the blog over the years implying that my politics are from the left wing.  The comments are sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly made by proud conservatives and proud liberals.

I think folks from both sides of the right/left spectrum misunderstand me. I am going to make a political (or apolitical) statement so that there isn’t any mystery about where I stand on the subject of politricks.

While I believe America has become a corporatocracy (that has sometimes verged on fascism) I also believe it has socialized so much as to have created an incentive toward ‘entitlement’ that has become degenerative.  I believe that those who capitalize (and many do as politicians and media) on these obvious problems and make a name for themselves by cleverly arguing that total elimination of either side of those competing evils is the only solution are perpetuating the problem.  I don’t waive any flag, right or left.

I think we continue to evolve and survive as a species because of the unsung heroes in the middle who get it hard from both sides while trying to push things ahead a little bit for everybody. And I think those on either side of the spectrum who earnestly push for reforms (as opposed to those capitalizing on making people anti-this or anti-that) are a lot of times, when they are focused, worthy of support.

A line by Spencer Tracy from an old classic we recently watched, A Bad Day at Black Rock, resonated with me.  His character answered about his political affiliation to a threatening, inquiring redneck (in the stereotypical sense – I have nothing against rednecks and have many times been called one myself):

I’m a rock ribbed Republican who believes Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great man.

From 06 through 08 I worked for two papers in the Corpus Christi Bay region:

a) We The People, the voice of working men and women. A newspaper whose sponsors considered Barack Obama was too conservative to be elected President.

b) Coastal Bend Herald, The Conscience of the Coastal Bend.  A newspaper so conservative it runs a column by Ron Paul in every edition.

The publishers of both papers – on either extreme of the political spectrum – never once attempted to edit a single word in the hundreds of articles I produced.

Both publishers considered me an asset because of my investigative and writing skills, but more so because I wasn’t backed off from dealing with corruption – whether the perps were Democrats or Republicans.

My politics are that I don’t cotton to corruption and greed, and bullying and injustice to perpetuate corruption and greed.  My philosophy is that if enough people could be brought around to that way of thinking to the point of doing something about it, politics would be a rather pleasant subject and the world would be a far more fair and enjoyable place to live.

Isms don’t pull a lot of weight with me.

After living in this region for more than six years my two most trusted friends and allies are:

a)  The head of the local branch of the Tea Party.

b) The head of the Corpus Christi Populist Progressive Coalition.

Go figure.

I have. I reckon they both are trying to achieve the same thing, only via different routes.  Both of them have hearts of gold.  Both of them do what they do because they detest injustice.  Neither of them are making any money for their efforts.  Both of them would, and have, dropped everything to come to the aid of a fellow citizen in need.

I think the old man had it right when he declared Scientology to be apolitical.

Politics will sort itself out when enough good folks transcend politics.

 

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