in my ongoing effort to suggest what to DO about this mess

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I feel here is a third way, after either fighting them mano-a-mano or simply changing your mind and not standing for their fascism.

Simon Black, better known as Sovereign Man, presents some disturbing thoughts which are sure to get the broader spirits elevated. Instead of continuing to fight what some see as a losing ideological battle with a government which no longer even remotely represents the broader population's interests, Black says simply to walk away: "When you think about it, what we call a 'country' is nothing more than a large concentration of people who share common values. Over time, those values adjust and evolve. Today, cultures in many countries value things like fake security, subordination, and ignorance over freedom, independence, and awareness. When it appears more and more each day that those common values diverge from your own, all that's left of a country are irrelevant, invisible lines on a map. I don't find these worth fighting for...The government beast in your home country feeds on debt and taxes, and the best way to win is for bright, productive people to move away with their ideas, labor, and assets. This effectively starves the beast and accelerates its collapse. Then, when the smoke clears, you can move back and help rebuild a free society." Perhaps Black is right and this is the best, and possibly only, non-violent way to fight the political-financial plutocracy?

I mean, they all have their drawbacks, of course, or we'd've done one or all of them by now. We're not used to having to make uncomfortable choices, to having to leave off our mesmerism with our jobs and families and friends to really PAY anything for our freedom... which is goofy as hell, because we are paying vastly more by clinging to these things than we ever would by cutting ourselves from the herd and beating paths others could follow. That's the hell of it! Courses of action are barred forever by FALSE notions pounded into us from every direction our whole lives. Who stops to think of the lethal entrapment in full force and effect inside EACH of our heads alone?

You should. Freedom isn't free. It isn't easy. You're a grownup. It's your responsibility.

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love, 99
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turn off yer tv

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DO IT. DO IT NOW.

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love, 99
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i'm not kidding about these russian fires

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Follow the links at this piece. I also found a world fire map that pretty well blew my mind. What the HELL is going on? Why the fuck isn't this stuff splattered all over the front pages of everything? WHO is in charge of this shit, of deleting from the possibility of our knowledge so much crucial information?

And what really irks me the most is that people have no hope of getting to the bottom of all the information, even when we get it. It takes armies of GOOD FAITH ACTORS coming together to gather and pore through the information to get it into a form that is even remotely tenable for the average person to take it all in. WHERE ARE THEY? Don't mention the intertubes to me because most of the ones people visit are corporate-owned, for profit or nonprofit, and even when not pumping you with propaganda like their MSM brothers and sisters, ARE NOT CUTTING IT.

WTF is wrong with everybody?

In view of our dull acceptance and/or avid denial of reality, can we be surprised the powers that be are treating us like a big herd of brainless sheep whose individual lives are virtually meaningless to them?

I rather think not.

THE POINT IS NOT TO WAIL ABOUT IT BUT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

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If you cannot get the world fire map to load, here it is for today....

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naomi wolf is voting with her feet

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It's what I love about her, beside how smart she is and how much she loves everyone. I got an email from her that she's merging the American Freedom Campaign into the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. I see she is now on their advisory board, along with a bunch of good people from liberal, conservative and libertarian political leanings. I see they really are about CONCRETE ways people can take action to put the Bill of Rights back and restore the LONG LOST rule of law.

This is music to my eyeprints, you guys.

This Hatfield and McCoy crap on the intertubes mortifies me, depresses me SO badly. I'm not kidding. It hurts like holy hell to witness it, let alone try to get along in it. So HERE is a possible route to justice at last, IF people put as much energy into it as they do into bashing their ideological fake adversaries.
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i want you to listen to this very carefully

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And do what you can to support these beautiful kids.
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maybe not

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I find I really want you to listen to this hour-long interview I also linked last night:



It doesn't matter who is speaking. It only matters that both are knowledgeable, ordinarily bright, humans, expressing what has been going on and is still going on. The people in charge have been doing what they're doing to us now to every other country in turn and in blocks for a very long time. The delusion hammered into you since childhood by society and by the media, without letup, has prevented you from assimilating this and stopping it. So take out an hour and listen.

You can hear about how we sabotaged Russia's economy... how much Larry Summers had to do with it... about the consequences of that... about how it's happening to us now... about what this does to life expectancy, quality of life... about a few very motivated people making life hell for masses of not that kind of motivated people. You need to listen. It is a much more accurate assessment of the State of Our Union than anything that came out Obama's mouth last night.

Agent BB2 and I had been talking about it already down the page, here, and, guys, this is not a drill. And this is ALL of us. So, continuing in this vein, he just gave me this link, which I'm hoping helps pound it home.

Radical Inequality Is Literally Killing Us
New scientific research shows that Wall Street's war on the middle class is sabotaging our longevity.
By Sam Pizzigati | January 27, 2010

Two British intellectuals — one a distinguished, gray-haired professor emeritus, the other a rising young academic superstar — have just finished a 15-day speaking tour across the United States. They came to fan the flames of “populist rage.”

We don’t, of course, normally associate populist rage with sophisticated scholars. Our most eminent pundits almost always employ "populist rage” as a condescending, even derisive, put-down, a tag for an unfocused, unthinking anger directed toward elites — a cry from the great unwashed masses born of frustration and envy.

But Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, our two recent scholarly British visitors, would beg to differ. Populist rage at bank bailouts and Wall Street bonuses, they believe, actually reflects state-of-the-art scientific insight.

Wilkinson and Pickett both work as epidemiologists. They study the health of populations, and, over recent decades, pioneering work by Wilkinson has helped reveal the most reliable foundation for good health and long life. Want to live long and prosper? Go live in a relatively equal society.

Over 200 studies since the early 1980s have now documented that people living in societies where wealth has concentrated at the top of the economic ladder live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than people who live in societies that spread their wealth more evenly.

And we’re not talking just poor folks here. All people in unequal societies do worse. Middle-income people in the United States, the world’s most unequal developed nation, have shorter lifespans than middle-income people in Japan, Sweden and a host of other more equal nations.

This same dynamic, Wilkinson and Pickett show in their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, is operating on all our most basic yardsticks of social decency. On everything from homicides and teen pregnancies to drug addiction and levels of trust, people living in more equal nations do better — from three to 10 times better — than people in societies where treasure tilts to the top.

And that treasure, in the United States, is tilting top-bound as rapidly as ever. The latest Wall Street bank bonus totals may have no precedent in American history. Seldom — if ever — have so few profited so profusely in the midst of a general economic collapse.

The 32,500 souls fortunate enough to work at Wall Street banking giant Goldman Sachs will pocket an average $498,153 for their labors in 2009. Their total compensation for the year, $16.2 billion, runs $3.3 billion more than the pay that went the year before to the 207,315 teachers who staff New York state’s public schools.

We see this same top-heavy distribution of income throughout the U.S. economy.

Two weeks ago, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that just a tad over a million U.S. taxpayers will take home over $500,000 in 2010. These one million top-earners will collect $200 billion more in income this year than the 80 million taxpayers who make $40,000 or less.

The data from epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett remind us that gaps like these have consequences: they translate into ever-higher levels of stress and insecurity in nearly every corner of our daily lives. This economic insecurity assaults more than just our household finances. Over time, the chronic stress it causes actually wears down our immune systems. Our epic inequality, in essence, is quite literally killing us.

Last week, on the last day of the Wilkinson and Pickett U.S. speaking tour, Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich joined the two British scientists at an Economic Policy Institute forum in Washington, DC.

Democratic Party politicos, Ehrenreich charged, “have failed to speak to the resentment out there on inequality."

Average Americans will rage, and rightfully so, until they do.

Do you want to hang out and despair? Do you want to go ridicule right wing dummies on the Righteous Wing oases of Outer Blogistan? Feel like tweeting about Piglips' malapropisms today? Is this your plan?

The power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. —Howard Zinn
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qualified for office

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make it so

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That is all.

disregarding his belief in nineteen box cutter wielders

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Ward Churchill is telling you PRECISELY what you need to hear.

Please listen.

exercise yer first amendment rights 'til yer blue in the face

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...for all the good it will do you. The proliferation of organizations that has sprung up from our urges to make our government a workable entity is just staggering. Even the most admirable and altruistic of them quickly devolves into a mailing list with someone in charge of alternately pleading for you to sign a petition or to donate to their cause. Every time someone in Congress drops a phrase pertaining to one of these pet causes, immediately there are emails urging one to call, write, email, petition, donate in support of actually following through on this vague mention of starting off in a direction that might one day produce something that will pass for action.

In short: Say anything you like, and you can even say it to our faces, but, pfeh, dream on, rube. We ain't listening. And, exactly what do you propose to do about it?

It's been this way for at least a decade, and steadily worse as time passes. The American Freedom Campaign, the organization I would expect to have the theatrical nature of the whole First Amendment gig down pat, has graced me with but another form I can fill out to be ignored by Congress. I'd hoped for more.

It isn't that we shouldn't use our rights, ineffective as they have been rendered. It's like with election fraud. If we don't make them steal our votes, they get their way without even having to be devious about it. But, be all this as it may,

NOTHING IS BEING SOLVED.

How many ways are there to state this such that someone might let this miserable reality sink in past the intellectual functions to the point where the being itself feels the imperative and

DOES SOMETHING ABOUT IT?

Oh, oh, I know. That gets you into the zone where you can be identified as not "peacefully" exercising your rights -- which is when your rights stop being your rights according to the Constitution -- and so you are in jeopardy of being incarcerated for your subversion. They made no provision for when all three branches of government ceased to respond to the people's pleas for redress....

Something has to give, because we are in a fascist-if-you-do-and-fascist-if-you-don't situation. It's like a big boil on the ass of America, all the festering of determination coming to a head, all the true humans being turned into puss needing to be expelled for the sake of tranquility.

An extremely unlovely metaphor, I know, but... well... there you have it....

doctors!

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It's a tie between more myelopathy and thyroiditis... in a nutshell. It's more complicated than that, but doctors all over god's green earth are alert and testing the living snot out of me. I'm a crimped up pin cushion about now, and on the verge of becoming pilled to a smithereen as well. Oh! Well.

Bottom line is: we will find out what can be done and do it. I have a couple weeks of hanging at the parental units' place before I have to go back and face all the traffic and scrubs and waiting rooms and machinery again. I tellz yez they're all on speed down there!

[Davis has left the building and I am heartbroken.]

throw him through your tv set

My boyfriend's back.

hey! the ap is snubbing my boyfriend! goddammit!

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They vaguely mention him as "one dude" while clearly rooting for the Obama slut! I can't believe it!

He's a... the... dancing god and genius of the planet, and they call him "one dude"? Just how dense can these people be? What the hell is wrong with everybody? Will they really be so shallow as to vote for the chesty thing over Davis "My Hero" Fleetwood?

[UPDATE: He didn't win, but neither did Obama Girl.]

my crush on tim grier

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I know you've got to be sick of me falling in love with guys every time you turn around, and I'm usually just kidding, but this Tim Grier thing has me by the throat. For about the last 48 hours, suddenly, I've gone Tim Grier crazy. It started the night before last. I am so going to get over it. Rest assured of that! It's just throttling me right now.

I think it's part of enlightening being, of karma, of shedding delusion once one has gotten a gander at truth.

I'm just kidding about Davis. I think he's a doll. I love most of his videos and seriously dig his readiness to action. I really do think he's a dancing god, and don't think I can stop calling him my boyfriend, even though he's married.

But the Tim thing is of an entirely different character. I found out about him on another website a few weeks ago. I've been skimming over news of his various battles with local authorities, and Tim was just a bit of news to me, a guy trying to fight the good fight and catching flak from a bunch of self-important local poobahs. What nailed me was going to his website for the first time a couple nights ago, finally finding out exactly what he was doing, and noting that there was no trace of whining or self-importance there at all. Just the facts.

It's ridiculous, really, that I should get nailed by someone over twenty years younger than I am, but seeing what I saw, as I saw it, made my knees go all wobbly and that warm front moved in. It's really not appropriate to have such a reaction to someone merely doing what he thinks is right, but, truly, don't you think hearing of such a person these days is too much like a breath of air to a drowning person? Yes. That's just precisely it. Someone merely doing what they think is right is water to the one dying of thirst on the desert or air to the one drowning. In the best of times it is too infrequent. We tend to make those guys into heroes damn fast, but, lately? Am I missing something?

Yes!

THAT.

Now that I've watched a couple videos and read some news about him, I see he keeps being identified as an "activist". That's how I was once known too, before that surgery clocked me. Maybe soon I can go back to it, but it's a seriously silly way to describe anyone who's only doing what they think is right. I mean, if we live in this world we have to be active or the world gets done to us. People who want what is everyone's, people who do have the will and the energy to act in furtherance of that goal, can just take it if we do not act. The laws we've let be turned into total shams hardly slow them anymore. It's like taking candy from a baby. You just have to wait till nobody with any backbone is looking.

Always seems to me that maybe three people on the planet grok this. Can't work with anyone because their failure to assimilate the bare bones of real life on earth, true humanity, fundamental humantude, always leaves me searching wildly for ideas about how to take everyone's blocks off with one cosmic swipe. And. Ka-ching. A heavily tattooed one of those three pops up in the arrangements of pixels in front of me and it plum bowls me right the heck on over.

Pfeh.

It's the buddhas working to get me back on the razor's edge.

Okay. Okay! Give me a break! I hear ya! Sheesh! He's too young! This is silly.

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No. REALLY. Doing what is right is ORDINARY. It's just that when everybody isn't doing it, it seems so outrageously vital. It's just that when everybody isn't doing it and nobody can even tell that they're not doing it a couple of us feel like we're being held under water, like we're crawling on our bellies across the Gobi in a sand storm, on the way to dead for so long we almost couldn't identify LIFE anymore.

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I remember my teacher hollering about when people would gush about my teacher's genius. "No!" my teacher would holler, "I'm just normal. I'm just ordinary. This is what humans do." The ticket, of course, is that people are out there not letting themselves be normal, be ordinary, do what humans do. Too risky. Someone might see you fail. You might have to work at something on top of how much work life already is. Better to just say stuff. That will cover it.

It doesn't cover it.

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Walking in the County Clerk's office, or the Registrar of Voters office, or the Board of Forestry office, wherever, slapping down your complaint, or whatever is going to actually bring them up short and make them attend to the problem, and sticking with it for as long as it takes, for as much as it takes, covers it. EACH of us not only knows that is right, but we make ourselves ever more ashamed every time we don't actually DO what is right.

The ones who take what is everyone's are not even partially fazed by any number of signatures on a petition, or letters to our senators, or floods of emails to the local station. Sheets flapping in the breeze of a freight train.

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God, I hope there are enough decent people in Wilkes-Barre to make sure Tim's complaint doesn't get buried. How absurd is the term "activist" anyway for doing what you think is right? It means everyone else is a "passivist" fer crapsakes... which seems quite horribly to be the case. Is it really any wonder so many who consider themselves elite condescend to be our "leaders" while they very obviously -- to each other -- are only there to rob us blind? We can be relied upon to prefer the safety of flapping like sheets while they drive their freight train right over us.

Does it occur to you that most everything is almost exactly backwards?

It is. And you are as responsible for it as the kleptocrats running the world. Until you will up and do what it takes to bring them up short, you are a passivist enabler of planetary doom. Whatever fantastic excuses you have, this is so.

We are in charge of the world. All of us. If we do not perform, this is our world.

real men license their dogs or own property

Move over Davis, another is vying for first place in my heart. Tim Grier, a resident of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, even before he bought licenses for his dogs, has sued the county for... well... wait... who cares why? They are doing what counties do, mishandling public funds, and Tim just up and took the appropriate action to stop them. Bip bam. Nobody does that. It drives me nuts. Has always driven me nuts. And here, big as heck, at last, is relief. He's twenty-two years younger than me! Even more age-inappropriate than Davis!

Do I just sit here swooning? Or whut?

davis has come so seriously late to this party

I'm sure you recall me pitching a purple polka-dotted hissy over this at the time, but he does such a sterling job of it here, and... let's face it... we still need to get to the bottom of this really, really badly.

my inbox

Somebody asked me why I don’t like any of the presidential candidates. Beside the multifarious unsuitabilities, naked insufficiencies, blaring inadequacies, I’ve harped on over the last entirely too long to bear this sort of thing, there is the matter of our planet. Our good and faithful dying planet.

Peppered with incogitant criminals who call themselves “leaders” though it is, it is our only home.

There is a vast whirlpool of plastics choking off the sea life in the Pacific. The polar bears are drowning. These two facts alone are enough to nix everyone running, everyone who was running. Which of them has been hollering for the free market to do something about either of those problems? Or for the world to pitch in to build freezers for the arctic and send battalions of barges out to haul out that immense floating island? What world leaders or candidates for world leadership are addressing this stuff? Every decent scientist on the planet has come out and said we are in a planetary emergency and which of them is giving it a tenth of the attention it so obviously requires? Name me one!

Dennis Kucinich might have said a thing or two trending in that direction, and we might even have heard it if he’d been serious about becoming president, but I don’t think so. And trending toward it doesn’t cut it. It’s flat out not good enough to choose between the people who have decided to run for office. We have to be out finding real candidates and clearing the decks of the criminals, who are too busy running heroin and nukes through Turkey to do anything other than create planetary crises, so as to make it safe for real candidates.

But no, no one ever went broke underestimating the apathy of the electorate. Your brain is going directly to the old saw about how never getting a choice better than the lesser of two evils has made the public apathetic. Shoot your brain. Use your head.

The waiter says you can pick between the rancid chicken and the rotten vegetable soup. Which are you going to pick? Neither? How are you going to eat then? "I'm going to go out and find me some fresh nutritious unpoisonous clean food, even if I have to grow it myself."

That’s how you get the right presidents too.

Don’t sit back and take potshots at potential candidates. We’re going to starve to death if you don’t stop that. The matter at hand requires that real statesmanship of a nature positive for the whole planet come to power. It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby to sit back and dis the people who might or do run for office, but another matter entirely to help insure there is really someone to vote for, or to help insure the bad candidates are made into good ones.

I heard someone stumping for a parallel government the other day. That sounds like a potentially brilliant idea. Anyone feel like talking about it? About how good an idea it could really be? The pros and cons?

UPDATE: "I mean, it felt like he was urinating on my face!"

dennis excluded again

Don't take it lying down! Hassle the War Pigs for him!

dc arrests 80 against torture

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viggo for president!

Viggo/Davis 2008!