You matter, you are important and you are capable of knowing more than you do. You know that you exist and that can lead you to knowing other truths. If you bother, you can know other people and their truths.
If you are interested in a subject, click the tag at the bottom of any post for more posts on the same general subject.
YouTube - China Banning Non-Electric Cars. Watch the video and hear the talking monkeys of The Young Turks speak. They are excited that China is going to ban gas burning vehicles and think this is great for the climate change issue. ROFL. China will make the electricity by burning coal. They leave that part out cause they are too stupid to look it up. By the way, as I have explained before there are 500 ships that transport China's goods to the United States and Europe and they create more pollution than all of the cars in the United States each year. The funny thing is that they mention in the beginning that China is the biggest polluter in the world; but, fail to ask where the pollution comes from. It comes from creating the energy that their manufacturing uses, not from the products themselves.
CNBC - The party's over: Republicans and Democrats are both finished. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Gandhi said that. It is something I quoted when the media was going after Sanders and Trump, especially in regards to Trump.
When Trump entered the race, they ridiculed him with the Huffington Post classifying articles about him as Entertainment. They didn't go quite that far with Sanders; but, they did go far even saying that men that supported him just did it to pick up women. The establishment didn't take the Occupy Movement or the Tea Party seriously and managed to destroy them both. Trump and Sanders were the response to having those movements ignored by the establishment. For the past year the establishment has been trying to prevent these movements from growing now that they have seen success. For their part, the Democrats are trying to kick the progressives out of any place of decision making within their party. The Republicans on the other hand are continuing to distance themselves from Trump; but, are actually distancing themselves from the people who voted for him. The establishment is losing and they know it. Denial is no longer working for them. It is still all Hillary can manage to do; but, she will never be relevant again
Recently Jerry Lewis passed away. For decades I was involved in supporting the Muscular Dystrophy Association, MDA. Mr. Lewis had put on a annual fundraiser for the on Labor Day. He started doing it in 1966 and was let go in 2010. He did it for 44 years and raised over a billion dollars for the charity. In 1972 Lewis made a film called, "The Day the Clown Cried". I has never been shown in public, though at least one copy exists. Lewis said the film would never be seen because it was horrible and I believe it was; but, still want to see it because I think it could have been great. I read the script.
The Greeks said there were only so many stories, they classified them as comedies and dramas and recognized the seven plots available to either. The essence of comedy is not the plot, it is the ending. Let me explain. Comedies have happy endings and dramas do not. This is true for action films too, it is true for all stories. If a story The feelings you have when you end a story is either happiness (comedy) or sadness (drama). The two masks that symbolize theater, the smiling mask and the frowning mask.
Comedy and drama both work best when there is something to cheer for. Most comedy goes for the silly underdog; but, the challenge he faces has to be real for the comedy to work. You have to care about him. You have to want to see him succeed, you have to wish him well and seek a happy ending.
The problem with "The Day the Clown Cried" is that they wanted to have humor in a movie with a horribly sad ending, a drama. You can mix humor into a drama; but, not too much and it has to be a very unique style of humor, gallows humor, not fun humor.
The film is about a clown in Germany who is sent to a concentration camp, jail, for Germans that ends up being side by side with a true concentration camp, one for Jews and Slavic people. The character that Lewis plays is a sad character, devoid of self. He is a broken man uselessly trying to fill out the papers that will get him released as he is a political prisoner, he insulted the idea of Hitler being the leader in front of the Gestapo.
Lets be clear about something, Jerry Lewis was a Jew and his parents were Russian Jews. Looking from the outside, attempting to make a comedy about the Nazi's gassing children seems like a really stupid and horrible idea; but, he wasn't making fun of them. It could have been his own family and he knew that.
I read the script for the first time tonight, it is linked above. The writing is terrible and the writer seems lost to me, he indicates which parts he thinks can possibly be played for laughs. I believe the writer was told to find places where the jokes could go in; but, it was never meant to be a comedy. There is a movie called "Life is Beautiful" that pulled off a very similar script; but, any humor was incidental to the story.
After making the film, Jerry Lewis stopped making films for years. He said he lost his artistic vision because of that film. Humor is tough, it is always a tight wire act and the performers usually die till they get really good at it.
Comedians frequently make great dramatic actors; but, in my opinion, Lewis never was. I think Don Rickles was a great dramatic actor (just watch Casino); but, Lewis played silly in comedy. Of silly comedians, I think Jim Carrey might just be able to pull this movie off.
I don't know that this movie deserves to be remade. I believe it could be powerful; but, too much time has passed and the dialogue is horribly immature. Francis Ford Coppola could have made this a good film; but, as much as I like him, Tarrentino could not make this film. If made, I don't think it would make tons of money, in fact, it is really depressing watching a clown lead children into a gas chamber. The biggest mistake the film made was focusing on the clown, on Lewis. It should have about the lack of compassion of the guards who were willing to send children off to be killed with a clown, just to make their jobs easier. If anyone bothers reading the script, let me know what you think.
When you hear the same solution being suggested in different countries but the excuse changes, it is because they believe that one society will like one excuse more than another; but, it is still just excuses. The reality is, they want to tax everything except income. They want to tax you for living, but not succeeding. Watch the water games in your town and you will see it coming too.
MSN - CNN - Hillary Clinton: Time to abolish the Electoral College. You have to appreciate the hypocrisy. She is totally in favor of rigged primaries and super-delegates that represent only the donors a in crowd; but, is concerned about the electoral college. The electoral college is more representative of this nation than is the Democratic National Committee's rules for choosing nominees.
Without one state casting a single vote, she already had one third of the Democratic delegates for the primaries. I wrote about it at the time, still on this blog with links to the corporate mainstream media talking about it and why Bernie could not win. Just imagine if we had an electoral college that gave the votes of one third of the whole country to a specific party in advance of anyone voting. That is how the Democratic primaries work. The Republicans are not much better; but, they actually more democratic. I wrote about that too when the primaries began.
Both parties want to fix primaries so that you only have two choices and both parties choose corporatists who only look out for the wealthy. They only argue over homosexuality, what it means to be citizen, abortion and religion. They agree on not regulating banks or business and cutting back on how much we help the poor.
Imagine growing up in the Midwest or South today, imagine being the kid of an unemployed auto worker or steel worker or manufacturing worker who voted for Trump because they wanted their jobs back and hearing day in and day out in the media that your father is a bigot, fascist and racist because you voted for Trump and he was the only one saying he would try and get your dad's job back. I want you to think about that.
The corporate media and the establishment are creating a hatred for themselves by constantly attacking those who complain that we are killing jobs in the Midwest. They are losing any trust with these Midwest kids whose parents voted for Obama and then Trump. They see the lie, they see the hypocrisy and that is why they are listening to alternative voices. What do you think these Midwestern kids will grow up to think about the establishment?
I will speak personal experience and I am a very educated coastal socialist. When I went to university in Boston, I found more bigotry by coastal elites against minorities than I ever did from southerners. I also found that Midwesterners were more bigoted than the easterners or southerners and found the west to be the least bigoted against minorities.
Lets look at women and men's perspectives on each other. What do coastal young men want from women? Just sex. I mean that's it, they don't want kids or families. The only value coastal young men see in women and the well to do too, is sex. The more they have, the less young men care about women other than for sex and they seek no commitment. The coastal women assume that because it is just for sex, their relationships have no other meaning and that it should be enough for a relationship. The modern feminists see no value in being a woman, only value in seeing being the same as men.
The coastal educated establishment sees no benefits in being either sex, no give, no take, no reason for commitment, just sex. The value of human relationship and commitment, unity, they see as limited to sex for a minute or two. The only value young coastal elites see in the opposite sex is the orgasm that they can achieve by being with them. They see no innate value in the opposite sex other than sex.
What could possibly be sadder than growing up in a home where your parents argue over who has to raise you and neither wants to be a parent? Why have kids when the only reason a man and woman should be together is for sex and not procreation?
Consider this, kings and queens inherit their wealth, status and power because of who their parents had sex with, not because their parents raised them to be better or deserving of trust by the rest of us. The exact same is true of our oligarchy. The whole idea of inherited wealth is due to the belief that who you have sex with should determine who owns the world. Why should who have you sex with determine who will own the earth or control a company or control an industry? I could ask this question of the Rockefellers or Fords; but, they would say that they tried to be deserving of it and trained for it. That is how oligarchies used to justify their position; but, now they don't bother justifying it other than saying they are better than the people who got screwed in the Midwest.
The benefits of having a stable society should go to those who benefit that society the most. What a concept. It is however a very old one and one that good kings used to understand. My professors begged me to become a professor and wanted me to be the world's expert on Polynesia. There are other ways to live and organize people. There are ways to organize society to benefit members based on how much they benefit the society. Not communism, under that everyone gets the same. Communism is stupid and based on the idea that all labor has the same value. It doesn't.
I doubt many will understand what I am about to write and it may seem totally disconnected from what I have just written; but, it is not. If you read the Unabomber Manifesto, you will find that he was really focused on one point. He was focused on what happens when we live in a world where your labor is no longer needed and his fear was that we would cease to have innate value because we were incapable of making a difference in any real way. He missed the point of our lives. He believed our lives only had value proportional to our ability to "achieve" more than others. Did you know that our tech leaders have written volumes on his writings? They have, you should research it.
If one were to actually bother learning from history, one would learn that technical achievement is meaningless and that human joy does not come from it. Human meaning comes from human interaction of a positive manner.
I met a missionary, I wrote about her once or twice on this blog. She moved to Papua New Guinea about 45 years ago and went to a place where the people had no written language and whose primary food source was a tree sap they made drier. The hardest thing she found teaching them was forgiveness and she was responsible for putting an end to a war that had gone on longer than they had recorded as they had no written language and only knew that they hated this other group. Still, there lives were meaningful and they continued to grow and get better and eventually made peace and enjoyed that peace with the other tribe. By the way, they are not Polynesians, they are black. Not all islanders are Polynesian, not even in the pacific. Australians are not Polynesians either. They are Melanesians.
The tech giants and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, see life about them and not about society. Life is not about what you can do to improve your situation unless you are starving to death, it is about what you can do to make things better for everyone and we are not even trying and seem to have stopped caring.
I do not expect children, sheep or the average person to understand the ways of the world. The establishment however expects them to follow right into the slaughter cages and then congratulate themselves that they won the game. This is why we teach children musical chairs is a good game when it is the opposite.
In the past a husband was expected to take care of the needs of the family, while the wife was expected to take care of the emotions and remind the husband of why what he did had value, that it had value to the family. That is the lesson of the middle class and now we are told that the only value of relationships is sex. Are we advancing as a society or in anyway when all we believe in is self?
Yahoo - Newsweek - Robert Reich: On Labor, Tragically, Trump Was Right. The article points out that the wealthy are spending more and more to control elections and buy politicians which is why we are gutting public services like education and what workers are paid. We all know this, in fact, only one in ten even trust our businesses, banks or political leaders. This by the way is why there is an increase in propaganda to think about everything other than following the money.
MSN - Country Living - Parents Can't Figure Out Why This Student's Math Problem Was Marked Wrong. They are intentionally destroying education for all but the well off who attend private school. Want proof? Read the article or answer this question, what is 5 X 3? I would say the answer is 15, nope according to how our children are being taught it is 3 X 3 X 3 X 3 X 3. In fact if your answer it is 5 X 5 X 5, you are wrong. Why are we teaching kids that math is harder than it needs to be? Oh, yeah, so they won't learn or like learning.
Fox - Mark Hamill donates to campaign to remove Donald Trump from Twitter. I like this, people are actually willing to donate money to someone else to buy a majority position in Twitter, rather than getting the stock themselves, to prevent our President from being able to speak directly to us. Hmmm. Why not just start a new site that works like Twitter and say that what makes your site different is that you don't allow the President on it or other people you don't like? The people who control this nation really still have not figured out how to control the internet; but, they are trying.
Independent - Scientists think they have discovered the maximum age a human can live to. Something I have written about before. People are not living to be older, the top age has not changed. The difference is people are not dying as young as they used to, like we have impacted childhood deaths and early deaths; but, not the extent of life.
Fox - Trump, GOP should keep DACA but scrap birthright citizenship. Why are people on the left and right both against making these people citizens? DACA didn't make anyone a citizen, yet the media acts as if these people were safer under the rule which wasn't a law and the right wants to say being born in America doesn't make you a citizen. It is all about creating two levels or more of citizenship and watch if accomplished only a few will get the right to vote.
Fox - House moves quickly to pass self-driving technology law. Congress is moving right now to approve laws preventing states from making their own laws. Funny, I thought the Republicans were in favor of states rights. Hmmm. Oh, in addition, this is being done so that 150,000 self driving cars can be put on the roads by NEXT year.
Yahoo - The Independent - Donald Trump doesn't realise Ivanka 'isn't that impressive to people', says political analyst. Well, expect to see more and more articles attacking Ivanka. I guess she was the next member of his family to get all negative attention. Isn't it great that with only 6 corporations owning 90% of all the media it doesn't matter who you read or watch in the corporate mainstream media because they all speak with one voice.
Washington Examiner - FEC Dems renew bid to regulate Internet, Drudge, 'not done fighting'. Yep, the corporate Democrats want to regulate political speech on the internet because some Russians put ads on Facebook to the tune of $100,000. I wonder how many political ads the Democrats put on Facebook or the Republicans? It was a lot more. The elitists really do not understand the internet; but, they know they hate it. They hate it, free speech and democracy. They like control and monopolies.
Congress establishes the rules for immigration, that is their job. Congress has not changed the immigration laws which prohibit people coming to the United States to live without approval by the federal government. Immigration is not a state's rights issue, it is a federal issue. If Congress wanted they could eliminate all immigration laws and allow for open borders.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if we eliminated all immigration laws. If you want an example of what it would look like, look at Europe. Few openly call for open borders. Hillary Clinton was exposed by WikiLeaks for calling for it in private while she denied it in public. The reason is pretty simple, the vast majority of Americans do not want open borders.
Instead of passing laws to outline what is and is not acceptable in order to move to this country, Congress left it up to Obama to institute the policy of not enforcing immigration laws. President Obama instead instituted a policy known as "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" or DACA. The biggest problem was that it didn't change the immigration "laws" one bit. Congress did not pass DACA which means it was never a law to begin with, merely a policy of not enforcing the law for the moment, that is what deferred means.
Now lets look at some other facts. It is estimated that there are millions of people in the United States illegally. Some call them undocumented but that is just word play. They are undocumented because they haven't sought or obtained legal citizenship. Children who are not citizens of this country; but, came to this country when they were under 16. In fact, you may recall the influx of minors who came to this country after Obama instituted the DACA program.
The fact is Mexico allowed these people to come here from central America; but, did not allow them to immigrate to Mexico. This is a fact that the corporate mainstream media chose not to address.
The DACA program has actually exacerbated the problem by adding even more confusion over what the countries immigration policy is and that is the single biggest problem with it. DACA was never the law of the land. Because of that, President Trump is not and never has been bound by it. DACA gave an out to congress so that they did not have to actually address the issues or change the immigration laws.
With all the discussion in the media about Trump ending DACA, there is practically no discussion about what our immigration policy should be and that is a problem. We should be openly discussing it and if changes need to be made, congress should make them. That is how laws work. While the media would have you think the questions are difficult, they are not.
Lets start with the basics. Should we have immigration laws? Most people would say yes. Should those laws allow people from other countries to move here and become citizens? There are those who say we should allow people to move here; but, not become citizens. The corporations would love to have them come here to reduce wages; but, would say these immigrants should not get any benefits. In fact, our tech and business leaders have not offered to pay more in taxes to provide benefits for immigrants. They are unwilling to put their money where their mouths are. That is hypocrisy.
When Trump announced his run for President, he stated he wanted to stop illegal immigration. He announced he would enforce the immigration laws passed by congress and remove people who are breaking those laws. People seem to believe in immigration enforcement and that is one of the reasons Trump was elected whether you like it or not. It should be noted that our laws allow for making asylum seekers citizens. I know, I worked with people at the church who were seeking asylum because otherwise they would be killed for being gay in their home countries.
The options available to us are vast. We can totally open our borders and give full citizenship upon people reaching this land, we can open our borders and let people come here but restrict which rights they have, we can change our immigration laws permanently allowing anyone under 16 that gets here to automatically become citizens or allow anyone under 16 that comes here to stay; but, receive no benefits or limited rights. Yu can have any combination of these things.
It should be noted that Mexicans account for an estimated 6.5 million illegal immigrants to the United States, yet, Mexico does not contribute to their well being here. Mexico sends no money to care for their people who are here illegally. Again hypocrites unwilling to put their money where their mouths are.
The media seems to think that enforcing immigration laws is wrong; but, is not willing to openly call for ending all immigration laws. Perhaps they would be willing to pay additional taxes to support those here illegally. Nope.
Living in California, these questions are not new to me.
YouTube - Harvest of Shame is the video above. It is from 1960. I recommend that you go to 49 minutes into the video and you will see that these issues are far from new, yet we continue to defer making a decision on immigration policies.
A question to be considered is one of illegal immigration and crime; but, the answer may surprise you. We do know that a large number of illegal immigrants become drug dealers. You may think this is an outrageous thing to say; but, you might want to look at the type of crime they commit. It is estimated that 80% of the 50,000 or so members of the notorious 18th Street gang are illegal immigrants. Rather than being innately bad people, selling drugs is a way to earn an income when you cannot obtain benefits or legal employment. Telling minors that they can come here; but, not receive benefits guarantees this. The question is not just one of what should our immigration policy be; but, what do we do with poor people who come here. That is not being addressed at all and DACA did not clarify it. I blame that on Obama.
The economist Milton Friedman discusses illegal immigration from an economic perspective. His conclusion was that immigration only made sense if it is illegal.
You will find that agricultural states love illegal immigration; but, they are unwilling to provide benefits to these people. It's been that way in California for as long as I have been alive. Nothing has changed and those promoting illegal immigration don't address it now.
Another question has to do with people who say that we are overpopulated and need to reduce our carbon footprint; but, then say we should allow unfettered and uncontrolled immigration. Hmmm. Lets think about this, our birthrate is negative and sperm counts in the west are down over 50%; but, we want to allow millions of people into the country that have much higher birth rates. I guess we are not really that concerned with global warming or overpopulation.
If we consider the environmental treaties that are being promoted by globalists then let me ask this. If we increase our population by 10% will we be able to increase our carbon footprint by 10% too? No, the Paris Climate Accord had us as the only country committing to decreasing our climate footprint, not China or India who are now the biggest industrial producers and don't regulate their pollution with the same technologies that we require in the west for our own industries.
Let me explain this to everyone in the simplest terms I can think of. The establishment wants the United States to agree to never use more resources in the future than we do now. That is why they talk about carbon limits. At the same time they want us to take in millions of immigrants which would otherwise increase our carbon footprint; but, they have a solution. They want Americans that already are citizens to give up what they grew up with. The tech gurus such as Zuckerberg know that there will not be any jobs for the immigrants or the current Americans so they are willing to share the table scraps with the useless eaters, the middle class and working class. They now refer to them as the precariat. You should look that up and look up the last Bilderberg meeting where it was discussed. I already wrote about it. They anticipate a world where most people have no job and live in 150 to 250 square foot rooms with virtual amusements to simulate a meaningful life. What was it the Democratic National Committee email from Bill Ivey said to John Podesta? Oh yeah he said, "And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry." Read the actual e-mail at this link, WikiLeaks.
