I bring you the innovative pop guitarist named Albert Hammond Jr.

When I was a child it was about if, it was about when, but now ... it's about how.

Having a 100 year storm every year is starting to reach people.

The second vid is "answers with joe" who is a good source for reliable presentable knowledge in my opinion. At least so far.

Why -- a new poem

why
why is there more movies recently about the final battle that destroys humanity
why
why do I have to see the presumptive villains
why
why
why
is this an umbrella or just a ruse?

I am getting sick of these youtube ads making John Cox sound like the comeback kid from South Chicago who "wasn't supposed to be" ... in the race? Really? You weren't supposed to be in the race, but somehow you are in the race to be California governor. That's because you were the only Republican in the primary who did not have obvious baggage. And because John Cox is a Republican, John Cox is in the party of racism, sexism, bigotry, and the self-absorbed greedy mega-wealthy donor class who bankrupts the people's government to have massive tax cuts that they sock away in Cayman Island bank accounts while pretending to pass it on to their workers. John Cox is not an outsider.

Then there are the ads with an upper class suburban mom complaining about how costs are going up, and thanking the Democratic establishment for the tough times, saying "we need a change" without offering a single proposal or policy that will enact that change. Obviously the pollsters are hoping to peel off some of the female vote, hoping some female voters will ignore the rampant sexism in the Republican establishment, hoping they will forget that the Republican party would have ruined decent health-care had not John McCain stood up and said thumbs down.

The last time there was a Republican governor, it was Arnold Swarzenegger, and all he did was leave the state mismanaged and 32 billion dollars in debt. It took 2 terms of Jerry Brown to put the state fiscal budget on a sound foundation. There is now even a rainy day fund for the coming inevitable economic downturns in the future. Thank you Governor Brown.

All these Republican political creatures are just actors trying to convince people to vote against their best interests, providing specious arguments and emotional banter to drown out the truth. Gavin Newsom is not my favorite choice, but he is also not a Republican.

Here is the link if the youtube video has errors.

Malcolm Nance is a true patriot. His family has been military and security personnel since the civil war. His great-great grandfather was a Tennessee/Georgia black slave who escaped and joined the Union forces in a black regiment.

I absolutely love this man.

Buy his two books. click here for books by Malcolm Nance

This is the first 2 chapters of my first Novel, "My Country This of Thee".

Click here

There are currently 24 chapters, and the novel is 200 pages so far. There are 3 chapters that I want to touch up some, and I'm considering a 25th chapter. Otherwise the novel is done.

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

~Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

The US Chamber of Commerce interactive map shows how each state will be affected by tariffs.

Louisiana will have 5.9 Billion in sales threatened : Click here for a pdf.

What is an alienated dysfunctional society? Good question. Let’s look at each of those three words separately, one by one.

Alienated. Alienation occurs when individuals feel no connection or relation towards other people or institutions. Sometimes the sentiment is such that there is a largely negative, fearful connotation. As a result, avoiding connections becomes a preferable option, resulting in a lack of communication and feedback, magnifying the feeling of alienation, often warping their views about individuals and institutions that can be drastically different from any bearing on reality.

Dysfunctional. Dysfunctional literally means “against the function”, or not serving to benefit the purpose of the function. Dysfunctional behavior involves doing things that are actually harmful or not helpful. Irrational behavior or irrational thinking can be a symptom of some central dysfunctionalism. So you might encounter people who have a certain phobia that justify said phobia with illogical thoughts, and develop extensive behaviors in order to avoid instigating the phobia involved. For instance : my mom used to be so afraid of bridges that she would make me drive her 15 miles out of the way to use a dangerous unregulated 30 year old (often crowded) river barge, instead of traveling 2 miles across the river on the modern 3 year old four lane bridge that had very little traffic.

Society. An organization of people who collectively perform activities that sustain the overall existence of its members.

So an alienated dysfunctional society is a group of people who are harboring irrational attitudes, having negative and/or fearful sentiments about other members of the society, and organized in a manner that might be beneficial for some of the members, but is not beneficial for society as a whole.

We have a society now in which large sub-groups are incubated into group-think outlets reacting to and manipulated by vague inaccurate portraits of events. The overall structure now of society is one of wealth extraction, not wealth distribution, and the ongoing relentless extraction of such wealth from the resources of the earth is ignoring the inherent balance of our planet’s ecosystem, acting as if resources are infinite and endless. Large economic entities owned by very small numbers of people insist on making more and more profit, even while more and more people struggle with a basic means of existence. Granted a little struggle is inherent in life, but that is quite different than a large monolithic weave of corporate ownership structures narrowing down and limiting pathways for all of those individuals not lucky enough to be born into prosperity.

In the days before the rise of merchants and the modern middle class, servants and peasant children sometimes found their way into a life style that was above the vast majority of everyone who was not an aristocrat, but that’s not the same thing as working hard and rising up the social ladder based upon merit. The forces of acquisition forget about the concomitant feedback loop of economic distribution that sustains a functioning social order. Machines cannot buy the products that the machines produce, and shrinking the accumulation of wealth to a smaller number of people cannot support a large sprawling market system unless the uber-wealthy replace the economic distribution created by large numbers of smaller wealthy individuals by putting everyone else on their payroll. However, instead, the uber-wealthy prefer to fund think tanks promoting ideology, buying media outlets to control information, funneling money to compliant politicians who pass the laws they want, and spend their money excessively on costly extravagance for leisure and carnival solipsism. Or do you think an economy can run on private jets, private yachts, gold bathtubs, and million dollar sales of paintings and sculptures?

The non-wealthy are pushed to the edge in an alienated dysfunctional society. The rewards of the efficient production system largely accrue to the owners and stock holders, with very little trickling down to the lower classes that do the actual work of the production system. Marginalized and struggling, the mental day to day pressures of managing to find meaning in life is very difficult for even those who have strong instincts and mental acuity. Not everyone manages to stay sane, and some of those who lose the balance turn violent. This is what it means by statistics when the percentages of a subgroup are much larger than that of another subgroup. It’s not an indictment but a statement of an expected rate of increase due to the circumstances the alienated dysfunctional society places upon some subgroups in the society.

However, rather than become self-introspective, those who benefit from this alienated dysfunctional society chose blame or comforting biased explanations. Hence, black people are said to be more violent, liberals or socialists are just lazy people looking for a handout, and the homeless are just losers who cannot cut it in the modern world. Victimization is the glue that holds the fragile belief system together when the abundance of evidence cries bunkum.

Meanwhile those who benefit from the alienated dysfunctional society dabble in peddling nationalistic narcissistic racism in order to divide and conquer the minds of the beleaguered, who must be convinced that the alienated dysfunctional society is innocent of the designs by human actors. For some of the beneficiaries, it is difficult to be willing to admit that there is some responsibility on their part to reform the alienated dysfunctional society. So they ignore feedback loops and bottom up management systems, because it is too easy to believe in facile natural solutions that don’t actually address the underlying factors that create the alienated dysfunctional society. It is too easy to hide behind easy philosophies which remove the human from the precepts of the philosophy and presume unrealistic human behavior, because the end result must lay blame and personal responsibility on the individuals within the subgroups in order to justify the accruing of benefits to the other subgroups. Those who have advantages will explain these advantages are due to their own strengths and find weaknesses in others who lack such advantages. They will focus upon superficial individual characteristics and ignore the macroscopic systemic reality.

As a result, all human progress is an inevitable struggle, which is why war and revolution are periodic hallmarks of the human species.