JHUS Staging

Tag: power

  • When I Was Forty-One I Had A Very Good Year…

    A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.

    Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.

    2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…

    If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.

    Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.

    Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.

    But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.

    “C’mon now, who do you think you are?
    Hah! Bless your soul…
    You really think you’re in control?”

    Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

    Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.

    These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.

    I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.

    But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.

    Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.

    Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.

    As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”

    People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.

    The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.

    The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.

    I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.

    That’s pretty nuts.

    Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.

    Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.

    The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.

    The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.

    Now ask yourself this question:

    Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?

    I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.

    What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.

    Class dismissed.

  • International Women’s Day: Wendy O. Williams

    When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.

    Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!

    I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!

    Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.

    A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.

    It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!

    Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)

    Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.

    Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.

    It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.

    There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.

    Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.

    Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”

    So speaketh Mama Wendy

    One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.

    Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.

    After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.

    Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:

    The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.

    Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:

    “We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”

    With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.

    I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.

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  • Fear, Part 2

    (This article originally appeared on my site in September 2013.  It has been slightly updated for re-publication.)

    Scared_Child_at_Nighttime_800h by Pink Sherbet Photography via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from originalDon’t be afraid.

    Don’t be afraid to see where this is going.

    Don’t be afraid to follow the trail to the end.  It’ll be worth it.

    As long as I have memories, I’ve had a “problem” with wearing my heart on my sleeve.  I think that’s a universal metaphor, but in case anyone’s not familiar with it:  that is to say I don’t hide what I think and feel.  I’m very straightforward, blunt.

    You might notice that I put that word problem in quotes, in the first paragraph above.  Not because it’s a euphemism, but because I have never, ever understood – and never will – why so very many people are so embarrassed to be human in public.  Why is “this is how I feel” ever a “problem?”

    One of the reasons I think I developed this behavior – and if you think it’s something that only exists on Facebook you definitely haven’t been paying attention – is a simple matter of social self-defense:  Why would I want to hang out with or be friends with or really want anything to do with someone who doesn’t care what I think or how I feel?

    Part of it is also this:  the most effective solution to evil and ignorance is to drag it out into the light and call it what it is.  I “put myself out there.”  And when someone turns their back, I know they weren’t really my kind of people in the first place.

    When someone decides it’s “entertaining” that I’m angry or hurt or feeling in need of external validation or broke?  To ridicule someone else’s difficulty or pain?  That’s a giant red flag, to anyone:  this person sucks.  This person, the way this person thinks and acts, how this person treats other people when they believe there are no consequences…it is a Bad Thing.

    But it’s not just a bad thing, It is the Bad Thing.  Absolutely everything that is twisted up and broken in this world can be described by the same words, phrases, and concepts.  From the schoolyard bully to the world’s most brutal dictators, there are unifying elements:

    • lack of empathy
    • lack of reason
    • high degree of self-absorption; not “I think about myself a lot,” but “I think the world around me is mine, and if what I do has consequences in anybody else’s life, too bad for them.”
    • low self-esteem expressed as a driving need to control every aspect of the world around them.
    • absolute intolerance of criticism.

    I’m sure there are others, but I’m writing off the top of my head.  Whether it’s the neighborhood frotteur or the guy pushing the big red buttons, they all share those real  “problems.”

    So the problem is, right now the world is defined on those people’s terms – and make no mistake, those people are just as many “liberals” as “conservatives” as “independents” as “libertarians” as whatever.  Your favorite social group is not exempt.

    When you allow yourself to absorb the output of those people, you start to become like them.  It spreads.

    And it’s killing us.

    In a trillion tiny cuts and a billion gaping wounds, it’s killing us off.

    They have defined the rules of the game, those rules are designed to give them an exponentially increasing advantage in the game, and they have taught you that the only way to be happy and fulfilled in life is to play the game their way…knowing that you can never possibly win.

    People wonder why I’m so adamant about not doing things like swiping other people’s original content, pretending to be a news site when you’re really a glorified RSS feed, being certain that when you present yourself as an information source you are an information source.  Not a PR campaign for a political ideology or a ring toss on the back fairway of the political carnival for your own amusement and profit.

    Because you see, it’s all the same thing.  It’s all the same lack of empathy, the same lack of reason, the same self-centeredness, the same low core self-image, the same refusal to ever admit outwardly that they might be wrong about something; they might even be jerks.

    They might be exactly the kind of jerks a lot of people reading them think they’re fighting against.

    And they don’t care, and they make the rules.

    And they’re wrong.

    Those of you who read my Facebook page or blog regularly, or have for a while, know that I’ve had intermittent problems with various kinds of harassment from these sorts of people.  My regular FB page readers will know what I mean – the “get a job,” “get a haircut,” post multi-terabyte screed examining my life crowd, the little group of trolls and the folks who run the BS “news” sites.

    Those people control a big chunk of left-wing, progressive, and liberal conversation on Facebook, and by extension throughout the world.  Millions of readers, millions of shares.

    And they are no different from [insert your favorite “bad news” source here], no different from [pick a conspiracy theory about world domination you really like], no different from [your go-to example of an obviously bought and paid for politician].

    They’re all the same, you see.  Because it’s all the same behavior.  Consistently.  Every time.

    They tell you what to think, they tell you why you should be angry or happy or sad.  They tell you what constitutes success in life, and they ridicule you for failing to achieve it even as they do everything in their power to stop you.  If you have something they want, they will take it.  If they cannot take it they will destroy it.  And if you don’t like it?  Too bad.

    They are in control of not just the US, but increasingly the rest of the world as well.  To the point that many of the world’s most developed nations have taken undeniable, unquestionable turns back toward the tyranny and oppression that their very existence was dedicated to wiping off the face of this planet.

    It’s all the same, you see.

    And those of us whose eyes are open, those of us who have been those things and realized how wrong they were, understand the key method by which they hold their power:

    They prevent you from communicating effectively.

    To the very point of redefining truth so that only their version of reality is allowed.  See, for instance, the Texas Board of Education attempting to teach mythology as science.  See, for instance, the entire mentality that has led us to the point where facts themselves are no longer accepted as facts because we can no longer agree on what a fact is due to the deliberate erosion of our critical thinking skills over a period of generations.

    To the extent that they not only teach us to be afraid to speak, but they teach us to make others afraid to speak.

    Used to be politicians would blow smoke up our collective asses as a matter of routine, and we knew they didn’t believe their own lies and they knew they didn’t believe their own lies and the one that had enough things we liked (often lies, sometimes not) got to play Big Man In Charge.  Sometimes, a politician could convince a lot of people to believe his or her lies, and they would gather more power and increasing ability to convince more people of their lies.

    But now…they believe their own lies.  There are really people on this planet, people who consider themselves intelligent and well-informed, people in leadership and decision-making roles that affect all our lives every minute of every day, who believe that deregulating business will empower individual liberty.  There are people who believe a magical all-knowing and eternal creature imbues the zygote of human beings with a special quality that makes them separate and distinct from all other creatures the moment sperm meets egg.  There are people who don’t believe global climate change is happening.  There are people who believe the cure for diseases is to not be tested for them.  One of those people is currently the President of the United States.  There are people who believe that religious freedom means the freedom to force everyone else to respect and be indoctrinated by their religion.  And these people will brook no dissent.

    They’re all the same, where it counts.

    The only way to stop them is to speak.  Don’t be afraid to be wrong, and don’t be afraid to admit it.  Don’t be afraid to admit you’ve made mistakes, to yourself or anyone else.  Don’t be afraid to correct them.  Don’t be afraid to let anyone else know you’ve been wrong or made a mistake.  Don’t be afraid to need help, and don’t be afraid to ask for it.  Don’t be afraid to not be good at everything or know everything, and don’t be afraid to seek knowledge and expertise wherever and whenever you can in whatever subject matter or pursuit interests you.  Stop letting them make you afraid to be who you are.

    But Speak.

    Stand up and speak.

    Get informed, but most importantly get real.

    Get real.

    Be who you are.

    Stand up to those who tell you that because who you are isn’t a big money-maker, you’re a failure as a person and what you have to say or do in this world is unimportant.  Stop thinking that because your job isn’t glamorous or cool, it’s not worth having even if you enjoy it.

    Stop being a “what” and start being a “who.”

    Don’t be a Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative or libertarian.  Stop worrying about whether you’re a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Taoist or a Buddhist or an atheist or agnostic or Jainist or Satanist or any other kind of –ist.  Stop worrying about which direction you lean in, and which direction other people lean in.

    Just be a decent human being.

    There’s no excuse for looking at hungry people and going “well, do they deserve to eat?  Did they earn their food according to the rules we set forth?”

    There’s no excuse for a nation with 18 million empty homes to have three million homeless people. (And say, how’s the math work on that anyway?  How do they figure those homes are going to be filled?)

    There’s no excuse to ridicule people for having self-doubt or being misinformed (although one might fairly poke those who choose to be misinformed, one must also consider that most of us live every day of our lives being filled with misinformation).

    Those aren’t decent things to do and every single person on this planet knows that in their heart.  It’s not something I need to prove or support with argumentation and reason; you know it and I know it, and that’s just the truth.  You might pretend you don’t know it.  You might even have yourself allllllmost completely convinced.  It’s not only self-evident, it’s reinforced consistently by every single important work of philosophy and religion in human history.  It’s not just a nice thing to do; it is fundamental to the survival of our race.  And we just love to tell ourselves that we are already doing everything right, it’s just the other people.  The people who aren’t my -ism and don’t lean my direction.

    But deep down, you know the way we treat each other sucks ass from top to bottom about 95% of the time, and you know that to some degree, that almost certainly includes you.  It has certainly included me, although I like to think I’ve managed to get it down to maybe 60%.  I’ve met people who got it down to maybe 20% or even 10.

    But it’s always there, and it’s taking us over and dragging us back to the middle ages.  If it continues, it’s a near-certainty that it will drag some parts of this planet back to pre-humanity while leaving the rest in prehistoric conditions supplemented by the junk our current attempt at evolution leaves behind.

    The only way to change that is to stand up and speak out, and that includes within our own minds, to the bully inside ourselves.  For many of us, from what I see when I look around this world, that’s got to be where it starts.  That’s certainly where it had to start with me, and as the aphorism goes “we all fall short of the glory…”  Pobody’s nerfect; not me, not you, not this religious figure or that deity or the other world leader.  We must all, individually, cultivate the ability to accept that and not let it stop us from always seeking to improve our own treatment of others in thought and deed…but by no means can that be where it stops.

    You must stand up, and you must speak.

    Speak against the bullies, the liars, the tyrants.

    Correct the misinformation and demand that those who propagate it stop doing so.

    Admit your mistakes and share the lessons you’ve learned from them.

    Stand up and speak out.

    Don’t be afraid of being “infiltrated.”

    Listen to your heart.  I don’t care what religions you do or don’t belong to; I simply believe that each and every human being alive on this planet has a heart, and I believe those hearts tell us the same things.  Call it instinct, call it learned behavior, call it whatever you want to call it; I’m a creative artsy-fartsy mofo and I choose to call it having a heart.

    Listen to your heart and speak.

    Stand up and refuse to be misled.

    Stop hating, you know it’s a waste of time.

    Stop getting wrapped up in ego-feeding internet arguments, you know it doesn’t solve anything.

    Reject those who refuse to stop hating and stop fighting, and focus on how to retrain ourselves and, over time, make these things just as instinctive as procreation, and eventually those who refuse to stop hating and stop fighting will die off and we can get on with the business of evolving.

    Focus on how to deprogram ourselves from the big lies we’ve been told throughout our recorded history.

    That is how to “beat the one percent.”  That is how to break the monopolies that exist on our information.  That is how to turn back the rising tide of stupidity and distraction and misinformation.  Start inside yourself.  Get real.  Stand up.  Speak out.  Be who you are.  Do not submit to fear.  That is the only freedom.

    That’s the only way to bring humanity to a sane, sustainable condition.

    If those of us who reject the tactics and confused mentality of the bullies and tyrants of the world just do that…they can’t win.  It’s the only way they can’t win, because when it’s all said and done?

    Well, when it’s all said and done…

    You cannot be controlled if your mind is free.

    Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” – Robert Heinlein, “If This Goes On –“