Copyright Gary Edward Nordell, all rights reserved. Powered by Blogger.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Essay #81: "Your Vote Is A Gift"

      The Founders of the United States of America established in the Constitution that each and every citizen has the Right and the Duty to exercise their will in the act of voting. {While the Founders believed in the principle of We The People, the unenlightened times reserved voting for only white male landowners, or about 3% of the population. We The People have since extended the reach of that concept.)
      Voting is a right and a privilege and a gift and a duty. If you do not vote (and you are eligible) then you demean the U.S. Constitution.

* *          * *          * *          * *

      The act of voting is so important that the Corporatist-Fascist machine (i.e. the Republican Party) is removing voters from the rolls. The Secretary of State of Colorado (Republican, of course) removed 20% of registered voters statewide – without notifying those voters. This brings intentional hassle to every disenfran¬chised Colorado voter, and a serious problem for voters who take no action and show up to vote in November at their polling place and are turned away. (Provisional ballots are worthless.)

* *          * *          * *          * *

      How you have Power is you give it away; how you have Love is you give it away; how you have Freedom is you give it away.
      Your vote exists only when you cast it – at the ballot box and elsewhere. Your vote is a gift that you must give, to yourself and in behalf of your loved ones. And to your enemies.

      Many sheeple say that they don’t vote in elections because their vote doesn’t count, doesn’t matter, is wasted effort.
      All that proves is that they bought into the propaganda.
      What is true is that each of these non-voting sheeple has decided that he/she doesn’t matter. They each surrendered (at best) and are often-times soon semi-innocent tools of the vast Corporatist-Fascist Oligarchy. They blindly obey orders and trudge unhappily toward a meaningless death.
      Each and every citizen matters when they vote. When they vote they have done something that matters – therefore ...

      Each vote is registered in the Universe as an event, as an overt act. Many other overt acts also constitute a kind of voting, such as each and every monetary act – where you buy your groceries or your fuel or your clothing ultimately matters.
      Which is why advertising exists, to manipulate the masses of sheeple into trading with the Oligarchy. The reverse is a very powerful form of protest: Keep your dollars away from the Oligarchy – Wal-Mart, Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the Agribiz monopoly, Big Media - and they will starve.

* *          * *          * *          * *

      Who says that you cannot fight/beat City Hall? City Hall, of course. The entrenched bureaucracy wants no opposition.
      Who says not to discuss politics or religion? The same entrenched regressive folks who use religion and politics as their excuse for dastardly deeds. They use religion and politics as their stealth weapon, and don’t you dare use open discussion of religion or politics back on them. Don’t you dare discuss religion or politics as if they are not closed issues, cast in stone in the dogmatic form that the regressives want enforced.
      (Knowledge gives light. Only bugs under rocks fear the light.)

      You vote when you attend religious services. You vote if you keep a promise. You vote when you smile at a stranger – or smile at a loved one.
      You vote when you drink a six-pack. You vote when you go to bed early. You vote when you obey the speed limit. You vote when you litter – or when you recycle.
      Every overt act performed by all citizens, even the sheeple, is a vote for or against some Value, some program, some political intention. Likewise, avoiding taking any action is still a vote, albeit a vote against the result of such an action.
      Vegging out in front of the tube is an action and a vote. Mindless chitchat or texting for endless hours on your cell-pod-P.D.A. unit is an action and a vote (for vapidity). Hours spent absorbing actual information at the library or on some wiki is an action and a vote. Visiting bed-bound old folks is an action and a vote – for connection and for service and for unlimited & unexpected experience.

* *          * *          * *          * *

      And another big vote is participating in the General Strike on Thursday September 11th. A major vote. And asking all your friends and family to participate in the General Strike is a vote in itself. The plan: Stay home, buy nothing, make no phone calls, skip the TV and radio for just one day.
An army of aware, progressive activists in Manhattan are planning to spend Strike Day out¬doors and in the streets, joining with their neighbors in demon¬strating Solidarity, showing that the People have the Power, that the Power is indeed inherent in the Individual.
      You can also do this wherever you live. The official website is www.votestrike.org.

      Voting is not about winning. The win is in the act of voting itself. By each act of voting we each protect the Right to Vote, the Privilege that there is in voting, we both give and receive the gift of voting.

      Anyone who is not living their Life AS a series of votes is missing out on the Gift given to the world by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. Your vote, the series of votes made by your actions in your Life, determines whether Freedom exists for the next generation and forward in History.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Essay #82: "The National Election is Contaminated"

      Karl Rove has not yet been convicted of his many crimes and locked up in prison. His job is to mess up the U.S. national and local elections because the Republican Party cannot win on the issues important to American voters. So the Republicans have given Rove the covert task of inventing new ways to subvert the Constitutional election process in America, so that the Corporatist-Fascist leaders of the Republican Party can continue their rape of the American people and economy.

* *          * *          * *          * *

      Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews were recently removed as scheduled anchors on MSNBC’s coverage of the upcoming national debates and of election day and evening on November Fourth; the reasons given are spurious. The scheduled replacement is Karl Rove’s dancing partner (indeed!) David Gregory. So that gives election coverage by Karl Rove on FOX (‘the faux news channel’) and coverage on MSNBC by his close buddy Gregory – with Olberman and other legitimate journalists left to radio and the blogosphere (if their contracts even allow such).

* *          * *          * *          * *

      The Secretary of State in Colorado, Republican Mike Coffman, removed twenty-percent of Colorado’s voters from the rolls during 2008 – without notice to the voters. Reason given: to prevent voter fraud, when instead the act was another case of Republican election fraud. At best, each of these summarily-disenfranchised voters will have to visit their local County offices to fight for restoration of their Right To Vote. The intended result is that the mostly-Democrat disenfranchisees will show up on November Fourth and be surprised to find that they are not allowed to vote. Period. (Provisional ballots are worthless.)

* *          * *          * *          * *

      Republican John McCain approved and executed an even more nefarious election fraud, across seventeen key states. Under his signature, bogus absentee ballots were mailed out to registered independent and registered Democratic Party voters asking them to vote for McCain, but if they still wanted to vote for Barack Obama, no hard feelings, here’s a convenient absentee ballot. The number of these bogus absentee ballots was as many as a million in some of the 17 states.
      But when the ballots arrived at the County offices, all were rejected. McCain’s stealth tactic was to have one extra box printed on all of the myriad versions of absentee ballots, so that each and every McCain-approved ballot was disqualified. In all seventeen states.

* *          * *          * *          * *

      Having thus committed election fraud in seventeen states, Republican John McCain has disqualified himself from ever holding any further elective office in America. When the Democrats restore Constitutional Law in America in January 2009, and the new Attorney General begins the plethora of impeachment hearings and prosecutions long stymied by the Republican Party’s control of the filibuster in Congress, then Republican John McCain will be held to account for his desertion of his oath of office and his criminal acts in this election.

* *          * *          * *          * *

      Any vote besides the Democratic Party candidate for President or for Congress and Senate is a vote for the continuation of the Corporatist-Fascist agenda that has destroyed the American economy, killed millions of people here and abroad, and made the world that your children and grandchildren will inherit a mean and nasty world, with the United States of America seen around the world as The Bad Guy.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Monday, September 15, 2008

September Quotations II (The Sequel)

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."
~~ Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]

"Vice has this defeat: It cannot be truly intelligent. It's very motives are its weakness."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"One has to buy [immortality] with the blood of one's heart."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"Knowledge always brings responsibility."
~~ P.D. James

"Every soldier who ever died was innocent."
~~ David Baldacci

"The worst crimes ... are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves."
~~ John D. MacDonald [1916-86]

"As a high school English teacher, I can testify that ,,, [television] is so poisonous and hypnotic that the disease of illiteracy is rampant."
~~ Robert G. Arthur of Kings Park, NY (circa 1984)

"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action."
~~ Frank Herbert [1920-86]

"A poet doesn't choose his subject, it chooses him."
~~ P.D. James

"Life is, in fact, a battle ... Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916] (in 1878)

"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done."
~~ Jean Piaget [1896-1980]

"Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual."
~~ Jean Piaget [1896-1980]

"Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process."
~~ Jean Piaget [1896-1980]

"Live all [that] you can; it is a mistake not to."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this [only] after they are in the nursing home."
~~ John D. MacDonald [1916-86]

"I don't seek, I find."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]

"What kept me going was maybe stubbornness and a lack of good sense."
~~ Oliver Stone

"Every stick points in two directions, one opposed to the other."
~~ Isaac Asimov {attributed}

"Man was born to be rich or inevitably to grow rich through the use of his faculties."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832]

"The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place."
~~ Gary Zukav

"A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose."
~~ Chinese proverb

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
~~ Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]

"Those who wish to sing always find a song."
~~ Swedish proverb

"Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-1983]

"What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"All utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical."
~~ A.J. Ayer

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-1865]

"An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision."
~~ James McNeill Whistler [1834-1903]

"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]

"Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end ... but not necessarily in that order."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors."
~~ Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."
~~ Woody Allen

"Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences."
~~ Sherlock Holmes

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
~~ physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962]

"The present is pregnant with the future."
~~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [1646-1716]

"I have a naive trust in the universe ... that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.”
~~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and grsvity we shall harness the energies of Love. Then, for the second time in the history of thr world, man will have discovered fire."
~~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [1881-1955]

"I think our own hearts can teach us no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts to make the world a place to live in instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] {quoted by Felix De Cola on his deathbed}

"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so [that] I can have a word with him?"
~~ Chuang-Tzu (circa IVth Century BCE)

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Thursday, September 04, 2008

September Quotations

"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny."
~~ Ben Franklin [1706-90]

"Man must learn to think for himself, rather than follow blindly what he has been taught."
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."
~~ Michael Mukasey, figurehead U.S Attorney General, 2008

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits."
~~ Thomas A. Edison [1847-1931]

"Without risk there is no possibility for glory."
~~ David Baldacci

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing. But I couldn’t give it up because by then I was too famous.”
~~ Robert Benchley [1889-1945]

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
~~ Dr. Seuss {Theodor Geisel 1904-91}

"The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty."
~~ Frédéric Bastiat [1801-50]

"True believers are always wrong, whether they are Christians, Muslims or Jews."
~~ Janet Maker of Los Angeles, CA

"If death is truly the worst that can happen to a man, there is nothing to fear. But death is not the worst."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]

"Don't ever let anyone monkey with your swing."
~~ baseball great Ted Williams [1918-2002]

"To lay blame is an abdication of power."
~~ Jeff Herman

"The province of art is ... all experience."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from Himself."
~~ Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"It is the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time."
~~ Tallulah Bankhead [1902-68]

"Every man has his price? That is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Nothing is so detrimental to quality as success."
~~ J.M.K. Nyks

"It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else."
~~ William Hazlitt [1778-1830]

"The great rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you."
~~ Katharine Whitehorn

"A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished."
~~ Zsa Zsa Gabor

"Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"I require only three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

"Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often needed but seldom minded."
~~ Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield [1694-1773]

"The best answer to anger is silence."
~~ German proverb

"Most women are not so young as they are painted."
~~ Max Beerbohm [1872-56]

"Sometimes I write sober and revise drunk, sometimes I write drunk and revise sober."
~~ Welsh poet Dylan Thomas [1914-54]

"Small things amuse small minds."
~~ Doris Lessing

"Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level."
~~ Quentin Crisp [1908-99]

"Paradoxes are verbal, they do not exist in the real world."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"Liberty is always dangerous, but the safest thing [that] we have."
~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-69]

"Most of us edge forward, painfully advancing, yard by yard; [the truly creative] parachute behind enemy lines."
~~ P.D. James

"We have at times to be willing to be guilty."
~~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer [1906-45]

"No man is lonely while eating spaghetti."
~~ Robert Morley [1906-92]

"If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done."
~~ anonymous

"To kiss the lips of women, love the gods, do justice, laugh, and know [that] the world is mad."
~~ motto of director Oliver Stone

"Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]

"There is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation."
~~ John D. MacDonald [1916-86]

"Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self; the passionate state of mind is an expression of inner dissatisfaction."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"Art and morality have little to say to each other."
~~ Anthony Burgess [1917-93]

"A true realist demands the impossible; a true idealist demands the impractical."
~~ Marilyn vos Savant

"The most pitiful human ailment is a birdseed heart."
~~ Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]

"What comes to perfection perishes."
~~ Robert Browning [1812-89]

"The flowing river never ceases, yet the water is never the same."
~~ Kamo-no Chomei [1155-1216]

"After a while you realize that if you're a real writer, then, like all writers, you're finally at the mercy of your readers. And giving yourself up to them, you just write."
~~ Michael Ventura

"Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold."
~~ André Maurois [1885-1967]

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Essay #80: Rebuttal To The Rove-McCain Virus Email

1) Each & every person who forwarded this email is politically brain-dead.

2) The content of this email is fascist propaganda, i.e. false information. {FASCISM: the takeover of a government by corporate & military interests, as opposed to government By The People}.

3) The current U.S. National Debt is TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS, and somebody will have to pay it off, probably your grandchildren. What is unreporte4d (not on the books) includes the fact that Dubya has set aside ZERO dollars for bringing the troops home, and in fact, no money is designated for any military programs past fiscal 2010

4) If Republicans spend nothing more, the National Debt will STILL grow by TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in interest each year, which is basically extortion money paid to the Oligarchy (out of the workers/taxpayers' pockets).

5) Each and every person in America owes a National Debt portion of $70,000, including newborns and seniors with no income.

6) The Republicans spent the money, so let's give them the bill; that is $250,000 owed by each and every Republican (who get to keep their mealy mouths shut until they devise a plan to pay that debt).

7) Obama's ACTUAL plan is to CUT TAXES for the Middle Class by $1000 each and CANCEL the freebie Bush Tax Cuts deal for the Wealthy Class; McCain's plan is to give FURTHER tax cuts to the Wealthy Class.

8) The mis-named Death Tax does NOT affect you, only the wealthiest 100 families in the U.S; the über-rich Walton family has spent over $100 MILLION to propagandize the sheeple -- which is working quite well, since their expected benefit is in the BILLIONS (and nothing for you).

9) The Dividend Tax does not affect you unless you earn over $100,000 in unearned income / dividends in the tax year. DO YOU?

10) The 2008 election cycle gives all American citizens the chance to choose between a fascist dictatorship and a constitutional republic. That is the only choice before you, no matter your location – democracy or fascism?

11) If the actual cost of health care in the United States is counted as a tax, then American taxpayers pay the highest income tax rate in the world - for faulty health care. Every industrialized nation except the U.S. has a version of single-payer healthcare, and in each case, the system works and the people live longer. Cost of healthcare in America is 16% of G.D.P., double any other country -- for faulty health care and 40 million not covered for any such care. Any single-payer or everybody-is-covered health plan here will reduce that cost, period.

12) "Congress is controlled by the Democrats" is simply a Republican lie.
           The House is currently 236 Dems to 199 Republicans: 56% to 44% is not that wide a margin.
           The Senate is 49 to 49, with independents Bernie Sanders & 'Traitor' Joe Lieberman; votes often hinge on bootlicker Lieberman.
           The 110th Congress last year DOUBLED the previous record for filibusters -- Republicans preventing any action by the Democrats-- and the number will likely break that record this year.
           The sad truth is that Congress is controlled by lobbyists of the Corporatist Party: There are 66 lobbylists in Washington, DC for each member of Congress.
           The two-part solution is campaign finance reform and enough Democrats to prevent such toddler-tantrum filibustering.

13) The budget is determined by the President, modified & passed into law by Congress. In Dubya's case, there is much spent that is truly off-budget, such as military funding (over & over) and the trillion-plus annual interest on the Republican National Debt.

14) America does not "tax corporations to death". Corporations are doing quite well, paying 15% in tax, while the dying Middle Class pays 28% or more. The last two years, savings in America has gone negative (and that is including what the Wealthy Class set aside) – the first such condition since the Republican Great Depression. Hmmm.

15) You forget (or never learned) that "Labor is the source of all wealth".

16) "We are a Republic, based on capitalism". You obviously failed Civics Class. The United States is a representative democracy, or was until the Reagan Revolution, which changed America into a fascist-corporatist Oligarchy.
           The Oligarchy now owns 65% of everything in America (similar around the world), and the Wealthy Class own 90%. The Middle Class is near dead, labor unions are prevented by law from organizing, and the goal of the Oligarchy is slave wages, a rubber-stamp Congress, and elections based on Fox News propaganda.

17) I am not a liberal, nor is liberal a dirty word. I am a progressive, and the Republican Party is told what to do by the Corporatist-Fascists, as delivered to them by the lobbyists of K Street, etc.

           Disregard this Rovian propaganda and vote in November. But be very clear about the choice that you are making: If you do not vote to restore constitutional democracy, or if you do not vote at all, then you have voted for the Corporatist-Fascist Oligarchy.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved