No one seems certain what WOKE means. All words have a life, like people, they change with age and never more so than a newly born one.
It is how a word is used that defines its meaning. Right now the use of WOKE seems most like a synonym for political correctness particularly as it applies to any class of disadvantaged.
If it stays on that track I hope that one day it will get its due: That is to say, every single one of us owes a debt to WOKE. If there were not enough WOKE, no one would have the vote, certainly not women, we would still have slavery, ovens for Jews would still be in operation and Christians could find themselves lion food in the Colosseum.
Now we, as the LUCKIEST GENERATION, choose to live unearned lives on the gains made by our fathers and their fathers before them. Lives that all previous generations in human history could never have imagined.
Yes, we spent much of what was earned and saved in the past and much of what has yet to be earned in the future, all to enjoy today.
Mention rational adjustments to our spending on Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid or defense and we will butcher you.
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Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
Sign up on my blog at RichardKimball.org
or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Deny elections, deny vaccines, deny climate change, deny wages, deny all abortions and health care for the poor. Defund social programs and public education. Support assault weapons, a paralyzing defense budget, and a Christian nation.
Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Ford, Reagan, the Bush’s, and every other Republican leader in history weren’t!
So much politics to write about and suddenly struck dumb, unable to hold a solitary thought for more than a blink of my red puffy eye. A strobe blinks out endless distractions, a sneeze, an aching jaw, hip, shoulder, an uncontrolled “toot” of the troubles below to come, a throat wincing at the endless hacking release of gluey phlegm so indigestible by the bathroom sink my wife begs me to spit into the trash instead.
Three years after the “Shit Show” started in Wuhan, after getting every vaccine and booster, and a few cases of N95s, I have the Covid.
And yet, I feel lucky. I live in a country that saved and is saving millions of lives all over the world, including mine. We Americans did that. As I come out of my misery, I toast us!
Decades ago, my congressman boss would joke: You know what the difference is between a cactus and a congress? With a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.
HUH?
Give me a switch and it would be tough to choose who to smack first: The Republicans who cower at the feet of their lowliest, or those Democrats acting joyous at the spectacle.
This is what happens when the mindless self-obsessed of our number, once only seen in the crassest of local politics, are elevated to the highest offices in the land.
This is the opportunity, for what is left of reason, to come together from both sides and put our nation back on track. Not Republican vs. Democrat, but the rational/thoughtful vs. the galactically stupid.
A simple equation of enormous significance to anyone that understands it and now with this week’s useful proof of it, stand ready to save the world.
equation by Vote Smart
Democracy equals education/facts multiplied by infinity.
You simply cannot govern yourself without unlimited education and access to facts.
It is that equation that you must focus on and why Vote Smart began. Vote Smart: a simple idea, where people get the facts and citizens have enough knowledge (education) to use them successfully.
At its core, it is not difficult to understand. If you support turning over the rules that govern your life to millions of strangers that you do not know, who you will never know, you must struggle to insure they have access to education and the facts. That is what was began begun at VoteSmart.org.
What are we thinking?! We get an entertainer if we free a mass-murdering thug selling arms to our enemies, anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down our pilots, someone convicted of conspiracy to kill Americans.
If you, as an American citizen are captured, tortured, murdered, and dismembered with a bone saw it’s A-OK with Joe.
That is precisely what your President said last week when he gave immunity to Prince Muhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, in an obviously agreed to subterfuge using international precedents.
That would be the same Prince that imprisons, tortures, and kills dissenters in Saudia Arabia and sends his agents elsewhere in the world to torture and dismember our fellow Americans like Jamal Khashoggi.
That would be the same two-faced Joe who previously called the prince a “thug” who had “shocked him to his very core.” The same Joe that promised he would make him a “pariah” on the world stage.
Want to celebrate American backbone Thursday by eating some off a turkeys? Just go to Joe’s house.
I have employed hundreds of people over my years helping to run a company called the United States of America.
In the old days most applicants I reviewed made a real effort to impress me. They were often pleasant, always seemed to appreciate my time, sometimes nervous but always smiling through it, and to a person, each would struggle to answer the questions I required answers to.
Questions that always had to do with their experience, and how much they knew about the job they were applying for, or issues I was concerned about. More often than not, they would give cogent responses about what they would do if they were given the responsibilities.
Today, that is all gone. Now I am not given time to talk and must listen instead to each one moan on and on about how horrid the other applicants are.
I, of course don’t feel very good about hiring any of these kinds of people. Hell, I wouldn’t hire a dishwasher that behaved that way, but what choice do we have when those are the only ones applying?
I will tell you why: Because no respectable member of your community would put themselves up or push their families into such a bloodbath. So, you are left with NO choice.
These people do not make your causes right, they just use your anger to claw their way to power.
Now, the end of this round is coming Tuesday, and most of us will toss in the towel, knowing it a mess and we’ll simply vote for what money we imagine can be kept for ourselves. To paraphrase a famous line, “My money, stupid, my money.
For those of you that still believe in the dream, I would suggest you try VOTESMART.ORG, an organization that has collected the facts about those craving the power to control your life.
CUCKOO BEES lay their eggs amongst the eggs in another bee’s nest, hoping their larvae hatch earlier, allowing its young to feed on the provisions stored for the other’s eggs. Then with their extra-large mandibles they dessert on the others’ eggs as well.
Feeding on the haves to engorge the have nots with little demanded in return.
SHREWS don’t look like much to worry about but are total bastards. They secrete venom from their jaws, paralyzing prey, not to kill but to keep alive for prolonged feeding.
At first, Shrews look like a joke, no real threat but now they come for November 8th where democracy will be paralyzed, and the main course served.
EXTREMISTS now control the dialogue, the considerations, and in the end, the actions with too few remaining to bring reason.
Get the facts at VoteSmart.org and good luck to us all this election.
Then uneducated, ignorant of democracy and unable to think critically, I was set free and found my faith in what I wanted to believe rather than what I should believe.
Once American education was the envy of all, our student performance second to none, our skill at self-governance a beacon the world over.
The attack on education, truth, and the facts is no accident. The dimmer we become, the more malleable we are.
The only remedy is to sustain at least one source for trusted facts that any citizen can turn to in confidence — facts without interpretation and protected from influence.
VoteSmart.org is exactly that, but requires a people’s will to use it, believe in it, and to support it. A source to which all conservative and liberal citizens can turn in confidence for the facts and the truth that is dependent upon those facts. Without that, we cannot sustain an ability to self-govern successfully.
It can be done, ensuring its integrity with an elected board balanced between the multiple sides on major national issues. Supported without dependence upon self-serving interests and operated by those willing to commit their time and expertise in the national interest and not financial self-gain.
That is what VoteSmart.org strived to be. As a young man, my boss once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” Without VoteSmart.org or an organization very much like it, it is not the meek that shall inherit the earth, but the stupid.
If you are not white, male and don’t own land, you can’t vote. That is the way we introduced self-governance to the world, with most people still not being actual people, as in “…of the people, by the people, for the people.” Women and most non-whites were not really defined as people in that wonderous American phrase.
It wasn’t till 1920 that most Americans would finally be considered people and allowed to vote — but not all, including the first Americans, native Americans. For those that were first, one or maybe two gazillion years before anyone else — well for them, it would take a tad longer.
The freedom and the liberty that comes with that vote, has been a slow, torturous march for most of us, with barriers erected by the people, against those not yet people, all along the way.
Your vote is your personal hard chunk of power, fought for through the suffering of others, and finally giving you a say. If you do not use it, your power doesn’t go away, it simply marches over and adds its power to those other chunks that are used, by the people who get to order you about.
“If you’re young and conservative, you have no heart. If you’re old and liberal, you have no brain,” a favorite Churchill quote and spot-on description of me.
For me the money I earn is a super-efficient warehouse where I can store my future needs, food, clothes, shelters, etc. And the taking of it (taxes) a levy I willingly pay for the items I need but cannot afford on my own: roads, schools, protection from fire, crime, war, and yes, even my desire to assist those amongst us in trouble who cannot take care of themselves.
But why should you be forced to give what you earn to those choosing not to earn or those taking and not repaying? Those that demonstrate no sense of responsibility or value you. There are all kinds of bailouts, some given before they’re needed or requested. You experience and pay for bailouts of banks, insurance companies, the health care industry, military contractors, right on down to students, the poor and even a member of my own family.
Expectations of paying back, performing better or even a thanks are not required but should be. Requiring those we give to, to participate in the giving or to pay back as their conditions advance does not sell well, as you have seen with all that “Too Big to Fail” nonsense, but it also applies to some you may not have thought of. I remember one of my old bosses, Sen. Daniel Moynihan of New York saying that millions would be plunged into poverty, and we would “find children sleeping on grates,” back in 1993 if we changed welfare programs that simply gave away cash into less generous, time-limited, work-required programs. It is hard to argue that that switch had nothing to do with child poverty and family welfare rolls being cut in half.
Politicians — Democrats and Republicans — all like bailouts for their friends or those they hope will become friends, blue collar or white. It is just easy to spend other people’s money and amongst politicians your money is just other people’s money.
It was America’s longest private meeting. With the windows and doors closed they argued for months in the gluey heat of a Philadelphia summer. Then on September 17th the doors and window were finally opened.
When a Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
F
Perhaps more clearly than ever, every single American adult will be asked to respond to Dr. Franklin when they stand alone in that voting booth this November 8th.
Dr. Franklin feared what all the founders feared, and what every thinking American now fears. Are the institutions the Founders and a dozen other successive American generations made possible and built these past 244 years all to be swept away? Is every citizen to be allowed to vote? Is all future opposition journalism to be oppressed? Is every fact to be cloaked and skewered?
Your knowing what you are doing on that first Tuesday in November is what Dr. Franklin and all who have championed freedom for over two centuries bet on. It will be time for you to stand and answer.
Please use VoteSmart.org to get the facts, the truth and defend yourself and your fellow citizens.
I think the world of compassionate people, often value their judgment more than my own, even as I disagree. The other day one let me know that saying bad things about evil people would not help heal.
Where is that point of departure, when a lovely person, smart, kind and gentle, decides, “OK, I gotta fight.”?
If it is not when they bludgeon YOUR capitol, YOUR institutions, YOUR schools, YOUR books, science and the facts, can that point ever come? Does it even come when they come for you?
We are all products of the sources of information we choose to absorb, and those sources have latched on to what every other species on earth has always known — fear sells.
The basic difference is that no other species would ever think of screaming fire in a theater if there were not an actual fire.
Pick your source for information, doesn’t much matter which one, watch for a bit and see if they do not tell you to be worried about stuff, often with who to blame or even hate. That is what sells. That is what builds audience and cash. We are all simply wired to pay attention, to tune in when someone says, “WATCH OUT!”
Hell, information sources have become so fear mongering that Americans can no longer agree on what is right and what is wrong.
Institutions that could only have been created by a free people for protection and justice, like the Congress, the FBI and Justice Department, are now seen as enemies by millions of Americans. If abandoned, replaced by what, by whom?
A leader of the French revolution famously said, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” In today’s vernacular it might be put: “I cultivated a mob and will follow no matter where they go.”
No, there is not much fun in it, but as in all past American epochs, and I believe with this one, someone in the mob will eventually stop, then someone else, then others and a sense of common commitment to each other will win the day. It is then that sensible leaders both conservative and liberal will be exposed and politically survive, stand on solid common ground, and turn us back to reason.
Few things make one more miserable than that moment in an argument when you realize you’re wrong!
For that reason, two words have never been heard in debate, “I am wrong.”
Once you invest in a point of view, you’re done. In fact, research has shown that exposing people to contradictory facts only intensified their existing beliefs, making them more inflexible. You see this reality with participants on January 6th, opposing sides on the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, at your job and in your personal life.
If you want to be persuasive and impact someone’s misguided beliefs, you’d better start by agreeing with them. Only that approach can expose any unfrozen receptors and open potential for adjustment.
Millions being spent by Democrats to support election fraud, pro-life and Uzi-supporting Republican candidates?
W T F !
Of course, they do it in the hopes of getting unelectables as Republican nominees in the general election, or at least get more viable Republican challengers to burn through their cash defending themselves before facing a Democrat.
They are having so much fun with voters it gives them the giggles. You know, the same giggles Trump gets when surrounded by evangelicals he privately says are full of shit, scammers, and hustlers.
These Democrat 2.0 versions of Trump deserve an equal amount of your derision. If you do not think so, just imagine if this idea gets legs. Democrats funding extremist Republicans and Republicans funding extremist Democrats. That is a world you DO NOT want to see or in the end, live in.
