Category Archives: Political

Comedy, Political, Random Thoughts and Stories, Shared on Social Media

Thoughts on A.I.

Just in case the rock you’re living under doesn’t get any signal and it just so happens you got this one due to the shifting magnetic poles causing the northern lights to weakly shine in central Texas, there is a song created by a non-human currently charting at number one in country music.

“Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust. Is not an actual human artist in the video or written by a human songwriter. It’s all fake, and it’s working.

We are entering an era where nothing is perceived real. Books,music, art, and films will from now on, be met with immediate skepticism, questioning its authenticity. The News and media is already there.

My first protest is that someone somewhere decided that AI would omit punctuation. It just looks like Al (as in Alfred), and I’m sure my good friend, Nathaniel, who goes by Al is none too happy with being singled out, by name, for this cultural disruption.

My petition, assuming this collaboration with robots is here to stay, is a plea to humans or robots, or whoever is going to be in charge, that we include the cherished, ‘period’ punctuation after each letter. After all, it is an abbreviation, not an acronym. Otherwise I would address Artificial Intelligence as, “Aye”! Regardless of any official decision, I will henceforth address the self learning, questionably threatening, digital code as, “A dot- I dot”.

The moral dilemma is easy, albeit confusing. Of course it’s not okay to replace human art with robot art. I don’t even think it could. I mean, sure it can make art that’s already been done, but it won’t invent anything that humans haven’t created yet. The fear is that someday it might, which is also the day it realizes, just as multiple sci-fi stories predict, that humans trusted to make peace is questionable and therefore should be eliminated from the equation.

I’ve watched the morning shows, hosted by the popular kids in school that only had each other as friends, (another strange cultural contradiction) as they giggle and prod each other about the song’s odd rise to the top of country music worship. Clearly, they do not understand the lizard brain followers of redneck pop. This is the same population that has accepted and praised line dancing, country rap, and a city slicker, yankee President. They have no real connection to healing, soulful music that can only be created by anguished and painfully tortured creative minds.

I’ve seen the t.v. reporters claim they cannot track the person who has perpetuated the code that birthed this charting, ungodly audio beast. My question is, how hard did you look? Songs have songwriters that release music through publishers. Songs generate royalties (money) collected by performing rights organizations and mechanical rights collectors. Sound Exchange, Ascap, BMI, etc. They all have a bank account to deposit payments. The IRS has a social security number attached to everyone that makes a penny off this song. Songwriters actually do pay taxes. So, again, how hard can it be?

I assume it’s a singular group of tech savvy people that are getting their kicks poisoning the airwaves with fake, stolen, generated music just to see if they can. They’re also probably going to get stinking rich, with which comes greed and eventual corruption.

But, by then the robots will have figured out that we can’t get along, and kill us all.

I’m thinking this might be a good thing. Let’s just get it over with. The inevitable destruction of man has no reason to be postponed. Please, let’s continue to fill our world with ridiculous, bad, art. If we can get to a point where our collective conscience can’t tell the difference, we will have succeeded in our own demise. Then the robots can just hit delete.

Another way the sentient robots can kill us, is creating a cookbook designed by A.I. If people can blindly follow a pooped out music recording to the top of the song pile, surely they would eat food created by a robot. Of course a robot cannot understand taste. Especially when it’s combined with texture and temperature. So naturally A.I. would make food that tastes good to dolts, morons, and imbeciles, but ultimately the taste will evolve and deliciously spread to kill us all one by one.

Political

January 19th, 2025

Today is January 19th, 2025.

It is the last day for The United States of America as we have known it.

Our nation has chosen to put a felon in power. A felon who has manipulated and lied to win an election. A criminal who has created a Supreme Court that will not hold him accountable for future crimes he will commit. A convicted Felon, who’s crimes involved payoffs and hush money and tax fraud and rape and collusion with an enemy government and destruction of classified documents. A criminal who is backed by extremist politicians that have infiltrated our House and Senate. A grifter who has taken over the Republican party, forever changing it into a new chaotic political force called MAGA.

The Republican party is no more.

American history shows that when our nation is ruled by the super wealthy, by corporations that value profits over quality of life, we all suffer. The economy gets disrupted, like the 1920’s Stock Market crash that plummeted Americans into years of starvation, unemployment, and poverty. Like the Housing Market Bubble that evicted thousands of people from their homes. The same one that President Donald J. Trump bragged about making money from.

Today is the last day. Tomorrow starts a different America. Deportations that will create a labor vacuum. Tariffs that will cause another inflation boom. Foreign affairs that will topple governments and cost lives. Chaotic and backwards thinking controlled by one single man, not a government, but a single person.

And when it goes bad, and it will, we only have ourselves to blame. We have refused to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, and truth from lies.

If America survives, it’ll get another reboot. Liberalism will be the answer again. Just like every other time the pendulum swung. After Rockefeller and his petroleum corporation collected and burned all the electric powered trolleys. For just one little example.

But this time is different. This time we have a leader who is a known criminal and has no legal repercussions with the support of the Supreme Court. That’s never happened before.

Hold on to your hats.

Political, Random Thoughts and Stories, Shared on Social Media

Thoughts on the Future

I’ve decided what to call the blind followers of bad politics. ‘Mold People’.

Why Mold People? Is it because they are easily shaped and sculpted into the worst people in the world? Close, but that’s not it.

It is simply based on a metaphor I came up with. Mold, as in a form of fungus. It grows fast and covers a large area if it’s in the right environment. It will take over and nothing can stop it.

It’s almost like a virus too. It spreads and takes over until it kills or makes the host very sick. But it’s not a virus, because we have vaccines for those and they don’t take over completely, and because we also have science. Smart people who understand stuff.

Mold People feed on negative thoughts, especially blame, fear, and hatred. The source is sensationalized news shows. Not the actual fact based News, but those opinion programs that pretend to be News. You know who they are.

The mold is always there. It’s underneath the rugs of the White House, and in News rooms, and around the family Thanksgiving dinner table.

It’s the negative nature of humanity that originally kept us safe from the other tribe that had an infectious disease or wanted to steal the meat from the fire. But we don’t need that anymore. We just need to be informed by trusted informants we can trust.

You may wonder, is the susceptibility of the mold based on intelligence? I don’t know. I’d hate to call someone stupid for being a follower of insanity. Let’s just call it evolved. No, that’s not any better.

The good news is that we now know what is happening. The environment is full of mold. The bad news is that there probably is very little we can do about it. It just might have to run its course.

Does that mean America will be a fascist nation in the future. Probably.

Does that mean the end for America. Not necessarily, but it will be a different America.

We can fear for democracy and our children, but honestly, they’ll be okay. Especially if they were born white and rich. Everyone else will have to struggle as usual. So not much will change really.

Sure, more people will suffer and die. The perception of our Rights will change and we will be forced to follow a different law. But that’s just the mold. It spreads and covers everything eventually.

But there’s hope.

Eventually the Sun will come out again and the mold won’t be able to thrive. It’s almost like a revolution. A changing of the season. A dark Winter followed by a fabulous Spring.

We won’t be alive to see the flowers grow again, but maybe our posterity will.

If we could only bury ourselves in the yard like a time capsule and come back when people are sane again. Where kindness and rationality matters. Where intelligence is aligned with morality. Where wealth and power are bad things again. Where people are actually equal without question. Where a mass influence of negativity would be unheard of.

So don’t worry about America. It’ll continue to perpetuate the atrocities of the past. It’ll always take advantage of the poor. And it’ll always strive to be corrupt. It’s just evolution.

Go ahead and vote the way you think you think. Keep watching that horrible TV show. If you are one of the Mold People, you’ll eventually win.

Political, Random Thoughts and Stories, Shared on Social Media

The Wire

If you’re looking for a trusted news source. Not cable news. Not sensationalized media, but actual unbiased current event facts, it’s the Associated Press.

Most of my childhood I would go see my dad inside radio stations across the southwest and somewhere stuffed in a closet or back room was a Teletype Machine constantly autonomously typing away like a futuristic robot. It was simply called “the AP”, “the Feed”, or the “Wire”.

I was always fascinated by the idea of the entire news of the world being constantly pumped and pushed through the airwaves and phone lines across the country and translated onto neverending rolls of non perforated paper, folding and rolling itself into gigantic piles on the floor. The off-white colored smooth paper had strange markings along the edges that lined up with mechanical gears to feed it through.

At some point, a frantic DJ would bolt into the room, read some headlines, and tear off a piece of paper- then run back into the control room to broadcast the typed words onto the local air, informing all that could hear it through a single speaker, rattling in the center of the dashboard, or a small radio sitting on a shelf.

The noise of the constant, sometimes sporadic typing was mostly ignored by the inhabitants of the media workplace. It was the background soundtrack of their daily lives. White noise.

You might remember it (as someone in a prominent network TV station had the thought to put a microphone on it) starting a news program with the sound of fervent typing. It was the sound of serious business. Your fate. The sound of News.

For me, it was a comfort zone in a tiny building somewhere in a small town, knowing the machine kept us all safely informed. It was a responsible super-power hidden inside a back room in my dad’s office building that I knew was the complete authorized voice of humanity. The opposition of anarchy and corruption housed in a marvel of technology, disguised as a simple ugly, boring, paper vomiting, grey metal typewriter machine sitting on a small wooden table in a closet.

At the time, the AP was only available to radio and TV stations authorized by the FCC to relay the information to the public. It was up to the discretion of the owners and deejays (who were an accurate diverse representation of all humankind) to decide what was important enough to convey to the village citizens and strategically use the precious seconds of time to attract and monetize their audience.

But now, it’s available on your phone – in your hand right now. The voice of humanity. Untainted by biased opinion. It’s directly up to you to interpret.

Stop listening to hyperbolic, overwhelming, opinionated cable and radio news. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for America.

Associated Press

Political, Random Thoughts and Stories

Intellect is the Enemy

It wasn’t until the recent last few years that I have been trying to understand our American culture. Unique to the world, our own brand of patriotism, pride, and power, all deeply connected to the Constitution and the beginnings of our nation.

It has been most recently presented that if you acknowledge the horrors and murderous behavior of our predecessors, you hate America.

It’s coming from the Right Wing of persuasive conservative minds in an attempt to discredit any liberal thinking voter. It’s intentional and purposeful to sway votes in their favor.

It’s nothing new, to manipulate people for votes. It’s even bi-partisan. Every politician in history has learned the practice of bending truth and reality in order to excite their constituents and gain or remain in power. But never like this. Never with the awesome power of social media and the lack of consequences for telling half truths and all out lies to the American public.

For those that are unaware, there used to be a law enforced by the FCC that required truth in news programs. That law was revoked by Ronald Reagan and gave birth to political opinion “news” programs such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. I can only assume that The Gipper was convinced by puppeteers that a law that limits what you can spew out of your insane fucking mouth is an infringement on free speech, and ol’ Ronny fell for it.

And here we are today with a whole plethora of bullshit to wade through that no one can find the actual truth about anything without digging deep into trusted, but always still biased, independent news sources. You have to do focused research on who you can trust. You need to have the ability to recognize when you are being targeted and manipulated. And most people don’t.

We don’t have the time, education, or instinct to decipher the coded news. We don’t have the ability to see the manipulation if we are not manipulators ourselves. We have been trained, conditioned, educated, and indoctrinated into believing what the officials on TV are telling us. And now everyone looks official. That’s how they got us.It’s not our fault. We were taught to trust them. They look like the News. They talk like the News. Why aren’t they the News?

If you study the smallest amount of history about nations where democracy has failed and about the takeover of fascism. It’s almost always the same playbook. You’ll see the tools of manipulation, like using Law and Order, Free Speech ,and Patriotism to convince hard working, good people that they’re being duped. You’ll see the Right Wing accuse the Left of exactly what the Right is doing as a way to confuse people. It’s a way of pointing the finger as a distraction to get away with something and it works. It creates doubt and places blame on their enemy so no one gets suspicious of them. They appear to have seen it coming, so they must be smarter. They are protecting us and calling them out. Well, no. They are manipulating you.

One strange thing we do is despise intelligent people. ‘Know it alls’, arrogant and pompous educated people. We don’t like anyone who is smarter than us and we are offended when we are wrong. We call our own kids ‘smarty pants’ when they know something we don’t. We stomp our feet and throw tantrums and become absolutely defiant when smart people tell us what to do.

I was truly disappointed in America, not mad, not offended, but sad when the election results confirmed Donald Trump as our President. I honestly didn’t think it could happen. That an obviously child-like, wannabe dictator, city slicker, whiny, cry baby convinced rednecks and country folks that he was better than a woman to run the free world.

I was continually surprised that those followers appeared more like cult believers and would do anything he told them to. I’m still amazed that after all he has said and done, and crimes he has committed, he is still the front runner for the Republican Party.

We are being warned about the loss of our democracy. Some of us have been very vocal about it for a long time. But we play nice. We try to have respect for those that don’t agree with us. All the while, the Right Wing is taking down our freedoms. Our civil rights. Our country.

I see the future of America as a fascist nation. My kids will live to see a different America. Ironically one that goes against the very thing that made us. The Constitution.

It’ll function. America will convince the masses that they are free and have unalienable God given rights. They’ll be convinced to die for it just as it is now. But the homeless, the poor, and the working class will hurt. There will be a lack of empathy and more despair. Violence and illness will run rampant and the gaps in our society will grow. It will be a worse world to live in. Even if you’re rich, there will be futility and guilt. And history will look back and wonder why we didn’t see it coming or stop it from taking over. Again.

Political, Random Thoughts and Stories, Shared on Social Media

Pride

Heavy post time.

My youngest kid’s birthday is on Halloween.

He’s always had a difficult time just existing. He’s had issues with anxiety and depression since the very day he was born.

It’s taken a lot of work to figure him out.

Right now he’s attempting middle school. He’s been mostly home schooled since the first grade. It’s really difficult with his social challenges but he’s trying so hard.

He’s figuring himself out too.

Luckily, he has a great team of educators working with him this time around. The support he’s getting this year is awesome and is making all the difference.

I told him that if he can manage middle school he can do anything.

It’s probably the most difficult time in our American lives. Kids are mean. Grown ups are mean. Everyone is judgmental and impatient all while we’re trying to go through a massive brain development that shapes us for the rest of our lives.

Some of us don’t make it. We have an arrested development and stay at a seventh grade mentality forever, ironically forever unaware.I am incredibly proud of both my kids, but Halloween is all for my little monster.

________________________________________

I’m also proud of myself.

I was about his age when my family broke apart and I was essentially emotionally abandoned. These are formidable years and I am proof of the damage that can be caused by shitty alcoholic parents.

I was also battling being a shitty alcoholic parent up until just a few years ago. I was just slightly better than my own shitty alcoholic parents because I was still trying at least. But hangover dad is never a good look. I couldn’t be there 100%.

When they say, “where do you want to be five years from now?” Well, five years ago, I wanted to be dead and I was well on my way. (told you this was heavy). My depression was gloriously intensified by alcohol and I was hell bent on drinking myself to death.

My most powerful driving motivation for getting sober and fighting alcoholism (besides not leaving a disgusting mess for everyone else to clean up) was my kids.

I knew they were still going to need a dad. A functional one.

A sober one. So I quit drinking. It finally took after a few tries.

I tell my kids, there’s no such thing as failure as long as you keep trying.

And now I can see the difference I make in my kids lives. I see it every day. I’m not bragging, I’m just glad I survived to do some good and even make new stupid mistakes.

I’m proud that I have surpassed my own parents. I also thoroughly enjoy the time I have with the kiddos before they grow up and leave.

No matter what I do with my own life to call it “success”, from here on, I’m satisfied. I survived when others haven’t. I’m still here and that’s something.

And I think my kids are going to be okay.

At least I’m not going to make their lives worse.

Political

The 4th of July in Great America

Published on Facebook July 8, 2022

Being annoyed at the insanity of the 4th of July has got me thinking.

It used to be about celebrating the existence of the USA. Patriotic and proud of our freedom. With BBQs and parades and a hot summer day off work. To watch TV and hang out with friends and family. To celebrate being an American with baseball, hot dogs, burgers, and watermelon. And watching little kids chase fireflies or play spotlight in the evening.

We didn’t always have enormous fireworks that looked like a professional display in our own yards. We didn’t have as many obnoxiously loud bombs that caused dogs to run away in absolute terror for hours and cause wildlife to panic and die. And most of us had a water hose ready to put out the sparks in the driveway or the street.

If there was a fire, it was because we weren’t warned about drought and we were careless. Now, everybody knows about the fire danger and there’s no excuse.

The big displays lasted an hour and were put on for the whole town to enjoy, at the park or the high school, not just private parties.

We were ignorant to the atrocities at the beginnings of our country, slavery and genocide. The ugly truth about our nation’s history that current politicians are trying to bury again, which just makes it worse. They’ve made the horrors of our nation now front and center. Reminded of it with every silenced teacher. It makes it so much harder to ignore, even for just one day.

Patriotism now has been marketed to the worst people in the country, and flying the flag is now a radical political statement. It didn’t use to be this way.

Our beautiful nation is now not so beautiful anymore. Made so by the very people that are so obnoxiously proud of it. The very people that want only one version of it. That point their finger in your face and accuse you of being something other than an American simply because you want good things. The people that don’t actually understand the Constitution and the fragility of our Nation.

The 4th of July is ruined for me now. Hopefully not forever, but things are going to have to change for the better, for everyone. Everyone.

I want someday to fly the flag proudly because of the good we caused, the wrongs we righted, and the opportunity and freedom we promised. I want my kids to worry about changing the future world for the better, not just getting back to common decency. I wish they could just work for above and beyond decency and the terrible past is completely unrelatable.

I don’t understand why we occupy ourselves with making things more difficult. We have the ability to solve every problem our country has, if we could just get to work. I don’t understand the constant blocking of progress and desire to go back to the worst times in our history. There’s no making us great ‘again’, we were never great.

But we could be.