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Today I voted against Bush/Cheney/McCain/Republicans across-the-boardSponsor this pageThis page last updated on or about 10-18-08a - j m o o n e y h a m . c o m - o r i g i n a l |
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Today I voted to throw out all the Republican rat-bastards. Despite knowing my vote won't change anything in my home state. Because my state is one of the 'reddest of red' states, which means I'm surrounded by people who think politics is no more important than a high school football game, and their team is Republicans forever, right or wrong.
I honestly believe Hitler himself could get elected here, so long as he proclaimed himself a Republican.
Maybe some of the majority of my fellow state natives are better than that, but simply get tricked by corporate media such as Fox News into believing all sorts of outrageous lies about anyone who opposes Republican dogma.
I'm the exact opposite of a rich media mogul like Rupert Murdoch, who can finance a staggeringly huge media empire to push his own perverted views onto the world, with abominations like Fox News.
But I can afford to post a tiny little web site, and do my best to present the truth against their lies, with pages like:
The enormous hidden costs to society of 'right-wing' political governance
They own you and all your property too
How to get rich in America OR What are your TRUE chances of getting rich in America?
What the rich do with their astonishing freedom from taxes
Things only Americans worry about
Civilization's best defenses against war, terrorism, technological stagnation, and economic ruin
Stephen King could have been God
Are we there yet?
Sometime soon humanity should be hitting a techno-economic tipping point, after which all the basics of life like food, shelter, transport, and medical care would logically become dramatically easier and cheaper to obtain...UNLESS...
America's de facto domestic and foreign policies of artificial scarcity and institutionalized poverty
Part one
Part two
Part two references
If I had the money, I'd do lots more. But at present all I can do is show up at the polls, and keep my web site online.
I hope anyone reading this will do what they can, as well.
Who am I, and where am I coming from? I once thought of myself as a Republican. Today, I'm an Independent.
I grew up in an almost rabidly Republican rural area. The lock-step Republican mind-set of my home county (where it's nearly impossible for Democrats to ever get elected-- and Independents are considered Democrats by another name) has left the region perpetually impoverished, and burdened with near continuous corruption scandals in local government, business, and law enforcement. The evidence is plain for all to see in the historical newspaper archives of my hometown.
My parents were a bit more moderate than most Republicans there, I believe. Less racist, and more tolerant of others in general. But they never strayed far from the same lock-step of everyone else in their voting.
My own earliest national vote was for Ronald Reagan-- though I preferred the more moderate-sounding Bush in those primaries. I didn't always vote, come election time. I had to be moved to action by some particular issue to do so. Reagan 'the great communicator's' speeches resonated well with my recent reading of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and my own budding entrepreneurial efforts of the time.
I truthfully didn't understand much about the world back then. Plus, didn't always feel my vote mattered in the scheme of things, anyway. So my voting record was spotty for decades.
College didn't do much to change my political views. What did, was my own personal pursuit of knowledge relating to business and entrepreneurship, in support of my own business ambitions. Unsure of what exactly I needed to learn in those early days, I studied everything I could. Plus read tons of stuff recreationally as well.
By the early 1990s I aspired to writing the best science fiction book the world had ever seen-- at least in terms of 'hard' science, and the plausibility of its description of future events and technologies. And I wanted to present readers a detailed and technologically likely view of the most distant future reality that I could.
But that required immense research. For one thing, I figured I'd have to include how exactly humanity had finally solved some of the biggest problems likely to be encountered along the way. Not just faster-than-light space travel, but far more down-to-earth things like poverty, illness, war, etc., etc., etc.
Fortunately, my engineering training and business experience helped immensely. Plus, all that reading of topics across-the-board during my life. And just as I realized the need for still more research to feed my project, I got access to the internet! Hooray!
But I would end up being surprised by the directions my research took me. For it turned out virtually everything was far more complex and nuanced than I'd ever suspected. To paraphrase that old saying, 'the devil really was in the details'.
And more and more, it turned out that U.S. Republican politicians and pundits preferred to ignore or gloss over extremely important details which almost always contradicted or diminished the value of their ideas and policies. And mainstream media often aided and abetted this practice, to the detriment of open and honest debate and discussion in America.
The more research I did, the worse the Republicans appeared to be. And I finally began to understand the link between my own home town's irrepressible corruption and never-ending poverty, and its unshakeable Republican voter base.
Unfortunately, while practical and just solutions to problems rarely lend themselves to being neatly packaged into catchy mottos, slogans, and sound bites, simple-minded ideas which can't work but sound good, do.
And that's the point where my own political leanings began to change. The results of my research regarding the future can be seen in my speculative future history timeline, as well as the pages linked above.