Problems and Solutions in American Politics

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

20 problems we all accept as part of life Why you should not have faith in your government Borders are inhumane How valuable is your vote?

Americans, you’re not represented in the 2012 presidential elections.

The quality of our leaders reflect the quality of our education system What four more years of Obama means 3 steps that would drastically reduce corruption Why I’m not sure we need another big Occupy Wall Street style protest We need to talk about cops beating up protestors An intervention with the police Should police enforce unjust laws?

Why stop with just making drugs illegal?

A vote to criminalize sin is a vote to legalize oppression The 28th amendment Don’t ask what your country can do for you.

We need to talk about Utopia.

Don’t be a naysayer A cost/benefit analysis of terrorism The psychology behind the game theory of revolution If you see people rioting and burning buildings…print this out and give it to them.

Conservative Americans, you don’t need to overthrow your government to make America a better place.

Stop talking about gun control and start talking about poverty.

6 steps to change America Solutions for the 47% How to create Utopia.

Silver bullets and butterfly wings Why the world sucks and how to save it An open letter to Generation X An open letter to Conservative America An open letter to liberal America

INTRODUCTION This book is a collection of essays about the flaws of the American political system and practical nonviolent solutions to those problems. These essays were originally written between 2008 and 2012 and posted on the website, The Wise Sloth. Since each essay was originally written to stand alone some of the information in them is repeated.

20 PROBLEMS WE ALL ACCEPT AS PART OF LIFE 1. “Corporate financing of political campaigns leads to corporate control of the country.” You know it. I know it. Protestors know it, and nobody knows it better than politicians, but campaigning politicians never promise to end corporate sponsoring of politicians. Until that happens nothing will change, and we all know it, but people still act like it matters which politicians we elect when the only people they represent are their campaign donors.

2. The War in Iraq. George W. Bush told the world Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and gave Iraq an ultimatum: give up the WMDs or get invaded. Sadam didn’t give up the WMDs, and America invaded. Then it became public knowledge that the Bush administration knew Saddam never had WMDs. Then George Bush said the real reason the U.S. invaded Iraq was to free the Iraqi people. Then the U.S. spent 10+ years fighting off people in the Middle East who just wanted the American military to leave their country and quit killing civilians. Meanwhile there are countless other people begging to be rescued and freed from ruthless dictators who are too poor to attract America’s attention. There should be an entire prison built to hold all the people who should go to jail over the Iraq war. We know this, and we accept that no one will ever hold the Bush administration accountable.

3. American soldiers are not fighting for the freedom of the American people in Iraq. Nobody can agree on exactly why America invaded Iraq, but everybody knows it wasn’t for the freedom of the American people. There’s just no way to connect the two. So nobody knows what the American troops are dying for, but everyone just says “freedom” and lets them go on dying.

4. Global warming is real, but let’s suppose it isn’t. Just because we can screw up the planet a little more doesn’t mean we should. In a lot of ways taking care of the environment is the most important thing we can do. It’s even more important than corporate profits. Suppose environmental regulations cost companies money, which lowers their profits, which forces them to cut jobs, which hurts the economy. The worst case scenario still can’t be worse than poisoning the planet until it’s unable to support life. We know we should be taking care of the planet. We shouldn't be arguing about this.

5. We live in a wasteful consumer economy. We slash and burn resources and produce mountains of trash. There’s a layer of garbage the size of a continent floating in the Pacific Ocean. We shouldn’t be using disposable kitchenware, and we shouldn’t be using disposable plastic bags. But we’re using more disposable good than ever and speeding up our production of garbage.

6. University degrees are flawed. The hardest part of getting a university degree is paying for it. It’s a glass ceiling for those who can’t afford it, and it’s an unfair advantage to those who can. It’s classist, and pampered idiots all over the world are riding their paper credentials to the top of their professional organizations where they’re destroying

and squandering companies built by intelligent, hardworking people who couldn’t afford as many degrees as their bosses. The higher education system is broken and overpriced.

A lot of smart professors have said all this a billion times, but the glass ceiling factories keep churning.

7. The war on drugs needs to end. Legalizing drugs worked in Holland and Portugal. The results are in. The debate is over. Academics have made their case, and every year another South American politician tells America to end the war on drugs because it’s a futile war that does more damage than it prevents. Even American policemen are calling for an end to the war on drugs. The American people used the whitehouse.gov site to send a petition to the president to legalize marijuana. The president laughed at the people, the professionals and all their evidence. And then everyone just said, "Darn."

8. Nudity isn’t evil. Women shouldn’t be forced or even pressured to cover their heads or their breasts. That’s basic human equality. If a 5 year kid in a nudist colony sees an 80 year old penis the kid will be grossed out. If a 5 year old kid sees an 80 year old penis in suburbia the old man will go to jail and the kid will be told by a therapist they’re supposed to feel traumatized. You know what would happen if we got rid of all nudity and censorship laws? Not much…because nudity is not an issue. The people who told us to hate our bodies also told us it was okay to own slaves. We stopped believing them about slavery, and most of us have stopped believing them about sexual taboos as well, but more often than not we act like prudes so nobody will suspect we’re as amoral and horny as we really are. But deep inside we all know nudity and censorship laws are overblown and unnecessary. Even if a lot of people want censorship laws in place, if their right to not be offended supersedes another human being’s right to free will then we’ve set a dystopian precedent. Come on. With as much blatant sex is on television, cartoons and the Internet it's obvious that the world is okay with nudity and sexuality. We just haven't come out of the closet to ourselves about it.

9. Fox News is the most unethical, hypocritical, malicious disgrace in the history of journalism. Fox won a court case that said they had no obligation to tell the truth. The entire world laughs and cringes at Fox News. This isn’t even a slanderous thing to say. It’s just a simple fact. The organization wears its business model on its sleeve for everyone to see. Fox News is not fair and balanced. It pushes the limits of free speech by lying and sensationalizing for the purpose of instigating social disharmony.

That’s some dystopian shit right there. And it’s real, and it’s still respected. That’s terrifying.

10. Israel invaded Palestine and forced the Palestinians into ghettos where they’ve been systematically stripped of their humanity and are being ethnically cleansed. Israel shot aid workers trying to bring medicine to the Palestinians. Israel tortures Palestinians. These are human rights abuses. There’s no ambiguity here. Just like there’s no secret or ambiguity that North Korea is committing human rights atrocities. The world superpowers know all about these problems. But

they let it go on because…even if they didn’t actively create the problem they’ve been complicit long enough to share the blame…just like the general public.

11. Police shouldn't beat up protesters. When the police beat up protesters then you officially live in a police state. When it’s a crime for people to gather to demand freedom, justice and representation in government then you live in a police state. When the police shoot a veteran in the head with a tear gas canister and crack his skull and then throw a flash bang grenade in to the group of people trying to rescue him, and nobody gets fired over that incident then you live in a police state. If warrantless wiretaps, x-ray body scanners and full body searches don’t constitute a police state then what line do you have to cross before you concede you’re approaching a police state?

Maybe America isn’t a police state, but it’s not the land of the free. But people keep saying it like if they say it enough times it'll make it okay to get groped at the airport and have your E-mails read.

12. There should not be for-profit prisons. There should not be prisons traded on the stock market. The richer a man can get by filling prisons the faster prisons will fill.

We shouldn’t incentivize incarcerating as many people as possible by allowing prisons to exempt their inmates from their basic human rights so they can work in sweatshop conditions. We’ve seen enough movies about prison to know that the guards let the inmates tear each other apart like you’d expect animals in a cage to. They even made that “Scared Straight” program to make sure children understand how unethically human beings are treated in prison. We all know how inhumane prisons are, but we're not using that knowledge as a call to action to do the right thing.

13. Suburbs are a terrible way to design a city. Major suburban cities are congested, unsustainable, stressful, dangerous shit holes. Every single building looks the same, and the same businesses are on every corner. Everything is too far to walk to, and the suburbs are so bland and lifeless you wouldn’t want to look at them if you did have to walk through them. They force us to spend our lives in traffic wasting time and resources traveling. But cities don’t have to suck. We have the technology to build ultraefficient floating cities for less money than it costs to maintain the broken, unplanned cities we’ve scarred the earth with. If nothing else, we could just stop expanding suburbia and start designing new suburbs more effectively. But we’re not even doing that. 24 hours per day somewhere there is a crane and a tractor clearing the earth to make way for another isolated, unsustainable, boring cookie cutter suburb. And they’ll keep going until there’s no land left. And we’re all watching the train wreck shouting for it to stop while paying our mortgages and rent in the suburbs.

14. Everyone who has ever bought a house knows that the housing market is a giant scam. Mortgages are full of meaningless add on fees and charges. Interest rates could be set at anything. They’re set high to squeeze more money out of the customer.

That’s it. Banks don’t make money unless they’re fucking their customers in the ass. And we let them get away with it because we assume there’s some higher economic reason why it has to be nearly impossible to buy a home. But really it just comes down to “fuck

you.” That’s why houses are so expensive, and that’s why homelessness is so common.

Again, this isn’t a secret. But it is something you’re children are going to have to learn for themselves because apparently nobody is going to change the way banks fuck their customers in the ass…I mean…do business.

15. Politicians should have competency and sanity tests. Anyone familiar with politics at all can name a few examples of politicians who were unarguably unqualified to hold office. There’s nothing un-American about competency exams. Everyone’s careers are built on competency and character tests. The people with the most responsibility should be held to the highest level of accountability. Anything less is a recipe for disaster. Everyone wants a better president, and it’s crossed everyone’s mind that maybe if we screen the candidates a little better then we’ll get a better pool to choose from. If nothing else the voters would be fine with giving politicians drug tests...just like politicians have mandated that soldiers and school janitors have to take drug tests. But politicians decide what the political debate of the day is on television, and they’re too busy blaming all the world’s problems on how school teachers aren’t monitored and reprimanded enough.

16. Everyone knows teachers are being used as a scapegoat for society’s failures. Schools don’t suck because teachers are stupid. School suck because they’re underfunded and the parents have made it illegal for schools to enforce discipline. Every political and religious organization big enough to fill a P.T.A. board or donate to a politician’s election campaign can have their warped ideology forced onto the Department of Education. The one person with the least amount of say or control over the classroom is the teacher. And they’re too busy filling out paperwork for the performance-monitoring companies that are bankrupting the school to build meaningful relationships with their students. Kids in school know this. They know the system is rigged against the teachers. Everybody does, and we know it’s crippling children forever. But the only way it’s going to change is for parents to accept some responsibility for their children’s performance and cede some authority to the school system. Experience has taught me not to expect that level of humility from first world parents.

17. People want to be able to listen to any song whenever they want and watch any television show, movie or clip ever created any time they want.

And we have the technology to allow that. We’re just not allowed to use it. If Hollywood won’t give their customers what they want then their customers will go somewhere else to get it. If Hollywood made one website where anyone could access any song, show or movie anytime and it would work without any hassle then everyone would pay a premium for that luxury. As it stands, you can either go pay a ton of money to a bunch of different services to get random access to media or you can go get it all for free on a pirate site as long as you’re willing to deal with pop ups and virus threats. Customers don’t pirate because they’re evil. They pirate because it’s a more user friendly way to access the content they want. Hollywood needs to stop blaming their customers for expecting a better consumer experience. The world is waiting for Hollywood to get its

shit together and offer everything it’s got in one place for a flat fee. You can make excuses for why that’s not legally possible, but as long as that excuse continues to prevent customers from getting what they want legally, they’re going to keep paying pirates to host and organize pirated media. We're all waiting for Hollywood to save itself, but we're not holding our breath. All we really expect Hollywood to do is bribe more Orwellian-worded spying legislation Hollywood through congress.

18. Everyone knows Hollywood creates anti-intellectual crap that is lowering humanity’s potential. “Jersey Shore,” “Full House” and “Saved by the Bell” should never have been on television. Television was supposed to help mankind fulfill its potential, not record it celebrating its suicide. Celebrities are irrelevant. If you buy celebrity gossip magazines at the checkout line you’re retarded. That’s not mean of me to say because if you buy those magazines you know you’re retarded, and you don’t care.

But when you look at those magazines in the future look at them as a test. The more of those that get sold the more people there are who are living in the dumbest reality you can create in a Los Angeles basement. The most dangerous force in the world is a large, frightened group of dumb people. The more gossip magazines you see the higher the apocalypse threat level 19. Everyone knows their phones and shoes were made in sweat shops. But if you boycotted every product that was made in a sweat shop you’d die from starvation and exposure. Slavery isn’t the exception in our economy, it’s the premise. So what do you do? Apparently you just give up thinking about the problem and carry on with your life. We’ve been ignoring the problem for over 10,000 years. Why would we do anything different now?

It’s common knowledge that these problems and their solutions exist. People have been talking about them for years. Maybe if we just talked about them a little more we can actually fix them. If you don’t see any of these problems getting fixed in the coming years though, then that may be a good sign that you should invest in a bunker because we can’t stay this ignorant and apathetic forever without blundering into some kind of avoidable extinction level event.

20. It's past time churches started paying taxes. Taxes help people. Tax havens attract dishonest people. Taxing churches is a win/win situation for everyone. And why should believing in mythology be rewarded anyway? The tax free status of religious organizations is archaic and obsolete. Even religious people understand that...even if they won't admit it.

WHY YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE FAITH IN YOUR GOVERNMENT You never signed a social contract agreeing to any terms or conditions regarding what authority your government has over you or what you get in return for ceding authority to your government. You were just born into a country at random and told what laws you were expected to follow and how bad the consequences would be if you didn't follow them.

This might not bother you. You might even be able to come up with an excuse that sounds good on paper to explain why it's a good thing you didn't get a choice in whether or not you wanted to be a citizen who is subject to the laws of the country you were born and/or raised in. Even if this arrangement is legally justifiable, it's still important that we be absolutely clear about what this means. Your life, liberty and happiness are bound to the conditions of a contract you didn't sign.

It's a logical fallacy to say that since you have some freedoms then you're free. You're not free. You may have some freedoms, but you only enjoy those freedoms at the whim and leisure of the people with the power to dictate and enforce the law. You may be free to choose which religion you express belief in, but at no point are you free to drive as fast as you want, to do whatever drugs you want, build whatever want or take your clothes off wherever you want. You're not that free.

Even if you would have chosen to follow all the rules you're subject to there's a very important principle implied by the fact that you didn't choose them. The laws you’re subject to...subjugate you. Forcing you to do something you never agreed to is an indignity to you even if you would have done it anyway. The indignity of the situation is doubled if you willingly follow rules you never agreed to, and the more you celebrate your own subjugation the more indignity you heap on yourself. Anyone who would tell you to celebrate your own degradation is not your friend. Your government doesn't treat you with respect and dignity; by forcing you to follow rules you never consented to, your government treats you with the disrespect and indignity of a slave, not a free and equal human being.

This inherent state of indignity is compounded by a list of other factors such as the fact that you never agreed to pay taxes. You never agreed to what kind of taxes you have to pay, how much those taxes are, what they’re spent on or what the punishment is for not paying them. You were simply told that you have to pay an arbitrary amount decided by someone you'll never meet, and the punishment for not paying them was set arbitrarily by an arbitrary person...yet you're held to those expectations strictly. If you're a citizen of the United States of America you're still expected to file taxes in the United States for the rest of your life even if you expatriate and renounce your American citizenship.

True, you do get something in return for your taxes, but that doesn't justify taking any amount of money from you for any reason, especially when you're punished severely for not paying. Even if your taxes were completely fair and were spent entirely

on public works that benefit you, if you'll go to jail for not paying taxes you never agreed to then you're being extorted. If there's any basic human right that everyone deserves, it's the right to choose how much money you give to your government in return for services of your choosing, but you don't have that right. You owe your government a lifetime of money the moment you're born, and since the only way to get money is to work for it that means you owe your government a time debt. That time is infinitely valuable, because life is short and irreplaceable; the fact that you have no say in how much of your life is taken from you is infinitely degrading.

Not only are you denied the right to choose what taxes you pay, how much you pay or what that money is spent on, you don't have the right to even know what your taxes are spent on. There are thousands of rooms in this world with "Top Secret" signs on the doors that nobody outside is allowed to enter or know the contents of without authorization and a need to know. You don't have authorization or a need to know...what your taxes are spent on. You never chose to be kept in the dark about what your taxes are spent on, and you have no recourse to rectify the situation. If you don't continue to fund these mystery projects you'll go to jail. This is not a situation you put someone you respect into.

The people who authorized your taxes to be spent on classified projects will tell you that you’re being kept in the dark for your own protection and benefit, but what are you being protected from? You're being protected from someone overthrowing your existing government and replacing it with one that forces you to follow rules you never agreed to and pay taxes you never agreed to for projects you never asked for and aren't allowed to know about and will get thrown in jail for not funding.

If you assemble in a group of protesters large enough to have the leverage to influence your political leaders then your political leaders will order the law enforcement agencies (that you fund to protect you) to terrorize you and your fellow citizen/protesters until you disperse. If you need any proof how free or represented you are, just watch footage of the last protest your government shut down. If you need any proof how much dignity your government believes you're worthy of, watch footage of the last instance of police brutality that went unpunished.

If you come to the conclusion that your government only cares about you to the extent that it can exploit you for taxes and farm you out to businesses as wage slaves and no amount of protesting will influence your leaders to treat you with the dignity becoming of a human being then you might decide to just leave your birth country. Surely, if you complain about your government on the internet long enough someone will eventually tell you to "vote with your feet."

That sounds reasonable in theory, but all the governments of the world (by intent or incident) have effectively colluded to make that option impractical to the majority of the human population. In order to emigrate to pretty much anywhere you need a degree from an accredited university and at least $10,000 in cash. Plus you have to be perfectly

healthy. University degrees tend to cost more than $30,000. So unless you have at least $40,000, an able body and a brain smart enough to pass all your university classes then you can't leave your home country. You're effectively a prisoner. I know all the arguments and reasons for why immigration laws exist, but if they sound reasonable and justified then that just means it's reasonable and justified to imprison human beings in their birth country. Furthermore, it means the poor and stupid don’t have the right to choose where they live or which laws they're subject to. So by justifying the current immigration laws, you're justifying denying equal rights to all human beings. You can make that argument, but in doing so you cede the right to claim you believe in freedom, equality or the right to life, liberty and happiness.

This is how the world works. These are the indignities you're subjected to. Yet you've been told your entire life that if you don't like it then you can change it by voting. And yet, year in and year out new politicians get elected and appointed to power without changing the system that imprisons, exploits and degrades the poor. How many more impotent politicians do we have to elect before we accept that electing different politicians isn't changing anything?

And why would you expect electing politicians to change anything when your politicians are in no way held accountable for their actions? They've given themselves and their friends diplomatic immunities you don't have. They may as well have painted the words "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others." On every government building. That's not just a line from a dystopian children's story. That's reality even in democratic capitalist countries. Politicians don't get in any trouble for reneging on their campaign promises either. The can even break the law with impunity, because when politicians break the law, it's legal. If they get really backed into a corner they can just get another politician to absolve their criminal charges. That's true freedom. Now why would you expect your politicians to restrain themselves when they have free reign to abuse their powers? Because they represent you? They don't represent you. Most people have never even met a politician. We only find out who we get to vote for a few months (at most) before it's time to vote.

You’re not represented in government. You have no say in government. Your vote is meaningless at best and a lie that enables your victimization at worst. You don't know what your government does or why it does it. If you don't like it you have no recourse, and if you take matters into your own hands you'll be punished with severe prejudice.

The only thing you can do is run for a government office yourself and dedicate your life to your political career until you have the power to make the changes you want, but everyone can't do that, and nobody should have to.

So what can we do about this? You can't do anything alone. The only leverage the civilian population has is their numbers. No army can stop a hundred million people acting in unison. A hundred million people literally don't even have to do anything to effect change. If they all went on strike at the same time or stood in the streets and refused to move then their inaction would have enough leverage to twist the arm of their

politicians, but a hundred million people are never going to act in unison until they think in unison. Nothing will change as long as people have faith in their government and believe the benefit of keeping calm and carrying on outweighs the cost of sticking their neck out.

If you want to make meaningful change in your government the first thing you need to do is explain everything I've just said to your fellow citizens (particularly those in law enforcement and the military who will be called on to terrorize anyone who makes any progress in effecting meaningful change). When the majority of the population loses faith in their government then the stage will be set for the people who are capable of organizing nonviolent political change to do so. If you choose not to help erode public confidence in your corrupt government then you should build a bunker to protect your and your family from the problems you're enabling. You might survive that way, but you're choosing to live without dignity, and you're condemning your fellow man and future generations to live without dignity. If that's your choice then you have no right to pat yourself on the back for anything you ever accomplish for the rest of your life because all of your accomplishments will be tainted with the indignities you've accepted for yourself and everyone else.

Why should you have dogmatic faith in your government anyway? Your government exists to serve you. Why would you be expected to have unquestioning loyalty to your servant? Your servant should have unquestioning loyalty to you. When you subjugate yourself to your servant you make your servant your master and place your dignity under your master's feet. You're better than that, and you deserve more than that not just because you're a human being but because your government is a product that you paid for with your blood, sweat and tears. You deserve to get the highest quality product for your tax dollar. If you’re not going to demand to get what you deserve, I guess you didn't deserve it in the first place after all.

BORDERS ARE INHUMANE The world is a confusing place, and there's so much disinformation and misinformation pushed in our faces everyday it's hard to tell reality from fiction. Here's a little trick that will help you see through a lot of the illusions. Social issues always involve multiple people, usually from multiple groups. These different people from different groups get differentiated with labels like gay, straight, American, Korean, president, citizen, soldier, officer, enlisted, supervisor, immigrant, owner, renter, customer, capitalist, communist, etc. These labels have their uses, but sometimes they confuse the real issue more than they clarify it. If you ever run into an issue you don't understand, try replacing all the labels with the term "human being." For instance, if you're having a hard time understanding why straight people have the right to marry and gays don't, replace the labels and ask "Why do human beings have the right to marry and human beings don't."

When you do that you see that the justifications we use to deny one group of human beings the same rights as others are beside the point. The real point is that we're all human beings. Bringing labels into the equation just confuses the issue and creates an environment where one group of human beings can oppress another group.

Let's apply this concept to political borders. Suppose your child asks you this question: "Why aren't Mexicans allowed to move freely into the United States, and why are the Mexicans who sneak North across the border paid slave wages and not given any employee benefits while people born in the United States are guaranteed a higher minimum wage and certain benefits and protections from their employers?"

Tell your child to replace the labels with the phrase "human being" so the question becomes: "Why aren't human beings allowed to move freely into the United States, and why are the human beings who sneak North across the border paid slave wages and not given any human being benefits while human beings born in the United States are guaranteed a higher minimum wage and certain benefits and protections from their human beings?"

When you do that the question sounds absurd...because the real issue is in fact, absurd.

But that's hard to see when you fog reality with arbitrary labels. The truth is our passports are lies that perpetuate a false and inhumane reality. They're not designed to help us get around the world. They're designed to limit our freedom to travel, which limits our freedom to choose where to live, which limits our freedom to choose which laws we live under, which rights we have and probably most importantly, who we work for and who we pay taxes to. Borders don't keep bad people out, they keep tax payers in.

Any country that truly believes in freedom would open its borders unconditionally, but no country in the world has done that, because it would free the human beings from the stranglehold that rich human beings have on poor human beings. Eliminating borders would give human beings the ultimate power to veto their corrupt leaders by simply leaving.

If that were possible then rich and powerful human beings wouldn't be able to create trade restrictions and sanctions that exploit human beings from poorer "nations." The corrupt leaders from those poorer nations wouldn't be able to exploit their own people or rule them with brutal force. People wouldn't sit around saying to themselves, "Oh, the world sucks but what can we do about it?" They would simply leave and go live under the laws of a more just nation, and no leader wants that.

If we are all truly human beings, what right does one human being have to tell you where you can live? In truth, they have no right. All they have is the authority you give them over you. Unfortunately, so many people believe the lie of political borders and help enforce it that they make the lie real and in doing so, we eliminate our own freedom to travel, to choose which laws we would live under and which dictator's regime we fund with our taxes. And that's the reality we've created for our children to grow up in.

HOW VALUABLE IS YOUR VOTE? Every time I check the news these days I see a dozen articles about how bad the economy in America is getting. If it's not that it's about workers losing rights, poison in the food, overflowing jails, crime in the ghettos, the quality of education being undermined by politicians, corruption in the government, civil liberties being infringed on.

Whenever I read forums where people are discussing the things wrong with America, inevitably someone will squawk this golden bit of wisdom, "This is what happens when you don't vote."

Allow me to use a chart to illustrate the flaw in this logic.

In America voting is generally considered more sacred than Jesus. But all of America's problems have been caused by poor leadership, and all of our leaders have been elected.

The few who weren't elected were chosen by people who were elected. Our leaders have consistently failed us. I think Albert Einstein put it best when he said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

Insanity is also not being able to see the obvious, or seeing it and refusing to acknowledge it. The reality is that the right to vote doesn't empower or protect the American people. The way voting in America works it blatantly disenfranchises them.

Here's how voting works. Two or more people run for an office. The public doesn't have much time to get to know the candidates. So the only information they're given about the candidates are the things the candidate wants them to know or what their opponent can dig up on them. Since the people can't judge the candidates by their qualifications,

they judge them on their charisma or familiarity. This means the person with the biggest public relations budget is most likely to win. This means the person with the most money is most likely to win. Most candidates don't have enough money of their own to finance a campaign. So they get donations. The individuals or organizations who donate the most money expect favors in return.

Now, when a candidate is on the campaign trail they will tell the people whatever they want to hear to get their votes. So they'll avoid making any concrete statements about their position because they know that will alienate someone. They'll also make the most unrealistic promises because they know everyone wants to hear that, but once they're in office they have absolutely no accountability to keep any of those promises or to lean in any direction.

Voters can send letters to their elected representatives, but those letters will be opened, read and responded to by a young intern. If you want to actually talk to a politician and give them a typed up policy for them to sign into law you have to lobby them. Lobbying is when you shower a politician with favors and gifts in return for their compliance. Note that you don't have to vote for a candidate to lobby them. In some countries this is known as bribery. And who has the time and money to lobby politicians? Wealthy individuals and organizations. How do they get wealthy? By making goods and services as cheaply as possible, paying the workers who produce them as little as possible and charging the customer as much as possible.

What do you think the wealthy ask politicians for? The right to make cheaper products, pay people less, work them more and charge them more. And that's exactly what's happened since WWII because that's how voting is designed to work. It gives regular voters the illusion of control when in reality it empowers those with the most to gain from exploiting and subjugating the masses. All voting accomplishes is keeping that illusion alive.

AMERICANS, YOU’RE NOT REPRESENTED IN THE 2012 ELECTIONS Note: I fear that if you change the names at dates, everything I say here will apply to every presidential election in the foreseeable future.

Every election season you hear people say, "If you don't vote you can't complain." Any time you complain about laws you don't like people will tell you, "You live in a democracy. If you want to change things then vote or run for office."

This brings us to the 2012 presidential elections. Mitt Romney is the Republican candidate, and Barak Obama is the Democratic candidate. Those are the only two candidates you get to choose from. A Libertarian might be on the ballot, but you don't really get to choose him, because he's not going to win. So choosing him is tantamount to choosing not to vote.

The Republican party doesn't want Mitt Romney to represent them. He might have a few die-hard fans, but he's a big city fat cat pandering to poor country voters. He doesn't carry himself with confident poise like Barak Obama. He almost seems terrified to be running for president because he knows he's not very good at lying on the spot and saying it confidently...like say, Newt Gingrich. And he's a Mormon, which godless liberals might not judge him for, but the kind of Christians who wouldn't vote for Obama because they believe he's a Muslim believe Joseph Smith was just as much of a false prophet as Muhammad. For a lot of reasons, Republicans just don't want Mitt Romney to be their president, and they really, really don't want Barak Obama to be president. So they're unrepresented in this presidential election.

At the same time, Barak Obama is running as the Democratic candidate for president, and while he has some die-hard fans, a lot of liberals don't want another four years of Barack Obama doing everything they hated George Bush for doing.

Obama-mania is over. He had his chance to change things, and he didn't. He maintained the status quo to the point of standing by silently, consenting to police beating and arresting people for protesting for freedom, justice and representation in the various "Occupy" protests.

A lot of people who vote for Barak Obama in 2012 will be choosing him as the lesser of two evils even though they know neither candidate truly represents them, and a lot of conservative voters will be voting for Mitt Romney only because they perceive him as the lesser of two evils even though they know neither candidate truly represents them.

So in the 2012 election the conservative voter base doesn't have a candidate that actually represents them...and neither does the liberal voter base. What Americans get to choose from are an old white guy who made a fortune in the financial sector squeezing the little guys and an old black guy whose campaign is funded by old white guys who made their fortunes in the financial sector squeezing the little guys. And both candidates are going

to staff every government position in their power with old, rich people from the financial sector who made their fortunes squeezing the little guy. If that's enough to scare you into voting Libertarian you'll just elect an old white guy who wants to remove every safe guard that protects the poor from getting squeezed by the rich. So the 2012 presidential election is merely a charade where the American people get to choose who they want to represent the rich and open the gates for them to squeeze the little guy more.

At the time I’m writing this, the 2012 election isn't for another 6 months, but I can already tell you who's going to win representation in the White House. The rich are going to win representation, and the poor are going to be told that if they don't like it they can change who represents the rich in the White House in 4 more years.

I can see how some people might not have seen this coming in the 2008 presidential election with everyone so excited that George Bush was gone and Obama-mania was sweeping the nation, but I don't know how it could be any more obvious in 2012 that nobody who is running for office represents the American people. And the American people will never be represented in any presidential election as long as they only get to choose between who the Republican party and the Democratic party nominate.

THE QUALITY OF OUR LEADERS REFLECT THE QUALITY OF OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM I was already deeply unimpressed by the Republican party, but I hadn't realized how completely and utterly superficial America's leadership (and the entire machine responsible for rotating those leaders) had become until I watched the 2012 Republican National Convention was as artificial and insincere as a fast food restaurant, and all the makeup and flashy backdrops in the world couldn't dress up that pig. That turd was polished as well as it could be, and it was still an offensive pile of shit. To be fair though, I'm sure the Democratic National Convention won't be any better.

The entire 2012 presidential race in America has been a gigantic, flashing red warning light that America is desperately long overdue for an intervention about how fake its political machine has become, but it also points to another, possibly more important issue. Everyone who made a fool of themselves during the 2012 presidential race held a degree from an accredited university. Some of them had masters and doctorate degrees from prestigious schools known for their high academic standards.

The standardized higher education system we're using to educate the people who are running the world doesn't work. If you need more evidence then look at any career field in the world, but possibly the purest example of the ineffectiveness of university degrees is the American military officer caste. Every enlisted soldier has stories of woefully (and I mean woefully) incompetent officers. I'm not saying every officer is incompetent. I'm saying there are enough incompetent officers to constitute a pattern, and if we trace that pattern back to its source we can fix the problem. The problem (other than the UCMJ) is the broken higher education system.

Nobody likes to admit when they're wrong, especially people whose careers are based on the premise that they're smarter than everyone else, but humanity can't afford another generation of leaders as incompetent as the one we've got now. We can't even afford to endure the incompetent leaders we have now. The failures of the higher education system are felt in every career field every day. The cumulative affect is that it's killing people. It's lowering people's quality of life and the potential of the entire species. I would even go as far as to say that the failures of the higher education system are pushing the Doomsday Clock in the wrong direction.

How can we fix this problem? The most fundamental change that needs to happen first is that every level of education needs to be free. As long as credentials are sold higher education will be a glass ceiling for the poor, schools will compromise their effectiveness for higher earnings and students will be set up for failure.

If you want to design a better education system then you need to talk to people who understand how the human mind works. If the American Psychological Association had

been in charge of the Department of Education (and its funding) all along we might not be in the place we are now.

It frightens me how blatantly broken the higher education system is but it can't be fixed because it can't be changed because it’s so suffocated by bureaucracy. Plus, there are too many people making too much money ripping off students under the current system to let anyone change the system in any way that would lower their profit margin. However, free online video schools like The Khan Academy and M.I.T.'s open courseware will make the traditional higher education model obsolete once they've created downloadable content for every class in every subject at every level. If America had given its entire Iraq War budget to The Khan Academy and/or M.I.T. then everyone in the world could be going to university for free to study whatever they want as long as they want at their own pace by 2020.

Some day that will happen, and then students won't have to pay half their life's wages to learn about their professors' personal lives, how to bullshit their way through Power Point presentations or how to cram for an exams on topics they'll never use again. Once students are free to learn whatever they want and/or need without having to endure a traumatic gauntlet of unreasonably complicated, irrelevant assignments then universities like the one that Herman Cain graduated from will die a natural death, and the world will be a safer, more productive place.

It sure would be nice if we could speed that process up a little, because stupid people are getting too close for comfort to the red button.

WHAT FOUR MORE YEARS OF OBAMA MEANS Obama won another four years as president of the United States. I'd be more excited, but as we all know, he hasn't lived up to his 2008 campaign slogan of “hope and change.”

Since he didn’t change hardly anything we’d hoped for he had to modify his 2012 campaign slogan to “moving forward.” While Republican politicians and Fox News played an instrumental role in holding Obama’s administration, the American political system, the American people, and to some extent, the world, hostage with their stubbornness and ignorance, Obama himself didn’t take a strong stance against a great many injustices. In the next four years he’ll continue standing by idly while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and humanity slides closer to extinction. Here’s a list of things Obama won’t change in the next four years. In fact, these are all things that no Democrat or Republican candidate would have or will take a strong stance against for the foreseeable future. Remember this list every time you go to the polls.

Campaign Finance Reform: The main reason the world can’t expect to see America change or even move forward is because millionaires and billionaires fund politicians’ campaigns. As a result, American politicians are compromised before they even enter office, and if they don’t play ball with the big political financiers while they’re in office then they’ll lose their funding, and that money will go to fund their next opponent.

The rich only want their politicians to do one thing for them: make them richer at the expense of the poor. And the richer the rich get the more political power they can afford.

The poorer the poor get the less political power they can afford. Politicians know this, but they won’t put an end to it because they’ll lose their career (and possibly their life) if they so much as talk about how important it is to take away rich people’s ability to unofficially buy political power by making campaign contributions.

Holding Politicians Accountable: Politicians don’t have to take the same competency exams that soldiers have to take before enlisting. They don’t have to pass the same exams foreigners have to take before immigrating to America. They don’t have to take the same drug tests that janitors have to take. When politicians prove their incompetency they won’t lose their job like teachers do. When they break laws they rarely go to jail like voters do. When they go senile with old age they’re not forced into retirement. They can even get convicted of corruption specifically and still be able to stay in office and run for higher offices. There’s no motivation for them to give a fuck, and they behave accordingly. And since no politician is going to instate stricter standards for politicians they’re going to keep not giving a fuck...about you.

Crushing protests: It would be hard to send a clearer message to the world that hope will be crushed and change will not be tolerated than ordering police to beat, mace, taze, arrest and disperse protesters. The American government sent that message to the world when the Occupy Wall Street protesters were terrorized by the police and discredited by the media. There’s no reason to expect any American politician will act any differently now.

The U.C.M.J.: The Uniform Code of Military Justice violates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Human Rights. The American public will continue spending trillions of dollars in taxes to support this inhumane document because no American politician will stand up against it.

Ethnic Cleansing in Israel: What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is ethnic cleansing at best. Given enough time it will be genocide, and the Israeli government will have all the time they need to exterminate the few Palestinians that remain in the concentration camps they’ve been corralled into because Israel has the full support of the United States government.

Predatory Lending: Do you know why interest rates on loans are so expensive?

Because that’s how bankers get rich. And the higher interest rates on mortgages and business loans are set the more landlords and business owners have to charge their poor customers to cover the money they’ve lost to the banks. Banks are bleeding humanity to death so a few people can get obscenely rich, and they’re going to keep bleeding humanity to death because no American politician will stand up to big banks.

Manipulation in the Media: Fox News argued and won a court case in Florida saying that they have no obligation to tell the truth. They’ve been lying through their teeth ever since and have crippled their fans’ ability to think or act rationally. Now insanity is the norm in America. Even less biased media outlets still bombard their audiences with commercial propaganda that convinces them to act on their base instincts and spend money they don’t have on products they don’t need. The media in America is more Orwellian than even George Orwell could have predicted. Every generation of American children is going to grow up getting mind-fucked because no American politicians will intervene on their behalf.

Fair Wages and Prices: The standard business model all around the world is for companies to pay their workers as little as possible and charge their customers as much as possible so that they heads of the company can keep as much money as possible.

Billions of people don’t live in abject poverty because they’re lazy and stupid. They’re poor because the only way the rich can get richer is to take more of their money. The rich are going to keep bleeding the poor to death with the consent of the politicians they’ve bought…politicians like Barack Obama.

The War on Drugs: The war on drugs is a misnomer. It’s really a war on people. It’s an obvious and well-established fact that the war on people is hurting more people than it helps. The only people it really helps are criminal kingpins and war profiteers like the gun and prison industries. While the poor live in fear and rot in jail there are a lot of rich people getting richer, and they’re going to keep getting richer because no president will stand up for what’s right.

Equal Rights for All: It's still illegal for women to take their shirts off in the same places as men. That makes women second class citizens. Obama isn't going to fix that,

because...I guess equal rights aren't as important as bailing out predatory lending institutions. Also, despite Obama's lovely piece of propaganda about how he supports gay marriage, he let the issue drop after he got the popularity boost he was looking for.

3 STEPS THAT WOULD DRASTICALLY CURB CORRUPTION 1. Hold all government officials to the same level of screening used when hiring school janitors and the lowest level enlisted military troops. That includes a drug test and a criminal background check. If it's too dangerous to have a janitor on drugs then why don't we make sure our leaders aren't on drugs? If it's too dangerous to give a soldier with a felony conviction a gun then why give members of Congress with felony convictions the ability to control our troops? About two weeks ago Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska got convicted of 7 counts of felony corruption. Guess who got reelected to the Senate two days ago? Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska. Guess who couldn't vote for Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska because he has a felony conviction on his record? Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska.

2. Make corruption a treasonous offense.

(Political) corruption is defined as: "the use of governmental powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain."

Treason is defined as: "1. the offense of acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign. 2. A violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state.3. The betrayal of trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery."

Corruption is treason and should be punished as such. Unfortunately, the penalty for treason in America is death, and I don’t personally believe in the death penalty. Life in prison would still be a fair sentence for politicians who undermine the political system for their own gain.

3. Outlaw campaign contributions and lobbyists. Our government already gives money to political campaigns. Take all that money and make a couple of websites/television stations devoted solely as a platform for campaigning. If it's illegal to spend any money on campaigning you automatically accomplish two things. First of all, anyone can run for office. You don't have be a millionaire or well connected. As it stands, those are the two most important requirements to run for office‌as opposed to be qualified. Secondly, politicians won't have to pay back their campaign contributors with political favors. If lobbying is outlawed then they can't do under the table personal favors for politicians in return for political favors.

If we can do at least these simple, common sense things we can eliminate the vast majority of corruption in our government and begin to head away from the fate of Rome, Russia, and every other corrupt nation that has fallen from glory. Then we can begin to move towards Utopia and the glory that we ignorantly boast so loudly about having today.

WHY I’M NOT SURE WE NEED ANOTHER BIG OCCUPY WALL STREET STYLE PROTEST

I think it’s great that the Occupy Wall Street protests got people out on the streets talking, commiserating and networking. It woke a lot of people up to the flaws of our political and economic systems. I wouldn’t take back what’s been done. All I'm saying is, I'm concerned about a few trends.

First and foremost is police brutality. Police brutality is wrong, but if you know the police are going to beat you up every time you do something then if you keep doing that thing then at some point you're just asking for the police to beat you up. This doesn't just hurt you. The more you get beat up the angrier the nation is going to get on your behalf (or at you). If you keep doing the same thing over and over again that keeps making the nation angrier and angrier then at some point you’re just poking a bear with a stick. Regardless of who's right or wrong that’s not going to end well for anyone.

From this point on, if you’re going to go out of your way to get beat up by the cops then at least don’t act surprised and horrified when it happens. Own it and use it to raise the point soberly that cops shouldn’t be beating people up.

Before you go out of your way to make a martyr of yourself though, you have to seriously consider that the Internet has already taught every disgruntled young men's club that they can dress in black and cause mayhem at big protests. Even activists suspect that law enforcement agencies pose as black bloc instigators to undermine protests so that the only impact protests will ever have on the public consciousness is to prove that protesters are all a bunch of maniacal hooligans. If you know your protest is going to get undermined and you protest anyway then all you’re really doing is rolling out the red carpet for ninjas to come chop your feet off.

And you know they’re going to be able to do it and get away with it too because they’ll just blend in with all the homeless people you now know will show up to any long term urban camping facility where there’s free food. In all seriousness, and any social worker can back me up on this, the more homeless people you take into your camp the more likely you are to take in people with serious mental issues. Ironically, the issue of homelessness is one of the most important topics that should be discussed at a social activism meeting, but there's a reason why there weren't any drunk, homeless schizophrenics present when the Bill of Rights was written.

The Occupy Wall Street protests taught us that big groups of people in tents can solve real world problems if they stick together long enough and stay focused. It also taught us that it’s hard to get work done if those tents are in the middle of a Burning Man themed homeless shelter surrounded by the National Guard.

We also learned that life goes on. Time is of the essence, but patience is a virtue. Fixing all the biggest problems in the world isn’t something that’s realistically going to happen over the course of a single Ren Fair. Every time human rights have progressed it has

happened because a bunch of people sat down together and thought really hard and found the right words to express what they had to say. Then they formulated an argument to back up their proposition. Then they voted. Then they acted.

That can be done in any tent anywhere. We'd all like to show our dedication to a good cause, but it's just not realistic to ask everyone to uproot their lives to go sit in a tent in a strange city until the party fizzles out. But just about anyone can get a permit to set up a ring of tents at a local public park every other weekend for a working luau.

At this point in the game we need to be identifying solutions to problems, not raising awareness of them. Before the Tea Party, the Rally to Restore Sanity, the Occupy Wall Street protests and all America’s shooting sprees it could have been argued that people needed a big event to wake them up. Well, everyone is awake now. We’re just not doing anything about it because we’re too shocked to stop watching the train wreck happening in front of us, and we feel powerless to stop it anyway.

The way to stop the train wreck is for us to sit down and talk with our neighbors soberly about practical, positive solutions. Then we can get up and make the changes we've been praying and begging and waiting for. We don’t have to throw rocks or bottles at anyone to do that. We don't have to kill any grass. We don’t have to pee in a bucket or take time off work to get there. All we have to do is find a place where’s it’s okay to put up a tent and talk to other people. We can even keep moving the tent until we've solved all the problems that motivated us to leave the house in the first place.

If we wanted to gather in a gigantic crowd somewhere we should be gathering in cyber space. You'd have a better chance of organizing thousands of people using a social networking iPhone app than a mic check.

I want to see the world get better without anyone having to get hit in the head by the police, and I don't think that's necessary anyway. I think if we thought about it hard enough we could come up with a way to make the world a better place without putting police in that position to begin with. All we have to do is...talk about those problems without putting the police in that position.

If we absolutely must have another massive, long term urban protest, I suggest the organizers check with the Rotary Club, Kiwanis, Lions Club or the Girl Scouts first. They know how to organize productive, orderly conferences that can raise money and direct resources to legitimate charities and humanitarian organizations. They could teach a drum circle a thing or two.

I do hope the Occupy movement finds productive, nonviolent solutions to the public's grievances. All I'm trying to say is that if we do keep having massive protests and they just seem to make things worse every time... just remember that it's been pointed out that there are other options on the table besides playing Red Rover with the police.

WE NEED TO TAL K ABOUT COPS BEATING UP PROTESTERS Protesters look great on TV; from home protesters look like harmless, courageous, peace loving, innocent civilians doing their civic duty, and while that may be true on some level, police don't have the luxury at assessing the situation from their living room.

I imagine police are a lot like soldiers who have seen combat action, and now, even when they're on civilian time in civilian clothes, they're still on edge in large crowds of people because they understand that people are dangerous, and a lot of people are really dangerous.

I understand that police took an oath to perform a role in society in the name of order and part of that oath was to follow orders. I know that the police force has its own internal culture full of customs and courtesies built around rank and protocol. As a result the police feel a deeper sense of pride and satisfaction in performing their job and following orders than say the average civilian working in the bowels of a giant, faceless corporation.

So I have sympathy for police who approach a once peaceful and orderly street to control a stampede of potential lunatics, many of whom are dressed like lunatics. I understand that when police get the order to clear uncooperative protesters out of an area by any nonlethal means necessary, that's pretty close to getting a commandment from God; that order came down from the mayor to the head of the law enforcement organization all the way down the chain of command to the police on the scene. The cost/benefit analysis of following that order is stacked heavily in favor of doing so especially because officers who don't will get in trouble, which in a best case scenario would prevent them from getting promoted later. In worse case scenarios they could lose rank or even their job.

From a practical, stoic point of view, it's logical to beat up and arrest nonviolent protesters in the heat of the moment, but that’s a narrow point of view that ignores the bigger picture. Let's take a step back and look at the situation from a broader view.

Protesting and rioting isn't normal. Sitting at home watching TV, shopping, visiting friends and having sex are normal. That's what people want to do with their free time.

And people are really lazy. They’re too lazy to open a can of pre-cut tomatoes without an electric can opener. So when people turn off the television and take to the streets it's because there's something really, really wrong in their lives that they want‌nay, need fixed, and the more people there are protesting, the more likely their grievances have merit.

Their grievances are especially poignant when they concern inhumane government policies, because the chain of command the police follow leads straight up to the civil government. So when police beat up, arrest and disperse nonviolent protesters for protesting against inhumane government policies then the police become the tools of

oppression. They’re directly enabling those inhumane policies to continue destroying people’s lives, and preventing people from speaking out against those inhumane policies is the very definition of suppression of free speech.

This is self-evident in theory, but on the streets it becomes clouded. You can arrest a protester for a million seemingly logical reasons. Maybe they don't have a permit to gather. Maybe they’re outside the approved protesting cordon. Maybe they’re wearing a mask. Maybe they shouted a threat or it sounded like they did. Maybe they raised their arms above their head in a threatening gesture. On the surface these seem like practical reasons to arrest people, but if a protest can be dispersed by using all these little justifications then the end result is that the police silenced the people’s voice in government by terrorizing them. By enforcing rules like these the police are telling people that if they attempt to make their voice heard then the government will send thugs to silence them under false pretenses in a way that absolves the government of the crime of suppressing free speech and makes offenders out of protesters. That's how protesters have to see the police on the street.

That's not what the police signed up for. They took an oath to serve and protect people.

It's more than a slap in the face to the police force to order them to violently suppress free speech in the name of peace and freedom, but that's exactly what’s happening in America today.

I thought we were passed this phase of history. All my textbooks in school said the days of cops beating up citizens trying to hold their politicians accountable to the basic principles of human rights was over. I wonder how many more skulls the police have to crack before they just let the people have their voice. I wonder if the police will ever collectively come to the conclusion that maybe if they just let the people get what they want from the government then they'll all go back home to their TVs, friends and lovers and be happy and not go outside and cause trouble any more.

What the police force should be doing is helping the protesters organize. The police are inadvertently doing it anyway by locking all the organizers in jail cells together with nothing else to do. Come on. We all just want the streets to be safe. We’re on the same side fighting for the same goal. Why can't we work together?

AN INTERVENTION WITH THE POLICE Every American school kid was raised on well-meaning propaganda that painted the country's police force as super good guys, and that propaganda has worked; many young Americans look up to police as heroes…but not just because of the propaganda; kids who grew up in the information age aren't dumb. They understand how important it is to have a highly funded police force. Americans are happy to wear "NYPD" hats and not just because they got duped by a marketing campaign to buy novelty apparel but because they really do value their police on meaningful intellectual and emotional levels.

The thing is, the police are making it real hard to keep liking them. Americans who were raised on Saturday morning cartoons want to believe that every police officer is like Andy Griffith meets Robocop. That's how WASPS were raised to perceive cops. So that's how they try to perceive cops, but it's hard to keep giving the police the benefit of the doubt when the public looks around, and they don't see Robo Andy Griffith. All they see are protesters getting pepper sprayed and shot in the head with tear gas canisters, and the public can't do anything about it because anytime they bring up the issue of excessive use of force they're told they're ungrateful and spoiled and are sternly reminded that all police deserve the full honors and privileges of Robo Andy Griffith.

The "you're a spoiled, naïve liberal" excuse isn't cutting it anymore. There was a time when young Americans smiled when they saw cops. Now seeing a cop is more likely to wipe the smile off their faces, and the reason they’re scared of police is because the police go out of their way to scare them.

Police cars are designed to appear menacing, not welcoming. I’m sorry, but you don't get to act surprised when you pull up in a car that looks like a prop from a Hollywood movie about a futuristic dystopian police state and people say they feel menaced by you.

And it sends a mixed message that undermines your authority when the side of your car says, "To protect and serve." but it's an accepted fact of life that you do not ever speak to the police without a lawyer present. Ever. The police are even required to remind you that "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." Why would anyone want to be anywhere near someone who can and will use anything they say to put them in a prison system that is globally famous for its unchecked human rights violations?

The thing is, young American aren't even asking anymore. They're telling the police they feel absolutely miserable, terrorized and afraid of the people they pay to protect them.

Some people have even given up on the system so completely they've left America to go live in less wealthy places where at least they don't have to be afraid of the police or the corrupt government the police are protecting.

The correct way for the police to respond to that charge isn't to say, "Oh, well then fuck those people if they don't like it here." The correct way for the police to respond is to say, "I accept that I have a problem and am ready to listen."

And the good news for the police is, young Americans are smart enough to understand that police aren't just inherently bad people who deserve to be hated because of the color of their clothes. The American people understand that people who are police officers aren't the problem. Unethical police behavior is a symptom of flawed police system. To blame it all on the cops on the street would be like holding teachers (who work at the bottom of an obsolete and compromised education system and have their hands tied behind their backs by cumbersome bureaucracy) solely accountable for children's test scores, and that would be ridiculous.

There are some serious flaws in the way the police force is designed on paper, and the police should be more eager than anyone to address those flaws because they're setting up good cops to lose sight of the purpose of the law, and if the law has no purpose then you don't have a police force; you have a mafia. I actually wouldn't believe any senior cop who says they've never been pissed off at how ineffective and backwards and in need of upgrading the police system is.

The police want the police system fixed. The people want the police system fixed.

Everyone just wants the streets to be safe. The police and the people just never talked about it together because they've always been compartmentalized with a great divide between them. Now they're both part of the 99%, and there are people with tables all over the world listening to ideas, writing them down and sharing them with other people.

If the politicians can't figure out an effective way of balancing crime, authority, freedom and equality then the police and the citizens are the only parties left for the responsibility to fall to. The people took the first step setting up the tables at the Occupy protests. All the police have to do to have their voices heard is sit down at the table. The least the police can do if they want to live in a better society is not kick the table over and beat the hell out of everyone sitting around it.

SHOULD POLICE ENFORCE UNJUST LAWS? In Nazi Germany it was the police's (by any other name) job to arrest Jews and send them to their deaths. Even though the police made a vow to uphold the law, no reasonable person would argue that the Nazi police were morally bound to uphold that law because it was blatantly unjust.

In modern day America the police take a vow to uphold the law as well, and the law says that smoking or selling marijuana is illegal. I would argue that calling the police on your neighbor for smoking or selling marijuana is one moral step down from calling the Gestapo on your neighbor for being Jewish. Likewise, any police officer who enforces unjust laws is one moral step down from the Gestapo especially considering the inhumane conditions American prisons force the humans inside them to endure.

Convicts may not get gassed, but they'll be stripped of their humanity and get beat, raped or even killed. If they're released with a felony conviction on their record they'll be lucky to ever get a job again. For some ex-cons it would have been a mercy if they were just gassed the day they got caught with marijuana.

This is what American police are ordered to do to the civilian population, and they wash their hands of the blood of the civilians they sacrifice to the industrial prison system by saying, "It's not our place to question the law, only to enforce it."

Well that's not good enough. Where do all those laws the police vow to uphold come from and what gives them validity? The laws were written by politicians and hold validity for the same reason money holds value: By active or passive consent, the majority of the population has made a social contract with each other to agree to give politicians the authority to pass laws and assign value to money.

The Gestapo had their orders that came down the chain of command from the highest level politicians in their government too, but no reasonable person would argue that every rule Hitler told his police to follow was automatically and unquestionably valid simply because the leader of the government said so. People are just people no matter what man-made rank they wear. Things people say or write are just things people say or write. The American Declaration of Independence said the rights of man are self-evident and exist regardless of any laws written by men, even if those men are kings. The only way we can know these unwritten rules is by reason, not faith. Thus it's up to the individual to think for themselves to determine whether or not the laws of their land are just.

This is all good and well for the average citizen who isn't in any position to push their morals on other people, but the point becomes poignant for police who are charged with the responsibility of enforcing a canned version of morality on all the citizens within their jurisdiction. This issue becomes even more poignant the more power the police have to fine, detain, imprison, black list, beat and kill citizens without facing any repercussions.

The American people have already told their government they want Marijuana legalized, and the president literally laughed at them. If elected politicians won't honor the social contract then who else is there to stand up for the citizens who have to suffer the indignity and danger of unjust laws and an inhumane prison system? The only people standing between the citizens and the unjust laws are the police who enforce those laws.

The police are the first line of defense against tyranny, and by rights the police should serve the interests of the public over the interests of politicians. Police officers' pay checks come from taxes, and their authority comes from the social contract they have with the people they're charged to protect. Politicians are simply servants who try to manage the affairs of the nation. They’re not masters or gods.

You still may not be convinced though. You still may be saying, "But you simply can't make it a categorical imperative that every cop should enforce whatever laws they personally feel are just, because that would just result in anarchy." As true as that may be, what's the alternative? If we make it a categorical imperative that cops should never be able to exercise their own judgment then that literally makes them slaves, and that gives their leaders unlimited power to oppress the civilian herd. That doesn't immediately make civilians slaves, but if the executive and judicial branches of government can use thugs to force civilians to follow rules they don't believe in then you can't say those civilians are free.

We don't have to choose between a praetorian slave state or anarchy, but if civil servants aren't allowed to question the morality of their actions then we're well on our way to a police state.

WHY STOP WITH JUST MAKING DRUGS ILLEGAL? Drugs are illegal because they damage your health, inhibit your ability to function in society and lower your potential in the long run while increasing the likelihood that you'll commit crime. That pretty much sums it up, right? Well, if those are solid reasons to make drugs illegal then why stop with just criminalizing drugs?

Let’s make it illegal to drop out of school. Uneducated people lack higher level social skills, are less useful to society and are more likely to commit crime. A lack of education is every bit as dangerous as drug use. In fact, if we’re truly concerned with the individual's welfare (as well as society's) we would make it mandatory to stay in school through the completion of a bachelor's degree or at least a trade certificate. If you should go to jail for using drugs then you should go to jail for not having a bachelor’s degree.

While we're at it we should make it illegal to eat fast food and junk food. McDonald's food will literally cripple and kill you faster than marijuana, and in the meantime it’ll give you health problems that will rack up extremely expensive medical bills. That’s every bit as tragic as a worst case scenario heroin junky. Obviously, you should go to jail for eating fast food.

Next, we obviously need to make alcohol and cigarettes illegal. They're drugs. Cigarette packs even say right on the front, “This is poison.” Legal poison hurts you in every way that illegal poisons do. It's cut and dry hypocrisy to make one poison legal to consume and another illegal. By the precedent we’ve already set, you should go to jail for smoking (cigarettes) and drinking.

We also need to make slave wages illegal. Poor people have poor health, low potential and are more likely to commit crimes. If, instead of letting CEOs become obscenely rich off the blood and sweat of slaves, we force CEOs to pay their workers a fair share of their company’s profits then people won't be so poor. Then they'll be able to afford better food.

They'll be able to save and invest more, and they won't have to resort to criminal activity for money. So it should be illegal to pay workers minimum wage.

While we're at it we should make religion illegal. Religion hinders logical thought, which puts a rock solid cap on people’s potential. It also forces barbarically archaic moral standards onto people that conflict with their natural instincts. As a result it causes undue stress on individuals, which has proven to push people to dangerous ends. Also, since religion divides the world into the wicked and the righteous it inevitably leads to the righteous oppressing the wicked, which is bad enough to begin with but made worse by the fact that religion uses barbarically archaic standards to distinguish who is righteous and who is wicked. Religion flies planes into buildings and gets homosexuals lynched. Bibles are worse for your health than marijuana and should be correspondingly illegal.

Obviously, hand guns and automatic weapons are the next big item. They kill people....and that's pretty much it. I don't even need to elaborate on that. Granted, not everyone who has a gun is going to kill somebody, but since there will be a few worst case scenarios we should hunt down everyone who has a gun and send them to prison for years where they'll almost certainly be beaten and raped. While we're at it we should black list them when they get out so they’ll never get a good paying job again. That will certainly solve the gun problem without causing any other problems.

Let's add television to the list as well. Television is by and large a waste of time. You get fat and stupid by watching too much TV. This is bad for your health and lowers your potential. Using the same precedent set by drug laws television should be illegal.

What else? Sports. Sex. Aging. Pets. Unkempt houses. Working too much. Asshole bosses. Driving. Hell, we may as well just lock everyone up. We're all doing something that could hurt us if we take it too far. And since prison doesn't have any adverse effects on health happiness or potential then once everyone is locked up in prison then everyone will be healthy, happy and able to fulfill their highest potential both for themselves as well as society. ...or maybe some other judicial reform is needed.

A VOTE TO CRIMINALIZE SIN IS A VOTE TO LEGALIZE OPPRESSION Religion invented this horrible concept known as sin. The concept of sin is noble in theory because it attempts to point out behaviors that are destructive to society. The problem with sin is that it’s not based on a scientific deconstruction of society that attempts to determine what kinds of behavior will most help a global population survive in a diverse range of environments that are consistently changing while providing people the most room to grow to fulfill their potential as an individual as well as a group.

What it does instead is reflect the behaviors of ignorant, ethnocentric, theocratic, tribal, murderous, superstitious, chauvinistic, 0bsolete cultures.

The modern world has dismissed most of what our ancestors had to say about morality such the need to allow the church to rule the government, the right to own slaves, ownership of women, beating/murdering women, children and slaves, not eating certain meats, not wearing clothing with mixed threads, not cutting your sideburns, etc.

However, despite the fact that we’ve thrown out those commandments there’s still a large portion of the world that still believes in sin. So now, thousands of years later we still have laws against gambling, alcohol consumption, drug use, prostitution and other victimless “crimes.” Granted, any of these behaviors can be destructive when taken to an extreme, but outlawing them is like outlawing candy because eating too much of it will make you fat.

Ultimately, all these laws really accomplish is taking away people’s personal freedoms to enjoy life and punishing them for victimless “crimes,” which ruins their lives with fines, jail time and criminal records. If we took these laws off the books the same people who are already doing them are going to keep doing them. The same people who aren’t doing them are going to keep not doing them. The only thing that would change is we wouldn’t be oppressing our fellow human beings for no reason, and people would be happier, more able to fulfill their potential, and the government would have more resources to combat society’s real problems.

But we’re having a hard time legalizing these victimless “crimes” because the religious population views legalizing sin as supporting sin. So out of blind fear they choose to continue to oppress their fellow human beings because they think oppressing people will please God more than helping people and leaving the judgment to God. A vote to criminalize sin is vote to legalize oppression, and the religious population has voted by an overwhelming majority in favor of senseless oppression.

THE 28TH AMENDMENT The American government needs a new amendment for its constitution. The legal jargon used in this amendment would need to be more professional than mine, but if you’ll look past my layman’s language and focus on the main idea you may find a wealth of truth and value in the overall concept.

The amendment needs to state that no state or federal government shall pass or enforce any law that prohibits people from harming themselves or behaving in ways considered indecent unless the actions of the individual directly or indirectly hinder another person’s right to the pursuit of life, liberty, ownership or happiness. (You might also make an exception that people can harm others if the person being harmed has given full consent because there are some exceptions like euthanasia and smoking tobacco where people want to be hurt.)

Here are 6 reasons why we need this amendment: 1. Without this rule we have no way to systematically limit what kind of culturally relative laws will be passed that will oppress people. Look throughout history. People were locked in stocks for gossiping. Women have been killed for doing pretty much anything, including eating bananas. Today countless laws are enforced that don’t actually protect anyone. All they do is reinforce cultural norms to the detriment of the individual’s right to the pursuit of life, liberty, ownership and happiness. Women still can’t take off as many clothes in public as men. Blasphemy is still a crime in many countries. Alcohol prohibition was a disaster, and marijuana prohibition is currently destroying countless lives. Censorship laws reinforce an oversimplified explanation of reality that debilitates people’s minds. People who just happened to be naked at the wrong place at the wrong time are being jailed as sex offenders. Curfew laws are blatant oppression. If you look long enough you’ll find countless minor local laws that are just ridiculous and only serve to fill the police coffers.

None of these rules should be brushed off as exceptions and mistakes. They were inevitabilities in a system that has no failsafe to limit the control of moral fanatics, and as long as no failsafe exists you leave open an avenue for laws to be passed in your country that legalize oppression.

2. The cost benefit analysis of these kinds of laws doesn’t add up. It would be one thing if these laws actually protected society from itself, but as it stands they do more to tear society down and hold it back. What happens after a woman gets thrown in jail for smoking a joint on her front porch while not wearing her shirt? How is society protected? Since these are victimless crimes nobody has been protected. The only way society has been affected at all is this woman has been made to live in fear, been black listed with a criminal record and had her money stolen from her by the police to pay unjust fines. Now what happens when this isn’t just one woman? What about when it’s 2 million people? That’s systematic oppression. That’s living in a terror state. There’s no

cost benefit analysis here because there’s no benefit. There’s just cost in the form of destroyed human lives.

3. Victimless crime laws waste resources. Every time someone is jailed for a victimless crime the labor they could have devoted to improving society is temporarily eliminated, and the labor used to apprehend and incarcerate these people is wasted when it could have been used to apprehend and incarcerate actual criminals.

Everyone who knows anything about criminology knows that locking up criminals is an ineffective way of reducing repeat offenders. Rehabilitation would be more productive, but at this point rehabilitation isn’t even an option because our resources are stretched too thin by apprehending, prosecuting and locking up people for victimless crimes. If we ever hope to reduce real crime it’s vital that we stop wasting our resources enforcing subjective, victimless taboos.

4. Victimless crimes contradict the Constitution of the United States and the Universal Bill of Human Rights. These documents don’t place conditions and exceptions on the manner or extent to which people can choose to pursue life, liberty, ownership or happiness except to say that our actions may not infringe another person’s own pursuit of life, liberty, ownership or happiness. Victimless crime laws do.

5. One of the big arguments against the idea of legalizing victimless crimes is that society will break down; society won’t break down. People do what’s in their best interest, and it’s not in anyone’s best interest to sleep with every whore in every brothel and shoot up heroin at work. The people who would do such things are in such dire positions in their lives that these actions appear to be in their best interest. If this is truly unhealthy behavior then the causes need to be addressed. These people need to be given what they’re missing in their lives and rehabilitated, not punished and have more of their life taken away from them. This will only push them further past the limit of desperation and increase the chances that they’ll actually harm other people.

Furthermore, most of the people who want to sleep with hookers and do heroin are already doing it. The only difference is that we’re wasting our resources and theirs by trying to stop them when we could just let them do what they’re going to do anyway and get on with solving real problems.

6. It’s not our place to play God. If we allow people to live at odds with the various mythologies humans have created to explain God then we would be denying the sovereignty those mythological deities have over mankind. While some people would applaud this step, others fear it. However, even if one of these mythological deities were the real one then by passing judgment for Him we’re playing God. Therefore, it would be more blasphemous to enforce God’s will than to leave judgment to God.

DON’T ASK WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU Governments exist to serve the people living under their care. Anytime any government acts in any way that’s legitimately in the disinterest of the people then it voids its whole purpose for existing.

If you hire a person to build a system that helps you, but instead they build a system that hurts you then you're just being dumb if you pledge unquestioning loyalty to that person or the system they build. Conservatives understand this, and they show it in every hate mongering diatribe they spew against liberal politicians and the systems liberal politicians have created or that liberal voters want.

But put aside fanatical conservatives' brazenly hypocritical attitude towards patriotism for a moment and consider how hypocritical it is that liberals tend to despise fanatical conservative politicians and the policies conservative voters want. If you believe electing politicians to represent the will of the people is a just and fair way to staff a government then you shouldn’t complain when you don’t like the representatives your peers elect.

Just because you don’t feel the electoral system worked in your favor doesn’t mean it didn’t work. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

This raises the question, should public opinion play a role in shaping government policy?

Governments exist to perform a functional role in society. They exist to minimize human suffering, and the causes of human suffering are rarely subjective. For example, poverty is a mechanical consequence to unsustainability. If there are enough resources to feed and clothe the entire planet ten times over but 80% of the population gets poorer every year while 20% gets richer then there’s an objective problem with the system that’s causing all that human suffering. There’s no reason it should be up for discussion whether or not income inequality is a problem. Human suffering is a problem, and governments exist to fix that problem. It doesn’t matter how any two voters feel income inequality should be fixed and human suffering should be alleviated. We might as well ask voters how they feel sewer systems should be designed or how they feel military leaders should plan their wartime strategies.

But we don’t typically ask voters how they feel about technical problems. We let experts with specialized education and experiences study the problem scientifically and deduce logical solutions, which they then apply to the problem without generally asking or telling the public about it. The public doesn’t get up in arms about this, because as long as their toilets work and the suburbs aren’t invaded by barbarians then they can get on with living. If the public had to vote on every single thing the government did then nothing would ever get done. So a good government is like a fire-and-forget missile. We embrace this concept every time we don’t call up our local politicians to complain about every single street light and crack in the sidewalk we don’t like.

This is very practical of us and is to be commended, but where do we draw the line? And remember, this isn’t a question of “Do we draw a line?” It’s a question of, “Where do we

draw the line?” If you live in the country with the highest quality of living in the world then these philosophical questions aren't that immediately important to you. At least, you could just ignore them and let your government keep doing whatever it’s doing and you’ll probably be able to continue enjoying a high quality of living. However, the question of how much influence voters/tax payers should have in the day-to-day business of running the country becomes very important to your quality of life in the immediate present when you live in a country full of maniacal idiots who have as much power in your government as they can afford to buy.

Idiots act in their disinterest. That’s what makes idiotic behavior idiotic: it doesn’t work out well for you in the end. If there’s one thing conservatives and liberals can agree on it’s that there are too many idiots with too much power in government. Everybody hates that, but nobody wants to change it because everyone perceives it would be in our disinterest to forfeit our ability to elect leaders in open elections. After all, if you don’t have the freedom to influence government then you don’t really have freedom. At least, you only enjoy your freedoms at the whim of your leaders, and that’s a pretty watered down flavor of freedom.

So conservatives and liberals alike cling to representative “democracy” even though they forfeit their freedom to influence government every time their peers elect a politician who represents an ideology they disagree with. Conservatives and liberals alike forfeit their freedom again if they allow politicians to do whatever they want without ever being held accountable for their campaign promises or any human suffering that is objectively created by their actions. If/when we don't hold our leaders accountable then we’re just electing dictators. The freedom to choose between two dictators who only represent their own interests isn’t just a watered down flavor of freedom. That’s just…not…freedom.

This raises the question, how do we reconcile all our contradictory expectations of government? Well, holding politicians accountable to their campaign promises and making corruption punishable as treason would be huge steps towards reigning in politicians, but it still wouldn't prevent idiots from entering political office in the first place.

There are a lot of simple changes any government can make to keep idiots out of power.

Competency exams and background checks for politicians are obvious examples. If you can get smart people in office to begin with then you might not have to create a robust system to regulate them. NASA doesn’t have as robust of a system in place to micromanage and punish astrophysicists as say a high school would have to micromanage and punish students. NASA doesn’t need one because astrophysicists already think scientifically, and their scientific approach to understanding the universe generally keeps them sane.

Governments can improve the odds that the children who will someday grow up to be politicians will be sane, intelligent people capable of acting in society’s best interest voluntarily if everyone in the country had unlimited access to free education.

If you want to go a step further and actually build a robust system of checks and balances that ensure politicians act in the best interest of their voters/tax payers (even when the voter/taxpayers demand unyieldingly that politicians act in their disinterest) then you’re going to have to rewrite your politicians' job contracts, and since their job description is to uphold the social contract then you better have a brilliantly logical and robust social contract to base politicians’ job descriptions on.

As it stands, every country in the world needs to rewrite their social contracts whether they're stated in a constitution or some other legal premise for their government’s sovereignty. The best way to do that is not to have violent revolutions that replace our existing governments with…whoever is leading the revolutions. Governments can fix themselves with constitutional conventions.

But politicians who currently have the freedom to act like dictators have very little incentive to let the public arrange a constitutional convention much less arrange it themselves. It would just be naïve to expect politicians to ask a constitutional convention to take away their freedoms for the greater good. At the same time, it would also be naïve to expect all the idiot voters/tax payers to support a constitutional convention that limits their ability to force their cherished misconceptions down the rest of society’s throats.

The world is the way it is because that’s the way people want it, and until people change their wants it’s futile to try to force them to change, much less compromise. So if you want to save the world, the first thing you should do is support unlimited free education.

Until we raise a generation of intelligent adults capable of thinking logically and running a productive constitutional convention all you can really do to ensure your quality of life is hunker down and try to ride out the storm and minimize how much power idiots have over you. The key to that is sustainability. If you live in a village that can completely sustain its population without the intervention of a higher echelon, national government then you won’t need a national government to minimize human suffering in your village.

If you live in say, the United States of America or the Congo there are a million reasons why it would be naïve of you to expect your government to save you. Your livelihood is at risk in the first place because your government is run by idiots who have access to enough guns and brainwashed, patriotic supporters to squash any attempt to change the status quo. So don’t ask what your country can do for you. I’ll tell you right now, it won’t do anything except what it’s been doing, which is making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But if you live in a self-sustainable village then you don’t need the government to take care of you. You’ll be fine. If everybody lived in self-sustainable villages or cities then we wouldn’t have to fight over issues like welfare or social security because those problems will have already been solved by intelligent urban planning.

Once the majority of voters/tax payers’ lives are stabilized then they can turn their collective attention towards education, philosophy and maybe even setting up constitutional conventions. That would be great, and we owe it to our children to leave them a world where the biggest thing they have to worry about is what subject they’re going to study next, but we don’t live in that world yet. We live in a world designed to boom and bust to pump up investor returns and pave the way for monopolies. The best thing you can do to save the world right now may be to build yourself a sustainable refuge and ride out the storm that’s already here.

If you’re not suffering yet, don’t assume that means you won’t suffer tomorrow, because poverty, crime and war are your government’s modus operandi. That’s why you shouldn’t ask what your country can do for you. That’s why you should be asking what you can do to save yourself from the problems your government is creating.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT UTOPIA I know exactly how to design the Utopian society.

Did that scare or nauseate you? Well, the good news is I don't know how to design the Utopian society, and even though I have theories on how we can improve the ones we live in, that's neither here nor there. We need to talk about our fear and skepticism of utopia.

Books like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, Anthem, The Fountainhead, Brave New World and even movies like Demolition Man have instilled society with an unreasonable fear of anyone positing any vision for Utopia. Over the years we've become more and more paranoid about anyone openly discussing what a perfect world would be like that now you can't even whisper the idea without someone playing the 1984 card and calling you Hitler or the Unabomber or Al Qaeda.

Granted, the world isn’t completely dystopian, but even in America 1 in 4 American adults will go to prison at some point in their life. Over half the federal budget is spent on wars. Politicians lie to the people about the reasons for starting wars and everybody knows it but the politicians are never held accountable. Politicians' careers are openly sponsored by corporations, and everyone knows that those corporations influence politicians to pass laws that make them money at citizens’ expense. Everyone knows the war on drugs costs more in terms of money and life than the drugs themselves, and we've known this for years and have done nothing about this. The country calls itself the land of the free and yet several large (as if the size mattered) groups of people are still denied equal rights, and the people who are most vocal about denying them equal humanitarian rights are religious organizations. Suburbia is environmentally unsustainable. Ghettos are rampant. Teen angst is epidemic. Half the population is taking psychoactive drugs. Illegal drug are cheaper than books. Schools are underfunded.

Health care is unaffordable. Wage slavery is not only legal but the standard business model. You can go to prison (where you're practically guaranteed to be beaten and raped) for downloading a movie, but CEOs can embezzle billions of dollars and practically walk away with an apology from the judicial system when they're caught. The cost of a higher education has consistently risen faster than the price of oil. The stock market is designed to fleece the populace. Businesses that went bankrupt because of fraudulent and unethical practices have been rewarded with tax payer money while tax payers whose lives were decimated by natural disasters were left to die in the streets, literally. There's a serious debate about whether or not mythology should be taught as fact in public schools. The Food and Drug Administration approves poison for human consumption; in fact, it's almost impossible to buy food at a supermarket that isn't poisoned. And everyone sits on their couch getting fat watching romantic comedy and action movies that glorify pettiness and anti-intellectualism while their society exploits and murders them, and if you complain about it you're called a terrorist. And that's the "best nation in the world." The consumer luxuries America enjoys are all produced in sweat shops by child slaves in third world countries oppressed by the World Trade Organization, World

Bank and International Monetary Fund. And that's just making a short list of things wrong in America off the top of my head. How much more dystopian does it need to get before we actually start calling it a dystopia and stop jeering citizens who point out the flaws of society?

Regardless of how dystopian the world is or isn't right now, you want the world to improve. You’d like to see the world move closer to a state that we can all agree on as relatively Utopian, but we're never going to reach that point without talking about it.

The more people who talk about it and the more we talk about it the faster we'll get there.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that there isn't a more important topic that everyone can and should be talking about than what we can/should do to create a more Utopian society. If you're not talking about it then you're not helping. If you're not actively helping create utopia then you're passively allowing the world to degenerate into the very dystopia that you're afraid of living in.

But who is to say what utopia is? Who has the authority to say, "This is what we should do?" And who has the right to say, "Your way is bad."? You do. You have the authority, the right and even the moral obligation to decide what is right and wrong without asking for permission or being certified as an authority by a higher authority. We can't live in utopia as long as we're constantly waiting for Big Brother to take us lovingly by the hand and guide us. If we don't exercise the right to self-determination then we cede the right to self-determination.

For that matter, you don't need to change the whole world, the whole country or the whole state. You only need to improve the place you're at. If we each take responsibility for creating utopia where we live in then we'll improve the whole world. But in order to do that we need to talk about how to design and implement Utopia in the place you live.

Another reason we may be hesitant to approach the subject of utopia is because on the surface it appears to be a problem that requires Stephen Hawking level intelligence to solve, but I believe we all understand the issue better than we think we do. I'll prove it.

Ask yourself, "What sucks about the place I live?" If you can answer that question then you can improve the place you live. Once you've identified the problems then you can brainstorm a list of ways to fix them. Your solutions might not be perfect, but if we never make any mistakes then we'll never have anything to learn from and we'll never make any progress. So by all means, we should allow ourselves to dream freely and make mistakes.

Not only should we dream freely, but we should dream big. Don't focus on what's the most "realistic." Focus on what the best case final scenario could be. We can worry about figuring out a way to make that dream a reality later. Really, if we're not going to do the impossible and change the world for the best then what the hell are we doing here? Why should we just sit on the couch and watch sports and sitcoms for the rest of our lives and let the chance to be real heroes pass us by? Do any of us really have anything more important to do than the impossible? For that matter, who convinced us that we aren't

capable of accomplishing the impossible? Most of human progress was accomplished by people doing the things that society said was impossible. So we know humans can do the impossible. The only question is whether or not we'll go down in history as the timid majority of sane, practical naysayers who did nothing except discourage anyone who tried to change the status quo for the better or are we going to go down in history as the people who said, "You know what? I know I'm not a genius. I'm not a world leader. I'm not a prophet. I'm nobody. I come from nowhere, and I have no right to presume to be able to change the world, but I'm going to change the world whether I'm allowed to or not.

If nothing else, I hate to sound clichĂŠ, but...think about the children. Think about your children. You want to leave them the best possible world, right? Well, spending your life watching mindless TV will guarantee that they inherent a dystopian world, and it doesn't matter how good of a parent you were because they're going to spend their adult life as mindless slaves working in a system that is rigged to make them lose for the benefit of the people controlling the system. So all the sacrifices you made as a parent will be for nothing since your inaction in the greater scheme of things will have guaranteed that their chance of success will be as good as winning the lottery. And the first step doesn't require any sacrifice. All it requires is talking about utopia, but in order to do that we need to get over our fear of utopia.

DON’T BE A NAYSAYER When Americans complain that their government needs change they're inevitably jeered for being unpatriotic. The naysayers forget that every American president campaigns on the platform of change. No American president has been so blatant about this than Barak Obama, who was cheered into office as a hero before he ever signed a single bill. If the president is called a hero for campaigning for change then why is the common man dismissed as traitor for doing the same?

When Americans complain that their government needs change they're inevitably jeered for being ungrateful and are indignantly reminded that people in other countries live in much worse conditions. But what does that prove? Does the fact that millions of Americans live comfortably negate the reality that millions more are homeless, starving, overworked underpaid, in debt and in prison? How long should we use this excuse to justify the suffering that’s in America? Would it be proper to wait until the middle class is completely gone before we're allowed to complain? Or when that day comes will be told that we still don't have any right to complain because at least we can eat scraps?

When Americans complain that their government needs change they're inevitably jeered for being lazy and are reminded of all the success stories of people who worked their way into the upper class. What gets left out of these stories though is the part where the ultra-wealthy earned their riches by overworking, underpaying and overcharging those at the bottom of the corporate ladder. The rich haven't gotten rich despite the poverty around them. They've gotten rich by creating the poverty around them. These success stories we hear so often also leave out the fact that while the winners enjoy two hour lunches and early retirement, nobody works longer or harder than the fruit pickers, the dish washers, the janitors and burger flippers who will never be able to save enough money to enjoy the good life because the fruits of their labors are sucked up the corporate ladder and only trickle down to the oligarch's children and their children's children who will live like kings, and even though they may work hard themselves, they'll never have to worry about cutting corners to make ends meet or suffer the indignity of servile work.

When Americans complain that their government needs change they're inevitably told, "You were given a tight rope to walk. It's your own fault you didn't make it across." Even if there were some truth to that point of view, I have to ask, is that what America is all about? Is that the best we can do? Is that all our fellow man deserves?

When Americans complain that their government needs change they're inevitably told they're throwing out the baby with the bath water; to complain about America's shortcomings is to ignore the magnificent strides it's made. But isn't that just drowning the baby in the bath water? America has real problems that are hurting and killing real people when there are more than enough resources to available to take care of everybody if we just used them more wisely.

Our schools (and with them, our children's futures) are being sold off to testing companies, and every teacher in America is screaming about the damage it's doing, but the government's only response is to use the teachers as scapegoats for the failures of No Child Left Behind. America is scaling down its space program while spending billions on military rockets that kill civilians in collateral damage every month, and all the government has to say about it is, "Oops." Their response to torturing prisoners of war has been less apologetic. America says it's fighting in the name of freedom, but it's funding ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Millions of Americans are being slowly killed by cigarettes sold over the counter, but once a person has contracted terminal cancer they're not allowed to buy euthanasia drugs that will end their pain quickly. America is waging a costly war on drugs under the auspice that it protects people from getting addicted and ruining their lives, but drug users are sent to prison where we all know they're being beaten, raped and released with felony convictions that guarantee they'll never get a professional job. In other words, we're protecting people from shooting themselves in the foot by shooting them in the head. Today more African Americans are working as slave labor in prison sweat shops than worked in the cotton fields before the Civil War. Millions of families can't afford health care because drug companies inflate their prices because they know insurance companies will cover the cost while insurance companies deny claims for any reason they can get away with. Corporations wield so much power in government that they've given themselves the legal right to claim ownership of seeds and rain.

These problems aren't conspiracy theories hatched by a small group of paranoid lunatics.

These problems have been written about at length by reputable academics and have been reported extensively in the main stream media. Social activism groups have been begging politicians to take action on these problems for decades and donating money to the political campaigns of politicians who promise to fix end these human rights abuses but only seem to end up adding to them. These problems aren't accidental anomalies or regrettable oversights. They're the inevitable result of a faulty political system that treats political power as a commodity to be bought and sold. If the American people were somehow able to convince or force their politicians to correct these problems today we could expect big business to simply buy back the ground it lost in a few election cycles.

If the American people hope to see the change they deserve then they need to address the root of the problem and not waste time hacking at the branches. The root of the problem is the method by which politicians get into office and the standards they're held to once they're in office. If America made the following changes to its political system it would go a long way to ensuring that the most qualified candidates earned the highest political positions and wielded their power with integrity and accountability. Then, the public wouldn't need to beg their politicians to act in their best interest. They system would just work. Well, it would work significantly better than it does now.  

Politicians should be required to pass rigorous competency exams to run for office.

The electoral college should be eliminated.

         

All candidates should be required to run as independents.

The need for campaign financing should be eliminated or minimized by holding all campaigns in government-hosted venues.

Campaign ads should be banned or at least be more tightly regulated for objectivity and quality of content.

Lobbying should be made completely transparent to the public.

Politicians should be monitored as closely and held to the same ethical standards as criminals on probation and the lowest ranking enlisted troops.

Politicians should be automatically removed from office when their approval rating drops below 50%.

Corruption should be legally defined and punished as treason.

Politicians should not be able to accept jobs after leaving office that constitute a conflict of interest.

Politicians should not receive any special favors under the law that aren't granted to the general public.

Presidential pardons should not be available to politicians convicted of corruption.

A COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF TERRORISM Every potential terrorist needs to serious ask themselves, "Is killing a bunch of people an effective way to motivate a government and/or culture to conform to a new ideology?"

You can find the answer to this question by studying the history of terrorist attacks.

Terrorist attacks have had some success in motivating encroaching imperial forces from leaving an area they're not welcome in such as in Ireland and Beirut, but you'll notice the British are still in Ireland, and the Americans are still in the Middle East.

Other than those small "victories" for terrorism, a quick scan of the history books show that terrorism is an overwhelming failure. It has never succeeded at producing total long term political or social reform. And why would it? Look at the cost/benefit analysis of giving into terrorist demands from the point of view of a government. If they gave into terrorists then that would set a precedent that terrorism works. Then every disgruntled punk would be blowing up schools. The only logical course of action for a government to take is to reject the influence of terrorists regardless of the short term cost in civilian life.

Even if one terrorist won a total victory and overthrew an entire government through terrorism their victory would set a precedent that terrorism works. So everyone who disagreed with the successful terrorist's ideology would fight the successful terrorist with more terrorist attacks. Then the original terrorist's regime would be overthrown with a new regime that will be overthrown by someone else's terrorist attacks and so on until there's no one left to attack. In order for terrorism to work, the first successful terrorist would have to oppress and silence any future dissenters, but that would just sow the seeds of frustration and resentment that will make future terrorist attacks inevitable on a long enough time scale.

That's just a best case scenario which assumes a government even cares enough about civilian deaths to cave to terrorists’ demands. Before you go killing innocent people, do a case study on the government you're hoping to influence. The United States, Russia and China (to name a few) lock up their own civilians in prisons for nonviolent, victimless crimes where they're raped and beaten only to be thrown out in the streets with felony convictions that ruin the rest of their lives. These countries sell tobacco, alcohol and toxic food to their civilians and create laws that prevent the poor from being able to afford the medicine that will save their lives after they get sick from those poisons. These countries set the legal minimum wage below the poverty level. They've even been accused of state sponsored terrorism themselves. Even without that last accusation, it would take an army to kill as many civilians as those countries let die every year. It would be illogical to expect terrorism to hold any leverage over countries that make a full time job out of terrorizing and slaughtering their own population.

You could try using terrorist attacks on more humanitarian countries like Norway, Sweden or Switzerland, but giving into terrorist demands would be a huge step backwards for them. So the cost/benefit analysis of giving into terrorist demands wouldn’t add up. They would lose more than they would gain, and it would require them

to act against their values. So terrorism is unlikely to hold any leverage over countries like that either.

As a matter of fact, giving into terrorism directly contradicts humanity’s very instincts.

When someone attacks you, you don't embrace them or sit down and listen to them. You either put up your defenses or attack back. Look at history. Terrorist attacks might get you an airplane or a little money, but it also gets the attention of insanely well-funded military and paramilitary organizations that are able to operate outside the law.

Attacking a world super power is tantamount to personal and ideological suicide. When you attack a super power it will attack back. Period. There’s no question about that. If a terrorist kills him/herself in their attack, the super power will still need to attack somebody in retaliation. So they're going to attack the terrorist's family, colleagues and like-minded individuals. And since the largest, most powerful militaries in the world are riddled with bureaucracy, inefficiency and unaccountability they're probably going to end up imprisoning and bombing more of your innocent neighbors than your actual associates. If/when/before that happens, you really have to take a step back and ask yourself what terrorism really accomplishes. It just sets in motion a domino effect of murder and mayhem until there's nobody is left to be angry at. The only people who really win are the bullet and bomb merchants.

If you truly have an ideology worth spreading, the worst thing you could possibly do is kill a bunch of innocent civilians. All that's going to accomplish is getting you and a significant number of like-minded individuals killed, and your ideas are going to die with you.

You're not going to die as a glorious martyr either. You're going to be demonized, and your ideology is going to be demonized right along with you. Even if your ideology isn't demonic, you'll have made it demonic in the public eye.

Terrorist kill themselves and other people because they believe they've been pushed up against the wall. Terrorists say they were forced to use violence as a last resort against overwhelming odds. That's the line we hear anyway, but when have the police ever raided a terrorist's bomb-shack and found a door-length list hanging on the wall of every other method the terrorists had tried before finally resorting to violence? Never.

Terrorism isn't the last resort of courageous men. It's the first idea of uncreative fools.

Here are a few ideas that have worked for other people that you and your organization should consider trying before resorting to violence to propagate your ideology: 1. Bribery. Maybe you have a righteous ideology that you want your government to adopt. Killing innocent people will obligate politicians to reject your ideology. However, history shows that nothing motivates politicians better than money. Instead of funding terrorist training camps, just fund a politician's political campaign. Even if your ideology doesn't make any sense and is blatantly in the disinterest of the common citizen, you can still get a politician to sign legislation that will force your ideology onto others. Case in

point, in Colorado, rich people got the government to give them ownership of the rain. If you can buy the rain, you can buy anything.

2. Outreach. The Catholic church tried to spread Christianity by the sword. Now the Crusades are remembered by believers and non-believers alike as a prime historical example of FAIL. However, Christianity still spread all the way around the globe because the Christians changed their tactics. They sent missionaries to foreign lands to set up schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses. The locals didn't (usually) fight off the missionaries. The locals came to them. Then, once the locals were inside the church the Christians pulled a bait-and-switch and pushed their manifesto on the locals in exchange for the services they provided. Hundreds of years later Hawaiians, Maoris, Alaskans, Native Americans and countless other ethnic groups are still worshiping the God that stole their land and erased their culture.

3. Propaganda. You don't have to kill your enemy to defeat them. Ultimately, what’s your enemy? Your enemy is the ideas in people's minds. Defeat the ideas and you convert your enemies into your allies. Then you win twice.

If your ideology isn't sound enough to convince people to adopt without violence then you need to seriously consider whether your ideology is worth spreading at all. If your ideology can convert people without violence then why use violence?

If you have an ideology worth killing/dying for then you must have a giant manifesto detailing your cause, right? If you don't then you have to ask yourself what you're killing/dying for. How do you spread an idea? You use honey, not vinegar. You don't even have to be subtle about the fact that you're spreading propaganda with a bait-andswitch agenda. Just make it cute and funny. If you want to get into people's minds then DO get into their television; DON'T kill them.

4. Regroup/Rebuild. Joseph Smith had an ideology he wanted to spread. He was killed for his beliefs, and his followers were brutally persecuted by Christians.

Afterwards, his followers didn't start burning churches and attacking government buildings. They moved out into the country and built a new nation based on their ideals.

Unfortunately for them the United States forced them to accept annexation as a state instead of being able to start their own country, but even after that happened they still didn't start burning churches and blowing up government buildings. They set up schools in places Christians had already done the groundwork of wiping out the local culture.

They sent missionaries door to door all over the world to spread their manifesto and convert people's minds by talking to them, and they've had far more success that way than violence could have ever achieved. They haven't taken over the world yet, but that's no reason to start killing people. Point in fact, at the time of writing this a Mormon is running for president of the country that wouldn't let Utah be its own country.

Regardless of whether Utah is a state or a country, it's still a stronghold of the Latter-day Saints, and it became that way through hard work, not violence.

THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND THE GAME THEORY OF REVOLUTION This isn’t directed at any government in particular. It’s a general analysis of human behavior in a hypothetical, generic revolutionary environment.

Revolution is a game played between three groups of people: politicians, law enforcement and citizens. By understanding the psychology of each group you can understand how/why they play the revolution game. The most important thing you need to understand about each group is that they tend to act in their own self-interest.

These three groups tend to act in their own self-interest because humans tend to act in their own self-interest. It's an evolutionary trait that has served the human species well (with some exceptions). This isn't to say that people are inherently selfish to the point of being evil. We all make conscious decisions to do good, selfless things on a regular basis, but even people like Evangelical Puritans who sincerely try to do good all the time have lapses of reason where they fall back on their subconscious instincts. Actually, I suspect we do it more often than we'd like to believe, and when everyone acts on their subconscious instincts, the group as a whole acts like a giant zombie on mental autopilot.

Consider how dangerous it is that the politicians who run the world don't think using pure reason 100% of their lives either. Even sociopaths can't think at that level all the time. So politicians zone out too sometimes. They make snap decisions, especially when they're stressed. They have cognitive biases. They're guilty of making the fundamental attribution error from time to time. When all their lapses are combined they add up to a sleep walking political system that tends to serve its own interests.

It's the least profound thing in the world to say that people want as much money, power and prestige as possible. Everybody fantasizes about having more of whatever they want out of life, but getting everything we’ve ever wanted doesn’t tend to satisfy us; it just tends to wet our appetites. So it should be the least surprising sight in the world to see people getting money, power and prestige and then wanting more and doing everything they can to hold onto what they've got. That's what humans do, and since politicians are humans that's what politicians tend to do.

The working class isn't any different. They want as much as they can get, but since they’re born into an exploitive system that subjugates them, they have no power or leverage to improve their lot in life. So they go to work day in and day out and try their best to impress their boss and get a promotion.

When people have a legitimate path to success paved in front of them where they're fairly rewarded for the amount of effort they put in, human nature compels them to take that path. Even if they’re not fairly rewarded they’ll still work themselves to death for the hope of a better life.

Governments and business owners understand this, and since politicians and business owners tend to want to horde as much money and power as possible, history shows a tendency for governments and businesses to collude to pay their workers as little as possible while pushing them to work themselves to the limits of human endurance while making it as expensive as possible to survive. This makes the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. The greater a disparity in wealth there is, the greater a disparity in leverage there is; the rich have more resources to oppress the poor with, and the poor have less resources to stand up for themselves with.

This is not without consequences though. The economy can only exploit its workers so far before the cost/benefit analysis of illegal activity outweighs the cost/benefit analysis of working as a slave for your entire life only to get kicked out into the streets in your old age. That illegal activity may be selling drugs on the black market or rioting on the steps of the capitol. Either way, people don't tend to end up in such low places unless they don’t perceive any other recourse.

People are even more likely to turn away from the light at the end of the corporate ladder when the cost of education is raised so high it prevents the poorest of the poor from buying-up the socio-economic ladder. The glass ceiling of prohibitively expensive higher education guarantees a percentage of society will turn to a life of crime...not because they're evil but because it makes sense from their perspective (especially if they’ve been denied the education necessary to reason like a self-actualized adult).

Having said that, the average human tends to accept their lot in life even if it's a backbreaking and thankless one as long as they can survive and have at least the perceived hope of prosperity someday. The average person perceives the cost of scraping by as less than the cost of striking or revolution, and they perceive the benefit of getting a guaranteed small pay check each week as better than a theoretically better pay check in the future after a costly revolution.

Striking and/or revolting would makes sense to overworked, underpaid, unrepresented people, but they're not completely stupid. Look at the disrespectful way professional, educated workers treat each other in office politics. Based on that evidence you would be naive to believe common citizens could organize into a revolutionary force capable of operating with the resolve and efficiency of a military unit. Even if they could, governments and businesses have learned to demonize and/or outright criminalize unionizing or forming grass roots political organizations to prevent the lower class from even wanting to unionize.

For all of these reasons and more the cost/benefit analysis of wagering one's position in life on strangers is too tenuous to risk....unless you have nothing left to lose. When the population has nothing left to lose they will take that risk because it finally makes sense to do so.

How violently the population pushes back depends on local conditions. Protesters in the Arab Spring rioted in the streets, but for the most part they weren’t violent because they weren't slaughtered in the streets en mass, and most of the protesters were family members with homes to lose.

Palestinians, on the other hand, have been actively fighting their oppressors with guns and rockets because their homes have been bulldozed and their families have been cut down in the streets remorselessly for decades. Unlike the Egyptians, the Palestinians are facing ethnic cleansing and have responded proportionately. I won't argue that their taking up arms was justifiable (or that it wasn't), but I will argue that it was inevitable given the corner they've been backed into.

This brings us to the third group involved in paving the road to revolution: the law enforcement and military (aka the praetorian class). We'd all like to believe that police and soldiers are morally impeccable heroes, but politicians understand that they're humans who tend to do what's in their best immediate interest just like anyone else.

Politicians understand the psychology of service better than anyone. Every law enforcement and military organization in the world uses text-book brainwashing techniques to indoctrinate their members. It's standard procedure, but people might not notice it because it's so innocuous and commonplace. Any technique that gets the members of an organization to base their identity on their job and embrace a jobcentric culture is using brainwashing techniques on their members whether those members realize it or not. In fact, if you brainwash someone correctly they shouldn’t know they’ve been brainwashed; they should deny that (accurate) accusation to the death.

Once these psychological walls are put up in the minds of law enforcement personnel, disobeying a direct order from their work boss ceases to be a work decision because they’ve been put in a position where disobeying their organization would be going against their identity, their culture, their (surrogate) family, their beliefs and their oath.

Corrupt governments craftily force their law enforcement personnel to swear an oath to serve their country at all costs. While that sounds noble on the surface, what is a country?

I would argue that a country is the people who live within its borders, but law enforcement personnel don't salute or recite incantations of loyalty to the people on the streets. No, they salute and recite incantations of loyalty to a flag or other organizational symbol, which symbolizes the authority structure of the government first and foremost.

You can disagree with this statement in theory, but look at how the oath of loyalty plays out in practice. Anyone the government labels a traitor, dissident or criminal immediately loses the protection of law enforcement personnel. However, the people can't label their politicians corrupt and expect law enforcement to act on their behalf because law enforcement personnel are bound to obey only the people in their chain of command, which ultimately extends up to the corrupt politicians. So when the common

citizen is pushed to the breaking point by their government where striking and revolting is in their best (and even dire) interest, the government only needs to label those protesters a threat to national security and law enforcement personnel will be obligated by duty, honor, oath, patriotism and the threat of losing their own livelihood to point their guns at their fellow countryman. After that's happened you can't say that the law enforcement and military personnel ever saluted the people when they saluted their flag.

They saluted the leaders in their chain of command. That's all the flag ever represented in practice...in a generic revolutionary environment.

Understanding that, as long as law enforcement and military personnel associate their identity and their culture with their job and swear unquestioning oaths of loyalty to inanimate objects that represent their chain of command, you can expect law enforcement personnel and soldiers to beat and shoot civilians if/when their leaders order them to, and politicians who trampled the rights of their people to rise to power can be expected to use the police and military to trample the rights of the people (who pay their pay checks) to hold onto power.

This puts oppressed civilians in an impossible situation. Fighting law enforcement personnel is typically futile not only because law enforcement personnel are better armed and better trained, but also because they're a political straw man. They're not the problem. The politicians are. Fighting law enforcement wastes lives, resources and momentum that could be directed at the real source of the problem.

More importantly though, protesters need support from people who are organized, effective and have access to massive resource networks. No one in the world is better trained and prepared to fight injustice than law enforcement and military personnel. If law enforcement personnel can be convinced to leverage their strength against the real source of the problem on behalf of the oppressed, then the protesters have taken the main source of the politician's power and turned it against them. So one of the first goals of a unified social movement should be to educate law enforcement personnel of their plight and remind them who they should be fighting for/against and why. This will yield an even better chance of success if revolutionaries give the law enforcement personnel an incentive and a new source of identity.

A revolution will have an even better chance of succeeding if it’s clear that its goal isn't to "overthrow the government." The government isn't the one selling out the people. The government is just a stack of books sitting on a shelf somewhere. Fighting "the government" is fighting a ghost...a ghost that law enforcement personnel are bound to protect. The real source of the problem is the specific individuals instigating the oppression. A successful revolution should have the clear aim of identifying and removing corrupt individuals from power. Coincidentally, law enforcement personnel know how to remove criminals from society non-lethally, and they're bound to do so to protect the greater interests of their country and their government.

The worse the consequences of revolution are for the politicians the harder they'll fight to remain in power and the more force they'll authorize against the uprising civilians.

The less the politicians have to lose, the more likely they'll be to acquiesce to the people's demands. While justice demands those people be removed from office, prudence recognizes that the most important change that needs to be enacted as a result of a revolution is to get a set of laws on the books that remove the incentives for politicians to exploit the working class and then holds politicians accountable for their actions in the future. Without these changes, the system would eventually revert back to a state of corruption and require another potentially bloody revolution anyway. So a revolution may be wise not to overthrow their leaders, but merely to force them to bind themselves with more regulations. If the politicians refuse they weaken their case that they deserve to be protected by the law.

The only question that remains is what the working class can do to make it in the politician's best interest to perform their jobs in the best interest of the people. The first thing that needs to happen is the people need to draft a clearly articulated set of demands and circulate it as widely as possible. The American revolution against the British got this step right, and the rest of the world could learn a lesson from their success. The next thing the people need to do is confront their corrupt politicians directly where it matters most to them. Chanting slogans in the boondocks behind police cordons doesn't give a political movement any leverage. All that does is let protesters blow off their steam and feel productive without affecting anything. If you want to influence politicians you need to make it in their immediate interest to listen to you.

Corrupt politicians use their political offices to wage class warfare against the working class to build up wealth in their own homes. Their offices and their homes are the most fundamental sources of their motives. Occupy those and they lose their power and their incentive. Both their offices and their homes are physical places that can be occupied non-violently. Surround them and put the politicians out in the streets and you can take back your freedom, your dignity, your equality and your fair share of your nation's resources.

Of course, there are other ways to wage a revolution. This one simply uses human psychology to target mental pressure points in an attempt to maximize efficiency.

IF YOU SEE PEOPLE RIOTING AND BURNING BUILDINGS… PRINT THIS OUT AND GIVE IT TO THEM Protests don’t influence governments because they teach politicians anything they don’t already know or tug at their heart strings. Nobody cares what protestors chant or what their signs say. Nobody looks at a protester and says, "Your cleverness and anger has motivated me to care about your life." Rioting is the same. Nobody cares how valid a mob’s complaints are. Governments don't negotiate with mobs. They disperse them with superior firepower.

The only reason protests and riots have any leverage is because protests and riots clog up the streets so that nothing can move in the city until they get out of the way. Without using violence, if enough people stand in the streets then business can't move. If business can't move then Big Business feels the impact in their wallet, which Big Business cares about more than blood, tears, souls or political red tape. Stop commerce long enough and Big Business will put pressure on the government to agree to the people's demands. In some cases, it would be more correct to say that Big Business would allow the government to agree to the people's demands. Either way, the end result is the same.

But in order for a protest to be effective it has to be sustainable. Chanting inflammatory rhetoric, throwing rocks and engaging with authority goons will only serve to burn out the protesters physically and emotionally. Of course, peacefully standing in the street isn't an option when the police are ordered to engage the protesters, but that teaches us something. If you need to block off a street and the police are going to use teargas and rubber bullets on people then take the people out of the equation and put something else in their place, like their cars. If 10,000 people parked their cars in major intersections and abandoned them to go form human blockades in front of the tow truck companies, they could shut down a major city and spend the rest of their night sitting at home watching how the city reacts on TV. If you do protest in person, never engage authority's henchmen. They're not the real problem, and most of them don't want to be there. If they have to disperse a protest then most of them are probably going to walk away with regrets and spend the rest of their lives justifying their actions to themselves saying, "It was my job. I didn't have a choice.

I took an oath to obey orders. Etc., etc." Don't put them in that position. You don't need to hold one single street corner. You just need to have a bunch of people in the streets at the same time somewhere. If you constantly run away from police and form up in groups on different sides of the city you can block traffic unpredictably, potentially causing more nonviolent damage to business with less people.

And if past riots have taught us anything it's that the more live video footage of a protest there is the more responsible authority has to be for their actions. Tweet. Take camera phone pictures. Stream as much live color HD video as you can with full audio taken from as many vantage points as possible. Hide cameras all over town prior to any

protest. Do you have a camera? If not, don't donate money to a political revolution fund.

Go buy a camera and go stand in the middle of the street with several thousand other cameramen.

And it defeats the whole purpose of a protest if you don't have a clearly articulated, unanimously agreed upon list of demands. If you don't have that then what could your protest possibly accomplish? The authorities can make any vague, noncommittal gesture of surrender to disperse the crowds. It can impose harsh compromises and just say they did their best. It goes back to that saying, "If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything." So what do you stand for? Freedom? Peace? Justice? Equality? All of those words are vague to the point of being useless. The government can't just open up their warehouses and start handing out boxes of freedom and justice.

What is the root cause of your suffering? Identify that. Articulate it, and then explain exactly how you want that problem to be solved. Until you do that, stopping traffic is just stopping the economy for you to blow off some steam before you get back to the same life you had the day before.

You need more than a good reason to participate in a protest that shuts down a city.

There are real, negative consequences to shutting a city down even for a while. The cost/benefit analysis of protesting only adds up when the government is hurting people worse. When that happens though it becomes a moral imperative to stand up against injustice nonviolently.

CONSERVATIVE AMERICANS, YOU DON’T NEED TO OVERTHROW YOUR GOVERNMENT TO MAKE AMERICA A BETTER PLACE A sheriff in Lubbock Texas recently made a surprising comment "predicting" there would be a civil war in America if Obama were reelected. Not long after that a couple of American soldiers got caught plotting to assassinate President Obama. It doesn't surprise me at all that either of these events happened, and it worries me that I'm so unsurprised.

The extreme conservative right has been beating the civil war drum since 2008, and what started out as a slow clap has finally worked itself up to a fevered pitch, and I blame conservative shock jocks and Fox News pundits almost entirely for this. They've been acting like fire and brimstone evangelical preachers this whole time. It's just taken them this long to have finally played enough hymns and ranted enough to get the conservative base worked up like a church revival.

I don't know why they're doing it, but I can see what the end result is. They're poking a bear with a stick, and by "bear" I mean "millions of people who already own A LOT of guns and resent authority." And by ""poking with a stick" I mean "feeding sensationalized disinformation to." It was only a matter of time before a self-proclaimed Republican somewhere in America acted on what people had been thinking after watching Fox News.

The thing about that is, yeah, the American government is completely broken. That's been front page news since we were born, but civil war won't fix that. All it will do is make America turn its gargantuan war machine on itself and shoot itself in the foot. No group of Tea Part militia men could possibly defeat the U.S. military no matter how many shotguns and rifles they owned.

If a rogue group of battle hardened veterans started attacking government buildings (let alone politicians) the American government would have to declare martial law on all of its citizens, which would needlessly inconvenience and infuriate an already stressed out, anxious and fearful population. The worst consequence of (even a small scale) violent rebellion in the United States would be shutting down travel and business. That would stop people from working, getting paid or buying goods. If roads were shut down or became unsafe to travel on then consumer goods would stop reaching markets. Once grocery shelves ran dry very few Americans living in suburbs or cities would have any way of getting more food except to fight their neighbors for it, and since there are so many guns in America, that's a recipe for total collapse of civil order.

Anything remotely resembling civil war in the United States is a lose/lose situation for everyone except America's enemies. Anyone doing any saber-rattling is either completely detached from reality or wants America to lose.

The ironic thing about all of this is that there's a perfectly sane, nonviolent solution to all of these problems built right into right wing, conservative values. You want government out of your life. You want to set the laws where you live. You don't like handouts. You believe in hard work, fiscal responsibility and fair compensation. And between the lot of you, you've also got a ton of money.

You could channel all of those strengths into butting heads with a bankrupt government that can't wipe its own ass without going through six months of legislation first and is going through the death throes of an unsustainable empire while being bled dry as we speak by a unnecessarily huge and epically wasteful military, but by your own propaganda, you expect the American government to collapse if another Democrat gets elected anyway. So why not just let the government you hate so much die a natural death?

Then you can be the first in line to pick up the pieces instead of being the first to drag yourself out of the rubble you went out of your way to create. I'm just saying, you can do this the hard way or the lucrative way.

And let's be honest here for a minute. If the Chick-Fil-A protest was any indicator of how prepared you are to put your money where your mouth is or endure hard times then armed rebellion is not an option for you.

Even if everyone who read this took an oath of lifelong pacifism it would still be naive of us to sit around hoping nobody else in America will ever fire another gun. If you know that, one way or another, life in America is heading towards (effectively) a second great depression then the most important thing you can be doing is preparing for a great depression.

During Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign he raised over $500 million from conservatives, and all of that money got flushed down the toilet. Imagine how big of a trailer park you could build with $500 million. You could build a trailer park the size of Pecos County, and since Donald Trump is on your side he could Trump it up. With or without trailer houses, you could build your own conservative Utopia surprisingly easily in this day and age. Then all the godless liberals can go to hell inconspicuously outside your walls while you wait for the rapture securely.

If you build your own cities then you'll get to do things your way there. If you design your city to be sustainable then you won't be dependent on your government. The less people who are dependent on the government the less people the government can depend on in return. You can assert and enjoy your independence by simply living independently, but that means moving off the grid and building new infrastructure.

You might not want to move off the grid though. You might feel like you paid for the grid with your tax dollars and therefore it's owed to you. Well, as true as that may be, that grid is broken and unsustainable. It's a cash sieve. It's a white elephant. The smartest thing anyone can do is move out of the suburbs and into sustainably designed, selfsufficient communities. If everyone did that then it wouldn't be a problem when the old

system finally dies from eating its own tail. Then we could all just pick up the pieces without having to fight each other over scraps.

I just have to ask, was Jesus a builder or a fighter? If you want the world to be a better place then build a better world. That option is still on the table. In fact, the more violent and destitute America becomes the more you'll wish you had built a sustainable world when you had the chance. If you ever get to thinking that you can bomb your way to a better world, just ask any Iraqi how well that works.

STOP TALKING ABOUT GUNS AND START TALKING ABOUT POVERTY The big topic in America right now is gun control. This has always been a popular issue, but it didn’t dominate the national dialogue until December 12, 2012 when a person shot twenty children and six adults in an elementary school in Connecticut. Since then a lot of Americans have been saying that the call to action this event raises is for there to be more guns more places in America, and these people are outraged by real or imagined prospects of stricter gun control laws.

While the self-proclaimed Christian, conservative, patriotic base is calling for secession and revolt if they lose the freedom to shoot people, there are billions of people in the world and millions of people in America who are trapped beneath an economic glass ceiling and forced to spend their short, irreplaceable, invaluable lives working themselves to death doing undignified, inhumane work for barely enough money to survive, let alone enjoy the luxuries of the 21st century.

Every day spent talking about guns is another day the oppression of the working class continues. Everyone talking about guns right now is distracting the national dialogue from the actual biggest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: poverty.

Anyone who truly believes that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” should want the gun debate dropped in favor of the poverty debate, because desperate, uneducated, stressed out people are the ones who use guns for evil.

Desperation, ignorance and anxiety need to be removed from American culture before gun violence is going to end, and American culture isn’t going to change until the oppression of the poor ends. The oppression of the poor isn't going to end until it dominates the national dialogue. So talk about that.

6 STEPS TO CHANGE AMERICA America is in desperate need of change. The signs are strewn across America like debris from a hurricane: foreclosed houses, packed prisons, ghetto birds, illegal immigrants working like slaves in the hot sun, college graduates waiting tables, panhandlers, fanatic nonsensical protesters, obesity, diabetes, cancer, STDs, poisons in the food and water, drug and alcohol abuse, a military far larger than is necessary, and the list goes on.

The most telling sign that America needs change though, is blood. There are students shooting other students, gangstas doing battle in the streets, parents killing their children because of misplaced religious beliefs, hospitals letting patients die because they can’t afford overpriced healthcare and people flying planes into buildings to name a few.

After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma city we all breathed a sigh of relief when we found out the perpetrators were mentally unstable radicals.

After the Columbine shooting in 1999 we all breathed a sigh of relief when we found out the shooters were mentally unstable social misfits. Same with the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. The motives of the freedom-hating psychos who flew planes into the World Trade Center in 2001 were reduced to one word by the president, “evil” as if they were 1980’s cartoon villains. On February 18th 2010 a highly educated entrepreneur fly a plane into an IRS building in Austin, TX, and he was labeled a nut.

I’m not saying that all the aforementioned “terrorists” weren’t unstable, unhealthy, misled or at least stressed to the point where they weren’t thinking clearly. I’m certainly not advocating that their actions were justifiable, and I’ll explain that more in depth later. However, I am most certainly saying loud and clear that we would be fools if we didn’t learn one lesson from these cases. We need to ask ourselves how it got to this point. How many times can we play the whacko/loony card before we ask ourselves if there might really be some sinister undercurrent beneath the magical facade of the American dream that is pushing people over the line?

I’m not going to go on any further trying to convince you that America needs change. It’s obvious that it does, and if you can’t see that, it’s not because you need it pointed out.

It’s because you’re refusing to admit what it’s in front of you. What I am going to do is point out how you can help change America. Before I do that though, I need to point out 3 things that won’t change anything.

1. Waiting for a leader: This is as true in your individual life as it is for society.

Nobody but you is responsible for you. If you’re waiting for someone else to come along and sweep you off your feet or wipe your ass then you deserve nothing. As the old sayings go, you need to “be the change you want to see in the world” because “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Nobody gives a damn about you because nobody owes you anything. That’s why nobody is going save you. The only people who are even interested in you are the people who want to exploit you. As long as you’re not trying to save yourself they’re going continue to exploit you.

2.Voting (in Federal Elections): All voting accomplishes is electing the person you want to represent corporate interests. That’s it. Period. Voting is a sham. If you haven’t figured that out already then you’re part of the problem. Stop supporting the corrupt system by voting if for no other reason than it’ll stop making you feel like you’re doing something when you’re really not. I’ll explain in a minute why I specify against voting federally.

3. Violence: Violence begets violence. The more violence you use against the government the more it’s going to crack down on everyone. If enough violence is used against the government eventually the government is going to declare martial law. Once that happens civil war will break out. When civil war breaks out everyone loses.

And violence isn’t necessary. If you’re smart enough you can work around the barriers to change that the current political parties and corporations have put in place. You just have to “fight” smarter, not harder.

And quite frankly, the Russian and Chinese military would have to team up to beat the American military, and even then the American Industrial War Complex wouldn’t go down easy. The right to bear arms for the purpose of protecting yourself against your own government is a joke. A hunting rifle isn’t going to stop a Black Hawk. Even without getting all ideological about nonviolence, the practical fact of the matter is that the only thing fighting the American government with violence is going to accomplish is getting you killed.

What will change things: 1. Educate yourself: The first step to changing the world is always to change yourself.

If you can’t see the solutions to the world’s problems then you need to educate yourself until you are smart enough. Don’t sit around waiting for someone to give you a solution.

Educate yourself and figure it out on your own.

Don’t make excuses about how you weren’t born a genius. What if I wrote an essay saying you were too stupid to do anything? Would you just agree with me or would you get pissed off and change the world just to prove me wrong? If you’re not going to take discouragement from me then why would you take it from yourself?

Even without instigating a cataclysmic change in the world, simply educating yourself to the point where you can make responsible decisions in your daily life is half the battle. If every single person educated themselves enough to make responsible decisions in their daily lives then oppressors and exploiters wouldn’t have any power over the public. If

half the public actually did educated themselves to the point where they could understand the systemic problems inherent in the system, see solutions to the problems and be able to orchestrate plans to address those problems then the power of the people would be unstoppable. As it stands, everyone just wants to know who is going to the next American Idol contest. Of course people that stupid are going to be exploited.

The point is that until you educate yourself there will be no change. There will only be business as usual, and by “business” I mean “slavery.”

2. Educate others: Let’s say you educated yourself to the point where you’re making responsible decisions in your daily life and understand the problems inherent in the system. That’ll help you live a more free life in your own private domain, but you won’t be able to make a difference in the greater scheme of society without the help of others.

Go ask some American Idol fans to help you. Ignorant people don’t do work at anything but making excuses because there’s nothing ignorant people fear (and thus hate) more than change. Your fellow slaves will beat you down for trying to help them and the greedy, selfish leaders you’re fighting against won’t have to lift a finger.

So the second thing you need to do to help bring about change is to help educate others, especially the poorest of the poor. They have the least to lose and the most to gain.

That’s why the military targets them for recruitment. They have the potential to be your most motivated allies if you can just educate them. And unlike the military, you don’t have to lie to them and systematically brainwash them and isolate them in a cult. You have truth on your side. Just educate them and they’ll put two and two together and do what’s in their best interest…just like you’re doing.

3. Organize with like-minded people: Look on the back of an American one dollar bill. You’ll see an eagle holding a claw full of arrows. The symbolism of that image comes from the wisdom of Native Americans who recognized that you can break an arrow easily, but it’s nearly impossible to break 12 arrows with your hands at once. This is the power of the people. There is strength in numbers.

If you want to create a force for change you need to organize with like-minded, educated people. The key word is “organize.” To use a more modern analogy, think of football. A team of disorganized football players are going to run around the field like chickens with their heads cut off. An organized team where there is a hierarchy of authority, a division of roles and most importantly, a plan, is going to be exponentially more successful than a blind mob…especially when playing against a professional team that has been practicing for hundreds of years and refining their organization techniques.

So get together with a group of smart people and come up with a plan, and make sure part of that plan is reaching out to other smart people.

4. Bribery: If you want to enact change in America, I’ve got great news for you. There is already a streamlined method for creating change that anyone can take part in

without voting or running for office: legal bribery. All you have to do is make lavish campaign donations to everyone running for public office. Donate to both sides just in case. And regardless of who wins, use lobbyists to shower them with gifts and favors.

Then they’ll do whatever you want them to and you didn’t even have to kill anyone to have your voice listened to.

I’m completely serious. The American government is always up for sale. If you want it, just buy it.

5. Act/change locally: You don’t have to change all the rules in America to live a better life. You certainly don’t need to tear down the entire government, and realistically, you’d most likely fail if you tried anyway. So don’t bother. Organize locally, run for office locally, vote locally, pass laws that favor the individual locally. Create a utopia in the local area. That’s realistic. That’s manageable.

6. Exert your independence: If you manage to create a quaint little utopia with freedom and equality for everyone and the federal government comes down and tells you to stop…just don’t. Don’t take “no” for an answer. What’s the government going to do? Declare martial law because you legalized freedom and empowered workers? If they do it’s only going to galvanize the rest of the country. And if enough small towns put the right laws in place the government won’t be able to stamp out all the fires. It’ll have to go along with it and act like it supported freedom and workers all along. Then you might see the change on Capitol Hill that every corrupt, greedy, selfish, lying politician promises in their campaign speeches.

SOLUTIONS FOR THE 47% Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently told a room full of rich people that 47% of the American public would vote for incumbent Democratic candidate Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election no matter what and that all of those mindless voters feel entitled to government handouts. Mitt Romney’s statistic isn’t based on reality, but let’s play a mind game, and pretend that it is. To make this mind game more interesting, let’s pretend that that it was Barack Obama who was secretly recorded telling a room full of rich people that 53% of the American population would never vote for a candidate from the Democratic party because they’re hopelessly closed minded red necks clinging to their guns and religion.

The call to action in this mind game isn’t to celebrate the mud-flinging contest between Republicans and Democrats or to discourage either party from trying to reason with their rivals. The call to action is to consider the need for a contingency plan.

Put yourself in the shoes of a member of the 47%. If you "knew" that over half of your country were completely close-minded and could not be counted on to act or vote with reason then simple math suggests that voting would be unlikely to produce change since the majority of the country is already committed and able to shut your vote out with their numbers.

To make matter worse, Democrats have already found the ultimate poster boy for change in Barack Obama, and he turned out to be George Bush 2.0. He turned out to be so Bushy in fact that in 2011 he passively consented to the beating and hospitalization of protesters who were demanding that representation in government should no longer be a commodity that can be bought and sold by rich people. Then George Bush 2.0 sat back and said nothing as the mainstream media painted the protesters as wild animals. You can vote for four more years of George Bush 2.0, but if you've been paying attention you shouldn't bet all your eggs that he’s going to make young people’s dreams come true.

The point isn’t that voting and protesting can’t change the world, but at this point in history it would be naive to put all your eggs in those two baskets. That’s not being pessimistic. That’s being realistic. If that much is true, if those two options for enacting change in the American political system are effectively off the table then what options does that leave left?

Before we attempt to answer that question let’s also assume that assassination and violent revolution are off the table as well due to the fact that they're too morally reprehensible to consider, and America has the largest, most advanced military and spy network humanity has ever known. Furthermore, anytime anyone attacks any of America’s interests the American government tightens its grip on the American people.

So violence is a lose/lose situation for the American people no matter what.

So if voting, protesting and revolting are all off the table, what options does that leave left for the 47% to enact change in the American government? Before we can answer that question though, we also have to consider that even if you had a plan to save America you still won’t be able to get all of the 47% of Americans who aren’t brainwashed by Fox News to support your plan. Some are too stupid, lazy, selfish or apathetic to go out of their way to change anything. Or, it could be that your plan is actually terrible, and most of the 47% are too smart to support your plan. In addition, there’s a significant portion of the 47% who are already irrevocably convinced that Democrats, socialism, communism, libertarianism, or some other ideology is the cure for all of society’s ills.

If these assumptions are true (and I’m not declaring that they are, we’re just playing a mind game) what options does that leave for someone who wants to make America better but has no hope of rallying even the majority of the minority under one umbrella?

In other words, what do you do when you’re hopelessly outnumbered?

Well, there are a lot of things you can do. Here’s a list for your inspiration: 1. Raise the bar: You have to ask yourself, how did you get so damn smart that you know what’s best for the world? Oh, you went to school and did some investigative study on your own free time. That’s very commendable. Well, if education made you so sane then education can make others sane too. If you help fund free online schools then we can have free online classes covering every course at every grade level. Then the traditional predatory higher education system we currently have will become obsolete, and everyone will be able to help themselves sooner rather than later. Seriously, free online schools are going to revolutionize society. Be a part of it.

2. Circle the wagons: America is stampeding towards economic and environmental collapse, and 53% of the population is not only celebrating that fact, they own a lot of guns. If/when America collapses America is going to turn into the O.K .Corral for a few years until the guy with the most guns stands supreme. Hopefully that will be a compassionate, functional U.S. Military.

You might not be able to change the world, but you can change where you’re at. Chances are you’re in an unsustainable city suburb. The suburbs suck now, and they’ll suck even worse when the grocery stores around the corner aren’t stocking canned goods anymore and the only jobs in town for young men are in convoy security.

The world would have never gotten to that point though if we’d been building sustainable communities since day one. You don’t have to wait until the things we’re doing destroy us before you do what you know you need to do anyway. If you just start building sustainable communities now then you’ll be unaffected by economic turbulence, and you’ll set a precedent for others to follow. So when the shit does hit the fan, maybe everybody could ramp up into building mode instead of fighting mode.

Throw a Hail Mary: If you have no hope of winning in a fair fight then it makes sense to try something that would have otherwise been considered absurd. Here’s an example of an absurd idea. Pitch/make a reality TV show that focuses on the lives of people locked in a self-sustainable building where they work together as a community to survive and live out their ideology. One building could have ultra-right wing conservative Americans, one could have hippies, one could have socialists, one could have communists, etc.

If all the world’s ideologies are going to be constantly fighting over which system is the best then we may as well bottle them and put them to the test. Let them prove on camera that their ideologies work in a controlled environment. If they all do then maybe we’ll learn our differences aren’t that big. If some of them don’t work then it’ll help us understand ourselves a little better. Either way, it would make great ratings and help build interest in sustainable architecture, politics and social experiments.

Here's another Hail Mary idea. Build floating islands in international waters and create society 2.0.

Eat the elephant: There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, “One bite at a time.” America has a big elephant that’s crushing the poor and lowering humanity’s potential. If you want to replace that elephant with a new social/political movement based on reality and sanity then at some point you’re going to have to go to a room with a bunch of like-minded people and talk about that. Then you and your like-minded associates will need to formulate a plan to build a new political party and draft documents detailing your principles. In order to accomplish that you’re going to have to meet on a regular basis, organize into groups and establish process flows and responsibilities. This can all be done. You just have to do it…one step at a time.

It’s a long path, but the longest journey begins with a single step.

You can begin this journey by meeting people in houses, office buildings or tents on Wall Street, but if you meet in tents on Wall Street then New York's finest will probably beat the hell out of you. If you want to meet in tents you might be more productive putting them in a permanent camp on someone's land who wants you to be there.

Ask the right person for help: Money is power. If you could accomplish something genuinely productive for society if you only had just a little more money/power, you could get that money/power by begging a million poor people to help you out or you could schmooze ten rich people and win the support of one of them.

If you have a message you want the world to know you could pass out a million fliers or get one famous and/or hot person to say it and everyone will pay attention for a moment.

Pressure Points: America was raised on television. Americans base their perception of reality on television. If you’re not on television then you’re not the most important thing in Americans’ lives.

Get on television by giving Americans what they want: funny, farty, slutty television.

Just put an intelligent message in your stories. If everyone watches enough television that teaches them how to think like sane, rational people then society will wake up one morning and act rationally.

It’s not hard to make television these days. All you need to get started is a message, a script, a camera and a few charismatic people.

HOW TO CREATE UTOPIA The most basic definition of utopia is: "An ideal state or place. Any visionary system of political or social perfection."

The big problem with creating an ideal place is that the terms "ideal" and "perfect" are subjective terms. So your utopia would be someone else's dystopia and vice versa. However, even if it were possible to prove what constitutes an ideal environment and an ideal culture you still could couldn't get everyone in the world to embrace your system.

People are stupid and selfish, and people are always going to be stupid and selfish. Even if you could create the perfect external world with a perfect government, perfect laws, perfect distribution of wealth, perfect education system, etc. you're still going to have people who choose to be mean, selfish, inconsiderate and ignorant. A thousand years from now we might cure all disease, but I don't believe we'll never cure being a jerk.

However, this isn't to say that we should abandon the dream of Utopia. It's surprisingly easy to create Utopia. The key is simply to compromise the acreage of our dreams.

Utopia just means living in a place where the rules allow you to behave the way you want to behave and enjoy stability and security of resources. In addition you want to be surrounded by other people who have (incidentally) chosen to share the same beliefs and norms as you (and thus, they define Utopia the same way as you).

Obviously, the whole world is never going to come together to fit those criteria. That's impossible. However, you can achieve those conditions in a small geographical area. It could be as small as one room or as large as a nation.

Yes, I'm advocating communes, but I'm advocating a lot more than that. Creating utopia is as simple as getting like-minded people together to live according to similar values.

There are millions of ways to make that happening. You could buy some land, fence it off and start your own government within the boundaries. Or you could start a club that meets at our house once a week. You could start a secret society. You could start a socialactivism/philanthropy group. You could start a business and run it with like-minded people in a way that you're all shareholders. You could start/join a monastery. Your space could even be virtual. It could be a chat group or an online video game. There you're not even confined by reality.

Creating utopia is only a matter of defining what you want, meeting like-minded people and spending time together in a time and place where your shared ideals are accepted.

The hardest part of the whole process, the part where most people fail, is in defining what they want.

SILVER BULLETS AND BUTTERFLY WINGS The world sucks. That's no longer a pessimistic thing to say. That's an objective fact, and I can prove it with numbers. Just count the global statistics on protests. When life really is good, there are low numbers of protests. The more life sucks, the more people protest.

Naysayers dismiss protesters as young people just being young, ignorant, lazy, spoiled and ungrateful, but I say that's just all the more reason why protests are such a strong indicator of life objectively sucking. Kids spend all their time smoking pot, playing video games and watching TV, right? They don't learn about the world around them.

They're desensitized to the problems of others. They're apathetic. When kids these days do the cost/benefit analysis of getting their butts off the couch they don't see a potential return on investment of expended energy because they're so pampered right where they are. Isn't that what old people have been telling generation X,Y, and the Milennials for the past 40 years? Well, when people that useless get off the couch, march down the street and stick their neck out, it's because some real problem has breached their bubble of first world problems, and it's too serious to ignore.

This is how dire the situation is getting. On Sept. 17th 2011 there's going to be a huge protest on Wall Street that's set to last "as long as it takes," and the protesters don't even know what they're protesting. Some people would see that as proof of how stupid the protesters are. I see that as proof of how badly people's lives suck.

To make matters worse, the protesters are playing poker with the government. They're betting that driving all the way to New York and sleeping on the grimy streets for months where there is a 90% chance that they're going to get violently evicted by police who look like Robocop is going to pay off. That's a long shot in and of itself, but the situation is made more absurd by the fact all these people planning on protesting know that in a best case scenario, their actions will likely only fix one problem. To make matters worse, they can't decide which one problem they want to fix, but they're so fed up anyway that they're still going to go protest understanding that there's a very real possibility that their actions and sacrifice won't accomplish anything because their fellow participants will fail to agree on a demand or stand together for the long haul. So the success of the protest depends on 3 generations and 100 nations of slackers from different cultures who have their own priorities and perspectives all acting as mature and steadfast as Clark Kent...and they're going to do it anyway because they believe the potential benefit outweighs the potential risk.

These kids are serious about something. Would it kill us to listen to them? Maybe there's some truth to their angst. Maybe we really have officially reached the point where if you think the world sucks, it's not that you're a pansy. To the contrary, if you're not pissed off then you're not paying attention.

But what can we do? If there was an obvious answer to that question then people wouldn't have to ask it. I've speculated on what one change (or set of changes) I'd choose,

but that's just one bullet, and that's probably not even the best use of it. One way or the other, if/when that metaphorical bullet gets used life will still go on, and the rest of the world's problems will continue to affect people’s lives in very real and very negative ways.

The question "But what can we do?" will eventually turn into "But what can we do next?"

So while we're just sitting around anyway right now, why not skip to the chase and ask the next question, and the next, and the next, and the next. Or do we just accept that what we get from the next silver bullet is all we're ever going to get? If not, how many problems are we actually going to keep grinding away at solving? If you were going to devote each year of your life to solving a different problem in your own country for the next ten years and then spend the rest of your life living entirely for yourself, which ten problems would you prioritize?

Or what if you only had one year to do one thing to help the entire world before retiring to a life of self-interest? Where would you place your one bet in the chaos theory casino of global issues? If Willy Wonka took you to a magical field where all the chaos theory butterflies in the world flew around spastically, and Willy Wonka gave you a gun with a single silver bullet in it and told you that you could shoot one butterfly for one chance to save the world, how would you decide where to aim?

It's a funny question, but it's important because the world's problems are your problems, and your problems are your responsibility. And the only answers you're ever going to get are going to be to the questions you ask. So at some point in your life you have to stop asking "But what can we do?" and start asking yourself, "What causes problems?"

You can make a game out of the question. Just walk around until you see something that sucks. Then point at it, and have someone take a picture of your pointing at the problem.

Then go find a solution to the problem and point at it. Have someone take a picture of you pointing at the solution. Once you have each of those pictures in each of your hands then you should be able to figure out how to make a real difference in the world. If enough people did this and sent their pictures into a website that could organize the information and correlate it you would find that a lot of problems share similar solutions. If you took a third picture of the causes of the problems you'd find that a lot of problems share common causes as well. If you identified the cause and effect patterns you could chart a map to save the world. I guarantee that if this experiment were performed for a long enough time, the majority of the arrows would eventually trace back to education.

Everything education touches it turns to gold. When a dictator wants to crush the threat of progress the first thing he does is execute the educated and gut the education system.

You can send in a group of educated people to a barren wilderness or a garbage dump and they'll turn that area into a Utopia. Give a man 8 years in prison and he'll come out a monster. Give a man 8 years in school and he'll come out a doctor. The defining difference between an officer and an enlisted troop is education. The first thing

employers ask job applicants is what their education level is. Education doesn't improve civilization. Education is civilization.

So what do we do about that? Should we donate all of our money to universities and testing companies? Because that's what we're doing. We're betting the future of the human species on universities and testing companies, and most of that money is getting funneled into sports cars and swimming pools. The test scores from the testing companies we're giving all of our education money to are showing that test scores are falling because children are learning less because our schools are focused too much on testing. And the lower you test the higher a percentage of your income you have to spend to further your education. But education is getting so overpriced that almost nobody can afford it, and even those that can are finding that the cost/benefit analysis of investing in an education doesn't add up. The system in place discourages and in many cases, bars people from getting an education. And we wonder why we don't have enough skilled workers or innovative thinkers to solve the world's problems. Instead we have unemployed, angry young adults complaining about not having the opportunities they were promised, and the youngest generation is growing up not caring because they've known their whole life the education system is an overpriced commodity that only leads to a cubicle that's barely distinguishable from a jail cell. They're not apathetic because they're lazy. They're apathetic because life is one giant, Skinner box.

So what do you do? Do you fix the testing companies that are cannibalizing our public budget or do you fix the universities that are cannibalizing our private budgets? Or is there a butterfly out there somewhere else that we can disturb and cause ripple effects throughout the whole system that will solve both problems, if not more?

The end goal is to provide a full spectrum of easily accessible, high quality information to as many people as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible for as long as possible.

The ideal dream scenario would be for every level of education to be completely free to everyone everywhere all the time. The ripple effects of such a school system would do more to render more causes of more problems obsolete than any other single solution.

Universal, free education is the holy grail of social action. It's the ultimate tool of selfempowerment. It's the silver bullet for poverty. It's the silver bullet for making responsible voters, citizens, soldiers and politicians. It's the long term cure for corruption and the key to technological innovation.

Universal, free education is the key to the next golden era of human history, which will be the greatest golden era mankind has ever seen, and this key exists today in its infancy at the Khan Academy, and it's underfunded. If the United States had donated every penny it's spent on war in the last 10 years to the Khan Academy instead we would be living in Gene Roddenberry's wildest dream today. But instead of investing in education, America is investing in check points and tent cities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The question of whether that's right or wrong is moot, because there's apparently nothing anyone can do to stop America from investing its children's future savings on tent spaces in the Middle East.

But there is something everyone can do. Everyone can donate to the Khan Academy.

Once we've enlightened the world then the solutions to the rest of our problems will be clear, and we'll have the skills to engage those problems. I guarantee, it'll help more than investing in sports cars and swimming pools. It'll help more than killing brown people.

It'll help more than cheap gasoline. It'll help more than funding a Republican or Democrat's political campaign. It'll help more than funding the war on drugs. It'll create more jobs than tax cuts for the rich. It'll put more food in children's mouths than churches.

All I'm saying is it's something you can do to make a difference if/when you're not out on the streets protesting.

WHY THE WORLD SUCKS AND HOW TO SAVE IT This is very simple. The world sucks because people suck, and people suck because they're stupid.

You want to save the world? The solution is free education. Once all human knowledge is completely free and accessible anywhere, anytime then everything else will follow.

Who should pay for it? You. Everyone. If you live in the United States of America then most of your federal income tax goes to bombing brown people. That money should be spent on giving you and everyone else free education. Any politician who doesn't make that their number one priority is the barrier between us and utopia, but politicians choose to continue to use your money to fund an unnecessary and destructive weapons industry. If you want to know why, read Noam Chomsky.

Since your elected leaders won't spend your tax dollars to give you free education then Hollywood should. Second only to religion, Hollywood has been the largest producer of stupidity in all of human history. The majority of all media content produced in Hollywood is stupid. It's designed to appeal to the lowest common intellectual denominator. It's brain candy, and most people in first world countries binge on brain candy most of the time they're not at work or school, and it makes them stupid.

Hollywood owes the world free education to atone for the stupidity it has created. Who is your favorite celebrity? That person is a millionaire and has played a role in making you, your friends, your enemies and countless strangers dumber. Your favorite celebrity should pay to build a free online school that offers video classes on every subject broken down by topic.

If Hollywood won't do it then the richest person in the world should pay for it. You know how you become the richest person in the world? You sell stuff, and you pay your workers as little as possible to produce something everyone needs and that is as cheap as possible to reproduce, and you sell it for as high a price as you can. Then you avoid paying as many taxes as possible by exploiting tax havens and loop holes.

The richest person in the world is the world's biggest legal thief. The richest person in the world has ripped off more people than anyone else in the world. The richest person in the world owes the world a free school that offers instruction in every subject. The richest person in the world can afford to create that school and never have to sacrifice any luxury or necessity in their personal life ever.

If the richest person in the world won't give the world free education then the smartest people should. MIT has already created a small, free online school. That's great, but it doesn't include elementary school lessons on the alphabet or downloadable video clips on how to build and launch a space ship (yet). If MIT doesn't have the money to give the

world that scope of free education then MENSA should pay for it. If MENSA is so smart then the need to fund a free school should be obvious to them.

If high IQ societies won't fund a free school then religious groups should. Religions claim to want to help people and to not be greedy. Great. Sell all your temples and ridiculous outfits to pay for school. Or be a hypocrite and stand by and watch the world burn knowing that you have the power to save it but chose not to. Yes, the issue really is that black and white.

If religion won't give the world free school then the people should give it to themselves.

People on social networks should collaborate and fund it. Until then stupid people will continue to destroy the world until there's nothing left.

AN OPEN LETTER TO GENERATION X Note: "Generation X" refers to people born in America between 1965-1981. That time frame obviously encompasses more than one generation. For the purpose of this letter, I'm mainly referring to the youngest members of Generation X (born around 19761981).

I'm a member of Generation X, and I don't have many good things to say about the Baby Boomer generation. Suffice it to say that I blame them for most of the world's problems, but I don't want to dwell on things I can't change.

What I can change is myself, and I feel like my generation can listen to reason. So I want to point out to my generation that anytime we find ourselves resenting our parents' generation for abandoning us and throwing us under the bus, we should be vividly aware of what kind of big brothers and big sisters we've been to Generation Y and what kind of parents we're being to Generation Z. As it stands I'd say that despite all the blood, sweat and tears we've poured into making old people rich and fighting their wars we're actually failing pretty miserably as a generation. We haven't protected Gen Y's freedoms. We sat by while privacy became a thing of the past. We didn't do a diligent job of raising them. We sat by and let the television warp their minds into cartoons. Generation X hasn't done much for generation Y other than to make better software to amuse them into not caring how unfulfilling the rest of their existence is. I'd go as far as to say that Generation X is well on its way to becoming Baby Boomers 2.0.

When Gen Z takes over the world I don't want them to resentfully dismiss Gen X as senile old road blocks to a rational society. When my generation passes the baton I want to get a sincere hand shake and a meaningful nod. More importantly, I want to die knowing the world is headed in a better direction because of the role my generation played in history.

But we have to earn that by doing something other than fighting old people's wars and making old people richer. The biggest way Gen X can fail is by carrying on the Baby Boomer's legacy of screwing their customers and workers to get obscenely rich. We can do better than that. We are better than that, and I will be very disappointed if Gen X becomes Baby Boomers 2.0.

What can Gen X do for Gen Y and Z that the Baby Boomers didn't do for us? Well, if you don't know what Gen y and Z want or need you could try asking them. Their answers shouldn't surprise you. They're bitching about the same things you've been bitching about your entire life: that life sucks because we have to follow archaic ideals that nobody actually believes in and that business is war, and war is hell.

The corporate culture our elders based the world economy on makes life hell for workers.

Even after you leave work there is a war going on between every business in existence to

get as much of your money as possible, and this problem is ubiquitous Every time you take out your wallet to put money in or take money out someone skims off the top. You get charged for not having enough money. You get charged for having too much money.

You get fined for not telling the government how much money you have. You get bills in the mail telling you that you owe money for things you don't even understand. In this dog-eat-dog, cut throat world the cards are so stacked against the young and poor that they're basically just set up for failure. Life is hard because our elders gave us a system that makes life as hard as possible so the rich can get as rich as possible.

There's no big mystery about what young people want. They want what all young people have always wanted: to not get screwed and not have to live according to irrational, archaic, obsolete, ascetic ideals. If we're currently screwing the young then we shouldn't be asking what we can do to help young people. The answer is to stop screwing them.

Stop overcharging them for all the basic necessities of life and stop paying them barely enough to survive for working as hard as they can for the majority of their waking hours.

The rest of the time, just let them be themselves.

This really isn't profound. People have been talking about this since before "We're Not Gonna Take It" first aired on MTV. The story of our generation has always been leading to the point where we either build a better world or sell out to the old one. If the old guard won't let their young change the old system then all that's left to do is stop asking for permission to build a more humanitarian, rational, sustainable world and just build it.

How do you rebuild an entire world? I don't know, but I know if you can build one city that works properly then you can copy that pattern. So until Gen X builds the city of the future my generation can't say it's done everything in its power to make the world a better place. Gen X owes the world a city.

If the Baby Boomers finish the job of driving the world to apocalypse we're going to have to rebuild a better kind of city anyway to adapt to post-apocalyptic conditions. Some young people in this country are so scared of an apocalypse they're willing to fight to prevent that, but violence only begets violence until the only thing left to do is rebuild. If we've got time and resources to fight then we've got time and resources to skip the fighting and just get straight on to the rebuilding. You might think the idea of building a city is downright stupid, but if you hear people whispering about doing stupider things to "solve" the world's problems you might want to try to sell them on the idea of building anyway even if you don't personally believe in it.

This raises the question, how do you set a project of that scale in motion? The answer to that question isn't profound either. If you need inspiration just go back and watch some of the old 80's coming of age movies you were raised on. What did our television heroes do when they had to have a show down with the preps from the fraternity across the lake?

They threw a party. Then everybody pitched in to complete a monumental task.

Generation X needs to have its Woodstock, except instead of getting muddy, doing drugs and dancing to pop bands from major record labels, we need to get all the right nerds together to figure out how to build a city right there on that field that doesn't treat people like shit. If we can make one good city then we can rebuild broken ones later. If we can't make at least one then we don't really have a leg to stand on when we complain about the ones we've got.

One city isn't too much to ask from a generation that wants to live in a city that reflects its own values anyway. Most of us hate our jobs. We'd all love to escape to a place where you don't have to constantly agonize over bills and feel insecure about the future. So I don't know why we haven't built X City already.

AN OPEN LETTER TO CONSERVATIVE AMERICA I’ve written a collection of comic strips called, “Two Conservative Ladies” that sort of poke fun at conservative beliefs and behaviors. I say, “sort of” because the way I came up with all the comics was by visiting conservative internet forums and watching Fox News.

Then I just transcribed what I saw there into comics that stripped away any pretense. If those comics come across as funny then it’s just because the behavior I witnessed conservatives doing is a joke in-and-of itself. Having said that, a lot of my “Two Conservative Ladies” comics aren’t funny. One person even told me that, far from being funny, they made him feel “disgusting.” I agree, the beliefs and behaviors those comics are transcribed from aren't funny. In a lot of ways they're disgusting, even frightening, but the point of the comics isn't just to be shocking. The point of making the comics is to raise the issue that conservative America is in dire need of an intervention.

It’s impossible to have that intervention without making some generalizations about conservative culture, but if you’ll allow me to make a few generalizations that are true enough to be worth saying it’ll help you understand how the rest of the world sees you, and hopefully you can use that information to take a critical look at yourself and recognize some areas you can improve in.

For what it’s worth, I should start out by saying that I was born and raised in the Bible Belt. I come from the deep, dirty South. I lived in a trailer. As a child I believed country folk had more horse-sense than city slickers, and atheists were evil. I was baptized in a Southern Baptist church when I was 17. I'm also an honorably discharged veteran. I'm not saying that all conservatives fit that mold or that any of that makes me cool. The point is I know where you’re coming from, because you raised me.

I’ll be fair to you, I know that your actions are motivated by good intentions, the best intentions. You believe Jesus Christ was born of the virgin Mary, and on the third day after Jesus died he rose from the dead; His blood sacrifice atoned from the sins of mankind, and whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.

Therefore, as Paul stated in the Great Commission, it’s every Christian’s duty to spread the word of the Gospel to redeem as many of God’s children from the broad path of wickedness that leads to the fiery pits of eternal Hell. Therefore, allowing homosexuality, atheism and every false religion to have an equal, protected (much less celebrated) place in society would make you complicit in sin.

I get that. I also get why you’re so patriotic. I stood up proudly every morning in school, put my hand over my heart and said the pledge of allegiance. My class-mates and I even said prayers at school and thanked God that we lived in the greatest country on earth. I learned in school that the Founding Fathers forged the first nation in history built on the principles of truth, justice, freedom and equality. Sure, America had a few blemishes in its history (like slavery), but we put our primitive ways behind us and evolved as a culture and a country because that’s what Americans do, and that’s part of why Americans tend to believe America is the best country in the world.

Americans do have a lot to be proud of. We did in fact build a world super power from scratch. So in the small towns where I grew up we took it for granted that if the government would just let us have our freedom, we all formed strong families and didn’t complain when things got hard we could work our way through any difficulties life could throw at us; if every American just returned to their roots and embraced the beliefs and behaviors that built America in the first place then America could fulfill its potential once again.

When you lay out the reasons for conservative beliefs like that it sounds so wonderful. It wraps up the whole world in a pretty package that gives you a sense of identity and purpose you can be proud of. It sounds so good that anyone who disagrees with it must either be completely stupid or evil.

As I grew older though I came to realize that this perception of reality is unrealistically oversimplified. Ultimately, it translates to the belief that whatever you’ve been doing is the only right way to do things, and whatever anyone else does is evil. Any psychology 101 class will tell you this way of thinking isn’t the product of divine instruction or manifest destiny. It’s called being a cognitive miser; you just refuse to think about anything outside your preconceived beliefs. You reverse-engineer illogical excuses to dismiss evidence that conflicts with your biases, and the more your beliefs are challenged the angrier you get.

I’m not saying this to be mean. It’s human nature. Everyone does it, but some cultures measure maturity by how little people behaves this way because this kind of behavior has objectively measurable negative consequences, and it’s immature to keep doing things that have negative consequences. However, conservative America measures maturity by how much people celebrates and defends this behavior.

The best example of this is far-right wing conservative Republican Christian’s extreme hatred of liberals (or “libtards” as they’re often called). As proof that conservatives hate liberals, tune into any Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly program. While those three individuals only speak for themselves, they have a huge, loyal following. Conservatives tune into those charismatic personalities for the same reason liberals tune into “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:” to hear someone say the things they want to hear so they can have their biases reconfirmed. We can point fingers at both audiences and say they’re guilty of being cognitive misers, but that’s beside the point I’m trying to make just now. The point is there’s a huge population of conservative Americans who hate liberals, and you can prove that there’s some truth to this by looking at the ratings conservative shock jocks get for bashing liberals. Or you could visit any conservative internet chat forum.

The problem with bashing liberals is that liberals aren’t the problem; they’re a scapegoat.

There’s no liberal agenda or conspiracy. There’s just a bunch of people in the world who don’t think the same as you, and that frightens you; and you respond to that fear with

hatred, which is all you really wanted all along; you weren’t looking for logical solutions to the world’s problems. You were looking for an enemy to blame.

You can beat the liberal straw man to death for the rest of your life, and it’s not going to solve any of the real-world problems that are having real, negative effects on your life. If you go far enough down the path of blaming another group of people for all your problems you’re eventually going to end up gassing innocent people in death camps.

That’s where that path leads, and I have no doubt that some of Fox News’ most loyal fans would love to repeat that failed solution to the world’s problems.

That’s not going to happen though, because the world is too small, and America is too diverse to let that happen. All liberal-bashing is actually going to accomplish is derailing all logical conversation about the world’s problems and thus enabling the continued existence and exacerbation of those problems. Even if that doesn’t lead to the collapse of modern civilization it’ll keep progress stagnated and trap millions (if not billions) of people in miserable poverty and oppression.

If you’d bother to listen to your opponents you’d realize you share the same hopes and values as most “liberals.” You’d also notice most Democratic politicians act the same as Republican politicians because all politicians only answer to their financial sponsors, and they all have the same financial sponsors. Indiscriminately hating politicians who call themselves Democrats and indiscriminately loving politicians who call themselves Republicans allows the overall political system to continue business as usual, and the businesses who sponsor politicians' careers are in the business of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Your indiscriminate support of the upper class (aka “job creators” as you've been told to refer to them as) isn’t making the world a better place. All you’re doing is indiscriminately supporting economic inequality. Indiscriminately opposing welfare, pensions and social services isn’t making the world a better place. It’s making the poor poorer so that the rich can get richer, and that wealth isn’t trickling down. The only thing trickling down is the blood and tears of the poor who have to resort to more desperate measures to stay alive and enjoy a moderate standard of living. If you want to solve America’s problems you need to focus your energy towards fixing campaign contributions and lobbying that allows big businesses to buy a monopoly on political influence.

What’s not going to help solve America’s problems is oppressing everyone who doesn’t share the same values as you. If all sin were legalized tomorrow do you know what would happen? Nothing. Everyone would keep sinning at the exact same rate they’re currently sinning. The only difference is sinners wouldn’t have to live in fear of oppressive Christian laws. That… and we could actually focus on the real issues that are driving America to the brink of collapse.

Sure, in some ways allowing sin makes you complicit in it, but at the same time, punishing sinners puts you in God’s shoes. God didn’t make you judge, jury and executioner. You were tasked with being God’s envoy’s not his right hand of judgment.

To that end, your witness would carry more weight if you weren’t famous all around the world for dogmatically oppressing everyone within your borders who doesn’t think exactly like you while gleefully bombing people outside your borders who don't think exactly like you.

I know a lot of conservative Americans have never left America or possibly even the state you were born in. So you may not have a strong frame of reference to judge how life could by any different, but you have the internet. You can talk to people from all over the world. I encourage you to seek out people from other countries and ask them what they think about Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and other conservative shock jocks. You may be surprised to learn that the entire world is either laughing at you, scared of you or they pity you. No outside, objective observers perceive you as the heroes you perceive yourselves to be.

It’s blatantly obvious to everyone but you that Fox News and all the celebrity conservative shock jocks who make a living off of bashing liberals are in it for the money and they’ll tell you any lie they can to make your blood boil, because the higher your blood pressure goes the higher their ratings go. The higher their ratings go, the more money they make. The conservative leaders you look up to treat you with complete and utter disrespect and contempt. They must hate you, because you wouldn’t lie to someone you love and trick them into blaming all their problems on an innocent scapegoat while manipulating you into defending the real source of your problems with blind, dogmatic faith.

On one level, my heart goes out to conservative America. Sure, we have our differences, but we agree on far, far, far more than we disagree on. Plus, we’re all humans. We’re all stuck in this life together. We all have to share this world. We come from the same evolutionary tree. On every level, we’re brothers and sisters. It hurts me to watch selfish sociopaths manipulate you into hurting yourself and wasting your life fighting a phantom enemy.

On the other hand, you scare the hell out of me. The smartest thing I can do is get as far away from you as possible, because you’re a mindless wrecking ball. By rights you should be ashamed of yourself, but you’re not, and you’ll hate me for trying to help you.

You’ll hate me for just holding up a mirror that shows your flaws.

Your behavior is a problem, and I can’t in good conscience be complicit in that problem.

So as long as you’re going to behave destructively I’m going to keep holding up a mirror to show you and the rest of the world what you really look like beneath the flag-waving, good Christian façade.

AN OPEN LETTER TO LIBERAL AMERICA I recently wrote a strongly worded letter to conservative America. So it's only fair that I send one to liberal America too.

Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my previous letter, there's no such thing as "liberal America." That's just a catch-all term conservatives use to lump everyone they disagree with together so they'll have someone to blame all their problems on. This makes it impossible to write a letter to liberals, but to be fair to conservatives I really need to say something. So I’m going to hazard some generalizations. If you consider yourself a liberal then all/some/or none of things I say may apply to you. If I say something that doesn't apply to you then it doesn't apply to you. So don't take it personally.

First of all, voting for Democrats isn't going to make the world a better place. Voting for Obama in the 2012 elections isn't going to make the world a better place. At best, voting Democratic is voting for the lesser of two evils.

Neither Democrat nor Republican politicians are accountable to their voters. They're only accountable to their financial sponsors. Those are the only people whose interests are represented in the government. That's why both Democrats and Republicans consistently pass legislation that helps make the rich richer and the poor poorer. That's why if you write to your Congressman your letter will get read by a young intern who will send you a meaningless form letter. Your political leaders don't represent you. They just endure you. If you continue voting for Democrats because you think they're going to change anything other than making the rich richer and the poor poorer then you're part of the problem.

This raises the question, "But if voting doesn't work then what can we do?" It's been my experience that 99 times out of 100 when someone asks, "Yeah, but what can we do?" it's not because they're looking for actual solutions that they can put at the top of their priority list of things to spend their free time on. They're saying it as an excuse to give themselves permission to throw their hands up in the air and quit thinking before they even started.

Let me ask you this, "What were you going to do?" Statistically speaking, you'll probably spend less than 1% of your time or money on humanitarian or activism-related activities.

You're going to spend more time shopping, watching TV and looking for "the one" than you're going to spend helping other people or trying to solve the world's problems.

You're going to spend most of your time working for a business that's making the owner, C.E.O. and investors filthy rich while the rest of the employees drown in debt and worry.

Sure, you may volunteer at the recycling center on the weekends. You may plant a tree on Arbor day. You might even have a recurring direct deposit to feed an African child.

But you just punch your humanitarian time card enough to feel smug. The real guiding star in your life is chasing a higher pay check so you can buy more consumer goods you

don't need that were made in a sweat shop by a child laborer in India, Vietnam, China or any of the other countries America exploits for its human resources.

The 1% you hate so much are so fat because you've dedicated your life to feeding them.

To the human beings who make all the cool stuff in your house that you don't need, you're the 1%. Your liberal beliefs don't make you a part of the solution, because 99% of the time you don't act on them. You spend that time being a part of the problem.

What can you do? Look around you. The American people are on autopilot. All they care about is eating, shopping and watching movies, and they'll defend their arrogance to the death. America is Idiocracy. There's no reasoning with these people. The best advice I can give you is to build a bunker and try to survive the apocalypse the American public is working so hard on bringing down on themselves.

If you really want to do something productive with your life, here are a few other suggestions: 1. Donate to free online schools like the Khan Academy. The world sucks because people are stupid. Enlightened, educated people equate to an enlightened society. If everyone in the world had free education they could all help themselves. Nothing will bring the world closer to utopia faster than free education.

2. Boycott the pop culture that's making you dumber. Turn off Jersey Shore and watch Stephen Hawking's Universe. Turn off Lady Gaga and listen to an audio book version of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." When you're finished with that then ask yourself what the next most important thing you can possible learn is. If you can't figure that out then devote your free time to figuring it out. Keep learning the most important things in descending order until you die.

3. If you know something really important that other people don't then devote your free time to telling people about it. The problem with the world isn't that we're talking too much and acting too little. We haven't talked enough yet. If we'd talked enough about the most important issues then everybody would be on the same page and we'd all be ready to act in unison. We're fractured because nobody knows what the hell is going on.

If you're not talking about the world's problems, identifying their causes, figuring out solutions and advocating them then you're part of the problem.

4. Don't go into debt buying junk you don't need. Debt is slavery. If you're a debt slave then you have no leverage to stand up for yourself. Spending your money responsible will free you. Of course, in a debt-driven, consumer economy we live in this will lower demand for products and thus lower demand for workers, and the whole system will break down. The solution to this problem isn't to keep eating your own tail. It wouldn't matter if there were no demand for products we don't need if we lived in sustainable cities instead of unsustainable suburbs where everything is expensive as possible. Make

your home and your city self-sufficient and you'll free yourself from the fear of destitution that keeps you locked in a cubicle dying inside every day.

5. If you get to the breaking point where you simply have to act in a big way immediately, don't dress up like a vagrant circus clown, bang on steel bongos and shout obnoxious, hostile catch-phrases at police in riot gear. The volume and conspicuousness of a protest isn't what makes it effective. The only reason protests are effective is because all the people in the street block traffic, which blocks commerce, which defeats the purpose of having a city or a civilization in the first place. If you want to organize a successful protest then have everyone dress in their Sunday best and go sit in the street and don't say a word. And don't move. And don't block just one street. Shut the whole city down.

6. Before you do that though, understand that the referees who ultimately decide the winner of class warfare are the police and the military. If they're against you then you have no chance of winning. If they're on your side then you have no chance of failing.

The real struggle of class warfare isn't at a protest. It's in the minds of the police and soldiers before they get the call to go break up a protest. If you're not directing your message towards the police and military you're wasting your time and money.