Catering to the Rich

Being mostly a science fiction and fantasy writer who had cancer and has a part-time job, I mostly do not delve into political writing much. But this obvious kleptocracy needs comment. So much of a better future has been sacrificed to feed the greed of rich people in this nation, so I ask...

What does catering to the rich cost us?

A stagnant middle class.

More poor people. Fewer programs and funding to raise them out of poverty.

Misery and pain from the lack of medical care. Universal health care would solve this, but catering to the rich prevents its adoption.

Less money for science and technology development. Which means we fall behind other countries.

More violent weather, because global warming is not being dealt with, mostly because of rich oil men spreading around money in our government.

The corruption of some Christians, turning themselves into satanists to cater to the rich...and my apologies to real satanists, who act more like Christians than fundamentalist Christians and evangelicals do.

Betrayal of Jesus. The New Testament is straight up on what happens to people who won't do a thing to help the poor. There is no injunctional in the NT for using government as a tool to help the poor and the sick. None. Got this straight from my own reading of the Bible and a Jesuit. This is also a betrayal of Buddha and the Way. Nothing good will come of this. The lies about not using government to help are spread by agents of the rich, who want to keep some Christians enslaved to the rich.

College kids so poor after getting a degree, they dwell in near poverty for years.

Working class people suffer from poverty, poor health, and cannot afford the Votech training to keep their skills buffed.

The space program is so weak now, because of the rich. The universe waits for us, but no, we gotta give the rich what they want so they will continue their bribes.

Unnecessary wars, fought for the rich.

Huge "defense budget" to fund the military needed to control the worldwide economic empire.

Soldiers who unnecessarily die in unnecessary wars.

A weaker military. A military is only as strong as the nation it fights for. It is a myth that tech can compensate or that there are cheap ways to wage war. Rich guys like their cocks sucked, they aren't into reading or studying. They are the ultimate greedheads. Greed is not a positive force, it is destructive and like a locust invasion, a swarm that consumes everything. They also have no idea who Sun Tzu is.

Our national education institutions undermined to enrich already rich people.

No improvement or maintenance of infrastructure.

Slowest, most expensive internet of all industrialized nations.

The middle and lower classes mined for their wealth.

Oppression by the police and using them to mine money from the middle and lower classes.

Remember, good and evil exist. The rich choose only themselves, which mean they are evil, Satan's buddies.

So...you like sucking a rich man's cock? His come must be sweet, since so many politicians all over the USA, not just in Washington, do it constantly. This is something I will not do. If forced, I will bite their dicks off.

This also applies to some Dems as well as Republicans...though Republicans are hogs to rich men's come.

The solution? Me, I view all this as direct attacks on democracy, on a form of treason. We use ropes on traitors.

How Punching Nazis in the face Accomplishes Nothing

The big thing now is beating up people who are supposedly NeoNazis. “Punch a Nazi in the face” is a popular theme in Facebook and that Twitter thing. The people preaching these ideas have the minds of uneducated children.

Why do I say that? Here’s why.

1. This technique has been tried before. It doesn’t work. Worse, it is counterproductive. We know this…from HISTORY! That’s the subject most of you slept through in High School and college. This street violence has been tried in many places by the opponents of fascism. It’s been done in Italy, Spain, several South American countries, and in Germany several years before the elections that eventually brought Hitler to power. Can you see the pattern? IT DOESN’T WORK!

2. Using street violence to stop a movement that thrives on it? Using street violence against an organization that has a command structure — -beating up the “privates” in the movement? What good does that do, when their very leaders consider them expendable. It also feeds into the belief systems fascists are spreading. This violence scares and angers voters, driving them away from fascist political opponents. It sours the image of progressivism, which is something the billionaires who control this country want to do, to destroy progressivism. They want to destroy the progressive movement by any means. We have seen this in Germany and elsewhere.

Also, such actions misdirect a shallow uneducated mind — — especially about the use of violence. The actions appear to serve no purpose except self-gratification.

3. To use violence for political purposes, this is what is required. When done properly, the enemies of democracy and the people are defeated.

A. Have read extensively, especially Sun Tzu, Carl Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and history.

B. Know the structure of the opponent’s movement. Is the command structure vulnerable to violent disruption? Where is the danger? If it is the leaders of the movement, act against them.

C. Realize violence is a tool. If you want to use it, be committed to it. If you aren’t willing to kill people, then give it up!

IF YOU ARE NOT A LIFE TAKER, THAT’S FINE, BUT IF YOU WANT TO BE, THERE IS A RIGHT WAY AND A WRONG WAY.

HOW TO KILL PEOPLE

1. Study the target. Not just the target, but all of those in his life and in his area as he moves around. Watch for security. Read a little of the history of assassination, the key to a successful action comes from the pages of history. If he has a regular route, steal some uniforms and road crew gear. Plant a command-control mine in the road. Blow him up when he drives over it. Reference assassinations in Italy.

2. Single or group attacking with knives or guns during a politician meeting and greeting event. Not many of the attackers will survive, but for a sure kill, someone willing to sacrifice their lives for the kill can’t be stopped. Assassinations in the Philippines and other places to be references.

3. Same as above, except using a bomb strapped to the body. This was the technique in a failed attempt on Hitler — — Hitler blew off the event and stayed away. Also assassinations in India. Fooled you, didn’t I — — you thought the inspiration was from Israel.

4. Ambush. Combination of small arms and an improvised explosive device.

5. Masquerade. How the Egyptian ruler Anwar Sadat was taken down. Very effective, don’t know why it isn’t used more often, especially in the USA with vast numbers of cops from different agencies from different agencies swarming around politicians.

6. Sniper — — not very effective — — given the swarms of counter-snipers around most politicians. Hollywood’s in love with it — — an indication this technique should be skipped.

7. Remember, assassins are not terrorists. Mass casualties is not the point, the death of a single person is the goal. Terrorists are lazy shits who suffer from poor thinking. One can accomplish much more change with the more gentle killing of a single person than wanton slaughter. They’d know this if they studied a little history.

Do you want blood on your hands? This is the way to do it. It is not as effective as another technique, a technique that overthrew the racist order in the USA and defeated England and freed India.

MAIN POINT! Non-violent actions have a long history of success in American society, including economic actions, boycotts, sabotage, monkeywrenching, and wrecking property. But never aimed at people. If you are not committed to the use of real violence — -assassination, and bombing of elites (never attack middle and lower classes, people you are fighting for, or even allow your violence to become random) — — then give it up! You can make a better, more successful non-violent action that can change the future.

Because that’s what you’re after, isn’t it? To change the future, to make it a hospitable place for everyone. To restore democracy.

SO NUT UP, get educated, and decide if you want to change things or play games. The best way, MLK and non-violence. Better results. If you want to use violence to effect, you will have to kill people, get real blood on your hands. You don’t have to go that way. Be different than the ones you oppose…choose non-violence.

Let the future we want come into being. Let us purge the corruption from our government. Hell’s bells, let’s take a page out of the ancient Athenians and the Romans: let us strip the rich of their power, maybe even exile them! Let the delightful future where all lives matter be born!

My battle with cancer: Recovery and teeth...

I don't know what I did to deserve the wonderful friends and allies I have. Thank you all so much! I have changed my plan a little. Getting my teeth done (or would "installed" be a better term) is now number one on the list. It would improve my health and my outlook. The moment, with your help, that I can take off several weeks or a month, I'm gonna get the teeth done. I'll start the preliminary work of talking to dentists now, since I can go to preliminary inspections and it won't affect my ability to speak.

I have great affection for you all in my heart.

.....

Part of this decision, it is hard for me now to even chew soft things. I mostly subsist on things I can drink. And also, the nerve damage is inside my mouth, too. I can't feel half my tongue or the left half of the inside of my mouth. I thought about it a little, this is not a good situation, to have radiation or tumor destroyed teeth in such a mouth. The teeth come first as soon as possible. It probably doesn't help my mental outlook that I cannot eat healthy food, mostly living on those supplementary old-folks drinks.

Anyway, I hope I explained everything. Thanks so, so, so much for standing with me in this harsh time. You are in my heart forever, my friends, my allies.

 

https://www.gofundme.com/rpn9r9-support-for-surgery

Star Wars: Day of the Jedi, Childhood - Opening Crawl

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Star Wars

Day   of   the   Jedi


Ten years after the Battle of Endor,
the power of the IMPERIAL REMNANT
increases.  Though the EMPEROR is long
dead, his military continues to spread
war, misery, and slavery across the galaxy.

Jedi Master LUKE SKYWALKER has moved
to restore the JEDI to their rightful place
as peacekeepers of the galaxy at his JEDI ACADEMY
on Yavin 4.  But the revolts of the dark Jedi JEREC
and Luke's renegade student DESANN have undermined
his attempts.  Luke and the remaining Jedi
spread out among the stars in search of others
like themselves.  The power of their enemies grows.

Meanwhile, far beneath the towering spires of Coruscant,
a miracle occurs.
Frustrated, The Force,
the voice and power
of the Living Universe,
is taking a hand,
Summoning to it in a loving embrace
A teenage girl named JADEN KORR,
who feels a hidden power growing within her….


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Links:
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://www.gofundme.com/lastcomma

Star Wars: New Jedi, Childhood - Preface

    This is a complete re-imagining of the Star Wars universe in the years after the fall of the Emperor. I picked and chose from various ideas and characters in the Extended Universe, not feeling at all bound by anything other than the events of the original three films. The project was inspired by the last of the Jedi Knight video games, Jedi Academy. I found it in the discount bin at a Walmart. This is also a complete rejection of the recent Star Wars films. I'll repeat that: the new films PLAY NO ROLE AT ALL HERE. This is what Leia, Han, and Luke would have been. No fan service, no keeping Han an outlaw smuggler because that's what the "fans" want to see. We even see the main characters of the original films evolve, as humans are prone to do. Han becomes a leader of soldiers, a general. Luke accepts his destiny as the first Jedi of the New Order. Leia becomes a Jedi and later a leader of the New Republic. Sometimes life insists that you change, regardless of your desire to stay the same. That's what I liked about the Expanded Universe, not only the acceptance of the reality of change, but telling new stories.
    This is a labor of love, not money. I'm not a greedy studio executive sitting in his office at Disney, trying to figure out a way to trick addled Star Wars fans out of their hard-earned money.
    I've been a professional writer since 1989, not a very successful one, but I have the habits of a professional. I wrote every day, no matter what job I have or had, and I had a lot of jobs. Then my dad died and I took over his job as caregiver to my mom. She had Parkinson's related dementia. A long, long career as a 24/7 caregiver began. My ability to write went away. I took care of Mom and I read a little during the day. At nights after she went to bed, I played video games and chatted with friends online. Jedi Academy captured my attention. I discovered the large modding community associated with the game. I also discovered a large group of gamers who liked to play the lead character, Jaden Korr, as a young woman. Some also favored playing her as a female twi'lek. It's built into the game. The player can choose both the species and gender they wish to play.
    Perhaps because it was an extension of the game, of pure escapist play, I began to write little stories during the day while sitting with Mom. Her dementia meant she had to be supervised. I also had to help her around the house and prepare her meals. No time for anything more than a few scribbled notes. I eventually found several women to give her baths and clean house a couple times a week. I still couldn't work on my own fiction, but at least I could write about Jaden, who had become a teenage girl in the little stories I wrote. The game gives her a lightsaber right at the start. I knew from my limited reading in Star Wars Expanded Universe lore that this meant she was a gray Jedi, one on the Path alone. I began to read more in the Extended Universe.
    One thing that helped me in this: my mom liked to watch the Star Wars movies almost as much as the Lord of the Rings films. So we watched them, not as often as Lord of the Rings, but often enough to embed them all in my mind. It was the action, you see. She couldn't remember enough of the plot or the dialog to follow a conventional film, but the surface texture of the Star Wars movies were perfect in their constant action. Lord of the Rings had those beautiful images to capture her eye, but Star Wars had the simplistic action to keep her attention. Underneath the action, over time, I detected both the immense flaws of Lucas as a writer and the hints both he and his co-writers put into the story, hints of a deeper story. I name Leigh Brackett as the source of these...hints. She is sometimes known by her nom de guerre: Queen of the Space Opera. Lucas is no Tolkien and that's too bad, because the potential for a deeply imagined fictional world was there, as potentially rich as Tolkien's work. But no one saw it. Everything was superficial...until I played Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Like a baseball bat to the head! So it is possible to "Tolkienize" Star Wars!
    The takeaway from KOTOR comes, I believe, from Kreia: it was never about the Republic. This was an eternal war of beliefs, with the reality of the Force at the center of it all.
    Lucas borrowed the idea of the Force from the Chinese concept of Chi (or Qi), but the concept appears in various forms in other religions. The Prana of Hinduism. The Mana of the Polynesians. The Odic Force of Baron Carl von Reichenbach, inspired by the Norse god Od. The Iroquois Orenda. The Way of the Tao. The Holy Ghost in Christianity. These are deep roots.
    He never followed this thread. Too bad.
    Two other threads Lucas never dealt with...
    One, Obi-Wan's line right before Vader kills him. "Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can imagine." I guess Lucas thought it was just another throw-away line. But not me. Combined with my thoughts about the Tao, about Qi, about Prana, and how this related to the Force in this fictional universe, I began to have ideas about just what it meant, how it could be portrayed in a story.
    Two, and here is a central flaw in Lucas as a storyteller. Just what, exactly, was the Sidious up to? And why were the Jedi so easily defeated? Before, the Jedi were brought nearly to obliteration by immense Sith armies, in wars that devesatated the galaxy, nearly made extinct, along with all life, by that  abomination, the Great Hunger, Darth Nilhius. Just one schemer and a couple of henchmen bring down the Jedi?
    First, what does the Force want? If it is the voice of the living universe, what does life want? Were the Jedi somehow weakened because of this voice? And how is this related to Sidious's wishes?
    As I cared for my mother, and in the years since her death, and my near-death from cancer, I have explored these themes through the character of Jaden Korr.
    Welcome to her world.


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Links:
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://www.gofundme.com/lastcomma

Who's the Guilty One Now?

I've just got to get caught up on posting my essays! There's a backlog of them five miles high!

Just a final thought before sleep. Back when I taught adjunct, students were constantly complaining about the Romans, making moral judgements about this past civilization. "They had slavery!" "They conquered other nations!" "They did this! They did that!" I could hear the moral superiority in their voices.

What would the Romans say about us? If they could speak to us, they would condemn us as bloodthirsty monsters. "Are you guys insane? What's the matter with you? You killed around 170 million people due to war and massacre in the 20th Century!! You built bombs to destroy entire cities! Why would you do that? You must be insane! You in the USA, even our slaves had rights by the first century CE! We gave them a path to freedom and even citizenship! We didn't oppress them and force them to live apart from us! What the hell is wrong with you? Some of our emperors were of African descent! Even our gladiators were freaking volunteers! We had healthcare for everyone at temples of Asclepius, at military hospitals for veterans, even a sliding scale for private physicians! We fed the poor! You starve and mistreat the lower classes! Wherever we went, we built roads and supplied clean drinking water to cities. You let your infrastructure rot! You let citizens drink poisoned water! Damned barbarians! And you have the effrontery to claim us as your cultural ancestors!!"

So don't be so proud of our morality. Just the numbers alone show we don't have any. We make the Romans look like saints by comparison. The Romans would spit on us for our kill-crazy behavior.




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Links:
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
http://www.rpbird.com/
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https://www.gofundme.com/cancersurvival
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https://www.facebook.com/rpbirdwriter
http://rpbird.blogspot.com/

Mystification 01

What would timeless beings look like to us? We are time-bound, our thoughts, our perceptions, even our biology seemingly linked to the arrow of time. But timelessness might be a real thing and transfinite beings might be all around us. We would see them through our time-bound eyes. They would age, they would die. Except they wouldn't. It would be a trick played on us because we are embedded in spacetime, we are linked to the sensation of time. We would be incapable of seeing the timeless as timeless.

What's more, time is variable. Our sense of it is affected by the physical properties of matter. Gravity can distort time because it distorts spacetime and time is fundamentally linked to space. What people don't realize about this weirdness, it's been proven. Einstein's theory of general relativity has passed every last test put to it. From distortions in astronomical observations due to the curvature of spacetime to the slower decay of atoms when accelerated to a percentage of the speed of light, general relativity has passed the test. It's real.

It's also essentially timeless, since time is bound up with spacetime and highly malleable. Time does not exist as a separate dimension or quantity. Yet we are time-bound.

Where does time come from? Or our sense of it. Quantum entanglement, that spooky action at a distance predicted, and once again, proved to exist. Time, or our experience of it, is an emergent phenomenon...

What is an emergent phenomenon? Generally speaking, an large-scale event or object or aspect of existence derived from small components or tiny events. Like the giant termite mounds in Africa are an emergent phenomenon from the simple behaviors of the termites themselves.

Oh, man, have I gone far afield from from a little fictional thought experiment...not my intention.

Just this: we could not see the true nature of transfinite beings because of our time-bound existence. We would perceive the transfinite or timeless as temporal creatures like ourselves. We would see them age and die, even though they do not age and die. Inside the spacetime bubble of our universe, we are time-bound. But this is not true of outside observers. A tiny bit of this has been experimentally proven in physics experiments involving entanglement.

What we perceive as reality might not be...real.

To go into more detail would require hours of study and even then I might get it wrong. I just don't have the math (manifolds and topological space for instance, that goes way, way beyond Calc 3 and differential equations, the level at which I stalled out way back in college) and the knowledge of quantum theory (I stalled out at Engineering Physics II) to deal with it. My brain hurts.


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Links:
http://amazon.com/author/rpbird
http://www.rpbird.com/
https://www.gofundme.com/lastcomma
https://www.gofundme.com/cancersurvival
https://twitter.com/rpbirdwriter
https://www.facebook.com/rpbirdwriter
http://rpbird.blogspot.com/