Fame

What happens when you turn 30 and the world forgets?
You realize that, for 30 years, you've lived in the shadows
And that, for 30 years, you built your life in the absence of everybody else's light.

And after 30 years, you became my brightest star in the sky.
For you learned how to keep everyone else from extinguishing your flame.
I wish I could learn from you how to light up the night sky
Without feeling that nobody will come

For what makes the glory
Of a pure and unadulterated light
Is the notion that when the flame finally does die,
The only thing that will remain is the silent night sky again.

Dreams

The difference between dreams and delusions

Is that you wake up from a dream.

The difference between destiny and delusions

Is the magic whose existence is enabled,

Once fully awakened in reality.

High

Last decade, you helped me come out of the closet.
Last year, you helped me find the light.
Last month, you guided me to the lift.
Yesterday, you taught me why I need to wait
Today, I'm pressing the button,
In a moment, we step forward, together,
For tomorrow, we awake
All aboard the next level.

Commencement

It was a bright summer day in June,

Our class was set to graduate in 2004.

The skies were clear and sunny,

But commencement was held indoors,

For what’s more important than the color of your stadium’s grass

When we’ve got something to say

About the stains you’ve paid so handsomely to erase?

I grow weary of being told to sit down

And to listen to your consultants and your promises.

I grow impatient when we cry out “YES WE CAN!”

Only to have you mock the fire, spreading throughout the land.

Thank you for playing the game.

It is our turn to speak.

You had your shot.

It is our turn to show you

Why the future is worth fighting for.

The simplest and the oldest lessons endure.

In a world where everyone

Shouts for likes,

Mines for shares,

Sometimes, what we need to do is

Tune out the noise,

Tune into our soul.

He’s teaching, we need to be quiet.

Russian Influence

I felt something,

Something big,

Something that echoed farther than I ever could imagine.

Was it divine?

Was it destiny?

Was it simply a system resonance 

That I unknowingly tapped into?

For when the world reverberates

Those who lie on top

Are the first to fall off.

And those who sense

Can only feel the dizziness of the stir that surrounds them.

And when the world calls out to your heart,

You have the choice

To let the melody enchant your soul

Or to let the resonance shatter it.

Will you opt to tune in?

Sheep

It has always been known

That slavery exists

In whatever form the present permits

What is not always known

Is the peon class

Of the unfortunate and the unenlightened

Who vote against their own interests and dreams,
And vote against freeing their fellow Americans from today's oppressors.

Because they would rather vote,
In fear, against something
Rather than vote for a dream worth living.

DGAF

The "bad" news is that
I no longer give any fucks.

The good news is that
I no longer give any fucks
About the things I was too nervous
To take apart and fix.

What is it that distinguishes confidence from hubris?
A dose of humility,
Rooted not in apathy,
But rather a healthy patience,
Because time must be your friend, not your enemy.

Patience is a virtue

My biggest flaw is that I lack the patience to break down the lens and biases of the individuals that I need to empower and recruit towards the fulfillment of good.

Coronation Speech

For my 30th birthday party,

I prepared the following spoken word

On the topic of the election propaganda cycle.

IRL

I find it fascinating how social media, over time, has driven America from a "me" generation to a "ME! ME! ME!" generation.

Look at this election, and look at your Facebook.

Just make sure to btw check on the people and things in front of you, too.

Ignorance is sometimes bliss

When we fail to speak,
We don't learn.

When we fail to learn,
We don't grow.

When we fail to grow,
We stagnate.

As we stagnate over time,
Temptations elsewhere call.

Make sure those temptations
Are not EVIL
Whether Mr President be a wolf in red.
Or whether Madam President be a snake in blue.

Loud TRUMPS Love

The Sheep seek a dramatic,
over-simplified,
Packaged and consumed
Straw Man
So that a Real Woman can
Lead us in 8 more years.

We The People
Cannot afford to Wait any longer
For our voices to be heard.
By "her" - by whoever.
Whatever person, place, or thing elects to FIX the problem,
Rather than exploit it for feminismOr for some other-colored banner.

Humanity sucks sometimes When it comes to thinking long term.
We're so consumed with ourselves
That we miss the bigger picture.
Facebook is the mirror
That provokes
Rather than commits.

I have HOPE that our country
Is distinct from that looking glass
In that we will work together to fix who we see in that mirror
Rather than the color of the frame.
This is a fix That we need To identify,
Not optimize for an election.

Shock and awe will always
TRUMP common sense.

Love of Country

We are a nation
That must start
To connect the dots
That God Had Always
Blesseth Upon Our Nation
With the blessings of
Our technology,
My performance,
And of course,
His Divine Providence.

For it is without GOD
That this nation will continue suffering
Regardless of the best, or of the brightest
Among all of Mankind’s Bells & Whistles.

GOD comes in many forms
It’s hard to really see.
But I Believe that He
Ultimately comes in the form
Of a divine projection unto your soul -
A projection of your dreams
A projection of your past
And ultimately a vision into your future
All based in the safe, secure, reliable,
And solidly grounded system of the present.

But it is the fog that stirs fear,
But never fear, right, for the bell tolls?
For whom? For whomever buys the nicest bell?
Or is it for whomever throws the grandest balls?
Because after all,
When we check ourselves,
We make better sure we don’t wreck ourselves.
No wonder OHIO has so many Presidents.
We have some common fucking sense, People.

Maid in China

When you discover
How the glass ceilings
And the sparkly gates
Surrounding us all
Are, at the end of the t’work-day,
MADE IN CHINA.
You discover the missing soul
TO AMERICA THE GREAT.

The WE generation

It is far more effective
For We The People
To come together
To repair and replace the aching limbs of our great nation.

No matter which branch of our nation
No matter the size of the twig that we hold

We all come together at the trunk
The trunk provides for all
From the earth through which our nation is rooted
To the bright green leaves that seek the morning sun.

The bounty of our collective energy
Is realized not only when we maintain our branches and leaves
But more importantly, when we elect to take care of our shared trunk.

For when our trunk dies,
Our nation falls to its knees.
It is then that our enemies knock on our stoop
To finish destroying us
And to pick up the pieces of our
Divided and broken home.

My Privilege and My Precious Vote

Quit bitching about my privilege if you’re not going to also consider my struggle.

I don't buy into this "PRIVILEGE" argument that I often hear discussed – mostly among the “holier-than-thou” libs out there. WHY are you electing to use my privilege against me? What is it about my identity – among both the privileges AND the struggles that it comprises – that is so suddenly objectionable through your lens, due to this newfound “privilege” buzzword? Why is it YOU who gets to define my privilege for me? Nobody (not even my loved ones) will ever have a 100% complete picture of my "privileges" and “struggles” to criticize.

Nonetheless, your unique life story indeed does entitle yourself privileges, just as it weighs you with oppression. However, I do not like it when others try to define for me what those privileges and oppressions are. But I DO appreciate genuinely their good-intentioned insight!

Individual experiences, "privileges," oppressions, etc. notwithstanding: We need "heart-soul agreement." We need CHANGE. And we need it NOW. For all of us – TOGETHER here. This great diverse nation should not be divided into demographic segments and political parties. Today’s Americans are more complex, unique,and fluid in their identities than ever before. To call us blacks, gays, liberals, progressives, whatever – it TAKES AWAY from my individuality and the great diversity we share as a nation. All for what – to get elected? If we are too truly have a conversation on how to make America great, we should be focusing on common goals – not talking points. Therefore, I invite OHIO to COME TOGETHER - to BUILD THIS COUNTRY UP AGAIN - regardless of your color or other preferences - OUR collective end product,

The United States of America!!!

This snake is neither privileged nor oppressed; it is DEAD.

Because divided we fall.

If we were to let that occur, that is the point at which we WILL have a COMMON struggle - in chains.

I LIKE TRUMP

I’m scared of hell about this fact

I think I’m starting to LIKE Donald Trump.  

Not only that, I’m becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of a President Trump.  

If you’ve read to this point and decided not to unfriend me from Facebook-land, then hear me out for a second.

I fell in love with Bernie Sanders in the late 2000’s, years prior to this present election cycle.  

The issues that emerged with Sanders on my eye were a broad form of economic populism based on a broad dissatisfaction at the long-term economic trends of the past 40 years.  The middle-class of the United States of America has long been extracted – whether or not its people or its leaders choose to admit this.  Unchecked global arbitrages among labor safeguards, environmental standards, safety standards have sustained a “race to the bottom” among multinational companies and the nations’ leaders throughout the world that empower them in order to keep rich and happy its fickle citizenry.  I was raised in Appalachia, where I witnessed through all 18 years of my childhood the steady decay of the factories, the businesses, and the communities that powered the Ohio Valley.  It was simply cheaper to produce steel in China, because its government ran the steel companies there, allowing them to absorb losses from selling under cost and to skirt Chinese safety/environmental oversight, specifically in order to displace American companies out of the steel market.

Instead of understanding this dissatisfaction and addressing it, our nation’s leaders (i.e. Hillary, Bush) insist on continuing a neoliberal agenda of global interconnectivity through unchecked free trade with hostile nations and entanglement of our resources into foreign conflicts. 

Meanwhile, in the absence of any viable economic/diplomatic solution to address this longstanding issue of chronic job losses among “blue-collar” communities, Trump has managed to turn this broad economic populism into a robust scorched-earth anti-immigrant campaign.

The distinction between Bernie and Trump is this: who do we blame?  Multi-national corporations or immigrants?  The choice is clear.  

Hillary (and her husband Bill) have both abstained from this problem; instead, she will use the race and demographics game to engineer her electoral victory.  It is doubtful that she will depart from the economic advisers (including her husband) and the foreign policy cohorts that have been the architect of this 40-year philosophy.  Her campaign strategy against Trump completely ignores these longstanding economic headwinds, and she has apparently decided instead to focus on lampooning Trump’s character.  Based on what I’ve seen in this primary so far, that seems a risky bet for this country.

What emerges from the Trump campaign is a story of safeguarding America.  We do need to safeguard America.  The question that will be critical in this election – when it comes to Trump vs Bernie – is to who to safeguard it against – corporate greed or immigrants.

Immigrants drive the modern US economy. Hope guides us towards tackling the impotence of our political system by addressing the outsize influence of corporate money in American politics. That is why Bernie Sanders is really the man who best epitomizes how to persist as the Greatest Nation on Earth throughout the 21st Century.

2-3-4: A “bi”-partisan 3-step solution to a 4-way race in 2016

Background

Despite the evidence so far in this election that the American People are rejecting “politics as usual,” pundits, politicians, elections officials, political parties, etc. continue to live under the outdated framework of a two-party paradigm, the “left” versus the “right.”  Already, the People see how the two-party infrastructure has relied upon contrast, conflict, and campaigns to sustain a government stalemate, in lieu of compromise, governability, and sustainability.  Despite its perverse effects in disproportionally empowering corporate interests in the US political process, the “Citizens United” decision by the US Supreme Court had the unspoken benefit of unshackling our political system from the two political party establishments.  Money now flows freely between super-PAC’s, candidate PAC’s, industry advocacy groups, unions, etc. without the intervention and influence customary to the two major political parties. 

This has opened up the domain of the political space from a line between a “left” and a “right” side, to a more complex and multi-dimensional space.  Is it rightly “conservative” to advocate for government intervention in intimate family decisions such as marriage and childbearing?  Is it rightly “progressive” to rely on cheap imports to enable cost effective deployment of clean-energy solutions that can compete with conventional, fossil fuel technologies?

Trump has upended the convention of the Republican Party as we know it.  Furthermore, in the likely event that moderates coalesce around a “reasonable” nominee like Kasich or Jeb Bush, Trump will likely defect to wage an independent campaign.  This would present a grave potential for “spoiler effect,” effectively splitting the votes among the base.  Many would argue that this amounts to a tyrannical strategic move that would hand the election over to the unified opposition.

However, the rise of Bernie Sanders against the favored frontrunner Hillary Clinton challenges this calculus.  With Trump’s independent campaign in play, no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, there is the unique opportunity here to wage a third-party campaign oriented to the “left,” without the spoiler effect concern that typically prevents such strategic action.  If both Bernie and Hillary ran –- one as the official Democratic nominee and the other as an additional third-party bid in addition to Trump’s – this offers a 4-way race in the general election.

This election's calculus yields more than 2 possible answers.

To prevent the further chaos and division that such a general election dynamic may present, I would like to propose 3 easy steps to reforming American elections.  These three steps would benefit all voting citizens of the US (whether they identify as “left” or “right”):

1. Automate the drawing of electoral district boundaries.
2.  Establish instant runoff voting as a means to foster third-party development and to give people more choice
3. End the Electoral College.

Automate the drawing of electoral district boundaries.

In today’s data-driven age, when it’s easier than ever to compile data from devices and social networks to pinpoint who lives where within a few meters, why haven’t we figured out a way to institutionalize an automated process for drawing electoral district boundaries?  Thanks to institutionalized gerrymandering, our democracy has devolved to the point in which voters no longer select their politicians; rather, politicians select their voters.  In the meantime, optimization software has already been developed that will draw district boundaries, even while respecting as best as it can local boundaries defined by townships, cities, counties, etc. (think of it as a “snap- to-grid” function for the electoral map).  It does this through an algorithm whose logic can be made accessible to the public, so as to prevent any attempt at quietly hijacking the procedural steps for any one entity’s benefit.  I propose we banish all factors that have traditionally been used to administer electoral district boundaries (yes, this does include minority and other demographically defined districts), and replace it with a computer process that is simple to understand.  It will save lots of money, and it will eliminate the human and special interest element altogether from this mapmaking equation.  Plus, the maps will be prettier.

[Source: Brian Olson, “2010 Redistricting Result” website: http://bdistricting.com/]

Instant runoff voting

Allow for voters to select multiple candidates, in ranked fashion, for each position.  One way to implement this is the instant runoff election.  In this process, the ballots are collected, and the votes tallied.  With these totals, an iterative counting method is used in which the first candidate to receive a majority of the votes is declared the winner.  With this method, first, the #1 selection from each voter is counted and totaled.  If a candidate receives more #1 selections than 50% of the total number of voters, then they win.  If not, then the last-place candidate is eliminated from the race.  If you voted for the loser candidate, I’m sorry.  But the candidate you chose for your #2 selection (if you chose one at all) will now gain a vote from your ballot.  This occurs for all ballots who voted the loser #1.  If a candidate receives enough of those “loser runner-up votes” to put their total above 50%, then they win.  If not, then this process repeats, traversing up the ladder of remaining last-place candidates until somebody finally surpasses the 50% mark.  The important thing to note here is that, at no point, was there a “wasted vote” doomed to “not count.”  Additionally, this system does not penalize voters who may only want to vote for one candidate.  Each voter still counts equally.

Because an instant runoff ballot would allow individual voters to vote for multiple candidates, it does not require the voter to choose “the lesser of two evils” in their candidate choice.  In many cases, especially in a close general election under the present-day two-party system, voters might be compelled to vote for their preferred mainstream candidate instead of a candidate from a similar minor party, with whom they may share more views in common.  This happened in the 2000 election, when many Green Party voters faced the choice of whether to vote for Ralph Nader or to vote for Al Gore out of fear of a George Bush win under the “spoiler effect.”  In fact, it’s still unclear as to the extent of this effect on the razor-thin margins between Gore and Bush.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Tea Party didn’t have to fight with the Republicans, but could actually work alongside each other, as one would expect with folks with similar philosophies?  Similarly, wouldn’t it be nice if similar conflicts didn’t have to exist between environmental progressives and labor unions within the Democratic party?  A few simple but fundamental electoral reforms, like those outlined above, could make this reality.  And if we could eliminate issues related to primaries that are skewed by low overall voter turnout, then hey, we can save some more money by eliminating primaries altogether, since minor party candidates can now be represented in a big-tent general election with ranked ballot choices.

In Conclusion

I would recommend that folks from both sides work together on framing and implementing these electoral reforms, with the dual purpose of allowing more diversity in our political discourse, but without the divisiveness and destructive rhetoric that has characterized this election so far.

I'm Mike George, I am a maverick, and I approve this message.

Guns & Freedom

In the good ol' days, owning a gun was seen as a noble sign of individual responsibility and the protection of your hard-earned property and family. Now, any two-cent redneck buys a gun from Wal-Mart on their way to the nearest Donald Trump rally to show off their goods to those who enable such behavior.

The flamboyence of such a perverted lifestyle choice needs to be stopped at once. It's not natural, and it's obviously not what God designed men to do. Quit waving around your unnatural abomination, enabled by an entire underground horde of like-minded sinners throughout the GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH, producing and marketing these disgusting products, that we, as God-loving people, are forced to explain to our children.

We don't take kindly to having our tranquil communities interrupted by a bunch of flaming gun owners, trying to corrupt our children's values with their perverted ways. Tell these gun blowhards that they can move back to Cabela's or Alabama or wherever, and quit tainting our communities with these NRA queers.

trump-burn

Dissatisfaction at the two-party duopoly in Washington, fed by a bipartisan-media-controlled two-party state that presently strangles our country and works to amplify this stalemate for the interest of readership and corporate profit.

I adore Hillary; it's a shame that Hillary has unwittingly become part of that status quo, because her stellar resume would otherwise seal the deal with the American public. But Bernie Sanders is far more reflective of the issues that people (including many progressives) have yearned for, with little to show for from the Democratic establishment.

We'll see if Hillary can survive this anti-duopoly up-swelling better than the incumbent Republicans on their side. So far, she's maneuvering much more gracefully than those candidates.

unsure emoticon
Here's a succinct 3-step proposal for any candidate to propose, in order to address the dynamic described above:

1. End the electoral college.
2. Automate allocation of districts to end gerrymandering.
3. End first-past-the-past voting; replace with ranked-ballot (instant runoff) elections.

This would enable the multifaceted conversation that's going on around the country, thanks to us having more than two choices, without fracturing the large tent of the mainstream parties. Think if we had a system that rewarded candidates and parties for offering choice, rather than punish them with a system that stokes division rather than drive collaboration.

Whatever your party affiliation, the 3 steps outlined would likely benefit your candidate, but without driving the wedge that the "other guys" are likely trying to exploit. When our politics are so sorely constrained by gamesmanship, it's time to shake up the game, and change the rules a little bit.