Post Alpaca Lips Posts

Re-Imagine ( pic from east side of our yard) First published on Medium . Today’s Republicans see politics through the eyes of a states’ rights republic; Democrats have a We The People , democracy perspective. Everyone voting, and counting every vote, is a primary objective of most liberals, progressives, and other leftwing Americans. Conservatives are less anchored to such popular election concepts. Of course, that view is more prevalent with far right conservative politicians, pundits, and partisans. The current electoral college system that makes the senate so powerful, as to representing the number of states rather than the number of voters, is bolstered by the reduction of one person, one vote value in our Constitution’s republic portion. While Republicans will say the United States is a republic, I take the view that we are a democracy with various limitations , or checks and balances, related to a republic, like senators and representatives. It is possible to reduce, increase, ...

Crisis Blizzard  Essay first published on Medium . Consider first the French Revolution. Today, many American conservatives demonize it, and denigrate the Age of Enlightenment because of the mob mentality excesses in its last few years , and final grisly outcome as well as the status-quo upsetting ideas the philosophes produced. In the late 18th century, Sir Edmund Burke feared their radical ideas, also propagated by Thomas Paine, could spread across the channel, but thought incrementalism was the best way for Britain to avoid such tumult, and that the nation’s generational continuity held the answer to its future thriving.  However, it was his almost servile linkage to this institutional progression , derived at that time from an aristocratic “DNA” that we are concerned with here. He figured minor tweaks indicated by a proper structure of the forefathers’ inheritance or knowledge-base is basically all that is ever needed. Inertia : the property of matter by which it reta...

This is a shortened version (with minor editing) of a similar chapter in my book, Our Democracy Requires An Update . T he private and social property paradox contributes to our schizophrenic approach to solving societal problems in the United States. Social property includes all the elements of life you have ultimate control over, or should have , as well as those provided by the government or society that do not have a direct relationship to private financial elements. Public schools, roads, freedom of speech, and bodily autonomy are examples of social property. Health insurance is what I call a crossover property in the United States, since economic elites will not allow the consensus on its social property status to be instituted. Our extremely unequal balance of both property types over time, and up until now in various ways, as to who has it and how much they have, helps explain our paradoxical situation. Race, and gender are the defining and divining factors in our detrimental d...

The first thing many, maybe most whites will do is deny we have any riotous involvement. How could we Whites be the cause when we are hardly ever seen rioting? Yet there have been infinitesimally few riots where whites were not the central cause . While Ku Klux Klan- type white supremacy was often an instigator, it is the larger white supremacist cohort (see image text below) , which includes most white Americans throughout our history, that has created the greater context, the massive matrix of unlit matches you could say, especially today. Even when riots "instigated" by blacks are included in our rioting history, white structured society would be the true culprit of our significant riotous past, our very recent past as well . The evidence to support this claim is infinite, and begins below. The definition of the term riot can be narrowed down to limit the political formations of violence to exonerate state violence, or violence by preferred citizens. Instead I define ...