WarRyan: Warren we meet our heros.

Forged from the remains of a mad scientist’s sister’s abortion and the expression on a child’s face when their school funding gets cut but that’s fine because they were going to have to drop out anyway and get a job for a couple years before the police shoot them, Elizabeth Warren and Paul Ryan each make up half of a legendary creature who’s sole purpose is to defend democracy against all threats. They are careful to remain anonymous when they combine to form the ultimate fighting machine, the legendary libertron which can punch communism so hard that the proletariat falls out their ass.

Chapter 1: Democracy Drills

The ongoing adventures of our intrepid heroes continues as Ryan discusses the lack of democratic literacy in American Society with what he thought was a male colleague in the adjacent bathroom stall while dropping off his morning briefs. On the topic of holding democracy drills (like fire drills but for things that can actually hurt children), Ryan was uncertain, recognizing the importance of it but struggling to figure out a way to privatize democracy (and drills) at the same time.

““it’s [democracy is] important, you know. Why should we not have drills on how to defend it? Did you know most citizens who have earned the diamond tricorn don’t even know about the secret word you can say to police to let them know you are a freeborn soul who is commandeering his-”

“-or her!” Interrupted Elizabeth Warren from the next stall over.

“No, a real cop.” Corrected Ryan, “-Commandeering his assistance and justice defending phallus in defending liberty and then he has to help you for 72 hours.”

“Most people don’t know that?” grunted a skeptical Warren.

“No, and what are you doing in the restroom for people with penises? The restroom for other things is across the hall.” Whined Ryan, hoping Warren didn’t realize he had sat down to pee and now his shy bladder was hording the urine he had carefully crafted from several recovery drinks, a diet redbull, and carefully sipped, lukewarm, distilled water (with a pinch of lemon zest because he was a rebel and liked a bit of flavor in what went down his throat).

“Because menopause fluidated my gender.” Growled Warren around a particularly burdensome blockage, “so today I am a male.”

“You don’t have a penis”

“No more than you don’t.”

“I have a penis-” Pouted Ryan, glaring at his recalcitrant member and its unwillingness to release his relieving stream.

“No, a real penis that could satisfy a woman. Mine at least satisfies me. So that’s one woman.”

“Gross.” Said the secretly masturbating Paul Ryan.

“So you support the idea of democracy drills” said Warren, making yak sounds in her attempt to expel her onerous offal.

“In theory.” Said Ryan, choking himself in two places, “We should have more checks in place to make sure that we preserve democracy. We should make sure citizens know what to do when democracy is under attack. We should let them know where the sacred scepters are that let the wielder command either an f16 for an hour, a platoon of army for 3 hours, or one marine for 5 minutes.*”

(*The idea was that these were roughly equivalent in deadly force. Except for the marine. If it takes more than 5 minutes to explain and execute, a marine would fuck it up anyway, so there was kind of a built in time limit.)

So, said Paul Ryan, writing his name in calligraphy and drying semen on the stall wall, and blotting gently with bathroom tissue, “let’s have some drills.”

.................

This ends chapter 1. Stay tuned for chapter 2 where we find out what drills WarRyan have in mind. Will Paulizabeth make it out of the bathroom? Will the evacuation of their waste go smoothely!

Find out soon!!!

2nd Amendment.

“When boldly we stand, balls out or boobs up, against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it is nice to have superior firepower.”

-Baby Jesus

The Argument for Exploding Necklaces and Random Remotes. (Or: How Our Great Founders Failed Us With the Second Amendment.)

In the perfect unison they are legendary for working in, the founders of our constitution overlooked a crucial component within our penultimate of amendments. The second amendment is designed to help citizens defend themselves from the government. This is fine when your president worked part time at a bar in Ohio or when the biggest gun could be pulled by a few mules. But now we have high flying drones, smart bombs, and dumb asses running the show. As wondrous as the beautiful technology of commercially available weaponry is, even the blackest of markets lacks the products one would need to meet the threats now faced by even the third largest standing army in the world (which I am pretty sure is some dude in Kansas with an underground bunker and 12 corn-fed moonshiners who likes what he says). This is why we need exploding collars on every human being and universal access to the remotes.

Rightly worded, the question our second amendment seeks to answer is: How do we defend ourselves against tyranny? What if Elon Musk finally succeeds in developing the Obamatron 5000 (an adamantium android who will steal your guns and white daughters)?

Regardless of which dystopic prophecy you prefer, the fact is that technology is advancing much faster than our access to it. The government monopolizes the ability to kill in mass quantities and the only solution to this is outfitting every man, woman, and child on the planet with a wifi enabled, remote triggered, exploding necklace. This will make possible to all bipeds and monopeds and nolopeds (of the featherless persuasion), life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Too often, when this reasonable option is discussed, people worry that some collars won't work as well as others, that they will be ugly, or that jews might get them first. However, the careful explication of why incendiary neck decoration is necessary usually quells such worries.

Assumptions:

1.) The premise of rights and equality is built on a foundation of force. Ultimately, what isn’t? Even molecules have force fields so why not misuse the homonym? If someone takes away your rights by force, you no longer have them. If you have the right to something but no one can defend it for you, you do not truly have that right. Ron Paul's fanciful ideas of inalienability have a tough time in places where peewee murder ball is the national sport.

2.) Our access to firearms is ultimately the access to force. As inventive terrorists trying to impress the main character of their favorite book continue to prove, there are plenty of other means of force than the one Kansas men use against ISIS engineers posing as computer technicians from India. However, the gun is the traditional symbol of power and safety and is an efficient way to exert force in defense of your rights (plus, it's like, so cool to own a gun, please keep showing me your guns).

3.) If guns are force and force is necessary to preserve rights, I propose to make all equal with remote detonated necklaces we are fitted with at birth and the accompanying remote. The remote gives anyone, anywhere the ability to execute any number of other individuals. It has the ability to be specific to a person or an area or even simply select a random necklace to explode.

To this day, hippy-ass liberal organizations like the NRA advocate the use of primitive powder explosions to defend your rights. This is brainwashing, sheeple. Commercially available guns are as effective as rape whistles in a frat house. We deserve more.

When the government has space birds that can kill me on the toilet (that's where I type and they might try and stop the stream of sensible ideas coming from my throne. If I ever am found dead in the bathroom with a large hole in the roof and a certain 'exploded' look about me, believe me, it wasn't a suicide.), it is imperative that I have equivalent access to force lest someone who failed the SAT's be elected president and they decide they want to throw tantrums such as one might if their chronological age was equivalent to their single digit iq, attacking anyone who criticizes them through the malicious recitation of facts.

My solution will also address the other problem with our second amendment: How do I use a hand gun when I lost my hands when trying to greet the emissary from our robot overlords (my wife still insists it was still our garbage disposal but she can't stop me feeding it the tasty aborted fetuses it desires #liberalvalues)?

So even though toddlers have access to guns, there are still many in our god soaked country who are helpless to the imminent threat of Elon and his Musketeerbots. However, the most differently-abled Luddite could save the world from tyranny if they could kill everyone on the planet with a push of a button. Right now, we have technology that can kill all the human people on earth and it would kill all the deer, bison, and mole people as well but we hardly have time to equip every type of animal with collars too (especially snakes, they will be our most fearsome opposition once combustible vertibreal ornamentation makes man equal).

Currently, the barriers to accessing the ability to kill everyone are too onerous for any Americans and those other things to have more than a papery facade of rights. Even in places where access is pretty lax, there is simply too great of a power imbalance for citizens to have more than a participation trophy of freedom. In the U.S., for example, the access to this power is granted only to those whose mothers dropped them whole unto the sacred soils of Mother America directly upon exiting the womb, surviving for 35 revolutions round an exploding ball of gas, preferably having a clitoris which grew into a penis and ovaries bouncing around in the wrinkled bag their sealed labia made for them, and then you need to win a series of popularity contests. That’s it. There is no IQ test, you don’t need to provide any evidence that you are a decent person or are capable of doing anything you say or undergo any kind of emotional or mental stability evaluation. Basically, be born here, be old enough to wonder why the pop music isn’t as good anymore, probably have a penis, get enough people to hate you less than the other person, and boom, here’s a gun that can kill a fucking world. In such a country, why do we content ourselves with the present theater of autonomy? Why do we not demand the real thing?

North Korea has an Asian dough boy beauty contest, Russia has a game of 'tag, you’re dead' with journalists and opposition to maintain control of enough nukes to simulate the surface of the sun more times than what’s his name has bitchless problems. Germany gives control of it’s nuclear arsenal to the librarian of the year. China... China has... I mean, they’re communist, so... a president? A premier? Trouble reaching tall shelves?

The point is that there are these artificial barriers to getting access to the ability to trigger the nuclear forces of multi-syllabic molecules and turn lots of people into dust. They give us toys and tell us they are the real thing, the present the porn of liberty and convince us we are free. These tyrannically atomic forces needs to be accessible to all, for how can man be equal when less than 1% of the people have the ability to kill the other what is meaningfully 100% of the population? That isn’t equality! Am I equal to a herd of second graders? What if I have a gun and they don't? What if they all have guns and I don't? The point is, everyone needs the ability to kill everyone else. How else will we be equal?

Now, you sensitive snowflakes might quaver in your safe space blankets thinking of just the humans you know being given the ability to kill any other or all others on the planet. But that is the only effective path to peace (but by all means, keep up the virtue signalling 'trade agreements' and 'treaties' and 'concealed carry permits' if that's the voodoo you want to rely on).

Also, that’s pretty much what we have now. There are no mental health evaluations to use these guns. There are no iq tests. Proof or evidence or even the tiniest hint you are not a psychopath with all the guile and wisdom of semisentient pond scum is not required to access the most devastating firepower in history. But we still enact laws and structures and make paperwork trying to protect billionaires and poor people from each other and the government.

We could save so much money if everyone could kill anyone. I am still waiting on an estimate for how much a few billion exploding necklaces (and accompanying remotes) would cost, but I bet it is way less than what we spend developing more roundabout ways of making one another and each other’s children dead.

Children would be the group that benefits the most from this. Even if we keep the remotes locked to their safest setting (self), they will still have an easier time defending themselves against their most deadly threat (themselves (after pools and car accidents but I don't have a plan to kill those yet)) than they do now when they have to crawl all the way to mommy's purse in order to spackle the kitchen in kiddie brains.

You might be inclined to winge that crazy people might kill random folks. Again, that’s what is going on now. It would be easier, however, to defend yourself if a little button was all you needed. Would you want Stephen Hawking on your side in a street fight? Well, now you might not be so dismissive. So next time an untreated (healthcare is not a right, keep our crazies on the street, away from houses where they might hurt real humans) schizophrenic comes at you with gun, you might wish the black hole electric roller derby champ was there with you. You might wish that you had the remote to blow up the head of the mentally ill.

See? Equality. Besides, market forces would quickly drive the development of affordable mental healthcare and childproof remote lockers. It's like the old problem: would you rather be locked in a room with 10 people, one of whom is crazy and guns will be distributed randomly? Or would you rather have everyone have a gun? Either only a few get guns, maybe you, maybe the crazy people; or everyone gets guns and then at least you know you can kill the crazy person (even if it's you).

Free Coffee!!!

It seems unlikely that we would be not three weeks into the first term of Obama's successor and be frustrated that he is not yet undergoing impeachment proceedings. It is a unique problem I did not anticipate concerning myself with. But there may be a solution. One which I am uniquely qualified to speak on.

Attention.

I think that is the reason we lost the election. We were outspent in the only currency that matters. Even now we enrich an incompetent dictator by allowing so much of our precious time be governed by his rambling tweets and misguided assumptions of how the world works.

Money is attention. It is a symbol of value, of time. Our time is attention, our love is our investment of that currency through thoughts and deeds upon those we love.

By this metric, the leader of the (presently) free world is the most loved man of all.

This is not good. It is not healthy to dwell so long upon so fowl a person. But it would be greater folly to ignore him.

Right now, he stirs us up like bees, swarming around him angrily buzzing our disdain. By artifice or accident he seems perplexed we do not revel in his actions while he refuses to countenance other courses.

But he is a bear and we bees will never stop him with our clever stings.

We are a hundred thousand dust motes irritating his afternoon. We are a tiresome patina on his glorious mirage. We are a damp mist seeping into dark socks on an otherwise wonderful morning for him.

We need to be a rock. We need to be a river. We need to quite scattering at every tapping of the glass and mixing metaphors more often than tweens at a soda fountain...

We need attention. Right now the forces from all sides against him keep him upright. We need to upset this dangerous balance and crash this car before it picks up speed.

The two things we are missing are a symbol and a plan.

I don't have either but we need something more than 'This guy sucks! Wake up, sheeple!' 'This guy' afterall, is no more than an obscenely irritating and distracting symptom.

For sure, Steve Bannon needs to be removed from power, him and his puppet need to go. But there are repairs that need to be made that can best be made with the energy their actions stir up against them.

We are losing faith in our institutions. Seeing as all this is held up by the force of our imaginations, this is a dangerous course we need to work to correct. I have ideas on this but for now I simply wish to remind people to look for a plan and look for a symbol.

A few ideas: Save Pepe (weave a narrative that pepe was kidnapped by people too twisted by pain and fear to have proper compassion and benevolent intents).

I Love Losers! (Spread information about the importance of being humble and embracing mistakes and failures. This might encourage greater engagement with science and weaken the knee jerk tendency to dig in heels when core beliefs are challenge)

Free Coffee! (Demand Free Coffee. Protest everywhere. Blame the puppet.)

Free coffee is ridiculous. But we will need attention and the ridiculous can get us there. It can also make it fun. Fun is what we need most. Something light to clear away the clouds and get more people working with smiles against the damage done and damage doing.

I expect all this is jibberish, I expect this (like my previous posts) will fail to foment the giggling revolution I dream of. But I am a middle child. I was born to seek attention because I don't distinguish that from love. I need love. We need love. Let us start loving what we do. Let us find a symbol and raise it. Let us build a slogan and say it. Let us formulate a plan and let it be washed across the world as we unleash the floodgates of our love upon a more deserving idea.

June 14th: Our Love is Louder Than Our Fear

(The title needs work but it sounds better than the alternative: Hippy-love-fest-but-getting-shit-done-and-oh-my-god-we-need-to-party-before-the-world-ends-apalooza!)

What it is:

A Day of Effective Altruism followed by a Night of Freaky FundRaising.

Effective Altruism:

Putting our energy out there in ways that make a positive difference. There are many different ways of doing this through volunteering, through research, or through funding charities that do the most good with the funds they receive.

What can we do?

Help organize community cleanups, civic service projects, or other volunteering opportunities. We should try and focus on areas that Trump is harming the most:

Inner cities. Can we clean up some of the inner city neighborhoods, can we establish some tutoring centers, or some day care centers? Can we build some inner city food oasis where there are food deserts? Can we have lawyers volunteer at court to try and keep a few kids out of a counterproductive judicial system?

Latino and Muslim Communities: Can we ask for volunteers to prepare food and provide instruction on some of the projects that might impact their community? Can we all play soccer? How do you say 'I love you' in Arabic?

The environment: If you have as much trouble as I occasionally do with crowds, why not take to the woods for trail maintenance or trash pick up? Why not collect water samples to test for toxins? Volunteering to help coordinate trash and recycling collection would be a huge help!

Freaky FundRaising:

Well, imagine Woodstock but all over the country. Or imagine your jam band and a few people from the neighborhood. Or a 5k you do all by yourself or with a few thousand people you found online. The more people we have hosting fundraising events for the institutions that are quickly becoming the best chance we have for having a future, the better.

I say Freaky because while preventing harm and repairing damage is important, we also need to send a message. We need an ungodly amount of coverage on this. This message, that our love is strong, that our love is effective, and that our love is louder than our fear needs to be heard all over the world. We need gags and gaffs and a reason to turn a camera our way. We need an impossible amount of attention. We need enough attention to drown out Trump, even if it is only for one day, that day should be his birthday.

If you are interested in helping, please let me know. If you are interested in partying, please be patient and stay tuned.

Triage

The Scene

After working ourselves up to the reality of a Trump administration and wearing our fingers out, trying to cling to any hope it won't be as bad as we think, the reality is setting in and it is just as bad as we suspected.

Whether his efforts are designed by malice, ignorance, or manipulation, the response needs to be the same. We see the wounds opening up and we need to staunch the blood loss.

The Problems

Can illegal immigrants and the Latino communities who will get swept up in his proposed punitive measures resist on their own?

No. They have little enough political clout but are protected by moral and practical reasoning. They benefit communities but if Trump is able to break the cities, they will be tossed out.

Can the black communities respond to further misguided attempts to fix struggling communities by themselves?

No. Both sides of the aisle have been trying everything short of just admitting to racism and letting them fully integrate. If they had the power to force the wider culture to accept them, they likely would have already.



Can liberals of all stripes continue to foster compassion while the President pushes hate if they sit alone at home and do nothing?

No. As a pot smoking hippy, I am fairly aware of how potent my 'dreams' are when I sit alone and imagine wild schemes while staring at the ceiling, imagining a world where I didn't sit idly by, hoping someone else would step forward.

Can conservatives work for better opportunities and less government interference while Trump expands the government and her interventions exponentially?

No. The policies that will be enacted will be the same sort republicans have always enacted. They 'help' business the same way democrats 'help' minorities. There is a token show of support but really the only ones who are helped are the ones that don't need it: the big businesses that are thriving already and the 'articulate' black men who are polite enough not to cause problems.

Everything that is Trump is pushing for will only help out a few individuals and will only help them for a short time. All of us are going to suffer through reduced opportunity, larger, more restrictive government, and 'definitely not racist but totally targeting race' legislation and cultural influences.

So. We can stand together or fall apart.

BLMBSDOLBMBLNANAAWITTCHTLOPWVOGIATTCHPWAWBSAGFGBSOTA

We know how this is going to happen. We have seen it before. We need to stop it now.

But where do we start? What is the triage for such cultural wounds?

Why don't we start with the most impacted? The people who are already working to better their lot? Why don't we start at the bottom because the more people we can get working on this the more effective we can be.

I don't have all the answers. I don't have most or many of them.

It would make sense to begin by acknowledging we need to work together and that this will be most effective if we start with those who need help most.

To that end, I say we start the Black Lives Matter But So Do Other Lives But Maybe Black Lives Need Attention Now And As We Improve Theirs They Can Help The Lives Of People With Vaginas Or Gender Issues And Then They Can Help People Who Are White But Are Still Getting Fucked From Both Sides Of The Aisle.

The name needs work. But we all need help. And we all need to work together or we are all going to suffer immensely.

Many groups are starting to come together. But let's start networking even more and working to resist. This will be a weak link game and we need to shore up our weakest sections first.

Day 1

In what will likely be known as the most timely post of all time,

I'd like to talk about Trump's record as a business man:

On this, the first day his wondrous reign, it would be more prudent to post various tips and tricks on surviving authoritarian con-men but I find myself distracted by things I have procrastinated upon too long. Namely, whether or not Trump is a good business man.

Method:

* Establish Criteria

* Do some research.

* Draw conclusions

Criteria:

There are many ways to judge a businessman (height, weight, bikini contest), but I will be focusing on two main aspects:

* Success as compared to the market

* Success as compared to other individual businessmen

* Moral good, in terms of ethical practices and improvement of community.

I know this last one may not be important to others, but I think it is relevant if he is going to be running the country as a business (Our product will be bigotry and Russian nesting dolls. They will sell like hotcakes.).

Success as compared to the market:

For this metric, I was just going to compare his claimed worth that is the result of his actions versus what we would expect his worth to be had the market taken care of it.

If you measure the value of the money he received from his father and what it would be if he would have invested it in some conservative growth funds, then no. He lost 10 Billion.

Now, it could be argued that the media exposure and political connections he made while mismanaging his businesses have greater value than the 10 BILLION he would have had if he let the market handle his money. But I would argue that social and political capital, while very much tied to business, is not what we are discussing.

And it could be said that maybe he wished to take a more active role and we shouldn't criticize his attempts that failed because failing is always the first step and that is true. He did try and tried again and the fact that he still has a company and lots of money (Probably. Tax returns, anyone? Tax returns?) would lead me to believe he has at least a modicum of competence or the wisdom to hire someone else to run things while he collects an allowance.

And so, perhaps we should compare him not to the market but to other innovators and entrepreneurs and businessmen.

Other successful businessmen

There are many self made billionaires (many compared to zero, anyway, not as a relative value to the population) that started off with far less than Trump and did way more! Trump started out with 14 million (31 million today) and grew that into 3.7 Billion (Or more... or less. Tax returns?). That is 250% (check my math, please, it's been awhile edit: I totally fucked up the math! It's 25600% or 11900%. Way more impressive!)). This is an impressive number.

Of course, my daughter did the same thing when she spent $10 (roughly, it was awhile ago) on lemonade supplies, sold $25 worth of lemonade, and repeated that process until she had the $300 she needed for a new phone... Is she a great businessman? And she didn't have the political and commercial connections that Trump was given. She didn't have the mentorship that Trump would have.

Meanwhile other billionaires who actually earned their billions started with way less and earned way more ('way' is the professional economists measure of intensity).

And they did far more good with their money.

Moral Good:

It has only been recently that anyone has been able to indicate any "good" Trump has done (my own cursory searches did not turn up much). Doubtless this is a result of the 'unfair' media who is working against him while giving him free air time on a regular basis (?).

I had simply assumed there wasn't much to say since it was never talked about. What we did hear regarding his charitable acts involved scandal.

But, as the brave redditor pointed out, he has done some very flashy good by giving away so many rounds of golf and helping out headlining tragedies.

So, if we value his giving at (very roughly) $200-300 million dollars (and we assume that all of that benefited good causes) we can say that the man has (probably) given his 10% (TAX RETURNS?) tithe to the community (in addition to paying taxes, maybe?).

Conclusions:

I don't know. Maybe I should stop using 'failed' to describe his businessman acumen, but it hardly looks impressive when you compare it to other billionaires. He earned more in trying than he would have had he done nothing, he showed no innovation in the businesses he started up so it isn't a matter of trying something new and failing. He entered into some very established markets and failed several times.

Elon Musk tried something new and then continues to try new things. They are not all successful yet but he is definitively trying new things.

This is why I don't consider Trump to be an effective businessman. In a field ripe with cronyism, given a good chunk of money, mentorship, and a rolodex of connections, he underperformed the market, declared bankruptcy several times, and brought nothing innovative to the market (apart from his presidential campaign, that shit was wild! I am excited for more of this going forward.). In other words, while I should refrain from saying 'failure', I will also withhold the term 'succesful'.

And I still lack that for which I am most hungry: Some reason to think he is not an authoritarian with no clue how to run the country well. A puppet or at least an easily manipulated useful fool with little hostages with his name all over it scattered through the world.

I really hope this is the first day of 4-8 years of being proved wrong.

A few indicators we can look at over the coming months are:

* S&P 500 is valued at 2,269.50

* Total Uninsured Rate: 8.6% (exceeded 10%)

* Median income is around 55k/yr

* We are still (barely) in the top 50 for most free press.

* An estimated 1.2 million violent crimes are committed per year.

Now, much of this is old data for 2015 or earlier. As more current data becomes available, I will try to keep things updated.

Wacism

Of man's many accomplishments, I believe I am most moved by his overcoming of reality in the year of our lord, 2016.

Certainly, many cartographers of man's mind might claim we did so ages ago but I might argue that in such times, there was not so great a preponderance of evidence available to so many that they might overcome it. In other words, can one overcome that which they have not encountered?

Undoubtedly we still are without a complete understanding of the world and the universe it nests within, but we have easy access to compelling evidence of familiar claims. Racism, for example, or unfair tax policies, or the destructive affects of authoritarian rule on intimate and international scales.

Racism

Racism is the game we play when we arbitrarily divide featherless bipeds into groups based on physical characteristics. Discrimination is a broader term that can encompass other team drawing exercises that tend to feature large amounts of distrusting and blaming the weakest teams. Discrimination can feature religion as the basis for team building, but it can also feature geographic location, nationality, or the type of music a person listens to.

As social bags of gas and fat, it is quite natural that our pattern seeking soft tissue would assign values to physical characteristics. As upright apes intent on existing in proximity to other vertically inclined hominids, it is likewise assumed that we will seek to rank our place in the wider sphere of thumb juggling monkeys. It is important to know your place in the world. It is important to know who is above and who is below you.

This confluence of tendencies make it likely that meat-bags such as look like us would likely devise some grouping of arbitrary traits, rank the members of the group, set the group in groups of groups with their own rankings and then blame the less powerful groups for being less powerful because they lack a certain level of 'articulation'.

Does Racism Exist?

Thoroughly overcoming reality, though, has made it possible for racism to no longer exist and exist at the same time.

One thing I am forced to ask people who proclaim the death of racism is "What would it look like if it were alive? What signs exist or would exist to indicate the presence of racism?"

When we look to at the distribution of wealth and knowledge and opportunity, we notice that significant portions of the population are clustered around the bottom that share certain physical characteristics. Given we are wonderfully rhetorical creatures, there are all sorts of stories relating to how this came about. People love stories and become quite defensive if you question the facts or legitimacy of their story.

Who can I yell at so I don't have to think about it? Surely if we just burn few white guys in effigy and vote for democrats, we can solve this thorny issue.

But maybe the words of a story are less important than listening to one another tell it. Maybe the most valid story is not the story that will help us solve a problem that is hurting everyone but is hurting some people way more than others. Maybe, rather than vilifying people for exposing biases that we all have, we should accept each other's handicaps with love and help them overcome them.

I think by denying we have racial biases is why our previous interventions haven't worked to the extent we might prefer. I think we should be able to open up about them and say things like, "I am kind of afraid of black people," or, "I get really uncomfortable around Arab people," or, "Why are why are Mexicans not as hilariously foolish like they are in movies?" These are questions we can answer and help people overcome these fears or see Latinos as a diverse group from many cultural backgrounds who don't always know where to score some dank weed but they might know a guy or maybe they don't and that's ok too because my white neighbor who works with computers has a cousin in Denver and he sent me this primo bud that gives you the ability to travel in time.

At this point, people usually stop me and explain that we are travelling through time even as we write these words or read them and rather than acknowledging that they might have a point, I will pivot and say:

Maybe it doesn't matter?

Maybe it doesn't matter what story, precisely, you believe to most accurately reflect the events which led to a continuous struggle of getting people of certain phenotypes to succeed in this society. There are numerous advantages towards integrating a society. Race is not a field that benefits from specialization. In the same way that the whole body is affected when even the littlest toe is in pain, the whole society suffers when one group has a much harder time finding happiness and success.

We have seen what happens when a significant portion of a group feels their need is unmet: those needs get met in unhealthy ways. It is dangerous, it is immoral, and it is pretty darn difficult to deny the existence of racism in America.

I would say that it is also misguided to suggest attacking people who show racial biases. Instead, I would suggest we encourage talk about racial biases and look at ways we can overcome this cultural infection.

Because we all have it.

Every. Single. One of us.

And it's ok.

I know you didn't set out to be racist. I know you know it isn't ideal. But just like pooping, we all do it. Unlike pooping, though, we need to find a better way.

Thanks for your time,

A. Racist
(but I feel really bad about it)

P.S. Send me some feedback if you would like me to expand on this or continue with a similar summary of taxes or authoritarianism or if you would like to suggest a topic, I am open to that as well.