The real scam & the scammers - Rev. J.T. Smith

Recently, I've come across two opinion pieces included in the daily AlterNet Top Stories  newsletter in my email that I'm subscribed to. The author of the pieces, John Stoehr, is of the opinion that third party Presidential candidates are all scammers because all third parties are a scam.

He didn't drink the Kool-aid.  Clearly, he guzzled and gargled with it.  He also assumes the only people who are attracted to third party candidates are those who solely vote during Presidential elections and take no other particular part in politics.  He claims those third parties are full of false promises, are in a sense demagogic, and are anti-democratic as a result.

Strange.  Every year, I see a smattering of third party candidates for positions up and down the ballot.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that Bernie Sanders is not only currently a United States Senator representing Vermont, but he is also an Independent.  Strange.  (Obviously Sanders switched to the Democratic party from 2015 - 2016 and 2019 - 2020 in his run to be President, but the fact remains that he is now, once again, an Independent.  See my previous entries about his running as a Democrat.)

As a matter of fact, there are currently four Independent Senators: Bernie Sanders (VT) (2007 - present); Angus S. King Jr (ME) (2013 - present); Kyrsten Sienna (AZ) (2013 - present); and Joe Manchin  III (WV) (2013 - present).  And they are not the only Senators in American history that belonged to "Third or Minor Parties."  While there are no members of the House Of Representatives belonging to third or minor parties as of the writing of entry, there have still been many examples throughout American history.  To be fair, not all of those third and minority party members were originally elected as a third or minor party member.  Some changed parties and were still reelected, and some like Bernie Sanders were elected as a member of a third or minor party member.  And those examples are strictly referring to the federal government.  There are still more throughout state and local governments as well.

So while third party candidates are rare enough masse in American politics, they can and do still win.  And in winning they adjust the course of politics.

As I have noted previously, the corporate duopoly of American politics is the problem.  Alright,  technically it is a problem.  The two bigger problems which combine with the corporate duopoly are the real overall problem.  What are the two bigger problems?

First is the Electoral College.  I've already spoken about that travesty in previous entries.  The other relates to Duverger's law in political science.  America is a political system with single member districts, which means each district is represented by a single officeholder.  In contrast, systems with proportional representation usually have more representatives of minor parties in government.

Considering that America started with zero political parties, which George Washington would refer to factions and in fact Washington was strongly against because he felt that unity rather than division was necessary for a democratic republic to survive.

Ultimately the only reason third parties have yet to break through that wall is because enough people buy the lie that the only viable parties are the corporate duopoly, and fools like John Stoehr who think that we must do everything to make changes while maintaining that duopoly.

My father was a member of the Libertarian party.  His father wanted to name him Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but didn't know how to spell Delano.  My father, for reasons I neither understood nor really discussed with him, hated Roosevelt.  That was my personal introduction to politics aside from what was loosely taught in school.  Frankly I had no interest as it all stank of bovine defacation and held less than no interest in it for me.  Especially considering the President is not elected by the majority of Americans due to the Electoral College.

In November 2000, I wasn't registered to vote.  My personal take was that my vote doesn't count, and I pointed to the Presidential election as the prime reason for concluding that.  For clarification, in 2000 I was residing in Pennsylvania, a state that Al Gore, whom I would have voted for had I been registered to vote, won handily even without my vote.  Not only did Gore win Pennsylvania, he also won the Popular Vote.  We all know how that played out.

My first actual real involvement of any political kind was to add my voice to the chorus who stood against AT&T's intended buyout of T-Mobile as I was and am a T-Mobile customer and I don't want to be ripped off any more than I have to be.  And AT&T wants to charge me more for the same services I currently pay less for with T-Mobile.  I made calls and wrote letters to my local/federal government and signed every petition I could find to end that "merger".  When I learned the part those calls, letters, and petitions ultimately played , I started signing petitions and writing letters to elected officials involving the environment, ending the death penalty, government issues, and far more.  Feel free to check out my Pinterest page for a better understanding of where I stand.

I didn't get properly involved in "local politics" (which is how I see all human politics regardless of nationality) until 2012 when I registered to vote for the first time and I voted for Barack Obama because I saw the Mitt Romney's vision regarding women as a direct threat to all of my female friends, and who make up the majority of my friends.

While I have no interest nor intention of running for political office myself, my political activities haven't slowed.  Frankly, I loathe politics in general.  Unfortunately, I have to get involved to try to make change. 

As of January this year, the number of registered independent voters surpassed the number of registered Democrats and Republican voters.  Frankly, take that as a good sign. 

On a personal note, while I am registered as an independent, and with the exception of the times I briefly changed to Democrat simply to vote for Bernie Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and while I lean Democrat, I more closely align with the Green Party and the Working Families Party.  And for over a year now the Green Party is an official party that you can register to vote as in the state that I currently live in.

The movement to eliminate the Electoral College is growing.  Fighting the corporate stranglehold on American politics is ongoing.  If history teaches us anything, it is it can be done. Hopefully without a relative replay of the French Revolution.  Eliminating those will definitely help to allow third parties to be able to end the duopoly.  As will getting people to wake up to the fact that people should vote their conscience even when it's a third party candidate that most aligns with your conscience.

Voting for third parties is not a scam.  The scam is believing the only viable options are sticking with the corporate duopoly.

 

- Rev. J.T. Smith

 

 

Keep Your Own Data - Rev. J.T. Smith

I am old enough to remember when audio cassette tapes were the go-to method of storing music.  Not just the music albums from your favourite artists bought at the music store, but also the homemade mix tapes we made for ourselves and to give away to someone we liked and/or were hoping to woo.  And since cassette players were ubiquitous in cars, it was far easier than vinyl records.  Not to mention cheaper than CDs.  Cassettes also held more music (90 minute audio cassette tapes were easily available even at K-Mart, as were 120 min tapes) than CDs (only 80 minutes).

Obviously, as CDs gained traction, CD burners for your computer became widely available, and since CDs aren't susceptible to magnetic fields, and the costs of CDs in general came down, they overtook cassettes.  Even with their inherent limitation of not being able to fit as much music on them.

 

While I still keep my hardcopy music collection primarily on CD now, I still miss audio cassettes.

 

Similarly, I also miss VHS cassettes.  Albeit currently buried in storage, I still have my old VHS library.  Granted, my DVD collection has far surpassed my VHS collection overall, but I still have things like classic Doctor Who as it was aired on PBS in the States, meaning no adverts and all the individual eps within a serial were put together like a movie.

In terms of computers, admittedly, I finally adopted Windows 3.11 when Windows 95 had been out for a few years and Windows 98 was very soon to be hitting the market simply because I liked DOS.  I still miss DOS: my computer was only ever infected with a virus once while running DOS and I was able to wipe my hard drive completely, reinstall everything from 3.5" floppy disks that I knew were not infected, and I was fully back up and running in approximately in 45 minutes.  Good luck doing that now.

Contrary to what you may be thinking I am not a technophobe, and I do still try to keep up with the times.  Granted, I don't replace my mobile phone every year with the newest toy as I keep the same handset functioning as long as I can, replacing it only as I deem necessary.  But mostly due to costs and I'm a Scottish Jew.  (Think about it, it gets cheaper.)  But it's more than mere cost issues.

 

I don't immediately adopt the newest tech as I've watched my even techier (dunno if that's actually a word, but I'm using it anyway) get burned by the bugs that hadn't been dealt with by the first patch.  I also analyze not only the potential benefits but also the potential pitfalls.

As a result, I have not and will not get a DVR.  Not only do I not pay for television, aside from box sets of seasons and complete series of shows I like, meaning I will never be paying for cable/streaming, but DVR has a massive drawback that VHS never had.  It's a drawback that I witnessed from mother and father.

When they were living in Tennessee, they had accrued a sizeable collection of shows and movies on their DVR.  Until they maxed out their DVR's storage capacity.  Which served them well for a time.  The great drawback was when they changed carriers for their television.  Instantly, that collection on their DVR was permanently wiped out simply because they didn't own any of those recordings, and they had to turn in the DVR to their service provider and then rent a new DVR from their new service provider.  The beauty of VHS was that it didn't matter whether or not you had cable, nor did it matter who your television service provider was.  All that mattered was whether you still had access to a working VCR (Video Cassette Player, which allowed you to record your show of choice) or VCP (Video Cassette Player, which couldn't record but could still play back), and as for storage you just bought new blank VHS tapes and you were set to go on.

Prior to the general public being able to record music from the radio (adverts and all, or trimmed down to eliminate the adverts but with shorter versions of the songs than the actual albums would have) and shows from the telly, when a network decided to no longer air it, you were boned.  The ability for the common person to record onto medium that they could physically hold onto changed all that. 

Obviously, major entertainment corporations weren't happy about it as we were less dependent on them, so their profits dipped.  But it seemed the ability to time shift, the vaguely technical term for recording shows, whether radio or television, and playing them back whenever we wanted to, seemed like would be with use forever.

Then mobile phone apps and streaming came along.

The newer generations latched onto it as it's the latest and greatest.  All while missing the pitfall.  A pitfall that I partially discovered the hard way.

Among other artists I am a fan of DJ Heavygrinder.  At one point, I paid for her Love Letters mobile phone app.  Like the rest of my music collection in general, I didn't listen to it every day.  I was more of a sporadic thing.  That is until what I thought I had bought was more like rented as I can lo longer load it onto my phone.  It cannot even be found on Google Play.  And since I was never able to find a hardcopy, that album is gone for good.  I've looked.

Between streaming and tech like DVRs and cloud storage owned by other corporations which offer only the illusion of it being yours, corporations are once again gouging you.  Even when you're paying them money as they're still monetizing everything that you let them store for you.

I insist on buying shows on DVD and music on CD simply because as long as I have the equipment to play them, I will be able to watch/listen to them any time I want to, even when I have absolutely zero internet access.

And I've been trying to get friends and neighbours to realize this for ages now.  Unfortunately, the ones I couldn't convince are now discovering the hard way what I was trying to tell them.

"On June 24, 2024, the financially struggling entertainment behemoth Paramount began a large-scale defenestration of its vast public and free web archives. LateNighter and other entertainment news sites began reporting that Paramount took down footage from its MTV News archives (back to 1996), Comedy Central, and CMT (Country Music Television). The company wiped out decades of comedy, pop-culture news, and left-leaning political satire. Episodes of The Daily Show (TDS) dating back to 1999, the entire run of The Colbert Report, the Key & Peele sketch comedy show, and South Park are, with no warning to the public, no longer available. It’s likely to get a lot worse, since Paramount has now merged with the production company Skydance, with a deal involving billions in Wall Street debt funding—and the new co-owners want $1.5B more in cuts than Paramount was talking about last week."

 

Oops.  I'm thinking it's safe to say that what's happening with Paramount is merely the beginning.

 

Now, while I have been talking about audio cassettes, VHS, etc, I am not opposed to having a digital copy as well. However, there are two caveats.  First, that digital copy should really be in addition to a hardcopy, whether you're talking about books, music, or television/movies, etc.; and second, the only "cloud" storage should be physically accessible to you (e.g. external hard drive that you can disconnect from your computer and by extension the internet).

This also includes any personal projects you may be working on whether it be recordings of podcasts, books/articles you're writing, etc.

You should be certain that you can and do keep your own data.

 

by Rev. J.T. Smith

Some Things We Must All Keep In Mind Here - Rev. J.T. Smith

I originally wrote this while I was still in Acute Rehab at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital following my surviving a hemorrhagic stroke that initially left me completely paralyzed from the neck down on my dominant side.  I originally intended this to be for both the physical/occupational therapists and staff and their patients.  As I was slowly typing this one-handed, I concluded that it was appropriate for all the patients and staff, and not just in that hospital or in any specific kind of rehab..

 

 

 

SOME THINGS WE MUST ALL KEEP IN MIND HERE:

 

 

 

STAFF

 
It is your knowledge, your skill, your patience, your guidance, your kindness, and your heart which allows the patients with whom you work with to accomplish all that they do.  You never seem to give up on a patient even if it seems or feels like they’ve given up on themselves, and that action by itself can be a tremendous source of strength that you might not even realize.  Always remember with the appropriate humility that it doesn’t matter how much drive the patient has without your contributions, as the patients will be facing a much longer path ahead of them without your help.  Your contributions should never be ignored or overlooked, and you deserve the thanks of so many people.  Just please always remember that the patients know their body more intimately than you do.  They live there while you’re merely visiting.  Living through it is far more instructive than any amount of “observation,” and you may need to be occasionally reminded of that.

 

 

PATIENTS

You’ve already been through a lot in life.  You’ve survived, and that should never be taken for granted by anyone, including and especially yourself.  What will help you in your personal battle beyond what the staff can do for you is what you yourself bring in your heart.  Without your drive, your will, your desire, and your sheer tenacity, no amount of instruction or guidance will help you to succeed.  The staff working with you realizes that you have a difficult journey ahead of you, and they are willing to help you providing you make an effort.  No one said it will be easy; but once you get there, you’ll know how much it really is worth it!

Never worry about whether or not other patients are watching you.  

If they’re watching, it could just as easily be curiosity on their part.  Considering that they’re also facing their own personal battles, they’re most likely either cheering you on or watching in genuine curiosity.  Any other reactions don’t matter in this vein because you’re the one ultimately fighting your battle.  Always accept support as it means you’re not as alone as you may feel.

If they’re not watching you, most often it’s to help you concentrate on what you’re doing.  They’re leaving you completely alone simply because they don’t want to intrude on you or interfere with you.  You’d be amazed how many prayers of support that are still being sent your way.

Never fear even perceived failure.  It simply means that you’re trying and you’re learning.  You’ll learn and grow as long as you never give up on yourself.

Among so much else, you’ll learn about yourself most of all.  Including and especially how much strength you really have, and that’s something you’ll always have and can never be taken from you.  Remember while you’re learning that you know your personal situation better than anyone else.  Living it is more instructive than any amount of observation, and you may have to occasionally remind some people of that.

With hard work, and providing you don’t give up, you’ll really succeed far more than you might realize; but, only if you never give up.

 

- Rev. J.T. Smith 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here We Go Again With Not Voting For X Is A Vote For Y - Rev. J.T. Smith

 

Every four years America is treated to the Presidential election when Americans are directed to vote for one of two wealthy (anymore it's more like obscenely wealthy) candidates to run the country.  And for many decades now, American politics has been subsumed by a corporate duopoly divided between the Democrats and Republicans.  That duopoly has literally become its own industry that claims to cares about its customers (you guessed it: us) but in practice only serves to enrich itself.  And for free advertising, bring in major media outlets that drown out every other potential candidate.  Just look what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016.

I've been hearing the trope about voting for a third party for decades now, about how it's a thrown away vote, or it's a vote for such-and-such candidate, etc.  I am NOT a fan of Trump by any means, so I will not vote for him.

The reality is that America desperately needs to break free of the corporate duopoly of the two-party system; but, as long as people continue to buy into the fallacy that it is the only viable system, which is a lie that you've been spoon-fed since you were in grade school and fed to you by the corporate "elites" who effectively control both parties with their extremely deep pockets, as long as Americans buy that lie, and as long as the Electoral College is allowed to remain in place, then America is screwed by it.

The only ways that I'm aware of to break that cycle is: 1) Permanently end the Electoral College; and 2) to finally vote for someone else, someone who is not so beholden to American corporatocracy, for enough people to both be registered to vote (finally starting to see some small movement on that, albeit infinitesimal) and for them to stop automatically simply voting for only either Democrats or Republicans.  That Senator Bernie Sanders held that office as an Independent for as long as he has is an indicator it can be done.

Eliminating the Electoral College is not impossible.  For things to do to achieve this, there are many avenues.  There are a plethora of petitions dedicated to this.  Sign all of them.  You can even start your own if you're so inclined.  You can also contact your government representatives, both state and federal.  You have the right, utilize it.  Write to and call your Representative and Senators.  And not just once and done, but repeatedly.  Don't let them ignore you.  To magnify your voice, also join or start a local group for this purpose.  For perspective, "gun rights" adherents and groups are calling in nearly daily.  It's one of the reasons Congress has failed so miserably to actually do anything particularly to curb gun violence  in America.  You can do the same.  As always, be polite or you'll be working against yourself.

Frankly I still think that if he had run as an independent in 2016 rather than falling into the trap of running as a Democrat against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, then we might finally have seen a solid crack in the system.  Especially considering Sanders was bringing in more small money donations and larger turnouts at his campaign rallies than Clinton and Trump combined.  But he was a clear and present danger to the established order which is why, since he was running as a Democrat, the Democratic Party was able to quash him and hand the nomination to Clinton.  Frankly, I could never vote for her as she never met a war she didn't like.

Until that break from the corporate duopoly happens, every cycle there will be people screaming that a vote for someone other than the corporate chosen candidate is a vote for the other corporate chosen candidate.

Want to keep Trump out of office?  Then do everything you can to make certain that the protections of the 14th Amendment are enforced, and throw his arse in prison where it likely belongs. 

Impossible is for the lazy.  Nothing is impossible if people start thinking rather than merely reacting.  It takes a lot of hard work and time invested.  As a hemorrhagic stroke survivor who's ambulatory again (after being completely paralyzed from the neck down on my dominant side, I'm not fully recovered YET), I am here to tell you impossible is for the lazy.   According to the laws of aerodynamics it's impossible for a bumblebee to fly.  Screw impossible and just DO it.

- Rev. J.T. Smith