Tag: politics

UN Troops should be in Kiev

jamie

What the fuck? Wake up, Joe!  I’m just saying. Biden should’ve been at the UN before Putin’s troops crossed the border into Ukraine, demanding a vote for UN Troops be sent in to defend the Ukrainian people.

Not NATO. The United Nations. And No, Russia doesn’t get a vote because they just lost their seat on the security council, thanks to this criminal act of aggression.

UN Peacekeeping Troops

I’m serious. UN troops should be defending Kiev. I mean, isn’t this what the UN is for? To defend democratic, peaceful nations from war pigs like Putin, who would invade sovereign soil and attempt to overthrow a duly elected government, and replace it with a Kremlin puppet.

I’m really not a war monger, in favor of American troops being used as ‘peace keepers’. But under the UN Flag, those same troops make an important statement: “Civilized people don’t do this shit, Vlad”. UN troops are a deterrent. He’s not just attacking Ukraine, he’s attacking the World.

War Pig Vladimir Putin.
Where’s a CIA assassin when you need one?

This bold move would send Putin a message:”The World is against you on this”. If Putin chooses to fire on UN Troops, he’s declaring war on the World. He truly would be over the edge, to do that. I would argue that anyone THAT unstable is going nuclear eventually anyway.

Yeah, I said it. That’s what we’re all afraid of: Putin’s Nukes. If he doesn’t get his way, he’ll throw a big boy tantrum. Then, how does this not escalate to ICBMs unless he backs down or we do? I’m sure the generals have a plan for this. Time to roll Operation Pig Roast?

Bullies only understand strength.
It’s Time To Eat Our Spinach.

Because appeasing a bully never works. He took Crimea, now he’s back for the rest because no one made him pay for his crime. If the World lets him take control of Free Ukraine, what will he plunder next? UN Troops in his way are an IMPORTANT statement that the World will not stand for it. Not America. Not NATO. The World.

Defending fledgling democracy from criminal acts of warfare by autocratic dictators should be Mission #1 for the UN. Defending peace, and those who struggle to defend their freedom.

“You can say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world can live as one”.

~John Lennon /Imagine

If the UN will not stand up for a free Ukraine, what the hell is it good for? Let’s just get rid of it. Scrap the useless den-of-shuck-and-jive United Nations, and replace it with a United World that is willing to act. Willing to do the right thing.

For Ukraine, and for everywhere democracy and freedom struggle to survive. ~jg

UN Building – New York, NY

Don’t ask me, I’m just a #GuyOnACouch

~jamie gray

Humanity First

jamie

Capitalism is survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. Caveat emptor. Profits and power are the cornerstone of the elite class, a self made royalty in a society that measures value and worth by the dollar and acre.

In contrast, most of us ordinary people see the importance of the common good. We recognize the inherent value in taking care of everyone, not just the ones who would kill and eat everyone else in order to ensure their own survival. As human beings, adopting degrees of Socialism is the acknowledgement that we’ve transcended to those higher places. It’s evolution of the species, to a new place, where we learn take care of our own. ALL of them, even if they don’t look like us or speak our tongue.

Socialism doesn’t mean everyone gets an equal share, like in communism. Instead, socialism seeks to ensure that everyone gets an equal chance, and less lives are wasted. Even a capitalist should be able to grok the concept of less waste. Isn’t prevention of wasted human potential just as important as protecting human life itself?
Our society should be made up of haves and have-mores, instead of haves and have-nots. The rich can still get richer. They just can’t do it by exploiting people to the point of sickness, starvation and homelessness. THAT sounds like Humanism to me…and shouldn’t we ALL be humanists? #HumanityFirst ~jg

Authors Note: All opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don’t like mine, I probably won’t like yours either. Let’s just nod, and walk away. Maybe come back with solutions instead of opinions. Because of the two, only solutions actually matter.

Fuck Insurance (Especially health insurance).

jamie

All insurance is a scam. Health Insurance is a fucking crime.
You have insurance, you think, ‘Cool I’m covered’. But nope…you still have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. How is that fair?

Insurance should be fucking insurance. I get sick. I’m insured. Insurance fucking pays, not me. It’s not really insurance if they get you coming and going. You pay all that money up front…every month…hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands per year. Sometimes they take it right out of your paycheck, before you ever see it.

Then you get sick. You give em the card, cross your fingers and pray. Deductible here. CoPay there. Deny this. Pro-rated that. You get out of the hospital, and before your recovery is even complete, they start coming: A bill from this doctor you don’t remember. A charge for this test and that screening. You haven’t even gotten back to work, and you’re buried in red ink.

What the fuck people. How is THIS the ‘best’ healthcare? If they save your life and then take your house to cover the cost…and that’s if you HAVE insurance. If you don’t, good luck even getting the services you need. When they know they aren’t getting paid, they somehow manage to do the barest minimum. Imagine that. For-Profit Hospitals putting profits above the best healthcare for all. WhoDaThunk?

Fuck Capitalism. Services like healthcare, police, fire, EMS, ambulance, military, prisons, education. These should NEVER be privatized. Everyone has the right to the best services we can provide when it comes to health and safety. People shouldn’t have to worry about paying the bills for these services. It should be included in our taxes, even if they are a little higher.

Separate but equal doesn’t work any more in healthcare than it does in education. Haves and have-nots alike should be protected from harm as citizens of an advanced and equitable society. Exploitation and greed have no place competing with the Hippocratic Oath for healthcare dollars. Those dollars are best spent on research, not drug commercials, dividends and CEO salaries.

The only way you do that is to get rid of the insurance companies and big pharma. Our universities, properly funded by tax dollars, could be an amazing core of medical research and medicine development…for the good of ALL, not just the shareholders and board of directors. No more price gouging on critical medicines. No more rationing of new medical treatments to the well-to-do and connected.

That’s what socialized medicine could be. It doesn’t have to be a poorly designed and inequitable system. There are plenty of examples of socialized medicine around the world that are models for a better standard of care than ours.

Healthcare is a human right, in a society that has advanced to the point where we CAN CHOOSE between profit and doing the right thing.

Do we really want to be THAT country? The one that chooses profits? Because WE have a choice. ~jg

New York writer and musician, Jamie Gray

Authors Note: All opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don’t like mine, I probably won’t like yours either. Let’s just nod, and walk away. Maybe come back with solutions instead of opinions. Because of the two, only solutions actually matter.

Better is Better

jamie

It’s a circus. A dog and pony show, of lies, half truths, and propaganda, moderated mostly by the honor system, as actual journalism has devolved into a mass-media marketing scheme. Competing corporate overlords selling the particular brand of fear they think you’re most likely to buy. When in truth, they should be afraid of YOU.

Here’s the thing about modern American politics: They want us to argue, to the point of complete distraction if at all possible, about big picture shit that is really hard to change. Both parties want the same thing.
They want us at each other’s throats over masks and vaccines, instead of just wearing them. They chide us on, to defend or attack the right to be an idiot vs. social responsibility and acting in the common good. Respecting the rights of all the other idiots.
But what they DON’T want us to do is to learn to communicate with each other.

Uncle Sam is a Corporate Tool.

They ply us with contradictory information. Some of it’s true, but they make it all seem true. That way when we discuss it, nobody can easily agree on the facts. Close scrutiny will reveal the truth eventually, but who has time for that? By the time the truth comes out, the ‘facts’ don’t even matter, thanks to the hype.

It’s a circus. A dog and pony show, of lies, half truths, and propaganda, moderated mostly by the honor system, as actual journalism has devolved into a mass-media marketing scheme. Competing corporate overlords selling the particular brand of fear they think you’re most likely to buy. When in truth, they should be afraid of YOU.

Corporate News is Not Journalism. Take the time to find The Truth.

Someday, I hope Americans will wake up and realize they deserve better than lip service. We deserve great things.

‘We live in the greatest country in the world’. That’s what they say. I beg to differ.

The greatest country in the world would be at the top of every list. Education. Happiness. Poverty. Healthcare. Crime. Violence. Civil rights. Wellness. Climate change. Sustainability. Incarceration. Mental health. Innovation. Productivity. Renewable energy. Manufacturing. We don’t lead the world in ANY of these important issues.

Poverty in America rivals many ‘third world’ nations. Education sucks. Don’t get me started about healthcare. It’s fine if you can afford it.

The United States of America: It’s fine if you can afford it.

We may have the most powerful military in the world, but even that’s not going to last long. We’re diving deeper and deeper into a national debt we can never repay, to fund wars on terrorism, which are really just thinly veiled political power plays, economic plunder at the expense of the indigenous people who really just want to be left alone to live their lives.

If every American could just go to the doctor without worrying about money, that would be great. If every kid had the opportunity for a GREAT education, and no one had to worry about being homeless in their old age, people would say THAT is great. If we sent food to the hungry, instead of missiles and tanks to their government: greatness.

People in many countries live a better life than we do, here in the States. Free healthcare. A social security system that works. Clean power fueling sustainable industries. Great free education for all. We have plenty of opportunities to become a great country. Truthfully, we’ve been a greater country before. The MAGA folks are at least partly right. We were far from perfect, but we used to lead the world in something other than greed and exploitation, before we lost our way.

We’ve given the keys to our future to a few powerful people, people who control corporations, which control our government. Corporations are very good at doing one thing: maximizing profits. THAT’S how they’ve managed to get people to work sixty hours a week and STILL not earn a living wage. Life isn’t better than it was fifty years ago for most Americans. Even most rich people don’t feel like things are better. Many wealthy people are preoccupied with losing everything, all the time.

Protecting rich people is so much more important than protecting poor people.

Why? Because, the rich are better than everyone else, of course. Wealthy people are simply more entitled to human rights than other people, simply because they have money, and…they’re just fucking entitled. That’s just ‘how it is’.

We let this happen. We allow a system to exist that causes this to be true, despite our ability to make demands enforced by democratic action (OUR VOTES). The system doesn’t have to be like this. It doesn’t have to be like it used to be, in order to magically get better. Think about that. It just makes no fucking sense.

Vote. It counts. Otherwise the minority, GOP assholes wouldn’t keep trying to suppress it.

The system has to get BETTER to get better. Better for EVERYONE, not just the elite. Not just for some people. Better in the things that matter. Change must benefit the majority to have a positive effect. Better.

I say, how about we try making things ‘better’ first and THEN maybe we can talk about ‘great’.

Greatness isn’t just a claim you make to impress people over cocktails. Greatness is easily recognizable. Greatness lasts. Truly great things stand the test of time. Some even improve with age. ~jg

Jamie Gray – Musician & Writer

Authors Note: All opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don’t like mine, I probably won’t like yours either. Let’s just nod, and walk away. Maybe come back with solutions instead of opinions. Because of the two, only solutions actually matter.

Uncommon Sense

jamie

Common sense is a paradox. Having common sense is not common at all. What seems common sense to you, may not be obvious to other people, and many people just don’t have any common sense at all. Some people just act irrationally. Even if they claim it’s by design, that doesn’t make it sensible.

So much about life today is paradox. Almost no one is who they seem, as much as who they want you to see them as. Even our leaders have abandoned Truth and Logic for lies and deceptions.

I’ve always thought that most people ‘get it’. I figured, a small minority may be clueless, while most people understand things. More or less. That’s what I thought. Used to think.

…our Leaders have abandoned Truth and Logic…

It’s easy enough to look back and ask if what you did made sense, but it’s also hard to look at our mistakes objectively. It’s much easier to ACT as if we’re smart and just ignore our own ignorance.

Lately, it’s become clear that those of us who truly think about what we’re doing, and whether it makes sense, we are a drastic minority.

Talk about a paradox. ~jg

Jamie Gray – Musician, Writer, Thinker

Authors Note: All opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don’t like mine, I probably won’t like yours either. Let’s just nod, and walk away. Maybe come back with solutions instead of opinions. Because of the two, only solutions actually matter.

Rationality

jamie

Rationality. If you look at American politics right now, you don’t see much of it. No, you mostly see two heavily armed camps, ready to flirt with disaster, risking all of our futures to achieve some set of higher principles that, if left to the other party, mean nothing short of destruction of everything we hold dear.

If you lean left, you’re being told that the evil Republicans are trying to stop the valiant Democrats from purging corporate control of our government and giving money, and the country, back to the people.

US Capitol – Washington DC

If you lean right, you’re worried the stupid Dems will spend us into doom, while taxing the rich until they can’t afford their summer homes and ski retreats.

If you’re on the far right, they’re trying to convince you that Socialism is the root of all evil, and that Satanic forces are killing babies in the womb, as they hand our God fearing Nation over to Hillary and Obama’s army of godless heathen Democrat pedophile pizza-politicians.

Now, I’m not saying I believe politicians from either party (especially the MAGA Republicans). Politicians are liars. It’s what they do. But some things they say make a grain of sense on their own, while others require a leap of faith to believe. I’m too old for leaps of faith. Especially when they require lapses of logic.

None of the MAGA Republicans claims hold up to rational thought. They are based in conspiracy theories, rumors, and full-on mistruths, lacking in facts or proof of any kind. There simply isn’t much in the way of a rational argument. For anything.

Share your fire. Feed the blaze.
#happiness #N0H8

When it’s all said and done, proof is best measured in actions and results. Rich people always do well. They do better when Republicans are in power. Since the 80s they’ve claimed the wealth will “trickle down”, while it gushed up to the millionaires…who became billionaires as millions died in the Pandemic. Meanwhile, America is deep in debt, and sitting on the edge of climate disaster and insurrection. Suffice to say, the trickle they’ve been promising for 40 years ain’t enough.

Poor people rarely win in America. Their voices, while numerous, are routinely ignored and rejected by all in power. At least when Democrats act, the average goes up. Poor gets less poor. Inequity decreases. Usually not by much, of course.

Jan 6 Insurrection| Capitol police defend The Capitol from Trump supporters in Washington DC – Jan 6 2021

We’re reaching a tipping point where debt threatens to collapse our economy as injustice and inequity are rising to unsustainable levels. The seeds of revolution are deeply sown, and change WILL come, one way or another.

Our choice is to usher it in gracefully, or let it take us by force, and at great cost. If the way we’ve handled climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic so far are any indication, we are in for a REALLY hard ride, folks. ~jg

Musician and Writer, Jamie Gray

Authors Note: All opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don’t like mine, I probably won’t like yours either. Let’s just nod, and walk away. Maybe come back with solutions instead of opinions. Because of the two, only solutions actually matter.