Ignore all polls -- yesterday, today, last week, next week, next month, a week before the election. I don't mean you need to remain ignorant of the polls, but seriously, what sort of person lets a poll result affect their vote or any part of their decision-making process? A dipshit, that's who. You already know that, though, you don't need some internet wiseass to point that simple fact out to you.
Much like reality teevee, the constant churn of meaningless data is a very real and metastasizing cancer on this country. It has poisoned the impressionable brains of simpletons, people who shouldn't be allowed out of the house with money or without a helmet.
Unlike every other modern representative government on this groaning, beaten planet of ours, the US is blessed with a perpetual campaign machine. It's another in a long list of uniquely American rackets that turn out to be lucrative, because we are largely a country of willing dupes.
So, for example, the health care system is a collusive racket between the insurance companies, HMOs, and big pharma. The university system is a collusive racket between the schools and Wall Street. Both are designed to do exactly the same thing -- hoover ungodly amounts of usury out of the pockets of a captive market.
Now, the perpetual campaign racket is similar in that it is basically underwritten by most of the above entities, since they all buy ad time on the corporate media propaganda outlets. But instead of sucking money directly out of your pocket, they grab your eyes and brains with piles of the worst sorts of tea-leaf-reading bullshit and pseudo-analytical nonsense.
Why are white men without college degrees twenty-five percent likelier to vote for Trump than any other demographic? they ask. I dunno, because they're idiots? Who knows? Who cares? I don't give two shits who my next-door neighbor or my relatives or some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner is going to vote for -- at all. I mean, I care in the sense that I hope they don't make the stupid choice, but whatever their choice turns out to be, it doesn't affect my choice in the slightest.
But when you have billions of dollars thrown at weaselly consultants whose sole mission is to convince you that some doofus "swing voters" should be courted like a busload of horny supermodels, you have your racket. And it's every bit as pernicious a racket as the health care or college rackets, maybe more so in some ways.
The real job of this dipshit consultant with their focus-group polling, appearing on a panel with other useless assholes on Jake Tapper's show or whatever, their real job is to convince you that any bold ideas that might upset the billionaires who own everything is Bad, and makes Candidate X "unelectable." This is explicitly designed to force Candidate X to "moderate" their tone, coin some "conciliatory" phrases in order to reassure our benevolent plutocrats that All Is Well, why, we would never so much as dare to dream of anything beyond a life of pointless make-work, eternal usury, and endless advertisements.
So the real "problem" with Elizabeth Warren proposing a plan to move to a "Medicare for All" type of system, is certainly not that it might displace some number of paper pushers and bill collectors whose jobs would be made redundant, nor even really that a "wealth tax" would be instituted to pay for it. The problem the billionaires have with it is that they are unclear on where their revenue stream is in the proposed new system. How can we monetize it? How can we financialize it? Where is the magic pond in this plan, the one where I get to wet my beak for eternity?
As I keep preaching, their equity is an amalgam of other peoples' debt, just as your personal debt could be pieced out as other peoples' equity. They have a clear vested interest in keeping as many people as possible broke, stupid, and on the debt hook for the rest of their goddamned lives. An important part of gulling people into voting against themselves over and over again is to make them feel like they have at least a small stake in life, something worth not losing or risking, and then destabilizing them with barrages of data -- some true, some false, none of it matters -- in order to induce a state of fear.
Fear of losing your job or your house because the company you work for pulls up stakes overnight and moves operations to China. Fear of losing your crappy health insurance, because if you or your wife or one of your kids gets cancer or hit by a bus or whatever, you're fucked. Hell, even if you do still have your insurance, you're probably fucked. But at least there might be some lube involved.
(Of course, the hospital will charge the insurance company a thousand bucks for the one-ounce tube of lube, which the insurance company will then deny and send you the full bill on the EOB, against your five-thousand-dollar deductible. But I digress.)
And so the pelf-grubbers and the usurers and the spreadsheet-diddlers who produce and create nothing, but own everything, are welcomed on to the corporate media which is institutionally aligned with them, to lecture the peons about the "moral hazards" of not gouging every possible cent out of working people, for a product which typically does not recoup its cost in the first place, never mind the next decade or so of vig added on.
And then they'll turn around and have that nazi Spencer on, or the liar Kellyanne. The mission is not to inform, but to deform -- to irretrievably mutate the terms of discussion, so that a truly honest debate can never be had. It takes some serious balls for these fucking hacks to grind on Liz Warren's proposal -- which is all it is, we're not even into the primaries yet -- and not provide a side-by-side comparison with that flag-humping Caddyshack reject, who has done nothing, has proposed nothing, to resolve or even address what most people across the political spectrum agree is a serious problem.
It's a game, and we need to stop playing it. People like Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd really ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they do is not journalism, it's (as Frank Zappa once memorably put it) the entertainment branch of industry. It's PR for the Koch brothers and for Exxon, and whoever else is paying the bills.
The perpetually changing polls in the perpetual campaign are critical pieces in keeping the average rube unsettled and destabilized. They're designed to give the just-over-half-bright viewer a few simple talking points they can memorize the next time they have a run-in with their smarty-pants co-worker at the water cooler.
They can prattle about the two million clerical and admin jobs that might be lost in the M4A transition, which would take years to implement in the first place, without considering that part of the problem is that at least some of the money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for your shitty insurance pays for those jobs, and that maybe creating a real marketing efficiency would not only save you money on your insurance premiums, but give those workers an opportunity for something better than churning out EOB forms.
They can recite Leon Cooperman's bullshit about the moral hazards of student-loan forgiveness, without thinking about the fact that Cooperman owns a stake in Navient, so yeah, students' debt is his equity, where have you heard that one before? I think we're at the point where you could start a super PAC called "Chickens for Colonel Sanders," and no one would see the irony in it. We're post-Onion now. And it's because mediots with no sense anymore of what is actually newsworthy decided to give infinite air-time to people with no scruples or principles whatsoever.
So I don't care what the polls say, even when I agree with them. And I don't care what any media monkey says, even if I nod along with them. I have already made my resolution, and it's best phrased in A.R. Moxon's tweet at right:
I used that exact argument with a Trump-supporting friend a few months ago. I reminded him that I was very much a ticket-splitter for a long time, but as the Republicans have increasingly soiled their brand with hucksters and scumbags like Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, et al, I've written them off forever.
I figure I've got another seven or eight presidential election cycles left, and I don't care how bad the Democratic candidate is, I will never vote for a Republican again, not even for so much as fucking dog-catcher. My wife will never vote for a Republican. My daughter just turned eighteen, and is very much looking forward to casting her "fuck you" drop in the ocean against Trump and his scummy ilk next year, and for the next sixty or seventy years. And we already stopped buying from companies that support Trump or Fox, watching shows made in Georgia, all of it. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle, but I am fucking done with all of these people, and refuse to give them anything -- time, money, attention.
Just as I know more than my share of Trump supporters, I also know a good number of people who, like myself, did vote Republican sometimes, but now regard them with a snarl usually reserved for child molesters and red-light runners. Trump is not the cause of all this, but the natural outcome of their efforts for my entire lifetime. It's not just him, it's always been them. They're fucking scum, top to bottom, whether they vocally support Trump or not. Silence is complicity.
And I will make sure that if a pollster calls me, they know that, that it's not just "no" to Trump, but "never again" to the Republicons. They're a party of Fredo Corleones, completely dead to me. I think maybe Matt Bevin just found that out the hard way as well, and Trump may finally start figuring out that despite what the paid prognosticators and his bullshit in-house surveys tell him, people don't like that motherfucker, because he's an awful excuse for a human being, and a goddamned embarrassment to a majority of Americans.
Fuck the pollsters, and the mediots who put them on the air. Let's get this party started!
Much like reality teevee, the constant churn of meaningless data is a very real and metastasizing cancer on this country. It has poisoned the impressionable brains of simpletons, people who shouldn't be allowed out of the house with money or without a helmet.
Unlike every other modern representative government on this groaning, beaten planet of ours, the US is blessed with a perpetual campaign machine. It's another in a long list of uniquely American rackets that turn out to be lucrative, because we are largely a country of willing dupes.
So, for example, the health care system is a collusive racket between the insurance companies, HMOs, and big pharma. The university system is a collusive racket between the schools and Wall Street. Both are designed to do exactly the same thing -- hoover ungodly amounts of usury out of the pockets of a captive market.
Now, the perpetual campaign racket is similar in that it is basically underwritten by most of the above entities, since they all buy ad time on the corporate media propaganda outlets. But instead of sucking money directly out of your pocket, they grab your eyes and brains with piles of the worst sorts of tea-leaf-reading bullshit and pseudo-analytical nonsense.
Why are white men without college degrees twenty-five percent likelier to vote for Trump than any other demographic? they ask. I dunno, because they're idiots? Who knows? Who cares? I don't give two shits who my next-door neighbor or my relatives or some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner is going to vote for -- at all. I mean, I care in the sense that I hope they don't make the stupid choice, but whatever their choice turns out to be, it doesn't affect my choice in the slightest.
But when you have billions of dollars thrown at weaselly consultants whose sole mission is to convince you that some doofus "swing voters" should be courted like a busload of horny supermodels, you have your racket. And it's every bit as pernicious a racket as the health care or college rackets, maybe more so in some ways.
The real job of this dipshit consultant with their focus-group polling, appearing on a panel with other useless assholes on Jake Tapper's show or whatever, their real job is to convince you that any bold ideas that might upset the billionaires who own everything is Bad, and makes Candidate X "unelectable." This is explicitly designed to force Candidate X to "moderate" their tone, coin some "conciliatory" phrases in order to reassure our benevolent plutocrats that All Is Well, why, we would never so much as dare to dream of anything beyond a life of pointless make-work, eternal usury, and endless advertisements.
So the real "problem" with Elizabeth Warren proposing a plan to move to a "Medicare for All" type of system, is certainly not that it might displace some number of paper pushers and bill collectors whose jobs would be made redundant, nor even really that a "wealth tax" would be instituted to pay for it. The problem the billionaires have with it is that they are unclear on where their revenue stream is in the proposed new system. How can we monetize it? How can we financialize it? Where is the magic pond in this plan, the one where I get to wet my beak for eternity?
As I keep preaching, their equity is an amalgam of other peoples' debt, just as your personal debt could be pieced out as other peoples' equity. They have a clear vested interest in keeping as many people as possible broke, stupid, and on the debt hook for the rest of their goddamned lives. An important part of gulling people into voting against themselves over and over again is to make them feel like they have at least a small stake in life, something worth not losing or risking, and then destabilizing them with barrages of data -- some true, some false, none of it matters -- in order to induce a state of fear.
Fear of losing your job or your house because the company you work for pulls up stakes overnight and moves operations to China. Fear of losing your crappy health insurance, because if you or your wife or one of your kids gets cancer or hit by a bus or whatever, you're fucked. Hell, even if you do still have your insurance, you're probably fucked. But at least there might be some lube involved.
(Of course, the hospital will charge the insurance company a thousand bucks for the one-ounce tube of lube, which the insurance company will then deny and send you the full bill on the EOB, against your five-thousand-dollar deductible. But I digress.)
And so the pelf-grubbers and the usurers and the spreadsheet-diddlers who produce and create nothing, but own everything, are welcomed on to the corporate media which is institutionally aligned with them, to lecture the peons about the "moral hazards" of not gouging every possible cent out of working people, for a product which typically does not recoup its cost in the first place, never mind the next decade or so of vig added on.
And then they'll turn around and have that nazi Spencer on, or the liar Kellyanne. The mission is not to inform, but to deform -- to irretrievably mutate the terms of discussion, so that a truly honest debate can never be had. It takes some serious balls for these fucking hacks to grind on Liz Warren's proposal -- which is all it is, we're not even into the primaries yet -- and not provide a side-by-side comparison with that flag-humping Caddyshack reject, who has done nothing, has proposed nothing, to resolve or even address what most people across the political spectrum agree is a serious problem.
It's a game, and we need to stop playing it. People like Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd really ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they do is not journalism, it's (as Frank Zappa once memorably put it) the entertainment branch of industry. It's PR for the Koch brothers and for Exxon, and whoever else is paying the bills.
The perpetually changing polls in the perpetual campaign are critical pieces in keeping the average rube unsettled and destabilized. They're designed to give the just-over-half-bright viewer a few simple talking points they can memorize the next time they have a run-in with their smarty-pants co-worker at the water cooler.
They can prattle about the two million clerical and admin jobs that might be lost in the M4A transition, which would take years to implement in the first place, without considering that part of the problem is that at least some of the money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for your shitty insurance pays for those jobs, and that maybe creating a real marketing efficiency would not only save you money on your insurance premiums, but give those workers an opportunity for something better than churning out EOB forms.
They can recite Leon Cooperman's bullshit about the moral hazards of student-loan forgiveness, without thinking about the fact that Cooperman owns a stake in Navient, so yeah, students' debt is his equity, where have you heard that one before? I think we're at the point where you could start a super PAC called "Chickens for Colonel Sanders," and no one would see the irony in it. We're post-Onion now. And it's because mediots with no sense anymore of what is actually newsworthy decided to give infinite air-time to people with no scruples or principles whatsoever.
So I don't care what the polls say, even when I agree with them. And I don't care what any media monkey says, even if I nod along with them. I have already made my resolution, and it's best phrased in A.R. Moxon's tweet at right:
I used that exact argument with a Trump-supporting friend a few months ago. I reminded him that I was very much a ticket-splitter for a long time, but as the Republicans have increasingly soiled their brand with hucksters and scumbags like Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, et al, I've written them off forever.
I figure I've got another seven or eight presidential election cycles left, and I don't care how bad the Democratic candidate is, I will never vote for a Republican again, not even for so much as fucking dog-catcher. My wife will never vote for a Republican. My daughter just turned eighteen, and is very much looking forward to casting her "fuck you" drop in the ocean against Trump and his scummy ilk next year, and for the next sixty or seventy years. And we already stopped buying from companies that support Trump or Fox, watching shows made in Georgia, all of it. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle, but I am fucking done with all of these people, and refuse to give them anything -- time, money, attention.
Just as I know more than my share of Trump supporters, I also know a good number of people who, like myself, did vote Republican sometimes, but now regard them with a snarl usually reserved for child molesters and red-light runners. Trump is not the cause of all this, but the natural outcome of their efforts for my entire lifetime. It's not just him, it's always been them. They're fucking scum, top to bottom, whether they vocally support Trump or not. Silence is complicity.
And I will make sure that if a pollster calls me, they know that, that it's not just "no" to Trump, but "never again" to the Republicons. They're a party of Fredo Corleones, completely dead to me. I think maybe Matt Bevin just found that out the hard way as well, and Trump may finally start figuring out that despite what the paid prognosticators and his bullshit in-house surveys tell him, people don't like that motherfucker, because he's an awful excuse for a human being, and a goddamned embarrassment to a majority of Americans.
Fuck the pollsters, and the mediots who put them on the air. Let's get this party started!
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