In case you can’t figure this out on your own…Any other questions?

All Lives Matter All Lives Matter All Lives Matter

 

Anything that demeans or detracts from the lives of any of us, diminishes the lives of all of us.

We Are all in this together.

All that it takes for Injustice or Tyranny to prevail is for people of good conscience to do nothing.

 

Namasté
नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/19/2020

 

 

 

Just One More…

 

Don’t be Too Sure

 

 

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”  

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong…The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.” –H.L. Mencken

““The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

 

Quotes by H.L. Mencken

The Same as it Ever Was

 

“True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. . . . They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.”

“The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion.”

“By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds…of evangelists?”

“Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.”

“Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

“”Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us in the past.”

“It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true.”

“The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government.”

Namasté
नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/18/2020

Troubling Quotes for Troubled Times

 

Concerning Law and Order

 

“The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good.”

“Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.”

“One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions.”

“The laws are innumerable and idiotic, but only prisoners in the penitentiaries and persons under religious vows ever obey them.”

Namasté
नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/18/2020

 

More Quotes

 

As True as Ever

 

“What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

H.L. Mencken

Quotations by H.L. Mencken Pt II

 

 

Some Things Never Change

 

“It is now practically impossible…to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto “In God we trust” were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, ‘verboten,’ substituted.”

“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.”

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

“Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.”

 

Namasté
नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/18/2020

A Series of Quotations…100 years ago…Pt. 1

 

Does This Sound Familiar?

 

The prevailing atmosphere of what I can only think of as “The Daily Insanity” reminded me of a number of quotes by American author, and literary critic, H.L. Mencken.

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.”

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”

Namasté
नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/17/2020

 

Once in a Blue Agave Moon: chapter 38

What is the meaning and value of Money?

With the advent of the repeated pandemics starting in 2020, came an almost crippling downturn of the economy to a point that virtually all working class people were facing bankruptcy, hunger, or worse. 

Long before the Armageddon (computer) Virus took all the virtual money away from the Western Banking System, it became necessary to re-assess the difference between what was of value and what was not.

During the first pandemic, farmers poured out milk, and plowed crops back into the ground as the specter of famine stared  back into their faces in the midst of world-wide shortages elsewhere. Markets closed down; there was no one to transport the goods, and no place to take them.

Meat packing plants had to be shut down because the workers were making each other sick, resulting in animals being destroyed and meat being sent to landfills, because it was too expensive to either feed them or even freeze their carcasses, and no one to do it.

Desperate families seeking some form of relief from food banks often faced shortages and lines several miles long.

For the first time in over one hundred years, “Oil Futures” suddenly went from over one hundred dollars a barrel to being worth less than nothing, as the cost of their storage exceeded their present value when demand plummeted in a world of quarantine and isolation.

In 2008, when the Real Estate and Stock markets tanked, the government bailed out the banks, while the banks foreclosed on their mortgages, leaving entire blocks of homes uninhabited. 

This should have created a renter’s market, but because the banks owned the homes, they let them sit, rot, and develop black mold, eventually rendering them uninhabitable (declaring them as a loss against other profits later to lower their taxes even further), thereby allowing the price of rents to skyrocket.

Because the blatant fallacies of “trickle-down economics” could no longer be perpetrated upon voters, the legislature proposed to infuse the general economy with money paid directly to people who were previously employed, so as to allow them to continue to pay their bills, creating secondary and tertiary effects within the economy as the money changed hands again and again within their own communities.

It just wasn’t enough, because the stimulus packages were just another way for Congress to placate the public, as if to jingle their car-keys to make the baby stop crying while hedge-fund investors sucked up the money supposedly designated for small businesses and the President fired the Inspector General that was supposed to oversee the much larger sums of money allocated to protect industries that needed little, if any protection.

If anything, the Public should have been protected from the major corporations…(as well as the President and his cronies).

It took several more pandemics before those abuses could be identified and eliminated.

No longer would the populace accept believing that whatever fell from the tables of the mega-wealthy was all that they deserved because after all, it was they who performed the labor, marketed and transported, as well as stocked and sold the goods that they in turn paid for yet again to the same system, so as to buy back what they had already produced.

And yet, for every job lost, each new virus created more and more jobs in public health departments, testing laboratories, and manufacturers of anything medically-related.

Anyone who could use a computer to work from home did so.

They were still slaves however, being simply traded from one master to another.

Even small brick and mortar operations found ways to flourish, and servers became delivery personnel, or telephone and internet order takers, or else they suffered the consequences.

For over one hundred years, the culture and economy of the United States was carried on the backs of its workers, not its owners, through numerous World Wars, Police Actions, Interventions, a Great Depression and innumerable recessions.

The American people rose to the challenge, answered the call, performed the duties, made the sacrifices, and all the while the owners reaped the profits.

Eventually, populist politicians managed to convince voters that it was not nearly as important how much the government spent as it was what they spent it on, and how they spent it.

Enough “Trickle Down Economics”. It felt more like “Golden Showers” if you were dependent upon being on the receiving end.

The country had to finally face the fact that it was cheaper to provide the restorative interim money, training and recruitment for its citizens, and let them pay their own bills, so that they didn’t need to fund every major corporation that claimed that it needed life support instead.

Throughout all of that time, the only common thread that ran through all of it was Money.

But what is Money, really? Pieces of paper, denoting the value of some coin of the realm of wherever you happen to be?

Even Atheists believe in Money, despite the fact that the similarities of both belief systems needed Faith to support such a thinly proven existence.

So, if someone works for an employer for X number of hours, the employer agrees to pay them Y amount of money, which is a symbolic representation of what they have chosen for which to sell that particular portion of their Life in the belief that some time in the future, when they need or want to buy something, they can trade some of what they sold their life for to someone who will accept this symbolic representation of value as payment for whatever it is that someone else is trying to sell that they want.

From the earliest times, gold, silver, and precious gems have so hypnotized mankind that they will lie, cheat, forge, fuck, hurt, or even kill to get more of it, or at the very least, some form of symbolic representation of it.

The disassociation created between these symbolic representations of Wealth and Reality is because all the wealth of the entire world is not worth your life, or the time of your days, your desires, and your loves, or ultimately, your consciousness, and the reality that you create within your perceptions.

Now imagine a world where the only real wealth is determined by your ability to manipulate your environment by virtue of your intelligence, your sapience, your strength, determination and perseverance.

A world where you could only keep what you could control and maintain.

No need for money. If you can’t find or make something yourself you can barter or trade something you have or something that you can make or even for your knowledge, in trade for something that you want.

You can’t eat gold; it won’t keep you warm. Silver cannot slake your thirst, even for power, and no one has ever built a house entirely out of precious metals, and the only “shelters” built by them were Tax Shelters.

Same thing for precious gemstones, except that although diamonds are nine times more plentiful than emeralds, their prices were artificially controlled by the De Beers cartel, and the precedents they set have remained for years afterward.

This is the difference between real value and market value.

Of course this is a ridiculously simplistic concept that is baseless within the reality created by Mankind’s infatuation with the Illusion of Value.

But what if one day, you woke up and found out that all of the days of your life that you had traded for virtual Money, suddenly had disappeared into the virtual reality of a now-defunct internet?

And what if the day after that you realized that you had been bamboozled into trading all of your Instincts for Reason when you could have had them both all along?

The perfect atmosphere for Simplicity.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish Satire or even Facetiousness from Sarcasm.

Sometimes it makes no difference; sometimes there is no difference.

Sometimes all that it needs to do is encourage you to think. 

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

copyright  ©  March 12th, 2021  

Fish swim with the tides, in and out of the lagoon as it empties itself, receives from, and flows back into the sea.

*ALL REFERENCES TO ANY PERSONS CONFIRMED STILL LIVING IS PURELY CO-INCIDENTAL…AND THE DEAD ARE TOO BUSY LAUGHING AT US TO CARE.

PS: After all, in the midst of the perfection of the Garden of Eden, there was no need for money…(and no need to put a mustache on the Buddha either.)

Once in a Blue Agave Moon Cyberterrorism: Chapter 36

Cyber terrorism: Part Two

Stuxnet set the stage for all world-class cyberterrorism that was to follow.

Although not the only efforts being attempted at the time by other nations, Stuxnet raised the bar to a newer, higher level in ways not previously imagined.

It made its first appearances in 2010, allegedly hatched by the United States and Israel, with “lawyer’s fingerprints” all over it” it specifically attacked Siemens System Seven programs designed to provide control of everything from assembly line operations to the speed at which Iranian centrifuges operated during their uranium enrichment program, its intended target.

It was effectively the great-grandaddy of the Armageddon Virus that brought the Western Banking System to it’s knees, then decapitated it by essentially making all the virtual money which we had been spending for decades unavailable because there were no more records of it and no way to corroborate who had what.

Other than paper money (which in and of itself is essentially worthless), few banks even bothered to keep any real wealth within their ubiquitous safes, and their transactions were essentially virtual.

In a related, but separate series of plots, the day before the release of the virus, other terrorists had spent the last fifteen years slowly and carefully tunneling under the Federal Reserve Banks and almost simultaneously exploded a combination of stolen and makeshift “dirty” thermonuclear devices underneath them so as to make the gold and silver reserves dangerous and unusable for thousands of years, creating a general panic and the worst run on the banks since the Great Depression.

It’s hard to remember that the money in all the Federal Reserve Banks only amounts to less then twenty percent of the GDP, but the mindset of the general public was not such that they could be placated, and riots ensued.

What no one knew, was that the Armageddon Virus had interrupted what would have been the most sinister plot ever dreamed up to make puppets of all but the most connected and wealthy without even creating so much as a ripple of controversy.

Curiously, it began with insurance actuarials, which could accurately predict with alarming accuracy how long you will live and what will probably kill you, based upon the records they kept, so as to assess the level of risk that you represented to an insuror.

Then came genome testing, which assessed the effects of your DNA upon your health and predicted lifespan.

With the advent of the COVID-19 virus pandemic came the practice of tracing and tracking not only your vital signs, but with whom you had been in contact by way of Smartwatches Fitbits, and social media applications.

In the name of safety, people will give away all manner of Privacy, Liberty, and Freedom.

Credit reporting agencies, police files and permanent school records rounded out a picture that could be used to predict the most likely outcomes of your life.

In fact, the Armageddon Virus utilized, and even began setting up phony credit improvement apps and agencies to gain control of the world’s finances.

The six richest people in the entire world owned ninety percent of all of the wealth of the world, and each year, the disparity of the distribution increased.

It was not by accident.

Given the opportunity to decide who got selected to go to the most prestigious schools, or offered the most lucrative careers, bank loans, or investment opportunities, it was only a matter of time before those entrusted to make those decisions had the data they desired to minimize their risks before the applications were even filled out.

It was not necessary to use mind control or some kind of external force to control the population in order to determine the outcomes.

What this does not account for is physical attractiveness, individual self-determination, ambition, independent thinking, creativity or even personality; however, the longer that the program was in use, and the more widespread it became, the less likely it would be for anyone to break free of the predictions made for their future because it became a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Then suddenly, Chaos had stepped in to level the field.

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

copyright  ©  March 12th, 2021  

Fish swim with the tides, in and out of the lagoon as it empties itself, receives from, and flows back into the sea.

*ALL REFERENCES TO ANY PERSONS CONFIRMED STILL LIVING IS PURELY CO-INCIDENTAL…AND THE DEAD ARE TOO BUSY LAUGHING AT US TO CARE.

PS: This is probably out of sequence for the final story, but I thought to add it now.

What’s in a Name?

Those of us who make a living by working on the telephone are not necessarily telemarketers.

If one works in customer service, for instance you are not marketing anything, because you are not selling anything except your own cult of personality in order to placate people who are afraid (usually for good reason) that they are being victimized by whatever service you are trying to defend.

A few years ago, I learned that the federal government treats telephone workers as “factory workers.”

Before I was given the opportunity to enjoy my self-righteous indignation, it was explained to me that in fact, that was a good thing because if we got laid off, we were now entitled to the same benefits as factory workers, which were much better than they had been before.

Somehow, the term factory worker did not sit well with me. I’m no snob (I thought), but as I pondered the whole thing, I thought that where we worked was indeed a Voice Factory, which I then began to refer to as The Voice Box.

Over the last eleven years, my job has taken on more and more intrusive measurements of literally every second from the time I walk through the door.

It is all connected to a feature they refer to as Adherence, and they can fuck with everything from your rate of pay, or any future raises, to your pecking order for bidding for your scheduling.

I used to jokingly refer to us as Lab Rats, because I often suggested that we were in reality being used as test subjects to see how much stress they could introduce into our workplace before someone “went postal” and shot the place up.

We’ve had three suicides, but no mass murders so far….

I eventually endorsed the term “Talking Moneys” about the time I started the second novel.

But, in truth, There are Some Things that a Monkey Won’t Do.

As my employers’ quest to engineer the last shred of humanity out of the workplace, a new term now comes to mind.

It is Biobot.

We are, for now, a necessary evil, but rest assured, as soon as someone invents a robot that can do what I do, I will be out of work in less time that it takes to kick me to the curb.

Biobots of the world, unite!

 

 

 

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

07/28/2018