Party Members will

random things I thought of lately:

The Comic Strip will be called Orange Star Tricks, and i'll...uh...it'll get figured out. so I'll get some help or something.

I think they should be something between talking points, allegories, and satire. But it should be really really entertaining somehow. Think Gary Larsen. Maybe we'll misspell his name and use that as our Pen Name/Collective Moniker. I'd want it to work like a Platonic dialogue, or maybe a sitcom from the 80's; between those.

Moving on.

Party members reserve the right to form themselves into a huge Corporation whose sole purpose is influencing politics and attempting to use mind control to turn people into money generating (copper-top!) batteries. And by money, I mean politics, because they're the same. Which brings us too...

Party members reserve the right to create their own legal tender or to use the barter system with each other. Where official United States currency is required to assist in paying for social services and social programs (e.g. for those party members choosing to pay taxes to any of the various agencies that collect them on behalf of We the Peoples' Government), we'll use currency, otherwise: FREEFORALL!! In the eyes of our opponents, we would insert a film clip of inner-city and university residents rioting and looting. Then we'll laugh at our irony that they wouldn't get because we know that nothing is further from the truth. Replacing their money system with our own money system goes like this: we have to have the discipline to not want, need, desire, or gift things purchased with their money. Their money is filthy. Ours can be relatively non-filthy for at least a hundred years before it should be replaced (since it will be filthy, given that nothing stops the march of history).

Party members are hereby given the right to massage the neck and shoulders of any other party member, regardless of their, or the recipient's, gender. If they shall massage each others' shoulders more than twenty times each, they shall be considered common law married, but will have no right to any of their new partner's stuff.

Party members may save money by cutting their own hair, or not cutting it at all.

Party members may use their hair as fire-starting material in an emergency.

Party members should know CPR so they can save someone's life, then ask that person to join the party in return for saving their life.

Party members are allowed to consider really good TV shows as holy texts, but are encouraged to view commercial-free, and choose wisely. However, excessive use of the holy view screen is strictly forbidden. Seriously. Computers are pretty much okay, depending on your relationship to it.

I started my day today by listening to Thom Hartman (Hartmann?) talk to Ralph Nader on the radio - the Air America station, in case your neighborhood radio station doesn't carry Thom Hartman, broadcasting every weekday from Portland, Oregon. They were discussing the shit that went down today in the Supreme Court, about how a Corporation won a law suit again a TV station for refusing to air some stuff.

Well, I don't know enough about all that, but Nader listed several ways around this new bogus-ness, and part of me steps back and says - hey, maybe we can use this too. What if they all want us to be pissed about it, but it could be looked at in other ways too. What if this proves something about the Judiciary, and what if it makes it more obvious to more people that the People need to do something before it's too late to do anything. What if this gets even conservative people to push through public financing of campaigns. What if, what if, what if. Either way, nothing can really stop us from seizing the moment, since all they who are the powers that be, want us to do is believe any reason there is to not seize the moment and take back the politics of a wacked-out a-political country. That's right. As of Sarah Palin, I'd say we're a-political now.

In fact, maybe party members will mark the year of the election of Barack Obama as the day between B.S.P. (before Sarah Palin) and A.S.P. (too weird?). Either way, since I'm going through my fourth Alaska winter, and Sarah Palin is purportedly from Alaska, down the highway a ways from where I currently am, maybe the only two good things to come out of Alaska will be a divergent, robust political party that sweeps through the non-voters and voters alike, and the one woman who looked so stinkingly like Pandora and her proverbial Box, that everyone finally woke up to shrill cackle of her laughter as she...cackled with laughter? I don't know. she cackles I guess.

many more party members will... to come later. Some just stored in the phone and need to get transferred.

I Bring To You A Message Of Hope

First of all, wealth abounds in the United States. Those who seek to part you from your wealth prefer if you feel otherwise, but we are in no danger of running out of stuff in the United States. It is only recently in human history that wealth has become such a complicated idea. In the olden days, humans, the animals we are and aren't any different from our forbears, humans needed food and warmth and each other. Once farming came along, our idea of wealth was plenty to eat, and some extra for preserving or fermenting (luxury). At some point we became fans of jewelry, clothing, tools, and weapons. Now, for a very long time, that was the sum total of wealth and what wealth could be. A very long time. Food, jewelry, clothing, tools, and weapons, together with how fancy your abode is, was all wealth meant for a long time. There was also State wealth, a different kind of wealth, or the wealth of a King, but even for Ancient Egypt, compared to the modern costs associated with living a luxurious lifestyle, the Pharoah was pretty frugal, choosing instead to spend vast riches on pointy buildings that he'd try to live forever in.

Every Public chooses how to spend it's collective wealth. There is a much more complicated version of that truth, but for now, let's just keep in mind that people have overcome every institutional and beuracratic paradigm that has come before.

The United States is filled with many people who think our land and peoples are threatened by outsiders (or from within, but we quickly associate those insiders as quacks or having been affected by outsiders). Statistically speaking, as near as I can figure, most of the people who think this the most, vehemently, are also far less likely to know any facts or even events going on in the world around them. By some magic property of algebra, therefore, I presume to state without proof that the above implies that we are in fact not under threat. Near as I can figure, the United States gets a housing bubble bursting, like an economic pimple on our big powerful face, and the whole world goes for a tailspin: China makes legislation, the E.U. takes a hit, and even places like Dubai suddenly look like the monopoly guy when he's shrugging with his out-turned pockets empty. Nobody is going to come and hurt us, except maybe the stray suicide bomber, but they can't really take out more than a few hundred of us, or thousands in the most extreme case I can think of - so destroying any sizable chunk of the United States at that point would literally take thousands of suicide bombers, or tens of thousands. Good luck getting that many humans to do that. I'm sure the T-Party has the right idea on how to create that kind of zealot.

My point is, no one is coming to get us, we decide what happens here, and the big awful bullies that we think the hate-mongers are, are so dependent on us that even a little zit sends them all flurrying and panicking. They are the ones who can't live without wealth. We are the ones who need only food and warmth and each other.