Month: May 2019

Since they don’t have a shareable link I’m cloning the email by hand.

None of the links work because the email is of course full of tracking garbage. But I like the points made in the base text.

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Happy Memorial Day! I hope you are enjoying a wonderful day with loved ones and family.

Memorial Day became a federal holiday in 1971, though it has been celebrated in some form since the 1860s. Today, many Americans—especially those who have not experienced personal loss in this arena—have a natural inclination not to look too closely when it comes to the results of the wars we are fighting or have fought. We are quick with a, “Thank you for your service.” We are slow to think deeply about what it means that less than one percent of our population serves, and that even within our 50 states, there is a marked difference in enlistment rates, and that 25% of our active duty members and veterans show signs of PTSD and other mental health issues.

To this end, I asked a member of my staff who is a veteran what he would ask of Americans on this Memorial Day. He recommended an essay that struck a chord with me—Phil Klay’s The Warrior at the Mall. The essence of Mr. Klay’s argument is that, as a result of the same minority of Americans spending decades at war while an overwhelming majority carries on with their lives as if nothing is amiss, a chasm has opened up between civilians and veterans. This chasm must be bridged, or, as Mr. Klay says:

“We risk our country slipping further into the practice of a fraudulent form of American patriotism, where ‘soldiers are sacred,’ the work of actual soldiering is ignored and the pageantry of military worship sucks energy away from the obligations of citizenship.”

Mr. Klay also points out

“Support for our military remains high at a time when respect for almost every other institution is perilously low, so pushing a military angle as a wedge makes a certain kind of sense. But … our military is justified only by the civic life and values it exists to defend.”

That is, we don’t believe in much these days beyond our military. But the military exists to defend our society itself.

Thus, we owe it to our veterans to take our citizenship seriously enough that it warrants their sacrifices.

If there is a way that we can celebrate this Memorial Day beyond reflecting on and thanking our veterans and members of the armed services for all they have done and given up, it would be to try to become more worthy of their sacrifice. This includes examining our decisions to put our soldiers into harm’s way and how we treat and support them after they return. It even includes how we treat ourselves and other members of our society.

I met with a veterans’ organization this week to learn about their experiences. Both of the officials I met with served in the Middle East in the Marine Corps. Now they work at an organization that tries to end the ‘Forever Wars’ and advocates for Congress regaining its say on military deployments which have fallen solely to the executive branch since 2001. That is where their patriotism and service has led them.

We can do better. We will do better. For our veterans and the country they sacrificed so much for.

Respectfully,

Andrew Yang’s Signature

-Andrew

Yang2020
Thank you for helping to make Universal Basic Income a reality.

Update 2019-09-07 1209 AM: They are using blatant media rigging imo as cover for the eventual machine hack. So that when they return a narrow victory for whatever establishment candidate, we’ll blame ourselves, or the media, and not actual cheating. Thus securing both their legitimacy and the legitimacy of rigged elections.

Exit poll discrepancy is how the state department detects rigging in other countries, so why don’t we even have it here?

Update: See also. The california primary is purposefully broken.

Update: See also. The purpose of the DNC is controlled opposition.

Update: I consider this evidence. They used machines to rig the debate against him.

Why do I say he’ll lose? Because hacking. Rigging.

“We’re reacting to it in one of the worst ways possible we’re reacting to it by pretending it’s not happening.” Yang said in a recent town hall with Lessig.

Pretending it’s not happening eh? Like silence on the fact that the machines are rigged and have been rigged since Bush/Gore? (HBO Hacking Democracy/#ExitpollGate) Silence on the fact that the DNC argued in court that it’s perfectly legal to rig a primary because they are a private corporation, and the court agreed? (#DNCFraudLawsuit) Silence on the fact that the Podesta emails prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the 2016 primary was indeed rigged accordingly? (#PodestaEmails)

My comment on that video…

I’ll still go through the motions. I’ll still vote, I’ll still put up the yard sign, etc. But I have no hope of him winning. None. Zero. Unless someone can tell me something new.

Bush v Gore, Ron Paul, Tim Canova v DWS, Bernie Sanders v Podesta.

Blackbox voting, exit poll discrepancies, insecure voting machines, courts agreeing it’s perfectly legal for a party to rig its own primary.

Leaked emails, and insider books, make it clear that happened in 2016.

No substantive audit of vote machine security, Ever, as far as I know has happened, and certainly not since 2016.

Over and above all the problems people talk about with election integrity, such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, media bias and corruption, etc, we have also had since 2016 a deafening silence on the rigged game side of things.

Despite the popularity of blaming Russia for everything bad, there’s still silence because no one is for example using Russia to explain exit poll discrepancies. No one is saying we need to harden our voting machines vs Russian agents. No one is saying the Russians infiltrated the DNC to suppress Sanders. In fact no one of consequence is saying anything about any of it as far as I can tell. That’s why I feel like that whole Russia thing is probably bunk because if they were really worried about foreign agent election tampering that’s the first place they’d go.

It’s been a cliche since the 1880s that vote counters are superior to vote casters when it comes to election influence.

Bickering about policy when the machines are wide open and it’s not even illegal to hack them, is like a 6 inch thick vault door on a child’s nylon bed tent. Indeed it’s even worse than that because at least with the tent it would be obvious if someone cut a hole in the side to bypass the door.

Our voting machines on the other hand being black boxes with no substantive logging or security or even legal protection, would show no direct evidence of tampering.

This is not “conspiracy theory.” It’s simply a combination of documented facts that paint a grim picture for any insurgent popular disruptive candidate. (Sound like anyone we know?)

Silence on this can’t be the response. It didn’t help Gore, it didn’t help Paul, it didn’t help any of our causes.

So this is me calling it. Yang will lose. But not for any of the reasons they will tell you. I’m calling it now so that when people are exploring the aftermath, hopefully they’ll find this or something like it and respond finally to the real problem.

Our society rewards madness with copious amounts of cash. We really are objectively doing something wrong. Step back and look at the machine and ask where the design flaw is. Personally I think it’s the intellectual property law religion.

The single point of failure imo is public art being “owned” privately. It should all be fan films and crowd funding and no one should need anyone’s permission to make or consume art. Art should be treated like science. Record credit and respect creators, but the information belongs to us all.

Innovation should not be contingent on anyone’s permission, especially not for reasons of profit.

I can’t drive because of an anxiety disorder. I turn 40 this year. I have no income and I live in a small city in the same house since I was 3. Parents own the house but moved out when I was 17 and cover utilities. I’ve always been disabled but ironically since I can’t make phone calls either I can’t prove it well enough to qualify for aid.

I basically have lived in near total solitary confinement except for grocery trips with family and my 2 remaining friends fetching me for dinner and drinks. I basically haven’t lived in my own country yet. I await self driving cars to a degree I can’t explain. I’m tempted to compare it to being able to walk the first time but I worry that might be taken wrong.

If anyone knows of any way I could get into a self driving car earlier, I would love to hear it.