With Citizens United, democracy requires a socialist economy

America isn't a democracy.  The word democracy is used to conjure pride and other sensations in Americans, but the US is a "representative democracy," not a true democracy.  In a true democracy, each citizen would actually debate and vote on every law.  That would be a pretty free society, I suppose, except that since the entire society would effectively be a member of Congress, it would be understood that there wouldn't be a lot of time for anything else.

I'm being a little facetious.  There could be ways devised to preserve genuine democracy while giving people time to, for example, grow food and/or send pictures of their genitals to friends and strangers.  The main point I'm actually driving for is that the US is a representative democracy, meaning that we decide collectively who the people who will decide the laws will be.

As such, the best we can do, as far as democracy goes, is to make the process of choosing our representatives as egalitarian as possible.  We aren't doing that.  "We" are doing the opposite, in fact.  The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision officially allows the rich to buy politicians, for all intents and purposes. Since there isn't any limit to the amount of money that a company can "donate" to a political campaign, they can strongly influence the outcome of any election in the country. 

A medium-sized corporation has tremendously more financial resource than all but the very richest American families.  Since the very richest American families generally run those companies, they rarely go against one another.  In fact, the richest 20% of Americans control about 85% of the wealth in the country, which gives them the ability affect elections in a way that is almost impossible to counteract by ordinary citizens.

So, the combination of Citizens United plus tremendous income inequality in the US means that the US isn't a democracy of any kind anymore.  Since the very wealthy choose the representatives, the representatives represent the very rich.  This kind of government system is called an aristocracy.

Given these data, there are two ways to make the US into a more democratic country.  The first is to overturn Citizens United.  The second is to outlaw wealth.  Which would you prefer?

How to avoid the death penalty and other useful tips

When people called bullshit on this Time cover, that's when I knew OJ would be fine.

There has been a good bit of talk about the death penalty lately, because a guy who seemed like he was innocent and got a rigged trial was executed this week.  A lot of folks are talking about injustice.  Well that's hogwash.  This guy could have taken a few simple precautions to avoid death row.  They're all outlined in this summary of death row statistics.  Here they are:

1. If at all possible, be white at all times.
2. when murdering people, murder non-whites.
3. Whatever you do, don't be accused of killing a cop.
4. the OJ Rule: If you must be non-white when killing a white, be sure to be very wealthy.

 It's that simple folks. 


The OJ rule brings up another thing folks have been complaining about lately, namely that the political process appears to be unequally influenced by rich people's money.  Historically, the rich have had great political influence in the US.  This is because they have money to throw around, and politics at every level are influenced by money.  However, it is important to point out that actual wealth of the people attempting to influence politics isn't important, as long as there is a lot of money from somewhere.  To be clear, a poor person can influence politics, as long as they get a lot of money together somehow, and it doesn't even matter if that money originally came from a rich person or from a very large number of poor people.  So the system is completely equal opportunity.

Another quick point that apparently needs clearing up.  The US isn't afraid of the Middle East developing nuclear weapons because they're worried it would immanentize the eschaton.  The US is, on average, protestant, and thinks the end of the world is going to be a dandy time when they throw off their corruptible bodies and dance up the escalator to heaven in their shiny, immortal duds.  The real reason the US doesn't want countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons is that nuclear powers have to have peaceful relations with one another, and the US would rather not be obliged to not bomb the Middle East when it suits their mood.  The US has an official record of not being nuked by other countries* and wants to keep it that way.  So, while the deaths caused by a nuclear attack to the US would probably be absorbable from an absolute standpoint, it would be a public relations disaster.  Thus, it's vitally important that we keep nuclear capability out of the hands of any Islamic nations, or else we'd pretty much have to stop attacking all of them. 

*The US has nuked itself over 1000 times