This is an EPIC fail-

"I would not have assassinated Bin Laden"- Jill Stein.

I'm not a war hawk. I'm already against the next war. BUT ffs we peace-nicks are a super minority folks.

perhaps I'm reading this wrong. It sounds like you're saying that since we're in a minority that we should at least go along with some killing. To build "credibility". Let me know if that's not what you meant.

convention killed any 'support' from the 'Party' that we ever had. When they saw the fighting in the streets and heard the demands to stop the war and to clean up corruption in our political system, the establishment Dems knew that their gravy train would come to an end if the plebs got any power.

They most certainly couldn't have that.

Or are you renting the beach house?

I am pretty much with you on this.

We have locked horns on voting or not voting in the past, but that does mean I disagree with your basic idea. I truly believe that nothing will change until the structure of government is changed. Our current system promotes political parties and our system of government precludes anything other than two corporate owned political parties. The problem is that I am not sure how to get to a better situation. Parliamentary government is a step up, but still not the solution.

As for the premise of this essay, it assumes that somehow a viable third party can be a part of our political system. Without systemic changes, a third party will only replace one of the two parties and eventually will become corporatized. The key is to find a better system first and that may mean the entire current system is going to have to fall under its own corruption. Sadly, I do not believe we are there yet and we are running out of time with climate change upon us and neither of the two current parties cares one whit about climate change as long as they keep their donors happy and continuing to line their pockets.

By the way, I am one of those older fogies!

You are free to try doing that...

The problem is you will be up against organized

.... crime .....

parties,

same thing......

small units against the dark (and heat). Today is the last day of summer. Summer, 2016. I am not sure that I have made any new small ties, older ones may be stronger or tossed away. A campfire talk, usually side-by-side can break through many barriers.

towards Babylon 5, or other enterprises involving larval behaviours like warring, warning, fighting, killing, fearing, organizing, etc.

I incline more:

The Basic Con

Those who can't find anything to live for,
always invent something to die for.

Then they want the rest of us to
die for it, too.

No change in the structure of society can by itself effect a real improvement. Socialism used to be defined as "common ownership of the means of production," but it is now seen that if common ownership means no more than centralised control, it merely paves the way for a new form of oligarchy. Centralised control is a necessary pre-condition of Socialism, but it no more produces Socialism than my typewriter would of itself produce this article I am writing. Throughout history, one revolution after another—although usually producing a temporary relief, such as a sick man gets by turning over in bed—has simply led to a change of masters, because no serious effort has been made to eliminate the power instinct. In the minds of active revolutionaries, at any rate the ones who "got there," the longing for a just society has always been fatally mixed up with the intention to secure power for themselves.

Koestler says that we must learn once again the technique of contemplation, which "remains the only source of guidance in ethical dilemmas where the rule-of-thumb criteria of social utility fail." By "contemplation" he means "the will not to will," the conquest of the desire for power. The practical men have led us to the edge of the abyss, and the intellectuals in whom acceptance of power politics has killed first the moral sense, and then the sense of reality, are urging us to march rapidly forward without changing direction. Koestler calls for "a new fraternity in a new spiritual climate, whose leaders are tied by a vow of poverty to share the life of the masses, and debarred by the laws of the fraternity from attaining unchecked power." He adds: "If this seems Utopian, then Socialism is a Utopia." It may not even be a Utopia—its very name may in a couple of generations have ceased to be a memory—unless we can escape from the folly of "realism." But that will not happen without a change in the individual heart.

Mister Jones: I was looking through your lyrics. There aren't very many political songs in there.

Bob Dylan: I don't know which of my songs was ever political.

MJ: "Masters Of War" is.

BD: I don't know if even "Masters of War" is a political song. Politics of what? If there is such a thing as politics, what is it politics of? Is it spiritual politics? Automotive politics? Governmental politics? What kind of politics? Where does this word come from, politics? Is this a Greek word, or what? What does it actually mean? Everybody uses it all the time. I don't know what the fuck it means. Left, right, rebel. Some people are rebels. Let's see. Afghanistan are rebels, but they're OK. Nicaragua's got rebels and they're OK. Their rebels are all right. But in El Salvador the rebels are the bad guys. If you listen to that stuff you go crazy. You don't even know who you are any more.

MJ: We all have our favorite rebels I guess.

BD: Yeah! That must be it!

MJ: Who do you admire?

BD: Who is there to admire now? Some world leader? Who? I could probably think of many people actually that I admire. There's a guy who works in a gas station in LA—old guy. I truly admire that guy.

MJ: What's he done?

BD: What's he done? He helped me fix my carburetor once.

The information we're plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It’s built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there's a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it's only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we're all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that's really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it's only a tiny little glint, but it's already over. The change has already happened, and it's a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We're living after the fact. It's a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately it's very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult.

And here man undergoes a transformation as important as when he became a tool-user. He becomes a natural being again, having used his tools for hundreds of thousands of years to pull himself up by the bootstraps. Now, he no longer needs them. He has transcended his own nature, as that original ape did, and now he is no longer a "man."

Instead, having grown old and died, he is reborn as a child of the universe. As a solemn, wide-eyed infant who slowly looks over the stars and the Earth, and then turns his eyes on the audience.

These last 20 seconds, as the child of man looks down on his ancestral parents, are the most important in the film. We in the audience are men, and here is the liberated, natural being, Kubrick believes we will someday become.

But when Kubrick’s space infant looked at the audience the other night, half of the audience was already on its feet, in a hurry to get out. A good third of the audience, must not have seen the space infant at all.

working toward direct material benefit for your community, everything is fucked from the get-go....I think.

But they have a presence now on state ballots, most states. I thought the Plan was to merge and if necessary co-opt the machine. Too much resistance, or had that been tried? I don't do meetings, in general, guilty.