248 million. Stripped naked. At 10:37 PM or AM, nobody remembers for sure because we were with three administrators who were still receiving federal paychecks to manage nobody at the National BS Disallowal Authority and thus had nothing to do, so we decided to guzzle whiskey at a pub. The drunken admins decided to announce disclosed that the department had successfully and, by god, accurately managed to group every US citizen 18 years of age and older into five indecipherably useless characterizations: 1) Liberal or conservative. 2) Democrat or republican. 3) Intelligent or dumb. 4) Hard-working or lazy. 5) Aware or ignorant.
Chief Administrator Francios Sarhenschy praised his furloughed employees, who are currently in desperate search of food, car and rent money for their families, with having accomplished the classification of millions of US souls. Data analysis experts have hailed the results for having a mind-blowing 37.6% accuracy.
7 percent! Uh, really? You are gazing at the number of US adults who watch TV series episodes ranked #1 through #3 (by share). Impressive? Jury is still deliberating. (Note: Viewer share and actual numbers watching are not equivalent.) What about TV series episodes ranked #4 through #20? At best, around 6 percent have watched #4 to #7, dropping to a low 4 point-something percent for #12 through #20. Scanning the charts from #1 to #20, one doesn't notice a precipitous difference in rankings because all are braced by an abysmally low reference point. Viewer share of shows ranked below the top 20? Yeah, right. Do the words "essentially invisible" make sense?
Such shining results make it is easy to understand why Hollywood's hype advertising concentrates on "most watched" and "best new show". Forced to mention actual viewer numbers, rather than viewer share, it would be damned tough to build excitement when more than 95 percent of US adults could give a rip about watching all but a handful of shows, and even then.....
114 million. Seniors guzzle checks, needed sex. The number of US adults who are currently retired, or will retire shortly, is somewhere north of 114,000,002 (Barb and I are now also members thus, the 2). Given the known number of eligible working adults, while being armed with intent to maintain current Social Security obligations for retirees during the next 15 years while adding only mandated COLA adjustments, auditors have determined that in the near future Social Security taxes will need to be increased to more than 30 percent. Holy crap. Obviously (now, not at the time), retirees should have had unprotected sex more often, when we were doing such things. Opportunity lost. We needed more young asses and elbows running around our house back then, to pay for today's Social Security checks now.
There is an alternative which has repeatedly bailed this country out of difficult times throughout two centuries: Significant immigration of working-age adults and their children. Makes me wonder why US citizens are fixated on border walls and tossing out people who went through hell to arrive here, when the better choice would be to improve and streamline our immigration process to unleash these willing workers so we won't bury our children and grandchildren in a mountain of debt to pay for retirees income. But noooo, that would be too easy and cost effective.
Facebook. Fricking daily. How boring would life be if you didn't have good friends re-posting from nowhere somewhere gif's containing pithy 5 to 12 word phrases that portend to be the holy gospel regarding inordinately complex political and social issues. To further drive home the inadequately analyzed point attempting to be made, said friend thoughtfully adds their deeply considered analysis atop the gif, such as "Yes", "So true", or "I agree."
To what end? Cut and paste is lazy. Thinking and writing for yourself takes time and effort. Don't fret, we want to hear from you. Your thoughts. Beliefs. In your words and style. Anything less is useless bull shit.
Charley nailed it. I won't belabor columnist Mr. Reese's article, released February 3, 1984 by the Orlando Sentinel. Go read it. You can send trivial baubles my way to express your appreciation.
The critical point made is there are 545 people in our Congressional, Executive and Judicial branches who decide what our policies, laws, regulations and taxation will be. Our government functions as it does because our representatives want it to be that way. They can make no excuses for a current state of affairs because they create and exercise sole control over what will effect the lives of 325 million citizens. What have our esteemed representatives delivered recently?
Mid-term elections in which donors spend 5.2 billion dollars and who of course never expect, much less ask to receive a smidgen of special consideration for their investment. National Parks lay in trash-strewn shambles. Corporations report millions to billions in profits per quarter, yet somehow need tax incentives and breaks to be competitive. An increase in funding for military operations (really, really bad guys are really, really hiding under every real rock) which all told cost more than the next 10 largest military budgets combined...but the troops did get a 6% raise to their measly pay. Yeah! This years mind-bogglingly "small-ish" military funding increase would, if redirected to a different purpose, pay a full year tuition for every student attending a public university in this country. Mergers and acquisitions galore arrive that reduce competitiveness in multiple categories of business, are heartily endorsed, then deemed as magically increasing competition. Representatives and their staffs preferred method to debate complex, critical issues is now undertaken via tweets and sound bites derived from murky-sourced surveys, while simultaneously denouncing the press for having somehow misquoted their seven word statement.
They want it that way
Final take. Below are a few suggestions. I own all errors and misconceptions, whether found or perceived.
Just because somebody doesn't conform to your view of the world doesn't mean they are evil, or bent on destroying life as you know it.
We frequently have more in common than first words reveal. Carelessly tossing people into narrowly defined buckets precludes our desire to listen, learn, and understand..
Our differences often nestle within small details about how to accomplish the big goals that we share.
Become a party of one. Divorce yourself from all party dogma. The downside is your primary ballots will look sparse. You just bumped into a cost of setting your unleashed sprit free.
Above all, don't accept the premise of a statement. Dig deep to learn what your representatives actually want, and for whom.