Pepsi Vs. Coke

I've had the good fortune to live and work around the planet, to realize that our country is only 4% of humanity. Essentially, we live in a box -- but a very BIG box, making it ever-so-easy to forget we are in a box. Even today, I find it important to "Get out of the big box," every 6 months or so, merely to retain perspective.

One thing which has always struck me - everywhere - is how the rest of the world doesn't understand OUR country. "America is this...," and "America is that..." and statements of profound oversimplification about a country I grew up in, understand quite well, and still can't get my arms around.

And those dopes think they are more sophisticated than we are?

Being a strident (albeit amateur) philistine and conversationalist, I am always struck at how naive the other nationalities (who think they are more sophisticated than we are) in fact, are. Watch them, sitting around....watching soccer.

Soccer!

There's a metaphor for you. Compare soccer with the sophistication in strategy and rules of American football. There's an interesting juxtaposition of sophistication.

In fact, I believe American society is SO socially sophisticated, that like the former Soviet Union, we are ruled by a single party, with an iron-fisted grip on the rules of who may contest them. However, being super-sophisticated (i.e. nefarious, duplicitous) this solitary party has two heads, pretends to represent competing ideologies, all in an attempt to turn us against our fellow countryman, whose interest is nearly identical to our own. Look at the issues YOU get to vote on, silly shit that means nothing but is engineered to turn you against your fellow countryman, things like gay marriage, etc. Issues where no smoky, amorphous, global "entity" has a stake in. No, those "REAL" issues, we don't have any say in. (In fact, those smoky global entities would like nothing more for you not to even have a vote, and I believe they are working towards that end.)

Democrat vs. Republican, Coke vs. Pepsi. The binary, meaningless choice to deceive us into believing we have a choice. A primitive, two-thug party system, where the two thugs have colluded together against us.

One thing absent from the thugs and the the goons who work for them is an absolute vacuum of real ideas. Ideas that are novel, or based on empirical evidence as opposed to mere (nonsensical) ideologies. That's what I am going to be talking about in the forthcoming blog postings here.

Ultimately, if leaders of tomorrow in the big box come from this group, my hope is some of these ideas will have been kicked around enough to percolate to the surface of people's consciousness.

-Ralph Vince