Author: Rex Nipper

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That’s Ridiculous!

I am a liberal.  I don’t deny it.  Being liberal doesn’t mean I want things for free.  In fact, I take offense to that.  It’s one of those ridiculous quotes you get from ignorant people looking for someone else to blame for their money problems.  The more accurate reasons you’re struggling are likely a lack of education, bad career choices, or just making poor financial decisions.  “Poor people are taking food out of my kids’ mouths.”  Yep…that’s it.  I guess it’s not the 40 ft. bass boat dry docked in your driveway. 

That’s not to say I haven’t made my own share of poor financial decisions.  I ride a mountain bike that cost more than a new car.  That’s crazy even to me, and it’s been my hobby for four decades.  However, I can afford it, and I’m not going to whine about being broke and starving while I blow money on my hobby.  Hint…if you are struggling yet you’re able to spend $5000.00 a year on hunting equipment it’s time to reevaluate your life choices.

I have been dead broke.  From 2007-2009 I went from a comfortable income to 2 years without a job.  All the businesses in my community either went belly up, left, or just shipped the work I did overseas.  I had to sell all my belongings just to live and eventually my house.  There was no work so I went on welfare.  It wasn’t easy.  I was angry at both industry and government:  Industry for shipping my job to Ireland, and my local government for doing nothing to bring business to the city.  However, I never blamed the family on food stamps.  That would have been stupid. 

Living on less than $46.00 a week in food stamps wasn’t the life plan.  However, it happened, and I got through it by reinventing myself.  I left my home, and my comfortable lifestyle to move to a new city just so I could get work.  I learned all I could about what I do today so I could start a new career in my 40s.  So, when you stand there complaining your steel mill job, or your soon to be obsolete coal mining job is about to end and it’s a liberal’s fault, I don’t have any sympathy for you.  Get off your ass and learn a new trade.  Don’t tell me I’m the one who wants a free ride. 

Now that I’m back to full employment I’m paying enough in taxes to support several families.  I don’t mind it either.  What I mind is it going to industries and organizations that are set up to keep failing and obsolete businesses afloat through military spending and corporate kickbacks.  If someone is really hungry and needs my tax money they can have it.  Just don’t give it to an ignorant, whiney backwater who refuses change and wants the planet to suffer while they sit in a hole and dig in the dirt all day.

Most liberals are not poor.  They’ve rarely experienced anything close to welfare.  However, my experience is still not unique.  What happened to me happened to millions of people during the great recession.  Could I have prevented my situation?  Sure.  Had I a crystal ball I would have shorted CMO’s and retired a billionaire instead of having a 401k invested heavily in the failing investments.  Invested I might say on the recommendation of Goldman Sachs, a company that was secretly divesting itself from those same investments because they knew they were failing. 

Does this mean I go out and set fire to the planet, killing all life as we know it?  Nope.  It means I get out there and find new ways to survive and make ends meet and eventually get back to the lifestyle I had before the collapse.  It also doesn’t mean that I blame black people, Mexicans, or Muslims for my problems.  And I certainly don’t blame the homeless mother on food stamps. 
That’s ridiculous!

Rex

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It’s Too Late

I was actually going to write an article about Donald Trump not being a racist, but a populist, catering to the attitudes and prejudices of those who he intended to con.  Then I watched clips of him in speeches, interviews, and testimonies before political hearings on subjects from his casinos to Indian affairs.  This guy is a racist bigot who should never be allowed within a thousand miles of the white house, let alone in it.  His sexism knows no bounds as well.  His adolescent remarks both public, and private, have inhabited the airways since the beginning of his public life.  Saying that Donald is not a racist, or a sexist is like saying that Martin Luther King was not black or a preacher. 

The problem that Donald and many of his racist minions is that they don’t think they are racist.  Racism comes in many shapes, sizes and degrees.  You don’t have to wear a hood and lynch black people to be racist.  In fact, many people who are racist would be mortified by such actions, coming to the conclusion that they, for that reason alone, are not racist.  They’re functioning under a false assessment.  If you walk around all day saying that “that’s just how “those” people are, you’re a racist.  It’s a fact.  Kind of like global warming is a fact, or gravity is a fact.  Denying it doesn’t make it less of a fact, it just makes you look like a moron. 

Donald is that old school racist that thinks most black people are shifty, Mexicans are lazy, Jews are cheap, Irish are drunks, and Italians are greasy.  He also thinks women rule by emotion, not logic, and homosexuality is a choice.  These attitudes, and the actions that support them are the worst kind of racism.  These ideas enable people to make sub-conscious decisions that can negatively impact the minorities they deal with every day.  When you’re some guy working at a fast food joint in Alabama that doesn’t mean much.  However, when you’re the leader of the free world it means everything. 

Donald’s racism is overshadowed only by is demand for attention.  He’s like the class bully who thinks that any degree of the teacher’s notice on someone other than him should be regarded as a threat and must be dealt with in belligerence and violence.  He’s a knuckle dragger.  Had Donald not been born into wealth he’d be a just like all the other idiots who blame their meager existence on everyone but themselves.  Now he just uses his riches to take advantage of the idiot class.

What Trump did during the election is insidious.  He brilliantly used racism, fear, and hate to engender power.  He knew perfectly well what he was doing.  He was able to take the fear and hate that has been boiling in middle America, call it Political Correctness, and then turn a large group of mostly white, mostly poor, mostly uneducated, predominantly male, and completely ignorant voters and tell them “It’s OK.  You’re not racist.  People are just being sissies.”

This is the reason Donald likes the uneducated so well.  They are the easiest group to manipulate.  Educated people are a little harder to win over.  This is due to the fact that a four-year education is geared around critical thinking.  You can’t just look at the surface of what is being said, you have to take the time to dig a little deeper.  If someone says for instance “Hilary Clinton ran a child prostitution ring out of a pizza place in Washington D.C.” you know that quite possibly this is ridiculous.  However, this was a headline in conservative corners and 75% of the people that read it thought, and still think, it’s true.  This isn’t a group with any critical thinking skills.

I’ve even had people come to me and say “Rex!  How can you think that?  There are a host of successful people and billionaires who support him.”  Yes there are.  They too are a fuckload smarter than you.  They know that to keep their wealth, they have to keep you stupid.  They’re very good at it.  You’re fed so much shit you don’t even notice it anymore.  It’s like being slowly poisoned.  You might figure it out in the end, but by then it’s going to be too late. 
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Irony

I admit it.  I’ve been in mourning.  The election of Donald Trump sent me for such a loop that at 1:30 a.m. on November 9th, I stood in front of the toilet thinking I was going to vomit.  It shook me to the core.  I was sweating and shaking terrified thinking about the future of the modern world.  What is this man going to do to the country?  How are other countries going to respond?  Are we now going back to 1950 where cross burnings were commonplace, and women were relegated to the kitchen, and the country was constantly on the brink of nuclear war?  I was at my wit’s end. 

Then I remembered how much I love irony.

I get it.  Middle and working class America, you want your jobs back.  You are trying desperately to make ends meet, working to provide for your families.  The rust belt has seen jobs diminish as CEOs do business with China and other countries to save money on manufacturing and construction material like steel.  Corporate leaders at Ford, GM, and Chrysler are moving jobs offshore.  Major high tech companies consistently use cheaper Indian, Russian, Ukraine, Chinese, and Vietnamese workers over the higher paid, higher skilled U.S. markets. 

The jobs that do stay here aren’t what they used to be.  The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created a job market where high paying positions that were once filled by Americans are now filled by foreign contractors.  Sure, the rule is that the can only hire an H1B holder IF there is no other U.S. worker who qualifies.  However, CEOs have found ways to work around that, hiring foreign workers who are willing to take less for the same job.

You’re upset that Mexican nationals keep coming over the border to take advantage of our social programs.  Large corporate farms continue to hire the cheap labor, sending busses to bring them across the border to pick fruit, and butcher meat.  Major construction projects that were once done by skilled union labor are now hired out by corporate leaders who hire illegal immigrants who they know will work for 10 cents on the dollar. 

If you are able to save a little for your family, the financial markets can’t be trusted.  Banks and financial institutions game the system to work in their favor.  Business leaders set up programs which dig into your pocket, or outright steal from you.  Then when their antics are discovered and the system crashes, all your savings is gone, your credit is destroyed, and they just file bankruptcy, working the system so they can cut their losses and keep the money they stole. 

You want someone who can make you feel safe.  You worry about your children and what dangers they might have to experience in the world.  You’re afraid for your daughters and relaxed laws that favor criminals over the victims.  As you see it, the world is full of criminals and terrorism and all around you are dangers that make it impossible to feel comfortable in your own home. 

Your response to this was anger.  You’re angry.  We are all angry.  It’s time to stand up against the system both corporate and political which allows these things to happen.  To you, Hillary represented that system.  After 35 years in politics, to you she was just a representation of everything that’s wrong with America.  What had she done for minorities?  What had she really done for women?  What had she really done for children?  With her all you saw was the corporate control you so hated in politics.

So…your response was to vote for Donald Trump.  To you what this country needs is a CEO who can straighten out Washington.  Because from where you sit there needs to be a shake-up at the top.  Government is the reason for all your pain and that needs to change.  What we need is a corporate leader who can bring about real upheaval in Washington and start bringing jobs back to the U.S.

Here’s where the irony comes in. 

Donald Trump’s hotels are staffed almost exclusively with workers from other countries.  He benefits from the lower labor costs that Mexican and other workers will take over the more expensive U.S. labor.  He’s a corporate CEO who has constantly gamed the system filing bankruptcy not once, not twice, but six times, regularly using the system to cheat his contractors out of promised payments.  He has consistently fought unionization of his properties and broken labor laws to prevent his company from paying staff a fair wage.  He built all of his buildings using cheaper materials purchased offshore so he could avoid the higher costs of domestic steel.  He offshores all manufacturing for his brand name goods to China so he can save costs. 

Now that he has been elected President, Donald Trump is packing his cabinet with political insiders.  His chief of staff is the outgoing head of the Republican National Committee.  I’m not sure how you get more inside the political establishment than that.  Jeff Sessions, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, and many others who have been in political life for decades are his advisers.  You voted for change yet all that seems to be happening is more of the same.

Your decision to vote Trump into office is the equivalent of handing your Vicodin to a drug addict for safe keeping.  You were looking for more jobs, and you’re getting less.  You were looking for more control in your financial life and you are getting less.  You were looking for someone to keep your daughters safe, and now you are getting a man that will grab her pussy.

I’ve been laughing at the irony for days. 

Awesome!

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We’re All Gonna Die!

Oh good lord we’re all gonna die!  That’s what half the country is thinking this morning.  They might be right.  The next four years are going to be exceptionally interesting.  The first thing we will likely see is a twitter war between Donald and ISIS.  Then when the real bullets start flying I guess we will see if his first response is to launch a nuclear strike, escalating what can only be described an international annoyance into the destruction of civilization.  This is pretty much how a lot of people envision the next year.

I watched Donald’s acceptance speech.  It was actually pretty good.  His speech writer deserves an Oscar.  If Don only means half of what he read then we might live through this.  Then again, from what the rumors say he’s chosen Gingrich, Mnuchin, and Giuliani for his cabinet.  Gingrich and Giuliani are serial philanderers (that got Donald the Christian vote…you know…screw thy neighbor’s wife?), and Mnuchin was an executive for Goldman Sachs, one of the most corrupt financial organizations in the country profiting from not one, but two financial debacles.  I’m not really getting a warm fuzzy feeling.

So how did we get here?  First is that Donald Trump can play a crowd of red necks like Roy Clark does a banjo.  He speaks from the hip, and says it like he sees it at the moment.  I don’t think anyone in the current political establishment really gets how important that is to the working class.  While it is often light in facts, it resonates loudly because they just “want it straight.”  Compare it to the practiced, cautious, careful, and calculated speech of Hillary Clinton, and you’re going to lose out every time.  It doesn’t matter to them if all they’re getting is bullshit, they just like how it’s fed to them.  It’s like an apple.  Hand it to a child and they likely won’t touch it.  Cover it in chocolate and 10 lbs of sugar and they’re on it like rats on pizza.

Another part of this is race, and sexism.  Is Donald Trump a racist, and sexist.  Most definitely yes.  The problem is so are all his supporters.  I say all because if you voted for him, you support racism and sexism.  You do.  Look in the mirror and realize you hate anyone not white or sporting a penis.  The sheer magnitude of facts surrounding Donald’s attitude toward anyone not rich, white and male would buckle the knees of an elephant.  You might as well own up to the fact that you’re deplorable. 

 The Clinton family’s propensity for controversy didn’t help.  You would think that they would know after so many decades of being under a microscope that anything that might look inappropriate would play out poorly in the media.  Does that mean that Benghazi, Emails, Vince Foster, or land deals where the Clintons lost money have any basis in reality?  Nope.  Seriously…if any Trump supporter thinks that anything will come of any of this now that the election is over they are sadly, sadly, and ignorantly mistaken.

I think the last of the reasons we are here is that half of the voters in the United States are just plain ignorant.  They think from the gut.  That’s why they liked Donald so well.  They see themselves in him.  The problem is they’re stupid.  Donald knows what they wanted to see so he gave it to them.  He’s a salesman, and a very, very good one.  This is the only way a billionaire who had fed on the weaknesses of unions, minorities, veterans, and women for his own enrichment could possibly be voted into office by the people he regularly screwed.

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I Hate Plane Travel!

Traveling sucks!  Let’s just start with that.  Let me be specific.  I like taking long drives in the mountains, or on long deserted roads where there’s great scenery and wonderful places to stop and camp.  However, slogging into an airport, dealing with the sniveling, sneezing, whiny, smelly, rude, and generally unkempt masses makes me want to scream! 
Let’s just start with the preparation.  I can’t just pack a bag and go.  Because some asshole who decided to blow up a plane using whatever came to mind I now have to make sure I don’t have anything that might resemble a bomb, or any object that might resemble a deadly weapon.  The problem is that even a set of car keys can be a deadly weapon so you never know what security is going to flag.  They have a list, but it’s not complete, and it changes depending not only on which airport, but which minimum wage idiot needs to feel your crotch. 
You have to be careful about how many bags you use too. This isn’t too bad for me, but when my wife goes away for longer than a weekend it requires a three-week logistical analysis of semi routes and freight train schedules.  I’m now eligible to be a member of the Teamsters due to all the bags of her’s I’ve carried.  To make it worse airlines now charge for every bag so you need a second mortgage to pay for it if you’re going to have anything larger than a shave case! 
I live outside Denver so the commute to the airport in good traffic is about an hour.  That’s not so bad, but if you have to make the drive in rush hour traffic consider three to four hours of stop and go joy and amusement.  There’s a reason I commute to work at 5 a.m.  I don’t want to deal with people.  The problem is that you have to make sure you schedule a flight that coordinates with traffic.  That means if you’re going to make it to the airport, get through security, and board your plane on time, you have to leave for your Friday afternoon flight on a Tuesday morning.  I’m better off driving!
Now let’s talk about boarding the plane.  This is a fun experience.  I don’t travel all that much, because as I mentioned before…I hate it. Still, it took me about two seconds of my first flight to figure out how to put my bags away.  The process is pretty simple:  find your seat, put your bag in the overhead compartment.  However, I’m amazed at the sheer number of people that have difficulty managing this simple concept.  The looks on their faces is mind boggling.  They’re actually confused by this simple concept. 
I mean I can’t blame all of the slow process of boarding on stupid people. The plan isle isn’t wide enough for a two year old so an adult trying to maneuver is almost impossible, but I see people trying to walk up and down the isles while others are trying to put their bags away and the whole process is frightening!  Sit your ass down and WAIT!  If you needed to pee you should have done it before you got on the damn plane!
Once in flight you’re stuck in this tube for the duration so the best thing to do is to try and relax.  However that’s not always possible.  To start with I think there should be a new law.  Babies and young children should be sedated on flights longer than 10 minutes.  That’s right…10…fucking…minutes!  After listening to an 18 month old kid whine, watch him bite his mother, and SCREAM at the top of his lungs for FOUR CAPTIVATED HOURS I’m done!!!!  I have never fantasized so gloriously about the multiple uses of a plastic bag and a rubber band as I did on my last flight.  Admittedly I don’t have children, so I don’t have the patience for them.   And this is why!
Now after you get off the plane you get to deal with grabbing and organizing your luggage.  Again, not that big a deal for me but I travel with my wife which requires some organization.  However, I have been pushed, tripped, bumped and generally assaulted so often at the luggage carousel that I feel I need football pads.  On the up side my wife usually has so much luggage that I can skip that day’s weight workout. 
Now you get to manage your way onto the shuttle to your parking spot or hotel.  Since you don’t want to take out a second mortgage for your house you park in the long term lot which is about a days drive from the airport.  This lengthens your trip as well.  If you’re going to your car you only hope it is still there with all the wheels and glass still attached.  If you’re going to a hotel you just hope they have your room ready because at this point you’re so annoyed and tired you don’t really care that it might be home to a dead body and bed bugs.  You can just push the rotted carcass into a closet and the bedbugs can be dealt with later. 

People suck.  All of them!  They are pushy, rude, and lack the basic decency to function in a pluralistic society.  All you need to do to see this is travel through any airport in the world.  I have no patience for them.  It’s why I prefer being in the woods and backpacking.  I’ve never met a bear or mountain lion that I feared the way I do the stupidity I see every time I travel.  The only thing I hope for when I do get on a plane is that the pilot has at least one more chromosome than the passengers.  Because if he doesn’t, we’re all fucked!