To me the cause is simple to understand … a society that allows any individual to attain unlimited and unrestrained wealth and power.

In a society where anyone is capable of attaining unlimited wealth and power, eventually you will end up with a small group of people or even just one or two individuals with all the power and control. That was the lesson that the creators of the game ‘Monopoly’ tried to teach. If you build a game where only one person can win by gaining so much wealth that they can buy everything, then everyone must lose in order for one to win.

It’s the same scenario and cause that corrupted the Roman Empire, the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Persians, the Mughals, the Islamic Caliphates, the British … they all rose with great wealth that eventually became concentrated to ever smaller groups of people until there was so much wealth at the top and none at the bottom that the system failed and it was reset again and again and again. We are just living through another cycle of wealth being concentrated to smaller groups of people again.

The problem is not that we keep looking for a system or a government that can control people … it’s that every one of us believes that we can be capable of winning the entire game by making everyone else lose.

Place a wealth cap on society and then we might able to see more people around the world wanting to cooperate on a few things. And when I say wealth cap, I don’t mean a few thousand or even a million dollars … I mean a wealth cap of $10 million dollars … anyone who has control to more than that is either taxed fully or not allowed to participate in business. No billionaires, no muti level millionaires. It would automatically spread wealth to so many people everywhere. It wouldn’t cause a utopia either, we’ll probably still have the same problems as before but there would be many more people with the resources, ability and finances to be able to do something about everything.

I’m Indigenous and we have a big sprawling family of cousins and relatives. When I was about ten, I was part of a small gang of about 20 kids my age and we all played together and loved wrestling and the WWF. A bunch of my cousins built a shitty looking wrestling ring in their backyard with old mattresses and lined it with old boards and dirty old rope with turnbuckles made of old clothing, duct tape and hockey equipment. We played on it for a long while until the literal body count of broken fingers, twisted ankles, bruises, cuts, scrapes, a dislocated shoulder, a few broken bones and a daily train of crying children forced the adults to shut it down.

But before it was closed, we all learned how to do a ‘figure-four leg lock’ … and how to reverse it! … and it was glorious to watch my buddies climb a turnbuckle, stand with arms raised and jump off into the air like Super Fly Jimmy Snuka … of all the dumb pictures I take now with my smartphone, I wish I could have taken tons of photos back then.

lol … god we used to go wild watching all that when we were kids and mock DDT the youngest kid in our group

Uncle jumps up onto the deck

You and the other kids get ready for a fire works show

Jake the Snake reaches into his bag and drops a hundred pound python onto your shoulders

The kids roar with excitement as you pass out from the snake wrapped around your neck and chest

First, the weirdest US presidential debate … and now this.

What’s next? World War III?

No empire is that powerful … as soon as you think you can control a group of people with violence and fear, you’ve taken the first step to losing control.

It might work at first and it may even go on for a while but it won’t last.

It’s not a Hollywood fantasy either … every empire in history started with great power and ended in destruction. It won’t be pretty and it won’t work out as some epic drama but it will end because people everywhere will never stand for it.

The problems always boil down to money and power.

Everyone wants to rule the world and think and believe that they can become masters of the universe.

No one can … a few of us might be able to attain that possibility momentarily but it will never be possible to make it last.

So the problem lies with money and wealth.

Remove and outlaw excessive wealth. Go ahead become a millionaire with ten million, no one will stop you but you are no longer allowed to gain any more than that.

Once excessive wealth is removed and more people are able to share wealth and power … then we can talk about world problems like adults … equal adults who have an equal chance at the benefits but also an equal share of the risks of failure.

Right now, the few people holding the power have no risks and only stand to benefit, no matter what happens, so they have no incentive to change. The majority who have no power risk losing everything but have no power to change anything.

… all that nonsense gets thrown out the window if the person in charge has a bagillion dollars and can hire and fire whoever they want regardless if it is their fault or not. And they can just throw endless amounts of money at problems until either the problem is fixed or everything and everyone surrounding the problem is liquidated, sold and reset while the people in charge take no responsibility.

Dr. Bashir? … is that you?

Now I get it … but now I feel like someone actually opened the Temu Configuration Box and made all this possible.

Always love that argument …

• red party does all sorts of things for bad government, keeps getting elected
• blue party does all sorts of things for bad government, keeps getting elected
• NDP does one thing nobody liked in the 90s … we can’t elect them ever again!!!

I’m Indigenous and I live in northern Ontario … and I fully support our current government for what it is and most of the people I talk to around me feel the same.

It’s only a very loud minority of self serving conservatives with a huge bone to pick and an oversized chip on their shoulder that talk non-stop about how terrible this government is. I see stickers on trucks, ads on the internet, ads on tv, ads in paper, constant bombardment from everywhere in public ads saying how bad the government is … while most of the people I talk to have no real ill feelings against the government and only a handful of hateful, spiteful, angry conservatives who go around saying how terrible our country is and blaming it on one single person for no real reason.

Honestly, the only message I hear from conservatives is that they hate Justin Trudeau … some knowledgeable ones and those with a decent vocabulary can describe to me why they hate Trudeau … the rest just keep telling me we are living in a communist dictatorship and they demand their freedom back.

I agree that this isn’t a perfect government … they could be doing so much more but as they are now, they are doing fine.

It’s the conservatives I fear the most because if they achieve power, we will regress this country back to fighting between minorities/marginalized people/people of colour/indigenous and a vocal moral minority of conservatives that think they own the country.

This isn’t a political campaign for any kind of ideology … its just another hate campaign designed to make one group fight another because of??? just because they want to be hateful and fight … then after the fight is over, they’ll continue fighting with everyone and blaming problems on those they deem less than themselves.

Also discovered something crazy about birthdays when it comes to athletics and competitive sports.

An athletes chance of success are based on what month they are born. Depending on the sport, region and organizations and systems involved … if an athlete is born earlier in the year and the rank they are placed in starts at the beginning of the year, they have a better chance because they will almost be a year older than the player born at the end of the year. In Junior leagues or youth divisions at 10 years of age to 18 … a year makes a huge difference in the players.

I learned all of this from talking to a few individuals who went through provincial level hockey in Ontario.

When it comes to the top level sports … what month you are born really matters.

The slippery slope is like a gradual descent or gentle move to a lower place and it takes a while … the further you go, the faster you go down … eventually at one point, you’re traveling so fast down the slope that there is no more turning back and you have no choice but to fall off the edge.

“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”

Will Durant

The thing that is upsetting about American fascism is not that it exists.

It’s the fact that everyone is debating it like an argument about what kind of chairs you want at a wedding.

It’s the same scenario that played out in 1930s Germany and the rise of Nazism … everyone kept arguing that it wouldn’t happen, it’s not like that, it isn’t that bad, they have good points, we can control it, we won’t let them go too far, everyone obeys the rule of law, we have morals …

… then we all had to literally break the entire world in order to fix the problem.

I have a friend like that …

We’ll both be looking at something amazing, like fireworks, a magician, a street performer, a house fire, an air plane crash, a ufo has landed, or a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion … and even though he knows full well that the thing we’re looking at is so interesting that you can’t look away or ignore it, he will still tell me and others around us …

LOOK AT THAT!, JUST LOOK AT THAT, SEE???, LOOK AT IT!! … while nudging, holding, turning people at the shoulder and pointing manically … LOOK AT IT, LOOK, YOU SEE THAT?, LOOK!!! … even after you acknowledge him and tell him you’re looking at it … LOOK AT IT!, YOU SEE THAT! LOOK!!!

Is that a Ferengi rule of acquisition?

Also, I have an Italian friend who sells jewelry and a long time ago he taught me that one of the ways to make something … anything … more valuable is to simply increase its price. If you price something cheap, people naturally think it’s cheap … if you price something as valuable, even if it isn’t, most people will believe it is valuable and will be willing to pay the higher price.

lol … you’re already doing your part with a user name like that … Anony Moose

Is this guide affected by skin colour?