Writing in Word, and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and anyone else who chooses to run

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I just got started learning to use a program called Scrivener, which is a sort of add-on to --apparently-- a number of other word-processors, such as Word.  Most of the features of Scrivener echo what's available in Word, and it struck me that most people really don't know how to use Word with all its features, so I'm writing this little introduction.

Meanwhile, down at the farm, the Presidential "race" is gearing up.  First the Democrats have to have their own private bloodbath, with Republicans sniping from the sidelines, and then the Republicans get to have their bloodbath, while the Democrats laugh themselves silly, or get furious, depending on what goes down.  Fortunately we've already heard a lot of the nonsense spouted by the Republicans, and they will have to come up with a newer and more preposterous lie to get me really angry.  Unfortunately, the Dems have succumbed to pressure, and begun to use the same sort of clever tactics, such as telling the electorate any sort of lie it wants to hear, just until they get elected.

One of the truly original American inventions is, as a great man said several times: advertising.  The concept of advertising has now developed into a finely-tuned plan for propagating as many lies as possible without getting caught, and having a good story ready, just in case you do.  More money seems to pass through the hands of advertising companies and consultants than through any other industry.  For instance: you've heard about college fees skyrocketing.  You know why?  Because private colleges are in a race to make their campuses look as attractive as possible, which means: more buildings, more sports facilities, more athletic teams, more coaches, more team-mascots-related sportswear in the college bookstore.  Why?  Advertising.  Every student, therefore, has to pay more tuition just to attract more students, to pay more fees.

In Politics, the game has become advertising, all advertising, all the time, and nothing but advertising.  All these conservative antics, and the complete circus to which they have reduced the electoral process, are, broadly viewed, an advertising game aimed simply at the next election, to denigrate their opponents, and persuade the public to vote for their candidate.  So, okay, I'm lumping all sorts of propaganda under the general heading of Advertising, but the word advertising gets across how cheap the whole thing is, in a way that the sophisticated word propaganda fails to do.  Propaganda seems, in its tone, something subtle, subversive, intelligent, sophisticated, and worthy of indulging in, to defeat a clever enemy.  But what we have here is a cheap, expensive effort to confuse the fact, and put someone in place in the White House and in Congress so that Business can continue to run roughshod over the poorer members of Society.

There is an element of fear in politics, from the point of view of the most wealthy members of society, the so-called One Percent.  No one ever got into the One Percent by working.  The only way into that select few is to be born with money.  If you're born with money, or you can steal it, or talk a lot of people out of it, this society has ways to enable you to steal more of it from poor folks.  This is the so-called American Dream: to get on the thieving side of society, rather than to keep working so that you can be stolen from.  Remember that.  If you're already rich, you can stop reading now.  All you can possibly be interested in is to steal more money from the poor by overvaluing your services to mankind, and to prevent the government from returning it to the poor, via taxes.

If you're not rich, you have two choices.  Work hard, and subsidize Big Business: Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Media, Big Automobiles, and Big Military; or organize together to change the system to be more friendly towards workers.  Don't let the One Percent, and it's media slaves, and your idiot poverty-stricken friends who imagine themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" persuade you that being a worker is stupid.  Being a worker makes sense, provided the affluent end of the spectrum pulls its weight, and pays its fair share of keeping the country running.

The One Percent should pay at least 90% of the cost of rebuilding roads.  Why?  Because they own the trucks, which bring goodies to them in their enormous homes hidden away in Connecticut (or Texas, or wherever).  The same goes for practically everything.  If the One Percent gave 1% of their wealth to fix the roads, that would give the working poor a living wage for a year, which would boost the economy like you would not believe, and bring WalMart so much income they could probably start a shuttle service to the Moon.  Excuse me, while I go try to find out how much the One Percent owns ... roughly 2 million a year per person.  That's obviously an income, not wealth.

Let's suppose that the population of the US is 300 million.  That means there are 3 million members of the One Percent.  Suppose they donated 10% of their annual income.  That's 10% of $2 million per person, multiplied by 3 million people: $600 billion.  Divide that up among the 15% unemployed or underemployed people out of the 300 million population: that's

$600 billion / (15% of 300 million) = $600 billion / 45 million = about $13000.

$13 thousand a year would not get a large family very far, but the poorer, single members of my family could sure as heck use $250 a week, no kidding.  Right now, some of the younger members of my family have no income at all, and they would dearly like to contribute at least a little bit towards their room and board.

"Why I want to be President."
One of the harder things a presidential candidate --who is for real-- will have to do this year is to persuade the public that they have good reasons why they want to be President, because the more thoughtful among us knows that the job can bring nothing but misery to anyone whom we trust.

1.  I want to push legislation through that reduces business influence in politics.
This is going to be almost impossible to accomplish, because Congress, by and large, is in the pocket of Big Business.  I want to restrain and restrict lobbying practices in Congress.  Lobbying is a type of corruption.

2.  I want to get people employed repairing the US infrastructure: roads, bridges, schools, water systems, and parks and preserves that have been destroyed by energy companies, electric cables, airports, waterways, and the coastline.

3.  I want to force streamlining of the automobile industry energy standards.  At present, car companies can get away with not improving gas mileage for some of their vehicles by promoting the model line to a larger-sized one.  Larger cars are allowed lower economy, so car companies simply make the car larger, without making the engines more economical.

4.  I want to liberate schools from tying their financial support to student performance on tests, or at least make the rules a little more reasonable.  (Don't get me started.)

5.  I want to alleviate the tax burden on lower-income people.

6.  I want to continue to withdraw troops deployed abroad.

7.  I want to remove the tax subsidies to Big Energy.

8.  I want to regulate Banks and consumer credit.

Word

Man, I'm pooped.  This will have to wait.