I joined a band. If you didn't know that you can check out the root page of the band's site at www.mackenzienellis.com/abominati, or perhaps in the future a direct migration to www.abominati.tk if you want to see media related to the band. Tim asked me one time after jamming on the guitar for a bit one night, "If I put a bass in your hand, do you think you could play our band?" I was like, "okay."
The next Monday we hopped down to a little basement studio in Lishuiqiao and rocked out four songs. The next week it was six. But that was a long time ago. By this time that band has learned 7 songs. Sadness.
The band's gone through some changes. Originally Zhaolizhi, Lizhichao and Qidan were backing us up, but now we have Ibragim Dzangiev and Vlad Ivanov...all told we have about 13 songs we can perform already. Frickin' awesome.
Most of the new music is just pop rock covers, but we have a new song called Fly Away that'll rock your socks off. It's kind of poppy, too, but it still has an edge...pure genius. The core of the song is pretty simple, just five notes on the bass, but it's really totally sweet. I could never get tired of playing this song.
The TV director we're working with right now, Zhaolei is cool. He just called me, though, and said our show is too "rock and roll" for his crowd, explaining that his leader thought it was too "noisy." That's okay. So we got together this weekend twice to learn about five new songs. All of them pop songs. We'll see.
There's more: I'm considering volunteering a big sum of my time to the Justice Party (http://justicepartyusa.org/) but I want to make sure I go into that with a clear goal.
The Justice Party is the only party raising the issues I think the most important in this race. How are we going to prosecute the unending cycles of corruption bringing our great nation down? How are we going to end wars and not put millions out of their hard-earned living? How are we going to get a country to rally behind any goal, however great, however obvious and right? My prescription, the one I wish to promulgate with executive authority, the kind granted to kings, not presidents?
Maintenance mode.
Keep the companies with outstanding contracts and maintain contractors' expected future contracts at healthy but not exorbitant rate of profit. This will take away their incentive to corrupt the agencies of government. Yes, basically I think we should buy off corporate America, allow them to get back to what they do best: inventing, innovating, and producing, while the destructive corps discover better ways to meet the demands of a peacetime market.
We throw the meat to the corporate beast, so the people of America have a minute to think about their next move. With the kind of enormous surpluses the American machine is truly capable of, what kind of society do we want to build in our peacetime state? Could schools with holographic projectors be a common thing? Could we create a classroom in outer space? Could we make large multipurpose construction bots like in all the sci-fi movies? Could we do it all with clean and renewable energy systems? Of course we could. We're America.
We end all offensive operations. (I think no matter how hard the lawyers spin it, offense and defense mean different things. An offensive defense is in fact defensive, but it is also certainly offensive to people not attacking you.)
So, first we announce our intentions to the world. Then we move our actively deployed troops to defensive positions to await further notice, pursuing only active engagements and maintaining active operations. Does this sound like suicide? I don't think so. We just have to make sure we pull back to a defensive perimeter. Who knows? Maybe one of these days all our troops will make it back home?
The prescription drug industry should be allowed to sell prescription drugs more freely to people who are willing to pay the higher cost of medicine through pharmacies, while the government continues to negotiate a nice, heavily government-funded solution befitting any advanced industrialized nation.
We purchase back the schools we've sold, maintain the ones we have. Create a new "Brain Trust Fund" to fund teachers' salaries as a mandate, commensurate with society's demand for education and nothing else.
We should handle the corruption of local officials, like corrupt county clerks, self-interested judges, and so on, with care. They are all skilled and important members of society, just like the drug offenders they throw in jail willy-nilly. But we also need to get a handle on the prison-industrial complex. Police are arresting folks they don't want to, because the laws are forcing them to. One-strike laws that can turn decent poor folk into slaves, for want of the price of their docket fees and bail. It's getting like revolutionary France, these days.
But you have to get elected before you can govern.
So anyway, I've delayed writing this email long enough. Drop me a line if you read this.
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