Cognitive Dissonance and the LGBT Response to the Orlando Mass Shooting

Orlando. Pulse Nightclub. A night that will live in infamy. As a lesbian liWorkingStiffed_Orlando Strongving in Florida, the Orlando mass shooting hits close to home for me, literally and figuratively.

While the Orlando massacre was an unspeakable tragedy, and we mourn the heartbreaking loss of too many young lives, I have to admit that I am dismayed by the LGBT community’s naïve and myopic failure to acknowledge this atrocity for what it is: radical Islamic terrorism.

This is not your garden variety hate crime, people; and banning assault weapons won’t stop future attacks. Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack. It’s no secret that ISIS has been targeting and murdering gays throughout the Middle East and that mosques throughout our country, including the one in Fort Pierce, FL that Mateen attended, preached that homosexuals should be murdered.

Obama calls this attack an act of “homegrown extremism,” but he refuses to acknowledge the Islamic root of that extremism. How can you defeat an enemy, if you refuse to identify them? You can hate Donald Trump all you want, but his take on this issue is spot on.

Jihadis also like to employ suicide bombers. How do you propose we ban or regulate them? Besides, when have criminals or terrorists ever followed the law? And, for that matter, what good is passing laws when the ones already in place are selectively enforced to appease politically correct sensibilities?

Then, there is the embarrassing systemic incompetence of our alphabet agencies. Mateen was interrogated by the FBI several times a couple of years ago and was still issued gun permits and was allowed to work as a security guard and subcontractor for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), no less. How the f*** does that happen? Who’s running our “intelligence” network, Barney Fife?

Oh, and so much for the NSA spying apparatus keeping us “safe”…I guess Mateen bypassed their radar, because they have their hands full monitoring white guys and veterans who hate Obama or Hillary.

This threat requires more sophisticated thinking

Let’s call out the elephant in the room that no politician, including Trump, is brave enough to point out, shall we? These terrorists are targeting us, because while we’ve been busy tweeting, taking selfies and posting to Snap Chat and Instagram, the bankers who own our politicians used our military to invade the Middle East under false pretenses and to depose rulers who didn’t serve us (really, them…the bankers).

How would we react if China or Russia overthrew our government, occupied our country and accidentally killed thousands of innocent citizens during bombings and drone strikes while they searched for what we would probably call freedom fighters?

True homegrown extremism: angry white guys

As for the non-jihadi mass shooters, those (mostly white) guys are a product of our broken economy and Big Pharma’s profit-driven assault on our bodies and minds. It’s not hard to spiral down into anger and despair these days; the spiking suicide rate among middle-aged white people confirms that.

The media plays a significant role in this. After all, we are constantly told that we live in a “consumer-based” economy, but when close to 100 million people in the U.S. aren’t working and there is no (or little) financial support available for U.S. citizens facing economic devastation, you can go sideways in a hurry, I imagine.

And to keep us docile and uninformed, news programming is saturated with mindless coverage of celebrities, instead of unbiased reports about economic or political issues that should be of importance to us. The overall message is that the key to happiness is to be as rich and famous as George Clooney or the Kardashians.

That’s not an easily attainable goal, especially when most of us can’t find or hold jobs (thanks to the go-to recipe for increasing shareholder value that calls for displacing hundreds, or even thousands, of people at a time).

Because our leaders can’t be bothered to work on improving economic opportunities for Americans, physicians are confronted with increasing numbers of broken, disenfranchised people. And they do what their pharmaceutical sales reps encourage them to do: they immediately place these unfortunate people on a steady diet of SSRI drugs, even though most MDs know that side effects include suicidal thoughts…or (ahem) violent tendencies. Problem…reaction…(dangerous) solution.

Others, (especially those who can’t afford prescription drugs and/or don’t qualify for Medicaid), are getting sucked into the heroin epidemic that seemed to materialize as soon as we “liberated” Afghanistan and started growing and importing heroin into this country. Voila! A perfect recipe for mass psychosis.

Instead of “Orlando Strong” we need to get “Orlando MAD”

So, what will stop mass shootings? For starters, putting wedge issues like trannie bathrooms and gorillas on the back-burner where they belong (although these concerns are worthy of discussion, they should not suck all of the air out of the room 24/7). Understand that the powers that be are using these issues to distract you from the big time criminality taking place in Washington and on Wall Street.

We need to focus on electing people who will represent us and throw out (and even arrest) the traitors in government who sold us down this river of insecurity, fear and loathing.

Our new representatives should then get us the hell out of the Middle East and other regions of the world where we don’t belong, prioritize bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., work to create more jobs…and, (drum roll, please)…reign in Big Pharma’s assault on us through overpriced, often damaging drugs and “anti-psychotics.”

Oh, and for God’s sake, the last thing we need is to allow Hillary Clinton to steal the presidency; in addition to her many crimes against humanity, as head of the State Department, our own Lady Macbeth was the midwife who oversaw the birth and growth of ISIS, so guess who has Orlando blood on her hands?

Politicians, led by Obama, and their mainstream media lackeys are working WorkingStiffed_PinkPistolsovertime spinning the narrative that this is solely a gun control issue and/or a homegrown homophobic hate crime; this is misleading at best and criminal at worst.

Sadly, many of my fellow LGBTers are guzzling this Kool-Aid. Thank God for enlighted LGBT groups like the Pink Pistols; they understand the folly of giving up your rights for “security.”

What makes this all the more perverse is that Obama and Congress are ignoring or supporting policies that actually jeopardize our safety: they are allowing our borders to stay wide open, they secretly import hundreds of thousands of unvetted Muslim “refugees” (BTW: Mateen was an employee of G4S, a global security firm used by the DHS to move illegal aliens around the country) and they refuse to deport illegal aliens from Latin America who commit crimes (even repeat offenders). Ask yourself, why?

As our modern-day prophet, George Carlin, once wisely observed: Terrorism involves a series of acts intended to put a civilian population in a state of panic, fear and uncertainty in order to achieve some political goal.

San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, the Boston Bombing, and now Orlando…no outcry about the religious, pharmacological, geopolitical or economic motives for these heinous crimes is allowed to be discussed in mainstream media (and dissenting voices are called racists or “conspiracy theorists” and are routinely censored by Facebook and Google and mainstream news sites). We’re just told that the magic remedy is to ban the guns. Again, why?

Tyrants throughout history have understood that disarming citizens is essential for complete domination. And this is accomplished so much easier when you can do it with the support of “useful idiots” (as Joseph Stalin called his brainwashed, compliant citizens).

To understand why, consider what Obama’s close friend (and current Chicago mayor), Rahm Emanuel, said while still at the White House: You never let a serious crisis go to waste. Indeed.

Carly Fiorina: From HP Board Meetings to Iowa Bored Meetings

Carly Fiorina’s hapless bid for the presidency should serve as a warning to all self-important corporate executives: Your hubris may not play in Peoria…or Des Moines, Iowa. The exception, of course, is Donald Trump…but then again, Trump didn’t need to slide on his belly, kneecapping smarter coworkers out of his way on his climb to the top; his daddy handed him a successful real estate empire.Carly Fiorina's Presidential Run

After making her mark at AT&T by plowing through a (probably small) crowd of female wannabe executives (from secretary to CEO!!!), Carly Fiorina was tapped to lead Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1999. Her bipolar self-importance, coupled with her intense, ferret-like gaze, allowed her to become an extremely well-compensated poster girl for diversity in the tech industry. How cool was she to head a company in an industry dominated by men?

Six short years and many bad (often heartless) decisions later (the Compaq acquisition and her penchant for outsourcing everyone and everything top the list), she flushed away 50 percent of the company’s value and 30,000 jobs. In the end, Carly’s greatest achievement at HP was her resignation; the stock shot up 7 percent when she announced she was leaving the company.

This former tech “mogul” didn’t even have the common sense to purchase her own domain name. Instead, one of the many former HP workers that she displaced snatched up carlyfiorina.org and used the site to mock Carly and expose the extent of her relentless need to destroy jobs…in her own words. For example, after being asked how she would handle the layoffs at HP if she had to do it again, she replied: “I would have done them all faster.” O-kay.

Carly has been running for office (and losing) ever since, trying to regain a large canvas on which to paint her human carnage. Such pluck is admired by corporate board members who love putting tenacious, self-centered people in charge of companies…people who don’t mind getting a little (or a lot of) blood on their hands to achieve “economies of scale,” but in the real world, people like Carly are rightly shunned for being the psychopaths that they are.

After a career of failure, scandal, and a complete lack of empathy for the people whose lives she carelessly destroyed as HP’s CEO, politics beckoned. As a former corporate CEO, she didn’t feel the need to start at the bottom, so she ran for senator of California against the Yoda of female politicians, Barbara Boxer (who quickly schooled the “secretary-to-CEO” upstart). And now she wants to fail up to president and become the Republican Party’s Hillary Clinton. Such hubris. The Onion humorously captured her delusional aspirations, as only they can.

I suppose it’s easy to think you’re the cat’s pajamas when you spend years addressing a captive audience of employees who applaud and laugh at your bad jokes at town hall meetings. Still, there’s a big difference between addressing an audience of employees who depend on your approval to keep their jobs and addressing American voters, such as those at the Iowa caucuses this week, who you have to depend on to get the job.

Like all bipolar CEOs, when she does face rejection, she folds like a cheap suit. After a poor showing at the Iowa caucuses, she skipped town and her own party. No need to thank the few people who worked on her behalf; it was time to move on and be a world leader pretend at the next stop on the campaign trail…the New Hampshire primary.

Carly, like Hillary Clinton, are examples of what is wrong with too many women who achieve power. As a woman myself, I have to admit that I preferred working for men. Many of the women I worked for who had high aspirations viewed me as a threat (even though I never shared their C-suite aspirations) and felt it necessary to neutralize my contributions or even to take credit for my occasional good ideas. I can honestly say that I have inadvertently helped a lot of these women move up that coveted ladder without so much as a thank you from them.

I wish I could say that all women leaders are wise, gentle souls who have an innate desire to better the world and nurture the growth and development of other women, but that hasn’t been my experience. I can’t imagine what Carly did to her female coworkers during her meteoric rise up the corporate ladder at AT&T.

On some level, you have to blame the environment…with so few opportunities for women to break through the glass ceiling, I can see how an ambitious woman can turn into a psychopath trying to squeeze through the eye of the needle of achievement. Still, until we can level the corporate and political playing fields and the Lady Macbeth syndrome becomes the exception and not the rule, voters (and employees) need to proceed with caution.

This is the problem I have with identity politics. I’d love to see a woman become president (I wish Elizabeth Warren had decided to run), but I don’t support voting for a powerful woman just because she’s a woman. Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina are flawed, power-hungry, mentally ill women. And the reality is that after a life time of stepping on other women to get ahead, well…they don’t like other women, so why give them your vote, ladies? Neither would make a suitable first female president and it troubles me that so many women are blinded by ovaries wrapped in a power suit.

While it’s easy to single out Fiorina as a narcissistic, psychotic product of corporate dysfunction, the reality is that C-suites at companies nationwide are filled with Carly Fiorinas and even more bipolar or psychologically damaged men.

I wonder how different the corporate landscape would be if leaders were selected by employees, instead of by corporate board members who see personnel as “human resources.” A little more humility and a lot less hubris in leadership would be appreciated.