Should America Adopt a Fat Tax?

A "transition period" for the wealthy to wean themselves off the government teat?
Is that the way they would do to the poor? Nope.
I say jerk that nipple right outa their greedy gobs & let them figure it out. No welfare means no welfare. They want to drug test the poor to give them welfare, but they won't be drug tested themselves. They want to get the poor off the dole but don't want to get off themselves. They're greedy, selfish, hypocritical, heartless bastards who want to take the cash from the middle class & shove it into their own pockets. They don't want to share. That's the only reason they want the poor off the dole so bad.

Funny, I've met so many wealthy people from all over the world & it's really quite rare that I meet one who is as selfish, heartless & greedy as American wealthy people. Rare indeed.

I think that the way to get things moving in the right direction is for The People to figure out that we're being duped by both "parties" & take our freaking government back from the plutocrats who are undermining our liberties by removing them bipartisanly.
We HAVE to get our government back.
Everyone is so focused on the POTUS, but they don't remember that he's one part of a three part system & one of the other parts is screwing us just as hard... maybe harder than the POTUS, because they ALLOW him to do what he wants. We have NO representation in government anymore... none. Our Republic is now a Plutocracy & it's going to be a hell of a fight to get it back.

Our hope is all but lost without Ron Paul. He was our strongest & best hope & the RNC just propagandized their blind sheeple with slander & innuendo.
Blast the two "parties!" Damn & blast them all to hell! They're succeeding in destroying our nation.

"Forgive them Custodian, for they know not what they do"

DILBERT·opia & SEINFELD·sensible is the RULE today

Most people can relate to examples of when customer service organisations have driven you completely bonkers: being passed on to another department that does not answer your call and drops you into a black hole; getting through to an overseas call centre that has not a
clue how to address your problem; orders placed and fulfilled incorrectly the list is endless.
But given that the customer relationship is such a fundamental component of the success of any business, why do companies behave in such a maddening way?
We believe the answer may lie in some interesting new research which describes a model that can help us both diagnose the roots of certain common mental health problems  as well as understand some of the wider dysfunctions within organisations.

Context blindness

Recent psychological research in the UK has come up with a new model for us to understand better what is going on with people suffering from a range of mental health conditions, such as
Asbergers syndrome, autism and schizophrenia.
In summary, these symptoms are best expressed by the inability of people to switch easily between several foci of attention and to track them against the history and context that relates to them.
This new line of research has been called caetextia by the researchers from the two Latin words caecus (meaning blind) and contextus (meaning context). Further details can be found at http://www.caetextia.com.
Our thesis is that organisations, or parts of organisations, can also demonstrate the symptoms of caetextia or context blindness. Organisational caetextia (or OC as we will now call it) can help us understand why some organisations exhibit a sort of madness when dealing with their customers and employees and also provides a clue as to why they remain blind to the significant consequences of acting in such a crazy way.
In cases of caetextia in individuals, the new research has uncovered two types of context blindness. This relates to the part of the brain that allows us to process context.
In order to see context, we need to be able to observe events from different points of view. Recent research has shown that all mammals have a part of the brain that can process masses of information at the same time similar to the new ways that we configure parallel processing in computers.
This part of the brain developed millions of years ago to gauge risks by processing multiple streams of information and unconsciously comparing them to previous experiences. This is something we take for granted today, but millions of years ago it was the key to any mammals survival and ability to conserve energy by not reacting to every stimulus that came along.
The research has concluded that this parallel processing part of the brain can become impaired and this is particularly prevalent in people who demonstrate symptoms on the autistic spectrum. In such cases, the brain cannot do the parallel processing necessary to keep separate streams of attention, switching ffortlessly between each of them to assess their relevance to what is actually happening in the hereand-now.
This form of parallel processing requires the brain to dissociate in other words, to be able to review what it knows about something that it has come across before, whilst also paying attention to that something in the present. It is no wonder that such people often suffer from learning diffculties!

Organisational caetextia

The research has also uncovered two types of caetextia: front-of-brain or straight-line thinking blindness; and back-of-brain, random association blindness. We can and have applied these two types of caetextia to organisations and describe some of the symptoms below.
The first type we have termed Process OC. This is where an organisation processes work in logical straight lines without taking into account the wider organisational implications of doing so.
This type of OC is fixated in the front of the brain. Examples might be a call centre agent who does not know which person or department to hand-off someone to and simply puts them into a telephone black hole. Another example might be an agent who says, I am really sorry that this has happened to you, I will get someone to ring you back and they never do.
Organisational caetextia of the process type tends to happen lower-down organisations (for instance someone in the back office saying, That’s not my job, I only process this type of transaction). Front-line workers will often be encouraged to adopt this type of thinking with phrases such as, You are not paid to think. Just do what I say.
This dysfunction is exacerbated by outsourcing arrangements where the supplier organisation fulfillls its minimum service level obligations and is very much driven by the mantra, If it is not in the contract, then I can do it, but it will cost you more.
The second type Informational OC tends to be found higher-up in organisations. This type of OC is based in the back of the brain.
The symptoms of this type of organisational madness are driven by managers and leaders defining a whole load of information they need to run the business that is of very little value, other than to those managers holding their jobs down.
Often the amount of information needed expands without any understanding of the cost associated with gathering it. The information is then dressed up as targets to motivate those lower down the organisation to stretch themselves to meet those targets and get a bonus. Vast parts of the organisation chase numbers that have no bearing on the reality of what is actually happening to customers on a day-to-day basis.
In times of stress, this information will often be used to create random associations between the data sets, coming to rapid conclusions to reinforce otherwise illogical assumptions and then finding it rather difficult to justify their decisions after the event. The whole saga of justifying Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq is a good example of this.
Organisations also use such pools of information to get rid of people lower down in the organisation who are not conforming even if the data bears no resemblance to reality and the people are doing valuable work with customers.

Reality check

Until now, organisations who offer services to their customers have managed to get away with dysfunctional behaviour with very little accountability or public transparency. Managers have moved on before suffering the consequences of their decisions.
Organisations themselves have restructured, merged and implemented new technology which has clouded their own perceptions of reality.

Could our society be contributing to the rise in autism rates?

According to recent news reports, the number of school children classified as being autistic has risen by 56% in the last 5 years.

This is an enormous number, and controversy is raging over whether the rise is due to parents pushing for a diagnosis to gain extra resources for a child showing only mild traits or if there is an environmental cause for such a dramatic rise.

"Another factor favouring autistic behaviour in today's workplace is the growth of overly prescribed working practices that remove personal responsibility from people in public services. The management style in HM Revenue & Customs, and agencies focused on education, health, policing and law, suit those who are context blind. (For a person with caetextia, 'responsibility' is just a buzzword - without multiple processing abilities, their attempts to be responsible often lack common sense, which after all is just another way of saying, 'seeing the bigger context'.)
Alongside the growth of working conditions that favour people with left-brained caetextia, the media may be encouraging right-brained caetextia by randomly generating fantasies and continually stimulating imagination in ways that make it harder for people to stay in touch with reality. Vast numbers now pay a disproportionate amount of attention to emotionalism in music, television, 'reality' shows, computer games and on-screen interaction with one another in ways the inhibit the development of apathy skills and the ability to read multiple contexts. Characters in soap operas become real for them, artificially constructed celebrities infiltrate their mental landscape, and online 'relationships' divorced from empathic face-to-face communication, mimic psychotic symptoms to become delusional substitutes for genuine friendships (which involve mutual understanding and getting innate needs met.)
Although both types of caetextia occur in society, there is no widespread understanding of what is required for people to hold the middle ground: the flexibility of thought that arises from having equal access to imagination and reason. If we continue to create the conditions that favour both left-brained and right-brained caetextia, either by means of the media saturating the population with emotionalism, or by subjecting people to overly systematised, computer-controlled and rightly prescribed working environments, without valuing the middle position, the end result might be that the window of opportunity for us to evolve further will slam shut."

Plenty of other Planets Out There, it's a BIG Universe. We FAILED?