Category Archives: News

Our Government’s Purpose is to Protect Government and Rich People

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In case you haven’t figured it out, the reason our government exists isn’t to protect the rest of us. It’s to protect very wealthy people and other people in government. An example is the current event involving e coli poisoning. For the last week or so, we were told there’s absolutely no fear of any spread in the United States, even as the same articles were reporting that were sporadic cases of infection in the United States. It’s almost like no one even pays attention to what’s really going on and then just continues business as usual. Well, guess what? There are actual cases of e coli spread in the United States now. Imagine that.

I’ve been stating this for a long time, but no one seems to care (and they still won’t): Our government isn’t really representative of the rest of us. It’s representative of very wealthy people who continue to believe themselves worthy of raiding the government coffers for themselves. They’ll justify it under all sorts of different rationalizations, like “giving back to the poor” or “the wealthy pay the most taxes” or whatever makes them feel best. But in the end, when it comes down to a simple yes or no decision, rational actors decide what is best for them, not for the greater good. This is why we can have a story where the claim is made that oil companies are profiting off of people by doing horrific things to other people and the environment, and then when challenged by “government”, they’ll still continue to do horrific things to other people and the environment, and then turn around and claim “PROFIT!” before giving out absurd sums of money to their executives in bonuses, right before turning to the government and claiming a loss in the same breath that they tell stockholders they are raking in more money than ever before. And the rest of us? We’re so insignificant that they don’t care what we think.

Right now, we have a party in power that got into power by claiming the other party was doing evil things. Rather than stop those evil things, they continued doing the same evil things, claiming the issue is “complicated”, and have asked for four more years to continue doing the same things to make things better by doing the same evil things that have been done for decades. And we’ll vote them that extra time. Why? Because we’re morons. And they know it, so they’ll lie to our faces and tell us everything’s great. And we’ll buy it. Not only that, but we’ll donate to their campaigns to make sure they keep doing it.

And a few of us will complain. And no one will listen because we’re not listened to by anyone. Hell, we can’t even get a major distributor to give us a voice for other people to hear. Instead, the people who get heard are the mainstream people who keep doing the same shit over and over again. And then someone will try to sell us Lady Gaga as if that’s “extreme”. Or they’ll talk about how outrageous Charlie Sheen is. And we’ll buy into it. Why? Because we’re morons. And they know it.

That’s really all I have to say. Which is okay because I’m not important to have anyone pay attention to me anyway.

Have a nice day.

21st Century Technology for a World Stuck in the Middle Ages

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Sometimes when I read the news, I’m just too amazed to believe that what I’m reading isn’t in fact something from the Onion, rather than from the actual news. The other day, I caught the story where an Egyptian general, who is still a general today, indicated that female protesters who were arrested were administered virginity tests because, and this part still floors me, they wanted to make sure that when the women claimed they were raped, they could be proved liars because:

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” he told the American network. “None of them were [virgins].”

What really gets me is the gall the guy had to actually make some kind of in your face comment that somehow any claims of rape would be false because they weren’t actually virgins, the translation meaning that in Egypt, a woman can’t be raped if she’s not actually a virgin. Think about that for a second. Now think about it for a minute. Did any more time somehow make that come off as making any more sense than the ridiculousness of when you first read it? I would hope not. Or you’re a part of the problem, and you really should be reading comic books instead of this blog. No, I take that back. Comic books shouldn’t get that kind of an insult.

Every day, I read more and more ridiculous stories like the one I just mentioned, and every day they just keep on coming. It’s like we don’t learn anything, and the stories just get worse. To add even more insult to this injury, I can’t even feel comforted by saying, well, that just happens in some obscure part of the world. Way too often the stories are coming right from the United States, where you read of some politician who makes some kind of statement that you feel even a general in Egypt wouldn’t be stupid enough to make. Like the subject of abortion. Recently, it’s been used as justification for all sorts of ridiculousness, so that whenever it’s brought up in subject, people throw all sorts of common sense out through the window. Male politicians in this country, who would never advocate that raping a woman is an okay thing, will then turn around and say, “well, it’s probably God’s way” if someone raped a woman and some anti-abortion person doesn’t want to use this to justify why she shouldn’t carry a baby to term, specifically one that came from someone who raped her. It’s like people have a tendency to turn off the “common sense” knob whenever we start talking about political issues.

But when it comes to relations between men and women, this country, this planet, is like some kind of purgatory for the Middle Ages because we’ve stopped learning anything and suddenly no longer think in common sense terms. I’m reminded of the Civil Rights movement, which most people who have some sense of common sense will argue on the right side, but when it comes to offering those same civil rights to gender, suddenly we’re back in Dred Scott days. So few people even realize that at one point, African-Americans were finally able to gain the right to vote, specifically through an alliance they made with women, who put off their own struggle for equality by dealing with the race issue first. But when it came to the Equal Rights Amendment, suddenly African-American men immediately remembered they were men first before being black men, and they turned completely against the same people who offered them assistance in their most needed hour. There’s something about gender that people just don’t seem to get.

In the 1970s, there was a huge battle in gender roles, mainly because men didn’t seem to see any actual issue when it came to rape. Believe it or not, in the 1970s, a woman had to prove that she wasn’t a slut before she was able to prove that someone may have taken liberties that he shouldn’t have taken. But you’d think that we’d gotten over that. Instead, every now and then, you’ll see some court case appear where some company is being sued by a group of women because it is STILL acting like its mentality is stuck in a loop in the 1970s, not the 21st century. And people will STILL side against women, as if the issue is brand new. And then you’ll get sniping from other guys who start to yell “reverse discrimination” and all sorts of other things, mainly because there’s still this belief that women need to be in the kitchen making dinner, or in the bedroom making babies. It’s amazing how quickly we fall into these roles yet again.

Anyway, I found myself reading the newspaper today again, and I began to wonder if I was stuck in a time loop again. But I guess I’m not. I have a feeling this is going to be the way things are for a very long time to come. So women, I guess you’re going to just have to learn to live with it, because apparently, I’m the only one who seems to care.

Cell Phones and Cancer

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It turns out that there may be a link between cell phones and cancer after all. About a decade ago, there was a lot of talk about the potential for cancer being caused by using cell phones, but as we’re apt to do in a capitalist society, we ignored it and trusted the companies that make products to tell us the truth. Why are we surprised that model has yielded bad results again?

I’ve always suspected there was some kind of risk when it came to cell phones, which is why I’ve always been glad that I don’t really use one that often. Yes, I have one, and I take calls on it when people call me, but I’m not the social type, so my amount of use on my cell phone is minimal, which means my chances of getting cancer are a lot less than most other people. Had I been a constant user of my cell phone, I probably would have been a lot more concerned, but I’ve always kept it in the back of my mind that there’s probably something wrong here with this picture.

Now, having an iPhone, there’s no way for me to know that just carrying the thing around isn’t causing some kind of damage, which has always been one of my other concerns. But I figure that over the average lifespan of a human, I’m probably not going to be around that much longer to make a difference anyway. I’m just glad I don’t hold that thing up to my ear on a constant basis like so many other people do.

What does concern me is the sort of thing that we have no control over, and that’s the bigger picture. I mean, there are cell phone towers all over the place, which means these signals are floating all over constantly. To me, this has always felt like I’m being subjected to potentially dangerous signals, but I’ve also realized that there’s nothing I can do about it. In order for Muffy and her friends to have 24/7 phones stuck to their ears, I may end up dying of cancer just because I exist. Unfortunately, that’s one of those sign-offs I never got to sign off on at any particular time.

But what doesn’t surprise me is that corporations went out of their way to debunk any criticism against cell phones, mainly because they want to sell you shit, and information often gets in the way of doing just that. Because the cell phone industry is so interwoven into our society, I doubt anything will be done even if there’s hard evidence that proves that cell phones are definitely killing you. People just aren’t willing to give up their convenience in order to let a few other people live. We’re not designed that way.

Which means that we’ll continue killing ourselves, if these phones are, in fact, killing us. 20 years ago, had the manufacturers been a bit more honest, it might have made a difference, but when there’s a dollar to be made, I don’t have a lot of confidence that the “right thing” is going to be done. Why should we start doing that now when we’ve been going the opposite direction for as long as we’ve had a civilization?

Why Hire Reporters? Just Have Your Staff Rewrite Someone Else’s Story.

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An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.

The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.

This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.

Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.

Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.

I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.

Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.

Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

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ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.

Drowning in Misleading Information About Technology

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About six months ago, I decided to give up my iPhone for an Android phone. I’ve never been a real fan of Apple, the company, although I have somewhat been on the sidelines for Apple, the technology. The iPhone was definitely one of their best products ever, and I bought one when they first emerged. Then I upgraded to the second generation of the phone, which I believe was the 3G or 3GS (I get them confused). One of the things I really liked about the cell phone (my first real smart phone) was its long battery life. There were times when I went several days before recharging it.

One of the problems with the original iPhone was that you had to go through AT&T. That’s another one of those companies that I’ve learned to live to love and hate, sometimes in the same sentence. Their customer service is atrocious, no matter how hard their PR people try to make it seem otherwise. And sometimes dealing with them as a customer can be a freaking nightmare. But when you don’t have to deal with that side of the house, they do what they need to do, and things generally go smoothly. Not exactly a five-star endorsement, but you take what you can get, I guess.

Well, I discovered at one point that I couldn’t block calls on my iPhone no matter what I did. I was getting nonstop calls from telemarketers and bill collectors (most not even for me), and it was becoming really frustrating. So I looked to Apple to see if there was an app to fix this. There’s not. Apple doesn’t like you to block things, and if Steve Jobs doesn’t like something, that’s just the way every customer will experience the customer experience. Also, AT&T sucks in this area, as they couldn’t figure out a way to stop this other than to block a call (each one), to which they would charge me a nominal ($10) price to do so EACH TIME. That wasn’t a solution.

So, I bought a Sprint Samsung Epic phone (after trying out a few crappy Sprint phones). So far, I’ve been massively disappointed in Sprint. I mean MASSIVELY. They drop calls constantly, and they have finally acknowledged that there’s something wrong in Grand Rapids, although they can’t figure out what it is, but they’re not willing to really do anything to make the experience better other than to offer a different phone (on the same crappy service, which is actually the problem).

And the smart phone isn’t really that smart. In so many ways, Android fails. Miserably. I use Touchdown to link my work email, and whenever I have an appointment on my calendar, any change to the at calender appointment adds a brand new apointment (AND) leaves the old one in place, so that even though I’ve changed my appointment, my phone constantly wants to remind me at the old time that there’s an appointment, even if there no longer is one. When you work in a place where people are changing their appointments all of the time, this makes your calendar somewhat useless. Again, failure of miserable proportions.

The other day, my phone stopped working. For no reason. And then the next day, it started working again. No explanation. Meanwhile, two people phoned me and kept getting voicemail, which they left messages. No messages, of course, ever went through because, well, Sprint sucks.

So I contacted AT&T again, trying to figure out if there’s some way to get the new iPhone 4, and it turns out that I’m in my upgrade range now. What I didn’t know, until I asked a few colleagues who had iPhone 4s on both AT&T and Verizon, that the battery life of the iPhone 4 is no better than my crappy Samsung epic. For some reason, Apple made a brand new phone that is worse than the previous version. My 3G goes for days; the iPhone 4 doesn’t go longer than a half of a day, which seems to be the life span (battery wise) of almost all smart phones these days. That’s just crappy.

So, it looks like I may end up staying with my old iPhone 3G because it’s still the best phone on the market. It doesn’t matter that we’re already into an iPhone 4, and probably moving to an iPhone 5. I doubt it’s going to be much better itself. And every Android phone made is massively dysfunctional, yet it’s branded as the “thing to beat Apple”. If that’s the case, then we’re still a few years away from ever getting something decent out on the market that fills the need of the rest of us.

And that sucks.

Several days after the Rapture didn’t happen….

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There are a lot of people congratulating themselves on predicting the predictions of the crazy religious guy were not going to happen. Atheists laugh because it makes them feel, well, more justified in their belief that nothing exists, religious leaders feel better knowing that they still hold all of the cards (people can’t determine religious events without relying a church), and everyone else breathes a sigh of relief because Saturday didn’t end with a bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale-like moment in reality. As we in the academic community like to ask, was there a teaching moment in all of this?

I’m going to venture that the answer is no. We didn’t learn anything from this, and chances are pretty good that when the next nutcase comes along, the media will hype his drivel insanely, and in the end, they’ll act like they were the sober ones all along. In other words, we’re never really going to win.

But I did want to ask a rhetorical question just for the fun of it: What if the rapture happened, but no one actually observed it? Think about that for a moment. Everyone talks about how the Rapture is going to be some fire and brimstone moment, but in reality all religious tellings tell us is that it’s going to be a moment when God brings all the worthy up to Heaven to avoid the eventual destructive battle that will take place between Satan, Jesus and, well, the rest of us. But we make a massively interesting conclusion that because the event didn’t happen in a way that was televised by Fox News and CNN that, therefore, it didn’t happen.

What if it did?

What if instead of a big, televised moment, the “worthy” were actually brought up to Heaven and the rest of us are now about to go through the rest of the story? I mean, how many people are really “worthy” to begin with? Think about that one for a moment, just on the semantic principles alone. How many people go to church every Sunday (or whatever day that organization holds its religious functions)? Of those, how many are actually living their lives in true, Christian morality, as opposed to the kind of morality that uses the thought process of “well, I generally do what I’m supposed to do, but it’s so easy to sin, and, well, it happens to everyone”? I ask this because even priests molest children, and their churches don’t hold them accountable, which means even their institutions of religion are seriously corrupt. So, if someone had to actually go out on a spiritual limb and say, who amongst you is truly devout and truly submissive to your specific religion, I argue that there really aren’t that many to begin with. I’m assuming there are probably so few actual idealized indivduals of this nature so that if the Rapture did take place, maybe no one would have noticed because so few people would have been brought up to Heaven in the first place. I figure, thinking generally, that the major numbers of the population all fit into the not so perfect category so that chances are pretty strong that when the Rapture happens, it’s going to happen in such a way that very few of us are ever going to be brought up in all its spiritual wonderfulness. If you buy into that sort of thing.

So if there really is a Rapture, maybe it happened, and the majorit of us turned out to be unworthy of the honor. If you think hard about it, it’s probably not that hard to realize that such a possibility is massively, scarily true. Remember, if you believe in that sort of thing, to the point where religion is that significant to you, how hard is it to make a leap of faith that might point out that an all-knowing God isn’t going to miss any of the nuances that make it possible for the “perfect” religious soul to be lacking in all things necessary to make it worthy of ascendance. I’m just saying.

So, like I said, maybe the Rapture happened, and so few of us got brought up to Heaven. I’d be more interesting in doing a missing persons search to see if a few people went missing that day. I’d argue that they probably live such unimportant lives, unfilled with the morass that we package as fame and fortune, so that so few of the rest of us would ever notice they left. We focus on famous people, celebrities, and the very wealthy, all of whom I would argue would never fit into this category of the person who would be brought up to Heaven for a moment like the Rapture. Oh sure, they’ll protest and get their throngs of followers to condemn such a thought, but no matter how many times Charlie Sheen talks about #winning, it’s really not winning if he’s as corrupt (or worse) as the rest of us when it comes down to the cosmic, spiritual questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I”m one of the good ones either. I mean, I’m here, right? No angels descended, grabbed me and brought me up to Heaven, although a very attractive convenience store clerk did give me the eye the other day, so maybe I just missed the sign. I mean, I have as much experience in this sort of thing as anyone else, including the Pope, who would love to convince the rest of us that he has a direct phone line to the Almighty, but in reality has to stand in line like the rest of us; he’s just a lot more comfortable standing in line.

Now, having said all that, the odds are pretty good that we were bamboozled by yet another charlatan who tried to get money out of his many followers by pretending to be something he wasn’t. And chances are pretty good that another one will show up shortly after he disappears from fame and will do it again. And we’ll fall for it again because we’re stupid humans who don’t know any better. I mean, we play the Lotto in hopes of winning and have fights over baseball and football games that sometimes lead to serious injuries and death, not because we’re brilliant, but because we’re generally really stupid people who only can claim advanced evolution beyond primatives because we’re capable of making cell phone calls on our weekend and nights data packages that we pay extra for.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. No one does. But we’ll gladly pay money to anyone who lies to us to convince us there are more answers than we can ascertain by looking up at the sky and seeing that the stars haven’t changed one bit in the last thousand years.

So What if Tomorrow Ends Up Being the Day of Rapture?

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Doomsday predictions predict that tomorrow, Saturday, is supposed to be the day of rapture, when God takes up all of the good people and leaves the rest of us to deal with Satan’s return, Armageddon and all the theatrics that entails. Most people talking about tomorrow completely get it wrong and think tomorrow is Armageddon, but don’t realize that it’s only the day of Rapture. My understanding is that it’s followed by four months or so of hell on Earth and then the final end.

As expected, most people are laughing at the predictions, mainly because they come from a crackpot guy who supposedly has predicted Armageddon six times before, and not surprisingly, he hasn’t goten it right yet. So, the confidence people have in him being right the sixth time isn’t all that strong. Therefore, it’s being treated as a big joke.

But what if he’s right? What if the Rapture happens tomorrow? What do we do then?

Well, most people aren’t considering that because once that happens, it becomes a bit too late. But the possibilities, and that narrative of the story going forward have always fascinated me. I mean, the argument is that after God takes up all of the good people, he leaves the planet to everyone else to fight over. But my question has always been: “Who is fighting whom?” I mean, if all of the “good” people are gone, once Satan returns, who does this final battle take place with? The apathetic? The undecided? People who suddenly turn good because they realized the Rapture was true and that has made them sudden believers? That part has never really made a lot of sense to me from a narrative perspective.

So that means that after Saturday, if a large segment of the population disappears, there should be a whole bunch of people left over who should suddenly become instant believers. I mean, what more proof do you need than to see it actually happen? Would someone really remain an atheist if subjected to acts of God that are so obvious and present that there’s no disputing it any longer? And then, does that mean that God would then punish a whole bunch of new believers because they didn’t sign on before it was too late? Questions of this type of religiosity have always plagued me because it means to me that we have what can only be considered an unjust God, and if that’s the case, then it negates the very wonderful nature that religion should be in the first place.

Unfortunately, tomorrow is most likely going to be a day as uneventful as the next. Except a bunch of people who were devote believers are going to be faced with the fact that their beliefs were taken advantage of by yet another deceiver who used them for personal monetary gain and a quest for power. As these people would have to be seriously devoted believers, this means that they put their faith forward for the wrong reasons, which means, to be, a total waste of such great devotion that seems truly unfortunate, because it’s hard enough to find anyone with an ouce of faith in anything these days. And once someone of such devotion has had his or her faith dragged through the mud once again, that can’t make the next leap of faith occur just as easily, which means that where faith has become forlorn, what is left for them to believe in? And will they ever believe in anything again?

I think people who do this disservice to them do the ultimate disservice to mankind and the better nature of humanity. But they are NEVER held accountable for it. Instead, they will hit replay on the calendar and start recruiting more devoted followers to follow them down yet another rabbit hole of future despair and ultimate depravity. Sadly enough, those they follow will claim the ranks of the truly religious, of highest faith, and in reality, they will destroy the very foundation of which that faith was first built.

And no one will ever question it well enough to keep it from happening again.

Sidelined Onlookers Documenting the Last Days of the Republic?

Business, Economics, News, Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,

When I was working on my Ph.d for political science (how’s that for a first line, name-dropping, “look how important I think I am” opening?), one of the observations I kept making was how so many political pundits of their day were constantly making the prediction that the empire was about to crumble. There would be all sorts of analogies pointing at the fall of Rome, and yet another self-important political pundit of that time and day was convinced that the United States republic was about to collapse upon itself. It got to the point where I started to make predictions about the predicters, figuring that the eventual demise of a political entity is the propensity to fall into the ultimate entropy of political discourse: The belief that eventual destruction has to come on that person’s watch.

So, as I am watching the events of today unfold, I can’t help but find myself making the same mistake that everyone of these Thomas Paines, Mark Twains, Bill Buckleys and Helen Caldicotts kept making. We underestimate the inevitable apathy of the American people to care enough about their own circumstances to ever want to try to make things better.

You see, that’s pretty important, and as a political observant, it’s equally important to understand why people don’t do something as well as why people do the things they eventually do. Political scientists are very good at seeing French Revolutions under every rock, but incapable of seeing Moscovites living in squalor and despair, yet never doing anything to change their personal situation because while the payoff might seem great, the cost of achieving that payoff is sometimes just a bit more than any one man (or woman) is willing to pay. It’s one thing to complain about current events and to demand justice, but when that demand requires that you stand up against oppression by personally risking your own hide, that dynamic changes quickly. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We’re really good about making grandiose statements, like “give me liberty or give me death” or “I may disagree with you but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” but when it comes down to actually putting up one’s survival against one’s survival instincts, survival instincts win almost every time. We’re really good at complaining and claiming a backbone that we believe we might have, but like every bad war movie there’s that inevitable scene where the cigar-chewing sergeant reveals that a soldier may act all tough, but it’s only on the battlefield when you see whether he puts up or shuts up. In reality, we’re very much like that. We’re often all talk and very little action. I’ve often thought that political science could benefit from incorporating psychology into its discipline (where we put people into a room to see how much their political rhetoric stands up to experimentation…for the record, we don’t do that sort of thing because it’s ethically vacant in social science, but I’m really only talking in semantics right now).

Which brings me to my thesis for today, and that’s that I’m seeing all sorts of “fall of the Republic” activity happening on a daily basis right now, and I wonder how much of it is in place observation that always happens versus actual observations of real implications. In other words, I wonder how much my educated observations are really seeing as opposed to how much my educated perspectives are skewed by that same institutional framework I’ve been talking about since the beginning of this essay. In even more words, am I really seeing what I think that I’m seeing, or am I just another one of those overly observational folk that see things that have always been there but our current paradigm now recognizes it as something less than it really is?

I mean, let’s look at some of the evidence. We’re currently in a budget mess that this country has never been in before. Unlike the past, our solutions were usually to go back to the drawing board and come up with new solutions. Today, we aren’t going back to the drawing board but spitting out rhetoric that doesn’t solve anything but actually makes things worse. People are out of jobs because we may have exhausted the majority of the low-hanging fruit that was once available to us by virtue of our ever-expanding economy and untouched resources. Our economy is no longer expanding, and our resources are essentially tapped, overtapped possibly. The solution was always to find cheaper labor and cheaper resources, but we’ve run out of those options because the former labor solutions have wised up to this act and now controls the labor channels that we used to exploit. Instead, we have lost revenue sources, labor pools, and our own people don’t seem to be able to find the jobs that they used to find that usually existed on top of these other resources and lower income labor pools. If you look to our political leaders, the choices are either to raise more taxes or to cut spending. But neither solution is a solution to the actual problems we seem to be facing. Raising taxes doesn’t do any good if you have no one to raise them on, especially if we have fewer and fewer jobs. Cutting spending is great, but at the same time that only kicks the can down the road again because as we lose that choice labor we used to have, more people end up relying on government to fill in the gaps, yet cutting spending makes that even harder. In the end, we have what’s called the continuous rush to the bottom, and rather than recognize this and try to push back up, we are building infrastructure to make sure the trip to the bottom happens a lot more comfortably.

So what’s the solution to all of this? Well, if you’re a naysayer or a doomsayer, your answer is pretty simple. We let it all collapse and start over again. And sadly enough, we have political leaders that seem to be advocating just that. Oh, they won’t say that exactly, but their solutions are just that. Rather than try to find viable solutions to build prosperity, we seem to have a lot of leaders who are basically just trying to fund the megastupidopoly a little bit longer so they can cash out before it all comes crashing down. The solutions all appear to be named: I’ll get mine and the hell with the rest of you.

Which brings us back to the “people”, the ones who are responsible for fixing it all sans great leaders. But what can we really expect from them when the only input we allow from them is to punch a Yes or No hole on a ballot? We don’t ask for their ideas. To be honest, our political leaders don’t care about their ideas and are really only interested in their money, support and again, what the people can do for their leaders rather than the other way around. Oh, the rhetoric always sounds the opposite of what I just said, but actions speak much louder than words, and those bad actions have been speaking a lot lately.

When the economy started to collapse, our leaders bailed out the car companies, the banks and Wall Street gazillionaires. The common person received zilch. When the common person had his house foreclosed on, the government backed the banks. When it become political impossible to keep doing that, the government stepped in and demanded the banks be slower about taking everything away from their customers. Not that they stop taking everything away. Instead, they gave the banks everything they wanted in practically every area of discourse. Credit card companies received guarantees that people could no longer go completely bankrupt without some kind of continuous debt to the banks involved. When banks were discovered with their pants down involving overdraft charges, government stepped in and did as little as they could there as well. Even with the tiny movement made by government on the people’s behalf, the banks managed to get huge lobbying to soften the changes, and even now are working on reversing some of the impact they have “suffered” as a result of government forcing them to be less greedy and more upfront about their attempts to screw over their customers.

But what it really comes down to is the question of whether or not the common person in America really cares enough to pay attention to what’s happening. President Obama and the minions of government are trying very hard to convince the rest of the country that the budget impasse is important. The media is starting to make comments about how much the debt really “costs” each person and how much in debt EACH person is as a result of the debt ceiling we are currently living under. But what none of them have been capable of doing is convincing the average American that he or she really should care. Oh, they’re trying to make that argument, but it’s falling flat. Let me explain why, using simple logic that the average American is using.

Let’s call me Citizen A. The government tells me that my current debt (as a result of the deficit) is $70,000 (just for the sake of using an arbitrary number because the real number is just that, a number). My first thought is that as a citizen of this republic, I should be concerned, but in reality, I’m more concerned about the $150,000 student loan debt I’ve incurred trying to get a college education, my $350 monthly car payment, and my $500-1000 monthly rent bill I have to pay. Adding in a whole bunch of other expensese I probably have to pay a month, Citizen A really doesn’t care one iota about the personal $70,000 that is part of my slice of the deficit because to be honest, it’s not really my debt. I don’t see it that way. That $150,000 I owe in student loans is my debt, but it’s going to take a lot of rhetoric, a lot of speeches and quite possibly an overweight FBI agent in a bad suit with a crowbar to convince me that the government’s deficit is in fact, MY deficit. Citizen A doesn’t feel a connection to that debt. In fact, he thinks the government squandered that money, and that it’s really the debt of people who work for the government. That, in fact, it’s THEIR debt, not his.

Now, as a rational individual with a bit of education, I understand it shouldn’t be this way, but game theoretics are involved here, and when it comes to payoffs, the average citizen feels just like Citizen A. We don’t feel the debt is ours. It belongs to the government that for years has treated the “people’s” money as its own. When we took away the draft, made voting voluntary, and made presidential state of the union addresses optional television programming, we eliminated the ties between government and Citizen A. People see our government as an entity that exists because it has to exist, but as none of us fought to create this republic, very few of us actually have served to defend it, and most of us are oblivious to what this republic does on a daily basis, it’s very difficult to sell the supposition that government and people are tied to each other.

So, I ask: Are we seeing the end of days, or is this just another hiccup in the usual way things happen? And if it’s the latter, then how do you get people to care enough so that it doesn’t end up becoming the former by eventual default?

Even in America, we have newspapers doctoring the truth

News, Religion, , , , , , ,

Religious paper cuts Clinton from iconic photo

This is a copy of a newspaper that was printed in New York.

Here is the same photograph on CNN:

President Barack Obama and his national security team watch updates on the mission to capture Osama bin Laden on Sunday.
Notice a difference? Well, in the first picture, someone went through the work of photoshopping all of the women out of the picture. Turns out an ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious organization doesn’t believe that women in a picture should be included, because it would then be “sexually suggestive.” I’m not making this up either. It might have been possible to get away with this if the picture in question wasn’t such a talked about picture in the first place (whether or not Clinton was reacting in a strange way to some mysterious event that could have been about Osama Bin Ladin). You know, without the whole Hilary thing, there wouldn’t have been a story in the first place, SO WHY INCLUDE THE PICTURE IF YOU CUT HER OUT OF IT?
Okay, let me get out front and say this before continuing on. I have nothing against any specific religion, or promote any religious organization (or anti-religious organization either). However, having said that, I think we do a serious blow to any idea of organized religion whenever we try to pull this crap over the eyes of any followers. Censorship, or doctoring the truth, is NEVER a viable alternative to the truth. EVER. Lying means dishonesty. I have yet to come across a religion that advocates lying is the right course towards anything good. Ever.
The sad thing is: Anti-religious folk are now going to use this to cripple religious organizations. And then anti-Jewish groups will use this to insult Jewish religions. In the end, the only thing that was served was we promoted more hatred, more dishonesty and ruined the chances of honest conversations in this country and the rest of the world.
Good job, dishonest newspaper. Score one for Satan. (All apologies to Satanists who weren’t involved in any of this dishonesty)