Category Archives: News

My Proposal: Please give us interesting news instead of what we’ve been getting

Business, Economics, Healthcare, News, Politics, Technology, Television, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Joshua had a few things he needed to say
Joshua had a few things he needed to say

Here’s a confession. I read the newspaper every day. And some days are more informative than others. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the news over the last couple of months has been really crappy, almost to the point of where I sometimes suspect that today’s newspaper might have been recycled from a few weeks ago and sold to me as brand new. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. It’s like there’s no interesting news any more, and that worries me because I’m a newshound, constantly in need of news gratification. So, here’s a quick rehash of what I’ve found to be the “significant” news stories for the immediate past (and present).

1. Justin Beiber did something. Don’t know what it was, but for some reason when he does something, the news wants to tell me about it. I get it. Teen girls like him, mainly because teen girls haven’t matured to a point where their brains actually generate understandable logic. So this “heart throb” did something that may or may not have been controversial, and as a result the media is in a frenzy making sure that we know all about it. I don’t care. Please stop telling me about it. It’s taking up space where I could be reading about…well, honestly, I don’t have anything else I’m following, which is a part of this whole post in the first place. As a corollary, please don’t tell me about Selena Gomez either. The only reason I know who she is is because she’s often mentioned in the same sentence as Justin Bieber, which makes her even less significant than someone I find of absolutely no significance.

2. Congress voted to not vote on anything. That’s about the length of the summary of the latest stories involving Congress. They’ve spent the last two years arguing over how they don’t agree with each other, with the president, with the people, and with the color of the sky. I get it. They don’t get along, and they believe that they need to get rid of the people they don’t get along with in order to get anything done. As a result, they’re going to have to justify their ridiculous salaries and excellent health benefits ( that are not upto the standards found in Forest Hills urgent care clinic and also they are the not the same as anyone they vote to approve health benefits for, such as the poor, the military or, well, anyone else), so they need to pretend to be doing something. And because the media can’t just report: TODAY, CONGRESS PROVED IT’S USELESS AND DID NOTHING, they report all of the horse race crap, and we end up with stories that tell us absolutely nothing.

3. School shootings are on the increase. I’m not happy about this, and at the same time I kind of want to stop hearing about it because statistically, they’re not actually increasing. We’re just hearing more about them because they fit the “if it’s on fire, then it’s a story” paradigm of national news outlets. Most people don’t realize that kids have been stupid for about as long as kids have been around. What is different is that the media is in such a need of stories to fill a 24 hour news cycle that whenever someone shoots someone, pulls out a gun, draws a picture of a gun, bullies someone, thinks about bullying someone, says mean things, or whatever, we’re going to hear a national story about it. And then commentators are going to get on the news and talk about the “tragedy” and how it never used to be that way “back in my day”. Yes, it was. It just didn’t happen in your particular school at the time you’re remembering back on. But it happened in the school down the street, which means that “back in your day” these things were happening but because they didn’t happen in YOUR school, you weren’t paying attention, and because most people didn’t pay attention to news back then (as most of it was from the 3 networks and boring as hell), there’s a belief that it was much different back then. Statistically, the only thing that really changed was we have more access to national information than we had before, which means that something that happens in Colorado when you live in New York gets put in front of your TV screen, making you feel that it’s happening in your neighborhood, when it’s thousands of miles away from where you live.

4. The most important story in the country is gay marriage. Well, you’d get that impression from the amount of rhetoric focused on it. Yes, I agree that it should be an important story, but it’s not really, and it affects so few people in comparison to the grand total of people who think they’re affected. Disclaimer: I’m not gay, which means that the issues involved in this continuously involving “issue” doesn’t actually affect me. Reality: That’s not completely true. It does affect me, but not in the way that seems to be the focus of so much attention. Let me explain.

You see, there are people in the world who are not heterosexual. I’m not one of them, yet because I’m heterosexual, if I was a total dweeb and rude person, I could say that how someone lives his or her own life somehow has an impact on my life. Reality: It doesn’t. If two men want to marry each other, and they live next door to me, the total effect after doing all of the mathematics is…um, zero. What does affect me is how much noise they make playing their stereo, or in what seems to be my personal experience, how much of a complaint they have about the fact that I sometimes play mine too loud. You might notice that how loud their stereo is has absolutely NO connection to whether or not they happen to be gay or straight. So, their impact AS A RESULT OF THEM BEING GAY, is none.

Then the argument comes in about how gay marriage somehow diminishes the status of marriage in general. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe that divorce has a much larger impact on the status of marriage. I feel that if NO ONE ever got divorced, then marriage would be sanctified and never in fear of danger. Not only that, I think that if spouses NEVER cheated on each other, then marriage would be strengthened that much better. So, from now on, I think that anytime someone talks about a divorce, that person should be shunned, thrown out of the country and declared a heathen of all good thinking Americans. Come to think of it, if people didn’t get married in the first place, then perhaps the fear of divorce would never happen, which would strengthen the very value of partnership. Or perhaps partnership is the problem, and that it’s kind of unnatural, as God originally intended for every person to be alone, which is why He didn’t create people as partners but designed each person to be capable of functioning without another person. I’m sure there’s a verse somewhere in one of the many different interpretations of religious texts out there that says exactly that, although it might say it in different words that need to be translated by some priest who has spent too much time reading the book and pretty much nothing else.

The point: How does the way someone else lives affect me when it doesn’t have an effect on me? I can have all sorts of bad feelings about how someone else lives, but I guarantee that someone else is probably having bad feelings about the way I live for some random reason, no matter how wonderful I live my life in the constant vigilance to the ideals put forward by the Shania (if my religion happens to be the worship of all things Shania Twain). Unfortunately, no matter what you do, someone else is going to disagree with how you live your life and think that he or she knows better than you do, and then for bizarre reasons DEMAND you live another way. I like the old George Carlin belief system that people need to just leave people alone (to paraphrase several great speeches he’s given over the years).

5. Which brings me to the story lines of national politics. As I read stories on national news, I find absolutely nothing in the way of interest for any story because none of them make a single difference to me whatsoever. The stories that do are glossed over and treated as afterthoughts, meaning no one seems to care about things we should care about. So, what kinds of subjects should we hear about. Well, I have a few:

A. Health care. I’m not talking about Obamacare or how badly the health care exchanges were implemented. Although I will say that those stories COULD have started off a conversation about things that NEED to be discussed, but never will. What needs to be discussed then? Cost. Health insurance is expensive, and it shouldn’t be. Because our government has taken a hands off approach for so long, we have the worst health care system in the world, aside from dictatorships that use firing squads as a health care remedy. For the first and second world, our health care is abysmal because we allowed the whole system to evolve from a really bad premise to begin with. Government has been playing catch up with our system since day one, and that means that any solutions aren’t going to happen from half measures; the whole system needs a restart and the old money profiteers need to be put out of the system so that we can put together something that shows we are, in fact, the one first world nation in all ways. What does that mean? Everyone gets health care covering pretty much everything they need. We start to create a system that is proactive rather than reactive, meaning that you don’t seek health care for the first time AFTER you’re already starting to get sick. One of our largest problems in this country is diabetes, which if you understand the disease, all of our efforts to combat it are to alleviate the symptoms, and that’s it. We do the same thing for cancer. Instead of massive money being spent on “curing” cancer, most of our procedures are designed around helping people “live with cancer” instead. I don’t advocate stopping the reactive measures, but I’d really like to see us work on the proactive measures. This would mean a completely change to our health care mentality, and that’s never going to happen as long as these decisions are being made by people who are so indoctrinated by this payment system plan, because they are completely incapable of seeing any other alternative. And a personal belief of mine is that pharmaceutical companies might be a huge part of the problem as well, although there’s lots of room for debate in that one. An example: I was dealing with some depression issues a few years back and went to a therapist, who I immediately discontinued seeing because her “solution” to practically everything was medication. I didn’t need medication to stop being depressed. I needed to feel better about my situation by finding solutions to my situation. Medication was a stupid solution, but this therapist saw no other alternative. A friend of mine was diagnosed with “stress” and prescribed lots of medication. She started on it for a few months before she dumped it and took an alternative route NOT condoned by her prescriber. Her “new” route consisted of paying for massages, and she’s doing a lot better these days. The interesting side bar to that is that her health coverage didn’t cover massage therapy but did cover medication. Again, the eye is on the wrong ball, and as long as we’re a part of this system, it’s never going to change. Additionally, for those struggling with severe issues and looking for alternative approaches, seeking help from a private rehab centre might be a viable option to consider.

B. Elections and Representation. Every election you hear people start complaining about how so few people participate int eh voting process. There’s a reason for that. It’s not because they’re apathetic, happy with the system as is, or lazy. Many people don’t participate because they don’t feel they have a voice, no matter how hard political parties try to convince them otherwise. This was seen during the whole Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. In case you weren’t completely following what was happening, people were dissatisfied with government and their lack of influence on it, so they tried mobilizing outside of the power structure that already exists. What they discovered was that the entrenched power system gave them no voice, and when they made a stink about it, the powers that be ridiculed the protesters and treated them as crazy people. Occupy Wall Street was defeated early in its infancy as the media treated it as a joke, constantly ridiculing its members by pointing out that they had no better ideas, were disorganized and weren’t making any headway in their protests. Having watched the back and forth, I came away with a different perspective, albeit a more economic one. The media responded as the powerful business interests they were, seeing Occupy Wall Street as a financial threat, which caused the media to treat them as outliers and a humorous joke. Wall Street itself, responded in kind, as they were the financial target of these people who were upset with how there has been little oversight over economic impact issues from this part of the political system, and because of such a response, there never will be.

The Tea Party has been an even more interesting animal, mainly because this was a protest from an actual economic power base that couldn’t be ignored in the same way. Remember, Occupy Wall Street was coming from the poor, disenfranchised side of the political spectrum, much easier to knock its wind out right from the beginning. But the Tea Party was a disorganized response to dissatisfaction from the political right, which is inhabited by those with financial clout, meaning the people Occupy Wall Street were actually protesting against. As they were now organized against OWS, they came about immediately after with a power base that demanded the Republican Party (its main level of constituency) to respond. As a result, they’ve entrenched themselves as a part of that party. What we’re starting to discover is that they only represent an elite economic power base, which has its own representation mainly because it can afford to make its message known through financial clout during elections. We’re starting to see this with their attacks on Obamacare, and specifically the members of the Senate who supported it. We’re going to see a lot more of this in the months to come.

But what it means is that the average person has less and less touching of the strings of government. And this means that as we move closer to the next election, people have come away from these previous two movements convinced that nothing is going to change because when they did try to become organized, nothing happened, unless they were already rich and powerful. To participate in that environment is a lesson in futility, and nothing that either political party says is going to change that. The Republicans don’t have any intentions of representing the disenfranchised, having sold their souls to the very franchised economic elite, and the Democratic Party is counting on these disenfranchised souls to somehow embolden them with the ability to maintain power in a system that still rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Basically, the Democrats have to convince people who bought into “hope and change” that more years of their control will somehow bring about “hope and change” when the originator of that message did very little for them other than try and fail. The alternative is to opt out of participation, and sadly enough the expectation is that rhetoric can somehow make this different. Good luck on that.

C. The economic future. This is really what should be the main focus right now. There is no lack of books on the concept of low-hanging fruit that has disappeared from the process, meaning that all of our advantages we used to have available (like continued open spaces for colonizing land, economic opportunities for business growth, and access to untapped natural resources) are practically gone. We no longer produce new things but seem to have fallen into a rut of continuous reinvention of old things, like the consumer electronics show that instead of showing us new technologies on the horizon continues to show us new variations of television sets that keep reinventing the old technology. When every house in America that needs a television has pretty much already bought one, we’re forcing a false need on people that they’re no longer responding to with checkbooks. The last few major advancements in technology that drove need have been around for some time (televisions, microwave ovens, computers and cellphones), meaning that we’re not producing anything that’s changing the paradigm to move us towards new need. Sure, you can argue the iPad was a new invention of this nature, but it just gathered a number of different products and combined them into one, which, if you think about it, actually is a step back on the production of new things list. As long as our future consists of combinations and reinventions of old things, we don’t have a lot of progress to take advantage of, which would explain why industry innovation has focused a lot more on consolidation than progress, meaning the idea of expansion by robotizing a labor force and outsourcing to countries where its cheaper to produce something.

Anyway, this has gotten much longer than I originally intended to write, so I’ll stop there for now. I would hope, by now, the basic idea has been relayed.

Still no such thing as a free lunch

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

Some moron running for senate in Georgia thinks he has a great idea to, well, I don’t really know what it would solve, but like usual, a House Representative in Georgia, who wants to rise in power, thinks it’s a really good idea to put school children to work to earn their “free lunches.” Basically, U.S.Representative Jack Kingston thinks it would be really nifty for the poor to put them to work sweeping up cafeterias for their lunch money, because somehow this would instill in them the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you think about it, he’s advocating a legal fix to an old adage that doesn’t actually have a lot of connection to anyone’s reality.

The obvious counter to this whole situation is this belief that somehow this is going to make poor kids feel like they’ve “earned” their lunch. No kid pays for his or her own lunch at that age, or at least very few do, because no kids have their own money at that age. Their parents give them money, so they aren’t learning money management skills. They’re learning that their parents have money, or they’re learning that their parents have no money. That’s really the lesson that gets taught here no matter how some Republican Neanderthal wants to spin it.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Well, it’s not really a secret, but I grew up dirt poor. My mom was uneducated and my dad split when I was too young to ever know him. So my mom worked crap jobs and was basically too uneducated (and proud) to take government handouts. She probably should have. It didn’t help that she was sick and then went blind in one eye. She tried and that’s really all that’s important.

So, at one point I was put on discount lunches. Somehow, even though our apartment was overrun with cockroaches on a daily basis and our neighbors were crack addicts and prostitutes, we were too well off to get full free lunches. So, my mom had to pay a certain amount of money and then got discounted lunches for me when I went to school.

Let me tell you about those discounts. They gave you a special paper card that you had to present each and every time you presented for lunch, and the system was so obviously designed to point out that you were using this card, which meant that every other kid looked at you when you were presenting it, and I can’t tell you how bad kids are at making someone feel like shit in some weird process of making themselves feel better about themselves. It was humiliating every time I had to present that card and then pay my token of the discount I was allowed to pay. There were many times when I skipped lunch because it was easier to not eat than to have to go through that process each and every time at lunch.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Representative Kingston never had to go through that experience when he was growing up. And I’ll bet that not once has one of his children ever had to go through such a thing just to get a stupid lunch meal. That sort of thing scars you for a long time, and even in my middle age these days, I have never forgot how it felt to have to present that stupid card when I was at that age.

And that’s the problem with a lot of our representatives who think they actually represent people they serve. Edmund Burke argued a long time ago that he could “represent” miners in his district even though he’s never been a miner because he knows what’s best for them. He was wrong then, and Kingston is wrong today. I’m sure there’s a special place in Goddess Hell where Kingston has to ask for a school lunch each and every day and is told that no, he must starve because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Sometimes, it seems like the whole world just wants to fight with itself

Memoirs, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

star-wars-darth-vader-sense

I found out today that Michigan decided to tell women to go screw themselves when it comes to rape. Basically, women used to be able to get abortions if they were raped. Now, they can’t, unless they thought ahead and bought rape insurance. Yep, I said that correctly. They have to buy rape insurance. I have all sorts of snide comments to make on that, but I’m just going to leave that one for you to digest. Rape insurance. Okay, moving on.

Meanwhile, there was another shooting in Colorado, which has verified to me that if you want to die, and happen to be young enough to still be in school, go to Colorado. Come to think of it. Go anywhere in America, and you’re probably going to find somebody willing to kill you. We’re just that helpful.

I was happy to see that our Congress was able to come together long enough to decide on a budget, which will pay for military projects and anything needed by very wealthy people who already have enough money that they couldn’t possibly think of anything else to spend it on. Those on unemployment, well, go screw yourself because this country just thinks you’re some lazy ass who is sitting at home trying to get free bon bons while the rest of us work hard at…um, well, not sure what we’re working hard on, as I don’t think too many people in this country actually have really difficult jobs these days, although they like to think they do. But I’m sure they’re all upset at the freeloading people who are starving to death in the snow, while trying to push their broken shopping carts that some legislator seems to think needs to be smashed with a sledgehammer (guess that somehow gets those freeloaders back to work?). Anyway, basically our country works well if you’re already filthy rich. If you’re not, you’re just lazy and should go out and get a job, even if you have three of them that don’t pay enough combined to get you off of food stamps (which, by the way, we need to cut because government decided that money needed to go to rich billionaire oil barons).

And we just bombed a bunch of strangers in Syria with drones that we stated we wouldn’t use just to bomb anyone, although we may have just accidentally taken out an entourage of people returning from a wedding, which someone in our government than had the audacity to state: “They were all enemies of state”, which I’m sure includes the toddlers and the bride. But what do I know?

And China decided to play top gun with its ships by basically threatening to ram a US missile cruiser in international waters. And what did we do? We stepped aside and let them pass. In other words, the most powerful Navy in the freaking world just backed down to yet another tin hat power broker.

Oh well, I guess I’m just bitter because my stuffed animals have more of a social life than I do.

Taking Umbrage With the N-Word

News, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , ,

There’s an interesting article on Salon this morning from Mary Elizabeth Williams on how white people shouldn’t use the N-word under any circumstance.  Ignoring for a moment that most of MEW’s articles tend to be reactionary and designed to cause people to get upset over mundane things that they wouldn’t normally pay much attention to, the points she brings up are interesting, although I’m not sure I completely agree with all of them. I’ll let you read it for yourself and then decide. What I did want to discuss is my own particular perspective in the whole thing, coming from someone who would never use the word, mainly because I find it offensive, and even more important, that it rarely serves a purpose in any conversation I’ve ever had.

But I want to go back in time a bit to a friend of mine I had back in the days of my second visit to the college environment. I had decided to attend a community college (years after the Army AND West Point), cause I was interested in pursuing computer science as a future field. Anyway, my roommate at that time was a really cool guy named (for the sake of here) Bob. Bob was friendly, a good all around guy, and he was dating a woman that he was eventually going to end up marrying. He was also a pretty big guy, and he hung around with a bunch of other big guys, a few of them caucasians and a few of them of all different types of backgrounds, ethnicities and colors. But one thing that used to shock the crap out of me was that Bob used to refer to ALL of his friends as “my Nigga.” And they would refer to him in the same way. And none of them had a single problem with it.

I once asked Bob if that word didn’t bother him, and he looked at me like I was a moron. To him, the word had little contextual meaning as it did to me. It didn’t even have the same meaning to the African-American friends he had, because I couldn’t resist asking them either. They just didn’t grow up in an environment where they felt the typical socio-economic fabric that hangs over so many African-Americans of urban locales. They just smiled when I asked about it and didn’t have a negative thing to say whatseover.

No one thought of Bob as a racist, and not once was race even considered a part of the conversation.

But for me, I never could come around to using that word, even in the mixed company of where it was tossed around on a constant basis. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying it no matter how “welcome” the word was. And part of that is because I grew up in an environment where the word was used in very negative circumstances. The whites I grew up with around in the late 1960s and early 1970s were living through forced busing and the ramifications of the Civil Rights movement, so there was still a long of antagonism existing back then. I was fortunate in being integrated with very diverse populations as a child because I was dirt poor in an urban environment (Santa Monica, California). While many of my caucasian neighbors (meaning people who lived way out of my neighborhood of crack houses and prostitution dens) lived in isolated communities, I spent most of my free time at places like the Santa Monica Boys Club, which tended to cater to the poorest kids who couldn’t afford to spend time after school at the YMCA (where the richer kids hung out). So, I was exposed to all sorts of diversity that quickly educated me on what words were friendly and which words were taboo. As I was always a friendly sort of kid, I learned the ones that made friends (and made lots of friends) and discarded the words that turned friends into enemies.

Years later, in the presence of Bob and his friends, I was completely out of place because the conversations they were having were alien to me, so I did what I did when I was a kdi. I listened and avoided participating whenever I felt uncomfortable. There are certain words I’m not comfortable saying, and I’ve discovered that that is probably never going to change.

This is why I don’t feel concerned that there are rappers out there using the N-word in their music. I generally don’t sing to rap music, mainly because there’s not a lot of it that insterests me. The types that does generally doesn’t have profanity in it, or it’s impact is in a completely different direction. I do think that there are a lot of people who feel they have to emulate that type of behavior to be seen as cool, and fortunately, I’ve never been known to be someone who seeks out that type of status. Whenever I consider myself “cool”, there’s usually a sense of irony or sarcasm involved.

Which brings me back to that word. I don’t know why people feel such a need to use it. But unlike the professor mentioned in MEW’s article, I don’t care enough about the fact that others use it to feel slighted myself. Words do have power in some circumstances, but what MEW and people like her don’t often recognize is that they also lack power if people don’t subscribe to their doctrine. Whenever I hear the N-word, I don’t think “subversive”, “cool”, or even “outrageous.” I think “uneducated” and “limited in vocabulary”. But then, when writing a novel, there have been times when I have chosen the simple phrase rather than the more complicated one because the message was the medium, not the other way around. And in those cases, I guess my own jury is still out.

Jelly Bellies are for eating, so please just shut the hell up

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One of the few givens in today’s society is that either some pop star is going to try to push the envelope by participating in some semblance of outrageous behavior (like saying the wrong thing, or forgetting to wear her clothes in public, or just having sex with strangers in church) or that some corporate executive is going to overstep his or her authority and say things that probably should have been sent anonymously to the racist message board where it belonged. Today, the owner of Jelly Belly decided to come out against transgendered rights in California, somehow thinking that his ability to make candy filled with high-fructose corn syrup somehow makes him an advocate for anyone who advocates hating people who are just trying to live their lives without discrimination and problems that most of us generally don’t have to deal with because we’re part of mainstream society.

A few weeks ago, it was Abercrombie & Fitch. Before that, Chik-Fil-something or other (honestly, just didn’t feel like looking up their name to spell it right as their company isn’t that important to me that I’d waste that much time putting their name into a Google search engine. And before that, it was Martha Stewart doing whatever it is that rich white women do when they’re not doing what rich white women do normally.

The point is: I’m getting really tired of hearing about corporate CEOs acting badly in public. It was fine when I was dealing with Paris Hilton, who was kind of an acting-badly CEO, even though she’s not actually the Hilton CEO. At least she was attractive and said lots of dumb things that made me laugh, even if that wasn’t her main intention. She at least provided entertainment, and I never felt that behind her ridiculousness was someone who was actually out there hating other people for being different.

But that’s what these CEOs are doing. They’ve made a shit load of money off of the rest of us, and for some reason they think that somehow now gives them the platform to spout some really racist, homophobic bullshit that somehow is relevant to the rest of us. If anyone of us have a problem with what they have to say, they chalk it up as irrelevant because what’s relevant is that we paid them money to become very wealthy and now that somehow their wealth and power makes them think that their opinions are somehow more significant than the opinions of the rest of us.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Those CEOs are not smarter, more lived, or even cognizant of facts that the rest of us don’t know. They don’t have more education than the rest of us; some of them have tons less. The only thing they have that the rest of us don’t have is money and gobs of it. That money opens doors for them so that when they have something “important” to say, people listen, which is why we’re hearing their racist, homophobic rants instead of just eating their candy.

What really seems to be happening is that our media pays dire attention to these Neanderthals because of the money factor. This is why when one of them farts on national television, we all have to smell it for the next couple of days. So, if we want to make this problem go away, we need to write to our media sources and say to stop telling us whenever a millionaire/billionaire sneezes. We don’t care.

Sure, the usual response is to start the infamous boycott of Jelly Belly products, or whatever product a company makes when one of these morons starts spouting his or her nonsense, but most often these products are things we like; we just don’t like the owners of these companies who make them. Why should we lose the things we like because they’re made by morons we hate?

The simple fact is that these CEOs are nothing more than people who were lucky at getting their product to the market and made a killing doing it. What they’re good at is business, so if they want to tell me how to run a bookstore, then the media should pipe that discussion to me. But I don’t go to a guy who makes candies in order to find out how I should feel about social issues in America. For that, I usually go to social figures who have knowledge in those areas of information. By the same token, I don’t turn to LGBT folk to find out the best way to reinvest my 401K; that’s not their expertise. Sure, one of them might know something about it, but you generally don’t just randomly go out into a crowd and start trying to get knowledge by hoping that maybe one of them might know something about the issue you’re dealing with. At least I don’t, any more than I have a tendency to avoid bringing my back pain issue to my dentist, who might feel bad about it but can’t really do anything to make me better.

So, with that said, can you CEOs please kindly shut the fuck up and get back to selling us things we don’t need?

Martha Stewart loses it on Twitter and CNBC thinks it’s a big enough story to do an entire story on it

Business, News, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , , , , ,
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets

The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.

You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.

I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.

I’m just saying….

We Now Live in an Era of Institutionally Required Paranoia–And there’s no solution

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They found me, even though I live next door to the Unabomber
They found me, even though I live next door to the Unabomber

It was recently announced that hackers broke into three of the largest data brokers out there and stole millions of social security numbers, plus all sorts of other identification characteristics on people they track. Basically, what this means is that companies that track your information without your permission, or even without your knowledge, have had that information stolen from them, so all of your information is now in the hands of some very bad people who will use it to steal from you, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. So, have a nice day and please buy more products from random companies.

In case you were unaware of it, this sort of thing is happening more and more often. Even if you choose to remain completely off line and never even do anything that can cause anyone to try to steal from you, there are companies out there making it so that you’re already online and everything of yours online is pretty much open to someone breaking into it, EVEN IF IT’S NOT YOU THEY BREAK INTO. That’s the real scary thing because the way our capitalistic system works means that companies we’ve never done business with can now use your information, collect your information, trade with each other based on your information and pretty much put you into the poor farm by using your information.

A couple of months back, someone used my bank credit card to buy train tickets in France. I have no idea how they got a hold of my information, but I can tell you that when I dealt with my bank, I was very much put on the defensive, almost as if something I had done caused this sort of thing to happen. There was never any statement along the lines of “you know, maybe it was our fault.” Shortly after this, it was leaked that this bank suffered a huge data loss that resulted in accounts being compromised. Not once was a single comment made about that, although when it looked like maybe the mistake was on my part, the conversation was sure a lot different.

And that’s kind of the future that we have to look forward to. Credit monitoring companies maintain databases of massive volumes of information on each and every one of us. But if they lose some of that information, they MIGHT (usually if the government steps in and shames them) inform you. And they just might offer a free credit report to see how screwed you really are. If you were screwed because of their action, expect years of having to explain yourself as no one will ever believe you didn’t actually try to buy 10,000 units of widgets from St. Petersburg in the middle of the night while using your credit card to buy a bail bond for some criminal in Florida.

The real issue here is that so much information is available about people and no one seems to care that we’ve become products rather than the owners of this information. Just think about Facebook and LInkedIn. Both “services” are actually data brokers who believe they actually own your information and that your contribution is that you’re allowed to organize it for them so it’s easier to access. If you quit Facebook, your information stays there pretty much forever, no matter how much they say it won’t be. And if you never joined Facebook, your information somehow made it there any way, and they’re just basically waiting for you to acknowledge you’re who you are so they can start tracking you better and send you notices of things you should buy.

We’ve all become products who think we’re actually in control of ourselves, and that’s the real tragic thing. We haven’t been the owners of our own identities for a very long time now, and even now people don’t recognize that. Or when they do, they just sort of shrug and figure it’s too much of a hassle to bother with anyway. But when their identities are stolen, it’s usually too late, so we all play a reverse lottery game here in which we hope that nothing bad ever happens to us while we cast discerning eyes at thoese who do get their identities stolen. We’re good until it happens to us.

And then, like I said, it’s generally too late. But that’s okay. We have much more important things to pay attention to. Who has time for this sort of thing?

We’re halfway through 2013 and racists are still living in the 1950s

News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Television, , , , ,

Cheerio’s did an interesting thing the other day. They created an ad where a white woman and her black child are having breakfast, and the kid goes to wake up dad, who is black. There’s no “hey, look, we’re doing an interracial thing here” commentary. It just exists as one of those “hey, life is life, so deal with it.”

 

Of course, the world couldn’t just leave it at that. As soon as Cheerio’s ran the ad, suddenly all sorts of uptight people had to chime in and make it out as if there’s something wrong because an interracial couple eats cereal in the morning. Imagine that.

What gets me is that it’s been 50 years since the very first interracial kiss (taking place in geek history between Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura). You’d think that we’ve come so far since then, and we should be at a point where we just laugh at this sort of thing. But there are people in America claiming that this is the worst thing ever. Looking at the Youtube stats, 21,673 people liked the video, while 1.453 disliked it. We’re talking about 6.3 percent of people actually registering that they don’t like whites and blacks being depicted as in the same family. The only positive is that 6.3 percent is pretty small (for example: on You Tube, 50 percent of responders disliked A Tribute to Jar Jar Binks. But that’s a whole other issue as 50 percent liking Jar Jar is downright scary to me. But I digress….

What’s of more significance is that there are still people who have a problem with interracial relationships. When General Mills aired the ad, there was a constituted effort to remove hate responses from those who immediately took offense at the approach. What was surprising is that with such a controversial topic (which in my opinion should NEVER have been controversial), General Mills stuck to their guns and refused to back down to any outlash against their message.

It should be interesting to see if this becomes more than just an outlier conversation piece, or if it leads to something that might possibly bring the US into the 20th century (a century late, but at least it’s a start).

If You’ve Ever Wondered Who It Is Government Works For….

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Brucoe, a real man's stuffed animal who takes no crap from anyone, especially cell phone companies
Brucoe, a real man’s stuffed animal who takes no crap from anyone, especially cell phone companies

There’s an interesting situation going on right now in the US Government, and it involves cell phones. From the Wall Street Journal comes a story about how the president is trying to convince Congress that we should allow unlocked phones to be allowed so that people can switch phone providers after their contracts have expired. The interesting part of the story, and the part that most people won’t get, is that this isn’t the first time the president and Congress have dealt with this issue. As a matter of fact, Congress originally made this ruling with a previous law, but made it one of those cumbersome laws that expires, which they often do when they don’t really want to do something. After it expired, these “penalties” were enacted for unauthorized unblocked phones:

The Library of Congress’s rules establish federal copyright penalties for unlocking a cellphone. Wireless carriers can collect statutory civil damages of between $200 and $2,500 per violation and criminal penalties can rise to $500,000, five years in prison or both for the first offense. (from the previously linked article)

Only after a digital write in campaign did the president actually chime in with his own thoughts, backing the people rather than the rich bigwigs in Congress.

So, the question going through your mind should be: For whom does the government work? Because the last time around, Congress did nothing, which managed to benefit the phone monopolies instead of the people, because they realized they wouldn’t be held accountable for doing nothing (a common misconception by Congress). In my opinion, if there wasn’t a write in campaign to the president, I doubt he would have addressed the issue either.

I suspect nothing is going to be done about this, unless people rally and hold their representatives accountable. The telecoms love the way things are right now, even though they claim that they allow phones to be unblocked (so people can switch companies without having to buy a brand new phone), but they don’t make it easy. As a matter of fact, from AT&T’s response to the issue, they have to give permission, even though they claim they probably would. That’s not a right. That’s being locked into a post-contract situation over a phone that your contract actually paid for.

So, if you ever want to know for whom government works, watch how this plays out. People can say and claim all sorts of things, but until you see it play out in front of you, you don’t know how things really happen. Words are great, but actions trump works each and every time.