Category Archives: Politics

Who Judges When the Government Goes Too Far?

Economics, Politics, , , , , ,

In the northern, midwest part of the country there’s an interesting battle that has been taking place between citizens and government that most people don’t even know anything about. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about this until a colleague of mine was swept up into the bizarre, bureaucratic red tape and forced into some pretty draconian adventures with government and immovable government employees who are incapable of seeing two sides to any issue.

I’ll give you a link to an interesting article that was written in November of 2009. Imagine if you were planning to rent a room out of your home, and you were looking for a specific type of roommate. Well, as my colleague discovered, be very careful about how you designate what type of roommate you’re looking for.

In my friend’s case, he has a large home that costs a lot of money to heat it. Well, he had rented a room in his home to a family that brought in a lot more people than they indicated they were going to when signing the agreement to stay there. As a result, the heat was turned on constantly as there was always someone in the house, and the costs to heat his place went literally through the roof. He found himself almost unable to pay his bills each month because the heat bill was off the charts. And then the family left and decided not to pay the money owed for the heat, leaving him pretty much holding the bag.

So, when he decided to rent out the space again, he put forth a Craigslist ad and wanted to make sure this didn’t happen again, so he said he was only interested in renting to individuals, not families. If you know anything about how the system works from there, you probably know what happened next.

There is a group of people who must literally sit at home and read each new ad that goes up on Craigslist because immediately they contacted the regional branch of the National Fair Housing Alliance, which immediately declared my colleague guilty, requiring a cash payment and then a mandatory attendance at a discrimination seminar, which also cost about $300 and took place in Ohio, even though he lives in Michigan. So, imagine how my friend must have felt when he was now out about $700 for listing a room on Craigslist, when all he was trying to do was avoid someone cranking up the heat and literally forcing him out of house and home.

My colleague tried to get anyone to listen to him, but generally people don’t care. He, and I agree, felt he was railroaded through a system that didn’t even give him an opportunity to present his own side. He was literally guilty without a chance to even prove innocence, which in my opinion, should never happen in this country, but it does almost every day.

Well, something interesting just happened that puts an interesting wrench into his phenomenon. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a 31 year old nursing student put up an ad on her local church’s bulletin board asking for a “Christian roommate”. As I’m sure you’re suspecting, she was turned over to the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan, a regional branch of the National Fair Housing Alliance. And, of course, the government treated her as a criminal without even considering any other possible circumstances or potential outcomes.

The difference this time is that unlike my colleague, this isn’t something that’s being taken without a fight. Remember, this was a religious act of “discrimination” so it should not come as a surprise that major entities are now responding in anger at a government entity that has no intentions of backing down. Nancy L. Haynes, executive director of the local Fair Housing Center, offers: “Our interest really lies in her getting some training so that this doesn’t happen again.” But as this is starting to become an issue that is getting the attention of some very powerful religious organizations and groups, one wonders if the government is really going to have the last word on this.

And I guess that’s the point of this. My colleague had no recourse, nor did he have anyone that was willing to advocate on his behalf. Basically, he was told he was in the wrong, and that under no circumstance would he be able to respond in any way that was not exactly as the government directed. Well, if the government caves on this, and they most likely probably will once very powerful entities get involved, then it’s important to look at this and start asking some important questions, like:

Is government answerable to the people, or is it as all powerful as it claims to be (at least in this case)?

If a powerful organization can change the dogmatic approach of government, then why isn’t there some kind of recourse for the average American?

And most important: How come these governmental entities do not have oversight that keeps them from acting as judge, jury AND the enforcement mechanism.

No one likes to be railroaded by government, but what’s even worse is being railroaded right before someone else gets treated completely differently because of powerful friends. That’s the origin of the pool corruption, even though most people won’t recognize it when they’re swimming in it.

Is There a Cure for Spam?

Economics, Politics, Social Networking, , , , ,

Years ago, when the World Wide Web was still a few years away, one of the hottest communication tools available was a thing called Usenet. Sadly, some people may not know much about it, know it only from its current, sorry state, or had experienced it and fondly think of all of the potential that was destroyed. It was the forerunner of message boards, in that everyone connected to the Internet was able to go to a non-graphical environment and communicate messages with each other on various topics. There were different boards set up that ranged from soc.tennis (social networking about tennis) to alt.sex.bondage (alternative sex about bondage). Yeah, at one point there was a message board for practically everything out there. And it was showing us that the future of the Internet was going to be place where everyone could discuss things, and the alienation of one’s own desires and habits was no longer going to be a problem in the future.

This worked for several years, and it was a lot of fun talking, arguing, flaming and networking with so many people across the planet that you would never get a chance to meet any other way. The global community was finally upon us.

And then something ugly happened. People trying to sell things, mainly scams, realized that this was a far better (and cheaper) process than sending out letters to people at 23 cents a pop (the price of a letter back then, or at least somewhere back then in the past). Quickly, they started sending out hundreds, and then thousands, of messages to these message boards on Usenet to the point of where people could no longer read the actual messages because there was nothing but spam. The more popular boards were destroyed almost overnight. No one could write there anymore because it was nothing but spam.

So people started moving to moderated boards. But they found ways to start spamming those as well.

This was during the time that the Internet was making its transition from word text to a World Wide Web, and unfortunately we didn’t do anything about the spammers during this period, so they moved along with us. Realizing they could do the same thing with email, they practically have destroyed the very concept of email today, much like they did with Usenet.

Spam is starting to destroy the next frontier of the net as well. I have a blog on my own web site that I maintain. Every day, it receives hundreds of spam comments on every post that I write. I have to catch every message that comes through by a spam filter that makes it really hard for me to even try to read through messages for approving. I do it, and it takes time, but the spammers don’t care that they’re sending fake message in hopes of getting me to advertise their crap for free through my posts and messages. Oh, they think they’re intelligent by writing little comments like: “I really loved your post about a generic topic that I care a lot about, but perhaps your readers should check out my pictures of girls with tits for more information” and they’ll include a link to, yes, pictures of girls with tits (which will most likely lead anyone stupid enough to go there to a site that is designed to try to take over your computer).

Recently, I started posting a lot of my writing on several different mainstream sites that allow you to maintain blogs. A good example is Open Salon (where I’ll probably be posting this as well). Unfortunately, you can’t post a story or article on the site without being innundated with spammers trying to sell crap. The moderators try to do something about it, but they’re overwhelmed, much like the Usenet people were, so the spammers are probably going to win. Eventually, the site will either do something seriously draconian to cut down on spam, or the site will become overwhelmed and people will stop visiting there, causing Open Salon to eventually just close up shop cause it won’t be worth the effort for the eventual non-payoff.

So, what can we do? It doesn’t seem that there’s any way to stem this tide of shit that comes from some really sinister people who don’t care that they’re doing everything to destroy the potential marketplace of ideas by turning it into the marketplace of crap. What’s even of more concern to me is that I don’t think anyone even has the problem in their cross hairs, thinking that eventually the problem will go away, or something better will come along that makes it no longer a problem.

That’s the problem. That’s what we did in Usenet. Those of us trying to fight it were ignored, and then everyone eventually just left, thinking that it wasn’t worth their time. Instead of fighting back, they cave in and lose the very foundation of what brought them there in the first place.

Is that what’s going to continue to happen? Are we going to lose every great thing on the net because some really stupid thinking people feel it is their right to destroy whatever comes along? Why isn’t this a much bigger issue for people? It affects so many people, yet no one seems to give it any real attention. And those that do are completely ignored.

What more must we give up before people finally say enough is enough?

Why the Democrats Are Having So Much Trouble in This Election

Politics, ,

If you read the newspapers or watch that silly contraption all the new kids are talking about called a “television” set, you might discover that a lot of people think the Democrats are having a bit of a problem heading into the midterm elections. The blame is interesting. Some say it’s the fault of Obama for not living up to his expectations, or because he did things he shouldn’t have done (like that whole Health Care thing I keep hearing about from the intellectual minds of our time, like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell). Others say it’s because the president’s party tends to lose seats any way during a midterm election, even though two of our recent presidents didn’t (but who pays attention to recent facts when it comes to spouting off statistical information that is out of date?).

But I have a different perspective that might explain why the Democrats are losing seats, or at least are heading into the election with the prospect of losing both the House, and possibly the Senate. I say this knowing that both sides will completely disagree with me, even though I’m right, but this happens every election, and then when it comes to me saying, “I told you so”, everyone lies and says they knew it already, even though they were saving the complete opposite right until what I predicted actually happened. I’m not even going to make a prediction here. I’m just going to tell you what’s already happened, which is pretty funny because people are so good at putting their fingers in their ears and singing “lalalalala” no matter how much they should just listen.

The Democrats are heading into this election losing seats because of two factors. The simple one is obvious. People are pretty pissed, and they need to lash out at someone. The Democrats are in charge of the presidency, the Senate and the House, so who do you think the people are going to lash out at? The Republicans who aren’t actually in charge? Even if the Republicans are responsible for EVERYTHING that’s wrong right now, the people don’t see that. They see who has power and that’s who they’re pissed at.

Now, having said that, I should also point out that the statistical phenomenon of people voting locally but being angry nationally should have actually saved the Democrats from a massive retribution from the people. Unfortunately, another vector is involved in the equation, and that’s the one that I think is making all of the difference.

You see, when Obama ran for president. he was swept into power by a dynamic force of change that was promised by a lot of his biggest fans. I’m not talking about his own team, or even Democrats in general. I’m talking about a lot of people who were so pissed off at the US because of the Bush Administration that they were so enamored by an outsider that they started to invent godlike status to his name. When Obama was swept into office, it was less of an election and more of a piety-filled coronation. People who wanted him were so in love with him that they made it out like he was no only going to do good things, but he was going to usher in a new age for America so that we would be the new Camelot on the hill, and every nation would worship this nation, and its new messiah for all of its greatness.

The media fell into it as well. The articles that were written about him were so gushing that I was beginning to be sickened by the coverage, and I was actually a fan. It was this admiration of him that completely threw Hilary Clinton under the bus, leaving her almost a roadkill on the way to the White House.

Well, those people who bought into this illusion started to wake up when they started to realize there was nothing glowing about Obama but the fantasy of what he was going to be doing. None of the great things happened. Even his biggest legislative achievement has been seen to be so controversial that almost everyone who ushered it in wants absolutely nothing to do with taking credit for it. Right now, Obama is helping his fellow Democrats by sending out his wife because she’s more popular than he is.

The problem the Democrats have right now is that they have a sobering electorate that now needs to be mobilized the last few weeks before the election. How do you do that? How do you convince a bunch of formely drunk drinkers that they need to go out and do it all again, except this time they have to pay for their own beer, and we’re going to be carding everyone going in and breathalizing everyone on the way out? You really can’t.

Instead, they’re facing an election where everyone is having to fend for themselves, and the only record they have to rely on is the one that everyone realizes was part of the drunken party atmosphere. Let’s face it. The Democrats haven’t done anything to gain the advantage going into November other than to not be the Republicans. That’s a pretty shitty herald to have to hang on your head going into an election.

The bigger problem is that the country is waking up to the fact that our elected leaders are a bunch of lawyers who are really only interested in what’s best for themselves. The promises don’t yield results, and the business of politics has shown itself to be a pretty sick animal.

Unfortunately, the people also realize that they’re left with a choice of two candidates in most races that are pretty crappy. And people aren’t really excited about yet ANOTHER election where the better of two evils is the electoral choice. There’s a very poignant Simpson’s episode where two evil aliens are discovered to be the real Clinton and Bob Dole during the 1992 election. Someone yells out: “I’m voting for a third party” and one of the aliens laughs at him, saying: “Sure, throw away your vote!” That’s where Americans are today, and it’s probably not a great position to be in if you’re walking to a voting booth in November.

Now, a voting critic would probably then say, don’t vote, but that’s not my advice. If you find that you abhor the candidates, go into the booth and vote for the issues that are of interest to you. Not every issue in an election is a vote for a candidate. Take advantage of your right to vote, go in there and vote for the issues that mean something to you and then leave the candidate crap blank. When someone here’s you complain and asks you if you voted, you can say you did; you just didn’t vote for any of the shitty choices that you were given. Until this country enacts a law that says you have to have 50 percent of the population vote for you, and not just the majority of the people who bothered to show up, then we might have people in office who realize they have to do something to actually earn a vote. But I don’t anticipate that happening any time soon.

The Rent is Too Damn High and Other Third Party Fun

Economics, Politics, , , , , ,

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there was an immediate move to capitlism and democratization. If you read any normalized history or political book about the period of change, you read it as a collective move of the populations towards democracy, but that’s not really what happened. What really happened was it was a move towards capitalism. Democracy was just one of those buy one get one free things that came with capitalism. During the Cold War, people were interested in the things capitalism could bring, like food and shelves filled with products. They thought democracy had to be part of the deal, so they accepted it freely. It was only after they realized what democracy actually was that a lot of these newly “free” countries started moving back towards authoritarianism. The interesting part is that they still wanted capitalism; democracy just wasn’t all that important.

It is probably important to point out that one of the first things that came from this new formed freedom of democracy was a new sense of political parties. It might surprise you that one of the most popular political parties to arise was the Beer Party. Its platform was simple: “Vote for us and you get lots of beer.” They actually got a lot more seats than almost every other non-main political party. In the Czech Republic, they were so powerful they actually shared power in the coalition government.

Why am I talking about this? Well, in the United States, we don’t really have third parties that have any power or significance, but we do have third parties. Most of the time they’re marginalized and looked over as a joke, like the Green Party or the Communist Party, but in some cases they actually gain a bit of standing, like the Reform Party. And then they become marginalized like the rest of them and no longer stand for anything.

Yet, every now and then one of those parties comes along that has a leader who is so outrageous that he or she essentially becomes bigger than the party. This was discovered at the recent debate for the governorship of New York, when the debate was practically won by Jimmy McMillan, who is the governor nominee from a party called, wait for it…The Rent is Too Damn High Party. And as expected, Jimmy made every attempt to utter that phrase during his one opportunity to speak to the masses during the debate.

The strange thing is that he came off as the most interesting and most popular of the speakers during the debate mainly because he came off as being completely nuts. Will that translate to votes? Probably not, but it sure would be interesting if it did.

Which brings to mind a situation that happened when I was in California. There was an interesting individual who was running for president during the 2008 election. He was this guy that used to hang out at Carls Jr every morning, and by coincidence so did I. I had this theory that crazy people used to hang out at Carls Jr every morning and…um, I mean crazy people AND I used to hang out there. Anyway, so during the Obama election, I was minding my own business and this guy comes over to my table and says: “Aren’t you a political science professor?”

Now, other than the fact that I used to walk around with my graduate graduation attire on every day after I graduated, I have no idea how he figured that out, but I said yes, I was. So, he started to tell me about how he’s been running for president for the last 20 years, and the media never pays any attention to him.

Then he proceeded to pull out a briefcase with all of his papers. Okay, it wasn’t really a briefcase. It was a Manila envelope that was tattered with paper hanging out all over the place, but he called it his briefcase, so I’m sticking to that. He then began to show me, in no uncertain terms (well, uncertain if you’re certifiably nuts) the linkage between the Kennedy election, 911, and something called the Koala Bear Effect. I listened to him for about an hour, before I realized I was slowly beginning to understand and believe him, so I bid him fairwell and then ran home, screaming.

I wrote an article about this for the local newspaper, and then immediately started receiving inquiries from larger newspaper reporters, wanting to know how I was able to find this guy, as they’ve been looking to interview him for years now but never could. I said that he eats at Carls Jr every morning, and they didn’t believe me. Eventually, the calls stopped coming. I realized then and there that some reporters are extremely lazy when it comes to following up on a lead.

The point is: There are third parties out there that have some very interesting people running for office. And yes, there are nutcases out there, too. But as long as we keep focusing only on the main runners, we’re never going to change the system or even have new ideas. Unfortunately, there’s no one out there even trying to make a difference.

So, until the next election, all I can say is that yes, the damn rent is too high. Unfortunately, no one is planning to do anything about it.

My Blueprint for Fixing the American Political System

Politics, , , , ,

One of the problems inherent in trying to fix the American political system is figuring out what’s wrong with it that needs fixing in the first place. Often, these arguments get bogged down in partisan politics that end up with someone claiming that getting rid of the other side, or something equally as ludicrous, is the solution. I’m not going to argue any of that nonsense. Instead, I would like to tackle this subject as objectively and as usefully as one can.

First, the political system in the United States is not broken. There. I said it. Which might make you think that this discussion should be over, and then we can all get back to our Dancing With the Stars and Lindsay Lohan meltdown watching. But no, there’s more that needs to be said here.

I’ll repeat: The political system in the United States is not broken. It works just as it was designed. This should not be surprising to anyone who understands politics. Political systems are designed to work in a certain way, and even the most corrupt systems are designed correctly. It’s what’s done with them that matters the most. And that’s where the problem with our system comes in.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. The US system was not designed to work with this many people. It was the perfect system when we designed it because our government was really small. So was our population. But both have grown over the last two hundred years and some change so that our ability to do a lot of the things it was intended to do has diminished. When we first started, a member of Congress represented about 30,000 people. Today, a member of Congress represents about 703,0001 people. There have been no indications that anyone in government has any intentions of increasing the number of representatives, nor in addressing this particular issue. The main reason for this is because if more representatives were added, it would cut down on the power that current representatives yield. Asking a politician to give up power is like asking a child to give up his or her toys. It’s not going to happen.

And that’s where our problem starts. No one in government is willing to do anything about changing the problems, and I mean most problems, not just the first one listed here, because it would threaten their current bases of power.

So, let’s look at a few ideas I have for how we could make changes to make our system work, and then after I go through and tell you why it won’t happen, I’ll then address how we can actually make it happen, something no one seems to ever want to discuss. Unfortunately, most of these issues tend to get bogged down in the first two thoughts (what needs to be done and why no one will do it) and rarely do we entertain the actual process of how we can actually make it happen.

So, here we go.

1. Term limits. The biggest problem we have in government is the corruption of those who have the most power. The way to end the corruption is to remove people from the ability to overuse that power, especially for their own benefits. Term limits do just that. Why don’t we go there? Well, politicians who don’t want to lose power are very good at convincing people that the system stops working if their expertise is not involved. Yet, if a politician dies, a politician replaces that politician almost overnight. That argument has no merit whatsoever. What they’re really telling you is that they need you to believe they are expendible, but they’re not. Get rid of the incentive to pay off someone who is going to be in power for decades, and you end the ability for that person to become entrenched in a power base.

But that’s only a small start.

2. Lottery elections. Remove the elective influence of lobbyists, and you end their power forever. A lottery is a system where anyone can be chosen for a job. Politicians love to try to convince people that you need to have skill to be a politician. You don’t. Anyone can be one. That’s why the qualifications are so low. When we started this whole government, we put people into power who had very little political experience. Political experience is gained quickly once in office. Once you remove the throngs of politicians from the political mess, you no longer need experts capable of navigating through the mess because the mess disappears when the “other” politicians aren’t there to have to be cajoled to do what needs to be done. You don’t need an expert to maneuver through a series of amateurs if there are no longer political experts to have to worry about. Term limits eliminates the experts. Lottery elections make it so anyone can serve in government.

And that’s the important part. Serving in government should be a service, not an occupation.

3. More representatives. That should be a no brainer. As long as you don’t have people protecting power bases, you send more people to government to represent you better. Right now, my congressman has no clue about me, nor does he care. Nor will he care, even if I try to get him to care. I’m not already powerful, nor am I rich. Therefore, I am unimportant to him. That needs to change, but it won’t as long as we continue doing the things we’re doing. Being a representative should be like jury service, except it lasts for a few years. If you can’t afford to leave your occupation for a few years, you can take your name out of the election hat. Simple as that. Except, unlike juries, people tend to want to serve in government (which is why we have elections right now), so we’d probably actually have a lot more people willing to put their name in the hat. Well, let’s fix juries as the same time. If you want to serve in government, you also have to serve on juries. You don’t get out of one if you want to serve on the other. Might make the country a bit more interesting.

4. Change our system of government to that of proportional representation. Our winner take all system doesn’t work with so many people right now. We need proportional representation. We’re one of the only democracies, or representative democracies that doesn’t have PR. I find it pretty funny that when the US goes to a foreign country and helps them establish a new government (like we did with many Eastern European countries after the fall of communism, and during the Cold War itself after World War II), we almost always install a PR system, not our own. Why is this? Well, because ours is too complicated, and as diplomats have argued over the years, a winner take all system like ours is too easy to lead to corruption and dictatorship, or a dictatoral oligarchy (Aristotle’s aristocracy that has turned corrupt).

An interesting story, but when New Guinea was switching from a winner take all system to a PR system, they were suffering from horrific apathy of voting. After the switch, numbers that were in the 20 percentile, went up to the 90 percentile of voting participation. It dropped back down to the 80s and 70s, but that’s still well over twice the percentage we get in the US.

Okay, so what are the problems of converting to these simple little ways? Well, the people already in power today won’t do it. The two political parties say they represent the rest of us, but the second you threaten them with a potential loss of power, they argue that they are the true representatives and won’t even discuss it. PR is not even on their radar. Nor is lottery voting. If it threatens their power, they aren’t interested.

That’s why it will never happen by trying to install change from within.

This means you have several options for the future.

1. The first option is business as usual where nothing changes. People will continue to have less control over their political lives and will constantly be voting for the lesser of two evils. The only change that will ever take place is if some demagogue comes along and rallies the country to move in his or her direction. This is the kind of thing that has led to Hitlers and Mussolinis. Not really the best directions. It should be said that when you move towards a dictatorship, only two have ever really been considered enlightened and beneficial towards the people. One ended when the leader gave up government freely and went back to plowing his farm. The other never ended and led to dynasties that lasted nearly a thousand years, and the benefits were really only received by the aristocratic class anyway.

Without the dictatorship, things will continue to move forward as they are, and eventually the system will collapse through economic ruin. But if we’re lucky, it won’t happen in our lifetimes.

2. The second option is revolution which causes an immediate, violent change. I’m not a real advocate of this direction, although some revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, were not very violent, but there’s no way to know how that’s going to happen until you let things run their course, and once a mob goes on its own, no one has control of it to keep it civil. So, you get whatever happens.

3. This is the option I think is probably the best, and that’s change through government. We have two ways of changing the Constitution, because in order to do anything of this magnitude, that’s what’s going to have to happen. One way is a constitutional amendment, but that requires getting those in power to actually change things. Probably not going to happen.

The other way is a constitutional convention, which is a huge gathering where everything is put on the table. With a huge grass roots movement that gains enough steam to call for one of these, the changes can happen. But this would be the only way to do it.

Unfortunately, there are two obvious problems. One, is that you don’t know that you’d have enough of a following to create the change you want, and the second is tied to the first in that a constitutional convention is a dangerous vehicle that might change things far more than you originally intended. We’ve only ever had one constitutional convention in this country, and that managed to completely change the government as we knew it (we used to be under the Articles of Confederation…the constitutional convention created our current system of government). So, you could be opening up a whole big can of worms.

But as things are right now, perhaps a new can of worms is exactly what is needed. To let things go on as they are is foolish.

But I suspect that’s exactly what we’ll do.

1(source: Reporternews.com)

A Few Comments That Need To Be Said

Economics, Memoirs, Politics, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

I thought I would take a moment and just make a few comments that need to be said. Unfortunately, only my stuffed animals read my blog. Well, my stuffed animals and my imaginary girlfriend…from Canada…and maybe that mysterious group of government assassins who have been trying to replace my nonfat milk with soy products, but you probably get the point.

1. If a news article is ever written about me that includes the phrase, “and police searched the wood chipper for signs of the body” then let’s just say that I’ve probably reached a saturation point of relevance and should immediately be put to sleep. Or if police were searching the wood chipper for signs of ME, then let’s just say that I’ve probably got worse problems than anything I might complain about on my blog.

2. I’m convinced Craigslist has no further relevance or importance now that they have removed the adult ads. I’m sorry, but it has no purpose any more. I attempted to put up a personal ad the other day, and it never showed up. The system said I did everything right, but it just never made it to the production side of the house. This has convinced me that all the site was ever really good for was advertising fake personal ads that were really a cover for underage girls selling sex to dirty old men and local law enforcement. Or it was local law enforcement trying to pretend to sell potential sex to dirty old men to put them in jail for wanting sex with underage girls. Or it was NBC trying to snare dirty old men trying to find sex with underage law enforcement officers, or something like that. Either way, underage girls were involved and so were dirty old men, so do the math, and you can probably figure it out. Let’s just shut down Craigslist for good. It doesn’t make sense any more.

3. No politicians are honest. At all. Oh, they talk a good game, but they’re really only interested in pretending to be something they’re not so they can get a job they probably don’t deserve. We should force them to create Craigslist ads instead, and then we can hire the underage girls to run our government. I’m just saying….

4. The “check engine soon” light on your car is a boldface liar. It doesn’t want you to check your engine. It wants you to bring your car back to the dealer so they can charge you $99 to tell you that they need to charge you $299 to replace a sensor that tells you to check your engine soon. What they’re really doing is replacing the light in the sensor so that it will go off two days after you leave the dealer’s shop. Mine did. And now it goes off for a week, goes on for a week, and then repeats the cycle. There’s nothing wrong with the engine, other than it has a faulty sensor that keeps telling me to check the engine soon. Or perhaps my engine is just lonely and wants friends. Maybe I should get a sensor that goes off whenever I’m in public that says “check duane soon…he needs friends”. And then people can pay me $99 for me to tell them they need to pay me $299 so that I’ll tell them to pay me $99 very soon.” I’m just saying….

5. The lives of celebrities aren’t important to the rest of us. It’s one thing to follow the news and be interested in celebrities. It’s another to have it thrown in our faces nonstop as if it’s important. I was tuning into the news the other day, and the point-counterpoint was all about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I’m sorry, but there’s the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election around the corner, and all sorts of actual news stories that are really news. We really don’t need too political partisans going back and forth about what kind of role model Lindsay Lohan is presenting for young girls who don’t even know who she is because she hasn’t been relevant in about a decade now. Same with Paris Hilton. Since her last actual television reality show, she hasn’t been relevant, significant or even interesting in a very long time now. The people who remember her are no longer capable of being influenced. The ones who are capable of being influenced really have never heard of her and probably think she’s some old woman who their parents might have found interesting. It’s amazing how socially irrelevant celebrities become in a few years.

6. The publishing industry sucks. No two ways about it. I get so discouraged trying to make it as a published novelist, only to find out that Snooki or Tyra Banks is being given a huge publishing contract to churn out drivel that my pack of monkeys (who write Shakespearean sonnets…remember them? The ones who if they write enough gibberish will eventually duplicate a Shakespearean sonnet) could have written just as well. Bah, I get so upset at this sort of thing.

How Do Anarchists Vote During an Election?

Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk about elections lately, and whenever that happens the topic of voting tends to rear its nasty head as well. For people living in western societies, where they tend to be heavily weighted towards voting, there is a certain satisfaction that comes from the concept of enfranchisement (voting). Unfortunately, the concept of not voting is rarely given the respect it deserves, and quite often the idea is seen as horrific and counter-productive. I’d like to take a moment to talk about just that.

It’s understandable why not voting isn’t given a whole lot of respect, and we don’t have to go much further than history to figure out why. Throughout most of the history of us as a people, we’ve been struggling for the ability to make our voices heard. More often than not, the people in power have done everything to control who gets a say in the bigger picture, and the years have been a series of steps towards allowing everyone the ability to be properly represented when it comes to making decisions. In the olden days, kings made all of the decisions, and the people who chose kinds were the rich, elites who controlled pretty much everything. Fortunately, we don’t live in that sort of dynamic any more.

Or do we?

In the old days, a group of elites would get around and decide amongst themselves who should be the next king. Sometimes, they emphasized these decisions with violence, but in the end it was usually a class decision, often supported by economic clout. Today, anyone can run for office, and those people are decided by the whims of the people. However, it should be pointed out that so few of us have any say so in any of these decisions whatsoever. Quite often, to even be considered, a candidate must already be known by enough people to make it onto the ballot. In order to do that, the potential candidate must already be part of the elite class itself, because so few others have even a smidgen of a chance of being recognized by others when it comes to elections. This means that economic clout is necessary to get a person recognized, and before you know it we’re right back where we started with economic elites pretty much deciding who gets to run for office, and even more important, who gets taken seriously. We’ve even gone so far off the deep end that a number of our future leaders are choosing themselves based on their own economic clout, buying their ways onto the ballots, and because they have such connections already, we’re left to choose between them and other people considered viable by other economic elites.

Now, let’s take the argument even further, and let’s look at it from the perspective of someone like me, someone who hates the very nature of power itself. You see, I have a real problem with people who want to be considered the elites over the rest of us. I don’t see my elected officials as people who are trying to help me, but I see them as people who see themselves as special, who see themselves as individuals who think they deserve to rule over others. Because elected office is simply that, a vie for power. No one ever took a position of power because he or she was trying to be one of us, but quite often someone will pretend to be one of us in order to become lord of us (the recent debacle of Christine O’Donnell is exactly an example of that where she has been trying to say that she is “us” in hopes of ruling over “us”). Sure, every now and then you get an enlightened, potential leader, but most of the time it is some person who has felt that his or her education and experience makes him or her worthy of vying for power. And then once in that position that person becomes untouchable and set apart from the rest of us.

Don’t get me started on the eventual move towards dishonesty and corruption, but that seems like a natural progression that I think psychologists could easily link between the typical behavioral patterns of someone who seeks power and someone who abuses one’s position. I’m not surprised that so many of our leaders of government come from the professions of law and business.

But what this means to me is that I’m not a fan of anyone who purports that he or she should be representing me because honestly, no one can best represent me but me. And I wouldn’t in a million years ever say that I would be the best person to represent other people because I only know how to represent my own interests, and yes, I would be just as corrupt as everyone else out there in politics, because I would mainly be looking out for what I consider my own best interests. Sure, I would want to help people and do good things, but that doesn’t mean I deserve to be in power any more than the guy who sweeps the street outside where I work each day. What makes me more worthy of power than that guy?

Yet, a whole bunch of people think they deserve to go into government to make decisions for the rest of us. I find this wrong. I feel that any time someone decides to vie for power, that person should be feared because I have yet to come across a politician who was really interested in the desire to help another person by personally sacrificing one’s own well being, because that is what would be necessary for me to believe that a politician can best represent me. Instead, I find almost everyone of them to be much more interested in assisting themselves, and if you’re lucky enough to be part of the rising tide of those boats, then you’re going to benefit as well.

So, I find myself not wanting to participate in elections. Yet, I’m constantly condemned because I say I don’t believe in voting for the people running for office. People heard me complaining about the Bush Administration, so they tell me I should be voting for Democrats. But Democrats aren’t all that interested in doing anything specifically for me, unless I happen to be lucky enough to benefit in specific things THEY want for themselves. The last two years haven’t been all that great for the country, but then that doesn’t mean that the Republicans are going to make things any better for me either. They’re interested in taking care of their own, much as my definition of any politician would fill. So, voting for any of them is a useless cause because I don’t believe any of them should be in power to begin with.

So what is a quasi-anarchist to do? There are no solutions to this problem other than to compromise and give up on what one believes because the status quo isn’t going to offer anything better.

What would make things better, in my opinion? A lottery of elections. I don’t have a problem with people serving in government. I have a problem with people wanting to be in power. But a lottery would make it available to everyone, and anyone. But that will never happen because the people who want power will never give up power to the masses.

You see, I believe in democracy. If we lived in one, I think it would be the greatest government we could ever have. I just don’t believe in the fantasy we try to sell ourselves about what we think is our democracy.

But I do vote. I vote every election. I just don’t vote for people. I go into the booth and choose the yes and no votes for issues I find to be important enough for me to want to decide. That’s democracy to me. But whenever I see a name behind a position, I ignore it.

I just wish people would stop condemning me every election because I don’t want any of the people that want me to vote for them.

Why war happens in this day and age, a primer on making change

Economics, Politics, Religion, , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk about war lately. It seems that whenever international diplomacy starts to fall apart, or easy answers to complex questions don’t seem all that available, talk of war starts up, and people begin to think that this is the solution to everything. It rarely is, and on an unconscious level, I think most people realize that. But in the end, it tends to be the final vestige of common sense, and then we find ourselves engaging in war talk which leads, not surprisingly, to war.

But few people seem to think about why we find ourselves talking about war, except in simplistic terms, like “they started it” or “they gave us no other choice.” Unpacking such comments can often lead one to realize that such proclamations are the same kinds of claims we made when we were children, when that one kid threw a rock at us and “forced us” to engage in a fight. We all know that walking away was an option. We also know ten or twenty other alternatives that didn’t lead to “knocking his block off”, but for some reason the escalation of hostilities seemed to be the only one we chose.

But is it as simple as that? I don’t think so. I think there’s a part of that, but it still doesn’t explain why a nation would want to go to war. People don’t think collectively like that unless something happens that puts them into a disturbed state of mind (like being bombed unprovoked by another country, invaded in the middle of the night, or where hatreds between two peoples has gone on so long that no one is capable of thinking any other way). So, if we put this sort of thing on the shoulders of the leaders, the ones who make these sorts of decisions for nations, then perhaps we might figure out why we see so much war today.

One of the problems historians have with modernists is that people who think in terms of “today” often think that we’re in some kind of enlightened age where things today are so much different than they were in earlier eras. We see that we have so much more technology, so we sort of assume that our thinking has progressed just as well. Well, it hasn’t. If you examine most wars happening today, you’ll see the same sorts of horrific actions occurring today as existing back in the days of barbarism. Soldiers still pillage. Soldiers still rape. Soldiers still run off with the spoils of war. And no, there isn’t a nation around that is so enlightened that it hasn’t done these things. Wars in Africa have been decimating the infrastructure of those countries. The UN has been accused of, and has definitely stood on the sidelines of, numerous rapes that have happened as a consequence of war. The United States had a run of American soldiers removing the relics of Iraq during its most recent war, and in some cases soldiers had to be forced to give back these items as we had to keep reminding ourselves that “civilized soldiers don’t do that sort of thing”. Only very recently did we return some of the spoils of war from Iraq’s palaces, as some military units in the United States had them on display as “trophies” of the war.

So, our thinking isn’t any more enlightened than its ever been. In some cases we act better, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty actions of war, we look the other way when things start to fall apart. That’s a natural consequence; no one wants to think they are part of the problem but somehow always part of the solution.

Which brings me back to leaders. When leaders don’t get along with other leaders and can’t seem to find easy solutions to complex problems, they do what they’ve always done: They declare war. Or they just attack. You’d think that centuries having done this over and over that we’d figure out how to stop this, but we’ve never been all that good at learning from history. Or even our own pasts.

But what’s significant about this is that we’re still following a model that is no longer relevant for today’s time. In the old days, just a few hundred years ago, leaders of nations used to duke it out on the battlefield over all sorts of stupid reasons. (“You stole my girlfriend, so we’re going to wage an epic war.”) But for so many centuries, wars were fought between the nobles of their subsequent empires. A king would declare war, and then all of his nobles would rally behind him and fight. Sure, lots of soldiers would fight as well, but the important fighting was the accumulation of nobles. If a king wanted to go to war, he had to convince all of the people who would actually be going to war that they needed to go to war. So those people would take to the field and fight. That was war.

Today, we don’t have that model. None of the leaders who declare war, or who help that leader decide on war, actually fight any more. The nobles are now very rich men (some women, although not that many) who are part of an aristocratic infrastructure that has no connection to the military. Instead, our military consists of a lot of people who are not part of the economic elite. When we go to war today, we send a lot of very poor people out with the skills to decimate the very poor people in the militaries of other nations. No more do we send out nobles on horses, leading the charge.

This means that the people who decide to go to war are most likely not the people fighting it. Think about that for a moment. If you didn’t have to fight a war, what would stop you from deciding to go to war? Sure, some might have kids fighting in those wars, but look at our legislature when Iraq and Afghanistan wars started. Very, very few sent their own kids. Instead, they sent the kids of other parents. There was absolutely no risk to them. Only benefits. And the economic elites didn’t send their kids either. They received only benefits.

But that’s just the western nations. What about all of those other third world nations? Same thing. Their leaders are rarely fighting the wars. Instead, a lot of brainwashed, or patriotic (call them whatever they are), young people fight those wars for them. When you have this model in place, there’s absolutely no reason to avoid war. As long as the enemy doesn’t destroy your infrastructure and your continuation of being able to rule and enrich yourself, there’s nothing to lose. Even the economic elites of Iran and Afghanistan have suffered minimally, having stopped being rewarded by their former leaders and now enriching themselves through the corruption of having themselves selectively placed in positions that allow them to do so.

With this in place, why wouldn’t a leader want to go to war? That’s the question that no one seems to ask. Instead, they allow themselves to be rallied towards more wars. As long as you have standing armies that need to be used in order to be seen as useful, you are always going to see petty wars being fought for the purpose of justifying existence.

Until people stop accepting this as the way things are, the model has no reason to change itself.

Stewart/Colbert hold a real rally, but no one will probably take them seriously

Politics, Television, , , , , , ,

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show is planning to hold a major rally in Washington, D.C. that is a direct response to some of the stupidity that has been happening by pundits and/or politicians like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. The theme of the rally, being held on October 30, is “Rally to Restore Sanity”. Stephen Colbert, not one to miss out on the fun, is holding a counter rally at the same time, in the same location, titled: “March to Keep Fear Alive.”

The significance of this event (these events) is that politics and media have gotten stupid lately. So, what better way to hold them in check but to call them out on it.

The problem that I perceive is that the news media doesn’t even realize that it’s being ridiculed for how bad they’ve gotten. What is most likely going to happen is some pretty face is going to announce the success of this “event” and treat is as if they’re somehow “in” on the joke. I think that’s what pissed me off the most about whenever the news covers Stewart and Colbert. They so often are NOT “in” on the joke, but the actual butt of it, and I’m sorry but laughing about it doesn’t make it any different when they go back to doing exactly what they were doing that caused the ridicule in the first place.

Unfortunately, this is a one time event. Which means that the media will get right back to being stupid again.

Poverty is getting worse in America, but no one seems to care

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , ,

It was reported again today that poverty is getting worse in America. The info came from the Census Bureau this time. Seems that in 2009, poverty jumped to 14.3 percent from 11.3 percent in 2000. Unemployment is also worse. Yet, you wouldn’t know this from the pundits who want to do everything to convince us that everything’s fine, or everything’s just on a downswing, just waiting to start swinging back up to prosperity.

But there’s no evidence of that. We’ve had a couple of HUGE stimulus packages and MAJOR bailouts of industries and banks. Hasn’t done anything but make a few more millionaires into mega millionaires, and the job outlook doesn’t look any better, and poverty looks like it’s becoming more of the norm.

So what are we supposed to do with this information? Riot in the streets? Jump off the nearest bridge? I’d like to know because I don’t really have an answer. There are two political parties in power that will continue to be in power NO MATTER WHO GETS ELECTED, and these two parties are acting like it’s no big deal. Oh sure, they’ll complain if it might get more of their people into office, but in reality, they don’t care. Because everyone of them have jobs. We’re paying for them. They have jobs pretty much for life because the system is designed to keep them in power and to allow them to decide how much we get to pay them. We, on the other hand, have little to no power, and we have to listen as they argue about how much they should be able to charge us for the privilege of letting them serve on the government payroll.

Oh, we can get upset, but it won’t do any good. They’ll still be in power no matter how mad we get.

And people will still continue to get poorer, and the jobs will continue to disappear from us because the corporate heads of most companies have discovered there’s profit in not paying people. There’s even profit in bankrupting your company, cheating all of your customers, and in some cases, pretending you have a real company and charging people to rip them off before they go bankrupt themselves and the criminal gets even wealthier.

No, there are no jokes in this post because there’s really nothing funny about it. Those who might actually be reading this will just file it away to never be used again and then go back to wondering about whether or not Lady Gaga will wear something bizarre during her next television appearance. Instead of paying attention to who really runs the country, they’ll think about who they want to vote for on the next American Idol, or who to vote off the island.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate will continue to rise, and unemployment will continue to dip, while someone in government (doesn’t matter which party) will spin it to make it seem like everything’s better, even though everything’s not.

Kind of sad. I’ll close with a picture of cute puppies because that’s probably more important to people anyway.