Monthly Archives: January 2011

No End to the Misery that is the City of Detroit

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , ,

On Sunday, in Detroit, a man walked into a police station and opened fire, injuring four officers before being killed by the rest of the officers who returned fire. As of the next day, there has been no motive, explanation or even bizarre justification for his actions, other than he was some guy who walked in off the street and decided to pursue “suicide by cop.” Since then, there have been all sorts of commentaries, ranging from the expected to the outrageous. But what hasn’t been discussed at length is how much this should have been expected. I mean, no one expects these things, and when they should, they rarely do.

Detroit is one of those cities that ends up on practically every bad list that gets reported about cities in the United States. Literacy is lowest, crime is highest, murder is highest, corruption is constant, racism is everywhere (from expected racism to reverse racism), gang activity is amongst the highest in the nation, and the city is pretty much a cesspool and an example of what should not be done with a city if you want to achieve some sense of normality and progress.

The former mayor of the city is in jail, as are numerous members of its former governments. Crime is so out of control that people don’t even think about moving there; it’s on the lowest of the low lists for people moving to a city. Whenever a television show has something to do with Detroit, it’s almost always a gritty police procedural where people die, cops are on the edge, and there’s lots of gang violence. I have yet to see Meg Ryan looking for love in Detroit, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see some random hood beating the crap out of a suspect with a baseball bat because “dat’s how we do tings in da Troit!”

What’s interesting is that Detroit is one of those cities where if government really cared, it could actually use the city as a petri dish of improving urban despair all over the country. Other than Washington, D.C., and maybe parts of Los Angeles and New York, Detroit has pretty much everything going wrong for it so that a concentrated effort might actually make a very significant difference.

But no one seems to care about places like Detroit, except for the people who live in Detroit, and for some reason they don’t seem to matter. If you follow the politics of a place like Detroit, you notice that quite a few of the people running for office all run on the same types of platforms, about improving Detroit so people can be proud of it. But then a few years down the line, people throw those bums out because it turns out they weren’t interested in helping the city, but in helping themselves, usually to the coffers and whatever they can lay their hands on before they’re either caught or voted out of office. Even when they’re caught, quite often the masses will rally around the culprit, somehow claiming that going after a public official the people elected is wrong, that even though the person is corrupt and stole millions of dollars, he’s “their” thief, so the government should leave him or her alone. It’s often enough to cause one’s head to spin continuously at the ridiculousness involved.

Detroit is very much becoming one of those Mexican provinces where government has collapsed, and the drug gangs have taken over. The police are fighting a never-ending battle to regain control of the city, but like a proud parent, they just refused to believe that they’re really not in control. It would not surprise me to discover the culprit in this current case is some drug dealer who felt slighted by the police, and this is his way of striking back, or that he’s some trigger man for a drug gang that has decided to send a message to the cops.

Or he’s some delusional man who decided life wasn’t worth it, and suicide by cop was the easiest way out. Either way, there are problems in Detroit that need some serious attention. Unfortunately, the experts IN Detroit are obviously not the ones who are capable of handling the problem. They’ve been doing the same things over and over, hoping for different results (the Internet definition of insanity).

I used to drive through Detroit a couple of times a month, and it’s like entering a different world when you do. You go from the nice, grassy landscape, and then the journey on the freeway turns into dirtied concrete, and you realize that this is not a place that has any respect for itself. And why should it? It’s just getting worse and worse.

What’s going to happen over the next few days, and possibly weeks, is locals will point their fingers at what they’ve always pointed their fingers at, blaming unions, gangs, politicians, big government, little government, the auto industry, drugs, guns, overzealous police, underzealous police, and they’ll come up with the same conclusions they always do. But in the end, they’ll do nothing, hoping it was an anomaly that will never happen again.

Until it happens again, and then some reporter will start off a story with some ridiculousness like: “They never believed it could happen here.”

How Do You Fix the Problems of Race in America?

Economics, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m going to talk about a subject that no one wants to talk about, mainly because to do so automatically causes the person talking about it to be perceived as either a racist or clueless.

I was watching an science fiction show from the BBC (British Broadcasting Channel), and something kept striking me as odd, but I really couldn’t put my finger on it. The show was about some frumpy woman reporter who solves science fiction mysteries with a couple of neighborhood kids, which happen to be about three or four high school youths who bounce back and forth as to which ones are the main characters at any one time. One of the main characters of the kids is a young black man, who plays one of the centered character’s best friends. As I continued watching this show, it started to remind me of a previous season of Doctor Who (the new ones broadcast over the last few years), and I realized that there had been a central black male character who played an off and on love interest for the main female partner of the Doctor. It was when I thought about these two characters that I started to realize what was wrong. It took only a few American shows on television for me to realize exactly what that was.

Let me explain by first pointing out what is so significant about these two black characters on both of these shows: Not once was I ever reminded that they were actually black. The parts they were playing could have been played by anyone of pretty much any race or ethnicity. They fit in so well with the fictional dynamic that I started to think that perhaps they were creating some kind of weird fantasy in Great Britain. And then I started to understand that these characters represented something even more fascinating: They didn’t have to “act” black in order to be black. They were accepted no differently than any other character on their respective shows.

Now, if I was to watch something like Law & Order in the US, I’m immediately shown that the one main black character is a street-talking, tough guy who fits a very strong stereotype, which not so ironically was somewhat created and prepetuated by the former hip hop/rap/whatever star who plays that particular character. As I moved from one show to another, it was very rare to find an African-American actor or any ethnically-diverse actor who was not playing to an identity that was substantiated by a whole lot of stereotypes and markers that continue to separate disparate identities from the centralized, white, middle class expectation of what is often construed as mainstream. A few anomalies do come to mind, however, like Tony Stark’s buddy in Iron Man, who represents a military colonel, not played using any obvious stereotyical constraints. Or Morgan Freeman when he plays a scientist or detective. But those are rare exceptions. Instead, I find myself seeing way too many television shows and movies where whenever there’s a call for a person of race, color or ethnicity, the part is usually played to maximum effect by revealing how diverse that individual can possibly be.

It shouldn’t go without saying that such continuous uses of identity might actually be creating serious problems for any type of reconciliation or desires for integration. During the 1960s, there was a huge battle fought for desegregation in the nation’s schools, because smart people realized that separating people by differences was going to continue to make it impossible for this melting pot of ours to ever actually start melting. But something happened that we should have figured on, but we seemed to ignore it once we won our little victory in the courts and on the school steps. We forgot that previous separation might just make it very possible for continued separation once we got people into those schools together. Having been brought up during that period of desegregation, it was not unusual for me to experience large periods of time where I lived with separation in the schools themselves. Blacks sat with blacks, whites sat with whites, and Hispanics stuck with Hispanics. There were a few cross-overs, but there needed to be more, and the institutions themselves did very little effort to actually break down those barriers. Today, they’re institutionalized, and I don’t see them breaking down any time soon.

Part of the problem is that the organizations that were formed to end the separations are now part of the continued separation today. Civil rights leaders of the past, who were instrumental in getting people to rise up and be noticed, are still fighting the same battles today, but instead of pushing for desegregation and cooperation between disparate entities, the fights usually end up being more geared towards future separation and honoring identity rather than melting identity so everyone can be cooperative and as one.

What decades of this behavior have done is set up a paradigm that I don’t think is going to easily be fixed as long as we keep going on with the same MO we’ve been using since day one. Add in socioeconomic problems, and we’re at a point where I don’t think we have any recourse but to try to fix this now or end up at a point where it can never be fixed by peaceful methods. I”m starting to fear we may already be at the saturation point as it is.

A year or so ago, I was attacked and beaten by three young black men who targeted me because I was an easy target. It has been so hard to not see this as a racial thing and to keep from painting every black male I see as a potential attacker. Since that moment, I get nervous and extremely defensive whenever I see a group of young black men walking towards me on the street. It shouldn’t be that way, but it only takes one incident of such impact to cause someone to change his natural way of thinking about things. I still find myself crossing to the other side of the street when I see a group of young black men walking towards me, and that was something I never thought about doing before.

Our society has managed to create an identity marker of race and ethnicity that is continuously perpetuated by our media and entertainment entities. Part of me thinks that by doing so, we’re also telling people of diverse race and ethnicities that it’s okay because it’s expected of them to be like the stereotypes we put forth in these channels. Yet, something tells me that if I was walking along the street in Great Britain and I came across a group of young men of a different race or ethnicity, I’d probably not have the same complications as I do here. And that tells me that we’re doing something seriously wrong here. Whether it’s due to the drug culture we’ve developed that’s tied to a gang mentality, or if it’s just a side effect of the continously divergent class distinction we have in this country where wealthier people are further and further removed from the poor, I’m not sure. But something’s seriously wrong.

Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone is actually working on making things better, but hoping that continuing to do the same things we’ve been doing will somehow improve the general picture. But that’s never going to work. We have a real race problem here in the US, and part of the reason we’re never going to solve it is because no one wants to talk about it. We have this PC spin to everything these days, and the only people talking about race are the ones who are consumed by it, which means we’re going to continue trying to solve gushing chest wounds with band-aids.

So, here are a couple of thoughts.

1. The problem needs to be addressed by everyone, not just by former civil rights leaders or sociologists who think the solution is to have government create more bureaucracy. Everyone needs to be involved in both the planning and the implementation.

2. Poverty needs to be addressed and dealt with. Too many people are struggling to survive, and whenever you have that dynamic, you have people willing to do some unruly things to gain leverage over others.

3. We need serious conversation about the drug war. It has created an element of society that should never be a part of our very foundation. Whether the solution be legalization, even stronger enforcement, or whatever, we need to get everyone involved in tackling this issue. Or it will continue to destroy us.

4. Schools need complete integration. The goal should be the elimination of race, not the celebration of it. Unfortunately, there are too many people tied to the benefits of separation and identification. That one hurdle may never be achieved, which is sad because this is probably the one hurdle that might make the biggest difference.

5. Elmo needs to be involved somehow. He always gets this right.

Time for Another Round of Current Events and Happenings

Economics, Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1. The Assassination Attempt in Arizona. Okay, there’s really no way of walking around this topic without having to address it head-on. It’s pretty much the main story of what’s going on in the country, and like most current events, it’s yet another one of those that seems to be so out of context practically everywhere it gets reported. What everyone can agree on is that it was a tragic event, and most of us wish such a thing had never happened. However, I suspect that it’s only been a matter of time because there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if John Lennon’s death wasn’t a warning decades ago, we really should have been paying a lot more attention.

You see, there are a lot of people who are not playing with a full deck out there. We run across them each and every day. If you live in a big city, you can’t step over enough of them without running into another. Some are homeless, who stand on the street corners and do all sorts of bizarre behavioral activities, like yell at you, try to pee on you, beg from you, and pretty much anything else you can and cannot imagine. We had to be nuts ourselves if we honestly thought that they’d stick to their little corners and not start to bother the rest of us. I teach at a community college, and in the years that I’ve been teaching, you run across a lot of people who sometimes don’t seem like they’re all there. And you get really worried and concerned. But for the most part, no one really cares, because as long as it doesn’t affect them, why should they care?

The event turned into a bit of a surreal experience when suddenly people thought it was supposed to be a wake-up moment for the problems that have been occurring in our society. There’s a lot of anger and hate speech going back and forth between the different sides of the political spectrum, and for some bizarre reason people actually thought that this event might lead people to talk about these problems and do something about it. Not going to happen because no one wants to admit there’s anything wrong. Well, at least not with themselves. They’ll point fingers and say something’s wrong with YOU or someone else, but never with themselves. But that’s been the problem from the start, and as long as we’re never going to engage that, we’re never going to change the hostile discourse happening in this country.

Sure, it’s easy to blame Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or (pick any politician or pundit), but the odds of actually opening up a real dialogue so that people actually listen to each other is practically impossible. It’s a nice pipe dream, but pipe dreams are just that. Dreams.

2. Verizon is Getting an Iphone. Good for them. I had one with AT&T and I’ve been very upset with AT&T and Apple for awhile now because of the fact that I can’t stop people from calling me, especially when they’re people I don’t want calling me. Neither Apple nor AT&T were very helpful here. So I left and joined Sprint, adding on a Samsung Epic phone instead. Pretty happy with it. Be happier if it had a battery life like the iPhone, but you take what you can get. Now that Verizon has an iPhone, I don’t really care. It’s still a phone from Apple, and Apple requires that it maintain control over its walled garden. Not a selling point for me.

3. Golden voice Ted Williams. I saw this coming a million miles away. The media jumped on this rags to riches to rags to riches story and thought he was the next best thing to sliced butter. Well, I kept wondering, “when is the other shoe going to drop” meaning when is the media going to turn against him? Well, now he’s kind of gone of the deep end because of personal problems, which no one could have ever expected would happen with a guy who has been living on the streets after throwing away his previous life. I mean, who would have thought something like that could happen? Anyway, sarcasm aside, he’s now heading to rehab and was arrested in Los Angeles. We’ll see how this story plays out, but I’m not expecting a lot of happy endings.

4. Unemployment has gone up again. Of course it has. And last month, it went down. The month before, I think it went up. We need to stop reporting these numbers and then providing commentary after it. Each time they do it, some pundit makes an argument that fits his world view of what he thinks should happen, rather than what is really happening. We’re in a recession right now. The market is going to be flying all over the place on a month to month basis. Stop trying to figure out long term strategies based off of short term notifications. It never works. Which brings me to my next one:

5. The Stock Market Fluxuates. Yes, it does. But one thing that needs to be constantly brought up, and it never is, is that the stock market really has very little connection to what’s really going on. It’s the Las Vegas for rich people. People buy based on speculation, and they think they have an idea of how the market is going to change in the short term. NONE OF THESE FIGURES has anything to do with what’s really going on. Companies are selling products, people are working for these companies and get paid whatever wage they normally get paid, and then some people buy some of these products. But because the stock market price of a company went up or down does not always reflect what’s going on in the real world of that particular company. Quite often, these fluxuations come because some executive did something stupid, like embezzled money, or had dinner with a celebrity. If the stock market goes south over the span of a week, it may not really mean anything to the real world as an implication. It may just mean a whole bunch of people panicked because they stopped living in the real world and see the market as the real world. Man, I hate the stock market.

6. Middle East Talks Aren’t Going Well. They never are. The two sides of that conflict are probably NEVER going to get along. Each new administration comes to the table convinced it’s going to make a difference but rarely ever does. That’s because the two sides hate each other. They have no incentive to be friendly to each other. Each side wants the other dead. That’s their international policy towards the other side. And it’s been that way for so long now that generations of their people grow up hating people they may never have met. If you want to fix the problems there, you have to do it generationally, and you have to do it by a completely different set of characteristics than our current process of diplomacy allows. Tit for tat and carrot diplomacy does not work on countries that live their entire lives to kill each other as their one foundational value. I could go at length on what would work, but NO ONE CARES OR LISTENS, so I’m going to stop caring, too.

7. Tablets Are the New In Thing. I’ve said this before, but it requires repeating. Tablets aren’t new. When the iPad was announced, suddenly a whole bunch of people who never wanted a tablet suddenly thought they needed one. We were like Eskimos being told we needed freezers and refrigerators by Don Draper and whatever fictional agency he might be working at. But shortly before this announcement, tablets were already out there trying to get us to buy them. And we didn’t. Why not? Because we didn’t need them, and they seemed kind of stupid to have. Well, now we all need them because Don Draper Steve Jobs told us we needed one. So now every other company under the sun is now releasing their tablet computer to compete with the Ipad. And I won’t be surprised if we start buying them this time around. We’re such sheep.

8. Myspace laid off half its staff. So what? Myspace has been irrelevant for years now. It used to be the “in” thing, and then Facebook came along and turned Myspace into an ugly sister of the hot cheerleader. Ever since Facebook, Myspace has been struggling to appear relevant. But its not. There’s nothing about Myspace that causes people to care. When it was told to sit at the kiddie table of technology, they tried to appear relevant again by pretending that it was the place to go for music. But Facebook was already there doing that, so Myspace continued to become even more irrelevant. At one point, I thought I might use it to hype my writing, but then realized that they were really only interested in doing so if I was already big time famous, which I wasn’t. So it wasn’t useful to me. And then I figured that if I was already big time famous, I probably wouldn’t need them. I’d just have a million facebook friends instead. Then, add to the mix that no one seems to be using Myspace anymore, and you realize why it’s probably going to be sold one of these days to someone like Murdoch who keeps buying up properties that are already irrelvant and trying to somehow make it seem like he bought a very relevant purchase.

9. Seth Rogen is Upset About the Hate Towards his Green Hornet Movie. So what? It’s a movie, not anything relevant. Make a really good movie that causes people to take notice, and maybe it won’t get the hate. Just saying. Then again, no one’s actually seen the movie, so perhaps the condemnations are a bit early.

10. Two of my novels are now on Kindle and the Nook. Innocent Until Proven Guilty, my first novel, is available on the Kindle.  Thompson’s Bounty, which is a science fiction, time-travel novel I wrote involving pirates, is available on the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it is available on the Kindle as well. I would not be very upset if you chose to read my novels. Really.

11. The people of Haiti still seem to be suffering, even though most of the world has left this area because it’s not a photo op any more. Just saying. Some people gave up on it because they don’t like how the Haitians are continuing to follow corrupt leaders who continue to cheat them out of international aid. Some people gave up on it because they only have the capacity to handle concern for a certain amount of time (usually the time between football season and American Idol finalist run-offs). And then some people just don’t care.

That’s all I have for today. My stuffed animal Brucoe thinks people should do more to care about other people, but he’s just a stuffed animal, and what does he know?

Bioware is Ripping Off Gamers Again

Computer Games, Economics, , , , , , , ,

Last year, one of the better games to come out was one called Dragon Age, and it was created by famed game design company Bioware. I’ve been a huge fan of Bioware for many years, mainly because they created some of the best roleplaying games known to mankind, like Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Well, they’ve recently been working on the sequel to Dragon Age, appropriately called Dragon Age II, and like most gamers, I’ve been looking forward to it. But part of me has been a bit apprehensive, and let me explain why.

When I was playing Dragon Age last year, there was a point in the game where I found myself staring at the computer, wondering if the game was actually taking me seriously. Let me explain futher. You see, a lot of games have what’s called downloadable content (often abbreviated as DLC). This is almost always new content designed for the game after the game has been released, where the developer has figured out new ways to expand the adventure. Sometimes, it’s new armor or weapons, and quite often it’s completely new quests and adventures. For someone who has played through a game, when new content like that gets released, you jump for joy, enter your credit card information, pay a nominal fee, and you’re off slashing at enemies again.

Well, in Dragon Age, there’s a certain part of the game which is considered a rest area, where your characters set up a camp, and you can go talk to the individual members of your group. It’s often a neat way to explore the quests that exists with secondary characters. If there’s a new quest, Dragon Age had a way of showing you this which was blatantly stolen from World of Warcraft, but you see an exclamation point above the character’s head and go talk to him, or her. Well, one of those characters had that exclamation point over his head, and I went to talk to him, but his conversation was different from the others. Unlike the others who gave me more information, he was essentially telling me that if I wanted to explore his adventure, I would have to buy downloadable content from Bioware first, and he even offered me an opportunity to exit the game and go buy that DLC. Yes, it was very tacky. But I was interested, and it wasn’t that expensive, so even though I felt dirty entering my credit card information, almost as dirty as some woman on the other end of the phone asking me for my credit card information before pretending to be a naughty schoolgirl. Okay, not as dirty, but definitely not as fun.

This, to me, was a pretty tacky way to do it, but I figured that this was how they had added some of their extra content, and it was probably patched into the game a few patches after the game was released. Pretty tacky, but I was willing to go along with it.

Well, on Tuesday, January 7, Bioware announced new DLC for Dragon Age II. Great, except there’s one caveat. Dragon Age II hasn’t even been released yet. In other words, Bioware has announced downloadable content that will cost $7.00, and the game hasn’t even gone gold (been released). As many gamers are sure to immediately think, this is ridiculous, as this is something that should have been released with the original game because this isn’t “after the game has been released after thought material”. This is material being released WITH the game.

Part of the problem is that Dragon Age II isn’t some game that is going to be released for $19.99 and this is a way of making up some of the lost cash. No, Dragon Age II is going to be released and charged at the maximum a game can be charged. This is straight out greed in the name of stupid profit. It’s looking at the gamers and saying, hey, fuck you and give me more money.

What’s really also happening is that every other developer out there is going to be watching this to see what happens, and next thing you know, games are going to be released half done, and then they’ll charge you for the other half of the game. But they’ll release the game at full price the first time and then like a blackmailing girlfriend with pictures of you and her and a midget, she’s going to charge you to get the full experience.

I may not buy Dragon Age II because of this. As much as I respect Bioware, this is a line that shouldn’t have been crossed. It’s not like they’re not going to be making insane profits anyway. This is just a way of them saying, we know you’re all a bunch of stupid kids, so pay up or we’re not going to let you play our game.

Well, there are always other games.

Maybe Amazon and B&N are Revealing Bad News, Not Good News About Their Readers

Writing, , ,

Barnes & Noble just announced that their Nook is selling the best of any product of theirs in 40 years. On the surface, that sounds great. Just like the story that Amazon keeps telling us that their Kindle has sold more than any of its products. But what exactly is this telling us? Is it any surprise that a book reader would be selling better than any one product that a company that sells books would be selling? Think about that for a second. Barnes & Noble sells books. They’re not telling us that they’ve sold more Nooks than they’ve sold books. They’ve sold more Nooks than any particular product, which would mean specific books. So, they’ve sold more Nooks than they’ve sold of any one book by Stephen King.

Big deal. That’s really not that astonishing. Neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon are really stretching the limits here when they tell us that their e-readers are their biggest selling item ever. I’d hope that would be the case. Or their e-readers would seriously suck.

What’s probably more significant is to think about the implications of these two announcements. Both companies, that sell books, are indicating that they now suck at selling regular copies of books. They’re much better at selling book readers. But not books. Because they’ve told us nothing about how many books they’ve sold on any of these readers. For all we know, lots of people bought e-readers and then went out and downloaded free copies of Crime and Punishment, because classics are free on e-readers. I find it highly significant that BOTH companies refuse to actually give ACTUAL numbers, but just big announcements that they’re selling more than ever. If we go with that strategy, I would like to admit that I’m boffing Playboy playmates more these days than I’ve ever boffed before in my life. The numbers are just ASTOUNDING. Yeah, that doesn’t really tell you very much, does it? Nor do I think you’re suddenly going to be hanging out my door, waiting to take pictures of all the Playboy playmates who are leaving at ungodly hours.

What’s interesting is that no one seems to be interested in telling us what’s really going on. Even Apple doesn’t tell us how it’s doing with its bookstore. Steve Jobs tells us how many iPads they’ve sold, but that doesn’t mean anything either. The iPad is used for lots of different reasons. Someone with one may NEVER buy a book for it. Again, we get no numbers of any significance, but veiled statements of “we’re doing great” and we’re dating lots of Playboy playmate supermodels.

So, I’ll leave you with this, a picture of a supermodel. Because even though I’m not dating her, and she won’t return any of my phone calls, at least you got something substantive from this post (a picture of a hot supermodel who won’t date either one of us).

We're not "officially" dating