Tag Archives: Government

Why white privilege is the wrong battle to be waged in seeking equality and justice

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

There’s been a lot of talk lately involving the concept of “white privilege” and how quite often a Caucasian will misunderstand his or her benefits of being white while trying to appear just towards those who do not maintain the same generic status. Some examples are the #alllivesmatter versus #blacklivesmatter, which is often used as an erroneous argument of “I care about everyone, not just a particular race.” And then from there a whole diatribe is usually leveled on the idea that anyone who is born white exists in a world of privilege that others can never reach.

Some of it is correct, but in reality, people with diabolical purposes are using these arguments to create a false dichotomy, something I often equate to a framing issue rather than a normative one. Let me explain.

The argument is that someone born white has certain advantages that are not afforded to someone who was not. Examples include: Cops tend to shoot non-whites more than whites; whites are less likely to be convicted of crimes than are non-whites, a white male with a prison record is more likely to get a job than a non-white person with a prison record, etc. Many of these can be summed up in this comic about white privilege. What people don’t seem to understand when they post these kinds of arguments linking to this type of information is that it doesn’t mean what they think it means.

word means When someone makes that argument about white privilege, it is followed by an insinuation that those are actually benefits, rather than lucky brushes against much worse circumstances. The fact that I’m a white male should not then be met with “well, aren’t you lucky that you don’t get railroaded by the system by cops who might hate you.” It should be met with “cops shouldn’t be railroading anyone anywhere”. It’s like we’re already on top of a slippery slope that is continuing to force us back to unwanted situations rather than we should all be on a flat surface trying to make sure that no one creates the slippery slope in the first place.

This is why #alllivesmatter is not an adequate substitute for #blacklivesmatter. Sure, all lives matter, but all lives are not being targeted. Black lives are. Therefore, a movement to make sure that doesn’t happen became necessary. #Alllivesmatter creates an “issue” that doesn’t actually exist so that if that takes the other’s place, we’re left with the situation we stared with: People doing nothing because it doesn’t affect them.

So, what’s my point? Stop focusing on white privilege because that is not the problem. The problem is the opposite: Minority Disadvantage. THAT is the issue that should be dealt with rather than trying to create a wedge between those being oppressed and those who might actually care that there are people being oppressed. This is why Occupy Wall Street was such a powerful voice that quickly got squelched by those who feared its power. The real oppressors are the ones who actually do have the power, the one percenters who control manufacturing, media and even the police forces. Without turning this into some outdated communist manifesto, the problem is that the people who need to band together aren’t because the people creating the messages for them to follow have done so in a way that only creates an us versus them dynamic but in a way that never actually addresses what needs to be addressed.

So, how do you find answers in a civilization that is so blinded to its actual problems? Well, we could do what my grade school teachers always said: Start at the beginning. How did it happen? If we trace the time back hundreds of years, it’s not hard to figure out that the government we live under was created by rich people who wanted to continue being rich (meaning others would have to be poor). This isn’t the social model people constantly think we’re living under because that social model would actually look at the group of people around us as equal and in need of the same benefits as everyone else. We don’t live in that society. Sure, we pretend to, but when it comes down to it, a person who has little is going to always have little to none, whereas someone with much is probably going to end up with even more. That’s the civilization we live in.

How do you recognize that if you’re currently living within its infrastructure? I can conduct a simple experiment just by walking into a bar and talking to the first woman I see. In the US, the chances are that the conversation will hover on what my job is (and how much I make) before it turns into anything more interesting. I’ve had this same conversation in many other nations, and strangely enough, it was usually me that thought I had to bring up money as apart of what makes me be me. It took years to realize that the further away I moved from centralized capitalism, the less focus there was on income as what someone is worth.

So back to my original question. What steps should we take to lead to a future of equality and justice?

I hate to go all Socratic, but if you want justice what steps are you taking to actually achieve it? Do you hold conversations with people who aren’t like you? Do you comment when someone says things that lead to injustice and inequality? I’ve listened to conversations in mixed demographics where some people have said some awful things about people not present in the conversation. What I find interesting is how many people don’t say a thing, or even worse, escalate the conversation to even worse levels. Speaking up in these circumstances is difficult, and I’ve felt the tug almost every time I have done so. But what bothers me is how often those moments go unremarked, almost as if they’re okay.

The same thing is happening today in our political atmosphere. We have some politicians saying some awful things, and so few people are even casting a light on these moments other than to treat it as a news cycle rather than say: “Hey, by the way, there’s an awful racist running for office. Here’s what he said.” And even in the few circumstances where this has happened, the people listening are responding with the thought process of “yeah, but he’s better than those other guys.” If our canary in the mine is at this level, we’re going to be breathing some pretty toxic fumes sooner rather than later.

So, what’s the answer? Right now, I don’t perceive one because I think we’ve moved so far down this road that we’re not going to turn around. Sure, a nation can adjust, as many have before (I mean, face it, we aren’t ruled by divine kings any more, so eventually we can make huge changes), but I don’t see our current civilization all that anxious to try to make things better for everyone because until someone is scrounging for scraps in the gutter, people aren’t all that focused on change. And when you reach the gutter, people stop listening to you and wait for you to die. So, rational change isn’t to be expected.

Irrational change, however, is a different story. That’s the sort of punctuated equilibrium that no one ever sees coming. Unfortunately, we’re coming closer and closer to having that as our process of change, only because most other methods have fallen on deaf ears or were dismissed by people who are pretty happy with the limited value of the status quo.

But what do I know? If I was truly wise, I’d be a rich entrepreneur and well rewarded in the society in which I live. There’s a joke in there somewhere, if you look hard enough.

The Problem of Dealing With Race By Invoking Historical Ancestors

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Race seems to be a big issue these days. I guess that’s a good thing. It means people are thinking about the concept and discussing it with others. At least that’s my hope. In some cases this is massively necessary because it helps deal with oversights that have been going on way too long. In other cases, not so much. What I see is that in those types of cases racism as a concept is used as a process to silence others or to beat people over the head in an attempt to collapse all disagreements under the blanket of racism, even if the individual artifacts we’re discussing may have had little to do with racism (which is why blanket criticism is used).

But this post isn’t really about that. Like I said, I’m glad people are addressing racism. There’s just way too much of it present in this day and age, even though a lot of closeted racists would really like to put forth the idea that racism is gone (so they can stop being rightly accused of being racists, or at least apologists for the same). What this post is really about is one of those commentaries that shows up in these discussions, and quite often this commentary comes in groups of people who don’t actually deal with racism in any way.

I know that sounds confusing, but let me explain. People who address and call out racism are quite often those who are directly affected by it. Racism directed toward race is more often addressed by African-Americans in U.S. society because let’s be honest: African-Americans are far more the targets of racism here than most other demographics. Sure, any minority race and/or ethnicity is a potential target for racists, so I don’t want to make an argument that assumes otherwise. But overall, African-Americans are going to have a better chance of perceiving racism more than a Caucasian because racists are pretty one-sided when it comes to this dichotomy. Sure, an African-American can be a racist, but part of what makes racism as powerful a weapon as it is is because it also has a mechanism of power to be used against the victim. A group of African-American racists standing around the streets of Wall Street aren’t going to chase a non-African-American away from Wall Street because the background of Wall Street doesn’t support such an attempt to alienate the victim, but a group of Caucasians targeting a non-Caucasian on a street of Wall Street might cause someone from that targeted demographic to think that Wall Street isn’t a safe place to hang around. The point is: Racism involves power, but it also requires power in order to be effective.

As an academic, I find myself around a lot of people who quite often invoke specific arguments whenever it comes to the idea of racism. I’m also a moderator on a very active current events message board, so I see all sorts of commentary that comes from that origin as well. And what I’ve come to observe is something I don’t believe a lot of people realize seems to be happening around them. And specifically, this sort of racism that is happening today is also very localized in its temporal vicinity (the time it inhabits right now). As a result, people today who are frightened of being perceived as race-challenged (or “racists” for lack of a better term) will do everything possible to avoid being cast as villains in this dynamic. As such, it’s not surprising to hear someone say something along the lines of “I’m not a racist because I have a friend who is black.” Okay, that one is kind of obvious because we’ve all heard that one and know how it’s almost become a punchline to a joke no one wants to admit making.

No, part of the problem stems from an argument that orchestrates how a lot of people who are a part of the problem that they don’t even acknowledge exists. We all know the argument, even though we don’t think much about it because we discard it because of its simplistic nature when we should have thought about and realized why it makes things worse rather than explain things away. You know you’ve heard this argument whenever you hear someone say “Well, my ancestors are from Europe, so I wasn’t responsible.” It’s one of those arguments made in hopes of closing off conversation (and hoping the topic changes as well). But think about it. If someone’s ancestors were from South Carolina, does that make that particular individual responsible for racism that happened 150 years ago and several generations ago as well? Probably not. But that’s only if you feel that responsibility ends with theoretical people who may or may not have been personally involved. Are people complaining about stuff that happened in the 1860s? I don’t think they are. We all know that horrible things happened back then, and we all pretty much agree today that if we could change things, we would make sure they didn’t happen again. Or would we?

And that’s where that argument that gets made loses its traction. There are problems happening today, and rather than deal with them today, we have people saying they shouldn’t have to be responsible because they weren’t around 150 years ago. But again, the problems exist today. What are any of us doing to change things here and now? I would argue “not a lot” because if we were all doing something to make things better, my belief is that things would be better.

Instead, we have ghettos, slums, income disparities, fenced off housing, more cops than educators, hostility towards certain populations, massive corruption in places that should be making a difference, and finger-pointing rather than any desire for accountability. An example is the City of Detroit. It practically collapsed due to white flight and inner city corruption. Instead of solutions that work to fix these problems, we end up with right versus left rhetoric, race baiting and people who support corrupt leaders because to not do so means giving ground to racist rhetoric. In other words, NO ONE is seeking to fix the problems, and the few who are seem to basically be drowned out by the people who find more importance in criticism and looking for scapegoats.

So, what’s the solution? Well, let’s stop caring about what the color of someone’s skin is and start looking at how we can make the neighborhoods of people prosperous and worth living in. That means also changing our criminal codes so that “crimes” that don’t hurt people stop being crimes. If “drugs” are seen as a problem, convict people to treatment programs rather than criminal institutions. Some aren’t going to be fixed the first time, but a responsible civilization doesn’t give up after the first time. It keeps trying until it works.

We also need to change our financial circumstances to benefit all. Yeah, a lot of very rich people are going to hate that. But having a few pissed off people and a civilization filled with thriving individuals seems like a good trade off. This A. Rand society of doing well and screwing over everyone else needs to end.

We need to stop going to war because some group of people don’t think like we do. Different thinking people should be interesting, not enemies. The reaction is that we need to do this because there are people out there trying to kill us. They’re trying to kill us because we always go to war against people who don’t think like we do. That tends to lead to diminishing returns. Change the thinking; change the outcomes. It can be pretty simple. Of course, the naysayers will say no because they only know the institution that we are currently in and like the frog in a well who sees only the circle of light in the sky, we’re never going to see constellations in the paths of other wells if we never get out of the well we’re currently stuck in. Just saying.

Or we can keep doing the things we’re doing and hope that somehow things get better. But they won’t. So good luck with that. I’ve given up trying, so I’ll be playing video games while the world crumbles around me. At least I can accomplish something with a high score. They don’t give Nobel Peace prizes for that, but I guess that’s just cause I don’t own an army that kills a lot of people. Yet.

The Problem with Bernie Sanders Isn’t Exactly Bernie Sanders

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about Bernie Sanders as an alternative to Hillary Clinton for those who really don’t like Hillary Clinton as a candidate. Sanders has done a great job of showing that he’s an “outside” candidate that doesn’t go along with corporate greed and all of that. As someone who basically isn’t all that fond of Hillary Clinton, I was seriously looking at Sanders as an alternative, but then I started thinking. What makes anyone think that Bernie Sanders is going to be that much better of an alternative to Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Barack Obama was a better alternative to Hillary Clinton in 2008?

Think about it. Part of the reason why so many people like me don’t like Hillary Clinton is because she’s as close to a corporate follower as you can get (aside from being a current Republican). When she takes office, she’s going to give Wall Street exactly what Wall Street wants because she needed Wall Street to get elected, and let’s face it: She’s a freaking elite who is going to do for the elites what elites generally do for elites. She’s not one of us. Hell, even Bernie isn’t one of us. We don’t have one of us running for office, and when one does, he or she is so far marginalized that we never hear from that person again.

Obama was going to be the outsider response to Hillary Clinton in 2008. Unfortunately, what happened once he took office was he discovered that Washington doesn’t do anything different than the way Washington likes to do things. Wall Street doesn’t comply. Politicians don’t change their ways. And the rich don’t stop doing what they do in order to embrace new ideas. No, things stayed pretty much the way they have always stayed.

Some things got better. But marginally. Not so that students mired in student loan debt were relieved. Students loans were addressed, mainly to spread more margarine on the butter so that things didn’t really change, but people got to say “hey, look, change!”

That’s what’s going to happen with Bernie Sanders. He’ll get to the White House (if he wins) and see that the Republicans aren’t going to allow any changes. Hell, the Democrats in office aren’t going to allow any changes because they’re filthy rich millionaires that don’t want to rock that apple cart any more than they have to. Wall Street will continue to rape the American people, and politicians will take their payments while pretending to care about doing something about corporate greed.

Change isn’t going to happen until government holds corporate greed hostage, and that’s never going to happen in our system. We live in a capitalist system that rewards greed. How do you change the system from within if everyone who makes change is receiving kickbacks from the system in the first place?

So, we can all vote for an outsider, but he’s either going to become an insider, like Obama did, or he’s going to remain an outsider (more like a Carter) who can get absolutely nothing done. That’s kind of the problem.

People of Detroit are Learning How Much Government Doesn’t Care About People

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faucet

It was reported today that a government official in Detroit, U.S. bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes, has decided that water isn’t a right, and that if people can’t pay for it, the government is obligated to shut them off. Basically, the argument is that government has been keeping the water on too long, and if you can’t pay, you don’t get to drink, or bathe, or do anything else that involves the most abundance substance on the planet.

What people should get from this story is not that water is not a right, but that when it comes down to basic survival, your government doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you, even though they will say the opposite in hopes of getting your cooperation, or votes.

I learned this myself this month when I moved to Texas. I moved into an apartment that was kind of nice, but over this first month, let’s just say that I’ve had EVERY utility that is owned by government somehow blow up in my face, and then some uncaring civil servant has sat across from me (or sat on the phone with me) and basically said: “It’s not my problem, so why are you bothering me?” Well, they didn’t say exactly that, but they could have and it wouldn’t have changed the outcome whatsoever.

As we’re talking about water, let’s talk about water. I was fine when I moved to my new apartment, but the person who lived in my apartment before me decided to cut off ALL utilities when she moved. And the way the government did it was quite unique. It didn’t matter that I was now the person on record as paying the bills, EVERY utility treated that original cut off notice as more important than the person who was now living in the building and actually paying for the service. So, for one week, I lost electricity. The next week, I lost gas (which meant hot water). After those were re-established (keeping in mind that NONE of these companies will do this at night or on a weekend, and almost always they shut me off at five o’clock on Friday (yep, each of them did it one weekend after another), meaning I went without electricity first, then without hot water (or the ability to cook)…well, that was followed up last week with several days of absolutely no water whatsoever. The people at the water company were “wow, that sucks, but sorry, we can’t have someone out there to turn it back on, even though he’s probably a few yards from where you’re at now because he just freaking turned the water off, so you’ll have to wait a day or two until we can pencil you in for our next turning on the water guy to show up.”

So, the other day, I got to take a shower with bottles of water from Wal Mart because I had no water in the apartment. And of course, it was cold water, because I couldn’t exactly heat up a plastic bottle of water for a shower (it just wasn’t really an easy proposition).

So, when I see people protesting out in Detroit over the government being a meanie, well, that’s just what government is. They don’t care about the common person because they’re not a common person, nor do they know any. They see someone who doesn’t pay as a delinquent, and if you happen to be one of them, expect them to respond with extra fees to turn back on your water because you’re inconveniencing them for their trouble.

For those in Detroit, keep in mind that when they turned off someone’s water, getting it back on isn’t just a matter of calling up and saying, yeah, I’ll pay the next bill. Instead, they’ll charge “administration” fees to turn it back on, which quite often are more than the water ever would have cost in the first place. And more importantly, they don’t care.

That’s life in the big world. And quite often, it sucks.

If you have no voice, does democracy really matter?

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One of the paradigms of democracy is the idealism that goes along with that institution, specifically that when everyone has the opportunity to vote it somehow translates to a freer society. We know this isn’t really the truth, which can be provided with evidence from Ukraine, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and practically every other dictatorship that requires mandatory voting in which the choices are limited to either the dictator or specific party choices. Whenever we talk about those kinds of nations, we laugh at them and raise our hands in solidarity, voicing our opinion about how great our democracy is.

But is it?

I started thinking about this question the other day when one of the national politicos started talking about the inevitability of Hillary Clinton running for president. And I started thinking, why is it inevitable? And more importantly, why her? Why not the guy who lives down the street from me who waves to me every time I walk by, even though I think he’s kind of nuts? How about the cute girl that works at Starbucks? I’d vote for her. She really couldn’t do a worse job than anyone currently in government. And at least she gets most of the drink orders correct. That means she can take instructions from the guy standing at the register, create the correct drink and bring it to him without totally screwing it up. Most politicians fail at taking the order, and from there you go from ordering a carmel espresso and end up getting an F-35 that crashes because it goes so fast that its pilots pass out when flying the thing.

But back to democracy. Who decides what people are on the ballots? If you read the propaganda that gets put out, we do. But who are we? Most people don’t think about that, yet they will go and vote for one of the names of people they don’t really want. Very few, and I mean VERY few, choose someone that is not from one of the two main parties, even if they don’t who any of the people are from either one of those parties. Basically, most of our elections are decided by attack ads that cause cognitive dissonance about one candidate, or you might vote for someone because you saw more yard signs with that person’s name on it. Or you might recognize the name because the person has served in Congress for so many years that it’s impossible not to mention the name, even though you haven’t heard a single thing about what that person has ever done in the 40 years he or she has been in office. Yet, you’ll vote for him or her because, well, they’re on our team, or some bizarre reason makes you think that somehow this person who has always had the job will somehow change things for the better, even though he or she has never tried doing that in the past.

It’s enough to drive one batty.

The problem with elections is that they serve people who have strong name recognition, which in most cases means someone who already has political clout or a lot of money and economic connections. That means that most of us are unimportant and insignificant. Seriously, we’re insignificant and basically unwanted by those who are in power because talking to us is a waste of time when there are so many important people with power and money they could be talking to.

Part of the problem is that our country is so big that in order to have any influence, you already have to be part of the power structure to even be heard by anyone who might make a difference. Yet, we’re also in a country where more and more people are graduating from college and universities, which means there are more and more people who have the brains and intelligence to possibly change the world for the better but are compartmentalized by those in power instead. So, the only places they have to make a name for themselves are in business or the arts, which for the most part means an alternative route to a place that politicians ignore or condemn as unimportant again.

The real problem isn’t just that so many people have so little voice in government. Well, actually that is the problem, and as in most iterative scenarios, if you crunch those numbers, you end up with a lot of people growing more and more dissatisfied with government, which means people start protesting, and when those protesters are marginalized, like the Occupy Wall Street protests were, people start to look for other avenues to participate in political empowerment, which if you follow the logic, means that it may lead to very dangerous outcomes, because once people give up on the given institutions and look for their own places to have their voices heard, pretty much anything can happen. That’s basically the menu that led to the French Revolution and practically every other overthrow of a social institution in the 20th century. With this much anger festering, I can imagine that when things do happen, those with money and power aren’t going to be the royals trying to find a new position in the new paradigm, but possibly the victims of such anger.

We’re already starting to see this sort of thing in race relations. Sure, we like to pretend that those are just circumstances that got out of control, that everything is really fine, but in reality when you have powder kegs all across the country, and world, ready to explode at the first ignition of trouble, it shouldn’t be all that surprising when you see that sort of thing happening on a regular basis. Which then leads to people in larger cities feeling completely unsafe in their cities because whenever these things happen, the police are completely taken by surprise and overwhelmed. People power has a tendency to do that. But when people no longer trust their government to be the instrument that keeps things safe, they start looking to protect themselves, which makes the next powder keg that much more of a demonstrative explosion.

The real problem (think I’ve said that a few times now) is that people keep thinking that “it can’t happen here” which is usually the last cry you hear before something happens and then you hear “I never thought that could happen here”. Our institutions are being stretched to the limit, and while the solution would have been to stop educating people so they wouldn’t realize they were being marginalized and disenfranchised (and believe it or not, you can vote and still be disenfranchised), but we’re way beyond that, and no one these days could ever justify the idea of saving the state by not educating people, unless you’re Stalin, or a politician in Iran.

But then, no one really cares. There are too many interesting things on television to pay attention to this sort of thing.

Why the U.S. needs to stay the fuck out of Syria’s conflict

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Sorry for the vulgarity, but sometimes it just seems like it’s necessary.

Anyway, as the U.S. is getting ready to start up a new campaign of military violence against some place most people in the U.S. can’t point out on a map, I just wanted to offer my rationalization for why we shouldn’t be involved in any way, shape, or form. My reasons could be the expected ones, which involve:

1. We have nothing to gain by killing people in Syria. They don’t matter to us. They’re having a civil war. Either make it about us, or do your own thing in your own miniscule corner of the world. We need to stop thinking our input is really all that important to people who generally don’t like us anyway.

2. Syria has never been a great friend to the U.S. anyway, and after we bomb them, they’re not going to suddenly think “You know, those Americans who dropped those bombs on our local hospital and killed many of my relatives seem like pretty okay guys. Maybe we should start conducting trade with them tomorrow after I visit everyone I’ve ever known in the hospital.”

3. All lists require a third item, and I hate being seen as someone who doesn’t do what other people do.

No, my reason is different, and it’s simple. As a matter of fact, I can sum it up in one word: Emus. And Australia.

emu

You see, in 1932, there was this war that was fought in Australia between the government of Australia and, well, emus. Yeah, those dorky looking birds that look a lot like ostriches but are called emus. Their most redeeming value and attribute is they make a really ridiculous sound when they speak. That’s about it. Oh, and they shit a lot.

Anyway, Australia was having this real problem with emus back in 1932 and decided it needed to stop them from eating all of their crops, so they did what any industrial nation would do and declared war on a bunch of stupid birds. So, mobilizing their army of soldiers and cannons, they went on a safari in the outback, put one on the barbie and then unleashed holy hell on the emu terror. Only, they discovered something they didn’t know before. When you shoot at a bunch of very fast moving birds, they run. And they run fast. They also hide. So, after the first skirmish, which I like to call The Battle of Waterfowl One, they discovered a few of them died, but most of them lived and ran away. This caused the Australian army to have to chase emus across the land, and they discovered that they didn’t do it very well. They also discovered that no matter how many times you shoot an emu, they tend to not die. They just take the shots and continue running. And the ones that are shot are now angry, so they come at you like, well, emus very angry after having been shot.

The war didn’t go well. By most accounts, the Australians lost this war, and it’s forever been considered one of the biggest military failures in all of history, right up there with Stonewell Jackson being shot by his own troops because he forgot to tell them he was returning from intelligence gathering and not to shoot at their own guy who might be coming at them from enemy lines really fast.

The point: War is quite often unexpected. Great nations were destroyed in the past because nations thought they were incapable of failing at military maneuvers. If you look at the Gulf War, that’s exactly what happened. We went in with the hubris of a nation that can’t be defeated and then after a great military campaign (fighting emu equivalents of enemies) we then ended up bogged down in a decade of minor skirmishes that continued to take the lives of American soldiers. We’re still there now.

So, we should be very wary of just jumping into a conflict because we heard they did bad things. Sure, we don’t want the next German Hitler running around, but not every conflict is Nazi Germany running around the world trying to enslave the population. Sometimes a regional conflict is just that: a regional conflict.

Just ask the Australians. I’m sure they’d love to talk about their great Emu War.

Why Continuum May Be the Most Subversive Television Show Ever to Air

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The story is pretty interesting. It’s about a female police officer from the future of about 60 years who travels back in time to today, following a group of fugitives who are hell bent on causing terror. My friend Teramis wrote about the great writing of Continuum a few weeks ago, but I wanted to go in a different direction, mainly talking about the political implications of the show.

What makes the show so interesting is that the group that comes back in time, while being a terrorist organization, is also doing what they’re doing for the betterment of society. Which, when you think about it, is somewhat subversive on its own. The group, filled with really bad people, uses its evil tactics it used in the future to do its evil to the civilization of the past (today’s time). Their purpose is to change the past in hopes of providing for a better future.

The future is pretty interesting in this show, in that what has happened is that corporations have taken over everything, and people are now minions of the overseers, not the other way around. Freedoms are gone. People live their lives in futuristic splendor, but it’s pretty obvious that to get to that future, a lot of rights were trampled on, and a lot of people were made to live some pretty crappy lives at the expense of those who benefited.

What makes it really interesting is that when the main character returns to today’s time, her purpose is still to stop some very evil people from doing bad deeds in today’s time. But her eyes start to open up to the evil that exists in today’s time. This evil is the sort of thing that leads to the oppressive society that will one day emerge, and she is very much a cog in that wheel that uses the tools of technology to act as an enforcer of some very draconian rules.

What is interesting about the show is that there’s a real grey area here where I’m not sure she’s ever going to recognize that she’s actually the problem that came back in time. She thinks she’s doing the right thing, but as she’s doing it, the police agency she’s working with (in today’s time) is slowly becoming very much more oppressive.

I’m reminded of the whole very recent incident where the British government decided to haul in the domestic partner of a reporter it was targeting over the whole Snowden case. Without a warrant, or even a reason, the government hauled him in and imprisoned him for 9 hours (the maximum amount of time it was allowed before being forced to make a charge). What’s interesting is that no one seems to even recognize that a man’s rights were completely ignored for some kind of governmental vengeance. And no one will ever be held accountable.

That is exactly what Continuum is all about. The good guys in this show are the usual cops and white hat wearing people who always save the day. Yet, they are required to do some really horrible things in order to “get the bad guys”. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such grey area in a show before. There are times when I’m watching it when I start to lose focus on who I should be rooting for, even though the show maintains its narrative in a way that keeps you thinking the oppressors are still the good guys.

It’s an interesting premise, and it’s definitely an interesting experiment. If they play it out as the are already doing it, and SyFy doesn’t cancel it, this could turn out to be one of the most important shows to be on television.

Dear Credit Collectors: Please Stop Calling Me As I’m Not the Droids You’re Looking For

Business, , , , , ,

Okay, here’s my little piece of advice for credit collectors: If you’ve been calling a phone number for the last two years for “Munro, Alexander” and the person who answers the phone is NOT Munro, Alexander, doesn’t know Munro, Alexander, and has never heard of “Munro, Alexander”, STOP CALLING BACK. Statistical analysis indicates that the probability of finding said Munro, Alexander is not going to increase if you call 300 times, 700 times, or never. The reality of the situation is that Munro, Alexander DOES NOT LIVE HERE. So stop calling for him.

Unfortunately, I do not have a phone that can be blocked, so they call it nonstop. I get two to three phone messages on my phone for this same guy. I’ve talked to them and told them to stop calling (they promise not to), called up their offices and said same, but nothing seems to make a difference. They won’t stop calling me.

This wouldn’t be as bad if this was the only one, but I also get calls for all sorts of other random people who may or may not have had my phone number somewhere in the past. I am so sick and tired of wanting to answer my phone only to get another one of these morons on the other end of the phone.

The Munro, Alexander one is even worse now because they no longer have a person on the other end of the line but a recording that says: “If you are not Munro, Alexander, please hang up. Otherwise, you are indicating that you Munro, Alexander, and this call is for you.” This is a message that is left on my answering machine, so of course NO ONE HUNG UP. No one was on the freaking line to hang up.

Government keeps saying they’re going to do something about this, but they never do because I suspect these companies have lobbyists that keep any normal politician from passing legislation that ships them to Siberia for the rest of their natural lives, a punishment overly warranted by the abuse the rest of us have to go through.

I’m just saying.

So what does the sequester mean for the rest of us?

Business, Economics, Politics, , , , , ,
Sometiimes you have to back up your words
Sometiimes you have to back up your words

I keep reading, hearing and watching doom and gloom stories about how the apocalypse is now upon us because of the sequester. A few weeks out, it was warnings of all government services suddenly stopping on Saturday morning. When that didn’t make much of a dent in everyone’s day, we started hearing about how the Defense Department would have to stop giving out guns and issue recycled plastic sporks to soldiers instead, the homeless would be fed turf grass, and our income tax returns wouldn’t be returned to us until the Year 2375.

Then Friday happened, the two parties couldn’t come to an agreement, and then the apocalypse came upon us. The news stories around then seemed to all have the same point: “The other guys are being really mean to the good guys, and now the world is at an end.”

Now, I understand the whole desire to blame the other guys; we’ve been doing that sort of thing as long as we were old enough to point fingers at other people. One thing we never really learned was how to stop pointing fingers and just get things done. This would be easy if we didn’t have a government that’s so two-sided that they are completely incapable of coming up with compromise. The funny thing is: In Morris Fiorina’s must read book (if you were doing a Ph.d in political science it was, in fact, a must read book), Divided Government, having a government where one side wasn’t in charge (which is what we have now) is the greatest thing ever because that means both sides compromise and work out solutions that benefit the most people. Unfortunately, it hasn’t looked that way for about a decade now, and I don’t perceive it going back to the way things were before. Hell, even Fiorina turned around last election and heralded Ron Paul as a solution to our problems, basically throwing his lot in with someone who had zero chance of winning whatsoever. If our main political scientists have given up on both sides, it can’t mean good things for the Republic.

But right now, we’re in sequester land, which means Monday morning a lot of sober people are going to have to look at the government they’re leading and realize it is going nowhere very fast. Does that mean we’ll start to see compromise, or will it be more of this zero sum crap we keep seeing all of the time where one side has to lose so the other side can win? Instead of governance, we get kids in the playground laughing at the handicapped kids because they haven’t been taught that’s inappropriate.

There are some real issues that need to be worked out, but probably never will because the people who have to work them out are rich, out of touch with the population and more interested in being reelected than they are in making things better. What they don’t realize is that there aren’t two sides to this problem; there are three: The Republicans, the Democrats and then everyone else who has to actually fund these two sides in their esteemed places in government. That third party (the people themselves) often is seen as only signficant when it comes to elections. Otherwise, they’re mostly ignored and spit on the rest of the time.

It should be interesting to see where things go from here.

Schools have become much more dangerous yet politicians are arguing about abortion

News, Politics, Religion, , , ,

Another student at a high school brought a shotgun to school and killed another student. The week before, some other student decided to air out his grievances using guns against random strangers. A short while before that, yet another gunman brought guns to a Batman premiere and erupted in violence there.

What’s going on these days? Why have people in Random Town, USA showing up with guns and killing people for whatever twisted reasons they can concoct at that particular moment?

When I went to high school, I remember being scared for my life at times, but that was because I went to Santa Monica High School (my first year) and there were violent gangs that were quickly taking over the outskirts of campus. Even so, campus was considered somewhat safe; it was just dangerous when you walked off campus, including the one time I got mugged for $15 by an entire gang of black street thugs (who also happened to be students at my school). Back then, the gangs fought amongst themselves (black gangs versus Hispanic gangs, but slowly the rest of us were being singled out for violence by these carefree criminals living in our society. Things were getting worse, but they hadn’t reached the point where I think they’ve become today.

Keep in mind, I went to school in a large city, where that kind of violence seemed to become the norm. But what we’re seeing now is violence on an unscaled comparison that is taking place in those communities where news stories begin with: “And we never imagined such a thing might happen here.”

Yet, the politicians in this country, all running for office, seem mostly interested in talking about abortion and other inane topics that really have no relevance to the majority of people on a daily basis.

I’m sorry, but abortion is a fringe topic, and while some people may find it significant as an issue, that’s one of those things that really needs to be decided between people who are faced with that issue, not by every fly by night politician who wants to pretend to be an advocate for family values or some other nonsense. What has happened is that it has become one of those issues that appears to have meaning but is really smoke, mirrors and air. It’s like saying you’re against crime. We’re all against crime. But that doesn’t make the issue go away. Abortion is a lot like that because the real issue shouldn’t be about abortion; it should be about the causes of prenancy, because THAT is the issue that progressives and fundamentalists are REALLY arguing over. They just don’t want to admit it. Instead, they make grandiose gestures about saving lives (either the unborn child or the life of the mother), when in reality both sides are really wanting to be arguing about promiscuity and free choice decisions for men and women. It’s just so much easier to go the other direction with the argument.

In reality, conservatives have a great opportunity to punish a woman for her “promiscuity” by taking away her rights to decide for herself what is best for her and/or the child she may or may not have. On the other side, the progressives argue that it’s about free choice, when it’s free choice that got the particular couple into the mess in the first place.

In other words, there’s no real easy answer to the children issue, and trying to “solve” it gives a great opportunity to ignore that the REAL issues of America can’t be solved either. And I’m talking about crime and poverty. Because if you trace all of the problems that seem to come into the disagreements, THOSE TWO are the issues that fuel pretty much everything else.

If there was no poverty, there would be no need for crime (other than just crazy people doing crazy things). But poverty leads people to do all sorts of things that they wouldn’t normally do, right or wrong. Then we have to allocate resources to stopping them, putting them in prison, and maybe even trying to rehabilitate them. Without poverty, you probably wouldn’t even have an abortion issue, because even if conservatives got everything they wanted, every child could be born and put into adoption. But that rarely happens today because quite a few poor women who have children have all sorts of problems that stem from the fact that they’re poor. Pushing aside the obvious desire of a mother to keep her child, there’s also the possibility that the child is going to be born with problems because of the fact of poverty that existed when the mother was pregnant. There is drug use, crime infested areas and abuse issues that are inherent in a lot of these cases. In some cases, a mother may not have access to any of the services she needs because a) she may not even realize the services are available because no one ever told her they might be, b) she may be in a home situation that forces her into making decisions that she doesn’t want to make but lives in an environment where she really doesn’t have the freedom to make choices like she should be able to (either through an oppressive partner or any number of other factors, and c) she may have access to nothing to help her, including information. Some areas see the indigent as problems and have very little desire to assist them.

I’ll give you a good example. Me. My mother was uneducated and forced to work in very low-paying jobs in the 1960s. She had few skills, which meant she wasn’t capable of doing a lot of things. She probably should have aborted me or sent me off for adoption as that would have probably increased her survival. She already had a teenage daughter at the time I arrived. Yet, she didn’t do that, and we lived through some very harsh times. And she died very early as a result of destructive diseases that took her down fast. Had I not been around, there’s a pretty good chance that things might not have been so bad for her. For most of her life, whenever she attempted to access governmental benefits, she was turned down and sent away. Instead, we went without, a lot.

Poverty is probably the one basic factor behind why most of the problems exist in America today. Yet, we do absolutely nothing to alleviate it, other than flash in the pan treatments that only continue to make things limp on as they have before. We’ve done more to eradicate poverty and hunger in other countries than we have in our own country, somehow relying on charities at home as a solution that has never actually solved anything.

But this whole conversation started as a discussion about random violence at schools and in our communities. On the surface, poverty and those events may not seem related, but they are. You see, violence brought on by poverty has fueled a thought process amongst the youth over the last few generations where the belief is that in order to achieve what you need, it may take violence and guns to do it. I mentioned before that one day when I was mugged walking home from school in Santa Monica. Shortly after that, I started imagining what I could have done if I had had a gun that day. I realized I might not have been a victim, but I could have gotten the upperhand and killed a bunch of them before they ever stole from me again.

Fortunately, that moment never came, and fortunately I channeled a lot of that aggression into a military career instead. Today, I don’t feel the same way as I used to, prone to moments of nonviolence rather than the other way around.

But I can see how years of this kind of institutional abuse would start people down a path that makes more sense to them than might have made sense years earlier to a previous generation. And meanwhile, we’re watching the gladiators perform in the coliseum while Rome burns, wondering why its getting so hot.