USA Today has a nice little article/movie on the most dangerous places to use your debit, titled 4 places you should not swipe your debit card. Now, in most cases, such a list would be great, and I’d be thankful that they took the time to present this. But let’s look at their list, shall we?
1. Gas stations
2. Restaurants
3. Stores
4. Online
Okay, if this was an Onion article, I’d accept it, but let’s be a little frank here. That’s practically EVERY place you would EVER use a debit card. That means the title of the article should be DON’T EVER USE YOUR DEBIT CARD AGAIN. When I read the first one, I thought, wow, that sucks, but then read on to see where else I would be in jeopardy. And then it just got worse. Every one of those entries shows that the author of this story did absolutely no work, no investigation and no thought whatsoever to come up with a story. It would be like my next article, which I’ll highlight right here:
Duane’s new article: HOW TO DATE SUPERMODELS
Step One: Find a supermodel
Step Two: Date her.
Yeah, it’s essentially true, but at the same time probably not all that useful to anyone reading it. That’s the feeling I get after reading an article like this. A “real” story would have pointed out certain gas stations that are negligent in their protections of debit card information. Or particular stores where the staff are negligent in the same process. “Online”? Really? Was this article written by a cave man discovering fire for the first time?
Here’s a confession. I read the newspaper every day. And some days are more informative than others. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the news over the last couple of months has been really crappy, almost to the point of where I sometimes suspect that today’s newspaper might have been recycled from a few weeks ago and sold to me as brand new. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. It’s like there’s no interesting news any more, and that worries me because I’m a newshound, constantly in need of news gratification. So, here’s a quick rehash of what I’ve found to be the “significant” news stories for the immediate past (and present).
1. Justin Beiber did something. Don’t know what it was, but for some reason when he does something, the news wants to tell me about it. I get it. Teen girls like him, mainly because teen girls haven’t matured to a point where their brains actually generate understandable logic. So this “heart throb” did something that may or may not have been controversial, and as a result the media is in a frenzy making sure that we know all about it. I don’t care. Please stop telling me about it. It’s taking up space where I could be reading about…well, honestly, I don’t have anything else I’m following, which is a part of this whole post in the first place. As a corollary, please don’t tell me about Selena Gomez either. The only reason I know who she is is because she’s often mentioned in the same sentence as Justin Bieber, which makes her even less significant than someone I find of absolutely no significance.
2. Congress voted to not vote on anything. That’s about the length of the summary of the latest stories involving Congress. They’ve spent the last two years arguing over how they don’t agree with each other, with the president, with the people, and with the color of the sky. I get it. They don’t get along, and they believe that they need to get rid of the people they don’t get along with in order to get anything done. As a result, they’re going to have to justify their ridiculous salaries and excellent health benefits ( that are not upto the standards found in Forest Hills urgent care clinic and also they are the not the same as anyone they vote to approve health benefits for, such as the poor, the military or, well, anyone else), so they need to pretend to be doing something. And because the media can’t just report: TODAY, CONGRESS PROVED IT’S USELESS AND DID NOTHING, they report all of the horse race crap, and we end up with stories that tell us absolutely nothing.
3. School shootings are on the increase. I’m not happy about this, and at the same time I kind of want to stop hearing about it because statistically, they’re not actually increasing. We’re just hearing more about them because they fit the “if it’s on fire, then it’s a story” paradigm of national news outlets. Most people don’t realize that kids have been stupid for about as long as kids have been around. What is different is that the media is in such a need of stories to fill a 24 hour news cycle that whenever someone shoots someone, pulls out a gun, draws a picture of a gun, bullies someone, thinks about bullying someone, says mean things, or whatever, we’re going to hear a national story about it. And then commentators are going to get on the news and talk about the “tragedy” and how it never used to be that way “back in my day”. Yes, it was. It just didn’t happen in your particular school at the time you’re remembering back on. But it happened in the school down the street, which means that “back in your day” these things were happening but because they didn’t happen in YOUR school, you weren’t paying attention, and because most people didn’t pay attention to news back then (as most of it was from the 3 networks and boring as hell), there’s a belief that it was much different back then. Statistically, the only thing that really changed was we have more access to national information than we had before, which means that something that happens in Colorado when you live in New York gets put in front of your TV screen, making you feel that it’s happening in your neighborhood, when it’s thousands of miles away from where you live.
4. The most important story in the country is gay marriage. Well, you’d get that impression from the amount of rhetoric focused on it. Yes, I agree that it should be an important story, but it’s not really, and it affects so few people in comparison to the grand total of people who think they’re affected. Disclaimer: I’m not gay, which means that the issues involved in this continuously involving “issue” doesn’t actually affect me. Reality: That’s not completely true. It does affect me, but not in the way that seems to be the focus of so much attention. Let me explain.
You see, there are people in the world who are not heterosexual. I’m not one of them, yet because I’m heterosexual, if I was a total dweeb and rude person, I could say that how someone lives his or her own life somehow has an impact on my life. Reality: It doesn’t. If two men want to marry each other, and they live next door to me, the total effect after doing all of the mathematics is…um, zero. What does affect me is how much noise they make playing their stereo, or in what seems to be my personal experience, how much of a complaint they have about the fact that I sometimes play mine too loud. You might notice that how loud their stereo is has absolutely NO connection to whether or not they happen to be gay or straight. So, their impact AS A RESULT OF THEM BEING GAY, is none.
Then the argument comes in about how gay marriage somehow diminishes the status of marriage in general. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe that divorce has a much larger impact on the status of marriage. I feel that if NO ONE ever got divorced, then marriage would be sanctified and never in fear of danger. Not only that, I think that if spouses NEVER cheated on each other, then marriage would be strengthened that much better. So, from now on, I think that anytime someone talks about a divorce, that person should be shunned, thrown out of the country and declared a heathen of all good thinking Americans. Come to think of it, if people didn’t get married in the first place, then perhaps the fear of divorce would never happen, which would strengthen the very value of partnership. Or perhaps partnership is the problem, and that it’s kind of unnatural, as God originally intended for every person to be alone, which is why He didn’t create people as partners but designed each person to be capable of functioning without another person. I’m sure there’s a verse somewhere in one of the many different interpretations of religious texts out there that says exactly that, although it might say it in different words that need to be translated by some priest who has spent too much time reading the book and pretty much nothing else.
The point: How does the way someone else lives affect me when it doesn’t have an effect on me? I can have all sorts of bad feelings about how someone else lives, but I guarantee that someone else is probably having bad feelings about the way I live for some random reason, no matter how wonderful I live my life in the constant vigilance to the ideals put forward by the Shania (if my religion happens to be the worship of all things Shania Twain). Unfortunately, no matter what you do, someone else is going to disagree with how you live your life and think that he or she knows better than you do, and then for bizarre reasons DEMAND you live another way. I like the old George Carlin belief system that people need to just leave people alone (to paraphrase several great speeches he’s given over the years).
5. Which brings me to the story lines of national politics. As I read stories on national news, I find absolutely nothing in the way of interest for any story because none of them make a single difference to me whatsoever. The stories that do are glossed over and treated as afterthoughts, meaning no one seems to care about things we should care about. So, what kinds of subjects should we hear about. Well, I have a few:
A. Health care. I’m not talking about Obamacare or how badly the health care exchanges were implemented. Although I will say that those stories COULD have started off a conversation about things that NEED to be discussed, but never will. What needs to be discussed then? Cost. Health insurance is expensive, and it shouldn’t be. Because our government has taken a hands off approach for so long, we have the worst health care system in the world, aside from dictatorships that use firing squads as a health care remedy. For the first and second world, our health care is abysmal because we allowed the whole system to evolve from a really bad premise to begin with. Government has been playing catch up with our system since day one, and that means that any solutions aren’t going to happen from half measures; the whole system needs a restart and the old money profiteers need to be put out of the system so that we can put together something that shows we are, in fact, the one first world nation in all ways. What does that mean? Everyone gets health care covering pretty much everything they need. We start to create a system that is proactive rather than reactive, meaning that you don’t seek health care for the first time AFTER you’re already starting to get sick. One of our largest problems in this country is diabetes, which if you understand the disease, all of our efforts to combat it are to alleviate the symptoms, and that’s it. We do the same thing for cancer. Instead of massive money being spent on “curing” cancer, most of our procedures are designed around helping people “live with cancer” instead. I don’t advocate stopping the reactive measures, but I’d really like to see us work on the proactive measures. This would mean a completely change to our health care mentality, and that’s never going to happen as long as these decisions are being made by people who are so indoctrinated by this payment system plan, because they are completely incapable of seeing any other alternative. And a personal belief of mine is that pharmaceutical companies might be a huge part of the problem as well, although there’s lots of room for debate in that one. An example: I was dealing with some depression issues a few years back and went to a therapist, who I immediately discontinued seeing because her “solution” to practically everything was medication. I didn’t need medication to stop being depressed. I needed to feel better about my situation by finding solutions to my situation. Medication was a stupid solution, but this therapist saw no other alternative. A friend of mine was diagnosed with “stress” and prescribed lots of medication. She started on it for a few months before she dumped it and took an alternative route NOT condoned by her prescriber. Her “new” route consisted of paying for massages, and she’s doing a lot better these days. The interesting side bar to that is that her health coverage didn’t cover massage therapy but did cover medication. Again, the eye is on the wrong ball, and as long as we’re a part of this system, it’s never going to change. Additionally, for those struggling with severe issues and looking for alternative approaches, seeking help from a private rehab centre might be a viable option to consider.
B. Elections and Representation. Every election you hear people start complaining about how so few people participate int eh voting process. There’s a reason for that. It’s not because they’re apathetic, happy with the system as is, or lazy. Many people don’t participate because they don’t feel they have a voice, no matter how hard political parties try to convince them otherwise. This was seen during the whole Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. In case you weren’t completely following what was happening, people were dissatisfied with government and their lack of influence on it, so they tried mobilizing outside of the power structure that already exists. What they discovered was that the entrenched power system gave them no voice, and when they made a stink about it, the powers that be ridiculed the protesters and treated them as crazy people. Occupy Wall Street was defeated early in its infancy as the media treated it as a joke, constantly ridiculing its members by pointing out that they had no better ideas, were disorganized and weren’t making any headway in their protests. Having watched the back and forth, I came away with a different perspective, albeit a more economic one. The media responded as the powerful business interests they were, seeing Occupy Wall Street as a financial threat, which caused the media to treat them as outliers and a humorous joke. Wall Street itself, responded in kind, as they were the financial target of these people who were upset with how there has been little oversight over economic impact issues from this part of the political system, and because of such a response, there never will be.
The Tea Party has been an even more interesting animal, mainly because this was a protest from an actual economic power base that couldn’t be ignored in the same way. Remember, Occupy Wall Street was coming from the poor, disenfranchised side of the political spectrum, much easier to knock its wind out right from the beginning. But the Tea Party was a disorganized response to dissatisfaction from the political right, which is inhabited by those with financial clout, meaning the people Occupy Wall Street were actually protesting against. As they were now organized against OWS, they came about immediately after with a power base that demanded the Republican Party (its main level of constituency) to respond. As a result, they’ve entrenched themselves as a part of that party. What we’re starting to discover is that they only represent an elite economic power base, which has its own representation mainly because it can afford to make its message known through financial clout during elections. We’re starting to see this with their attacks on Obamacare, and specifically the members of the Senate who supported it. We’re going to see a lot more of this in the months to come.
But what it means is that the average person has less and less touching of the strings of government. And this means that as we move closer to the next election, people have come away from these previous two movements convinced that nothing is going to change because when they did try to become organized, nothing happened, unless they were already rich and powerful. To participate in that environment is a lesson in futility, and nothing that either political party says is going to change that. The Republicans don’t have any intentions of representing the disenfranchised, having sold their souls to the very franchised economic elite, and the Democratic Party is counting on these disenfranchised souls to somehow embolden them with the ability to maintain power in a system that still rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Basically, the Democrats have to convince people who bought into “hope and change” that more years of their control will somehow bring about “hope and change” when the originator of that message did very little for them other than try and fail. The alternative is to opt out of participation, and sadly enough the expectation is that rhetoric can somehow make this different. Good luck on that.
C. The economic future. This is really what should be the main focus right now. There is no lack of books on the concept of low-hanging fruit that has disappeared from the process, meaning that all of our advantages we used to have available (like continued open spaces for colonizing land, economic opportunities for business growth, and access to untapped natural resources) are practically gone. We no longer produce new things but seem to have fallen into a rut of continuous reinvention of old things, like the consumer electronics show that instead of showing us new technologies on the horizon continues to show us new variations of television sets that keep reinventing the old technology. When every house in America that needs a television has pretty much already bought one, we’re forcing a false need on people that they’re no longer responding to with checkbooks. The last few major advancements in technology that drove need have been around for some time (televisions, microwave ovens, computers and cellphones), meaning that we’re not producing anything that’s changing the paradigm to move us towards new need. Sure, you can argue the iPad was a new invention of this nature, but it just gathered a number of different products and combined them into one, which, if you think about it, actually is a step back on the production of new things list. As long as our future consists of combinations and reinventions of old things, we don’t have a lot of progress to take advantage of, which would explain why industry innovation has focused a lot more on consolidation than progress, meaning the idea of expansion by robotizing a labor force and outsourcing to countries where its cheaper to produce something.
Anyway, this has gotten much longer than I originally intended to write, so I’ll stop there for now. I would hope, by now, the basic idea has been relayed.
I found out today that Michigan decided to tell women to go screw themselves when it comes to rape. Basically, women used to be able to get abortions if they were raped. Now, they can’t, unless they thought ahead and bought rape insurance. Yep, I said that correctly. They have to buy rape insurance. I have all sorts of snide comments to make on that, but I’m just going to leave that one for you to digest. Rape insurance. Okay, moving on.
Meanwhile, there was another shooting in Colorado, which has verified to me that if you want to die, and happen to be young enough to still be in school, go to Colorado. Come to think of it. Go anywhere in America, and you’re probably going to find somebody willing to kill you. We’re just that helpful.
I was happy to see that our Congress was able to come together long enough to decide on a budget, which will pay for military projects and anything needed by very wealthy people who already have enough money that they couldn’t possibly think of anything else to spend it on. Those on unemployment, well, go screw yourself because this country just thinks you’re some lazy ass who is sitting at home trying to get free bon bons while the rest of us work hard at…um, well, not sure what we’re working hard on, as I don’t think too many people in this country actually have really difficult jobs these days, although they like to think they do. But I’m sure they’re all upset at the freeloading people who are starving to death in the snow, while trying to push their broken shopping carts that some legislator seems to think needs to be smashed with a sledgehammer (guess that somehow gets those freeloaders back to work?). Anyway, basically our country works well if you’re already filthy rich. If you’re not, you’re just lazy and should go out and get a job, even if you have three of them that don’t pay enough combined to get you off of food stamps (which, by the way, we need to cut because government decided that money needed to go to rich billionaire oil barons).
And we just bombed a bunch of strangers in Syria with drones that we stated we wouldn’t use just to bomb anyone, although we may have just accidentally taken out an entourage of people returning from a wedding, which someone in our government than had the audacity to state: “They were all enemies of state”, which I’m sure includes the toddlers and the bride. But what do I know?
And China decided to play top gun with its ships by basically threatening to ram a US missile cruiser in international waters. And what did we do? We stepped aside and let them pass. In other words, the most powerful Navy in the freaking world just backed down to yet another tin hat power broker.
Oh well, I guess I’m just bitter because my stuffed animals have more of a social life than I do.
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets
The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.
You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.
I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.
Little Brucoe knows exactly why politicians do what they do. They want to hug him because he’s so cute.
For those who have been following the exploits of New York politicians, specifically one who seems to text graphic pictures of his private parts to random women and the other who was laughed out of office for paying for high priced hookers, it leaves one wondering how either one of these individuals actually thinks he has a chance in hell of ever regaining a political career. Senator Barbara Boxer mentioned yesterday that Warner needed to drop out of the race, and chances are pretty good that even though the highest ranking Democrat (his party) wants him out, he’s probably not going to comply.
Which leaves one wondering how they can actually imagine they have a chance of serving their constituents again. Critics of these two have been making statements about how both are incapable of providing their constituents with service, yet neither one of them seems all that concerned about the criticism. Sure, they don’t like that they’re being criticized, but at the same time they’re not planning to go away any time soon.
This leaves me wondering how this fits into the greater schemes of political science itself, and by that, I mean how does this make any sense to the central axiom of American government theory, which is that politicians do everything they do in hopes of being elected and re-elected. Everything else is irrelevant. If this were the case, then we should expect that one of them wouldn’t have pursued expensive hookers while the other one would stop sending pictures of his cock to random women. Or at least stay faithful to his wife, who happens to be an insider with the Clintons. But instead, we keep getting very interesting, and titillating stories from these two.
And they’re not the only ones. The mayor of San Diego seems to have a problem dealing with just about any woman he comes across without looking for a hook up from her. If he followed the central axiom of political theory, then he’d stop trying to score with every woman he comes across. But that hasn’t happened. He won’t resign either, because he doesn’t seem to think it’s a detriment to his serving in office.
Which brings me to something I brought up a long time ago while pursuing my doctorate in political science. It was understandably laughed at back then, and probably will be again, but a colleague and I came up with this joke of a theory that perhaps the central axiom of political theory is not incorrect, but that it isn’t finished. If you follow the logic, you would come to the conclusion that politicians want to be elected and re-elected after being in office. The theory my colleague and I played around with was essentially the next step. If they get elected, so what? What does that lead them to? Does serving in office give you the ultimate satisfaction you’ve been seeking all your life? Or does it allow you to provide for satisfaction because of the results of that office?
Let’s explore that. Our theory was a joke back then, which I’ll mention now and then get back to seriousness. We postulated that the reason why politicians do what they do is not to become re-elected, but to get dates. In other words, the reason they do what they do is to appeal to the opposite sex (or same sex if that’s their thing). When they score, they have effectively achieved all that they have sought out to do.
Yes, it was a joke, and no one took us seriously. But what if it was somewhat true? What if the reason why politicians did what they do is to achieve some ultimate goal? For some, like the ones mentioned in this article, maybe it is about getting dates or appealing to the opposite sex. For others, perhaps the end goal is power. And for even more, perhaps it is the accumulation of wealth. We’ve seen over and over again that people in power are easily corrupted in the end, even if we don’t always know what it is that’s going to corrupt them.
So, the bigger question that should be asked is what exactly is it that a particular politician seeks as an ultimate result. If it’s sex, then we look for that arena. If it’s money, then we should expect just that. And so on. The point is: If this theory is correct, then perhaps our motivations we put behind political science are a bit premature, in that they lead to something, but they aren’t the thing that actually point the final finger. An example is a politician who is leaving office after a set of years having served. Political scientists tend to ignore the individual from this point on, figuring they’re nothing more than a lame duck and not worthy of further exploration. But my theory looks at them as even yet another variable that needs to be studied, because something caused them to realize that politics was no longer worth their effort. It’s all an end game sum type of situation where there are intricate cost-benefit analyses being played out before our eyes. Sometimes, we can see it clearly, as we can see when a politician is outed for some behavior that goes contrary to stated intentions. Other times, it’s not so easy to see.
But studying politics from this direction means we might actually start to find the true motivations behind why politicians do what they do. This is what the intelligence services have done for as long as there have been administrators. They find out what the person really wants and then provide that for them. That usually leads to the beginning of a long, lasting relationship. But they’d never have succeeded if they went into the situation convinced that all administrators do what they do because they’re interested in keeping their job tomorrow. Yet, that’s exactly how political theory deals with this issue. If you think it through, that’s exactly what we do.
Anyway, so from now on I think I’ll be looking at politics from the angle of “what’s in it for me” or for the politician himself/herself. What I suspect I’ll find is that the answers aren’t that much different from the expectations. What I do believe I’ll find, however, is that we might stop being so stubborn about actually studying the real reasons why people actually do what they do.
The New Year is here, and all that jazz, so I just think I’ll say happy new year and move on from there. Hope everyone is doing well. If not, hope the new year gets better for you.
One of my usual places to find up to date news is Google News. I’ve found it to be quite informative, and I tend to read first the technology section, then the entertainment section, then business and then US News. Maybe I might read some of the other categories, but those are the main ones that interest me. However, it wasn’t until today that I started to notice something that’s been secretly bothering me for a long time. And that’s what gets included in Entertainment News.
When I read Entertainment, I’m interested in movie announcements, revelations of new music and the ocassional ridiculous scandal that tends to make me laugh. However, I”ve started to notice other pieces of news that are being included in this feed, and it’s just wrong. I’ll give you an example: James Holmes, the nutcase that shot up the midnight showing of the latest Batman movie, is having his hearing and the news wants to know what his defense will be. Why does this bother me? This is not entertainment news at all. I don’t care that he did his crime during a Batman screening. I don’t care that the media is excited and hyped about the case. THIS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT NEWS. It is national news, or serious news. To put it under the entertainment umbrella is sending a signal out to every nutcase out there that if he wants his 15 minutes of entertainment fame, do something ridiculous, like kill a whole bunch of people during a movie screening.
Entertainment news needs to be held to actual entertainment stuff, not this kind of thing. The message the news is sending by this sort of thing is that we’re going to be entertained by whack jobs killing people in real life. This is why “news” people like Nancy Grace exist, and I so wish that they didn’t get a single moment of air time. We don’t need media celebrities trying to make a name for themselves by going crazy on the news and trying to gain attention, which is one reason why I refuse to watch anything Nancy Grace related. She’s exactly the kind of reason why we have this sort of thing turning in on an entertainment feed instead of simple news.
And that’s the problem today. News has become entertainment, which just fuels that old problem of watching the evening news and seeing that the lead story is a fire that affects less than 0.001 of the population. Fires are exciting, and you can watch things burn, which is why you rarely see a fire story in the newspaper (unless it burns half the city). It’s only exciting on television with pictures and footage.
This is why we’re now seeing Holmes as an entertainment story. Instead of CNN, Fox and the major networks covering this story and its impact on America, we’re now going to have E!, People, and the Celebrity Gossip talking about what clothes the killer was wearing, and why the prosecutor so shouldn’t have been wearing those shoes.
On another note, chances are pretty good this web site is going to be closed soon. I’ve discovered very few people are actually interacting with me and that most of my views appear to be from spammers trying to sell shit to people who do read my blog.
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.
Like a lot of other people, I was waiting on the Supreme Court decision over health care legislation. At the time, I happened to be in the hospital awaiting the decision, but that’s really not a significant factor. However, when CNN, and then Fox News, announced the decision IMMEDIATELY after it was written, I didn’t get very excited. The reason being: I figured they’d probably get it wrong.
And they did. CNN first reported that it was repealed. It wasn’t. Fox News then announced something equally stupid, and they were wrong as well.
The important question is Why did both of them really screw up the decision?
Well, the answer is simple. Reporters write differently than Supreme Court justices. You see, the reporter process is to report the decision first, and then they continue to write the story, filling in relevant facts later. The most irrelevant facts are left for the end, just in case an editor has to snip the end of a story. This way, the important parts of a story remain untouched.
The Supreme Court doesn’t work that way. If they issue a 30 page majority opinion, that means that somewhere on page 17 or 18 you might actually get the decision. Everything else is legalese and details that back up that decision. Quite often, you can read for pages and still have no clue where they’re going with the decision.
I learned this in graduate school when I used to have to write briefs on Supreme Court decisions. There were times when I’d read through the whole thing and still couldn’t tell you what was the decision. When you’re a reporter, you’re expected to be able to figure out that ruling quickly, and what happened was they failed at it. They kept trying to read the first few pages of the brief and basically got lost. So, when they got it completely wrong, it made complete sense.
That’s why I waited. I figured after a couple of hours, someone would actually read through the whole thing and then report what actually happened.
Years ago, I was working in military intelligence, and the training exercise was something you’d see on any episode of “24” or any other television show that pretends to understand what intelligence people do. Basically, we’d receive all sorts of intelligence information from sources, news, and wherever, and then based on an assessment of the map, we’d make recommendations about what needs to be done in order to counter the “threat”. It was a period of 24 hours we were dealing with (shortened for our exercise), but what kept annoying me was that no matter how many “brilliant” suggestions we made, the scenario wasn’t designed to actually implement any of our suggestions. So, if Dictator A was waging some kind of guerilla campaign, his actions would have sanctions based on any of the recommendations we made. In other words, it was all scripted out ahead of time, so no matter what impact we tried to make, we wouldn’t actually make a difference. The exercise serves two purposes: One, you learn to react quickly to a changing scenario, and (possibly unplanned by the designers) second, you learn that quite often intelligence people have all the information but no one bothers to listen to them.
Now, this could go on into a diatribe about intelligence and how no one pays attention to it, but that’s a column for another day. Instead, I’d rather deal with something a little closer to home. Having read my little introduction, I would like to put forth that my life is very much that scenario today. Except I’m no longer in intelligence. I’m an average Joe who has zero impact or say so in government whatsoever. And sadly enough, I’m discovering that it’s just as frustrating now as it was when I was supposed to have a voice.
You see, every day I read the news to see what’s going on in the world and in my local community. And every day, huge things happen, but none of them have any ties to me whatsoever. There was a huge protest in Oakland yesterday, where OWS people were arrested because of what they believe in. Police are up in arms (as they usually are), and the city officials are planning to “meet” this disruption with the usual gumption. Me, on the other hand, well, I’m not involved. I don’t live in Oakland, and even if I did, chances are pretty good that I’d be somewhat of an insignificant cog in the wall over there, so what’s it really matter?
Our country is going through huge budget problems. I have lots of ideas I’ve tried to share with people. No one cares. They listen to economists who have continued to prove they know as much as anyone else, and they argue amongst themselves, but the average person with a plan, or a solution, is insignificant. Instead, we’ve been relegated to the ranks of the spoken to rather than those who have a voice.
And that’s been bothering me a lot lately. Unfortunately, other than to complain about it to an audience that doesn’t exist, I really don’t know what to do about it. And I never have. Instead, I seem to live a non-existent life without purpose, doing the same things over and over without any path towards anything greater. The critic can easily say, well go do something, but I’m left in that same quandary of “do what? And why?” I guess that’s the whole attraction of the Occupy Wall Street thing for a lot of people. We’ve been so disenfranchised for so long that at least there you have a voice, even if no one really is listening to you again. For a fleeting moment, you get to yell and scream, and others around you yell and scream as well. But in the end, what do you get out of it, other than arrests by police and ridicule from everyone else?
In the end, you start to realize that the world revolves around some people, and the rest of us just occupy space. It’s like our only purpose is to be consumers of stuff that the revolved around people manage. We exist so they can have good lives, and we pretend that one day we might be one of those people, but secretly we realize we’re probably never going to be.
So, what is the average person supposed to do, other than live a mediocre life that has little to no meaning?
Since then, I’ve been reading a whole bunch of different articles on different sites where readers have chimed in, and basically everyone pretty much admits that this is nothing new, and that using various men on dates to get free food and tickets to movies (or the theater) has been a commonality for quite some time. On some of the sites, the commentary gets so crass as to project that certain “benefits” are expected after a certain amount of money spent, or a certain number of dates have been attended. The woman in the article indicates that she only dated men 5 times before dumping them (or moving on), so I’m not exactly sure where that fits into the calculations, but something tells me that that number has a LOT to do with that specific calculation, so I’ll just leave it at that and let you fill in the rest without having to say more.
What I do find intriguing is that dating has gotten into this whole “who pays for what” situation while in 21st century gender politics there has been a huge move towards equality of the sexes. As a commentary example, let me just mention that recently I finished off my schooling in which I did a Ph.d and a couple of MAs, and when I was dating in that pool of individuals, I found it quite intriguing that the women were demanding of equality at all times (whenever discussing rights, politics and academic rigor) but when an actual date occurred, there was an expectation that regardless of education, current state of gender politics or anything else, the guy was still expected to pick up the check for dinner. That included movies, or any other shared experience as well.
Now, keep in mind, when it came to “between friends” that changes a lot as in most cases a guy rarely ever has to shell out any money for a “date” when the “date” is being shared between friends, not two people thinking they are on a romantic date. So that’s a whole different dichotomy completely.
Now, I should also point out that way too often I’ll pick up the check regardless of the mindset of the adventure (be it romantic or friendship), but that’s just me. But what really gets me thinking more than I should is how many women actually walk into such an experience “expecting” certain things paid for. That includes drinks at a bar. I was at a group outing one night not too long ago when a young woman I casually knew sauntered up to where I was sitting and joined me. Within a short bit of time, there was an expectation that I was going to pay for her next drink. And I started to think to myself: “I’m not dating this young woman, nor am I probably ever going to be dating her, yet she has every expectation that the next set of drinks will be paid for by me, just because our genders are different.” At that moment, I was amazed at the brazen expectations people have, based off of ancient customs that have carried over into dynamics where they generally don’t fit any longer.
The whole dating scheme has gotten so that it’s very difficult for someone who is tired of playing a lot of the games that get played in this atmosphere. As one who abhors bars and drunk people, I avoid those places or people who frequent those kinds of places. Therefore, that leaves me with very few choices to find someone, other than venues like Match.com or Okcupid.com. As this article has shown me, and a lot of conversations with others have revealed to me, a lot of the women a guy is likely to find on Match.com or Okcupid.com are going to be very much like the entrepreneur in the original article, who sees any date with me as a chance to save money on her dinner bills. Whenever I go through the rankings of people advertising in my area on Okcupid, I’m left thinking that they’re really not looking for me, but for some weird fantasy of a guy who only exists on episodes of Gossip Girl or as a creature of the night in the Twilight movies. Recently, I found one woman who looked exactly like the down-to-Earth girl I was looking for when I read the last line of her profile, indicating that if the reader of her ad was someone who has EVER played World of Warcraft, she wasn’t interested. As those who know me know I’d be lying to say otherwise, I hid her picture and continued searching for that elusive someone who I began to realize probably didn’t exist.
Which is probably why I don’t date any more. I’d like to say that as a writer, I spend a lot of time alone on purpose, but sometimes it goes a little further than that. Somewhere down the line, I really got tired of the dating atmosphere and probably should have married years ago, but I never found the right person, so I realized at some point that I would have to go through a lot of the wrong people in order to finally find the right person, and just writing that is tiring enough. So, I tend to find solace in writing, reading a newspaper, and maybe a bout of magecrafting in World of Warcraft.
