Tag Archives: Politics

Navigating Healthcare Without Political Rhetoric

Healthcare, News, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of political talk about the affordable care act (ACA), or as some like to call it, Obamacare. Whatever name you choose to call it quite often determines what political perspective you tend to associate with the plan. An example: If I call it Obamacare, chances are pretty good that I’m a conservative who hates it. If I call it the ACA, chances are pretty good that I’m more liberal, and I support it. Sure, there are outliers in both areas, but for the most part, that’s sort of framed the issue for everyone.

So, imagine my surprise when I read an article from Fox News, indicating how much trouble a woman got into with her cancer because of the horrible policies involved with “Obamacare.” Obviously, I’m being a bit facetious, as the fact that it came from Fox News should have been an indication it was going to be negative from the start. Now, I’m just waiting for the Salon article debunking the original article, including the part where we find out that the woman actually has better coverage now because of Obamacare than was previously reported in the article. If not, we won’t hear from Salon at all. Or from Jon Stewart either (another of the liberal debunkers). I can already tell you who will report the story based on what conclusions they come up with. That’s about as bad as media gets, and nothing I say is ever going to change that.

So, I thought I was address an anecdotal case and talk about health care, specifically MY health care. After I left my job, I found myself realizing that I had to get my own medical coverage. I was originally under Priority Health (which is co-owned by the employer I left). Historically, I’ve always known it to be overpriced and quite often geared more towards the business owner than the people put onto the plan. When Cobra information was sent to me, I wasn’t all that astonished that it was astronomically priced. So I went looking on the education marketplace to find my own insurance.

What I discovered was that Blue Cross/Blue Shield seemed a lot cheaper with better coverage. Figuring my health concerns would require the highest tier of service, I figured I’d be paying an arm and a leg (to keep my arms and legs), so I called up Blue Cross and decided to negotiate my way through it. The first person I spoke to was somewhat of a drip (and a drag). He wasn’t helpful at all, basically sounding like he was reading information off of some sheet and really not into assisting me. I hung up and figured I’d be screwed in the very near future because I probably wouldn’t have any coverage. In the midst of all this, I also explored alternative options like CBD/THC products to for pain relieve and stress to manage my health.

Later, I called back and I got a very nice woman who really seemed to know what she was talking about. She convinced me that the highest tier wasn’t beneficial to me, as one of the lower tiers, combined with the government incentives available to those in my wage bracket (for the easily fooled, attractive women reading this, that would mean “extremely wealthy and billionare-like”; for everyone else, it translates to “dirt poor and barely able to afford to feed his own stuffed animals”), would definitely be the route for me to take. With my deductible lowered big time because of the government incentive, it would make my savings over time even greater. Additionally, this website provides information on rehabilitation centers that can facilitate a quick recovery. Understanding the drug rehab cost can help in planning for potential health expenses and making informed decisions about rehabilitation options.

Into the first month of this coverage, I discovered one of the low points of this plan is prescription coverage (which with any non-generic drug forces me to pay full price, which also means far more money than anyone aside from Donald Trump might be able to afford). Feeling I’d probably end up either destitute, or dead soon because I can’t afford my medication, I saw my doctor, explained the dilemma, and she informed me that the pharmacy attached to the medical service where I see her actually has a contingency plan to deal with such circumstances. So, while it wasn’t free, I was able to get the drugs I needed that were overpriced through my regular plan.

The point is that sometimes you have to go through a little extra work to figure out the best solutions, and that not always is just “signing up for Obamacare” going to get you the results you need. Sometimes, you have to keep your eyes open and your ears listening to make sure that you’re able to find the deals that make your situation better.

Now, something else might come around the corner and make things difficult again, but so far, I’m seeing numerous lights at the ends of multiple tunnels, so as long as you keep moving forward, your chances of success are that much better.

It’s partly why I hate following politics any longer. I’m a political scientist, and I’ll admit that I hate politics so much. It’s rarely positive; it’s always about how someone else did something bad, and how bad everything is because the other guys are in office, in control, or behind the curtains. One of the things I teach on day one of every class’s semester is my perspective on how I teach the class, where I explain that we’re not going to be studying politics but something much simpler: Why do people do the things they do? I’ve been convinced that it explains politics far better than most of the theories I’ve studied over the years. People do things for reasons. Politics cloud those reasons, and once those clouds dissipate, things become a lot clearer.

Rising Above the Noise

Politics, Television, , , , , ,

governmentThere is an interesting conversation that has emerged because Russell Brand, the comedian/actor, decided to lash out at some interviewer on politics who held him to task for writing for a political magazine. The upshot, or the telling points, are that Brand purports to be an anarchist who doesn’t believe in the current system, doesn’t vote, and doesn’t feel that holders of the current system really have a lot of ground on which to hold him accountable for these thoughts. In today’s Salon, Natasha Leonard expands upon this and then adds the criticism that Brand is basically a misogynist who essentially started his article by stating that he only wrote it because a pretty woman asked him to do so.

Having read both the article and having watched Brand’s interview, my only thought is that I find it fascinating that the concept of ideological anarchy is getting some attention, but at the same time I’m somewhat dissatisfied that it had to be someone like Russell Brand who brought it to our attentions. You see, personally I can’t stand his humor, his movies and pretty much anything about him. Okay, I liked his choice in marriage, as he married Katy Perry, but then that just meant she wouldn’t marry me because she was married to him, so I’m not sure that counts as praise any longer. At least they divorced so she’s still available (once she gets over those extremely rich and famous other guys), but that’s another story.

As for politics, I agree with Brand that the system is rigged, which is basically his entire argument. You see, he doesn’t really have a well-thought out argument. He just has a couple of news bytes, and they’re not all that impressive. It’s like someone listened to an Occupy protest and then shouted out slogans that people wrote on signs. Much of his diatribe was a lot like that. Sure, it was well articulated, but it was basically much of the same.

And that’s the problem with anarchy because we’re always going to be seen as a bunch of yelling, Molotov cocktail throwing Neanderthals who don’t understand that money makes the world go round. Okay, we do understand that, but only because we’re stuck into a specific paradigm that never lets us forget it. And that, too, is another one of the problems.

There are a lot of great ideas out there that have been written down and spoken over the years by people much smarter than me. Many of them have been anarchists. Hell, Marx was an anarchist, if you really think about it. Of course, I’m referring to Harpo Marx, that anarchist-leaning Marx brother who just doesn’t seem to get enough respect.

But anarchy is one of those out there institutions that really gets little to no respect because it’s not something tangible we can put our hands on and say, if we do this set of things, we can move to a system of government that actually doesn’t allow us to have government any longer. We could do that if we all lived in Hobbesian times where we were all scared of our neighbors killing us in this brutal world we live in, but because Locke and Rousseau got to reexamine Hobbes through later lenses, we’re now stuck with a system of a state of nature that requires bartering, food stamps and industry to build very large explosives that will be dropped on other people who might want our food and food stamps (and possibly our bombs). In order to protect the land barons of yesterday, we built industry barons of the day before yesterday, and now we coordinate technology barons who gives us access to our own information so we can reconnect with the people who live down the hall from us, but we’re too lousy to leave the apartment and knock on their doors.

Which brings me to diatribes on anarchy. There was a lot Brand and Leonard both said that is both significant and important. But no matter how much you listen to what they have to say, you’re still left with an overwhelming sense of despair, brought on by the fact that getting to there from here is a lot like walking through muddy waters, without  Chicago blues to back you up. People are really good at talking the game of anarchy or lack of government, but not too many people are really good at being able to envision just how you get from where we are now to a state of perfection (if that’s argued to be someone’s ideal). However, Leonard makes a great argument in that if someone has a parasitic creature on its face, telling that person that he needs to explain what creature he’d replace it with is not a question that should be asked, rather than just offering to get rid of the creature. The same thing can be said for a government system and economic infrastructure that are both not working. The answer that its defenders want is “what would you replace it with” when what anarchists are really saying is “get rid of it first, and we’ll figure out what should replace it later”. Democracy fans (or even monarchists and totalitarian fans) don’t like the absence of government as a state of being in order to deal with the removal of a parasitic government instead, which is why they’ll keep asking “what will you replace it with” when anarchists want that answer to be “nothing” or “anything you haven’t tried yet”.

And that’s where the complication of anarchy and not-working government comes to a head. Our system hasn’t worked for many years now.. I’m not even talking abou the dysfunction between two overpowered parties that stopped serving the mass needs of most citizens a long time ago either. I’m talking about how those two parties stopped serving the mass needs of citizens a long time ago. I don’t care that they can’t get along. I don’t care that they hate each other. I care that both of them have zero problem enabling themselves off of the system and making themselves filthy rich while pretending to be doing it in the name of the people. We should have seen the warnings when CEOs argued that corporations should get citizenship but shouldn’t have to pay the penalties that are enacted against actual citizens when they do wrong or illegal acts. It’s why major corporations cheat, steal and basically take actions that kill people, and there’s no ramification that causes any of their executives to do anything other than hire a PR team that only responds when too many people start to think they’re doing bad things and stop buying their products. If I’m part of a corporation that kills tens or hundreds of people with my industrial waste that helped my stockholders profit greatly, the only payback that might occur will probably involve fines (at worst) and possibly very weak future oversight. Me, personally, I’ll be free to do it again, and probably wouldn’t lose my job or position, and if I got away with enough, I’ll probably be promoted (or put somewhere with even more responsibilities because I’m seen as someone who can get things done).

That is what a lot of the complaints have been about, but no one really seems to care. Instead, we watch reality TV, worship movie and TV stars,, allow media conglomerates to take over the media industries that report our news, and we become dumber and dumber. And when someone rises above the dumb level of conversation and says something, we marginalize that person and make sure no one else listens to him or her again. If I was a comedian, this would actually be funny. But even our bad comedians, when they say this stuff, aren’t listened to, so what chance do I have to be heard above the noise?

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

Politics, Television, , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Why Politicians Do The Things They Do

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Little Brucoe knows exactly why politicians do what they do. They want to hug him because he's so cute.
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 World Is Going to Die Again and It’s Up To Me to Stop It

Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

star-wars-darth-vader-senseSome years ago, when I was doing graduate school, I used to have to judge speech competitions between different colleges and universities. It was mostly fun, but one event I hated more than anything else was persuasive speaking, which boiled down to ten minute speeches that pretty much blamed the audience for a problem that was destroying the world and how each audience member was now responsible for fixing whatever was wrong. It would go something like: “Evil pharmaceutical companies are making drugs that are hooking people on curing symptoms rather than the actual problem itself. This is really bad, and YOU must do something about this to make things better.” And usually they’d mention my responsibility was now to contact my congressman, start a letter writing campaign, stop taking drugs, or whatever. But it always came back on me.  I was the solution.

Well, I never bought that. In that scenario, pharmaceutical companies, doctors and insurance companies are the cause. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: They don’t give a rat’s ass what I think about it. They’re not going to stop because I tell them they need to stop. My congressman is not going to tell them to stop because I told him to do so. And if I’m taking pharmaceuticals to keep myself from dying of diabetes, chances are pretty good that I’m not going to just stop taking my medication because it makes some hippy kid in college feel better about himself/herself in that he or she got back at big bad pharma by delivering a speech condemning them.

Which brings me to Noam Chomsky. It seems that Noam has a diatribe about how something’s wrong with America, and how Americans need to stop doing what Americans do and somehow fix the world. Sounds great. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, Noam. The people who are contributing to the problem aren’t Americans. It’s the corporations that own Americans, their media and their legislators. Sure, “Americans” can change their ways and make things better, but they won’t, mainly because the ones that need to do the actual work don’t give a rat’s ass about the people who are being hurt. They only care about the profits. And as long as both political parties are part of the profit process, they’re not going to care either. Which means, NO ONE will do anything to make a difference.

And that’s the problem right there. Much like some freshman in college, Noam somehow thinks that shaming the average American citizen is somehow going to get that average American to take up his cause and somehow make things better, much like those underwear gnomes who claim 3 steps to profit, with step two detailed out as “????”. It’s a great sentiment, but in case Noam doesn’t know this, he has much more financial clout than I have, a much louder voice that people listen to, and so many more opportunities to make a difference. Yet, until I just read his article in Salon.com, I haven’t heard a peep from him about practically anything. Being a professional complainer might be fun, but it isn’t any more capable of making a difference than sitting in the basement and playing a full night of World of Warcraft. If you want to make a difference, you actually have to do something, not just complain about things that are wrong.

The real problem with America is that Americans are now to the point where they just don’t care. The problems we’ve created are so large and looming that it’s easier to watch American Idol and hope that the people we elected are smart enough to get the big things done. The dilemma is that the people we elected aren’t capable of solving these things. They’re not even capable of running the government so it doesn’t collapse on itself, forcing us into recessions, depressions and sequesters. Those are the people we’re looking to in hopes of making things better.

Right now, we have a large percentage of Americans who are more concerned about having a job tomorrow than they are about whether or not global warming is going to destroy a farm in Kenya. We should be concerned that North Korea and Iran are gravitating towards nuclear weapons, but we’re more frightened of being caught on the wrong side of town when it gets dark, because now gangs run freely in certain areas without any fear of being harassed by the police. We should care about the economies of small countries that have people in destitution, but when the majority of western wealth is held in the hands of less than 1 percent of the population and that the local police receive assurances from the Supreme Court that they’re not required to actually protect the people they serve rather than the government that hired them, there’s more of a problem that Noam isn’t going to come close solving because he’s as out of touch with the bigger picture as those who he complains about.

So how do we make things better?  Simple. Make people care. But we don’t do that well because the organizations that do that are all about focus issues that are funded by lots of money. Not surprisingly, there’s no money behind “cleaning up the streets”, “putting people to work so they don’t join gangs”, or even “separate the 1 percent from the majority of the money.” When we do care and create movements like Occupy Wall Street, we ridicule these people and act like they’re inconveniencing us instead. To that, I don’t have a solution because unlike others, I’m willing to admit I’m just as much a part of the problem as anyone else. No one else seems to care, so it becomes so hard to try to care myself. As a matter of fact, it’s exhausting.

So, next time someone writes an article about what WE need to do, my first thought is “what are YOU doing first?” Quite often, the person hasn’t really thought it through, or more likely, hopes you just won’t figure that out.

Boss: A Show Designed to Make You Hate Politics

Politics, Television, , , , ,

I’ve recently been watching the first season of the television show Boss, which stars Kelsey Grammer, the guy who used to play Frasier. The show is one of those paid television episodic soap operas that involves Grammer as a guy named Tom Kane, who happens to be the mayor of Chicago. As you would expect, a show about Chicago’s inner government is going to be one about the Democratic Party’s control of the city, and as might also be expected, it’s also about the serious corruption of Chicago itself.

Now, I could go on a huge bent about politics and how I suspect the show might actually be written by Republicans who hate Chicago and Chicago-style politics, but I’m suspecting that’s not the case. But rather that it’s designed by people who just hate politics and love to throw mud all over the place and laugh at how well it sticks to everything.

A quick run down of the premise: Tom Kane is dying of some degenerative disease, so he has to keep it a secret from practically everyone. At the same time, as the Mayor of Chicago, he’s probably the most corrupt individual to run a city since, well, honestly I don’t know someone as corrupt as this guy in the whole of history. Caligula comes to mind, but even Caligula seems like a nice guy compared to Tom Kane. As we quickly find out, Kane screws over his closest allies, his enemies, his wife, his daughter, a nurse caring for his father in law, union members, the city of Chicago, cities near Chicago, his own senior adviser, his own senior propagandist, and…well, you probably get the idea that there’s not a person Kane wouldn’t screw over if you gave him enough time.

In a show like this, you’re bound to find some characters to care about to juxtapose against the evil Tom Kane, but honestly, there’s not a single one. His department head is probably the closest to someone you’d like or respect, but at the same time this guy has no problem hiring people to beat up other people, or just kill them. And this is literally one of the good guys. Kane’s female assistant (I guess she’s a deputy mayor, although I suspect “sex object” is part of her job description as well) is a beautiful blond woman who has zero problem sleeping with Kane’s new project, a guy running for governor under Kane’s umbrella. I guess we’re supposed to feel some compassion for her as she screws the governor candidate over and over again, even though the guy is married and screwing pretty much anything that moves. I guess she’s the jilted woman on the show?

Speaking of the blond woman and the governor candidate: Look, I’m not a prude or anything. I like a good sex scene here and there, but my god, this show has so much sex going on that at one point I felt I had to pause the playback and seek out a priest to confess. And I’m not even religious. Look, I understand the girl is attractive and foolishly chose “will appear nude” in her contract, but my god, I’ve seen her have sex more times in one season than I honestly think I’ve had my entire life. And I had a good run. I almost fear whenever the two actors end up in the same room together because panties are going to slide off, his shirt’s going to go flying off, and we’ll have porn for the next five minutes.

Anyway, as I was saying, I couldn’t find myself caring about a single character on the show. They’re all a bunch of scumbags that I’d vote out of office the first moment I got a chance. And that’s every politician on the show. It doesn’t matter if they’re with Kane or against him. There’s not a single one that doesn’t look like he or she came from the same crappy cloth as Kane did. They’re all on the take, taking what’s on the take, or just evil, bad people.

You might say it gives a watcher the sense that anyone in politics is a crappy person and not worth respecting.

Part of me wants to say I dislike the show, but it’s got that certain quality that comes to people who are transfixed by an out of control train wreck. You can’t stop watching, even though you’re convinced you’re completely wasting your time and energy.

So, I finished the first season and am apprehensive about season two. There’s only so much corruption and sex I can take in an hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When you’re blind-sided by religion in class

Education, Religion, , , , , ,

The other day I was teaching a public speaking class where the students were required to interview another student and then present a two minute speech about that person. All was going well until one of the introductions of a student indicaated that he was a member of a religion that’s been around the US for a long time but is mostly unknown to most people who don’t follow religious news, or are just not very cognizant concerning theology. One student asked what that religion was, and the student tried to respond by not getting into a conversation about religion. However, the questioning student continued, trying to get more information, essentially putting the original student on the spot to have to explain his religion to a group of people who knew nothing about it.

The one thing I could see was that he was very uncomfortable talking about his religion in front of class (the student who interviewed him had only mentioned it as an aside, saying she was exposed to it for the first time when talking to the student and was more intrigued than anything else, and then she moved onto another subject). So, as this student tried to explain quickly and without any elaboration, the asking student still continued to want to know more information.

What I found interesting from the exchange was that the questioning student appeared to be more interested in talking about the religion because it didn’t fit his understanding of Christian religions (although it actually was one of the more Baptist variety). It almost felt like this was about to turn into a “explain your religion so I can see if I approve of it” converation, although there’s no way to know that was the direction it would have taken. Fortunately, the discussion ended quicky, and then we went onto another group of students. At least before it became too uncomfortable.

This reminded me of the many political science courses I’ve taught over the years where one student is an outlier from a completely different political philosophy than everyone else. It is so easy to make just one student very uncomforable, which is something that most educators are supposed to learn is never acceptable. Over the years, I’ve taught courses where I try to take the middle ground of a group presenter/moderator rather than someone with a political opinion. What usually happens is a select few students start to suspect I’m politically opposed to their personal philosophy because they always seem to notice when I’m not siding with their side and giving conversation time to a side they might not agree with (when in reality, they haven’t a clue that my philosophy is so out of the mainstream that they’d be hard pressed to actually try to guess it if they were put on the spot to do so).

Religion is one of those scary topics because no matter how hard you try to avoid it as a conversation, someone always manages to try to pull it back in and then tries to put you on the spot to engage the topic. Students generally feel more comfortable when they can back a professor into a boxed corner. Why? I haven’t a clue. But I find that happens way too much.

For that class, we managed to avoid a political/religious issue that seemed to want to take the stage, which tells me it will likely happen again. All I remember is when I was in class instead of standing up in front of the class, and so many professors took the bait and allowed their classes to become very uncomfortable for a lot of students. What’s amazing is that administrators NEVER discuss this with professors as to how the college/university stands on such issues, so you’re generally on your own until some administrative body decides you took the wrong approach (and then they fire you).

The funny thing is: Even though my class was a success that day, there’s really no way to tell if you’re maintaining the peace as well as providing the correct education. It’s almost a continuous series of trial by error moments that you hope is helping to provide the best education to all involved.