Tag Archives: Government

I’m Confused About the End of the War in Iraq

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Okay, maybe I’m just not all that adept when it comes to military things. Let’s discount the military background I actually have, the numerous degrees and my fascination with girls who shoot guns for a moment so I can somehow understand what’s really going on here. Some time ago, the actual ground battle stopped in Iraq, which is why the bombs stopped dropping, the soldiers stopped invading and the airplanes stopped flying nonstop combat missions. So, somewhere after that we started walking around the country and getting fired at by civilians, or terrorists, or Imperial stormtroopers working for the Empire, or whatever, and we were, um, fighting?

Now, we’re going to stop fighting, turn the mission over to the Iraqis and then go home? Oh wait, we’re not going home. We’re going to hang out in barracks and do nothing? But why do I have this feeling that we’re still going to get daily counts of Americans dying while sitting around in the barracks?

What exactly is changed? Or changing? Is the war really “over”? Or are we just looking for something to sound good so we can say it’s over?

I’m really confused about this because I don’t think anything’s really going to change other than a different president is is charge who promised the end of hostilities in Iraq, so he’s telling us it’s over, but we’re still going to be there in the same exact places where the enemy is firing at us on a daily basis. Or am I wrong? I mean, I could be. What do I know about such things anyway?

I really hope it means good things, but I just don’t understand what it means other than a change in rhetoric. Are the al qaeda guys listening to rhetoric? Or are they too busy trying to kill Americans?

I apologize for being confused here. It’s like I turned into a season of Stargate only to find out that I missed an entire season while playing World of Warcraft every day instead, so I don’t understand why there are strange people on the show. Can someone get me up to speed? Or should I just go back to playing WoW?

The Complexities of Government in the 21st Century

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I know this is going to sound a bit strange, but I got the idea for this post from watching a really low quality science fiction tv series imported from the BBC. The show is called Survivors (not Survivor as in the really stupid reality TV show about tribes on an island). The premise is that some kind of virus has killed most of the people in the world, and a very few people are now amongst the survivors. The story is told from the main perspective of two women (one formely very wealthy and the other somewhat dirt poor). The two women hook up somewhere around the third episode, and slowly they are traversing the outskirts of London looking for some way to survive.

The wealthy woman seems to have come to a conclusion about what needs to be done for the future, and this came from some old geezer guy who was maintaining a vigil at the school where her son was last seen (her son becomes the motivation for her to seek out any attempts to find him). The old man, realizing he’s too old to really do any “surviving” tells the rich woman, Abby that long term survival isn’t going to come from hoarding the stuff that’s left but in the ability of the survivors to reinvent the old days of basic manufacturing. An example the guy uses is that in order to build a table you not only need wood that was cut down from a tree, but you need to be able to make the ax you used to cut it down because eventually the supply of axes and tools will break and run down, meaning that we have to be able to make this stuff again. The victors will be the ones who relearn how to do such things so that we’re not just scavengers but producers as well, so that the future of humanity is not just gathering but creating as well. Well, Abby takes up this idea and pretty much tells everyone she comes across that this is needed for the future, and she becomes very convincing as a future leader for whatever institutions they create.

This doesn’t really resonate until they hit about the third episode when she comes across a former parliamentarian who has taken it upon himself to rebuild “society” by claiming control over certain sections of the local area. If you want to scavenge supplies from abandoned stores, you need to go through him and his goons, and quickly you start to realize that in all of the talk that they have about saving civilization, they are really just another version of lazy government officials who have taken it upon themselves to take control because they got there first, and everyone else is pretty much at their beck and call. Abby fights against this and decides to go it alone with her little ragtag group of people, and suddenly you start to see the beginnings of class and political struggle that results, and the reality the story shows is that no matter how much you try to avoid it, you’re forced into that paradigm one way or another.

Which caused me to start thinking about the moral that this story has to be telling to those of us who are living in civilized society where a virus hasn’t wiped out government yet. As I talk about from time to time, somewhere down the line we surrendered power to people who have had their hands on the reigns ever since. Sure, we can believe that we can “vote” them out, but in reality we have little ability to change anything because the vast numbers necessary to make a difference are practically insurmountable and incapable of being obtained. As Mancur Olson points out, we can get a lot of people to rally together for a cause, but once we get them together, there’s little way to keep them motivated on the end game, and even worse, as is pointed out by me, once you have those numbers of people gathered together, there’s no telling what they’re going to do on a whim. Look at the protests that took place during the first Gulf War that happened in San Francisco. At one point, there were thousands of people gathered in the streets; the next, people were climbing the railings of the Bay Bridge, disrupting traffic and getting arrested while doing absolutely nothing for the movement but everything for their critics. Look at the protests that took place in Berlin in the 1990s. People wanted to get together to protest the harsh conditions and the rumors that were circulating about future freedoms. The result: They tore down the wall and ended communism in East Germany overnight. All it took were random people throwing rocks and bricks before things went completely out of control. In Berlin, that was great for freedom. In Czechoslovakia decades earlier, it was disastrous as the government responded by opening fire on the crowds and arresting anyone who dared to protest such treatment.

Yet, there’s a problem that has emerged in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century that no one is addressing, and that’s that people are no longer quiet peasants who are uneducated and willing to do whatever the forces of power tell them to do. We’re seeing all sorts of random violence taking place all across the world at government summits and economic meetings where people are angry and no longer willing to just sit on the sidelines waiting for crumbs of information from those in the know and those in power. There are powder kegs all over the world that are waiting to explode, and some already have, yet we see these as isolated incidents and pay little attention to them. Partly because we aren’t concerned, and partly because I think a lot of people want to hope that such events do not lead to horrific futures that they refuse to imagine.

People often see the Obama victory for the wrong reasons. So many people want to see it as a refutiation of the Bush Administration, as if the country wised up and “threw out the bums”. Yet, these same people seem shocked when the masses are going through the motions of throwing out government officials from Obama’s side. To them, none of this makes sense and appears to point to a public that is unsure of what it wants. But a logical mind can look at these incidents and realize that something very simple is taking place: The masses are reacting against pretty much all authority and showing its dissatisfaction with anyone who is in power.

Unfortunately, this is just a placebo that will work only long enough for people to realize that throwing some people out of office will only strengthen the ones that manage to stay in, and even worse, create a new group of cronies who will quickly grow into the types of people the masses don’t want in power. The masses can only get angry for so long before one of two things happens: Things REALLY change, or they take their anger out in other ways. The first alternative is the best course, but it hasn’t ever happened that way, and it isn’t happening that way. Lobbyists still control government in the shadows, and as long as they continue to do so, and the rich continue to use government to enrich themselves as the expense of the public, then the first alternative will never happen. Oh, we can hope for it and pretend it’s working, but convincing ourselves is not the same as convincing the angry masses who aren’t easily appeased with government cheese handouts and pretending that a loss of jobs is really an uptick in jobs because we turned the statistics chart upside down and said all is well. The second alternative is the dangerous one, and if things go that way, there is no going back to the first alternative because once things start moving down that road, they don’t stop. And there is no controlling events either because once things start to go into anarchy, only the gods of anarchy can be appeased, and they are appeased by chaos and uncertainty.

Could make for an interesting future.

The Problem for the Future Might Not Just Be the Government

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As an advocate of free speech and very (extremely) limited government, I’m often talking about the problem of government control and its intrusive nature. For those like me, we’re often seeing the future as a variation of “1984” and fear the process of new-speak and Big Brother. But one thing that has emerged over the latter part of the 20th century and into the early part of the 21st century is the revelation that the problem may not be coming from big government, but from big business. This is somewhat ironic, or tragic, because most people who tend to advocate for less government are usually big fans of privatization and the freedom of business interests. But what has happened is that big business is slowly usurping big government as the entity we most need to fear.

Look at Microsoft, Google and Facebook for examples of what I’m talking about. Microsoft won the operating system wars by dogmatic policies and, as some lawsuits would have you believe, through some pretty crappy business practices involving monopolies and claims of stolen innovations. Whether or not there’s any truth in that latter claim, I don’t really care about, but what arguments can be made is that by having huge monopolies of this nature, we’ve really made it practically impossible to innovate in new directions because dogmatic companies just don’t let you do that.

But to make matters worse, these types of companies are now going out of their way to innovate their own successes on the backs of most of their customers. Facebook, lately, has shown itself to be a behemoth that no longer cares what people think as it buys and sells our own personal information, and it laughs at us if we think what they’re doing is wrong in any way. I love their procedure for dealing with you when you decide to quit them. Instead of actually allowing you to delete your account, they “allow” you to “deactivate” your account so that they can still use your information and treat you as one of their products rather than one of their customers. To ACTUALLY delete your account, you have to go through a four or five click process to finally reach a page that then informs you that it will take 2 weeks to delete your account, as if the owners of Facebook realize that you’re being rash and hotheaded, so they’ll give you some time to think about it before they’ll allow you to make the “mistake” of leaving. Even when you deactivate your account, they make you feel so guilty about it, reminding you that if you should dare to deactivate your account, you will no longer be able to communicate with your friends, your wife, your loved ones or your family EVER again.

The biggest problem with some of these companies is that they buy and trade our own private information as if it is their own. And read the legalese they make you click and agree to before you ever access their pages. THEY OWN YOU and your information, and you’re only living in THEIR worlds. That’s really how they feel about it.

Lately, there has been a new movement to pretty much dump Facebook because of their unilateral strategies in ownership of information. The backlash has been a claim of “if you don’t continue with Facebook, then you can never communicate with anyone ever again”. It’s straight out arrogance and stupidity, but people fall for it.

What we used to fear was government becoming too powerful, which is why we made rules of what government could and could not do. But private enterprises don’t have this same type of hold on it, unless you count the government itself. Right now, Congress is looking into a number of these different large companies to stop their approaches to ownership over data and information, but these companies are doing an amazing thing as a response: They’re appealing to citizens and acting as if government is using its power to stop them from donig what is their right to do, which essentially means they are upset that government is stopping them from doing to us exactly what we wanted to make sure government could never could do to us. The irony is that because they’re not government, they think it’s okay that they get to do things that we would never allow government to do.

As big businesses are becoming more aligned with the wants and needs of government, and often use government to back up their plans (police agencies have always responded to the needs of large businesses before they respond to the common folk), this collusion may one day reach a point where we are going to find ourselves being detained by government at the behest of these organizations. Recently, when Gizmondo printed a story about the new iPhone, the government raided their offices and took all of their computer equipment. No one knows who pulled the government’s strings on that as Apple claims it was the individual who lost the iPhone, while many others claim it had to have been Apple because the government agencies involved then went silent when questioned further.

It might not be something people realize is a problem just yet, but when it becomes a problem that everyone notices, it will then be too late. But when has that ever caused anyone to be proactive about one’s own rights and responsibilities?

The US Government’s Problem with the Census

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There was another article today about how the Census is trying to target students to fill out their census cards because of the “need”. Every time there is an article of this nature, there is this commentary on how the census is necessary because without it our areas lose funding for roads, schools and all that. But here’s the problem that the government keeps running into: The information they’re asking has nothing to do with funding for roads, schools and all that. The questions they are asking are personal, have more to do with personal demographics, and because of that, have a tendency to cause people to become more pissed off the more they look at the questions.

Look, if the government was asking people about where they lived and ended it at that, I’m sure the majority of people would probably have very little problem with it. But they want to know my ethnicity, race, how much money I make, and questions of that sort of nature. The questions they are asking are identity questions, not accountability questions, and that causes people to start getting suspicious because those are the questions that are usually asked when a governmental entity is trying to pry.

If I answer “white”, “Native American” or “race of the Avatar people, even though I never saw the movie so I don’t really know what planet they’re from”, how does that make a difference in the money that my county is allocated for road repairs? Do we get more money if we have more Avatar-race people? Do we get less? That’s the question that hasn’t been answered once by the government, yet every public relations campaign is all about how important it is that people return their Census information cards.

And then you get the loonies, like Glen Beck, who claim you shouldn’t fill out any information at all, except for your address, because Constitutionally, that’s all the government is really supposed to be able to ask. That sounds fine until you read most articles that cover these sorts of stories; it usually has a mention that if you only put that information in, SOMEONE is going to come to your house to get the rest of the information, that you are legally obligated to answer the questions. And believe it or not, that pisses people off.

From a rational choice perspective, meaning people do what’s easiest and most logical, someone who feels uneasy about giving out so much information to the government (for whatever reason) is going to choose to not return the card because then there’s not GUARANTEE that someone is actually going to come out and strong arm a citizen for the “required” information.

Part of the problem is that the media has been in cohoots with the government on this due to the tin foil hat syndrome that seems to follow the issue. Think about that for a second. Whenever the government claims that some nut case is protesting the Census, the media laughs and talks about how people are just being paranoid. But is it really paranoia if the rationality behind the Census doesn’t make a lot of sense to people? What the government is having to deal with these days is a public that doesn’t feel represented any more. And that’s dangerous. We have congressional leaders that represent their own best interests, not the interests of the people they are supposed to be representing. Historically, the census mainly affects those people. It decides what districts get more people to represent; it doesn’t give people more representation. The people representing them are still elites, and unfortunately, changing the sheets still maintains the same elite status for the power structure that is still in place.

If you wanted to attract people to the Census, you might want to find some way to make the government more representative, but that’s never been a thought every ten years. We haven’t increased the number of representatives for many decades now, and there are no plans to do so in the immediate future. So we’re mixing up the marbles even further and allowing the elites to change their colors every ten years without really affecting the membership of the elite club.

So, when some formerly unemployed guy knocks on my door every ten years and flashes a badge that he won’t be able to wear after the Census is over, I have a hard time thinking that he’s representing me when he does so. He doesn’t even represent himself. He’s representing a power structure that has been in place for a very long time that justifies itself by pretending that it’s working for us, when it’s really working for itself. To be honest, the only positive thing about the Census is that if I don’t turn in my card, someone gets employed for three months because someone needs to come out and question me. Otherwise, the only benefit of the Census is that the people in power are then told to “represent” different lines on a map, even though they will still be in power.

I’ll leave you with my usual criticism of Census government because it mirrors my other pet peeve of stupid people who always pop up whenever it comes to representation. I’m talking about the people who always vote who then comment: “If you don’t vote, you don’t have a right to complain.” This is one of those statements that makes a huge assumption that voting actually makes a difference rather than causes one to choose between two already predestined outcomes that were chosen for us in the first place. I’ll say this again: Voting does not equal democracy. Lottery equals democracy, but John Adams decided to ignore the lottery portion of democracy when he was putting the big plan together some odd 200 years ago. He liked the democracy part of Athens; he just didn’t like the part that completed the equation.

Anyway, I’m ranting now. Time to take my medication that makes it all seem better again.