The war to end all wars

One hundred and two years ago, in July of 1914, the first tendrils of the flame which would become known as The War to End All Wars were sprouting. It was not an accurate name, later it was referred to as the first World War, even before we started numbering them, because it was recognized the world was at war. About 4600 years earlier, the first recorded war, the Battle of Ur, involved the world of the time. There is little doubt there were wars before that, the desire to write was never as strong as the desire to kill.

Humans have always been at war with each other, there have been more than one hundred major conflicts since the War to End All Wars. It can be difficult to tell when one ends and another begins, the “first World War” began as a conflict between Serbia and Croatia, which continues today despite numerous “peace treaties.” The latest spark being when the cases each had against the other for genocide were dismissed in February 2015. The Prussian military analyst Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831), in his book On War, calls war “a continuation of politics carried on by other means;” the Serbians and Croates always seem to find those means so something should be happening over there soon. And in Syria, The Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Israel, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya, and The United States of America.

Yes, I am hearing the call here in the states. Credible calls which I shall not spread less I be accused of sedition. Hatred and mistrust is at an all time high in the states, look at a political candidate, the one who you won’t vote for, and realize that person’s supporters feel the same way as you. Their candidate has been unfairly vilified, the process was rigged against them, there are multiple conspiracies against them, and the other (your) candidate is the worst being to ever cobble together 46 chromosomes.

I am quite accustomed to hearing young people talk about revolution. I refrain from laughing out loud, they are often passionate, but direct action has no safe spaces.  When our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they said “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” They understood the meaning of their words, they had lives, fortunes, and honor to pledge. The rumblings I am hearing today come from such people.

Recent events have been disturbing. Using a variety of ruses, the Bill of Rights has been under attack. In California, a law criminalizing speaking against climate change failed to pass, but the Department of Justice is considering civil actions to bypass the first amendment. The second amendment is dying the death of a thousand infringements. The third amendment, prohibiting forced quartering of soldiers, is in question in a case arguing that forcing land owners to allow government designated endangered species habitat is a violation. The fourth amendment has been all but overruled by the NSA. The fifth and sixth amendments, guaranteeing due process and listing rules of evidence and testimony, have been bypassed not only with drone strikes enforcing the death penalty against uncharged American citizens, but also in calls to use “no fly lists,” secret documents compiled without evidence, as reasons to deny second amendment rights. The seventh amendment, guaranteeing a speedy trial by jury, has not applied to the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay or victims of countless other renditions, both within the continental United States and elsewhere. The eighth amendment, protecting against cruel and unusual punishment, was saved by a filibuster, narrowly preventing drone strikes on American soil. They are currently used on foreign soil to avoid renditions, which can cause bad public relations; better to kill than imprison. The ninth and tenth amendments have simply been ignored, as the federal government created new rights, sometimes (as in the case of Same sex marriage) overruling the voice of the people who passed contradicting laws by referendum. The president has scoffed at separation of powers with his statements of “I have a phone and a pen,” essentially saying “I can do whatever I want, nah nah nah.” The corruption revealed in the FBI and DOJ deny our intrinsic faith in the rule of law, and in any power the Constitution might still hold. Rules are meaningless without enforcement.

The calls for rebellion have many sources, the tinder already glowing. The first war encompassing the world started with a botched assassination in Sarajevo, the American revolution was sparked by a tax on a breakfast beverage.

The horns are blowing with the winds of change.

 

 

 

Beware of Darkness

Watch out now, take care
Beware of soft shoe shufflers
Dancing down the sidewalks
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
Beware of Maya

 

 

This happens to be my favorite recording of this song, Leon Russell’s verse stands out as a life lesson in itself. File this under “Are you listening yet?”

But this article is not about George Harrison or Leon Russell, maybe a little bit about Bangladesh, but not in a direct way. Today I write about Maya, as I do most of the time. The veneer which many accept as reality.

Our National leaders are a measure of the consensus of gullibility. When Obama was elected his charisma was palpable. For those of us who have experienced cult behavior, the parallels of his blind followers and the Jonestown Massacre were frightening. As the years passed, most intelligent people have been able to see him for what he is, a deluded puppet with no understanding of politics, leadership, or the Constitution of the United States. Unfortunately, intelligent people are a minority.

How he was re-elected at the point his approval rating was at an all-time low astounds me, and as polls show his increasing irrelevance (those who “strongly approve” of his performance decreasing while those who “strongly disapprove” rising) they also indicate the polarization he has reintroduced to American society.

For some reason, the adage “Politicians lie” is accepted by an increasing number of people, the more disturbing subtext is the number of people who don’t care that politicians lie. Obama’s inability to accept the responsibilities of the office he holds has me fuming this morning. In two years and four months he’ll be gone, but it appears he intends to do as much damage as possible before he goes.

A man who is so widely accepted by his followers as being incredibly intelligent has been able to use the “I didn’t know about that” defense for years. I take that as an indication that his followers are equally uninformed, as anyone with a passing familiarity of the subjects he has claimed ignorance about knew more than he claimed to know. One would assume that during his daily intelligence briefings he picked up more than golf tips. I guess that’s the down side of having followers who believe anything you say, being honest becomes unnecessary.

In case you’ve been playing golf for the last couple of years, there is a group who call themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” abbreviated as ISIS, ISIL, IS, and also known as “those freaking bloodthirsty maniacs” by almost everyone else on the planet. When Al Qaeda calls a group “too extreme,” they might be worth tracking. Somehow, a retired intelligence analyst in Princeton NJ is more aware of their threat than the President of the United States. I am certain his sources are better than mine.

He is not. The rise of ISIS, which began in Syria and flowed into Iraq over the last few years, was an absolute surprise to POTUS, the man who actually had wanted to support them over Assad last year. Rather than stating he underestimated them, he blames the intelligence community for not informing him of their fanaticism. He blames the CIA for overestimating the Iraqi army’s ability to fight ISIS. Who would have ever expected the army that surrendered to journalists in both 1991 and 2003 to actually fight radicals? A few lines from the film “Full Metal Jacket,” (Emma’s favorite) comes to mind, “I’ve got some ARVN rifles, never been fired and only dropped once”, and “yeah, I’ve seen plenty of the local troops, most of them were running the other way.”

A leader takes responsibility for his team. Six years into his term he is totally responsible for his advisers, yet he still blames failures on them instead of either admitting he wasn’t paying attention to them or he made poor choices in appointing them. I wish I could feel pity for this pathetic fool but right now all I feel is disgust. If you can’t trust your intelligence, try tuning into BBC, CBC, Al-Jazeera, or even your media pet CNN. How is it that the President of the United States is the only person on the planet that underestimated ISIS, and somehow that is the fault of his intel team?

Okay, maybe it’s a soft spot for me, Clinton decimated the intelligence community and then bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade due to bad targeting intel. The waves from Clinton’s purge still affect us today, it can take decades to build assets in societies that are closed to Westerners. But Bill Clinton did not blame the agency he had torn down for their subsequent failures, personally apologizing to Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Obama misses news that is available on the street corner and blames his intel sources? Is this why intruders keep “slipping by” the Secret Service, gaining access to the White House? Just wondering…

A friend had a saying when the Air Force was undergoing a “management overhaul,” in which officers were promoted based on their management skills. Carl would say “You don’t manage a man into battle, you lead.” Over the years the entire concept of “leadership” has devolved into “management.” I see it everywhere, but when the President stops being a leader and is just another manager, dodging responsibility and stealing the limelight from true achievers, the attitude spreads throughout society’s expectations of their leaders. It seems unlikely that our next President could be worse, but it is altogether possible considering what the American public will settle for.

I was just Skyping with Lieve, and she mentioned an incident in which a two year old ate some mushrooms, and had to be rushed to Lieve’s father with an uneaten mushroom so he could identify the species. The baby had been left under the supervision of his five year old sister, who was being berated for not watching the baby closely enough. If you think it is appropriate to make a five year old a babysitter, is it really the babysitter’s fault if something goes wrong?  Responsibility lies upon the top authority figure, in this case the Father, he made a foolish choice entrusting his baby’s safety to another child.

We, as citizens of the United States, are ultimately responsible for the performance of our elected officials. I didn’t choose Obama, but I accept my responsibility as a member of a democracy to accept his authority. I just wish my fellow Americans could accept their responsibilities in choosing a leader.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harboring fugitives

There was a discussion about immigration yesterday, or more precisely the harboring of fugitives. Because that is what it is. If someone has broken the law, they are a criminal. Until they are brought to justice, they are a fugitive. The gentleman today was speaking about how unjust it is to bring fugitives to justice.

We can use whatever terms we wish, and just like the toilet scrubber who believes they should be paid as much as the CEO, a criminal who is insulted by being called “illegal” is living in a fantasy. In my mind it would be best to start these conversation with “We are going to provide you with the same treatment your government would provide to me were I to overstay my welcome in your country”. If you are required to have documents which prove you have the right to be here, and you don’t have those documents, you have no right to be here.

But no, they say. You need us.

We really don’t. We don’t need eleven million people making up their own minds about what is and is not legal.  We abolished slavery one hundred and fifty years ago, but with a class of workers who dare not identify themselves to the Internal Revenue Service, slavery is once again a temptation for some people. The list of people who have been caught keeping slaves is populated mostly by Democrats, who had never wanted to get rid of slavery in the first place, but Republicans may just have enough sense to clean up before they make it to Washington. Here in lovely Princeton New Jersey, police have been instructed on how to not enforce the laws, because we wouldn’t want to leave a lawn without a cheap manicure, or distress a family by forcing them to seek a housekeeper or nanny who was trustworthy enough to have followed the immigration laws. Losing slave labor might cut into the boating budget.

Without slaves, we might have to hire Americans, and they would want to be paid minimum wage, and we would have to extend to them the protection of our labor laws. That could be expensive.

Which was, in effect, the argument put forward this morning. The cost involved in enforcing laws. In this case we were given the example of a man from Guatemala who had lived illegally in America for twenty two years. He was married and had children. He had a catering business (no information on how he managed to operate without legal tax documentation). And then the big bad immigration police scooped him up and deported him. “They didn’t even allow him to pack a bag and retrieve his favorite watch”.

He was shipped back to Guatemala, at an expense in time and resources of $12,500. Sounds like a deal. But wait, that’s not all it cost us, because if the polo club is going to have to go without sandwiches, you need to realize how much this will cost you. Not only did we have to pay for law enforcement officers, facilities, and passage to Guatemala, now you are stuck with supporting this criminal’s family. They’ve been left with nothing and are on public assistance now. They’ve lost their home, and now the American taxpayer has to support them because the family breadwinner was deported. Were you to apply the same story to another person it would be a tragedy, but this wasn’t another person, this was a criminal who was finally captured. I see no tears shed for murderers or drug smugglers who had their personal lives destroyed by being brought to justice. We used to say “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”. At least Tony Soprano hid money in the bird feeder to help his family were he ever arrested.

A woman spoke up with her situation. She identified herself as “undocumented” but claimed she wasn’t a criminal. She acknowledged the programs that have been put in place to assist immigrants in obtaining legal status, but stated she chose not to participate in them for fear once she was identified, were she unable to achieve citizenship she would be deported.

Just a moment while all the gun owners who are called paranoid because they fear registering their guns might result in those guns being confiscated laugh at the irony. She came all this way to live under a government she doesn’t trust.

She went on to say how much America needed cheap labor.

Just a moment while those McDonald’s workers demanding $15.00 per hour storm the podium. She came all this way to take one of those minimum wage jobs.

She spoke about her rights and the life she had built in America. Illegally. I couldn’t help but remember the kid arrested with a gram of cocaine complaining he had been punished enough with jail and fines so he should be given his drugs back.

You can call illegal immigrants “dreamers”, invoking the quest for the American dream, but that dream has been fulfilled for the generations of those who came to this country legally. If your dream is to start by violating immigration laws, you do not have the “American Dream”, your dream is of unearned benefits, a lifestyle you saw on television and assumed was reality.

If by odd chance you actually care about the welfare of an illegal immigrant, send them home. The DREAM act was designed to collect taxes from people who have little chance of ever obtaining citizenship (estimated length of time to citizenship after illegal entry, thirteen to twenty years; length of time for immigrants with legal entry, five to seven years). It applies to young people who will pay taxes and purchase health insurance, not to older people who might be relying on government assistance. It is a cold-hearted cynical approach to people who won’t realize they have been lied to until the liars are long out of office.

Allowing illegal aliens to infiltrate our society is more expensive than we acknowledge. The undermining of our faith in law enforcement is only the beginning. But if it can’t be measured in dollars, more importantly your dollars, you’re not likely to be upset. So you’re willing to “help out” the poor immigrant by paying him less than you would an American. Is that really help? Is looking the other way when an employer exploits illegal aliens helping the millions of Americans who depend on government assistance because they can’t find a job? Let’s not even go into the people who are not looking to enjoy our lifestyle, but rather destroy it. Terrorists love countries with lax immigration enforcement.

So today my wife and I travel to Elizabeth New Jersey, so she can be fingerprinted (again) to be sure she’s the same person she was when she applied for her green card, as she follows the path to citizenship that my ancestors followed in the past, and almost seven hundred thousand followed just last year. It’s not that difficult to play by the rules.

The path to citizenship

It’s not easy, if it was easy everyone would do it. It’s a hassle, it’s time consuming, but when it is completed you get to be an American. And if you think rednecks and conservatives are the only folks who dislike illegal immigration, ask a legal immigrant about it. That’s why most employees at Immigration are immigrants. They’re not letting anyone sneak through.

 

Motives

I try to be an open minded, understanding person. Really, I do. I’ve found that understanding someone’s motives can be instrumental in accepting their actions. Not forgiving or endorsing, but at least understanding well enough to follow the logic back to its source.

I find myself looking at both sides of an issue, which tends to allow me to be more fair in my appraisals. On the other hand, I also tend to expect the same balance in others, and have to soften my judgements of people with little or no insight. I’ve operated a business, so to me some functions appear obvious. A manager is responsible for his employees, therefore he should be interested in hiring people who can accomplish their jobs, which makes him look good to his managers, because he has proven himself to be a good judge of character, hiring people who assist in the business’s growth. It’s fairly obvious this is an outdated notion, operations continue to function with the absolute minimum of competence.

Society seems to be grinding down to its lowest common denominator, standards are lowered, making any drive for excellence whither. It’s disturbing and depressing, and the fact nothing can be done to change it makes it more so.  There is no way to change the tide.

We started with “Nobody’s perfect” and found we could justify any behavior with the phrase. No, nobody is perfect. But there are a lot of people who are ninety nine percent perfect, even more that are ninety five percent. When we start excusing the failures of people who are fifty one percent perfect by saying “Nobody’s perfect”, we fail to motivate those people to become fifty two percent.

It’s not just the people who think they should earn a “living wage” working at McDonald’s that fail to see a need to do better, it is seen in every strata of society.

There was a segment on the news last night about healthcare. As you probably know, hospitals bill ridiculous amounts. The reporter was shown on the phone with the hospital, trying to negotiate a bill, and said “who is looking out for these people?”. What is wrong with this picture? When did we become so feeble that we need to have someone looking out for us? Isn’t that entire “American Dream” concept centered on self reliance? Does thinking for yourself hurt so much that you just refuse to do it?

What comes from this? A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is driven by people who are either clever and trying to take advantage, or stupid and incapable. The trouble is telling them apart.

Ken Burns, the academy award winning producer of documentaries about America, is working on a project about the Gettysburg Address. Every American child memorized this speech in grade school, so we all know the words. It is a wonderful project, one of the more interesting components is a “mash-up“, a collage of different speakers reciting the Address. A grand show of unity.

“Unifying” is not the effect this project has had. In recording different celebrities, Burns allowed different versions of the well known speech to be used. In reality, the speech was given once, and the words were captured by journalists on the scene and transcribed in the New York Times. The words are engraved on the Lincoln Memorial. But due to the lack of photocopiers, Lincoln wrote the speech down on paper five times. There are differences in all five, the words “Under God” appearing in only three of them. The words “Under God” were spoken in Gettysburg, included in the transcript in the New York Times, engraved in stone in the Lincoln Memorial, memorized by every schoolchild, and included in Ken Burns’ “mash-up”, but for some reason the president of the United States decided to read a version that did not contain those words.

What was he thinking?

Immediately, right wing groups jumped on the omission as proof of his godless agenda. I personally don’t care if Obama is a closet Muslim, but last I checked they believe in God. Left wing groups defended Obama saying Ken Burns had specifically requested he read this version. Yes, he may be the president, but if Ken Burns asks…

What I know for certain is that more people have visited the project website, and learned about the Gettysburg Address, than ever would have without all the press the controversy has brought.

Clinton got away with playing stupid for eight years, Obama has worn the card thin in just five years. The latest play has been the suggestion that Edward Snowden should not be prosecuted, because without his information leaks Obama would have never known what the NSA was doing. He didn’t know what the IRS was doing, even after they admitted it. He didn’t know that you can’t build a website coordinating every branch of government with multiple private industries on a political timetable.

With his popularity at an all time low, and worse, his unpopularity at an all time high, it’s time to get serious. The flocks of Obama Zombies are thinning out, and although he won’t face another election, there will be other members of his party running for office in the future. In order for his programs to survive, Democrats will need to maintain at least a presence in Washington for the next decade, so if he wants a legacy other than “biggest fool on the hill”, someone needs to start thinking, no matter how much it hurts.

Medical costs

As most of the nation argues about Obamacare, a fair number of people are still getting sick. They still see a doctor and they still go to the hospital. Fewer people have insurance, with millions of policies cancelled only a few hundred thousand have been able to sign up for insurance through state exchanges and the national program.

Beyond all the discussion about what Obamacare might have done, there are a number of things it was never supposed to do. All Obamacare was supposed to do, if the dust ever settles, was to make insurance available. The point that gets argued is whether that insurance will actually be “affordable”, not whether it will cover all medical expenses.

Sure, these new insurance plans will have to cover you if you have a pre-existing condition, and they’ll cover a minimum of basic services, and with any luck, premiums will go down because everyone will be required to have insurance. The math doesn’t work, the influx of newly insured could never have offset all the new required coverage, but that’s how it was sold. Caveat emptor.

Anyone who’s ever had an insurance claim knows that insurance doesn’t pay for everything. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a government program knows that they never deliver what’s promised. So it appears that the great issue in Obamacare is expectations versus reality. Most of us know there is no way these new plans are going to do what they’re expected to do, and that we’ll be paying for the expectations of people who didn’t have insurance before, while risking the benefits we have today.

Presently, no one can be turned away from an emergency room due to lack of insurance, so that won’t be changing. Presently, some people don’t access healthcare as much as they should, that will change for a while. Until the bills start showing up. So for a while, emergency rooms and doctors offices will be packed, because nothing in Obamacare provides for more medical professionals.

I suspect there will be a large number of angry people, who, having spent hours waiting to see a physician, will not understand why they receive a bill. The concepts of deductibles and co-insurance will need to be absorbed by a large sector of society who have never heard of them before.

Nothing will change about billing procedures. An aspirin will still cost $125.00, a bed for the night $8,000, in addition to all those little extras like nurses and doctors, bandages, imaging, tests, and one use medical equipment like an IV, tubing, needle, tape to hold it in place, and a specialist to start the IV. And of course, the non-existent extras. When my daughter was four years old and needed a CT scan, the bill included $400.00 for a “prep and shave kit”.

Emma’s bills were high, but my insurance covered almost all of it. The hospital had procedures to make sure they collected as much as they could anyway. A week after Emma was diagnosed, we received a call from the billing department offering to assist us in applying for welfare. Not that welfare would have covered anything, but we would need to show that we had been turned down when we applied for bankruptcy. They had done this before and knew which boxes to check.

The bill for Emma’s first stay in the hospital came to $30,000.00. Two nights. That was just the hospital. Over the next few months we received bills from various departments, all based on that stay. That was one of the more annoying tasks, coordinating all the bills for the days of service. In just over one year, the total amount billed by the hospital was in excess of two million dollars.

The “incentive pay” for the CEO of the hospital was slightly more than that amount that year. This is another thing that will not change under Obamacare, and what I believe is the driver of excessive medical costs. Executive pay. Switzerland has just voted on a law that will limit the pay of executives to twelve times that of the lowest payed worker. The CEO can’t make more in a month than the lowest paid worker makes in a year (A CEO with employees earning $8.25/hr is limited to $198k a year). I’m sure that the lowest paid worker in the hospital made much less than a quarter of a million dollars that year.

Of our two million dollar bill, insurance paid about half a million dollars. I paid about ten thousand. The rest was written off. So the next time you hear about hospitals losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year to unpaid bills, remember that number is “potential” income, what the hospitals would make if bills were actually paid in full.

I can’t feel too bad for the healthcare industry, whose CEO compensation rates have risen more rapidly that healthcare costs. While the CEO of Emma’s hospital only made just over three million, the CEO of the insurance company made over twelve. Quite a few healthcare CEOs are in the top ten highest compensated, with the number one spot held by John H. Hammergren of McKesson, who made over one hundred thirty one million dollars in one year. Under Swiss law his lowest paid employee would earn almost eleven million dollars a year. Four times as much as the Hospital CEO.

Our “Health Care Reform”, AKA “Obamacare”, AKA “The affordable care act”, just gave these people millions of new customers. We are required by law to give them money, and they in turn are required to take it.

If we really want to reform healthcare, perhaps we should start a program like the Swiss. Of course there’s no way we could do it overnight, but maybe sliding introduction. Start with not for profit entities, like hospitals, and make insurance companies not for profits, maybe start out with a fifty two to one ratio rather than twelve to one, so that the CEO can’t make more in a week than his lowest paid employee makes in a year. That would still put the CEO of an operation that had minimum wage employees at around a million a year.

Capitalist that I am, I just can’t justify the individual incomes at the top of the scale. The contributions these people make to society don’t justify them and our economy can’t justify either. This is a cost we can address that will have direct impact on all the other costs down the line.

The gorilla in the room

Rated PG-13 for frankness

Gorilla, Elephant, Ass, whatever

You may be familiar with the term “Eight hundred pound Gorilla in the room” used as a simile. Maybe not, literacy is rapidly decreasing, and common phrases are often mangled beyond recognition. I have seen the words “It’s not rocket scientist” in writing, making it clear that the writer was indeed not a rocket scientist nor capable of rocket science, or even forming a grammatically correct sentence.

There is an alternate term about an elephant in the room. If you’ve been in a doctor’s waiting room you no doubt have seen the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine in which they used the simile to represent New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

Almost funny, certainly derogatory

Time magazine lost most of its credibility when it joined Warner Communications in 1989, subscriptions have dropped steadily since then as it has become a pretentious version of “People“. Vying for readership in waiting rooms across the country with such journalistic titans as “Highlights“, Time has come to depend on striking cover images to attract readers.

Cute, right? The elephant as a symbol of the Republican party, Christie as a poster child for morbid obesity, its all in fun, because of course no one takes Time seriously. Remember this cover?

Time for double standards

Of course not. Calling Obama a jackass would be disrespectful. Which brings us back to the gorilla.

How much time do you expect it would take the NAACP to don its hoods and robes and burn every document within Time Warner Communications if Obama was depicted as a gorilla? I seem to remember a fair amount of outrage when the simile was made of Rodney King.

The elephant, gorilla, jackass, or iceberg in the room is the double standards applied to journalistic integrity. In fact, the term “double standards” infers that there are standards, so let’s just cut through the bullshit here. Sycophancy hasn’t been so popular since brown shirts were in vogue.

Do not mistake the object of my disgust as being its propagators. When a society accepts, endorses, and makes profitable the unrelenting hypocrisy which twists the mores they claim to uphold into apologies for the willful disregard of basic human decency, that society is no longer a consumer of such trash, it is the manufacturer.

I present to you this example. Are you able to laugh at yourself?

There is a satirical news program, “The Daily Show“. The host, John Stewart, pokes holes in the rhetoric of groups all over the political spectrum. It is the one program I can laugh about every night. Segments of the program are routinely held up by the side that was not satirized. They routinely miss the point that both sides were satirized, seeing only what they want to see.

When “The Daily Show” covered the topic of this Time magazine cover, the story started with poking fun at Christie, displaying an “alternate cover” with the words “The elephant in the room” replaced with the words “The Fat Fuck in the room”. I’m willing to bet Christie found that hilarious, I certainly did. As the story progressed, Stewart delved into the disingenuous explanation by Time editors, claiming that the headline wasn’t insulting because it’s a common expression.Continuing with the editor’s logic, Stewart presented a cover of Time magazine showing a pile of dog feces, with the headline “Time is a steaming pile of shit”, saying “see, it’s just a common expression, I don’t really mean anything by it”. Equally hilarious.

People who chose to hold up only one of those “alternate covers” as some sort of evidence of their views being supported by “The Daily Show” miss the point. Yes, Chris Christie is overweight, but that has no more to do with his ability to govern than the color of his skin. Yes, Time magazine is a parody of a once great publication, but they are in no way unique.

If we cannot discuss our differences without being insulted or insulting each other, we will just remain different and insulted. If you can’t support your opinion, it really isn’t your opinion then, is it? So don’t be a jackass, ignorance is nothing to be proud of.

Dutch political poster. “Believe no poster. Inform Yourself”

In all honesty

Our gubernatorial election is on Tuesday. At least, Governor Christie and a large percentage of the population believe it is. Democrat opponent Barbara Buono seems to think that she’s the only one running.  Her ads are quite amazing, unless your question is “How is a Democrat trailing in a traditionally Democratic state by more than thirty points?”.

Politicians are quite used to simply saying things which have no basis in reality. Sometimes it’s purely delusion, sometimes the politician has been misinformed, sometimes it’s just a semantic issue. As in when Obama said “If you’re happy with your healthcare, you can keep it” when what he meant was “If I’m happy with your healthcare, you can keep it”. The truth is, if your healthcare doesn’t meet the standard, you probably weren’t happy with it.

I’ve lost most interest in political speeches. I hear excerpts of the President speaking, saying “I want…” and I wonder if he realizes just how few people care what he wants? When was the last time he asked what I want?

I don’t mean to sound self involved, but there’s a lot going on out here. And the more I know about what’s going on, the more I realize that I just can’t care about everything. I have to prioritize, or my commitment becomes diffuse, and eventually meaningless. I’m approached about animal cruelty at least twice a week, bullying at least once a week, natural disasters happen routinely. Discrimination, Education, The Homeless, Autism, Cancer(s), and Mass Transit all tugging at me, and I’m supposed to care about what the President wants?

I recently saw an article with the headline “Jimmy Carter calls Obama an incompetent president”. I wasn’t a big fan of Carter, so his opinion isn’t that important to me, even if I agree with it. When I checked the article’s source, Carter did not say Obama was incompetent. He had said that Obama’s major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of Obamacare was “questionable”. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of defending Obama, who is certainly incompetent, but was not called such by an equally incompetent president.

An article in Snopes took apart misquotes of George W. Bush (with an obvious slant). We want to believe things we agree with, but as prominent Climatologist Kerry Emanuel of MIT commented about the false information tying superstorm Sandy to Global Warming, his statements still carried a headline implying that Sandy was the result of Global Warming and more storms of the type would occur. He was saying that false headlines damage credibility. I find myself in discussions with people who believe they are well informed because they read the headline, but having read the article and its sources, I have an opinion opposite of theirs. The false headline clearly damages the credibility of the person who repeats it.

A recent article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette took an “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach, claiming that Global Warming caused the dull leaf hues this Autumn. The article itself was filled with invalid conclusions and a little bit of absolute nonsense, but what was amazing to me was the online comments. The majority of comments pointed out that the autumn leaves were unusually colorful, and that the paper had in fact predicted brighter colors due to the amount of rain in the spring (which they also had blamed on Global Warming). Moving beyond “anything that happens is because of Global Warming”, they take a “Even if it isn’t happening, we’ll say it is and blame it on Global Warming”.

There was an article in Scientific American, reporting that Public Health England (PHE) had studied fracking and found that public health concerns were minimal if operations are properly run and regulated. Rather than embrace the study as evidence of negligence in the situations in which fracking has resulted in pollution, the article was attacked, with many suggesting that Scientific American should be banned. Could it be any more clear that some people have absolutely no interest in the truth? Have we reached the point where we just can’t do anything right, so we should stop doing anything at all? Public opinion says that nukes are unsafe, fossil fuels are either going to pollute us to death or run out within our lifetime, carcinogens are a byproduct of solar panels, wind power endangers wildlife, bio fuels require an unhealthy diet of deep fried foods, and we need to consume almost nineteen trillion Kwh of electricity every year.

We have to make some important decisions in life. We can’t make those decisions in an intelligent manner if the information we receive isn’t presented honestly, and we are hopeless if we can’t be honest with ourselves.

The Golden Rule

There is a reason that the intelligence community and the Department of State don’t mix. No, not the obvious. Intelligence services play by the Golden rule, the Department of State has diplomatic immunity.

The Department of State spends its time pretending it’s not gathering information. Pretending to be playing nice. They tend to foul intelligence operations to protect their own interests. Which brings us to my favorite loose cannon, Edward Snowden.

The reason that the initial uproar to capture Snowden came from the Department of State rather than any of the recognizable sources is because Edward pulled open the curtain on political spying. It was alright if we spy on Americans, but diplomats? Back in 1979 we found so many bugs in the new embassy in Moscow that we couldn’t use the building, but we were adversaries with the Soviets.

Obama has tried to spin the release of information into a “everybody does it (wink wink)” story, but the Germans and French don’t want to play that way, so they’re raising a fuss now. You’re not supposed to admit you’re spying on each other. That’s how it works.

This is only one reason I’ve always detested “Staties”. An intelligence service is upset when an operation is blown because work has been lost, contacts revealed, and possibly lives endangered. The Department of State is more concerned with keeping up appearances. One line that always touches me in espionage stories is when the seniors reminisce, “I miss the old days”. Obama can’t decide whether he’s a diplomat or a generalissimo.

There are no rules today. Part of this is blamed on the middle east, the viciousness of their security has been difficult for some people to accept. We said the same thing about the Japanese in World War two and the Koreans in their conflict. The NAZIs said that Jews ate children. It is normal to dehumanize the enemy, especially when they have a different culture. The fact is we all play rough, but we used to play fair.

The truth has not changed. By lowering our standards we validate the standards of others. Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer was just as true for Sun-tzu as Michael Corleone. We have always kept an eye on our friends, long before Jonathan Pollard or Kim Philby, we made no secret of not trusting our allies.

This entire episode reeks of inexperience. Clinton gutted the intelligence community, and it was being rebuilt during the Bush administration. Obama came along and expanded intelligence tasks without adequate personnel, and rather than wait for proper clearances, people like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning found themselves in positions they should never have been in. An administration which can only be described as isolated from reality has no idea how to deal with such situations, other than to deny the existence of issues, or to  flex its muscles and make threats. Parallels can easily be drawn to Kennedy’s fumbling in Cuba.

This is not a game for amateurs. The stakes are too high.

Perspectives

I’ve been thinking about how various groups fit into the world, what our ranking is by size. This started a few weeks ago when I was writing about religions, and found that for all the attention paid to Judaism, there are only 15.4 million Jews in the world. Looked at another way, more than twice as many people live in Tokyo Japan than are Jewish. Yet we consider it a “major world religion”. This may become my new measuring stick, the Jewish population, or JP. America has a population of 22 JP.

Oh my God he’s playing with numbers again.

I heard on the news that in the first three weeks, 475,000 people had signed up for Obamacare (This does not mean that they purchased healthcare, just that they signed on). Less than half a million. Less than the population of Fresno, CA, or 0.03 JP. At this rate, two million (0.12 JP) people will be signed up by 1 January. The other three hundred eleven million Americans will be facing tax penalties.

I had no idea that the system was so unstable. It is alleged that the administration didn’t either. I’m not sure if I believe that, but there are plenty of management types out there who are incapable of saying “I’m sorry, we cannot possibly accomplish that”. When we switched to an Oracle system from mainframe at Imagistics, with only a few thousand users, it took a year to prepare and two months to work out the kinks. Could no one in the administration comprehend the scale, the number of systems being integrated and the number of users, this project represented?

When the system crashed soon after going live, how could anyone reasonably blame it on volume? Exactly how much traffic did they expect for a system with three hundred twelve million users? Did it not occur to them that on a daily basis, ten percent (2.2 JP) of those users would require access?

It is only recently the blame has been shifted from traffic volume to software, and now the software designers are blaming the White House for last minute changes. They apparently were not aware that you would have to register with all your data before you could compare prices. Obviously they had never purchased insurance of any kind for themselves. How ironic, the very people Obamacare was supposed to help…

But this wasn’t just a traffic problem. The software itself is useless. All of the data collected thus far is corrupted. If you happen to be one of those residents of Fresno CA who managed to sign up, the options you have been offered are based on corrupted data, so should you choose to purchase a healthcare plan, you may find that you don’t qualify for it. When will you find this out? When the doctor’s bill is rejected, and you’re responsible for it.

Not to be overly cynical, but which part do you suspect will work? How about the part that fines you for not having health care? There is a natural mistrust of anyone who handles your money, but the IRS has certainly earned their mistrust. A few years back there was a change in the tax code, and a large number of people were calling the IRS helpline for assistance. The information they gave out was incorrect. Not only that, but they refused to take responsibility, because it is the taxpayer’s responsibility to correctly file their tax forms. Add to that the recent scandal in which the IRS was targeting conservatives. First they apologized, then they denied having done it, then the director stated the employees did not know the regulations. I know I have trust issues, but this is ridiculous.

The White House has just offered a solution, allowing a six week extension (15 February 2014). This should only leave three hundred ten million Americans (20 JP) facing a tax penalty. Perhaps this is the solution to the deficit. All those people that we hear are not paying taxes will now be fined by the IRS anyway.

The only way for a system this large to work properly, is to erase all current data, rewrite the software, and test with a reasonable sample, let’s say 0.12 JP, or roughly the number of federal employees. After the bugs are worked out (there are always bugs), then roll it out to the general public. Of course this may mean that the program isn’t implemented during our children’s’ lifetimes, but this would be the right way to do it.

Immediate surroundings

I’ve seen a number of examples of people who are not aware of their immediate surroundings, being busy texting as they walk up on a bear is but one example.

The recent government shutdown has been a feast of dissociative behavior. The administration seems to believe that America is their personal property. Woody Guthrie is spinning in his grave. For the first time ever, shutting down the government has meant barricading national monuments and parks. In South Dakota the Federal Government blocked views from a State road (a violation of several laws), and in Florida, the Florida Bay was “closed“. Apparently, paying Federal employees to keep Americans out of America is “essential”.

Maybe the best illustration of this drama is the following graphic.

Isn’t that how it’s always been?

Smokey Bear, a symbol of personal responsibility since World War Two, has somehow had his message twisted to imply the Federal government has been doing the job he’s been saying that only you could do for seventy years.

How any of these things can be justified is beyond understanding, but it seems people aren’t aware of what belongs to them and what belongs to the government.

But the Drama king in DC is not the subject of this article, just one of many examples.

I was watching a home renovation program the other morning, a contractor who has done quite well for himself (it’s his show), was renovating a home for his family. He lives in Austin, TX and has purchased a beautiful rural property. From what I can tell he is a Texas native.

While I can’t find any reputable sources to compare States, Texas has one hundred thirteen species and sub species of snakes. But for some reason this guy never expected to find snakes on his property. He actually asked the snake handler he called after finding a snake how to keep the property “snake free”. The handler was polite, he didn’t say “Move to Hawaii”.

I recall a group of tourists being run over by a drunk driver one night in Delaware County, PA. A number of people said “They were from the South, maybe they didn’t know not to cross a highway”. Right. Driving through Princeton the other day traffic wasn’t moving at all because of pedestrians walking into the street, must be Southerners.

This may be the best example of a driver not watching where he’s going. Watch carefully, no deviation from course, no brake lights.

There are countless videos of people so wrapped up in their cell phone conversations that they walk into lamp posts. Bizarre to me is the epidemic of “Apple picking“, in which the phones themselves are stolen from the person speaking on them. Someone is so unaware of their immediate surroundings that the phone they are holding to their ear is stolen, with such thefts being an epidemic they could hardly not be aware of. Well, obviously they’re not aware, probably not aware whether or not they’re wearing shoes.

I’m not sure how people expect to be adequately aware of world events to hold positions, when they can’t be aware of their immediate surroundings. Or even simple concepts such as cause and effect.

Who did you think was paying?

The God of Politics

I’ve recently completed  series on religions, examining spirituality, and I realized there was  God I had left out.

Who is more dangerous, the leader who sends people into a war, or the bully who thinks he can just launch a few missiles? Has lobbing a few missiles ever resolved an issue, other than displaying  the impotency of the leader launching them? Isn’t that what we vilify Iran and North Korea for?

Our present Demigod started out as a demagog (that sounded so poetic I just had to use it). Having built his castle by appealing to common prejudices, he found that not only did he believe he was a God, so did his followers. He could do no wrong in their eyes, even when his dog rated an extra aircraft to Maine. Of course there were people on the plane, that doesn’t alter the fact that were it not for the dog, there would have been one aircraft. This during the “crippling sequester”, which has left servicemen on the front lines without hot meals. Oh, that’s not budget cuts, that’s due to the reduction in troops. Really? Never happened before.

He’s done really well appealing to the lowest common denominator. Class warfare worked really well, until it became evident he was more interested in the war than the solution. Feeding racial tensions was a winner, but it wasn’t as easy a sell when the victims were white. “If I had a son, he’d kill a stranger out of boredom” didn’t go over in middle America. Fortunately for him, that “lowest common denominator” also has the memory of a goldfish.

A comedian I once knew would respond to hecklers with “Go ahead and walk out, I already got your money!”. Our current President appears to be at the point he is saying the same to us. It doesn’t matter if he can convince us that the United States should intervene where the United Nations will not. It doesn’t matter if Congress votes against military action. He’s under the impression he can do it anyway, and what are you going to do about it?

In the web of lies, a petition was created to “Stop Assad”. Signers number in the dozens. “Syrians are killing Syrians. Click here to support President Obama’s plan to send Americans to kill Syrians, so Syrians can kill Americans”. Despite overwhelming rejection of his plan to get involved in another war, the President continues to press his case. Remember when the President of the United States’ “case” was the interests of the American people?

Consider this. Last summer, the military changed it’s rules about women in combat. Last month, congressman Charles Rangel began his campaign to reinstate the draft. Anyone having trouble with the math? After two unpopular wars and consistent degradation of the military spirit, and facing a war in which public support is at an all time low, little Susie will have the opportunity to be the first one on her block to come home in a box.

A recent statement by Vladimir Putin, suggesting a diplomatic response, has received the following comment: “So is it possible, that the threat of retaliation from our President, for the use of chemical weapons was actually used as a ruse to prompt the Russians into engaging the Syrians into defusing their chemical weapons stockpile? …if so, well played President Obama!” The apologists never give up. Diplomacy was never part of Obama’s strategy, he opened with threats and was backed into a corner when his bluff was called.

Last night, President Obama spoke to the nation, promising there would be no American boots in Syria, despite the fact there already are. I’m sure some people believed him. He was late taking the stage, gathering public opinion up to the last minute, and he appeared to be relieved to have some breathing room. Perhaps his most foolish statement was when he said “We have to take action, that’s what makes America different”. Any Cowboy stereotypes need to be reinforced? I thought what made us different was our following procedure, staying within international law. Right now the only stereotype he’s representing is poseur, all hat and no cattle.

With time perhaps we’ll locate the truth. Credible reports are stating to come in that the entire chemical attack was staged. Motive? I can think of three possibilities. 1) Assad used WMDs using untraceable sources to hide his involvement. 2) Rebels used WMDs against their own people to cross Obama’s red line and get the support of America. 3) Rebels possessed WMDs and accidentally contaminated themselves.

Actually, I support invading Syria. An invasion force led in person by Barack Obama, waving a flag, followed by all the congresspeople who voted for intervention.

After that, maybe the UN could do its job of enforcing the Geneva Protocols, as they have for almost one hundred years.

Who do you trust?

I don’t know how other people choose what to believe. Most of us go with our gut feelings, but some of us have better trained guts than others. Some people choose to believe things despite hard facts to the contrary. Telling a delusional person that they are delusional is pointless, just remember that by rule of mathematics, half the population has a below average intelligence level, and have another glass of wine.

I have been blessed (or cursed) with a strong sense of observation and memory. I have a good sense of people, I feel their vibe. Sometimes I’m wrong, but usually I’m right, and the weight I apply to the decision is based on the importance of the decision. In addition to those skills, I have this handy little guide for evaluating information:

First evaluate the source,

A – Reliable: No doubt of authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency; has a history of complete reliability
B – Usually Reliable: Minor doubt about authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency; has a history of valid information most of the time
C – Fairly Reliable: Doubt of authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency but has provided valid information in the past
D – Not Usually Reliable: Significant doubt about authenticity, trustworthiness, or competency but has provided valid information in the past
E – Unreliable: Lacking in authenticity, trustworthiness, and competency; history of invalid information
F – Cannot Be Judged: No basis exists for evaluating the reliability of the source

Then evaluate the content,

1 – Confirmed: Confirmed by other independent sources; logical in itself; Consistent with other information on the subject
2 – Probably True: Not confirmed; logical in itself; consistent with other information on the subject
3 – Possibly True: Not confirmed; reasonably logical in itself; agrees with some other information on the subject
4 – Doubtfully True: Not confirmed; possible but not logical; no other information on the subject
5 – Improbable: Not confirmed; not logical in itself; contradicted by other information on the subject
6 – Cannot Be Judged: No basis exists for evaluating the validity of the information

Some of you might be familiar with that system. You evaluate the source, then you evaluate the information, and you have a metric to compare data. Obviously, A1 is almost blind trust, E5 is useful only in knowing the information is false, F6 is between C3 and D4, and there are thirty six permutations. It’s a basic thing that some of us do subconsciously, but it works so well it’s been codified into intelligence agencies.

In a world where we are swamped with information, being able to know what is “true” is a valuable asset. In a world with opinions driving the course of society, it is invaluable. This is one of the reasons I enjoy having a wife who constantly questions me, I am reminded to evaluate my opinions and their sources daily.

I find it frustrating that the general view has moved from trust to belief. One symptom of this is the “accreditation” given to Jenny McCarthy, by her placement as a co-host on “The View”. To me, this just furthers my appraisal of The View, and opinions produced by it, as E5. But millions of viewers will adopt the “I saw it on TV” attitude and believe. Jenny has a child with autism who received childhood vaccinations. In the 80’s a preliminary report linked autism to vaccines. That link has since been refuted. But Jenny continues her crusade against vaccines.

When I was in the Air Force, the preliminary study made headlines. NBC ran an “investigative report” on the subject. A Staff Sergeant I worked with said to me “If you love your kids, you’ll watch this program”, to which, after I restrained myself from punching him in the face, I replied “Never question my love for my kids, I’ll read the study“. I did, all my kids received their vaccinations. Since then Measles epidemics have run rampant, causing thousands of deaths every year. Mumps have gone epidemic. God only knows how many birth defects can be traced to exposure to Rubella.  Other children, with even less intelligent parents, have been left at risk of Diphtheria, Pertussis, Hepatitis, Polio, Tetanus, and Pneumococus. Evolution at work.

When the “Global Warming” furor began, I gave it a C3. When Al Gore got involved it became an E3. After going over the data it moved to E4. Now, there is adequate data to confirm it at E5, and in fact, false. Nonetheless, egos have continued to refuse they were wrong, and a large percentage of people believe it to be true. My mother told me not to argue with crazy people, so I have removed myself from most arguments on the subject.

I do not seek marital advice from people who have not had successful marriages, but some people will trust a friend, regardless of their actual experience. Presently the President of the United States enjoys almost messianic, and certainly maniacal, immunity from his history. I can understand forgetting the man made a cornerstone of his campaign transparency, and now runs the most secretive administration in history. Heck, 2007 is ancient history, right? People who really remember ancient history agree that Obama is worse than Nixon. Nixon, that horrible guy that everyone can remember, or at least claims to. Selective memory, that cognitive dissonance that allows people to forget what Obama said six weeks ago, but “remember” to hate the previous vice president runs rampant.

We live in a society led by individuals who have earned a D rating at best. They are driven by information that rates a 4 or worse, and have demonstrated opinions with a value of 5 routinely. When they make decisions that can be corrected at the next election cycle, I try not to get upset. When they drive us toward a World War, I feel the need to become more vocal.

Although I have used the term “acceptable losses” in the past, there are no acceptable losses prior to entering a war. Zero is the acceptable number, best achieved by staying out of the war.

Watch out now, take care
Beware of greedy leaders
They take you where you should not go
While Weeping Atlas Cedars
They just want to grow, grow and grow
Beware of darkness (beware of darkness)

Limited response

I am not currently employed. When I have applied for jobs, and been interviewed, I have heard the phrase “Well, if you can do what you say you can…” and tried not to take much insult. It would never occur to me to say I could do something that I couldn’t. I’d like to keep a job more than a few days. It would never occur to me to lie to people and expect them to trust me again. I am, I’ve been told, “Weird”.

Why would it be odd to suspect an average person to make unrealistic claims, when it is commonplace for the President to do so? In 2007, Senator Barack Obama stated “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”, although he had changed his mind shortly after the next shiny object entered his field of vision. By 2011, just two years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for diverting soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan, he stated quite clearly that the rules didn’t apply to him, and bombed Libya.

Then he decided to “draw a red line” over the use of chemical weapons. Just ninety years late, chemical weapons were banned as part of the Geneva Protocols in 1925. America is not the judicial or correctional arm of the UN, the President’s threat of a military response was out of line. War crimes are not prosecuted during a hot war, and they are prosecuted by bringing the criminal to justice, not by killing civilians. Even Assad knew this, but apparently not Obama. Assad also knew that Obama could not act on his own, he would need the approval of congress. It’s so sad when a foreign dictator knows more about your constitution than a “Constitutional Scholar”.

After realizing that almost no one was supporting his unilateral threats, the President decided to “allow” congress to vote on whether we should commit the lives of our children to a war with no sides.

We’ve gotten used to the idea of “push button wars”, but the futility of such actions hasn’t sunk in. There is no such thing as a “Limited war”, unless you want to surrender before beginning.

Diplomacy works when both sides of the table take each other seriously. No one is taking the President of the United States, and by extension the entire United States of America, seriously any more. We might have been successful in ending the war in Syria with an embargo, but it’s unlikely we can pull that off now. How safe are our soldiers enforcing a blockade when the Syrians believe we won’t respond if attacked?

I was born in Texas, and over the years have spent about a fifth of my life there. Every state has it’s “State Police” or “Highway Patrol”, in Texas we have the Texas Rangers. The Texas Rangers aren’t just police who work for the state. They are like the Marines. If you’re a bad guy, you don’t want to even see a Ranger.

The Ranger’s motto comes from an incident in Dallas TX in 1896. A riot had started so the Rangers were called in. They sent Captain Bill McDonald, and his pistol. When asked why they were only sending one man, the response was “there’s only one riot”. Other stories of Rangers facing down crowds include a Ranger on the steps of a courthouse, facing a mob. From the mob came a shout “He’s only got six bullets!” to which the ranger replied “I guess I can only shoot the first six up front”. The mob inverted, as no one wanted to be in front.

So far this year there have been thirty one homicides in Trenton NJ. About the number for Philadelphia PA in January, but per capita a higher rate. The governor wants to send in the State Police. The problem is that the bad guys in Trenton don’t take the police seriously, in fact two of the homicides were police officers. The police officers I have known in the Northeast are either afraid to shoot because they don’t want to be sued, or trigger happy, shooting people when they reach for their wallets. We need the Texas Rangers.

If we want to be taken seriously as a “superpower” we need a President with the soul of a Texas Ranger. All ours has is the mouth of an impotent bully.

Niet schieten ik ben met de pers

There are certain phrases which I always try to learn in other languages. With Flemish, as part of my “new” life, I chose “Ik hou van jou” which means “I love you”, rather than my first (self) interest, “Don’t shoot, I’m with the press”.

Not that I was ever a working foreign correspondent, I just felt it was the safest thing to say in a confrontation. Being a member of the press has always been as safe or safer than being with the Red Cross, and these days even Doctors without Borders are finding themselves under fire.

Reporters have seen the shield of the press fading, not just in war zones, but even in their home countries. The outrage over this seems a little out of sync with reality. Respect for the press is a little much to expect when the media has been repeatedly been exposed as being biased. With trust that the press will present an unbiased picture of events lost, the expectation that press credentials are protection would seem rather foolish.

We are rapidly descending into a world with many similarities to Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange”,  with people killing at random out of “boredom“. I would genuinely like to understand how limited a person’s options are that murder is the only interesting possibility on a Saturday night. It’s not only an American problem, teen shootings occur everywhere.

I was never terribly affected by tragedy, but I remember friends breaking down in tears after they witnessed a traffic accident. I’m sure the world is still full of such people, I see outrage expressed over violence and loss of rights, but there is a growing sector of society that is numb, feeling no compassion at all. After a child at the local high school committed suicide, there were grief counselors at the school for days. Where do these “feral” people come from? How could they never have been exposed to compassion?

There is a reason, probably thousands, that people can feel disconnected from society, but there is no excuse. Such people are evidence for our need for a justice system, and the lack of a functioning system of justice is probably the main reason children can grow up and kill without remorse. One person is locked away for a relatively minor offense, and scores more are given a slap on the wrist, or never prosecuted, for major offenses.

A lesson in law enforcement that stood out to me years ago was “a man will jump out of a barbers chair in the middle of a haircut to put a coin in the parking meter, because he is sure he will get a twenty five dollar ticket, but the same man will rob a bank because he doesn’t believe he will be caught”. Okay, I haven’t been to a barber in decades, but the lesson is still true. The other side of that analogy is that I wouldn’t bother with worrying about a parking ticket in Philadelphia, because the price of the fine if I got a ticket was less than the price of a parking garage for all the times I wouldn’t be ticketed. Punishments need to be more severe than the odds of prosecution in order for laws to have a deterrent effect.

Our legal system will entertain any defense, one attorney representing a young man who shot an infant in a stroller tried blaming the parents, because they had collected the life insurance on the child.Any excuse is considered appropriate, in traffic court last week a young woman argued that a collision wasn’t her fault because the other car had parked to close to her. She was the only one driving a car when the collision took place. It’s always someone elses fault.

At some point the concept of justice was replaced by “getting even”. Somehow these two concepts have been confused as both the victim and the perpetrator are removed from the legal process. Courts are merely a stage for attorneys, leading to trial by media, and its bastard child, “Street Justice”. The president stands before the cameras and says “This is a nation of laws“, after stirring mob violence throughout the Trayvon Martin case, and in the midst of his continuing violations of the law. Multiple threats have been made against Syria, that if the “red line” of using chemical weapons is crossed, we will respond. Now that the line has been demonstrably crossed twice, there is still no response. The idea that refuge may be taken in the law is evaporating on all sides of the political spectrum.

When we see Egypt descend into mob rule, and refuse to call a situation in which a leader is replaced by the military a “military coup” so we don’t have to cut off military aid, It becomes obvious that lawlessness exists at every level.

The solution doesn’t come from the top, or either side. It comes from within. Attempts to teach “self respect” turned into “self esteem” which resulted in overblown and undeserved “self importance”. You cannot teach your children or your peers self respect if you do not respect yourself, and you can’t respect yourself if you don’t understand what “respect” is.

Buzz words

There is something incongruous in modern culture. Okay, more than just one thing. In a world filled with time saving devices and an internet that provides all he information available in the world at our fingertips, people still choose to use abbreviations and buzz words rather than conveying information. I could never understand why, in an internet conversation, someone will say “google it” instead of providing the information, or at least a link to the information. And while I find some people’s idea that they need to question everything when they are dealing with a reliable source annoying, the tendency to believe everything presented by unknown or disreputable sources is astounding.

I understand the desire to “believe what you want to believe”, but why try so hard to deny what is obviously correct? When did it become more honorable to believe than to know?

I know there are countless examples, but the one that always stands out in my mind is Janet Reno‘s explanation for the Waco tragedy, “We did it for the children“. Hillary Clinton had made “for the children” an excuse for everything, but killing eighty people, including twenty one children “for the children” is rather difficult to swallow.

The new buzzwords are “fighting terrorism”. Anything is acceptable if it is for the cause of fighting terrorism. As long as you can define anyone as a terrorist, they have no rights. If you refuse to call someone a terrorist, whatever they do is acceptable. Picking up on this cue, both sides of the conflict in Egypt call each other terrorists.

Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying “They who give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”. Those should be our buzzwords. Presently we have abandoned several amendments to our constitution for that “temporary safety”, in order to “fight terrorism”.

We sit idly by as the government violates the first amendment, the second amendment, the third amendment, the forth amendment, the fifth amendment, I could go on, but the point is if you can’t see another violation of the constitution every day, you’re just not paying attention. Most of this started with the Patriot act, and once the snowball started rolling down the hill it just grew. All in the name of “fighting terrorism”, fueled by “what can we get away with”. A recent case exposed the existence of “secret courts“, in which the accused was ordered to comply or visit Guantanamo bay. This is how the government causes people to disappear. Pick them up, charge and try them in secrecy, and when found guilty off they go to Guantanamo bay as a terrorist, all in secret.

This is not to suggest that governments are the only ones asking you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The recent crises in Egypt resulted in this meme from unifying groups.

Some people on the Occupy Wall Street page (which has become simply radical Muslim) posted a different image, with the top portion removed. These same people are the first to claim “media bias”, although during the Egyptian crises they have attacked Al Jazeera, both figuratively and literally. Al Jazeera has always been the media source used to refute American media outlets, the only trusted source in the Arab world. Someone has managed to remove the anti-Al Jazeera satirical cartoons and dissenting videos from the internet, so some exceptionally powerful forces are at work here. Interesting that Al Gore is doing business with Al Jazeera lately.

There are over one million words in the English language, There is no excuse for not explaining issues, particularly issues that directly affect our safety and freedom, in their totality. Unless of course, you’re lying about what you’re doing. Lately though, they’re not even bothering to lie, we just accept it “because it’s for a good cause”.  Like “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”.

Someone else did that, uniting a country towards a common cause, building that country from near ruin to a world power.

“Mother fight for your children!”

As you read this, you are sitting in front of a computer. Use it. Listen to people you don’t agree with. Sift through the propaganda and find the truth, it is out there.

Tin foil hats

To me, there is little funnier than someone describing a person whose sanity is in doubt as wearing a “tin foil hat”. Although aluminum foil was first produced a century ago, and tin foil all but ceased to be manufactured after world war two, a reference to a product that more than likely has never been seen by the speaker is a measure of the other person’s sanity. “I’ll see your paranoia and raise you an anachronism”.

The original use of tin foil hats was to block “mind control rays”, because tin foil is fairly thick and isn’t a bad shield against electrons. Aluminum (by the way, how many syllables do you pronounce in “aluminum”?) is much thinner, but the right design might foil (sorry) the NSA if they’re listening to your brainwaves. I’d suggest this one.

If the pleats are at the right frequency per inch, they should actually block transmissions. Doesn’t really matter, the NSA is following every keystroke on your computer, and apparently intercepting regular mail as well. Yep. We all knew that Washington DC bound mail is filtered through a facility in Virginia to check for Anthrax, Ricin, or any other chemicals, but on the news the other night discussing the Embassy closings, the government spokesman let it slip that some of the information intercepted was in the form of ground mail. Oddly, that clip is no longer available.

This is not to say that foil hats are going out of fashion, paranoia is always in vogue. If you decide to use aluminum foil, there are types that are bonded to paper. Put the paper side out, it makes you less noticeable in a crowd. As recently reported by that grand lady of journalism, Mother Jones, the Obama brain mapping project is a secret attempt at mind control. Apparently, you can wear a foil hat while operating video equipment:

I miss the old days, when “Secret” meant “Not on the six o’clock news”. Back when if someone was obviously a threat to the gene pool you could…oh but don’t let me get nostalgic.

I agree, every advance in science has been weaponized. This may be why education is in the shape it is, free thinking individuals are a threat to the state. Then again, almost every weapon of mass destruction has assembly directions on the internet, and a modest background in chemistry provides the recipes for explosives using items in your cleaning closet. Certainly, if the aim is controlling objects with the mind, the door to controlling the mind with objects will be wide open. But seriously, what technological advancements has this administration been successful with? They think evacuating a country is not retreating from terrorism. They’re definitely low tech buffoons, but start worrying if there’s a foil shortage.

As a rule of thumb, do not keep tin foil in the ice box, it tends to get brittle. You also shouldn’t pick it up with a carpet sweeper, tin is conductive and can generate a triboelectric charge. You can take your motorcar to the soda fountain and wrap your goods in tin foil while you shop at the record store for an album, if you still have a phonograph.

 

You may choose to say “Aluminum” or “Aluminium”, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) uses both spellings (and pronunciations).

He brought snacks to a gunfight

It was difficult, but I avoided commenting on anything American for the last two weeks. Now I’m back.

In Brussels, Blaine Reininger covered the dubstep song “Knives to a gunfight“, dedicating it to Trayvon Martin. He started by saying “Out of respect to Trayvon, we’re going to call this ‘you brought snacks to a gunfight”. I knew I’d have to write about it.

The President of the United States of America stated “Trayvon could have been me”. Wouldn’t Trayvon have been fortunate. At seventeen, Barry was at the Punahou school, a 17-acre oasis of calm, order and privilege tucked behind a low stone wall topped with cacti in Honolulu Hawaii. In his own words, he used marijuana and cocaine to push the questions of who he was out of his mind. Sounds as if thirty five years ago, Barack Hussein Obama II was more like George Zimmerman (let me spell that out. A liar). Trayvon neither used cocaine nor was he awaiting a scholarship to Occidental College.

I’ve seen some pretty bizarre responses to the Zimmerman verdict, the New Black Panther party offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of George Zimmerman, dead or alive. Publicly. Repeatedly. I’m not sure exactly why they feel like they’re “third class citizens”, I doubt very much the Klan ever made public statements that outrageous. Now of course that offer was made more than a year ago, and I don’t recall the Panthers paying the bounty to the state of Florida when they arrested him, but bringing the story to light sure is a great way to fire up racial tensions.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry felt their opinions about justice would be of interest. Something about pots and kettles goes here. In a related (too bizarre to comment) story, Zimmerman’s brother is worried about vigilantes.

Another great story was a collection of twits saying they would go out and shoot a Mexican and call it self defense in response to the “Not Guilty” verdict. Well, at least they’re getting closer. Zimmerman’s mother is from Peru. He actually doesn’t like Mexicans either, so maybe shooting a Mexican would put you on his good side.

As a matter of fact, George Zimmerman is an idiot. It doesn’t matter what his race is, and it really doesn’t matter what Trayvon Martin’s race was, Zimmerman was told to stay in his car by a police dispatcher, and instead confronted a man on the street. None of us will ever know what happened between then and when George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, but for some reason twelve people on a jury thought that “stand your ground” doesn’t mean that it’s actually your ground that you’re standing on.

Another twelve people in Florida thought that Casey Anthony wasn’t responsible for the death of her daughter.

Things were starting to look pretty good for violent offenders in Florida, then a woman went out to her car, got her gun, and came back to fire a “warning shot” at her ex husband, and received twenty years in prison. Apparently she hadn’t realized that in order to get away with a crime, you should not leave witnesses. Particularly witnesses who you’ve shot at.

If these stories were all you knew about Florida, or America, you might think we’re a bunch of idiots. Well, we have done everything we can to encourage idiotic behavior but there are a couple of things to remember.

First, there are about three hundred fourteen million people in America (over nineteen million in Florida alone). Allowing for a lunatic fringe of three percent (although I believe it’s closer to twelve), that would be over ten million lunatics in the United states. They can’t all live in Manhattan.

Second, while some people still believe the news media reports important stories about society, the job of the news media is to sell the advertising space that allows it to exist. News is not a public service, it’s a business. Dog bites man doesn’t make the front page. Man bites dog might make page three. A story has to be unique, not representative, to make the lineup.

Third, a headline is not a story. A headline is supposed to get your attention. This is why the most intriguing story is mentioned over and over, and then broadcast last, so you’ll watch the entire show. Which isn’t a terribly bad thing, many people sit through an entire newscast and might pick up some actual information while waiting to see the squirrel on water skis. The headline is the carnival barker, making the bearded woman sounds interesting enough that you’ll pay to see her.

Rioting in response to an unpopular verdict is not the answer. Using a tragedy for self promotion is a number of things, ranging from pathetic to disgusting.

We cannot fix every broken mind out there, but of those that we can fix, we can only do so with love.

Unified change

I believe in leadership. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point “leadership” was replaced by “management”. This has been a gradual change, I remember in the eighties hearing complaints that the two styles were not interchangeable. From a military standpoint, you do not manage a man into battle. But as we faded away, a new generation has attempted to do just that, with foreseeable results. The same change of styles can be attributed to other failures in society, the most obvious being the banking and healthcare industries.

When Einstein said “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”, he could not have anticipated an elite that would try the same thing, but call it something different, and expect different results. As words became more powerful than actions, our leaders became our managers, and their concept of the responsibility of leadership became the responsibility of management.

Realizing that this doesn’t work comes from the bottom and works its way up. That a change is necessary is not the object of the debate, but an efficient manager can unify his minions for the purpose of managing them. Yes, everyone wants a change. If we argue about what changes we want we will get nothing done, and if we unite and stand together for change in and of itself…nothing gets done. My desired change and your desired change are not capable of coexisting, but everyone voted for the candidate who promised change. Well, not everyone. Fifty two percent of the fifty seven percent of voting age people who voted. Which would mean that somewhere in the area of one out of five inhabitants of the United States voted for that change in 2008. Not exactly a mandate, but you get what you pay for.

Despite the lack of any positive changes, a slightly smaller percentage of a slightly smaller percentage elected the same person in 2012. In a recent survey, exactly the same amount of people believe that the weather affects cloud computing. Just sayin…

Approximately the same percentage of the population in Egypt voted in a new president last year. Muhammad Morsi was the change the people wanted after thirty years of Hosni Mubarak (who had brought historically unique stability to Egypt). They wanted the change so much they could not wait for the scheduled elections just two months away. Last week, after a mere twelve months in office, he was displaced in a military coup. You can call it a revolution if you wish, I believe the Chinese are still using that term to describe their system, although the Wuchang uprising was over one hundred years ago. The fact is a minority of the Egyptian people decided to protest in Tahrir square and break things until their country changed again. The military, a largely autonomous organization, wasn’t terribly happy with the new leader, so they placed Mr. Morsi under arrest, suspended his new constitution, and appointed the leader of the constitutional court acting president. Yeah, it didn’t make any sense to me either. “Democracy”, “Constitution”, “and “Elections”, are not quite the same there as they are here.

So they went from dictatorship to democracy to military junta in just over a year. And the “people” are calling it a revolution. The people who chose Morsi to replace “the tool of the USA and Israel” wanted Morsi out because he was “a tool of the USA and Israel”. Maybe they should have watched a news report from the states, where Morsi was seen as an enemy of the USA and Israel due to his bonds with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Which reminds me of what some people would call a joke. A guy on his first op (FNG) is told if things go south, to say he’s with the CIA. “But why? Won’t they deny I’m with them?” So you explain, “Of course they will, they deny their own people, so that builds your credibility. They will assume you’re with the CIA, they’ve never heard of us.”

The other day I was reading through my favorite anarchist site, and one young man made the statement “Each and every Egyptian is against Morsi”. I suggested to him that if that was true, why are there protests? With that kind of consensus they should all be getting along wonderfully. I applauded the fifty one percent of voters who had changed their minds. His English was not strong enough to appreciate my sarcasm. I’m finding the anarchists less fun lately, rather than the individualists I grew up with, they want to put forward the idea that everyone agrees.

The over three billion genes we each carry allows for differences that can for all practical reasons be called “infinite”. No two of us are precisely the same, nor do we have precisely the same desires. We build consensuses, we agree to majority rule, but we know that even within the majority there are subtle differences of opinion. A crowd of a million protestors calling for change is looking for a million different changes for a million different reasons. They may take comfort or find strength in their unity, but that unity is often simply in the desire to protest, to express dissatisfaction.

Racism

Warning. This post contains words that some may find offensive.

The word “racist” gets used a lot. More than it used to be. I use it to display when actual racism is taking place, hoping that someone might notice what the word actually means. The job gets more difficult as language becomes meaningless.

Merriam Webster defines racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”. That’s the way I interpret the word. A racist would be someone who has that belief.

Recently, and by that I mean over the last decade or so, a new definition has come to light. Check out this definition from the “Urban Dictionary”: “If you’re a white man, this is what you are. It doesn’t even matter if your wife is black and you have an adopted child from India, or how many black friends you have, somehow you’re going to end up being a racist according to how the media portrays the white man as “racist whities”. All of this is funny because the white man is the one that is stereotyped as being racist, which is hypocrisy at its best. It’s racist to assume that white men are racists( emphasis mine). If you don’t get offended by racial insults, then you’re apparently racist too, but an actual racist would get offended by it. When you hear a certain word too much (I’m sure we’ve all heard “cracka” hundreds of times thanks to standup comedy) then you become desensitized to it.” This appears to be the new standard.

In the early 90s Spike Lee said “Black people can’t be racist, only white people are racists”. That has slowly turned into “White people are only racists” as in “All white people are racists”. As suggested by both the Merriam Webster and Urban Dictionary definitions, such a statement would in itself be racist.

The new definition of racism is that it requires prejudice and power, so “racism” is institutional. By that definition, individuals couldn’t be racists, but never mind, this wasn’t ever going to make sense. Just because I’m white doesn’t mean I have any power. To assume such would be racist.

The real truth is that like any other insult, the actual word is meaningless. Which is sad, because real racism does exist, and there’s no way to identify it.

Think about profanities. Wouldn’t any father be a “Motherfucker“? Unless you take the time to think that the phrase initially referred to Oedipus. Other curses have developed into similar non-insulting meanings.

I was recently taken to task by a person who felt insulted by my use of the word “racist” in the blog titled “vegetarians”. She felt that I had misapplied the meaning. I thought that being Korean was a race, and that attacking Koreans for their cultural practices was racism. I was surprised, because I was under the impression that the word is so often misused and overused that no one took it as an insult anymore. You can read the conversation on that thread. She was certain that no animal rights person could be a racist. That’s the kind of blanket statement that could be interpreted as racist in some applications.

One of what I would call the benefits of the Obama administration is the dilution of the word “racist”. After calling everyone who didn’t vote for Obama a racist, and then calling all Republicans racists, they had called enough people racists that were most definitely not racists, the word meant next to nothing. That is not necessary a good thing, it would be nice for words to have meanings so we could communicate, but losing an insult might be a step in the right direction. Most recently the democratic chairwoman in Louisiana, a woman who most probably has actually encountered racism in her lifetime, made the following statement.

So racism is about disagreeing with one policy of one man. That seems to be about as far from racism as you could get, if the word wasn’t just a reworking of “Cracker”. It’s just an insult, a sound without meaning other than “I don’t like you”. The card has been played so many times that it is the only thing transparent in this administration.

We’ve done the same thing with other words, “Retarded” used to mean “Slowed”, so that “Mentally Retarded” was a clinical term. Calling someone retarded as an insult became so common that people who were actually retarded became insulted. Sorry, but that’s genuinely funny. The term will be changed in the ICD-11, and has been changed in official usage, but in ten or twenty years that word will be used as an insult as well. “Homophobe”, a term I’ve never felt portrayed its meaning properly, has become so politicized and overused that it has lost meaning, which was “anti-homosexual” and not actually “afraid of homosexuals”. We’re getting there with “terrorist”.

I prefer that words carry meanings, otherwise communication becomes more and more difficult, but insults fall into a category of undefined exclamations, like “ouch”. They should be regarded as having just as much meaning.

You’ll know if I intended to insult you. I use the word “Wanker“, because I like the way it sounds. And because it really annoys one particular wanker.

 

 

 

 

Oppression

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. (James Madison, in letter to Henry Lee June 25, 1824.)

Any arguments?

Following 9/11, the Bush administration passed the Patriot Act. Or, as I call it, “The Federal Witch Hunt”. In order to remind you just how corny things were back then, the USA PATRIOT act is an acronym, “Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001″. How many of you knew that?

Besides having one of the stupidest names since Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” campaign, even in the days just following an attack on our soil in which nearly three thousand Americans died the act was recognized as oppressive. Well outside our concept of liberty, but just inside our desire for revenge, the act was designed to expire, but was approved again in 2006 with the same “sunset” provisions.

There are a few things that prevent George W. Bush from being a “Great” president, this is one of them. Two hundred and forty years previously, Benjamin Franklin had said “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”. When something like, oh, let’s say indefinite detention, is wrong, it remains wrong regardless of the circumstances. I am not a follower of Catholicism, but I was taken by Pope Paul VI’s comment on changing the churches view to “keep up with the times” when he said the laws of the church are eternal, they do not change with the styles of the day. Then he went ahead and let Catholics eat meat on Fridays, so what did he know?

President Obama was elected because a large number of people believed that he would reverse the oppression that they blamed on the Republican party. Such has not been the case. Not only did he fail to repeal the act, he extended three key provisions. I agree that “Roving wiretaps” are common sense. If you can tap my phone, it’s me, not my phone, that you’re after. The other two are a little more disturbing, as they are doorways to abuse. Expanded abilities to search business records, and the ability to conduct surveillance on individuals not tied to any terrorist activities is asking for trouble. The most recent “victim” of this “lone wolf” provision is Cameron D’Ambrosio, an eighteen year old high school student, who is being held for making terroristic threats. Various reports indicate that he is being held without bail, or with a one million dollar bond (pretty much the same thing), for publishing violent rap lyrics on Face Book.

A couple of other things have been in the news lately. The Internal Revenue Service, one of the more frightening branches of the government from the perspective of the average American, acknowledged that they had targeted certain groups based on their names. Those names were anything containing “Freedom”, “People’s”, or “Tea Party”. They may have been within their regulations, they’re not sure.

The Department of Justice seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters for “an unspecified criminal investigation”, and had the reporters at Fox News under surveillance.

The handling of the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi has been criticized, more for the cover-up, changing stories and out right lies than the actual failure to rescue an embassy under attack. (Nixon’s impeachment was for the cover up, not the actual break-in at the Watergate)

The Attorney General’s comments on the legality of a drone strike, targeting an American Citizen on American soil, were just a little more chilling, following the execution of Americans overseas, one of whom was a sixteen year old (whose execution was justified because he “would have grown up to be a terrorist”).

Various government organizations, including the National Weather Service, purchased huge amounts of ammunition, and the Department of Homeland Security put out a bid for “Personal Defense Weapons” that mirror in description what they were trying to outlaw as “Assault Weapons”.

Add to all this reports that Obama is dismissing Senior Military Officers who will not fire on American citizens, and you might be a little cautious about criticizing the administration. That of course, is the point. Oppression doesn’t require violence, just the fear of violence. If you think that the reporter taking your story is being watched, you might choose not to talk. If you think that by just making an offhand remark you could end up in Guantanamo Bay, you might choose not to make that remark. If you think that publicly opposing the government could result in the deaths of you and your children while you sit at the dinner table, you might choose to keep your opinions to yourself. Suddenly, there is no opposition, everyone agrees. Big Brother is Good.

Have a few stories in the news about the police shooting people who they were only questioning, and everyone will profess to love Big Brother. Heck, why not just repeal the 22nd Amendment?

I once had a supervisor whose management style was “you can do whatever you want until someone makes you stop”. I believe he works within the Obama administration now.

Cults

There seems to be a rise in cults lately. Let me reword that. There seems to be a very large cult insidiously taking foot today.

My introduction to the concept of cults was the Manson Family, in 1969. I was living outside Los Angeles, and the murder of Sharon Tate was in the news, then it became the “Tate/LaBianca Murders” and eventually we all got to know Charles Manson. Before that, the only time I’d heard the word “cult” was in reference to the Catholic Church (more on that another day).

It was a time of young people looking for guidance, and charismatic opportunists began having a field day. Weak minds and popular drugs made recruitment relatively easy, and soon every parent of a  young person who had run away to find themselves was able to blame the problem on cults. Sometimes that was accurate, more often it was just that running away was much more fun than mowing the lawn.

The next big cult story was the Children of God. As young people literally disappeared from the face of the Earth into this cult, families fought back with “Deprogramming“, in which the loved one was kidnapped from the cult, and subjected to treatment not too dissimilar from the techniques used in “A Clockwork Orange“. Deprogramming became troublesome, in that the cure was more than likely worse than the “affliction” in most cases. Bringing someone back into the fold by force is an ethical challenge, and some people thought it might be a cure for what they felt was “deviant” behavior of any sort. Deprogramming was attempted on homosexuals and others who were considered “abnormal”.

In the seventies, other cults began forming and/or growing. Marshall Applewhite started “Heaven’s Gate“, ending with the suicides of the remaining thirty seven members in 1997. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s “Unification Church” which is still going strong. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh brought his ninety three Rolls Royces to Oregon and began a commune, culminating with the first bio-terrorist attack in the United States (not counting blankets given to native Americans). My worst memory  is of “The People’s Temple“, as I happened to be working as a security guard, by myself, with only a radio and a gas heater as I listened to the reports unfold from Guyana.

Cults are not always religious in nature, but there are of course core beliefs, and because they are believed fanatically, the concept of cults in general being religious groups became common. This is in some ways unfortunate. The word “cult” has become pejorative, so there is a negative association with religion in general whenever a cult hits the news. Additionally, whenever a new cult is noticed, it takes on religious terms.

Coronations are rarely as majestic, and he’s just being nominated. Today we have the Cult of Obama. I have no idea how this happened, except that, as in the seventies, there were a large number of people who were unhappy with their lives in 2008. Hitler blamed the Jews, Obama blamed the Republicans. Do not believe that I “Hate” Obama. I am not an extremist, and actually, I admire his brilliance as a politician. I also admire Timothy McVeigh, and no, I make no parallel.

I was pro Obama in the early months of 2008. I believed that a black man could lead this country away from racial stereotypes. I knew that there would be people forced to face their own prejudices, and I saw this as a good thing. I bought his line about transparency. By late Spring I could sense that something was wrong. His supporters were fanatical, which always sets off alarms for me. As questions arose about his background, rather than address the questions honestly and openly he would act as if he was above being questioned. His supporters ridiculed rather than responded. The level of hatred expressed by his supporters was genuinely frightening. More than a few friendships ended, open discussion was not to be. Cracks could be seen, but even suggesting the possibility of Obama being less than perfect resulted in being shouted down, and slandered with accusations of being part of any number of extremist groups. Any detraction of Obama is responded to with “Racist”, “You must have heard that on Faux News”, or anything other than a thoughtful response to the issue.

By 2010, I thought we were on the road to recovery. Some of Obama’s most vocal supporters were recognizing that he had not measured up to his promises. The radical left began to turn against him, as his actions showed a man who was just a little to the right of the opponent he had beaten in the election. Some of my friends came back, and we laughed about it. As we approached 2012, it seemed that the “line” had moved, but was deeper than ever. The new mindset was variations on “What does it matter?”. In many ways, they were right. He had been elected and filled the position of President of the United States for four years, his lack of actual credentials was no longer important. It seemed altogether possible that he would not be reelected. But, as I mentioned, he is a brilliant politician. That is to say, by targeting specific precincts he was able to turn a popular vote margin of three percent into a much larger electoral victory. The result, as seen in the Bush v. Gore election, was a polarizing effect, laid upon an already polarized nation.

Carrying forward his “What does it matter” rhetoric isn’t working quite as well, but as there is little rational discussion, it doesn’t matter. The scandals grow, the cracks spread, and the cult grows more defensive. One of the many recent scandals involved the Internal Revenue Service, which, although a part of the government and thus his responsibility, he could easily distance himself from. Instead, after the IRS publicly apologizes for misconduct, Obama says in a press conference “If this happened”. Yes Mr. President, it happened, the IRS has already apologized, too late to deny.

Four years ago, Barack Obama could read the telephone book from a teleprompter, and thirty million American voters would hear whatever panacea they sought. That is changing. But there is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal, even when that animal is already a lame duck. Cult members don’t usually just wake up one day and say “Oops! I was wrong, sorry”, and I don’t expect to see it now. It is a time for grace. The words “I told you so” can be sympathetic and consoling if the phrase begins with “I’m sorry”.

I am hopeful, that since only fifty seven percent of eligible voters make it to the polls, and only fifty one percent of those people voted for Obama, we will not see a huge swing to the right in the next election. In many ways we can thank Barack Obama for breaking the left/right barrier down. I would like to see, but am not holding my breath, a reasonable, honest discussion. I would like to see, not the programs, but the government Obama promised. Regardless of who implements it.

(In)tolerance

Maybe it’s just my rosy view of the past, but I seem to remember a world in which there was more tolerance than there is today. Not always acceptance, but tolerance.

People will always have differences of opinion. A natural product of free expression is that we hear opinions we don’t agree with. A cornerstone of a stable society is the ability to disagree without the need to eliminate opposition. I had thought that the desire to destroy those who differ was largely restricted to those messy uncivilized third world countries. I had thought that as the world became “smaller”, civilization would be the driving force. Not the only time I’ve been wrong.

I can recall heated discussions at parties that my parents held. I also remember the same guests being invited to following parties. It was possible, perhaps even preferable, to have differences of opinion, it kept the conversation “lively”. People were not considered inferior due to their differences, and “preaching to the choir” was considered boring. This was a predominantly conservative crowd, yet I was still under the impression that the “liberals” were more tolerant. It was part of the “rules”, conservatives were rigid, liberals were flexible.

So we moved from our conservative enclave to the bay area, just in time for the “Summer of Love”. We were a tourist destination as our friends would visit just for the tour of “Haight Ashbury“, I felt a connection to the philosophy of the hippies, I believed they had discovered what I thought America was all about. I do my thing, you do yours. Years later I was saddened by the decay of that philosophy as I watched cut throat capitalists selling tie dye souvenirs. They were doing their thing, pretending to be doing mine, and making a profit.

I found myself increasing isolated. Most of my views were based in conservatism, but my lifestyle was more liberal. At first, I thought I was demonstrating how the two “sides” were not mutually exclusive, the things accepted by liberals could be tolerated by conservatives. The exclusiveness came from an unexpected direction. My liberal friends couldn’t tolerate my conservative friends. Things got worse.

The “revolutions” of the 60s and 70s created revolutionaries. Unfortunately, once the revolution was over, the revolutionaries still needed a fight. Race relations improved immensely in America for a decade or so, but I would argue that today things are worse than they were in the mid 60s, and in some ways as bad as the 50s. One (black) friend relates that his family despises Bill Cosby, because they believe that his portrayal of the Huxtable family was unattainable, propaganda by an Uncle Tom.  The sexual revolution became the war between the sexes. Anything denied to a woman was evidence of the “War on Women“, even when it had nothing to do with sex. Great advances in equality were followed by hatred rather than grace. While gay rights made strides, anti gay groups became more vocal, and violent. Gay rights groups refuse to accept anything less than equal verbiage, “Marriage”, a religious term adopted by the state, must be what unions between couples are called. Even in European countries that allow gay unions, the official documents are referred to as Civil Unions. Everyone calls them “marriages”, but that’s not good enough in America. “Justice” became “getting even”, beginning with affirmative action, followed by “reparations“.

We not only stopped accepting, we stopped tolerating. When the Taliban destroyed the statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, tolerance died. I do not entirely blame the Muslim influence, but I do believe that they have turned the level of intolerance to eleven. With help from the news media, the existence of tolerance has been eliminated in the minds of the general public. With the advent of twenty four hour news stations, “fair and balanced” became a joke. Each outlet has it’s own views, preaching to its own choir. The only balance is when you split screen two opposite viewpoints. We call people of different viewpoints “sheeple”, as if “we” are somehow different. We used to believe that a person was innocent until proven guilty, now once a suspect is announced lynch mobs appear.

Politics have become downright ugly. Political figures are hated, decades after they leave office. There is no reflection or redemption. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s achievements, she was largely hated upon her death, some twenty five years after leaving office. “Ding Dong the witch is dead” hit number one on the BBC. Five years after leaving office, Dick Cheney is the first person to come to some peoples’ minds when asked “You know what I hate?” during a conversation that has nothing to do with politics. Move on became a mantra for people who refuse to move on. Claims against President Obama stay alive years after they become moot, and really, in a country that allegedly separates politics and religion, who cares if he is a Muslim or Mitt Romney a Mormon?

Not to be left out, the scientific community, after centuries of distancing itself from public opinion, becomes embroiled in the “Climate Change” debate. I was disappointed enough when I heard that the Space Shuttle was “too complex” to be built today, the scientific community acknowledging we are not as intelligent and creative as we were in the 70s, but the abandonment of the scientific method in favor of popular consensus is truly disheartening. I feel like Galileo facing the Pope.

This is not the world I want to live in. One in which “disagree” means “hate”, “disagree with a person of another race” means “racist”, “tolerance” means “I tolerate those who agree with me”. I’m well aware that I’m a dreamer, but I cannot be the only one. Our level of understanding one another is supposed to be increasing, not decreasing. We can’t get there without talking.