Category Archives: Politics

Blessings

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I read a lot online. Mostly material curated by my friends and acquaintances. Sometimes I run into a thick vein of feel-good affirmations. About the nature of happiness and how to cultivate it in your life. All of this is good and wonderful and I value those friends that bring those things to light because they really do deserve saying and sharing.

One thing does get me though, and this came up with the notion that happiness is not bound by external situations. Are you sure? I think about all the people I read who are very loving, very expressive, and very positive people… how much of that output is supported by a comfortable life? What happens if you don’t have the blessings that come with a first world existence? What if the water that surrounds you is toxic and if you drank any of it would lead to a slow agonizing death? What if you were homeless? What if you were starving? What if life arranged to punish you at every turn and you could never catch a single break? How fluffy and positive would that poor person be?

Don’t get me wrong here, I think that these people are vital and what they share is wonderful and I’m glad they do so, but, all the advice in the world, all the love and fluffy feelings and rah-rah aphorisms, when they land on the ears of someone who is struggling for the most basic things in life – how is that person supposed to react? Do they react with anger? Upset that people who are blessed with comfort feel compelled to export super-fluff are somehow not getting the big picture?

I think quite often on the poor soul who can’t scrape together a meal today, who has no reliable potable water to rely upon for survival and has no idea if someone or something will end up trying to kill or nibble on them in the night. How would they react to being told that everyone is suffused with love and true happiness is all in your mind and how you perceive and approach the world? When I imagine myself in that condition the last thing I want to hear is someone expounding on the fluffy. I’d really like something to drink, something to eat, and maybe someone to watch over me as I collapse.

It isn’t until you get to writing how you feel that you find yourself tripping over the very core reason why your political views are formed the way they are. I think it’s this, this poor soul, a nameless faceless sufferer that compels me to be a liberal. To share what I have, (with hope that we share what we have) in order to ensure that this one poor soul never has to face such an empty existence. And I think it’s this poor person that I always think about when I walk into the voting booth, and when I look upon my paycheck and note how much FICA I’m paying, just to start. It’s something I cannot understand, and probably never ever will. Why people can be so cold and unfeeling, so unimaginative that they cannot comprehend someone to be in this suffering state. I think that’s one of the core reasons why I am filled with boiling waves of rage when I hear conservatives railing against social programs. How corrupt and alien would be our world if any one of us fell through the cracks and died while others did nothing. If you want to know evil, I think that’s the core of it. Not being violent or malicious, but being indifferent to suffering. By being indifferent, in some ways you are actively collaborating with suffering itself. It makes me feel wretched.

So, getting back to where we started, the central question remains. Is happiness bound by external things? I think it most certainly can be. People should not lose sight of that.

Most Americans Blame Wars For Federal Debt; Few Cite Tax Cuts | TPMDC

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Most Americans Blame Wars For Federal Debt; Few Cite Tax Cuts | TPMDC.

It’s time to declare that we won both wars and pull our troops home. Cease all operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan and let China, Russia, and the European Union take over. They’re so hot-to-trot to wear the big-boy pants, why not let them? China has billions of people and all our money to waste on Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to concentrate on issues at home.

I can remember railing at length that these frivolous wars are going to drain our treasury and sap our collective wills and it will come down to a clear and simple choice. Do we maintain our bloated and grossly over-important military or do we have social programs? It’s going to come down to that you know. The Department of Defense versus the Social Security Administration. Americans will then have to choose which one they want more. Do we want to kill strange foreign people for fun or do we want to kill grandma and grandpa for fun? It’s a choice. Either we keep our war on and the elderly and infirm start to die off or we recall all our troops and we have a shot at keeping Americans alive and well.

One thing does strike me, does it really matter to make that choice at all? It’s really a self-solving problem. Once the US Dollar is no longer the world reserve currency, that’ll pretty much punch our collective tickets and then inflation will come and wipe out pensions and retirements, kill off a massive amount of people, and leave America an empty scarred hellscape. I’m sure our proud military servicemembers will work for no money and they can survive on pure refined patriotism. It will be a true test of an aircraft carriers pilots mettle to navigate San Diego Harbor manually without tugboats, as there won’t be any fuel oil to run them… to say nothing of the hapless Army grunts who are effectively trapped wherever they are because there isn’t any gas for their vehicles. It’s a long walk home from, well, wherever they are. When they get here, I’m sure they’ll have nothing but happy news to report. I have no doubt in my mind.

It’s just a matter of waiting really. How long before we smash our teeth out on these stupid wars? How long before we have to start deciding between War and Social Programs? There will be a lot of funerals.

 

Destroying our gulf shouldnt be a tax write-off. Tell BP to pay their fair share.

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Destroying our gulf shouldnt be a tax write-off. Tell BP to pay their fair share..

I saw this and blinked furiously for just a moment. That’s 10 Billion dollars, or, 10,000 Million dollars. Written off. Just like that.

I’m always waiting to see what it is that finally and completely kills off any positive feelings I might have about my own species. This is a pretty good whammy. I think it’s high time we root for the monsters kids. Storms, Hurricanes, whatever it takes to nail us nasty creatures off has got to be for the best. This takes self-loathing to a whole new level.

News is Depressing

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One of my friends on Twitter expressed their physical disgust whenever they encountered “News”. I advised them to just stop looking at it.

Really.

What good can come of consuming “News”? Horrible stupid incompetent idiots who are bumbling around with the world in their hands and they have butterfingers! Nearly everything in the 24 hour news cycle is negative or upsetting in one fashion or another. Most of it doesn’t really directly affect any of us in any meaningful way other than to make us sad, depressed, upset, or disgusted. I have stopped watching the 24-hour news cycle shows and now get most of my news-a-tainment from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and even that I pick and choose what I watch and what I just toss out.

If something in your life just makes you angry and upset, what’s the value in it? The world will continue, or not, whether you are aware of it, or not. Is knowing about what is going on really that important to you? Ignorance is bliss, so why not choose ignorance? In the end it’s far better for your mental and physical health. If you absolutely MUST touch this toxic stew of suffering, at least filter it through your preferred satirist. Laughing about the horrible is far better than enduring the horrible all by yourself, without the laughter.

P2 or Not P2

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Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂

Banishment

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Earlier today I read a news article that stated that someone had successfully knocked the Westboro Baptist Church offline effectively silencing them online. There are few people who get under my skin, but these people, they hit all my buttons. They hate gays and are obnoxious about it.

While I don’t approve of their speech being curtailed, as the First Amendment protects us all, despite the quality of what we say and I must respect that. Deep down their silencing does gratify me, despite it technically being a crime.

What I think should be a new element of popular media is a type of banishing. Banishment has always been a really effective punishment for anyone. Yes you committed a crime, and so you are sent away. In this context however it’s impossible by the law to actually physically banish anyone. What I propose is a kind of attention-banishment. In the case of the WBC they are allowed to spout their vitriol and hatred according to the First Amendment, but every popular media outlet agrees that they are to be ignored. This could only work if all the elements of popular media could be brought together in this way, but it doesn’t really have to be an all-or-none deal, a majority would do just as well. Everyone agrees that stories that touch on the WBC are skipped. It’s not that anyone curtails the WBC’s speech, it’s just that nobody really learns of it or hears about it. In many ways, they are banished, ignored, and over time and enough starvation of attention they will fade into nothingness. The majority of the banishment would be covered if Google removed every reference to the WBC from its index and CNN purged all the stories in its archive that touch on the WBC. In a way, it’s a little like 1984, that if we all agree to forget, and if we all agree that organizations like the WBC exist, then in a very real way, they actually cease to exist. Yes, they can continue to scream and protest and carry on without any curtailment to their actual speech, but we all agree to turn our backs on them and ignore them. Eventually there won’t be any reason to grandstand and show off and protest for them because it’s meaningless. Nobody sees them, everyone ignores them, and no cameras will point their way. No reporters will write stories on the WBC and their existence will be struck from public consciousness. It’s even within this argument that the Wikipedia article for Westboro Baptist Church be eliminated. No historical record of them will be shared.

With this type of banishment, especially in our increasing socially connected world, anyone who is declared banished might as well just give up what they are doing, as it’s just a waste of time, money, and energy.

This reminds me of one of those late-night sci-fi shows that used to be on, like Outer Limits, where criminals weren’t incarcerated at all. They had a mark placed on their forehead that they couldn’t cover up and anyone who saw the mark behaved as if they didn’t exist. They weren’t seen, they weren’t talked to, they weren’t THERE. They could do anything they wanted, but they were cut off from the rest of humanity – and in a way, banished. What a punishment. It just takes my breath away.

Reagan’s 100th

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Poring over the morning news I ran across a news entry that spoke about Reagan’s 100th Birthday. Much like how a very strong odor can key on a memory and bring a flood of remembered things back into your mind, so did this. I grew up with Ronald Reagan as President. I remember the Cold War with the USSR and I remember “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” speech that Ronald Reagan gave.

This man has accumulated a halo around him that places him just beneath the Holy Trinity itself for Christian conservatives. The memory of this man and his presidency bring many overheard arguments between my parents as I started to learn that when two people are dedicated to polar opposites, that the law of attraction is mostly relevant for magnets. I don’t think anyone really regards the man, Ronald Reagan any longer. Death has transformed him from a person to a canvas, it has sucked out his 3rd dimension and converted him into a handy surface that anyone can use to their heart’s content. The man is dead, how could he complain at how his memory is treated?

Conservatives pray to him. They read what he wrote, what he said, and what he stood for as slightly less important than the New Testament in the Bible, but way more important than anything else. His political life has been transformed into a conservative ideal, and if you fashion a hand grenade of Reagan’ness and pull the pin and lob it into a GOP gathering they all will turn to the light and get very quiet and pray to the Reagan-y-Explody-Goodness. The fascination they have borders on the fanatical, there are terms for what they are afflicted with – you could call it hero-worship, enthrallment to the cult of personality, a whole host of things. For a segment of our political spectrum Ronald Reagan is the second coming of Jesus Christ. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to force the hand of the church and have him sainted.

Now, for the Liberals, Ronald Reagan is something just as precious, but completely opposite. He’s a flame-eyed monster bent on world domination and more shifty criminal acts than you can shake a stick at. Liberals remember the Contras and Sandinistas, all the underhanded dirty tricks and the policies that brought anger and rage. Death brought Reagan to a canvas and Liberals painted that canvas with their impression of the man, casting him not in a saintly light, but one of monstrousness and epic Mordor-class evil. For the conservatives savior, he’s the Liberals bane.

If ever you want a handy guide to political polarity, simply drop Reagan’s name and watch the response. If you see a halo, wistful eyes, and te-deum’s forming then you have yourself a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. If however you notice some frothing, restlessness, agitation, and perhaps the construction of effigies that are set on fire, then you are facing a liberal.

I personally celebrate the fact that he’s very much dead and can’t form any new political opinions or wield any political power. It’s not that I sought his death, that I prayed for his untimely demise, but I did thank the Light when he did die. This is in stark contrast to the oedipal-obsessed spawn of Reagan’s Vice President. For that son-of-a-bitch (the term is apt) I will hold a very large party and feast upon his death, celebrating the worlds freedom from that unbearable monster. Reagan is just as much a monster, but his corpse in the ground tempers my anger into a kind of wistful fuzzy disgust.

So, for the 100th Anniversary of Reagan’s Birth, I mark it with this blog post, I bite my thumb and I spit on the ground. And that’s all I’m giving it.

Federal Budgets

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Watching bloggers go bonkers reporting that Social Security may be cut to balance the government’s budget has me laughing all the way to Apocalypse. What is it that people thought? Social Security is a time-shifting Ponzi Scheme that isn’t illegal because the government runs it. It gratifies the liberal in me and makes absolutely no sense economically especially when we have an upside-down-triangle shaped population as ranked by age (thanks WW2 baby boom!).

When people catch wind that an entitlement as big as Social Security or one as fundamental as Medicare is threatened everyone instantly closes their eyes and power-stuffs their head into the sand – wham wham thhhwap plork!

I tweeted a while back that it would be an interesting time when the government was faced with Social Programs vs. Military Spending. This particular versus is an insidious one, because if either side wins it’s an economic apocalypse. It’s a Catch-22 as well, since you can’t keep this kind of spending going forever, eventually China will go apeshit and demand that we take the borrowing we’re fleecing them for seriously. In many regards, USA(SSI vs. DoD) Vs. China. If we cut Social Security we’ll have outrage, panic, and most likely a spike in heart attacks. If we cut Medicare we’ll have a lot of dead elderly as medical care will become catastrophically unaffordable. If we touch military spending then we’ll harm the military-industrial complex and the massive flow of cash out of the DoD and back into the general economy will squelch and then we’ll have another economic collapse. So, if we all play a very good game of pretend, we can ignore that problem as long as none of us do any kind of simple mathematics. That is until China can’t stand the Catch-22 they are in with us and stop lending us money. They know that it’s disaster if they stop, but eventually they’ll have to, and then we’ll stop buying all that cheap chinese plastic crap and their economy will tumble as well.

This is epic level drama whore material. “May you live in interesting times!” Indeed a blessing and a curse! Afghanistan nearly broke the Soviets, and it’s going to break us. What’s the practical upshot? Massive hyperinflation as the US Treasury prints billions of worthless dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the mighty US economy from total collapse. Those of us who are filthy debtors are going to be the only ones dancing in the streets as our debt, which is not keyed to inflation quickly pay off the numbers, and then we’ll follow the rest of you down the whirling economic toilet hole that is our collective future.

All it takes is time. In the meantime it will be interesting to see how the Federal Government responds to these ever-mounting pressures. Which will buckle first? Entitlements or Defense? Anyone care to toss the dice?

Letter to Levin

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Dear Senator Levin,

I just read on the Wall Street Journal that you and Senator McCain have made moves to strip the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the defense spending bill. I would be enraged, I would declare that the democrats have effectively turned their campaign promises to us inside-out and displayed the lies that they are. I would claim these things if I were really an American.

I can’t serve in the military, I can’t donate blood despite the need, and I cannot marry. I am not equal under the law and by evidence because I am robbed of my 14th Amendment rights I am easily written off, easily ignored, and issues that matter the most to people like me matter not one jot to those in the Federal Government.

On November 2nd I voted. I went to the polls and I cast my party ticket for the Democrats. The idea that people like me have to find someone to be our champion, to secure our basic rights before the law, and then to have them trample us, to use us via glittering campaign promises which are barefaced lies hurts the most. We have no party to turn to except the Democrats, despite our apparent leprosy.

The problem isn’t just with your decision to strip DADT from the military spending bill, but rather with all the democrats including our President whom I pleaded with when he was just a senator from Illinois to please run for the presidency. I would have never thought it possible that a man and party I idolized would betray us.

In the end I’m just another ignorable voice, one of millions who just fade into the woodwork and don’t really matter. When I go to vote next, I don’t know what I am going to do. Vote for someone who can’t possibly win or for someone who doesn’t really care about people like me. It’s a horrible thing. The only thing that comforts me is that nobody lives forever and with new representation perhaps someday we’ll have someone who thinks that equality is something more than just something to put on a bumper sticker.

You’ve more friends with Senator McCain than with your gay constituents.

Thanks.