Autodracotheism

There are lots of things that need work in our world.  This isn't all of them, but it's some.

Energy: We need more, and need to find ways of not running out. Historically, improvements in efficiency have lead to greater use, this is good, but it won't solve the problem of running out of oil and uranium.

Politics: American politics is all them-vs-us, nobody talks about ideas anymore. Is it third party time? Or do we need a movement towards discussions and away from sound bites?

Health Care: Health care costs skyrocketing, Health insurance becoming unaffordable, Health care legislation? See politics above.

Criminal Justice: Cops are seen as "bad guys", we spend more on prison inmates than on college students, Predictably, students learn to be better intellectuals and inmates learn to be better criminals. People up in arms about sending a terrorist to court because (among other things) of the inefficiencies in the system.

Terrorism: It scares people way out of proportion to the actual chance of you or a loved one personally being targeted. Terrorism is too effective.  We need measured response that both removes terrorists and says "Meh." I'd say send in the cops, not the marines, but see above.

World Police: Related to terrorism above, we send in the marines when there is great injustice and the people involved are white, or when there is great injustice and the people involved have oil. Dirt poor brown people can apparently kill each other all they want, just like in our inner cities. The world needs a better system for determining when and how much to get involved with other people's problems.

Poverty, Drugs, and Crime: Big downward spiral here, and it's expanding. Can we solve this with an improved criminal justice system, or do we need to change the paradigm?

Ideas and Intellectual Property: There's a big uproar about what is and is not patentable. More computer algorithms are patented than makes sense. Yes, a developer wants to get credit for inventing something, but how long before every software company in the world has to reinvent the wheel every time they want to code the simplest of functionality? Obviously, we want an artist to be able to copyright, say, Aquaman, but "fair use" laws are tricky at best.

Liberty vs Security: In an increasingly wired world, it's almost impossible to NOT know what someone is doing. How do we protect our personal information from people who would use it against us, while at the same time sharing with our friends? Case 1: picture on facebook with you and your cat, background includes big screen TV + facebook status: Going to Hawaii, see you in two weeks! = house robbed. Case 2: publishing lists of petition signers and their addresses, for good or evil.

Posted by DanP at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So our president is being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Almost certainly a bit premature, as most of his work as president is still to come, but good for him, right?

Well, apparently not, if you don't like him.

There are a lot of people who do not like him because of his policies.

There are some people (hopefully not too many) who do not like him because he is only half white.

There are quite a few people who are so inundated with negative partisan propaganda that they don't even really understand his policies well enough to take a stance, but hate him with a passion based on what they hear.

Often, when the subject of President Obama comes up, he is blasted for "apologizing for America".  This comes up so often that I can almost start to believe it, except that I know what he said, and why he said it.

In the infamous Cairo speech, he indicated that overthrowing Iran's prime minister in 1953, an act that led directly to the Islamic Revolution and therefore to Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and about 2/3 of everything that's wrong in the Middle East, might have been a bad idea.  His mostly Islamic audience pretty much said "well duh, finally someone gets it!".  Americans who listened or read the speech had to look it up on Wikipedia.  Apparently, a lot of conservatives either still do not understand how the CIA overthrowing an elected government might be a bad idea, or else simply ignore the facts and yell "apologizing for America!" to win partisan points.

Then there's the recession.  The recession is older than the current administration, but a lot of people love to blame the current president anyway, apparently for not being able to change the course of the global economy in under 8 months.

And of course the big health care debacle.  A lot of people do not want to see health care reformed.  They fear long waits, they fear a decline in the quality of health care due to rising costs, and many, frankly, just don't know what it's like to be faced with a 30k hospital bill because your gall bladder went out on you and you have no insurance.  If you work for a minimum wage job, chances are any health insurance offered by your employer comes out of your paycheck.  If you work for yourself, you need to find insurance, which is expensive even if you are not disqualified outright for "preexisting conditions".  That's right, in our current system, it's perfectly legal for insurance companies to deny coverage to people.  If you make 1200 bucks a month, how are you supposed to pay 300 of it to get coverage and still pay the rent and put food on the table?  The answer is you don't.  You just hope nobody in your family gets sick or has an accident.  And instead of going to the doctor when you think you might have a problem, you wait until it's an emergency, which means more expensive treatment, and when you can't pay for that treatment, health care costs rise for EVERYONE.

Now, naturally, health insurance companies don't want to cut into their profit margins, and want to retain the right to refuse insurance to people who might be inconvenient.  Let's face it, providing health insurance is profitable, actually paying for health care is not.  So there's a lot of people playing up the fear that health care reform will lead to long waits, rising costs, and government officials deciding who gets care and who does not.  They are not very quick to point out that currently, it's insurance officials deciding who gets care and who does not.  Would you rather the decision be in the hands of someone with the public interest in mind, or someone with the insurance company's profits in mind?

But all that is irrelevant, as all you have to do is yell out "socialized medicine!" and anyone who supports reform is a commie.

So why is the president getting the prize?

I think it's simply because he is not George W Bush.

The prize committee could care less about his race or health care.  What they do care about is that the office of the President of the United States of America is still the most important position in global politics.  An aggressive, war-mongering, anti-civil-liberty good ol' boy in the White House scares the crap out of the rest of the world, and the prize is no more and no less than a great big sigh of relief. 

Posted by DanP at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Kids live in a culture of violence.

And no, I'm not talking about the glorified violence on TV, in movies, in video games, and popular music.

I'm talking about day to day physical violence done to kids by kids.

Almost all of it is dismissed by adults.  Kids will be kids.

I'm not saying we encourage it.  Most of us, if given the chance, will stop one kid from beating another.  But by and large, in our culture, it's "normal" for children to assault one another.

Of course, this changes dramatically when we are old enough to be tried as adults, but I'm not talking about adult violence right now, I'm talking about childhood violence.

Maybe you remember, back in the day, when the teachers weren't around, there was always one annoying kid who got beat up a lot.  Maybe you remember.  Maybe you were that kid.  Maybe you beat him up.  Maybe you watched someone else beat him up and was just glad it wasn't you.

Two nights ago, I went out front to find out what the commotion was in my front yard.  When I came outside, about a dozen teenagers ran for it, and 4 smaller kids came running up to me and my fiancee.  My step-daughter-to-be and her friend, both 12, and my fiancee's two nephews, 10 and 8, had been confronted with about a dozen teenagers, some of whom were old enough to drive.  It seems my future step daughter doesn't get along with another girl at her school (what a shock!) and her big sister decided to teach her a lesson.  Fortunately, they scattered before anyone could get more than a few scratches.

The girl is fine, a couple scratches, but she insists she gave better than she got, and seems to be getting over it just fine.

I, on the other hand, am very angry.  Livid.  Pissed off.  And instead of getting over it, I'm getting more angry every time I think about it.

And I know it's my own emotional baggage making this more difficult for me than it should be.  You see, I was that annoying kid who got beat up all the time.  And by "all the time" I mean several times a week, all through 6th and 7th grade.

And, while I know better now, it seemed at the time that nobody cared.

Certainly not the other kids, as I did not actually have any friends there.  I was a nerdy, introverted kid, and making friends was a skill I would not learn until later in life. 

Not the teachers or councilors, either.  You would expect these people to treat an awkward child who lived in constant fear of other students with a little sympathy.  Maybe some of them did, but all I can remember are the ones who I went to asking for help, who told me, with some exasperation, that the only way to make it stop was to ignore them, and no, I was not allowed to hide in the office when they came after me.

But it's hare to ignore someone who is punching you in the stomach.

My father explained to me his theory of the "pecking order", where one kid picks on another kid who picks on another, smaller kid, and so on.  But it did not seem to me that this is what was going on.  It seemed that everyone in the school picked on the three nerds.

Yes, I was not the only one.  There were two other kids at the school who were just as awkward, small, uncoordinated, and smart-mouthed.  In a movie, the three of us would have banded together to overcome adversity.  In reality, we all wanted desperately to be less nerdy than the others, and would have nothing to do with each other.

And so the years of junior high and middle school passed, marked by many fights (none of them went well for me) and even more embarrassment and humiliation.  High school was much kinder to me, as I finally learned how to make friends and not get beat up, and in college I really hit my social stride, making many close friends who I stay in touch with years later.

I would like to say that I am stronger for having survived this, but it seems all it takes is one incident to turn me from mild-mannered 30-something computer geek to a raving, wild-eyed, ranting lunatic who wants to press criminal charges against a bunch of teenagers and take every last one of them to court.

Posted by DanP at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I hear in the news and on the 'net a lot of people describing US foreign policy since Obama took office as "weak".

It's weak because he wants to talk with our enemies.  It's weak because he admits mistakes made by the US in the past.  It's weak because he is "throwing Israel to the Muslims", as one pundit put it.

Our previous president made quite a big deal out of refusing to talk to nations such as North Korea until they changed their behavior.   North Korea did not change it's behavior.  Neither did Iran.  Iraq and Afghanistan both changed their behavior, but obviously not because they wanted to normalize relationships.  Not talking to our enemies does not seem to work.  I would even submit that not talking to your enemies is the weak position.  A middle school nerd does not talk to the class bully because any possible conversation is gonig to end badly for the nerd.  The captain of the football team, on the other hand, can talk to the bully.  And, if he's got a heart, he'll do so if it can stop the bully's predation without getting into a fight.

Admitting mistakes is also a sign of strength.   George Washington's famous admission of guilt regarding a certain cherry tree remains enshrined in our culture as an example of his strength of character.  It seems a truism that we must know our history in order to learn from it.  I would certainly hope that a failed course of action will be recognized and acted on -before- the next change in administration.

The Middle East peace problem, of course, is very complicated, and exactly what's going on is sometimes difficult to figure out due to all the shouting on various sides of the issues.  Our president has called for a halt to Israeli settlement construction.  More than a few people have said that ongoing settlement construction is the biggest, most important obstacle to the peace process on the Israeli side.  So it makes sense to put a halt to it and get the Palistinians back to the negotiating table, right?  Apparently not.  According to a large number of very vocal people, Israelis have the right to settle wherever the heck they want to, and what's more, stopping the settlement process will result in the destruction of Israel.  The frist claim assumes the failure of the two-state solution.   The second claim makes it much clearer exactly what's going on.  This is a land grab.  And it will continue as long as fear dominates Israeli politics.  A strong, secure Israel would have no need of this.

I want to generalize these observations.  I want to claim that intolerance, fear, hatemongering, and bullying are all weak positions.  Tolerace, helpfulness, and peace are strong positions.  I will definitely at some point be writing more on the subject.

Posted by DanP at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)