Marking my territory with digital feces.
Latest annoying trend in superstar/Hollywood fashion: relatively flat-chested women wearing deeply-plunging necklines showing off… their sternum. Is that sexy? No, it is not.
I suppose it’s an improvement over trends in previous years such as collagen injections in the lips, or shoulder pads, or whatever nonsense.
I don’t get fashion, that’s for sure.
I think I understand now the pattern that Obama is using. He seems to do the same thing every time.
He’s done this several times now, and it has worked every time. In his Senatorial campaign, in the Presidential primary, in the 2008 general election, with the stimulus, with the clean energy bill, with the Sotomayor confirmation, and now with medical care.
Basically, he decides to be reasonable and way too nice, but as his opponents decide to respond by not acting in good faith, he digs in further to his position, but also just keeps on being nice and willing to compromise, and lets them dig themselves into a hole.
That’s because, I think, that he wants to compromise, but, alas, the opposite side doesn’t want to. The big difference with this guy is that he lets them own the problem of their intransigence. It’s simply not his problem if the Repugs don’t want to deal in good faith. It’s their problem, and they own it.
Whatever, hey, it works.
UPDATE: Cool! Governor Dean confirms that this is exactly what Obama is doing! Thinking about this a bit more, it seems that having the first African-American president is a very helpful thing: he’s studied Dr. King. A lot. The tactic Obama is using– which Dr. Dean correctly identifies as "smart"– is exactly how the Civil Rights movement did it. Be dignified, be peaceful, be strong, be calm, and let the other side bring out the water cannons, batons, and attack dogs.
Most of the SPAM I get tends to be all about the same subject. Relentlessly. For months or even years. Then it changes gears.
In the 90’s it was for Weight loss products.
In the early 2000’s, it was for Viagra and Cialis and other penile-enhancement products.
A few years later, it was nonsensical word-salad schizophrenic Bayesian crap, obviously to try to derail SPAM filters.
Then pain medications. For some reason, all the SPAM was trying to sell me some kind of drug or pain med.
Then it was all for stocks. My whole in box was filled with stupid stock tips.
And then it was for business opportunities in Dubai and UAE. Every bit of mail, trying to sell me some crap in the middle east.
And now it is watches. Watches? All the SPAM, daily, is trying to sell me watches.
It’s like little kids playing soccer; everyone all bunched up around the ball, chasing it. When the ball moves, they all move.
Sheesh.
I love it when things I’ve been trying to explain for years, get summarized more succinctly and accurately than I ever could… and as a passing comment:
…the freedom they’re fighting for is the freedom of corporations to make even more money off of them.
Exactly. Too many libertarians and objectivists have for long been the "useful idiots" of the corporate power elite. Well, not really "idiots" per se, more like naive abstract idealists getting chumped by the powers that be.
American health care is not really a system at all. It’s a market. In a market, people with money can buy what they want and many people are left out. So we thought, no, we don’t want market-driven health care. We want a real system, something that covers everybody and doesn’t depend on how much money you have.
Best summary of the problem that I’ve ever seen. And, it also sets up the fundamental conflict between capitalism and democracy. Markets are, by definition, anti-democratic. One dollar, one vote. No dollars, no votes. It’s corruption in a bag.
In short, a belief question is totally worthless in measuring American’s knowledge on the subject or the value of the theory. It’s a measure of a theory’s popularity.
Exactly. This kind of thing has been driving me batty for years now.
No question about science should be asked in terms of "belief". Science is not made of beliefs. It’s made of data, and theories to summarize and organize the data. Theories are invalidated when the data doesn’t support them, or when a better theory fits the data better. It’s totally irrelevent whether people who have no fucking clue "believe" or don’t "believe" them.
I’ve spent a lifetime getting sidetracked into various traps and dead-ends, and now I think I’ve found a way to avoid them.
Doing things for the money– specifically "to get rich"– is a dead end. It can never work out well. It’s either soul-crushing, health-crushing, or– even worse– both of the above, and doomed to failure too, by its very nature. If you’re doing something only to make money, you can’t actually succeed at it. Believe me, I’ve tried, over and over and over again, and I’ve watched way too many people bang their head against that wall.
Doing things to save money is also a dead end. It never works. Being DIY is great, being frugal and efficient is great, but trying to DIY in order to save money is a fool’s game: it never actually saves money– it usually costs more. The "penny-wise, pound-foolish" trap catches anything done only to save money.
In general, doing things out of terror (of being poor, of looking a fool, of being alone, of making mistakes, of danger, of social disapprobation, of the wrath of some person or group of peopel, of losing money, of not making enough money, of conflict, etc.), are all dead-ends, and IMHO the worst kind. I know people who have actually succeeded with this strategy, but it is hazardous and life-sucking.
So what’s left? The only motivations that seem to actually work towards a sustainable, healthy success are:
I haven’t found too many ways to hit all three simultaneously, but any one will work. Really, if it doesn’t fit into any of those, it ain’t gonna work as a long-term strategy.
I’ve been a big fan of community currencies ever since reading "The Future of Money" by Bernard Lietaer, in 2001.
Since then, I tried to get some currency projects going, but the time wasn’t yet right. It was too hard to explain, or get people interested or motivated, or the software wasn’t yet usable, or there were too many other problems, which I’m going to outline below.
Now it seems that there is a lot of activity in the area. The software is definitely ready for everyday users. I’ve been getting involved and trying to help get something going. I’m struck by a few things that are still problems, for currencies in general, and for me in particular.
First of all, the fundamental problem we are trying to solve is to close the gap between two senses of the word "value". The value in the sense of moral and ethical value, and the sense of monetary value. We live in a psychotic society driven mad by the hypocrisy inherent in our money system: it requires us to value things which are abhorrent, and it desecrates things which we value. So the first thing a community currency system does is– at last!– value things which are actually valuable. This is determined by the community which is issuing the currency, and different communities may have slightly different values, based on who’s in them and what they’re doing. That too is a good thing, if we value (in both senses) diversity and freedom.
Secondly, I’m convinced that no community currency will ever be considered "real money" until it can be used to meet basic human needs like food and shelter and transportation and clothing. When I can pay rent and buy food with my good works done for community currencies, then it will be valued. This is the third sense of "value", meaning– to be desired or wanted or needed. There’s no more tangible way to value someone’s good works helping people than to feed, clothe, and shelter them. These are things that everyone needs. A currency has to offer things that humans need in order to be a real money, and not just a way to track volunteer hours. I’ve been told that too many currency projects end up with people racking up hours but not spending them. This is why: their needs aren’t met by things offered by people who accept community currencies for pament. Get apartments and food and clothing and transportation into the system, and it will thrive. Don’t do that, and you have a toy, ivory-tower project that won’t go anywhere.
Thirdly, I’ve found that I have very little patience for theoretical and “ivory tower” discussions of currency and money– and groups that see it as a toy or a theoretical game. I am a musician and therefore I am poor and I live in a world of dirt-poor, near-starvation people. For me the great hope of community currencies are very much a practical affair: feeding people, keeping people in their apartments, enabling people to have time to work on their craft, keeping them from the crushing despair of a system that views us as less than human. I’ve already stepped back from one community currency project because influential people in its steering group are too far up in the clouds and too lost in perfectionism and a quest for elegance.
Fourth, the greatest danger to community currency projects is its corruption by the fiat currency and fiat financial system. I don’t want anything to do with venture-backed, or otherwise fiat-currency-oriented community currency projects. I backed away from one some years ago because they wanted to charge its members in US Dollars a monthly fee to participate. That’s defeating the whole purpose. I backed away from another one soon afterwards, because it was basically just a front to get grant money (in fiat US dollars) and wouldn’t have solved the problem of detaching from fiat system. And I am still seeing today projects that look like little more than "social networking" Web-2.0-type Facebook bubble scams. But at the same time I can’t condemn them; they have to eat! And this illustrates point #2 above, as well, and in a big way. A currency that will let you buy food– that is backed by basic human needs– will drive out all others.
Fifth– and related to the purism I’m revealing in points #3 and #4 above– is that I find that my personality doesn’t suit me well for community. This is a huge irony since I believe so strongly in community currencies. It’s a potentially terminal irony, if the financial system continues its collapse and communities are all that is left for support of human life. I’m a loner. I don’t work well with others. I can’t stand having to meet social obligations, and I hate to place them on others either. I like to learn, to get answers to questions, and sometimes to get help, but I’m very American and somewhat addicted to self-reliance. I like to go it alone. I do not trust people. I am impatient and often contentious. Not a great recipe for success in community currency projects– and yet the whole path of my life (and indeed, I think, the whole path of civilization if it is to continue as a going concern) seems to be leading me to them.
I need to think this all through quite a bit more, but this is the state of my thoughts at the moment.
The number of people in other industrialized democracies who feel trapped at their jobs for fear of losing their (or their family’s) health insurance = 0.
That last number is particularly galling given conservative reverence for entrepreneurism. Though it’s difficult to quantify, I would bet that our dysfunctional health care system, more than any other factor, discourages entrepreneurial risk-taking in this country. Which makes all this talk about free markets all the more absurd.
Exactly. I’ve been saying this for a decade now. Small business owners should be out there with pitchforks and torches, demanding government-funded universal medical insurance.
Free market my ass. We don’ t have a “free market” in America. We have a corporatocracy. Huge, trans-national corporations have people by the balls. The best and brightest cannot go out and out-innovate and out-compete the corporations– or even offer a modest, local, smaller-scale alternative–, because, if they leave their jobs, their children will die.
