All the hip kids these days are debating the whole healthcare crisis thing. And I agree it is a crisis. Yes, we’re living longer than ever before — so one might argue that we have no crisis, because we should just be happy with the way things are — but I would argue that the crisis is not really physical; it’s moral.

As usual in the American political world, the two sides are throwing accusations at each other, packed with unspoken and inflammatory assumptions. Like-a so:

GUY 1: Opposing the President’s healthcare reform clearly indicates that you think it’s okay for people to die just because they’re poor and because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy.
GUY 2: Supporting the President’s healthcare reform clearly indicates that you think the Federal government should take away taxpayers’ freedom to keep their own property and make their own decisions.
GUY 1: You obviously believe that only spoiled rich people have the right to a healthy, pain-free life!
GUY 2: Well, you obviously believe that victims and lazy people should be able to demand honest, hard-working people’s money at the point of the IRS’s gun!
GUY 1: You, my friend, are apparently a Fascist.
GUY 2: And you, sir, are a Communist.

The problem as I see it, as in many political issues, lies ultimately in our oversimplification of the issues. Well, some of us. Others don’t do this. But pretty much anyone on TV is leading the oversimplification army over the cliffs of doom every freaking day. Continue reading →

Bullfrog on Biggar Lake, Algonquin Park

…aaaaand to spoil the effect, a little rant from one character in the book I’m listening to in my current workouts:

“Let’s see… you work every day of the year except for three lousy weeks. You make about a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two-thirds and gives you one-third, and you give a third of that to the government. The government uses what it gets to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So, naturally, you complain about your bloated, inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Forty Signs of Rain”

Of course the character who says this is ignoring some things (like the fact that the government can, indeed, be bloated and inefficient, and not all executives can afford mansions); but the point it makes is acute: we complain more about the small percentage of our paychecks we give to the government — for which we receive some benefit — than we do of the much larger percentage that goes into corporate profit, for which we arguably receive little (or certainly much less) benefit. We feel the visible loss in our monthly paycheck more than the much larger one that happens before the check is even cut.

Hooray! I have phone and internet again! And it only took a FRIGGIN’ WEEK! As I had begun to suspect, the cable modem was fried. Interestingly, so was my little Belkin 802.11g router, I think. Hm. Adding to the mystery, when I boot into Ubuntu (the machine the modem is physically hooked to dual boots), the clock now says something like, “January 8, 12:42 pm” or such. Counting backward, January 1 at 12:01 a.m. would have been sometime last Thursday morning, which is when I lost service. So, power surge killed modem and router in one blow? But they’re both plugged into surge protectors, and the protectors did not blow a fuse or trip off.

Anyhoo, $70 later I have a new router that’s way faster than any of my receiving equipment can possibly take advantage of. But it works, and here I am. Of note, this would have been fixed faster if the first 3 days of phone calls hadn’t gotten me repeated (and vague) reports of an outage in my area. I’m not sure there ever was an outage. If so, it was never really acknowledged or explained. On Monday, the CSR finally said, “there’s no outage; your equipment just doesn’t seem to be working.” So that’s frustrating. Was there an outage? Grrr.

In honor of feeling all internetty, here are some joyful Star Wars parody doohickeys just for Alex. Warning: one is Robot Chicken, and though it’s not the MOST offensive one ever, it has some, um, content. A little bit.

1. Comic based on a recent forum moderator’s comment, “there’s no homosexuality in Star Wars.” ORLY?

2. Teh Robot Chicken – Star Wars Episode II.

Finally, a comment on a news story I saw just now: The NYT calls Obama’s recent deal with Chrysler (in which the car maker declares bankruptcy in return for federal moolah and the ability to perhaps save itself in an alliance with Fiat) “…yet another extraordinary intervention into private industry by the federal government.”

Okay, I’m not going to argue the general fact that our President has pursued a very pushy — perhaps unprecedented — agenda of government interventionism in this economic crisis. But singling out this case as “extraordinary intervention into private industry?” How does this even possibly compare to the bazillions of taxpayer dollars flung willy-nilly at the banks and insurance companies over the past months? Here, Obama is intervening to make them declare bankruptcy. And isn’t that what they were going to do anyway, if they hadn’t gotten any government money?

Sometimes the media misses the boat. Me, I want to hear more about the extraordinary interventions into my friggin’ pocketbook, driven by massively over-lobbied financial institutions paying off congresspeople. Since that little ongoing debacle has cost this nation crazystupidtimes more money than the car manufacturer deals ever will, I want to see it front and center, with the critical tones the media seems to have reserved for the car industry.

And now that I’m all riled up, time for work.

This post is a response to Laine’s thoughtful post/essay on some of the issues involved in the “gay marriage” debate(s). She was interested in a religious person’s POV, and I figured I fit the bill. It’s a monstrous response, and didn’t fit in LiveJournal’s character limit. So, after the cut, the whole way-large response.
Continue reading →

I’m talking mostly about the U.S. here. Our housing crisis seems to have been caused by both banks and consumers deluding themselves into believing in a completely unrealistic and unsustainable idea of mortgage borrowing. Now that the dookie is hitting the fan, our congress is authorizing an amount of money that rivals our hugely unpopular foreign war to bail out the largest lending institutions responsible for these practices as well as the lenders who bought homes they couldn’t afford.

Our infrastructure is crumbling. Roads, bridges, power lines, etc. are in need of repair, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars¹. Infrastructure repairs on highways are partially funded by money from fuel taxes. Now, however, due to our century-long dependence on the oil that has risen stratospherically in price,  we’re driving less, paying fewer of those taxes, and yeah. Bad roads ahead. Also more toll highways and catastrophic bridge collapses.

Speaking of the fuel situation, our Big Three — mainstays for nearly a century — are going down like drunk prizefighters. This is generally considered to be bad for the economy.

The overall economic woes are causing Americans to pay off their credit cards and stop carrying balances (well, at least some of them). This is bad for the credit card business. So, companies like Bank of America (and others) are starting (even more) to penalize responsible cardholders, and reward the spendthrifts.

Other interesting tidbits: The U.S. Patent Office is reported to have said that almost all software patents may, technically, be illegal and unenforceable. If this is ever put into practice, there goes one of the more profitable sectors of the American economy (since we no longer build or make or produce anything tangible, apparently). Cell phone companies are shaking in their boots as a judges increasingly rule that some of their bread-and-butter tactics (which also happen to be deeply slimy) are illegal. Our Presidency (in close collusion with the rest of the government) has racked up a national debt of (estimated) over half a trillion dollars for future generations to pay off. The government has finally decided to honor a century of science and regulate tobacco as a drug². We’ve already seen some of the demise of that industry. Americans are (sort of) wising up to the health effects of fast food, and some expect those profits to fall drastically in the foreseeable future. Oregon has been the first state to estimate the economic impact of getting rid of migrant workers, resulting in a dismal outlook. Energy companies are beginning to respond to people conserving more electricity and even producing their own. The response is not pretty, and not good for consumers. It may also not be good for the energy infrastructure.

Here’s my take on all this:

1.  As some have already said, obviously, some of the most fundamental elements of our economy are shifting. I’m not the guy to predict what our economic reality will be in 50 years, but it will be different.
2. This is our comeuppance, in a way. Or karma. Or the simple consequences of doing things we always knew were terrible ideas, but hoped would never come back to bite us. It will take a while to dig ourselves out of this.
3. If some miracle happens and we are saved from the consequences of our actions, I’m not sure that will be a good thing for us as a nation, or as human beings. I think working through this (the economic side, at least) and fixing it, step by step, will be good for us. I hope we do it well.
4. We’ve put our money on the wrong horses. Large segments of our economy — and even government funding — are based on sources of revenue that are nonsustainable, immoral, illegal, or that depend on large-scale consumer fiscal irresponsibility.

1. Which we might be able to afford, if we weren’t involved in a certain war or two [↩]
2. No word on alcohol, of course… it couldn’t possibly be a drug! [↩]