Tag: politics

A Bullshit Free Day

I’d like to declare a national day free of bullshit. We can call it National No Bullshit Day. NNBD. Although bullshit is spelled as one word, some call it as BS, or more colloquially, B.S.. So we could do NNBSD. Naturally, I like my idea better. We can have shirts and tee shirts, and raise money, or some other bullshit.

You know BS when you hear it and you call it by your expression. Mularky. Bull. Bullshit. B.S. Garbage. Crap.

We were used to it in the military. Bullshit inundated us, which, if you think about it, which I try not to do, is actually a lot of B.S. We had our bullshit meters. Hearing something that we knew as bullshit, we’d say, in a sort of laconic way, “That just pegged my bullshit meter.” That statement meant that the needle went all the way to the right. Another expression used was, “That buried the needle on my bullshit meter.” Buried the needle was an old expression referencing tachometers and opening throttles to the point where the needles entered the red zone or went as far as it could. Of course, the ultimate bullshit expression was, “My bullshit meter just broke.”

Most bullshit meters used to go to ten. Mine, of course, went to eleven. It was the Spinal Tap Special. (rim shot)

I suppose, in this precise digital age, that bullshit meters are way more accurate. They’re probably on a scale of one to a thousand, enabling the ability to assign a more accurate bullshit value to a given statement, action or news. There are probably apps that can be downloaded and installed on your smart phones, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Being sixty, I don’t need a bullshit meter, and will tell you, with a sniff, “I don’t need a meter to tell me when something’s bullshit. I’ve experienced enough bullshit to know bullshit when bullshit is around.”

But many naive and gullibles do not recognize bullshit. They believe you can get something for nothing. I, of course, believe that’s bullshit. Of course, the problem with bullshit is, once it’s in your system, you can’t get it out, debilitating your immunity to bullshit. You soon can’t even detect it.

Still, there times when my bullshit meter gets broke. For example, when a car manufacturer, like Ford, declares they’ve completely re-invented a car, I think, that’s bullshit.

When they announced literally no longer means literally, I shook my head and said, “What bullshit.”

When I see the price of my quad shot mocha is five dollars, I think, that’s outrageous bullshit, even though it’s not, really. Bullshit often depends upon your frame of reference. I have some years behind me so my frame of reference has gotten pretty damn big. First, I would tell you, “Nobody sold mochas when I was a kid. We didn’t have a Starbucks or coffee house on every corner. Coffee houses were part of the beat generation. Only artists and poets went there, not people.”

And then I will tell you, “I remember when a cup of coffee cost less than a dollar.” Someone with a bigger frame of reference will naturally top that and declare, “I remember when it cost ten cents a cup,” and another will say, “I remember when it was free.” I’m not sure if coffee was ever free, so that moves my old bullshit meter needle a little bit, but that’s okay, because they’re old, and it’s honest bullshit.

The Internet doesn’t help. I mean, come on, there is so much bullshit on it that it seems possible that the bullshit will take it down. Which would be a pretty good news lead: “In today’s top story, bullshit broke the worldwide web. More coming up, after this word from your sponsors.” Which is bullshit in its own right, to need to wait to hear about this important news until you’ve heard someone try to sell you something.

I may be showing my age there.

You’d think some tech company could design an application that not only detects bullshit but blocks it, just as intrusion detection and prevention software works. Then, as you’re downloading a page, a little popup arrives on your screen and says, “Warning. Bullshit was detected and blocked.”

We could even assign the bullshit levels of threat: faint, mild, average, serious, dangerous, and OMGWTF infuriating.

I dream of a time when television commercials could contain the disclaimer, “This commercial contains no bullshit,” and you can sit back and listen and know, you’re not hearing any bullshit. Because if they were spreading bullshit when they made the commercial, some great Bullshit God would zap them with a laser and declare in a thunderous voice, “No bullshit allowed. Not on my watch.”

But, yes, that’s a fantasy. For now, I’ll dream of a bullshit free day, or even just, like an hour when I don’t read something and say to the cats, “Can you believe this bullshit?”

I don’t think it’s going to be until after November 8th.

 

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What I’m Following

I try to follow the news and escape the echo chambers. Demoralizing as so many American newspapers essentially offer the same take on every story. So vanilla. Meanwhile, columnists along the political spectrum are generally predictable about what they’ll claim, reducing their value. I like jumping out of the US and checking the news on BBC America, and British, Canadian and Australian newspapers for coverage of American events. I still dance through WaPo, SFGate, NYTimes, Boston.com, Forbes and a few others on a regular daily/weekly basis.

I’m following theSkimm because a friend recommended it. They read so I can skim. I wanted to see how they read and interpret.

Longreads take me into places I wouldn’t otherwise know. Longreads offer compelling, vivid stories. They take a lot of time to read. Yes, I read the Nation, the Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, which also have long articles. Oi.

Haven’t seen anything on theSkimm or Longreads about Lionel Shriver’s opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival regarding cultural appropriation, but there’s an eruption of blog posts, newspaper columns and editorials about the complex, challenging situation. Wow.

Trying to drift into a different direction, I’ve been checking out Merry Jane’s website. Marijuana is morphing into a large and legitimate business in Oregon, with signs like ‘Exit here for the BEST marijuana’ emerging alongside Interstate 5, right beside signs claiming to have the world’s BEST pie.

I delve into Pinterest, FB and Instagram to see what’s bouncing around those places. I still check Flipboard and BillMoyers daily, and read an overabundance of writing blogs and newsletters, along with Wired, Popular Mechanics, the Smithsonian, Union of Concerned Scientists, Delancey Place and EPI when their newsletters arrive.

What are you reading out there? You have any sites that you recommend?

 

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I Can’t / I Can

Meditating and calming is hard today. My heart is with Dallas. My heart is with the people the police killed. My heart is with the officers and family killed by snipers.

I can’t digest the reasons a traffic stop ends in death. “I have a gun. I’m permitted to carry it.” Four shots later, dead. Some witnesses say the shots were fired before the officer finished saying. It’s contested. John Scalzi writes what I think. I can’t imagine, I can imagine, I can remember moments when an officer confronted me, but I never thought about being shot and killed. I’m white and male. It’s a different world for me.

Police are called to a convenience store. A black man is outside. Police arrive, confront him, taser him, wrestle him to the crowd. They see a gun. Bang. The narrative is contested. No one is agreeing about what happened, about what videos showed, about who remembers what.

Black people are being killed for broken tail lights. Shot in the back eight times while running away. Because they’re a threat.

Protests break out. Trials, investigations, inquiries are conducted and almost every time, from small black child with a toy gun to people tasered and on the ground, the results return, “It was justified.” The officer feared…. The officer followed proper procedures….

So, who is surprised? Someone else says, “I’m fucking tired of this. I’m fighting back. I’m taking it to them. See how they like it when they’re shot and killed without provocation, because they’re not the ones who did anything, but the system is rigged and has provoked me to this response.” And they get up there and start shooting at officers.

How many trigger words are in those sentences I wrote that people would contest? Many, many. We ‘know’ more violence isn’t the answer but we ‘know’ that nothing has been changed to protect people from being shot and killed by a good guy, bad guy, or police officer, with a gun. We know fear is rising. Imagine being a police officer right now. Imagine being a black person. Imagine being in Dallas when the shots are fired. Imagine being in a car and reaching for your wallet when shots are fired.

There will be responses. There will be posts like this. There will be prayers and pious statements that our hearts are with the victims, whether they’re officers or citizens, of this rising streak of violent death by guns, as I wrote in my first paragraph, as I, weary of these dire headlines and violence, struggle to understand. The NRA will remain silent. They’ve learned not to speak out at these moments. Bad PR. Others will make foolish statements. Some will challenge and mock, “See, those fucking police officers were good guys with guns.”

Yeah.

Reading the officers’ accounts of going into Orlando after that mass shooting – how many days ago? –  they tell of the darkness and uncertainty in the club, of going through carefully to find the shooter. Add some good guys with guns shooting at what they think is the bad gun with a gun into that charged environment of darkness and uncertainty.

But we know the future. There will be protests. Marches. Calls for change. Petitions. Blog posts. Prayers. Statements. Maybe sit-ins. Gun sales will rise again.

We know the future. Just look to the past. You don’t need to travel far.

Just travel to June.

 

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Thrive in the Mud

Hello.

I am the middle person.

The average dude.

Ah, to clarify, the white, late fifties middle income liberal average guy. Black guys, young guys, white guys, females, Libertarians, Conservatives, Jews, et cetera, are all also average guys, the middle person, a consumer, partner/spouse/atheist.

Whoever I am, I’m stuck in the middle of the mud. Facts are being sucked into a heavy, gluey, clinging muddiness that traps light and squeezes out air. For example, search for results about the recent Board of Trustees annual report about the state of Medicare and Social Security in the United States. Refine your search to determine how solvent the system is, and even what is meant by the system. It’s surprising how the report’s points are spun.

Muddiness exists around any subject where facts can be distorted, dis-proven or disregarded. Politics are catalysts to create hyper states of distortion and disregard. It’s a sweet place for writing because this is where creativity ferments. Too often, I try to logically explain a fictional situation, or characters’ positions and actions, trying to establish that they do this because of this, ergo, they will do this next. That’s essentially how I think. I keep trying to break out of that for myself; I over-analyze information. Vacuums are the worse, generating a need to create information that makes sense in the vacuum, and then over-analyzing that information that I created.

But I want characters who are different from me, and different from most, characters (and situations) with a WTF aura that entices readers to press on turning pages. Sometimes that means abandoning ‘my’ logic while establishing ‘their’ logic. To me, their logic is frequently mired in emotions, how they feel about matters, rather than what they think about it.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have emotions about things, but that I temper, stifle and throttle those emotions (most times) so that I can react intelligently and rationally (all the while reminding myself not to over-intellectualize and compartmentalize). But yes, I have angry, frustrated and bitter WTF!? reactions to too, too many issues and items. Some of them, like other drivers, are enormously petty. I call this ‘drivism’, the tendency to look down upon other drivers because they don’t drive like me, which automatically means they’re not as good as drivers.

This is exactly where such logic lies. Brexit, Trumpism, even racism, sexism and about a dozen categories of other -isms are reminders that sometimes, to create a character’s narrative, I need to step out of my zone. First, think about what I would do. Next, think about what the normal person and the average person would do. These may all be the same, or not. Then decide to have the character do something perhaps by doing the opposite, and then explore those results. It can be head-spinning but it may also be liberating. After a time, I become sufficiently immersed in the character and situation that less and less of these exercises are required.

Okay, that was the fruit of my meditating and walking today. Time to write like crazy, one more time.

Let’s take it from the top.

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Conveniences

Modern conveniences have spoiled me. Nuke something (via microwave) and have a meal in a few seconds. Refrigerators with built in ice makers. CD and MP3 players and home theater surround sound systems with speakers and woofers that are almost invisible. I use voice over Internet protocols, so I don’t have a telephone land line and don’t pay phone bills. Of course, the phones themselves don’t have wires, either. Just a handset and a charging station.

How fast can I travel the country, or the world, via aircraft? Many waits in security lines and processing to board the aircraft now take longer than the flights.

Once I thought color television was amazing. The rotating mechanical outside rotary antenna supplanted color television as an incredible addition, adding so many more channels. I think we were able to get about eight. Then came cable, and the cable explosion.

Now I don’t have cable or a rotating antenna, nor a satellite dish. I receive over the air broadcasts via a digital indoor antenna, and supplement my watching habits with Roku devices on two televisions. The third television is a curved, high definition smart TV. It doesn’t need a Roku. It has a wireless connection to the web, a ‘smart TV’.  Its screen is 55 inches but it weighs about forty pounds, though it has stereo speakers built into it. Through the Roku and smart TV, I stream offerings from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Now, Acorn and Showtime. I have monthly subscriptions but these cost me almost nothing. I use Swagbucks to buy gift cards to pay for these subscriptions.

My computers have gone from heavy, thick machines with a small green screen (and no mouse or pointing devices, back then) to sleek, four pound laptops. Enhanced Graphics – wow, sixteen colors! – gave way to VGA to digital graphics and plasma screens. My mouse is wireless. I can take my computer anywhere and connect to wireless systems, using its battery pack to write and converse with people around the world, watch videos, or create posts, like this, that others can read within seconds of me clicking ‘publish’.

All of these are almost taken for granted but the stuff in my car continues impressing me. I’ve had it almost two years, and two things, the climate control, the keyless entry, and the headlights, keep me impressed.

With the climate control, I rarely touch them. The air conditioning and heater are utilized to keep the temperature on my side of the vehicle at whatever I’ve chose. The fan kicks on to a higher speed if necessary to cope with colder or hotter conditions. Sometimes, when it’s really cold, I turn on the seat’s heater. All of this is a long way from rolling down windows, adjusting vents, sliding heating and air con controls back and forth, and turning fans on higher or lower. The car does all these things for me.

Likewise, the keyless entry impresses me. I put the fob into a pocket and forget about it. Press a button to unlock the doors. Press another to start the car. No key.

The headlights are always on, dimming themselves as needed, turning around corners to minimize blind spots, raising and lowering to keep level in relationship to the car and road’s angles. This, again, is a long way from the early days of turning the headlights on, stamping on a metal cylinder to toggle the high beams on and off. The metal cylinder gave way to switches on sticks mounted on the steering wheel column.

How long these will continue impressing me, I don’t know. Digital clocks and watches long impressed me. Cable television amazed me for about four years, I think, because it soon became a flawed offering. But the things that concern me each day are not these amazing devices, but more basic matters, like water and drought. Where are the modern devices to deal with those? And what about the hand gun deaths in the United States? I understand the second amendment but I really thought we could hold two positions in our minds and intelligently address these.

I must pause to write, too, and note, yes, and what of prejudices, prejudices based on sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, poverty, race, the color of your skin, or even your clothes or the way you wear your hair, and your politics, and your education, and the way you speak?

Of course, the flow is all about money. There is money in prejudice as fearful people keep pathetic power hungry people in leadership positions. If there was more money in solving the drought or improving water efficiency, more modern conveniences would emerge to deal with those issues. We see that happening on the power side. I have passive solar panels on my roof but I’ve had them almost ten years. I take them for granted, too, although I do pause when passing the invertor to see how many watts my system is generating, and I look at the electric bill each month. Yet its technology has already improved and that system is how the mechanical antenna with its rotor was like compared to cable.

I don’t mean this to sound or be self-congratulatory. It’s meant to be a reflection of the changes witnessed, no matter which direction they went, in my lifetime. The world amazes me, but I’m frustrated that we can’t solve or seem even to address some issues, because there’s no profit involved. Where profit becomes involved, like housing, heathcare, agriculture and politics in America, the results become depressing, with profits, power and control overwhelming the common good.

Yet, perhaps because I write fiction, and was raised on Star Trek, or maybe because I’m a natural optimist who hates giving up on anything, I keep hoping and believing that change will come our way. We’ve elected, at last, a black human to be America’s President. A female, at last, is being nominated for the Presidency (assuming all goes well between now and the convention). And the Pope has apologized for some of his religion’s more regretful recent issues, and is pushing his church to be a more charitable and humane organization, the way it was originally intended (I think…).

The USA has even re-established relations with Cuba. Back in my youth, in the 1960s, we were in the cold war with the USSR, which no longer exists, and fighting a hot war in Vietnam (which now manufactures our consumer goods). Hot wars around the world still subsume our energies and destroy lives and the planet. Cue Edwin Starr: “War! Good God, y’all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” And people will argue, no it’s necessary to deter aggression and right wrongs.

Maybe it was once. But now I think of war as a small black and white portable television, with a tiny screen and limited reception. Unfortunately, there remains too much profit in war for anyone to rush to do away with it.

What we need to do is find the profit in peace. And then the modern convenience machine will go right to work.

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