People Kill People

The Aurora, Colorado Theater massacre is just one more example of what I hate about my fellow humans.  Yes, it's clear that the young perpetrator is mentally unhinged.  It's also clear that the culture we live in allowed him to purchase, legally, enough mass destructive power to empty the entire theater of humanity.  We can and will suggest that people kill people and that guns have nothing to do with it.  Well so what?  How many people would have died this morning if James Holmes had arrived at the theater with a club or a knife or even just a hunting rifle?  Why make it easy for the mentally ill and the criminally inclined to destroy human life?  Let's not delude ourselves, Pistols and Assault Rifles have only one purpose.  That purpose is the death of humans.  Any other suggestion is just plain bunk and if you believe it is OK to kill people check the mirror?

A SOCIALIST AT HEART My Daughter’s Boy Friend

Don’t know how to talk about this.  My daughter says she’s keeping company with a corporation.  It’s a nice enough corporation, mind you, a maker of machine tools from Ohio.

Now I’m trying to be a good dad and a good American here.  I know the US Supreme Court says these corporations should be treated just like ordinary people.  They are people, right?  The Supreme Court says so.  I’m trying to treat my daughter right, trying not to be prejudiced, but I’m thinking there’s just something wrong about the whole thing.

What I worry about is what if my daughter’s boy friend, this small corporation from Ohio, starts feeling big for his britches?  What then?  Does he/she/it (don’t have the faintest which) drop my American daughter and  run off to Dubai?  What if he outsources all his machine tool making to Bangladesh, how’s the daughter going to feel then?

Well, you can see that this might go very badly.  Heaven forfend there should be children involved.  What do you think?  I’m guessing that I’ll try to be supportive of my daughter, maybe not so much for Mr. corporate boy friend.

What do you think?  Do you want your children consorting with corporations?  I’m thinking you’ll get more grandchildren if the kids stick to dating real people.

DISCLAIMER:  This is not really about any of my daughters.  None of them are dumb enough to fall for that corporation as person ruse.  Just having a little not too gentle fun - poking at the ridiculousness of some recent Supreme Court decisions,

Newspapers and Journalism

Perhaps a discussion about Newspapers and Journalism is in order.  Recent days have seen  major reductions in print journalism.  The Times - Picayune of New Orleans moving to three day a week publishing and hoping to make up for the loss with a poorly conceived and executed web presence is an example.  Numerous reporters are let go or offered less lucrative employment in web based newsrooms.


The quality of news goes down as reporting is outsourced, sometimes to web based companies like Journalic, (a Tribune company) made famous for writers in the Philippines inventing local American bylines.  


A lot of people will shed no tear over the loss of newspapers and news journalism.  After all many of us, me included, get much of our news on the web.  That’s just great but, and it’s a big but, how much of that web based info do we really get and use?


I worry that results like the US History 2010 Report Card  that showed that only 17% of eighth graders and 12% of high school seniors were proficient in history are problematic.
Or in a Pew Research study, only half of the respondents knew that Abe Lincoln was a Republican or that less than sixty percent knew that Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat. Those results also showed that the young (under thirty and presumably more web savvy) were much less well informed than those older and presumably more into print media.


You might ask what difference does it make?  Does the average American need to understand History and Politics?  I guess not, if you plan to miss the revolution, stay at home watching Reality TV while the rich and well educated put democracy out of reach for the rest of us.


Here’s where I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist.  What I think is that it is a mighty convenient thing for the poor and lower middle class to be mired in ignorance.  The upper classes have access to all the information and the means of making it hard for the rest of us to uncover that information.  You might say that the poor are lazy and don’t want to know.  I say that’s the same kind of B.S. that invents the myth of welfare queens and people who want to be on the dole. 


 No one wants to be ignorant or downtrodden.  Anyone who tells you that lie is a propagandist or a fool.  These are the same people who say that it’s OK for others to try to live on a wage of $10 per hour or less.  


So what should we do about the demise of newspapers and newspaper journalism?  I know one thing for sure, if we don’t think about it and talk about it, nothing will change. 

Annoy the Rich reelect Obama

Obama Care

They call it "Obama Care", not "The Affordable Care Act".  Do you wonder why?

They say it's because it costs too much.  Obama's a big spender compared to who, George Bush?  Two wars and no payments made yet.  Of course we already pay more than any other nation and fail to provide coverage for 50 Million of our citizens.

They say that private enterprise can and will do better.  Well, have they?  Have you seen any evidence that we are about to add those 50 Million uninsured to the rolls and improve coverage so that those on the rolls have outcomes that match the costs?  You can guess that the answer will continue to be negative.

My guess is that for those against the Affordable Health Care Act it's about two things.  One is that the Insurance Industry would actually have to work at providing real health results to protect it's profits.  Sick people would have to be helped, a radical idea for most Insurance Companies.  The second, and more difficult to address, is that it was enacted by a Democratic Party led by a college professor, a pointy headed intellectual, from a middle class background who, by the way, is black.

Yes, what I think is that the Anti-ObamaCare noise is really about class and race.

Many who say they want private business to shoulder the health care load would happily embrace the Affordable Care Act if it had been passed by a Republican Congress and President.  After all this is the plan put forth be the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) and by Mitt Romney when he was the Governor of Massachusetts.

A SOCIALIST AT HEART The Class Struggle

Recent world events, the revolts in Egypt,  Libya, et al., the failures of advanced nations to provide for their citizens and the world wide failure to address environmental degradation have made me a revolutionary.

Unlike the Libyans, I own no guns. I am a follower of Dr M. L. Kings doctrine of non-violence, so there will be no recipes for bombs or molotov cocktails (sorry to disappoint).  What I will do is point out problems that I see and solutions where they can be found.  Most of these problems and solutions will not be of my own invention, but will be the work of those I find helpful or insightful.  What I will do is share the thoughts of thinkers and reporters of world and local events. What I hope for is some dialogue that leads to change and that advances the well being of the working class.

   

You may notice that I say nothing about bringing the upper classes along to my revolution?  I have to invite their participation; however, as they are what we are revolting against.  Yes, I’m a socialist at heart.  The class struggle is in my genes.  For those of you who can not join the revolution without having the reasons enumerated here is a partial but not exhaustive sampling.

Just one percent of Americans own more than twenty percent of the countries wealth.  Ten percent of Americans own half of all American assets.  That’s half the nations wealth in the hands of just 30 million of the 300 million plus citizens of this great land.  That means that 90% of us have to get by on the remaining 50% of the available resources.