April 1, 2010

• one

  "Good Morning! It's April 1st, APRIL FOOLS!!"

  That's what the announcer said on the radio today. My weird mind finds that declaration infinitely amusing. It's an infinite loop you see. If it's April 1st Then it's April Fools. But If April Fools is true, then it's not April 1st and therefore April Fools cannot be true. But if it's not a valid April Fools statement then in fact it really IS April 1st and therefore it is in fact April Fools. And so on and so forth.

  OK, so this is the first entry in a series. The series has no point and no consistent theme and I'm not even going to describe why I'm writing it. It's just a series. It'll go on for as long as it goes on and that's all I'm going to say about it.

  Except I will say this. Traditions don't depend upon the person who starts the tradition. We can, in fact, as consumers of a tradition choose whether to embrace it or allow it to die. I'm not very good at following through with things, but I really hate watching things die. And so we have one. Tomorrow we will see if we have two.

  Now, this year Google's April Fools Day jokes sucked. Did they fire all their funny people? I was vastly disappointed. Or perhaps I just missed it and didn't see the real jokes. In fact I haven't seen ANY good April Fools Day jokes today at all. I'm vastly disappointed in all of you. I realize this may be way too early to judge as maybe the best ones will happen in the next 5 hours but I'm gonna go out on a limb and call it right now. Worst. April Fools. Ever.

  To be fair you can't always be brilliant. In fact I imagine Google needs to have a few "lesser" April Fools days interspersed over the years in order to lower expectations. That way the really good ones will be held off for future years. I imagine that Google has like a huge list of great April Fools Day ideas contributed to by all their employees ranked in order of awesomeness. This year I suspect they picked ones out of the middle of the list just to lower expectations. Lull us all into a false sense of security you know.  Plus they've gotten way too much bad publicity already.

  I have many weird thoughts about April Fools days in general. First I find a twisted sickening kind of amusement out of the fact that February is Black History Month, and March is Women's History Month, and right after that? APRIL FOOLS!!! It's as if the world is saying "Pfft, you didn't really think we cared about all that black and women's history junk did you?" Maybe they should have picked different months for those. Nice Spring and Summer months maybe?

  There's a lot of things you can do that kinda reasoning with though. Take for example this. Today is apparently Census Day. APRIL FOOLS!!! That silly census. Don't fill out that junk.

  I'm not at all serious about that and no this statement is not an April Fools. The census is important. Fill it out.

  I understand the security concerns here. There's a real civil liberties question there. A lot of people are afraid to fill out the census because they've bought into the rhetoric that we're moving toward fascism and they'll be put into concentration camps and the Government will use Census data to do it. That sounds kinda crazy only it's real. Japanese Americans really WERE put into internment camps and census data really WAS used to do that. Worse there was a huge cover up of the census's role in that dark day in our history.

  Here's the thing though. That was a LONG time ago. Things have changed. And by that, no I don't mean we've become an enlightened society that would never ever do anything untoward with the personal information of the people living in our country. Ha. Yeah right. No. Things have changed in that the government has countless other ways to get that information about you now. Seriously. The census is a trivial source. It's only got ten questions and fits a single page. Three of the questions are just to figure out if they aren't missing people hiding in your attic and the likes. The rest are name, race(2 questions), age, gender, phone number, and whether you own or rent your home. They already HAVE your address.  In addition there are numerous privacy protections put in place in the Census Bureau and some of which are mandated by law and have been affirmed by the courts that protect the census from being abused in the way it was during World War II and the Japanese internment camps. These protections may not be perfect. One day census data may be abused again, but it's disingenuous to pretend we're in the same situation now as we were way back then.

  This year's census is actually significantly simpler than the one from 2000 and is one of the simplest we've had in ages. The  2000 Census for example had two forms. The basic form everyone got had basically the same questions plus an additional question about how you each person in the household is related to the person owning/renting the home.  In addition a longer form survey was sent to 16% of households that had questions about your salary, previous living arrangement, marital status, language spoken, educational level, place of birth, citizenship status, ethnic origins, etc. There has been a long form census since 1940. Starting in 2010 that has been discontinued entirely.

  Not that that "long form" data will fail to be collected of course. It's just not part of the census. Rather the American Community Survey program will continue decade long to get more accurate information throughout the decade using modern statistical methods so they don't have to go door to door demanding you fill out an outdated form.

  Nevertheless anyone telling you that the census in 2010 is an expansion of the data gathering capacities of the Federal Government is lying.

  That's just it though. The census is minor outdated information. It's really no big deal at all. It's not some secret government plot to take your life over. If the government wanted to do that, it totally could. It wouldn't need a big public census to do it. The government already has much much better information on you and if it NEEDS to it can easily get more. They have your social security, birth certificate, tax returns, driver's license or ID cards, passports, etc. They can get information about what flights you've taken, what credit card purchases you've made, and probably what google searches you've done. They can find your location through your phone's gps. And they can listen in on your telephone conversations. Basically we live in a world where information about people is enormously available compared to what it is in the past. Not only that but there are numerous companies mining information through surveys and polls and buying lists and watching customer habits. Every time you use one of those damn grocery preferred membership card thingies you're giving someone a LOT of personal information about you. Information they could conceivably use against you or sell to or provide to anyone including the government. This harmless 2010 census by comparison is a drop in the bucket.

  There are no constitutional patriotic grounds on which to reject the census either. It's been around since the constitution and was explicitly demanded by it. The original census asked questions about race and gender and how many slaves people owned and whether they were the "head" of the household. We've basically just updated that to the modern era. Furthermore, historically the census was highly promoted as essentially necessary by some of the major founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson was the head of the first census bureau and Madison wrote some of the first questions on the original census.

  If you are really worried about civil liberties there are, I think, a LOT scarier things out there then the census. There's for example the warrant-less wiretapping started by Bush and continued under Obama with congressional authority. There's the patriot act which authorizes all kinds of intrusions into people's records and behaviors, started by Bush, re-approved by the Democratic congress under Obama. There's things like current initiatives to put full body scanners in all airports. There's things like the plan to create biometric ID cards for immigrants in order to help identify illegal aliens currently going through Congress. That last is the most frightening to me. I would bet money it won't stay limited to immigrants for long if ever and that will provide the government with vastly more accurate identification information about you than a census ever could. Over time it could be used for everything.

  In contrast to these, the main impact of of the census is just that those who don't fill it out end up costing the government more money as they have to hire more people to go door to door to get the information from you. Cuz they will get the information. That or they'll collect their $100-$500 fine from you unless you're lucky enough to be somehow missed. Which is very possible. Every decade lots of people go uncounted and sadly as a result their districts get less representation and less money in federal programs. Historically most frequently most uncounted people are amongst he poorest and most destitute communities. Though nowadays they are using GPS systems to identify the homes of everyone living in the country. So they'll probably find you. If you already got a form of course that you are refusing to fill out, well then you've already been found. So all you're doing is costing the government more money.

  It's sort of ironic isn't it?  It's conservatives who are complaining about the census and calling on people to not fill it out and it's liberals arguing that people should.  Yet the main consequence of not filling it out will be a very Liberal result. It will create more federally funded jobs putting people to work. Heck it might even help us get our way out of the recession since liberals generally argue that the government giving people jobs helps in a recession.  In contrast conservatives argue that excess government spending makes recessions worse. By that logic then, conservatives should be the ones MOST inclined to fill out their forms and encourage others to do the same.

  In other words, not submitting the census is an idiotic proposition ESPECIALLY if you're conservative. Save your battles for serious risks to your well being and safety. Whether or not you fill out a census will not determine whether or not concentration camps come to the US or whether or not you'll be safe from them if they do. Relax.

  Now if you want to argue for making the census simpler, removing a question here, altering a question there, fine. That's a rational argument we can have. Maybe gender and race questions aren't so necessary anymore, or maybe we should change our laws in such a way as to make them unnecessary. I'd disagree with those propositions but at least we'd be having a coherent logical discussion. It's much better than "Oh noes! The government is coming to get meeeee!!!" rhetoric you hear far too often with regards to the census from the right. Like I said, RELAX.

  Anyways, whoever's idea it was to make National Census Day April 1st should be fired. I'm not even sure I get why Tax Day is in April. I know it's the start of the 3rd quarter by the fiscal calendar, but still, who cares? Both days could easily be March 31st or May 1st.  Seems like putting it in a month known for jokes and falsehoods is just a bad joke.

  Yes, if you didn't notice I appear to be advocating the seemingly ridiculous proposition that absolutely everything we do in this country should be timed based on when April Fools Day happens to occur. That's right. But IS it ridiculous? Is it really? I think I've demonstrated pretty conclusively the confusion and craziness that can happen if we don't abide by these rules. We'd lose all of black and women's history, the federal government would be deprived of taxes and the House of Representatives would cease to exist because nobody would fill out a census and we'd have to assume the US population is zero. IT COULD BE MADNESS!!! We have to put an end to this right now! Absolutely NOTHING should happen during the entire month of April or the two months preceding it lest we accidentally assume those things are false April Fools jokes being played on us. I'm serious. Really I am.

  Anyway, I do sometimes wonder if there aren't weird things that happen in April because we have a day devoted to deception that nobody can predict.  Like, it's entirely possible that one day ages back someone did a really super subtle April Fools Day joke on  the first of April only nobody noticed and that person didn't ever tell anyone. And over time it just became the accepted truth.  Like maybe somebody changed a famous statue in a very subtle way and nobody at all ever looked at that statue closely enough before to notice. So after it was done, everybody just assumed that was the way it always had been. Wouldn't that be interesting?

  It's possible there are dozens if not hundreds of unowned April Fools jokes that just because the truth of the world because nobody noticed. We could be living in a world that really is vastly different than what it appears to be. If we only knew!

  There's the opposite too. It's possible something real that just happened to be really odd and unbelievable happened on the first of April but everybody just assumed it was a joke and no matter how often people swore it wasn't nobody believed them. Maybe nobody ever believed them and yet it was true. Yet again, it could be that all the world we're living in a mere shadow of the truth!

  But of course what I'm really waiting for is the day when something super momentous happens on a global scale on April 1st and everybody who hears about it just shrugs and assumes it was just a silly little April Fools joke. We might end up believing that right up until it's too late. It's kinda scary if only it weren't so potentially amusing. I just hope when it happens it has nothing to do with my imminent death.

  It's probably rational to just believe every single April Fools joke and be a dupe, rather than being the one fool who dies assuming the nuclear radiation cloud coming toward him is just somebody's bad idea of an April Fools joke. 

  But the proper strategy for dealing with April Fools day requires more analysis. Tune in next year when I contribute more brilliant wisdom about the day of Fools. For now, I'll chat with you tomorrow.

  • 8:32 pm
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