Earlier today I had a conversation with two friends about stories and understanding. Basically they were observing that there were certain people who seem to miss what is to them the most obvious things in stories. Of course I was one of the people who was "missing" stuff.  As a result it seems that they and I have rather completely different tastes in stories. Stories that they say "makes perfect sense" really leave me feeling frustrated and annoyed because too much is left out. I end up feeling like raging at the author or writers and shouting at them "Why don't you just explain it already!!!"

My friends theorized that it's different ways of thinking. Different brain compositions of a sort. Some people, that is, experience things more emotionally through their senses. So musical and visual clues, clues in tone and style, and clues in symbolism and imagery speak more directly to them and their brains are able to process the information in order to fill in the gaps that the author obviously intended the reader to fill in themselves.

In contrast, other people have a more concrete logical mindset. Things need to be related through cause and effect. When given the pieces of a puzzle they can fit them together very well to make a whole, they can even do it rapidly, but without all the pieces they can't imagine what might fit in those missing spots even if the author obviously intends the readers to bring their own experiences to bear in order to fill in those gaps. And the lack of the pieces will just annoy the hell out of them.

My friends observed that it tends to though not always be the kinds of people who end up in Math majors and engineering type programs that tend to think in the second category. In contrast it tends to be artsy types who think more along the lines of the first category.

Yeah that second group is definitely me. I'm much more comfortable in the world of things I can experience directly and understand fully and completely than a world of guessing and wondering. That kind of abstraction process is forever uncomfortable to me because it just feels like there's no right answer to me. So I can come up with a million guesses and they all seem equal to me. I see no reason to believe one explanation for how to fill in the gaps over another. None of them  "just feels right" to me.  Though of course my friends it's the opposite. If I propose a possible explanation they'll give me a flat look and just say "No." In their minds there's a right answer and the reasons my answers don't work are wholly obvious. 

What's weird of course is that they agree. They come to their explanations independently but it's always the same explanation. That suggests that they are really seeing something I don't rather than just making things up out of thin air. Though for all the sense it makes to me they might as well be doing some kind of mysticism or magic in their interpretive process.

Me, I'll just read the explanation online and think the writer is an idiot for not explicitly explaining the things I read in the piece of work itself. I can't help but part of me always thinking that that whole abstract reasoning thing is a load of make belief bull. My mind just doesn't work that way.

Of course the sad thing is, I really WANT my brain to work more that way. As I think it would make me a better writer. Hence I try at times to read poetry and more poetic short stories just for the practice. GEnerally I end up reading these dozens of times over without having a clue what they are talking about until it is explained. And yes I know poems can have lots of interpretations and there's no real "right answer" as the writers say, but trust me, my my random guess interpretations tend to be so far off the mark that nobody else in the world sees them the way I do.

Then again there are some very excellent writers who do live more in the world of the concrete and I'm not just talking about Journalists and historians. Fiction writers like Brandon Sanderson are definitely more concrete than others like say Jacqueline Carey or Robin Hobb or even Robert Jordan for example. But even Sanderson the more he writes the more he seems to excel at this kind of poetic abstraction process and emotional invocation.

Me, I only ever can do it when I at the height of my depression. Everything else I write feels very stale and flat to me. I don't give the reader an opportunity to misunderstand me because I explain things is extreme detail. Ironically though the level of detail seems to lead to more misinterpretations of nearly everything I write than I would have ever thought imaginable. It's amazing how much people can manage to not read especially if something is long.

Anyways, styles of writing and how they relate to different ways of thinking are definitely subjects worth thinking about especially for those aspiring to write regularly either for fun or for profit or to scratch that ever unscratchable itch.

On Pairings in Language

I think every sibling pair close in age or set of close friends has experiences a phenomenon of language I call "Pairing". Pairing is when two peoples names are always spoken together as if they were one in the same entity. It happens sometimes too with coworkers, cousins around the same age, roommates, married couples, and people in a close relationship.  And of course it's probably the worst for twins.

Pairing can be one of the most frustrating things in the world to experience. When you're "paired" it feels like part of your identity is being disregarded. In effect the differences between you and the person you are paired with are disintegrated leaving only the aspects that make you the same. It seems to build up too. The more you are referred to as a "pair" the more it happens and the more your distinctions start to rub away and disappear.

The other major problem with pairing is its often used to reduce not just the uniqueness of the entities within the pair but the uniqueness of the pair itself on a whole. For example people will say things like "people like PersonA&PersonB"  as in "siblings like Jennifer&Bob" or "couples like LeAnn&Sally".  When that formulation is used the implication is that the pair is just symbolic for the vast majority of people who are exactly the same and in no way unique.

This latter phenomenon often happens when someone wants to make a generalization about others. In order to do that you always need at least two examples in order to be deemed credible. If you only had one example people would call you out and say "Maybe there AREN'T any other people like that!"  So they use two people and refer to them together as if to suggest that there are tons and tons of examples and the speaker just happened to pick these two.

In television news discussions you hear it. People will say MSNBC shows like KeithOlbermannAndRachelMaddow. All together just like that as if they were one and the same thing. Never mind that their shows are very very different and nevermind that there are no other shows on MSNBC that are anywhere close to as left wing as those two.  Likewise on the right you'll hear SeanHannityAndGlennBeck when discussing Fox News shows. And you'll hear RushLimbaughAndGlennBeck when discussing right wing radio hosts. Always altogether even though all three of those people are very very different. It's entirely possible for a person to be a fan of one or two of those and not the other.

Pairing phenomena happens with lots of other things that aren't people too. Like people will say "Movies like 300AndGladiator" or "Comic Book Movies ike X-MenAndSpiderMen" or "Video games like FinalFantasyAndDragonQuest" And so on and so forth.

Pairing is very lazy language usage. It's convenient and easy but creates rather apparent distortions in understanding. It's easier though for people to use a pairing to imply more than they are willing to say then to take the time out to speak about each entity individual. This is especially true when discussing the individuals would detract from the overall theme or intent of the writing or speech at hand.

Still, I'd rather people pause before pairing things up in their mind just a bit more, ESPECIALLY if it's people. Though your subject is unlikely to complain outwardly, it's highly likely that a person paired is secretly just a bit annoyed by being lumped together with someone else and not treated as a unique individual.

However, if you have some deep urge to really annoy someone, start pairing them up in your speech with someone completely different from them. Best of all make it someone they really don't like very much. Keep doing it over and over again and watch how long it lasts before they can't take it anymore and explode with anger. It'd be especially funny if they explode while the other person is present. 

Though be warned, the resulting fight between the three of you might not be particularly pleasant. Still it could be an experiment worth trying once if you are really bored and don't mind toying with the emotions of those entities you call friends.

Otherwise stop pairing people up dammit! We're individuals!

I often wondered what we would do if we didn't have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to creatively criticize the ridiculous narratives being force fed to us in our broken media system. I suppose the answer to that question, is that we'd still have Rachel Maddow.

That's it. That's exactly right.

I often wondered why it is that I care so much about politics these days. I didn't used to. Politics used to be the last thing I could ever imagine myself writing or reading about on a regular basis. And in the past I didn't feel bad about that either. Whenever I did dabble in politics, it didn't get me outraged, and I didn't feel such a great pressing need to express the truth.

And things didn't seem so different back then than they were now. There were still a lot of arguments. There was still a lot of disagreement about how things should be. There was still just as much vitriol in the language of the debates in 1996 and in 2000 as there is today. Liars still existed. Racists still existed. Rush Limbaugh was on the air then and he's still on the air now.

But increasingly I've gotten this feeling over the last year or two that things have changed. Something is just really really different now. Politics doesn't work like it's supposed to anymore. Something is sort of un-jarred. Something is broken.  I just couldn't put my finger on what it was exactly.

I knew some of the phenomena that were being driven by this unidentified change. The rapidly rising popularity of Fox News, the media's increasing love of opinion television. The war in Iraq itself and the recent economic collapse. Our inability to act on climate change, and the brutally bitter battle over simple health care reform and the downright scary aftermath. None of these things felt normal to me. It all seemed off.

I think Rachel Maddow does a great job of getting at the core of the problem.  We live in an era where we all are sharing almost no facts. It's not just that we disagree about the facts. It's not just that we are interpreting the facts under the lenses of different ideologies. No. We literally live in different facts universes from one another.

It's as if the entirety of politics was like a crazy Mathematics debate wherein one side argues that 1+1=3 and the other argues that 1+1!=3 (not equal).  Vitriolically angry argument arise about whether or not 1+1=3. But nowhere is ANYBODY even bothering to say the obvious truth that one plus one is actually EQUAL TO TWO!

And if you can't get there, then how can you move on from there? We haven't even bothered to analyze the consequences of what it might mean if 1+1=2 or to find out what we can derive from it. We don't even have an argument about what to do about the facts. We can't get there. We're too busy arguing about the basic definitions of the facts. We can't even characterize the phenomena in a way that we can all understand and agreement.

We've become so used to lies that it's become our default assumption whenever we hear facts that are damaging to our position. If someone says something, we immediately start looking for a way to prove that person to be a liar and whether we find it or not we just assume that the lie will be exposed for us eventually. We don't take the other person's word for it. Not if they're the enemy.

The worst thing is, the way our political system works is we are almost invariably shown to be right about that skepticism. EITHER we find the truth eventually that shows the person a liar, OR we find someone willing to LIE even MORE in order to make the person seem like a liar thus giving us our needed justification. And it makes us feel good. Our world view remains unchallenged.

That's what's different now. There's a profound loss of trust, not just in one another, but in the veracity and verifiability of facts themselves. People don't seem to even believe that there are scientific truths, that there are moral truths, that there are political truths. Or at least a good chunk of people believe that any of those truths are particularly a big deal. Who cares if you make shit up if it makes your own life better, if it makes your own political party do better, if it helps you achieve your religious aims, if it makes your company make a bigger profit, or if it just plain makes you feel superior to others? Why not lie? It works.

In the old days there were a lot of lies too. Governments lied. Businesses lied. All authorities lie. But when the truths were exposed people believed in and accepted the new truths as they came to light. Sometimes it was a tumultuous acceptance process, but generally agreement was achieved.  Nowadays though, even when the truth is readily available, easy to look up and has been exposed repeatedly, people continue to believe the lies without even the slightest sense of humility or shame or even cognitive dissonance. The truth just doesn't matter if the lie is good enough.

One of my favorite examples is another Rachel Maddow clip. I can't find it at the moment but I'll summarize. Basically Maddow was doing an interview with an anti-gay rights person. The person had just made a big deal giving a speech saying that the courts in a ruling had defined marriage as "the establishment of intimacy" which he claimed would lead to all kinds of crazy results. Obviously if that's a line in the ruling its consequences are a worthy subject of reasonable debate. The problem is, as Maddow explained in the interview, it wasn't in the rulling at all.  Maddow confronts the guy and she tells him point blank that the statement he made about what was in the ruling was not the truth of the ruling. She tells him repeatedly. His final response was I think ultimately revealing. He never agreed it wasn't in there. He never promised to go back and look and issue a formal apology or correction if it wasn't in there. No. All he did was say "we'll just have to agree to disagree".   It's as if in his mind the literal wording of the ruling is not a subject of debate but of opinion. But if that's the case you could obviously just make up the ruling saying whatever the heck you wanted it to say in order to serve your purposes.

I kind of imagine what would happen if the Pentagon Papers were released today? I kinda think people would just assume they were fakes. No amount of verification or validation would convince them otherwise. They're part of some conspiracy! Someone would produce fake documents that contradict them or come up with some other ridiculous circumstantial evidence that they would believe would discredit the whistle blower.  Likewise, I imagine if Joseph McCarthy were conducting his hearings today, there would never be any public outcry even after it was revealed how deep his hypocrisy went. Edward R. Murrow would give his speech and instead of being listened to, he be dismissed as a commie and ultimately fired. If Watergate were to happen today, I suspect we'd find a way to praise Nixon rather than impeaching him.

That's how different things seem to me. Maybe I'm far too skeptical. But to me it's as if massive chunks of the populace have decided to consider all of the major truth authorities on which we used to rely to be completely discredited:  religions and churches, the government, journalists and reporters, the media, scientific institutions, schools and universities, unions, businesses, even our elder relatives. What's left is a massive power vacuum into which the most vile nonsense sprouted by the most unreliable untrustworthy of demagogues with compelling personalities have been able to flow. People don't have anything left that they feel comfortable grounding their facts in. So they just take whatever facts that give them the most immediate sense of satisfaction and go with those. Invariably those sets of facts are exactly those that their immediate friends and family agree with. Often it's whatever they hear on television said by the person whose personality they can most identify with.

So when I criticize the Republican party and the Fox News noise machine, to be perfectly honest their power and influence isn't my greatest concern. My concern is their methods. And my deepest fear is that they will export those methods to the rest of the society. I fear that in the end it might be that after the Obama administration if there is a Republican administration next, the Democrats will learn the lesson that the utter disregard for the truth and riling up the public into a frenzy actually works pretty damn well in politics.  And so they'll ratchet it up to a new level. And then thereafter the Republicans will see how well Democrats did it and bring it up just another notch. And so on and so forth.  If THAT happened then the civil war some of the crazy people are threatening over mere health care reform really could happen.  And if it did, I suspect it would be a contender for the most pointless and unnecessary civil war in the history of human civilization.

I agree wholeheartedly with Maddow's final point. We NEED debate and discussion in this country. But there has to be a way to pull people back into the realm of somewhat similar conceptions of reality. We don't have to agree on everything. We shouldn't. But we have to get to a point where when the truth is put in front of us we can at least all agree that it IS the truth and build our conclusions on the basis of those facts.

I don't know if you've noticed because of his regular general level of awesomeness, but Jon Stewart has been being particularly incredible lately.  I've believed for a long time that Jon Stewart was probably the most capable and effective media critic on television today.  He just keeps proving me right again and again. Let me just share a little bit of what he's been doing lately in the form of three clips.

First. These are clips going around youtube of segments of Jon Stewart's appearance on Bill O'Reilly's program.  The user who posted them subjected them with "unaired scenes" and shows some of the context. I haven't seen the show that aired so I can't determine which scenes were aired and which weren't. However, I have seen the full interview which was posted on the O'Reilly Factor website and which you can also watch here.


This was an amazing effective interview. The full interview is in a lot of ways more impressive than the clips above, but it's a little long and the unaired scenes gives you a good sense of what happened here. Stewart made great point after great point throughout the interview.  But more importantly, I think, he and O'Reilly have a civilized intelligent conversation. They disagree about just about everything but the conversation does not degrade or collapse. I always like it when these two spar. They're both very smart and very quick and clearly have a sense of humor too. And while they both think each other are incredibly wrong and often hypocritical, they both clearly have considerable respect for one another.

Secondly, here's an interview Jon Stewart gave recently with Marc Thiessen. Thiessen is a former speech writer for George W. Bush who wrote a very popular book titled: Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack

The interview is longer than this. There's part 2 and part 3 that are available online. Thiessen was apparantly annoyed that he couldn't say as much as he wanted during the aired segment. You can judge for yourself but he seemed to get a chance to say an awful lot to me.  One of the weird things were the moments where Thiessen would be in a middle of a response and would posit a question, a question that Stewart obviously disagreed with him about what the right answer to was. But Thiessen just started to keep talking after asking the question and Stewart had to jump in and say "hey wait a minute, I don't agree with that".

The interview is clearly adversarial. That's the way interviews are supposed to be conducted between people who disagree. I don't agree with the idea that the interview was unfair. My only problem with it was that Jon was not as knowledgible about the subject matter as he could have been.

The thing is of course that Thiessen is full of shit.  First he argues that lawyers who represent a terror suspect are exactly the same as lawyers on the Mob's payroll. That's a ridiculous comparison. Second he suggests that we've always had "enemy combatants" fully not acknowledging that "enemy combatant" is a status created by the Bush administration in order to escape giving prisoners either the protections entitled to Prisoners of War under the Geneva Conventions or the protections entitled to others accused of crimes under the Criminal Justice system.

His book is full of a lot of false statements. He gets the orders of events wrong, uses questionable evidence, and leaves out evidence that doesn't suit his overall "torture works" narrative. One really good article refuting a great deal of his nonsense is this article by Jane Mayer.  It's hard to read that article without getting the impression Thiessen is simply a liar.  But it's not just in what he argues that Thiessen is questionable, it's also in his general general style of approach to contradictory evidence. As Mediamatters documents whenever Thiessen is approached with data that contradicts his position, he immediately accuses the person of being a liar. The end result as MediaMatters explains is that in order for Thiessen to be correct everybody ELSE must be a liar.

The best part of this interview is when Jon Stewart makes an amazing general point about narratives. He said:

Third.  The following is a contender for my favorite Stewart clip of all time.  It really stands on its own.

 

I can't say how lucky we are to have Jon Stewart out there. We'd be in a lot of trouble if he weren't around. His existence gives me hope.

Six.

This video was leaked through WikiLeaks a site that has broken numerous impressive stories. Amongst the documents they've leaked include:
-the Climate Scientist Emails
-the Standard Operating Manual for Guantanamo
-offshore loan documents from Iceland
-documents pertaining to toxic dumping off the coast of Africa
-documents showing the US government's plan to destroy wikileaks
-microsoft's global criminal compliance handbook which details what personal information they collect about people
-CIA reports of plans to figure out how best to manipulate public opinion in France and Germany
(most of these come from this)

To date none of wikileaks documents or videos to my knowledge has ever been shown to be a fake. The staff of wikileaks researches and documents every story before they release them.  The video below was recently confirmed to be authentic by the US military.

Here is the video. It is one of the most disturbing things I've seen in a while pertaining to the war in Iraq.

Some things not mentioned in the video that are important to note:
1. According to wikileaks, the quality of the video is significantly worse than what the people would have seen had they been there. There was considerable degradation in the decryption process.
2. At the time of the incident Reuters tried to get this video released and was denied.
3. This was the Pentagon's cover story as reported by the New York Times via Dan Froomkin

"There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad."

4. According to wikileaks, what had actually happened is that unconfirmed gunfire was reported in the vicinity some time earlier. They didn't know the source at all and for all they knew it could have been a car backfiring. The military sent in the helicopters afterward to investigate.
5. The FULL video is available on the wikileaks site and was released prior to the smaller edited version I've posted.
6. In the FULL video there is a third attack by the same helicopter within the same hour as the two displayed above. In this third attack missiles were fired into a building. Wikileaks' investigation found that there were at least two families inside who were killed.
7. According to wikileaks there was only one person amongst the eight men killed in the first encounter who was armed and he was not armed with an AK47.
8. The children who were wounded survived and there are pictures available of them online.

You can learn by watching today's DemocracyNow coverage of the incident. Or read more at Glenn Greenwald's blog who has been talking about the story for the last few days.

Some of my own observations:

Notice how throughout every step of the encounter the soldiers frame their report in such a way as to increase the likelihood that their superiors will give them the ok to fire. It seemed like they wanted to be able to kill these people.

For example, in the first encounter they see two people that MIGHT have guns. One of them has a camera, and another is talking on a cell phone.  None of them are shooting at anybody or even involved in any kind of conflict with one another or anyone. Nobody is pointing weapons at the helicopter. Yet the soldiers call in that they see five or six individuals with AK47s and a possible RPG.

The second even more glaring example is when the van pulls up. The soldiers describe the van as coming "to pick up bodies and weapons".  They make the van out to be scavengers or possible terrorists. When in reality as the video plainly shows the men were trying to pick up the wounded individual not "the bodies". 

It strikes me as entirely possible that by the second incident the soldiers involved knew that they had done something wrong and wanted to leave no evidence or witnesses behind. They seemed almost panicked when it seemed like an Iraqi civilian might take the one remaining wounded somewhere to get help. They beg for an order to shoot. Similarly the one soldier wanted the wounded camera man to pickup a weapon earlier so he could shoot him. It seemed like they wanted to leave no witnesses.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the soldiers themselves are solely to blame any more than I did with Abu Gharaib. And it's obviously easy to second guess here from the comfort of our homes. No. It's their commanders that create this environment that justifies this behavior that deserve the lion's share of the blame. And even beyond them it's the civilian leaders who brought us into this war and don't set the expectations from the top level down that encourage better behavior.

The soldiers are doing what they were trained to do. They've desensitized themselves to brutal violence because that's what they have to do. That's what happens during war. We know that human beings all kinds of normal regular people are capable of truly horrible things when put into unusual circumstances. There's a boatload of psychological literature to that effect. Environment matters a lot.

It also occurs to me that as many of the apologists who are trying to excuse this behavior keep saying, the context here matters a lot. This was at the height of the surge when violence in Baghdad was at an extreme high. It's entirely possible, maybe even likely that at this time there was enormous pressure being placed on these soldiers to "get results". They were likely in effect "unleashed" with a mandate to do whatever is necessary to maintain the peace. It's not surprising at all that some of them engaged in brutal methods. Not justifiable in the least, but not surprising. It seems likely that one of the ways the "surge" worked was by having US helicopters out over any area even suspected of having hostiles shooting anybody who moved or gathered around in public places. That kind of terror would undoubtedly reduce violence levels. But does that make it right? I don't think so. It means many civilian casualties.

In the video it certainly seems as if the soldiers and their commanding officers are somewhat nonchalant about it all. That matters to me less though than the actions themselves. I really don't care what people laugh about when they're in brutal dangerous situations. I don't think it's wrong to have a bleak sense of humor and I think there's also a pressing need for people to desensitize themselves somehow to what they are doing in order to do the job of being a soldier. It's repulsive to civilians but not something that would make them liable for anything.

However, what this nonchalant seeming attitude does seem to suggest is that this was perhaps not an uncommon kind of engagement.  Engagements like this, though hopefully not as extreme, could be happening every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're just not seeing it here in the United States. We're getting a light weight propagandized version of the war. I'm pretty sure the people in the Middle East are seeing this though. They probably see this reports of killings like these all the time. Some likely have reasonable explanations that show no wrong doings. Others undoubtedly though are much much harder to justify or even understand like this video. It just seems downright immoral.

There are other stories being released lately about immoral US soldier behaviors and even worse behaviors by independent military contractors who would not be in these countries were it not for United States involvement. I won't bore you with going into the big huge list but there's tons of them.

On Jeremy Scahill's twitter account he notes that there's also a LONG history of the United States killing journalists like they did in this incident. Here's what he tweeted:

And all of this is just more reasons why war is not justifiable.  It turns monsters into regular human beings and taints everyone involved.  The real criminals here are the civilian leaders who brought us into these wars and continue to refuse to do anything to get us out of them.

Some will try to argue that I am hurting our troops by talking about this video or that I am dishonoring them.

But there is no honor whatsoever in this video or what happened there. There's no honor in any of the civilian deaths we've seen and heard reported. This is not morally justifiable. This is happening because we are sending kids out with overwhelming force and little guidance into foreign lands. It's an idiotic system that causes countless deaths and harm to everyone involved. And for as long as it continues unabated, we are all responsible for it.

People say the United States has the best and most well trained and most moral and civilized army in the history of the world. If that's true, then they need to prove it. That means, NOT covering up mistakes. That means punishing the people involved AND their superiors to disincentive mistakes like this from happening again. And likewise punishing the people who cover it up. Transparency is essential for any institution for us to know that they are doing good.  Because as evidence has shown time and time again, it is impossible to simply take the Pentagon's word for it.

That's not to say they shouldn't publicize the good things our military does as well. They absolutely should. But we need to know exactly what's going on in our name. We need to know what we've created so we can put pressure on our leaders to make changes in order to make things better.

So Thank God for Wikileaks.

Dreams and Music

Last night I had what was perhaps the strangest dream I've ever had. It started off with me being in the minds of a number of people experience weird reality altering aberrations. They were sort of reminiscent of the "signs" of the dark lords prison being broken in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. Only the characters were much darker and more gritty down to earth people. It had a very fatalistic feel, like I was trapped in the minds of people who had lost all hope and had resigned themselves to seek pleasure in the now above all else.

Then in the end of the dream there were like visisons of tidal wave forces striking the East coast and people fleeing inland. My perspective kept jumping around from the people on the East Coast to television broadcasts detailing the chaos to people on the West Coast on the beach enjoying themselves wholly oblivious.

The vision came to a head when my perspective jumped into the mind of the one person on the beach on the West Coast, who was somehow aware of what was going on on the East Coast and felt the urge to shout a warning. But then, in like a flash faster than a bolt of lightning, I was stuck underwater and drowning and there was no air and no Earth anywhere to be seen. It was just endless water. *I*, my overarching perspective, knew that the West Coast was simply gone, that it had been swallowed whole by unimaginable tidal forces. I was trying to swim up to find some kind of salvation but it was a hopeless endeavor.

That's where my dream ended. I woke up and it was about 11:48 PM. I'd fallen asleep just a couple hours earlier unintentionally.

My very first thought, was wow this would make a great story! Of course I didn't remember most of the details of the characters and their lives but I felt they were deep and interesting characters.

My second thought, was woah, that was creepy! I don't dream that often and what I do dream I rarely remember. But to have an End of the World Dream during the last moments of Easter Sunday of all days was immensely disturbing.  I started to wonder if other people had had a similar dream at that time. Because if everybody had like a world drowning in water dream during the last thirty minutes or so of Easter Sunday well then I might start to think there might be something to all this religion stuff after all.

That's not to say that that would be enough to make me believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible or even that there is a real God. But it might make me believe that there is some sort of powerful entity out there effecting our dreams that knows something about the Easter Holiday and is using it to send some kind of warning sign to people. Even then I'd wish whatever force it was could be more efficient and specific. There are things he could tell us more directly that would certainly be more likely to spur me into action.

So how about it? Did any of you have weird end of the world dreams yesterday night? If not, I guess it's just my overactive imagination again as usual.

In any case, I probably won't be moving to the West Coast anytime soon. That's kinda a crazy place to live anyways. Everybody knows about the fault lines there and the enormous risk of Earthquakes.  I'll take my nice flat safe  middle of the country thank you very much. Dodging tornados I can do.

It's sort of funny that later after I woke up I heard about the earthquake that hit Mexico and California earlier that day. Well funny in the even more creepy kinda way. (My roommate says I'm probably a bit psychic, I say she's more than a bit insane ^_^) However, it also gave me a viable explanation for why I might have had such a strange dream that is not grounded in the world of mysticism or religion. Just before I went to bed I was reading through my twitter feed, just glancing through without paying attention. It's entirely possible that before I fell asleep I read something about the Earthquake that struck Mexico. My subconscious mind took note of it and incorporated it into my weird ass dream. That together with the history of lore surrounding Easter and Christiantiy and the fact that earlier that day I had heard an interview with a woman who studies crazy right wing "end of days" cults fully explains the phenomena.  It just means my subconscious mind is deranged and hates me.

Phew.  That was a close one. I was on the verge of becoming a believer!

All of this reminds me of a song or two. First there's these lines:

That's from a beautiful song Breakeven by the Irish pop rock band known as The Script.  Now why does this completely arbitrary song about heartbreak come to mind when I have dreams about world changing climate disruptions? Well largely it's because of the line "prayed to a God that I don't believe in". 

That line I think is just amazingly human. People really do do that, whether they believe or not when things get to their most disastrous points, people so often silently ask or even beg something, anything for help. I've done it. I've prayed more often then I like to admit. That's not to say that I believe in God or even in any power beyond humanity. It's just that I too have these tendencies. And when times are dark I tend to cling to hope. It's an entirely emotional response. It's what we do when we're hurting. We ask for help. Even if we can't do it in words to people we know, we ask it in our hearts to forces that may or may not be wholly imaginary.

And I guess just the thought of a global disaster would cause so many people to pray, atheists, agnostics, secularists, and followers of all manner of religions. It's that ingrained in our consciousness. Our need for hope in times of despair manifests itself in these rituals of invocation that are so common in our communal memory. It's sort of fascinating to think about. It's one of those things that reminds us of how similar we all are.

The other song that comes to mind is Ruler of Everything by Tally Hall.  Once I understood this song I came to love it. Basically it's a song about a person arguing with Time itself. On the one hand you have a person trying to say how important his life is how amazing it is, how substantial and meaningful it must be. On the other hand you have Time explaining the person's real place in the grand scale of the Universe, how we're all just dust in the end and all our works amount to nothing.

And yet the song is not negative about Time. Quite the contrary. Time is described as the person's "one only friend". It's in effect saying that our short lives in the context of that greater history is in fact what gives our existence meaning. It's what causes us to strive. It's what makes life important enough to cherish.

Now there's a LOT in this song and you could probably write a decent term paper analyzing it, but for me I just enjoy the thought of the endless human struggle against Time itself that has been a part of our existence since the beginning.

Indeed, I'm watching right now on the Science Channel a program about Ancient Egypt and the creation of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx. If you think about it, ancient Egyptian culture was ALL about that struggle against time. Their entire society was devoted to making monuments that would withstand the test of time and make them effectively "immortal" as was a part of their religion. Their struggle was all so that their civilization nor their rulers would never be forgotten.

And yet even their efforts are nothing compared to the great test of time. Eventually even the pyramids will vanish from this Earth  and leave not a shadow of a shadow of a memory of their existence. IT will happen. It's the way the world works.

I think it's pretty clear how this related to my end of the world dream. We're all lost in the end. Noting lasts forever not even this extraordinary civilization we have today. But that's not something to worry about really. Time is still our one and only friend. It's the striving and what happiness we can achieve in the process that matters, not the results.

Anyway, below I'll post a playlist with these two songs.  Please recommend songs that remind you of these kinds of concepts. End of the World songs as you may. I'm always interested in being exposed to more music.

And of course, I'll write more tomorrow.

The Government Can't Force Me to Do Sh*t!!!

I'm a bit lazy today so I'll just make my entry a quote of a comment I posted earlier today on jenessa1889's blog. Basically I responded to a comment where someone wrote "Also, the government really shouldn't be able
to force me to do sh*t."

Here's what I replied (basically spelling and grammar cleaned up a little):

"Really!?!?   So the government shouldn't have the right to force you to follow the speed limit? Or wear a seat belt? In fact, the government should allow you to drive right on down the left side of the road or on the divider or through the middle of fields if you want. And you can do so at 200 mph if your car can do it in the middle of the night while its raining with no headlights or windshield wipers on. And you should be able to do it without a license and without insurance in an unregistered vehicle you just stole from your neighbor last night. Oh and with a baby or two in the backseat just lying there without any straps and not in car seats.

I mean obviously the government doesn't have any right to force you not to steal right? You can walk into your neighbors house and if he doesn't have a gun or is unwilling to protect his stuff, sh*t on him. You can take whatever crap you want and leave. No damn government is going to get in your way. And in fact if he DOES try to stop you, you can beat him to a bloody pulp, rape his wife and children, and shoot his grandmother in the face. There's no damn government that's going to stop you.

I'm sure you believe the government shouldn't be able to force you to pay taxes, What about a draft or registering for selective service? How about abortion rights? Presumably if the government can't force you to do sh*t, it can't force a woman not to have an abortion. Indeed, she can have one the day before the child is born. In fact, a woman can kill her baby six months after it is born and don't expect government to be able to stop her or punish her. It certainly has no RIGHT to do so.

Government can't force you to send your kids to school or even to feed your kids or otherwise interfere with your family life. In fact you should be able to marry 30 entities, 20 of them underage children and 10 of them animals in your household. You should be able to sexually and physically abuse all of them. You can tie four of them up in your basement and make 16 of them fight in gladiatorial combat for your affection.

In meantime, you'll start a business where you'll run an unregistered nuclear reactor to power it. You'll pour the nuclear waste and other waste materials into oceans and rivers. You can use that power to build a giant farming operation where you employ slave labor to produce opium, heroine, pcp, and various prescription drugs all which you'll sell to minors without a prescription. On the side, you'll manufacture unregistered unmarked arms which you can sell to foreign nationals and terrorists domestic and abroad. All this is just to bide you time while you train up an army of spies which you'll have infiltrate the federal government and sell state secrets to multinational corporations based in China. Of course you'll use your profits to buy every television and radio outlet in the country on which you'll play nonstop kiddy porn 24 hours a day.

I could go on and on. Governments absolutely can and SHOULD be able to force people to do sh*t. Absolutely every law that exists is a restriction on people's ability to do sh*t, That's why we HAVE governments."

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I'm of course being a little unfair to the commenter in order to make a symbolic point. Nobody who has ever thought about it, really believes that Governments shouldn't be able to make you do ANYTHING. Undoubtedly the writer probably just meant things like filling out the census or buying health insurance.

I think the anti-government fever that is flooding the country is very often extremely irrational. The idea that the best government is no government is just plain false. It's not true.  A world with no government is a very dangerous and enormously unfair world. You don't want to live there.

For many who are anti-government, their anti-government sentiment is awfully selective too. For example, it's fairly frequent for us to see anti-government activists who protest taxes but don't have a problem with torture or illegal wars or indefinite detention. Fairly frequently we see anti-government activists who have no problem with warrant-less wiretapping of Americans or full body scanners or with the patriot act giving people access to their library records.  And of course many of even the most pure anti-government activists seem strangely to think it's just plain cool and right for the government to interfere with a woman's right to choose and to intervene to ensure that schools teach religious ideas like intelligent design. And the idea of the Government genetically registering every single immigrant in order to find those that are here illegally doesn't sound bad to many of them either.

If you're a self proclaimed "libertarian" who believes all those things then you're just a hypocrite and a liar. You don't really believe in smaller government, you just believe in government that doesn't have the features that YOU don't like.

But if you are really consistent in your anti-government principles then fine. More power to you. I don't think the resulting world you'd create if you had complete sway would be good for anyone. But at least your fighting for less government can influence our Government to keep it in check from having too much influence in our lives. There are times in our country's history when we absolutely need that. That's why we have Democracy so the people can serve as a check on their leaders.

Reasonable people I believe understand that there has to be a balance. It can't be all or nothing. The government when it pays to help us have public schools, and regulate pollution, and enforces basic laws is a Good thing even if that restricts a little of our personal freedoms. On the other hand, a Government that tapes all its citizens conversations and keeps their DNA on file and randomly hires mercenaries to assassinate citizens is a bit much. Striking that balance is important. It requires reasonable thought and debate.

Instead we get lots of shouting "Government is Always Bad!", "Get your government hands off my medicare!", and other such nonsense. That kind of rhetoric helps nobody.

Also want to randomly note I mentioned in my rant the phrase "the government doesn't have any right to force you". That's kinda sloppy wording on my part. I don't believe governments have rights per se. Governments have powers. Government secure rights possessed by the people. In order to do that, often the Government has to restrict behaviors.

I will write more tomorrow though right now I know not yet about what.

I'm not fond of titles. I'm very anti-titles for people and somewhat neutral toward titles for stories and poems. But I'm just not fond of titles for essays and blog entries.

The problem as I see it is this. Whenever I write a blog and use a title I then have to come up with an introductory sentence that is not wholly redundant with the title of the blog itself. I am lazy and this to me just strikes me as too much thinking that is interfering with what I find important and that is the business of the actual writing itself.

In addition so many titles are  very gimmicky or just plain goofy. Obviously people use titles to encourage random passerby to read their entries whether or not  there is any content there actually worth reading. And it works too. Just like controversy draws readers, there are just certain kinds of blog titles that are more likely to get your works read than others. For example,  just try writing a blog entry with a subject line in which you call someone else in the community a name. Something like "TheModernBunny is a SILLY BUNNY!" or "Elvesdoitbetter is a DAMN ELF!" or "OMG Did you Know Buckeyegirl31 is a GIRL!" Everyone would think WTF and immediately read those entries to figure out what the heck the reason might be that the person titled the post in such a strange way. In addition people will smell controversy and will flock to the controversy so they can put in their two sense and feel superior to one side or the other.  They can go "Mmmhmmm, You're damn right she's a bunny!"  Or "How DARE you call her an Elf! You're suck a JERK!" And so on and so forth.

So I think I'll just do without titles for a while. Maybe I'll try them again in the future. For now I'll use numbers. Numbers are nice. Simple. Easy. Clean. And as all math majors and sudoku players know they're loads of fun too.

This morning I woke up thinking a lot about individualism. I'm not sure my thoughts on it are really coherent enough to make into any kind of post so I'll just sketch out a bit of it here. It seems to me that in the United States there's a very new kind of philosophy individualism developing that is sort unique in human history. First we're far more individualistic today than we were in the generations of our grandparents and great grandparents. Back in the day the idea of people contributing money to take care of said grandparents as a collective even if those grandparents aren't specifically YOUR grandparents but they're somebodies grandparents, sounded like a great idea. Nowadays you get people saying crap like "How dare my tax money be wasted by the government when I could invest it and make so much more money for myself!"  The latter idea totally misses the point. Social Security isn't a government savings account. It's a vehicle for social collectivism.

But it's not just that. Everything seems more individualistic these days. Schools, hospitals, churches, charities. Everything is designed around this idea of everyone being on their own and having to do their best to survive.

Only it's sort of worse than that too. Pure radical individualism while disturbing can conceivably work as a way to organize society. I think the resulting society would be a soulless, lifeless husk of a society that I wouldn't want to live in, but that doesn't mean it can't WORK. Some people would undoubtedly LOVE to live in a society where nobody helps out their fellow man and everyone takes complete responsibility for  their own actions.

But that aint what we got here either. Like I said this is a brand new kind of individualism developing in the United States. It's not that you reap all the rewards of your successes and face all the punishments of your failures individually all by yourself. No. Nowadays you can reap the rewards of your successes and you can totally ignore the external consequences of your actions. In addition, you can expect society to collectively help you out when things go wrong to push you back up to a level of equilibrium.

It's worse than that sounds too. Because we also have a world where the people laboring under those rules likewise express extreme judgementalism against anyone who causes harm to the society provided they are of a lesser standing. Hence people can be disgusted for example at someone who is Obese because they are causing "social harm" in their mind, yet at the same time feel no shame whatsoever about taking loans when their business is failing.

Basically this is an individualism tilted wholly in favor of the people who deem themselves the "best" people. It's a twisted sort of individualism and people on all sides of the political spectrum deep down find it sort of appalling. That's part of why there is such contention in society today. Yet for some reason not only does it remain strong but it seems more and more people implicitly ascribe to it as judged by their behaviors. The prophets who preach of the greatness of this twisted philosophy are not cast low and few are willing to call them on their rank hypocrisy. Rather the angry people follow them who are the very source of the problems that create their anger.

It's a strange world we live in.

Anyway, Final Fantasy XIII is LOONNNGGG.

But maybe I'm just getting old.

Also I went to Noodles n Company for lunch today and I noticed something quite odd. It seems that every time I and friends go to Noodles n Company we end up talking about school, like past educational experiences and the likes. It's quite odd. IT happens more often than if we were at Panera Bread or Starbucks where you are likely to actually see people working on work for school.  I wonder why that is. We theorized it might be because they have those weird small little wooden and metal chairs that maybe remind us of chairs we sat in in school when we were kids and that's subconsciously influencing our thoughts. Another possibility is that the people who attend Noodles n Company tend to be pretty young. But that doesn't make sense because today the place was almost empty when we were there. So the chair theory is our best guess.

Anyways, that's it for three. More randomness to come in four. Have a good night and a Happy Easter!

Comparisons are nice. You need a minimum of two concepts in order to engage in a comparison.

Like consider the comparison between April and August.  April is a small month name with a small number of days. It contains great ideas like April Fools Day, Earth Day, Arbor Day, World Health Day, Buddha's Birthday, and the likes. April even usually has Easter.  April was, according to the great Wikipedia (the font from which all knowledge flows), possibly named after a Goddess, namely Aphrodite. Alternatively it was named after the Greek word for "open" because it represents the beginning of Spring.

In contrast August? Well August is lame. It's hot, generally unpleasant, and during that month you have to worry about the dreaded impending September and the end of your summer break (if you have one). August is 31 days long. It's the month in which Hiroshima and Nagisaki were bombed a disastrous day for world history IMO.  It was named after some lame Roman Emperor.

So generally I prefer April to August and when given a choice between the two I would always choose April over August. In addition, April comes before August so I don't have to wait. These are the reasons that this series is being written in April rather than August.  That statement, which is a bold faced lie, should be directly compared to the statement that would represent the actual Truth. The Truth being of course that I don't read my twitter account often enough and I'm not inclined to go back on a plan once begun.

Distinctions are also quite nice. Again without two things, distinguishing things is impossible. You can learn an enormous amount though from drawing clever distinctions.  I've been thinking a lot about distinctions lately, especially when it comes to Politics.

For example, there are in fact two sides to the Left.

By the "Left" of course I mean what is generally called the Left, which is a hodgepodge of self described or externally described liberals, neo-liberals, progressives, democrats, reformers, activists, war doves, community organizers, anarchists, atheists, socialists, unionists, communists, agnostics, egalitarians, secularists, humanists, anarcho-communists, anarcho-collectivists, statists, marxists, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights activists, market liberals, social libertarians, radicals, greens, multiculturalists, believers in social justice, social welfare, and social well being. 

All of those words, it should be noted, barely have any meaning at all. The are so often used and abused and mish mashed that there's hardly anything coherent left of them.

But in other words, what I mean by "the left" is anyone who approaches politics from a perspective that believes in social change, or systemic change that can be brought about in order to create a more equitable balance of wealth and power.  That could mean using mechanisms such as sharing resources in a "commons", creating fairer rules and regulations, or directly redistributing wealth or managing markets.  The means of achieving it could be revolutionary or populist or through legal frameworks or through reforming and empowering the State or whichever powerful institutions exist in the society from the inside out.

Of course this is a huge and disparate group just like any broad classification inevitably will be and you can't really pin down. The Right is similarly diverse and I can go on and on naming names for them too but I won't because you're already bored. Suffice it to say "the right" is generally the group that approaches politics from the perspective of wanting to preserve social order, traditions, rules, and values. Again the means and mechanisms differ. Some on the right think the best way to preserve those traditions and values is to give power into the hands of the people and let them do whatever they want. Others believe the best way is to control State power and roll back destructive changes. Still others believe in encouraging order through compelling institutions such as religions and educational institutions.

The best way to look at the two is that the Left generally says we need to go Forward to get things to the way they ought to be, whereas the Right generally says we have to go Back or more importantly Stop going Forward recklessly in order to get society to a reasonable State.  Basically this distinction has served us well for understanding politics since the French Revolution and it remains perfectly relevant today.

But in modern American politics I think we need a new kind of distinction especially for understanding the infighting that has been going on on the Left side of the political spectrum since the inauguration of President Obama. Also, these old formulations don't really capture well the significance of corporations in modern life because such institutions did not exist or did not have nearly the amount of sway over our daily lives when the old labels were created.

The new distinction I propose is to look not at means or goals but instead to look at who people perceive to be their enemies. That is what is it that each group perceives as being the real problem, the major obstacle standing in the way of their implementing their means and mechanisms or achieving their goals. To me what someone identifies as their major opposition says a lot more about what policies and persons they will support than even their core beliefs will.

So on the Left there are two core perspectives on who "the enemy" happens to be.  On the one hand you have the people who perceive the enemy to be "Conservatives and Republicans".  Most notably they perceive their core opponents to be the Republican Party in the United States.

This is the bigger proportion of the Left in the United States these days. They see the Right as being far more dangerous to their agenda than any other force. This side was greatly strengthened by the Presidency of George W. Bush which the Left generally considered to be utterly disastrous.  Hence the rallying cry of these kinds of Leftists is a kind of a "never again" call. To them it is imperative that the left do everything within their power to ensure that there is never again another President like George W. Bush.  Often they make the argument that even weak democratic policies are enormously better than what would happen if we had another eight years of Bush.

The other side of the Left sees things very differently. For them, the enemy really isn't the Republican Party though they certainly also tend to agree that the Republican party has been really bad for the country over the last decade and more.  For them though the core problem is Concentrated Corporate Power. In their minds  corporations are inherently dangerous and totalitarian and have very little if any accountability to the people and to the society. They see the modern era as being an era of societies being dominated by conetrated wealth and power being funneled into the hands of a few mega-corporations run by just a handful of people with a legal and willful mandate to do earn money no matter the cost to themselves and the society.

This latter group is far more likely to criticize the Democrats even if there is a Democratic President. Because to them, there is a chance that said President might well be as much a slave to concentrated corporate power as any Republican. The Democrats could just be the kinder gentler face of the Corporate hegemony ruling this nation and indeed the world.

Now generally this division isn't exclusive. Many of the people who see republicans as the core problem also recognize the problems of concentrated corporate power and many of the people who see concentrated corporate power as the problem are also no fan of the Republican party.

BUT the division is very instructive whenever there is a major controversey amongst the "Left" position. One of the most recent of those was of course the controversey over Health Care Reform.  The first side of the left saw even a very conservative plan to achieve real liberal aims would be much better if implemented by a Left Wing President, not only because they believed he would implement it better than a right wing President is likely to do, but also because passing that bill would likely enhance that Left-wing President's chance of getting re-elected and similarly enhance the likelihood of other progressives making it into positions of Public Office. For them the real disaster would be NOT passing any Health Care Reform Bill at all in which case they believed the conservative forces would be able to use it to destroy the Obama Presidency and wipe out Democratic leads in the House and the Senate.

In contrast, side 2 of the left saw the bill as a "sell-out" precisely because it seemed like in many ways to them a bill barely different than what they could have gotten out of a Republican President and which would strengthen and empower corporate industry, in particular the same industries that helped CAUSE the Health Care crises in their minds. So to them the #hcr bill might be better than nothing since it does achieve a progressive goal of covering more people, but if it is, then it's just BARELY better than nothing. And they feared it might even be WORSE than the status quo because it makes the REAL fight, that is the fight against concentrated corporate power that much harder.

There are lots of other conflicts between these two groups and often people exist somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes. For example at the end of the health care reform debate only the furthest to side 2 remained opposed to the health care reform bill and even some of them started to doubt their position. The argument that letting the republicans win would be worse was very compelling for a lot of people. And it's hard for compassionate people who share the same core goals of progress through change to really turn down anything that promises to help provide health care to millions of people in need even if they can rationally see the problems with the approach.

Likewise in 2000 a lot of the side 2 group supported Nader but by 2004 very very few remained so far into the side 2 component of the Left that they were still willing to accept the risk of supporting a Nader run for President.

Personally, I lean significantly more toward side 2, though I do have critiques of both sides.

IT should be noted that a very similar distinction to this can be drawn on the RIGHT as well. There are people on the right who perceive their core opponent to be Democrats, Liberals, and Leftists who want to change things in destructive ways. Whereas there are other people on the right who see the core of the problem being Concentrated Government Power which interferes with our liberties.  This is a huge conflict in the Republican party RIGHT NOW in that there are battles between the old guard that supported Bush and Cheney who are trying to retain as much of their influence and power, and the newer Ron Paullites who are growing massively in popularity in the conservative movement. Each side is trying to utilize generic popular outrage to their advantage against the other and major popular figures like Palin and Romney are trying to tow the line cowtowing to both groups.

Anyways distinctions are useful things when it comes to grasping the nature of politics as it is in all things. Perhaps I will talk more about them tomorrow.

"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.