A Different Set of Stories

I sometimes stop in at a local coffee house to get a bagel. This morning the young woman accidentally closed the register before getting my change from the drawer. That cleared the transaction. She asked me to do the math. My bill was $6.55. I gave her $7.00. She couldn't figure out how much to give back.

She has a high school diploma.

In related news, I read a summary of a longitudinal study conducted jointly be three universities. The study followed American kids from kindergarten through high school. All the children were native English speakers. The study was looking for the reasons for performance differences by ethnicity. Here is what it boiled down to: Asian kids applied themselves more than whites who applied themselves more than Hispanics who applied themselves more than Blacks.

Tied that data to other studies and we have added another 50 pounds of paper to the stack of "Why our schools continue to fail."

I know, we need more of "All Children Left Behind."

According to Rogers Telecommunications, the content of their ads is covered by Canadian free speech guarantees even when the content is not factually true. And they are using that to defend against a possible $10MCD fine.

Story here

The implications, if they win on that point, staggers the mind. And not just for Canada, but for the US as well. Any opportunity to redefine the popular understanding of "free speech" will move into the legal world given enough time. Advertisers and political operatives already walk a thin line between merely "misleading" and outright lies.

As far as I am concerned, we define free speech to broadly in the US. It is difficult to take action against hate speech if it is delivered by a politician or in the name of religion. Even if that hate speech can be shown to contribute to a violent act by a listener.

If Rogers wins, it will be even more difficult to pursue criminal or civil action against liars. Lying as a tactic for profit or power is a prime skill for most of the richest and most powerful people in the world. Psychopaths have no problem looking you right in the eye and lying about anything and everything.

This defense must not be allowed to get traction. Really, Rogers? Really.

I've been reading reddit. Mostly /r/polyamory, /r/bisexual and /r/atheism.

/r/polyamory is filled with "give me tips" and "how can I deal" and people who are confusing swinging with poly. General poly 101 stuff over and over and over. /r/Atheism has lots of religion bashing and any thought that religion is the excuse not the cause of trouble in the world falls on deaf ears. Okay. I like bashing religion, too.

But /r/bisexual is a sideshow fun house of sloppy sentence construction, inappropriate word choices and angst. Post after post of the same crap. One of my favorite bits of crap is the "I accidentally came out to ...." These are the best. In the subject, it's an accident, but in the body it's not. In the body it's just coming out to someone. Might be in the heat of an argument or coming out for the first time to someone you thought you were already out to. But, really people, none of it is a accident. Take some fucking responsibility for what comes out of your mouth.

Another thing that crops up is some flavor of "Which label should I use?" I've given up on this one. The responses are predictably the same. it might as well be an bot post with bot responses. And the bis are still whining some version of "nobody like me, everybody hates me; I'm going to eat some worms." I get it, though. The group you want to belong to doesn't want you as a member. Find a different group, for pity's sake.

A recent post had a very misplaced modifier. These are often very funny. I like word play. But just how many clowns in a row can a person watch?

Well, hell. That's the end of my trying to use archiveopteryx. I've spent a week working out the kinks in the configuration of postfix and archiveopteryx only to find that they don't play with each other all that nicely. I really like the idea of storing email in postgresql which what archiveopteryx is good at.

But to do that, I have to tell postfix to "relay" mail to it over either smtp or lmtp. And all that is fine, too. Except that if I set the mailbox_transport configuration to do that, postfix immediately stops rejecting unlisted recipients. As far as postfix is concerned it is just a mail relay. Okay, I can live with that, too.

But archiveopteryx does not doesn't reject, it bounces, mail for unknown recipients. And that I can't live with. I want mail to unknowns to simple fall into the bit bucket. I am not interested in becoming just another great backsplatter server for spammers to use.

I suppose I could try and modify archiveopteryx source. Hell, I'll go have a look anyway. But, damn that is the hard way.

People have raved about the HBO series, Game of Thrones so we cued up the series at Net Flix. Watched episodes 1 and 2 this weekend, won't be watching the rest. The story has plenty of intrigue and magic and so forth, but I am sick to death of make believe worlds in which women are evil, brainless, sex objects or property.

Let's see, we have the queen and her son. The former evil, the later evil and stupid. We have the "rightful heir" who is evil, stupid, and arrogant to a fault. His sister who has been sold to the barbarian for an army. We have the older sister from the north is all a flutter of the stupid son of the queen. And the youngest daughter from the north is plays the part of a warrior son. And the whores. And the obsessed and worried mother.

And we have the men. WAR, we want WAR and power and sex and money and property. And we want to join secret warrior clubs because we are a bastard son.

This show seems to be a teenage boys wet dream. But it is BORING and predictable. With a couple of minor exceptions (for the shock value), everything was telegraphed is dreadfully obvious ways. And the sex scenes are pathetic. I mean, if one has had sex, one would not be able to suspend disbelief.

I suppose if we really had story line set in a world in which the difference between the sexes was almost entirely which one gave birth, it would be so different that people would not be able to identify with the characters. Too bad, but can we at at least stop giving young men these kinds of role models?

Okay, it started two weeks ago. But last night, I watched live TV and noticed all the Black Friday ads. Stores opening at midnight with teasers. Wallmart is rolling out their teasers throughout the day to entice a much faster ebb and flow.

I really dislike November and December.

This week has been an interesting NPR/KBPS week for Thanksgiving related stories. They are making an attempt to divorce the holiday from religion. Most of the stories are cooking related for the "traditional" feast with little or not mention of "giving thanks". A few stories featured non-Christian cultures. One of those was a Navajo story in which the Navajo interviewed spoke about daily thanks giving to their Gods.

There are plenty of rationals about giving thanks to family and friends and so forth, but Thanksgiving is a Christian/religious holiday.

I think one of my upsets about this time of year is the smugness of the Christians who claim this part of the year as theirs. There isn't much room for non-believers in the US anytime, but this time of the year, there is even less.

This morning, on my way to work, I passed a new, $70 luxury sedan with a perfect symbol of irony on the trunk near the license plate. A silver-colored representation of a fish with a cross where the eye would be.

The 2000 year history of the religion named for the character in the four Gospels has almost nothing to do with the reported teachings of this character.

Oh, there are small pockets of Christians who, more or less, follow in the philosophical footsteps of their charismatic cult leader; i.e. the Brethren, Quakers, and Amish to name a few. Mostly, though, Christians are products of their greater society.

One of the many translations of Matthew 19:24 reads, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” I am confident that the driver of that sedan is convinced that his place in Heaven is secure.

And Matthew 19:29, "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life." Does this not describe clearly a cult? For 2,000 years, the cult of Christianity has grown in wealth and power. Its history is one of terrible violence, war, and general intolerance.

It has little to do with the values preached by its original leader.

There many examples. I am reminded almost daily of the oppressive nature of most religions and, particularly, Christianity.

This morning it was a rich man claiming for himself the earliest symbol of the Christian church.

I read a LA Times story headlined " Judge strikes down Wisconsin's anti-union law."

The article gives short shrift to the story opting to fill the column inches with loose background information. The average reader of that article isn't going to understand a damn thing about the judge's decision. The Judge did merits of the law, but rather the manner in which it was passed.

And that points directly to a concern I've had about America's schools. Somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd grade, we go right off the rails.

In the beginning we teach skills like reading and simple arithmetic. Then we start in on facts. And that is the end of education in America. Grades 4-12 are mostly a waste of time. Still some skills, but mostly crap. Really good teachers find a way to put skill building into their classes, but most teachers don't because they aren't well educated either.

And we don't teach what is important. It is important to know how our governance systems work. It is important to understand the criminal and civil justice system and appellate system work. It is important to be able to read a decision from an appeals court or the Supreme Court and understand it. It directly affects our liberties. Nothing has a more lasting effect in American freedoms than SCOTUS decisions.

The law has a profound effect on every single American and we teach rarely teach anything about it in most schools through college. It is a sad state of affairs.

It can not change, though. It is not in the interest of the political parties and those who control them to have an educated electorate. How could the tea party exist if Americans understood America? It could not.

We don't teach our children how to discern fact and fiction (opinion). We don't teach how to tell when rhetoric is empty and when it isn't.

Americans are woefully ignorant about those things that are vitally important but don't involve immediate response. It is pitifully low-brain existence.

Wake up and smell the manipulations, lies, deceits. Learn to spot malefactors. Learn to tell stupid from ignorant.

Bah.

Americans are a bit STUPID about privacy.

1. We don't want the government to know anything about us. But the government does know, but we have made it nearly impossible for various agencies to share any of that information. That means there are dozens of databases with your "private" information. It is very expensive to maintain all those databases and the likelihood of errors is dramatically increased. Whose privacy are we protecting that way?

2. We don't want our public record data available to just anyone! (This is my favorite bit of insanity). Those records are called "public" precisely because the data contained is NOT private. It should be absolutely public and easily accessed. One does not and should not need a permissible purpose for accessing any public record.

3. We live in a society where screening tenants is accepted, but the idea of screening a landlord is a serious breach of privacy.

4. We worry about government surveillance and dismiss private surveillance. You are being watched 24 hours a day by people who want to sell you something. The government makes mistakes with their surveillance from time to time, but they (mostly) need approval before they can track your habits. There are more or less no such constraints on marketers. But we don't hear a huge outcry about that invasion of privacy (except from the geek world).

We are upside down with our privacy concerns. The more we are trying to keep secret, the more likely the black hats win. We end up protecting their identities while they go about their nefarious business. We are concerned with protecting that which is not worth protecting and not protecting the information that is worth protecting. Why?

Well, that would be the black hats, of course. They are getting their message out to misdirect our concerns to keep themselves hidden. That has two benefits for them. They are hidden, obviously, but it also makes the government the bad guy, so any kind of regulation is slow to happen or ineffective.

"There's burglars in the bedroom while your fiddlin' in the parlor."

I want a national id card. I want a number for every single citizen that does nothing but identify them. I want that card to have a magnetic strip. Use that card to identify yourself for the purposes of using a credit card (or any other legal transaction) and the other party can swipe that ID and have a picture of you show up from the national database. Positive ID. Every time. All the time.

I want a government run, national public record database that is easily accessible by anyone for any reason. (Some data, under certain circumstances, could be suppressed by court order.)

I want a government run, national criminal and financial databases that can be accessed under certain conditions by those with permissible uses. I want the person who is the subject of the record to have free access at any time at all. And I want response error correction available. I want every inquiry to be listed with who, when and why. I want every contribution (creditor submissions, for instance) to be fully disclosed to the subject of the record. No more Big Three credit bureaus.

I want any contribution (direct or otherwise) to any political campaign to be included in a public database. And I want it to have a serious "chilling affect." I want the power brokers in the country to be fully in the open. I want everyone to notice that they have strings be able to see who is pulling them.

I want every elected official (and their top staff) to have their work related calendars publicly accessible. I want to know who my elected officials are meeting with by name and who they are representing. And if that person is a lobbyist, I want that listed also.

We are so concerned with keeping private that which isn't really a secret at all, that we hand a great amount of power over to those who lurk in those shadows. We are being led around by the nose while believing that we are the masters of our universes.