One more thought on guns and the lack of gun control in America.

Here's a comparison to think about when debating gun violence in this country.

On 9/11, one of the worst days in American history, somewhere around 3000 people were murdered in cold blood by a number of fanatics.  Over that event, this country ended up starting two wars (even if Iraq wasn't about 9/11 directly, George Bush certainly used the opportunity to get his war of choice), each of which set a record for the longest war this country had ever participated in.  Thousands of American soldiers were killed, and tens of thousands were maimed for life.  Over a trillion dollars was spent, and hundreds of thousands of civilians from both Iraq and Afghanistan were killed.  That's what this country did in the name of the 3000 people who died on 9/11.  "Never forget!"

On the other hand, somewhere between 9000 and 10,000 people in the U.S. are killed by gun violence each and every year, and we do absolutely nothing.  Let me repeat that.  Between 9000 and 10,000 people in the U.S. are killed by gun violence each and every year, and we do absolutely nothing.

The ability of Americans to rationalize away anything that contradicts with their established beliefs is nothing short of dumbfounding.

UPDATE:  Actually, Cognitive Dissonance was the term I was looking for.

UPDATE:  Here is actually what looks like to me a non-satirical commentary from The Onion, courtesy of Balloon Juice.

What does and does not upset Conservatives in America today.

Here’s what Conservatives find outrageous these days.

So at an Obama fundraiser headlined by the First Lady, Robert DeNiro tossed out a moderately funny joke:

“Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?” De Niro asked to cheers from the crowd. “Too soon, right?”

Yes, it was a joke, you see, because in 2008, a lot of people asked if America was ready for a black president. We’ve had 43 white presidents, and 42 white first ladies, you see, and we don’t tend to think of them as belonging to any race. It’s a reminder of selective race-consciousness. I’m typing this v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y because some people don’t seem to get it.

Among the non-getters is Newt Gingrich, who has gone nuclear over the joke, and even tried to compare it to Rush Limbaugh’s sliming of Sandra Fluke:

“I do want to say one thing, both on behalf of my wife and on behalf of Karen Santorum and on behalf of Ann Romney — I think that Robert DeNiro’s wrong,” Gingrich said. “I think the country is ready for a new first lady, and he doesn’t have to describe it in racial terms.”

Gingrich went on to demand that President Obama apologize for the comments.

“What DeNiro said last night was inexcusable, and the president should apologize for him,” Gingrich said. “It was at an Obama fundraiser, it is exactly wrong, it divides the country. If people on the left want to talk about talk show hosts, then everybody in the country should hold the president accountable when someone at his event says something that is as utterly and terribly unacceptable as what Robert DeNiro said.”

Inexcusable.... Yep, that certainly is Inexcusable. But Gingrich wants an apology anyway, from the President, who had nothing to do with the joke in the first place.

And here is something that apparently doesn’t bother Conservatives at all.

Just moments before Trayvon Martin was shot and killed, he was on his cellphone talking with a 16-year-old girl. For the first time, the girl is speaking out about the last, horrifying moments of Martin's life.

"He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man," the girl told ABC News. "I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run but he said he was not going to run."

According to accounts gleaned from 911 audio recordings made the night of the killing and the teenage girl's statements, Martin eventually did run. But Zimmerman wasn't far behind, and soon the two would be face to face. Zimmerman, the self-appointed captain of the neighborhood watch, was armed with a 9mm pistol. Trayvon had little more than a bag of candy in his pocket.

"Trayvon said, 'What are you following me for?' and the man said, 'What are you doing here?' Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the headset just fell. I called him again and he didn't answer the phone."

The line went dead, according to the girl's account.

"He knew he was being followed and tried to get away from the guy, and the guy still caught up with him," Tracey Martin, Trayvon's father, told ABC. "And that's the most disturbing part: He thought he had got away from the guy, and the guy back-tracked for him."

It’s apparently fine for a white guy with a gun and a history of calling the police every time he saw a “scary black person”, essentially stalk, initiate a confrontation, and then shoot a black 17 year old kid who was armed with nothing more than a box of skittles, and then claim “self-defense” and the laws of the state of Florida are perfectly fine with this. But lord, have some liberal make a joke that has some racial component, and everyone has a grand mal seizure. But killing an unarmed kid who was walking home from the local 7-11? That’s apparently fine and dandy.

I am so sick of these fucking assholes. And I feel so sorry for the family of Trayvon Martin….

I just don’t know how these racist cretins can live with themselves.

UPDATE: Read this, from BlackSnob, for an up close and personal perspective on this outright murder of a black kid. And much as this angers me, I could never really understand it from a black person's perspective. This will give you one. Highly recommended read.

Love of money consistently outranks doing the right thing in the United States.

I find that I keep writing blog posts that start out with some variation of “The ONE thing that I find most amazing….” Of course, that only reflects what I am thinking that very day. In reality, there are just so many things is today’s society that I just don’t understand and could never imagine happening in this country.

Today’s “ONE thing I don’t understand” is how often we see stories, from all the various aspects of our complex society, that show us that people seem to consistently put making large amounts of money over doing the right thing. In this following story from Crooks and Liars, “the right thing” not only has to do with following the law but also protecting worker’s safety in a very dangerous workplace.

An independent state probe in West Virginia concludes that mining giant, Massey Energy, was responsible for the April 2010 explosion that killed 29 underground coal mining workers. It echoes preliminary findings by federal investigators earlier this year that Massey repeatedly violated federal rules on ventilation and minimizing coal dust to reduce the risk of explosion, and rejects Massey’s claim that a burst of gas from a hole in the mine floor was at fault. The report also notes Massey’s strong political influence, which it uses "to attempt to control West Virginia’s political system" and regulatory bodies.

Even when people have died and it is shown that the owners were negligent, they still fight against doing the right thing, because it will cost them money. These huge companies already make lots and lots of money for the people running them, as well as all the “stakeholders.” I absolutely detest that word, as it infers that the workers themselves are not “stakeholders.” But it is the idea that companies can’t even spend a 10th of one percent on making workers safer or even paying them little more than subsistence wages if it would mean giving up even that much of their precious profits. Profits are all that matter, it seems. Making huge amounts of money is never enough if there is one more drop of blood that can be squeezed from the stone. Profits for owners and stakeholders. That absolutely comes first these days.

Why is this? Where did this mindset come from in our society? Is our species just that greedy by genetics that it comes naturally? Have we not reached a place in the history of our society that we can afford to make sure that everyone has a piece of the pie, and is confident in the fact that their workplace is safe from hazards in the process? Why does a rising tide NEVER float all the boats? Why is it that the rich and powerful always want more riches and more power? I just truly do not understand this motivation.

In the richest country our world has ever seen, why is it that those on top seem to think those underneath them in the power structure are somehow slackers, that they are undeserving to share in the riches? What is it about people that drive them in this manner? Getting back to the story I quoted above, how could anyone be so callous and uncaring about worker’s safety that they couldn’t spend a bit more time and money in making sure their workers, the ones the rich and powerful depend upon for their riches, are safe when they come to work? What ever happened to “doing the right thing?”

This is a constant theme from today’s news items. Republicans want to bust those greedy unions, the ones that try to give a voice to the people who educate our children, who protect us on the street, and who answer that 2 a.m. alarm bell when our houses catch on fire. They want to demonize anyone who desires to a bit bigger share when it comes to dividing up the pie. How dare they ask for more! It’s ours! Greedy, undeserving maggots! As if someone who sits in a boardroom all day long or manages a hedge fund is somehow deserving of all the wealth they are siphoning out of the system.

Is this some inherited tendency of our species? Are we programmed to act in this way? Or is this a learned behavior? Is greed and avarice so widespread in our society that everyone “understands” that those are the rules everyone is working to?

I don’t know the answer, of course. I was trained as an engineer, not some behavioral scientist. But what I see of our species makes me ill. Yes, there are many, many good people who act selflessly and not just in times of extreme need (such as after this spring’s devastating series of tornadoes). There are many people working to change the system to make it fair to all, not to just the rich and powerful. But I am more interested in the motivations of those who are constantly fighting against doing the right thing by everyone who is part of the system.

I am very much not impressed with human beings as a species. Yes, we are capable of some wondrous things. Awe-inspiring. But we are also capable of thoughtless cruelty, even when the results of that cruelty is staring us back in the face. And we seem to be able to rationalize away any second thoughts or bad feelings this might cause us if we dwelled on it for more than a few seconds. Our ability to hold double standards and believe conflicting ideas at the same time is truly mind-boggling, and not in a positive way.

I hope that humans never do find a way off this planet and start “seeding the galaxy” with other human societies. I think, at this point in our development, we have failed the test and I believe that we don’t deserve any further chances. And God, if She exists, must be shaking Her head and thinking something along the lines of, “Well, I should have seen that coming. I guess I won’t try that again.”

Technology: Does the Japanese nuclear reactor crisis indicate we have become far too trusting of technology?

Before I start on this, I need to explain something. I do know something about this subject on which I am about to expound. I have a job involved in very complex technology. I can’t write about those direct experiences, however. One of my firm rules I imposed upon myself when I started this blog was that I wasn’t going to blog about my job. That is a good way to lose said job. But I do have almost 30 years experience with dealing with safety critical, highly complex systems. You are going to have to trust me on that point. And, for the record, I have a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in physics. While I was in college, I also received some experience in the power generation field and spent some time around a nuclear power plant, courtesy of my participating in the school’s cooperative education program. Although that was now over 30 years ago, I do remember quite a lot of the fundamentals involved here.

For the record, no, I don’t work in the power generation field with my current job.

I have been watching with interest the ongoing and continually worsening crisis in Japan regarding the four (I believe it is now four, it could be more) unstable, possibly out of control, nuclear reactors in Japan. This emergency has been ongoing since the double barrel hit of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a huge tsunami, and it seems to be getting worse as the days progress. I am not going to try to summarize the current situation, as any summary I try to put together will be out of date by tomorrow. Rather, I would like to focus on the bigger issue of technology in general and how our society has become totally dependent upon it without understanding or underestimating the very real risks involved.


I have seen some writers in recent days compare this accident, if that is even a good word for it, to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. That ship was labeled, from the time it was on the drawing board, as “unsinkable.” Literally, the belief was that it could never be sunk. Technology had advanced during the Industrial Age to the point that it was infallible. That was one reason why, when that huge ship sank on its very first voyage, it just clobbered the accepted reality of the day. Yes, the horrendous loss of life also had a huge impact on the collective psyches of both America and Britain. But the one part that I would like to discuss is the fact that people really had come to believe that the technology involved was that advanced such that all risks had been negated. That ship could never sink, end of story.

Our society today seems to find itself in that same erroneous state of mind regarding technology. It has become an integral piece of the fabric of day-to-day life in the 21st Century. We are literally surrounded by very sophisticated technology that we hardly even see for what it is. Smart phones, iPads, instant connectivity no matter where you might be, electrical power that we never even think about except when it isn’t there anymore, relatively inexpensive gasoline for your automobiles no further away than the gas station or convenience store three blocks away, on and on. Technology surrounds us. Our current society is totally dependent upon these things and we hardly ever think about what might be required to sustain all this technology and what the consequences might be if it doesn’t behave according to our preconceived notions.

There is one basic fact about all technology, no matter how advanced or primitive it might seem. That is, at some point, it will fail. Things break. Washers in faucets wear out. Pipes break. Metal fatigue can result in a catastrophic failure of a component in a system. Transistors fail. Insulation in wiring becomes chafed which results in a short circuit. Water gets into somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, which always results in things not working correctly. Oil pumps fail which causes moving parts to become dry and fail due to heat and friction. Failures are a fact of life in technology.

The trick for system designers, therefore, is to anticipate these failures and build mitigations into whatever it is you are designing so that the failure is not catastrophic. That is why we have backup systems and backups to backup systems. You have monitors in place for anything that might go wrong, so you can detect it and do something about it. A very easy to understand mitigation factor is for an operator of something, such as a car engine or a nuclear power plant, is to shut the thing down when it starts not working correctly. However, the trick to that is for the operator to understand when it isn’t working correctly and that he should intervene. With very complex systems, that becomes a very tricky proposition indeed.

The problem with this approach of understanding and mitigating all possible risks for very complex systems, such as modern commercial airplanes, nuclear reactors, submarines, and petrochemical plants, is that the list of things that can potentially go wrong becomes almost infinite. It becomes much worse of a problem when you start factoring in multiple failure conditions and what is always referred to as “operator error” on top of those failures. Once the system designer starts applying his or her fertile imagination to this problem, the whole process becomes almost infinite.

That is where “probabilities” start coming into the picture. Because it is impossible to take care of every single and multiple thing that could ever go wrong, then it becomes a matter of addressing what is most likely to happen and what is the thing that can happen that could have the worst consequences? Those are the risks that system designers address first. And as one who has seen the inside of this process, it becomes almost a game you play. Cost factors start to become very large in the overall decision making process. If a designer wants to address a possible situation that could have dire consequences if it were to happen in a very specific way and it would take a whole lot of money , time and resources to address, but it really isn’t all that likely to happen, then it is obvious that the people that make those kinds of decisions are not likely to address that particular scenario. It's all in how you "draw your box" around the possible scenarios you have to design your system to accommodate in a manner that will hopefully minimize death and destruction. Once something is placed outside that box, then, by definition, it is outside of your accepted reality. It will not happen. The Titanic will not sink.

When the increasingly dire situation in Japan started hitting the news, I immediately started wondering why the backup cooling systems of those power plants didn’t automatically kick in. Not having cooling water for a nuclear reactor is probably THE one big thing that designers worry about. It is rather likely that it will happen, too, if you don’t design and operate your reactor in very certain ways. So it was a mystery to me why all of these reactors that are in trouble seem to have lost their backup cooling systems. All of them had that problem at the same time. How did that happen? I won’t go into the probability numbers, but that would seem like that would be a Once In The Lifetime of the Dinosaur Kingdom kind of event.

Well, it turns out that the problem with all these plants is that they did have a backup cooling system that depends on emergency electrical power generators. And guess why those all failed? The tsunami wiped them all out, as they were built in a low-lying area right next to the ocean. That risk was either never identified or was considered to be so unlikely that they designers didn’t need to bother mitigating that one.

In a country like Japan that has a long history of violent earthquakes and tsunamis, you would think that this scenario might have been considered, given the possible catastrophic results. No, this was one of the things that was not considered in the realm of possibility. Why? My guess was that it was an economic decision, not a technological one. The potential for this scenario was recognized but it would have cost too much money to address a situation that people in charge didn’t think would occur.

That is called “acceptable risk.” People are making decisions about what is acceptable, given what it would take to address that problem. That is the basis for a Cost/Benefit Analysis. The problem here, as you might be able to see now, is that the main risk involved is for the citizens of Japan along that stretch of coastline. The risk that the managers of the company that had those nuclear plants built is being borne by the citizens of Japan, who had absolutely no vote in that decision.

Believe me, this kind of thing is constantly going on in today’s society. That is how this vast technologically based infrastructure we have in this country and the world works. Everything is a tradeoff.

There has been much discussion about nuclear power and whether it is a “safe” technology. Here’s my thought on that question.

There will never, repeat, never be a totally safe nuclear power plant. There will always be a possibility of something going wrong. If the system is designed in a way that the first and almost only requirement is that it will never experience an accident, then the risk that there will ever be a critical problem will be very small indeed. For instance, the plant could be designed with quadruple redundant cooling systems and with not one but two containment domes, each about 30 feet thick that would withstand a military type bomb being dropped directly on it. Accidents will not be a Zero Possibility, but they become increasingly very, very unlikely. The more safeguards you put in, the less likely that anything bad, no matter the cause, will happen.

However, that is not how things are done in our society. The companies that are going to invest billions of dollars in nuclear power plants are going to want a return on their investment. What’s the point of having these wonderful power plants if you never make any money? That, in common parlance, is referred to as a "Bad Business Case." Therefore, economics is a very major player in design decisions that you might think would be totally technologically driven. If you think that, you would be wrong.

But this is still O.K. That’s how our society works. The problem lies with how one goes about assessing the possible risks. If your schedule is very tight and your company is on the verge of going under, you might be inclined to start cutting corners in order to not spend any more money or effort than you absolutely have to. You might start “drawing your box” around the possible scenarios that you must account for in a way that starts to minimize those possible scenarios you must consider. If you limit those scenarios, then your job as a system designer becomes much easier. And cheaper, by the way.

That is what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The situation that occurred was considered to be something that the designers did not have to worry about happening. When it did occur, then the response is invariably, “Who could have foreseen X happening?” Does that sound at all familiar?

There are a number of other factors that contribute to accidents, of course. This is a very complex field of study and many books have been written on the subject. I am not going to be able to cover everything here. But I will mention a couple of other factors that I believe are very prevalent in how our technological society functions.

The first one is that these systems, whatever they are, are now so complex that the designers don’t truly fully understand what it is they are building and, more importantly, how they can fail. They are just too complex and there are too many individuals and different companies involved for any single person to grasp the intricacies of every single aspect of that system. When the first failure of something we have never seen before occurs, designers can learn from that experience and address that particular aspect in future designs. This is called (by me) the “Oops! Well, we shouldn’t do THAT again!” approach to systems engineering. However, that approach certainly didn’t help those affected by the first accident.

Another factor that is very important to the study of industrial accidents is that of complacency. To summarize, this means that since something bad hasn’t happened before when we did X, then, by definition, it won’t happen when we do X the next time. And complacency becomes so prevalent that it becomes nothing bad will happen when we do X again and put Y on top of it. That was one of the leading contributors to both the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle accidents. That entire process is called, in more academic circles, “Normalization of Risk.” Nothing bad has happened before, so it won’t happen in the future. Everyone has accepted the unstated assumption that the condition, which I called X previously, will not happen. It just isn’t in the entire paradigm. Therefore, we don’t need to worry about X, or even X plus Y, in our design.

I don’t think I even want to start talking about “operator error.” That’s what everyone’s reaction seems to be when anything happens outside of your preconceived notion of how things should work. If anything happens that designers didn’t anticipate, don’t we always see that “operator error” tag, even though you might be asking the question, “Well, how was the operator supposed to know how to react to these circumstances, since they have never been trained to deal with X, or X plus Y?”

All of this goes a long way in explaining why the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine was built without a containment dome or building, in case of a radiation leak or explosion. An explosion of the nuclear reactor was never in the realm of possibility, so therefore, it would have been a waste of money to build a containment dome to contain something that would never exist. As a result, we now have an uninhabitable zone, a la The Planet of the Apes, the size of Switzerland in the middle of Russia and the Ukraine.

If, on the other hand, worrying about the economic impact on your design and operational requirements is NOT part of the picture, then it is possible to design, build and operate a technologically complex system, and to do it safely. This is the case of the U.S. Navy and their nuclear power submarines. After the loss of two submarines, the U.S.S. Thresher and the U.S.S. Scorpion, the Navy decided that they were not going to lose any more submarines, for any reason other than being sunk by a hostile military force. To this end, they instituted a system called SUBSAFE. As a direct result of this program, the U.S. Navy has not lost any submarines since this program was instituted. Please note that economic considerations, such as how much this program costs the U.S. Navy, is not a factor. Keeping their submarine fleet safe from sinking is the only priority. This is not the case for anything done where profit margin is a concern, which is pretty much anything not involved with the U.S. military.

Where am I going with this discussion? I think the main point I wanted to make here is that we, as a society, do not understand the risks involved with these very complex technologies. Things will always go wrong, and the likelihood of spectacular accidents and failures increase the less that the people in charge worry about the possibility of those things actually occurring. And the risk is borne by all of us. Yes, those companies will lose money, maybe the entire company, if accidents are bad enough. But it is the unwitting participants who also bear a very great risk, such as those who live next to nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, underground pipelines, etc.

It is too late to put this particular genii back it the bottle. It is out and the possibility of it wreaking significant havoc is very large, especially when you lump all the possible risks of all our technology together. You end up with the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India, in which thousands died. You end up with collapsing coal mines with miners still inside. You end up with deep-water oil rigs that explode and leak millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico with absolutely no known way of shutting off a deep water leak like that, even though many workers knew that risks were being taken. And you end up with the possibility of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people being forced to relocate from an area that may be contaminated with radioactivity for thousands of years to come.

“Acceptable risks” are always acceptable. Until they actually happen, that is.

My vision of how the United States, as run by the current Republican Party, would look in 30 years.

I this is something that has been playing around my mind in the past few days. I am not putting a lot of thought or research into this. This is just how I perceive the U.S. would be run if Republicans had their way, as evidenced by what they are currently saying and doing (that is an important point in my scenario).

There would not be an opposition political party. It would not be allowed. Our government system would resemble the old Soviet Union style of government, but only in form, not in content. Party loyalty would be paramount and no dissent would be allowed, even for trivial matters. All political votes would be expected to be won with 100% margin. The same goes for political elections. They would still be held, but they would be a total sham, with usually only a single candidate on the ballot. Voter suppression tactics would not really be needed anymore, because there would be a total lack of choice about the candidates.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights would still be in force, but by name only. Certain items contained in these documents that would cause an upset in the current system are either summarily ignored or else changed.

The political media would be a replica of today’s Fox News Channel. Every story, every news item, would be in support of the current administration and what a great job they are doing, or else to demean and denigrate anyone brave enough to come out and actually say anything about the system. But there would be much more coverage about the economy and business issues. This would also be a huge propaganda operation, but in support of the huge corporations of the country instead of the politicians. That distinction, however, would be getting harder to make every single day. The rich and powerful that run these corporations would also be, in essence, the puppet masters behind the curtains that told the politicians how to conduct their business. That would be a huge difference from how the old Soviet Union was run. That was power politics for the sake of being in power. The new system in place here would be in total support of the “free hand of the market.” Anything that corporations wanted to do, or didn’t want to do, would find willing supporters in our political system.

There very real stratification of our society would continue where it would reach a point that the upper class of the country would have total control over everything. The middle class would essentially be non-existent. The lower class of the country would be huge. It would be largely uneducated, as the public school system would be dismantled and anyone wanting an education could find it at private schools, but for a price. The rest of the population would resemble the rural America in the 1800’s. Education for the lower class would be at a minimum, and the jobs that would be available would be menial or backbreaking, dangerous work, because that would be all that is available. All the good jobs would be used as gifts for cronies, and the sons and daughters of cronies.

If you have the money, everything is available. If you don’t, then you are truly SOL. There would be little to no social services available. Even what are today considered to be “essential services” would be available at a price, such as health care, fire departments, and law enforcement for crimes against your person or property. This part of our society would resemble the corrupt states where money and bribes would be everything. If you want something, you would have to pay through the nose. For those with the wealth, that would mean little because it would be a drop in their bucket.

We would still continue to have a very strong military that would consume most of the available resources of the country. That would be a major way for the poor and uneducated to escape their particular hell, to join the military. The country would continue to throw our weight around the world, invading smaller countries whenever they did not bow to our sometimes very capricious will. The rest of the world would start to align against us, both economically and militarily. That would not stop us, however, because God is on our side. The United States can never be defeated.

This brings me to the subject of religion. Christianity of the most fundamentalist and militarist type would become the order of the day, and it would be fully supported by the government. If you didn’t subscribe to this particular brand of religion, you could never advance in society or your profession. Other religions, such as Judaism, would be tolerated, but only just. You would not be allowed to practice openly any religion on the “banned” list, and there would be many of those. Harassment, intimidation and physical violence by vigilantes and officers of the law against the others would be openly tolerated if not actively promoted.

The ruling class would be totally oblivious to the rapid decline of the country, of course. When it was noticed, it would be the fault of someone else; such as “old Europe”, Jewish Bankers, the lower class, or whoever the current convenient scapegoat might be that day. There would be very little manufacturing done in this country. All investment in the future will have stopped, as all profits that corporations made will be channeled into the already fat bank accounts and stock portfolios of the already obscenely rich. They will not notice that there are no customers anymore that have the resources to buy whatever products are produced. Most of the wealth of this country would be made by shuffling paper around and very complicated “financial instruments” would be used to build a house of cards upon which the very fragile remains of the economy rests.

I will not continue to what I think would be a very grim and hard landing. Such a system would not be sustainable. I could see several possible endings to such a society. It would not be pretty. Total collapse of a society never is, and one as large as ours would make it that much worse.

That is what I see when I hear how the Republicans say when they are describing their view of the country. I do not believe I am being over-imaginative here. This is what they are saying. I am fabricating totally wild hypotheses, either.

Would anyone like to discuss this?

There is no possibility of understanding each other when we insist on having completely different realities.

In fact, I believe that we have reached the point in this country where the two sides, commonly referred to as “left” and “right” or “red” and “blue”, do not want to reach an understanding with the other side. All we want is to see the other side lose, hopefully with the added bonus of being humiliated at the same time, and generally lose all credibility for all time.

In support of this not terribly startling hypothesis, I give to you a very personal example; me. I generally look upon myself as a rather reasonable fellow during most of the day, subject to the periodic whims of bad temper and irrational wishes. But generally, I think we, as a nation, should do what is best for our people and the future of our nation. That’s pretty high-level stuff, of course, and rather simplistic. The devil is in the details, as they say. But still, I normally wish for whatever is best for us, collectively, and I am willing to rethink my position when presented with new information.

Still, I am at the point where I have absolutely no wish to understand the mindset of many on the right, because I am convinced they are batshit crazy. They have absolutely no concept of what they are doing, even on a daily basis, except to do or say whatever they think will make their enemies “lose” or “look foolish.” That’s it. They just open their mouths and spit out whatever comes into their minds that they think sounds the best in accomplishing those goals. I won’t go offer specific instances here. You can find them in abundance every single day. I will point to people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, most of Fox “News”, etc. as sources of what I think are insane ravings. I have absolutely no desire to try to look into their side of things, because I believe that would be akin to looking into the Mouth of Madness. There is no understanding possible, because it is impossible for a sane person to truly understand an insane person. All we can know is that person is insane. I experience difficulty when talking with my older brother or someone who used to be my closest friend, because I have to put it out of my mind completely that what I believe and what they believe are in total opposition. It takes as effort even at that level.

One the other side, based on all evidence I have seen, the right has exactly they same mindset, or even worse. They truly believe that every single problem in this country has been created by the left. They don’t want to work with the left to make things better. They want to destroy the left. They don’t want to understand any of our thoughts or positions on issues that affect this country and its people. All they want to do is to crush their enemies. That is what they want.

There is no understanding possible between these two sides. I believe the term is called “irreconcilable differences.” It takes two to tango, as another old saying goes, and in this current situation we have, not only do the two not want to tango, they don’t even want to be in the same building with each other. It is pretty difficult to reach an understanding with each other and work toward constructive solutions to difficult problems when the two hate each other’s guts.

I doubt we are anywhere near the point of, say, what occurred in the now defunct Yugoslavia. But that wasn’t pretty. Or even Northern Ireland. I sincerely hope that we haven’t reached the point where killing each other seems like a natural reaction to real and perceived grievances. But given the rash of “lone madman” events that we have had over the last few years, and add in the case of the very powerful and sophisticated bomb in Spokane, Washington along the parade route on Martin Luther King Day, it seems as if the United States might be closer to those two examples than we might like to admit.

End of the Year Blogpost: Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on your way out, 2010!

What is to be said about 2010? Certainly not much good on the political side, if you consider yourself to be a progressive. Mordor appears to be gathering its forces once again to unleash all out war on the forces of Truth and Light…. Which is a totally over-the-top metaphor, but it encapsulates the way I feel about things.

On a purely personal level, though, I really can’t complain. My career seems to have “arrived”, in that I have a good (albeit very frustrating at times), stable job that pays pretty well for engineering. I am actually held in good esteem by my management and I am considered as something of a knowledgeable expert on several subjects. We finally finished up the four year long process which saw our family adopt our new daughter, which culminated earlier this year in getting her a U.S. passport and social security number. She’s getting settled in with her new high school. The finances are in good shape, we will have the house paid off in less than a year, and we have our health (with the exception of a pre-existing condition which may or may not ever cause a problem). So, on that front, life is probably as good as I have ever experienced. Given where I have been in my life, both literally and metaphorically, I have no reason to complain and every reason to thank both myself and Lady Luck (or whatever deity who would like to be thanked).

When I started this blog a number of years ago, I imposed a rule on myself and the occasional guest bloggers that I might coerce into making a post now and then that I would not talk about me. This wasn’t going to be personal therapy disguised as a blog. I wanted it to be about topics that people might actually be interested in looking at, at least for more than about 45 seconds. The use of the personal pronouns “I” and “me” were not allowed. Politics, humor, history, movies, interesting visuals, those were all part of the game. But this wasn’t going to be about me as a blogger. Opinions were to be expressed as some “greater truth”, because opinions that don’t really belong to anyone aren’t really opinions, are they? I wanted this blog, whenever, someone did stumble along, to be interesting. I don’t find myself a very interesting topic….

But over the last few years, and especially 2010, I have become more and more despondent over the entire sorry state of affairs that is The United States. I have come to the very unfortunate conclusion that a very large percentage of the population of this country is comprised of complete and utter ignoramuses. Oh, many are ignorant because they don’t have the education, which is not always their fault. You certainly can’t pick the life circumstances into which you are born. You have to play the hand you are dealt. It’s a tragedy, of course, that you only get one hand per life. You can’t really say, no, I don’t like this hand. I fold. I’ll get it on the next hand. Sorry, but as we all know, life doesn’t work like that. But I digress… Which is a nice way of saying that I am blabbering and forgot my main point. The point I was making is that many people in this country incredibly gullible and are easily manipulated (let’s just call them, for the sake of a label, IGEM) by the more intelligent, the more devious and the less moral. And those people make up another large percentage of the population “Greedy, Egotistical Assholes”, or GEA. The rest of us, although we still make up a substantial percentage of the population of this country, just feel overwhelmed by the others. It feels as if we are being sucked down into a black morass of stupidity, greed and hubris, a’la the La Brea Tar Pits. The more you fight against it, the deeper it sucks you in.

This is where it has become increasingly difficult, to the point of total rigor mortise, to write anything resembling a rational, unemotional blogpost. I can’t keep myself out of it anymore. I have never felt so despondent about anything in my entire life. Oh, I went through some extreme depression in high school and college. But that was focused inward. It was me. This is about the country, where it is going and where we might end up. I can’t help but feel that this country is on a long, downward trajectory. I don’t see a soft landing anywhere. It could be very bad and end up in some nightmarish scenarios envisioned by writers like George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. At the very best, I see the U.S. sliding into irrelevancy and becoming the largest Third World Country on earth, with lot of nukes and a huge, undereducated, largely unemployable mass of people that will make up the non-privileged class.

I won’t bother going into detail on all these various scenarios I could possibly envision. It wouldn’t mean anything and would probably just depress me further.

It is possible, I suppose, that 2011 will see the beginning of a slow return to rationality. It’s possible, but not very probable. Fox News will still be with us, as will Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, etc. etc. The GEA’s will still be in control and more than willing to do whatever they can to manipulate the entire setup such that they will become even that much more rich and more powerful. There will be many people, both big and small, that will try to fight back but ultimately, they will fail. Just ask all those Saber Tooth Cats at the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits. Oh, you can’t. They’re extinct.

There are many aspects of our current society that are contributing to my despondency, but I think one of the biggest ones is the fact that we, as a country, are purposely devaluing learning in general and the importance of science in particular. We are purposely becoming a nation of dumbasses. Education is now something we don’t aspire to. We now snort derisively about education and use it as something to show our distain for “elitists.” Our social and political discourse reminds me of nothing more than those knuckle-draggers everyone knew in high school, those “good old boys” who sat in the back row, never paid attention in class, usually got failing or near failing grades and yet, found it within themselves to ridicule the “eggheads” in class, saying that we might “have good book learnin’, but don’t know nothing.” That’s what this all reminds me of. There’s no use arguing with people who don’t even know enough to understand how stupid they really are.

If you profess a believe, say, of global warming and climate change, what you normally get in return is a response that contains nothing but utter contempt and a retort comprised entirely of made up “facts” and even louder opinions. Fundamentalist Christians are doing their part, of course, to undermine science, because anything that might cast any sort of doubt on their interpretation of a book written by a large number of people over the period of several hundred years, based on verbal stories handed down from generation to untold generation, and has been edited and revamped on who knows how many occasions, cannot possibly be accepted without extreme pushback. Many people are more than willing to rewrite history in order to suit their particular reality. Reality, facts and conclusions reached by the scientific process no longer matter. All that matters is opinion. This is what I find most disturbing. We are actively trying to become ignorant, and we are succeeding. We are even demanding ignorance in our elected officials. I find this inexcusable. We might as well all go to the local hospital, en masse, and demand a frontal lobotomy.

Sarcastic humor and satire just aren’t funny anymore. I can hardly watch The Daily Show anymore. This isn’t because Jon Stewart isn’t funny. It’s because of the subject matter, the idiocy that is this country, seems to be beyond satire. It’s like trying to satirize Through the Looking Glass. The truly absurd and nonsensical is beyond satire, and any attempt at it is, by definition, absurd and nonsensical by itself. Who could have possibly imagined scenarios such as sitting senators complaining about being asked to vote on a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, because it was somehow sacrilegious to be voting on that during December, which is also the month that contains Christmas? That is just insane, but yet, it happens and hardly anyone blinks an eye anymore. The ridiculous is now so commonplace that hardly anyone blinks an eye anymore.

Another aspect of our society that appalls me is that the quest for every greater “profits” is paramount. Nothing else matters. Oh, I am not so blind as to not know this has been true for every single year this nation has existed. That’s the entire point of capitalism, as far as I can tell. Let the drive to make money be the primary purpose of the country and everything else that is good will follow along. The personal well-being of the population isn’t the primary reason our economy exists. It just sort of is expected that it will happen as a result, sort of the way a large boat generates a large wake wherever it goes. It’s a by-product, not the point. But now, anything that takes away one single iota of “earning potential” from those who already are very well endowed is something to be banished by whatever means. Minimum wage law? Must get rid of that! Protections and safeguards that protect workers and investors, not to mention the entire well-being of the economy? Too much of a burden on free enterprise! Begone! Pensions? Can’t afford them, too expensive! But if we would like to try to close some legal loopholes, such as not allowing giant corporations to locate their shadow headquarters offshore with the sole purpose of not having to pay taxes, that’s strictly verboten! Increased tax levels for millionaires and billionaires? Heavens, what are you trying to do, destroy the economy?

I really hate this society. We swallow camels and strain at gnats as a normal exercise. We fixate on the truly trivial and are oblivious to the truly horrific. State-sanctioned torture is now a fact of life. We are still involved in two wars that no one understands the purpose of. It is likely that many thousands of Afghans and Iraqi civilians have been killed, many on purpose, but since only American lives matter, then it is not a problem. You can’t have a war without breaking some eggs, you know. Global climate change may be the most single significant issue that this country will have to deal with in the future, and yet, it is treated as some nefarious plot by evil liberals to destroy the economy. Why liberals would want to actively try to destroy the economy, I have no idea, but that’s how it is portrayed these days. I feel like a good historical comparison for this particular time might be Rome during Nero.

So much for the rantings of an aging Boomer. I have a few more years until I can realistically consider retiring. I hope the fabric of society holds together until then. Perhaps I can then just check out, sit back on my proverbial porch and watch the show from a dispassionate place. I also might try looking in to relocating to another country. Who knows what this place might look like in eight to ten years? Even retired, I might not want to reside here. Until then, I have a feeling I am not really going to enjoy the next seven years. And, as things stand, I will be one of the fortunate ones. There will be many people who will experience significant pain and anguish for no other reason than that is how our society is set up. This doesn’t sound like a place I will really want to call home.

Thoughts on Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity.”

It was a great cause, even though Stewart couldn’t define the reason everyone showed up. It was just an attempt at an antidote at all the ridiculous BS that has been out there, but I really do think that Stewart did take Glenn Beck’s rally as a bit of the last straw.

The comedy was mostly tame or not all that funny. I found the “benediction” by Father Guido Sarducci pretty amusing, where he was asking God for a sign when, during a bit of a “roll call” of religions, he happened upon the right one. The music wasn’t much to my taste, I guess, but that was to be expected. At 55 years old, my tastes are not quite mainstream these days. I didn’t much care for the interruption of Yousef’s/Cat Steven’s song, Peace Train, by a Colbert running joke and bringing in Ozzie Osbourne. I mean, the concept was funny, but I would have rather heard the song. Colbert’s poem, read by Sam Waterston, was pretty damn funny.

But all of that isn’t what I was going to comment on. Stewart, when he was getting to the point of the rally, to “restore sanity” used video clips of people saying some pretty extreme things on both sides of the political spectrum, with a generous helping of mainstream media stupidity (e.g., CNN) to illustrate how out of whack our national discourse has become. I agree with all that. I am not pleased when someone on the left goes and says something that I actually might agree with, but they do it in a way that is bound to be incendiary. Joy Behar really had no reason to say that Christine O’Donnell was going to Hell. Jeez. Walking off the set of The View is fine when you are protesting something that Bill O’Reilly said, but then don’t go on and stay something incredibly stupid yourself! That’s just dumb. Keith Olbermann, even though I agree with most of what he talks about, can be just as bad. If you don’t want to look as bad as the people you are criticizing, don’t say inflammatory things. You can phrase things in a different way and make the same point. When you take the flamethrower approach, all you are going to do is make the other side accuse you of the same tactics that you are accusing them of.

So, I get Stewart’s point. Everyone needs to take it down several notches. Only Hitler was Hitler. No matter how much you disagree with the other guy on specifics, they are not “actively trying to destroy the United States.” So, fine. I got that point, and mostly agree.

But when conservatives and Republicans have constantly been accusing liberals and Democrats of everything from supporting terrorism to socialism to treason, with a huge dose of personal insult as they can dreg up, then after about 25 years, it gets to be too much to take. When conservatives have an entire “news” organization including a 24 hour, 7 day a week television channel devoted exclusively to tearing down anyone that doesn’t totally agree with them, then human nature starts to take over. As I have said at this blog before, eventually Ralphie fights back against the bully that has been terrorizing him all these years. (That’s a Christmas Story reference, if you didn’t get it.)

I thought some of the clips from MSNBC that Stewart used yesterday were taken a bit out of context and were not on the same level as the ones that he used from Fox News. I am really glad he didn’t use any clips from Rachael Maddow, as I see her as a genuine sane voice in the wilderness. Yes, MSNBC’s, The Ed Show is very much over the top and should be toned down. But for everyone of those examples you find on the left of the political spectrum, you can probably find 10 to 20 examples on the right.

So, sure. Let’s tone it down, people. Take a deep breath before you say something you know can be used as ammunition against you. But disarmament takes participation by both sides. If one side isn’t going to put down their weapons (not talking about real guns, just following along with the disarmament analogy), then you really can’t expect the other side to say, O.K., keep hitting us with your best shot. We are going to continue to sit here and take it. That’s a very unreasonable expectation.

So, thanks, Jon Stewart. That was a very good effort and may ultimately have some effect. But truly, I doubt it. The country is too far gone. The only thing that I believe will restore some sanity to our political discourse is if something very big happens to cause that correction. We can’t expect people to just agree to be more reasonable on their own. Humans don’t work like that and there is too much money and political force being exerted behind the scenes to allow that to happen.

I think some sort of blow up is going to happen. Or maybe, blow out is a more appropriate comparison. The worn out old tire has been pumped up with too much air pressure and there are danger signs all over. A blow out, at this point, may be inevitable. Hopefully, it is a small one that relieves the pressure. At that point, perhaps we can repair the blow out and then pump things carefully up back to the point of good, sustainable pressure without going overboard.

That’s about my only hope at this point. But Jon, if I may call you by your first name, I certainly applaud you and all the people who were on the National Mall yesterday for trying. Great job.

Photos from Huffington Post. I'm sure they won't mind.

America is like that guy in the movie, “Memento.”

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OMG, this is the end of the world as we know it!! But first, a bit about the ongoing NCAA realignment.

As I write this, the University of Colorado has jumped the Big-12 rapidly sinking ship and has joined the Pac-10/11 and counting. The University of Nebraska seems to be about to accept a bid to join the Big 10/11 and counting. All of this could change within the next few days, heck within the hour, so I wanted to give readers a context in which I am writing this.

Well, my take on all of this is that this is a bit like airlines charging exorbitant fees for checking your luggage. 1) To make outrageous sums of money. 2) Just because they can. 3) To keep up with everyone else who is doing it or will be doing it in the very near future. In each case, the welfare and well being of the main players in not the first or even the fifth priority. The airlines do not care one whit about sucking every penny they can from their customers. The conferences are intent on making as much cash as they can. The welfare of their “student athletes” is not really part of the equation here.

In the case of the conference realignment process, there do seem to be some very real and valid concerns here that are driving all this. With money tight all over (except for Wall Street CEO’s and hedge fund managers), it is pretty unreasonable for the universities of this country to expect taxpayers to fund their athletics programs. Even historically successful programs are hemorrhaging cash, and something must be done.

I won’t go further into the reasons behind all this. You can find that elsewhere. I just wanted to put down some of my thoughts and impressions here. I have two college degrees, one from a SEC school and one from a PAC-10 school. I had season tickets to the University of Washington men’s basketball for a number of years, before they started treating their season ticket holders and athletic dept. donors as major sources of revenue that must be milked dry each and every year. But I still watch them on television quite a lot.

Football is driving all of this, of course. Basketball is an afterthought, if even that. Just ask the Kansas and Kansas State, which may be left out in the cold. Having read some of their local papers, they are not at all pleased with this prospect of joining the Mountain West conference. The most hope they seem to hold out is that not all of the potential invitees from the slowly imploding Big 12 conference (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State) will accept the invitation from the Pac-10/11 and they get picked up as replacements. Having read most everything that is being written on the subject on the west coast, I haven’t ever seen this one proposed as even a long shot possibility. I feel very badly for those schools that will be left out in the cold, just because they aren’t super-desirable. Not terrible, but the circumstances just weren’t “right” for the current situation. That sort of resembles my situation during high school, so I do have some empathy there.

Now, to the Pac-10 or whatever it will be called and whatever teams might end up joining. I can’t see it staying at 11. That just screws up a lot of things, primarily basketball scheduling. Utah seems to be most often mentioned as “Plan B” if “Plan A” involving the Texas and Oklahoma schools falls through. I’m not sure how Utah would feel about all this, being invited into a conference when they know they were Plan B. But hey, pride takes the back seat when it comes to increased money and prestige, no matter how badly you feel you have been treated.

And while I am on that note, I read a lot yesterday about how it was a “slap in the face” of the University of Texas for the Pac-10 to have invited and accepted Colorado FIRST, before Texas. As Steve Martin used to say, “Well, EEEXXXCUSE MEEEE!!!!” Jeez. Is this how this is going to go all the time? They got their collective panties in a bunch because the situation for Colorado was just right and Texas and its little brothers are waiting to see what Nebraska does first? I am really concerned that the Pac-10/11 will be bringing in a LOT of baggage with the addition of the Texas schools, baggage that ultimately led to the likely demise of the Big 12. Will this be an ongoing and continual soap opera? Will Texas actually accept a role where they are not the only “big dog” on the block? Hey, USC (even with the NCAA penalties imposed) is still a heavyweight. Even though, as a UW Husky fan, I don’t like to admit this, the University of Oregon with Phil Knight’s money is a wheeler-dealer. UCLA is one of the biggest names in college basketball. Washington, although down for many years in football, is still a major player, as is Stanford, California, Arizona and Arizona State. Will Texas accept being just “one among many?” I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem really likely, no matter how much money is involved.

I am also wondering about the potential for cultural differences. LA is pretty laid back about most everything, where football may be equal to religion, in terms of the importance it plays in people’s lives, in the state of Texas. How will people from Texas and Oklahoma deal with being in the same conference as those liberal bastions, Seattle and California’s Bay Area? What will they think of the trip to Pullman, Washington (home of WSU)? Pullman is very nice, for a small town with not a lot to do. It is home to Keith Jackson, football announcer extraordinaire, Edward R. Murrow, and the Giant Palouse Earthworm. But it is certainly not a travel destination in any sense of the word. How many people will make the trek from Lubbock, Texas, to Pullman, Washington, to see a football game?

Yeah, if this happens as many people expect, I will probably pay some extra money to see Pac-Whatever sports on the new Pac-Whatever television network. I will probably still go to some games. But I can’t help but wonder what will happen to these soon-to-be mega-conferences that have truly terrible travel arrangements within the conference if the economy really tanks and real hardship continues and increases within the country. Sports, including college sports, in a commodity and, as such, is subject to discretionary spending by its consumers. Will these conferences be able to survive in their bloated states when the customers are no longer beating down the doors because they are too concerned about their own survival?

I have lots of mixed feelings about this. At least my teams will not be on the short end up the stick after this coming nuclear war. My schools will still be part of a major conference, which is a lot more than can be said of many schools that are now part of the Big-12, ACC and Big East. It might be exciting to see Oklahoma and Texas coming to play in Seattle on a regular basis. But something fundamentally is changing here, and that never really feels good unless your current situation is truly terrible. And, truth be told, our current situation regarding college athletics is not terrible. At least for the consumers of the product, it isn’t terrible.

I can’t help but think we are all making a huge mistake, one that we might end up regretting in the long run. The influence of huge money is ruining many aspects of our society. College athletics is no longer pretending to be about anything but making as much money as possible. That doesn’t feel very good. "Student athlete?" Phht. Don't make me laugh. As someone else somewhere on the web said yesterday, we might just as well call these professional football teams that are stationed near colleges.

UPDATE: Yes, well, I rather suspected that things would not turn out as predicted. Texas and the rest have decided to stay with this Big "12". Texas got lured by the promise of a bigger pot of money. They will have their own television network, which I understand would not have been allowed if they joined the Pac-10. There were a lot of other factors, mostly about money. And it appears that someone fabricated a reason to blame the Pac-10 for the deal falling apart, claiming that the Pac-10 all of a sudden wanted to include Kansas instead of Oklahoma State. The Pac-10 commish says this is not true, and I believe that. If they wanted Kansas, that would have been their going in position. They didn't really want Baylor and had no problem about aiming at Colorado instead.

Anyway, the Pac-12 now includes Colorado and Utah. Not necessarily a blockbuster, certainly not a "Super Conference." I would really rather have stayed at 10. But you know, if the Pac-10 was really intent on expanding, I am not at all unhappy with this deal. We have two schools that really wanted to be part of the Pac-10, and I think they will fit within the culture of the Pac-10 very well. They most certainly won't demand that everyone else cave into their demands, which is what I believe probably would have eventually happened with Texas. I read some columns out of the newspapers in SLC, and they seemed overjoyed to now be part of a BCS conference. Welcome, Colorado and Utah.

Now, is this nonsense about done with? Can we stop now?

My own dalliance with racism and bigotry.

The year was very late 1969 or early 1970, when our family, now under the control of new a stepfather, moved from Colorado to rural Alabama. It doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to understand that this was a huge change for me, a rather shy, unhappy, impressionable and neurotic teenager just starting high school, moving from a relatively progressive place to a very small town in the Deep South, where the Civil War was still very fresh in the cultural consciousness. The Civil Rights movement was not some distant event that today’s kids read in their history books. We were less than seven years removed from the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, attack dogs and fire hoses unleashed on peaceful protestors, also in Birmingham, and the abduction and murder of three young people in Philadelphia, Mississippi whose only crime was attempting to sign up black people to vote. This was the environment into which I found myself dumped, terribly unprepared and uninformed.

My new hometown, which shall remain nameless in this telling, was very similar to every other small town in the Deep South at this time. There was an almost identical town about seven miles to the west. They could have swapped names and it would have hardly made a difference. Unemployment was high, alcoholism was a problem. The towns had very little to offer in terms of employment or entertainment. Both had a white population and a black population that got along marginally well. For the most part, there was no overt hostility between the two groups and there were true positive feelings among a number of individuals. But the subject of race was there. It was always there.

It wasn’t very long after I started in the local high school that I found myself labeled as a “Yankee.” That was, without a doubt, not a compliment. After all, I talked differently. I wore different clothes and tended to have longer hair those days. This was before it became acceptable for country music stars to have long hair. I was an outsider, and that usually means “not acceptable.” Yankee! Outsider! Alien! Looking back, I certainly didn’t do myself any favors. But, at the time, I was just trying to cope with a new family, a sometimes hostile and drunk stepfather and the loss of every friend I had ever managed to make up that point.

At some point in time, I remember being surrounded by a number of the white kids who demanded to know whether or not I was a “nigger lover.” I remember being rather confused by this at the time. I wasn’t certain what that actually meant. My school in Colorado had a total of one black kid in the entire high school, and the football season before I moved away, he had just been voted by the student body as Homecoming King. I don’t remember my reaction to that. I think it was probably confusion, more than anything. I certainly didn’t believe it was somehow “wrong.” However, I do remember that I instantly knew what the answer that my new classmates were expecting from me. I said something to the effect of a very indignant, “No!” I don’t know what would have happened to me if I would have answered otherwise. Probably nothing except some additional ostracism.

The drive-in restaurant in the town (which my stepfather later bought and I was forced to work in when I wasn’t at school or doing school work) had “WHITES ONLY” painted above the walk-up window at the front of the building. There was, of course, the corresponding “COLORED ONLY” sign over the window at the side of the building. This was 1971, not all that long ago. There wasn’t a sign, but it was just an unstated rule that blacks were expected to not come inside into the dining area. Outside was fine, but not inside. During my hours working at the windows at the restaurant, of which there were to be many over the next five years or so, I remember those became my expectations as well. I felt that some unknown code had been violated when a black kid used the window designated for WHITES ONLY to order an ice cream cone. I didn’t say anything, I filled the order. I think it might have been a kid from school. After a few years, that code seem to become relaxed so that the COLORED ONLY window got covered up by equipment so that no one could have used it if they had wanted to. But when it first happened, I do remember feeling uncomfortable.

There was some outward conflict at the school on occasion. I remember one event, which may have lasted several weeks, where there was definitely some animosity going on between the white boys and black boys. It was kid of like a “Jets vs. Sharks” thing from West Side Story. I think it was centered in the higher classes, and I was just a freshman. I remember a bunch of kids standing around, talking, and there were actually some cooler heads trying to prevail. I remember one white kid trying to reason it out saying something like, “Look, if the football team wins, who is it that wins? Is it the colored boys? Or the white boys? No, it’s the team that wins.” Looking back now at that environment and who I remember it was saying that, I am rather impressed. That situation could have easily spiraled out of control. But it didn’t. Everything just went back into the pressure cooker to be heated up a bit more.

The biggest flare up between the two groups of people came not at my town, but the aforementioned town seven miles to the west. It could have just as easily been our town, I suppose. But it wasn’t. The conflict started, if I remember correctly, when several of the white cheerleaders started dating a couple of the black kids who starred on their football and basketball teams. Now, this was definitely crossing a line that the townspeople did not want to see crossed. It came to a head when the two or three couples wanted to go to the prom together. Maybe they succeeded, maybe they didn’t. I honestly don’t remember. But what I am attempting to convey here is my reaction. I don’t remember being outraged. I think my own reaction went something along the lines of, “Gee, those are cute girls. I don’t understand. They couldn’t get a date with a white boy?” No doubt I was feeling a bit left out, like I always did, as I wouldn’t have been able to get a date at that time if my life had depended on it. I cannot say with any amount of certainty what the girls’ motivations were. No doubt they truly liked the black kids, and they were stars on the sports teams, after all. But I imagine a healthy dose of rebellion was in there as well. “You aren’t going to tell ME who I can and can’t date!” I can now respect them for that.

I got along, for the most part, O.K. with the black kids in my class. I didn’t know what to say to them, really. The black boys were on the basketball team, on which I also played. By “played”, I really mean, “sat on the end of the bench a lot.” The black girls, I just didn’t know what to say to them. But then, I usually didn’t know what to say to girls anyway, so that’s no big surprise. Two of the black girls seemed really nice kids and they were rather well liked. The black boys got into no more or less trouble than did the white kids. Maybe less, now that I think about it. I was treated no better or worse by the black kids than my white classmates.

So, now I come to the reason I started to write this. Racism and bigotry have raised their heads again. We have a black man as president, and that doesn’t seem to be going over very well with a segment of the populace. Thoughts and feelings that have been submerged but still present in our society since my days in high school are popping out all over. Things that used to go unsaid are now being overtly trumpeted by the right wing media personalities and even some local politicians. The focus is now more on Latinos and Muslims instead of blacks, but it’s the same thing. “You are not like me. Therefore, you are bad and are to blame for all of my problems.” I won’t try to rehash the current societal mess. It’s just that I can’t help thinking that I have seen all of this before. I “know” the people who say these things that you would not expect to hear in America in the 21st Century.

Why? What is it with people that we can be trained to view with hostility anything different than ourselves? Based on what I know of history and from my own experiences that I recounted here, I have come to believe that human beings are extremely susceptible to manipulation. Some people may call this “tribal knowledge” or “learning at the feet of your elders.” However, manipulation is as good as any term that I can come up with. I believe that you can get a human being to believe anything if you start early enough and repeat it often enough. Children can be taught values when they are young that they carry with them for the rest of their lives. I remember being taught about The Golden Rule when I was in kindergarten. Now, I may not have always practiced that as diligently as I should have, but I have always believed it. Of course, there is the other side of the coin. Children can be taught distrust, hatred and prejudice as well as what most of us would consider to be more positive attributes of society. Protestants can be taught to hate Catholics. Germans can be taught to hate Jews. Many tribes of Native Americans hated each other and were in a constant state of conflict.

For my part, I am rather ashamed that I fell so easily into that trap. Of course I was not a “nigger lover!” How dare you think that about me! I now hope that was more just a knee-jerk reaction to my intense desire to be accepted than it was to my real beliefs at the time. As I said, I do not remember ever really disliking black people because they were black. I have been uncomfortable around them sometime, as I never knew how I was supposed to act or react, and whether they were going to be hostile to me. But then, I can also remember other times, like working with a black guy at a job at an office supply store, and we got along very well together. During one delivery trip, he and I, along with one other white guy, stopped off at a nightclub where a lot of black people hung out. The club band was practicing and we sat and listened to them for a while. My work buddy introduced us white guys to the rest and we sat around and got high. Being a head trumps being a racist, I suppose. I suppose I can feel somewhat mollified by the fact that really don’t believe I ever felt any animosity toward anyone because they were black. I was just reacting to the pressures of the times and of high school.

I am now married to a very nice Asian woman and have been for almost 20 years. We adopted her niece, who is also Asian, it should go without saying, as our own daughter. I have known many black people and gotten along with them well, as I have other “different” people such as gays and lesbians. I am a “good” progressive. The only time I really dislike someone is not because of their skin color, religion or sexual orientation, but because I perceive the person to be a jerk. I am extremely proud of the fact that the United States of America, with its very messy and unfortunate history regarding race relations, has a black man as President. I am the epitome of open-mindedness and acceptance. Until I look past the surface and into my own thoughts and history. Then, I sometimes begin to wonder. Why did I not object to the WHITES ONLY sign above the serving window of our family restaurant? I never questioned that at all, and I wonder why and am rather ashamed that I don't have a good answer. Should I have stood up to the bullies who demanded to know my feelings about my black classmates and told them where to get off? I still dislike thinking about that event and the answer that I so immediately and easily came up with.

Are we ever really truly free from fear and distrust of “The Others”, especially if we have been immersed into a culture that condones that fear and distrust?

It’s an interesting discussion I sometimes have with myself.

I would have never thought that BP wouldn't have a way to plug a gushing underwater oil well that was already figured out.

Incredible. "Hey, who would have thought that this could happen?" Well, anyone with any sort of engineering background or even a vivid imagination. Anyone who has ever watched any cheesy "scientific experiment gone horribly wrong" B sci-fi movie from the 50's or 60's, that who. This sort of reminds me of a rather old but apparently very rare sci-fi film called "Crack in the World." Some scientists get the brilliant idea to turn a rocket upside down and shoot it INTO the earth. I forgot the point of this little experiment. It all goes horribly wrong and the resultant hole starts a large crack in the ground (hence the name of the film). Actually, two cracks start. Panic ensues. Calamity results. The two cracks eventually come around and merge. The result is that it was like an apple corer had been applied to the Earth. A large chuck was forcibly ejected and, viola! It became another moon.

Oops.... Sorry about that. Certainly didn't see THAT one coming.

O.K., silly analogy. I just am an old sci-fi film buff, so almost everything reminds me of a movie these days.

But what kinds of black belt morons do these people have to be to do something that, in retrospect, looks as dangerous and prone to accidents as it turns out it is without any sort of backup plan?

Unfortunately, that seems to be the way our society is evolving. Risks are not considered. To consider risks and have contingency plans is to "plan for failure." I was actually told that once at a previous job. Anything that anyone can imagine automatically becomes "the plan", which will be wildly successful.

Balls. People have forgotten that life itself is a dangerous business. Pushing the technological envelope in ways that haven't been tried before (such as drilling to such depths in very deep water), by definition, is a dangerous business. To not recognize some possible but somewhat likely outcomes other than the one that you really want to occur is to be blind. Stupid. Idiotic. Which about sums up my feelings about our current society.

I have maintained, for quite some time, that the stock market is just legalized gambling.

If you know what you are doing, there are opportunities there for you to make a killing. There are also opportunities for you to lose your life’s savings, even if you do know what you are doing. I remember one person at work was very offended when I said that during a discussion. "No, it's not!" It was like I had insulted his mother. That was the depth of his reaction. But I think I have been proven to be correct. The stock market is just one big roll of the dice, in my mind.

May 6, 2010 is a case in point. Getting near the end of the trading day, The Dow Jones Industrial dropped almost 1000 points. It was in total freefall. Brokers were panicking, CNBC “analysts” were panicking, and certainly those people heavily invested in the stock market that set up their Blackberries to get programmed alerts if certain things happen were panicking.

From HuffPo:

At this point no one knows why. Some say it was sudden burst of worries about Greece's debt and the increasing possibility of a default that might cause a run by global investors. Others point to a "trading error." Giant high-speed computers generate millions of trades based on instructions embedded in computer programs designed to move fast enough to beat everyone else. So when there's a glitch in one of them it can immediately spread to all the other programs designed to move just as fast. Some say it was an erroneous trade entered by someone at a big Wall Street bank who mistyped an order to sell a large block of stock, and that the big drop in that stock's price (Procter & Gamble?) triggered "sell" orders across the market.

Regardless of why it happened, it's further evidence that the nation's and the world's capital markets have become a vast out-of-control casino in which fortunes can be made or lost in an instant -- which would be fine except for the fact that most of us have put our life savings there. Pension funds, mutual funds, school endowments -- the value of all of this depends on a mechanism that can lose a trillion dollars in minutes without anyone having a clear idea why. So much of the market now depends on computer programs and mathematical models that no one fully understands, so much trading is in the hands of a few people whose fat thumbs or momentary carelessness might sink the economy, so much of global wealth now depends on who can move their money quickest at the slightest provocation -- that we are toying with financial disaster every day. The luck or foolishness of a few traders, and inside knowledge and information that some possess and others don't, combined with ultra high-speed computers, put us all at the whim of a system whose risk is way out of proportion to any public benefits.

The stock market now is just one more out-of-control element in our out-of-control society, and this event, if there was still a doubt after the the Big Meltdown of 2008, should give absolute proof for anyone willing to actually see. That’s the problem, though. There are very few people who are willing to actually see what is going on and to take action. There are too many vested interests that want to maintain things exactly the way they are.

This is just such an obvious indication (to me, anyway) that we have lost control of the beast who once served us so well. If this article is true and no one really knows what happened, or if they do know for certain that it was some sort of “error” on a big trade that triggered all sorts of computer programs to automatically kick in with their sell orders, then we have big trouble on our hands. This is Frankenstein’s Monster. We will never know when it will turn on its “Masters.”

The stock market is a very strange thing, in my mind. It’s original intent was to provide industry the working capital it needed to invest in itself. Money has to come from somewhere in order to expand. Therefore, stocks and stockholders were invented as a way for the company to obtain the capital it needed and for the stockholders to have an investment in that company. I wasn’t around back then, of course, but my understanding of the early Twentieth Century mindset is that stocks were regarded as long-term investments. They were something to be held on to, rather like U.S. Savings Bonds are today. The stock market was not really invented for people and corporations to make a quick buck or huge fortunes by manipulating their holdings on a daily basis. But that’s what it has become, and everyone has gotten in on the game.

I haven’t trusted the stock market in a long time. I have had almost 100% of my holdings (mostly two 401K accounts) in bonds and stable growth funds. Yes, I know that is terribly, terribly conservative. Financially, that’s who I am. If I don’t understand something, I don’t get involved. And I certainly didn’t understand what was going on in the late 90’s and early “aughts.” As a result, I wasn’t pulling down 15 to 20% a year on my investments, like everyone else in this country seemed to think was some sort of God-given right. If they weren’t making that much, there was something terribly wrong and they were going to go find somewhere else to put their money. I have talked to those kinds of people, so I know that mindset existed. However, all these mutual funds and other types of investments that were packaged such that people thought their investments were diversified all collapsed pretty much at the same time, for the same reason. Many people lost 50% or more of their investments, which they had regarded as safe. My investments, on the other hand, kept plugging away at their usual very slow growth, without a single drop in value through this period. Who knows? Maybe I would have come out about the same if I would have been making all sorts of money on my investments and then lost it back. I might be just about in the same place as I am now. But I know that I didn’t really want to experiment with what I see as my retirement. That is not a place for me to be playing around in something I know that I don’t understand. But yet, I seem to be one of the few people in the country who thought like that. Even now, people and companies are still trying to find a way back to those heady days of 20% return on investments. Maybe so. Maybe those days will return eventually. But I know one thing. Until I can be convinced that our financial system isn’t some sort of out-of-control monster that will turn around and devour its “master” without warning, I know that I am going to remain a very conservative investor.

UPDATE: Via Attaturk.

Reports from CNBC and our own sources suggest that it was a Citigroup (C) trader that accidentally entered a sell BILLION-size sell trade, when they meant to do million.

Since the market came back and only ended down over 3%, all the focus now is on what happened. There's going to be an investigation into Proctor & Gamble (PG) trading, Accenture (ACN) and the market as a whole.

O.K., this pretty much makes my point. Any time we can experience an almost instantaneous meltdown of the Dow Jones due to a single keystroke error, then this system is really screwed and we are f*cked. I don't care if the market recovered pretty quickly. This is a screwed up system. One more thing in our society that no one really understands, but is yet entirely of our making.

UPDATE II: It appears that people who should know still have no idea of what caused this instantaneous crash and almost as instantaneous recovery. People, human beings, are going through a huge number of trades to try to figure out what happened. They don't know. I am very intrigued by several reports that a number of trades were "obviously in error" and were being cancelled. Really? Now, just how do people know that? We couldn't tell with the Florida ballots in 2000. What makes for an "erroneous trade"? And how do you "cancel" them without screwing over someone else? Maybe it was because some huge corporations lost lots of money, and that is what made their trades "erroneous?" I wonder if the little guy is getting as good attention.

This all reminds me of that old movie "War Games", where a computer sort of takes over and mixes reality and a test exercise to the possible elimination of the human species. Rather silly movie, if nothing more than the presence of Matthew Broderick. However, the part about the computer taking over and causing vast destruction, without the slightest comprehension by the people who designed the computer and without a hope in hell of heading off the catastrophe? That seems really plausible right now.