Missing Link

Back when I got my first mac,  a 12″ Powerbook G4,  one of the guys I worked with suggested that I get Applecare with it in case anything went bad.  I thought it was a bit pricey, but opted to heed the advice.   I’m glad I did, though, as two years after I got the powerbook – my hard drive died.  A call to Applecare and a week later, my laptop was back with a new hard drive (and has been running just fine ever since – still runs to this day.)    Now – a lot of people will say that the cost of a hard drive is much lower than the cost of applecare, and you’d be right.   In my case, though, it did end up paying for itself – though not the way most people would expect (or want).    A very long story short – I tripped over my power cord and caused my powerbook to fly off my lofted bed and crash to the floor, bending the case and causing some problems.   I sent it off for repair to be told it would cost me $700 because of accidental damage.   I tried – unsuccessfully – to cancel the repair and have it shipped back,  only to have them repair it anyways.   Since I had tried to cancel they never charged me for the repair – so I got $700+ in repairs for free.

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It’s no secret – I love technology. For the most part, I’ve quite enjoyed the dawn of social media and it’s impact on the Internet.

First, there was blogging. I love blogging – even if nobody reads what I have to write.  Then came Myspace/Facebook – while I have a facebook account, I *rarely* log in.  Then there’s Flickr for photo sharing (I use regularly), Twitter – for…. twittering, etc.

And there is one thing that binds them all….. Spambots.

My first experience with spambots – outside of receiving annoying spam email – was with my first blog, which ran on a MovableType platform. At the time there wasn’t any good way to combat comment spam because it was a new problem.  I ended up having to disable comments for a good period of time.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about money, spending, budgets, etc.   This has been prompted by the global financial crisis.  It started with me looking at my own spending, money and budget – looking at where I could do better (there are plenty of areas…).   I then turned to the government, with it’s HUGE deficit and the national debt which grows by staggering proportions every day.

One of the big problems that caused this crisis is the housing bubble that burst in the recent past – which was driven by the subprime mortgage industry.    This was an industry that, essentially, let people (temporarily) live beyond their means.   And, ironically, that’s exactly what caused the whole industry to implode in such a spectacular fashion that it took several Wall Street investment banks, and several regional banks, along with it (not to mention the rest of our economy…).

One of the things I was taught by my parents is that it’s important to live within your means – essentially the principle that you have to have a budget, and your spending cannot be more than your income.  Preferably your spending is LESS than your income so that you’re saving money and – if you’re smart – letting it work for you (stocks, mutual funds, however you want to do it) via long term investments.  That’s how I was raised, and that’s how I operate my finances.

So, with that in mind – and with my thoughts turned to our government – I had to ask:  Why doesn’t our government do that?

It would seem that our government hemorrhages money.  It’s horribly fiscally irresponsible, and yet we’re looking at THEM to answer our financial crisis?  A group of people who have an addiction to spending money (and who wouldn’t if they could just keep printing more!?) are supposed to tell us how to fix the economy?   Excuse me for being blunt but I have to ask – are we all retarded?!

The solutions proposed are nothing more than a band-aid.  They MAY fix problems temporarily, but if I were to guess I’d say the problem will resurface in the not-so-distant future and likely things will be much worse than they are now.  

We NEED to reel in our leaders and demand fiscal responsibility.  Our spending is skyrocketing, yet very few are seeing any benefit from it.  Is our national infrastructure better?   Have we fixed health care, or schools?  Have we made any inroads in helping people in our own country?   No – we haven’t.

Schools are worse, health care is lagging, unemployment rates are up, our economy is going south. 

Where are we spending these billions upon billions of dollars?   

Well, recently, to bail out companies that took unacceptable risks and made incredibly poor decisions.  Decisions and risks that were made possible by….. OUR GOVERNMENT!  

We’re also spending BILLIONS a month in Iraq to wage a war very few here really want to be involved in, for some reason that is nebulous and difficult to really ascertain. Does anybody really know what we’re even doing over there anymore? They have a government and, presumably, a military and police force… so why are we doing all the work for them? More importantly, why are you and I paying for it?

We need to take some of the power back from the government, demand that they live within their means, and hope and pray we can get some fresh minds in Washington who aren’t going to keep on going with the status quo and will actually do their jobs – work for the people. 

Verisimilitude.

While sitting here allowing various thoughts to run rampant through my head – sometimes engaging in gladiatorial fights for the privilege to remain on the Train (you know – the Train of Thought), one such thought performed well in the fight (just like Russel Crowe in “Gladiator”) and caused me to want to write about it.

A problem I’ve found myself having lately, in regards to our upcoming elections, is getting real answers about the various issues.   It’s almost impossible to get anything out of the press these days and take it for face value.  Everything with politics in the media is one big ball of spin  - depending on your news outlet of choice.  I’ve also found that, depending on your political leaning, your news outlet of choice varies.   For instance – if you are fond of the Republican party, and pretty people, you can’t go wrong with Fox News.   If you’re fond of “The Dems” you probably enjoy CNN and The New York Times. 

Why is this the case?   And Why does Ann Coulter, a journalist,  have 3 books that all have “Liberal”, used in a negative way, in the title?   The answer is corporation.

Gone are the days (or, perhaps more likely, NEVER were the days…) where reporters and journalists reported “just the facts”, and present are the days when reporters and journalists report “just the facts, as spun in such a way to make it palatable to the corporation that owns the newspaper, station or network I work for”.  If that corporation happens to favor the “right wing”, then the stories will have a slant that is favorable to the right wing.     If It’s more “liberal”, however,  the stories will be more favorable to the left. 

This brings up a fundamental problem.  If you were to ask the majority of people what the purpose of the nightly news, or the daily newspaper, was – their answer would probably be “to report the news”.  This seems like a fairly straightforward notion – a news program, and news paper, should report … well, NEWS!  What many people may not immediately realize (and some unfortunate souls NEVER realize) is that this isn’t straight news,   it’s news filtered through that agency’s agenda.   Sure, some things are just straight news,  i.e. “a triple homicide occurred last night in the downtown neighborhood of blah blah blah” – it’s pretty hard to politicize that (ok, it’s not that hard, but it IS easy to pick out when they’re doing that).  But for the most part it’s all spin.  The problem, then, is that we’re not having the news reported to us in an unbiased way, and many people (forewarning: some will probably accuse this of being elitist – it is not.  It’s the truth, and sometimes the truth sucks) don’t possess acumen to realize it.  Some people DO possess the acumen but, for whatever reason, choose to either not care or to ignore it. 

So,  why is this a big deal?     Well, perhaps it isn’t for many – but it is for me.   Why?   For the simple fact that – when a news agency starts filtering it’s stories through it’s own agenda it loses it’s objectivity, and in doing so, loses it’s credibility as a source of real, actual, news.    I can then no longer trust it to give me the facts – I have to go out and check it’s story to verify the facts, and if I have to do that then why am I even bothering to view it’s stories in the first place.

Why do they get away with it?    I have a theory on that.   People don’t like to hear things that are contrary to their beliefs.   Want proof of this?  Have a philosophical debate with someone sometime.  I was a philosophy minor in college – I know what the end result will be (I’ve been there MANY times).  If you like debating and actually KNOW philosophy you’ll probably GREATLY enjoy the conversation.  The other person will likely eventually devolve into rambling, cursing and shouting (in some rare cases, foaming at the mouth).  It will probably end with balled fists being slammed onto a table and/or someone walking out in a huff. 

Because people like to hear things that parallel their views they are instantly drawn to news sources that have a slant similar to their own.   That’s why right wing fundamentalists flock to Fox News as if it were the Mecca of television news.  

This all stems from the realization that – despite several months of reading about both candidates, I know NOTHING about what they really stand for.  Why?  Simple.  If I were to believe what I’ve read, both are, absolutely without a doubt, the single best candidate for the presidency.  Since you can’t have a plural singularity (that’d cause the fabric of space-time to implode and destroy us all.  So could the LHC at CERN, if it ever were to REALLY work, but I digress…), I know something must be broken with our media.   Or perhaps it’s working exactly like it’s intended.