Corp. USA

Ever wondered why it seems the big fish are eating the small fish?  Why the land of opportunity seems to be growing smaller? Why the big shots in big firms seem to be running the government, or vice versa?

Then read this–all of it.

This explains Executive Orders (fiat power, almost like a dictator), the reason for the Federal Reserve, and the whole mentality in our government today.  The Government is basically a business with legal monopoly power enforced by a military (hey, it works better than a marketing department).

There are some heavy choices people make nonchalantly because there is no sense of gravity or understanding of the current situation.  Simple explanations can still be the wrong explanations.

A Real News Source

The Onion:

Obama the Sad Sack

Politics today is purely about image. It really doesn’t matter how well-thought or unthought a policy and its consequences are as long as the policymakers looks good and doesn’t embarrass himself he will grab votes. The Onion really makes a sad commentary about what passes for relevant news in politics today. The president eating dog meat while he was growing up in a third-world country has nothing to do with his leadership or ideas. But such a story spends evenings in the news.

These sorts of stories would be relevant if other nations wanted to launch nukes at the States because of these storylines. But the fact of their irrelavance has not caused any news editor’s to question running such stories. The fake news parodies the real news and it isnhqrd to tell the difference. More seriousness is needed in our current political climate.

Josh Cribbs Caught Speeding

Who cares?  Not sure why this is worthy of the news, but….

What is admirable is what he said about it in his tweets afterwards:

Yes I was pulled over for speeding, going too fast, luckily the police were on the job. Wasn’t going that fast the entire time obviously but wrong is wrong, gotta face the music just like anyone else:(

….

Much Respect to the police officers who pulled me over! I will lead better on the road now as well as on & off the field!!!

Like any guy with a sports car that goes fast, he likes the feel of speed and got the car going.  Maybe he was testing out the max speed but got busted before reaching the max.  Maybe he was cruising at 80 mph but stopped paying attention to speed and let it get faster.  Does it matter in the grand scheme of things?  He admitted he did wrong and will shoulder up to the consequences of his actions.  That’s refreshing to see.

Letter and Spirit

First, a link to the Yahoo news piece:

A 17-year-old varsity baseball player in suburban Cleveland is being banned from walking at his own graduation for racking up two too many unexcused absences. While those circumstances might be considered the fault of the athlete in most cases, Carrollton (Ohio) High senior Austin Fisher’s case is a rather extraordinary one: His absences were all brought on by time he spent caring for his mother, who has spent the past six years battling breast cancer.

Notice that actions have consequences.  Having been through the public school system myself, administrators are fairly good at annoying the student about every absence and also pointing out excessive absences.  At some point, I’d guess before the 12th or 13th absence, Fisher was told that 14 was the most he could have and be permitted to walk for graduation.  I am very confident that at some level he was aware that missing an X amount of days from school would have severe, negative consequences.  He made the choice instead to care for his mother.  He now lives with the consequences of his actions.  That how life works.

But there’s no reason to stop there.  Most people would agree that he made the right choice.  I certainly think so.  Even though he has no control over the fact that his mother is not married (be it some reason so frivolous as “I didn’t love him anymore” or something so serious as his father died tragically) and therefore does not have a partner for emotional, physical, and financial support, he stepped up to fulfill needed roles to the best of his ability.  I believe he made the right choice given his circumstances.  Family is more important than walking down the aisle with your graduating classmates.  While many people may say this, he actually had the courage to do this.

This brings us to the matter of the rules.  The rules state that missing more than 14 days of classes (unexcused) means a student will not walk on graduation night.  This rule seems very lenient (14 days–that’s 8% of the school year!) and is meant to keep bad, lazy students from being perceived as good, industrious students.  While this rule alone will not insure that this happens, it can at least weed out the fringes, one would hope.

But this breaks down, like many other rules which regulate intentions.  This is not some moral law or some variation of a moral law, rather, this rule is made to codify actions with intentions and penalize the presumed intentions.  However, if the intentions are different than what the actions normally would signal, the rules violate their very spirit and thus become illegitimate.  This is not to argue against rule of law, but to argue against law of rules.

Rules are made to provide a mechanism for good to occur in specific situations.  Unlike Laws (by this I mean Laws based on morality and ethics), rules are good or bad depending on the situation and the underlying morals.  While rules may function well in 99% of the situations, in the !5 of situations they do not they should be recognized for what they are: regulations which failed in guardianship of their intentions.

#iamtrayvonmartin

Almost inevitably there are two sides to every issue.  The Trayvon Martin killing is no different.  While I am not sympathetic to Zimmerman, as he could have more easily avoided the situation than escalate it, there is a deep resentment in me towards the “professional racists” (to use Vox’s phrase) who opportunistically exploit the death of a black teen.

With knowing hardly anything about Trayvon, professional racists, Obama included, started talking about how the stereotypes of Trayvon were all wrong.  Just because a black teenager walks around with a hood up does not mean he is a thug.  In fact, we were told, he was just an ordinary, harmless black male who fell victim to racism.  He was a sweet child who was so beautiful and loving that he could be easily mistaken for the president’s son.  Zimmerman was so blinded by racism and judging from bad stereotypes that he took the life from this shining exemplar of black maleness.

Then Yahoo, seemingly reluctantly, offers some scant details to the contrary:

“With a single punch,” the Orlando Sentinel, citing police sources, reported Monday, “Trayvon Martin decked the Neighborhood Watch volunteer … climbed on top of [him] and slammed his head into the sidewalk several times, leaving him bloody and battered.”

“That is the account Zimmerman gave police,” the paper said, “and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say.”

Zimmerman’s attorney, Craig Sonner, says that Zimmerman acted in self-defense and is not a racist as some have portrayed him.

“I think we need to let the investigation come forward and let all the facts in this case come out,” Sonner said on the “Today” show. “I think it’s going to tell a different story than the way it’s been related and portrayed in the media.”

….

As Dan Linehan, a blogger at Wagist.com, pointed out, correspondence with Martin on Twitter before he died alludes to an incident with a bus driver. “Yu ain’t tell me you swung on a bus driver,” Martin’s cousin wrote to him on Feb. 21.

The same week, Martin was suspended for 10 days from Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in North Miami-Dade. “He was not suspended for something dealing with violence or anything like that,” his father said. “It wasn’t a crime he committed, but he was in an unauthorized area [on school property],” declining to offer more details.

But a family spokesman told the Associated Press on Monday that Martin was suspended because marijuana residue was found in his book bag.

[emphasis mine]

Suddenly we find out why Zimmerman wasn’t arrested: because witnesses verified his story, not because the police were racist.  (However, I do not think a final judgment can be made about his guilt or his actions.  That remains to be seen in due time.  We can note that the police were not acting racistly, and it’s quite possible that Mr. Zimmerman was also not acting out of racial hate.)  As usual, there are two sides to this story.

Another main point is to be made about professional racists.  Without knowing anything about Trayvon, they made statements purporting him to be just like any untroubled child.  This they said only because they shared the same skin color.  This is racism at its most obvious–when people take a side based on the one known fact of race.  However, it seems almost every stereotype that the professional racists told us to reject is pretty accurate.  He appeared to be prone to violence (swinging at a bus driver), involved with drugs (possibly even had gang ties), and had no presenting himself according to a stereotype.  Not exactly the angel race hustlers made him out to be.

This is not to say that Zimmerman did the right thing by any stretch of the imagination, or that Martin did the wrong thing.  I simply want to note that there are two sides to the story.  And that those crying foul are racist for assuming that Trayvon was some role model and not a thug in infancy, or just somewhere in between searching for what he wanted to be in life.  And that those in the media and public arena exploiting an unnecessary, personal death to score some political points by pandering to racial sentiments are evil and heartless.

"I am Trayvon Martin...wait, I don't look like him at all."

“A Sick Joke”

From Simon Grey:

Sometimes I wonder if American culture is nothing more than a sick joke.  It seems to me that everything Americans do, especially those in the middle class, is designed to signal status.  That seems to be the case with the modern school system and with homework in particular.  There is little value to assigning homework because it is so easy to cheat at it.  All that happens, as Scott Adams notes, is that everyone simply becomes stressed out over a triviality.

More to the point, the parents act like homework is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER and thus push their kids to complete it, even though everyone knows it’s nonsense.  Yet, in spite of knowing how little and unimportant homework is, parents push their children to do it, often with the encouraging rundown of how terrible life will be if you don’t do your homework.  “If you don’t do your homework, you’ll fail the class;* if you fail the class, you’ll fail school;** if you fail school, you won’t go to college;*** if you don’t go to college, you won’t get a good job;**** etc.”

The results of this constant guilt trip have begun to yield a diseased, rotting fruit.  “Relationship” no longer refers to the emotional connection one has with his fellow human beings.  Instead, it refers to how much wealth/status/income one has relative to one’s fellow human beings.  We are a materialist society, driven by our shiny things and the pursuit thereof.  And so, parents continually pressure their children to accomplish meaningless tasks in the hopes that doing so will eventually ensure their children’s ability to acquire meaningless material goods.

The punchline is that this is called the American dream.

* Translation:  you won’t be properly brainwashed.

** Translation:  you won’t get a piece of paper celebrating you’re pitiful intellectual accomplishments.

*** Translation:  You won’t be able to go to an overpriced indoctrination camp to get a piece of paper that tells prospective employer what a compliant little drone you’ll be.

**** Translation:  You won’t be able to sit in a cubicle all day filing meaningless reports and crunching imaginary numbers in order to earn enough money to satisfy the hedonistic and materialistic desires of the ugly hag you married, in order to support ungrateful brats that you don’t ever get (or, truthfully, want) to see.

No further comment needed.

Funny Video, and They Still Love Each Other

So why all the rage still?

 

And the follow-up:

 

Many game truths in these vids, too.