Reaping the Consequences of Poor

About a week before writing this, I was feeling more impoverished than usual. You know how it is: when you can’t pay your bills, your shoes have holes in them, and your credit card company tells you that if you keep paying off your balance at the current rate, it’ll be all paid off by yesterday -- meaning, after forever ends and time starts over again, and gets back to then. Roughly 50-85 billion years, or never, depending on how much dark matter there is in the universe.

“So,” I thought, “let’s get us some of that household energy assistance!”

That led to about 3 hours of me and Anitra “Other Household Member” Freeman studying the application process for federal LIHEAP energy assistance funds. Our conclusion at the end of those 3 hours was that the government doesn’t think we’re poor enough.

While that was disappointing to us, it provided us with new respect for the people who do qualify for LIHEAP funds, and how truly needy they must be. Whoa, that is some amazing poverty, people! Way to go!

The very next day, Obama announced his budget proposal that would cut funding to LIHEAP programs by over 2.5 billion dollars. Millions of households in America, representing approximately 3 per cent of the population, that are currently eligible to receive energy assistance, would be cut loose.

You can’t manage the political will to bring about an end to George Bush’s gift of tax breaks for the richest Americans, so they can keep the yacht industry afloat, but you can slash funds needed to help the poorest Americans have heat? OK, I see how you are, Obama.

No, wait, that’s not fair, is it? We bought health care reform by giving the opponents an extension to Bush’s tax cuts. Yay, we got watered down health care reform! But, you know what? The Republicans didn’t shake hands with us on the purchase, so they plan on taking the goods back, and keeping the extension.

That was muddled of me. Let’s look at the stupidity of these cuts from a different angle.

Consider those Predator Drones you keep hearing about. Like the one that wiped out an Afghan wedding party in 2007. Recently, the Air Force decided they weren’t deadly enough, so they would replace all their Predator Drones with newer Reaper Drones. (The old Predators will be sold at a discount to the Italians, to take out Berlusconi.) Each Reaper, at 10.5 million, costs more than twice what a Predator cost, and they want to buy over 250 of them over the next couple of years.

Our own people can go without heat next winter so that Air Force crews trained on arcade games, sitting in comfort in Florida, can kill more Afghans with the click of a mouse. Have you seen the ads? “It’s not science fiction.” All the excitement of war, and you get to go home to your wife and kids at the end of each shift, 1.4 miles away!

Oh, I get. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. So it’s all one big war, then, isn’t it?

Other ways it doesn’t pay to be poor:
That Ian Birk will not be charged for murder or manslaughter comes down to this 1986 footnote to the law "The legislature recognizes that RCW 9A.16.040 establishes a dual standard with respect to the use of deadly force by peace officers and private citizens... " stating that the lawmakers “really meant it” when they said police should be allowed to get off for murder almost all the time.

So any police officer can kill anyone so long as it can’t be proved to have been done out of malice. For example, let’s say you’re a cop, and you see a poor person wasting space. So long as it isn’t personal (you don’t have anything against that particular poor person, just poor people in general) you can fire away.

Exhibitionist Heaven

A couple of weeks ago some of us at Real Change were talking about how the rise of internet background-check services has hurt poor people. Years ago it was a pain to run background checks. If someone wanted to rent an apartment from you, you had to take their application materials to an agency run out of a trailer and hand it over to a guy named Rocky. You didn’t do it because Rocky smelled like cigarettes, stale peanuts, and three day old fish, and he charged too much.

But now, Rocky has a website so you don’t have to smell him, and his work is automated and uses semi-public internet resources, so the price is down around $30. The way the poor would-be renter gets screwed is that, with the background check affordable at all, it’s the renter who’s made to pay!

Good news! This intolerable situation will only last a few more years! Thanks to improving technology, the price of background checks will plummet so far, they’ll be given away free to anyone who has a computer and knows how to use Google!

“But Wes, how is that possible?” my detractors ask. Sneaky detractors always questioning me. Well, I’ll tell you. It’ll all be done with cameras, wires, connections, and computers, with some math thrown in.

By the time this column is printed, you’ll have had an opportunity to watch a massively parallel IBM computer named Watson play Jeopardy. I don’t know how well Watson will do, but I know he’ll outdo grandpa’s computer. He may not win against the human contestants, but he’s going to do better than a lot of people watching at home could do. Yet, Watson is self-contained. He’s not hooked up to an internet.

Meanwhile, the European Union, the United States of Europe, is funding a project to create a “robot” internet. I put the word robot in quotes because Watson is defined as a robot for the sake of this thing, called the RoboEarth project. Computers all over the world who are equipped to learn from experiences, like Watson, will be able to link up and share their growing knowledge about the world, and the humans in it, on their very own internet geared to their special interests and needs.

Meanwhile, face identification software is improving. It will soon be possible to upload a picture of someone, and tell your favorite search engine to retrieve all pictures that feature only that person and people who look just like them.

Finally, more and more cameras are being installed in public places, Several states are setting up their linked networks of surveillance cameras. But there’s nothing in the law preventing businesses and private citizens from connecting their own surveillance cameras to each other on the net, and every reason for companies that would like to track us all to support them doing so. So, got a surveillance camera? Earn some money just for leaving it on 24/7!

Put it all together, and you realize that it’s inevitable. The cost of the systems that track you will be paid by advertisers wanting to tailor ads to you.

Unless there are major legal barriers put in place (a constitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy would be a start in this country) you can expect as early as ten years from now that if you don’t remember where you were a week ago last Thursday at 3 PM, you’ll be able to able to find out by googling yourself. Switch to image search, and see what you were wearing. Modify the subject, and find out where the spouse was.

Computers will track you from one camera to the next. If you try to trick the computers by ducking into a port-a-potty and switch into a disguise, it won’t work, Superman, computers can count. “Duh-uh, where’d da other human go? Someone’s trying to trick me. Alert, alert! Oh there he is, with the red pantsies.”

And the good news is, it will all be free!

Tweet Like an Egyptian

Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers.

Like everyone else in the world I’ve been watching the events unfolding in Egypt with great concern. How can people be so cruel to one another? I’m referring, of course, to the shutdown of the internet and Twitter. It’s insidious.

We all know why it was done. The authorities felt besieged by revolutionaries. Naturally, they (the authorities) sought to deprive the revolutionaries of their power, so they unplugged them. I’m sure I would have done the same, if I were a dictatorial regime propped up by a rich foreign power, because I am also a walking moral vacuum, abhorred by nature.

That got me thinking, though. How would the history of the world been different if this sort of cruel drastic measure had been resorted to in the past?

For example, we’ve all heard of the American Revolution, and how, because of it, we live in George Washington State, instead of George William Frederick State, and we call ourselves Americans, after the continent, instead of British, after the fraction of the island. These are good things. But what would have happened had King George III done what Mubarak did, and cut off the colonists’ internet and Twitter?

One good thing: I’m sure that if they were cut off early enough the Boston Tea Party couldn’t have happened. They could never have pulled off that kind of organization without the aid of selectively distributed electronic communication. Consequently there would be no Tea Bagger Party today, which would be a relief. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know they could have existed, so we wouldn’t feel the relief, so we’d just complain about some other yahoos. Probably the Australians.

Then there’s the Declaration of Independence, which I learned in school was actually finished on MySpace, a sucky 18th Century predecessor of Facebook, on July 2, 1776, and only tweeted two days later. The British people were having their own problems and King George had already (this is real history!) shut down Twitter on their island. That’s why the British, including King George himself, didn’t know about the Declaration of Independence tweet until weeks later, when the ban was lifted and someone did a #revolution search.

That was what did happen. But if King George had shut down the internet and Twitter in the colonies that summer, the American colonists wouldn’t have been able to declare independence, so they wouldn’t know they were really having a revolution. No one would ever know they could pursue happiness, so we’d all be couch potatoes today.

No one would know what a “John Hancock” was. If you said to someone “put your John Hancock there,” they’d think you meant something dirty.

That’s just one minor revolution, hardly even the most serious one! What about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Velvet Revolution, the Velcro Revolution?

As we know now, without the internet and Twitter, none of those revolutions could have happened. Now I’m sure that some of you would say, good riddance to bad history. But you aren’t thinking how cool it was that all that went down. Just the French Revolution, for example, got us “Let them eat cake” and guillotines. Come on! That’s some cool s#*t!

Further hypotheticals to learn by:

It’s long been said that if the internet had never existed, children wouldn’t have learned violence from internet games. Discuss how the absence of violent tendencies among children would have affected history. First, pay attention to the Childrens’ Crusades, the development of the Mother Goose rhyming industry, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the world-wide stick and rock trade. Then, look away.

It’s also long been an established truism that without internet porn, men would never view women as sex objects. What would they have viewed as sex objects instead? List five possibilities and their relative likelihoods. Take into account the prevailing forms of agribusiness in ancient times and more recently, the rise of little tiny battery powered thingies.

Future Snark

Whenever there are great occasions of public oration, I miss them. They always happen in prime-time, and I’m accustomed to averting my eyes during prime-time. In fact, I always arrange to sleep through prime-time.

Missing the oration means I don’t know everything that everyone else does. I know the words because they’re in the New York Times the next day, if the oration is anything to sneeze at. But I miss the nuanced delivery, the dramatic pauses, the turned up eyes, everything you need to really be fully informed in a country informed by appearances.

But we must do what we can. I shall now attempt to read Obama’s State of the Union address, as it appeared in last Wednesday’s New York Times. [Pause for slow reader.]

OK, let’s see, distinguished guests, fellow Americans, Boehner, rancor, shooting, contentious democracy, we’re great, yadda, yadda, we’re set apart as a nation (as opposed to what? -- as a broccoli?), we will move together because we must, but we have to do more, China, India, yadda.

Alright, here’s something. He says our country is built on an idea and that’s why our kids don’t just memorize equations, they answer questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never put those things together before. So, it was our founding as a free republic that’s responsible for gnarly uncles asking endless stupid questions. Yeah, I can see that. It sure explains Uncle Ned. He never should have been free.

Next Obama’s telling us we have to win the future. Whenever someone points to something, I make a habit of glancing over my shoulder at what he’s pointing me away from. I guess it’s acceptable to lose the past if the future is still there to be won. I can switch to door number three.

Now here’s something else I did not know! I did not know this was a Sputnik moment! How did the new Sputnik get by me?

If I could see the Sputnik overhead maybe I could figure out how Obama gets from “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to “I want be one of the 80% of Americans riding in high-speed trains powered by 80% clean energy.” I don’t see that as much of a career, but then, maybe I just don’t know what the word “career” means. Is it like “careen?” What’s this 80% fetish?

What about my dream, that 80% of America be underwater, so I can get there by stolen rowboat?

Speaking of knowing things, we come to Obama’s first immediate concrete proposal, to continue income tax credits we already have for paying tuition. So that the people who can now afford to go to college can continue to afford to, until tuitions are raised again. A bold proposal.

After three decades of cuts in support for higher education, no change is progress we should all applaud.

He talks about bringing high-speed wireless to 98% of all Americans in 5 years, so that, among other things, students can take classes with a digital textbook. How about using that to crank the tuition down? Is that too much to ask?

How about a future in which 80% of adults have college educations that are fully paid off, so we don’t have a country of debtors?

Questions to propel further snark

Could the author of this column be any snarkier? Suggestion: come up with a snarky over-all assessment of the State of the Union Address that the author could have whipped out. Then, raise the snark level with a counter-snark of your own.

Reading comprehension: Is the author really snarking at Obama, or is he snarking at Americans for setting themselves up for these kinds of addresses, by their absurd expectations. Should every presidential address be a callback to Kennedy’s “Man on the Moon” address?

Obama said that at the time Sputnik was launched the science didn’t exist yet to go to the moon. Hello? Newton’s Laws?

You're Welcome, Now Give Us a Kiss

My point this week: Eastern Washington should thank Seattle in writing for being so liberal.

See what I just did there? That’s a first! Fifteen years, and never before have I made my point in the first sentence! Sometimes I never get around to it at all!

I’m doing it now for two reasons. One, last week I opened with what I thought was an amusing misleading statement “Today’s topic is insanity”, and nobody got it. Two, recently I’ve been obsessed by something said to me 23 years ago. I was homeless then and a man I’ll call Luke Sidewalker had asked why, and I had given him four answers, the first three being impromptu jokes.

Luke, who had recently graduated in Advanced Pre-Modern Sociology, told me that my last reason, the true one, was false, because he had “learned” in Sociology Science 101 that people always say the truth in their first answer.

Not a sociology class; a sociology experiment.

I respectfully told him you can’t learn something that isn’t true, that sociology has yet to establish itself as a science, that sociologists don’t study whole people, they study half-formed college students because they make cheap plentiful guinea pigs, and that he was an idiot. But I have long pondered his words.

Mostly I’ve pondered, how many people are as stupid as Luke Sidewalker? How many really take every study ever generated by sociologists as gospel, without appreciating how much trickier it is to study people than atoms, and the tools aren’t there yet? Does diet cause such stupidity? Can we do a study?

But I digress. Last election, Washington State defied the national trend, re-electing Democrat Patty Murray over Republican contender Dino Rossi, and I spent hours on the internet trying to explain to various representatives of The Rest of The State, why there was a perfectly good reason that should have happened, even though only 9 counties went for Murray, and the other 30 went for Dino Rossi.

What looks like a failure of democracy is not, I said, because counties only report the votes, they don’t do the voting. The voting is done by people, and one-person-one-vote means if more people vote for one candidate than another, it’s not their fault that so many of them live in King County, which just happens to have 25% of the population of the state even though it’s only one county.

Contrast that with last Friday’s Seattle P-I headline: “King Co. pays for the rest of the state - is that fair?”

It doesn’t look fair! Our taxes make up 42% of the state’s income, but only 25% of the budget gets spent here! Wah!

However, as I have just now said, we’re 25% of the population, approximately, so the spending amount IS fair, on that basis. So what’s going on?

What’s going on is, King County is liberal. And liberals vote for liberal policies. Liberal policies are better. So the businesses here do better. So King County residents make more money. So they pay more in taxes.

More importantly, we’re liberal so we believe that’s exactly the way it should be! Let the wealthiest people pay the most, they that have the most to pay. Let everyone reap the benefits in accordance with their numbers and it will all work out for the best for all of us.

Now, a few conservatives happen to live in King County. For example, Luke Sidewalker lived in Eastern Wallingford, of all places. They might complain like this: “Hey, we King County-ers earned our money through hard work. Why should those the bare-foot children of Eastern Washington hippies, drunks, deadbeat dads, and other ne’er-do-wells get our money? They should earn their own!”

But most of us see the error in that reasoning. We know that our money will go to good use. It will be especially needed to raise the educational level of Eastern Washington, to the point where they could at least write that thank you note I mentioned at the beginning of this.

Above All, Please No Creepy Fake Smiles

 [We are up to date now. Reminder: these are my own versions, pretty much as submitted, with occasional graphic embellishments and added notes. The titles don't usually match.]

Today’s topic is insanity.

Ha, ha, that wasn’t very specific was it? Everything is insanity! The voices tell me so.

Seriously, an insane man recently killed some people while trying to kill a Congressperson, and this has been taken by many as a call to action. I don’t like what happened either, but honestly a lot of these calls to action are just nuts.

The idea that mental illness causes good people to do bad things is generally false. Mental illness most often causes good people to do good things that aren’t practical and not in their own best interests, or good things that aren’t efficient. Whereas, it causes bad people to be bad out in the open. Mental illness itself is morally neutral, like pneumonia.

When I was 12 I was visiting the house of another kid I’ll call “Charlie”. Charlie was the little brother of a former babysitter of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years. His parents begged my parents to get me to play with Charlie, because he was so lonely. His idea of playing that day was to hit me repeatedly with a stick, for half an hour, until I finally snatched it away from him, and broke it in ten pieces.

The parents, when notified of all this, sobbed, and said, “It all started when another boy threw a rock at Charlie’s head. He’s been mean like that ever since. That’s why he has no friends.”

Very sad, very tragic, very false. When I’d known Charlie before the tragic blow to his head, he was also a vicious jerk. He was just more efficient at it, and didn’t do anything so overt, so he could drag it out longer. All the blow to his head did was put him off his game. He lost his gift for creating deniability.

My mother was verbally abusive to people who visited her near her death. They excused her for it by saying it was “the brain tumor talking”. But she hadn’t had a talkative brain tumor 22 years earlier when she decided it would be fun to burn the back of my hand in one spot over and over again with a cigarette.

It’s all irrelevant until you start talking about prescriptions. The most popular prescription for the latest tragedy isn’t as bad as Homeland Security was for 9/11, but it’s just as illogical. We can’t be forcing ourselves to be civil just to keep from touching off a Jared Loughner.

It’s like saying, “we can’t integrate the Armed Services, Mr. Truman, it will touch off some violent racists, and there will be riots in the barracks!” Well, we did it anyway, there were riots, and anyone who says “I told you so,” give them a dirty look for me.  

It’s not that we shouldn’t be civil, it’s that you can’t be civil for that reason. It isn’t a sustaining reason to be decent. You have to be decent and civil to begin with. Some of you aren’t, and you know precisely who you are. Don’t strain yourselves to act civil for the sake of public safety. We’ll all see through your phony civility, including the Jareds. Be civil for the sake of your own self-respect, or forget it.

Topical local applications

The typical Seattleite is always smiling and civil.

Most of you good readers live in the Greater Seattle area, AKA The Passive-Aggressive Capital of the World. Is this is a great place to observe phony civility in its natural state, or what? If you say it is, the teacher likes you. If you say “what,” the teacher smiles at you, says, “let’s get together sometime” and avoids you from then on.

As I write this, the state legislators debate eliminating programs that help pay for mental health treatment and the survival needs of the mentally ill. This is happening because state voters wouldn’t approve higher taxes for the rich, for fear that it would cut into their own chances to be rich one day. Who’s crazy in that picture?

If It's Monday, We're In Hell

[from 1/12/10]

Here’s an expression I’m getting tired of hearing: “sign of the Apocalypse”. Now the End-Times are underway, do we really need to note that this, that, and everything else is a “sign of the Apocalypse”? Hey, it’s the End-Times, OK? If it’s morning, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s on the internet, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s Folgers, if it walks the walk, etc. Quit rubbing it in. We’ll all die and burn for eternity except the Christians (of the correct sect.) We get it, shut up.

I’m so over these End-Times. They started, as I’m sure you know, in the Summer of 1986, in the middle of Reagan’s second term. That was when the rapture occurred. My first thought, when Reagan and I weren’t rapted, was uh-oh, our lives are going to get way too interesting.

Well, they did. George Bush Sr., Iraq War I, Alzheimer’s, Clinton, Monica, Kosovo, Paul Schell, George Bush Jr., 9/11, Afghanistan War, Iraq War II, MySpace -- one daytime nightmare after another. Reagan didn’t survive it.

But now it’s just old. I’m sorry, I don’t have the attention span it takes to stay awake for this bore-fest. The real thing is as tedious as every end of the world movie I’ve ever walked out in the middle of.

The Bible totally over-hyped it. I thought birds were supposed to fall out of the sky everywhere at once. So far, what’s it been? Kentucky, Italy, and Sweden? That’s not everywhere. I’ve only been to one of those.

It turns out thousands of birds drop dead out of the sky, here and there, hill and dale, all the time, and have for hundreds of years. It just that before it didn’t get noticed as much as it does now that the world is ending.

A recently homeless man is now the spokesperson for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, while Bernie Madoff sits in prison. OK, that sign is exceptionally interesting, but not enough to sustain me.

I was fortunate that I missed one major sign of the Apocalypse, the reading of the US Constitution, except for the naughty bits, 30 words at a time, into the Congressional Record by the one third of Representatives who are able. I was busy doing something important, so I wasn’t at home in a zombie trance, glued to C-Span. Had I been, my innards -- bones, brain, and all -- would have liquified and spilled out my orifices, ruining my day.

What matters is, with a huge federal deficit hanging over us all, the Republican Party decided it was important for taxpayers paying Congresspeople’s salaries to see them demonstrate that they know the document (or most of it) that is the basis for their jobs. This proves that US Congressbeasts are indeed human with at least 2nd grade educations, and not horses, as they were (well, one of them was) the last time end-times were rumored. Hooray.

Locally, the Highway 99 tunnel project was officially handed over to the Dragados Company. (Dragados = Spanish for “pertaining to seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns,” an accurate description of a tunnel-borer.) This sign is simply annoying. Much like the collapse of the Minneapolis Metrodome. Ten years ago I might have cared. Now? Overdone. What isn’t collapsing, and what won’t be? Why should I have to keep track of every bit of it?

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” blah, blah. We only wished it was that simple. We know how to deal with mere anarchy. We’re talking massive cost overruns here.

An exercise by which to wait for your fiery plunge to eternal agony:

List ten signs of the Apocalypse that you have witnessed since Monday. You can do it. Been on a bus? In traffic? Read a newspaper? Write them large on separate paper and arrange them chaotically at your feet. Stare at them, and contemplate the next two or three years of your life.