Advisory Bullshit
It occurred to me again today how many people there are trying to tell us how to live our lives. Doctor Phil. The Dali Lama. Every inexperienced academic on the planet. The Federal Government. Oprah Winfrey. Fox News. John McCain. (okay, so those last two are telling us the same things) Cereal boxes. New age self-improvement books. Newspaper columns. Talk shows. Organized (and unorganized) religions. The Marketing Machine. Bloggers. The media in general. The “style” section in particular. Movies stars. Athletes. Everybody.
News flash. These people are all wrong.
They all have an ax to grind. They all want to look extra smart, or want some slice of your money, or want to exercise control over you, or just want to convince you that their way is the one true way. All of them are mouthing generalities which have nothing to do with you in particular and very little to do with human beings in general. They all want you to do things that are to their advantage and don’t even bother taking you into consideration.
You are the only one like you that there is. That uniqueness is much more than a platitude. The complexity and fine structure that makes up an individual human being is a truly awesome thing to behold, and is utterly impossible to fully comprehend. The best that the platitudes, old wives tales, and conventional “wisdoms” can do is try to play games with your mind for the advantage of the utterer. Pay them little mind.
There is a nugget of “truth” in all of them, if you are the “average” person. Of course, no one is average and there are no easy answers. If you’d like, have a look at what people have to say. If you have enough grains of salt, there is probably something to take away from everything anybody ever says. But that something is probably too general and too small to be of any real value for the specific you.
It should also be noted that looking endlessly at every platitude that comes into your field of vision is probably not a good thing. If you are looking for and at these things, you are probably trying to learn and improve yourself, which is an excellent objective. But the best that platitudes can do is set you to thinking about someone else’s truth and how it may apply to you, if at all.
The truth is, in order to improve yourself, you have to understand your own fine structure and not someone else’s. You need to study and understand yourself. There will never be time to compare yourself against everything. And even more importantly, you will need to actually do something to improve yourself. Pondering platitudes endlessly is an excellent way to waste the rest of your life. After some reasonable period of reflection, get off your butt and do something. If it’s wrong, learn from it and change what you do next accordingly.
Inaction leads only to more inaction. Only informed action leads to life. So stop reading this, right now, and go out and do something. 
Voting Critically
It is getting harder every day to discuss politics, simply because the electorate is too polarized. I believe that to be on purpose, a ruse to keep people from talking about the things that matter. Politicians want this situation to be commonplace, in order that we stay disgusted with the process and don’t look at it too closely, or begin to think that we can repair the current abysmal state of government. The mainstream media is certainly complicit. They talk about what the politicians want to talk about, which has nothing to do with meaningful issues. It’s all fluff.
We are kept focused on non-issues; the age, color, or sex of candidates, not what they believe about critical issues. We don’t even talk about critical issues. We talk about the difference between pro-life and pro-choice, two meaningless word-sets if I ever heard any, and not about the deeper societal issues around sex and birth. All issues are polarized, all have buzz-words, while most mean nothing. They are words and phrases meant to confuse, sound bites meant to divide us into ever smaller groups.
As long as we let it be about Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, man vs. woman, and so on down a long list, the politicians and the monied elite that have bought and paid for them them will have their way with us. Thay will have the control; we will be subservient. We will not talk about the important things that could make our lives better, could alleviate the suffering of citizens, and stop the bleeding of our institutions. We vote instead on buzzwords, wardrobe, and haircuts, not substantive matters. This ludicrous process is killing our citizenry and our country.
You can help to alleviate this critical problem. Pick an issue that means something to you. Figure out why it means something to you, exactly how you feel about it, and why. Then find out how the candidates feel about it. Read their position papers, the long versions. Dig into it. See if what they say changes your mind. Look at their records and see if it matches their words. Finally, decide which candidate is closest to your position, and is likely to stick to it.
Then select another issue. Repeat. Do until done.
If We Were All Terrorist Targets, We Would Know It
It’s not really a secret, but the Kansas Curmudgeon was born in Nebraska. In Omaha, to be exact. The same Omaha that was the site of the shopping mall shooting earlier in the week. I had worked right across Dodge street from the Westroads Center for quit a while before I moved, at a tender age, to California. Incidents such as that one are so senseless. The shooter was obviously a disturbed young man. The dearth of mental health services available in our heartless right-wing-led society doubtless contributed to the deaths of these innocent people.
It does help to reinforce my belief, last stated here, that not very much has changed in America since the 9/11 tragedy, at least in terms of security. This time a mentally disturbed youth has killed 8 people in slightly more than a heartbeat. Although it took a bit longer, another mentally disturbed young man killed 32 at Virginia Tech earlier this year. Although incidents like this are not commonplace, they happen often enough to show that a single person, even (or especially) a mentally ill one, can kill multiple strangers quickly with relative ease.
Let the Games Begin
It is the day past Thanksgiving and Christmas is now fair game. We will see photos and film at eleven documenting people lined up at the doors of big box stores to begin this years shopping wars. You will see them in the middle of the night in the freezing cold at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Macys, and every other store of size in our land. There will normally be two hundred people setting their sights on a dozen or two items at an additional ten percent off.
This particular curmudgeon was home, snug in bed, sawing pre-Yule logs. The culture of shop-until-you-drop has never taken hold in my mind. Shopping, rather than being a see-and-be-seen social activity for me, is an opportunity to make intelligent purchasing decisions as far removed as I can get from door-busters in the dark. I try hard not to get caught up in the frenzy of anything, and especially anything commercial.
Fantasy Is Killing Us
There are many things that I do not understand, but I really don’t understand the current overwhelming attraction to make-believe. We are deeply involved in a war in which we have no business. Our President is even more deeply involved in stripping the Bill of Rights away from our Constitution. The opposition party, such as they are, seems unwilling or unable to do anything to stop these activities, even tough most of the citizens of the country agree that what the President is doing is wrong. Perhaps the Democrats have been purchased by the same big business interests as the Republicans.
At the same time, Americans seem to be hiding their heads in the sands of fantasy and make-believe at every opportunity. Movies and television about people with super-powers. Best selling books about witches and warlocks. A retreat into the Dark Ages with ultra-conservative Bible literalists. A complete retreat from hard science fiction and into fantasy. “Reality television” which is nothing more that tightly scripted inexpensive actors acting out in sensationalized ways.
The Writers Strike
It seems that, because of the screenwriters strike, everyone is asking what people will do without television. Given the state of television, I have been doing without it for a long time. Were the screenwriters never to return, I would not notice. If I had given any thought to most television screenwriters before the strike, my thoughts would not have been kind, to say the least. The vast wasteland is alive and well. Television sucks big time.
There was once a stretch of seventeen years in my life when I did not even own a television. I simply did not want one. Televisions has sucked big time for a long time. Perhaps the problem is that I am not a moron, or that I refuse to let my standards fall that low. If I wanted sensationalism, sophomoric jokes, an emphasis on seedy sex, or a distinct lack of reality even when reality is in the program description, I could always go down to the local bar and watch the Fox Opinions Channel.
Underpinnings of the New Media
Just like the hardware has to improve in order to bring us the types of service we expect of the Internet in the New Media age, the software upon which it runs will need to evolve. Linux has been one of the better evolutionary steps so far, in the critical area of Web servers, just as open-source and freely distributed Web browsers such as Firefox have spurred innovation. In truth, the entire open-source software revolution did not happen a moment too soon.
I am not always totally happy with open-source offerings, just as I am not always happy with the offerings of commercial software companies. Nonetheless, it is difficult to be less than impressed with the spirit in which open-source projects are carried out. An analogy with college and professional football is not without merit, although in the case of software, where the “college player” is usually several years past amateur status, calls into serious question who will win the game when the teams go head-to-head.
The Reality of New Media
Writing on consecutive days about getting information from the new media and the Ron Paul campaign, a curmudgeon cannot help but reflect on how those things go together. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the (I think) questionable polling techniques of the Paul campaign, you have to admit that their grip on the Web as an instrument of politics is very firm. As more and more people embrace the technology, the Ron Paul model will become increasingly important in politics.
But it is not only politics. It is everything about how we get our information. Take Wikipedia as another example. There are people that say an encyclopedia that anybody can edit cannot be correct; another group maintains that an encyclopedia like that is more likely to be correct. Give the current sad state of textbook production, which is done by committee and mainly for political reasons, how can people possibly say that Wikipedia is worse than what we have now?
On The Transition of News Sources
I have been having an email conversation with a friend that owns a small string of rural Kansas newspapers. As a part of that conversation, I have come to realize even more fully that the news sources of the masses are currently in the phase that economists call “transitional.” That just means that the economists do not yet understand what is going on. They may never understand what is going on. ;o) They are, after all, economists.
Even economists must have noticed, however, that the way people get their news is changing. The fastest growing news sources are not CNN or Fox. The fastest growing are Slate, and the Onion, and blogs of all kinds. Newspapers are probably not here to stay in their current form. The real problem, however, will be transitioning the ethics of the brick and mortar newspaper business into the virtual media. It is not as bad as we think it is, even now, but it has a ways to go.
Sucking Up To A Search Engine
While Stumbling new pages during the last couple of days, I have run across several sites bemoaning the recent Google page-rank downgrading of a number of previously highly-rated sites . I even read one in which a blogger had decided to give up on Google entirely. There is much wringing of hands, rending of clothing, and self-loathing, with confusion and self-pity waiting in the wings. If I may, I would like to render a proverb for these people:
If you live by sucking up to a search engine, so shall ye perish.
It is the job of the Google-place to search the Web for you and return relevant pages. They once did a better job of that that they do now, since they apparently decided in one of their all-night strategy sessions that it was better to return a lot of pages than just returning the right ones. So once you get past page two or three of a search for “adenoidal teenagers” you are looking at what appear to be random returns about horse thievery or first aid.
