We saw this coming...

In the early to mid 90s I was introduced to the Internet.  To be clear, we had been talking about something very similar before this, but those were all private networks like Compuserve or AOL and I myself was a daily user of a bulletin board service (BBS) hosted by the American Embassy in Tokyo.  As an editor/reporter for a monthly high technology and telecommunications newspaper in Tokyo I was up to my eyeballs in stories about ISDN and B-ISDN with fiber to the curb, fiber to the home and Iridium, Inmarsat, and later Teledesic.  I was also following American politics closely since that's just what I do, so I was hearing a lot about the "Information Superhighway" from keynote speeches given by Vice President Al Gore.  I went to a lot of conferences where smart people talked for long stretches about how the information age was going to transform the way our society worked and played.  Not everybody saw this as a good thing.

If the 40 years from the 50s to the 90s were the age of Broadcasting many people began saying that the new era would be one of "narrow casting".  Some of the thought leaders at the dawn of the age of the World Wide Web saw that the future of news and entertainment would be vastly more customizable.  In fact, with Usenet it was already happening where people were only subscribing to news feeds that focused only on the things the subscriber was interested in.  At the same time the ability for anybody to publish anything they wanted to was only limited by their knowledge of how to build a web page (HTML), finding someone to host their "home page" and their time.  Then all they needed was the ability to drive page views to their content.  (In those days there wasn't a lot of competition)

The danger that a few people were talking about was that with all this narrowcasting going on, people's choices in news and information sources would tend to reinforce their own view of the world and insulate them from dissenting opinions.  This would drive them further to which ever direction they tended to live on the "left - right" political spectrum.  This might not be a terrible thing if there wasn't also the problem that nobody is fact checking the things we are being told.  As Abraham Lincoln once said, "You can't always believe the things you read on the Internet."

So now we have one candidate on the right who can say just about anything and his partisans will believe him and another candidate on the left who is considered untrustworthy because of 20 plus years of lies being spread about her by a "vast right wing conspiracy."  The echo chambers on both sides (which I do not exclude myself as being part of) preach to our choirs.  And democracy suffers as a result.   But at least we can say, we saw it coming.      

The Big Short - A summary

There's this guy named Walt.  (Wall Street Banks)  Walt has some money and he decides that he wants to loan some to some people for interest.  He is a nice guy and wants to give these people a good rate because they have good hearts and trying to get on their feet and besides, in a few years he's going to jack up the rates.  He tells them this too....somewhere, on one of those pages they signed.  Besides, he's gonna just get someone else to look after that loan anyway.  And also Walt's brother, Andy (AIG) is going to back up Walt just in case things go bad.  Andy just wants to be sure that these loans are sure things, so he has asked Walt to have Mary (Moody) or Sam (S&P) vouch for how good the loans are.  Walt has gone to Mary and told her that he would pay her $50 if she would just give some of these loans her highest rating.  Since Mary is pretty sure that if she doesn't then Walt is going to get Sam to do it, so she does.  "Triple A rating!" she stamps on it.  Sam does this with a lot of other loans too, and sometimes it's Sam and sometimes its Mary but every time it's a "AAA!"

Andy is happily backing up Walt and his loans with his own money because he hopes that when all those loans get paid off, Walt is going to give him some of the profits too.

Meanwhile Walt is dreaming about all that money he's going to get when the interest in those loans piles up so thinking if all that money he is going to have in his pocket he goes to the casino.  And starts betting all that money he's owed.  And other people are betting that he's not going to get that money back.  And people start betting on those bets.  Then other people start betting on the bets on those bets.  And they all say, "Jeeze, wouldn't it be cool if we had even more of those loans we could bet on?"  Walt says he knows just where he can get some.  He meets a few more nice people and some not so nice people, then just a bunch of people who have pulses and stops really caring about if they are nice or not.  He get's more "AAA" from Mary and Sam and YEAH MORE FUTURE MONEY FOR WALT!  Everybody is positive that the loans are an endless supply of fun and happiness, and sex in the Champaign Room!

Then, as per plan, the agreed to interest rates go up.  Dramatically.  Now the people who were given these loans, many of whom were convinced by Walt and his friends that they could afford the payments (including the stripper who bought 5 houses), can no longer make those payments.  Turns out all those AAA were really BBB and were really called "junk".  Walt calls Andy for the promised back up.  Andy, it turns out, can't really help out.  Walt starts to fail, but Walt and Andy's parents see that if Walt fails the whole community will go down the tubes, so they have to the bigger bank and take out their own loan to help bail out Walt.  They let Andy die.  As a lesson to Walt, and anybody who might want to be like Andy.  They complain loudly about Walt's behavior and say things like, we should do things to make sure that Walt never gets too big to fail again.  Mom says "we really need to set up some rules for Walt and...OH LOOK a shiny thing over there....what were we talking about?"  Dad shrugs and Walt goes back to look for more people to loan money to.

Oh...and also, all those people who bet that Walt's loans would go bad?  They made a killing.

Trigger finger in the dike

A few of my friends on Facebook have decided that they want to post, almost exclusively, on 2nd Amendment issues.  They are the few percentage points of the NRA membership that seem to be absolutists about guns in America, but there are just a few things that they are trying pass off as obvious that are really not.  One friend recently posted a picture with the words "The purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of federal government not the American People." 

This just stuck me as absurd.  That's not to say there weren't a lot of concerns over the size and power of the federal government as it related to the states own governments, but the purpose of the Constitution was spelled out pretty clearly in the preamble.  And nowhere in that preamble does it say "We the people, wish to limit the power of federal government."  The actual limits to federal government were drawn up and included in the document as a compromise to allow states to have their rights without falling back into the crippling and ineffective Articles of Confederation. 

It seems to me that the 2nd amendment absolutists have thoroughly missed the point.  The main concern of the Democratic-Republicans of the mid to late 1700s was the possibility that the federal government would either a) not have enough power to hold the union together and defend it or b) create standing armies that would be able to defend it but which could be used to oppress the citizens of the states. 

We have gone so far beyond what Jefferson and his bunch would have approved of (at least before he was elected President) that the 2nd Amendment seems like a little boy sticking his finger in the one of the holes of a crumbling dike.  For instance, one of Jefferson's biggest fears was that the US would create and maintain a standing army of professional soldiers.  Nobody arguing for gun rights and claiming that everyone is a member of a militia agrees with Jefferson anymore about not needing a standing army.  Jefferson himself was the first to use that standing army in a foreign conflict, vastly expanding the power of the federal government and doing something as President Jefferson that he very likely would have howled bloody murder about had it been Adams who had done it.  (Not that I think he shouldn't have gone after the Barbary Pirates, but then again, nobody asked me.) 

The point is, the purpose that Jefferson advocated the second amendment for is already outdated.  When a state militia, regulated by the states as a counter to federal power, was something that every man was expected to be part of, the act of banning weapons from them would have been tantamount to disenfranchising the states of their check on the federal government.  Sure they got to select the Senate and that gave them some sway on federal policy, but now even that is gone.  We have been chipping away at the state's sovereignty from day 1.  And we have been doing so because it was all based on a very justified paranoia.  But these days, unless you are planning on letting the states buy their own aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, as well as all other forms of modern warfare, we the people have no chance of being able to stand up against our own military with the few semi-automatic weapons we can buy or the banana clips we think we need.  But also, we are no longer paranoid.  We have decided that we can trust our federal government.  Don't believe that we trust the feds?  Try taking away our Medicare.  

"You'll keep your gubmint hands of my Medicare if ya know what's good fer ya!" 

So, this is a problem. My doctor tells me I have an under active thyroid so he puts me on medication and tells me no alcohol for 6 weeks. I can survive it, since I only have about a glass of wine a day and a couple of beers on the weekend, but he tells me this about 5 days before St. Patrick's Day. DOH!

Sakuracon 09

I sit in a Tully's in the Washington State Convention center after standing in line for three hours to get in. What would I stand in line that long for? Nothing! But since my daughter an I pre-registered last year for the yearly event called Sakuracon I was stuck. Yes you read that right, I pre-registered AND waited for 3 hours in line. There was a slight extenuating circumstance in that my daughter's friends came too and they could not wait in the same line and I needed to be with them because Sakuracon won't allow underage participants to attend without an adult, but that doesn't completely explain the wait. Even the pre-registration line took 2 hours. So, we saved ourselves an hour by signing up last year, but that was completely unacceptable.

What is Sakuracon? Well, you can't get much out of the name other than it is Japanese. Sakura is Cherry Blossom, and “con” is a Japanese contraction of the word "convention". (They do that with a lot of English words. For example, aircon is Air Conditioner) The event is mainly intended as a celebration of Japanese comics and animation (shortened to “anime” in Japanese). I am not going to try to be the expert on the history of this event, but what it seems to have turned in to is a conflation of a Japanese anime and manga (comics) convention with a lot of computer game characters mixed in as well. The attendees of this event use it as a sort of Star Trek Convention-ish event for everyone to dress up like their favorite characters. But this year they are not limiting it to just games and anime. I had lunch sitting next to the Joker (Heath Ledger version, not Jack Nicholson), stood in the pre-registrations line behind the bad guy from Silent Hills, and I swear to gawd I just saw Jesus carry his cross down the escalator.

The other thing that this place is for is exhibitionism. A lot of anime characters are very scantily clad or sexy in other ways. There are quite a few teenage and 20 something ladies dressed as Japanese schoolgirls but with cleavage and legs up to here. There is so much exhibitionism going on here that it is quite reasonable for the promoters to insist that adults accompany the underage. It's also not a bad idea for me to find a nice low traffic corner and put my nose in my laptop to keep from feeling like a dirty old man every time I turn around.

We will be back tomorrow and maybe I will have a chance to blog some more about it.

Hatred is learned: We can teach tolerance as well

We just have to try.

11-Year-Old Hangs Himself after Enduring Daily Anti-Gay Bullying

free hand ...hold on...reach: Banning Picasso at the Lapin Agile, part 2

free hand ...hold on...reach: Banning Picasso at the Lapin Agile, part 2

It is possible that I may never cease to be amazed at what some parents think they are sheltering their children from. I was at first wondering if the folks who oppose the relatively innocuous play in question understand what is readily available to their children via the Internet, cable TV or the current state of computer games. But when I stopped to think about it I realized that much of what these parents are trying to hide from their children I would have known about before I got through Jr. High School. As a graduate of La Grande High School in 1985 I can assure you that I had not learned any of it from the Internet or from Premium Cable movie channels. It all came from magazines smuggled out from under older brothers' and fathers' beds, romance novels, some of the more explicit western novels, or just stories we told each other. Our young imaginations we filled with stories of sex and gun play. Don't think for a second that we didn't know what would happen in real life if we ever got the chance to rescue a damsel in distress in our flights of fancy. We were already hip to the bedroom scene of such a fairytale scenario even if we wouldn't have the details figured out for years. (if ever)...

If you have been a parent of a child for the past 12 to 13 years and they are allowed to see an R-rated movie by accident or any other reason, and the child is scarred for life and damaged morally, then you have failed as a parent. The only children (young adults) who could see a play like this and have their morals compromised have already been trained to regard this kind of thing as smut and will not show up to it and will not participate in it. The only people this ban will impact are the ones who want to participate in it in some way.