As I sit here in my chair and watch American politics, the expression "If only we had a government as good as the people" comes to mind, because quite frankly a government is as good as the people who vote for it. If your population has a large amount of non literate morons, then a lot of your politicians will appeal to barely literate morons.
This is what frustrates the hell out of me with the teabagger movement. They spout slogans without knowing what they mean. They protest single payer healthcare systems because they feel they are socialistic yet also protests big corporations. The thing is you have to make a choice, big business or big government, you can't have none of the above.
If you want small government you need big business to cover the gaps, and if you want small business then you need the government to cover the gaps. Let's take postal service for instance, FED-EX, UPS and so on can deliver a hell of a lot faster around the globe, but they cost a lot more, I would love to see a private company try to deliver a letter halfway across the world for under a dollar.
When it comes to healthcare I will always prefer the government over big business, simply because the government has a lot less motivation in letting me die. A private insurance company make their money off clients that pay their premiums and never need to use their insurance for anything, so any client they have to pay for, is a loss in profit.
When a large part of your population votes against their own best interest, protest their own best interest and so on, democracy is not working in your fucking country. Democracy is based on voting for your own best interest, but a way to large amount of Americans do not know what they are, democracy fails.
John Edwards was without a doubt the strongest voice on poverty in the democratic party, but he gets drummed out for cheating on his wife... and my thinking is "Who gives a shit". Being a manwhore and being a good politician are hardly mutually exclusive, John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson just to name a few who pulled off both.
The teabagger movement strikes me as being this strange mass of everything, with no cohesive thought behind. They protest health reform, throw money at and degrade people who have been left for dead by their insurance companies, yet think they are the good guys.
Sarah Palin is the prime example of a teabagger, a person who knows more or less nothing about what she speaks of. Watching Joe Biden's face during the debate was like watching Patrick Stewart's face when Number 1 asked "Captain what's wrong?" and his entire face spoke "I am a fucking classically trained Shakespearian actor sitting here talking to the ambassador from the worm people!"
However she is very very good at tugging at the gunstrings of the "digestive tract is better than brain" people. The thing is a person who is uninformed will always react more viciously to "easy" topics rather than complex, multilayered issues.
The Gay marriage thing, the gun thing, the prayer in school thing, all very easy issues that tug at the biblestrings of an unimformed person. In the end very easy to solve issues to be honest, they will be explored in detail in a series I'm doing called "Stupid non issues"
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Religious people do not have much faith in God do they?
See the premise of the Christian faith is that God is all powerful, all seeing, all knowing, knows when you're sleeping knows when you're awake. So why do Christians feel the need to protest and create so much noise about certain things when an all powerful, all knowing, all seeing God would already be dealing with it in rather mysterious ways I might add.
There are some things that seem a bit "off" to me though. Let's take pro-life Christians bombing abortion clinics and killing people. Now I'm not going into how ironic a pro-lifer killing people is, but just thinking about this;
I am not a religious person, I don't subscribe to any specific faith, I simply state that I do not know, yet I would never dream of killing someone for simply having a different point of view than me. So a person subscribing to the 10 commandments definitely should not kill someone, unless they want to end up in Hell that is. Not that I believe in hell just making a point.
A Norwegian Islamic fundamentalist said "I put my faith in Allah, he will take care of me and he is the best planner that exists" as much as I hate religious fundamentalism I respect where he's coming from. He has faith in his God to take care of him, and not only him but the world.
If I was a religious person, I might disagree with stem-cell research, abortion, drug use, promiscuity, pornography, prostitution, or as I call it "Tuesday" but I would trust in God to deal with it, and judge everyone at the time of the apocalypse. Doesn't God say in his word "The Bible" that he is the one to judge, not anyone else? In that case how can any Christian defend being judgmental of others? According to the son of God, Jesus, one should be tolerant of sinners, somehow the behavior of most of Christian interaction I see is far from tolerant.
There are some things that seem a bit "off" to me though. Let's take pro-life Christians bombing abortion clinics and killing people. Now I'm not going into how ironic a pro-lifer killing people is, but just thinking about this;
I am not a religious person, I don't subscribe to any specific faith, I simply state that I do not know, yet I would never dream of killing someone for simply having a different point of view than me. So a person subscribing to the 10 commandments definitely should not kill someone, unless they want to end up in Hell that is. Not that I believe in hell just making a point.
A Norwegian Islamic fundamentalist said "I put my faith in Allah, he will take care of me and he is the best planner that exists" as much as I hate religious fundamentalism I respect where he's coming from. He has faith in his God to take care of him, and not only him but the world.
If I was a religious person, I might disagree with stem-cell research, abortion, drug use, promiscuity, pornography, prostitution, or as I call it "Tuesday" but I would trust in God to deal with it, and judge everyone at the time of the apocalypse. Doesn't God say in his word "The Bible" that he is the one to judge, not anyone else? In that case how can any Christian defend being judgmental of others? According to the son of God, Jesus, one should be tolerant of sinners, somehow the behavior of most of Christian interaction I see is far from tolerant.
Why we need drugs!
So I'm getting tired of watching anti-drug, anti-alcohol, anti-this and anti-that movements. We are living in a society so far away from what we are designed for, it's understandable that some people need something to take the edge off.
On the other hand people with a high tolerance for things, may pick other drugs. Some may go skydiving, mountain climbing, or throw themselves off a steep slope at speeds up to 60km/h wearing a condom suit standing on a pair of planks.
We all have a drug in some form or an other, and regulating which drugs people are allowed to take seems a bit silly. It's a bit like regulating taste. I for instance have never understood drugs like speed and cocaine, why would a person want to be edgy, have a constant runny nose, not sleep for days and literally pay through the nose for it?
People get prescribed all kinds of crap these days, valium, zoloft, vicodin, oxycontin, and that's only the ones on the table in front of me right now. Maybe there is a reason why so many people are on something, because this life is not what we're built for. Are we really getting the amount of work injuries from computer jobs because sitting there hitting a keyboard 8 - 14 hours a day is what we're made to do?
I mean the hunter/gatherer human spent maybe 5 hours a day hunting and gathering, that was it. Of course on some days there was nothing to hunt or gather and on other days there may be more. I doubt though that the hunter/gatherer spent 8 - 12 hours a day at a job, only to spend an hour or two to commute home. Then once the hunter/gatherer is home, the evening is spent stressing out about loans, payments, how personal relationships break down due to time and so on.
Sure humans can cope with stress, people can survive amazing ordeals of stress, the question is what long term exposure to near constant stress does to a person. Doesn't anyone wonder why suicide rates are the highest among teens and young adults? Doesn't anyone wonder why suicide rates are going up across the board? Why more people are on prescription pills, illegal drugs, alcohol, sex addiction, shopping addiction, food addiction, lifestyle diseases and so on.
Maybe if people didn't have to eat lunch in 20 minutes, but could take the time to have a decent meal. Maybe if people didn't have to commute to regional offices instead of local offices. Maybe if holding my mail for 2 days didn't require me to spend 45 minutes on the phone with a customer service rep in India. Maybe people would be able to enjoy life.
The thing is one cannot enjoy life if 8 hours or more of every day is spent doing something you kind of don't like to do. Like it or not a lot of us spend our lives in careers we dislike simply because they pay the bills. My goals are not to be loaded, in terms of money but to make enough doing what I enjoy to live a comfortable lifestyle. Comfortable to me isn't "MTV Cribs" comfortable either. I'm thinking a little secluded house, perhaps on a lake, second level room where I can sit and look out over the lake while I write.
It would have to be a place with a decent year around temperature since 26 years or snow is kind of enough for me, but it would need to have a picturesque fall with rain tapping at the walls, windows and roof. Decent media setup of course since I do enjoy watching movies and playing games.
But most of all it includes the freedom to spend the days doing what I enjoy, when and how I enjoy it, rather than having to rely on someone else's clock constantly. It's not that I might getting up at a certain time or anything, it's just that inventively you end up with something that makes your workday hell. I've had it be customers (when I was working customer service), it was my coworker when I was working the counter, since I had to do his work most of the time.
It can be anything, sometimes its feeling like you're just a cog in the machine, which would be fine if being a cog didn't mean getting slathered in grease and being forced to rub up against other cogs day in and day out. A wise man I know once said "I don't mind working 12 hour days because I get paid 100x the national average every year" yes in his case it was worth it. But how about for someone who works the same 12 hours but for under the national average? Even just barely scraping by, and even at jobs that should pay a fuckload more.
Everyone always talks about how important children are, but the public school systems in most countries are shit. So clearly they are not, most teachers have more surrender in their eyes than Vichy France and with the exception of math and physics I could probably teach their classes better than them. If schools were important, why wouldn't they be a lot better, or at the fucking least at a point where I have never had to answer a non sarcastic "Who is Stalin?"
Anyway all these little annoyances are why the world needs drugs. Imagine the following for a minute;
Every stoner, alcoholic, pill head etc without their drugs and imagine how many annoying fuckers would die because of those drugs not being there!
On the other hand people with a high tolerance for things, may pick other drugs. Some may go skydiving, mountain climbing, or throw themselves off a steep slope at speeds up to 60km/h wearing a condom suit standing on a pair of planks.
We all have a drug in some form or an other, and regulating which drugs people are allowed to take seems a bit silly. It's a bit like regulating taste. I for instance have never understood drugs like speed and cocaine, why would a person want to be edgy, have a constant runny nose, not sleep for days and literally pay through the nose for it?
People get prescribed all kinds of crap these days, valium, zoloft, vicodin, oxycontin, and that's only the ones on the table in front of me right now. Maybe there is a reason why so many people are on something, because this life is not what we're built for. Are we really getting the amount of work injuries from computer jobs because sitting there hitting a keyboard 8 - 14 hours a day is what we're made to do?
I mean the hunter/gatherer human spent maybe 5 hours a day hunting and gathering, that was it. Of course on some days there was nothing to hunt or gather and on other days there may be more. I doubt though that the hunter/gatherer spent 8 - 12 hours a day at a job, only to spend an hour or two to commute home. Then once the hunter/gatherer is home, the evening is spent stressing out about loans, payments, how personal relationships break down due to time and so on.
Sure humans can cope with stress, people can survive amazing ordeals of stress, the question is what long term exposure to near constant stress does to a person. Doesn't anyone wonder why suicide rates are the highest among teens and young adults? Doesn't anyone wonder why suicide rates are going up across the board? Why more people are on prescription pills, illegal drugs, alcohol, sex addiction, shopping addiction, food addiction, lifestyle diseases and so on.
Maybe if people didn't have to eat lunch in 20 minutes, but could take the time to have a decent meal. Maybe if people didn't have to commute to regional offices instead of local offices. Maybe if holding my mail for 2 days didn't require me to spend 45 minutes on the phone with a customer service rep in India. Maybe people would be able to enjoy life.
The thing is one cannot enjoy life if 8 hours or more of every day is spent doing something you kind of don't like to do. Like it or not a lot of us spend our lives in careers we dislike simply because they pay the bills. My goals are not to be loaded, in terms of money but to make enough doing what I enjoy to live a comfortable lifestyle. Comfortable to me isn't "MTV Cribs" comfortable either. I'm thinking a little secluded house, perhaps on a lake, second level room where I can sit and look out over the lake while I write.
It would have to be a place with a decent year around temperature since 26 years or snow is kind of enough for me, but it would need to have a picturesque fall with rain tapping at the walls, windows and roof. Decent media setup of course since I do enjoy watching movies and playing games.
But most of all it includes the freedom to spend the days doing what I enjoy, when and how I enjoy it, rather than having to rely on someone else's clock constantly. It's not that I might getting up at a certain time or anything, it's just that inventively you end up with something that makes your workday hell. I've had it be customers (when I was working customer service), it was my coworker when I was working the counter, since I had to do his work most of the time.
It can be anything, sometimes its feeling like you're just a cog in the machine, which would be fine if being a cog didn't mean getting slathered in grease and being forced to rub up against other cogs day in and day out. A wise man I know once said "I don't mind working 12 hour days because I get paid 100x the national average every year" yes in his case it was worth it. But how about for someone who works the same 12 hours but for under the national average? Even just barely scraping by, and even at jobs that should pay a fuckload more.
Everyone always talks about how important children are, but the public school systems in most countries are shit. So clearly they are not, most teachers have more surrender in their eyes than Vichy France and with the exception of math and physics I could probably teach their classes better than them. If schools were important, why wouldn't they be a lot better, or at the fucking least at a point where I have never had to answer a non sarcastic "Who is Stalin?"
Anyway all these little annoyances are why the world needs drugs. Imagine the following for a minute;
Every stoner, alcoholic, pill head etc without their drugs and imagine how many annoying fuckers would die because of those drugs not being there!
Happiness and Perfection
They are both concept which very much attract me, but truth be told they both exist as a mirage, something to drive us forward. Be it an illusion of a heaven after you die, where all your desires are fulfilled and there is no sorrow, or jealousy, sadness, depression, where everyone you love is safe and you wake up every day with a smile. Or perhaps a life very different from the one you're leading.
One of the funnier things we tend to neglect in our fantasies of perfect happiness is who we are in them. We tend to believe in that perfection is attainable but if it is, it only remains for a moment, and then it becomes a memory. See perfection literally means "That which has no flaw" and the thing is everything has flaws. If there is a God, he/she/it made a few mistakes. Things like placing massive amounts of oil underneath the seat of several major religions, and made sure that each one of those religions are fairly crass against people of the other religions.
Not publishing a new version of the Bible seeing as a book that happens to be over 2000 years old may not take into account the changes that happen in about 3000 years.
I mean the central story still works, people as a general rule are pricks, a lot of people are out for themselves, there is still prostitution, deceit, lying, violence, wars, persecutions and so on are still around strong. People can still identify with some of the characters, personally I would love to see the Father/Son moment between Isak and Abraham right after an angel had to stop Abraham from killing Isak but I digress.
Everything and everyone has flaws, nobody can live on this earth for a lifetime without eventually getting fucked over in some way, for some it never seems to end. Happiness can be destroyed in seconds, and depression can be turned around in days, but the feelings themselves tend to go away a little with time. My grandmother and grandfather used to tell me how they were even happier together in their old age than they were when they were young. A lie of course or self-deceit, even possibly a little from column A and a little from B. I say this not because I am a hopeless cynic, because I'm not.
I just happen to know very well the effect of various items that changes brain chemistry, and nothing is as strong as the feeling of falling in love with someone. It's a whole body experience with virtually no crash, that can go on for months and months. Our bodies are highly complex simple machines, the tasks they do and how they function are very complex, but the means at which it does them is very simple. Losing weight for instance is hard, because it used to serve us a function to store a lot of fat when the seasons made it so some months there was fuck-all to eat and other months a horn of plenty.
It's not that I don't think a person is unable to be happy, it's that I doubt a person could be happy every day, because after a while happy would become normal. If you haven't felt really bad, you don't know what good feels like.
One of the funnier things we tend to neglect in our fantasies of perfect happiness is who we are in them. We tend to believe in that perfection is attainable but if it is, it only remains for a moment, and then it becomes a memory. See perfection literally means "That which has no flaw" and the thing is everything has flaws. If there is a God, he/she/it made a few mistakes. Things like placing massive amounts of oil underneath the seat of several major religions, and made sure that each one of those religions are fairly crass against people of the other religions.
Not publishing a new version of the Bible seeing as a book that happens to be over 2000 years old may not take into account the changes that happen in about 3000 years.
I mean the central story still works, people as a general rule are pricks, a lot of people are out for themselves, there is still prostitution, deceit, lying, violence, wars, persecutions and so on are still around strong. People can still identify with some of the characters, personally I would love to see the Father/Son moment between Isak and Abraham right after an angel had to stop Abraham from killing Isak but I digress.
Everything and everyone has flaws, nobody can live on this earth for a lifetime without eventually getting fucked over in some way, for some it never seems to end. Happiness can be destroyed in seconds, and depression can be turned around in days, but the feelings themselves tend to go away a little with time. My grandmother and grandfather used to tell me how they were even happier together in their old age than they were when they were young. A lie of course or self-deceit, even possibly a little from column A and a little from B. I say this not because I am a hopeless cynic, because I'm not.
I just happen to know very well the effect of various items that changes brain chemistry, and nothing is as strong as the feeling of falling in love with someone. It's a whole body experience with virtually no crash, that can go on for months and months. Our bodies are highly complex simple machines, the tasks they do and how they function are very complex, but the means at which it does them is very simple. Losing weight for instance is hard, because it used to serve us a function to store a lot of fat when the seasons made it so some months there was fuck-all to eat and other months a horn of plenty.
It's not that I don't think a person is unable to be happy, it's that I doubt a person could be happy every day, because after a while happy would become normal. If you haven't felt really bad, you don't know what good feels like.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
sentimentality
Who wins when your sentimentality fights your desires, when you keep doing something that once served a purpsoe for you, but has now become a waste of time. What does one do when the place one goes to escape becomes a prison?
Sure leaving is the obvious choice, but what if the prison still has a few things holding you back, be it from sentimental value or something else?
Sure leaving is the obvious choice, but what if the prison still has a few things holding you back, be it from sentimental value or something else?
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The value of something?
What decides the value of something? Is it societal pressure as we see with diamonds and gold, or is it increase in living condition as with a new house? Is it set by supply and demand, as in the cornerstone of a market system, or is it purely sentimental and arbitrary? Maybe its a bit of all of them.
I value some family pictures, a few gifts, and trinkets more than things that hold a much higher monetary value. On the other hand I have things I valued a lot in a different time. When I first purchased my Zippo lighter, an original not a knock off I felt like it was the coolest thing ever, now it mostly collects dust. Not because its a bad lighter but because its just so much easier and more practical to buy disposable.
Anyway with values attached to everything, we've kind of blocked out when it comes to ourselves. It's considered a faux pas to show or say anything that gives the impression that you see people as having a value just like a watch or book. It is quite true though, for me anyway. You see while most people tend to pretend like they don't notice, they distance themselves from people who have low value to them, and gravitate towards people who have high value. If you have a person in your life that just takes from you, or that you don't enjoy spending time with, you tend to not spend time with that person. There can be other reasons, I don't go to visit my grandfather in the home much because;
1. He is senile so he doesn't remember if I was there, or even who I am when I go there, and when I do he sleeps most of the time.
2. It's excruciating to watch a person you look up to, who has been a person you saw more or less every day of your life until you were 18, turn into a shell of his or her former self. Watching a person become just a body, like their personality being ripped away is more painful than them being dead before hitting the floor.
Sorry for the short tour through sobville, I wrote that because it illustrates that sometimes you avoid a person not because of a lack of love for them, but to take a path of least pain. Now if you have a person who is improving the quality of your life in it, then you tend to want to keep them. Now the value of a person is relative, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. It can be having the newest shoes and clothes in a subgroup of fashionistas or the Sheen brother without a rap-sheet when they need to explain the dead hooker.
Regardless of that, we all assign values to people. I am honest about doing so and while it does sometimes lead to regretful situations and probably a result of our development.
Among a species the goal is to survive and reproduce, any successful species has to do this. In a world where I am programmed by nature to get my DNA to survive, or to use the literal term "blood" as its used in historical texts, assigning values makes sense. The closest thing to my DNA is the DNA of my siblings, my cousins, and so on. So in order to make my families DNA survive it does make sense to protect them, and to help them. Now a single family isn't much of a force and doesn't offer diverse enough DNA so add a few more families and you have a small community. Now the people of this community will value a member of their community over an outsider unless that outsider offers them something more worth than their members.
Sacrifices to the Gods in ancient and to a degree modern times is an example of a social group valuing the goodwill of their God(s) over members of other groups and in some cases even their own group.
I value some family pictures, a few gifts, and trinkets more than things that hold a much higher monetary value. On the other hand I have things I valued a lot in a different time. When I first purchased my Zippo lighter, an original not a knock off I felt like it was the coolest thing ever, now it mostly collects dust. Not because its a bad lighter but because its just so much easier and more practical to buy disposable.
Anyway with values attached to everything, we've kind of blocked out when it comes to ourselves. It's considered a faux pas to show or say anything that gives the impression that you see people as having a value just like a watch or book. It is quite true though, for me anyway. You see while most people tend to pretend like they don't notice, they distance themselves from people who have low value to them, and gravitate towards people who have high value. If you have a person in your life that just takes from you, or that you don't enjoy spending time with, you tend to not spend time with that person. There can be other reasons, I don't go to visit my grandfather in the home much because;
1. He is senile so he doesn't remember if I was there, or even who I am when I go there, and when I do he sleeps most of the time.
2. It's excruciating to watch a person you look up to, who has been a person you saw more or less every day of your life until you were 18, turn into a shell of his or her former self. Watching a person become just a body, like their personality being ripped away is more painful than them being dead before hitting the floor.
Sorry for the short tour through sobville, I wrote that because it illustrates that sometimes you avoid a person not because of a lack of love for them, but to take a path of least pain. Now if you have a person who is improving the quality of your life in it, then you tend to want to keep them. Now the value of a person is relative, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. It can be having the newest shoes and clothes in a subgroup of fashionistas or the Sheen brother without a rap-sheet when they need to explain the dead hooker.
Regardless of that, we all assign values to people. I am honest about doing so and while it does sometimes lead to regretful situations and probably a result of our development.
Among a species the goal is to survive and reproduce, any successful species has to do this. In a world where I am programmed by nature to get my DNA to survive, or to use the literal term "blood" as its used in historical texts, assigning values makes sense. The closest thing to my DNA is the DNA of my siblings, my cousins, and so on. So in order to make my families DNA survive it does make sense to protect them, and to help them. Now a single family isn't much of a force and doesn't offer diverse enough DNA so add a few more families and you have a small community. Now the people of this community will value a member of their community over an outsider unless that outsider offers them something more worth than their members.
Sacrifices to the Gods in ancient and to a degree modern times is an example of a social group valuing the goodwill of their God(s) over members of other groups and in some cases even their own group.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The bad thing about democracy.. it doesn't work.
Who are we kidding, no country is truly democratic at best our civilized western "democracies" are ruled by special interest groups and agendas. In a not so distant future more people will die from obesity than from smoking, why has so little preemptive work been done? Shouldn't "Gutfillers" have labels on them? I see no reason why products high in carbohydrates, sugars, high-fructose corn syrup and other unhealthy sweeteners shouldn't have big white labels on them with warnings.
The thing is the sugar industry and corn industry make lots and lots of money, and want to keep making lots and lots of money, preferably so much more that stock prices go up year after year even if the companies are doing extremely well already. So the sugar and corn industry grease a few pockets, use their connections and so on to oppose bills that would hurt their income. Let's take a senator or congressman from Nebraska one of the biggest corn states in the US, would such a man want to work for things that hurt his or her voters? The answer is obvious isn't it?
Renewable Energy is a field we need to do a lot more work in as a species. Countries like China and India are slumbering giants, China is already a big name in global business as a manufacturing nations, but they also have a huge market for goods in their own country due to a huge population more and more becoming consumers. So a need for more energy will be needed as more and more of the world become developed and needs to fuel industry and population. Unless something of biblical proportions happen the population of the world won't go down, the supply of oil will dwindle. People will want things like electricity, plumbing, air-condition, good heating, and the nice things that goes with a higher standard of living. Which it is reasonable that we will see as more of the world become industrialized.
So the need for energy goes up and the supply of a lot of traditional energy is running out, even with improved efficiency in all parts of the chain. So solar energy, wave energy, wind energy and water energy are all renewable sources that can provide a lot of energy cheaper and more green friendly. The second line of defense is something like nuclear power, which isn't as dangerous as it used to be since there has been technological improvements since it was placed in the doghouse.
Anyway the Oil business which is huge today, since most cars require it, all planes require it, has a lot of money gambling on the future of energy. Now they don't want to stop the research into alternative technologies completely, they just want to slow it down. Mainly until they have phased their assets into the new technologies, and have liquidated the obsolete assets. So they have their lobbyists working.
The media has the power, but they abuse it as they see fit. Can anyway disagree with that Elliot Spitzer was a much better governor than David Paterson and even if he had a relationship with a $1,000 in hour hooker was probably significantly better at the job. So who benefits from Ellitot Spitzer having to resign? The other party, the media who made money off the news about the scandal, I don't think the people benefit by having a less qualified official in office, but that's where we end up. If I was overly focused on politicians relationships, I'd be much more concerned with Dick Cheney's relationship with Hallie-Burton, than any sexual relationship politicians have. That is if you're watching their job performance, money is a much more effective motivator than sex,
Now democracy is meant as a system where the people control the country to a degree at the very least. Now the problem is that the people have to go through so many middlemen. Every middleman has his or her agenda, so does every aide, every secretary, every congressman, every senator, every lobbyist. So who wins out the people or the system?
What people forget is that democracy just like totalitarianism, communism and so on all end up with the same result when taken to an extreme. You end up with an elite who has the majority of wealth, influence and every other currency and a gradually worse off middle and lower class. This is exactly what we see in the US today, about 2% of the population has the influence, the money, and the power, while the rest are somewhat tag-alongs. When you take into account that the 2% have control over the media, the politicians, the lobbyists and so on how can that be a fair system?
You see there is no real difference between Stalin's elite and his purges and the various political elites that snipe at each other through the media. The only difference is that Stalin literally killed you, while the democratic elite prefer character assassination.
So in the end the only way a real democracy would work is that every single person eligible to vote has a button on their phone to vote yes or no on laws. However this brings up another problem, most people in a democracy do not know the democracy well enough. You see people tend to vote against their own best interest and vote with their gut rather than brain. I mean looking at what the 2 American parties say they want, most American's would be better off voting democratic instead of Republican. However the Republicans are better at bullshit. You see here is the thing, guns, religion, abortion and so on are non-issues. They are not important in the long run but they win elections.
The thing is the sugar industry and corn industry make lots and lots of money, and want to keep making lots and lots of money, preferably so much more that stock prices go up year after year even if the companies are doing extremely well already. So the sugar and corn industry grease a few pockets, use their connections and so on to oppose bills that would hurt their income. Let's take a senator or congressman from Nebraska one of the biggest corn states in the US, would such a man want to work for things that hurt his or her voters? The answer is obvious isn't it?
Renewable Energy is a field we need to do a lot more work in as a species. Countries like China and India are slumbering giants, China is already a big name in global business as a manufacturing nations, but they also have a huge market for goods in their own country due to a huge population more and more becoming consumers. So a need for more energy will be needed as more and more of the world become developed and needs to fuel industry and population. Unless something of biblical proportions happen the population of the world won't go down, the supply of oil will dwindle. People will want things like electricity, plumbing, air-condition, good heating, and the nice things that goes with a higher standard of living. Which it is reasonable that we will see as more of the world become industrialized.
So the need for energy goes up and the supply of a lot of traditional energy is running out, even with improved efficiency in all parts of the chain. So solar energy, wave energy, wind energy and water energy are all renewable sources that can provide a lot of energy cheaper and more green friendly. The second line of defense is something like nuclear power, which isn't as dangerous as it used to be since there has been technological improvements since it was placed in the doghouse.
Anyway the Oil business which is huge today, since most cars require it, all planes require it, has a lot of money gambling on the future of energy. Now they don't want to stop the research into alternative technologies completely, they just want to slow it down. Mainly until they have phased their assets into the new technologies, and have liquidated the obsolete assets. So they have their lobbyists working.
The media has the power, but they abuse it as they see fit. Can anyway disagree with that Elliot Spitzer was a much better governor than David Paterson and even if he had a relationship with a $1,000 in hour hooker was probably significantly better at the job. So who benefits from Ellitot Spitzer having to resign? The other party, the media who made money off the news about the scandal, I don't think the people benefit by having a less qualified official in office, but that's where we end up. If I was overly focused on politicians relationships, I'd be much more concerned with Dick Cheney's relationship with Hallie-Burton, than any sexual relationship politicians have. That is if you're watching their job performance, money is a much more effective motivator than sex,
Now democracy is meant as a system where the people control the country to a degree at the very least. Now the problem is that the people have to go through so many middlemen. Every middleman has his or her agenda, so does every aide, every secretary, every congressman, every senator, every lobbyist. So who wins out the people or the system?
What people forget is that democracy just like totalitarianism, communism and so on all end up with the same result when taken to an extreme. You end up with an elite who has the majority of wealth, influence and every other currency and a gradually worse off middle and lower class. This is exactly what we see in the US today, about 2% of the population has the influence, the money, and the power, while the rest are somewhat tag-alongs. When you take into account that the 2% have control over the media, the politicians, the lobbyists and so on how can that be a fair system?
You see there is no real difference between Stalin's elite and his purges and the various political elites that snipe at each other through the media. The only difference is that Stalin literally killed you, while the democratic elite prefer character assassination.
So in the end the only way a real democracy would work is that every single person eligible to vote has a button on their phone to vote yes or no on laws. However this brings up another problem, most people in a democracy do not know the democracy well enough. You see people tend to vote against their own best interest and vote with their gut rather than brain. I mean looking at what the 2 American parties say they want, most American's would be better off voting democratic instead of Republican. However the Republicans are better at bullshit. You see here is the thing, guns, religion, abortion and so on are non-issues. They are not important in the long run but they win elections.
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