trace-error

[trace-error]

The Crisis of Capitalism

This is going to be a quick rant about something that I have observed over the past few years.

In programming, having some logic stuck in a recursive loop is one of the worse possible things a developer can do. In short, the loop eats up more and more resources until the whole process crashes. The application must reboot and, once the logic is accessed again, rinse and repeat, it crashes.

Why do I mention this? Mass shootings. Particularly in schools. They're becoming an epidemic and I wouldn't blame kids at this point to stay home! I mean you're safer juggling EBOLA vials at this point. School and mass shootings in general are a becoming a recursive loop. We've been seeing it for the past few years. Some dude usually young and troubled, gets his hands on a weapon or three, goes to a public place, most likely a school, and takes whatever frustrations out on his peers. What happens next is we get a round of thoughts and prayers, some media attention, some criticism of the NRA, and then nothing. The argument and inability to provide a safer place to live crashes until the system reboots. By that I mean we get distracted by something else. The public and media combined get fatigued at the story, interest wanes, Trump says something Trump would usually say, and then another shooting occurs. Rinse the blood off and repeat.

It's fucking disgusting.

The media doesn't push hard enough and ask tough enough questions of legislators because shootings are good for ratings. We can't have laws because the NRA funds enough campaigns and has just enough of society brainwashed that having more hurdles to get a gun could actually be a good thing and a step in a positive direction. At this point, I want to homeschool my future child until maybe one of these NRA fuckholes has one of their kids killed in one of these mass shootings. That would be sad. Don't get me wrong. What does it take really for common sense to settle in. At what point, does big business bow to common sense and safety for the public? That's the crisis of capitalism. Guns make money in America. Guns also kill people in America. These mass shootings turn out to be big profit booms for gun manufacturers as they see sales go up for FEAR of legislation.

If you were an alien visiting Earth and reading the Blue Planet Times, it'd be easy to deduce that human lives just aren't worth all that much. And when compared to the millions of dollars the media and gun manufacturers earn from these massacres, that’s definitely true. Simply put, Big business > Human lives. Don’t need to be alien though. We live here and we can see it. Some of us die for it. Now what the fuck do we do about it?

[trace-error]

TraceError("Patriotism");

Ahhh Trump and his big fucking mouth. He seized an opportunity to cling on tightly to a demographic group that just might might be wavering on him. That group would be the ultra-patriotic, anti-Colin-Kaepernick, Blue-Lives- Matter, pile of people in this country when he spoke last week at a rally in Huntsville, Alabama. President Trump denounced any player that "disrespects the flag and our military", calling them "sons of bitches" that "should be pull off the field and fired".

There are groups of people in this country that just lapped up these words from the President like a feral dog. There are some in this country that absolutely despise Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee while he was a member of the San Francisco 49ers last year. His purpose was to draw attention to racial injustice, inequality, and police brutality in the wakes of multiple high-profile cases involving the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers.

The argument against Kaepernick and other players (many of whom stand-by him) are that he is disrespecting the flag, soldiers, past and present, and, ultimately, the country. How is one supposed to protest? Only when it's convenient for the opposition? Obviously, this isn't about patriotism, but the ability for so many to immediately counter a peaceful protest with unpatriotic sentiment is just flabbergasting. So what? What's wrong with being anti-America if you don't like where the country is? Are we not allowed to criticize? And what about the demographic that Trump collected last week, the supporters of the red-white-and-blue everything no matter what, the blind-allegiants?

The star-bangled banner reverence is a bit much. The national anthem ritual has become such a religious sacrament, it's downright amazing. It probably makes some fundi Muslim and Christians hard and jealous at the same time.

When we stand with our hand over our hearts, are we really celebrating the founding fathers battle against our former British overlords? Doubtful. Do we get all patriotic about overcoming our lack of representation in regards to the red-shirted tax. It certainly hasn't come up in any discussion about this issue that I’ve had. To be honest, I don't think you can find three people in your office or shooting range that could name the monarch of England at the time of the American Revolution. That would be King George III if you're keeping score. You see, we, Americans, lose sight of many important details, because we see things through our red-white-and-blue lenses. All that matters to people is that we roll out the flag, give praise to it, be thankful we won a war against the British to be our own country or something, and the rest is history (mostly written by rich white people).

Go to an American football game and the military has full representation, toting guns over their shoulder, in uniform, big huge flag rolled out on the field, while some service-member belts out the national anthem. Then we get a fly-over in every stadium with some billion dollar fighter-jets while numb-skulls look-up to ooh-and-ahh. Every NFL game engages in this absolute cock worship of the American military penis. We truly are an empire and no one really notices or cares about that part. Unless someone doesn't participate in it.

Every day in elementary school, I remember being told "to stand and give your pledge of allegiance". I remember it feeling quite strange. As an 8yr old subordinate you're made to stand up, put hand on heart, and perform this patriotic daily tradition. No questions asked. You just do it. Did I really pay attention to the words? Nope, I just memorized them because if I didn't, I was outcasted and marginalized.

Why do we engage in this sort of blind mindless "allegiance" and is it a bug in our societal software and what are the effects?

You don't get to choose where you're born. And with that, you certainly don't get to choose your parents. What patch of dirt, your mother happens to be laying her ass down on when you come raging out between her legs is the most involuntary thing in your life. Pride for that patch of dirt merely due to birth is not a solid justification whatsoever for the extreme pride and jingoistic tendencies we see in some people.

When people say "What are you, as in, are you Persian, Italian, Irish?", that sort of thing, you probably know exactly what to say. In your head you may think, "Well, my grandfather said he came to the States in 1928 from some small village in Italy, so that makes me Italian". I grew up with a number of friends who'd get tattoos of the Italian flag on their bodies because their family was from Italy. Pride in that sort of thing is so dumb considering that they actually LEFT that country for a reason. Besides , it's technology that's limiting us from going back even further. Ancestry.com seeks to help with that, but even then legible records are needed to climb up the family tree. Perhaps, my friend's family weren't always from Italy. What if they were from Austria at some point, or from Croatia (or that area as the country name is relatively young) both relative neighboring lands. Prior to the American and French revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, people would refer to themselves by a particular region of the Italian peninsula (i.e. Milan/Milanese). Italy wasn't united until the 1860s.

You didn't really expect an Italian history lesson so I won't bore you with anything more. The important thing to note is that the lands our forefathers say they were from are just words, dirt surrounded my imaginary lines. Some people at somepoint in time signed a piece of paper, shook a few hands, and they decided to call it something. People decided to fight wars and unify their country for the greater good of all people in that region. How about we do that for the world? What's stopping us from all getting together and deciding it's better for us all to refer to us as Earthlings, inhabitants of this beautiful blue planet, and rid the globe of these lines in the sand.

Well that won't happen. It certainly won't happen in my lifetime. While I believe the obstacles are more economic in nature, the theme of this essay is more patriotism so I'll say that people right now are too xenophobic and too reliant on their tribalism to let a grand unification happen.

People's first impulse in such a climate is to be concerned with self-preservation and because of the way governments are instituted that extends to people seeking state-preservation. When we are divided into states like we are, it causes competition over resources (things like oil, fresh water, arable land). That competition more often than not has lead us to war in which faction vs. faction fight until too many have died for a rather meaningless cause that could have been avoided if people saw themselves as equals, neighbors, inhabitants of the same place.

The state while it seeks preservation and competes for standing among other states, floods its people with propaganda to gain support for its endeavors or missions or, often, makes it very difficult to criticize such endeavors in the first place. In the past, the United States, a so-called beacon of freedom since it's inception, has had forced patriotism and anti-state censorship. Things like the Alien and Sedition Acts in which people were jailed and tried for treason if they spoke ill of the red-white-and-blue. There's also the prohibition of displaying caskets of dead american soldiers in media so the true nature of war does not spoil American's appetite for patriotism. On top of that, consider this, how much of our written history that's been taught within our country is one-sided and pro-USA? Could it be anything else? Do we get the whole story? Are we always the good guy?

Patriotism makes it very difficult to have honest critical conversation. When Americans look at themselves in the mirror, we're taught that what we see staring back at us is a real fucking hero. A Rambo, Uncle Sam, Iron-man motherfucker who will come take your lunch if you talk shit on us or don't do as we say you should. If you worked next to a guy like that, would you be friends with him? Sounds like a douchebag. Every 4th of July, I bet he wears $4 old navy American flag tank-tops made by Bangladeshi women making $1 a day in crumbling factory buildings.

Your next-desk-over-cubicle-Rambo probably belongs in the  35 percent of Americans who couldn't name a single justice on the Supreme Court. How many rambos do you think can name the current Secretary of State? Or the capital of Illinois?

We have to step out of our boxes and see ourselves as part of a whole. Not a whole country, but a whole world. And when we are capable of traveling the stars, part of a universe. No matter where you're born and raised, you are no better than someone else across the globe. We share the world and all it's resources. So no more worshiping the flag. Instead, let's worship the Earth and all of us that live in it. If we'd like to see a safer more peaceful future, we have to acknowledge this and begin living like it.

[trace-error]

The Flobots hit us up besides the head about 10 years ago with “Handlebars” which was a musical and lyrical triumph in its own right. This song, “Airplane Mode”, from a later album, didn’t catch the social viral wave like “Handlebars”, but is a poetic masterpiece and deserves an analytical breakdown like no other. Some of the messages contained within: racism, inequality, concern for the environment, anti-war, peaceful protest, improving education, nutrition, et al.

Give it a listen. Read the lyrics. Google shit. I’m telling you, it’s one of the most “woke” songs out there and it’s 7 years old. 

[trace-error]

TraceError(”Religion”);

Oh boy this one is sure to piss some people off.

Before saying anything, I believe it’s important to define what I mean by religion. For me, it is a defined set of beliefs that goes unquestioned by its followers with a combination of these basic tenets: higher power that creates and influences the physical universe, a revered text of some sort that contains rules and guidelines for living a good life, an afterlife for the good people who choose to adhere to those rules, an afterlife for the wicked people who don’t follow such rules, special individuals with some sort of connection to the higher power(s), special places of worship, and a mythology of stories or special events (i.e. miracles). Religion thinks it succeeds when it comes to answering questions of our creation, our death, and our morality.

So with that out the way and having a basic foundation as to what I mean by religion, why is it an error in our human societal software?

While some may see it as a stepping stone to our advancements and usage of science to determine facts and laws about the universe, many, like myself, see it as flawed, irrational, and mostly a disrupting influence over our ways of thinking. Religion treats fantastic ideas as true. By fantastic, I, of course, mean fantasy, not amazing.

You don’t believe in dragons and undead ice zombies, do you? Well, why would you believe someone walked on water or rose from the dead or that a snake-headed woman can turn you to stone if you happen to gaze into her eyes? Some believe Jesus did walk on water. Make that a lot of people! On the other hand, I’m thankful that beliefs have evolved a bit and people no longer believe a Medusa creature exists with transmuting capabilities.

Neighbor of yours?

Ah yes, “evolution”. It is such a combative word for religious folks. While I won’t get into the scientific theory that explains the gradual development of simple organisms to becoming complex organisms, I will use the word to show the development of an idea. I want to as briefly as I possibly can, give you a quick evolution of religion as an idea, where it came from, how it’s been manipulated, why it’s lasted so long, and what the consequences are for its continued perseverance in our advanced world.

This little graphic will visually explain the history or evolution of religion. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Apologies to pro-cavemanisists out there, but early man was dumb. I say that with affection and confidence. They simply did not have the ability to reason and explain the natural world as they perceived and experienced it. Imagine what it was like to see some orange circle rise and set without knowing what it actually was. Or the fact that the white circle in the sky never seemed to move, or that it changed shapes or that it became most visible when the orange circle was gone. How would you explain the small dots in the sky at night? What the fuck is even night? Could you imagine how freaked out you would be at a solar eclipse? How would you explain these things if you or anyone you ever encountered had never taken a basic science class? What kind of amazing things would you think up? What stories would you tell? Now imagine the power you’d have if the small group you were surviving with all thought you were the smart one because you had a good story that made sense to them. Imagine the dumbest person in your group of friends was the one everybody went to for answers. Now consider that this person is exponentially smarter than the most intelligent homo-sapien grazing the earth thousands of years ago.

Early man had to make some sense of his world and could only pull from the knowledge he had available to him. What makes him survive and what kills him? These things mattered on a minute by minute basis. Animals shared the land and were a source of food while also providing the clothing for warmth.  The rocks and wood sheltered them. Fire kept them warm. Water satisfied their thirst. Life was very basic and so were their early ideas. These simple things that we, today, may take for granted were revered.

The most primitive of belief systems that we really have record of is something called animism. It’s still practiced by remote tribes in Africa, the Amazon, and in areas like Papua New Guinea or the Australian Outback. Essentially, Animism is that all things in the natural world have a soul or are alive and should be worshipped in some fashion. So next time you stub your toe on a rock, kindly say, “Excuse me”.

Man anthropomorphizes things in order to understand or try to understand the world. In animated cartoons, we give animals voices and human-like emotions in order to educate and entertain our children (and some adults). But, while it is entertainment, what we are really doing is just telling stories, hashing out our moral codes, detailing how things work in society.

When early man looked up at the sky, it looked much much different than it does for us in 2017. We live in these big cities with a ton of light pollution and unless we go out into the middle of the desert or climb a mountain, we’re not getting the same perspective of the night’s sky that early man had. The sky was most definitely “lit” as the kids say. At night, they had a fire to keep them warm and the stars above to entertain them. Given their basic nature and catalog of their surroundings, they probably start seeing animals in the sky (today, we call them constellations). In time, they made-up stories for these starry animals. The night’s sky became their television, their cartoons. It was their source of entertainment. They were the show creators and after thousands of years of storytelling, they became very good at it.

Their stories and their ideas evolved. To fathom big issues like creation or death or smaller, but, yet, vital things like why it rained and why it hasn’t, their primitive understanding of things had to evolve. Some people asked questions. The sky beings became more influential and provided answers in a fashion that was all too familiar. For instance, the sun and its light battled the moon and darkness. The celestial bodies were given names and worshiped. We might just call them gods. There were fans of the sun while some were more moon people. They created rituals. Soon, to make storytelling less complicated, these many sky gods were consolidated into one sky god (Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam).  In more than one culture, the sky god(s) came to earth (Zeus, Jesus, Krishna) to interact with humans because, well, doesn’t that story sound cool? Cool sounding stories became a way of controlling people so charismatic salesmen (prophets, popes, imans, rabbis) sold them cooler ideas about the sky god(s) that they, and only they, could speak directly to them. If these particular people were good at their sales pitch, then why not give them money so they can afford to wear the best clothing in the land and, also, erect grand structures to prove how amazing their particular story is.

Viola, just like that we managed to fast-forward thousands of years of religious belief.

Religion is simply something drummed up by some dumb people who were bored and didn’t have modern-day science.  Imagine telling your child a bedtime story and thousands of years of it evolving lead to it be a way of life for billions of people. Come to think of it, I want my own religion now.

In all seriousness, religious belief comes down to one thing and that’s faith. A faith in something that is keenly illogical, irrational, unseen, untestable, and unverified by science. These stories that are the foundation of religious belief are usually void of any science. They are not replicable in today’s world. The sun doesn’t battle the moon. We understand orbits and processions. People don’t turn water into wine. If someone were able to, believe me, this person would have been the biggest celebrity on the planet. Historians of the time would be writing amazing tales of this person’s exploits. Of course, they didn’t. This Jesus Christ individual was simply not that famous. There might have been one contemporary historian who mentions Jesus, but it was more a small mention than say a whole chapter in a book sort of thing. Instead, it was people who came along decades later who did the reporting of this big Jesus character. How trustworthy of a source is that? Would you trust someone’s stories about JFK had nothing been reported between now and 1963?

Faith, to me, is a crutch people rely on when they’re too dumb to know how something works or functions. To help them piece together an explanation, they’re willing to accept a simple believable reason. Simple doesn’t make it reasonable. For instance, you lose your job and some religious person may conceivably say, “God has a different path for you. Have faith. Pray about it.” Ugh. That makes my blood boil. Maybe circumstance occurred where my skills either weren’t good enough or I became overqualified for the position. Perhaps the company was cutting back costs and I became expendable. Does God dabble in accounting? Or a more significant example would be something like innocent civilians dying in a drone attack or a horrific mass shooting in a nightclub. The religious may say, “We’ll pray for their families and have faith that God has a plan.” A plan? Really, the murder of innocent people is part of some plan? The consequence of this insane thinking is totally invalidating to what occurred. It allows the perpetrators to get away with the attack, while also glossing over the collateral damage of war and being all too accepting of violence. There’s zero critical-thinking being done here. Faith is to thinking what ordering take-out is to cooking.

So, you see the dilemma. Irrational belief requires a steady diet of laziness of the mind. Why is this significant? When you think you have been given all of the answers, you are steadfast with your idea the way the world should be. Religious folks vote and they vote in large numbers. They’re an appealing demographic who get easily riled up when they feel like they’re losing power or their beliefs are invalidated. The people they vote for are put into high positions of government leadership. They wind up controlling school curricula, military, budgets for scientific research, climate and energy policies, etc. Religious belief stymies progress. It impedes scientific curiosity. Most of all it divides us. Everyone thinks that their story is better evident by years of religious wars. People are too lazy to learn new things. When it comes to critical-thinking, religious believers sit their fat ass on the couch and order take out.

I’m not saying there isn’t a god. If there was a god or not, I think our lives would still be the same. However, we don’t need faith or religion. We understand the sky now. We know why it rains. We have awesome tools to view galactic bodies and the means to perform advanced math computations. We’ve built computers, planes, and automobiles. We’ve cloned animals. We can 3D-print human organs. We’re beginning to understand gravitational waves and what that means for the birth of the universe. We have the means to store all of our collective learning and instantly access it in the palm of our hand. We can share ideas with people we’ve never met in person who happen to live thousands of miles away from us. 

There are great possibilities and paths for progress anxiously awaiting us. More people are waking up and closing these ancient books and ignoring the phony salesmen in their neighborhood. We’re making slow progress. We’ve come a long way in some aspects, but, unfortunately, some people, make that billions of people, still like to talk to rocks.

[trace-error]

TraceError(”Greed”);

Do you remember when you were a kid and your mother would take you through a store? Perhaps, you’d be sitting in the cart, watching as numerous things passed by that interested you. When you tired of the drive-bys and ultimately something piqued your interest and you just had to have it, maybe you tried reaching with out-stretched fingers, but, unfortunately, the objects on the shelves were just out of grasp. The last resort was to whine to mom about how much you wanted whatever the hell it was, but of course, she said “You don’t need it” or “Maybe for your birthday you could have it”. It was hell being told, “No!”. Mom was such a bitch. What a dictator! Imagine if mom wasn’t there. Imagine, if no one was there to say “No!”, how would your greedy little kid-self react? You’d probably turn that store upside-down and take whatever you wanted leaving crap for the next unsupervised kid. You’d be a greedy little fucker, wouldn’t you?

Greed is a major cause of inequality, corruption, crime, classism, environmental issues, war, et al. Think about this: if you had the ability to make a million dollars right now, but it came at the cost of depriving 10 people of food and shelter, would you do it? Now you may ask for more nuance to that hypothetical scenario. Perhaps, you’d want to know,” How long those people would go without food or shelter?” or ask,“Would they eventually be able to find something to eat and sleep?” Maybe you’d say, “After I get the million dollars, I could donate some money to help them out.” At this point, you’re talking yourself into it. What if it wasn’t that explicit? What if that million dollars came from a big huge jar of money. Regularly, that jar is reserved for a number of different projects that distribute food and give people a place to stay when they need it. The jar is just sitting there. You could reward yourself and take some from the jar without really knowing or being aware of the consequences on others. You’d probably do it. I’d probably do it. Why? Greed.

We have a disconnect that’s been fortified by society to find ways to enrich ourselves without factoring in the consequence of our enrichment on others. Consider this, the resource that makes mobile phones work as well as they do and makes them as cheap as they are, is mined in heavily conflicted areas in Africa. What do I mean by conflict? People are actually fighting and dying to control the mines of this resource so they can sell to rich White and Asian countries. The controllers of the mines get pennies on the dollar because it is much more than they would earn otherwise. Groups are funded by companies hoping to get the best deal on coltan. Imagine if the cost of your cell phone was 300 times more than it is now. Might be hard to consider upgrading your phone every 1-2 years now right?

Coltan is just one small example of greed and the desire to control a resource. Oil, of course, is the largest example. Bloody disastrous wars have been fought to get this shit from the ground. It powers the American economy. It allows Sally and Don down the street to have two cars and drive themselves to work each day. Americans would absolutely lose their shit if the cost of gas was the same in America as it is in European nations. The average gallon of gas in the UK was around $5.50 in 2016. In the US, it was $2.47. That’s a major difference. By the way, it was $5.58 in Germany, $6.15 in Italy, and $6.37 in the Netherlands.

The price of gas fluctuates depending on a number of things like conflicts in the Middle East or environment regulations or policy decisions within the US. What that means is we have to be on good terms with some nations who control the resource or we have to go get that resource by any means. What if that country, say Saudi Arabia,  has major human rights violations? We simply have to ignore them, because business is more important they give us that sweet black honey at a good price. Or do we rollback environmental safety regulations because it allows business to make more money, sell us the gasoline more cheaply, but at the detriment to animals, drinking water, and the earth itself. Why do we allow these things to happen? We struggle to find other means to make ourselves more comfortable because we are greedy. We seek the easiest, short term way to satiate our greed.

The economic meltdown that began in 2007-2008 was called the Great Recession. Many lost homes, pensions, retirement funds all because of greed one way or another.  A great documentary called “Inside Job” could explain much better than I ever could about how and why it happened, but a quick one sentence summary of what went down could go something like this: In their effort to make as much money as quickly as possible, bankers sought ways to game the economy by, making it easier for people to buy homes who shouldn’t be doing so, transferring that risk down the line and away from themselves in such a way that they weren’t responsible for when things got bad, the American tax payer was. The worse part is that these bankers knew it was risky. They knew the potential for huge economic problems, but went forward any way with their schemes. Why? Fucking greed that’s why!

Now there’s more examples of greed and it’s ultimate consequences that I could hit you over the head with, but I’m not trying to make this an awful sad read. I want to acknowledge the problem we have and I want us to be able to fix it. Check that. First, I want us to want to fix it. We need to increase our awareness of conflict minerals like coltan or, even, diamonds which I didn’t even mention. We need to know why wars are really fought. We need to be more conscious of how little decisions add up to big consequences that affect people half a world away or how are actual environment is affected. Let’s all take more time in thinking where and how things are made. Let’s pass on taking from the jar if we don’t need it. Let’s become more knowledgeable voters, smarter consumers, and hopefully less greedy humans.

As always if you wish to see a source for something I said, please ask and I’ll oblige. Besides Inside Job, as I mentioned, a few more movies or documentaries that I suggest showcasing man’s greed and its influences on society are Blood Diamond, The True Cost, Gasland, and Requiem For the American Dream. If you have a suggestion for me, feel free to let me know.

[trace-error]

TraceError(”Racism2″);

art 1: http://traceerror.com/post/156745751986/traceerrorracism

As I laid out in the first part of this error log (please read that entry first), the main contributors to racism are religion, classism, fear, and scapegoating. As these ideas persevered throughout history, they alter the cultural zeitgeist of society. Certain things become natural or expected. White power and dominance is expected.  Coordinated efforts to keep communities down economically, corrupted by drugs and crime is normal. It may not be a conspiracy, but there’s definitely institutional racism and a measured proclivity to limit the power of non-whites. One could say well Obama shattered that ceiling by becoming President of the United States, but he still was half-white and did little to help with the institutional racism in his country. In fact, the rise of the alt-right culminating with the election of Donald Trump as his successor shows that white power is alive and well.  How well is it doing? Let’s see:

Police on average arrest black and other darker-skinned people more so for the same crimes. Why? Are white people not committing these crimes. If you take a petty crime like marijuana possession, more blacks are in jail for it then whites. In college, every 3rd guy in my private Catholic college had weed on him. However, I have no horror stories regarding SWAT teams knocking down dorm-room doors looking for perps. That sort of thing happens in inner-city communities all of the time.

The above chart shows the rate at which marijuana is used. We’re talking mere percentage point differences.

This chart shows that for adults ages 18-25, whites are more likely to be using. This coincides with my college experience in the early 2000s and I could easily venture to say not much has changed on campuses.

And finally the same study, took a look at marijuana possession arrests by race. Are you fucking kidding me? I knew there was a difference and felt it would be in the 10-15% difference range, but we’re talking 30-50% difference. The rate for whites doesn’t change at all. So what gives? Obviously, police concentrate in certain areas more heavily. Also, they unfairly profile and search blacks. Marijuana is a leafy herb or plant. It’s not a bazooka. To know someone is possessing marijuana, you need to search them. How many white people aren’t being search at all?

The unfair arrests rate contribute to broken families. That is a major issue in black communities as children don’t have a nuclear family to depend on. Quality education is hard to come by, as public education funds are stripped away (by a predominantly white Congress)

Watch this video from Vice regarding literacy in schools in Detroit, Michigan.

That’s with Obama in power. Now with Trump in power and the inevitable defunding of public education coming, we should expect things to get worse. The new Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, is an older wealthy white woman, who never went to a public school, her children never spend a day in a public school, and has lobbied against public schools donating millions of dollars towards the benefit of Christian private schools and the closing of “failing” public schools that simply need more funding. She is now the head of Education policy in our country. Is this racism? Not on it’s face it isn’t. There’s no blatant wording that Ms. Devos hates colored people, but her support for private schools (which are attended by predominantly white students) and her disdain for inner-city public schools is alarming.

Trump also nominated, and has since been confirmed, Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama to Attorney General, the top position of our justice system in the country. Jeff Sessions was deemed too racist back in 1986 when he was previously appointed by President Reagan to be a federal judge. However, now his past words and actions aren’t seen as damning.

It cannot go without saying that Donald’s Trump’s campaign rhetoric stirred up some subterranean racist feelings people had and with his election, validated those feelings. Trump came out strongly against Black Lives Matter and Mexican immigrants, while also being fully endorsed by David Duke, a grand-wizard of the KKK, and has a growing alt-right, all white, neo-nazi following that’s been unprecedented in the past 40 years or so. Now with his appointments to major positions in the government to go along with the things he’s said, it’s definitely placed our country in a precarious position.

There are many more forms and evidence of institutional racism. Much more than I have laid out here, but understand that it trickles down from the highest levels of government to the neighborhoods of our cities. It’s an ugly truth and a sad one at that. We need to look beyond skin color. Treat every human being as a brother and sister. Help those up who are lower than us on the ladder. Why? Because its simply the right thing to do. No religious book can tell me differently. No old white man in a suit can tell me differently.

If you want sources for anything that I’ve said in this blog, feel free to ask.

[trace-error]

TraceError(”Racism1”);

As a semi-privileged white male, what the fuck can I really say that hasn’t been said already without overflowing with white guilt or risk minimizing the ugly existence of racism? It’s true, I don’t know what it feels like to experience racism. I can empathize, but that’s not the real deal. In the near future, I genuinely hope for a VR experience that puts you back in rural Alabama in the 1960s as black man being hazed, bullied, and beaten by an angry racist white mob. That’s the closest that I, a descendent of various European ethnicities, will ever feel racism in my life. While the setting could change to Chinese railroad workers in the 19th century, it should be something that every white person experiences.

Why is it important to feel racism this viscerally? Because it’s still so prevalent in our society. It’s institutional. It’s suppressive. It’s the epitome of evil. Most definitely , it’s an error in our code.

If we’re talking code, let’s say racism is the result of a function. A function is merely a process that takes some inputs, does something to them, and then spits out a result. In this example, our inputs are fear,  scape-goating, classism, and religion. Let’s dive into those a bit. Moving backwards…

Religion

When Europeans started exploring new areas of the world, like Africa, Asia, or the Americas, white Christian traders felt justified of keeping and selling slaves by scripture. In the Book of Genesis, the descendants of Ham are cursed by Noah to be “servants unto servants”. With some odd etymological gymnastics, Ham’s descendants were believed by these Christian Europeans to be dark-skinned and, thus, cursed to be servants. How fucking convenient? This dumb ass interpretation of the Old Testament manage to last for hundreds of years and empowered rich white merchants and landowners to own slaves.

Classism

Throughout history, the ruling class always wished to maintain power over those under them. Since slaves were property, their owners tried very hard to maintain that relationship. You have to understand life was extremely good for the ruling class, especially slave owners. They sat back and raked in the fruits of other people’s labor, essentially free labor. They managed this setup for hundreds of years.

Over the past 150 years as we know the ruling class has had to give up some of that power. It wasn’t easy and you better believe that they’ve used every means to keep their place atop the pyramid. Byproducts of giving minorities a place at the table were largely things like hate and prejudice. Segregation, apartheid, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, etc. all were entities born out of this hate and prejudice. 

Scapegoating

As we saw with Chinese railroad workers during the Gold Rush and are seeing now with undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US, American whites blame cheap laborers for the reason that their wages have decreased or jobs are no longer available. There’s no condemnation of employers, who are usually richer white males because it’s much easier to blame the colored people with no voice, limited rights, and virtually no power to stand up for themselves.

Another example of scapegoating is blaming those who are victims of classism, for their own lot in life (i.e. the black drug-pusher who’s in jail, but has two kids with different women). Not providing reparations or investing in communities or allocating other beneficial resources to build up victims of racist policies has led to a lifestyle devoid of education, filled with crime, and a corrupted value system.

Fear

Collectively, we are terrified of change. Those in power fear change because it upsets the status quo. They’ll lose grip on what they have become comfortable with for so long. When slavery was abolished in 1865, rich landowners were forced to pay their workers a wage. Fearing they’d lose money, they sought ways around it. In fact, to skate around the 13th amendment (the one that outlawed slavery), criminals could essentially be forced to work as slaves. "No more slaves, fine, can we get more prisoners then?". Ask and thou shall receive. Basic laws were more strictly enforced upon minorities to fill prisons. The byproduct of that of course was a more negative and tense relationship between law enforcers and minorities. The aura of criminality clouded black communities eventually becoming part of the culture. Subsequently, fear grew in police departments, in the ruling-class-controlled media, and throughout the minds of the white populace all over the US.

Want to learn more about the effects of the 13th amendment, checkout 13th on Netflix.

There’s much more to add, but I’ll cut it short here and have a part 2 later.

[trace-error]

TraceError(”Lobbyists”);

When we, regular people, vote, we expect our representatives to follow through on campaign promises. It’s what makes them appealing to us. However, each election season, we grow increasingly more apathetic with how our politicians failed to come through. You may not have thought about it like this, but, clearly, this is an error message popping up at us on our screens. What’s causing this? Well, the major issue is lobbying.

Washington D.C. is utterly filled with lobbyists. In 2016, there were 10,882 “registered” lobbyists. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? To be fair, the number has gone down ever so slightly since 2007 when there was a high mark of 14,822 “registered” lobbyists. However, check this out: there are only 535 members of Congress. I’ll save you the time and do the math. That’s a 20:1 ratio. For every, legislator representing us, there are 20 people looking to have their ear. It’s their job to influence them one way or another depending on who they work for.

Why is that a bug? Well, the purpose of each member in Congress is to represent the people. Their function in this application of ours is to make sure everything is operating well for each person in the nation. That simply does not happen. Lobbyists do not work for us. They work for corporations most of the time. But most certainly, they DO NOT WORK FOR US.

Lobbying firms have “officially” spent a little over $29 billion over the course of Obama’s 8 years in office. Now this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with Obama specifically, but perhaps much of that money was indeed spent early on influencing his legacy defining policy, the Affordable Care Act. Maybe just maybe, that’s why it sucked early on and why premiums have gone up. Given the amount of money spent by lobbying firms in the run-up to the legislation being passed, one can assume the people drawing up the healthcare act were heavily influenced by the healthcare corporations. So who really benefits the most?

Are our best interests being taken care of in Washington? Most certainly they are not. Why are lobbyist spending all that fucking money then? It must be working.

Imagine being a kid and your parents giving you an allowance every week. Imagine that allowance being cut down every week because your uncle was telling them they could be using it elsewhere like say for his kids. Yeah I bet you think your uncle is douchebag. So are lobbyists. In keeping with the theme of this blog, let’s call them douche-bugs and they need to be fixed.

Got my facts from OpenSecret.org. The numbers they collect are mind-boggling and are a great public resource for government spending, campaign contributions, etc. Take a look for yourself: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/

Also, this is a good article from the Washington Post if you want to read more about this topic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/04/21/why-more-money-is-spent-on-lobbyists-than-on-congress/?utm_term=.400baf44e206

[trace-error]

TraceError(”Climate-change”);

As you use your computer for a long period of time, you may feel it get warm. That’s okay and natural for the computer to do that. If well built, you typically don’t have to worry too much. 

Quick tangent: Years ago, I did have an HP laptop that fried a month after the warranty expired! Fuck them! Never buying anything they make again.

Anyways, it wouldn’t be wise to rest your computer on top of the hot stove. Duh! Or it wouldn’t be wise to use it for too long outside on a 100 degree afternoon in the sun. You see the computer itself warms and cools during use and non-use, but there’s ways in which we, the users, can accelerate the warming or the cooling. We users have a responsibility to take care of the things we use like our computers and monitor them before they fry like my HP piece of shit laptop. Otherwise, you’re shopping around trying to buy a new one.

This big blue floating rock we call Earth is getting warmer and warmer. 2016 was the warmest year on record. It beat out 2015, which beat out 2014, which beat out 2011. We can’t run from it. We can’t hide from it. If you try to deny what scientists are reporting, you may as well be the kid with fingers in their ears, their eyes shut, and yelling “I’m not listening!”. You look stupid. You’re also slowing us down and preventing us from staving off the effects of what surely is some dangerous things to come.

Mmmmm science....

Scientists have been able to measure ice core samples going back thousands and thousands of years. Within these samples, they’ve measured the amount of carbon dioxide, the main polluting agent in the world, that’s present in the atmosphere at the time that corresponds with the depth of the ice core. For centuries, we’re talking going back 400,000 years, the amount goes up and down, but never over a certain number. That number being 300 parts per million. The number was reached a number of times and most recently in 1950. Today, only 66 years later, we are over 400 parts per million. Again, this hasn’t happened in 400,000 years.

Ocean temperatures don’t fluctuate too greatly, but the slightest degree can have monumental effects on weather throughout the world. Well, since 1969, temperatures are climbing, going up .302 degrees Fahrenheit. Warmer oceans bring more devastating weather such as hurricanes. 

There's much more evidence to back up Climate change, but, for brevity’s sake, I’ll chill with just one more thing which is the shrinking of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. On average every year, these two areas of the world lose approximately 9-15 miles of ice per year. That’s melt-water dumping into the ocean. Sea level rise has gone up 6.7 inches in the last century. In the last decade, the rate has nearly doubled from last century. Why is this important? Because as the water rises, cities near the ocean will go under. That means major hubs like Miami, New Orleans, Shanghai, and Bangkok could be going bye-bye in the short years to come. There’s A LOT of people that live in those areas who will need to be relocated subsequently causing a whole bunch of other issues that we needn’t get into right now.

So the error I’m logging here is one that will pop up in our “society application” a lot as I go step-through our “code”. It’s more of a framework error. And it’s threatening the actual hardware we’re built upon. There’s much more to cover here, but for now, it’s important to know that this climate change bug simply exists, that it’s a huge one, an existential one. If we don’t figure out how to slow the things I mentioned like ice sheet melting and rising seas levels, many other parts of our software program are going to be affected. In fact the whole computer it’s running on can and will fry. And well at least for now, we can’t buy a new planet.

The science stuff was brought to you by the smart people at NASA. To read more and I suggest you do, go here: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ 

[trace-error]

“On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale”

Alexander Pope

[trace-error]

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

Vincent Van Gogh

[trace-error]

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single one, and its life will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Buddha

[trace-error]

When you feel like you don't have the courage to stand up for something that you believe in, remember Irene Sendler. (via reddit)

[trace-error]

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/454112-martin-luther-king-jr-quotes-33-quotes-on-education-courage-love-racism-violence-and-service/#ixzz2qtdt0sIc