I'd like to continue on the topic from this morning, but today seems to be one of those all too frequent occasions when my internet access provider is testing their slow lane or something. Once or twice a month i have a day when any websites without corporate backing enter a connecting/loading loop from which they never break out.
I miss Qwest, the old company. But when the US government went hogwild grabbing up new power in the last decade, the owner of Qwest was one of the few who stood up for Rule Of Law and refused to illegally just hand over what the government wanted. So he was rapidly set up, prosecuted and destroyed, breaking the company and allowing a more compliant organization to take over. As is usually the case these days when one doesn't cooperate with a criminal government order.
Not surprisingly, things went down hill, and we now have very low expectations for the future when it comes to having our rights and access protected. The funny thing is, they think i'll still pay full price for half access - and typically the half that holds no interest for me. Jack the costs up and drop the service and a whole lot of us are going to start doubling and tripling up, sharing service to cut price.
When the Soviet Union was a going concern, people used to talk about how Communism works on paper, but once you get people involved the inherent corruption always manifests to destroy the potential. Of course, the very same holds true for Capitalism which is how you wind up with what we have under the label of "capitalism" these days. (More often called "American Style Capitalism" elsewhere) We have corporations that operate as admitted terrorists and extortionists while buying laws to prevent prosecution, or even civil suits. Our high courts have declared the government officially for sale. We have jails that rent better facilities to prisoners who have money. We have debtors prisons making a resurgence as a profit mechanism for our current corrupted style of crony capitalism. We have pathetic medical care that costs almost much as the other 9 in the top ten list combined while providing inferior care, and our solution to the problem is to let the profiteers write new laws to move the costs around instead of fixing the corruption. We've gone from politicians working to avoid the mere "Appearance of Impropriety" to the point that felony convictions are no longer necessarily an issue. On some international freedom scales we don't even rank in the top 30 while idiots run around asking "How Free Are You On A Scale Of 1 To America?" Social inequality is reaching Dickensian heights, with corporate leaders making 500-1000 times what their workers earn. (For reference, in the middle of the last century the ratio was about 50 to 1) We have self-labelled "Christians" who worship Money so hard that they've started a branch of the religion that teaches that Christ was a bit of a twat who didn't know what he was talking about, and his Daddy really wants you to be rich and rule over the filthy masses. (Yes, this is the church to which our current Executive Tweeter belongs) We debate what is or is not torture now, while only a couple generations back we executed foreign soldiers for using the exact same practices on our soldiers which we now embrace as "tools of freedom," even though anyone who isn't an idiot or evil will understand that torture doesn't make people tell the truth, it makes them tell whatever the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop. And then they can't figure out why people think they're evil idiots, reinforcing both notions.
Let's not even start on the bad joke of the "Freedom Lite"* two party system choking our politics. The current state of politics is akin to watching a couple of gangs fighting a bloody turf war and being told to pick one and pretend they're the good guys. Such is the binary nature of our ingrained cultural thinking.
Three pages of information to which i seek access have continued to attempt to load for the duration of this typing. The NY Times obituary loaded in seconds. The personal sites run by fans are all access blocked at the moment. Perhaps it's nothing more than a system glitch. But, as i said, this is a regular ongoing occurrence, and that leaves a great deal of trepidation for the future as our current greedy governors grab for more money and control. Again. Yet again.
It's funny when we hear the FCC talk about how the rules and restrictions they keep changing are no longer a reflection of modern business.
Of course not! They were set up as protections. Protections from business interests trumping social needs and from information distortion. Protections for the citizenry, and for the proper functioning of a free society. NONE of those are a concern today, in fact - they're considered liabilities, impediments to acquisition and consolidation of power (as they were intended to be) so they've got to go. When the majority of the information media outlets are concentrated into a half dozen corporations, you don't even need conspiracies to skew information. With numbers that small, mere common interest with bias reporting, or the lack thereof. (It's probably worth noting that they all have major "defense" industry interests)
And while they might spout some very nice sounding reasons at times, it's important to remember that they take hundreds of millions of dollars from the public to spend on research to learn what to say to make us give more, accept more, and bend over more readily.
Some day soon we should talk about identity. How many people even know who they are? Are you more than just an echo?
No wonder i'm a hermit, eh?
And i just wanted to look at Cats.
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* (Here's how the two party system works, and why it's considered to be "Freedom Lite":
You want to go out for dinner and you're given two choices - Did you want a Big Mac or a Whopper?
Pizza, chicken, steak, fish, lobster, salad, or anything else is not up for discussion. It's been decided you're going to have hamburger, now you have the "freedom" to choose between char broiling or frying, and to pick your condiments.
That, in essence, is the two party system of politics.)
