News Blog

The Perils of Non-Conformity

Ours is a conformist society.  Social media has made it even more so.  The vast majority of us are afraid to appear different from our peers.  Social media allows us to create and enforce peer standards that bind us to (locally) acceptable thoughts and behaviors.  We do what we must to fit in.  Woe to s/he who doesn’t.

The non-conformist exists primarily because there are still people so stubbornly independent that they cannot conform, and couldn’t even if they wanted to, which they don’t.  This would be okay  if society hadn’t organized itself to stamp out non-conformity wherever it appears.  Society is very good at this because society is composed of individual people, each acting in accord with the belief systems of their peers.  It’s as though society was a splintered mirror with millions of shards!  The non-conformist finds that through their atypical thoughts or behavior, they have taken on an army of others who exist (seemingly) to make sure nothing is said or done that isn’t part of the group catechism of proper thinking. Read More

An Easy Solution to the Healthcare Problem

Every time an employer issues a paycheck, they record two sets of deductions: one for Social Security and the other for Medicare. There’s actually a third deduction for federal tax but that one doesn’t matter for our purposes. What I’m getting at is that every employer already takes out money from employees’ check for social programs. We’re used to this system and guess what? it sort of works. So if health care is so important that every single person must have it no matter what, then why not treat basic health care the same way we do Social Security and Medicare, and just deduct it, proportionate to how much each person makes, from their pay. Read More

Magazines as Influencers and Data Merchants

Five days ago, my former favorite magazine Nylon, a young woman’s fashion magazine out of NYC, announced that they are ending their print edition, of which I am a subscriber.  According to their press release, they will concentrate their (increasingly confused) efforts on their web and social media presence in their new role as “influencers.” Read More

DACA and the Dreamers — Let Them Be Americans

I’ve never been a supporter of wide open immigration.  Without some controls over who comes to our country and how many, there’s simply no way workers aren’t going to be hurt — American and immigrant alike. But the case of DACA and the Dreamers is different, for all the reasons we’ve heard, not least of which is that they’re here, have been here, and will continue to be here whether we give them legal status or not.  Immigration policy prior to Obama’s DACA order was to deport them.  After DACA, the government backed off deportation and instead gave them work permits.  Neither is a real solution — one is draconian, the other temporary.  A more effective response to their situation would not be to deport them or relegate them to long term resident status but for them to become naturalized citizens. And therein lies the rub — according to current immigration law, they can’t. Read More

What Everyone Wants

“The one thing that everyone wants is to be free…not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death…The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.”

So wrote Gertrude Stein in September 1943 while living in the rural countryside of Nazi occupied France, but read out of context, her words resonate still because they cut to the heart of the nature of living creatures, humans as well as animals. Deep down, all living things want to be free.

We live in a world where levels of controls are in place that prevent many if not most living things from living freely. On almost every plane of existence, living things are controlled. We are captured in space, we are surveilled and monitored, our work options are limited, our speech is curtailed, our sense of our own value is diminished. We exist as data points now and the source of future data points, employed for the profit of some and a means of control for others. Our safety is threatened but not guaranteed. We trade our freedom for safety out of fear. In the end, we are extinguished as living beings, wild and free. We are worse than tame — we are cattle in a data farm. Is there any longer a reason to exist at this point?

People everywhere want to be free, but everywhere they are in chains — of their own forging.

Why We Need To Practice Creative Expression

4/30/2011

For decades now, it’s been impressed on us moderns that art is a frill, unnecessary and usually unaffordable.  This view has always struck me as patently wrong, but I’ve never had a ready answer for it until now.  You can try to explain why art is not a frill, or you can simply answer the question “What would life be like without art?”

If you’re really strict with yourself and strip out every form of art there is, you may start to see what a gift art can be — a gift of joy, beauty, inspiration, and pleasure. Read More

On Personal Sovereignty — Do We Have Any?

12/12/2010

Short answer: no. We no longer have personal sovereignty. What does this mean? It means we are free nowhere. Why does this matter? Well, some would argue that people need freedom to live authentic lives.

What do I mean by freedom? I mean the ability to feel that there is some space in the world to call our own and where we may be openly ourselves without risk of suspicion, intrusion, or fine. We don’t have that anymore.

Let’s look at some examples, kept deliberately general so as not to get caught up in pesky details and starting with where we live. Read More

Putting The People Back Into Democracy

6/29/2010

For a decade now, we’ve been watching the unraveling of nearly every institution in which we the people used to place our faith. One by one they’ve toppled in our esteem, leaving many of us to conclude that most of the institutions that run our world are utterly hollow if not rotten to the core. With this loss of faith in the bastions of society has come a commensurate feeling that the government, which was supposed to protect us from bad institutions, did not always do so, at least in part because government itself is subject to those same institutions.

To recap, first there was Enron and the accountancy scandal, the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery that the American military practices torture, the scandals in the mortgage and housing markets, and then the lending market generally, ending with the collapse of the entire global economy two years ago. To top it off, Barack Obama, for all that he isn’t George Bush, is not what many people hoped he’d be, and so there is that disappointment. Now, still in the same decade we began, BP is dealing with the reality that they are slowly destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Read More

Is Anyone Else Freaked Out?

Last Judgment By Jan Provoost

Originally posted: 6/1/2010

I was sitting outside with my mother last night, enjoying the gloaming after a pleasant and peaceful Memorial Day barbecue, when it suddenly occurred to both of us to look for the Last Judgement chapters of the Gospels.  We read a passage out of Mark about apocalyptic earthquakes, famine, and destruction — “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”  I think I just laughed but it was nervous laughter. At no other time in my life have those words sounded so apt for the times.  And that freaked me out

But I was already freaked out.  I had a mini nervous breakdown this weekend, created by a variety of factors —  exhaustion, stress, Gulf oil spill disaster, financial market weirdness, strange storms that take down trees, and probably most of all, the need I’ve felt to continue to carry on with my life as though nothing were happening.

Read More

The Limits Of Capitalism

1/22/2010

My argument, such as it is, is that Capitalism may be good at providing hefty benefits to the few, it’s no good at providing satisfying lives to the many.  And yet it dominates the lives of people worldwide, determining what work we will be able to do, how much we will be able to afford, what things will cost, and by extension, what kind of life we will be able to make for ourselves.  Capitalism is like Calvinism — it causes many things to be predestined.

As the moneys trickling down to the masses dwindles, we’re finding just how pervasive Capitalism is.  Everything we do is predicated on money and since the rules that govern money in America are predicated on Capitalism, we the people are forced to apply Capitalist principles in our lives, whether they really work for us or not.  Read More

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