I’m a Member of Country Club

Another great country music song, I’m a member of a country club, country music is what I love. I drive an old Ford pickup truck……at any honky-tonk roadside pub, I’m a member of a country club.

Maybe we need to remind our elected representatives that they’re not, actually members of a country club. Their job is to listen to the people in their district, the ones who pay them to speak for them in Congress. Many of them, probably my own state included, get paid far more from lobbyists and wealthy donors. Contributions to their re-election campaigns, jobs for their relatives, nice additions to their salary. Now it seems they no longer want to listen to anyone except those who agree with them. They don’t want to go to town halls in their local communities anymore because there might be (I would say, certainly will be) people there who are angry and upset about what their government is doing. What elected officials are allowing to happen on their watch.

More and more, it looks like once you get in, you’re a member of an elite country club, where, if you are more interested in yourself than in your constituents, you can make a fortune. Once elected it seems our representatives no longer represent the people, but something else altogether. They have a ticket to the big time.

Country clubs are great, though. There, you can be surrounded by vetted and ‘approved’ people. Money comes into it but looks are important too. It’s about as far from a democracy as you can get. There’s no merit involved except money and looks, and having the same opinions as the current members. That’s what a country club is, a place where like minded people can get together and not have to deal with those other people. The members are safe inside where everyone agrees with them. Anyone not following the rules is quickly asked to leave.

We may be fast approaching a time when those members will not tolerate anyone who disagrees with them. China and North Korea are examples. Every move is tracked, every communication is monitored, every action known. There can be no dissent. Russia allows dissent but anyone who gathers a following will probably first be given an opportunity to join. They would have to give up any outside ideas, become like all of the other members. If they choose not to join, they end up dead, one way or another. The country club members are in charge. Once they have the power, votes don’t matter any more.

Country clubs are fine for those who prefer them. Democratic leaders are not elected to a country club though. They are responsible first and foremost to the people who voted for them, not their ‘club members’.

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It’s So Easy To Slip

Great song by Bob Weir, vocalist and guitarist for the Grateful Dead. “It’s so easy to slip, it’s so easy to fall. And let your memory drift and do nothing at all”. So appropriate. It’s so easy to let the world skip on by especially if you are a politician and more worried about your career than the people you are in an elected position to watch out for.

So easy too for a democracy to become that in name only. Russia calls itself a democracy. But notice how anyone who opposes the current ruler ends up dead. Usually they get put in jail and then die while there. Sometimes they are poisoned while in other countries, with substances that are only available to defense departments of large countries. Russian laws are there for the aristocracy, not for the people. The people have no rights against the government. Anyone challenging the ruling class is arrested or killed. The exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the American Constitution. A government by the people for the people, not for a select few who work themselves into positions of great wealth and power.

Because many have been left behind in the economy of today they are rightly upset about the way the government is functioning. Currently many people think that having three equal branches of government is too cumbersome and would prefer to have a CEO, or two, to take charge and get things done. It might help in the short term. but down the road when there are no restraints and things aren’t going the right direction it will be a different story. There are very few in history who have given up power once they were offered it. George Washington was one. He could’ve kept the presidency for as long as he lived but he chose not to. He realized that it wasn’t him but the people who needed to be in charge. Leaders of democracies are responsible to the people, who have the ultimate say over them. But if the leader sets out to tear down the curbs and restrictions on his power, and no one stops him on the principle of it, then it won’t be possible to go back. Hitler was elected too and he dissolved the governing body so that he could do what he wanted to without anyone standing in his way.

Our current leaders admire dictators. They think they themselves are good at dictating. They really don’t believe in the three branch system of government. I doubt they have ever read the constitution, or had any understanding of it if they did. It’s not in their nature. One person, or two, with a handful of cronies ruling the empire. That’s how they operate. Because it’s so much easier, of course, than having to convince others who disagree with you, that you are right. We’ve lost, not only the ability to compromise, but the ambition to compromise. All or nothing is the new modus operandi. And every day they are testing the limits of their power, always pushing for more and more, at the expense of the other two governing bodies. Whittle away at the legislature here and a little at the judiciary there and soon neither will have the powers granted by the constitution. All the reins will be in one set of hands.

Is this what America has come to? Are we really willing to give up the greatest democracy in the world because it’s easier than working out a solution we can all agree on?

All it will take from here is to do nothing. But it’s going to take an overwhelming majority to do something, and soon, before there’s nothing anyone can do.

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Make America Great Again

Just when was this period of time when America was great? Because it’s looking more and more like the early twentieth century. Then, a few men had amassed enormous wealth. Small businesses were bought up and shut down to stifle competition. Prices kept rising because anyone who tried to come in with a better product at a better cost was quickly put out of business. That seems pretty close to what’s going on today. CEOs travel around the world on their private planes, going from one luxury mansion to another while the cost of living for working families keeps rising. Groceries, gasoline, not to mention rent or the cost of owning a home, all have steadily increased, and rapidly increased since the rise of the super rich.

Is there a correlation? I suspect there is. Technology is right there in the middle of it, maybe at the root of it too. Technology has allowed companies to offload many of the costs of doing business onto the consumer. For instance, how often do you get a paper statement in the mail these days? Not often at all and in many instances you pay a fee for that service. While it may be fine to skip the paper invoices, where did that savings to the company go? It went right into the exorbitant salaries of the executives and the shareholders. Self checkouts have saved companies billions, maybe even trillions. Prices continue to rise though because the wealthy not only need that money, but deserve it too.

When job cuts are made at an organization, who benefits? I heard one woman on the news the other day saying she hoped the savings being found in the Education department would be passed on to the states. I had to laugh. Those savings are going to fund tax cuts for the rich. How is it possible that billionaires many times over care anything about the poor? The poor are there for them to take advantage of, and to be afraid of. After all, the extremely wealthy, with a few exceptions, believe that every one is just like them. Willing to do anything to set themselves up with so much money they never have to worry again. Because they are ruthless, they believe everyone else is too. They live in a world where everything is cut-throat, get the other guy before he gets me. The fact that there’s a whole world out there who simply want to work for a living, have enough to raise their family and have a little fun once in a while, is alien to them. That money might not be the be all and end all of life is deeply offensive to them. People who want more from life than money are considered losers. They are to be stamped out because without the masses working as hard as they can funneling money into the hands of the few, how can they amass their enormous fortunes?

There’s talk about this new return to the greatness of America putting humans on Mars. Just what kind of a place is Mars going to be? It looks extremely likely that everyone will work one hundred and twenty hours a week until they are used up, then cast aside to make room for the next guy to make his sacrifice. Slaves to the ultra wealthy. A few women, slaves as well, will be there for servicing the men. I wish all the ones who want that kind of a world would just go on and go. If you can’t make it to Mars, set up some space stations somewhere in between. When you look back down to Earth maybe you’ll see us losers waving good-bye.

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Solid Gold

My local radio station has a program called Solid Gold in the mornings, with a real DJ, by that I mean someone who knows something about music, not just presenting blurbs for advertisers. This DJ doesn’t read from a script. He talks about the musicians and the music he’s playing and is old enough to have been around when most of the music first played on the radio. Solid Gold.

Which is quite a bit different from gold plate. Gold plate has a bright shine and draws attention to itself. Real gold is rather shy, stays hidden in the ground, waiting patiently for someone to search it out. It can trust in the fact that it is pure gold, it’s worth is acknowledged world wide. Gold plate parades around showing itself off, trying to pose as real. Just under the surface there’s no telling what. You can gold plate anything.

Not much real gold in the world these days. Lots of razzle-dazzle. If you could ever see them both side by side the difference would be obvious. But with solid gold still around, probably, but staying hidden for the most part (after all, it’s value isn’t affected by imitations), it might be hard to tell solid gold from gold plate. It’s worth asking though and better to know. You wouldn’t want to go around believing something had the value of solid gold when it was in reality just a shiny gold surface.

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Life Begins at ?

I could not help but laugh. Saw in the news today that a representative in the Mississippi legislature has introduced a bill declaring life begins at erection. I know this post will bring a lot of garbage to my site, thinking it’s about pornography but I get lots of garbage anyway so a little more won’t matter. The bill, which has no chance of passing in a heavily Republican congress, makes it illegal for a man to have any other use for an erection than to impregnate a woman. Wow! Oh my goodness, now that really changes the whole picture doesn’t it. Just think, if men were responsible for their bodies the way women are. The representative knows he’s going to get a lot of negative press on this, but seems not to care. I found it amusing also that it’s a man who brought the bill to the legislature. It seems much more likely that a woman would do such a thing. But then she would just be labelled as ‘menstrual, or menopausal, or even post-menopausal’. Maybe Republicans can’t see women in any other way than somehow relating to their ability to reproduce, like cattle or chickens. It certainly appeared that society at large had advanced beyond such notions but here we are, back again.

Still, it did make me laugh and my hat’s off to the man who did this if for no other reason than to point out the vast disparity between the standards women are held to and the standards men are allowed to sink to with no apparent consequence.

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It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

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Project Liberty

I read an article today about a new service that seeks to create an altogether different Internet. The inventors of the current model say it’s fundamentally flawed. It’s design allows a few tech giants to gather up everyone’s data and use it without consent or even knowledge that it’s being done. They say that it can never be fixed because of the way it was built and the only solution is to start over. I agree wholeheartedly.

I remember when the Internet first came into use. I was thrilled with all of the amazing things it was going to bring into our lives. And in many ways it has. I currently work from home which could not happen without it. I check out many websites on a weekly or even daily basis for updates. But outside these places that I feel fairly confident of I no longer have much faith in the authenticity of what I’m seeing. And this is before the full implementation of AI. Just think what can of worms that’s going to open up. Very soon you will not be able to trust anything you see online. The ability to gather up data and manipulate it to fit whatever model is in vogue at the time will overwhelm the internet.

One thing I know, having worked in the tech field for almost twenty five years, is you do not want the current group of tech wizards to be in charge of anything. They are brilliant in many ways but they are also not and most likely never will be adults. It’s as though we’ve given the keys to the universe to a group of teenage boys who have no more moral aptitude than you would expect of a smart ass sixteen year old. You keep hoping to see some glimmer of responsibility beginning to appear but it never does. There’s too much money blinding them to what their success is really about. Part of it, a large part, was being at the right place at the right time. Some deliberately positioned themselves there but others were just the lucky ones. Their adolescent egos will never let them admit that nor will adversity ever cause them to stop and re-evaluate.

The damage done to society by the digital garbage in our online environment may turn out to be as devastating as the plagues of the dark ages. No one knows what’s true anymore so they choose what they want to believe and once started the internet provides justification for any and every point of view. We rush headlong into the abyss of our worst nightmares. That’s what the current version of the internet is providing us, a way to make almost anything we can imagine seem real. Don’t for a moment think that the boys behind all of this will have any qualms at all about using any and every device they know of to get you to click. True or false, right or wrong, makes absolutely no difference. Getting you to click is the only thing that matters.

Unless we drop their version of the internet and adopt a new one that is built on principles of privacy and trust. Check out Project Liberty. I hope we all live to see it flourish.

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All together now

I’ll be so glad when we can get back to being one country again. There are too many serious issues that need to be addressed in the world for us to continue fighting each other. I work every day with people who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum, but we get along, we like each other enough to accomplish our various tasks and most of the time enjoy ourselves. I know they don’t believe the way I do but I still respect them and their right to do so. The fact that I see things differently doesn’t mean I have to hate them for not being like me. I am old enough and have enough life experience to know that hating is rarely a good thing. People can use hatred for all sorts of reasons. Once it starts inside you it can be manipulated and turned into actions, actions you may not have anticipated.

With all we’ve been through in the last few years I count myself lucky to still be alive with no serious health problems and living in a country where work is plentiful, along with all the necessities of life. I continue to work with those who are different from me and am thankful for them. Most are as kind and helpful as you could ask them to be. That makes me hopeful for us as a nation, in spite of every pundit’s assessment that our differences can’t be reconciled, that we are doomed to fighting each other forever. Maybe so, but I hope not. Let’s just accept the fact that we have our differences but that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we work to make it work.

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Osama bin Laden has won

Think about it. Shortly after 9/11 there were comical, I thought then, photoshopped images of George W. Bush wearing a turban. Twenty years later we see that instead of Iraq and Afghanistan becoming functioning democracies, the United States is becoming a one-man nation. Crowds storming the US Capital buildings at the instigation of their leader, who time and time again informs us that he is the only one who can save us. Stick with me and everything will be all right, I’ll watch out for you, he says. Millions of people have voted not to uphold democracy. Donald Trump doesn’t believe in democracy, he doesn’t believe in government at all. He believes one man should have total power, just like a CEO of some company which he owns. He has no respect for the institutions of government created by the founding fathers, people who were far more intelligent and less morally corrupt than he is.

Is it really time to toss it all in? Give up on democracy, where power is always balanced between the three branches in order to constrain men, or women, like Donald Trump? Men who want to become dictators? Look at all the people he admires, they are every single one brutal dictators who execute those who oppose them.

I am so glad my father, who fought in Germany during WWII is not here to see this. The sacrifices he and hundreds of thousands of others made to protect our democracy, and the belief that all men are created with equal rights under the law, that living in a country governed by laws, not individuals, was worth the sacrifice. He, thankfully returned home after the war, but it scarred him for life as it did many others who fought to oppose a mad man. Just remember, Hitler was voted into power, and then stoked the resentment the German people felt for the hardships that had been forced on them after WWI. That resentment erupted into hatred and into world conflict. Hitler started out saying he would address those grievances. Once in power, he didn’t stop there, he used the state he had seized control of to create what he hoped would be world domination. Anyone who opposed him was simply imprisoned or killed. This is the terrible danger involved in electing a person who does not uphold the law, who does not believe in the rule of law. The constitution becomes meaningless.

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Too Much Noise

Earlier this week I was working with a colleague at a customer site. My colleague encountered a technical problem and since she is fairly new at her position she jumped on Teams to get advice about what to do. Several people responded but they were all saying something different. So she chose a procedure that she hoped would save her a lot of time and get the customer up and running much more quickly. Unfortunately, it fixed the immediate issue, but created other problems down the road, meaning that instead of saving her time, it actually cost her much more time because in the end she had to start over, which was what she was trying to avoid. Late in the afternoon she got a message from one of the more experienced techs who advised that the method recommended earlier might not work.

I have long had the option to join a Teams group at work, and I did for a while. But it seemed to me that the people who did the most talking were the ones who knew the least. I never saw the people who really knew their business responding; they, like me, were too busy working to deal with the constant chatter. If I’m in a tough spot and need help, I have several different people I can call, depending on the situation, and that’s what I do. No general consensus from the tribe, just expert advise from someone who knows.

I have always been a quiet person. Maybe that’s why I can’t quite understand the new group think mentality. Yes, email and messaging are nice to have, and it’s very difficult to function these days without a smart phone. But for the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would sign up for Twitter. I had an account at the very beginning of it’s existence and quickly decided that, 1) I don’t have that much to say of any importance, and 2) I am not giving anyone the ability to spam me whenever they want to. It’s one thing to be interested in someone, their career or even their opinion on things. But to be constantly on the ready for whatever they want to say, no thank you. I notice that most news sites now prefer that you sign up for their ‘alerts’. I much prefer the old way, of when I want to hear from you, I will turn on the television, or go to your website, not the other way around. It gives me a little bit more control in a world where soon I’m concerned we will have none.

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