Coming Attractions

Working on a few new posts, and this year I will try to focus more on social matters rather than political.
Stuff is a-comin', my friends.......

Tardy Wishings

Alright. So, quite obviously I am uber-late in saying Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. For the holiday, I had the idea for a post about the End of the World not coming in the way people think it would come, and I wanted to say something snappy about the Fiscal Cliff at the end of last year. Unfortunately, I didn't find it that interesting or see any mind-crunching issues in it.
Just the fact that people keep saying the two American political parties should put politics aside and address what's right and what's wrong. Of course, what's ironic about this request is that the very nature of war between the Liberals and Conservatives is difference in definitions of right things and wrong things.

At any rate, I do have some posts lined up. It's just a matter of getting them down, which I will do soon enough. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, from the Samurai.

A Perception of the Principle of Presidential Personality and Presence

Excuse the sprawling and generic nature of this post. This was just more about having something to say.

So…I write this in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which has left a significant portion of New York City damaged. There are huge flooded areas in Long Island City and downtown Manhattan. At least 100 houses have been damaged by fires in Breezy Point, Queens. There are power outages across the city, in some places purposely put in place by Con Edison, the reasoning for which I don’t fully understand just yet. 35 is the number of lives I remember reading that Sandy has claimed.

The vote for the President of the United States is on November 6^th (next Tuesday). I *think I* have faith in how Obama will politicize (it will definitely be politicized) this tragedy in a good way. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a stalwart conservative who has promoted Mitt Romney hardcore over the course of his campaign, has already semi-turned over a new leaf and praised Obama and the F.ederal E.mergency M.anagement A.ssistance for helping out with the disaster of Hurricane Sandy, especially in his hometown of New Jersey. Romney, however, has leapt back into his American Civil War state-of-mind and said that the individual American states should be in charge of doing preparation and clean-up for disasters that hit them.

However, I’m here to talk about a perception of the Presidential debates. Over the past 6 weeks, the United States has aired their ceremonial 4. The candidates sit on stage as a moderator, usually a T.V. host or journalist of some sort who does not have a sharply-defined political bias, asks them questions about important national and international issues.

After the first debate, the general public opinion is that Obama lost due to Romney’s aggressive lying and refusal to admit the truth about his views on taxing the middle class, where he’ll get the money to fill our deficit, and actually caring about healthcare for old people. The second one centered on the Vice Presidential debate, where Democrat Joe Biden laughed and smiled his way through Republican Paul Ryan’s corporate-bought, plastered-on smile and usual conservative lies on the facts. The third one was a return to Obama and Romney, who were asked questions by a group of undecided voters. Obama was trained to show courage, to say what he had to say, and to point out what kind of scumbag Romney is. The 4^th one was much quieter, with Obama civilly attacking Romney and Romney agreeing to all of Obama’s views, which his voter base hated.

But one thing began to occur to me as these debates happened and Lawrence O’Donnell, a T.V. host on the cable channel MSNBC had explained it best.

We watch these debates and make judgments about the Presidential candidates on them, but they are not the true depiction of how these guys will be as Commanders-In-Chief. These debates display them on stage, by themselves, trying to respond to relatively random questions with the best deliberate and clear answers they can give off the top of their heads, and debating with each other face-to-face to show the public the best image of themselves that they can. True, realistic governing is done in closed rooms, with other people around of varying opinions and fields talking to the President about how to act on certain issues. Governing is also shown in the records of the candidates’ responses to public problems in the past. It is not shown in debating with their opponents and constantly trying to sell themselves to the public.

I also have trouble with people, especially undecided voters, who judge the Presidential candidates based on their personalities. My boss told me that I should appreciate Romney because he’s a church-going man (Mormon) and a father who has given to various charities, amongst a list of other things I could give two shits about. Who fucking cares?

He is pro-Life, pro-private sector, an opponent of Obamacare, not a believer of bringing a definitive end to the Afghanistan War, and a believer that Russia is a “geopolitical” enemy….whatever that means. Of course, in the aspect of War, Obama has a bit of failure as well, having launched combat drones into India, Pakistan and other places that have claimed the lives of over 170 civilians, which include women and children. Additionally, this issue over putting a stop to American companies sending jobs to China has to be further delved into. Romney says he wants to stop it, but he used to (and probably still does) work with companies that have done just that.

Anyway, it is the political principles and social views of the candidates that determine if I vote for them. These are the things that will be governing us. Not the church-going, or their love for their family, or where there from or how they look. I mean, I guess one can say that those things will determine if a President is lying or not. But as I’ve mentioned, one can look into a candidate’s voting history when they were much further out of the spotlight for evidence of that. One can also say that President will act in the interests of his personal views, but that then makes them selfish and automatically invalid in my eyes. A good President acts in the interests and the general good of the nation.

My take is that people should sit down and ask themselves to identify and describe what things they believe will develop and further the nation (and the world, if your heart is big) to a brighter, freer and more educated status, and then see which President properly responds to those things in his ideas.

However, it’s a free, democratic country. People are free to vote for their candidates using whatever standards they like. People have both fully supported Obama as well as try to destroy his administration based on the fact that he’s black. But for this whole qualified-guy-in-the-White-House thing to work, it might help if you paid more attention to things that are relevant to the position at hand. 

A Rising Tide of Unrest

Ok, so today’s post is simply a rant on something I’ve been thinking about. Pardon the attempt to connect things that have nothing to do with each other whatsoever.

The Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting in August by a White Supremacist. 

The girl who tried to set her family on fire, also in August. 

The Empire State Building shooting, also in August. 

The Aurora, Colorado shooting at a movie theater showing “The Dark Knight Rises” in July.

The survivalist who hid in his self-built bunker after killing his own family in April. 

The little boy who tried to suicide bomb in embassy in Kabul. 

The 81-year-old man who is accused of killing an 82-year old cop in Kentucky in September.

The killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, as well as the riots in Syria and Australia due to the Anti-Muslim video spreading. 

I know there’s the general sense that politicizing these events unfairly cheapens them and objects them to political party spins to get people to vote for whomever. But political discourse cannot ignore them.

Despite the fact that all of these things happened for different, individual reasons in very, varying places, what strikes me is that they’ve happened unusually close together in time. 

I think it’s easy to associate these things with the economy not substantially doing any better, and therefore easy to blame Obama. It’s easy to somehow tie these things to the restlessness and anxiety of people not finding jobs and his so-called “not changing anything”. But if we’re to follow that thread, we’d have to begin asking why there is a lack of jobs, where can the jobs come from, how do we fund that, how much of this is he truly in control of, who is antagonizing him, etc. 

But I digress. 

The number of people on unemployment insurance, or “The Dole” as The Streets would call it, has gone down, but this could be because people have ran out of government assistance and given up on applying to jobs, losing the ability to support themselves as well as some sense of purpose in today’s world. Given that they are still human beings, with the desire to contribute or consume from the world around them and take care of themselves and no place to go and do either, a frustration begins to mount and recklessness colors their actions.

Even amongst the employed in many businesses, there’s a sense of dumbing down and aggressiveness. At my friend’s “office” job, everyone shouts everything across the office to everyone else, completely obliterating any kind of discretion or respect for personal business or opinions. When customers calls and they’re angry because of some sort of disservice or faulty product that’s been sold to them, their call is inconsiderably passed off to other employees, who probably in turn pass it to someone else. The employees there decide for themselves what they do and don’t feel like doing, despite the fact that this attitude is what’s pissed the customer off in the first place. Management does virtually nothing about this. As a matter of fact, I think there’s one managerial person that supports it a bit. Additionally, more than half of that office is made up of people with jail records or people without degrees, and if any given 2 people are not sleeping together, they’re fighting, either with raised voices or fists.

It’s almost seems as if, as bodies age and opportunities shrink, brains regress, and people began to act out in rage all over the place. And it continues to become worse and worse as the richer get richer and the poor get poorer. Perhaps the apocalypse is indeed on the horizon, although I haven’t seen any 7-headed dragons or the Lamb Christ in the sky with 7 seals……yet.

This greedy, capitalistic economic divide is going to continue to turn us into money-starved monsters, all stepping on each other’s heads in order to either keep our jobs or over the mentioning of a job opening. This is what happens when you put the majority of the country’s wealth and power into hands of a small few, especially when that few are business-owners in the private sector, where they have the ability to fire people for anything they want and pay people anything they want without regulation or policy that supports the workers. Plenty of money will come in, but only a miniscule piece of it will reach the people who deal with clients and do most of the work to keep the place afloat. And when workers complain that the labor most certainly does not match the pay, they are simply replaced with someone else much more desperate. And when the people become fed up with having to completely object themselves for a private business or corporate profit and not having any other options but still being hit with gas and electric bills and no way to feed their children or pay rent, naturally they began to entertain some sort of outlet, wrong or right, to strike back at all this.

We need to calm the fuck down. 

Help each other, now more than ever. 

The anger of these violent crimes is, if not directly representative, then symbolic of the growing unrest. But a strong nationwide community can give these people (even the boy in Kabul) something to rest on when circumstances in a particular individual’s life are terrible at any given time.

Additionally, a strong community will show these greedy business people that we don’t need them. They need us. As I’ve said in a previous post, we need to pass each other opportunities and information about jobs. Obama needs to continue putting an unwavering foot down on keeping unemployment funded, especially if the government agrees with letting private businesses be a strong portion of the economy. There should be places where communities can pool resources together and people can take what they need (with everyone being accountable so that it is clear that they need to take from the resources). Everybody has families and bills and the like to take care of. Rally against an empowered private sector that has the freedom to suck up the economy and leave droplets of paychecks for their workers.

This, of course, does not even begin to be a new idea, but it also is not yet a reality. I have no idea what the nature of those communities-within-a-nationwide-community should be. I suppose it’s different for every culture and geographic location. I just know that today’s focus should not be how to get ahead for yourself, but how everyone can get ahead for each other.

Chick-Fil-A: Rights and Choices

Alas, business crashes with culture once more! I know I'm late on this subject......but f&*k you.

A particular issue concerning an American business has come up that presented an interesting mixup of people’s rights and choices, both of which end up indicating that even the simplest decisions in your life are inescapably political. Nifty bit of an addition to your perspective.

The business (and issue) in question is Chick-Fil-A, a more-than-50-year-old American fast food chain founded by Samuel Truett Cathy, a Southern Baptist World War II veteran who found out how to fry chicken as fast as McDonald’s fries their hamburgers.

He started his business serving turbo-fried chicken next door to a Ford plant, the workers of which he served all the time. As his success grew, so did his family, starting in 1953 with Dan Cathy and then with two other children who aren’t important. Dan took over running the business in 2001, and Chick-Fil-A continued to offer variations of chicken platters and breakfasts at moderately low prices. Stores have opened up in a bunch of new places. And now Dan’s 2 sons, Andrew and Ross, work at Chick-Fil-A as well. It’s a family-owned business, whose policy is that they treat every person, regardless of gender, religion, age, race or sexual orientation, equally. Yes, sexual orientation……which is interesting because, while they’ve written into the employee handbook that they give a solid smile and “thank you for buying at Chick-Fil-A” to their gay customers, they’ve been funding political groups that work to end homosexuality with the profits from their Chicken Biscuits.

As far back as January 2011, during the battle for Proposition 9 in California, it’s come out that Chick-Fil-A has been giving money to WinShape Foundation, a charitable organization made by S. Truett Cathy and run by his family…which is ok. However, WinShape has been giving millions to political organizations like Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and even the Eagle Forum, who is working on having gays be legally considered criminals.

Why? This is Dan Cathy’s frame of thinking:

“There's some essential, emotional DNA that God intended for us to get from a Mother and a Dad, that were [observed/served(?)] over life as children, it's implicit in growing up, that we can only get from our Dad, we can only get from our Mother and we're to get it in a whole, dynamic environment where they're interrelating together to build the stability and the self-esteem that God wants us to have to get through our teenage years. Now when we don't have one side or the other, you know, I just have to tell ya, I think we're, you, we're just emotionally handicapped. It doesn't mean we can't survive and have a happy life but it means that we, we're gonna have, you know, some odds stacked against us. And hopefully there could be somebody that intervenes, to help make that up for us.”

After this, he says a few sentences about how he wants to play the parent of his employees, and them not being from a household with a mother and father makes this difficult for him. And then he said the quote most famously floated around the internets in pertinence to this controversy:

"I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,' and I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to try to redefine what marriage is about,"

Alright…..

So, then…this is a fight against gay parents who will end up raising “emotionally handicapped” children that will be hard to hire at Chick-Fil-A due to the difficulty for Truett to be their make-pretend parent, although he holds out the hope that someone intervenes in this hypothetical child’s non-whole, non-dynamic environment.

Very good, Mr. Truett, very good.

Now, while I’ll agree that his beliefs are older than World War I and the LGBT community’s struggle is made this much harder by Chick-Fil-A supporting a bunch of narrow-minded social tyrants, the company and the founders are not without their rights to do these things. Which means that Chick-Fil-A is not the battleground for this issue. Others didn’t seem to think so, though.

Since this revelation of personal belief, both enormous support for and rebellion against the store has swollen up amongst ranks of all kinds, both of which I found to be kind of lopsided and stupid.

Starting from January of 2011, various colleges such as Indiana University and Northeastern University, and have signed petitions and submitted them to the Student Government saying that they did not want a Chick-Fil-A store on their campus. Now, this, I am completely ok with. The resistance was brought about democratically by the people who are paying to get an education and spend serious studying time at those institutions. Their money IS that school, so I think they can have a say as to whether Chick-Fil-A is setup there or not. However…..

In support, former governor of Arkansas and conservative politician Mike Huckabee began to build the concept of a Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day movement, and on August 1st, 2012, tons of people showed up at various locations of the chain and bought up a bunch of fried chicken. People in line at the drive-thrus would buy food for the people behind them. People were eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All on account of Mike fucking Huckabee. I think someone should look into Huckabee’s bank accounts. He had to be promised some sort of payoff for inspiring people to buy up chicken by the mass amount from a man who is already the 799th richest person in world (799 is a large number, but keep in mind, that’s out of 7,000,000,000 people on this planet). It’s clearly evident by the anti-gay donations that financial support was never S. Truett or Dan Cathy’s problem, yet the conservative logic was to a give a spectacularly rich person even more money for expressing his opinion.

In rebellion, the gay community has setup August 3rd as a day to show up to Chick-Fil-A locations and have a “kiss off” in front of the chains. But this is just them forcing their beliefs on the store, and that is not the kind of image that the gay community needs right now.

Three different mayors, which includes Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former White House Chief of Staff to Obama, have all announced that they will block any attempt by Chick-Fil-A to open their business in the mayors’ respective states, as Chick-Fil-A’s values do not reflect the values of those cities. I can definitely understand the drive to do that, but they cannot block a store’s receipt of a business permit because they do not agree with the store owner’s personal beliefs.

It was also reported that The Jim Henson Company, who are responsible for “The Muppets”, had a business partnership with Chick-Fil-A but then bowed out and donated money to G.L.A.A.D., an organization for the gay community. They were free to do this and I applaud them for it.

In response to the Mayors’ statements, The ACLU is pro-actively going to bat for Chick-Fil-A, because their thought is that if a government can stop a business from opening because of their anti-gay statements, they then have grounds to stop a business from running because of their pro-gay statements. I can understand this…but…I don’t know. Seeing the headlines “ACLU supports Chick-Fil-A’s right” doesn’t show me the indignation for the anti-gay funding, and it in turns makes me not want to be associated with what they’re about. Besides, I’m absolutely positive Chick-Fil-A doesn’t require the ACLU’s help.

A New York Times Article said: For many, it comes down to this: Eating at Chick-fil-A supports heterosexual marriage and religious freedom. Refusing to eat there supports same-sex marriage and equality. I find the rhetoric of the dilemma to actually be somewhat the opposite.

Eating there supports anti-gay legislation and bigotry. Refusing to eat there means you can just get a chicken sandwich somewhere else. This is simply about choice, not Chick-Fil-A’s rights or gay rights.

I could see if they were actively pursuing to ruin the daily lives of the LGBT community on the local level, throwing chicken sandwiches at customers and allowing employees to piss in the soda cups or something. Immediate action would then have to be taken. But they did say that, regardless of a person’s preferences or history, they treat every customer with respect.

I don’t think this is the sort of thing that deserves protest…..on either side. I don’t think gays going to Chick-Fil-As to make out is a good idea, and at the same time, conservative Christians families showing up to eat Cathy’s pressure-fryer cooked chicken sandwiches (especially on the advice of Mike dumb-ass Huckabee) is just stupidity beyond regular stupid.

Energy and work should be put towards ensuring that gays can marry just like everyone else, and that is fought for at the local and national political courts, where the organizations supported by Chick-Fil-A show up.

Some restaurant chain owned by an 8,000 year-old man with a family that has social ideas older than the first dinosaur isn’t the battlefield for this. Gays and gay-community supporters should ensure that they don’t eat there anymore (I personally think no one should, but whatever). I’m sure there are plenty of restaurants that will provide you with delicious chicken sandwiches without the anti-gay consequences.