The State of Our Union (Sadly)
A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”
Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves…”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my Dog.
Michael Jackson’s final days…
His staff said he was worried about the London concerts. “He wasn’t eating, he wasn’t sleeping and, when he did sleep, he had nightmares that he was going to be murdered,” one of them told Halperin. “He was deeply worried that he was going to disappoint his fans. He even said something that made me briefly think he was suicidal. He said he thought he’d die before doing the London concerts. He said he was worried that he was going to end up like Elvis. He was always comparing himself to Elvis, but there was something in his tone that made me think that he wanted to die, he was tired of life. He gave up. His voice and dance moves weren’t there any more. I think maybe he wanted to die rather than embarrass himself on stage.
I never was a fan on Michael Jackson and his behavior over the past decade and a half always struck me as bizarre on a good day. Clearly this man is the ultimate example of human tragedy. Despite all of the talent and fame he possessed and the lucrative trappings thereof, he died basically alone.
Jackson was lost. Utterly and despondently lost. His final days, if the above is any indication, were filled with dread, terror, and overwhelming despair.
Meanwhile, Joseph Jackson is worried about lawyers right now. Not his son who spent his life miserable despite being arguably one of the most talented to ever enter the lights and glitz of Hollywood.
Interviewer: “How’s the family holding up?”
Jackson: “Great. The family’s doing pretty good.”
Say what? Who in their right mind could give such an answer? This man has lost his son and there is no expression of grief? Fathers aren’t supposed to bury their sons. No father who had genuine affection for their son could say this.
Michael Jackson was the comeback that never was. Despite all of his reported fears of becoming like Elvis, he did nothing to prevent it from happening. All that is left is a sense of what could have been, not only for Elvis and Michael Jackson, but everyone who ended up down the same road.
Our Quality of Life
Recently I had an exchange via Facebook with a friend of mine as a result of a politically-related Wall posting he did not particularly care for. One thing about the exchange that struck me the most was his perception that the quality of life in the United States is poor.
I take issue with this at a variety of levels.
A lot of people are concerned with the economy and the health care “crisis.” There are problems in both areas, but the scope of those problems and the solutions to them seem to be lost on certain people.
Let’s put the current situation in perspective.
Every morning, every American without exception wakes up to a country that is secure from both foreign invasion as well as domestic insurrection. We have had a stable, predictable government from the origination of this country with the Civil War as the sole example of a time when our political system was threatened with upheaval.
This is largely due to the highly trained, dedicated military professionals who have volunteered to protect the American nation from attack. This is the same military that small-minded individuals thinking themselves to be progressive and more enlightened than the rest of us decry as a waste of money and or immoral. From this we see it is easy for people who have never lived in slavery to Communism, despotism, fascism of the Islamic variety, or any other autocratic state of bondage to deprecate the men and women of honor who are charged with our protection. It’s a pity these individuals cannot spend a few weeks in a state such as North Korea so they might be able to effectively re-evaluate the worth of our armed forces.
Every American has a convenient source of clean drinking water nearby. Most African villages on the other hand have to share a single dirty well with several other dusty villages like it. When we go to the grocery store, we can choose between a dozen brands of frozen pizza, an equal number cuts of beef, and an entire aisle of potato chips and pretzels. In North Korea people eat things that would make Andrew Zimmern vomit. Their choices consist primarily between whether they are having canine or feline with their tree bark.
We have an unemployment rate of approximately 9.4 percent. This is certainly elevated and indicative of problems with our economy in its current state. It is also indicative of the fact that NINE OUT OF TEN Americans still have their jobs. While there has been a swell of foreclosures, most people have friends, family, and acquaintances to give them shelter. For most who lost their homes, they either had no business buying that 6 bedroom 4 bath home “near the country club” or they thought getting an ARM that would graduate to an interest rate that would make a buy-here-pay-here car salesman blush was a good idea.
A lot of people want to blame the banks. Others want to blame the government. I suppose there is some justice there. Banks should always be in the business of risk mitigation. That means when the guy who makes $8 an hour wants to buy a $300,000 home on the lake, they should suggest he look into double wides instead. Of course when the government orders a bank to consider welfare payments as qualifying income and that they have to let poor people buy stuff from them they don’t have any business thinking about purchasing to begin with, their hands are largely tied.
The truth is that there is a single class of people who got us into this mess. The whiners. Fifty years ago, most people spent more time actually working than whining. If they wanted something like a house or a car, they scrimped and saved to actually buy it. Seventy-five years ago, it was considered foolish to actually purchase anything with credit. You didn’t whip out the plastic to buy what you could not afford. If Papaw John wanted a black and white TV with rabbit ears, he didn’t ask about the 90 days same as cash option. He went to the bank and if he had the money saved up for it, he bought it.
Unfortunately, people became attached to the idea that if they wanted something, that 1) they must have it now, 2) they were entitled to it by God, and 3) paying $2000 for a $1000 PC was a morally and financially justifiable, even when though the fact that it would fetch $25 at a yard sale by the time it was paid off was obvious to everyone. (And screw the kids, they can go another six months without new shoes)
Yes, it was the whiners and complainers that brought much of the vast array of misfortune on this country. They didn’t do it overnight. It took a few decades. The wound festered and wept for some time before it finally burst open in a stench that, to borrow a popular Obamaism, “ran from Wall Street to Main Street.”
As a society, we became tolerant of selfishness, the need for instant gratification, and acute discontentment with what one possesses that is indicative of the typical American consumers. Then these individuals went on to have children. They then instilled these twisted values into their children. Two to three full generations later, we see the end result.
“I have a Masters Degree in so-and-so!” says one. “I won’t scrub toilets to make ends meet until I can find a job that pays me exactly what I want to go on supposing myself to be the social and intellectual superior of other people.”
Seventy years ago, yes you would. Or you wouldn’t eat. The American taxpayer wasn’t bound with the same obligations to carry your sorry rear. You weren’t any more entitled to sit around, an able-bodied individual with sound mind, and collect benefits funded from the pockets of the American people. If you weren’t disabled from working in every capacity, society looked at you as a bum. It didn’t matter if you had a degree from MIT.
Unfortunately, people began whining. These people were allowed to retain their right to vote. They elected individuals who promised to do their bidding, no matter how much it infringed the Constitution, common sense, or morality. Some of these more famous individuals went by the names of Roosevelt and LBJ.
But with whiners, there is no satisfying them, no matter what you do. There is always a demand for more. In 1950, the government was bankrolling people’s retirements. A decade later, they were fighting the war on poverty. In the 1970s and 1980’s, dairy farmers were being paid to pour their milk down the drain. It’s 2009. Now we are paying benefits to people who don’t even live in our country legally or speak our language. Let’s just start paying people death benefits for the death of their pets. It makes just as much sense.
“Oh but we have to,” you say. “It’s the right thing to do.”
No it’s not. You are either an idiot, a liar, or have been drinking the Kool-Aid. Both natural law and the major faiths in this world state that taking something that belongs to someone else either without consent or through duress is theft. It doesn’t matter if you are giving it to someone else for some perceived benefit. Would you kick your dog so you could give his bone to a stray?
It’s never right to give to someone who is under the mistaken impression they are entitled to it. You might as well give a drunk a case of beer or an addict a suitcase of crack cocaine. You merely feed the addiction and more than likely allow for the creation of more addicts.
Our quality of life is not perfect by any means. We grow old. We get sick. We feel pain. Sometimes our car blows up. That’s what happens in life. Bad things. Stop whining and do something about it. Get a job. Get a second one. Sell the house that you can’t make payments on. Take better care of yourself by getting at least eight hours of sleep and following the food pyramid. Do something other than whining.
Arm chair politics, backseat economics, and social gospel-inspired theology do not put food on the dinner table. So shut-up about the “quality of life” you think is so bad. You and your attempts at getting more out of life than you are entitled to are the ones making it that way.
Installing PC-BSD 7.1
Most people who know me are aware of my experience with using Linux and my advocacy of LAMP, especially in the K-12 educational organization I work for. The Debian-powered LAMP server that our IT department site runs on has operated relatively trouble free since its inception in March. (The current hardware that LAMP is deployed on is a repurposed Dell Optiplex GX270 desktop with a Pentium4 and upgraded to 1GB of RAM.)
While I have staunchly advocated for the adoption of Linux, there are a number of features in BSD that I find myself having a growing appreciation for. (I am particularly fascinated by the concept of BSD jails.)
Last December I began my flirtations with BSD by installing FreeBSD. I would urge anyone wanting to get casually acquainted with BSD not to go down this particular avenue. FreeBSD’s text installer gives you a myriad of options that do not facilitate the type of installation that one is accustomed to with say Ubuntu. The FreeBSD installer essentially demands that the person installing it have an impetus other than a desire to test-drive the operating system.
On the other hand, PC-BSD has a very intuitive graphical installer that gives you really only two options: Desktop or Server. There are about a dozen other applications such as OpenOffice, Pidgin, and VLC that you can specifically select as well. Besides these two choices, PC-BSD doesn’t get too meticulous. Unlike FreeBSD, PC-BSD’s installer automatically installs and configures a graphical desktop (KDE4). (FreeBSD requires the user to manually select GNOME for installation and subsequently edit the /etc/rc.conf file post-installation.
This week I took the opportunity to install PC-BSD 7.1 inside a virtual machine (VirtualBox) on my Intel Core 2 Quad workstation. I’m evaluating BSD as a possible upgrade path for the IT Department LAMP server as well as other possible future applications.
Working in the educational sector, its great to have a variety of free and open source technologies such as Linux, BSD, and Apache at our disposal.