Free Market

The 'free' market has been an environment where some very good ideas have taken root and come to fruition. No matter where one is in the world — no matter what the system of trade and government — micro-economies with their own, organically-derived rules always find ways of not only surfacing, but undermining what infrastructure is currently there. It is essential that our system of trade is regulated in response to how it actually works, as opposed to unquestioning deregulation in the name of freedom.

Modern Conservatives* would have the world believe that the free market can only stay free when there are as few rules as possible. For many reasons, this is untrue.

Free in what way? Free to do what? Does a free market mean a market without rules? Can everyone be free if there are no guidelines?

In many people's minds, the idea of free market is much more accurately described as a market in which small ideas can become big, individuals become successful, and new organizations are given the opportunity to grow and become self-sustaining. This has also been referred to as the American Dream, which has a definition that is subject to entropy.

In order to have a world full of good ideas, and strong follow-through, it is clear that there must be rules. Opportunities must be provided and protected, merit must be understood, and merit must be broadcast. Without strict guides for this process, merit becomes secondary to a kind of miscommunication that stunts the progress of modern technology, blocks cultural development, and rewards those responsible with immense wealth and power.

It's been said that rules are limitations; but with certain decisions already made, doesn't that allow us more time and resources to focus on the details that matter?

*What on earth are they conserving? What a silly name.

Creation Myth

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, oddly, there was something. It was a bit hectic, and then there was a period of rearranging.

This was a long and laborious process, but it worked out so that not everything was shooting around everywhere and exploding all the time.

Suddenly, there were a bunch of really tiny things that might have looked like they had the intent to recreate themselves as much as possible. They might have been alive, or not.

Then they were alive. This was primarily because a bunch of them had got together and formed a group, which was quite a bit better at reproducing itself than just a single one.

The groups grew very rapidly in numbers, and eventually they all forgot they were groups and thought of themselves as individuals. This was useful for reference, but kind of muddied everyone's autonomy.

These individuals were happy for a while, but then there came a plague: The individuals were competing, cooperating, and eating each other! Many of the individuals realized that the only way they were going to survive, was by banding together into communities.

For a while, the communities were good. Eventually, though, there were a lot of communities, and the communities began to think of themselves as individuals. This was awkward to describe.

These new kinds of individual things eventually learned to move in packs, bands, murders, schools, and all sorts of other mobile institutions. There got to be so many of these, that they, too, began to think of themselves as individuals.

These newer, even larger kinds of individuals competed, as well; pretty much similarly (except in scale) to their hierarchical predecessors.

Some of them wondered if they were supposed to be part of something even larger, but didn't really speculate very far into the matter. Many began to realize that no matter how big their communities got, they would still be very small, relative to the rest of everything else.

Some of them wondered if the whole thing even mattered, because really, who was watching? Some speculated that someone very large or far-away was watching, but no one had any proof.

Links:

• Information about Douglas Adams, the writer I'm basically (stylistically, poorly) ripping off with this post.
• The Unitarian/Universalist Church, from which I get many of my views about religion.

Bringing Kid(s?) Into the Picture

My partner is pregnant, and I find it to be terrifying. Not the her being pregnant part, but the me having to look out for someone who doesn't know how to look out for themselves part (the baby, not the pregnant woman, jeez!).

I know our baby is going to be beautiful, and wonderful, I'm not worried about that, because I feel like we are wonderful. Kids tend to turn out like their parents, unless there's some serious resistance, and I'm just guessing, that since my partner and I are pretty nice and all, the resistance won't be there. I just don't want our baby to live in poverty for the early years of her life.

I guess this requires some back story, but where should I start? I guess by saying that I don't have a job. I don't have a job. That sucked to say. I don't want to say that ever again. I guess I kind of have a job, but it's freelance, and it doesn't pay all that well. Honestly, I wouldn't mind being poor if it meant that we could still eat.

The missus and I tend to drop some serious dough at the grocery store every week, and since I lost my full time job (through no fault of my own, damn it) we've had to cut back on our spending. It's not that I'm pompous (actually, maybe it is), it's just that information is often as much a curse as it is a power. My information has told me a few inconvenient things about food, politics, and the capitalist system. I guess I'll make a bullet list of them, because there are a few:

• Every time money is spent in the capitalist world, a vote has been cast toward the production practices of the individual or group who is providing the goods or services. That's right, every single item in your home that was made in China is a vote that you willingly made to support a country that abuses its workers without a flinch. How many items do you own that weren't fabricated in China?
  
  
• Foods that aren't organic are poisonous. Life would be so much easier if this weren't true, but it is. Genetic engineering would be a good thing, if it were being used for the right reasons. It's not, currently. It's being used to produce crops that generate their own pesticides. Do we really want to be eating that? The answer is no, and there's plenty of evidence to back it up.
  
  
• Factory farmed meat is not only unhealthy to eat, but it's immoral for it to be produced. Honestly, even if you ignore the facts about health issues, do you really think it's a good idea to be eating misery?
  
  
  
• Corporations with lobbying power in this country are influencing our educational institutions and our eating habits. These corporations tend to produce grains the cheapest, which is why grains currently are at the base of the food pyramid. Food stamps, for example, can only be used for the purchase of certain foods. Most of these foods are made from white flour. I could probably go on a rant about how feeding the poor bad food keeps them poor, but I think I'll save that for another day.
  
  
• It's better for the planet to buy local in just about every way I can imagine.
  

These and a myriad of other reasons keep our wallets empty, and our pantry not totally full. I don't want to raise my child perpetually hungry, and so I've been working to the bone to get another job. One that pays. Until then, we'll just have to tiptoe through the land of sparse funds and hope for the luck to be on our side.

Links:

• The Weston A. Price Foundation, a good resource for people who are interested in food politics, and learning some of the problems with the modern medical system.
• A little bit about factory farms, and why they're maybe not so great.

Top 10 Ways to Quickly Tell That a Blog Post Sucks

In no particular order:

1. There are more ads visible than actual content.
   
   This, to me, is usually a tip off that not only is this article probably %100 recycled content, but it's also created for the purpose of profits and not education or a genuine interest in writing.
   
   
2. There are pictures of over-sexualized women everywhere, and not just in the ads.
   
   This usually indicates that the organization providing the hosting for this particular content is sexist, and therefore failing miserably to make it out of the 20th century. Too bad for them! They're going to die feeling very isolated and alien.
   
   
3. The blog is in a 'Top (NUMBER) Subject Here' format. No wait, that's a good blog post, right?
   
   This type of blogging is a cheap method for shitting out words. A monkey could do this.
   
   
4. The title of the entry is an opinion that is plainly bigoted.
   
   It seems fairly obvious, but sometimes I get sucked into these posts. It's usually about halfway through them that I realize that I've been sucked into a pit of dispair, and that I have to try to escape.
   
   
5. The blog is written by a white male, and the subject has to do with 'girls'.
   
   Isolated, swimming in privilege, and now with a side of rape-apologist ranting! You won't get anything good out of this, move on to better things. Don't fall for it! Don't leave an argumentative comment! Let the poor bastard stew in his own juices.
   
   
6. The entry is some sort of scientific thing, but there are no sources cited.
   
   It's easy to check. Just scroll to the bottom, and see if there is any sort of reference list. There often isn't, in which case you're reading derivative trash anyways.
   
   
7. The entry cites a single scientific study, and makes a bold, definitive statement about it.
   
   This usually ties back to the bigoted title one. 'Studies show that women actually belong in the kitchen!' is the sort of thing I'm talking about.
   
   
8. The blog post is clearly just a bunch of art not created by the blog author, which has been popular on the internet now for some time.
   
   You know what? Let the artist's site get those hits you asshole! They don't have ad words on their site because they look good! You need to let artists soak money from their own fame. Don't waste your time on a blog post with an artist's work, but NOT BY THE ARTIST.
   
   
9. The blog post is about someone famous, but there is clearly very little actual interview material, and also very little about what they do.
   
   The popular format for transcribing an interview is pretty easy to spot. If the author dawdles for three or more paragraphs about what kind of beer a famous person drinks, or what color their living room is, you're probably wasting precious moments of your life reading the article.
   
   
10. The title has serious grammatical problems.
    
    I had to put this in here for two reasons. Now, here are the top two reasons why I had to put this in here!
    
    1. Sometimes I get sucked into articles with bad grammar in the title because I am naive, and I wonder if the writer is a true artist, pioneering a new way to write. Or: I consider the possibility that I was doing it wrong all this time, and here is this person who is rescuing me from MY bad grammar. These are never the case. Bad grammar in the title just means shitty writing all around.
    
    2. I needed a tenth item in my top ten list! I can' just create a top 9, now can I? Huh?
    

Links:

• 7 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Help a Girl Move - Don't read this, unless you like to get really mad. This kind of sexist crap is what makes modern society so ugly at t8imes.

Hurry Up & Get a Job! No, Wait! Work on Your Portfolio and Resume Until They Are Perfect!

The internet is always full of advice. In fact, it's full of -all- of the advice. Evar. Any advice that could possibly be given is available on the internet. This makes the internet kind of useless if you don't already have some sort of idealogical predisposition in a given venue.

I'm an artist, and I've just lost my job, through no fault of my own. Currently I'm torn between attempting to get a job as fast as possible, and patiently sitting down and working on my portfolio. Both seem like a good idea. Both seem like a good idea right now. They are, however, mutually exclusive. If I apply for a job that I want right now, while my portfolio isn't as good as I'd like it, I will have been on the ball for a moment, but it's less likely that I will actually get the job. If I wait, myself and my partner become more broke. We already, after only a week of my unemployment, are pretty hard up.

What to do, then? Go broke quickly while trying to do right? Or just sh*t out applications until some employer is gullible enough to think my current portfolio is good. Do I really want to work at a place that likes my portfolio in its current state?

Back to the internet being a collection of all advice ever. I looked this up, to see what bloggers and various other content publishers are saying about this dilemma. They say that I should do one or the other, but they say both. Wait for the perfect job, and settle for the next job you get. F**k you, the internet. You're not actually useful after all.

We already knew that, though, didn't we? I mean, the primary revenue for online companies at the very beginning was pornography which, let's be honest, is just a massive documentation of the oppression of women. What has it moved on to? People in the current up-and-coming generation (the 21 to 24 year olds) think that the internet is better than a library. Have they been fooled?

Yes. Yes they have. Seriously, you can't just take a bunch of sensationalized magazine-style articles, covered with advertisements and stuffed with rhetoric, and assume that they're as good as a book. The internet has positive elements in it, but seriously, to assume that print media will disappear? If the only source of information we had was the internet, we'd be in trouble.

Where was I? Oh, right, I'm talking about not having a job, or something.

Also, you can tell the internet isn't the be-all end-all, by the number of rape jokes splattered everywhere.

I can't get a job, because I seek advice from a magazine ad-covered collection of rape jokes.

I Don't Wear Shoes

It's true. I don't. That's not totally true. I wear shoes when I have been openly chastised by people who have some kind of power over me. That's annoying.

I stopped wearing shoes for a number of reasons, the initiating one being that my partner discovered several online writings, statistics, and data speaking to the validity of it. She spent some time telling me that I should go barefoot, and I responded by thinking she was totally bonkers.

The idea rolled around in my head while I watched my partner try to live in the world without shoes. Eventually, some sort of temptation manifested, and I found myself wanting to go a month without shoes. Then I did it. It was easy. I went to work barefoot, I drove barefoot, and I went to the grocery store barefoot. It was a good month.

For most of my life before going barefoot, I suffered from pain in my knees, pain in my hips, and foot fungus. The sudden escape from these problems was mind-blowingly immediate. I was able to run and jog for long distances without any pain. My foot fungus was pretty bad, but it cleared up almost entirely when the shoes came off and my feet were able to see sunlight again. A little diligence with a home remedy and some over the counter medication, and I was free of the foot fungus which had plagued me for my entire life before.

Then came the social backlash. When it was just a unique new thing that I was trying, people were charmed; but as time passed, resentment bubbled up towards my lack of shod feet. I was told at the grocery store that it was illegal to be there without shoes (which it is not). There are web sites devoted to archiving letters from the department of health for each state simply saying that it's not illegal to be barefoot in public.

The bus driver no longer wanted my happy, healthy feet to be exposed on the bus, and told me that I couldn't ride without shoes. Apparently, the bus driver (when I say the bus driver, I am referring to a number of bus drivers with whom I have dealt) was concerned that the bus would somehow be more dangerous for my feet than the concrete sidewalks and streets, and littered apartment complexes I had traversed to get to the bus stop. I am certain that there are no official rules on the bus requiring footwear, but I learned to carry moccasins or flip flops in my purse with me whenever I was about to get on the bus. It is far easier to wear sandals for the thirty seconds it takes to get on the bus than to attempt to win an argument.

The point I'm attempting to make with this long, blurry recollection is that shoes are stupid, Victorian-era hangovers that no one should wear. They cause the deterioration of bone an muscle in the body, they stunt the development of small children, and they fuck up balance. They also screw up one's ability to regulate their body temperature. I used to have consistently cold hands, but now my whole body is well-heated, even when I go outside and stand on ice with my little bare foots!

After my first month going barefoot, we took a vacation to Chicago. I brought sandals, as I was concerned with the amount of litter and general grunge that city brandishes. I walked at least six miles in that city barefoot through lots and lots of broken glass, and my feet were fine. My partner helped me pull a single, tiny piece of glass from my foot one of the nights we were there, but it was far from damaging to my foot, and the next day was spent walking through the city without a problem.

I'm sure there are more things to be said about wearing shoes, like the implications that it can negatively affect brain development, or that it can cause accelerated deterioration of bones and muscles (how many people over 40 do you know with bad hips?), or a million other things. It is a discussion I will have to entertain another day, because this post is just too long already.

Links:

• Society for Barefoot Living
• Bound feet of Chinese Women (an appalling combination of female oppression and shoes)
  

Dear Diary, Today I will Write Some Slightly Interesting Rhetoric...

Life spends its time doing whatever the fuck it wants, and I struggle just to keep up. Every day seems to peel past, leaving a little more of the banana that is life exposed to the stronger forces of entropy. I can clearly recall feeling a sense of purpose to time at an earlier age. Everything felt like it had a purpose until I was booted out of the business end of the safe, developmental institution-train that so many in my generation ride.

Institutionalization in general seems to have been washed away from my surfaces very quickly, some of this erosion starting just before the end of college. Presumably, this quick descent was easy for me, as I have always felt fairly 'outside' of the human race. Indoctrination doesn't take unless you're somewhat normal. My wide range of developmental problems and unique political upbringing have insulated me from normal quite well for quite some time. Not that I haven't tried very hard to fit in at times.

I used to like the internet; it was appealing to me because my body was (and continues to be, in some ways) defective. I've come to realize that the internet is actually just a stinky pit of half-true rhetoric, just like television, and its friends radio, magazines, and newspapers. The voice of the ruling class is dominant in all modern media, perhaps going back into history as well.

Back to the disturbing feeling resultant from breaking the surface tension of institutionalization. Modern pop memes claim so very often to embrace individuality, but they do not. Without fail, the main character in any given show (save very few that are likely to get canceled, or have already been canceled by Fox) is a white, competent male, to whom we are expected to relate without question. This character is often surrounded by unique and quirky characters, who are actually just stereotypes standing around, eating watermelon, and practicing martial arts. I think we, as a screen-parented society, are trained to embrace the individuality of white men. Individuality in others is treated with incredulity- what gives them the right?.

Even within the context of being a white male whose individuality is embraced, though, I've found that breaking out of the herd is rather easy... and not well-received. All you have to do is stop using a product that is a) very profitable, b) heavily marketed, and c) very popular. Perhaps this is what can be the primary focus of this blog over time. More likely, though, this will be a place where I can anonymously post random and disparate thoughts.

Links:

• The New Media Monopoly
• Democratic Schools, the Unstitutions
• Unschooling