Taboo Plaza

We begin with what they tell us.  It can be no other way.  We have unending questions, when we begin.  And so we begin with our questions.  Our questions reveal us to them.  We begin taking them into us with our questions. 

And so they proceed to answer our questions in what manner suits them.

They may answer our questions for fear of seeming ignorant.  We may break them down when we begin with our questions.  Our questions are nonsensical when we begin asking.  We have nothing to go on when we begin asking.  We simply have our questions because we are an issue for ourself.  And when they answer our questions, we take what they tell us and use it to formulate new questions.

Their answers are our first understanding of the world.  Their answers create the 'what' that is significant to us.  With their answers, the 'what' of our questions take on meaning.  But first we begin with groundless questions.  Their answers give us ground to create answers of our own. 

They ground us with their answers.  Their answers box us in.  We are narrowed by their response.  Without their response to our questions, we have nothing but clearing.  A clearing so open it is unintelligible without them to ground us in their answers.

We must ask the questions because we desire.  We desire an answer so we can know what we desire.  Without their answers, we are not sure for what we care.  They give us the answers that ground us in our care.  They provide us a frame through which we begin to see our own potential.  Our potential for being what we are not today is our issue with ourself.  Our potential is what we desire before we realize there is such a desire.

When we begin we question the limitations of where we've began.  Those questions come in the form of why.  Why can I not do what you do?  They usually have an answer when we begin questioning.  We learn too late, they only tried to have an answer for every question when we began.

'Why' questions are the toughest to answer.  Why questions move beyond our potential in many cases.  It seems we can never be in a place where all why questions become answerable.  We don't have that kind of potential. 

Sometimes the answers are not answers at all when we begin.  Some answers are: simply stop asking the question.  The question can take us no further and I don't have the heart to lie to you. 

How many times did they lie when you began?

They give us ground by answering the questions we have when we begin though.  The rest of our life is spent testing their answers.  And, every now and again, you will have a moment in which you figure it out.  They were fallible.  They didn't have supreme powers. 

They lied.

It's not their fault you had all the questions you asked when you began.  Because you desired to exercise your potential they were forced to answer questions.  They had questions when they began.  They found their answers ready to hand the same as you.  Maybe they find it again later.  And, here you come with your questions.  Just because you're beginning, they must test their answers before they know.

As if we may ever know.

Current Affairs

Wrapped up in presidential election politics, the media's underwhelming response to AIG's hellish handout from the U.S. Fed is nothing but predictable. 

Former privately-owned insurer, American International Group was granted another loan from the U.S. Fed in the area of 40 billion dollars on top of the original 85 billion dollar loan that marked the United States government's latest journey into Socialism.  80 percent of AIG is now owned by the U.S. government.  Through three different loan programs, AIG is able to pay off its bills to the U.S. Fed with other loans from the U.S. Fed.

This is seemingly done quite openly with nobody questioning the irrationality of keeping a company going simply by loaning it more money.  AIG has been hit very hard by the collapse of the stock market because the company had always been based on paper.  Paper, owned by AIG's owners, invested with value by other people givng credit to AIG's paper; therefore, AIG had value.  When people outside AIG stopped giving their paper credit, AIG fell apart. 

Like internet websites and the price of homes, AIG was a bubble.  Who cares about internet websites now?  Who cares to buy a home at an over-valued price now?  And who cares about A.I.G. now? 

Apparently, not the mass media.  Communism in the United States of America must be old hat.  Nobody apparently wants to hear about that stuff anymore.  We'd apparently prefer to hear media pundits explicate Barack Obama's socialist-tendencies rather than understand how government owning private business is a primary definition of Socialism.

The government's direct purchase into the private market is last month's story.  This week we've got the economy to think about.  We can think about it incessantly.  The GDP dropped, but what does that mean?  It seems to mean: you and I aren't spending our money.  The gas prices have come down and companies are crumbling.  Higher unemployment figures.  People don't have money, which is also a message coming from Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Even though the U.S. Labor Department reported a decrease in Gross Domestic Product, Wall Street rallied.  You have to ask, what is that?  What does Wall Street mean when a government report testifies to horrible financial pessimism throughout the country and Wall Street shows positive signs?  How can that happen?  Why isn't this question being asked in as public a way as possible?

I believe it has something to do with corporations.  When you think AIG do you associate that name with Edward M Liddy or David Herzog?  When you think NBC do you think of Jeffrey Immelt or Yoshiaki Fukimori?  If these people were related, would you know the difference by only looking at the names on a piece of paper?  Kings and queens intermarried their families in order to sustain authority. 

Liddy, Herzog, Immelt and Fukimori may all be great people.  I don't know and this is nothing personal.  Their names are only offered as examples.  Corporations hide names.  No conspiracies allowed, but the corporation openly covers over the activities of those responsible.  A corporation disallows contact.  A corporation reassigns blame.

You can only hope justice is served.  Behind the corporation, actions take place in private.  There's a modicum of deference to social authority, but if you want to know what's happening in a corporation- you better get a court order.  Those records are private and protected in the same way you or I would be protected in a court of law. 

That may be a little too optimistic on the part of you and I however. 

As if it simply can be wished true: there's a strong belief in the sustainability of the corporation itself.  As if it's timeless, the corporation.  As if, it is not an artificial creation based on a general level of acceptance from the populace.

Corporations stick together.  They're unique in our culture.  They'll try to make it okay to think positively about the corporate culture.  The corporate culture doesn't just deal with humans, the corporate culture devotes resource departments to humans.  Humans can be monitored and controlled all the while corporate culture tries to appear helpful.  Human Resources protect the corporation from legal liability.  Human Resources tells the humans in corporate culture to come to them with their problems and Human Resources will try to help the human out.

Human Resources doesn't deal with people well.

The corporate culture doesn't relate well because the corporate culture is obsessively selective with its attention-span.  By only choosing to deal with certain issues and forgetting its own inherent human error, the corporate culture tries to master the behaviors of humans.  This controlling takes many forms from on-demand urine to forming the hours in which an employee will spend with family. 

The corporate culture then pushes a notion of constant growth.  In our current economy, that seems to mean you shouldn't save.  The corporate culture needs your money, so the corporate culture can grow.  They trot trinkets out to separate you from your money.  You invest your money in trinkets, so the corporate culture can invest its money in companies like AIG.

The corporate culture invests its money wisely, but if everyone followed their lead the corporate culture would have no money to spend.  With no diversity there would be no value for their paper.  No credits would be given. 

Now back to our drop in GDP.  Whether you don't spend because you don't have money or you save your money, the result is the same.  When no money is being spent our current economic model does what it is doing now.  Consumer spending drives our economy, therefore, you're urged to blow your cash on bullshit.  You're not expected to prosper within our current economic model.  Someone must lose for someone else to win.  I can't have everyone start with twenty dollars and everyone end with twenty dollars.  That doesn't make sense.  We will not talk about these issues soon though. 

The media is corporate culture. 

NBC is owned by General Electric.  AIG is owned by the U.S. government.  In all likely-hood, connections can be drawn between board members of all four corporations.  The names are on a piece of paper somewhere.  If direct relationships can't be drawn, you still have the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" to fall back on.

Is it conspiracy? 

If so, its made to look very legitimate.

Our Nation's Dumber...Thanks for Participating!

Two young American men have been charged with conspiring to kill many other Americans.  The media assigned Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart neo-Nazi/ white supremacist motives.  It's unclear how the two got caught.  Apparently the capability of the two young men to kill Barack Obama and 87-ish other people is unclear as well.  They had a sawed off shotgun and a dream.

Their dream- as the media tells it- involved robbing, murdering and beheading black people.  88 dead people would've apparently symbolized Heil Hitler.  14 beheadings, according to the media, would've represented a commitment to securing the future of the white 'race.'

It's not often you see: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” in the New York Times.  But there it is.  It's been reported the killing spree would've started at a school and then moved across the country ending with a high speed rush on Barack Obama.  It seems the car Schlesselman and Cowart would drive had swastikas and other graffiti written on it.

Just personally reflecting on their plan, it probably wouldn't have worked.  At least not without a large portion of the country complicit in their plan.  I go back to- it wouldn't have worked.  Too much attention in the beginning.  Not enough focus on the end game.

That's kind of how the authorities seem to be assessing the case.

It doesn't seem likely these two had a chance of executing their plan to its ultimate conclusion; however, this is a great case for how terrorism can be prosecuted.  If true, this is a classic case of terrorism.

This case might not initially seem like terrorism because you understand the language of the two men being charged.  However, violence in the name of a political ideology is terrorism.  This case of Schlesselman and Cowart's provides an outstanding example of why the "War on Terror" is not necessary.  A war was not needed against these two. 

Lock them up in county.  Figure out what's going on.  Get them into court and do what you do.

Our nation is not necessarily dumber for the plot they tried to hatch.  Our country is over two hundred years old and this type of plot better represents the history of America than many other caricatures with which we might be presented.  Our nation is dumber for this because we will come away from this story worried about Barack Obama's future and possibly more worried about each other.

What is highly unlikely about this story is we recognize a case of terrorism on our "homeland" prosecuted in court rather than on a battlefield.  These two young men are no different than the people we call terrorist in other countries, except we understand what they're saying.

Terrorism everywhere can be dealt with in the same way we deal with terrorism at home.

Memory Lane

April 2001 was a challenging and interesting time in my life.  Professionally, I had never taken on as big of a challenge as when I had the task of training a brand new department of soft collectors/customer service/retention agents for a call center running a project for a major U.S. wireless carrier.

Preparations for the new project started approximately two weeks prior to the first class being taught.  I went to the wireless carriers own call center and received one week of crash course training on their systems and policies.  They had no other project doing the same thing we were being asked to do.  That is, call customers to collect money and take care of any account issues they had while trying to retain the ones wanting to cancel their service.  After corporate training, I went back to my home state and worked out a three-week training curriculum in about one week.  The training relied heavily on instructor-led systems training.

The first day of class I was given a roster of nearly fifty individuals.  The classroom was designed to hold approximately thirty.  I also found out that first day of class that none of the systems were working.  I had three weeks of material to teach and none of the equipment necessary to teach this first class of phone workers who would be making outbound calls in three weeks time.  To say I was a little stressed would be an understatement.

Standing in front of this class of new students, I did what came natural to me.  I focused on what could be done without the systems.  I initially exerted a great deal of effort to learn everybody's name in the first three days.  I greeted them- by name- individually everyday when they walked through the door.  I was honest with them.

I explained to the class what the plan had been and then I told them we would overcome our obstacles.  With the hope of system access being restored soon, I shifted the curriculum and began by covering everything that didn't require computer systems.  There was approximately one week worth of material not requiring computers and the first week went smooth if not out of order.  I was as open with my class as I could be during this time.  I cracked jokes and let them know that everything would be fine.

We had fun in that class.  It was over-crowded and a little hot from all the body heat.  I taught in the only manner I knew how.  Teach it once.  Allow questions.  Teach it again the next day with review.  We reviewed constantly and eventually the slower individuals started to catch up to the faster learners.  Systems did not come online until the third week, so the second week was a bit of a blur.  Essentially, for eight hours I would describe the systems and what needed to be done in each. 

Since this was the first class being trained for this project, I did not have screen shots or back up manuals.  This was theatre of the mind, so to speak.  I stuck to what I knew and I knew that repetition makes learning easier.  Questions from the audience creates clarity when clear, consistent answers are given.  I did my best and found that at the end of that first class, I understood the systems better than I ever had at the start.  I believe this was because I couldn't show them how to navigate, I had to describe the system first and then explain how to navigate second.  All the time, we had as much fun as possible over those three weeks.

The obstacles presented to our learning became a running joke.  The jokes weren't designed to undermine the program, rather the jokes were designed to lighten our collective burden.  I pushed the class on through the material and in the end the class had the information they needed to man the phones confidently.  They had a one week crash course on navigating the systems, but they must have felt pretty good at the end.  Unbeknownest to me, many people in that class printed and signed a "Best Trainer Award" at the end of the three weeks.  I found at that time- and still today- the award and their sentiments meant more to me than the paycheck I received for doing the job.

Belly Laugh

Because I'm sick of the election coverage, I want to focus on some of the non-political stuff Saturday Night Live's putting oout.  The skit below is brilliant if not terribly funny at the time.  It started a couple of weeks ago with Andy Samberg performing a rather random impersonation of Mark Wahlberg talking to animals.

The next week Mark Wahlberg shows up and pays off the punchline to Samberg's first skit.  Who'd guess Samberg was pulling a cliff hanger?





This throwback sketch probably speaks more to my generation and earlier than many younger people today.  I loved the James Mason drunk actor bit.  That's stuff you just can't get away with anymore, even though Bing Crosby built a career on being drunk.  Bill Hader's Vincent Price impersonation will probably be under-appreciated as well.

Wrapping up with one of the current best recurring characters.  This MacGruber series is older but hilarious.