What are you doing?

I ran into one of my old professors today and like many people who have not seen each other in a while we asked one another what we were up to.

I asked him about what he was teaching, and he cut that off and asked me point blank:

"Forget about that though. What are you doing?"

It was right about then that two thoughts came into my head. One was a screaming shallow noise machine designed to mask its quiet and powerful partner. This first thought gave all of the normal excuses:

"Looking for work."

"Working on my writing/painting/underwater basket weaving."

"Taking care of the puppy."

All of them true but useless and unspecific.

The other thought that was hiding right behind them was far more terrifying. It whispered its quiet poison into my mind:

"nothing"

It was then that Nietzsche's abyss stared back into me for it was also the moment that I realized I had been staring into it ever since I had lost my job. Or, more ominously, longer still.

Like all good questions it opened up into many more, but only two really mattered in this transcendental 'oh shit' moment: "Why?" and "What are you going to do about it?"

At this current time I don't know the answer to either one.

Conveniently by the time I got home I had come down with one of those psyche shattering migraines I am prone to and as such had a great excuse for lying curled in the fetal position in my bed. I spent the rest of my day running on automatic as my mind raced through oblivion and arrived at nowhere.

It was definitely one of those damn days.

The Know-Nothing Party!

Politics in America seems to have lost its damned mind. We have know-nothings on the left espousing the same reality denialism as those on the right. It is a knee jerk reaction that, if one side expresses a view on something, no matter how far out there or based in woo-woo fiction, the other must take the opposite.

Needless to say, this is fucking stupid. The opposite side of a nonsense position is one that is solidly built on rational thought and backed up by corroborative evidence that is independently verifiable.

Instead we have baseless accusations and nonsense straw men on parade from both sides. To be apart of the fun you really have to fall in step to the beat of the party, otherwise you are left in the cold. Talk about what your holy book tells you, or your gut, and make assertions with about as much evidence as the average alien abduction story and the legions will follow.

We saw it under Bush, we are seeing it again under Obama. Republicans crying out about socialism (after voting for a bailout of private industries) and Democrats turning their noses up without as much moral superiority as their predecessors.

This is a democratic republic folks, not follow the leader.
We need to be aware, and full of facts, not sound bites. We need uncomfortable questions to be asked, and when answered the answers need to be checked against the evidence and accepted once it checks out.

That last bit is EXTREMELY important. Too many times do we see legitimate evidence dismissed as a "conspiracy" or "wrong" just because of some fabricated reason in the receiver's head.

If that is too much to ask for, the welcome to the Know-Nothing Party! Everyone is invited to play the party games, just check your brain at the door.

This was what we should have feared.

While we were all occupied with who was receiving money in the bailouts, we weren't paying attention to the why.

Thus, when the bailouts came, so too did more hands asking for their own pie, not just a piece of what was there. It also failed to address the actual problem of poor government regulation, fiscal policies in both the gov. and private sectors, and not to mention company responsibility.

Now, some people have their suggestions as to what the problem is, from wars to atheists, but that for the most part is either excuses or scapegoating.

The issue is large, complicated, and rests on all of our shoulders. Thus, as one we must push back against the avalanche set off by those initial bailouts.

Vote these assholes out of office so we can have some peace of mind that things like THIS will stop happening.

To use terminology that the Republican's are fond of: It is a slippery slope we are standing on.

It does not help fill a hole in your yard if you fill it with dirt from a hole you dig right next to it.

All the king's horses....

With the economy seeming to be in shambles due to misregulation, idiotic business practices, manipulative marketing, poor consumer education, and enough bad decisions for everyone to take a pint or two I as a university student have to step back and take a look at a system that has placed a rather large burden on people like me.

Namely: Student loans.

One of the large problems with today's ease of going to college is the price of that same ease. Student loans are given out to people fresh out of high school with little or no money management skills. Most of them have very little concept of value or money, let alone how to plan to pay for something that is only getting more expensive with each passing day.

For some, they are told that they are making an investment. That the money they spend now will be paid back before they know once they are out in the real world and have a nice job where the money just rolls in.

Bull shit.

Unless you are getting one of those generic degrees that will always be needed (business, education, hospitality, medicine, ect) then your chances of finding that perfect job waiting for you is just slightly higher than rolling a thirteen in a game of craps.

This leaves a lot (read majority) of students entering the economy in the red with no real understanding of how to fix it except to throw some money at it and eventually it will go away.

Debt is a bad, bad thing for an economy. Especially when its largest consumers (young professionals and families trying to keep things running smoothly) are trying to fill a hole dug just to get them into a position so that they can make a decent go at making a living.

So, time to get down to the point.

Why do we encourage people to go into debt? It makes no long term sense! What the fuck is the point of making a ton of money one day, only to go bankrupt the next?

This current generation of graduates are inheriting what can only be described as a monetary clusterfuck, and are steamrolling along with debt up to their eyeballs ready to make the situation worse.

People, we all need to wake the fuck up and start doing this thing called saving that has fallen out of vouge in the last couple of decades.