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United States

It just feels like a waste of time

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The political system in the United States is broken

I watched the first presidential debate of 2016 last night. Gross.

Why do I have to choose between a shady, back-room power deals career politician and a shady, back-room power deals career businessman? Both of them are liars. Both of them are flip-floppers. Both of them are power hungry. These are not qualities I can support in a leader.

Every logical fallacy I am aware of was at play in the debate last night. These two individuals are not the best choices to lead the United States for the next four years. We shouldn’t have to choose between two paragons of fail. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not root causes. They are not the disease. They are the symptoms of a bigger problem.

The virus of the two-party system, where all opinions are slowly silenced until there are only two voices left. A system of decision making that offers only two choices is not healthy. The debate last night didn’t offer any real dialog about the problems average Americans face. It didn’t offer any real perspectives. That’s because, in the United States, minorities who aren’t bought are still silenced. That’s the real problem.

If you’re a socially progressive and fiscally conservative, like I am, there isn’t a real choice. If you believe politicians should be honest and responsible, you don’t have a real choice this election cycle. If you think government should operate transparently, always choosing to balance personal liberties with social infrastructure that demands personal responsibility, neither of these two is palatable.

They will both hoard power. They will both continue the vast, non-transparent, morally bankrupt security state we’ve been building since Sept. 11, 2001. We’ll keep using drones to extra-judicially murder those who, real or imagined, represent some sort of threat to this nation-state. All of our options will continue being boiled down into soundbites that lack any true substance. I can’t vote for that. I won’t vote for it. I don’t want to build a wall, and I don’t want to create more failed states like Libya and Syria in the name of the American people.

We owe it to ourselves to destroy the two-party system that offered up these two as our best hope for turning the ship before it collides with an iceberg named mediocrity.

I asked my girlfriend to register to vote. “It just feels like a waste of time,” she said. She’s right.

Until we manage to destroy the two-party system, this country is going to continue its downhill trajectory. It doesn’t matter which party wins in the upcoming election. The problem isn’t the candidates, it’s the system that offered them up as saviors.

A year of biohacking

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Health is on my mind.

In 2016, I’ll be starting an experiment with ketogenic living. I’ve been biohacking for many years but haven’t done anything this extreme. My 2016 begins with the premise that everything I’ve been taught about eating healthy is wrong.

For the last decade, I’ve been operating on the theory my weight and health can be manipulated by counting calories. I was under the impression that if I ate too much, all I needed to do was exercise a bit more to burn off the extra calories. Seems like I may have been wrong. Apparently, the kind of calories I’m ingesting is much more important that how many calories I’m taking in.

I’ve recently been introduced to a guy named Gary Taubes. He pisses a lot of people off by theorizing that a high-fat, low-carb diet is the way to go.  That’s not what the medical authorities teach in the United States or Europe.

His books, Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories, convinced me that most of what I know about healthy eating is completely wrong. I think hundreds of millions of you might be in a similar situation.

The experiment begins on Jan. 1, 2016. If you follow me on social media, subscribe to my newsletter, or happen to be a part of my physical world, you’re going to be going along for the ride. If you’ve tried a ketogenic or some other low-carb diet, I want to hear from you.

Moral turpitude

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“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– Clive Staples Lewis

There are many forces in the world that attempt to regulate and control the activities of the individual human being. Nation-states, religious institutions, legal courts and municipalities are just a few examples of these forces. These various concentrations of power are an attempt to keep us from destroying each other during the course of our daily lives. Sometimes they work in this endeavor. Sometimes they just clean up the mess that’s left behind after we exert our free will. Sometimes these institutions make things worse.[su_pullquote]Moral Turpitude  A phrase used in Criminal Law to describe conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, or good morals.[/su_pullquote]

Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person’s duty to another or to society in general. Examples include rape, forgery, robbery, and solicitation by prostitutes.

Many jurisdictions impose penalties, such as deportation of Aliens and disbarment of attorneys, following convictions of crimes involving moral turpitude. The idea of what constitutes moral turpitude and how an individual should be punished for engaging in such behavior changes drastically depending on time and place. A gay man in Russia in 2014 may be punished with a beating or by having containers of human urine poured over his head. It’s true. I watched a documentary containing video evidence last night. A gay man in Afghanistan is likely to face little to no backlash. They reckon the year differently over there, and that man probably won’t admit he is gay, but in the time and space I’m referring to it is perfectly fine for two men to copulate as long as they don’t talk about it publicly. Today in the United States a gay man can get married to another gay man in some places. Here we are – the human race – spinning through space on a ball of rock. And somewhere in Africa a gay man is being killed for being gay.

You’d find lots of people who, if interviewed, would passionately claim that being gay or engaging in homosexuality is a crime of moral turpitude. You’d find another large swath of humanity that would argue the exact opposite. I fall into that category. I feel no physical or sexual attraction to my own sex. On the other hand I have to ask myself how something consensual can be wrong. Human beings who engage in consensual behavior that doesn’t harm anyone else are not engaging in moral turpitude.

That’s where things tend to get fuzzy. Some people think they are being harmed if you do something they disagree with. If you do something that offends them. If you engage in behavior that they themselves wouldn’t engage in. These people are wrong. Human freedom is more important than your personal moral code. Human freedom is more important than your personal agenda. Human freedom is more important than anything you believe in.

When a human individual engages in behavior that makes you uncomfortable you always have the option to disengage. The only exceptions are when an individual perpetrates force or fraud against others. These are nonconsensual activities. You have every right to defend yourself in such cases. I study the communities and power bases in the world around me on a daily basis. I watch the ways that my fellow humans attempt to exert unnecessary control over one another. I spend a lot of time thinking about moral turpitude and my own moral compass.

I’ve made a million mistakes in my life to date. Engaged in a million choices that could have been improved upon. I’m probably guilty of lots of moral turpitude according to the people who decide that sort of thing. I am fortunate enough to have been born in a society that has mostly supported my ability to learn from each action, decision and mistake I’ve made without locking me in a cage, torturing me or stoning me to death.

I’m still allowed to exercise my free will and to publish my thoughts. These freedoms are gifts I don’t want to squander. They lead me to a mental plane where I spend a lot of time reflecting on the idea that I should be contributing to the evolution of personal freedoms in every human society I am able to engage with.

Moral turpitude. It’s not worth much if you use it to censor or censure people who aren’t harming others. Which leads me back to the quote at the top of this piece of writing. I won’t force my conscience on you unless you are directly harming others. Can you say the same?

The geniuses of Apple

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I’m a writer. I’m not making a living at it, but I’m working towards that. In 2011, with that eventual outcome in mind, I bought a Macbook. Spending $2,000 for a laptop when I could get a more powerful non-Apple machine for about half the price felt crazy at the time. One small catch – the writing program everyone raves about on the Internet wasn’t available for PC at the time. It is now. But back then, I bit the bullet and bought a Macbook Pro. Then I spent $45 for Scrivener. This personal rant isn’t about the writing software. It’s about the arrogance of Apple.

I avoid Apple stores because they smell of superiority. Customers and sales associates both turn me off. That just isn’t my kind of environment. I like the minimalist approach to design evident in the places, but I don’t like malls, and I don’t like Apple’s policies much. This is a warning to anyone considering buying an Apple product – good luck if you need an emergency repair and go into an Apple store. My touchpad broke today. It won’t click. That makes it almost impossible to write. One sort of needs to be able to mouse clicks for various activities.

So, I used Google Maps and found the nearest Apple store, which was about 30 minutes away. I’m working on a deadline today. I was turned off as soon as I got into the store. There were at least as many “geniuses” as there were customers in the place, and the assault began immediately. Unfortunately, they couldn’t give me what I wanted, which was a working MacBook Pro touchpad. “Do you have an appointment?” Well, gee, no. I’ve never needed to make an appointment to bring in my machine for a repair before. I usually do them myself.

And that is the truth. The MacBook touchpad has been acting up for a year, jumping around and doing squirrelly kinds of things at random times. It has infuriated me more than once. Perhaps you’re a Macbook owner and you, like I have, Googled the problem. It seems certain model years of Macbooks are notorious for “battery swelling” which pushes on the track/touch pad and causes it to act wonky. I replaced the battery just in case. The problem didn’t go away. When the touchpad quit responding properly to my touch, I tried to order one online for overnight delivery. No dice. Apple doesn’t want customers tinkering with their product. Arrogance.

In the first store I went to, the “genius” told me I’d need to come back at 2 P.M. for a diagnostic. “Can I do it myself? I know the part I need.” Nope. She told me that Apple doesn’t sell parts and that they don’t want me working on my machine because it voids the warranty. “I don’t have a warranty anymore.” Too bad. I started looking around at some stuff, trying to calm down. While I was doing that, the same “genius” told me that she had “pulled some strings” and that a technician would take a look. He ran a software diagnostic which revealed nothing, went in the back and told me that they could replace the part and it would take 48 hours. “My deadline is midnight,” I said. He didn’t care much. I asked him why I can’t buy the part, which is in stock, and put it in my machine myself. “Against policy.”

I asked him who is responsible for the policy. Apple corporate was the answer. For a moment, I wanted to burn Apple corporate to the ground. If you want immediate care, I was told, you have to buy a $500-a-year business warranty. I don’t have that kind of money. If I owned a PC I could have replaced the part myself and would have long ago. There are parts warehouses and shipping depots all over the United States and it is relatively simple to do most repairs in home yourself. But with a Macbook, you better have a backup Macintosh.

My files are all backed up to the cloud, so that was not a big deal. What was a big deal though, was that I can’t meet a deadline when I can’t use the mouse. No one at the first Apple store thought of suggesting that I buy a mouse and plug it in to solve the problem. I asked them what the chances of trying a second store would be. They had no idea. All they could tell me was that they were backed up and it would be at least 48 hours before someone could even look at my machine. Part in stock. Total repair time: about 15 minutes. Or, any one of the 18 employees standing around could have suggested that I use a regular mouse plugged into a USB port to solve my issue in the short term.

The second store was better. The technician there actually took the machine in the back after taking my information and tried to adjust the screw on the trackpad. That didn’t work, and I was suspicious it wouldn’t because I’d already tried the same thing myself. But, Royce, who was actually earning the title Apple gives employees, gave it a shot. He also graciously setup the Magic Trackpad, which is incredibly overpriced but nicely designed. Now, I’m able to meet my deadline. I made an appointment for later in the week to get the trackpad replaced. I’ll be setting up a backup plan for the next time something on the laptop breaks. Beware if you depend on a Macbook for your bread and butter – you’ll need a backup plan other than running to the nearest Apple store. Apple may make nice products, but they are also overpriced, and the people making policy about service issues should take a fresh look at how they handle customers in crisis mode.

I should have had a better plan, and Apple should have better policies. How hard would it be to charge extra for an emergency repair on the spot when the part is already in stock?

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