This is a typical conversation between a Christian and a non-believer:

Christian: Abortion/homosexuality/[insert incredibly incindiary topic here] is blah blah blah.
Atheist/agnotic: (smiles and nods)

We smile and nod because we know Christian beliefs are respected and other beliefs are not so much, and if we say something precisely as offensive/inane in response, we will be treated as if we just punched a toddler in the face. I’ve done this a number of times:

Christian: Abortion/homosexuality/[insert incredibly incindiary topic here] is blah blah blah.
Atheist/agnotic: Really? I feel abortion/homosexuality/[insert incredibly incindiary topic here] is the opposite blah blah blah.

For which I am a hideously offensive monster. Doesn’t matter that the Christian was the one who introduced a controversial topic into the conversation and stated an opinion as fact (which I don’t). Christians have long had the privilege of spouting their views uncontested, but if we respond with opposing ideas or criticism of their ideas, we aren’t just exercising the same rights they enjoy under freedom of speech: we are attacking them. This is why so many Christians today feel persecuted: they have been so mired in privilege for so long that they have yet to realize an equal but opposite assertion cannot rationally be deemed more offensive than their statements.

People of other faiths run into this problem in societies where Christianity is culturally dominant, too. Try responding to the above with some remarks on the hard and fast reality of reincarnation, and you won’t fare much better than the atheist.

For clarity, I’m not at all suggesting all Christians engage in this behavior. I’m just saying it’s a privilege available to them in our society, and it’s unfair to others. Of course they have the right to say what they believe. It’s just ludicrous for anyone to be offended when, after introducing a very controversial topic into polite conversation, they meet with intellectual opposition. Hell, when I argue that women are people, I brace myself for strong opposition to that oh-so-controversial view. If you’re arguing that you know God exists and what he thinks about things, you really need to be prepared for a healthy, respectful debate. And there is nothing unhealthy or disrespectful about someone voicing an opinion you find offensive, especially when you did exactly the same thing to them first.

No, I haven’t forgotten this site. I’ve been slowly making my way through a nightmare recently, and believe me, elements of what I’ve gone through will end up here, as there is a lot of privilege involved. But due to what I’ve gone through, it may be a while before I have the headspace and energy to get worthwhile articles written.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about a few other topics I want to write on. For example, anarchy and my concern that maybe the concept of fairness was the most harmful thing humans ever manipulated each other into aspiring to. If you knew life just wasn’t fair or equal and you were on your own, how would you have lived your life? Would you have been a selfish asshole, or would you have cooperated with others in mutual interests? If no one told you, “be patient, the government/daddy/the lawyer/etc. will fix it”, how many situations would you have fixed yourself, to your benefit, that instead you left to fester and cause you harm? Those of you who have reliably been able to get help from the government/daddy/the lawyer/etc. might wonder what I’m talking about. Those of you who – like me – did not have much luck with the people we were supposed to be able to turn to for justice might.

Another topic: how much does financial poverty contribute to abuse cycles in families? Money equals survival in a post-hunter/gatherer society. When people don’t feel secure, that leads them to either internalize or externalize the insecurity. Meaning, they either take it out on themselves or others, so it seems to me poverty tends to create families full of abusers and willing victims. And whatever good you may personally find in religion, it has undoubtedly been offered as a panacea to poverty. Just using Christianity as an example: it’s easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle eye than for a rich man to get into heaven. The meek shall inherit the earth. Etc. Chock full of delicious reassurance that we’ll be rewarded for taking shit. That’s a great way to set up a whole big class of people who will take abuse, and if you deny that religion has ever been used for that purpose, I’m not going to take you seriously. Being religious does not preclude admitting that bad things have been done in the name of religion. In fact, I would think it puts more of a burden on you to recognize those evils.

Possibly the best story in the Bible, for both topics, is the Prodigal Son. This son gets Dad to give him his inheritance early, and he blows it and ends up destitute. Comes home. Dad welcomes him and takes care of him. Meanwhile, the other son – who did his duty – wonders what the fuck is this shit. That’s the Bible being honest with you, kid. Get used to it. Do the responsible thing, and no one cares. Everybody loves to be a big fancy forgiver of sinners, so hurt them often and hard, and they will give you everything you want and then some. Irresponsibility always gets rewarded.

I don’t have a finish for this post – like I said, lack of energy and headspace – so I’m just going to stop. Comments are welcome!

The other day I got a fortune cookie which said:

Your happiness is entertwined with your outlook on life.

For the first time in my life, that sentiment did not piss me off. In the past, it always did because it blithely dismisses the fact that if you don’t have much power over your own life, your happiness is mostly entertwined with other people’s outlook on your life, and what they think it’s worth, and whether you’re someone they mind stepping on to get theirs. A positive outlook doesn’t keep a slave from being beaten to death. A positive outlook doesn’t keep a child from being murdered, raped or otherwise harmed by a sick adult in his or her life. A positive outlook doesn’t put food on the table.

But for the first time in my life I actually have some power, and that does change things. Now I understand why happy shiny people told me “Just cheer up!” Sure, if your basic needs are assured and you have some bargaining power over your existence, determination and courage and other positive attitudes are helpful.

Take my current situation as a renter. I’ve relayed stories before about how my theoretical rights as a renter just don’t enter into reality in a market as hot as the L.A. rental market. Normally in L.A., you’re so lucky to find a vacant apartment at all that you take it (at whatever price) and hope your landlord isn’t an asshole. Landlord ethics have an inverse relationship to booming rental markets – the bigger the boom, the less ethics they have. So my last three have been scum.

But for the first time in anyone’s memory (that I’ve talked to, anyway), L.A.’s vacancy rate is up. Suddenly, landlords are having to compete. Not only do they have to lower prices, they have to actually do those pesky things California law insists they do, or suddenly the renters have power over them. We can get them in trouble with city agencies. We can sue and win. We can find another place that’s cheaper and/or better managed. If they want to keep us, they have to actually do their jobs well for a change.

It’s a total paradigm shift for me to find the system working for me. Now I get it – the happy shiny people who always told me my attitude was the problem didn’t get what it’s like to be someone the system is designed to work against. How could they? They’re insulated by privilege.

As a child, I believed the US – and many other nations – really were intended to benefit every citizen who made an effort, and what caused them to privilege some groups over others were flaws in the system. Then around age eleven, I came to believe the systems themselves were really designed to create privilege echelons, no matter what we’d been told – a pyramid at which the largest part of the population was forever getting crushed at the bottom as the more fortunate stood on their shoulders.

It’s hard to detail exactly what changed my mind. The final straw came one day when I thought – really thought – about the fact that the original voters in the US were not just white, male and twenty-one or older – they also had to be landowners. All this time I had been getting taught that our “forefathers” were planning an enlightened democracy and I should forgive them for failing to include women and other races in it because they would’ve gotten there eventually, and what school had generally failed to mention was that even back then, people who didn’t own property were disenfranchised non-entities. This government was always all about the people who owned bits of it – the shareholders, so to speak, in the wealth of the country. It’s like a publicly owned company telling you “We’re really all about you, dear customer” when you know the shareholders don’t give a flying crap about the customer, and they are who the company really has to answer to. It doesn’t even matter how much money you spend buying from the company; it’s about the shareholder’s perception of their stock value, which can be based on anything – including fiction.

Once I looked at things in this light, I never managed to go back. Every once in a while, I find myself thinking maybe the government really is meant to work for everyone and just fails most of the time. Then I watch something such as housing prices soaring uniformly all over the nation over a seven year period – yay for people who own a piece of America! – because the banks are essentially churning the money. Making loans, then turning around and selling those loans so they can’t get stuck with the losses, and then the buyer of the loan sells again – basically, it was a period of lenders playing hot potato with doomed deals, cashing in on them in the short term and hoping they weren’t the ones who got stuck with the losses.

No one’s gotten stuck with those losses yet, by the way. They’re still not on the books. The foreclosures that are losing money for the banks are only the tip of the iceberg. But the government has so far refused to make them record the actual transactions that caused all this. To do so would cause an unpredictable level of havoc – no one knows what those losses will be. I suspect we’d discover something insane, like that the paper value of home loans in the US in 2008 exceeded the actual amount of dollars in circulation, and that would be the end of the US economy as we know it.

I also believe that even if some governments really did start out with the best of intentions toward the people at the bottom of the pyramid, it’s the nature of humans to organize in a pyramid fashion, and no system can thwart that behavior for very long. Ultimately, we revert to instinctive behaviors.

Even in an anarchy, people form pyramidal hierarchies. Look at the lawless Old West – we think of it as chaos, but it was quite structured in the same way a pack of dogs is structured. The leader is the person who’s most lately proven him- or herself as a leader. Because anyone may attempt to take over leadership, it’s much closer to a meritocracy than what we have now (in which college expense bars poor people from the best positions in society and your most important assortment of opportunities is defined by what your parents are able to hand you, yet we maintain the illusion that our choices are the determining factor). When you stop thinking of what we have as a system that needs some fixing and really look at what we’ve got, you see:

• Worthwhile people getting stuck in bad life situations not because of laziness or lack of intelligence/dedication, but because of poor health, bad family situations, or being born into families that couldn’t give them much of a start. In other words, not because of their choices, but because of circumstances beyond their control, some of which society could provide workarounds for, but doesn’t. Because it’s too busy ensuring…
• …the insanely rich getting even more insanely rich at the expense of poor people, and getting rewarded for it out of our tax dollars.
• Different groups receiving different punishments/rewards for the same damn behavior.
• Different groups receiving different opportunities than others, based on such insignificant traits as gender, skin color, etc., rather than on merit.

The distinct advantage anarchy has over any government is simple. In a governed society, laws limit the bahvior of law-abiders, but not criminals. In an anarchy, no one’s behavior is limited. Good people can fight back, and that’s the most powerful deterrent to both crime and aggressive acts of entitlement. You can try to rape me, but I can shoot you for it with no worries I’ll be the one to end up in jail. You can beat your kids, but they can kill you while you sleep. You and your posse can try to keep people like me from eating in your restaurant, but my posse and I can burn your restaurant down. I’m not advocating these violent solutions, though I do think they’re all that some people can understand. Just there mere possibility of good people fighting back is a deterrent. And the possibility of people being assigned positions and accorded respect because they’ve proven themselves must give the privileged nightsweats just thinking about it.

The only meritocracy is anarchy.

Every once in a while, one of my fellow Americans blows my mind with her assumption that customer service workers get insurance, paid sick days and paid vacation, and at least $10/hour. These assumptions are often of no consequence, but on some occasions they’re offered in justification of why no one should be trying to improve working conditions for minimum and near-minimum wage employees, or why we should feel free to take out our frustrations on $6/hour clerks. That’s when these assumptions do harm.

As we head into this holiday season, during which many shoppers will have more contact with customer service shop and restaurant employees than at any other time of the year, allow me to clarify a few things.

• Most people who work at shops, restaurants, hotels, non-union grocers, etc., do not get any sort of paid time off. If they’re sick and they stay home, they don’t get paid for those hours/days.
• They are forced by law to take vacation of at least one week per year, but employers are not forced to pay them. Many seek temp work during that “vacation” week because they can’t live without every penny of their normal income.
• They rarely have insurance benefits, and if they do, they almost surely pay far more for it than the average office worker.
• They rarely get 40 hours a week, which means many of them need to work more than one job to make ends meet.
• When the store needs to save money, it cuts employee hours. This means suddenly the 25 hours you were depending on may become 16 – or you may even find yourself with an unexpected week off. Not good if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
• If you are terminated for any reason – including a layoff through no fault of your own – you don’t get a dime in severance pay or anything else. You’re just out of a job.
• There’s rarely any sort of retirement account for these workers.
• THESE ARE NOT EASY JOBS. I can’t stress this enough - these jobs are stressful, they demand true mult-tasking and lots of skills, and very often expose workers to confrontations with customers in which they are expected to somehow uphold store policy without irritating a customer who wants to cheat the system. If you’re not an asshole, you probably have no idea how “wrong” customers can be – they even engage in verbal abuse and various forms of harassment. And in most of these jobs, management will not back up the employee – they will instead let the customer run rough-shod over store policies, even to the extent of cheating the store, or get away with sexual harassment, and perhaps even demand the employee apologize for not kissing the ass of a customer who wanted to, for example, return an item a dog had clearly chewed to pieces 3 years after it was purchased.
• Retail workers generally make no more than a dollar above minimum wage.
• Restaurant workers generally make better money than retail workers, but still far less than most office workers make (excepting clerical workers, who are also paid dismally, but sometimes get some benefits).
• A disturbing trend in retail in the past 20 years has been not to pay commissions – which would inspire healthy competition, but to count each worker’s sales and give more hours per week to the workers who sell more. This inspires stress and panic as people compete for the right to “keep” their hours. Companies who engage in this are trying to get $50k/year salesperson quality out of workers making $6.
• These workers usually get a store discount, which is just not as great as it sounds when you’re working to pay rent and put food in your mouth.

If you think people on the bottom of the job ladder enjoy the same stuff you do, only with less income, you are deeply mistaken. Please at least give them some respect when you interface with them – they’re not getting much else. And if someone talks about raising minimum wage or other measures that might improve the lot of these workers, you don’t have to agree with their proposals (some of which are bound to be useless), but at least come at the issue with the understanding that there is actually a problem when jobs that weren’t designed to be someone’s sole living have become that for too many people. Understand there are regions where these are the only jobs available to all but a select lucky few; that there are disabled people stuck with these jobs because no office employers will make a few minor adjustments to accommodate them; that there are people stuck in these jobs because they needed to earn a living right out of high school and can’t afford to quit the job to go to college and can’t get a better job without college; and so on.

And surely we can agree that no matter what sort of work a person does, they deserve to be treated like human beings rather than enhancement tools for your shopping/dining/traveling experience.

ETA: This post is US-centric, and I should have made that clear. How much or little it applies to other countries, I can’t say.

As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college started increasing tuition costs into the stratosphere. The cost for a four year degree at even a modest state school is now, in technical economic terms, fucking ridiculous.

How can I say that, knowing how much college increases (on average) a graduate’s lifelong earnings and so on? Because not every degree has that effect. Many degrees lead to an empty or low-paying job market. What can someone with a degree in history, English, or archeology do besides teach history, English or archeology? (And please don’t say “write books” – authors make well below minimum wage, unless they are among the very, very small minority who make it big.) There are a precious few degrees that actually pay for themselves in earnings: engineering, for one. Even degrees for doctors and lawyers – which can pay for themselves eventually – are getting tougher and tougher to justify, because the initial expense is horrendous, and the period of working for little or no money after school is harsher than it was for previous generations because the cost of living is increasing every year (forcing young graduates into even more debt than the degree did).

For kids whose parents couldn’t afford a college fund, who are completely on their own to pay their way through school, it just doesn’t make economic sense to become a doctor when you could become a nurse with far less expense. It may not even make sense at all to go to college, when you could become an administrative assistant or a carpenter and earn a modest but decent living without tens of thousands (or more) in debt from which you have to recover, and still have hope of promotion to something better. And don’t bring up scholarships – they’re increasingly hard to come by, the competition gets worse every year, and in some fields they’re not available at all.

Now, employer degree lust is not the only reason college costs have risen to the point where smart, poor kids are being left behind, but it is one that could be addressed very quickly without costing anyone a dime. Employers need to get over the idea that a college degree is necessary in every profession. It is not. Just a few decades ago, employers realized that people could pick up, for example, how to do an engineer’s job without having an engineering degree, and they recognized that a certain number of years of job experience were equivalent to a degree.

Employers need to stop thinking “degree=qualification” and instead establish qualifications that can be met in more than one way. For example, a poor smart kid can learn every skill needed to be an editor in a publishing house. Books and textbooks are readily available, and there’s information all over the internet, which can be accessed for free at most libraries, so self-education is very possible. Instead of requiring an English degree, a publishing house could instead require applicants to describe in an essay what they’ve done to train themselves for editing (whether that’s college or self-education). After weeding out the ones who don’t impress, the publishing house would interview applicants and give them an editing assignment to complete on the spot under supervision (to avoid the possibility of cheating). The publishing house would still get quality employees and poor smart people would have a fighting chance for good jobs.

For another example, certain types of engineering are far more complex – even if someone has a remarkable flair for constructing engines from crap they found at the junkyard, there are solid reasons why an employer might want them to learn the math skills and concepts involved in engineering. But is there any reason these skills can’t be learned on the job, if the person passes a math test which indicates the capacity to learn it?

The problem is that employers are too lazy to take on the work of apprenticeship. That duty has been passed onto colleges. And yet, the people who actually work with 23 year olds know apprenticeship still goes on. It has to – no college can anticipate precisely what your company wants its employees to do. Companies imagine they’re avoiding apprenticeship, when they’re not. And I suspect – based on personal observations – what most kids learn in 4 years of college could be compressed into 6 months of apprenticeship.

There are only two fair solutions: the Federal and state governments must find a way to make college degrees available to everyone at every income level, or we must create alternatives to college degrees that allow people to better themselves and have that reflected in their income. Not only does the second one not cost tax payers or anyone else a dime, it makes more sense.

Three states passed bans on gay marriage in the national election a few days ago. Regardless of where you fall on gay rights’ issues and the definition of marriage, this should frighten you because it is, plain and simple, the beginning of theocracy. Neo-Christian fascism. Sieg heil, Fred Phelps.

I was so livid about this for 24 hours, I couldn’t write on the topic. Now I’m calmer, but I’m glad gays are angry, and I hope a lot of other people join them.

Christians didn’t invent marriage. No culture did. Every culture invented a form of it, not exactly the same as every other, and not always for quite the same purpose. Letting any single group – and in this case, huge funding to promote these bans came from the Mormon Church, the assholes who also worked hard at defeating the ERA and ex-communicated at least one member who supported it publicly – decide how to define marriage under the law is mixing of church and state: an ugly display of religious privilege. And please note that being “Christians” didn’t stop the Mormons from lying to voters to sway them.

Be afraid. And hope that lawsuits against these measures succeed wildly. Because if Mormons can decide what marriage is for all Americans, then there’s precedent for them deciding what’s real parenting. What’s a real family. What’s in the best interest of your child, you undesirable Wiccan freak, you nasty non-Mormon Christian, you evil atheist. Marriage is not “theirs” to protect, except within their temple walls; in the eyes of the law, it’s simply an entity individuals enter into, not unlike a corporation. There are tax implications, paperwork to be filled out – otherwise, it’s none of the government’s business.

There are several things we can do to help. AfterEllen published a list of businesses that contributed to passing Prop 8 in California, and when DailyKos reported it, commenters added quite a few more – feel free to take your business elsewhere. Here’s a list of businesses owned directly by the Mormon church, which functions more like a megaglobalconglomercorporation than a religious institution these days.

Now, some people say it’s discrimination if I choose not to shop at any business owned by any Mormon, because some of those Mormons may have been against Prop 8. The problem with this argument is that every Mormon gives 10% of her net income to the church. Every time I make a purchase from her, I’m giving money to a church I feel is funding hatred. In order to stop funding hatred, I have no choice but to stop funding Mormons in general. And those Mormons who don’t like what the church is doing with their money should take that up with the church. Blame the church and its hate agenda for their loss of livelihood, not us.

I’m not a fan of boycotts, myself. I don’t think they’re very effective. And in this case, it’s not just Mormons promoting this who are responsible. What about the voters? They’re from a variety of faiths, and some of them may even be secular homophobes – it’s not like religion invented the concept of hating people who don’t or can’t conform to your arbitrary insecure bullshit standards.

In my opinion, it’s time for the law to stop recognizing marriage, period. There’s no need for it. Let it be a purely cultural/religious institution. Let people set upproperty sharing and medical proxy decision arrangements via legal documents other than a wedding license. The government shouldn’t be endorsing marriage at all, let alone one kind versus another.

I grew up Christian (I’m now an atheist, or more specifically, an anti-theist). This didn’t mean back then what it has come to mean today. I wasn’t taught we were being persecuted because public schools didn’t include a Christian prayer, and fuck the non-Christian kids who had to sit through it politely. I wasn’t taught I had a right to judge people who lived differently from me – in fact, I was taught the opposite. I wasn’t taught that Jesus wanted Christians to change US law to fit (their particular interpretation of) Christian rules for living – in fact, I was taught “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” I was taught theocracy was a very bad thing; the law should only contain practical rules, and we should be grateful it grants us the right to live as we see fit and serve as an example of good Christian living. I wasn’t taught to proseletyze my religion. We kind of assumed people had heard about Christianity, and if they were interested, they’d show their interest and we’d try to be helpful.

I was taught abortion was wrong and until a couple of years ago, when I discovered the horrific mental disorder that runs in both sides of my family and was shared by Hitler has a genetic component, I never, ever thought I could stand to abort, myself. But I was raised to be pro-choice; just because we believed life began at conception didn’t mean it did, anymore than the majority of the world’s population believing in reincarnation makes it true. When it comes down to belief rather than practical issues, the law must wash its hands and let people work it out themselves. I.E., when Hindi culture dictated that widows be tossed onto the funeral pyre along with Hubby, the British interferred with that custom, and I believe they did right, even though I doubt I’d agree with their motives: those were living women being burned to death. But no matter how strongly you believe a fetus is a living person, you must admit it’s far more clear-cut that the potential mother is a living person.

The version of Christianity I grew up with is no longer the public face of the religion. The last few friends I have who practice a similarly loving version of the religion, concerned more with improving their own behavior than that of others, assure me such reasonable Christians are still the majority. I hope they’re right, but I don’t know. The public face is Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson. Fred Phelps.

And Christians who can’t see their own privilege tell me the press has an agenda to make Christians look like ignorant bigots. Did Rupert Murdoch force Jerry Falwell to blame our tolerance for feminists (I didn’t know we had any!) and gays (seriously?) for 9/11, or did Jerry come up with that all on his own? And did the press risk losing their FCC broadcasting licenses by refusing air time for Christians who wanted to present an equal but alternate view to Jerry’s, or is it that no Christians came forward to set the record straight? Why is it feminists bothered to show so much dissent when Amanda Marcotte behaved in a privileged fashion that two such incidents made it into her Wikipedia entry? Why is it Falwell’s wikipedia entry shows no Christian dissent – only agreement from Pat Robertson for his superstitious bullshit about 9/11?

Because feminists really know what it’s like to be persecuted, and we know if our movement is to maintain any validity against continuous assaults by conservative assholes on our public image, we must police ourselves for hypocrisy and demand that feminist hypocrites acknowledge their mistakes and grow from them, or erode their support accordingly. Christians, in their privilege, assume it’s the responsibility of outsiders to research and figure out how unlike Falwell most of them are.

It’s not. It’s really not. Credibility is something you have to earn now, Christians. It’s no longer a privilege you’re granted just for belonging to the “right” religion. But nor does it mean anyone’s hostile to your beliefs. We’re just hostile to having them imposed on us. And if you think we’re exaggerating when we say that goes on…

…some of your more aggressive Christian brethren don’t tell you the stuff they tell us – they assume you already believe what they do. But those of us who aren’t Christian frequently get to hear the specifics. Over the years, more than a few Christians have informed me that God didn’t mean for black and white people to mingle, and really American blacks were happier during segregation (yep, some people are still not over that). They told me back in the early 90s the hole in the ozone was for Jesus to come through, so we should all be hairspraying for Jesus. Over the years, I’ve watched a staggering number of Christians ignore, or even in a roundabout way support, the actions of domestic abusers of both genders. They’ve blamed women for causing their own rapes by dressing sexy or just failing to be a virgin (once she’s open for business, the bitch has no right picking and choosing who gets a poke). Various of them have assured me Jews are going to hell, and black skin is the mark of Cain, and the end days are here (they’re always here; they’re the longest-running bit of cabaret in human history).

Does my bad impression of modern Christians come from Jerry Falwell sounding like a shit parody or an ad for psychiatric meds with his mentally deficient interpretation of the Teletubbies? No, it comes from those Christians I’ve encountered who seriously, despite the lack of Biblical, let alone logical, support, believe these crazy things. They are numerous. They always were – they just used to keep it to themselves because neither more progressive Christians nor the public at large agreed with them.

Now they feel secure in speaking up. They feel there are more of them than there are of the rest of us heathens. Educated, intelligent, well-employed Christians believe – and tell you this flat out – God wants them to take over the US and make our laws Christian. They can’t even see why anyone would object to that, unless they are Evil. Surely there can’t be other equally valid ethical systems out there for people to choose. And if there are, it doesn’t matter because this country was built by Christians (oh, I’ve been battling this one since the 80s, and let me tell you, I am tired).

Did Christians build the entertainment industry that saw us through the Great Depression? The finance industry? Department store chains and a massive retail market? No, wait – it was Jews and assorted others who contributed those massive pieces of our world dominance. Did Christians build the cotton industry? No, they just happily owned those who did. Did Christians author the Declaration or Constitution? Actually, most of our “founding fathers” were deists – non-specific believers in God.

What exactly did Christians do? Well, they contributed a little bit to everything, which is just fine. But they wanted more credit than that, so they moaned the loudest and measured their contribution in sweat rather than by actual, tangible achievements (see Protestant Work Ethic). But really, their biggest contribution to the founding of the US was genocide against the people who were already occupying what became the United States – carried out, of course, in the name of “God” and “manifest destiny” against “heathens.” Nice legacy there, guys. Are you still confused about why we don’t trust you to be good neighbors?

If there are any decent Christians out there, you have a serious PR problem. Stop whining that we have a duty to assume Christians would never shoot abortion doctors or commit genocide or condone the rape of women even though they already have. Get involved in the secular community. Start a blog. Let people know you’re out there, and you’re opposed to some of the things that have been done in the name of your religion. Let us know you support our right to live by our own ethics while you live by yours and we all try to get along.

Last night I watched the presidential debate. One of the questions was (paraphrasing): do you see healthcare as a right, a responsibility or something else I’ve forgotten. McCain said responsibility (of the government to make sure affordable healthcare exists) and Obama said it was a right for people to have healthcare.

I see it differently. I see healthcare as an investment a nation makes in itself. Whether you enable your citizens to get healthy and stay that way through government programs or a regulated free market, we should be appalled that people’s brains and skills are being wasted because they can’t obtain a medicine or therapeutic measure that’s readily available. Who knows what these individuals might accomplish, given the chance? Why do we not want this for our nation?

Because we assume that if they were valuable people, they’d be rich. Pure and simple; that’s what Americans are conditioned to think. Social Darwinism: if you’re worth something, the money gods will shine on you. If the money gods don’t shine on you, you must be mistaken in thinking you have something to contribute.

One that note, I’ve been thinking about those low-paying jobs that most people think a monkey could do until they learn the hard way. The hardest jobs I’ve ever had were waiting tables and being a receptionist at a busy office. These jobs call for true multi-tasking of the sort that studies now recognize the human brain just isn’t capable of: your focus must switch every few seconds, and you need to remember dozens of details at a time. These were the jobs I performed most poorly at, and they were nearly the lowest-paying jobs I ever had. Retail paid even less – while I found it easier than waiting tables and doing reception, that’s only because I never had to do it very long at a stretch. The amount of abuse you put up with from assholes who perceive you as a captive audience to whatever hostility they want to vent is ridiculous for any salary.

Here’s why I say a lot of CEOs couldn’t wait tables to save their lives – an example of what a waiter can go through in just a few minutes of a normal shift:

• You’ve got two new tables at once. You greet the first one, intending to get a drink order and run to the next table. They instead ask you questions about the menu. To which you don’t know the answer. You promise to find out and be right back.
• You greet the next table and get a drink order.
• As you pass one of your other tables, you notice their drinks are running low. Another of your tables stops you and asks for more napkins, a lemon, and another basket of free bread to fill up on so their tab and your tip will be even lower. Another server asks you to check if her order is up when you get back there.
• You go to the kitchen and get everyone’s drinks. You hopefully remember to ask a manager the answer to the menu question, get the napkins, the lemon, the basket of bread, a pitcher to refill the low drinks which you’re pretty sure were regular Coke not diet and check the other server’s order.
• While you’re back there, the manager asks you to restock the salad dressings, and you promise to do that after getting orders from your new tables.
• You come out of the kitchen with a tray loaded with heavy beverages (and the lemon on a little plate, and the napkins) balanced on one arm and a pitcher of cola in the other. You catch the other server’s eye while she’s busy taking an order and shake your head to let her know her order isn’t up yet. You deliver everything…
• …and remember you forgot the bread. You promise to bring it in just a couple of minutes.
• You go to take the first table’s order and they take all the freakin’ day about it. They’ve obviously been chatting the whole time instead of looking at the menu, so now they’re going to peruse the whole damn thing at their leisure while you stand there. If you’re confident you can do it in a friendly way, you let them know it looks like they’re not ready, and you’ll be right back in a minute.
• You take the other table’s order. Fortunately, this goes pretty smoothly.
• On your way back to the first table, you catch another server and ask them to bring bread to the table that wanted it.
• You go back to the first table and they’re ready. It still takes longer than usual because they want to reinvent the menu with all sorts of modifications and substitutions, and ask you diet & nutrition info on 90% of what they’re ordering. But you get through it.
• Another of your tables is ready for its bill now and getting impatient.
• You go to the machine (hopefully a computer, if you’re lucky) and run off the bill for the table that needs it and ask another server to take it to them. You enter the two table orders into the computer next, but get stuck at one point because you don’t know how to enter one of the modifications you’ve never had requested before today and have to find someone who can tell you.
• While looking for someone who can help you, you realize the other server didn’t bring the bread out to the table that wants bread. There goes whatever tip you were likely to get from them. You go fetch the bread while you keep looking for someone to help.

That’s assuming the kitchen is operating perfectly. When it’s not, things can get a whole lot hairier. When your tables are all difficult at the same time, it’s pure and utter hell. What I just described could all happen within 10 minutes or less, easily. I’m not describing the physical impact of the fast walking and heavy carrying that’s involved either.

What are some of the jobs you know of that don’t pay much and are perceived as something “anybody” can do, but actually require skills that a lot of people working at much higher salaries don’t possess?

If you want to understand the Treasury’s proposal that we give them $700 billion without oversight, accounting or court review and then they um something something with the money, Peter Orszag is your best bet. I’m no financial expert, but I watched his testimony today and was blown away with how easy he is to understand – if you’ve been following this stuff up until now, anyway. Now I get how the plan could possibly work with a lot more details. I’m also more convinced than ever that Paulson’s vagueness (and his curious initial terms that insisted there must be no review or oversight) should be taken as an indication his real goal is to give the money to hand-picked firms, then go back into the private sector in a few months and curiously find himself a chief officer at one of the now well-funded firms.

The above-linked blog entry is basically what Orszag said in testimony, but it’s a lot easier to understand hearing it than reading it. I’ll attempt to sum up, including some snatches I’ve learned from other sources.

Orszag is Director of the Congressional Budget Office. That office accounts for the Congressional budget, and his testimony was intended to help members of the House Finance Committee decide what to do with Paulson’s plan. He didn’t take sides or offer advice, but he was clear on a couple of things: Paulson’s plan provides “nothing” in terms of detail, making it impossible for the CBO to give meaningful estimates of what the plan might cost. He described ways it could cost very little and ways it could end up costing the bigger portion of the $700 billion with no return for tax payers.

The problem Paulson and Congress are seeking to address have to do with assets that are so far divorced from reality it’s a bit like selling non-specific promises. A lot of people are holding “mortgage-backed securities”, which are bundles of random residential and commercial mortgages, some of which will be paid and others defaulted. Because – for reasons that aren’t clear to me, but probably involve a great deal of stupidity – Wall Street firms have bought these securities with no idea who owns which mortgages in them nor which ones are likely to default. Now they need to sell them, only… no one can begin to guess what they’re worth. Their value was previously based on the word of the seller, who had good credibility… until the mortgages he’d brokered started to default.

So suddenly no one wants to lend anyone money, and this threatens to crush the normal flow of business and economy, resulting in not only an inability to get a mortgage or buy a car, for example, but also job losses as businesses can’t function normally.

The solution: we need to find a market value for the securities and/or buy some of these “toxic debts”. The first solution would help fix the liquidity problems – businesses would feel confident about lending again. The second solution would give the businesses capital. The first solution could be done at probably no expense to tax payers if they use a reverse auction process under other specific conditions Orszag describes, because that’s a good way to find a fair market value, which means the government is getting its money’s worth with these purchases and the balance sheet records no gain/loss. The second solution is trickier – and you’ll notice it’s the one Paulson keeps on about – because there’s no real way to tell if we’re getting fair market value for the toxic assets, and the banks will be motivated to get us to overpay. Which seems to be Paulson/Bernanke’s goal – they want to overpay, on the theory that this will give the businesses enough capital to get going again. But since we can’t tell what’s a fair market value, this method would cause us to likely end up subsidizing some businesses that don’t need any help, throwing money at some who can’t possibly recover, and failing to subsidize some that really could’ve done good with that little bit of capital. Orszag described this method as “haphazard.”

It sounds to me like there are ways to make a plan like this work, if you flesh out the details and put the right conditions into it. The fact that Paulson would even ask for a $700 billion blank check to spend any way he sees fit forces me to distrust him and the administration he works for.

And here’s a question: has anyone considered the probability that if we buy some of those securities, we’ll open them up and find they contain mortgages for non-existent properties? That’s the most basic sort of accounting fraud, and with people actually buying these packages with no idea what’s in them, it would be so easy to do. I can’t be the only person to think of it.

Unfortunately, all the Democrats can see is a bill that’s bound to pass, onto which they can tack a few things. Some of the Republicans – the real Republicans, who believe in personal responsibility for businesses as well as individuals – are raising good questions and may vote against the bailout, but they’re outnumbered. As usual, the Democrats are being aggressively useless – posturing for the voters without really thinking through the danger of passing this bill without a hell of a lot more details, and Republican leadership is functioning as counter to its party’s alleged ideals as is humanly possible.