More evidence the state (and country) are going to hell.

States across the country, led by Wisconsin and New Jersey, but others are joining in, are trying to undermine all unions so that state workers and teachers can all be screwed financially for the sake of lowering taxes. Our esteemed governor spent much of his first year decrying the precarious state of the state workers/teachers’ pensions, and how necessary it was that we members pay part of our salaries to stabilize the pension.

Naturally, most of the state residents approved of this solution, not caring that the reason the pension was short of cash was because for a dozen years the state legislature and governors stole the legally-required annual payments and gave that money to the state’s citizens as annual rebates. So while the average citizen had the missing pension money in their possession, the governor and most citizens felt that only the teachers and state workers should make up the difference.

Perhaps the most infuriating part of this was that two of my relatives, staunch Republicans, believed that the governor’s solution was fair, since it did not impact them, although it affected 5 family members who are teachers. Can we spell greedy?

But now the governor has abandoned all pretensions that he actually wants to help the pension fund. His newest demand of the state legislature is that all teachers should pay a portion of our salaries to the state, which money will immediately be turned over to the state’s citizens as rebates, while he still refuses to put the legally-required payments into the pension funds.

I need to re-emphasize this: all teachers will be losing between $5,000 and $10,000 per year, while our pension will continue to deteriorate, but the state’s citizens will get a windfall from the state in the form of money taken directly from teachers’ salaries.

This is beyond greed. This is amoral, and treats teachers like lower-class citizens beneath the dignity of non-public workers. Remember the landless serfs who worked in order to give the majority of their profits to their landowners? That’s what the governor wants to do to teachers. And by the way, the governor still refuses to make rich people pay any additional taxes to help the pension fund. He claims–and so do most state residents–that it’s not their problem. So who’s goddammed problem is it if teachers’ own money will not even be used to support our own pension fund?

Any teacher who agrees to give up part of their salary to reward non-public workers while our pensions slowly fade away is a fool. This is a caste system, in which teachers are the untouchables, and I refuse to support it.

As a side note here, the state has announced that it will specifically reject the Parsippany Board of Education’s budget because their superintendent is earning too much money. Let’s do a bit of comparisons of salaries here:

Parsippany Superintendents’ salary: $225,000
Rutgers head football coach’s salary: $2,250,000 (including bonuses and “hidden” money)
Assistant Rutgers football coaches’ pool: $1,500,000.

Have any of you heard a single complaint by the governor about the outrageous salaries paid to Rutgers’ football coaches, especially the head coach, even though they are also public employees? Of course not.

We have a serious double standard here: teachers should give up some of their money to the rest of the state’s citizens, and the superintendent of Parsippany is vastly overpaid, yet his salary is approximately 10% of a football coach's salary who has not been asked to contribute anything to the welfare of the state’s residents!?!

This state is seriously screwed up, and so is everybody who supports this inequity and believes that teachers are part of the problem. No, folks, we are not the problem. You and your amoral governor are the problem.

Some random thoughts.

Our house current looks like a huge storage facility since we emptied the kitchen last night in anticipation of having our cabinets remodeled this week. They are not being replaced, just having new backing and new doors installed. We already removed all the wallpaper in the kitchen and painted it, so that it is already transforming into an entirely new kitchen. I’m anxious to see how it looks when it is finished.

Our esteemed governor is presenting his budget proposal today. One news station said that he plans to cut school spending specifically from Parsippany-Troy Hills because the superintendent makes so much money. Only he would be so arrogant as to announce something so blatantly illegal as deliberately screwing one school district. He already announced that he refuses to fund the teachers’ pension while insisting that teachers must pay the brunt of the shortfall. Something tells me I will have a lot more to complain about after his announcement.

It seems as if every country in the Mideast is having demonstrations and/or riots, which have expanded into full-scale civil war in Libya. Am I overreacting, or is it possible that internal revolts could easily spread to international warfare? If that happens, there are too many countries with nuclear and biological weapons which could devastate huge portions of the world. Perhaps I am too pessimistic, but these are scary times. I have been writing a far-future series of science fiction stories in which the 21st and 22nd centuries were the crazy years in which civilization basically self-destructed. Hopefully, this will not be a prophetic scenario.

Without bragging, I have always considered myself reasonably smart, yet how intelligent can I be if I regularly get whipped at Scrabble by an immigrant who has only spoken English for about ten years? Perhaps I need a bit of humbling occasionally. ☺

I’ve seen five of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture and, as usual, I have opinions on them. I will rank them here in increasing order of preference:

5. Inception. I read a lot of science fiction, so the dreams-within-dreams aspect of this movie was not so amazing to me. Once you take away that aspect of the movie, what is left is a typical thriller about people trying to kill other people, which is probably my least favorite movie genre. Give it a “C+”

4. Toy Story 3. Were I comparing this against other animated movies, I would give it a rave review for its plot and compassion, a truly outstanding animation. But when compared against other great movies, it is obviously a bit contrived. “B+”

3. True Grit. Except for the fact that I absolutely hated the scene when Rooster Cogburn shot the horse Blackie, this was a very enjoyable movie, largely because it was told from the point of view of the 14-year old girl. While not a classic per se, it was a classic western. Last night we watched the John Wayne version for comparison sake. The plot was almost exactly the same, as were many of the actual lines used, which means they were taken directly from the book. The three main characters in the new version were better than the three original characters, plus it was slightly more realistic as well. The original version was probably “cleaned up” a bit for the John Wayne audience “A-“

2. The Social Network. This was a wonderful movie best described by the title of its source book: The Accidental Billionaire. While Mark Zuckerberg was not a particularly likeable protagonist, and Justin Timberlake was totally despicable, the story about how a bunch of relatively clueless college students morphed into business tycoons was fascinating and very well-done. I give it an “A”

1. The King’s Speech. This was the best movie I saw all year. What made it slightly better than The Social Network was the combination of its historical setting and the fact that it told the story of how the king overcame adversity in order to succeed, which is always an inspiring plot. Not to mention that both Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were fabulous in their roles. Another “A”.

While I would not be disappointed if either of my top two movies won the Oscar, were I a voter, The King’s Speech would be my choice by a narrow margin.

I was pleasantly surprised that Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It was a rare winner that I actually bought, the others being:

1968: The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band;
1971: Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water;
1976: Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years;
1978: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours;
1980: Billy Joel’s 52nd Street;
1982: John and Yoko’s Double Fantasy;
1987: Paul Simon’s Graceland;
1988: U2's The Joshua Tree;
1998: Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind;
2000: Santana’s Supernatural;
2006: U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

And that’s it, 11 albums since I started listening to music nearly 50 years ago when I was very young. Obviously since my taste is primarily for rock music, I do not have any of the pop or jazz winners, and perhaps I should listen to some of them. But there are many albums which I consider worthy of being Album-of-the-Year, and here is a baker's dozen which you might consider listening to:

1969: The Moody Blues’ To Our Children’s Children’s Children;
1971: The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies;
1972: David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust;
1973: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon;
1973: Wings' Band on the Run;
1974: The Strawbs’ Hero and Heroine;
1975: Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run;
1979: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’s Damn the Torpedoes;
1984: Chris de Burgh’s Man on the Line;
1995: The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness;
2003: Richard Thompson’s The Old Kit Bag;
2006: Willie Nile’s Streets of New York;
2007: The Decemberists; The Crane Wife

Saving the world in 5 easy steps (part 2):

All right, the last part was easy. Anybody can point at the flaws which are rampant in the world, but trying to find ways to actually improve the world is considerably harder. The basis of my improvement plan is simple: very few people can have a positive impact on the world as a whole, (or even their country as a whole). It is easier to have a widespread negative impact, especially for a dictator (think Stalin or Hitler) or military leader (Julius Caesar, Napolean). But positive impacts? The rare few who succeed at this are either religious leaders (Buddha, Christ, Mohammed), great philanthropists (Mother Theresa) or charismatic inspirational leaders (Mohatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.).

But what can the average person do to change the world? I think the key to changing the world is the domino effect. This was the basis of American foreign policy in the 1960s when the government decided to go to war in Vietnam under the belief that if one small country fell to the communists, then that would cause another country to fall, then another, until all the dominos fell and the entire world became communist.

While history has disproved that theory with regards to communism, it is still valid with regards to improving the world. Do you think Buddha or Christ or Mohammed changed the religious beliefs of one billion people overnight? Not at all. They influenced a few close followers, who then converted a few more each, who converted a few more each and so on. Big positive changes in the world can only come about through the domino effect. And each person who wishes to become part of the solution must be the first domino.

So here are some recommended maxims to start those dominos falling:

1. Follow Gandhi’s advice to “Be the change you want to see in this world.”
2. Any act performed by one person which intentionally brings a measure of happiness to another person reflects a portion of that happiness back onto the original doer.
3. When you perform any action intended to improve your personal good, be sure it does not negatively impact on the good of others.
4. A variation of the “Golden Rule” should guide your life: Treat all people as if they are as important in your life as you are.
5. Everybody should devote some small portion of their life to achieving the common good.

The first maxim above is fairly simple, and is a variation on the maxim “Either you are part of the problem or part of the solution.” You’re not going to change the world by sitting back and griping about it. Do something or shut up!

The second maxim occurred to me several years ago when I was helping my students and I realized that their increased happiness when they succeeded actually made me happy. And why shouldn’t it? Do you believe that Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. were totally unaffected by I improving the lives of the people around them? I seriously doubt it. If you enjoy seeing other people become happier due to your efforts, then it is easier for you to want to do it.

The third maxim is one which is ignored by many people who claim to be followers of Christ or Mohammed or Moses, but who are really hypocrites. The entire pre-occupation in this country with cutting taxes no matter what the impact on other people is morally wrong, period. Believing that the government should not provide medical insurance to poor people because it might impact our own taxes is morally wrong, period. I am as much opposed to government waste and mis-spending my tax money as anybody. Such as tax cuts for the oil industry which still manages to make record profits; such as tax breaks for corporations whose chief executives make obscene salaries and benefits; such as having such a fat military able to destroy the entire world ten times over while people are starving, crime is rampant, and our national infrastructure is collapsing right beneath our feet. But I believe that rather than wholesale cuts in taxes what this country needs is a serious reconsideration of our national priorities.

The fourth maxim is obvious. Notice I did not state “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” since love has nothing to do with how we should treat people. For 31 years I devoted my life to helping my students and other teachers as much as possible. While I really cared about most of the people I was helping, do you believe that I cared about every one of them equally? Any of my students should realize that is not true. Much as I would like to be, I am not Mother Theresa. ☺ But I always tried to not let my personal feelings toward some people affect my treatment of them. They deserved my help as much as my very favorite people did.

As for the fifth maxim, since I stopped teaching I have been seeking an outlet for volunteering although, I admit, I have not yet found one. My wife has done so, and she is volunteering currently. I will keep looking, and hopefully I will soon find some way to give aid to other people. Partly because it is my obligation to do so, and partly because of maxim two above: I just enjoy making people happier.

And so should you if you plan to have any impact on improving the world as a whole.

I would be remiss here not to mention the courage of the citizens of Cairo. For those of us watching them safely on television, it is hard to imagine the sacrifice and daring of what they did, especially in light of the massacre in Tiananmen Square 22 years ago. Those people gathering in Cairo had no idea whether the military was going to take their side and help keep the peace, or take the government’s side and start firing into the crowd. And what about the brave people who protected the museums from vandals and thieves until the military took over that task? They had no idea if the would-be thieves had weapons and would have killed them to steal some ancient valuables.

The people of Cairo should be an inspiration to all of us. They put their lives on the line for the cause of justice. Surely we can go out of our way to make a smaller impact on the world around us. It is certainly easier and more comfortable to enjoy our high standard of living and do nothing but *tsk* at the tv news. But if we do that, then we’re content to stay part of the problem as the world slowly crumbles around us.

I decided to check the “Stat” feature at Blogger and see how large my audience is for both of my blogs. I was pleasantly surprised at how many people have accessed each of them in the past year.

May 1, 2010 - Feb 7, 2011:
Out of the Depths had 1,600 total hits (159 outside the U.S.) for a daily average of 5.8.
Visions of Paradise had 7,254 total hits (2,509 outside the U.S.) for a daily average of 26.3.

While there is no guarantee that all the people linking to these blogs are actually reading it, I am pleased with the numbers. Visions of Paradise gets occasional links at SF Signal which might account for some of its hits.

Now let’s see how things are going so far this year:

Jan 9, 2011 - Feb 8, 2011:
Out of the Depths had 218 total hits (10 outside the U.S.) for a daily average of 7.5.
Visions of Paradise had 1,216 total hits (445 outside the U.S.) for a daily average of 41.9.

Whether the increased numbers so far this year are a trend or an aberration remains to be seen. But overall, I am encouraged to continue blogging. At least people are linking to it!

I am definitely not a Super-Bowl fan. I do not watch football games during the regular season, considering them mostly a waste of time during which I would rather write or, even better, read. Occasionally I’ll watch the halftime show, if the artist particularly interests me (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, for example). And when the Giants were in the Super-Bowl recently, I half-watched most of the fourth quarter as they beat the Patriots, with my attention drifting between the book I was reading and the game.

We were actually invited to a Super-Bowl party many years ago, and I think the hosts were fairly convinced that I was (a) bored, and (b) anxious to be elsewhere than stuck in front of a television for four hours while the other attendees screamed for their suddenly-favorite team or oohed and aahed over a bunch of insipid commercials.

And the food? Is there any better indication of most Americans’ fattening, non-nutritional diet than what is consumed in vast quantities at a Super-Bowl party? I had a conversation with a friend recently about the frightening growth of children’s allergies in recent decades, and we agreed that one obvious cause is the lack of nutritional food that parents feed their children almost from the moment they exit the womb. If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider what mothers eat during the months they are breast-feeding their babies.

Watching the Super-Bowl is not my only protest against the dumbing down of Americans. I rarely watch television, mostly restricting myself to Jeopardy! and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. I have never seen a single episode of Seinfeld, Friends, Lost, Heroes, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars or Survivor. In the past 30 years I have only watched 3 prime time programs regularly, Star Trek: The Next Generation (in the late 80s/early 90s), The Simpsons (for about its first decade) and one season of Battlestar Galactica. A year ago, I thought that considering how many acclaimed programs are aired, I should select one show and actually watch it regularly. But it has not happened yet, and is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.

So it goes. I think I'll pick out a good book to read this evening.

Saving the world in 5 easy steps (part 1):

Let’s face it: the world is totally screwed up, and on the verge of total chaos. Take a look at almost any country in the world, and something is happening due to greed and selfishness. It is too easy to watch the news, shrug and think, I can’t do anything about it. But that is not totally true. There is a lot of validity to the saying everybody is either part of the problem or part of the solution.

That being so, I would like to make some suggestions on how to improve the world while there is still a chance–if indeed, it is not too late already. I could write an entire thesis on how to go about this; in fact, a decade ago I began doing such a thesis, entitled A Manifesto for the New Millennium. I had gotten 6,000 words into it when the world trade towers collapsed, and I decided there was no more hope for humanity in this new millennium than there was in the previous one, so I stopped writing it.

But ten years have passed, and perhaps it is time to make another try. I’ve decided to skip the long-winded thesis though, since who would read it? We live in the age of tweeting and text messaging, where people want short sound bites they can read quickly and easily. So I have decided to save the world in two parts. Part One will consist of reasons the world is screwed up. Part Two will consists of ways to repair those problems. Each part will consist of 5 steps.

5 reasons the world is screwed up:

1. People are primarily self-absorbed and concerned only with their own interests.
2. Governments are primarily concerned with maintaining power at all costs.
3. Power corrupts.
4. People are bigoted against those who are different than themselves.
5. People are hypocritical.

Let’s discuss the first three: Not only do most people ignore concerns of other people, but they are so fixated on satisfying their own wants that, if doing so specifically hurts other people, so be it. Bruce Springsteen described it in a very pithy, but effective way: Poor man wants to be rich; rich man wants to be king; and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything.

So we have politicians whose only concern is being re-elected. They concentrate exclusively on satisfying their own constituency with little, or no, regard for the rest of the populace. Why else would the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives refuse to extend unemployment unless rich people get a tax cut? Which is more important, that the unemployed pay their bills or that rich people have a few extra pennies in their pocket?

Do you realize that many laws being passed by the US Congress specifically exempts members of congress from those laws?

The situation is worse when the ruler of a country has a rigged system where his/her power is guaranteed for life. Can anybody think of a single moral reason why Egypt’s Mubarak refuses to resign as dictator/president of Egypt when his entire country is in chaos because of him?

Non-politicians are no better. How many leaders of major corporations take exorbitant salaries and compensations while firing employees to cut costs? Big oil corporations pay virtually no federal taxes, yet illegally fix gasoline prices while making record profits. What about the people who bankrupt their companies, costing their employees jobs and pensions, while reaping outrageous profits themselves. Do you remember Neil Bush who orchestrated a major bank failure to reap a financial windfall while his father George H.W. Bush was president, and amazingly the federal government hushed it up instead of investigating it?

And what about common citizens who are so obsessed with lowering their taxes that they do not care who suffers as a result? New Jersey is a prime example of this. For over a decade, the state legislature (which was Democrat-controlled) refused to make their legally-required annual payments into police / firefighters / state employees / teachers’ pension funds, instead using the money for property tax rebates under the belief that without those rebates they would not be re-elected. Now those pensions funds are in serious jeopardy, so the governor (a Republican–this is a bipartisan screwing) wants to cut back on pension benefits due to the pension funds’ dire straits, while still refusing to make the state’s legally-required annual payments! And how does the average resident of New Jersey feel about this? Most people I talk to who have no family members affected by the state pension funds believe that (a) all state workers, police, fire fighters and teachers should voluntarily agree to be screwed, and (b) state residents earning over $300,000 per year should have their taxes reduced rather than help make the fund solvent. Another example of the rich people keeping a bit of pocket change being more important than the average workers making a decent living.

And we won’t even discuss how badly the governor is destroying public education while trying to funnel state money into private schools which–surprisingly–his children attend.

I know several people who claim to be strict Catholics, yet refuse to follow any of Christ’s teachings about tolerance and rich vs poor. How easily they ignore Christ’s parable about how It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The fourth and fifth reasons are obvious. Whichever wars in the world are not due to greed are due to intolerance. Remember Northern Irish Catholics battling with Northern Irish Protestants? The genocide in former Yugoslavia? Rwanda? Moslems fighting with Jews? Christians fighting with Moslems? Isn’t it sad that all religions preach peace and tolerance, yet people who claim to be staunchly religious are intolerant of other groups to the point of trying to kill them?

And while the United States tries to portray itself to the rest of the world as a beacon of tolerance, that is purely a sham. This country has a history of black slavery and genocide of Native Americans. Even today it is filled with whites who hate blacks, Christians who hate Moslems, ethnic groups belittling other ethnic groups. As a very minor example, I turned off the radio in annoyance this morning as a local deejay was speaking in mock insulting Italian-American dialect for ten minutes. How the hell could anybody think that is amusing?

And don’t even get me started about the Tea Party. Under the pretense of wanting to rein in runaway government, they are proponents of elitism and “me-first” in its worst forms.

If America truly wants to set a shining example for the rest of the world, then we need to get our own house in order first. Next time I will try to propose 5 ways that individuals can start to make a difference.