After almost five years of relentless blather on pop media, pop culture, politics, and technology, I’m retiring the site to prepare an all new, punchier, tablet-friendly site on a new domain. If you’ve been a regular visitor and want to be notified when the new site goes live, drop me a line. And if you’re interested, there’s a long-winded explanation of why Dissociated Press is calling it a day here. Feel free to express you thoughts or condolences in the comments.

But who the heck is Rupert Sheldrake, and why should we care what he thinks? Well, while Deepak Chopra may hail him as a visionary, the more skeptically-minded consider him a bit of a nut. I personally didn’t know anything about him until I read this interview recently, in which – while he talked about scientific heresies like morphogenic fields and experiments in paranormal phenomena – he also talked about the damage done to science by its own establishment – in part by the way that science has become largely driven by its ability to produce profitable results – but also how science seems to be stuck in its own reality-as-machine faith. He cites how no-one is likely to talk about how, for instance, the Human Genome Project has been a disappointment, primarily because there are billions invested in it. And how the best and brightest new minds are drawn more to high incomes in the tech and pharmaceutical industries than to opportunities for “pure inquiry”.

Two topics that he discussed in the interview that I found compelling were based on the fact that current scientific doctrine implies that genetics will explain everything about life, and that in spite of little in the way of hard evidence, it also implies that somehow we already know how memory and consciousness work, we just have to map the details into specific electrochemical reactions in the brain. The latter kind of popular thinking is reinforced when statements like “MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons” are made by popular tech and science articles. In that particular piece, the author goes on to say “By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory.” It’s not until the third paragraph that they mention that the “subject” was a mouse.

But one specific thing he said in the interview that really struck me was in response to the question “If…memory does not reside in the brain, then where is it?” to which he replied “‘Where?’ is the wrong question. Memory is a relationship in time, not in space. The idea that a memory has to be somewhere when it’s not being remembered is a theoretical inference, not an observation of reality.” Those two points are quite accurate, and I’ve personally never heard the concept framed that way. And it’s not terribly at odds with something that the trailblazing neurosurgeon we referenced at the top said, which was “Consciousness exists only in association with the passage of impulses through ever-changing circuits between the brainstem and cortex. One can not say that consciousness is here or there.”

I don’t know yet what I think of Sheldrake’s ideas about morphogenic fields and his other fringe-science pursuits, but I have a sort of “dull Occam’s Razor” view of the world. I don’t latch on to crazy, elaborate explanations just because I like them, but if there’s one thing I do know about science it is that it’s at its best when it overturns its own dogma. As Arthur C. Clarke said:

“If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

This is all a shame, because the notion definitely warrants a closer look. The list of top ten legal drugs linked to violence is topped by three familiar names: Paxil, Prozac, and Chantix. And of the credible, readily accessible studies and data that are available, the link does seem clear. For example, the research article Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others identified 1527 cases of violence disproportionally reported for 31 drugs. And for some probably biased – but at least comprehensive  – data on the topic, “SSRI Stories” has compiled a database of over 4800 incidents  related to antidepressants or SSRI’s, with links to news stories about the incidents. That link is to one huge sortable table; you might prefer to start with a subset like School Shootings & Incidents or Highly Publicized Cases. The CNN video below is typical of the softball references to the issue that you’ll find from larger media sources; CNN’s Sanjay Gupta talks for a while about the obvious connection between mental illness and mass shootings, but he barely addresses the pharmaceutical angle until the end, and immediately back-pedals on the notion:

Careful Kid, You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out

In the end, do you know who is going to win a debate about guns? The person with a gun. Which is too bad, because there’s no intelligence test required for owning a gun. Nor is there typically any kind of personality test, and one thing the last decade or so has demonstrated is that a lot of people who are allowed to own guns are either ignorant, insane, or both. Before I go on, I’d like to point out that my choice to not own a gun doesn’t mean I want to take away yours. Unless of course YOU are stupid or crazy. Personally, I grew up in a time and place where there were a LOT of guns. My family owned a huge piece of property, and hunting and sport shooting were a small but integral part of family life. We had a half dozen rifles, several shotguns, and two handguns, and there were rituals attached to learning to responsibly handle this little arsenal which were imbued with both seriousness and humor. One classic piece of this training involved making a decision about when an overly-eager youngster was ready to shoot a shotgun for the first time, with a 50/50 chance of getting knocked on their ass. This may seem like a flip way to introduce a kid to shooting a shotgun, but with the supervision of a caring parent who was a proficient shooter, this was in fact an excellent way to instill a kid with an awareness of the incredible power they were wielding when they put a shell in the thing, pressed it into their shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

And that last little concept is something that is – in my opinion – key to understanding the gun debate. If you’ve never fired a gun, there’s a pretty good chance that most of what gun advocates say sounds insane. And although some of it is, that’s not the problem. The problem is that much of what they say is irrational. And by “irrational” I don’t mean insane, or even illogical. I mean not rational. If you’ve ever fired a gun, there was almost certainly a moment when you acquired a visceral awareness of the awesome power intrinsic in the thing. How you internalized that awareness may have varied; maybe you felt a surge of excitement, maybe a sense of power, maybe a sense of comfort or security, or maybe you even said “Wow, I really don’t think I want the responsibility that comes with the life-or-death power here“. But whatever your reaction, you’re either ignorant or a liar if you say you felt nothing. And that’s the real key here. FEELING.

It’s easy to ignore or forget the fact that the sole reason for the original creation of guns was killing. Primarily for killing humans, but obviously they’re just as useful for killing other animals. But they served virtually no other practical purpose. Like it or not, be consiously aware of it or not, built into the existence of any gun is its birth and long history as a tool for delivering death to the recipient of its primary function. And putting life and death powers in someone’s hands changes their self-perception in ways that even THEY don’t understand. As we all know, surgeons may easily develop varying degrees of a God Complex, and are typically unaware of having this aberrant trait even though they’ve almost certainly read about it. Why would we think someone wielding the power to end another’s life by moving a simple lever will somehow not be prone to the same phenomena?

My point is that you can rarely have rational discussions about things that are almost entirely feeling based, especially if no-one involved in the discussion is acknowledging (or even aware of) the fact that feelings are involved at all. Much like discussions about politics, relationships, and sports, the dialogue about guns has an underpinning that is driven by human desires for power, security and comfort. There is in fact very little in the way of strict logic that supports the idea of the average citizen owning a 22 caliber pistol, let alone an arsenal of high-powered automatic weapons. Let’s talk about some of the flawed thinking that seems to go into the debate.

The All or Nothing Posturing

First of all, let’s establish how fundamentally insane the two extremes of either side of the debate are. To anyone who thinks we can retroactively implement sweeping gun control: you’re nuts. As of 2009, there were an estimated 310 million nonmilitary firearms in the United States. Good luck with that. And for gun nuts who say that no regulation at all is needed: you’re just as nuts. I’m sure we would all agree that about 80% of drivers in America are of imminent danger to the rest of us, simply because of the feeble requirements for securing a license to drive. And cars aren’t even meant to be weapons! Likewise with any of a slew of other potentially lethal items like explosives, drugs, poisons, airplanes, nuclear reactors – whatever – you probably in your heart of hearts wouldn’t be opposed to SOME sort of legislation restricting the ownership of firearms to people who aren’t insane, senile, or terrorists. Get real. Keep your gun if you’re a sane responsible citizen, but help protect us ALL from nuts or numbskulls incapable of such a responsibility to a presumably peaceful civilized society. C’mon even GUN SHOWS don’t like having loaded guns around.

The Government is Disarming Us

A half-dozen or so bizarre assertions are often made by the wingnuttier of gun enthusiasts about how any kind of gun control is the first step toward totally disarming the populace so that the government can have total control of our lives. Even if this were the case, sick your militant little mind on THIS simple fact: even if you had an armed compound fully staffed with a hundred trained military experts, the US military has any of a number of ways of reducing your fortress to rubble with the the push of a button by a drone jockey or F-18 pilot. Any defense against “our armed oppressors” is going to require more than a bunch of fruitcakes making a stand in a bunker, even if they have GRENADE LAUNCHERS. And I think it’s pretty hard to pick one of those up at the local gun show.

An Armed Guard in Every School

If you’re paranoid about the government ruling our lives, THIS preposterous idea is the one to watch out for. Have you ever been in a country where the police walk around with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders? They take a slightly different attitude with civilians than a cop here in the states does. Do you really want to cultivate a culture where your kids EXPECT someone to come shooting them, and have a constant reminder of this in the form of an armed cop or soldier at the school? There are about a dozen other ways your kid could die today, maybe you should also put a poster on their bedroom wall listing them. Death is always near you know. This is the road to fascism, if anything is. Never mind the fact that cops and soldiers are human too, with the same potential for going nuts with a gun, which they will on occasion.

The Second Amendment

Just shut the F up about the GD second amendment will ya? Even if you CAN quote it, you probably aren’t familiar with the contentious history of its interpretation. And aside from the fact that the words were drafted by intelligent cultured gentlemen over 200 years ago who had way more dignity than a couthless cur like you, it was also a dramatically different era, with different concerns. There is in fact nothing in the second amendment that imparts you a God-given right to own an “Armalite AR10 carbine gas-powered semiautomatic so you can stalk from office to office pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers”, to paraphrase Fight Club.

The Switzerland Defense

Likewise with your looney and ill-conceived Switzerland Defense. This is about as viable as the Chewbacca Defense used by Johnnie Cochran in his closing statements on behalf of Chef on South Park. Americans have guns because our country was a wild untamed paradise populated by indigenous people that frightened us, and by the time we had wiped them all out, we had established a cowboy culture of Booze, Cigarettes, and Guns, and were so wracked with anxiety and guilt that we couldn’t go to sleep at night without a loaded 45 in our shorts. That’s why we lump those things together under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. On the other hand, the Swiss were sophisticated, intelligent Europeans whose lovely mountain home was a favorite stomping ground of less sophisticated, less intelligent Europeans as they tried repeatedly and failed to create German, French, or Prussian empires. The Swiss just got fed up and said “F*** it! We’re making the whole COUNTRY an army!” They didn’t then proceed to set up an all-you-can-eat gun buffet, they systematically distributed guns for a very singular purpose and trained people to use them.

Home Security

One of the flimsiest and almost surreal arguments I hear for owning guns is for “domestic protection”. Really? I mean REALLY? If you really cherish your precious Brandon and Courtney, and are purchasing a gun to improve their chances of living the long and and happy life that you yourself have apparently abandoned in favor of one of fear and insecurity, ponder this: In a typical year, although only about 4,000 kids are killed in gun accidents that have nothing to do with intruders, over 30,000 are injured . Whether you care about their lives or not, those are over 30,000 incidents a year that wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t have a gun in your home. And if they merely get injured as opposed to dying, that is going to cost you a pretty penny, as opposed to paying you a few if you have a good life insurance policy. Which brings me to the next point. When a person insists they need guns around to protect their family, I have to ask them (with usually dismal results) questions like: Do your kids already have top-notch dental and health care? Are they getting the best education available? Are you buried with a mortgage? Have you set up their college fund? Are you driving a ’97 Chevy Caprice because you can’t afford better right now? Getting robbed is usually the least of a kids’ worries these days. Here’s an excellent alternative to stocking an arsenal at home:

Over the last year and a half or so, I have somewhat quietly spearheaded a campaign to preserve a classic “Doo Wop” or “Googie” era sign in the town I live in; the iconic Beer Depot sign, which blew over in high winds in 2011. The project was in the homestretch recently when it hit another snag, something I’ll get to in a moment. But first, a little background on why I would use the platform of my pop media and satire site to plug the final phase fundraiser we just launched for the sign. When a friend learned of my little project the other day, they asked me why I was putting so much time into it, knowing fully well that as much as I appreciate vintage design, I’m as much about progress as preservation, depending on the scenario. I had to ponder their question for a moment to give an honest answer. Although I definitely have a fascination with twentieth century design, from the Art Deco era right up through the era of Googie Architecture, in the end I think my pursuit was as much about beating bureaucracy and making a stand against “unjust power”, which in this case took the form of an insurance company. My joy in challenging stale, lazy authority and arrogant institutions goes way back. When I was dropping out of high school, the juvenile court officer that the school had assigned to “process” me for my juvenile behavior – which consisted entirely of NOT doing something, i.e.: going to school – showed me what he was writing at the top of my report out of frustration at how the system seemed to have missed a beat with me. It said “I would agree with the school counselor’s simplistic assessment that Ian has authority issues, if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t seem to recognize any“. Then he signed my walking papers, and I was done with high school at sixteen.

So when a client of mine came to me almost two years ago asking if I could help tackle the city government – which was blocking the restoration of the sign even though it was on a property designated as historic by the local Historic District Commission – I guess part of the reason I said yes was simply for the joy of challenging authority. Little did I suspect that later this would lead to spending a bunch of time in court when the insurance company refused to pay on the policy for the sign. But to be honest, it was quite gratifying to beat them. I certainly make no secret about my feelings about the insurance industry.

So here in the homestretch, after all the tedious bureaucratic challenges with the city (in the end, the folks at the city were helpful by the way!), and after the tedium of watching an insurance company wiggle through the “we’re not gonna pay” dance in court, it’s a little disheartening that precisely because of that shortfall in funds, we’re doing a fundraiser to finish the sign.

If we had known about this issue with the insurance policy at the outset, we might have done a fundraiser much sooner, like maybe when we got the last round of press. About a dozen supporters of the sign suggested it early on, but my client felt it was sort of their conrtibution to local preservation to foot the bill themselves.

They’ll still fund this last 20% or so ONE way or another, but if you’d like to show your support and speed things up, you can donate via their Indiegogo campaign.

Below is the sign in its former (slightly in need of restoration) glory:

Photo by dwacphoto.com

(Click image for an even larger version)

Love or hate Michael Moore (I lean a little to the latter, for the record), his movie Sicko was a fact-based eye-opener mostly focusing on the now-common insurance industry “innovation” called rescission. Which in a nutshell can be defined as “hiring a bunch of people to figure out how to not pay on policies you’ve sold“. If you have doubts about the veracity of Sicko’s stories, read in Deadly Spin about the PR panic it caused at the highest levels of the insurance industry. The author was right there on the inside working on damage control.

My personal stories range from a hospital charging almost a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS A WEEK for a standard room during my now-deceased mother’s hospital care, to a series of attempts by companies trying to weasel out of paying for business associates’ obviously legit claims, to a few stories from friends who had adjusters showing up while they wept over their smoldering homes, with a check in hand to help them out. How thoughtful! Unfortunately, they were checks for a third of the legitimate value of the claim. That’s a classic industry technique. Look like the good guy up front while you screw the customer from the other side.

Even former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had a run in with the industry. And lost. Like many homeowners in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Lott was shocked to find that his insurance company didn’t think wind had destroyed his house, but that water did. That meant they didn’t have to pay. Lott played the “Don’t you know who I AM?” game, and lost. We’ll never know all the facts there, but we DO know that when he tried to wield the power of Washington and Homeland Security, the industry didn’t flinch. And that appears to have riled him up so much that he may have resorted to behind-the-scenes intimidation and bribery.

So if the power of a senate leader doesn’t scare the insurance industry, what will?

Pretty much nothing. Although different reasons are typically offered for Lott’s eventual resignation, the real reason probably is that by stepping down when he did – two weeks before new legislation that would have prevented him from becoming a lobbyist took effect – he was able to get into the business that he’s now in, i.e.: lobbying. Apparently Lott learned where the REAL power in this country is the hard way.

But I’m rambling on all pitchfork-and-torchy here. Don’t take MY word for what an appalling monstrosity the insurance industry really is, let an old man who worked at the top of it for decades and couldn’t live with himself any more tell you. You’ll probably be stunned at some of the things you learn, and even if you you don’t care about the immorality of it all, Wendell Potter serves up a lot of simple facts about the history of insurance in America that will probably surprise you. It was once a brilliant idea for spreading risk amongst many, and has become a bizarre tool for enhancing the extravagant wealth of a very few.

Another way to achieve your goal is to create a legitimate business that so insinuates itself into people’s lives that they feel they can’t live without it, and then charge them enough to buy deregulation for yourself, so you can basically get away with murder, price-fixing, repossession of property, and slave-like labor practices. This would be the health and insurance, telecom, mortgage, and mobile device industries, respectively. The health and insurance industries get a special Goodfellas bonus for somehow maintaining their reputations as wonderful, life-saving services, in spite of the fact that the latter drives you to bankruptcy by weaseling out of paying when you most need them, and the former is often everything BUT healthy. As Walter Cronkite observed decades ago, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

But if you REALLY want to carve out your name in history as a master criminal – and never spend a single day in jail – you need to do BOTH of the above, by going  into banking or economics. Banking is the field for you if you like shopping for $87,000 rugs while your company is going under, or if you enjoy contriving elaborate schemes to strip the average working stiff of his self-esteem and home while telling him he can’t live without what you have, even though it was never yours to begin with. Economics, on the other hand, is a great field if you admire the basic methodology of the TV weatherperson, palm reader, or astrologer, but prefer hanging out with politicians and bankers.

The scary thing about all this apparent hyperbole is that it really isn’t hyperbole at all. Since 2008, we’ve witnessed the most massive financial crimes in history, seen very little in the way of punishment, and in fact seen the very perpetrators of the crimes elevated to the highest levels of government. Often in the very agency that is intended to regulate the industry in question. Even scarier is that these people are either blithering idiots who have no idea whatsoever how markets work, or they made this all happen on purpose.

If you’re a student of economics, there’s no hope of persuading you to think differently than you already do, because you’re almost certainly already indoctrinated into one of the two main schools. If you’re a Keynesian, you’re probably smugly saying “I told you so” and selling lots of books. If you’re a neo-classicist, maybe you’re still running around gazing at the world with 20/20 hindsight, constructing logical fallacies to explain the catastrophes after the fact. Or maybe there’s another secret frat house within the neo-classical school. Maybe this whole global economic shift is intentional. Maybe it’s just a variation of the kind of scorched earth policy suggested by the Starve the Beast strategy. We will never know, since so many things are either veiled in secrecy, or buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of data.

At the end of the day, there’s not much middle ground. Those responsible for guiding the markets over the past few decades were either dead wrong about their theories (operating sort of  like a Shaman doing a raindance while it’s raining), or they were intentionally engineering a world-changing shift in how governments work in relation to banking and finance. How could it be anywhere in between? Take the arrogant, floppy eared, squinty-eyed Ayn Rand sycophant Alan Greenspan. Wrong at almost every turn in his career, but rooms would fall silent when he spoke, eagerly awaiting his pronouncement about the new prime lending rate. Or his banal twaddle about irrational exuberance or whatever. At least he finally admitted to 30% of his ignorance. And more recently, two of the people who – if they really knew what they were doing – were best positioned to see catastrophe coming and failed to do so. And to fix the problems they failed to see coming, resorted to the exact opposite of what their own theories would recommend. They used the Invisible Hand as a big bitch slap to the world in general, basically telling us that if the government didn’t pay for the mess, the world would end. And then these guys not only kept their jobs, they either got bonuses or government appointments to boot.

The question of criminality is not a matter of opinion; in the aftermath of the financial crises of the last several years, the SEC has filed hundreds of actions. Over 700 in fiscal year 2011 alone. The scale of misdeeds by the financial services industry is literally mind-boggling. Even trying to list the most egregious here would be absurd; information in quantities like this literally requires databasing.

The most disturbing thing of all though is that little is likely to ever be done; no significant players have gone to jail, and when cases ARE successfully prosecuted, the banks pay fines in the millions against offenses in the billions. It becomes merely the “cost of doing business”. And you and I don’t seem to care, we still stick our hard-earned money in the same bank that we bailed out while we argue about Mitt Romney’s dog transport methods and Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

And any seemingly organized civil reaction has turned out to be a joke. While the Tea Party is far from the band of PBR-swilling yahoos that most smartypants liberals like to frame them as, they have largely either (quite successfully and intelligently) folded themselves into the conventional political process, or on the fringes, are obsessed with looney ideas about sovereign citizenship and other misinterpretations of constitutional law. And the Occupy Movement? NICE JOB. Call yourselves “Occupy Wall Street”, get the world’s attention, and then spend the next six months arguing about everything BUT Wall Street. Christ, even HIPPIES were more effective in fomenting social change.

So while we will probably continue to see these quiet wrist slaps by the SEC, most bankers can sleep well tonight in their five hundred dollar jammies, because the Department of Justice isn’t going to actually put anyone in jail. Why? It’s too hard, they say. These cats are just Too Big to Jail.

Financial Services

This is the one that’s probably going to kill us all, so let’s tackle this first. Money is probably the closest thing we have to a “commons” these days, and we all know about the Tragedy of the Commons. You see, back in Ye Olden Days, if Ug needed some fire for his cave, he might go over to Grok’s place and trade him a few dead possum for a lit torch, or a shiny rock for his girlfriend. This later became a little more civilized, and their descendants Jeb (who didn’t know how to milk cows) and Josh (who didn’t know how to forge a plow) would do similar trades, and sort of knew that they both needed the actual ground that they walked on and the water that flowed through it, or they’d die.

Later, some smartypants convinced everybody they needed a boss, and commenced to governing them. Not long after that, an even smartypantsier guy came up with the idea that dragging sheep over to Jeb’s place every time you needed a bunch of the nice sweaters his wife made was kind of silly, and suggested that everyone agree that they could use pretty metal coins as the means of exchange in place of the actual objects. Of course, everyone wanted pretty metal coins, and once you had a bunch, you needed a safe place for them, and VOILA! Banking was born. This guy was even cleverer than that though. He pointed out that since pretty metal coins were heavy, and since he was keeping them all safe in one place for you, it wasn’t much of a stretch to issue little pieces of paper to represent the coins.

We all know where this leads. Pretty soon, the Banker guy is creating all sorts of imaginary money just by signing sheets of paper and saying “ABRACADABRA” or “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash”. The most modern form of this sleight-of-hand-slash-pigeon-drop is known as “Financial Services”. The “service” provided is that when you give all your money to the banker, he’ll go spend it all to get himself deregulated by the government, so he can do all sorts of foolhardy gambling with it. He actually will make billions, even trillions of dollars, but he’ll do it with doomed Ponzi Schemes, and along the way he’ll tell you you’re not a good enough person to borrow any of it. Later, when the whole thing falls apart, he will have made so much money that you barely notice that he saves a few mil for himself as he rightfully insists that life as we know it will cease to exist if you and your offspring don’t bail him out. And with a bigger loan than you would have ever DREAMED of asking HIM for.

But before long, it won’t matter how many dollars changed hands. Because by that point we’ll actually be calling them Yuan. As I type this, the Chinese Yuan is worth about 0.1573 US Dollars, which makes the old Hawaiian rhyme “Ching chong Chinaman sittin’ on a fence/tryin’ to make a dollar outa fifteen cents” especially poignant for the moment. But soon, you won’t care how many dollars equal a Yuan, because the dollar will no longer be the global standard for currency exchange.

Lobbyists & Think Tanks

It’s pretty comical that the average person devotes any time at all to thinking about who they’re going to vote for and what the reasons are. Why think, when think tanks have done all the thinking for you? They’re much better at it than you are, and once they’ve decided on the best way to get you thinking about whatever they want you to think about in the way they want you to think about it, they’re going to get you thinking that way. That’s why you care more about gay marriage and abortion than the fact that the Supreme Court picked your president for you back in 2000 or that the country is umpty bajillion dollars in debt. Once they have YOU thinking the way they want, they turn things over to the lobbyists, who get the politicians thinking the way they want, basically by buying whatever legislation the think tanks wanted, just in case you don’t actually vote for it with all that democracy and freedom you’re so proud of. The upside under Chinese rule? There’s pretty much only one think tank, and it’s called the National People’s Congress. And it pretty much rubber-stamps all its decisions.

Baby Boomers

You can complain about Generation X or Millenials all you want, but it’s the Boomers that wrecked it all, just by being so damn plentiful. If you haven’t done the math yet, there will soon be about three times as many retirees trying to collect Social Security checks as there are younger working people paying into the system. This makes it inevitable that the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history  will collapse; there was already a $46 billion deficit in 2011. Politicians have known this for decades, but if they had bothered pointing it out, they wouldn’t have been able to gouge your paychecks in the guise of paying into  the system, when in fact the money was going to pay their salaries, pay for wars, or whatever else needed cash injections. That’s why GOP think tanks started calling it your independent retirement plan back in the 2000 election cycle. If they let you think about “Social Security”, you’d get all pissed, but by putting the onus on YOU, we now have the bizarre result that the average working stiff is against receiving their own benefits, contemptuously calling them “entitlements”. This is all less of a concern under Chinese rule, since EVERYBODY gets all the benefits they want, because NOBODY REALLY HAS MONEY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Religion & State

Want more church in your schools, and more God in your government? Try moving to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Medieval Europe. Those are examples of what life is like when you get all religiousy in politics, and the separation of the two was one of the most intelligent things about America’s founding documents. On the bright side, since Chinese rule has a few decades of being atheistic, the worst they’re likely to lay on you is some Buddhist or Confucianist thinking, which doesn’t have many specific rules about dancing and gay marriage, last time we checked.

Duocracies and Duopolies

Do you like Coke, or Pepsi? Verizon, or AT&T? Democrats, or Republicans? The polarized, black and white, red vs. blue, “for us or ag’in’ us” thinking that has overtaken the American dialog and paralyzed our government and made all consumer choices between “Shitty Thing A” and “Shitty Thing B” will no longer be a concern once we’re all speaking Mandarin and making electronic components for foreign countries. This will also be a blessing at the supermarket, since we’ll no longer have thirty-seven toothpastes to agonize over.

Homeland Security

Do you remember how weird it was when they announced the new “Department of Homeland Security” shortly after 9/11? No, I didn’t think so. I’ve always been astounded by how few people picked up on the Hitler-and-Stalin era vibe of the moniker. In my opinion, Bush may as well have donned a little moustache, gone on the air and said “Vee haff cree-ayeted ay noo dee-partment to PROTECT ZEE BELOVED HOMELAND!” while straddling a V-2 on Pennsylvania Avenue. Well, now that we’ve had the TSA anally probing us for ten years, and AT&T has eternal license to tap all our phones and web connections, we should feel right at home under the oppressive watch of our new overlords.

Manufacturing & Trade

All you so-called “patriots” that have been belly-aching about how we sent all the jobs overseas to slave labor cities can finally shut your yaps, because all that manufacturing will come back home under Chinese rule, except WE’LL be the ones with the bleeding fingers, making iPhones for twenty cents a day, and living on rice gruel.

Prison & Education System

It’s pretty impressive the way America shifted all the money away from education and into the prison systems without anybody noticing. And pretty handy too, if you’re planning a new totalitarian state.

Health Care & Energy

These are two things about America that probably astound the world. The former, because although we basically created the whole idea of modern health care, pretty much no-one here has any, and the latter because we not only created the machines that made us addicts to the oil that runs them, we have the natural resources and ingenuity to fix the problem, but rather than collecting energy from the sun to power things, we use coal to generate the electricity to run our air conditioners to protect us from the heat  the sun beats down on us 365 days a year.

Branches of Government

We could prattle on here about how the brilliant balance of government put in place by our forefathers is just a big shitshow once the president routinely invokes executive privileges, congress holds someone in contempt weekly, and the Supreme court is an active partisan wing of government that shapes elections, but that would be boring. Besides, this will be yet another benefit of the single party system that will guide our lives once we start paying our rent in Yuan.

Jeff Daniels probably put it all pretty well in this clip from The Newsroom:

Ironically, he later said they weren’t trying to make a big statement, they were just trying to create a good show.

Media Control & Citizens United

Remember back in The Before Time when we’d laugh at Russia’s TASS news agency and the way they would print the most seemingly absurd things, like “Russians First on Moon“? Well, today we’re Russia. And TASS is FOX, or CNN, or MSNBC. Don’t kid yourself that Fox has cornered the market on propaganda as journalism. Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher are just as full of crap and useless to you as Bill O’Reilly. Sadly, if you want accuracy in reporting, you have to turn to Comedy Central. Everybody in the world knows this except us, because they’ve been dealing with political control of media for decades, if not centuries.

Combine the narrow control of a few media conglomerates with legislation like Citizens United, which gives corporations the same rights to free speech as humans (except that most humans can’t afford to spend a billion dollars on TV time to promote their preferred candidate) and you essentially have elections that are sold to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder doesn’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not your kid gets an education.