critical thinking

I’m beginning to get a sense of the Right vs the Left down here in AmericaLand. You could sum up my impression fairly by saying that the Left favours regulation to protect individuals against unreasonable business practices, where the Right favours the free market above all else (if an individual doesn’t like the way a given company is treating him, he can exercise his Right to Choose, and take his business elsewhere). What that means, in essence, is that if a corporation gets itself into the position where it can casually rape and pillage us all into the stone age, well, congratulations, high fives. Capitalism Works.

But that’s just my opinion. If looking at the simple facts can be called opinion.

In principle, that’s what America The Free is all about — we all equally have the God Given Right to seek our fortunes, and if we win an unassailable advantage over the competition then we’ve earned it with all our hard work and we’re Living the American Dream. The market just happens to be working in our favour. Or something. It sounds great.

Never mind that, in reality, whoever has the power tends to act to keep it that way.

In my opinion, responsible and careful legislation is necessary to protect the individual from the skull-fucking corporations that could not possibly care less about us so long as we keep their bottom line black. The current structure of the health unsurance system is the perfect example. Any company that would let you die rather than pay your claim should not be protected by the Constitution. Full stop.

A less lethal but just as valid example is the current chaos over the principles of Net Neutrality. Put simply, most of us feel that the intertubes should be free, and open, and as unfettered as possible by the trappings of the bloated, twisted, broken system in which most of us have to live. No throttles, no blocks, no filtering, no bullshit tiers. The free market system is based on the idea that if you can figure out how to control a commodity, you can charge whatever the market will bear for access to that commodity. That, again, sounds great. It really does.

The FCC is responsibly and carefully considering regulation which will guarantee equal access to the web for all. This proudly upholds the All-American principle of freedom for individuals. Equal rights for all. No preferential treatment for anyone. Effectively, this regulation would prevent ISPs from filtering any legal traffic in any way. Just like roads. Anyone can use them for anything, so long as it’s legal.

John McCain would like you to believe that this action is actually un-American, a “government takeover” that will stifle innovation. This is absolutely fascinating for me. He and the movement he represents (chiefly made up of the ISPs themselves) are actually trying to convince us that black is white.

Their perspective, though they can’t state it honestly (because it’s not terribly popular), is that businesses should be free to run their business. The government, for better or worse, should stay out of it. This is the sentiment, again, that brought us the ridiculous, murderous profiteering health unsurance system.

To bottom line it for you, they want to be left free to choose (for us) which traffic they like, and which they don’t, and stifle the latter.

To illustrate, this means that Bing could pay AT&T to favour their traffic over Google, and that would be the end of painfully slow Google unless they paid to compete. Bing could then charge us to use Bing as the only show in town, splitting the profits with AT&T. Loser = us. Then it gets proper fucked– AT&T would offer a premier tier, where we could pay for unfiltered (or less filtered) bandwidth, so we could continue to use our beloved Google. So, without changing one single iota of the bandwidth speeds they are currently supporting, AT&T (or whoever) is suddenly making money hand over fist.

Just imagine what YouTube would have to pay to remain the video site of choice. Next up: Microsoft My Video Place, only $10 a month for a whole gig of downstream! And one free video upload a month! Only $50 for the premium service!

And so on.

Look, the reason Google is winning is because they are free and ad supported, but in a nice way. We don’t get splattered with intrusive flashing, popping, noisy garbage like the old days. We chose Google, and Google is mindful that if they treat us with respect we will stay loyal. Google knows that if they offer everything for free, they will have the traffic, and that means eyeballs on ads. And that means money. It’s just smart business. Long view smart. Not gouge you and rape you and treat you like a bitch because you have no real choice smart.

If John McCain gets what he wants, make no mistake, everything you love about the web is history. Only people who can pay will get to play, on both sides of the ISPs. How this is supposed to promote jobs and innovation is utterly beyond me.

PCWorld has a Net Neutrality FAQ right here. Get informed. Use your voice. Before you have to pay for the privilege.

I’ve been cruising the interwebs looking for a good graphic for atoms or chemical compounds or something of the sort, and I came across an article written a couple years ago by a wellness specialist named Vreni Gurd. Yes, really.

In her 2006 article at Trusted.MD, she points out what should be obvious, if only we had the information: polyunsaturated fats are bad. Vegetable oils, for the most part, are bad. Saturated fats, meanwhile, are good. Not to be confused with trans fats, which are as bad as ever. Polyunsaturated margarine is bad? Butter is good? Quoi? I know- not obvious yet. Continue…

It’s high school chemistry that gets you there: polyunsaturated means extra electrons looking to partner up with other molecules. Oxygen is a couple electrons short. Add heat (as in cooking) and you get oxidized oil, which is a geek way of saying rancid:

“The kicker is that most of the vegetable oils on the market are heated in the processing in order to get the oil out of the seed. (Can you imagine how difficult it would be to squeeze oil out of a grape seed?) Therefore they are already rancid on the store shelves. They are then bleached so they look nice, and deodorized so they don’t smell bad and the consumer will not know the oil is rancid.”

Wow. And you thought maraschino cherries were creepy.

She says most arterial plaque (read: heart disease) is made up of unsaturated fats. The body can’t get rid of them nearly as efficiently. Saturated fats, meanwhile, are nice & stable, and the body is already designed to ship them off if we don’t need them (within reason).

She makes another very telling point:

“The first heart attack on record happened in 1921, just as the vegetable oil industry was picking up steam, and sugar and white flour were becoming more plentiful.”

Whereas:

“Animal fats, whole raw milk, eggs and butter had been consumed and prized for their healthfulness for thousands of years…”

Makes sense to me. Food: the less processed the better. Bring on the bison and butter.

I believe it’s so enormously important to add a voice of moderation whenever possible. In today’s sound-bite culture of media driven hysteria, common sense is in pretty desperate short supply. Fact is, most people don’t take the time to get informed. They just skim the headlines and believe whomever generally agrees with them. So, if you’re a halfwit redneck, you will believe whatever Glenn Beck dishes out. If you would rather talk than think, you will swallow Betsy McCaughey whole. You think Fox is News.

On the other hand, if you want to know what you are talking about, you will cull actual knowledge from as many sources as you can, as close to the original as possible.

The fact is that the GOP is reeling in disarray, fumbling around in old school politics that no one with half an ounce of sense has any interest in anymore. This isn’t to say Republicans have nothing to offer, but I am saying that the far right is not doing America any favours. The knee jerk reactions, half-baked assumptions, and outright lies spouting from the deep right have slowed progress to a painful crawl across broken glass, for no better reason than that they rail against change. There just isn’t any nice way to say it: Hey morons, get the hell out of the breeding pool. You’re dragging us all down.

So in the interest of adding a voice of reason to the tumult, I respectfully offer this article from Newsweek that crushes the more idiotic claims.

Of course, the problem with posting this sort of thing on a blog is that, chances are, if you’re reading this, we are like-minded people, and you already know all this stuff.