Archive for November 2011
Don’t misunderstand me here as I like the protection a well-trained police force provides a community. The police I know are dedicated and care for the community.
But for some time now I have been switching channels on the television when I get a chance and have discovered that there are Police Dramas on all three major networks at the same time every night of the week and for a substantial portion of the evening. Everywhere you look on contemporary television there are police. And somehow I perceive that it is not just due to viewer demand. I realize it is difficult to accept the fact that we may indeed be living in some sort of Orwellian future such as in 1984, but now more than ever the technology exists.
In one Police Drama a female police officer threatens to “frame” a suspect and in another all men were basically unproductive womanizers. The perception the public must have after viewing these shows is not the reality of real police work, I am sure. The problem though is that television has a didactic effect upon the viewer and when shows suggest that police can “frame” a person in order to get a conviction or that all men are basically unproductive womanizers, well it leaves to a certain degree an impression upon the viewer. And when they then may interact with the police in a real life situation, it is quite possible the outcome can be negative for both parties, the viewer and the real police officer. But even more disconcerting is that the viewer might think it is acceptable behavior for police to frame a suspect or that women are always the victims of domestic violence and do not instigate certain behaviors or initiate domestic disputes.
Couple that with the totalitarian fact that old ladies and babies are being searched at the airport and you can only reach one conclusion, America is now a “Police State.”
And the media is a willing part of the Police State, often softening or clouding our perceptions about that Police State. Don’t forget that fact.
Copyright © William Thien 2011
Sign up to receive updates. It’s easy and safe. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address. We will never sell your contact information to anyone.
The thing that concerns me the most about The Patriot Act, that insidious piece of legislation that the country seems to have for the most part forgotten, that piece of legislation which enables the government to accumulate and collect each and every piece of information it wishes about any and all private citizens in The United States which makes everyone by definition a suspect in the War on Terrorism, that piece of legislation that enables the government to surveil any private citizen it so chooses without judicial oversight, the thing that concerns me the most about The Patriot Act is that it is probably the most unpatriotic piece of legislation ever enacted in The United States.
The ACLU claims The Patriot Act has only been responsible for one, yes, that’s one arrest due to terrorist activity. Yet, the government has been monitoring all of our financial transactions, credit card activity, emails, can monitor telephones, and anything else the government so chooses in the name of the War on Terrorism for a decade now.
I was surprised to discover that The ACLU is not against The Patriot Act in its entirety but has taken the position that it needs to be “reformed.”
A sheep might not find anything abhorrent in such behavior. But to a man, it is unacceptable.
The most disconcerting aspect of The Patriot Act is raised by the question, “What is the government doing with all of that information they have been collecting for the last TEN YEARS!” Why is everyone by definition a suspect?
I personally don’t believe the goal any longer, and it may never have been, I don’t believe the primary goal of The Patriot Act is to address the problem of terrorist bombers running around our country, but it is instead to surveil potential threats to the government from within the indigenous population of The United States that wish to see the changes our government is working so very hard to prevent. I believe that the legislation’s original intent has been bastardized in the name of “Big Government” and for that very reason The Patriot Act must be repealed.
Who knows how the government is utilizing the information? They are still collecting it. Is the government quietly assassinating citizens based on information collected using The Patriot Act? Are they harassing those they feel represent a political threat of some sort as defined by some secret council? Such disquieting questions are myriad and persistent.
It is time to repeal The Patriot Act and replace it with something less pervasive.
It is time to repeal The Patriot Act or we are not a country of men.
Copyright © William Thien 2011
Sign up to receive updates. It’s easy and safe. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address. We will never sell your contact information to anyone.
William Thien 
An Observation About The Net Effect of China’s “One Child” Law
Posted by: William Thien on: November 15, 2011
While in college I did a stint at The Daily Cardinal in Madison, WI. The editor asked that I write an editorial on the subject of “Infanticide in China,” something I hadn’t heard anything about at the time.
I was surprised to know that China had a “One Child” law and that there was a massive problem with parents killing their female babies. Because the male child carries the family name and because males can do more work in the field, peasants in particular were killing their female babies due to a law in China that penalized parents for having more than one child, the law being implemented to control China’s ballooning population.
In the countryside in particular it was not uncommon to find female fetuses floating in the local drainage ditches. Dead female babies were found in the most unlikely places.
Yet, I digress.
The net effect of the “One Child” law is that Chinese parents were no longer strapped with raising large families, and they had large amounts of time on their hands.
Enter China’s new industrial age. With huge numbers of adults with nothing to do just sitting around in the countryside, the time was ripe for China’s new Industrial Age to arrive. There was a massive supply of labor which could be had at very low cost. China’s leadership recognized this. China realized there were so many restless peasants with nothing to do. China needed to put them to work, to keep them busy.
This made it possible for China to begin a massive new industrial age.
While parents in the rest of the world were busy taking care of larger families, Chinese parents were manning factories in the new industrial centers which China had created outside of its major cities.
China’s One Child Law, even if the accidental result of policy meant to control China’s population, made it possible for China to suddenly race ahead of the rest of the world industrially as it could staff its factories with ready and willing labor. What difference does it make if they staff their factories with adolescents today when they laid the foundation for their new industrial age with single-child families?
This of course is just an observation and there is nothing scientific about it except for the fact that it is exactly what happened.
Why make the observation in the first place? Well, if you consider that certain religions forbid the use of contraceptives and there are particular political groups that are against abortion, it poses by default the question, are such positions really beneficial to an industrial economy?
But it also makes you wonder if that was China’s original plan in the first place, to have large amounts of unwed males to work on labor intensive projects around the world? It would not be the first time China has created such an army. And everything has seemed to work out so perfectly, except for the fact that there is nobody to take care of all of the elderly Chinese. Just another observation.
As an aside to the era now there are too many males in China and not enough females for them to wed. Furthermore, there is an increasingly large population of elderly people with nobody to take care of them.
Of course China has put those circumstances to good use as well as now China has a massive work force of males with no wives that China can essentially deploy around the world in labor intensive projects, which they have done in landscapes with difficult and inhospitable terrain such as regions of Africa and South America.
Copyright © William Thien 2011
Sign up to receive updates. It’s easy and safe. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address. We will never sell your contact information to anyone.
Share this: