to protect Democracy
What else do I believe?
This isn’t as immediately relevant to the office of Secretary of State, but it’s fair to want to know who you might be voting for.
First and foremost, I’m an American. I believe in this country and what it’s supposed to stand for – liberty and justice for all. And I don’t like it when people try to write exceptions into the word “all”. We don’t turn our backs on homeless, or queer, or foreign-born, or religions we don’t understand, or disabled, or any other lines someone wants to draw between us.
I’m not too fond of the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days. Everyone wants to build higher walls, not longer tables.
I was born and spent most of my life in Kansas. For me, Kansas was always a safe place to come back to after spending half a year in India, a couple months in Guatemala, or that year I lived in an apartment in Missouri. I don’t see any reason why it’s only me that Kansas should be safe for.
Back in 1776, the Continental Congress wrote pretty clearly that they believed we are all created equal, and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ever since then, people have been trying to make unscrupulous excuses for not listening to the “all” in all created equal.
The Great American Experiment had as an underlying principle that we are all equal. Not “Just Protestants are equal”. Not “You’re only equal if you’re of Anglo-British heritage”. None of that. We were always meant to be a diverse country. Our diversity is our strength, and that’s by design. And I’m getting tired of people pushing their “conditional equality” agendas. It’s un-American.
I'm an eyes-wide-open patriot. I believe in this country and what it represents. We are a promise of freedom, equality, and opportunity made manifest.
The United States of America was founded by bold visionaries, but mortal men all the same, and they weren't without flaws. A blind patriot would have you believe that to love your country means to refuse to acknowledge this country's failures, and to make excuses for the shameful moments in our history. He would tell you that to criticize our country in any meaningful way is to hate it. Other people see only the flaws. They would argue that our country is too far-gone to be worth saving.
I reject both of these notions, whole-heartedly. I acknowledge that America hasn't lived up to all its promises, but I'm not going to give up and walk away. There's still time to save this country from what it's becoming, to reclaim our place as a global leader that we've had for decades, and most importantly, finally fulfil those promises of freedom, equality, and inalienable rights that we've been struggling with since our inception.
It looks to me that there are two huge problems with this country right now: our failing economy and disregarding the Constitution.
We have what they call a “K-shaped economy”, where the line for the rich is going up and the line for the rest of us is going down. Biden took way too long to figure that out, and went on thinking all his work to stabilize the stock market would somehow benefit the rest of us. Trump is even more out of touch; he called the affordability crisis a hoax and continues to insist things are getting better, not worse. I am only a reluctant student of economics, and am not running for any lawmaker office because I’m not sure I have the knowhow to use policy to fix this problem. What I do want to do is make sure your vote is counted fairly, so your choice of what candidate to send to fix it is heard.
Our other really big problems boil down to ignoring the Constitution. The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, that is freedom from being seized/detained/arrested without a warrant signed by a judge, is guaranteed to us by the US Constitution, Article 1 section 9, and again by the Kansas Constitution section 112. Likewise, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, and/or warrants issued without probable cause, by the Fourth Amendment (US) and section 119 (KS). US Article 1 section 8 vests in Congress the power to declare war. We’re supposed to have rights to free speech and a free press, yet every time someone gets arrested without a warrant or any semblance of probable cause, any time we get pushed closer to war without Congress so much as being told, and every time anti-hate speech laws are hijacked to suppress free expression, Washington bullies the press to “take control of the narrative”, which is a fancy way to say broadcast state propaganda.
My beloved U. S. of A. becoming the U.S.S.R. We’ve got an autocrat, oligarchs, propaganda, a failing economy, secret police that send people to gulags, and we’re working on conquering satellite states. The only difference is instead of selling our dictatorship as communism, we sell it as freedom.
I don’t have the power to fix this mess on my own. I’m doing what I can do, which is to run for a position to at least keep our elections fair. Whatever happens to this country next, let’s make sure it reflects the actual will of the people.
These are two means to the same end. Democracy, as they say, dies in darkness. A democratic republic can only work when the citizenry has what they need to make informed, sensible decisions.
That’s why I will always support quality, non-partizan education for everyone – doubly so when it includes teaching critical thinking skills. I’m friends with a few teachers, by the way, and I know we really need to make some changes to the system. Pay them decently, and let them actually teach instead of just bouncing from one mandatory standardized test to the next.
A free press is the other part of informed citizenry. What we have is a few decent, minimally biased news sources, struggling to hang on, while most press is owned by corporations with agendas and runs on biased coverage intended to drive views with outrage and confrontation – and all of it is facing a government increasingly hostile to reporters.
Our current system relies on using half-truths, biased coverage, and voters who were never taught to see through it all.
I don’t like to dwell on my personal feelings about abortion. For one, it’s complicated. There are a lot of factors to consider, like whether the fetus if viable, whether the mother’s life is in danger, et cetera. For another, have you ever thought about how hard the decision to terminate a pregnancy must be? People going through that don’t need the weight of one more person judging them.
What’s not complicated is my feelings on abortion policy. We’ve seen what abortion bans do. It’s a disaster! Doctors are afraid to practice medicine without lawyers present. They’re fretting over whether the necessary care meets a legislative definition created by people who are neither doctors nor lawyers, while their patients are dying of treatable conditions.
And when you tell the “pro-life” politician responsible that a woman died because she was forced to carry a bad pregnancy when an abortion could have saved her, the politician will either deny it ever happened, or just mumble something about that ‘that wasn’t the intent of my bill”.
It would be nice if politicians took responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, but apparently that’s asking too much.
This is one issue where I’m a bit at odds with most others on the Left. When I say I love civil liberties, I mean it. I don’t make exception for gun rights.
It was only in the past few years I started practicing shooting. It’s an expensive hobby, and I’ve been way too poor for most of my life. (So don’t ask me about accuracy; I’m still kind of new.)
A short while back I learned that there’s a Zen to marksmanship, and ever since then I’ve loved it. To me, firearms aren’t about anger, power, and cheap thrills. They’re about focus, mindfulness, and responsibility. I think we’d be in a better place as a country if as youth we were taught to see guns in this light.
Would-be school shooters and new ICE recruits feel ignored and adrift, and see guns as a shortcut to commanding attention and power through fear and pain. Every time a school gets shot up, the rest of us make every effort to convince ourselves that person isn’t like us. Of course he isn’t; we would never do anything like that.
We’re sticking our heads in the sand by doing so. We don’t acknowledge that the shooter was subject to the same world, the same pressures as the rest of us. What’s different is he broke under the pressure, and instead of having the decency to break in a quiet and self-destructive way like depression, alcoholism, or self-harm that the outside world can ignore, he broke in the most heinous and attention-grabbing way he could imagine.
We don’t need to stop guns from existing. We need to stop society from breaking people. But we won’t do that because it requires some intense and uncomfortable discussions about how the world is structured to exploit and ignore us by people in power on all sides, and how people aren’t taught real ways of managing their emotions, setting boundaries, and defusing conflict because we all dismiss it as “woke crap” and “hippie nonsense”. And more unrealistically, it requires us to push back and against the "elite" who profit from controlling, exploiting, and discarding the people, in order to regain some agency and dignity in our lives.
I’m not running for a lawmaker office. If I were, I’d be alright with some basic gun control legislation such as closing loopholes in the background check system. But that’s about as far as I’d want to take it. Our national heritage is full of people who struck out into the deep woods with rifles to hunt for their own dinners. Self-sufficiency, or at least the right to pursue self-sufficiency, is part of who we are. And I don’t want to cut us off from that.
Do you remember when Congress used to investigate big corporations for price gouging? We need to get back to that. We won’t, because lawmakers are more dependent than ever on major corporate campaign contributions, and don’t want to upset their corporate masters.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling is the most recent really egregious fall in a long race to the bottom that gave us SuperPACs, dark money, and every other euphemism for corruption now haunting Congress. And as a result of that, no one wants to investigate where the money’s going in major industries like health insurance where the costs keep going up, the payouts keep going down, and CEOs announce record profits every year while practically in the same breath whining about how the high cost of business is forcing them to raise rates again.
It’s not just healthcare. Daycare providers and college professors are struggling to live on what they make, while the institutions they work for are charging exorbitant tuition prices. And don’t get me started on K-12 teachers!
Back in 2010, Obama made the case that pushing a lot of younger, healthy people into the system would create a surplus insurance companies would use to lower overall prices. He apparently didn’t realize that the companies were ethically so far-gone that they would pocket the extra profits and keep raising prices anyway. But to be fair to Obama, I fell for that one, too. Now I know not to trust big corporations, even a little.
My wariness of privatization and careless deregulation is why I get along better with Democrats than Libertarians, by the way.
Something needs to be done about the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, but in order to do that we need to bring back congressional investigations into price gouging. And doing that requires major campaign finance reforms.
When the system’s the problem, it’s never easy to get anything done.
On a personal note, for most of my own life I couldn’t afford any kind of health insurance. And I’ve had a couple medical conditions that dragged on for years. In 2010 my effort to join the Army was thwarted at MEPS because of a red flag on medical, which I couldn’t afford to get a doctor to look at. I suppose I should be grateful to our broken system. I tried joining the Army knowing full well there was a good chance it would get me sent to Afghanistan, and there’s a very real possibility I could have shipped out in one piece and come back in several.
You might have heard that data centers create a ton of jobs in their initial construction, but after they're built they only employ a few security and maintenance personnel. Well, I work in construction and I've been inside a partially operational data center. I can verify that it's true.
They suck down ridiculous quantities of water and electricity, and the only thing we get to show for it is a bland, soulless "suggested reply" to my e-mails that I don't even want to look at, let alone use. Anyway, here's how I think we should tackle the problem. If they don't like it, they can take their business down to Texas and risk the infamous energy grid there.
First, the State should pass a law invalidating those non-disclosure agreements they use to sneak into a community before the residents are aware. I don't know what unholy impulse would compel an elected official to sign an NDA in the first place, but let's fix the problem we can fix. Second, make sure each municipality has access to state legal counsel, with no barriers, so they don't have to blow their city budgets in court should the data center company threaten to sue.
Because I believe in local control, the rest are suggestions to municipalities.
1. Require each data center be cooled by either closed-loop water (which doesn't waste nearly as much) or some system that doesn't use water at all. Western Kansas is in a serious drought right now.
2. Require the data center pay for utilities at or above the private rate. No sweetheart deals that screw over private citizens.
3. Require the investing company pay for all upgrades to utilities, such as the electric grid and roads. The promise of modernized, more reliable utilities at no cost to the taxpayers could serve as an incentive for communities to allow these developments.
4. Require the company pay for these costs upfront. Data centers are usually paid for using various financial tricks that kick the bill down the road. You don't want to risk the company folding and leaving the county with a bunch of unpaid bills.
5. Have them come up with a plan for on-site solar, battery, and wind power to at least partially offset the drain on the electric grid. Not diesel; you don't want diesel fumes spitting dangerous fine particulate matter into the air 24/7 that your children will end up breathing.
