Frances Bean Knows Everything

In case you haven’t been on Twitter in the past 20 minutes or so, the U.S. stock market is collapsing. Well, it was collapsing (the Dow was down over 1,000 points at one point), but apparently now it is bouncing back. But it would be understandable if you had no idea what’s going on just from watching the web, because honestly, it’s struggling to keep up.

Under the weight of basically everyone and their mother checking the web to see what’s going on with the market, sites are failing left and right. Google Finance keeps bringing up an error message to “please try again in 30 seconds.” Yahoo Finance is completely down. Trying to look for news via Twitter, meanwhile, yields mixed results. At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600. The problem is that the “real-time” web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were falling.

Then the bounce started happening and people were still tweeting about the Dow being down 1,000, when in reality it was actually down only about 100 at that point. It’s like whiplash out there on the web right now.

So where else do you turn? Well if you loaded up CNN.com while the crash was occurring, you wouldn’t have even known anything was happening. It was only well after the bounce started occurring that they site had a banner up that the Dow was down 900. And again, things were already on the rise at that point. Stay tuned…

Sorry for the delay, I have a monster cold this week, so I have been out of commission lately. In my last entry I talked about some of the privacy issues surrounding the census. The reality is that the majority of information the census asks us is already out there, ripe for the picking. Between credit card and utility companies selling our information to the highest bidders, and simple things like social networking sites (facebook, myspace etc) the idea of privacy is really a thing of the past. That doesn’t take away the fact that there is an expectation of discretion when the government is involved. But often this isn’t the case.

The government has a history of sharing specific data with law enforcement agencies, especially during times of crises. Government assurances can definitely have a short shelf life. The original Social Security cards explicitly stated that they were not for identification purposes. Yet today the number is for the most part a national I.D, without which you can’t even open a bank account.

The predominant argument to elicit compliance, stated on the Census Bureau website : “Each question helps to determine how more than $400 billion will be allocated to communities across the country.” The money will be used to fund hospitals, job training centers, schools, senior centers, emergency services, and public-works projects.

In other words, tax money will be doled back to the community based on how many residents return the form. In an October Newsweek article, “Census Maps Out Strategy to Snare Elusive,” a census official was quoted about the effects of promised entitlements and peer pressure on potential non-complier: “What helps persuade the cynical to participate is stressing the count’s benefits for their children, such as planning for schools and hospitals.” And, if the “cynic” has no children or is willing to waive personal benefits to maintain privacy, he should be reminded that noncompliance is “stealing” from his neighbors and their family. Exercising his right to privacy is said to deprive his community of benefits and the neighborhood kids of a good education. Compliance with the census has been converted into a civic duty.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, and like I said before, I do plan in filling the damn thing out, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I want to make it clear that I recognize the historical and strategical importance of the census. Past census records are an invaluable resource, and for the most part the census bureau is a benign department set up by the government to count heads. My concerns stem more from the various other government agencies that have taken advantage of the information gathered by the census.

Some factions in the great census debate question the constitutionality of the current census. The Census Bureau draws on constitutional authority but the modern questions have little to no connection with the original intent of the census, which was ascertain how many people reside in each state, in order to assign a number of representatives and  to direct taxes.

No one can argue that the original mission of the census has drifted. The first census (held in1790) consisted of six questions: the name of the head of the family and the number of people in the household broken down into free white males 16 or older, free white males under 16, free white females, and slaves. The 2010 form demands information on race, ethnicity, the relationship of occupants to each other, and if you own your home, whether or not it is owned outright.

The federal government responds to concerns about privacy by assuring the public that the data collected is completely confidential. “Wrongful disclosure” by employees carries a fine of up to $250,000 and/or a prison term up to five years. Other federal laws reinforce confidentiality protection, including the Confidential Statistical Efficiency Act and the Privacy Act. Confidentiality is guaranteed for 72 years, after that the census records are opened to the public.

What people fail to understand is that while releasing data about individual households is illegal, most other information gathered by the census is not. This includes the number of dwellings on a certain block, or the number of people of a certain race in a particular neighborhood.

Since the early 19^th century statisticians have urged the government to expand the data collected on the census. Over the years the census has been used in some circumstances to facilitate government goals far beyond its original intent. For example, both sides of the Civil War used the 1860 census to plan military strategy. When Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made his notorious “scorched earth” march through Georgia, he used census data to locate the farms he looted for food and supplies.

During World War I the Justice Department used census data to locate males within a certain age-range who had not registered for the draft; during World War II the data was used to locate Japanese-Americans and target them for internment(as we saw in the document I posted yesterday). More recently, the IRS has compared census data to privately purchased lists to detect tax evaders.

Local governments have also been known to mine census data. In a Wall Street Journal column in 1989, “Honesty May Not Be Your Best Census Policy,” James Bovard explained that those responsible for building-code enforcement often used the data “to check compliance with zoning regulations” and to find violations such as “illegal two-family dwellings”. Some might argue that stamping out illegal apartments is a good thing. Try telling that to the poor families living in them that now become homeless because they can’t afford anything else.

To be continued…

I’m feeling ambiguous about the 2010 census. I plan on filling it out, just to avoid the annoyance of a census worker showing up at my door. But the fact that you could face fines and jail time of you refuse to fill it out, or refuse to fill certain questions out kind of rubs me the wrong way.

From what I have been reading the census has been used in some shady dealings in the past, from the poor being evicted from illegal apartments due to code violations, to race information being released to the army in the 1940’s to help round up Japanese Americans into internment camps. Check out the picture above. Note that the areas that are blacked out were done so by researchers who discovered the documents, not by the census when the document was released to the army.

Not to mention that in 1983 the IRS tried, unsuccessfully, to combine census data with private mailing lists in order to track down people who don’t file income taxes. This article, by James Bovard from The Wall Street Journal 1989 has a lot of great information.

In preparation for this year’s census, census workers took GPS readings for every front door in America in order for individuals to be located with greater accuracy.  April first, the date that the census is due, is officially recognized as “Census Day.” Later in April another mailing will be sent out, either thanking people for responding or reminding them to do so.  After that census workers will knock on the GPSed doors of nonrespondents; repeatedly, if necessary.

Outspoken opposition to this year’s census has been less active than during the 2000 census. In 2000 approximately 16 percent of American households received a “long form,” which consisted of more than 100 questions, most of which were extremely personal. After the 2000 mailing, the Census Bureau received over 500,000 calls, most of which complained about the length and intrusiveness of the questionnaire.

This year the long form has been done away with. There are only ten questions. The brevity of the 2010 census does not reflect a new government respect for privacy, but merely a change in strategy.  The 2010 census data are now supplemented by the American Community Survey (ACS), which is distributed yearly to select households.

Regardless of this fact many people consider the current form to be a violation of privacy. For example, one of the first questions asks, “Is this house, apartment or mobile home owned by you or someone in the house with a mortgage? Owned free and clear? Rented? Occupied without payment of rent?”

Privacy is not the only issue that arises. Tomorrow I will touch on some of the other controversies surrounding the 2010 census.

Because who doesn't deserve to married more?

We have heard for years from the Religious Right, how sacred marriage is, and how its sanctity must be defended from homosexuals. This rhetoric has led to the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in the mid nineties, and more recently California’s Proposition 8.

After hearing the same line of bull for as long as we have, one would think that marriage was literally under attack, soon to be annihilated in the battle of the “great culture war” by the horrendous secular progressives.

In spite of this constant “protect family values” theme being played out in the public arena that is CNN and Fox News — the defenders of marriage’s sanctity do not actually practice what they preach .Shocked yet? I didn’t think so. Divorce is quite common among Christians and the religious right. The reality is that born again Christians are actually slightly more likely to divorce than their non believing counter parts. The fact that divorce rates are so high for Christians at all shows a marked hypocrisy in these groups defending the so called “sanctity of marriage”

It must also be noted that in general the divorce rate among American’s of any faith or non faith is an average of 33% (according to the Barna Group study), much lower than the oft quoted 50%. Some findings have shown that gay marriage might in fact lower the average divorce rate.

“Provisional data from 2008 indicates that the Massachusetts divorce rate has dropped from 2.3 per thousand in 2007 down to about 2.0 per thousand for 2008. What does that mean? To get a sense of perspective consider that the last time the US national divorce rate was 2.0 per thousand (people) was 1940. You read that correctly. The Massachusetts divorce rate is now at about where the US divorce rate was the year before the United States entered World War Two.”

With that, I will leave you with some food for thought.

Homosexuality is an abomination...having a baby with a tail is not.