Personal/Political: If I Were President

With the most controversial election in my lifetime looming in front of me, I've had a lot of thoughts about what I think is wrong with with our political system and what I think ought to be changed. As part of my ongoing series trying to “present” my politics, here are some of the things I would do if I had control of the executive branch.

Some of my priorities: Don't overstep the bounds of executive authority; Solve the long-standing problem with legislative corruption; Reconcile the problem between the government doing what the money wants instead of what the people want; Prune wasteful, corrupt, and/or redundant agencies to both reduce the size of the federal government while improving its efficiency; and attempt to move more power into the hands of individual voters.

I can't say whether I'd run as a Democrat or a Republican. It would probably be determined by which party was at least publicly espousing the sort of things I want to do in office at the time.

Step 1: My Cabinet and the Department of Information

The first thing I'd do is dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and move all of its various agencies back where they were before Bush created the department. I think the whole formation of the department was a knee-jerk response after September 11 and we've since been exposed to 15 years of it screwing up our country. One of my major priorities during the election would be identifying competent cabinet officials based on what I know about them. I would do my best to pick people based on ability rather than politics. For example, Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana, would be my Secretary of State. He did what amounts to the Secretary of State's job throughout his time as governor, and he'd be excellent at it. Once I had a competent group, I'd leave most of the departments, especially the ones I'm not going to try to shake up, in the hands of people I could trust to keep everything going without my input and without distracting me.

With the DHS gone, I would form a long-overdue Department of Information. I'd do away with the CIA, the NSA, and any other little niche intelligence groups to be replaced with two: the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence and the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence. I think it's important to scrap the whole agency and start fresh so we could get rid of some of the baggage those agencies bring to the federal reputation. I would leave others, like the FBI, where they are, but I'd strip them of any sort of intelligence work not related to their primary purpose. The FBI, as a law enforcement agency under the DOJ, would keep doing things like watching suspected criminals (with the appropriate warrants), but would no longer be doing bulk surveillance to try to find people to suspect. I'd pick one agency, quite possibly the FBI, to take over all federal “security” jobs, instead of having 3 or 4 who have time and resources wasted with jurisdiction questions. This would also centralize all of their records, so there would be no more problems caused by one agency knowing something another one didn't. With all this concentrating of authority in the hands of one agency, I'd have to put a watchdog on them to provide oversight to keep them from abusing power. This is part of where the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence comes in: The Bureau of Foreign Intelligence would take over the CIA's job, with a clean record, and handle all the foreign intelligence work, as the name says.

The Bureau of Domestic Intelligence would have two main functions: gathering information from the people for the federal government, and watching the federal government for the people. It would need total authority to investigate other federal agencies.

I'd also restrict the ability of any one agency to classify information and make it secret: any other organization would have to submit it to the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence, who would be charged with weighing whether or not it's in the interest of the American people and/or national security, and then decide whether or not any given information could be declared secret. Just to make sure the new Bureau keeps its own record transparent and can't just classify all its own mistakes while exposing everyone else's, it wouldn't be able to classify any of its own information without approval from the FBI or another equivalent agency, so they'd in effect be covering each other at all times.

Step 2: Bureau of Domestic Intelligence and Survey Polls

Apart from watching the rest of the government, the main job of the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence (Have I used that term enough to just abbreviate it BDI from now on?) would be to gather information from the people for the government. This doesn't mean domestic spying – I'd largely get rid of any and all domestic spying programs – but polling: surveying instead of surveillance. Our polling system is incredibly underused, and technology has reached a point where it's time for an overhaul. Polling ought to be a full-time job, under the new BDI, where citizens can go into polls once per ballot to voice their opinions. The idea that people can influence how Congress votes by writing to their representatives and senators has not been shown to work except in some very extreme and public instances. When the US was considering attacking Syria, for example, the people were able to get them to back off, at least temporarily. Then we started hearing more and more about ISIS, until when the president said we have to go get them, the people were so afraid of them they just stayed out of it. ISIS of course is involved in Syria, so ipso-facto we got into a war in Syria right after the people said not to because the government found another way to do it. Now all we have to do is allow, or even help, ISIS gain control of one of the parts of the country we wanted to take from the Syrian government, and then we can take it from ISIS.

 

This kind of blatant disregard for the opinions of the voters should be stopped. I'll get to the blatant disregard for the people in the other countries in a while. I would transform spying on Americans into listening to them. I'm not talking about transforming us into a pure democracy, though. The constitution does guarantee us a republic, so it would be unconstitutional to put all power directly in the hands of the people. However, I've thought for years that a lot of the underlying problem with our government is that there is no instrument for measuring the Will of the People that they're supposed to be implementing. Suppose reform-minded leaders get into office, which they do sometimes. Once they get there, what are they supposed to change? What sort of laws do the people want? If they don't know that, how can they find out? Go through mountains of mail from their constituents, which only comes from people who still think writing paper letters is a good way of communicating and doesn't represent any sort of “common” view. Or maybe they can go to the streets and talk directly to the people, although I haven't seen that this works either. It always looks like a stunt, even if it's meant to be sincere. As a result, the people they talk to tell the politician what they want to hear, and the politician tells the people what they want to hear, and then everyone goes back to business as usual.

The biggest problems with both of these methods are firstly, there's no way to get a good representative sample of what people really want, and secondly, they're probably going to hear different things. In the end, they just do what everyone else does and listen to their paid advisers, who are of course paid to advise them in a certain direction.

The only way to really get them the information they need to do their jobs is the way we elect them to the job in the first place: we have to tell them at the polls. And we can't keep doing it only when we elect them, because that's why they spend so much money trying to convince us that they're doing a good job already. We need to tell them constantly. I'm talking weekly official polls, at official polling places, staffed by full-time professionals, where the people vote in numbers on laws, policies, etc. in order to ensure that the government has a good idea of what the will of the people is. The results of these polls remain advisory, though. Congress is still the deciding body, but suddenly we'd have something to go with their already-public voting records: people could see on a continual basis whether or not their politicians were actually voting in accordance with the way their constituents wanted them to. As president, I could use the “bully pulpit” to expose lawmakers who are ignoring their voters in favor of professional lobbyists.

Step 3: Satisfying the Money

If you've read this far, you're probably thinking “You'd never be able to pull this off. In fact, if you were running on a platform of doing something like this, you'd never get elected, because you'd be going against what the campaign contributors want by taking the power out of their hands.” And so far, you'd be correct. I hear a lot of reform advocates saying that we have to get the money “out of politics.” This might sound like a good slogan, but it's not reasonable. You're never going to get the money out of politics. This was true in Athens, it was true in Rome, and it's true now. We could pass all the laws we want to try to stop rich people and businesses from influencing government, but it just can't be done. Money finds a way; that is its purpose.

When you really look at it, it's not even right to get the money out of politics. Not only has the Supreme Court ruled that repeatedly anyway, but it's probably objectively right that the people who have more money have a bigger stake in the system than those who don't, and if they have more skin in the game, isn't it right that they should have more say in the outcome? The way I see it, the problem isn't that this influence exists. The problem is that what's good for business doesn't always line up with what the American people want. The “solution” they've been implementing is for the government to do what's good for business and either try to sell it to the people beforehand as being good for them, or just do it and then try to convince the people afterward that it's good for them.

I think a better solution all the way around would be to find out what the American people want, find out what would be good for business, then go with what the people want and pay the businesses off to let that happen. See my post about buying our way out of the oil industry for some more details on how we could do that.

Once we resolve the conflict between the Will of the People and the commercial interests, a lot of the corruption would go away. Of course, we'd still have the lobbyists trying to persuade the politicians just like we do now. How do we get that to stop corrupting the legislature? We get it above board. We get some laws in place that allow businesses to give to politicians directly. “But that's quid-pro-quo corruption!” you might say. Yes, and no. The whole reason we don't allow quid-pro-quo exchanges is because having politicians sell their votes means they vote the way the people who are buying them want. What we've done instead is have businesses donate money into campaign funds – some of the most regulated money on the planet – so that politicians have to do everything they can to get reelected because they've already pledged to vote the way their donors want, and the only way they can get the rewards is to stay in office and keep voting for them. How is that less corrupt than a system where the business gives the politician money and the politician votes the way the business wants them to? So really, we already have a quid-pro-quo system, but it's through just enough loopholes to stay legal while giving us none of the benefits. We just need a different system, then.

How about this? What if businesses could give money to the politician in an escrow account in exchange for their vote, but the politician couldn't collect the money until they leave office? This already exists, by a way, for the president. It wouldn't be a stretch to extend it to the House and the Senate. So now instead of a bough-and-paid-for politician who votes the way their donors want and ignores the people, we have mostly honest politicians who occasionally need to vote the way the people with the most stake in the government want. If they want to collect that money, they have to leave (and there goes any need for term limits) and if they want to stay in office, they need to vote the way their constituents want them to most of the time, with the BDI watching. You couldn't have anyone stay in office unless they made their voters and their donors happy, their votes would be public, their incentives would be public, and sure they'd sell a vote now and then but they'd mostly be beholden to their voters. That's several degrees of improvement with everyone getting what they want.

Step 4: Fix the Foreign Policy

I'm just going to say it: we have to stop antagonizing Russia. Let me go through some of the things we've done since the end of the Cold War. First, we promised we wouldn't take advantage of their weakness and wouldn't move NATO's borders an inch closer. Then we took advantage of their weakness with lopsided trade deals one after the other and expanded NATO to even include former Soviet satellite states right on their borders. Russia put their foot down when we started making overtures to Ukraine, a nation so culturally Russian in part that Russia once had more to do with Kiev than it did with Moscow and St Petersburg. So instead of pushing NATO in we sent in some NGOs to topple the elected government and try to install a pro-Western government that would ask for NATO on its own. Then when Russia took over a tiny bit of Ukraine for themselves and flew two bombers into the Gulf of Mexico, we acted like we were the aggrieved party.

In military terms, we need to pull the heck out of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. No NGOs, no troops stationed in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or any of that. Russia, and China, are going to rise to superpower status again whether we like it or not, and we're not doing ourselves any favors by either ignoring that fact or trying to hold them down. When they do make it, do we want them to remember us as the nation that did everything we could to hold them back? My plan would strengthen the position of the US in the world and increase military spending above its already stratospheric levels (and keeping the money happy), while at the same time pulling the pressure off the rising powers, and welcoming them, even helping them, reclaim their national pride and glory in a way that helps us do the same.

In a nutshell, I would focus on the navy. The US Navy is the backbone of the US military historically speaking, and in fact the navy is biggest determining factor in every military throughout history. Ours is the strongest in that history. It controls the skies, the seas, and the land with the Marines. In fact, the Navy does nearly all our military work for us, and is only supplemented by the Army and the Air Force when needed. I would use that force to form a sword and a shield for our country that no nation could possibly match. I'd establish fleet lines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific stretching from pole to pole. We'd allow no foreign military inside that lines, except Canada, Mexico, and any country in the rest of “our” hemisphere that gets its stuff together well enough to get some ships of their own. In other words, our military would have an impassable barrier holding half the world for us, but beyond that we wouldn't project power. Instead, I would invite Russia, China, and the rest to create their own naval lines alongside ours, so that they would feel included and encouraged in this idea instead of threatened by it. In the Atlantic and the Pacific there would be two great fleets sailing up and down past each other constantly, not like sentries menacing each other but as a fence between neighbors. If the UK wants to keep up their special relationship with us, then there can be a third, shorter dual line in the English Channel and the North Sea for the same purpose.

The true cooperative measures would come from the expansion of merchant shipping – after all, we let merchant ships from rival countries, even enemy countries, past our military ships now, so there's no reason to assume our floating fence would block those. There would be more of those than we have now with the oceans as safe as they would be with our respective navies constantly deployed in them. For that matter, we could expand our shipyards here in the US enormously just to build ships to sell to other countries for shipping. Think what that would do to the economy along with all the increased exports.

The other thing that would truly defuse the tension we have now is liberty calls for the navies. The one reason we'd let a Russian or Chinese fleet inside our barrier – escorted by a superior number of our own ships, of course – is to bring them to Miami or San Francisco to spend their money partying it up in our ports. That means jobs, jobs, jobs in shipyards, bars, hotels, restaurants, all flooded with foreign sailors looking for a good time. Not to mention all the added jobs for law enforcement making sure those foreign sailors don't get out of the port into the rest of the country. I'm not an idiot.

We'd do the same on the other side too, sailing to Hong Kong or St Petersburg for some of our liberty calls. Of course, the tension would be pretty high at first, but over time as these sort of things became more common, our peoples would get more used to each other and we would finally have some adults on all sides who'd spent significant time in the other one's company and had some fond memories of the other one's homeland. Only once that sort of pattern was established could we really be friends and cooperative partners with the next most powerful nations after us. At the same time, we need to crank up our almost-dormant diplomatic corps, perhaps a new agency within the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence, to not only keep their governments on our sides but as a scalpel to carefully keep them divided from each other. It would take a lot of effort, especially for us, but I think it would be worth it in the long run to see a world dominated by the US, Russia, China, and the UK all standing together arm-in-arm, following our ultimate lead of course, because the alternative is that we keep staring each other down in rising tension while we all still have our thousands of nuclear weapons.

As to all the various areas that my plan pushes outside our sphere of influence, I would be actively encouraging one of the other superpowers to take over management of those areas – especially the Muslim world – so that we can just get out of it altogether. My position on Israel is already clear; you can read that post if you want the details. As far as securing our oil interests, just because I'd pull our military out of the area doesn't mean I'd abandon our business interests. They'd just be defended by professional mercenaries, and contract troops from the other superpowers wrangled by our diplomatic corps and paid for by their own governments instead of risking the lives of our own sailors and soldiers to do the same job.

Final note: South Korea can take care of themselves. I'd pull out the “tripwire” forces. I think there's more than enough pressure on them from two enormous fleets up and down the Pacific Ocean to keep them in line, besides which I think if everyone else stayed out of it South Korea would win their fight anyway. And even if I'm wrong about that, that's China's problem, not ours.


[2018 EDIT: Several people who would know have told me that my energy ideas are dumb, and I don't have any business formulating ideas about something I don't understand. So just ignore Step 5.]

Step 5: (At Least Survey to) Fix the Energy Crisis

I've already explained my thoughts on global warming in exhaustive detail. I'd have to conduct one of those survey polls of the population to see what action the people would like us to take, then go with that. I'd really like to see some cities and states try different options and see which one works the best before we try adopting a national standard. I've also already covered the oil issue previously. Those really aren't the parts I think the president needs to lead the way on.

The biggest challenge facing us when it comes to energy on all fronts is how to get out of coal without hurting either the coal companies or the coal miners. As much as I believe in nuclear and hydro power, I think the best lateral move from coal would be geothermal power. We can even convert coal plants to geothermal plants: we just have to dig deep enough holes under them first. The best part for the economy is that once we reduced our own demand for coal, we could still keep digging it up to export it.

There is one thing that has to be checked out before we tackle geothermal power, though. The reason we have an atmosphere is because the liquid iron of the inner core rotates inside the solid iron of the outer core, which produces our planet's magnetic field. It's only because of the strength of that magnetic field that the sun's radiation can't blow away our atmosphere. That's a lot riding on the nature of that core. The potential problem is that the only thing keeping the inner core liquid is the enormous pressure being applied to it by the weight of the mantle and the crust. If we're going to bore holes through the crust, we need to know in advance how that venting will affect that pressure. If we somehow let enough pressure off the core to let it solidify, we would lose our atmosphere, and by the time we knew about it we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. So as dangerous as global warming might be, the danger of geothermal energy gone wrong is the complete destruction of our planet's ability to support life.

Either way, once we have tons of electricity flowing, the main role of the president is to encourage the states to put them to some good use. It would be good to see a lot more public transportation, especially when it comes to cities, so that cars would not be as necessary as they are. Cars are a part of our culture, and I'm certainly not calling for getting rid of them or getting rid of oil; just reducing the degree that they're needed to get anything and everything done in this country would be a major improvement. But the president and the federal government's role in that should be encouragement, not legislating. I would shine a spotlight on the states and companies that go along with this, as well as those that refuse to, and let the citizens make their own decisions. It's not the federal government's job to force that sort of thing on the citizens.

There you have it. Those five things would be my main goals to improve our country if I was the president. It's probably a bit ambitious to assume I could get any of them done, but that's why there aren't more than five. I think that's the most I could get done in 4 years nevertheless, and I don't think I'd run for reelection unless one of my survey polls told me the people really wanted me to.

Political/Personal: Quick Answers to Hard Questions

Unlike my "Big Six" post where I discussed some issues I just thought were big social questions, these are some of the more topical questions where either a) I've been asked my opinion already or b) everyone else is putting in their two cents, so I thought I ought to put mine in too. You might call them the "Current Five."


Today's topics are: Transgender Issues, Gang Violence, Syrian Refugees, 2016 Presidential Election, and Celebrity Deaths.


1) Transgender Issues   This is a very muddy topic for me, and I'd like to state at the outset that I don't have a clear opinion on it. It's known to some of my close friends and family (cat's out of the bag for everyone else) that I went through a little crossdressing phase myself after college. Between the severe mental illness, heavy drinking, and deep sexual confusion I was struggling with at the time, it seemed like there for a while I was willing to try a little bit of everything except for dating other guys. But there's a phase and there's deciding that's just who you are. I can't understand that idea at all, so I pretty much just leave it alone as far as moral judgment goes. Some people would say I am/was transgender for wearing lipstick and putting on eye shadow (the wrong way, as it turns out - eye shadow goes on the upper eyelids, not on the cheekbones) back when I was confused.
There is one thing I want to at least call out on logical grounds: when we were talking about gay people choosing to follow their biological programming, the cry was that biology was insurmountable. Gay people had no choice because they had to do what was natural for them, no matter how distasteful straight people found it. Now we're faced with a group that says the way they were born was wrong, and they have to overcome that biology. I'm not saying either group is right or wrong, and Lord knows I'm a walking paradox myself, but it's worth pointing out that there is one here that nobody seems to acknowledge.
Now the practical issue that's been politicized and blown way out of proportion is which bathroom transgender people are supposed to use. I wish I had written a book on that 10 years ago, because I called it. I knew that was going to be the big one, and I was right. We had to deal with this one at work last year because we had a transgender employee for about 9 months, and while everyone felt a little weird about having to change our thinking, nobody really gave her a hard time about it. We had hired more female employees than we usually had anyway, so my boss just picked one of the two bathrooms and stuck a "Women" sign on it. Since we were long used to just using whichever one was empty, it didn't feel like there was a real gender assignation involved, so nobody felt all that weird about our trans employee using it anyway, and so that was that, as far as we were concerned.
Now, as a manager, even though I wasn't her boss, I was dreading some sort of confrontation about "refusing to accept her" or something like that, and I tried to reason out a good parallel: Since I'm a pretty religious man, as you know if you've read any of my other posts, I asked myself, "What if I became a monk?" Suppose I changed my life in front of my coworkers and, particularly, started demanding everyone else call me "Brother" instead of the name they were used to, and started wearing slightly different clothes with my tonsured scalp and wearing a friar's rope through my belt loops in place of my leather belt. Nobody could really argue that I had done anything wrong; that wouldn't violate dress code for example, and my company is pretty open about putting 'faith and family first' and work second, within reason. But it would still be a little unreasonable of me to expect that nobody would find the change a little shocking, not to mention forgetting to call me Brother for a while until they got used to it. These were some of the arguments I'd prepared to explain to our trans employee that just because people forgot to call her by her new name or gave her some funny looks didn't mean we didn't accept her, or disapproved; it was just a little jarring when we'd hired and trained "Jack" and now we had to get used to "Jill."
As far as what everyone else thinks about the bathroom issue, I don't have a good answer. I'd be inclined to let them use whichever one they want, or just to have more single-occupancy bathrooms and everyone just use the same one. I understand a lot of people disapprove, but I don't know if there's more to it than just the general rejection of things changing. To that, I always want to say: get over it. Things change. If you don't have a good reason for it, you can't expect the rest of us to cling to the world you remember just because you don't like the new one. We're coming up on a year since gay marriage was legalized and the country hasn't been smitten with any plagues that I've noticed. Let people do what they want, whether it's something you would do or not. That sums up my attitude to almost every choice, in fact.


2) Gang Violence   This one has come up a lot recently because of what almost amounts to a gang war in my hometown. Luckily this one's easy for me, because I've had a plan for this one for years: treat gang wars like wars. When there's a gang war, declare the place a war zone. Deploy the national guard (or even the army) for general order purposes, an let the gangs fight it out. For gang members killing other gang members, they're enemy combatants, so don't count them as murders or in the area's crime figures. Civilians and the military presence wouldn't interfere as long as it sticks to gang-to-gang violence. When civilians (non-combatants) get killed, bang! you're looking at war crime charges. When government forces are harmed, if it's accidental, that's a war crime, and if it's intentional, it's terrorism. The only gray area is with people who might have been gang members or not, or in a recent example whether a gang member's girlfriend counts as a valid target. In those cases you need a little investigation into whether they should or should not be considered a combatant. The military already has that sort of procedure so it shouldn't be too hard to adapt. Then I'd say you can kill the opposing gang all you want, but aim better. If you don't, you'll be tried for crimes against humanity, and we'll have troops on every corner to make sure you don't get away with it. Suddenly there's no need to stop the violence; just let it shoot itself out.


3) Syrian Refugees   If you don't already know, my immigration policy is on the left of the most liberal view you've ever heard. I'd let everyone in, including known criminals, and just keep tabs on them to see if they're looking for a new start or just staking out new territory. Of course, I'd have a zero tolerance policy on immigrant crime: first offense, out you go. Even (reasonable) suspicion ought to be enough to get a non-citizen deported, green card marriage, anchor babies, or not. But that little fascist streak aside, I'd have a totally open border. This same policy fits perfectly with the Syrian refugee trouble. Take them all in, and make it clear: you screw up, you're out. There are definitely criminals and terrorists hiding in with them, but I don't want to let one affect the other. Let everyone in, then throw out the guilty. That'll solve everything. And if a few Americans get hurt or killed before we catch them, those are our martyrs. Those are the people we lose to stand up for our principles, and we'll memorialize them as heroes of the Republic, who died so that we need not live in fear or oppression. I'm tired of having to choose. And before you bring it up, that's how I'd feel even if it was my mother, brother, or friend. If you compromise your principles when they become inconvenient, they're not really principles.


4) 2016 Election   That last sentence transitions nicely into this topic. You see, I am against all four of the main candidates. I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and as Andy Rooney remarked back when I was just a toddler, that usually makes me hated by both. My problem with all four (except Hillary) is that they're waving the anti-establishment flag to get elected. We've got two Senators and a billionaire talking about taking on The Man, and I just can't swallow it. They are The Man. None of that means I like Hillary any better; she's The Man too, just a little more honest about it. I can't support any of them. I've seen this too many times. In 2004 (the first election I was old enough to vote in) I voted for Bush. In 2008, I voted for Obama. That was enough to convince me it doesn't matter which side you support; they both suck. In 2012, I voted for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, and that's the only one so far I don't regret. If we all did that, the real establishment would fall, even the ones pretending they're not the establishment.
The only person I can think of I might really support (if she would run) is Elizabeth Warren. She's a lot like Bernie Sanders without the socialism, but more importantly she didn't just start saying the right things when it became fashionable; she's been saying "outsider" things even when it cost her. That at least suggests she really believes it. Although, let's face it, she's in office, so she knows how to play the game, and it might all be a long-con political ploy. But at the risk of seeming a smidgen optimistic I think she really might do what she says she will. I don't trust ANY of the others to do ANY of the stuff they're promising. Can you name a single campaign promise that any president has ever kept?
That said, my prediction is a victory for Hillary, possibly with Sanders as her running mate. The reason for this is the same reason Obama won in 2008 and Bush in 2004: the other side is too divided, and she at least has the support of the core of her own party, something none of the others can say. That means she'll have the lion's share of the money and big name endorsements behind her, and like it or not those sort of things sway public opinion a lot more than Trump-like promises or Warren-like principles.


5) Celebrity Deaths   Compared to the others, this topic is more of a footnote. Prince died the other day (as did a wrestler and an actress I was superficially aware of), and I'm learning a lot of my friends held Prince on the same level of talent and accomplishment as Aretha Franklin or Chuck Berry. As the sort of music fan who would put him on the same level as Duran Duran or Britney Spears - in that I've heard about 5 songs and like one, sort-of - this was a bit of a surprise to me. Now the thing that happens with pretty much any celebrity death, from Robin Williams last time to Michael Jackson a few years back and on and on, is that a lot of their fans are really upset while those of us who didn't really know much about them don't consider it much of an event. What I'd like to say is that I respect everyone's grief and I don't want to trod on it, but I don't share your sense of loss. In fact I'm a little hopeful that now that he's dead his record company might be able to upload his music to YouTube where I can finally hear it. So, if I seem insensitive to your feelings, it's not that. It's that we're in the paradigm where you've lost a dear, close friend; one who I've only met twice and I just can't be as upset as you are about it.