The Panopticon

In case you missed this news on a Sunday.... From the BBC News: HSBC imposes restrictions on large cash withdrawals - "restrictions" as in, they want a reason as well as documentation regarding your intended withdrawal.

Customers of HSBC have been stopped from taking out as little as £5,000, because the bank has been requiring that depositors give them a "satisfactory explanation" of what they intend to use the money for. In order to comply, customers were told in some cases they needed a letter or other form of documentation. For example, a "Peter from Wiltshire" was told he needed to provide "booking receipts" for his travel plans.

One Wall Street adviser recently stated that actual unemployment is at 37.2% . I don't doubt this. Certainly, a lot of blame is warranted towards the top, but am I the only one who is thinking that America is just giving up on herself? Where is the spirit of entrepreneurship? Where is the can-do attitude?

It's dead in the water. People would be rather just take whatever money they can from the government than try to fix their lives or their communities.

I have noticed more and more that Americans are living in learned helplessness. They can't seem to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and many don't want to. It's not just the younger generation - I know people from my generation (X) whose main goal in life seems to be just to throw their hands up and quit trying.

I used to be skeptical of people who complained about Census workers coming to their door. What was the big deal?

Until now.

I have just received the American Community Survey, which is a highly intrusive, utterly unconstitutional questionnaire sent out to random homes in America. Supposedly the survey is to be used to help decide "where new schools, hospitals, and fire stations are needed." But why does the federal government need this information? Deciding where schools and hospitals are needed is the job of the city, county or state.

This will be short and sweet. This morning I ran across two headlines that I felt were important to share:

1) YELP critics must be identified, court rules in online landscape altering decision

I'll write a longer article at some point about privacy and the Internet, but this ruling is bad news for individuals as well as content providers. It irks me, because most of these judges and politicians who try to write rules for the Internet are clueless about the underlying technology, and I'll bet half of them can barely handle sending out an email.

I'm not trying to be unnecessarily alarmist here. And perhaps I've been keeping up too much on the latest Fukushima news. But I woke up this morning having a nightmare that another earthquake had hit Japan. While the quake in my dream was not as big as the massive temblor that initially destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it was big enough to destroy the delicate balance at the smoldering ruins, and the plant was set to blow at any moment.

Heck, the plant is teetering on the edge anyway, even without another quake. One fumble in the cleanup could cause a massive chain reaction. Things are bad. And yet, other than a handful of people covering it in the alternative media, it's as if Fukushima doesn't even exist!

The homestead here is in need of another female voice, so Turd has graciously allowed me to share some of my thoughts with all of you. Let me briefly introduce myself - and what you'll see here is only a small portion of the entirety of who I am - I have had many hats, including writer, life coach, yoga instructor and website wrangler .

Don't worry, I'm not going to regale you here with cheery self-help mantras and mindless affirmations. In fact, one of the reasons I moved away from life coaching was that I had a hard time putting on a chipper facade all the time. I would like to take the opportunity here to dig into some deep issues. There's a lot going on in the world right now.