Amerika

Earlier this month, the Mini Self Storage company in Scarborough was prepared to auction off the contents of a unit rented to a mortgage brokerage that hadn’t paid its bill: 60 boxes of financial records, including loan applications with personal financial information such as Social Security and bank account numbers.

In the wrong hands, sensitive information such as this can be used for identity theft. But the sale of such documents is legal.

Nothing in Maine law prevents storage facilities from selling sensitive financial, personal or medical records to the highest bidder, when their original owners do not pay their storage bills. And that is becoming a real concern, with the failure of several dozen mortgage companies in Maine since the recession began one year ago. – Maine Today

Our laws aren’t geared toward the idea that marks on paper, or the abstractions it represents, can be unique patterns that can harm us.

You don’t own your own image, if you are photographed in the street. Or even if you leave a blind down. The photographer owns that image.

You don’t own your own data that companies collect from you when you visit their websites. It’s perfectly legal for them to probe your leaky browser for information, and then use that to connect you to visits on their partner sites.

You don’t own your own financial information that you give to mortgage companies or other financial companies. And while technically giving your social security number is voluntary, we all know it is isn’t, on a practical basis.

Who’s the tail and who’s the dog here in our modern civilization? It’s like the plot of a bad romantic comedy:

Wonderful consumer society — which brings us admittedly some very cool technologies — could be like a farm in which the corn just thinks it gets free room and board, until harvest time. And they’re bleeding us, and each year it’s harder to get what we really want: homes in safe neighborhoods with good schools, a comfortable life and enough to retire. But since we can’t mention unpopular stuff in public, that remains a little secret among those who haven’t yet been destroyed.

Sure, we can afford the gadgets and crap, because those are relatively small change. But who’s really going to take care of us as we age? Who’s going to make sure our kids don’t get taught garbage and thrown out to be grist for the mill, cube-slaves instead of enlightened apes?

Big business is staffed with people who don’t want to be the ones beneath the wheel. Their workers are distracted by television, drink, socialization, movies, music, anything but reality. Go to a job, and people fill your head with paranoid, useless crap information. Watch TV and it’s worse. And so it grinds on. And our leaders? Our leaders are actors; in addition, they’re entering their twilight years, when they stop noticing negative aspects of reality — this is what, in nature, helped predators carry off the old and infirm:

There’s a scientific reason why older people tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses, Canadian researchers suggest — negative memories are more inclined to fade.

Study author Dr. Florin Dolcos of the University of Alberta in collaboration with colleagues at Duke University in Durham, N.C., identified brain activity that causes older adults to remember fewer negative events than their younger counterparts. – UPI

If this evidence isn’t clear to you, let me make it very clear: never, ever, ever trust a Baby Boomer (anyone born 1943-1953). These people are the blight who brought us the People’s Revolution of the United States, which even absent political concerns was a bad idea, as it took a divided society and fragmented it, all while legalizing and encouraging selfishness. In short, these people were dumb once; now they’re dumb and blind to the consequences of their stupidity. Expect nothing from your leaders. They are checked out of reality and never to return.

The good thing about this debacle is that destruction comes to the stupid and unwary. In fact, it’s coming in a tidal wave, and only those who are already prepared to keep their heads above water are going to do well. You will need to have personal discipline, family, finance and basic survival mastered, but if you do that, you’ll be part of the next civilization instead of getting dragged down with the delusional.

Tags: boomers, information, laws