Malevolent Scum

My home lender, that is. We'll just call them "Blank of America."

Last month, they sent me a bill in which they explained, "Oops, we misfigured your property tax escrow amount. Either send us $2,000.00+ American now and pay a little higher house payment OR send nothing now and pay a much higher house payment."

Indiana real-estate taxes are insane right now; the state fiddled with the way they are figured and it is messed up six ways from Sunday. So, okay, Blank of A can't maybe hire the really smart tax accountants for small fry like me and my piddlin' home loan. I moaned and complained and cut back on things and produced the exact amount the miserable weasels demanded with 24 entire hours to spend. They got it, too, I can go look it up on their website.

...That would be their website that still DEMANDS I pay them the "much higher house payment." The one I was avoiding by pullin' 2K cash outta not thin air but my housepainting, plumbing, out of pocket medical, car maintenance and general hobby, movies, restaurant dinners, books and fun budget -- if you don't have a house, the rest of that won't do any good anyhow.

So here I am as of now, $2 thousand bux short and per my lenders friggin' website -- where you can get a salesweasel 24/7 but actual bank-type help only during very limited hours -- I still gotta come up with an ungodly sum by the middle of the week. Do not have, not and pay the gas bill, too.

So I will be calling them at the crack o' noon or whenever exactly it is they roll their dewey pink rumps outta the silk sheets with their hired bed-companion, since nobody would sleep with 'em fer love, and I will be askin' just what the Sam-dammit-Hill they are after doing?

Update: Called, had to make four tries to get A Real Human Person, spent a very, very long time on hold, then got them to admit that indeed, I did only owe the lower amount, whoopsie! Got it paid. On time.

It used to be that smalltime borrowers like me were pretty safe once we'd got our loan; you can't get blood from a turnip and we were quite simply too small to be be worth messing with. This is no longer the case. Lenders, feeling the pinch of inevitable effects of their own irrational exuberance, formerly bouyed on the back of insane Federal lending policies, are now skinning every flint and charging the suckers for the free candy in the lobby.

I am gonna move this loan to a local bank somehow, or at least a bank with an actual office here in town where I can walk in and dare 'em to look me in the eye when they pull such tricks. They probably still will and smile all the while, but better some middle-manager I can see and who probably signed off on the skullduggery than a faceless (and innocent) Mumbai phone-bank worker who has no power, wasn't responsible for it, has no discretion in his or her responses and is paid to be unhelpful; I'd at least like to be shortchanged in person.

This.is.so.much.fun. Oooyeah.

Panic On The Ball State Campus

     The news was full of images from a circling helicopter over Ball State University last night, police cars from at least three different agencies (university, city and state) were littering the streets and sidewalk, armed officers leading crowds of students, even more heavily-armed ones going through a couple of buildings room-by-room, occasionally glimpsed via telephoto lens through a window or door--

     Had a madman mowed down innocents in a blaze of horror?  Were there, as early reports claimed, hostages?

     No.

     Was there an actual gun?

     No one is sure.

     What did happen was a student in the Rec and Wellness Center yelled, "GUN!"  And the the building got cordoned off, much of the campus was locked down and every available officer -- and the news media -- descended on the area.  After three hours of worry and consternation, nothing was found.

     Bank robbers of America and would-be terrists from all over, please do not take note.

     Much like happened earlier this year at IUPUI, when someone reported seeing a man with a long gun on the campus, the school was put on "lockdown," massive police presence followed and nothing turned up.  (There's been speculation that the incident at IUPUI was the result of someone quite legally securing a firearm in the trunk of their vehicle, but no one has come forward.)

     News coverage of bent half-wits mowing down unsuspecting students have resulted in this kind of over-reaction, with multiple police agencies combing through maze-like campuses and buildings.  Unless great care is taken in communication and coordination, sooner or later it's going to result in a blue-on-blue incident.  Students are no more careful of their words and actions than they've ever been and all it takes is for someone to want a little attention or get careless with a toy gun and--  wham.  Lockdown.  Staties and Officer Friendly and the Campus Cops stalking the halls with what one reporter correctly pointed out as "assualt rifles" and we can only hope their radios all have at least one shared channel and somebody's keeping track of who's where.

     ("Lockdowns" bother me, too -- that's what they do with unruly convicts at prisons, no?  OTOH, some BSU students were collecting outside the police barricades with cups of coffee, chatting with reporters and playing lookie-lou, so it's not quite a large-scale edition of the Stanford Prison Experiment, at least not yet; but save your Zimbardo faceplam, it's coming.)

     Big News Coverage -- of a big nothing.  A big needlessly-endangering nothing, reinforcing the lesson to college students that, should they see someone with a firearm, the correct response is to call the police and shelter in place.  Is that really what they ought to be doing?

Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempting to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank. 

Cash For This Clunker?

Hey, "Cash For Clunkers" is a wonderful program, one that reduces the supply of cheap, working-but-crappy cars (just like the ones I drove when I was poor and still drive today, since I can buy them for cash) while increasing indebtedness, as people use their klunkersgeld* as part of the down payment on heavily-financed Brand! New! Cars!

Yeah, it sucks. Also, there's this book Tam and I keep in the loo for emergency reading, The World's Worst Cars [Amber Books, 2005], and in it we find the following description of one of the worstmobiles, "...[C]heaper and more ordinary-looking than previous offerings. ...[I]t looked stupid.... The only saving grace was the beautifully ornate interior. ...[S]uffered from horrendous turbo lag. It was slow off the mark, then the V6 engine's twin turbos could kick in with dramatic effect. Coupled to the rather crude chassis, this made it prone to terrifying oversteer, especially if the turbos came on in mid-bend." Still, the book reports 25 mpg and you wouldn't think a Maserati Biturbo would end up on the C4C scrap-heap no matter how bad it was.

You would, of course, be wrong.

(Bonus! Link is to a CNN video that opened with an ad for Bank of America that talks about their tremendous tools. The term is dead accurate, based on the telephone conversations I had with them after they jacked my house payments way up: I met up with tremendous tools all 'round. Refreshing to encounter that kind of honesty in this day and age, really).
____________________
* A word in no language ever used on this planet, at least as far as I know. Kinda catchy, innit?

"REFI!"

     The aftermath of my mother's death has left me dealing with a small financial windfall, which led, by divers means, to talking to my bank about refinancing my home.

     Now, this is something I really should do; I bought at the wrong point in time, my initial lender was Countrymark, which was snapped up by Bank of America who are, after all, BoA, with all the warmth and personal touch you might expect from a mega-megabank.  The interest rate is terrible--

     But I'm used to it.  With homeowner's insurance and real-estate tax rolled in, my house payment is a predictable expense, and setting up a mortgage was stressful enough once.  Still, shaving five years off my remaining payments for a 10% increase in home much I pay each month is certainly appealing.

     My bank's home-loan guy is...too eager.  Pushy, even.  It gets my back up, and all the more when he exhorts, "Do it now!  Lock in the rate!  It's going up!"  Yes, well--  It's been going up for awhile now, and it's still not close to the rate I'm paying.  Plus, the appraisal process seems intrusive and time-consuming.  So I don't think I'll be doing it just yet.

     Banks used to be less annoying.  Stuffy, sure.  Stodgy.  Snooty.  But they'd by-golly take a hint and back down.

DTV Cutover Delay?

Mr. Obama's administration thinks maybe February 18 is too soon to shut off old-fashioned, coal-burning, analog TV.

I'm finding particular enjoyment in this quote from the first linked article:

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who has been deeply involved in the transition process, responded to the Obama transition team's request by saying Congress could make an additional 8 million coupons available by passing legislation exempting the coupon program from federal laws prohibiting the government from incurring expenses in excess of amounts available in appropriations or funds.

Yeah, that's it, we'll kite a check! Funny, if you or I do that, the bank gets really peeved; if we do it a lot and/or on purpose, we get arrested and hauled up before the court on criminal charges. But Congress doin' it? Dat's ooooo-tay!

Rep. Markey (Short Bus Party, MA) goes on to admit moving the date (to sometime in June) involves "logistical challenges." Hel-loooo? Also four more months of massive power bills for TV stations, the smaller of which are already teetering on the brink of insolvency; four more months of maintaining two high-power transmitters when most stations have been patching up the old analog rig like a junker car, serene in the knowledge that it only has to last 'til February. June might be a bridge or so too far.

I called it. Not exactly; back when I was cautioning friends and co-workers not to be too confident about the change-over date, I expected a Democrat-dominated Congress (rather than an incoming Democrat President) to push the date back, frettin' about the "technologically disenfranchised poor," or, as PBS President Paula Kerger whines chides us,

she’s especially concerned that children in less-affluent homes that rely on free television might lose access to PBS educational shows for kids.

Especially Sesame Street. Awwww. How ever else will they learn that it takes a village -- or a city block of slum tenements inhabited by creatures from a drug hallucination -- to hammer a child's mind into uniformity and compliance?

Meanwhile, the National Association of Broadcasters is standing firm and proud, er, kneeling firm and proud, er, offering a tongue-shine to the shoes of the President-elect's Administration:

Today's (Thursday) announcement from President Obama's transition team reaffirms the importance of free and local broadcasting in the American life. NAB looks forward to a continuing dialogue with the new White House and new Congress to ensure a successful DTV transition.

Or so says NAB President David K. Rher, who did not add, "Please don't hurt me," but he might as well. Is there any other semantic content to that statement besides abject submission? It's sad.

America's TV station's have been running a heavy schedule of announcements, warnings and reminders about the End Of Analog Television. If the delay gets approved, they'll all be left with sickly grins, goin' on the air and admitting, "Oopsie, we kinda lied." Nice.

"FIGHT PEACEFUL"

      That's the slogan on one of my favorite T-shirts: "Fight Peaceful," rendered in block capitals.  I like it for the ambiguity and the contradiction -- what's it supposed to mean, anyway?

      One of the things it means is how our political system is supposed to work.  We're supposed to fight one another peacefully, online, on the letters-to-the-Editor page, on the protest line, the debate stage, at the ballot box and in our legislatures.

       We're kind of sucking at it of late. 

      It's real easy to point at the other guys and blame them for starting it.  It's protestors high-sticking with the standards that were supposed to just carry their signs, it's mean cops or outside agitators, it's those guys throwing rocks or starting fires, it's that other guy shooting from cover--  It's those faceless s.o.b.s who run the government so wrongly, it's the surging, anonymous, wrong-headed mob....  Somehow it's never us.  It's never any of our friends.  It's never any elected or appointed official we approve of.

      Except maybe it is.  Maybe it's everybody: the people we like and the people we loathe.  Perhaps sometimes it's one and sometimes the other, occasionally both.

      And we should all knock it the hell off.  We're going to break something important, if we haven't already: the civil peace.  The way in which we have, mostly, fought one another peacefully since the country was founded.  We bled like hell and we made a hell on Earth the last time we forgot how to do it, and perhaps it's been so long that we've burnished and sanitized the carnage into legend.  It wasn't legendary to the dead and maimed at the time.  It wasn't legendary to grieving families back then -- and if we break the peace again, the heartbreak and tears, the pain and the suffering won't be a noble myth this time, either.

      Fight all you like; America is an ideal, an intention, an ongoing experiment in self-rule.  But fight peaceful.  Don't let grievance-mongering demagogues of any flavor lead you to try short-circuiting democratic processes with a brick.  You will bleed -- and they will laugh all the way to the bank.