More Postal Problems

I am currently fuming at FedEx because UPS couldn't deliver a package because they couldn't locate my post office because USPS had to consolidate because congress put a burden on the post office that any other corporation could have sued to get out from under had they tried to inflict it on them. I explain why FedEx in Who is Killing the Post Office? Current frustrating details: I ordered a new scanner from TigerDirect a few days ago. Today I wondered why it hadn't been delivered. They usually have things at my door within a couple of days. So I tracked it online, and found the UPS reported that the recipient had moved and left no forwarding address. Me, moved? I haven't moved in 21 years, and regularly get deliveries from this company. So I called TigerDee. They only knew what I knew from the online tracking. I called UPS. Several tries at hacking my way through their labyrinthine voice mail system and I finally reached a person who could inform me that UPS now uses USPS for local residential deliveries. But as of this month, my local zip code office apparently no longer handles our zip code. And UPS couldn't figure out where to send the package. So they returned it! Because UPS couldn't locate the post office!

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Who is Killing the Post Office?

I've been wondering this for years, as the USPS has been struggling to subsidize the Congressionally mandated 75 years in advance retirement plan during the worst downturn in the economy since the Great Depression. In order to continue, they have to shut down stations, limit deliveries, and eliminate next-day mail. Or be in violation of a Federal Unfunded Mandate. Note that the Post Office receives $0.00 in taxpayer money, yet Congress gets to tell it how much it is allowed to charge, how much it has to pre-pay on all its benefit programs, and even how many free perks it has to give to members of Congress. In my lifetime, the price of a First Class stamp has gone from the price of a cup of coffee (5¢) to less than a third of that. We pay less for postage now than ever before in history, in terms of coffee, movie tickets, ounces of gold, or any hard measure. Yet Congress in its wisdom has been steadily adding burdens and removing permissions in the last decade. And I have been wondering, why? Sure, the answer is clearly pandering to the lobbyists. But whose? Who really wants to kill the only company that delivers to every house in the country? Last night, I think I got my answer. I was watching the news, flipping through the networks, and every outlet covered this story: Record online holiday sales trigger record shipping day.So which stations covered which shipping company? Who covered this story for the USPS? For DHL? For UPS? No one. But FedEx was given minutes of free advertising (as an in-depth story) on every network. Thus my wacky conspiracy theory of the day is: FedEx is behind the lobbyists who are behind the legislation that is gutting the post office.

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Lesson learned about rationality, perhaps.

I thought I was different. I have a well-documented history of being more skeptical than the average person. At this website, for instance, I have vigorously attacked the hypocrisy of all politicians, regardless of party. In the spirit of letting the chips fall and seeking the truth, even if inconvenient, I’ve often taken positions contrary to family, friends and “country.” I tend to not be a joiner. I have long-agreed with David Hume that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Therefore, I tend to be on-guard regarding runaway emotions. I also agree with Jonathan Haidt’s conclusion that humans function like tiny lawyers attempting to control big emotional-laden elephants upon which they ride. The observations of Hume and Haidt dovetail well with the findings of Antonio Damasio, who carefully examined rationality. See Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Phineas Gage, a 19th century railroad worker who suffered brain damage to his pre-frontal cortex, couldn't no longer connect emotion to decision-making. He’s what Damasio discerned from the evidence about Gage (and about modern-day people who suffered damage to the pre-frontal cortex): He “could no longer set priorities or make decisions. He had no sense of the relative importance of any situation.” His accident made him “rational.” Damasio further noted that this pure rationality “is helpless to make decisions; it paralyzes us. In fact, he proclaimed that “Rationality” is the way “brain-damaged people make decisions.” I’ve known all of this for a long time, and I try to stay on guard that when I write that I will keep emotions in check enough that I can be seen as a trusted source of information. That’s why what I’m about to mention is embarrassing and frustrating to me. Back on April 28, 2011, the night I read the U.S. Supreme Court Case of AT&T v. Concepcion, I became angry at the majority opinion, and I steamed full speed ahead and published an angry post at this blog (since deleted, for the reasons discussed below). I stand by many of the concerns I raised in that post, including the following: [More . . . ]

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How to destroy a perfectly good real estate recording system.

What would you think if an outside enemy systematically attacked hundreds of U.S. county real estate recording offices, making it impossible for most of us to know who owns what legal rights regarding real estate anymore.   Imagine that our courts, from coast to coast, have slowed to a crawl because the enemy had nefariously dismantled a system that had worked quite well for centuries. Imagine that, also for centuries, the filing fees paid for recording real estate interests had funded numerous important local government functions, but that the outside enemy destroyed this source of income, causing many government functions to flounder. Image that this enemy then set up its own real estate "information" offices that gave lots of incomplete information, often refusing to provide any information at all, and did so with reprehensible customer service. Imagine one more thing:  This has all really happened, but it was not caused by an outside enemy. Rather, all of this has happened regarding 60% of all home mortgages, and the entities doing the damage are America's banks, who have conspired to create an entity called MERS, designed to circumvent government real estate recording offices, at a high cost to everyone who relies on the integrity of our real estate recording system. If you want to know the specifics, here is a terrific article by law professor Chris Peterson: "Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registry System's Land Title Theory." This damage to our recording system is relatively new--it's been happening for a bit more than ten years, but the theme is now familiar to many of us: Corporate players taking over government functions and, in the process, rigging the playing field against the interests of ordinary Americans. The challenge now is to see whether the courts across America can recognize MERS for what it is, a despicable scam that has clouded the real estate titles of millions of people in an effort to rev up private corporate profits.   The courts are now clogged with many cases attempting to deal with the problems caused by MERS; you'll want to keep your eye on this story to see whether the courts will slap down the banks.

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In The Tradition of Great American UnAmericanisms

Herman Cain is the latest in a long line of political mouths calling a populist movement UnAmerican. He says Occupy Wall Street is an assault on capitalism and that capitalism and the free market system are what have made America what it is. Can’t argue with that, but his intended meaning is other than reality. Setting that aside for a moment, though, it’s his statement that protests in the street are UnAmerican that I take greatest issue with. I’ve been hearing that from more or less conservative people since I was old enough to be aware of political issues. During the Vietnam era, the antiwar movement gained the hatred of Middle America not because they were wrong but because they were unruly, in the street, loud, and confrontational. “You should work within the system,” people said, “that’s not the way to do it.” Except it was clear that working within the system was not achieving results. The system is so constructed that those who understand where the controls are can make it respond regardless of general public sentiment. The system is often The Problem, and today we have another example. But more fundamentally than that, it was a failure to recognize that people in the street is very much a part of the system. What do we think “freedom of assembly” is all about?

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