Sociology – Page 14

The Final Underclass

See also: https://newrepublic.com/article/145734/costs-millennial

On this father’s day, I’d like to take a moment to briefly challenge the world and to make my position clear for peer (and not so peer) review.

Put simply I think the civil rights division of children and adults needs to be effectively abolished.

There is a false dichotomy implicit in the assumption that children must be treated as property, or allowed to destroy themselves and society with complete freedom.

I believe that a person should be born a full and complete citizen of the species with all the default human rights and liberties. Not as an infant, property of parents and the state for some arbitrary time.

So what is the alternative?

Simply treat them exactly as we treat newly awakened coma patients with good prognosis.

Think about what a coma patient is. A blank adult. An adult in need of orientation and (re)education.

Functionally and qualitatively I can see no substantive difference between such an adult and a child. The legal frame work is already in place.

There are guardians with enhanced temporary authority, but ultimately the patient in question is still a person. No one has the right to beat them, or arbitrarily control them. Their treatment must always take into consideration their default rights as human beings.

This is exactly how children should be treated because that is exactly what a child is.

A coma patient isn’t assigned a religion, or a social role, they are given empowerment and choice. They are protected from themselves but that protection ends not on an arbitrary date, but based on objective criteria of development and ability.

Explain to me if you can how the current treatment is ethically or functionally superior.

We don’t need schools, we need habilitation facilities and libraries. The term for this in one case is particularly brilliant.

The Awakening Unit of the St John the Baptist Hospital, Rome, Italy, which opened in 1997, has the usual radiology and diagnostic equipment for assessing patients with head and brain injuries, and those in a coma. But also the medical staff specialize in rehabilitation, physiotherapy and occupational therapy, aimed at helping patients to recover from their injuries.

Instead of raising children, we should Awaken them.

The future could be so wonderful. If only I could make you see.

I’ll spare you the links you wouldn’t click anyway. 🙂

West Wing Children’s Suffrage (pro-vote) Segment. (Edited for continuity and focus.) on Vimeo.

Addition 2015-08-22 0705 AM:

It needs saying, I suppose, that you could give kids the vote without playing with any other laws. (Age of consent for example.) After all, society is layered with such age specificities. Gun ownership, drinking, driving, consent, trial as adult limits (if any) etc. I see no reason why society couldn’t parse children as voters. Hell, voting often happens in school gymnasiums anyway.

I’m sure adjusting those age ranges would be among the many issues that children would be disproportionately interested in. And hey, that’s politics for you so I’m fine with that. Along with the issues noted in the West Wing episode, like longer term environmental policy, education, etc.

While I’m talking about it, I think the best reason to give kids the vote from a practical standpoint is civics education and future engagement. It’s sort of silly to take them on field trips to Washington DC and the like when everyone in the room knows they are essentially pigs as far as our legal system is concerned.

I, for one, would like to see all that change.

We live in a man hating culture, and if others are honest the first thing they think of when a white nerdy pudgy guy with glasses talks about empowering children is, stranger danger, complete with vans and sweaty trench coats.

(Never mind the statistical realities of child abuse. We all know facts are 99% irrelevant anyway.)

Beyond that the hideous fact is this: We, as a society, love having a domestic slave class to whip and command. We’re not morally ready to treat children like human beings yet. When we start to be, you’ll see more movement on this issue.

Addition based on modified comment.

I totally understand where the child human trafficking market comes from. It’s literally just an extension of what amounts to average parenting logic. Really think about this. I mean, if I have the right to basically plan “my” “child’s” entire life such that I can force them to live however I want them to live for eighteen years with the backing of the state, up to and including beating them and drugging them when they deviate (!) why shouldn’t I be able to sell them? Especially when there’s such a huge foster adoption market. The ONLY difference between the average American parent and a human trafficker is degree, supply chain, and commitment to the logic.

Well, I’m the other end of that logical consistency. I want the entire concept of “child” removed in the EXACT same way it’s removed for adults with the minds of children and adults recovering from brain injury. It is 100% possible to “awaken” a child instead of raise it.

http://underlore.com/the-tyranny-of-compulsory-schooling/ (I didn’t write this one, but I adore it. I suspect you won’t read it. Too scary.)

The entire “parenting” position is one of submission defense and the desire to force it on the next generation. It’s literally no less cliche than “well I had to walk uphill in the snow to school and so should you, builds character.”

How I would raise a child today is exactly like how I’d take care of my father if he had a stroke and forgot everything. I’d care for him and love him and do everything I could to protect and awaken him. The implied need to oppress and control a “child” is 100% myth. It simply does not exist for the same reason I would have no need to apply that treatment to this hypothetical version of my father.

This is not hard to understand, it’s just inconvenient because we’d have to give up our slaves.

As for how I’d structure society, that’s a big question and it’s subject to a lot of change and further learning. underlore.com/emperor-innomen/

But in the case of children it’s actually very simple. I would simply remove the concept of “child” as a legal entity and instead parse them, again legally, as adults with a regenerative brain condition. Everything about their handling would include the dignity and human rights implied thereby. Would those children turn out radically different from me? Of course they would. Am I crapping my pants in terror at the change that implies? No I am not. Because look around outside your bubble. Change is NEEDED.

I’m not trying to FORCE all future humans over which I have opportunistic power to become copies of me. Why would you?

‘If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.’ ~Frank Zappa

Sexual Consent

Lets just get this out of the way because it comes up 100% of the time eventually whenever I talk about liberating the child caste.

People always eventually balk at the idea of children having citizenship because of the idea that they could be manipulated into legally consenting to sex long before they are ready. False consent basically. Here is my response to that:

We do not have to enslave people to protect them from sexual predation. That argument is absurd. We’ve already solved this problem. For example, go try having sex with someone in a coma, or an adult with the mind of a 10 year old being properly cared for, or any other vulnerable adult in a sanctioned functional setting, and see how many layers of protection those fully adult recognized citizens have.

It’s conceptually trivial to protect people, and honor their rights at the same time.

The argument is bankrupt because it implies an exchange of liberty for security is required and that is famously not the case. Implying that the desire to liberate children is equivalent to the desire to legalize raping them is specious to put it gently.

Enough with the GMO hate.

Update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ecT2CaL7NA & http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/04/1319176/-Neil-deGrasse-Tyson-tells-GMO-haters-to-chill-out-people-get-angry & http://underlore.com/anti-gmo-zealots-the-best-friends-monsanto-ever-had/

Monsanto is the problem, not fucking science and technology and innovation, you ignorant Luddite shit heads.

GMOs are just another path to better food organisms. Less messy, less wasteful, infinitely better potential. It’s agricultural science, not black fucking magic you dimwitted serfs.

Anti GMO whiners need to give starvation a stab. 80% of what people eat is lethal in the long term anyway. Not to mention the fucking air. And you’re all apparently perfectly cool with that.

Start actually treating death like the fucking enemy and then maybe your face noises will be worth parsing as something of value.

I have yet to meet a GMO hater that didn’t reject efforts to end aging and death and pain anyway. Which means you’re all pampered control freak hypocrites. You’re cool with people dying of poverty and starvation you just don’t want them having the option of dying a little later from cancer instead.

If I was starving to death and the only fish I could find had mercury in it, I’d eat. Your collective ability to turn up your nose at perfectly edible food means you’ve never even come close to having to do without.

Sick and fucking tired of pandemic psychopathy and narcissism.

They whine about the science not being in, but I don’t care because the contrast material here is fucking starvation.

These people are obviously terrified by GMOs and your position is one of FUD (ironic) propagation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

There is a reason this guy was able to save a billion lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Right now somewhere someone is not allowed to work on a species of wheat/corn/rice/soy that is 100X better at feeding the world than our current best is because asshole cowards with full refrigerators are scared shitless of black magic.

And yes yes I know he didn’t use GM, but he manufactured a species to spec as best he could with the crude and slow tools at his disposal, and when he got even a modest bit of success he spent his life spreading that invention all over the planet.

Imagine what he could have accomplished with modern GM tools and techniques?

Modern GMOs are made to secure profit margins, not end starvation and that’s a patent and policy problem, not a problem with the technology.

A GM lab headed by someone like Norman could literally end starvation.

Imagine a life form that grows like kudzu but anywhere on anything and produces nutritionally complete fruit/flesh? That’s just off the top of my head as one possible end goal.

You’re whining about an infant technology.

To the allies of pain and death…

I’m trying to parse the larger scale here. Is there an objective? Am I wasting my time?

Is there anything I could type that would make you into an ally of life and joy?

Possibly.

Is my brain capable of that?

Almost certainly not.

I have a lot of thinking to do.

I’m going to write another book. I’ve had this debate and lost too many friends too many times. If I’m to be alone I’m going to do something with my time alone.

Context alters meaning and you can always add context. I’m going to try and find the positive context I can add to this life that will carry it’s meaning in a positive direction far enough to absorb the losses incurred by the agents of life and death.

It’s ironic. If I thought like you there would be fewer of you.

Your parasitic exploitative toxic existence is the best argument against the kind of universal compassion I advocate.

The only hope in the long term is that your own self aggrandizement and mammoth disregard for the well being of the rest of the species will lead to your collective annihilation through peaceful means easily avoided by those of us with a mind capable of something other than exploitation and narcissism.

When the cure for death becomes available, I hope your kind will find reason to turn it down. The future will be all the better for it.

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” ~Edward Osborne Wilson, The Father of Sociobiology.

Your kind represents a classic conflict of scale.

If I know a man that’s drowning will only kill two others if I save him, am I still ethically bound to try?

Similarly. Is my rejection of vengeance and war wise if I know that the only people who profit from it are monsters like yourself?

“The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” ~Adolf Hitler

Your existence forces me to choose between letting you have your way, or becoming you in order to stop you.

Your existence is proof that karma, cosmic justice, and god are all myths.

I can only hope that patience and restraint will allow me to outlive you, and hopefully undo whatever damage you did while living.

Know that I hate you. Know how hard it is for me suffer your existence.

There is nothing beautiful about death. Period. I know that.

But knowing what you people are, makes the illusion so nearly convincing.

Humanity is a killing machine. That’s what Intelligence is. It’s what we have instead of 1000 pounds of muscle and 6 inch claws.

Allies of pain and death would have us continue to direct that awesome power at each other instead of at suffering and death because they are more than cowards. They are delusional allies of death.

You’re all worse than pointless. You’re human monsters. A corruption of our infinite benevolent potential into it’s inverse grotesque opposite. Sometimes you present individually as polite, pleasant monsters, but monsters you remain because death and pain for our species is now a choice. You were not born a human being, and human beings if not saddled by the various servants of death and pain like yourself could destroy pain and death as efficiently as we destroyed polio and the saber tooth.

You were bred to be pliant live stock. First to a parent, then to a teacher, then to a priest, then to a spouse, and finally after you’ve popped out and trained a few larvae, you are expected to die with words of praise for your masters on your lips. That’s the life plan they gave you. You have a choice. Resist or submit.

And how do you respond to someone who wants nothing but your happiness and long life? Scolding for it. As if again my hatred of death and pain is flippant, trivial, and *intolerant.*

Your guilt at being a party to death, your fear of suffering, has clouded your judgement.

Despite having volumes on exactly how they did it, you still belly flop on their land mine with a self satisfied grin on your face.

I’m just as guilty apparently of failing to learn. I write these posts because again and again I reach out and again and again I am disappointed. Is that not the popular definition of insanity?

That is the question of my life. Is mercy and hope a fool’s errand? Should I become one of you and show you what Intelligence is really capable of if deployed as a weapon? I hope to never fall so far but every day one of you makes a persuasive argument that is hard to disregard.

I see agents of death and pain everywhere. I see their tools at work and I can’t help but picture how the world could be a little bit better if one or two monsters had heart attacks or car wrecks. And from there, from wishing for random death, it’s a small step to planning. I see the slope you’d have me dash for.

Time and again I encounter hope and temptation. I often think I’ve found an ally. But when the chips are down and it’s time to speak up against the real enemies of humanity, you all show your true colors.

Yours is a legacy of death, pain, and delusional. A world where suffering and the grave are made beautiful by your rejection of reason.

You are a walking software lobotomy. You choke and starve your own reason because it screams at you everything that’s wrong with the world and how to fix it but the price is so high… Change.

It’s so ironic. Agents of decay often accuse me of being anti-people by opposing death and pain. But if I were really interested in being anti-people would I not embrace the death and suffering of others?

Look at the countless ways society would embrace me if I did that. I could be a solider, or a prison guard, or a priest. There are a thousand ways I could profit from aiding death and pain and the rewards for doing so are immense, if by definition short lived and narrow minded.

How did I get here? Pain and death didn’t teach me this lesson. Love did. I cannot convey how much joy and wonder I experienced as a child.

I’ve had various tiny sips of the truly staggering heights of fulfillment the human brain can experience, even without reconstruction and transhumanist enhancement. Dreams taught me the value of life and joy.

How joyless your life must be, how ignorant you are of your gifts, to believe that death and pain are your ally. But of course you think you can deploy death and pain and not get any on you. Sadly, sometimes you’re right. Countless torturers and murderers lived long and fulfilled lives.

Again, that is the core question of my life. Am I a fool for being an ally of life and joy?

It’s so hilarious. We justify pain on the grounds that it helps us avoid death and we justify death on the grounds that it allows us to escape pain. It’s fucking maddening to me.

We measure our problem intensity by death rate, yet death itself we’re 99% cool with. It’s literally insane to me. I feel like I’m trapped in an asylum.

Is pain and death a worthy price to pay for my existence?

Of course not.

My only value on this earth currently is my opposition to pain and death. Had there been no pain or death I would have found a positive use for myself as opposed to merely countering something else of negative value.

If I was omnipotent and all knowing I could snap into existence a world without pain and suffering even if the price of that was a world without me.

This is how I know there is not now, nor has there ever been a white light god.

What reality isn’t tells me about the past and the present.

All that pain and death gave me is valueless.

Pain and death gave me fear and rage. I would be a far better ally of life and joy had I never experienced pain or death.

The Buddhists understand this which is why the myth/story of Siddhārtha Gautama starts in a pleasure garden.

If I could kill myself and take all pain and death with me, I would do it.

The only reason I would pause is to search for a way to have the best of both worlds, to live in that painless deathless world as well. I would also pause knowing that anyone, including me can be scammed.

But ultimately, if I truly believed my death could accomplish that ultimate feat, of course I’d die.

I must admit however that I would not suffer. I am a human monster by default and pain is worse than death. I would only sacrifice my life to accomplish this goal if the pain required were sufficiently minimal.

I would not for example burn myself alive to end all torture and death. And that is my flaw as a human. But do you see the irony? If I could not feel pain, I could accept any kind of death you want to accomplish that goal.

Pain makes us weaker, not stronger. Death merely makes us absent and silent.

*”Such modes of consciousness are simply unimaginable to the drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic pathways lie across forbidden gaps in the evolutionary fitness landscape. They have previously been hidden by the pressure of natural selection: for Nature has no power of anticipation.”* ~David Pierce

—

You’re the worst kind of human.

You’re like antifreeze. Sweet to the taste, but a torturous death to all who drink.

You probably genuinely believe you’re this kind and empathic thing, but you’re actually a torturer from the cell up.

You’re Ebola with a cortex.

The memes you are carrying and the skills you are acquiring to deploy them will contribute to the delay of our final victory over suffering and death.

Every second of your success means hell and death for thousands, perhaps millions of strangers.

You are a coward, and a sadist. And yet if I saw you drowning I would save you.

Because for me intellectual courage and kindness are ends in and of themselves, not merely tools, as you clearly use them.

Like Torquemada you’ll smile at the horror you create around you secure in the unshakable faith that its rightness is defined by the very screams and silence it creates.

And still, knowing what you are, I do not wish you death, or suffering. My wishes and objective are to out pace you, and to obviate you. To build around you a preserve and memetic quarantine until such time as a more ethical solution can be devised and enacted.

One of us is probably a fool, the other, a true monster.

Your immunity to reason and self righteous callousness horrifies me.

The way to handle you people is not futility attempting to reason with you, but rather to counter your works and wait for your ally death to indulge its nature.

Step one of that objective is to call you out when you are detected. That way no one wastes time buying into your illusion of open mindedness.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ~Max Planck

—

I’m saying if we as a species choose not to fight death then we have collectively chosen suicide.

Some say death is ‘natural’, but so is rape, and we fight rape, at least outside of prisons and youth detention centers anyway. We’d like to see, at least in terms of rhetoric and policy, rape banished from the human world.

Yet when it comes to aging people are so hopelessly whipped they don’t even contemplate what it costs us.

We’re slaves to death and pain and any men or women who wield them.

Not only is it possible to change that, it is morally urgent to do so, and you’ll agree with me when your pain starts. It could be an injury, or sickness, but eventually something will truly hurt you. Hopefully science can address that pain, with a drug or a treatment, but eventually as it stands, either your pain will defeat efforts to control it or you will die.

We tolerate death because it is sometimes preferable to lasting pain. But using one wrong to justify another is broken logic. Aging is a disease, and it needs a cure. Pain is a disease and it needs a cure other than death.

“They could be shown the mastery of their minds and bodies, so that they could achieve the full expression of their powers, not spend their lives like ineffectual ghosts trapped in a marvelous machine beyond their skill to operate. They could break the domination of pain, so that it became a sentinel and not a tyrant, sending messages which the rational mind could accept or ignore as it pleased. Above all, they could choose to die only when they wished; they would be shown the many paths that led beyond the grave, and the price that must be paid for immortality in all its forms. A vista of infinite time would open up before them, with all its terror and promise. Some minds could face this, some could not; here was the dividing line between those who would inherit the universe, and those who were only quick-witted animals.” ~Arthur C Clarke (Via character.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence

Aging is an adaptation like everything else about life. When an adaptation stops being adaptive you have two choices, change, or die.

There is a word for choosing to die.

—

See also: http://underlore.com/pain-is-worthless/

Libertarianism is Camouflage for Republicans

99% of libertarians want to be George Bush when they grow up, at best. They just know that the current crop of republicans are in the long term politically doomed

Libertarians have more in common with religious conservatives than they would care to admit.

Everyone in the real world knew that already.

That’s why the vast majority of “libertarians” most closely identify with the republican party. Even back when I was hoping for Ron Paul as president I lamented the collective libertarian choice of linking with the right instead of the left.

Imagine if instead libertarians had infiltrated the democratic party (which incidentally plays by it’s own rules more often and thus would have offered up Ron Paul had he won the internal primary) instead of the republican party?

And don’t give me that shit about smaller government. Everyone with half a brain cell knows that the right wing is owned by people that want a global monopolist corporate autocracy which is every bit functionally a one world government. So then why?

Because intelligent republicans of the earlier era saw the current situation coming. They saw how a massive right wing failure was in-bound and sought to be republican without having to admit to being republican. (I on the other hand simply pushed for the one real opportunity for change that I saw.)

If libertarians were collectively what they claimed to be and not closeted neocons at best, they would infiltrate the left, and force them via internal politics and simple logic to abandon gun control as an issue, at which point enough one issue voters could switch sides and make social policy the priority that it should be without the fear of being black bagged as a distraction. (Which is really what guns are about preventing, and I think that’s a fair fear given the rise of the security state and the NSA/whistleblower/drone/etc crap.)

2nd Amendment and Related Links

But that’ll never happen because the fact is that 99% of libertarians want to be George Bush when they grow up, at best. They just know that the current crop of republicans are in the long term politically doomed, and they don’t want to be caught in the open being a party to the pantheon of ethical degeneracies that is what it means to be right wing in the united states.

Can you blame them?

photo_2015-08-14_19-38-03

My Reaction to the Princeton Mom

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/living/princeton-mom-book-marry-smart-matrimony/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

I try to be open to opposing view points, if for no other reason than to understand my opposition. I still disagree with this woman but not for the reasons I expected.

If you assume that marriage and children are going to be a reality for 90% of women in the west, which it is in terms of having offspring at least, then would it not be wise to plan for it overtly?

Also if you assume that they are the ones in charge, which they most certainly are. Then why pretend your message is aimed at anyone other than the women?

I mean it’s like building a house in a flood zone. You know it’s coming, so get ready. Study the event, think about the best outcome and your resources, and make it happen.

That’s disturbingly good advice. The problem is that it conflicts with our popular media spooned conception of what love, marriage, commitment, and sex are.

I respect this woman because she’s being honest about it. She’s basically in my view telling women how to make the best out of an exploitative situation, but she’s giving no thought to changing it.

What bothers me is the ruthless pragmatism and the implicit acceptance of how things are.

Also I grow damned weary of the scolding:

“…men will not buy the cow if the milk is free, and that’s the truth. If you give men sex without commitment, you have eliminated the incentive for them to commit.”

Do you see what she’s admitting here? That marriage is ultimately a con for the men. It’s a manipulative trade. A sexual contract. A sexual sale.

Am I really the only one in the room that looked at that whole thing and said no thanks? If I’m supposed to pay for sex no matter what I do, then why on earth would I pay such a high price?

She’s telling women to go exploit monied men. And college is definitely the best place to do it because most of those morons are already proving they are keen for a shafting just by being there.

Being in a major college as a male proves that you are either monied, or you are willing to amass a life time of debt simply to do what the TV tells you is right.

Can you think of better husband material? Someone you can lead around with scolding and temptation. Someone perfectly willing to sign on the dotted line just to live up to the image.

If you assume that nothing’s going to change. If you’re a woman and you assume you’re going to get married. Then she’s absolutely right. If that disturbs you as a modern woman then maybe you need to rethink your support for marriage as a concept from the ground up.

Because the original point of marriage was about selling sexy little girls to powerful men in exchange for obedience and “social stability” which simply means keeping those with power, in power.

Do you really want to be a product?

~Looks at the statistics.~

I guess you do.

I don’t won’t to be a slave to an employer, or a creditor, or the television via a wife. And so I’m condemned to isolation, poverty, hatred, and like 60% of all men, childlessness.

If failure to gain is the same as loss, then you bastards stole my son.

Try to imagine the strength it takes to be me and non-violent at the same time.

What did you expect?

We make irrational demands and reject anyone that tells us what we don’t want to hear, thus we are stuck with alpha liars.

Sure, the government is a captured 1% puppet now, but we allowed it to get that way. And until we start making rational demands we’ll keep getting irrational representatives. And I’m not talking about a new round of punish thy enemy. I’m not talking about tough love for other people but magically you’re just fine.

I’m talking about giving up some shit you’re straight up addicted to.

The right in particular rose to power by telling people what they wanted to hear no matter how incorrect or cruel or narcissistic it was, and it still is that way. How many assholes get elected basically saying “I’ll make sure you can do whatever you want and force only other people to change/suffer.” All of them as far as I can tell. Right and left. Like the man said, you can always hire half the poor to kill the other half.

“Tough on crime” for example still gets votes. It’s basically just socially sanctioned sadism/racism/etc. The organized conflation of crime with criminals so that you can jerk off to all the modern equivalents of public flogging. (Crime shows and court TV much?)

What do we expect when we vote for those people? Unconditional compassion, patience, tolerance, these things are hard and require helping people we don’t always like. When you demand someone else have less freedom/compassion, don’t get all bitchy when suddenly yours gets taken away.

We love prison because we can imagine our enemies being beaten and raped. Then we get a police state.

We love school because we imagine our children turning out EXACTLY like we want them. Then we get teen pregnancy, school shootings, and bullying unto suicide.

We love “defense” spending because we imagine a death machine enforcing that will on all who disagree. Then we get drone wars and the NSA reading this post as I type it.

We love ignorant energy policy because we think windmills and solar panels are fashionable and we’re terrified of the dark magic of radiation. Then we get pipelines and coal inspired lung cancer.

We love the hope of patenting the letter E and dying a multi-billionaire and so we get the TPP and walmart on track to owning half of everything and Monsanto being handed a food monopoly.

We love marriage law because we damn sure want our ex girl/boyfriend fiscally and socially punished for breaking our hearts and we can’t possibly learn to share. Then we get domestic violence, atrocious music, sexual objectification, and the all too common homicide in a desperate attempt to avoid a costly divorce.

Bottom line, 99% of people are hypocrites and are merely experiencing the natural and logical consequences of their demands.

When you want to play with fire in the living room, sometimes the house goes up. Is it really the fault of the fire marshal with the nice smile you elected to tell you it was ok to do? Or was it your vault for handing power to someone who told you what you wanted to hear?