Should intimidation have its place in our lives?

Has physical intimidation by one human over another ever been a good thing?

People all over the world live in fear. It is an undercurrent in almost every society. The History Channel says islands in the South Pacific
may be the only cultures to survive into the 20th century without the words fear, greed, want and other motivational words so common in our society even in their vocabulary.

Mostly we fear physical intimidation. No one is immune. At some point everyone gets subjected to a bully in life, even if it was only during childhood. Nobody likes to get slapped around, or worse.

Since it is so commonly accepted it must be a good thing in some respects. You think?

Are Bush, Cheney, Woo, etc. at all right? Are torture or its lesser brother physical intimidation ever justified?

E-mail Attitudes

Everybody has one. Nobody's is the same.

Some say let the sun shine in. Others don't
want anything more than a single ray to get
through their filter.

So what happened? Who won? I guess you
could say two opposite thoughts spread out the
territory. Google, on one side, said give me
all your mail, spam and all. I've got storage
for everything you’ all can throw at me.

AOL, on the other hand, said they needed
permission from their client's to forward
anything at all to their clients inboxes. “Unless
you”, the sender, “are white-listed by our client,
your mail will be forwarded to the trash can”.

Every other mail service like Yahoo, MSN, AT&T,
etc. all have different tolerance levels. This
spawned a whole bunch of bad grammar. All of a
sudden money became mo*ney, and free became
fr*e or fr.ee. I am an agreeable guy but I don't
like my lexicon mangled.

Here is my open letter to my provider and, I hope
through him, to any spammers:

Dear filter screen thwarter,

I like reading the Queen's English. I like to
connect with what I am reading and I don't
connect with fr.ee, or fr*e or some other spam
filter frustrator abomination of the English
language.

If what you are trying to sell me you need to
sneak past my filter, I want your message to be
screened. If you do state your pitch clearly and
I like don't like your pitch, I want you to be
spammed, damned, and banned forever more!

On the other hand, if I like your message, I want
to be connected immediately to your server, so
my order can be processed without delay.

And I expect my scanner to know what I want.

Any questions?

Talk about a backfire!

President Obama and Prime Minister Brown touched upon the need to creat a world regulating agency which would oversee all financial institutions -- banking -- everything, tracking all money moving anywhere.

So the bankers really blew it for themselves this time. No more international safe havens. No more protection from prying eyes.

What if all of a sudden, follow the money actually lead somewhere?

What if we could see the red stain of cash making a trail all the way from our pile in the desert back through Halliburton to Dick Cheney's pocket? But that will never happen. Who would be brave enough to dip his toe in that river of molten lava. For all we know the last guy to disagree with Dick got his face shot off.

But maybe big oil, and big money, and the big guns got too big for their britches. (I hope -- I don't want this to pi** off anyone still important) Just maybe world government is the only way to effectively regulate big world-wide businesses.

Let's see; from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. I make $18(average country wage) and the guy responsible for losing trillions received just shy of a half a million for that same hour. Assuming we both have weekends off, of course.

Yeah, right, I want protect this guy's right to put all that money into his pocket at the expense of my kids education, health care, clean air and the environment. Or do I?

The Easiest Way To Turn Things Around!

Here are two thoughts.

Take for example, the 30 top venture capital (hence to be called vulture capital) firms which manipulated the oil market and extracted trillions of dollars from the economy. These top vultures paid themselves an average of $877 million for last year's evil deeds alone. That is over 30,000 times what the average American worker makes annually. Yet these men put their pants on one leg at a time.

If we took only last year's ill-gotten gains back from the dirty-thirty, allowing them to feel the pain the rest of the nation and world is feeling for just a second, we recapture $26 billion.

Well, we just financed national healthcare and the 30 vulture donors won't even notice the dip in their cash accounts.

Or take the Merrill Lynch (should be lynched) top executives who paid themselves $120 million in bonuses on top of salary for last year. They took this money as fair compensation for losing billions upon billions of shareholder and depositor equity. So we take that back and give one million people $120. That's one million people who are $120 happier and 4 vultures miss their bonus meal.

Think these moves would lift some spirits? It would put an instant smile on a million people, and a sad face on 34. The rest of the country gets free healthcare for a year. You still get to go to your own doctor, and you can move ahead with the stuff you've been postponing for years; and when you're all shaped up the government gets the bill. You think that would make a few people happy?

Of course this is all a pipe dream.

The local, state and mostly federal revenuers usually confiscate first and ask questions later when crimes are suspected. But not when these suspects ("gentlemen") step out of stretch limos in Armani suits. Then our "public servants" bend over and kiss these "gentlemen's" rings and take the fragrant grease.



All kidding aside, if we did punish the real criminals for a change, I mean the really bad guys, the ones who are ruining lives by the millions, I think the whole world would applaud. Confidence would be restored in American leadership, money would pour back into the system, and we would be on our way to a full recovery.

The cost of failure / A perilous analogy

Although our situation is perilous, it may not yet be fatal.
While business failures are devastating to those involved,
the business cycle should not be arbitrarily manipulated.
The US economy is like a giant coast-to-coast forest.
Occasionally, to stay healthy, it needs to reseed itself.
Fire is nature's best answer to burn the scrub and rubble .

When business and manufacturing, as limbs of the banking
trees, become diseased, infected, overgrown and choked
by overhead, they too must burn.
(Read big auto and big finance.)

Such is the cycle of life. The fire, while severe, will prepare
the way for the next round of growth. If we step in and
interrupt the cleansing cycle, we are probably only postponing
the inevitable. Rabid bankers and greedy businessmen, like cancers,
need to be burned out completely or they do twice the damage in round two.

To use another analogy, we find our country in a game of
world-class poker. Table stakes are whatever you can borrow
from everybody else on earth. You have had a run of bad luck.
Your stake is getting thin, so this may be the time to go all in.

Or maybe you should wait and play another round.

Where Do Judges Come From?

To me the most important protection of our democracy
should be the insulation of our judicial system from corrupt
influences. If justice comes down to who has the most money,
society as we know it would disintegrate. For a society to
survive the people within it must, after all, believe in their elite.
And they must have trust in the fairness of their judicial
systems. The only other way to hold society together is
with a large internal "security" force.

In a national bestseller, "Personal Injuries", Scott Turow
vividly describes what can go wrong when "The Judge" is on
the take. The story involves favorable rulings in personal
injury cases where insurance companies are on the hook
for huge settlements. Common wisdom holds that insurance
companies use the pretext of those monstrous settlements
to charge their customers outrageous fees for what are in
actuality rare cases. The lawyers get rich, the judges
(in these cases) get a nice bonus of some sort and the
insurance companies get to raise their rates. The plaintiffs
get hugely rewarded for their pain and suffering and as a final
tribute to a system gone horribly wrong, the evildoer is severely
punished. Everyone involved is the winner, the insurance company
pays off, and if there is a loser in there somewhere, no one cares.

WE, the majority of people in USA, have a firm belief in our
democracy (with a few detractors), and a strong backbone
of religious and moral convictions. And WE overwhelmingly
support our judicial system. I believe as a society WE feel shame
when the bad guy goes free (take OJ for example) or when the
good guy gets wrongly convicted (take the hundreds of inmates
recently freed from years of confinement by new DNA evidence).

So what in the world are WE thinking when WE allow the most
politically motivated, and by extension the most heavily influenced,
people in our society to --APPOINT-- the judges who sit on the
highest benches in the land. Every honest person needs to believe
that the person presiding over a court of law, and possibly
sitting in judgment of him, will be impartial, which is inherently
an oxymoronic concept under these circumstances. Shouldn't
WE the people be voting on these guys?

Teflon Ron

Incredible as it may seem, it appears the Illinois governor might be found innocent in a court of law for attempting to sell Obama's vacated senate seat and expect (extort) numerous other favors for family and friends.

I think in the court of public opinion, however, he is as guilty as they come. But if they brought the case too soon there is every possibility that, because he hadn't overtly (yet) committed any crime, he may not be found guilty of anything.

IMO whether or not he gets convicted he should not be permitted to appoint the next senator.

That PRIVILEDGE, the power to change political history for better or worse, for
both Illinois and the Nation, should go to an honest man.

One thing is clear; Blagojevich’s pick will be bought and paid for.