Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The word is out... promiscuous sex is in!

Finally, promiscuous sex is getting the credit it deserves.

An interesting news article on Dr. Nancy, MSNBC mornings (I'm sorry I don't have more details) discussed a study concerning frequent but unemotional sexual encounters. In particular, the study sought to determine whether promiscuous sex could be proven to have negative consequences on (either or both) the physical and emotional well-being of those who participate in “the life”. The story didn't cover particulars such as what they used for a control group. Presumably this would include people
who had little or no sexual contact outside of the prescribed social norms like marriage or those who at least had the handle "committed” or “seriously involved" attached to their sexual activity.

So guess what?

Long story short the promiscuous group scored the highest across all age groups for emotional and physical well-being. The group labeled promiscuous was clearly happier, less stressed out, and in better overall physical condition. The study covered 12,000people's lives over a period of 20 years of their lives.

Guess further what?

Those who had a promiscuous past had a more successful marriage once they decided to tie the knot. Apparently, having solved the "curiosity of the cat", promiscuous people were able to settle into a more reliable or complacent "I'm happy with what I've got" frame of mind.

Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat... it kills the marriage. Does it really surprise anyone that people enjoying active sex lives are happier, better adjusted, and less stressful? Apparently the last vestiges of our Victorian backgrounds are being shed. The ridiculous notion that sex under any circumstances, other than forced situations, could actually be bad for you in any significant way is being relegated to the trash bin of history.

Twenty years down the road I wouldn't be surprised to see athletic sex the new Olympic sport.

When in Rome…
one should act like a Roman.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Lets face it...War is a racket!

President Obama has, I suspect in order to relieve his incredible work load, turned over the war to the generals. (Eventually he was bound to follow the path of least resistance.) The generals will, without question, continue GWB's domino plan. His plan, if you'll recall, was to go from Muslim country to Muslim country on a Christian Jihad dedicated to eradicating the Taliban. (More truthfully
perhaps, eliminating Muslims.) Evidently, that's still our plan.

What should have been a rabbit hunt, where a few thousand of our elite special forces troops chase a few hundred of the 9/11 perpetrators into the mountains and caves, will be blown into $100 billion annual expenditure. The generals will attempt to justify a MacArthur style sweep throughout the Middle East. The fact that
Osama bin Laden, the ALLEGED target of our pursuit, has been dead these last 8 years doesn’t seem to dim the generals enthusiasm to hunt down and capture him.

The generals will fight this war phony with overworked, worn-out, suicidal troops. At least one soldier, when faced with yet a third tour to the Middle East, elected to end his own life rather than return. The suicide rate among the military is increasing monthly!

We will pay for this war on credit at our most critical economic point, when the stability of the nation's economic and financial well-being is still in question. We will neglect the needs of this nation in favor of another useless and unproductive war on the other side of the planet. In spite of what our leaders tell us, it doesn't take a big brain to realize what's going on outside our borders has nothing to do with our national security. No country on the map today is crazy enough to take on the USA.

If our national security is weak it is because our National Guard is overseas. The rationale behind sending our national defense troops overseas is as substantial as fog. The really stupid part of what we are being expected to swallow by the war council is that the people in these countries subjected to our bombarding appreciate us. It really takes a complete moron to even consider we may be able to win over the hearts and minds of a people by using guns and bombs on them.

We might stand a chance of winning over a nation’s people if we helped them to build schools or hospitals. If we helped the poorest of the world's nations with their infrastructure; their roads or electrical grid or water resources. If we did so I suspect they would learn to love us in double quick time. As long as we abuse their country they will never love or even appreciate us. But imagine the noise and uproar the good citizens of this country would create if it were known we were upgrading their country before upgrading our own infrastructure. It is much more politically correct to bomb them first.

The insanity of continuing to do over and over what has failed in the past will continue to plague our future.

The people in this once great nation are either too poorly informed, too misguided, too greedy, or too apathetic to care what is done in their name.

We follow blindly the actions of our leaders for one overarching reason. We all believe our nation's deciders know more than we do. We sincerely believe they have secret knowledge which, were we privy to it, would convince us the course we are on is true.

However, after watching the Bush/Cheney parade of people spouting the same lies over and over, I am convinced otherwise.

Fact: we are alienating the very people we are supposedly liberating. By indiscriminately killing them we couldn't possibly do more harm to our long-term interest.

We have allowed our generals to bring to full living color the popular board game RISK. One huge difference between a game and real-life is at the end of the game the troops, with no enemies to face, presumably get to go home. Our troops will never come home.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Tonight's Big Number (12/01/09)

Tonight we get to learn about plans to send additional tens of thousands of troops into Our-Gaff-Astan. We have big boys with expensive war toys wasting billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers lives and limbs... as usual.

Folks, if you think we got shellacked in Vietnam, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Here is tonight's big number... one million.

$1 million is what it costs the government (the taxpayer) PER SOLDIER PER YEAR! The war business costs the world's citizens more than any other business endeavor. And yet America's citizens get nothing constructive from those efforts and expenditures except death and destruction. And jobs. We are, after all, the world's largest arms dealer.

What kind of warped thinking results in our government invading a sovereign nation with 100,000 troops -- allegedly chasing a few hundred outlaws?

The whole mess reminds me of a fairy tale called Robin Hood. As we all know from childhood Robin Hood (Osama bin Laden in the forests or caves) and his band of angry men (the Taliban) took on the Sheriffs of Naughtyham (Bush and Cheney) because their regime was so corrupt.

The idea behind the cat and mouse chase we have been engaged in these last eight years is this:

Keep the game interesting enough so those on the sidelines ( the taxpayers) will continue to finance the game. We could have caught the mouse (OBL) eight years ago but that would have ended the game. Our Sheriffs of Naughtyham (Bush and Cheney) couldn't have that, so the chase was called off within, literally, hours from capturing OBL. Does anybody think that happened by accident?

We, like the Vikings and Romans of old, are addicted to war. How disgusting.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Government sponsored vice -- -- is nice!

It seems a sure bet that our government’s expansion into what were historically areas controlled by organized crime will continue .

In Oregon we have come a long way from prohibition to state-controlled liquor sales. Presumably this has led to less liquor related accidents and crime.

Over the past decade the state has taken control of social gambling. Their control is so strict they have even managed to move the time-honored tradition of betting in football pools in taverns to their own boards. Among friends you stood chance of recovering your ticket price when the winner of the pool bought the traditional bell ringing round. How dare the state take that away from us? They never buy a round.

It seems a foregone conclusion that at least some states will wrest control of the pot business from the cartels, and in particular in Oregon and California, within another election cycle or two. We the people are finally catching on!

Progressive and forward thinking among Europeans has led to control of the hard drug business. Drug addicts can go to the neighborhood pharmacy for a fix. Consequently they have no drug crimes being committed to support drug habits. No gangsters on street corners peddling dope. No thefts, robberies or home invasions required. For a government policy, how smart is that?

Those same enlightened countries have also taken over control of the prostitution business. Sex is for sale but regulated by the state so purveyors are guaranteed disease-free and safe. You go to a sidewalk smorgasbord to make your selection. No prostitutes are hanging out on street corners in high crime areas. There is no gang involvement and, most importantly for society, there are no sex crimes committed
in those countries where sex is readily available.

How incredibly brilliant is that? No rapes! No drug crimes! No gang influence!

No huge taxpayer cost is necessary to support a monstrous prison system; AKA as gladiator schools and schools offering advanced degrees in major crimes.

The sooner governments control all vice the sooner everyone will be able to purchase what they want or need at a reasonable price. Non violent crimes will be taxed, not prosecuted, and the cost of administering these new government programs will be born by the consumers of those services. The rest of us can enjoy the perks
that come with overflowing government coffers which will come from taxing cash flows normally going straight to criminal enterprises.

We in this country are not blessed with the experienced brain trust Europeans took centuries to acquire… but we are getting there.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Times Perspective

To a 20-year-old looking forward 20 years seems

like looking into eternity.



To a 60-year-old looking back 20 years seems

like looking back a few weeks, months at most.



To a 20-year-old the time till your 21st birthday

is forever. Time passes so slowly you can count

the seconds.



By the time you reach 60 time is moving so fast

the days are a blur. You wonder what became

of last week or last month.



At 20 we have ants in our pants and can't stay

still for more than a minute. At 60 we sit down

to read a good book after breakfast and the next

time we look up it's lunchtime.



If we could only have that longtime perspective

during our youth and realize that 20 years down

the road is far shorter than it appears. Long time

is just a trick of time's perspective.



Looking backward through time's perspective is

similar to looking at things in your car's rear view

mirror... Things appear closer than they really are.



Looking forward in time we get tunnel vision and

things seem much further away than they really are.



Somewhere in time we hope our perspective

balances out. Eventually our internal clock slows

down enough that things behind us in life are no

longer stretched out of proportion; and the future

isn't compressed to the point where you think you

can just jump ahead in line in no time.



You mellow out.

You get to relax for a while.

Hopefully/Maybe.

 

 

 

 

Sunday, October 4, 2009

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Déjà vu, catch 22 -- Goodmorning Afghanistan....

Déjà vu, catch 22 -- we will never learn.

It's Vietnam all over again. With the same backward
thinking guiding us now, as then, why wouldn't it be?

General McChrystal has spoken.
The Taliban forces are increasing in Afghanistan.

Well of course they are, and we are the reason.
We are the invaders in Afghanistan as we were in
Vietnam and Iraq and shortly, if we leave it to our
military machine, as we will be in Iran.

Consider the Taliban's argument to the people, with
Iraq being the perfect example. Here come the
foreign devils killing your friends and family members,
destroying your towns, and imposing a foreign belief
system and martial law on what was formerly
a relatively peaceful country. If this were happening
in the U.S.A. citizens would be enlisting by the millions
in a heartbeat.

The Taliban is recruiting in record numbers because
we are acting exactly like any other foreign invader of
Afghanistan since time immemorial. Afgans are joining
the Taliban because it has as it’s purpose the goal of
repelling the foreign devil/invaders (us).

It is important to realize that Afghanistan is one of the
poorest, most illiterate and backward nations on earth.
They have no TV and radio to speak of, especially in
their remote villages which is where the Taliban have
sway. What the peasants know or believe is only what
they have been told by the people that have lead them
for centuries. Who would you trust if you were them?

What they see is their friends and family being
murdered on aregular basis by a nation safe and secure
on the other side of the planet. To the peasant
majorities in Iraq or Afghanistan we, the good old USA,
are about as remote and relevant to their lives as
Martians. Their choice is simple. They simply need to
defend themselves until we go away. Then they can
get back to the lives they have been living for centuries.

This is precisely why we have never won a war of this
kind. The people we are killing believe they are fighting
for their country.

And they will never quit fighting for their country.

Just because, from our point of view, the Afghan people
have a rough life doesn't mean we have to slaughter
them to relieve them of life’s burden.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Epigenetic therapy-- the best words in medicine since vaccine.

First, here's what the dictionary has to say:
In biology, the term epigenetic refers to changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence.


Over the last century scientists have discovered that we share most of our genes with all other life forms on this planet. In fact, our closest relative, the chimp, has almost 99% of our genes. The remaining 1.1% account for all of the differences between humans and apes... OR SO WE THOUGHT.

Recently we have discovered that genes are only our genetic framework. The final touches to our body chemistry are environmentally derived. The things we feel and are exposed to emotionally affect who we eventually become. Epigenetics are concerned with the plethora of molecules which attach themselves to our genes. The results from these modified genes affect our looks, abilities, and lifetime health tendencies. This new science explains, for example, why identical twins aren't identical.

We now know were to look to unravel the rest of the "where do we come from" story. What a fascinating generation we are living in. Soon we will be able to zero in on and possibly reverse commonplace maladies like cancer or organ disease and failure.

One effect of these gene modifications is they are multi-generational. That is, we pass our environmentally modified genes on to our future generations based upon the dramatic events that occur to each of us during our lives.

The consequences from world traumatic events like the Holocaust will take many generations to fully manifest themselves. Scars from wars and other atrocities we afflict upon each other alter our core genetic makeup by causing some genes normally turned off to be turned on and others normally on to be turned off. These switches, from birth on, affect each one of us differently and are what really make us different from each other.

In other words, who we are is as much a result of the stresses, or happiness, or emotional content, be it nurturing or otherwise, that surrounded our parents and our grandparents during their lives as we are a result of what we eat and breathe and drink throughout our lives.

Behavioral science now has a foundation in chemistry and biology. As more sophisticated instruments are built to decipher our brain waves, clues are discovered and unraveled which have led to an understanding of the organic responses to our physical environment.
We had best get to cleaning up our act if we expect future generations to avoid our missteps.

What a brave New World we will soon live in.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

What should really irk us.

The country lost five trillion in wealth over the past two years.

The people who caused this financial nightmare have for the most part lost nothing. In most cases, especially at the top of the banking community where the real gambling with the country's equity took place, the biggest bettors got paid the most.

They walked away with billions in spite of the fact that their gross negligence and greed cost millions of working-class Americans their homes, their jobs and incomes, and at least for now, their future or even a small chance at a piece of the American pie.

With their jobs gone, their home gone, their insurance gone, their security gone and now living in tent city it is amazing that these people haven't erupted Watts style on Wall Street. (Yet)

As heavily armed as we are in this country, if we implode again the consequences will be worse than the civil war. There won't be a Mason-Dixon line to separate the combatants in this war; the war between the haves and have-nots.

Political opinions are as likely to split down the middle of the dining room table as well as they will across streets and neighborhoods, towns, cities and states.

We will go fractal. Those who defrauded this country had better figure out how to get that money back into society. Otherwise society will be crippled for a long long time.

Voilà! Along comes a plan for the government to be financed by Wall Street. Talk about a world-class Ponzi scheme. The federal reserve charges a margin to print the money it lends to the Federal Reserve...

The federal reserve charges a percentage to lend the money to Wall Street bankers...

The Wall Street bankers charge a percentage to lend the money back to the government...

The very same government who owns the printing presses which started the process in the first place...

People, we have to smarten up or everything we just did to prop up the banksters will just cost us more money. This latest proposed loop de loop just inflates the currency more than our borrowing is already inflating it. Inflation is, at it’s core, just another tax on the poor.

The problem with financial pigs is that their eyes aren't bigger than their stomachs.

Monday, September 14, 2009

A stroke of brilliance!

Obama is finally on track.

Although the entire world was caught with our collective pants down
one year ago, we have been "educated".

Obama's most recent proposals put our greedy banksters on notice
that there will be No More Bailouts! Any further gambling with
risky investments will fall squarely on the individual banks involved,
their officers and their shareholders. In other words, those who stand
to gain the most NOW stand to lose the most.

Life is now somewhat in balance. Should a bank CEO lead his cronies
off a cliff, with shareholder approval, then they all take the plunge together.
Shareholders will now have a say in the egregious bonuses paid to
CEOs on short-term, often unsustainable, profits. Masterminds
of previous disasters still employed, which includes most bank CEOs,
will no longer have the benefit of the most self serving compensation
policy ever designed... the "when the bank wins, I win huge and if
the bank loses I still win" policy.

It only took a year and the loss of 13 trillion in national equity to
effect this change.

Hopefully this and more changes to come will prevent another world
disaster like the one we are still digging out from under.



For more blogs from Bob just visit I Love Grants Pass and search for parmsplace.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Legitimate Thieves

You know who I mean. Companies who rely on "small print" to steal your money.
Banks and insurance companies are probably the biggest culprits. Somewhere
in page after page of legalese they slip it to you. The contracts you are forced
to sign because you are required by law to purchase services, like auto insurance for example, are written entirely in the company's favor. After all, they are the ones paying the attorney fees. A common tactic of lawyers is to design run on sentences whose content is so convoluted only company lawyers can figure them out. Somewhere within those often paragraph sized sentences they provide themselves with "weasel clauses" giving them the right to screw you somewhere down the line.

How about credit card companies? These are my personal favorite leaders in the legitimate thief category. They offer what appears to be a good deal up front and then allow you to develop self-destructive habits like overspending. If you were doing fine without something yesterday, chances are you can manage without that something today. But if you own a credit card, why wait? Once you're in over your head these companies increase your rate. You go "hey, how come my interest jumped from 10 to 20% overnight?", and they go "read the fine print”. If you have a credit card and have never read the small print I will summarize it for you here. Essentially they can do whatever they want and you are stuck with it.

Then came the Internet. I try to be careful but at least several times a year I get "educated". The most recent example of internet screwing came to me by way of a company called Ryder Marketing. They offered a "how to make a million online" CD which had some brilliant sales copy and a cheap price, $7.95 delivered, so I decided I might learn something. I was right! About three weeks later I received my disk and before I even opened the package my account was charged an additional $105.00. Long story short, by ordering the disk I was automatically
enrolled in a $1260 year long course payable in 12 easy $105.00 payments. I attempted to have the charges reversed but apparently somewhere in the video "fine print", which I hadn't even viewed prior to the charge, I "agreed" to accept one additional disk per month.

Agreed my ass. Moral of that story (and we can thank the Bush banking gangsters for this) is if you don't know who you are dealing with online, cancel your card after every online transaction. It is your only protection. It turns out even a punk like Ryder has a better attorney than the banks do. (My personal moral to the story is if my money is with Chase, it is no longer safe.)
An interesting note to the Ryder ripoff was my attempt to destroy this guy by posting a scam alert. To my chagrin I had to get in line, and the line was, at that point in time, almost three half-million people long. The guy wasn't lying. He really is making millions online... by stealing! The worst part was his video wasn't worth the substrate it was printed on.

I'm not even going to get into health insurance legitimate thievery except to say the only way for us little guys with small money to survive is to align ourselves with bigger money than the legitimate thieves can muster. Unfortunately, and in spite of all the pitfalls and potential for disaster, the only bigger money in Washington than lobby money is the government's money itself.

We need a government option to keep the health-care legitimate thieves in line.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Obama may tank faster than the Titanic.

He is championing the right causes but…
Put simply, people are not as gullible as they used to be.

On the war front:
The administration is expanding our wars on and off budget,
increasing the use of agencies like Prince's Blackwater militia in areas
like Afghanistan. Blackwater is part of the CIA assassination program
which uses a private militia to fill in where official government action
could be called into question. They operate above the law, courtesy
of policies established in the Bush administration, and they cost
at least 10 times what our own military personnel would cost.
And the deaths of their forces don't enter into "official" statistics.

On the health front:
It is hard for many Americans NOT to hold obese people
or drug addicts or people with unwanted pregnancies responsible
for their condition. While aids has lost steam as a major contributor
to death in our nation, to fight the disease costs a fortune and it is hard
NOT to hold the indiscriminate drug user or sex deviant responsible for
the consequences of their actions. People who live on Big Macs and
dingdongs at the expense of their bodies earn little sympathy from those
who protect their body's health with a proper diet. Unwanted pregnancies
are a result of raging hormones, but are also a result of a disgusting head
in the sand approach to sex education on the part of our government. The
backward facing Bush administration and religious communities can be held
directly responsible for the lack of responsible sex education but we all share
the burden of these irresponsible policies.

We can't trust the government to solve our problems since they are
in many respects enablers. We can't expect "for profit" businesses like
insurance companies not to capitalize on opportunities created by our own
personal lack of self discipline or self-respect.

So our only answer is to rely upon ourselves, our own good judgment,
and the hope that wisdom and experience will win out.

Geez we are in trouble.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Drug companies promote drug addiction.

I am not dissing drug companies. They do what they do and they do it well. They create a market for drugs and then they sell drugs to that market.

Just good business.

But they have moved from selling drugs we need to creating a need for drugs.

They are better at it than crack salesman. And they're not against the law. They're free to do whatever their lobbyists can convince Congress they should be able to do. If crack salesman had lobbyists crack wouldn't be against the law. In fact, for most of our history cocaine has been legal. Cocaine was the coke in Coca-Cola.

We are now promoting drugs to children to combat "childhood" depression, or blue days. Blue days are a symptom of childhood.

To put children as young as three years old on antidepressants is, IMHO, beyond ridiculous. It is scandalous. Parents too busy to pay attention to their children's needs follow the prescriptions of "doctors". Doctors are the drug companies first line of offense.

Any doctor who treats childhood as a curable disease should be defrocked and run out of town. Our children are being taught pill popping is the answer for everything. They get started on mood elevators or mood levelers like Ritalin and they end up popping Vicodin like candy when they are old enough to convince a doctor they need medicinal help. And the doctors oblige. In Michael Jackson's case, he was obliged to death.

Alcohol is legal and it is perhaps the most destructive drug available.

Marijuana is illegal and it is perhaps the most constructive drug available.

We have no drug sense anymore. Gimme some Ritalin.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

As the story unfolds...

It becomes clearer, day by day, that the Bush
administration consisted of some of the biggest
liars of the century. Guys like Rove, Panetta,
Cheney and, hopefully Bush himself, will
eventually fall under the relentless questioning
of the Justice Department and Congress.

These guys lied us into a war, lied about weapons
of mass destruction, lied to the Justice Department
about political reasons behind the firing of numerous
justices affiliated with the opposite party, lied to
convict a governor of the opposite party of crimes he
didn't commit, and just lied, lied, and lied some more.

No justice could be severe enough to compensate
this country for the damage these people have done
to undermine the world's opinion of our national integrity.
We stand disgraced.

Hopefully these people will stand convicted of their
crimes and be stripped of all benefits unfairly
awarded to people of their ilk and be known
as the common criminals they are.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

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?

Friday, March 6, 2009

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?

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

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?

Thursday, February 26, 2009

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.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

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.