The Bitchin' Post

Death is not complicated…

2012-01-23T20:05:00.000-08:00

Death is not complicated; it is simply the antidote to life.

In physics it goes like this:
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Birth, sooner or later, leads to death. You can't fight it;
it is a fact of nature as eternal as night and day.

So why do some world religions, and in particular
those religions whose roots sprang to life in the Middle
East, seem to promote the concept of a life after death
with such ferocity? After all, most people around the
world don't worry one bit about life after death. Life
is tough enough without that additional burden to carry.

I suspect the answer can be found within the concept
that, according to those religions,everyone will be
judged, and punished, by some
Dark Lord/earth and mankind creator who we manage,
by our very existence, to offend.

By supersuasion 100 generations of descendents of
these Middle Eastern religions, members of the Christian,
Muslim and Jewish faiths, have successfully transferred
the concept of guilt to their heirs. They have been so
successful at passing on their hand-me-down beliefs
they have completely distorted their own reality. In fact,
their reality is so disturbed they produce one of the rarest
creatures on the planet; one capable of self-destruction
for an imagined cause and a promised reward redeemable
in the afterlife.

Once having become enveloped in this particular brand
of mass delusion, where life after death takes on bizarre
dimensions, people can be managed easily. In all
descriptions of an afterlife, a perfect utopia, behavior
takes on human rather than godlike attributes. Everything
we missed out on while living we get to enjoy once we are
dead, as soon as we get to Heaven.

Right?

While in this malleable state our putty minds can be
shaped or warped into psychic manifestations more
animal than human; regressed into primal states. We
can be frightened into believing, and subsequently
following and doing, the most despicable acts
imaginable. I myself cannot imagine the horror of
living within a population where human beings daily
turn themselves into human bombs. Further,I can't
imagine believing in a religion so distorted it could
promote that kind of thinking and behavior.

And then I realized, eureka moment, it is not the
people of the Middle East that need to be ethnicly
cleansed and their residue flushed down the toilet.

It is the religions themselves.

Flawed Thinking

2012-01-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

As a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks our country has been in a continual state of fear; bouncing between yellow and orange, whatever that might mean. State and municipal law enforcement recruitment is at an all-time high; so high, in fact, municipalities and even some states are breaking their budgets trying to afford their swollen departments. In stark contrast, on a national level, Homeland Security’s secretary Janet Napolitano has virtually unlimited funds to use to upgrade and increase our national security forces. She actually has more money to spend than places to spend it.

As a result of all the money spent since 9/11 we should be as secure as a baby in a crib. What do you think? Are we? According to members of Congress we aren't. In fact, our war against Muslims has produced record numbers of recruits dedicated to our destruction.

As a direct result of the additional troops in blue all over our country, crime should be down everywhere, so conventional theory claims. In fact, crime at the street level is. However crimes committed by members of the upper echelons of society have never been greater, affected more people, or done more damage.

The greatest crimes in the history of mankind have been committed during the last 10 years. Incredibly, not a single person has gone to jail, and none of the wizards behind the scene have even been indicted. The greatest crimes in our history that I am referring to are, 1) the invasion of Iraq and, 2) the looting of the savings and pension funds of tens of millions of Americans.

Perhaps the greatest gangster to have ever lived is our former vice president, Dick Cheney. He almost single-handedly manipulated the country, through lies and bullysuasion, into an unprovoked war which cost the country $1 trillion and the world hundreds of thousands of lives. He then was able to manipulate Congress into designating his company, Halliburton, the ONLY American company with security clearance approval high enough to do business in the country of the war he created, Iraq. All the money flowing into Iraq flowed through Halliburton. When word of outrageous price gouging and death causing faulty workmanship in military barracks built by Halliburton contractors surfaced, Halliburton spun its KBR division offshore to avoid US prosecution. During this war Cheney broke international treaties and countless American laws by encouraging torture and other war crimes. Dick Cheney will most certainly go down in history as the most successful evil gangster of all time.

The other major crime committed during the first decade of a brand-new century was the credit default swap fiasco engineered by Wall Street and facilitated by the government mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mortgage bankers throughout the country granted everybody who wanted a loan on a home a mortgage, whether they qualified or not. Those mortgage bankers made huge fortunes in commissions on what were later to become known as liars loans. Mortgage brokers bundled up these worthless mortgages, put what turned out to be phony insurance on them, and then sold them at what appeared to be stiff discounts to other greedy bankers. To close the loop on those toxic assets these worthless mortgages were finally sold, again at enormous profits, to the final guppies in the pond, the less sophisticated pension funds and financial institutions managing the IRAs of tens of millions of Americans. Although none of the millions of Americans who were invested in these retirement plans had anything to do with the scam of the century, they bore the brunt of the losses while those responsible for the crash walked away with billions, indictment free.

So where is that flawed thinking I mentioned earlier? It is in the same place our war philosophy is; stuck in the Stone Age by our military-industrial complex. For example, while we have the technology to wage war with equipment which causes no death or property destruction, we continued to wage war with people against people in what can only be described as a frenzy of bloodlust. By our doing so we sacrifice lives, property, any claim to the high moral ground, or any sense of pride or national honor. We could, if we weren't being mislead by Washington gangsters and war profiteers, be inspiring worldwide peace and prosperity by using more humane methods to deal with the poorest among the world’s citizens. Imagine what world opinion of America would be if we started to build our world's poorest nations up instead of blowing them up.

On our state and local levels our flawed thinking is that more "men in blue" will deter crime. While it's true that crime on the streets of America is declining and today is statisticly at historically low levels, the types of crimes hurting most people today are "white-collar" crimes which armies of men in blue are powerless to prevent.

Regardless of how many cops we put on the beat, nothing can be done about the back street boys or politician plotting the next big American swindle behind closed doors.

So the truth about our nation is that in spite of the massive amounts of money spent on police and security during the years following 9/11, no amount of money or men in blue could have prevented the biggest crimes in our nation's history. Crimes which resulted in the looting of America. Crimes which resulted in the carnage inflicted on the Iraq nation. The looting of America's middle class was accomplished by our own upper-class, which has outstripped the world's most notorious crime lords in scope, audacity, and the massive amount of theft and destruction.

To think we can prevent the continued looting of America by adding more uniforms to an already over policed society is the real flaw in our nation's thinking, the real fly in the ointment. All we will accomplish is to bankrupt ourselves. Re-instating the "rule of law" in our country instead of "rule by the elite" is the only way to secure the future of America.

We need a foreign-policy geared for the 21st century, not the 12th.

2012-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

We have been one of the world's worst aggressors for over half a century. We seem to be stuck in the bully mode, incapable of switching to a more civilized national persona based upon compassion, not aggression; aggression,in spite of our rhetoric, is actually our national policy.

As the continuing Middle East revolutions clearly demonstrate, more revolutionary progress can be made overnight with cell phones than we have been able to make in, for example, Afghanistan, in over a decade. People talking to people are bringing about rapid change for the first time in thousands of years in the world's most backward region. In a matter of months, not years, a few countries in the Middle East have been able to become less fearful and more democratic countries. This is occurring not because the US is investing heavily in nation rebuilding by invasion, but because the people within these Stone Age civilizations are demanding change in a coordinated, organized fashion.

In other words, we can finally butt out of everybody else's business. We can leave the world’s country rebuilding to each country's own next generation to accomplish by themselves -- by phone, and begin to rebuild our own tattered country. Sure we can continue to help our poorer nations out, but with schools, hospitals, roads and infrastructure. The idea of blowing an entire region back into the Stone Age, at a cost of countless lives and trillions of dollars, just so a few of our country’s warmongers can make more billions, is barbarian at best, and just plain illegal, counter productive and stupid policy.

Folks, we can do better, and we can do it almost overnight. We simply need to replace the greediest, most corrupt members of our Congress with a better class of people. However, with big-money influencing elections all over the country, that is not likely to happen. We are a nation of sheep people, easily misled or misdirected by the best advertising campaigns money can buy. Instead of strengthening our freedoms and liberties we are ceding them to the rich and powerful en masse.

Millions of our young are being conditioned to believe war is a necessary and desirable part of our nation's ongoing military history, instead of the deplorable, mindless, murderous business it is. By moving millions and millions of our young people through our war machine our nation is becoming more barbarian by the year, not more civilized, particularly when combined with our nation's declining intellectual capacity. Heaven forbid our misguided leaders should be encouraged to use our own trained military muscle on ourselves. Whoops, too late!

We claim to be the world’s leading example of democracy, but our policies are backward and inhumane. Can anybody seriously doubt that the world's poorest nations would appreciate us infinitely more if we helped build them up, instead of blowing them up?

The Coming Religious Conundrum

2011-11-08T20:18:00.000-08:00

Advances in science have outstripped the immovable force which organized religion represents. Organized religions' very survival depends upon the public's belief in the eternal teaching of the truth about life and the afterlife. Changes in belief are organized religions' biggest enemy.

The birth of the universe, and its explanation in mathematical terms, will spell the death of organized religion. Two things will happen in the future that will dispel the hold that all religions have had on the public since Baal once held the throne.

The first shock to the religious system will be the discovery of extra terrestrial life. That will probably be accomplished in our lifetime; perhaps in the next decade, or at least within my lifetime.(And I'm pretty old.) Mars appears to have an ice layer and, given the billions of years of evolution, probably supported a water-based environment long enough for life to develop as many as a billion years sooner than ours.

The second event will be more transformational; earth shaking in fact. There will be the unequivocal discovery of intelligent life signs originating from outside our solar system. Imagine intelligent life arriving from the stars beyond our immediate galaxy! Once this fact is clearly established the traditional concept of God will become irrelevant. Once it is clearly demonstrated that evolution will undeniably result in the generation of life whereever conditions in the universe permit, and those conditions exist in infinite number, our opinion of our singularity among the stars will be destroyed.

Imagine the peace our world could enjoy if our concept of life and the everlasting was finally settled, and all the most pressing questions of our destiny were finally answered.

Hand Me Down Beliefs

2011-06-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

There is very little that everyone on the planet has in common with his fellow man, but we all share one thing. We are all brought up to believe what our neighborhood support system believes, at least at first.

Family, friends, teachers, and the community we live in all shape our belief system, at least through our formative years. Local and national religious beliefs offer a clear example. If you are born in Japan you will likely become a Christian since Japan has the largest concentration of Christians on the planet. If you are born in India you will most likely be Hindu, or in China a Buddhist. If you are born in Utah, USA you will most likely become a Mormon.

As a result of the cacooning nature of local bias, people seldom question their own given belief system. Instead, they question and challenge all belief systems different than their own. Unfortunately, in some cases, countries go to war over differences in their beliefs

It is OK to disagree. It is OK to hold strong opinions. It is, IMHO, insane to fight or go to war over hand me down beliefs. Sane people will agree that as long as your belief system doesn't require me to change my life we can co-exist peacefully. So why is our country at war? Constantly!!! No nation on earth infringes upon us, our beliefs, or our way of life. (A cynic may say none would dare, and they would be correct.)

Are we insane? We are currently involved in several presidential wars at a cost in excess of a trillion dollars. Neither the world and its citizens nor the USA and its citizens benefit, with the exception of the war mongers and their manufacturers and merchants of death. How can we preach "love one another" while we are blowing the bejesus out of the middle east?

While claiming to be a friend to the planet, we are by far its biggest polluter
per capita. Why do we in this country seem to have magoo style lenses when we look at ourselves? We seem incapable of coming to grips with our nation's hyprocracy. Who are we really?

No One Can Fix Stupid.

2011-06-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

An incredible number of smart people are trying to patch up the government money gaposis but the real problems are never addressed.

For example, incredible as it sounds, our Congress voted to require the Medicaid and Medicare systems to pay for drugs provided to seniors at full retail prices. Congress did this without regard for the fact that government is paying up to 10 times what they could be paying if they were able to negotiate lower prices. In what kind of make believe world does a policy like that make sense?

In other words, the biggest consumer pays the highest prices. Plain goofy if you ask me. Congress votes to require Medicaid spending increases in the billions annually by requiring highest drug prices to be paid to big Pharma for all the beneficiaries under their plans; and then complains bitterly when it comes time to borrow the money to pay the bill.

Until we can vote the stupid and greedy out of politics our situation will not improve.

Another million examples can be found in the trillions of dollars wasted on our military. We spend, as taxpayers, hundreds of billions yearly to businesses overseas which then contribute a ridiculously small US tax on that income. In fact our tax laws are so stupid these giant multinational corporations can't even bring that money back home. Our military gets away with wasting hundreds of billions of dollars annually with little or no oversight.

Until we require our lawyers (the Congress of the USA) to work for "we the people" and not the rich and greedy, as they do currently, the middle class stands no chance at all in sharing in the nation's prosperity. For that change to occur people will have to get off their intellectually lazy asses and pay attention to more than reality TV and their iPads. For us to get the leeches and bloodsuckers off the national stage and their fingers off our Nation's financial purse strings we need to study the issues. In order to vote correctly, I. E, in our own best interests for a change, we need to get a whole lot smarter or the middle class will grow no more.

Are human beings really special?

2011-05-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

What makes humanity special above other living things? Why do we grant ourselves a soul while condemning all other living things to a soulless existence? Upon our death and acceptance into heaven, why do we see ourselves sitting beside a God? Further, why would God want our company for eternity?

I believe the answer to those questions are to be found in the single word "hope".

As far as we know, all living things besides ourselves live in the moment, not the past or the future. That is to say, we have never been able to discern an animal reaction based upon that animal’s perception of its future. Therefore we have decided that an animal looks no further into the future than what is required for it to survive in the present.

Sure animals can learn; we teach or train animal behavior for all sorts of things. We acknowledge they have brains; but can they, or do they, hope? Does the thought of a better tomorrow, or any kind of future, ever cross an animal’s mind? Of course we have to say no. Consider for just a second what would happen to humanity if we decided that our animal food supply had a soul. Could we still slaughter a cow, or a pig or a chicken? Why is it we never depict God surrounded with a herd of bison?

The only reason for a human being to have a soul would be if that soul acted as transport vehicle for our life’s hopes; hopes to be realized or goals to be reached after our physical existence has died.

Spiritually speaking, or speaking from a cosmic point of view, would it really make a difference if our pathetic hopes and dreams died with our bodies?

Backwards money transfers

2011-03-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

Backwards money transfers: aka investments in the past instead of the future.

The big problem with our aging society is that the way our economy and society are set up, money flows from the young up the ladder to the old. Money ends up being more conservative, fearful, and essentially less useful. Instead of our society spending money on education for the young, for example, we spend far more on tax savings for the elderly, who actually need the money less than the rest of our society.

What needs to happen, but is politically so incorrect as to become lethal to any politician who dares suggest it, is this. Money has to be taken from the affluent seniors and redirected to young people who still have the capacity to learn the most. Instead of providing more and more tax relief for the old and rich, we need to invest in our children for this country to survive and prosper

And yet, we do the opposite.

For example, instead of investing in renewable energy resources within our borders we spend trillions trying to secure the world's most expensive and least efficient of energy producing resources. It seems insane to me that our biggest export is the nation’s treasure to our politically polar opposites. We invest in antiquated, inefficient and globally destructive crap like coal and oil. Old people and big money are the reason; young people are powerless to change our country's politics in any meaningful way. The old adage, “control a man's money and his heart and mind will follow”, has never been truer.

Here is what happens. In 2008 the youth in this country supported Obama and put him in office expecting an end to fruitless wars and the endless looting of the U.S. Treasury by the biggest international gangsters on the planet, the military-industrial consortium. What we got is more war, bigger military and offense (as opposed to defence) budgets, and more intrusion into our lives. We did get a dollop of cash proposed for jobs and infrastructure improvements, most of which were never funded because there were no job ready programs to funnel the money into.

This is not a party issue – Democrats versus Republicans. Money transcends politics. Democrats seem to favor spending in all directions and to heck with the future. That will be somebody else's bill; Republicans, in rhetoric at least, are against increased spending except where that spending is in their direction. The net result is our elected officials are more focused on themselves and their donor’s interests than on the country's welfare.

Our nations rich and elderly are the reason for a lack of change in politics and policies. Our country is in deep stagnation since our population is growing older while our birthrate remains level or declines. Thank God for lax immigration policies because these newcomers are the people who will keep our country young and growing. We need to direct our investment in the future to our youth for one simple reason; it is our young people who are learning the most. The elderly are lucky if they can still learn at all.

Facebook to save the world!

2011-02-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

To suggest that a social media site could have more impact on the world than the mightiest military force the world has ever known seems, I don’t know, ridiculous.

But facts are facts and the Middle East strong men are being toppled enmasse. People in the region are communicating freely with each other for the first time in their long history courtesy of cell phones and the social media sites facebook and twitter. And they are changing the regions politics overnight.

For the last 40 years the US policy was to prop up Middle East dictators and ignore civil rights issues to insure a steady flow of oil. We deserve credit for setting the bar on hypocrisy so high no other nation could possibly reach it. Instead of helping the poor people in the region we have contributed to their ignorance and subservience to “rulers” who rule their countries like mobsters
rule their mobs.

We need to pepper the middle east nations with cell phones, not bombs, and hope that when these countries turn the corner on democracy they don’t throw us out of the region with the rest of the trash (read former dictators).

Unfortunately our President prefers to wage war. The country continues to suffer with outrageous budget deficits due to a stone age mentality; people dedicated to blowing people up instead of bringing them into an era of peace and prosperity. Phones, not bombs, will do far more and cost far less.

Without the US military fanning fires around the globe the world would be a very peaceful place. The fact that a few disgruntled factions persist and do damage is no excuse for us to squander our nation’s resources trying to exterminate them. Phones and free speech will accomplish what our orgies of waste, death, and destruction have not, can not, and never will .

Our politicians need to face the facts and do the right thing by this country. Either they stop funding wars or they will face facebook, and it won’t be pretty. They will either modernize their thinking or they will face extinction like the dinosaurs they are. War mongers need to die off, and quickly, so the world can get on with the business of saving the planet, not blowing up its citizens.

Here is where we go wrong with our children.

2011-02-09T22:46:00.000-08:00

First of all, what was done to us as children we do to our own children. In my case it started with me as soon as I could speak, or more correctly hear, what was being said around me. In particular, what triggered my BS radar at an early, impressionable age was what I heard versus what I saw, or what I heard when I was not supposed to hear.

I caught on pretty quickly, at least by age 8, that my parents and other adults were pulling the old "do as I say, not as I do" double standard on me. As I grew older, more sophisticated, and a great deal more cynical I might even have said I was outright lied to by the adults in my life. Take smoking or drinking as examples. These products were supposed to be bad for me, and yet mysteriously good for them.

My parents were not saints. Few parents are. I don't criticize mine for their overindulgence in alcohol, for example, but I never forgave them their hypocrisy where the subject was concerned. Drugs would be another example. For some reason they were able to justify pharmaceutical drugs issued on the flimsiest of excuses but pot was considered a serious offense.

Our children aren't stupid. If anything they are far smarter than we were at their age. Their BS detectors are far more sophisticated than ours ever were. They just have a different kind of smarts.

When we try to fool our kids we are only kidding ourselves.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

2011-01-24T11:59:00.000-08:00

The above quote is one of my favorites by Albert Einstein. He spoke this amazing Einsteinism around 100 years ago and look where his imagination has taken mankind since then.

In upcoming issues of PBS's NOVA series Neil deGrasse Tyson will be discussing the future. The possibility that man will be headed toward Mars in the next decade is becoming more and more realistic. The first issue of the new season will be discussing a planned manned space flight to Mars. Although such a trip may result in unimaginable disasters, will require vast sums of money, and although the trip and exploration of Mars could be managed by robotics, men will nevertheless go there.

Just because we eventually do what we imagine we can do. Another NOVA issue will be discussing the possibility that man will soon be living much much longer than our present 70 plus years. This presents mankind with an entirely new outlook and possibilities for our species never before considered. It may be possible to figure out what to do with an additional 10 or 20 years of life but imagine what you might do with an extra 150 or 200 years.

Just imagine.

Water water everywhere but none for free.

2011-01-06T18:56:00.000-08:00

Until recently this would have been impossible to believe.

The one thing I have taken for granted all my life was that there would always be access to free and plentiful fresh water. In fact in the northeast part of the country where I'm from we had far too much; rain to the point of flooding in spring and summer and copious amounts of snow late fall and all winter.

But the Times they are a changing. Until the last 40 years or so there wasn't such a thing as acid rain to contend with. Today clean water supplies are dwindling rapidly and agricultural expansion into arid lands is literally sucking lakes and rivers dry, particularly in the Southwest.

As a result water is morphing into a major commodity; a cross between milk and oil. Water rights will become more valuable than mineral rights. Like other commodities water will become the target of monopolistic companies and price manipulation. In fact, T Boone Pickens is already in the process of developing an aquifer on his ranch in Texas which will, in time, drain the water from the surrounding hundreds of thousands of acres. In the not too distant future T Boone will be pickin his neighbor's pockets selling them back their water.

Some people predict that the big bottling companies will attempt to control the world's water resources so eventually everyone will be depending on them for drinking water. The State of Michigan is currently trying to secure the water rights to Lake Michigan. No joke!

An interesting play on water is a company called S2C Global Systems, Inc. (stock ticker STWG). They are developing a freshwater distribution potential. They have managed to gain the water rights to a pristine fresh water river and plan to fill and float huge balloons of water(similar to the balloons of glue which supplied our plywood mills == only thousands of times larger) all over the globe. They anticipate trains of water bags miles long heading to deserts everywhere.

If you have children or grandchildren you might consider giving them the gift of water. Shares in this company can be purchased for about a half a cent apiece,
(.005$), which means you can buy 10,000 shares for $50.

Over the next 20 years those shares may grow into a small fortune, or who knows, maybe a large one. The odds of success are way better than the lottery.

Stop the government union from bankrupting America!

2011-01-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

I wish I could take credit for that headline but Larry Kudlow gets the credit.

The truth is bureaucrats have managed to allocate to themselves and their political brethren salaries upwards of a million dollars annually in a few cases, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and benefits annually in most cases, without the tax paying public paying any attention.

Federal employees enjoy a lifetime of medical benefits and 100% of their last year’s salary, plus cost of living increases for the rest of their lives, once they reach middle management level and beyond.

I worked for MasterBrand for several years. For every year I worked I accumulated a benefit of $20 per month in retirement pay, vested after the first five years of full employment. In other words after 30 years with this company (this company is no different from many others) I would receive upon retirement age $600 per month/no medical benefits.

Had I worked for the government for those 30 years I would be entitled to a minimum of $6,000 per month and full medical benefits for the rest of my life. The average cost to the taxpayer per retired federal public employee currently is (correct me if I've missed my number by much) $125,000 per year.

The conclusion is obvious. We are completely out of our minds. Without realizing it we have put an entire segment of our population, i.e. the government sector, under European-style benefits and care worth far more than their lifetime service ever was. What's worse, the entire cost is being born by the private sector.

So to fill the gap in reason we are borrowing real money, in annual amounts which will sooner rather than later bankrupt every governmental budget nationwide. The next domino to fall will be the country.

Add it up. Would you give up 20 years of your working life as a highly paid public servant entitled to receive a lifetime of retirement pay and a lifetime of first-class medical care? Keep in mind that the cost of equivalent medical care would cost the average private retiree his entire monthly retirement benefit and more.

So don't bother to add up. If you are a private employee you're screwed. And we did it to ourselves.

Where the confusion in the country begins.

2011-01-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

Patriots abound. I suspect that if a box for “are you a patriot” YES ( ) NO ( )
were added to the U.S. Census poll close to 100% percent would check the YES box. Therefore we need to keep in mind that criticism of this country is not unpatriotic unless it is deliberately based on false analysis (manipulation) or outright lie and deception. (the controversy over wiki-leaks comes to mind) Everybody complains; that's patriotic!

Where the confusion begins is when people mistake the person for the office. If someone were to criticize this country in general my hackles will rise. Although statistically speaking the USA is no longer the best country in the world to live in, I would not trade it for another. There is still plenty to love about our country.

On the other hand, if someone were to criticize Dick Cheney I would do my best to pile on. Cheney outright lied to the American people often and bullied others in the administration to bend to his evil will, all for the most ambiguous of reasons. Hunger for power, greed beyond belief, and as a result a severe over-dose of fear and paranoia are my guesses for his behavior. However, I do not hold the office of the Vice President in disrepute because of Dick Cheney's actions. In spite of the fact that he was vice President of this country for eight years, the man was no patriot.

I don't believe the public will ever be told the whole truth about a whole range of bad acts covered up by the nation's dirty launderers. Some brilliant wordsmith once coined government expressions like “they are protecting us from ourselves”, or better still, “they are lying to us for our own good”. Speaking for myself I don't believe, or at least can't imagine, a single truth the universe could throw at me that I couldn't deal with. Of course, I am broad-minded. Don't ever lie to me and tell me it's for my own good. I am no mushroom.

Public officials, “lying to us for our own good”, are where the confusion begins. Starting with the Kennedy assassination our government has consistently lied to us where matters of national security were deemed to be concerned. Great orators and even greater speechwriters combine to elevate spin doctoring to a fine art and whose combined talents could bring the Mona Lisa to tears.

We the people are not stupid or brain-dead; we are just sorely misled. Until we hold the people who sit in public office accountable for their evil deeds those who follow in their footsteps will continue to push the envelope and abuse us further. Throwing a few bums out of Congress was a good start. Allowing big money to elect their replacements was a huge step backwards. Until our win/loss ratio turns positive this country will continue on its present course.

Something to think about

2011-01-01T11:29:00.000-08:00

The secrets that death holds will never be known by the living.

And why should they be?

When we are born we have no memory of where we came from. Everything in a newborn's universe is brand spanking new to that unique life.

However, looked at from another perspective, all the atoms which comprise that new life are atoms that have been in existence since shortly after the Big Bang. In other words, every life is composed of component parts that are eternal; from bits
and pieces that have been around for as long as the universe itself.

So when we die our eternal atoms get recycled. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The slate gets wiped clean.

And why shouldn't it be?

Check your conscience at the door.

2010-12-21T11:10:00.000-08:00

There is a reason military defection and suicides are at an all-time high. No, it is not tour durations, although it doesn't help anyone's morale to be redeployed over and over to a foreign wasteland.

The reason is far more basic. Our soldiers are not being entirely successful in turning their consciences over to their sergeants. Just like in Vietnam, thousands of innocent lives are being disrupted and ended in a war whose beginnings were contrived in a web of lies by madmen like Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Men of good conscience have questions.

Once a soldier sees in an upfront and personal way the damage and destruction of war some soul searching is inevitable. If a soldier ends up personally responsible for the deaths of women, children, and other noncombatant casualties, what residue of conscience that remains intact and wasn't completely replaced with the "just following orders" mindset begins like acid to erode and corrode the soul. Vitally important questions like “why are we really here and doing this?” slip around the official blarney smokescreen and into your consciousness. Seeing the fear and helplessness in the eyes of rural peasants, whose lives are being turned upside down and ended for reasons which can't make sense to any sane person, works in the soul like leukemia in blood.

And it should. The taking of someone's life is as personal as it gets in life. If you are not absolutely truly positively beyond a shadow of a doubt certain that ending someone's existence is necessary, you should not do it; possibly not even then. You can not in clear conscience, years later as you replay the scene over and over in your mind, ease your sense of guilt by telling yourself, "I was just following orders."

When you face your maker, I can guarantee you your sergeant will not be standing by to take your rap for you.

Doing the limbo with the precious metals ratio

2010-12-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

Historically speaking the price of gold has had a 30X1 price relationship with silver. Now it is currently trading for about 46X as much but recently was trading much higher However, the ratio has been plummeting, so how low can the gold to silver ratio go?

Could it ever return to its historical average of 30:1?

If so, we'd have to see one of the following occur:

* Gold would need to plummet to less than $1000/oz., with silver remaining stable at around $30.00/oz.
* Or, silver would need to gain another 50% to over $45.00/oz., while gold holds
steady at $1400.00/oz.
* In perhaps the most likely scenario, gold would need to see some retrenchment
combined with continued strength in silver.

The idea of gold plummeting back below $1000 without affecting silver or silver doubling to $45 with gold holding steady is pretty unlikely. However, there is some support for the possibility we might see silver prices decoupling from gold's coattails. Back when gold broke the $1,000 mark for the first time, in March 2008, silver was trading about $20/oz, or 50X1.

Today's disparity in price could indicate silver may be undervalued at the moment by historical standards.

In addition, silver's fundamentals are improving. With around 50 percent of silver demand coming from industrial applications such as batteries, electrical switches and other components, analysts have predicted that as the economy recovers so will demand, thus pushing silver prices even higher.

The biggest trick of all, if you play the spread, is to avoid trading a quarter for two dimes! The best and safest way to play is with Hecla Mining, ticker HL. If precious metals stay at these levels this company's profits will explode!

Heads up home gamers.

2010-11-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

If you missed the incredible run up in shares of Ford, Newcastle or Hecla mining, among hundreds of others, you have another chance to grab the gold ring.

A new segment in computer hardware/software is about to explode. I'm talking about computer security, and in particular encryption technology. Encryption is now available with the purchase of software operating systems like Windows 7.

With this new technology everything printed to your hard drives or storage devices is encrypted with the latest impenetrable code specific to your machine.
Also anything streaming into your machine, like e-mail or social network sites for example, would also be encrypted.

Networks for universities and businesses, hospitals, insurance data banks, and banks in general will all be secure, or at least more secure, from hackers than ever before. Some have already begun to use this technology.

Where they are getting this technology is from a little-known company called Wave Systems. WAVX will soon be licensing this technology all over the globe,
not just to Microsoft.

The company has seen its revenues and earnings grow at a 50% clip year-over-year and they are just getting started. Earnings are poised to explode. If you are building for the future, grab your surfboard and catch the WAVE.

Here is what Yahoo Business has to say:

“Interest in data protection has been growing as the incidents of data breach have escalated. Legislation in many jurisdictions now requires tough penalties, as well as public disclosure, when personally identifiable information is mishandled.
That's led many SMBs and enterprises to explore implementing full disk encryption. With the much-publicized launch of Microsoft Windows 7 operating system (OS), many are examining the full disk encryption feature that comes standard on Ultimate and Enterprise editions of the popular new OS. By providing full-volume encryption, BitLocker ensures that any file saved on a computer's drive is encrypted automatically.”

If you are interested here is a direct link:http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Wave-Introduces-Wave-iw-1079303132.html?x=0&.v=1

We will get high speed rail eventually.

2010-11-17T18:38:00.000-08:00

Hopefully soon!

At the moment this fantastic people movin revolution and product moving evolution has been side railed in the once good USofA. Here is a glimpse of what we are missing out on right this minute by delaying the reconstruction and upgrading of our infrastructure.

With high-speed rail we could move up and down either coast in under 10 hours. Talk about a boost to travel and the tourism industry! We could go from side to side across the middle flats of our country in about the same amount of time. Chicago residents could visit the MardiGras in a pleasant day's ride, and so could San Francisco and Miami residents; all of the above trips on the safe and cheap.

Anywhere within a 250 mile radius of Washington, DC. would be only an hour away. Talk about a boon to rural real estate in those neighborhoods!

So what are we waiting for? Why do we still spend money on worthless wars when we could do so much more for ourselves and the world by investing that money in our own country? As the US goes so goes the world doesn't have to be long gone and forgotten.

According to T. Boone Pickens we may have a national energy policy before the lame ducks leave Congress. I doubt it, but we'll see.

Unless our national energy plan calls for massive infrastructure spending in the transportation area, and of course in reducing energy dependence on foreign oil, we will do very little to improve our future, or create any jobs. Without a bunch of unskilled jobs for unskilled labor our unemployment situation won't improve.

The people around the nation were heard during the midterms. However, the "throw the incumbents out" plan of attack only works if the newbies in Congress are not already bought and paid for. With the judicial system making things ever easier for deep pockets to buy elections that ideal is becoming less and less likely.

“Once burned, twice shy” should be the rallying cry of the future. Politicians better beware. They won't be able to count on misinformation or stupidity to help them get away with murder forever.

Is there a double left in the price of gold or silver?

2010-11-05T18:13:00.000-07:00

Is there a double left in the price of gold or silver?

The answer is a matter of simple arithmetic believes
one USA producer. David Garafalo, president and
CEO of Hudbay Minerals, who recently relisted his
minerals mining company on the New York exchange,
(HBM) figures it this way. He equates conditions
today to those at the beginning of the 70s decade.
At the end of that decade gold reached an all-time
high of $850 an ounce.

On an inflation-adjusted basis that would put the
value of gold today north of $2400 per ounce. So
according to David Garafalo the price of gold still
has a great deal of catching up to do.

For those looking to capitalize on the gold rush
but don't want to own the metal itself, owning a
mining stock is a great way to participate. My
favorite pick is Hecla Mining (stock ticker HL).
If you're still getting back to even, get on board
the fast boat here.

If you Google Hecla Mining they have a great video
link which captures the fervor Associated with the
precious metals mining group today.

Warmest regards, Bob Parmelee

It's us (USA) against the world now.

2010-11-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

Recent moves by the FED are guaranteed to cause the dollar to continue to decline against foreign currencies. A declining dollar guarantees that prices
of commodity-based assets and other asset classes like stocks are going up.

This policy will stimulate our economy but eventually, say over the next couple of years, this will spark countermeasures by countries whose exports get hurt by the steadily increasing value of their currencies and hence higher export prices.

There are advantages to being the largest economy in the world. One of those is the ability to force other countries to accept our economic policies simply because they must trade with the USA to survive and grow. But we had better take advantage while we still can. This may be our last chance to flex our economic muscles before China holds the whip and we’re doing the genuflecting.

If we come to our senses and quit blowing the nation's resources on the bloodiest military decade since the Vietnam era we may hang onto the benefits this current FED policy gives us relative to the rest of the world.

Here is what happened.

Centuries ago marauding militaries cost their home treasuries a small fraction of the bounty they generated by planting their country's flag on someone else's soil. After the conquering heroes secured the land the invading countries "businessmen" moved in to exploit the resources of the vanquished land. The damage done to the host country and its people were largely ignored or kept under the radar, politically speaking. In other words, the spoils of war far outweighed the cost.

Today things are different. Hiding under the radar is less and less feasible so political capital is at risk on these military adventures, as Barack Obama is finding out. At the very least, in order to survive world opinion, we are forced to repair the damage our military causes while wasting our resources on useless offensives. Chasing long dead terrorists as an excuse for war is growing old.
Worse, as recent history has proven, we don't even get any spoils to speak of.

So we need to quit this medieval crap. Being as bloodthirsty as the Khan may be fun for the nation but we can't afford it anymore. It is time to try civilized behavior for a change. Buying people's love and affection is just so darned cheaper than killing them that we need to take mass murder off the table.

Here is the news today -- -- Oh boy!

2010-10-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

We just lost the speed advantage in computer computing to China recently. They won with the astounding number crunching capability of 2.5 times 10 to the 15th power per second. In other words:

2,500,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.

Talk about a twinkling of an eye. So once again in yet another venue we have ceded first place to the Chinese.

Here is what this could mean. Let's take the stock market for example. High-speed computers can now sample the fluctuations in stock prices in almost real time. They can tell, within microseconds, trends in an individual stock price based on two simple factors; one, the most recent price and two, the volume of shares traded. Pretty simple algorithm really. As share volume and prices in a stock fluctuate the computer calculates to a certainty of 99% the next trade share price and then executes a buy or sell transaction. If you're trading millions of shares, by trading in the right direction 99% of the time you will, without a doubt, make millions of dollars. Do this millions of times a day and, well, you do the math.

High-speed computing gives the user untold advantages in every endeavor man attempts.

Fortunately, access to equipment of this kind is not available to currency traders, commodity brokers, stockbrokers, bond traders, or money manipulators of any kind.

HA!

HA!

HA!

HA!

Happy Halloween

Another platitude bites the dust

2010-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

As the media relentlessly scours every dark corner of people’s lives for daily grist, one thing has become abundantly clear; at least to me. No one seems to be the saint they claim to be.

Virtue is no longer the key to success. Guile seems to be the new key.

Take banking for example. Banks have been the self-described bastian’s of integrity and honesty for centuries. Now they hang their heads in disgrace after news that their outrageous incomes come at great expense to their own investors. What’s up with that?

The dawn of our new millennium is not as yet spiritually uplifting. War is up while the workforce is down, and Wall Street is being held responsible.

We need a way to stimulate our nation’s morale. Blowing away less developed parts of the world will not accomplish that. Falling behind in every humanitarian statistic which measures our place in the world is not the answer.

Doing something for ourselves like rebuilding our infrastructure or reinventing our educational system or reducing our dependence on foreign oil, all the while creating jobs and alternative energy solutions in the process is the answer.

It is time to elect a few politicians who realize that the way forward is not to go backward. Getting rid of the politicians who have been presiding over the declining circumstances of America will be a great start to correcting our decades long losing trend.

Most of us are in the middle.

2010-10-20T18:47:00.000-07:00

Golly, how profound; knock me down with a feather!

The truth is, there is a huge difference between:

• The brightest and the dullest among us
• the most beautiful and the most visually challenged
• the most athletic and the clumsiest
• the richest and the poorest
• the most erudite and the least educated

The dichotomies are endless. But the fact is both extremes amount to a very small percentage of humanity. The vast majority of us fall into the middle 90 percentile.

With the middle’s overwhelming numbers it would seem the world should be a middle-class oyster. But we don't control our own destinies. We defer to others to decide our fate.

We could bequeath the world to the future with no more wars… no more poverty, or starvation, or disease. It seems unfortunate we spend far more of our combined capital and resources today blowing ourselves apart than we do working towards what should be every one's common goal.

It seems our overwhelming fear of humanity, in its various unfamiliar forms, overwhelms our love of humanity and the self-sacrifice it takes to do well by each other. Perhaps another millennium is required for humanity to reach the level of benign neglect we need to survive one another.

One thing is guaranteed. Polar religious views will not help speed the way. Religious leaders will in fact, only be dragged by the heels, kicking and screaming, into the future. Their vision will cause loss and disruption and devastation until their progeny, the product of their continual, millennium long, brainwashing has finally been replaced with a less self fulfilling, self-aggrandizing prophecy. Once the fanatics have finally been eradicated in all their myriad forms can humanity rest in peace and look forward to its future.

We are entering the final stretch.

2010-10-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

November elections are just around the corner and the airwaves will soon be saturated with political ads. At this point the best prevaricator usually wins.

The few voters who have kept themselves apprised of issues will soon be outnumbered in the polls by those whose entire knowledge of a politician's position has been formulated by 30 or 60 second sound bites. At this point in an election cycle total gibberish holds sway in the media. For an opinion favoring your bias just pick your favorite talking heads and follow their lead.

Those citizens whose opinions are formed by a close analysis of an individual candidate's voting record ... wait a minute what am I thinking? The few voters who even know the names of the candidates running for office in their district prior to the "voting season", or those who actually understand the issues, are so small in number as to be, polling wise, insignificant.

Is This Smart?

Is a democracy bought and paid for by the deepest pockets really the best answer to running the country? After all, as a population we are incredibly naïve. We have bought into it every subterfuge our government has run by us for over 40 years. We are suckers for a good pitch.

However, allowing the best advertising agencies to run campaigns which eventually dictate the future of this country seems, well, even more insane.

Without an educated electorate I wouldn't bet against Wiley Coyote winning the race for governor in Arizona… if he was running against immigration.

The "TYPO" of the 2010 election season to beat.

2010-10-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

If I were a cynic I would probably read more than is strictly necessary into this story I heard on Keith Olbermann's show (MSNBC 5 p.m. on DirecTV channel 356). Keith picks up this thread from a reporter in the hotly contested November election race for governor of Illinois:

A Chicago Board of Election’s touch screen test poll covering about half the counties spelled the “Green” candidate’s name correctly in their listing all of the candidates, but as soon as you cast your vote on those machines the green candidate’s name comes up misspelled. The error, according to the Chicago Board of Elections, cannot be fixed in time for the election.

Half of the wards where the test was conducted are predominantly African-American. The candidate's name is Rich Whitney and the typo was a loss of the letter “n” from his last name.

Good luck, Rich Whitey, in those close black districts come November's election.

Platitudes are the bane of truth seekers.

2010-10-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

Take, for example, this pearl of marketing wisdom, and I pseudo-quote, having been genetically overlooked in the eidetic memory department: “if you are looking to build a giant list, make your customers an irresistible offer and they will join your list! Let me repeat, make your customers an irresistible offer and they will sign up to join your list!" DUH!!

This sounded like an interesting approach so I followed up on the results of this guru’s conference call and found that one avid devotee of the above advice offered his subscribers a $600 laptop for each one year, $150 per month subscriber who joined his list. He subsequently went broke trying to fulfill his promise! Everybody took the laptop and most subscribers subsequently cancelled their subscription.

The guru was right but his advice overwhelmed and quickly buried his student.

Moral of the story: beware the gilded thorn for, while pretty, It will pricketh or sicken thee.

Mother Nature Abhors A Phony!

2010-10-05T21:08:00.000-07:00

Whenever we as a race have, in our supreme arrogance, thought we have mastered some technical problem like living below sea level, read New Orleans, or living on hillsides and beach front property, read California, Peru and elsewhere, or thinking we are safe behind some dam, read the entire middle of the country of Pakistan, for one example, we are corrected.

And not in a gentle way. Mudslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, fires, drought, solar flares, volcanoes, viruses, plagues, and nonspecific diseases will continue to torment humanity.

We will continue to suffer smack downs for quite some time to come from nature, as ants do, for as long as we live on this planet. We will never rule here. After all, we are only human.

PS: George Carlin is my muse.

Looking forward—please don’t firebomb the messenger!

2010-09-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

Here are some changes that progress is bringing to our lives you can believe in!

As sure as Apple et al are changing the way we live our lives, technologically speaking, genetic engineering will be changing the way our religious beliefs fit into our lives. Although Western-style religions have been able to successfully resist changing their basic premise over the millennia, church elders have been forced to make concessions to accommodate scientific advances since the days of Copernicus and Galileo.

Taken together recent advances in physics, biology, chemistry, nanotechnology, and medicine all have made the possibility of creating life a reality. Does that fact, in and of itself, mean we have reached the final stage of our evolution?

When we begin to clone ourselves, or at least to clone replacement parts, a procedure which will become a reality in the next 20 years or less, we can all stay at the peak of health indefinitely, at least theoretically. (Subject to cash on hand, of course.)

So where does this leave our religion? Religion has always served the purpose of answering the question; what happens to sentient beings after the body dies? My question is, "what happens to religion if the body never dies".

What if, as proposed 10 years ago, a lifespan is just a plumbing problem on a nano sized scale? If we solve the problem of the ever shrinking telomeres at the end of our genes, insuring cell reproduction can continue without degradation, can't we live forever? If we eventually correct that one minor flaw in our genetic make-up, and we can extend our lifespan to at least biblical proportions if not galactic spanning lifetimes, are we gods?

The advance of science will not be stopped so the probability of man's living a lifespan of hundreds of years, dying only when tired of living, will become a reality eventually. Are our Western religions like Christianity and Islam prepared to deal with that eventuality? Seems those religions are based more on dying than on living.

How is this for a concept steeped in self-delusion? The American Dream.

2010-09-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

The American Dream has been blown to smithereens over the previous decade and “the dream” shows no sign of reappearing anytime soon.

Supposedly John Q. Public is on the fence about whether or not to allow the tax benefits enjoyed by the top 2% of the nation’s income earners to expire.

Are You Kidding Me!

We are talking about those whose incomes have been above $250,000 per year, on average, for the previous several years. Is that you, or anyone you know?

Of course not! But that is the grand American delusion. We all think we are just a year or two away from having to consider how to manage our finances after a huge income tax increase comes down on our soon-to-be huger incomes.

The last thing we want to do is to put into place a tax code which might adversely affect our own future net incomes. Stupid. Stupid! Stupid!!

The top 25 hedge fund managers each earned over $1 billion last year. Each one of those incomes could have paid the yearly salaries and benefits of an additional 20,000 teachers, firemen, or police officers to the nations labor forces. And we are supposed to feel sorry for these people’s tax consequences?

I will say it again. How ridiculous! How stupid are we that we feel sympathy for the rich? Why are we crying for the only segment of our population that has managed to increase its wealth over the last decade? Let us not forget that most of these people were rich to start with, will never miss a meal in their life, and will continued to enjoy the best of everything regardless of whether they end up paying a few thousand dollars more in income taxes next year.

We vote and act against our own self-interest frequently because we believe that some kind of divine intervention will balance the scales of our lives some time down the road; at least in many versions of heaven. Unless we start sharing the wealth more equitably immediately and forget about down-the-road most people’s lives will continue to degenerate. We used to consider ourselves to be living in a land of equals but, in fact, nothing is currently further from the truth.

Has the day of the honorable man run its course?

2010-09-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

After watching four decades of political leaders around the globe becoming embroiled in controversy, I am now convinced that very few, if any, of our public figures are less than a total cretins in disguise.

Prior to Bill Clinton's presidency there was no such thing as moral turpitude
when it came to public figures sitting in office. Nor, for that matter, were any of our nation's other leaders and public figures any better. John Kennedy was a closet hero when his relationship with Marilyn Monroe became public. Forget about Jefferson's legendary cross culture and public policy misadventures.

But times change and dirty laundry is in the air everywhere today. There is no limit to the number of “stains” exposed on a daily basis around the world and no concern to the degree to which these exposures offend every Nation’s morality, let alone what's left of any country's dignity. For more disgrace for example take the world's captains of industry, people like Tony Hayward, or the leaders of Enron, or Bernie Madoff. These people make the news, but they are by no means the only news of this kind.

How about the military endowment fund; A pseudonym for the military appropriations committee and its band of modern-day treasury looting Robin Hood's. You remember Robin Hood, king of a band of merry men who looted the king’s treasury, stole the king's fortune, and then waged war for profit with those gains. If times do change, it doesn't seem like much of a change over many centuries.

There are always, of course, people of outstanding character and integrity. These people seem to avoid the public whenever possible, and avoid public service with a passion.

I wonder why.

When is the right time to reject...

2010-08-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

False promises, phony science, religious dogma, racial prejudice, and anything else we are taught from birth?

Society has survived this far because we have learned to challenge what we were taught to believe from birth. If Galileo had not challenged the church position on what was, at the time, considered to be the center of the universe, we might still believe the universe revolves around Earth.

Lord knows the church doesn't change its position until told to do so. Lately, or for at least the last 2000 years anyway, communication between the church and God seems to be experiencing technical difficulties, especially where canon law is concerned. What priests do is frequently ungodly.

The old saw blade doesn't fit the new kerf profile carved in our new wave of future generations. Slices of society become thinner and thinner and overlapped and overlaid until the vectors which point to society's future direction now point in all directions.

We have lost our compass.

Where religious dogma once filled the herd instinct of humanity (come all yea sheep to my flock), the Internet now is, and has replaced and obliterated the blinders and constraints religious leaders once placed on society. Frankly, people are smarter, better educated, and less easily lured down the garden path than at any other time in the history of humanity. They are moving to a different drummer than a 250th generation, frequently morphed BAAL.

Putting laptops in the hands of every remote segment of humanity will have consequences far beyond commerce. This will spawn a new world morality eventually.

Hopefully, it will be a more humane one. Hopefully, we will grow to appreciate each other for our differences, not just our similarities. And, hopefully, we will not try to imprint a herd mentality on a sentient society based on a Neanderthal
heritage.

The Root of All Evil II -- The US Tax Code

2010-08-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

Fellow Americans,

According to Paul O'Neill, former Secretary of the Treasury and CEO of Alcoa, our tax code is an "insult to intelligence", and a fundamental disaster for the country going forward.

Mr. O'Neill opines that a group of intelligent people would "design something that is sensible, that encourages savings and investment, and that fairly distributes the burden of public goods and services we need". In his opinion our current tax system accomplishes none of these.

The reason his suggestion for a fairer tax code is doomed to fail is because, well, it is fairer. At the core of power in this country lies a special-interest lobby which basically directs Congress to do its bidding. The last thing that cabal wants is a fair tax system. Those with the most have the most to lose under a fairer system.

Money talks, fairness walks.

The only way to get attention is to step on toes.

2010-07-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

Folks, the country is broke. We see millions of unemployed people losing their support lifeline over the past and continuing weeks because our government can't seem to find $34 billion. This small amount of congressional spending indigestion comes at a time when Congress is poised to approve another $60 billion, $33 billion of which is earmarked to expand the war in Afghanistan; a war which accomplishes absolutely nothing as far as the taxpayers in this country are concerned.

Congress deliberates on whether to extend the tax cuts for the rich. Fathom this:
Forbes list of 400 of America's wealthiest people pay a smaller percentage on their taxable income than our firefighters and policemen do. Make sense? Our national budget is 3.4 trillion and a huge percentage of that goes to pay interest on our skyrocketing budget deficits. Another huge portion of our budget goes to wage unpopular wars. Are these wise and necessary expenses?

We are being looted by our legislature easily because of our perpetual state of confusion, the public's ignorance of the truth thanks a biased media, and our own apathy. As our society becomes more polarized our ability to function as a society in any meaningful way continues to be diluted. Meanwhile, the pigs continue to gorge at the public trough while attempted reforms are gutted and proposed new laws are filibustered into the trash bin.

If the tea party accomplishes nothing other than getting incumbents thrown out of Washington it will have accomplished a great deal. It's time we the people get the representation we are paying for.

But nothing will happen if toes aren't stepped on.

Capitalism, or the lack of it, is the reason the US is a failing enterprise.

2010-07-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

Capitalism, by definition, is an economic system characterized by freedom of the marketplace. Private and corporate entities own the means of production and distribution and making a profit is the goal for every business.

With that freedom of choice, capitalists have chosen to relocate their means of production around the globe to achieve the lowest labor costs. Because of the disparity in wages between the East and the West the rate of migration of labor-intensive manufacturing to the East will continue and increase in the future.

Because people value their lives more than anything, duh, they are subject to extortion in the most perverse fashion by the healthcare industry. By artificially restricting the number of healthcare professionals and resources available (a subject for future discussions, I hope) healthcare costs have gone beyond ridiculous. This is causing the migration of millions of patients to institutions out of this country.

For example, the fact that our hospitals need $100,000 to perform an operation a hospital in India can do for $10,000 will simply increase the rate of exportation of our professional jobs to emerging nations.

Business cannot remain competitive when government expects an ever larger slice of gross revenues, which is another problem that capitalism is struggling with in this country.

Capitalism and greed are not the same, but greedy capitalists are destroying the distinction. Business has been able to replace capitalism (remember, freedom is the key word in capitalism) with rule by a financial elite. It is the members of this elite who determine market movements. By manipulating and bending our Congress and executive branches to the will of special interests they have effectively circumvented the markets from operating freely. Since nothing is really “free” about our economy in a capitalist sense, we can’t really consider ourselves living in a capitalist nation any longer.

It has been really amazing to have witnessed, over the past 30 years, the shift of capitalism from the US and Europe to, of all places, Communist China.

Capitalism, as a business model in this country, is in the wind.

They're never going to kill it!

2010-07-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

July 13, 2010 -- progress halted.

The fountain of black crude oil is pure gold to BP
and will be harvested because otherwise... if they
quit now everyone will have lost huge and benefited
nothing.

Regardless of who is at fault we all share an
obligation to salvage the best of a bad situation.
The damage is done, triage is in place, so let
the spilling continue.

Here is the rest of the story.

The unheralded pencil pushers will prevail and defer
containment until contractual obligations and BP
indemnities are secured. Meantime, the disaster will
not be salvaged; not until the last t to protect BP is
crossed and the last i is dotted and shifted down the
line.

BP stock is on the rise at the news. Potential
partners abound. The tax consequences will shift
any real penalty to you, the taxpayers, and will offset
obscene profits for years to come. The government
will get fat from huge fines levied against BP,
lawyers will generate billions of dollars in fees and the
burden on the taxpayer will continue to increase.

And that's the way it is.

Defense budget, my butt!

2010-07-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Who are we kidding? No country on earth is stupid enough to attempt an
attack on the United States. The idea is as ludicrous as a flea climbing up
an elephant’s leg with rape on his mind. So why do we call it a defense budget?

Let's call a spade a spade and an offensive budget, well, offensive. The idea we need to spend a half $1 trillion annually to protect this nation by fighting on the other side of the globe is preposterous. Why are we taking the fight to countries when it is actually individuals we are after?

The answer is as obvious as it is immoral. We are in Afghanistan, for example, to secure an administration favorable to US business interests. It's the same as our reason for being in Iran or Iraq. We now have one soldier for every businessman in Iran. We’re not protecting America from threats over there; we’re protecting American businessmen over there. At a cost of up to a $1/2 million per year per mercenary somebody needs to be making a whole lot of money to justify the expense.

I guarantee you that that somebody is not the American taxpayer. We are in the grip of such monumental stupidity that it doesn't faze us that our military budget is at least twice what it ought to be. What we are doing is at least as dumb as what we attempted to do in Vietnam; colonize a country to steal their raw materials.

Once again, we don't stand a chance.

We are bankrupting our country, while disgracing our legacy. We used to stand for something besides stealing from the natives. Er, that was after we were done stealing from our own natives. Now that we have no opposition from Russia, our only military opposition to speak of is in the Middle East and Pakistan. These are poor countries rich in mineral wealth, and we will have those riches for ourselves! (Geeze we are disgusting)

The final result of our wars over in the Middle East will be the warmongers will be up a trillion dollars, US taxpayers will be out two trillion or more and the Afghans will be getting their country rebuilt on our dime, as we are now doing everywhere else we have been busy terror-forming the natives… just so we can plant a McDonald's in the middle of their society.

Oh, and let's not forget the lives lost or dislocated or disfigured on two continents which get left in the ruins resulting from our imperial policies.
They number in the millions.

Trying to steal from the Afghans is the stupidest thing imaginable. WHY? Trying to put the most fiercely independent people on earth under our thumb is why. Trying to organize a bunch of warring tribes into a single government is why. Trying to wage modern warfare against a nation whose primary mode of transportation is the camel is why. And because Afghanistan’s treasure belongs to the Afghans. Our military offensive is just plain wrong. These are just a few of the reasons why.

Bob Parmelee blogging at ILGP.com AKA parmsplace

Beware of ransomware

2010-06-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

I spent an entire day grappling with the most perninious virus todate. It piggybacks into your computer on the back of legimate, trusted sites we probable all use at one time or another. If you find yourself affected, after my experience yesterday, I can help.

Here is the story about this new virus called ransomware or scareware disguised as a security suite. Diabolically brilliant!

AV Security Suite is a scareware and ransomware program from the same family as Antivirus Soft and AntiSpyware Soft. The developers of this program are distributing AV Security Suite through the use of hacked sites, spam, and Trojans that install it onto your computer without your permission. Once installed AV Security Suite will be configured to start automatically when your computer starts. Once started it will scan your computer and state that there are numerous infections, but will not let you remove any of them until you purchase the program. All of these scan results are fake and are only being shown to trick you into purchasing the program, which you should obviously not do.
If you are running older software, and not updating Windows, you may find that you will be able to remove this program, but then become infected again within a short period of time. This is because the malware developers are hacking legitimate sites or inserting malware ads that use vulnerabilities in common programs such as Adobe Reader, Flash, and Windows to install the malware onto your computer. If you do not update your programs to remove these security holes then the next time you visit a hacked site distributing this rogue, AV Security Suite will be installed on to your computer. A great tool that can be used to scan your computer for outdated and vulnerable programs is the free Secunia Online Software Inspector program. When you scan your computer with this program it will display a report showing all programs and Windows updates that should be installed in order to fix security holes and vulnerabilities. It is advised that all users scan their computer with this program in order to prevent your computer from being infected again after you clean it.
When AV Security Suite is running it will also block you from running normal tasks in order to make it harder to remove the program from your computer. First, it configures Windows to use a proxy server that points back 127.0.0.1:1041. A proxy server is a program that listens to requests from your web browser and then handles the request itself rather than your browser talking directly to a site. As AV Security Suite is set to be your proxy server, any time you browse the web using Internet Explorer it will intercept the request and display a fake security warning that states that the site you are visiting is infected. The message it will display is:
This website has been reported as unsafe
We recommend that you do not continue to this website. This website has been reported to Microsoft for containing threats to your computer that might reveal personal or financial information.
Once you disable the proxy server all web requests will go directly to the site you wish to go to and you will see the legitimate content. Please note, though, that the next time AV Security Suite is started it will configure your computer to use the proxy server again.
The second method that AV Security Suite protects itself is to block applications from running while stating that they are infected. It does this to stop you from running anti-virus programs that can be used to remove this malware. When you attempt to run a program you will instead see the following message:
Windows Security alert
Application cannot be executed. The file mbam.exe is infected.
Do you want to active your antivirus software now?
Spyware Alert
Application infected! The file rundll32.exe is infected. Do you want to ALLOW this application now?
When you see these infection alerts do not be concerned as your programs are not infected. It is only showing this to further scare you into thinking you have a computer security problem.
While started, AV Security Suite will also display fake security alerts that contain warnings that malware has been detected or that malware is attacking your computer. These messages are all fake as well and only being shown to further convince you that your computer is infected. The text of these messages are:
Windows Security alert
Windows reports that computer is infected. Antivirus software helps to protect your computer against viruses and other security threats. Click here for the scan your computer. Your system might be at risk now.
Antivirus software alert
Infiltration Alert
Your computer is being attacked by an internet virus. It could be a password-stealing attack, a trojan-dropper or similar.
Last, but not least the rogue will also display a fake Windows Security Center. This fake Security Center will look exactly like the original one except that it states that you should purchase AV Security Suite to protect yourself.
As you can see, AV Security Suite was created for one reason only; to scare you into thinking your computer has numerous infections so that you will then purchase the program. It goes without saying that you should definitely not purchase this program, and if you already have, please contact your credit card company and dispute the charges stating the program is a scam. Finally, to remove this infection please use the removal guide below to remove it for free.

The program actually hijacks your browser, resides in your registry so you can't find it to remove it, and prevents you from running your security program to remove it.

The solution to pollution is in not going to be dilution.

2010-06-03T20:29:00.000-07:00

Michio KaKu, a recent visitor on the Keith Olbermann show, likened the suggestion to controlling the oil spill in the gulf by exploding the well with a nuclear bomb, or any other kind of bomb, the equivalent of giving the Three Stooges nukes.

"We are in totally uncharted territory” he says. By exploding an underground bomb to contain this spill we could inadvertently cause multiple additional fissures, leading to multiple geysers, all needing top caps.

The truth of the whole scenario is that the most profit producing companies in the world, year after year, have been the oil companies. Their corporate largess, spread over Congress since the Valdez disaster, has prevented meaningful safety legislation from becoming law for over 20 years.

Now we have the largest man-made ecological disaster in the entire history of man. If no so today, it will be so tomorrow, or shortly thereafter, for monies sake.

Some pencil pushing fool determined the drilling project was falling behind schedule. He began putting on the pressure to drill faster. Later, when confronted with irrefutable evidence that a gasket designed to prevent explosive back pressure from unleashing was disintegrating, another manly genius spouted the most infamous directive in man-made ecological disaster history by saying -- -- drill on!

Yet another pencil pusher had previously decided to avoid spending a $500,000 to install a blow out preventer. This will ultimately be ridiculed as the stupidest cost saving mistake ever made by any single man in any business to date. He was probably thinking about his bonus. He may be the man responsible for single handedly bankrupting BP.

The poor citizens of the Gulf and soon to be Florida will pay for these egregious mistakes for decades. We cannot put a price on this disaster. Not now, and probably not for another 20 years.

But the drilling goes on.

As long as we allow people like Dick Cheney, unmitigated master of disaster in the Middle East (Bush was simply too ignorant to connect the dots between big government, big oil, and Cheney’s company Halliburton), to have sway, the planet, or more correctly the people on it, don't stand a chance.

Bribes or Blackmail

2010-04-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

Does it really matter which Achilles' heel brings down our elected officials? Sex, money, drugs, or a host of other seductive suspects are in every gangsters toolkit don't you know? Any one of which is a slam dunk for your average American.

When the wise guys go to work on someone... games over. Either they help you in, or they help you out, but the ever present quid pro quo applies, with one exception. If they help you win, they own you for life.

In my experience, no one is immune to coercion. Whether you are drawn to drugs, kinky sex or celibacy, whether you are orphaned or blueblood to the bone, you are vulnerable to someone or susceptible to something illegal, immoral, or just plain more fun than the law allows. (Junkets come to mind.) It is in our nature.

Even modest motivational sources, like ambition, family, religion, or sense of duty pale to the power behind the appropriate bribe or blackmail leverage.

Where this leads is to a society compromised by its own antiquated, hypocritical sense of morality. No society is any stronger than its most compromised officials, regardless of whether they are public or private.

Isn't it time we stop crippling ourselves by expecting saintly behavior from everyone? Wouldn't our society be better served if our morals matured into a more tolerant, consensual set of values? Can’t we leave Victoria’s hypocritical influence, and the religious guilt tripping to the last millennia?

Haven't we had our collective noses rubbed in enough dirt to learn anything?

The Truth About Lies

2010-04-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Lies are all around us. We live our entire lives among them.

They percolate among us until they takeover our thoughts and emotions,
our finances and finally our freedoms.

• Lies which lead us into phony wars.
• Lies about the true cost of those wars and their results.
• Lies, which lead us into phony mortgages. These were even called liar’s loans.
• Lies that scare us into forfeiting our privacy.
• Lies that promise us security and cost us our freedoms in the bargain.
• Lies about global warming.
• Lies about national health care.
• Lies from our congressmen and senators, and even our presidents.
• Lies from our news media.
• Lies from our parents, siblings, children and friends.
• Lies from our lovers.

The above list is by no means a complete liars list. Lies are as common as cornflakes.
But how about we add in the misconceptions, half-truths, exaggerations and distortions,
and hundreds more cracks the truth can fall into or slip completely through.

Is it any wonder nobody listens to anybody anymore? Why bother, what’s the point?
I have known people who would rather tell a lie when the truth was 10 times easier.

Some of our most prestigious federal agencies are based on deception. One of the most
secretive professions to spring up recently is called “perception management”. This profession
involves creating a “truth” and then selling the “truth” to a gullible public wholesale. PM
people are to spin doctors as neurosurgeons are to witch doctors.

So does the truth, which is as often as not a matter of individual perception, matter?
After all, we seem to be able to function without very much of the real deal.

Carlin at the Copenhagen Earth Conference

2010-04-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

Can you use a good laugh?

Here is a little George Carlin on the environment, and The Answer
to man's existence.

Please be advised, you will be exposed to adult language, adult concepts, and some very advanced thinking.

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2009/12/video-in-honor-of-copenhagen-carlin-on-t/

Does this resemble you?

2010-03-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

I am sure it doesn't, but...

It seems we have become so lazy or self-absorbed in trivia, some fed to us by the drama queens in our own lives and much more via the news media, that a majority of US citizens have literally tuned out and are leaving their important thinking for others do. The most important decisions we seem to be able to make on our own are things like what to watch on TV. Taking the time to become informed about the political, social, or environmental issues of the day is to be studiously avoided.

The final outcome of a country's people foregoing the heavy lifting required for informed decision-making is that the country becomes vulnerable to the master manipulators among us. For example, people completely ignorant of the facts behind the Nobel Prize winning scientific discovery of global warming and its consequences are easily persuaded to continue the ruinous behavior that is detrimental to all life on the planet.

Because we failed to act quickly in our own best interests, the people in this country responsible for relieving the citizens of trillions of dollars in savings and equity are in a position to do the very same thing again.

The very same people can do the very same thing… again.

Because we have been so focused nationally on sorting out the truth to the health care debate and its hundred billion dollar annual cost, we have allowed ourselves to be distracted from our wars. Phony wars based on lies and waged for the benefit of companies like Halliburton and Blackwater are where we waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year, gaining nothing except the opportunity to waste more money.

(You may disagree if you think spending billions of taxpayer dollars blowing up mountains and deserts while losing thousands of American lives in the process is good for America.)

We spend billions chasing long dead media darlings like Osama bin Laden(the only bite he has left is a sound bite). We pour billions more into a protection racket dedicated to making travel impossibly difficult and whose policies have literally rendered personal privacy in America a thing of the past, but haven't made us any safer from fanatics.

Fear mongers have convinced us we will be much safer as soon as big brother has a window opened into every corner of our lives. By dedicating ourselves to perpetual ignorance and prejudice we have opened the door to all master manipulators. We seem quick to forget that those who stick their heads in the sand are leaving their butts in the air for opportunists to take advantage of.

Misery Loves Company!

2010-03-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

If you have or soon could have:

No coin, no cash, no credit and no credibility left.

And if you are literally:

Down to the last roll of the dice,
or the last spin of the wheel,
or the last flip of the coin.

Guess what?
Things can only get worse.
Have I cheered you up yet?
Misery does love company.

Have you lost your job, your house, and your family?
Do you have at least one tooth trying to fall out of your
head now and do the rest seem destined to follow soon?
Is there no insurance of any kind protecting anything of
yours although you paid in for what seems like forever?
And are you still years away from being eligible for
Medicaid or Social Security?

Is your wall papered with late notices? Has your license
been suspended for back child support or court fines? Is
there nothing left in your house to turn off but the water
and that's just because the water department is busy? Is
your camper in good shape?

You'd better hope so.

Or maybe your significant other of many years (some bitter,
some sweet) has decided to stick it out ( I mean, what choice
does she really have?) and is busy purchasing dinner at the
day old Exxon deli while you are filling up the home away
from home camper; soon to become home. You are eating
at the Exxon deli because the Exxon card is the only plastic
still honored in your wallet... for one more payment cycle.

As I mentioned, misery really does love company.

And yet our government is pouring trillions into the deserts
and mountains abroad. We can’t afford healthcare, we can't
help our own homeless, we can't afford good educators or
legislators or honest "Captains of Industry" no matter how
much we are willing to pay them. Enough, clearly and simply,
isn’t enough.

The final dump on our democracy.

2010-02-03T15:15:00.000-08:00

With the last load of rip rap dumped on” we the people”
the ship of state is now on it’s way to sinking. I am referring
to the recent coup de grace granted corporations recently.
With this seriously flawed ruling the Supremes have joined
the other branches of government in overstepping by a
country mile their mandate.

With the stroke of a pen our own Supreme Court has
kicked the supports out from under democracy’s
“equal rights under the law” provisions by allowing multi-
billion-dollar corporations to use their unlimited funds
as a weapon, either for or against, candidates in free
elections, It sounds like a strong defense of free speech
until you realize how easy it will be for the large corporations
to swamp the airwaves in support of their candidates.

One man one vote sounds terrific until you realize that
giving a public voice in our politics to the richest corporations
on the planet, not just US corporations, and expecting a
fair result is ridiculous. This is similar to putting one man
on one side of a tug-of-war rope and putting one man
in a D8 cat on the other. Sure it is mono e mono until
the machinery is figured into the equation.

Over the previous decade laws were written or changed
which favored big businesses like drug manufacturers.
Take the law that was recently passed prohibiting the
government, the largest drug purchaser in the country,
from negotiating prices with suppliers. I find it simply
amazing that our lawmakers can get away with a law
so patently favorable to the industry while sticking it to
the rest of the nation.

Now our politicians will officially become the nation’s
highest-paid prostitutes. (Not that they weren’t already.)
No politician will survive if he isn’t beholden to a fat cat
funding his election campaigns.

Incredibly, most of the people in our once great nation
could probably care less about this incredible threat to our
individual liberties. The threat to our liberty is not from
another nation. It will now come from the feckless fortunes
of morally bankrupt rich corporations whose loyalty is only to
money.

Congress was originally charged with the responsibility to keep a sharp eye on the purse strings of the nation. The presidential power to wage war was supposed to be curtailed when Congress, following the will of the people, refused to pay for wars. Instead they just ordered up a bigger rubberstamp. Rather than safeguarding the country’s cash they are shoveling it out as fast as the presses can print it (almost literally).

So now all three branches of the government are vigorously exercising an unrestrained assault on the middle class. The President is wasting lives and resources at an unprecedented rate. Congress, while rubber stamping the largest military budgets in the world’s history (remember what peace used to feel like?), can’t get a single social program which may actually spell relief to the ailing middle class passed. And the Supremes, not to be outclassed by the other branches, have decided they no longer must wait for an issue to be raised before weighing in. They now feel free to advance any cause that takes their interest like the issue of campaign funding. There was no case before the court; they jumped on this issue before Obama has a chance to reseed the court with democratically minded judges.

So now what?

Barack Obama was the exception... Republicans Rule

2010-01-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

We are falling off the rails.

Recent disruptions in the force spell doom for the Democrats.
In spite of the fact that the Democrats had a majority in both
houses of Congress, and a sitting President, they have
managed to fail to pass any legislation which would have
been beneficial to "we the people" in any meaningful way.

The Republicans on the other hand, while small in numbers,
manage to accomplish their objectives in spite of the odds.
Republicans, generally recognized as being the party of big
business, stand to gain politically now that the Supreme Court
has paved the way for unlimited funding from corporate America.

For example:

Giant financial institutions, which brought the world economy
to its knees, are still free to do whatever they want with their
depositors money. In spite of serious efforts by Barney Frank
financial reforms are both slow in coming and watered-down.

Timothy Geithner, as quarterback for Wall Street, had the stones
to recommend less than full disclosure to regulators with regard
to government bailouts being used for obscene bonuses. I
suppose selling out your constituents (these would be the good
citizens of the United States for whom he theoretically works)
would curry favor among those he supposedly regulates and
guarantee a grand entrance into the ex government
pro-corporation Hall of Flamers.

The Bush Supreme Court just sunk the last nail in the coffin of
a government envisioned by our forefathers which was
a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Control of the country will finally and firmly rest in the hands of
corporate giants whose monopoly cash can dominate the media
and can now be used to openly purchase politicians.

Healthcare is back to the drawing board. By failing to move quickly
the Dumbdems frittered away their biggest asset in decades,
a filibuster proof Senate. If you thought they couldn't get anything
done before... Just wait till you see how little they get done now!

Unfortunately, America no longer bears any resemblance to
the country originally formed by the framers of our Constitution.

Money rules. Individuals no longer count in a society where cash
is king.

A kingdom of thieves.

2010-01-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

Country birthing is an expensive business.

Throughout our history, as we have grown into nationhood,
wealthy individuals have provided "loans" to the government.
The quid pro quo for these loans was usually a monopoly
granted by the government to these individuals for their
support in supplying the nation's treasury with liquidity.

The most recent chapter in our history started with the
robber barons acentury and a half ago. Carnegie, Mellon,
Vanderbilt, etc. all gained control of basic businesses
necessary for the survival and growth of the country.
These guys were no saints. They extracted a pound from
the treasury for every penny they loaned.

Here's what I think happened.

After the panic of '07 (last century and interestingly
enough this century also) an idea was hatched whereby
private individuals would help with a national liquidity
problem by establishing a bank called the Federal Reserve.
In 1913 the Federal Reserve was created.

There was nothing federal about it... it was a private bank
funded with private money.

The Federal Reserve System is the central banking system of
the United States. It was created in 1913, with the enactment
of the Federal Reserve Act , and
was largely a response to prior financial panics and bank
runs, the most severe of which being the Panic of 1907

A group of wealthy white boys saw a war looming on the
horizon and hatched a plan to finance the war. (Or maybe
they started a war with help from European bankers and then
hatched a plan???)

They needed security if they were to loan money to a
government under a war cloud so the government agreed to
establish an income tax as surety for the debt incurred
to these wealthy gentleman. Coincidently (the incidence
of coincidence decreases dramatically the older one gets)
the 16th amendment to the Constitution was ratified the
same year. The tax started at a maximum of 6% and before
the war was over that rate had risen to 77%.

Look out folks, I see this comming!

This 16th amendment would hearld the birth of the IRS.

This was the quid pro quo the government agreed with
in order to assure sufficient funds to wage the war.
It is similar thinking to the “carte blanche” the
government gave the railroad barons when they granted
a swath 100 miles wide from coast to coast to the railroad
on the off chance they could actually build a railroad
across the country. The risk was huge..The reward, well,
150 years later, still counting.

Amazing what a few "good old boys" could accomplish back then.

Suppose things are ever going to change?

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

2009-12-30T11:31:00.000-08:00

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.

Lets face it...War is a racket!

2009-12-15T16:06:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2009-12-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

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.

Government sponsored vice -- -- is nice!

2009-11-23T22:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Times Perspective

2009-11-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

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.

　

　

　

　

ybii6kq2sa

2009-10-04T13:30:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-09-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

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.

What should really irk us.

2009-09-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

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.

A stroke of brilliance!

2009-09-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Legitimate Thieves

2009-09-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Obama may tank faster than the Titanic.

2009-08-21T23:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Drug companies promote drug addiction.

2009-08-07T23:10:00.000-07:00

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.

As the story unfolds...

2009-08-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Should intimidation have its place in our lives?

2009-04-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-03-03T11:49:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-12-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

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.

Feels good to be a cat.

2008-12-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

We love them for their fur.... and their purr.

Think about it.

There is something incredibly tactile about a purr rumbling through thick fur. If you are lucky enough to be close enough, you can get a therapeutic benefit akin to a heat pad and a vibrator combined.

And then, there is their fur.

To run your fingers through the silky fur of a long-haired cat is like sliding velvet covered fingers on glass. The feeling is hard to describe, but so comforting it almost seems illegal.

And then, cats are so clean. Check out their tongues. The perfect scrubbing tool. The first company to replicate the scrubbing/cleansing action of a cat's tongue wins my housekeeping seal of approval.

Sure, they are imperious. You're darned right they have their own agenda. On occasion, they defer to their "master" and allow a few behind the ear or belly scratches. Consider yourself lucky are if you are deemed acceptable to a award
these perks.

Feels good to be a cat. They are so cool.

So be cool.

Purr.

Be like a kitten.

You'll get all the attention you want -- probably way more than you are looking for.

Banking Morals

2008-12-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

mIn old world banking circles personal conduct was regulated by a moral code whereby honor and self-interest were joined at the hip. To put client capital at risk was a cardinal sin punishable by dishonor and disgrace and therefore unthinkable.

That was a century ago. Where Wall Street erred in judgment was when the giants hired physicists and mathematicians to construct financial instruments. These new guys were not steeped in the 100's year old "Bankers Codes of Conduct", nor was their family honor at stake. The financial instruments they designed were so complicated analysts were unable to evaluate them properly or assess their risk. Or, possibly, they didn‘t care

But when people are making money, and bankers are no exception, they don’t ask why. They just smile and bank the checks. Effectively the morals clause implicit in traditional banking constructs no longer applied to these side bets. Since the banks, their shareholders, traders and brokerage houses were all making “bank” everybody was winning and the future was blindingly bright. That was only 2 years ago.

So we have all learned a valuable lesson again (for the third time). The notion that anything to do with money, actually gigantic money, could be self-regulating and the people involved trusted to do the “right thing” is a concept which has outlived its usefulness. Money corrupts — big Money corrupts completely. And forgetting the lessons of the past is suicidal.

Banking Morals Update

2008-11-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

In old world banking circles personal conduct was regulated by a moral code whereby honor and self-interest were joined at the hip. To put client capital at risk was a cardinal sin punishable by dishonor and disgrace and therefore unthinkable.

That was a century ago. Where Greenspan erred was when Wall Street hired physicists and mathematicians to construct financial instruments. These new guys were not steeped in the 100's year old "Bankers Codes of Conduct", nor was their family honor at stake. The financial instruments they designed were so complicated analysts were unable to evaluate them properly or assess their risk.

But when people are making money, and bankers are no exception, they don’t ask why. They just smile and bank the checks. Effectively the morals clause implicit in traditional banking constructs no longer applied to these side bets. Since the banks, their shareholders, traders and brokerage houses were all making “bank” everybody was winning and the future was blindingly bright. That was only 2 years ago.

So we have all learned a valuable lesson again (for the third time). The notion that anything to do with money, actually gigantic money, could be self-regulating and the people involved trusted to do the “right thing” is a concept which has outlived its usefulness. Money corrupts — big Money corrupts completely.

The Sarah Palin Chronicles

2008-10-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

Out of Alaska comes an avenging angel, Sarah Palin, to save the Republican Party from annihilation. Can she save the day? The election? The party? The country's first reaction to her was one of amazement at her choice. Then came the huge post primary bump. When the media finally got face to face with the candidate the gaffs began. After the first several gaffs the country turned dubious. A few more and fellow Republicans up for re-election begin putting some distance between themselves and Sarah Palin's pronouncements. It started beginning to look like choosing her could backfire on the Maverick. Lately she has decided to ride sidesaddle in her own direction to the consternation of the McCain campaign.

When this election is over and Barack Obama is President-elect will Governor Palin fade to white in a flurry of flakes, er snowflakes, back in Alaska? Or is the public in store for more countrified contributions from this most unlikely of places?

P.S. This blog is not meant to criticize the vice presidential candidate in any way. She was thrown into the national spotlight with, let's face it, practically no notice or time to prepare. Under the circumstances, she has risen to the occasion in spectacular fashion. I would expect the next two years to knock the rough edges off candidate Palin and to see a butterfly (floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee) born from this most interesting pupa.

Selective Exposure

2008-10-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

The best explanation I can find for a reason why people can hold such vastly different opinions after analyzing the same "facts" is provided by Farhad Manjoo in his book "True enough: Learning to live in a post-fact society". In his book Manjoo cites research which proves people tend to seek out information and interpret it in a way which confirms their beliefs, while avoiding information they find unpleasant or contrary. By looking for information which conforms to our beliefs we automatically bias our own opinions. This tendency of everyone to screen their own input is called selective exposure by today's psychologists.

What selective exposure has led to in the internet age is a splintering of society. Since anyone can now seek out others online who hold similar opinions to their own, it is easy to dismiss all opinions contrary to those we prefer. "Facts" can always be found to support any theory, no matter how far off the beaten path or ridiculous. Smoking is a perfect example. Everybody should be able to agree on the fact that smoking either is or is not bad for our health. However, people still hold opinions and facts which support both sides of this argument.

So far society has been able to find its way between the "proven" positions of its extremists. We all just need to remember that "facts" are in the mind of the holder as beauty is in the eye of the beholder and as such are subject to our own personal bias. In the absence of conclusive proof to support any particular point of view, we must consider all points of view to have some validity. Therefore, we all need to increase our tolerance to ideas contrary to our own. An exercise I use frequently is to watch or read opinions in opposition to those I hold to look for points in common.

TODAY'S CARPETBAGGERS

2008-09-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

About 140 years ago, following the Civil War, Northern businessmen flocked to the South with carpetbags, prepared (so Southerners thought) to loot and plunder the defeated South -- to the victor belongs the spoils. These carpetbaggers bought up the land at huge discounts to the land's former value, and then expected to reap huge profits in cotton with the help of the former slaves, now free men. Most of these "businessmen" never developed a love for the land, like its previous owners had from birth, and subsequently hung on to the land just long enough to turn a nice profit. They took their quickly gotten gains and headed elsewhere, changing little, but upping the cost of business for everyone else who followed them.

Is this starting to sound familiar?

Today's carpetbaggers have not been trading in land. Today's "land" is now virtual real estate in the sense that what is being traded is not the physical property but the mortgage attached to the property - the financial instrument. Today's carpetbaggers went to Wall Street with bags full of mortgages all bundled together, and generated huge commissions based upon the cash flow assumed to be forthcoming from these mortgages. Where the banking community erred was in assuming that there would be an endless supply of able buyers supplying these cash flows. After all, during the period when all this creative financing was making lots of people millions of dollars, if a buyer had trouble meeting his payments he simply turned the property over to another buyer and more paper was created. This paper took the form of second and third mortgages and balloon payments, and a plethora of new and esoteric financial instruments, all based on a forever upward price spiral in real estate. After each "turnover" everyone involved helped themselves to profits and commissions, and even cash back to the purchaser on closing.

Where this ends up is where we are now. The carpetbaggers have sold their bundles of mortgages and moved on with their millions (billions), and the rest of us get left with their empty bag. It is too bad that the money these financial geniuses and masterminds made isn't as virtual as the financial house of cards they built and are selling to the taxpayer. What sickens me is the fact that all the phony profit these people made is being turned into real money as we speak, by the government. Private profits turned into public losses. For shame, for shame.

Republican Political Savvy At Work

2008-09-20T18:20:00.000-07:00

American Political Savvy?

Out from the Alaskan wilderness comes a former beauty queen (runner-up) to the second highest office in the land. Are you kidding me? This stroke of brilliance from the Republican masterminds is a sleight-of-hand worthy of David Copperfield. A party which has recently failed this country in every measure of merit common to industrial nations, and done so in opposition to the wishes of the public it governs, has successfully diverted public attention from the major issues facing our country. This speaks volumes about the public’s political savvy. I am in awe of the fact that a Republican candidate who has voted for the reckless policies of the Bush administration 90% of the time can manage to distance himself from the results of those policies.

While the middle class has seen a drastic erosion of their real incomes, their standard of living, and their net worth and security (most middle-class American wealth is tied to the value of their home) the top 2% of the nation’s wealthiest people and corporations are still receiving bailouts and tax breaks. It further astounds me that the people most negatively affected by the costs of unending wars and unconscionable price manipulations on the part of the oil barons would even consider electing someone closely associated with these disasters.

It is beginning to look like the democrats’ decision to overlook Hillary Clinton for Obama’s running mate might be a fatal one. Americans seem to be more interested in a pretty face at the podium than in the war, the economy, education or health care. So be it. We get the government we deserve.

But wait! Breaking news! The Bush policy of laissez-faire with regard to corporate financial responsibility is actually making news again. As a few more of our oldest, largest, and most respected institutions crumble, Wall Street takes the worst beating since 9/11/01. This, unlike oil prices, won’t have as much impact on the middle class. It is America’s wealthiest who suffer most from collapsing stock market prices. If the current administration’s fiscal policies carry forward to the next administration, more government bailouts of private institutions will undoubtedly be necessary.

Maybe this latest example of the disastrous Bush years will refocus the public on how we got here. In a few short months we will have our answer. Hopefully sanity will prevail and the middle class will have looked past lipstick and rhetoric. Our national focus will move away from the acquisition of obsolete and environmentally harmful energy sources by any means possible, including more war. With a responsible and forward thinking administration we can develop those resources we have an abundance of here in the good old USA; like sunshine, propane, and clean nuclear and coal power.

One final note. It is a real possibility that McCain could have health issues. In spite of the fact that he is in the tightest race in his political career, he has managed to take ample time off and uses weekends to recoup. He is likely to be the last person in politics to accept a 3 a.m. phone call. His age must be considered. If, God forbid, he should succumb to the pressures he inherits from his predecessor, Sarah Palin will step up to the plate. The fate of the free world would then, theoretically, rest in the hands of a prolific soccer mom.

PS: Anyone who thinks a hawk like McCain will back off our military spending to save the economy needs a reality check.

Surprise -- Surprise

2008-07-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

Currently C-SPAN is covering a hearing in the House of Representatives on the resolution by Dennis Kucinich to impeach the president. As everyone should be aware of by now, the president has been using the highest office in the land to sanction illegal activities such as torture and phone taps. He has subverted the Constitution and allowed (encouraged perhaps) subordinates in his administration to break the law. He has then provided shelter to the perpetrators through the use of presidential privilege. (Take Karl Rove for example.) He has done this without fear of prosecution since, by law, a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for anything while in office. The only remedy available to the citizens of this country to address malfeasance by our leaders is to impeach them after the fact. It is extremely unlikely we will see anything of this nature take place within the limited time left to George Bush.

Here is the surprise. After listening to the proceedings, I learned that the minute the President is no longer president he can be prosecuted for any crimes committed during his administration. On several occasions in the past (Nixon and Agnew come to mind) officials have been threatened or were prosecuted only to be pardoned by the next administration. The thinking behind the pardons, I guess, is that the satisfaction the public would receive by seeing the crooks convicted is overshadowed by the disgrace to the nation and the blow to our national pride. Can you imagine Bush defending himself on a charge of murder, as some in Congress are suggesting, for the torture deaths of several alleged terrorists while in US custody?

This time might be different. Of course, if McCain were to be elected, any course of action against people in the Bush administration will be squashed. Or if Congress insisted on prosecution, the perps would undoubtedly be pardoned. However, Obama might be inclined to stand back and allow events to take their course. Congress is royally teed off at Bush for his outright lies and policies of secrecy, and seems inclined to blame the executive branch for much of the public's loss of confidence in the legislature. Obama, I believe, would be sensitive to their position and would not be inclined to thwart their effort to restore the public trust. After all, he needs their support if he hopes to accomplish anything during his administration.

It is ironic that the president, while attempting to subvert many of our constitutional safeguards, hides behind them. We need to send a clear and strong message forward that Congress and the public will not tolerate abuses of law by our elected officials. If I were Bush I would be quaking in my boots.

What say you, fellow citizens, to these amazing developments?

Who is the “Root of all Evil”?

2008-06-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

Corrupt politicians or corrupt billionaires?

Four decades ago we experienced a huge run up in the price of precious metals, and in particular, the price of silver. Silver futures reached into an unheard of and totally unwarranted $80 price range from a normal $4 price. Based upon normal market factors, like supply and demand, the value of the dollar, and world stability this run up made no sense. What turned out to be behind the extraordinary run up was a pair of oil billionaires, the Hunt brothers. They determined that the float in silver futures was small enough for them to gain a monopoly. They gave it the old “college try”, and nearly succeeded. But the US government stepped in at the last minute to save the day. The treasury released enough stockpiled silver bullion to pop the Hunt’s balloon. Since the Hunts were borrowing money to finance their diabolical plot they nearly caused a major bank failure in the process.

Next we saw a real estate boom financed by greedy bankers and real estate speculators. This has also required a government bail out. Could these scenarios possibly be precursors to today’s commodities manipulations? According to the Saudis they are producing enough oil to satisfy current world demand. Russia has moved into second place among the world’s oil producers and is providing for the large increase in demand in Southeast Asia, by way of a pipeline project similar to the Alaskan pipeline. The decline in the dollar is miniscule, when related to the increase in oil prices. All is quiet on the world stage with the exception of our unwanted intrusion into the Middle East. So absent any fundamental factors which could be responsible for the current price of oil, we are left with market manipulation by commodities billionaires. (The names may change but the irresponsible nature of the greedy remains the same). It appears that without our government stepping in and dumping huge reserves of oil on the market from its strategic stockpiles, manipulators will enrich themselves yet again at the expense of people who can least afford it.

As to corrupt politicians, consider this. Do you suppose this unprecedented run-up in oil prices could have occurred if we didn’t have an “oil ticket” benefiting directly from and facilitating the manipulators? First they stirred up the world’s major oil suppliers like Venezuela and the Middle East. Secondly, they have done nothing from a legislative point of view such as eliminating tax breaks to profiteers and spreading that wealth around, or dumping oil on the markets to depress prices.

For me the answer seems obvious. Big government, together with big business, is acting without a conscience to conspire to hold the world hostage to their will and egos. Corrupt politicians, together with corrupt billionaires, are the root of all evil. And the world’s poor and starving can’t afford to put rice in their bowls or purchase a loaf of bread for their table. For shame, for shame.

Bob Parmelee www.parmsplace.com

Can We Be Bribed?

2008-05-31T20:35:00.000-07:00

After enjoying the lowest approval rating in the nation's history, can both the Congress and the president buy their way back into the public’s favor? The proposed one-time tax refund of 600 dollars per person or 1200 dollars per household is designed to accomplish exactly that. Are we really that gullible? Can we really be expected to forgive all the lying, favoritism, and corruption perpetrated by this administration? After leading us into war and driving the nation into a recession, they propose to give the taxpayers some of their money back. Let us not forget that in order to give money back to us, they have to take it from us in the first place. And let us not forget, if it weren’t for this administration wasting trillions of dollars on an illegal, immoral, and unpopular war in the first place, we wouldn’t be on the brink of a financial meltdown.

$160 billion. It sounds like a lot of money. However, if we look at the Bush/Cheney welfare to Halliburton program it is a drop in the bucket. According to a recent Bill Moyers exposé, 200 billion dollars of the 400 billion dollars billed by Halliburton to the American taxpayer has disappeared. By disappeared I don’t mean failed to show up in Halliburton’s account. I mean disappeared as in the services billed to and paid for by the government were never performed. Buildings billed and paid for were never built. Outrageous double or triple billing for products and services were never reimbursed, or credits issued. In a recent investigation by a Senate panel concerning financial irregularities Condoleezza Rice attributed these disappearing funds to "accounting" errors. It is incredible to imagine waging a war on a cost-plus basis. Earmarks to other favored capital gangsters are rising to outrageous levels. Theft, by any other name, is still theft. Isn’t it?

Most economists agree that this proposed "stimulus package” won’t stimulate anything. Because businessmen realize the bubble is of short duration, they won't be adding payroll or capacity to plants. It is fair to say a portion will go to paying down personal debt, which won’t stimulate anything either. All this measure really does is drive up the nation's debt. According to Bloomberg analysts, this president has the nation on cruise control straight over a cliff. If anyone in the private sector proposed such a reckless policy, they would be on their way to an institution and fitted for a strait jacket.

We used to be able to tell the bandits from the good guys because the bandits had the decency to wear masks. Now the bandits are leading our nation and stealing us blind with the tacit approval of congress. Since the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde's are above the law they plunder and pillage at will. Unfortunately the scope of the nation's greedy plunderers extends around the globe. Because the country gets no benefit from the exploitation of our treasury, the value of the dollar is in steep decline around planet. Because our dollar is still the Globe's primary currency we are taking the rest of the world down with us. And consider the irony of needing Chinese AND Arab money to bail us out!

Now the administration is proposing the largest federal budget of all time, at a time when we can least afford it. A large portion of this budget will go to increasing this war effort and increasing military spending. While the world should be at peace, this pugnacious administration is creating an ever larger war machine and using it to invade sovereign nations without proven provocation. At the same time they propose cutting popular programs like Medicare and Social Security and other social programs like health care and education cost relief for the nations’ poorest children. The third Reich mentality couldn't possibly have arisen again, could it?

More articles of this nature can be seen at Black Belt Politics by going to
http://www.parmsplace.com

How should we spell relief?

2008-05-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

I, for one, spell relief as the end of the Bush/Cheney "oil ticket" reign of terror. If the rumors, founded on "leaks" in the White House to Andrew Cockburn of "Counterpunch", are correct, the gruesome twosome have signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against Iran, among others, unprecedented in scope. Bush's secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area stretching from Lebanon to Afghanistan and includes strategic assassinations of targeted officials. The source for these assertions comes from a former official on the National Security Council.

According to CBS sources, the State Department is at work drafting an ultimatum to Iran demanding they cease all current activities in Iraq. The fact that allegations of Iran's involvement in Iraq have never been proven seems of no concern to a man whose policies are based more on faith than fact. A curious side benefit to the most ridiculous foreign policy in this nation's history is a near bankruptcy of Citigroup, the world's largest financial services company. This company avoided immediate ruin by selling an 11% interest to, are you ready for this, the Arabs. The fact that a direct result of the war in the Middle East has driven oil prices to the point where major industries, airlines and trucking to mention just two, are on the verge of collapse, hasn't dawned on the war hawks yet. As higher oil prices put ever larger chunks of American capital in Arab hands, the Arab countries turn around and buy ever larger chunks of America.

Could we possibly be doing anything stupider or more damaging to our country than continuing, let alone increasing, our involvement in the middle east?

Who is telling the truth?

2008-05-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

marshall mcluhanWho is telling the truth?

Except for the liars, everyone is.

Unfortunately, we all view history through the lens of our own upbringing. An ever-changing kaleidoscope of world events refracts the “truth” into a thousand prisms. We each eventually pick a point of view of the world which is most pleasing, or least terrifying, to ourselves. That view is focused and shaped by what we see and read daily.

Saul Bellow once said about the media, “nobody will be heard, who doesn’t speak in short bursts of truth”. Bill Moyers recently reflected that news people need to speak in “bumper sticker” snippets to hold our attention. Media mavens have seven seconds to grab us and make an impression before we are “gone” and on to something else mentally.

It would be simple arithmetic to hold the media responsible for our loss of depth perception. But that would be wrong. We are conditioned to accept specially crafted sound bytes. Marshall McLuhan, back in the 70’s, wrote a blockbuster book exposing the medium as the message. People have always had a tendency to view what they read as “truth, so help me God”. Today people view what they see as the “truth”. But as the written word is just a sound byte, the video is just an action byte, and only as real as we perceive it to be.

Here is a case in point. The Bush administration focused our attention on terrorism after 9/11 and in true Barnum and Bailey sleight of hand switched our focus to Iraq. Although one had nothing to do with the other, we followed the sound bytes and believed the video clips, and “agreed” Iraq needed to be punished. Most recently, a concerted military effort has been made to link the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq to Iran. Over 20,000 weapons were assembled from various armed engagements, and military experts were tasked to find a link back to the source -- Iran. Of course, no tangible link exists. But many will follow this “sleight-of-hand” maneuver and accept the inevitability of a war with Iran.

We would do well to remember a former writer named Len de Caux, who said in “Armies Of The Poor”: “Sometimes I’d hear a Communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme I’d feel embarrassed. Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience -- shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour. Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, and hands to clap.” So here we are again, and to the thousands who protested before the war began and the hundreds of thousands since, the Bush administration says, more or less, “So?” Well, my face is glowing, my head is nodding, and I’m clapping my hands! And I am no communist.

Governments of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy are never sustainable; such empires always fall from within. The wealthy have been leading this charge over the cliff with their golden parachutes and laser guided bombs. Hopefully we will learn that arrogance and greed have no place in a democracy. And we will reorganize ourselves accordingly.

The Hornet's Nest

2008-05-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

Imagine walking through the forest one day and discovering an apparently unguarded or abandoned bee’s nest hanging within easy reach. Thinking a snack of rich honey can be had for little or no effort, you approach the nest. Suddenly your plan is interrupted by an angry buzzing. You look around you and discover a hornet buzzing about your feet. Following your first instinct you attempt to stomp on the hornet, and after several misses you successfully squash the pesky bugger. However, without you noticing, your stomping has shaken the ground and you now have several angry hornets buzzing about your feet. You immediately launch into an Indian war dance, hooting and stomping around, until you feel the sharp pain of a sting. This angers you further so you increase your efforts to exact revenge upon the culprit and his cohorts by flailing madly in all directions. You attempt to obliterate the source of these angry hornets by closing the hole from which they came. However, by now you are not fighting just one or several angry hornets, but the entire nest has erupted around you and you are getting stung repeatedly. Too late you realize that although you easily stomped the first soldier who attempted to defend his nest, and the several that followed, they are striking back. Further, you realize they are coming from more than one hole in the ground, and they appear to be everywhere.

The moral of the story is simple. Although our daydreamer was infinitely superior in size and weaponry, and although he was able to inflict serious damage to the pesky tribe, er nest, his victory was never accomplished, and in the meantime, he incurred some serious damage. The longer he stays the more damage he suffers until he leaves with his tail between his legs.

Mission accomplished.

Collateral Damage

2008-04-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

Jesus Christ or Genghis Kahn....Who's footsteps are we really following?

Collateral damage.

Sounds reasonable, acceptable, and even unavoidable to the military minded among us. But what is it exactly? It is the cost in nonmilitary casualties to innocently involved people during military confrontations. It is the cost in lives of unsuspecting women and children blown to bits in shopping malls or on subway trains and in markets when extremists seek to make a political statement. It is the cost in families dislocated to relief centers because their homes have been commandeered by military personnel in war zones, or to those whose homes have disappeared altogether from bomb strikes. It is the economic cost to countries whose infrastructure has been destroyed; manufacturing centers, roads and bridges, power facilities and grids, and commerce centers all disabled or destroyed by combatants during military campaigns. This destruction is a result of goals which are completely irrelevant to the people whose lives are being destroyed by the “ruling” elite who supposedly speak for the people they govern.

Does this still sound reasonable? Millions of people dislocated, hundreds of thousands of people dead, trillions of dollars of money wasted on the megalomaniac dreams and ambitions of a few deranged individuals? And I do mean a few. Less than a hundred powerful sheiks (similar to Mafia families) in Iraq are being propped up by a few hundreds of legislators in this country, in support of a few thousand businessmen. These “elite” are costing the rest of the world hundreds of thousands of lives, trillions of current and future dollars, and generations of grief.

And for what? I personally have nothing against a single Iraqi or Muslim. In fact, I don’t even know one. I feel certain that the poor civilian, who has lost a family member to this war (every family in Iraq has lost, on average, at least one) has nothing against me. Where is the sanity?

Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to turn a biblical eye to the damage caused to us during the 9/11 disaster? Instead of recovering from the disaster, haven’t we, in fact, more than doubled it -- just in lives lost? If we add the cost of the physically maimed and mentally diminished, and the cost in taxpayer dollars of a devastated economy, haven’t we caused ourselves infinitely more damage than the “enemy” could have ever managed? With no end to the damage in sight! Where is the sanity in a policy like this?

And to think my fellow Americans are considering voting for more of the same, for shame. And to think this is being done in the name of one of the foremost pacifists to ever place his saintly foot upon this planet…none other than Jesus Christ himself. It seems to me we do Genghis Kahn honor in the name of our savior.

Clinton for Governor?

2008-04-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

Since the New York governor's mansion has self imploded with Eliot Spitzer's and David Patterson's admissions of sexual excess, discussion has turned toward the possibility Hillary Clinton might consider moving from the U.S. Senate to the New York governor's mansion.

Recent polls clearly place Barack Obama a front runner in the national campaign. Perhaps it's time for Hillary to consider an exit strategy. Barack Obama has weathered the Reverend Wright earthquake and seems to be on firmer ground than ever. His ties to organized crime in Chicago have evaporated. His wife has slipped into the background after her gaffs about "finally feeling good about the country "she lives in and has benefited greatly from.

The worst that has been said about Hillary Clinton is she had ties to a company which got caught sideways in some very fragrant real estate deals. Nothing was ever proven regarding her involvement in the Whitewater scandal. On occasion, she is charged with orchestrating a few "cover-ups" regarding Bill's philandering. No one I know can blame a woman for protecting her home and family, even if it requires using Capitol police to run the "pass" interference.

So are the trial balloons about her moving into a position to become the new New York governor just hot air? Or is this just an attempt to thwart her national campaign hopes by the evil red herring genius? Or maybe this is some serious possibility we have to consider.

Needed: Spin Doctors

2008-03-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

Spin doctors are a new breed of language techs. We seem to have an ever increasing need for this specialty by the country's public speakers and politicians. With an ever larger national scandal sheet to consume the news media it is no wonder. I don't have any statistics that directly refer to this subject. However, I have been watching the news for over half a century and can not recall ever seeing so many public figures, like celebrities and politicans, getting their noses rubbed in dirt of their own making.

I rather doubt that morals in general or personal integrity, in particular, are much different today than they were in the days of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The fact that those gentlemen had mistresses (in fact, quite a few and many "of color") is common knowledge today. Children which resulted from those relationships were no cause for concern to the politicians, and certainly no public outcry was ever raised in the media of the time. Cocaine was legal, pot unheard of, and drinking the national pastime, so again no whisper of scandal ever appeared to blemish the saintly reputations of the leaders of our country back then.

Our European neighbors are apparently either more sophisticated, less immature, more worldly, or more personally engaged in affairs of the kind that titillate the viewers in this country. At any rate, conduct of the kind dominating the news here scarcely rates a mention in the tabloids abroad. The President of France is currently receiving congratulations by his fellow countrymen because his wife is appearing in public in the nude! Now there is an idea whose time has come. But on with our story.

I don't know if this is true, but it's funny, typical "Washington speak", and proves that a good PR machine is priceless.

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Hillary Clinton's great-great uncle, Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889. The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is this inscription: "Remus Rodham; horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889." Judy e-mailed Hillary Clinton for comments. Hillary's staff of professional spin doctors sent back the following biographical sketch:

"Remus Rodham was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed."

And THAT is how it's done.

WIN? WIN WHAT?

2008-03-24T19:29:00.000-07:00

I guess if you can call 4000 American deaths and $1 trillion invested in the worst catastrophe in American history, with the exception of the Vietnam conflict, progress, I guess we are winning.

I guess if you consider sacrificing the American economy and postponing all social programs, like education, Social Security reform, and healthcare progress, you could say we are winning.

I guess if you consider a tripling of the gas and oil prices over the past seven years by waging a war over oil in the Middle East progress, we are gaining on it.

And I guess if you consider doubling the national debt and causing the steepest decline in the dollar against other major currencies in the world a victory, we have cause for celebration.

Have we completely lost our minds?

What Is It with red ties?

2008-03-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

I never used to notice what color tie the people who were speaking to me wore. One thing I do remember is that speakers never wore red ties. I grew up in a generation when subdued was the order of the day and was synonymous with moderation and sanity.

One day, King George, the president, wore a red tie. Red was never to be used in the fraternity I joined. It was related to the red capes used to taunt bulls during the ritual slaughter of the bulls in Mexico. Waving a red color was used to incite the rage of the bull and to raise the temperature of the audience to a feverish degree.

Red was never worn by politicians, whose last ambition was to raise the temperature of the voting public. But all of a sudden, everyone is wearing red ties. It doesn’t seem to matter what side of the fence they are on. They are now even popular with members of the press.

I guess the only difference is what breed of sheep they are.

The Call For Change

2008-03-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Call For Change

Americans are discouraged. Polls show an overwhelming disapproval rating for our elected officials and the reason is obvious. They consistently ignore the will of the people who elect them. 80% of those polled want a quick end to the wars which bleed our treasury dry and result in the slaughter and maiming of thousands of our young. After all, we aren't that gullible or stupid, are we? I mean, with all the power of the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon, with all the surveillance satellites and the billions in the budget, does anyone seriously believe we can’t find and eliminate a cave dwelling ferret like Osama bin Laden? It is an insult to everyone in this country to expect us to believe a small task force of the best trained military elite, with the best technology in the world, can't find and eliminate a few hundred terrorists.

So the result is to be expected. People who line up for days for the opportunity to buy the latest Harry Potter novel won't cross the street to shake the hand of a politician. Some might suggest a reason is our people no longer respond to words or ideas, but only to movies or books or music. I think the reason is because, after several decades of having our noses rubbed in one scandal after another, by the nation's leaders, we are afraid the corruption might rub off on us; or the stupidity. After all, anyone with half a brain would realize we can't insult the 1000 year old traditions of a seriously religious region and expect them to appreciate us; or that after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of their friends and family they will eventually embrace us and our ways.

And so while there is a claim for change, can we really expect any? We certainly won't if a Bush clone gets elected. A close reading of the web pages of the Democratic primary leaders doesn't really promise any sudden moves either. About the best we can hope for is only four more years of war and only another trillion dollars wasted. It is unfortunately too much to expect a politician to say what he means and to do what he says.

Someone said it earlier. Yuck, just yuck.

Nobody's Perfect

2008-03-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

Not since the day of Christ, has anyone had the hubris to claim a perfect record on anything. After all, to error is to be human. Where we have a problem is where a President, who relies on advisers, claims to be making the best decisions for the nation. No one, after seven years of examples, can suggest that President Bush has had the mental dexterity to fathom the more complicated issues. He can't even manage the complexities of his own language. Where we have a problem is when unseen agendas and hidden motives of behind the scenes manipulators affect the direction of American politics. (Whew) The President's closest adviser, presumably Vice President Dick Cheney, clearly has his own agenda on foreign-policy. Dick has a huge stake in Halliburton and Halliburton has a huge stake in Iraq. So where do we find ourselves? We find ourselves lead by a completely corrupt company with no regard for the truth, or American troop welfare, or honest accounting. This company dictates American foreign-policy through the office of the Vice President of the United States of America.

I hate being a sucker. I hate falling victim to the fast card shuffle. Therefore, I try to pay close attention. I read between the lines. I read everything I can get my hands on. From Playboy to Scientific American, from National Geographic to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, I try to ascertain the truth. And the truth I have discovered stinks. I have no hidden agenda. I am living well (not that well is comfortable mind you) below the poverty level. The poverty level is so far above my income I could live on a year of poverty for three years. But I refuse to call a crook a hero, or a thief a public servant. I call a spade a spade.

I see no solution to our problems offered in the coming election. We need to find a solution within ourselves. This country has one of the proudest traditions of any on this planet. We have built a country free from persecution. We have built a nation of equal rights. We have built the land of opportunity like no other. But we are being lied to and misled by slick tongued orators. Our hopes are exploited; our good nature and willingness to cooperate and contribute are taken advantage of. As a result, we are falling behind. Other nations of vastly greater numbers are graduating college-level students annually in numbers greater than our entire population. Our better paying jobs are either leaving this country for cheaper labor elsewhere (which generally means everywhere), or are being supplied by foreign nationals granted work visas to fill the education gap between our graduates and the job requirements they fail to fulfill.

So, someone asks, what do you suggest? Since I am no liar, I'll tell you there is no one answer. But I have decided there is a window of opportunity. The window, for baby boomers at least, was suggested by one of my favorite bands of the 1970s. The Moody Blues. The window lies in recognizing that fear is just a lack of understanding. Fear can't kill you. Fear is irrational, overrated, and as an instrument of foreign-policy hopelessly abused. The people in these far-off lands we say are our enemies have the same hopes and aspirations for their children as we have. They have the same sense of justice and honor. Perhaps they have different customs. So what. Perhaps they even worship different gods. So what. They are people with lives and hopes and dreams like people everywhere. We are all the same under our skin. We need to get over ourselves.

Amen

The Ten Trillion Dollar Crisis

2008-02-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

In one of the great movies of the last century, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise gave us a glimpse of the state of mind of the military in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tour de force is called "A Few Good Men". I mention this movie only to repeat one of the greatest lines in the movie, shouted by Jack Nicholson's character as he was backed into a corner on the witness stand. He shouted, and I quote, "You can't handle the truth!", referring to the American public. And in another award winner, Bart Simpsons' writers noted, "It takes two to lie. One to do the lying and the other to do the listening". Unfortunately, these two statements are spelling doom for the economic state of our nation. The American public is doing the listening, and the leaders of our nation are doing the misleading. If we don't know the truth, we certainly can't be expected to handle it.

American's government debt has crossed the 9 trillion dollar mark this year. This roughly equates to 30,000 dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country. If you are a family of 5, your family's share of this debt is 150,000 dollars. Are you feeling a little poorer? Neither is anyone else, and that is a huge portion of our problem. In 31 of the last 35 years the government has operated in the red. For some reason, we all feel that the government's lack of financial responsibility has nothing to do with us individually. Just wait until our social security and medicare programs are cut back drastically and I guarantee you will feel the effects of ridiculous financial policies.

This year GW Bush proposes pushing the deficit up by an additional 400 billion dollars. The budget he proposes is over 3 trillion dollars and the deficit he proposes does not include the cost of the of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor does it accurately reflect the loss of revenue which is certainly forthcoming from a rapidly faltering economy. These items alone could easily add another 200 billion dollars to the deficit. Before we see another balanced budget we will go over the 10 trillion dollar mark. If GW has his way, we will cross the 10 trillion dollar deficit level in another two years. Further, we get these figures from the office of underestimators. We have taken a flight from reason in this country. When our president can propose adding 400 billion to a 9 trillion dollar deficit, and in the same sentence call this a "good" budget, he has joined Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter is at the helm! The public must be held partly responsible for the cataclysmic state of the nation's economic affairs. The president can only propose a budget; the Congress must approve it, and between these two branches of government it is hard to say who wears the bigger dunce cap. But we elect them all.

Remember the crisis the government faced as we approached the end of the last century. Some predicted the end of the world as we know it, because the computers which run everything didn't have the year 2000 available to them. Well guess what? We are there again. Government computers don't have enough room for 10 trillion dollars of red ink. That requires room for 14 digits. No one ever expected us to need more than 13 digits of room in the dollar column to run the government. The plus side to the equation is that the thousands of pages of line items will be compressed to just a few pages. That's right. The entire projected revenue of the United States government will barely cover just three line items; social security, medicare, and interest on the national debt. By 2040 there will be no money for any other government programs or expenses.

As the largest group of voters this nation has ever seen, the baby boomers must accept a large portion of responsibility for this travesty. If we continue to elect, through ignorance (by this I don't mean stupid...we are not stupid, just uninformed) or apathy, a group of people who put their own agendas above those of the nation, we will have in the not-too-distant future a dollar worth less than a peso.

Here is an example of what I mean by an ignorant electorate. On Bill Moyer's Journal, a brilliant author, Susan Jacoby, astounded me, and I hope everyone in this country, with the following results from a recent Roper poll about geography. Young people between the ages of 18 and 25 were shown a map of the world and asked to locate four countries; Iraq, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. This map, by the way, had the initials of every country printed within each country. Only 23% of college graduates and 6% of high school graduates were able to correctly identify these countries. This area of the world is one of the most explosive on the planet, and is consuming a tremendous amount of our nation's resources. The real shameful part of this poll is that these graduates didn't even know where the Middle East is in the world, or presumably they would have been able to identify the countries by their initials.

It is hard to suggest a course of action to correct these crippling problems. While YouTube, Facebook, Myspace and the latest video games consume our youths' time and attention, a monster of biblical proportions is building strength just outside the monitor screen. Our country is only a small portion of the world population. Even as we protect our shores from a military invasion, the financial invasion of our country continues unabated. The economic overthrow of our way of life is just around the corner. Hopefully our children and voters will see this threat in time and elect officials up to the challenge. "The good people in this country are at their best when things are at their worst" is another great movie line by Jeff Bridges in the movie Starman. I hope the writers were correct.

Disgruntled Campers Unite!

2008-02-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

Back in the good old days, the campgrounds of America were very nearly free for all Americans. For a dollar a month, or one-time annual fee of 12 dollars, the government issued any American a Golden Eagle Pass. This pass was truly golden for it offered its bearer the right to enter, and stay for up to two weeks, any of the nation's hundreds of national parks. No overnight charge, no daily use fee. Occasionally some parks had a coin-op machine on a hot shower stall. Otherwise, once the annual fee was paid our national parks were truly a free gateway to beautiful vistas and incredible natural phenomena, to be shared by all citizens equally.

These services were afforded because every tax paying American paid a small stipend to the government which went toward the upkeep of one of the nation's most treasured resources, the national park system. Hiking trails were built, campgrounds leveled, and tables and fire pits provided so anyone, regardless financial means, could afford to commune with nature. Living in tents and sleeping on the ground, breathing clean air and swimming in crystal-clear lakes and rivers, hearing the night sounds of insects and rumbling brooks and, above all, leaving the sirens and lights of the city behind was, and still is, psychic balm for the soul.

What happened? As far as I know a portion of our tax dollars still goes to fund those same parks. It can't possibly cost as much to maintain these parks as it cost to develop them in the first place. And remember, inflation raises the price of everything, but nothing inflates faster than the tax bite on our earnings. Now a night stay in a national park is a long way from being free. People with motor homes can expect to pay as much as nights stay in a motel room to park their camper and hook up to the electric and water. People staying in tents are paying about half the cost of a night in Motel 6 to sleep on the ground. With the nation's parks filled to overflowing, the parks system must certainly be self-supporting by now, but we still contribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually in taxes to "support" the system.

Camping in national parks (state parks are following suit) is no longer within the reach of everyone in this nation. To be able to stay in a park during the "season" a substantial deposit is required months in advance. Just to enjoy a parks vistas or lakes while driving through can cost a pretty penny. At the rate the government is usurping the prerogatives of the people I would not be surprised to find one of our legislative revenue agents proposing a "free air tax" sometime in the near future.

Unexpected Consequences

2008-02-15T10:53:00.000-08:00

There have been some unexpected consequences to an administration gone bad or mad or both. The first of these is an unusual vocal disrespect for the President, as witnessed by popular TV shows like Bill Maher, Keith Obermann, and Bill Moyer. A few of these men have come out calling the gruesome twosome, Bush and Cheney, outright fascists. While it has always been popular for late-night hosts to poke fun at the president, especially Bill Clinton, never before has there been such a torrent of rage and disgust. Our nation's leaders are held in outright contempt. This must signal a new low for the country. The next president will have a great deal more than just the economy to fix.

How about the invasion of our privacy? Whether or not, we have anything to hide most people feel uncomfortable knowing someone is (in effect) opening their mail and listening in on their phone conversations. Again, the benefit to our security is hard to estimate but tangible results don't seem to be forthcoming. Tapping our phones and e-mails is as offensive to most people as requiring public disrobing would be.

How about the tailspin our dollar is experiencing against the world's major currencies? In the not so distant past, we had the strongest currency on the planet. Now an economy as small as Canada's has a currency stronger than the dollar. Our stock market, real estate market, and financial markets seem to be in lockstep with the decline of the dollar. America's assets are selling at a huge discount; the equivalent of buying Tiffany jewelry at Kmart prices.

Another phenomenon, according to Chris Matthews's popular Hardball TV series, is the conferencing going on around the nation's water coolers. Office worker gossip has been replaced with earnest discussions about the candidates and their positions over wide variety of national issues. Issues like the expansion or contraction of the war can be expected to be hot topics. But not around the water cooler. National health care and the stumbling economy likewise are hot topics usually reserved for the cocktail hour.

And still another consequence to this administration is the early start to the presidential campaign. Whether or not the early stumping is a result of a reaction to the war in Iraq is hard to determine. One thing is clear. Candidates of both parties began their countrywide sweep for delegates nearly a year ahead of schedule. Perhaps the Democrats saw an opportunity to capitalize on a 75% disapproval rating for a Republican president. How they will turn this in their favor is hard to imagine, since the democratically controlled Congress enjoys an even lower rating than the president.

Anyone who has traveled lately has experienced the incredible inconvenience thrust upon our air traveling public. The debate is about whether any of these additional disruptions to our routine are accomplishing anything at all. On every occasion the Homeland Security's additional measures were tested they failed miserably. Agents posing as terrorists were able to smuggle components for all kinds of explosive devices through customs and onboard airplanes. On a cost to benefit ratio the cost is astronomical, and the benefit is near zero.

Lastly, how about the nations fear factor? Homegrown terrorists like those from Montana or Waco Texas have done extraordinary damage in the past, but never before have our leaders felt it was necessary to remind us on a daily basis to tremble in our boots. Nor have they used such occasions to strip us of our rights and dignity. We have plowed billions into a Gestapo like bureaucracy, Homeland security, which was supposed to have made us more secure. In my opinion, and that of almost every national commentator I listen to, it has had the opposite effect. Once these bureaucracies are built is next to impossible to dismantle them. Putting all of our security forces under one umbrella answerable only to the president is a fascist move if there ever was one. I felt more secure when all of our nations spy agencies were running their own shows. At least then there were checks and balances.

In the final analysis I believe the goodness and common sense of the American public will come to the aid of the republic in time to stave off disaster. The damage done to the nation's prestige and self-respect won't be restored overnight. But a talking American public is a healthy sign that we are taking stock of our perilous position and intend to do something about it. In the upcoming election there is a promise of change. One change which cannot be overestimated is the introduction of the internet into the equation. I believe the incredible amount of support and money raised by the grassroots/internet campaign waged by Ron Paul has not gone unnoticed, although he apparently has. When candidates feel the need to distance themselves from special interest groups and refuse their money, as has been done by Barack Obama, and can successfully run their campaigns without that fragrant grease, we are headed in the right direction.

Hoorah!

Split Personality

2008-02-14T15:03:00.000-08:00

Whether we choose to believe it or not, the facts are in. America has a split personality. For the most part, the good people of this country are in denial. While we deserve to be congratulated for the good deeds we do as free citizens, we refuse to acknowledge the evil done by our government in our name. Our hearts and our money pour out to the less fortunate, and to the victims of atrocities like genocide perpetrated by misguided regimes in Third World countries. Meanwhile these lawless regimes are more often than not supported by our own state department. We then invade sovereign nations whose religious convictions run contrary to ours under false pretenses. After blowing up our "alleged" enemies, at a cost in the billions, we then follow up by spending even larger amounts to rebuild and repair the damage we did.
Private institutions and individuals provide massive assistance to the malaria and HIV victims in Africa. We are in the process of providing laptop computers to the most remote villages on the planet to speed their arrival into the 21st century. We give aid to disaster victims everywhere; no disaster worldwide goes without our support and assistance. These are great acts of kindness done by private people and institutions in our country’s name.
Our alter ego, on the other hand, invades countries (Iraq is not the first and more than likely not the last) in an attempt to steal their natural resources. Our rich corporations export pollution and take advantage of cheap foreign labor. We export our jobs solely to take advantage of the poor and starving in less developed countries. Our continual military campaigns cause death, destruction, and dislocation to millions of innocent civilians. For our trouble we get a gross and bloated military budget. We give lip service to a war on terror in spite of the fact that we haven't had a terrorist attack in over six years in our own country. We commit crimes in the name of national security; crimes which were deemed so heinous they were banned from use by the Geneva Convention during World War II. We send our children to die in countries which were our allies and imprison and spy on our own citizens.
While the good people in this country strive to do the best we can for all people everywhere, a few disgrace our country and give us a black eye the world over. Their sole ambition is to increase their own wealth and power at everyone else's expense. They manipulate our government and our media and seek to undo the very principles which made our country the envy of all the world a few short decades ago.
We need to regain control of our evil twin, before all is lost. We need to dismantle an ever larger war machine. A machine which is being used as an instrument of destruction and mayhem. A machine which is sucking up so many resources we are bankrupting ourselves and putting the entire world's economy at risk. We need to put our resources into projects like clean air and renewable energy resources. Projects which will provide a secure and constructive future for our next generations. If we learn nothing else from history, we must learn the consequences of a government with an irresponsible military agenda and which is controlled by big business interests. This could be the first generation of a lasting peace throughout the world. But first, we must put Mr. hide behind bars where he belongs, and throw away the key.

Plus/Minus of an early campaign

2008-02-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

On the surface it sounds like a big win for the country. Voters have nearly a year’s head start learning about the candidates’ backgrounds and politics. As Jay Leno's jaywalk series plainly shows, most people of voting age don't even recognize the faces of the candidates, let alone have knowledge of any particular candidate's position on major issues.
When thousands of lives and billions (trillions) of dollars are being sacrificed to a war which may extend over several generations, we owe our undivided attention to the policies and promises of a future president.

From the perspective of the baby boomers, I relish the switch to politics from the mind numbing and never ending exposés about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Since we are putting the nation's future in hock past their eyeballs, we at least owe those future generations the courtesy of knowing why. However, it may only be wishful thinking to suppose the public will stay tuned to these most important of concerns. In all likelihood they will simply change the channel. As Jay Leno again says, “We get the government we deserve.".

One huge minus to an early campaign involves the early elimination of candidates whose campaigns couldn't raise enough money to gain parity in the Caucasus. Well-financed candidates were able to gain early momentum while late bloomers like Ron Paul got sacrificed on the altar of grassroots. It looks as though special-interest groups will trump the mamas and papas every time. Five dollars here and ten dollars there don’t amount to much when parking fees alone can amount to $500,000 in the year before the primary. The fact that Hillary Clinton had to "lend her campaign" $5 million at this stage in the process just to "hang in there” with Senator Obama shows how big a role early money plays in today's political climate.

Only time will tell whether the nation's affairs will hold sway over our celebrities’ affairs. We can't, after all, expect a nation whose rocket scientists aren't smarter than a fifth grader to pay serious attention to a two-year discussion of election politics. One thing that should be clear after such lengthy debate, however, is that we should have forced the candidates to have clearly expressed their opinions and positions. Their party’s platform should also be abundantly clear.

Whether we can keep a President accountable for his promises is another issue entirely. We have seen the powers of the presidency expanded to the point where it is fair to say Congress is now irrelevant. The fact that a democratically controlled Congress is now merely a rubber stamp to a Republican president is unprecedented. The fact that war crimes and blatant civil rights violations occur without redress by the President and his men doesn't bode well for our country's future. In a recent commentary by Keith Obermann he notes that our vice president needs to be careful what countries he visits after office, lest he be hanged for war crimes. It sickens me to witness our country's leaders compared to Hitler's henchmen. However, if we citizens allow our leaders to invade sovereign nations without provocation, we deserve the comparison. Lord help us if we continue to allow our leaders to help themselves to the nation’s wealth from positions above the law.

Can We Be Bribed?

2008-02-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

Can We Be Bribed?

After enjoying the lowest approval rating in the nation's history, can both the Congress and the president buy their way back into the public’s favor? The proposed one-time tax refund of $600 per person or $1200 per household is designed to accomplish exactly that. Are we really that gullible? Can we really be expected to forgive all the lying, favoritism, and corruption perpetrated by this administration? After leading us into war and driving the nation into a recession, they propose to give the taxpayers some of their money back. Let us not forget that in order to give money back to us, they have to take it from us in the first place. And let us not forget if it weren’t for this administration wasting trillions of dollars on an illegal, immoral, and unpopular war in the first place, we wouldn’t be on the brink of a financial meltdown.

$162 billion. It sounds like a lot of money. However, if we look at the Bush/Cheney welfare to Halliburton program it is a drop in the bucket. According to the latest Bill Moyer exposé 200 billion dollars of the 400 billion dollars billed by Halliburton to the American taxpayer recently has disappeared. By disappeared I don’t mean failed to show up in Halliburton’s account. I mean disappeared as in the services billed to and paid for by the government were never performed. Buildings billed and paid for were never built. Outrageous double or triple billing for products and services were never reimbursed, or credits issued. In a recent investigation by the Senate, Condoleezza Rice attributed these disappearing funds to "accounting" errors. Theft, by any other name, is still theft. Isn’t it?

Most economists agree that this proposed "stimulus package” won’t stimulate anything. Because businessmen realize the bubble is of short duration, they won't be adding payroll or capacity to plants. It is fair to say a portion will go to paying down personal debt, which won’t stimulate anything either. All this measure really does is drive up the nation's debt. According to Bloomberg analysts, this president has the nation on cruise control straight over a cliff. If anyone in the private sector proposed such a reckless policy, they would be on their way to an institution and fitted for a strait jacket.

We used to be able to tell the bandits from the good guys because the bandits had the decency to wear masks. Now the bandits are leading our nation and stealing us blind with the tacit approval of congress. Since the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde's are above the law they plunder and pillage at will. Unfortunately the scope of the nation's greedy plunderers extends around the globe. Because the country gets no benefit from the exploitation of our treasury, the value of the dollar is in steep decline around planet. Because our dollar is still the Globe's primary currency we are taking the rest of the world down with us.

Now the administration is proposing the largest federal budget of all time, at a time when we can least afford it. A large portion of this budget will go to increasing this war effort and increasing military spending. While the world should be at peace, this pugnacious administration is creating an ever larger war machine and using it to invade sovereign nations without proven provocation.. At the same time, they propose cutting popular programs like Medicare and Social Security and other social programs like health care for the nations’ poorest children. The Third Reich mentality couldn't possibly have arisen again, could it?

The Sellout

2008-01-31T16:35:00.000-08:00

In true Barnum and Bailey fashion, the Bush administration has used the hucksters' credo, you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, to great advantage.
According to Bill Moyer’s Journal, the Bush foreign-policy camp was investigated by two independent groups, The Senate For Public Integrity and The Fund For Independence In Journalism, to determine how many false statements were made prior to the invasion of Iraq. They concluded that the top seven officials, including the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State, gave false or misleading statements at least 935 times. On at least 532 separate occasions, Saddam Hussein was said to have links to Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction; statements later proven to be false. In his words, Bill Moyer states “the war in Iraq was a public relations propaganda campaign based on one big lie". Nevertheless, we are still in Iraq for an indeterminate length of time and at a continuing cost in the billions.
We the taxpayers are spending millions of dollars annually for junkets to the Middle East to keep our lawmakers informed, but we should wonder what they do there. Congressmen and senators are the most highly paid and pampered public servants in our nation. However, only a few voices seem willing to speak out against "the lie" and to vote against funding a clearly illegal and immoral war. It would seem to be clear that laws need to be passed providing penalties for those lying to the American public while in the publics' employ. How this can be done is hard to imagine. After all, this group has been responsible for approving massive pay raises and perks for themselves while working Americans' paychecks have remained flat over the past seven years. For a group which considers themselves above taxation (that's right folks, congressional and senatorial salaries are not subject to federal taxes) it would be completely unrealistic to expect self-censure. Although they make a huge deal out of consensual oral sex, oral obfuscation and outright lying are under their radar.
Somewhere along the line the reason to become a public servant and to put the public interest first has become an ideal whose time has passed. With big government in bed with big business, the resulting bastard child is the sellout of America. The poor boy from the backwoods of Illinois has no chance of moving up the political ladder while keeping integrity and honor intact.
People who keep score have determined a winning presidential candidate needs a war chest of upwards of $100 million to win an election. If you think anyone stands a chance of raising that kind of money on principles, think again. Every politician begins his career (one would hope) as an idealist. After a few backroom compromises are made to get the support of special interest groups, idealism is replaced with pragmatism. The reasoning is simple. With ideals, I don't get elected; with compromises I do. By the time anyone reaches a high public office, he (she) has compromised their soul. To recall an old phrase, once you have them by their purse strings, their principles and politics will follow.

Bob Parmelee Parmsplace

Actors As Politicians

2008-01-19T11:41:00.000-08:00

When Shirley Temple Black, child actress, was appointed Ambassador to Ghana I figured, strange, but why not. After all, supporters of political parties had been rewarded with special appointments since time began. Besides, she was loved both here and abroad. She did such a great job she was given a much more sensitive appointment many years later as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
My jaw hit the floor when Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and then, of course, president. It didn’t seem to me that a movie idol turned Screen Actors Guild president had the background to lead a state government, let alone the country. But as history is my witness, he is credited with doing a great job and is considered one of the nation’s best and most popular leaders.
Others like Sonny Bono and Jesse Ventura and Clint Eastwood have further proven that show business is as good a background as political science to be a spokesperson for the people. And, obviously, being a household name before running for public office doesn’t hurt one’s chances at getting elected. In fact, a previous career in front of a camera may be one of the better foundations for public speaking. It sure wouldn’t have hurt the king of gaffs, George Bush, to have gotten some practice before stepping in front of an audience.
It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that our constitution prevents another great actor from becoming president. I am speaking of Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course. He is proving to be a very capable governor, following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps somewhat. The fact that he was not born in this country would seem to have little to do with his leadership ability. As we can certainly see, being born in this country has little to do with a person’s ability to lead this nation either.

Bob Parmelee

Has Tom Robbins Had It Right All Along?

2007-12-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

pan, nymphIn one of my favorite books, author Tom Robbins makes a case for a way to promote longevity which doesn’t require vitamins or supplements of any kind. In “The Jitterbug Perfume” he follows the 1000 year life of King Alabar during the 10 centuries prior to the 21st. During feudal times it was customary to execute the king by means of a poisoned egg. All that was necessary for this to occur was a single strand of grey hair or a flagging performance in the private chambers of the king. This policy was to ensure a strong and virile leader sat on the throne, since his job was to lead knights to battle to protect the kingdom. His success was rewarded with a generous harem to assure bountiful heirs to the throne.
As the story goes, when the time came, the job of administrating the fatal poisoned egg fell to the king’s number one consort, or queen. Because of his unusual wisdom and compassion, Alabar’s queen decided to conspire with him to circumvent his death. When a traitorous grey hair was discovered by the court magician the king’s execution was ordained. As planned, the egg’s lethal dose was diluted, and after his faked death the queen dug him up and he fled the kingdom. He traveled East, and after spending an enjoyable time with Pan and his nymphs, he wandered into a secret sect who had discovered the secret to eternal life. He spent enough time with them to learn the basics of their ways and so was able to maintain himself in the prime of life. Although breathing properly and eating right were cornerstones of this sect’s secret, the Tom Robbins twist for a long life was to fool the body’s genes into believing a man’s reproductive powers were still necessary and in use.
The basic premise is that our DNA has but one function; to assure the survival of the species. To this end our DNA will perform the job of cellular cleansing and faithful cell replication as long as they believe the body is still performing it’s procreative function. Once our DNA determines we are no longer procreating it slacks off and ageing and cellular degradation begin.
Tom Robbins’ theory received an unexpected confirmation from an anthropology study of hunter/gather societies. A mathematical model by Stanford University biologist Shripad D. Tuliapurkar and colleagues affirmed that human evolution would have preserved genes that favor both male and female survival for as long as they can reproduce.
So the moral of the story is to use it or lose it. It seems our sex lives may have a great deal to do with the health and length of our lives. Sounds fair to me.
Bob Parmelee parmsplace.com

Science to the Rescue

2007-12-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

After the E-Coli /Spinach disaster of 2006 which caused several deaths and many severe illnesses in over half the states, little has been heard. However, the repercussions are still reverberating throughout the farming community. In a typical display of overkill farmers have been subjected to hoards of auditors. Among their duties these auditors roam the fields looking for animal feces. Crop circles are then drawn around these “piles” and no crops within 25 ft. are supposed to be harvested. I am no farmer but I can imagine trying to dodge a field full of circles and trying to make a living out of what is left. At great cost fences are being erected to keep the free roaming animals out of the crops. Animals known to carry the E-Coli bacterium include cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and deer. Ponds are being filled in and huge buffer zones are being established around irrigation water sources and livestock waste depositories. However, the invasion doesn’t stop with land animals. We need also to be concerned with snails, frogs and tadpoles, slugs, rats and field mice, and, of course, air born attacks from flies butterflies, and birds, etc.
Obviously we cannot protect ourselves from anything which might carry a disease. To suggest we can sterilize everything roaming millions of acres along with the ground they cover is ridiculous. However, science may soon provide a way to do one better. It seems E-Coli and other bacteria have a sweet tooth. Tests have indicated these bugs have an affinity for particular types of sugars. When nanoparticles of iron are coated with a pathogens’ particular favorite, they readily bond to the coating. Passing these solutions by a magnet can draw away an astounding 88% of the pathogens in as little as 45 minutes of exposure.
Because nanoparticles are extremely cheap to produce they could assist in decontaminating not just food, but blood reserves, water sources, etc. Virtually anything the little bugs live in we can trick them out of. Isn’t science grand?

Let's Talk About Accuracy

2007-12-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

A recent article in Science News discussed the latest satellite used to measure earth’s ice sheets. To calibrate the altitude measuring instruments on board the satellite the scientists use a salt flat in Bolivia. This salt flat was determined by previous tests to be flat over an area approximately 25 miles wide by 30 miles long. This New Jersey sized area was crisscrossed by SUVs with GPS antennas mounted to their roofs. The scientists collected data every 100 meters (about the length of a football field). What amazed me most about the survey is not that they discovered that the field wasn’t flat. What blew my mind was that they were able to tell that the vehicles were riding about 5mm (less than ¼ of an inch) higher off the ground at the end of the day when their fuel tanks were almost empty. The salt flat results indicated that the highest point was actually about 30 inches higher than the lowest point, about 30 miles away.
Now let’s talk about global warming. The same degree of accuracy is telling us the world temperature is rising at unprecedented rates. However, large numbers of senior legislators (read George Bush and cronies) are still disputing these results and their urgency. The ice caps are, in fact disappearing, and the oceans are indeed rising. These people who dispute the findings have no scientific background and are therefore able to doubt the accuracy of the scientists and their instruments.
What surprises me most about our country is not that these people can deny or bury anything contrary to their belief system under a mountain of B.S. What most amazes me is that we continue to elect these ignorant people to the highest offices in the land. If we don’t wake up soon, the damage we continue to do to the environment will be our undoing. Who cares if alternative energy development costs the oil ticket a few billions? They didn’t deserve the money anyway. Our children deserve better.
Bob Parmelee parmsplace.com

Political Wit and Satire

2007-12-12T07:17:00.001-08:00

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." -Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot; And suppose you were a member of Congress....But then I repeat myself. -Mark Twain

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. -Winston Churchill

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. - George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -G Gordon Liddy

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. -James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. -Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases:If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it, and if it stops moving, subsidize it. -Ronald Reagan (1986)

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. -Will Rogers

If you think health care is expensive now; wait until you see what it costs when it's free! -P.J. O'Rourke

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politic won't take an interest in you! -Pericles (430 B.C.)

No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session. -Mark Twain (1866

Talk is cheap...except when Congress does it. -Unknown

The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. -Ronald Reagan

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. -Winston Churchill

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. -Mark Twain

There is no distinctly Native American criminal class...save Congress. -Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. -Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995)

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. -Thomas Jefferson