Gangsters ain't what they used to be...

An amazing modernization has taken place, not just in our country but all over the world among the criminal hierarchy. Just a century or two ago you could see the bandits coming a mile away. They were the guys wearing masks.


Today's gangsters/banksters are likely to be wearing Armani suits and alligator suede shoes while lurking behind designer shades. They would be the guys with the manicured hands, $400 haircuts, and million-dollar smiles.


What is amazing is that the public, in spite of the fact that they are the ones being taken advantage of by these guys, can't help but worship well-dressed crooks. Take John Gotti, the dapper Don, for example. The fact that he led an organization whose members were all murders and hard-core criminals actually added to his appeal.


Ignoring humanity's principles with aplomb, the gangsta groupies fawn over criminal enterprise overlords like self flagellates before a statue of Christ. The bigger the crimes they get credit for the more prestigious these Dark Lords become. Many of our youth today admire and attempt to emulate these bad guys instead of admiring and aspiring to be the President.


I suppose it doesn't really matter whether it is the gangster, bankster, or some branch of government that is exploiting the little guy. In the end we are all treated like the sheep we are taught to be.

Hubble Has Changed The Odds

The new orbiting Hubble telescope has just added an alarming dimension to humanity’s concept of our place in the cosmos. Where we once thought we were all alone in the universe, it now appears that our galaxy must be teeming with life. We just went from being on God's arm to being on the edge of nowhere in a tiny galaxy far from the center of our expanding universe.


Recent Hubble photos of distant stars have revealed the presence of planets in orbit around most of them. That means that among the billions of stars we can currently see there must be hundreds of billions or trillions of planets and moons that we can't yet see. If our planet can support life I guess it would only be fair and make sense to suppose a similar planet or Earth sized moon could do the same.


We just lately identified a planet around a far sun which has a water-based atmosphere similar to our own. The major difference between Earth and that distant planet is it is twice our size and much hotter and wetter. Nevertheless, life forms we have living here in our oceans next to thermal vents and lava flows could probably survive there.


Out of approximately 500 planets recently discovered orbiting suns within our galaxy at least one has been determined to have an organic atmosphere similar to ours here on earth, capable of supporting life similar to or identical to ours. Therefore, the odds of another planet besides our own supporting life of some sort somewhere out in the cosmos just switched from zero to infinite.


Can you imagine the about-face all the pretenders to "sacred truths" and their devout followers of "divine inspiration" will need to make to get back in step with this new reality?

The Grease, er Greece, trap phenomenon.

Talk about an economic coup! When I think about it I realize just what a miracle the tiny little nation of Greece has managed for its citizens over the last half a century.


First of all the country has had free education and free healthcare for all of its citizens for decades. I may be off by a day or two or a country or two, but I believe the Greeks have afforded themselves the longest paid vacations of any country on the planet; and to think they get the spend their vacation on the Mediterranean.

On top of that they have also afforded themselves the smallest income and property tax rates on their continent. As a consequence the Greeks have had the largest growth in personal wealth in the world recently and, per capita, Greek citizens are among the worlds richest.

Now you may ask yourself how the Greeks afforded all these benefits and growth in personal wealth since they manufacture very little, export less than they import, and their only claim to fame is their shipping industry, which they tax at a ridiculously low rate.

Well the answer obvious once you think about it. They borrowed the money.
Talk about brilliant, wow. Greece muscled its way into the top 10 best standards of living on the planet for over half a century on other people's money. Smooth operators! But now what? You can stiff the fiddler but Shylock, the banker, sooner or later will have his pound of flesh.

Now the entire continent is forced to share in Grecian deflation and they are not pleased about it. Greece is like a close friend or relative who invites everybody to dinner at a really classy restaurant and then slips away before paying the tab, or leaving a tip.

On the other hand, the whole continent, with a few exceptions, primarily in the North, has been treating itself to the best that socialism can offer at the bequest of the best that capitalism can offer. Humm. So, have the European peasants finally managed to slip it to their gold plated masters?

Ironically, it is the richest in Europe who'll end up standing good for the largess the entire citizenry has enjoyed. People with little stand to lose little, but the poor have still enjoyed the benefits provided by their most generous leaders over these past decades.

The common, middle-class man will have gotten away with a far greater standard of living than he could've afforded for himself and yet he has no worry about future recourse since it is not possible to place a claim on past healthcare, educational, and other social benefits.

How it will all play out is hard to say. If the truth be told all countries have been borrowing to provide a better standard of living for their citizens. In Europe the whole structure of the euro community trembles at the first sign of a leak in the dyke, AKA the Greece default trap, for good reason. My bet is that the stronger European countries will have to bail out the weaker ones for their own good; it is also their cheapest alternative by far. No country, let alone an entire continent, can afford a deep depression without a revolution.

So just how bad is a Greece default? When you put it into perspective, just one of our companies, Apple, has more cash in the bank than the entire Greek default debt. Apple could buy Greece lock stock and barrel. So a default is not that tragic really. AIG, Lehman Brothers, and a few national banks have had far more impact than the entire Greek debacle ever could. Ireland survived, and so will Greece.

What scares Europeans most is that the Greek debt problem exposes the entire continent to Greek style belt tightening measures since they all have been living beyond their means. No one wants to give up steak for beans.

Consider doing the devil's work.

This is not a topic for the table, but...

From what I can gather the pay is fantastic! In fact, it is whatever your heart desires. The perks for doing the devil's work are, for all intents and purposes, infinite, and more to the point, immediate. You do what you want when you want, to whom you want, and all you need to do is to pay a little tribute; that is, until Judgment Day.

(Caution: don't cross anyone already doing the devil's work in your area. You may find your judgment day comes sooner rather than later.)


The tribute you pay is a percentage of your take. You donate to the right church (the right church being any group of influential people dedicated to their own interests and who will grease your wheels in exchange for you facilitating their cause) and you can do whatever you want without fear of interference, or if it comes down to it, fear of prosecution. The worst that can happen to you is that maybe you are forced to relocate; oh well, once busted soon harvested so it's time to move along anyway.

God fearing people can rationalize being used and exploited all their lives by believing that sooner or later those doing the devil's work will get their just desserts -- and they would be right. The biggest criminals and cretins get their just (or unjust) rewards day after day, year after year. You can try to convince yourself they will pay the ultimate price come judgment day; eternal damnation.

The master criminals' universal response to the claim they will get their "just rewards", eternal damnation, is "so prove it"; kinda like the show me or shove it digital finger response. Personally speaking, I'm still waiting for proof of punishment of any of the devil's advocates today before I can believe in the afterlife taking care of today's bad actors; otherwise, living by the rules and playing the game fairly is for fools.

Death is not complicated…

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

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.

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?