Pretty Penny

Clear – Rush, Beck, Hannity, Savage, Romney, Bain

2012-02-01T09:54:00.000-08:00

Clear Channel owns more radio stations (850) than anyone else in the United States. They also own Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, among others. Needless to say, Clear Channel basically owns conservative talk radio in the United States. So who owns Clear Channel? Well, it turns out that Bain Capital is one of the primary owners of Clear Channel.

http://www.infowars.com/bain-capital-owns-clear-channel-rush-limbaugh-sean-hannity-glenn-beck-michael-savage-etc/

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

Senator Burr and Insider Trading Vote

2012-01-31T09:30:00.000-08:00

Called Senator Burr. Asked why he voted to allow inside trading by members of congress? Woman says Burr voted against making insider trading illegal because he feels like it is already illegal and there is no need to vote on it. I told her I was stunned when I saw that last night. I had heard that two senators had voted against it and I wondered who on earth those two idiots were, then I saw Burr was one of the two idiots. SO I have a feeling 1) that he is playing games with me. 2) One of the two of us is dumb. 3) If he really meant well, he has a HELL of a communication problem. Then I told her he needs to clear this up immediately.

Open Tweet to Keith Olbermann

2011-11-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

This morning my wife asked me a dumb question while we were eating breakfast and reading the morning paper. She had just read Paul Krugman’s column and was talking about the “Occupy Wallstreet” and its offspring in other towns, and how the anarchists had now began joining in on the protest movements. She paused for a moment and asked: “Who are these ‘anarchists’?” Then, looking at me, “Really?”

I casually replied “Well they’re ‘anarchists’, you know. There are photos made of them from time to time, they are always dressed in black, they all seem to be men, look like they are in great physical shape, they have their faces covered so you can’t see their features and usually have hoodies on.” I added, “They spray graffiti on property, break windows of shops and set small fires.” She was still staring at me, so I continued “They usually show up a day or two after a protest has been going on and they become the reason the authorities have to step in and shut down the protest movement.” I thought for a moment and added “You would think the police could put plainclothes men in among the protestors and have them catch some of the “anarchists” – then we would know for sure.”

She was still staring at me with her eyebrows now raised, so I continued on “Sometimes they do capture one or two of them – the police do – but nothing ever seems to come of that. They just seem to disappear.” Then I asked HER a dumb question: “Yeah, who ARE they? Really?” I thought for a moment and then wondered out loud, "Could it possibly be that the 'anarchists' REALLY are policemen dressed in black with their faces covered and with hoodies on?” But I really couldn't believe that a policeman, or a military guy for that matter would betray his oath to office and do something like that. Then my mind began running through other possibilities such as Xe (nee Blackwater), or DynCorp, maybe Triple Canopy, or ArmorGroup . . .”

I probably looked like my mind was boggled (it really wasn't), so my wife asked. “But if that were true, who would hire these “anarchists”? Since my face still looked blank she continued, “Who would want to break up a protest movement, like those at economic summits, and these Occupy movements? Who would profit from that?”

So I said “I will write my congressman.” She shook her head. “I will write our senators.” Then I shouted “I know, I’ll write Paul Krugman!” She nodded her head and said “Write Keith Olbermann, he’s following the Occupy people.”

“Great” I replied, “and he's pushing 'tweeting' – I will tweet Keith Olbermann!"

I might also try to tweet Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell too, maybe somebody will look into this.”

Then maybe we can ALL find out who these “anarchists” REALLY are.

The Great Giggle – Oh!

2011-10-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

Suave, debonair, possessor of commanding presence, threatener of succession from the union he is. One who says he was hand-picked by God and told by God Himself to run, and his wife agrees with that. Evidently, God apparently meant to run far away from seeking any higher office, and Rick misunderstood and he now stands more naked in some ways than either Adam or Eve ever were.

New Hampshire found him grinning,

smirking and dancing (alone with his lectern)

happily squirming, like a

tadpole swimming. Really just a GiggleOh

Suave and debonair,

everywhere he goes

now people know the truth –

that he’s really just a GiggleOh

This grinning and giggling guy

thinks he should have his finger

on America’s nuclear trigger

should another coyote appear on the road. Oh no Giggle Oh!

And the worst part is he said the next day that he hadn’t been drinking and he hadn’t had a medical injection for any kind of pain. He said that was the way he sometimes is. Hmmmmm. I guess that depends on what the definition of “is” is. Or was.

At any rate he has a LOT of money behind him. That only goes to show how the American government "works", where the guys who want to run the world, but who could not ever be elected to ANYthing, those people like Rove and Yoo and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and others, some even worse than those, have to find a good-looking horse to ride in on the main stage. Then, if there is money behind all that, from some corporate bosses who want to run the world their way, then it is a done deal. Especially now that the Supreme Court has ruled that dollars are free speech and corporations are people.

Gotcha? Ha ha. Not ME!

2011-10-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain really is a different breed of political cat. For example, he proudly told reporter David Brody the other day that he was on the lookout for “Gotcha” questions. He gave an example “When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, ‘You know, I don’t know. Do you know?” And he continued “knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world.”

Wow. Surely Cain must know Uzbekistan is pretty significant in today’s world. It plays a major part in helping supply American troops in Afghanistan and also a number of corporations are very active in that country. Now you can agree or not with the war in Afghanistan, but surely no one thinks we should just abandon them there. But? Well, maybe he just didn’t know.

At any rate, Herman Cain just “gotcha’d” himself. That’s one way to stay ahead of your competition and leave them scratching their heads. Well, Cain is not the first candidate to Gotcha himself, he is just the first one I have seen who seems proud of it.

This is the guy who is "not a Washington insider"? Well, that's what he said. Of course he WAS a lobbyist. He lobbied for the National Restaurant Association. He lobbied hard to get legislators to continue letting their patrons smoke in the restaurants and fought hard against lowering the level of alcohol that determines the status of "DUI". He also knows the Koch brothers pretty well, and apparently receives a good bit of money from them. He also incurred a trail of two, three, four? sexual episodes, all paid off now with a pledge of silence obtained in exchange for that money. Apparently there is a lot more than just some of the world's nations that are small and insignificant. Ask Herman Cain.

Republican Candidates for . . . ?

2011-10-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

What are these guys campaigning for? Are they trying to be elected Speaker of the House? That’s where the tax bills originate. Surely they know that don’t they? That’s in the US Constitution. Article I, Section 7.1 reads “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” And, of course I “assume” that both Perry and Cain have asked the permission of Boehner and Cantor and DeMint . . . right? If either of those two get elected president, and the House of Representatives stays republican and the Senate goes republican too, will they just do whatever the new president wants them to do? For the first time in history? Or do Perry and Cain know – or care – anything about the constitution? Maybe they are running for Dictator of the United States?

And Cain was talking about an amendment to the constitution. He said, eloquently I thought, that if the House and Senate and the states of the union passed a constitutional amendment that he liked, he would sign it. Like maybe if he didn’t sign it, it wouldn’t become a part of the constitution? Surely he knows that the president doesn’t even get to sign an amendment. Of course he must? Doesn’t he? Ahhhhhh, but of course! Dictators would!

Or maybe, just maybe, the republicans need smoke and mirrors to detract from President Obama’s constant reminders that the House and Senate need to get busy raising taxes on the richest people in the world so America can start hiring teachers to teach our kids, and policemen to protect us and firemen to come to our homes when we call them, and also hire some new workers who can go out and work jobs.
The republicans have nothing to say about this, don't even want to talk about these things so they talk about Flat Taxes and 999s and so on.

How to Fix Congress

2011-10-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

These are not my ideas (actually they are, but it is not my writing). However, the persons who sent it to me did so ONLY under the condition that I would pass it on to as many people as I could. Here goes:

(Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election).

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only
3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011
1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present &future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen.
Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!

Telephone Calls to Congress about Gun Control.

2011-10-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

Today I called Senators Burr and Hagen, Representative McHenry, and Speaker Boehner about gun control in reference to the shooting in California yesterday in which 9 people were shot, 8 of them killed. All this because a guy was unhappy with his love life, or his wife, or girlfriend or something.

This was not an isolated incident. Every month 1,000 Americans are killed by gunfire. (*) They are victims of American Terrorists. Egyptian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans with airplanes on 9-11-01. Because of that act we went to war on the other side of world, spent more than a TRILLION dollars, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet that SAME number of Americans were killed AGAIN before the Christmas Day which followed the attack on 9-11-2001!

AND 3,000 more Americans have been killed by American Terrorists EVERY three months since then. That is 120,000 Americans gunned down and killed by American Terrorists since 9-11-2001. That's so far – we're still counting – and still shooting.

Isn’t this a national problem? What is the solution we are given? Arm everybody? Great - then a loud noise in a restaurant, or department store or mall and a number of people pull their guns out and what next? I hear a noise and pull my gun out, somebody else shoots at something, then I shoot at him, somebody else shoots at me, three or four other people shoot at him and me? Then everybody starts shooting? Huh?

I realize that a lot of Republican Party members of Congress have taken pledges to other organizations, which include Grover Norquist and the NRA, and who knows who or what else, and they place those pledges ABOVE their oath of office, and honor those pledges BEFORE they honor their oath of office, but STILL – doesn’t something need to be done?

All I ask is that we just start a democratic dialog in Congress and begin talking about our problem. Bring it out from under the rug, and talk about it. Will you help me?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States (!n the year 2000, 84 people died each day by gunshot for suicide and 34 each day were homicide deaths.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state

n 2010 - the latest year for which detailed statistics are available - there were 12,996 murders in the US. Of those, 8,775 were caused by firearms. (excluding Florida and Illinois).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18herbert.html Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. . . more than a million people have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr. King was shot to death in 1968.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/more/facts.html

Number of murders committed in 1995 in the US:	20,043
Number of murders committed with a firearm:	13,673
Number of murders committed with a handgun:	11,198
(Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1995)

Perry and Social Security?

2011-09-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

Let me see . . . How can I get this straight? Governor Perry thinks the Social Security thing was a misguided attempt by people who didn't know what they were doing . . . Because 70 years ago they were overly reacting to problems they had? This from the King of the Tea Party?

Standard and Poor's Trick

2011-08-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

At first it might seem justifiable that S&P had nailed the Republican Party for letting its Tea Party wing drag it into offering the United State's credit rating on a stone for sacrifice to their principles. And in that case, Good! That's what they deserve. Maybe the Republican Party will cast those demons out! And it is clear now that the Republicans will be back next time holding the national credit rating hostage again until President Obama kneels before them again. Also we must remember that some of the GOP presidential hopefuls said the debt rating was a joke. Bachman said she would not vote to raise it. And then the Republicans ran it too close to the wire.

But a moment's reflection reveals that this has happened before to other countries. It was not a real big deal to them at first. Not at first. Their interest rates did go up. Then about three months later their interest rates went up again. And then about three months after that, they went up again. So somebody is paying a lot more money than they were just three months ago and even more than they were paying six months before. A lot of money is rolling around. Somebody is taking some of that home.

I suspect – but can't prove (wish I could!) – that millions and millions of dollars are now poised to move to those individuals who made that decision in S&P to downgrade the US credit rating.

Contempt of Congress

2011-08-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

Please don’t call me to testify. Oh, I can go anywhere and talk – and say whatever I might want to say. But if I am called to testify, I will be sworn in and instructed to tell the truth. Then I will have to tell the Congress of the United States of America that I hold them in contempt. And I do hold the Congress of the United States in contempt because of the following – which is not a complete list:

The lack of jobs for Americans who were laid off by great corporations who fired them and who also out-sourced their jobs to other countries where labor costs were minimal and those corporations could thrust their profits higher than ever before, and achieve great personal enrichment of those few who run these corporations and share that great profit with nobody - except of course, certain members of the Congress of the United States of America. No wonder the Congress didn't intervene even though it has the power to regulate commerce and has regulated the action of corporations in the past. Maybe that's why a lot of them got a cut of the action.

The protection of the gun manufacturers so that America has become the “Gun Merchant” of the entire world. We sell guns to foreigners who use them to fight our own troops. And guns are freely used in America to settle our differences and shoot down people in shopping malls, universities, main streets of our country and in our homes. We entered into a ten year long war when foreign terrorists killed less than 3,000 people in the World Trade Tower attack in September, and have spent Trillions of dollars avenging that horrible act. Of course American terrorists then killed 3,000 more Americans between 9-11-2001 and the following Christmas day - with handguns. And American terrorists CONTINUE, ten years later, killing 3,000 Americans in EVERY three month period – or should I say “season”? The American Congress continues to say “Well, we got a right to defend ourselves don't we?.”

The persecution of gays and lesbians. These people are what they are because that is the way they were created. About 10% of all Russians are gay, about 10% of all Asians are gay, about 10% of all blacks are gay, and so on. The Good Book says that mankind was made in the image of God, and it also says that God makes no mistakes, so I must assume that God is gay. Or at least He makes these mistakes on purpose, like he did you and me – but members of the US Congress don’t like what God has done, and want that part of His work to be not REAL American citizens – unless they hide who God has made them.

The acts of treason committed daily by congressmen who refuse to vote in higher taxes because they have taken a pledge to Grover Norquist never to raise taxes ever again. According to the Constitution it is the job of Congress to “levy taxes”. More than 200 members of Congress now are being sworn in to office to do their job and support the Constitution but they have this prior pledge they made to Grover that takes precedent over their oath to the American people, their constituents and the Constitution of the United States.

This week’s refusal to bail out the American economy which may condemn our nation to ten more years of recession or possible entrance into another depression. The private sector of the American economy is sick. People have been fired and their jobs out-sourced to other countries and ten years of wars along with great all encompassing tax reductions . ONLY the public sector can fund the immediate employment of great numbers of workers by, yes borrowing money – which is available – and cheap – and put those people to work repairing roads and bridges, building light rail systems which will bring us up to the level of the rest of the world. But the congress says we have to pay off all our debts as soon as we can even if this results in reductions to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That is where the corner grocery store, the drug store and gasoline station begin laying off more people. That's where those stores call their suppliers and tell them to reduce their next orders.

Providing money for troops to engage in war without raising taxes to pay for those endeavors which depress the general economy. For facilitating the operation of great wealthy corporations that NEED wars to make their profits. Then for fighting wars endlessly – America has been at war constantly during my lifetime, except when we were still in the Great Depression. The GD#1, we may begin calling it now.

Eliminating 40 to 50 million Americans from any form of health care, and providing care for the rest of America that costs twice as much as people in other developed countries pay. Meanwhile the health of the American workforce, probably our greatest natural resource, falls into the level of a pretty good third world nation.

Incarcerating more members of its citizenry than any other nation in the world in both total number and percentage. And then for facilitating the operation of great wealthy corporations that NEED more prisoners behind bars to increase their profits.

For insisting that a business that makes a NET profit of more than $250,000 in a year is a “small business”.

For providing subsidies to the largest corporations in the entire world who are now making the greatest profits ever made by anyone or anything, anywhere anytime. Yet those same corporations pay NO taxes, and the American taxpayers who do pay taxes, also pay these corporations subsidies to please continue their work.

Well, this is enough for one evening. There is more. A lot more. Sounds like another book. At any rate I will have to make a list. Please let me know if you know of other reasons why the American Congress should be held in contempt.

Then if I do get called, and sworn in, I can fillibuster.

The Debt is Saved but the Dream is Dying

2011-08-02T21:34:00.001-07:00

The “full faith and credit” of the United States is saved! And at the last minute, too! What wonderful . . .

But there is something missing. In fact there are a lot of somethings missing. A sickness seems present. A pollution seems slowly spreading across the nation. We are like people who have just received very, very bad news. Stuff like that takes a while to seep in.

Much of this centers around the president. He was the one we were expecting to step forward and bang on the pots and pans, to blow the trumpet and to stampede the wild creatures who attacked. But no. Obama played it Very Cool. I suspect much of this was about the upcoming election.

Obama has no democratic opposition. He will be nominated and will run. And he will probably be reelected. Largely because the republicans are in such disarray. They have NO one to run, and those who are likely to be nominated are biding their time and hedging their bets.

But there is a blast coming from the south. It will blow all the other republican “candidates” out of the picture. I am talking about Rick Perry, governor of Texas. He will be able to control the republican party and he can capture the Tea Party people. He is not yet fully visible, but as he has already indicated, he senses that God has called him. Plus – he has a LOT of very rich people ready to back him.

However. If I were a republican, and if I were looking for the best possible person to be my president of the United States, I would have to think HARD about voting for anyone else than Obama. Sure, I know he “runs” as a democrat, but hey – look closely. As the Good Book says, “ . . . by its fruits, you shall know what kind of tree it is.”

If I were a republican, I think I would have to vote for Obama.

Loughner Declared Sane!

2011-07-23T21:19:00.000-07:00

A ruling from the United States Supreme Court this afternoon stated that Mr. Loughner " . . . was not an insane citizen in a normal nation, but rather was a normal product of an insane nation."

The 9-0 ruling was accompanied by a statement from Chief Justice Roberts who wrote that Mr. Loughner's actions epitomized the spirit of the country, as exemplified by the courageous refusal of the Congress to pass ANY laws concerning the regulation of hand guns or ammunition. "This," he added, "in spite of stupendous and overwhelming allegations that such laws might occasionally save a life or two."

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that Loughner's dedication to his own personal ideals and deeply-felt needs was an important prelude to the "Cap, Cut and Balance" legislation which passed in the House of Representatives and failed in the Senate by only 5 votes, this despite the understanding that its passage would result in some 700,000 Americans losing their jobs. “Mr Lougner showed us that we really don’t need to see through the results of the actions we know in our heart that it is the right action to take.” he concluded.

Justice Scalia pointed out that Mr. Loughner's willingness to do what would "normal people would regard as unthinkable", has been a sustaining inspiration to members of the Republican Party and its Command Center, formally known as the "Tea Party", and which is now more and more often referred to as "THE Party", as they engage in negotiations with the president over the Debt Ceiling. Probably without Loughner’s display of leadership”, Scalia continued, “ . . . members of The Party would probably have been unwilling to confront the many economic appraisals that refusal to raise that debt ceiling could somehow taint the nation.” He concluded “Now, The Party is encouraged to just pull that trigger and get it over with!”

Finally, Justice Alito wrote about the effect of “Mr. Loughner’s demonstration that “Any definitive action, especially if it is compelling action, can divert attention from mindless chatter over unimportant issues and show the rest of us how to accomplish those things that really NEED to be done, like our ruling which concerned campaign contributions by corporations.” Then he smiled and quietly whispered behind his hand, "Bang-bang."

Open Letter to President Obama

2011-07-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

Mr. Obama, it is my observation that the Republican Party is now waging a War of Terrorism against the old, the sick and the poor people of America.

It is threatening to shove the people of America over the cliff of historic prosperity into the abyss of financial misery unless they, the Republican Party, get the American public to give up the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other entitlements they have earned and built – PLUS – agree to never raise taxes on rich people or corporations again.

The Republican Party is declaring that the American Government is now dead, and they are the rulers of a new American Fascist State.

We have learned the hard way, and many other countries have too, that to give in to terrorists - and that’s what this threat rightly is - only encourages them to continue to demand some other trophy, and then another and then more. Eventually, we will HAVE to fight them.

My take on this is to let it happen now. Let the country fail and lose its “full faith and credit”, let the rest of the world fall with us into another great depression. Even THAT would be better than to remain dangling and twisting, being picked apart, bite by bite, by those who have sold their own souls to corporate greed and who are busy building a purely fascist nation. Fascism needs leaders and it need workers. it does not need – indeed, it cannot tolerate – a middle class.

We know how to build a country. We can do it again. We can build a new world, and we can build one that operates without its “full faith and credit” being devoted to the great corporations that need wars and prisons to increase their profits. The old industrial world has changed now anyway. The great age of industry based on oil and coal, nuclear power and big automobiles and endless highways is diminishing, it is clearly ready to transition into a different engine of power. New industries beckon us to enter into a new economy increasingly powered by solar and wind energies and using information technologies and new advances in medicine.

We would eventually evolve into such a condition anyway, but not if we are workers in a fascist state making millions and billions for our corporate owners.

Republicans and Obama versus US?

2011-07-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

Well, the last act if the great play is ready to begin but we know how it will end now. And here's what will make the audience scream in agony and tear their hair and rend their garments and smear their faces with ashes: just before the curtain descends, the main player, Obama, will announce to the world that Social Security and Medicare will take significant hits. He says they will remain strong, but everyone in the audience will know that is a lie.

The barbarians, played by republicans, will remain at the gate, and continue to shake it and shout, but their tone of despair will be as fake as Obama's ring of endurance.

How do we know the outcome so early? Some of the key players have tipped off that they know the outcome. How could they all know it? That would have to be because they have been briefed. We're talking now about the Chamber of Commerce, among others. Also the great players on Wall Street. These are the people who would be the great big losers if the debt ceiling does not get raised. If there was a chance that it would not be done, they would by now be conspicuous by their actions on Capitol Hill.

So they know. And they know more than that. They also know that it is all a great play so that the tension can be raised so high, that Obama can cave. He would have to know that too. And that's where the play comes in. Because it will all look like Obama navigated a dangerous strait, that he brought his ship in safely and only had to concede a minor amount. But that amount will bring an end to the "Social Welfare" programs that the republicans hate so much.

That's my hunch. I hope I am wrong.

Burr, McHenry, Republicans. Treason?

2011-07-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

The current problems in the American economy were caused by a) the freeing of the economic markets from regulations by the federal government, 2) the reduction of tax rates on the wealthiest people and great corporations and c) unfunded wars that have dragged on for 10 years and which have funneled enormous amounts of money to certain major corporations that NEED wars to increase their profits.

Now the inequities of that recession are being portioned out to the middle class and the poor people of America by threatening the dismantling of the Social Security and Medicare programs that we have built and paid for, and the destruction of Medicaid. Meanwhile, the richest people America has ever had are making more money than ever before largely due to the laying off of American workers and the out-sourcing of American jobs to other countries, like Mexico, Korea, China and others so they can continue to reduce their costs of business and increase their profits even more. AND, they are paying less taxes than any rich class ever has in American history AND they refuse to even talk about paying more.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party now seems to be saying they will NEVER raise taxes EVER, and they won't even talk about it either, because they have taken an oath to Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform Party that they now appear to be placing ABOVE the oath they took to the American Constitution when they took office. If this can be proven true, would they be guilty of treason?

I have called my two republicans, Senator Burr and Congressman McHenry. Their staff "doesn't know" if Mr. Burr or McHenry have taken any such oath, and they say they don't want to raise taxes on the rich people and corporations during a recession because those people and corporations "provide jobs", even though that not been true over the past 30 years since deregulation took place, or during the lifetime of the people involved. They are simply telling us that we have bothered them long enough and that our time is up.

John Womack

Response to "Skyscraper of Debt" by Patrick McHenry

2011-07-08T21:36:00.000-07:00

First, the debt was run up there by republicans - the debt ceiling was raised 8 times under George Bush. Second, it went up because the great corporations laid off American workers and they out-sourced American jobs to other countries - including textile and furniture making jobs from right here in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Third, it went up because great corporations do not pay taxes (instead, they are paid Subsidies (from us!)) AND the richest people in America now pay less taxes percentage-wise than they EVER have - this another legacy of George Bush and the republicans. Fourth, three wars in the middle east - including one to attack Iraq because of WMD that they HAD - well, Bush thought they had them (probably still does).

Now, if I get this right, you want to fix this debt issue by 1) eliminating or reducing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for American citizens. 2) reducing taxes further on the richest people in America and the great American corporations who are now making more profit than any corporation has EVER made before in ALL of history. And 3) by making all the Americans who are getting these "entitlements" from the government have to, as Orrin Hatch said today "go back to work".

Probably the reason your "Skyscraper of Debt" is being viewed on two programs is because they are laughing at it. It may well "go viral". But if Americans who have EARNED Social Security find it being reduced, they will have to spend less money at the grocery stores, drug stores, and gasoline stations - leading those places to lay off a few more people and call their suppliers and tell them to cut back on their orders, and lead hospitals and health care workers to find out they are not needed to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients and they can stay home. Emergency Rooms will find more and more extremely sick people showing up who have no money and no insurance. And no hope.

So. The answer to all this is the Spirit of America. Remember, our founding fathers pointed out that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then they added: "To SECURE these rights, GOVERNMENTS are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . ."

Thank you for providing this opportunity to respond to your video. A great country is always built by those who have been denied opportunity elsewhere, and their struggle is against those who are defending their own personal pleasures. We need strong, independent people who have not sold their souls for money to represent us. Show us your soul Mr. McHenry, are you with us?

When I Run for President . . .

2011-07-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

I will point out how a couple of historical coincidences, a New Hampshire state law, and tradition have decreed that only a tiny handfull of states fire off the first presidential primary contests each election cycle. These first four events have too often shaped the commitments of the candidates and eventually the platforms of their parties. But these four states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, are not representative of the United States! They are rural, small, self-sufficient entities that have no appreciation of the problems that haunt New York, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania for example, or of the problems peculiar to Florida and Texas, or the big cities or the great mass of Americans. These four states contain less than 11,700,000 people, or 3.7% of the total American population. Yet this 3.7% ALWAYS have a large say in the choice of the person who will be the next president of the United States and the commitments made by both parties.

Perhaps at one time, the contests of these four states were significant because they indicated the comparative strengths of the candidates and showed how they dealt with issues that were important to these small rural states. But in today’s world, all politics is universal. Every word uttered by any candidate in Iowa is broadcast across the world, every mistake made by any contestant is repeated again and again.

So. The remedy is simple. When I run for president I will campaign in these four states, like everybody else, but I will not cater to the “local” vote, being determined to get my viewpoint out to the entire country. Whether I do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, or those other two places matter not in the full swing of things. I will happily finish dead last in those four states as long as I can make clear my intention concerning matters of concern to the other 97% of the people of the United States.

I just hope that I am not the only one who understands this.

Anthony Weiner

2011-06-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

Carefully, intelligently, purposefully, passionately and successfully, Anthony Weiner maneuvered himself into a position as a major player in the United States House of Representatives, becoming a leading light in the liberal side of the Democratic Party, and a likely candidate to be elected mayor of New York City.

Yet while all these beautiful moves were being perfected by Mr. Weiner, he was also playing a different tune on Twitter, sending questionable, risqué, and even lewd photos of himself to young women whom he apparently did not even know.

It had to end. And when it did, Weiner played it well, claiming his Twitter account had been “hacked” and that he was outraged, and that No – he did not send those pictures. Then he was asked the inevitable question about one of them: “Is that photo a picture of you?” All he had to do at that point was to say that no, that was not him and that should have been the end of the entire matter, and cause for investigation of those damnable “hackers”.

But then the story turned. Weiner refused to say that the picture was not of him, and that immediately told the rest of us two things: 1) That the photo WAS a picture of him, and 2) That somebody else, somewhere, somehow KNEW it was a photo of Weiner’s private belongings. And the story began to intrigue the reporting pool of the world. It turned into a great spiritual-like quest, a marvelous riddle like a Zen koan similar to the famous “what is the sound of one hand clapping?" People who disliked Weiner joined with those who loved him and with many others who didn’t care about him and now huge numbers of people who had never even heard of him before, all sought the answer to Weiner’s Dilemma. He had stumped the entire world!

A great spotlight from heaven, or somewhere out there, now found and focused on Weiner. As a brilliant advertising executive or marketing director might dribble out pieces of enticing information and with a look in his eyes normally reserved for carnival barkers, Weiner led us all down his tricky little trail. Like a great performance in some marvelous Olympiad spectacular, every step he took was seen, photographed, videotaped, recorded and breathlessly watched. Such a level of attention is normally reserved for erupting volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis, and similar catastrophes and disasters.

So now. Having failed in everything else, Weiner tried to throw himself on the world's pity plate. Finally he says, he will tell us what he claims is "the truth". But it won’t work. Not now. Now when we have seen how perfectly he lies. When he finally tells us what we all knew, and even elaborates somewhat upon that, we now KNOW he is hiding the really bad stuff - and we all what to know what he is NOW covering up?

So we will forgive him – of course we will, but we will only forgive him as a human being. We can not forgive him as an ideal. He was at one time, something very special. He was part of every human dream, he was someone you could count on, rely on, trust and believe in. That is what made Anthony Weiner very, very special. Now he is gone. His shell will apparently remain with us for a while. He can still be a politician and still do some things that most politicians do here and there, now grinningly welcomed as one of their own, but the shell will remind us of what once seemed to be, and the rotten smell of decay will remain with us until he finally departs our midst.

An Open Letter FROM Patrick McHenry

2011-04-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

April 28, 2011

Dear Mr. Womack:

Thank you for contacting my office regarding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security reforms under the fiscal year 2012 Republican budget plan. I appreciate having the benefit of your thoughts.

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security compromise 60 percent of the federal budget, and represent the fastest growing . . .

WOAH! Sir . . . I thought you knew that Social Security brings in more money than it spends (actually, I thought everybody knew that!) and Medicare, not quite as effective, still brings in almost 60% of its TOTAL costs. So, I respectfully request that you take this letter back and rewrite it.

I did request you to explain why on earth you voted FOR Representative Paul Ryan's budget bill, and NOW I am beginning to see why you might have done such a destructive thing to 95% of your constituents. You have not been properly briefed. So, may I respectfully request that you return to the issue, review all budget matters, particularly issues relating to the difference between budget expenditures and budget income. Then you will be better able to carry on a dialog with the people you have taken an oath to represent in congress. You will also be able to point out to Representative Ryan how you all can write a new budget that will protect and improve both Social Security and help bring about Medicare for All Americans.

Respectfully yours,

John Womack

Open Letter to Mr. McHenry about Health Insurance

2011-04-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. McHenry:

Why do we even HAVE health-insurance companies? Health care is basically a supply-demand equation and we Americans know how to handle that. We buy groceries, houses, computers, automobiles, clothing, education and so on without any insurance “gatekeepers” to tell us “OK, you can have a Ford but not a Pontiac” or “no, you can’t buy a coat this winter, you bought one last year.” Or "you can't have anymore generic DVDs, you will have to buy these (which cost ten times as much)." And it’s not like we don’t all use health-care. Americans use health-care to get born, we use a lot of it when we die, and we all need teeth repaired and glasses replaced. From time to time we all have accidents and get sick and we all need health care. We "demand" medical services and we have a top-notch medical industry of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and organizations who can "supply" those services. Why do we think we need a gate-keeper to tell us we can have this but not that, or that's a “pre-existing condition”, or a certain procedure we need to live will cost more than we can afford so we can't have it, or that those pills the doctor has prescribed will cost $600 a month, even though they don’t really “cost” nearly that much? And people who live in other countries get those same pills for much, much less!

We can take care of ourselves together as a nation, and supply-demand will work in this industry like it does elsewhere. All of the money these insurance companies get is money we pay to them, then they give a little bit of it back to us in the form of permission to get some medical service, and the rest goes for their own profit, to their rich CEOs and to buy off our senators and representatives. THEN, they pay less and less in income tax every year and even get some subsidies from the U. S. national government. Let's get rid of ALL health insurance companies and let the citizens and medical industry of the United States collectively provide the care we need through a PUBLIC - not OPTION - but SERVICE - like Medicare for All - and really provide for our nation’s general welfare.

After all, no national resource is of more importance to any industralized nation that the health of its workforce. And THAT is too important to be left to any private company that MUST continue to increase their profit every quarter of every year.

John Womack.

Like Divine Guidance?

2011-04-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Bagman and Seatbelts

2011-03-31T20:32:00.000-07:00

Bagman and Red Lights

2011-03-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

Open Letter to Mr. McHenry about Firearms.

2011-03-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

I have no problem with the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms. And I agree with the statement in your letter to me of February 18, 2011, that “that right comes with a huge responsibility.”

I wrote you not to say that the Second Amendment has let the American citizens down, I am saying that the United States Congress has let us down by not establishing sufficient laws concerning the use of firearms in America. That is why I have written you four times and called your office five times in the year 2011 alone concerning gun laws.

You said in your letter that the “government’s responsibility is not to limit the lawful rights of law-abiding gun owners. Rather, it is the government’s duty to strictly enforce current gun laws and levy stiff penalties against criminals who use guns to commit crimes.

Well sir, let me propose to you that the laws of the United States are not sufficient to protect its citizens, and that the Congress of the United States is derelict in it’s duty to pass laws to protect its citizens.

That assertion is based on the following facts:

1) Some 11,000 American citizens are killed each year by firearms (Bureau of Justice - see graph at end of letter)

2) Consider that when a group of Saudi Arabians attacked and killed less than 3,000 Americans (and other nationals) on September 11, 2001, we embarked upon a war that now, ten years later, involves us in combat in three nations, Another 4,000 American troops have been killed in those wars, along with perhaps 100,000 Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani citizens, and we have spent somewhere between $1.4 and 3 Trillion dollars because “terrorists” killed 3,000 Americans.

3) BUT - that same number of Americans were killed again in the United States from firearms alone, by other Americans before Christmas Day in 2001, 90 days after the attack by alien “terrorists”.

4) And THEN, another 3,000 Americans were killed by other American “Terrorists?” in March, again in June, and September, and Christmas Day again in 2002, and the same in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and now we are coming up on another “anniversary”.

5) That means about 115,000 Americans have been killed by other Americans with firearms, mostly handguns, since the “terrorists” did their nasty little trick.

6) And you say – in your letter to me – that “the actions of a minority of people abusing their freedoms should not limit the freedoms of the majority of decent and upright Americans.”

7) Mr. McHenry, what part of 33 shot dead every day do you attribute to a minority of people abusing their freedom?

Notice that I have not even asked that you introduce any laws concerning gun control in America. I have simply asked that you help to begin a dialog in this country about whether we even need gun control. I have asked that that group include the NRA, along with other interested groups, and that a full and in-depth discussion ensue to discuss all the problems we can find that are associated with guns.

So - can we have a discussion? And. If not – WHY not? Please either help to start this discussion or tell me why you don’t want to.

Bureau of Justice Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

Note also that the National Center for Injury Prevention and control stated During the 33-year period covered by this report, the total number of firearm deaths increased by 130%, from 16,720 in 1962 to 38,505 in 1994.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/firarmsu.htm

Peter King and the Radical Right

2011-03-09T13:27:00.000-08:00

Republican representative Peter King of New York is convening a congressional investigation into the Muslim religion. Well, it’s really just an investigation into “radical” Muslims. I think that is great. It’s long overdue, too. And I hope that committee doesn’t just investigate Islam but I would encourage them to go further and continue their investigations into Judaism. Certainly, the Jews are part of the problem in the Middle East, and the United States is (secretly) sworn to protect Israel regardless of their issues, so Representative King should definitely get to the bottom of Judaism. Or at least the “radical” part of Judaism.

And while King and his Homeland Security Committee are at it why not take a peek into the Christian religion? At least those damn “radical” Christians? We have all heard that the Protestants are trying to take over the officer corps of the United States Air Force by going after the cadets at the Air Academy, right? And there has got to be a radical reason for that! And then why not call some Bishops from the Catholic church to talk about pedophilia perhaps, and the “Art of Coverup” and how to lie while holding a cross and looking pious. Representative King is a Catholic so he should have some input in there. And before we forget, why not take a look at Mormons, again, just those pesky “radical Mormons”. And before we forget, we also ought to see if we can find any radical Buddhists or radical Hindus and march them before Peter King. And to be fair, we also ought to seek out radical Seiks, Coptics, Jains, and . . . well, now we are getting close to ignoring some religions. So i will have to just quit before I upset some people. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to go before congress as a Radical Blogger. Oh, by the way, will these people have to take an oath with their hand on a Bible?

Of course, that brings to mind other possibilities of ways to spend taxpayers' money. Why not take a look at congressmen – only the radical ones of course – and let’s especially not forget investigating the radical Republicans. And then there is the matter of Radical Journalists – my, that would make a fine show – lots of really great talent there, Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and others. Maybe congress could even get Olberman to prepare a Special Comment! Wow. You know what? They could even televise this, put it on a special cable show like HBO, sell tickets and help reduce the Deficit!! Now how’s that for a Radical Idea?

Bradley Manning?

2011-03-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

Bradley Manning is a puzzle. To me – anyway. For a PFC he was a gigantic creature He knew a lot of information and he had access to an enormous amount of classified stuff. I can’t help but wonder how a PFC had that kind of access to anything. I used to have access to a lot of classified information myself, but I never knew anything close to the whole story. In fact I only knew kind of important little glimpses. Very few people, as I recall only one or two, actually had enough access to know anything like a “big picture”. And those people were of pretty high rank. So, I can’t help but wonder 1) how a PFC would have access to anything like a portion of the data he apparently released to WikiLeaks, and 2) what the hell were his supervisors doing, and 3) what the hell were his supervisor's supervisors doing?

Did Bradley Manning do the nation a disservice by releasing that data? Actually he may have done a great SERVICE to us by pointing out how much classified information seems to be laying around unprotected. Apparently he just released stuff that was really more embarrassing than anything else, the kind of goodies that eventually seep out anyway, and which all the people who are identified therein, and supposedly were embarrassed about in those leaks, all pretty well knew about anyway.

But Manning was apparently just after the petty stuff. If our classified information is really this poorly guarded then there may be some really important things out there that the wrong kind of people might get hold of and that could be really bad.

Also, maybe we could create some new levels of classified information. Then we could have “Confidential”, “Secret”, “Top Secret” and “Embarrassing”. That way we wouldn’t have titillating tidbits of gossip mixed in with the number of troops we have in a certain location, their firepower and problems they might facing, and you know – important stuff.

Meanwhile, how we are treating Bradley Manning in prison may be saying a lot more about who we really are as a nation than what he leaked about us says about him.

And then there is the question that we never ask in this country anymore: "Why"? Why did he do it? Why?

Open Letter to Representative McHenry - Health Insurance

2011-02-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. McHenry.

Thank you for your reply to my telephone calls and e-mails concerning the healthcare available in America today, But you did not answer the main question I asked which was – and still is: Are YOU receiving “Obamacare” yourself now? I have written three times and called four times and nobody “knows” if you receive your health care through the government or if you buy it yourself. Please let me know. I am asking you again now through my blog, Facebook and Twitter. And it’s no big deal. It really doesn’t matter to the rest of us. You obviously have more money than most of your constituents do, and you could afford to buy the best insurance and health care in the world,

Also, there are other questions I can’t get anybody else at your place to answer. Here are some of them:

1) Why do we have almost 50,000,000 Americans who don’t have health insurance? And why there are another probably 50,000,000 Americans who really don’t want to try out the insurance they do have. Is this a coincidence, or is it done on purpose?

2) The so-called health care we receive from the insurance companies is not really healthcare but actually a form of “disease management”. Real healthcare would result in a healthy America. The insurance industry needs sickness for the drugs they have, and other forms of treatment. Is this just an “accident”?

3) Another question I can’t get answered at your place is: what natural resource is more important to any nation than the health of its workforce?

4) Why is that resource left up to insurance companies to manage when THEIR need to make a profit is greater than their need to provide services? (And please don’t tell me I can switch to another company.)

5) Can government really provide good healthcare? A number of veterans have said they received good healthcare service (medical, dental and optical) when they were in, and a lot of those who are eligible say that the Department of Veterans Administration provides good healthcare services. And – Medicare has a large number of grateful participants.

6) Why not just go ahead and give the United States a form of Medicare for All?

7) According to http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00026627 , your largest contribution of money in 2009 came from “Health Professionals” ($85,000), next was “Insurance” ($57,450), and then the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons also contributed $10,000 to your last reelection bid. Please tell me that those “contributions” did not influence your stand in any way.

John Womack

John Galt is a Bitch.

2011-02-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

At least that was my opinion after reading his defining speech. Or perhaps that speech was written for him by an angry woman who had a lot of scores to settle. It had to be someone who hated religion, labor unions, the arts, universities, scientists, college professors, people with problems, politicians and governments in general. Also, the writer of that speech had to be someone who was ineffective in control of his or her own world and life. Yet that speech is the heart of "Atlas Shrugged", written by Ayn (rhymes with "mine") Rand. It has to be what the story was all about, and it was a only a series of complaints piled on top of absurdities. I found that just that single speech was very hard to follow, even reading it all by itself over several days, and it would have been very confusing to have had to receive it over the radio in a single three-hour dose, particularly when you were expecting something else.

But there is a lot more in the book. I was stunned by the beauty of some of Ayn Rand’s writing. She has a way of expressing feeling by combining a few words that collide like cymbals and create volumes of meaning and expression that shimmer and shine and stay with you as you read on. These marvelous gems are scattered throughout her book and often they jump up and try to grab you when you are being carried along by a free-fall of some of her other descriptive adventures. She also had several passages in which she writes very powerfully of great events taking place that seem too big to actually happen, then they happen, and then they get worse and then – then it gets really bad. There are at least six of these episodes that stand out. The work is a one thousand-plus page book with about twenty-four major characters and that obviously requires a considerable amount of planning, organization and creation of events and circumstances and I am not sure that she completely mastered many of those tasks.

The tone of the book is dark, very dark, even stygian in places. She carries that tone so pervasively throughout the book that I even have to congratulate her for another superb ability, that of consistency. I wonder though, if the very process of reading it does not tend to bring unwanted circumstances drifting into the reader’s life flow.

Her story is pulled forward by miracles. Not like water into wine, but metal that is greater than any other metal by many orders of magnitude. It is not just better, not twice as good or three times as good, but a complete revolution in the art of metal making, and it was all done by one individual, and came out of his own mind. Another miracle is an amazing motor that runs far, far better than any other motor ever invented and uses virtually no “fuel”. There are incredible locks that can guard a room beyond belief, and . . . then if they are forced to open . . . well, you will just have to read the book.

These miracles are all performed by the heroes of the book, who are presented as gods. They are a handful of super-mortal individuals who penetrate beyond the limits of existence to create new horizons of possibilities. They work hard, that’s true but they also leap forward, racing beyond the world, easily accomplishing scientific magic and technological invention far ahead of academic studies or experimental prototypes.

There are no management principles depicted anywhere in the book. If you can find even one, let me know. Everything that is done is just “done”, often by Herculean effort by one of the gods. There is great work going in in several places but then it later turns out that there was really nothing there – and nobody knew it! There is apparently no education system in place anywhere. College is constantly dismissed as an evil and useless thing: ". . . those modern college-infected parasites . . ." (Universal Reference .56584). People are not learning anything unless they teach it to themselves, or perhaps already know it. There are universities, but the education of masses is not addressed. The American public seems huddled in groups like lobotomized sheep, moaning “ I don’t know”, “It’s not my job”, “I can’t help it”, and so on as they watch their families fade into starvation and destitution. The people in charge of the country seem to direct it entirely by innuendo and influence although they always provide exceedingly well for themselves. We all know that politicians and their ilk are sleazy, but Ayn Rand’s guys are stupid, dumb, obviously inept, jealous, whiney and pitifully pitiful. Collectively, they are a pathetically sad monster.

(NOTE by "Universal Reference", I mean where the instance occurs in the book. In the book I read, the First Plume Printing, August 1999, the lower middle of page 1,054 occurs .90472 of the way through its 1,165 pages.)

Rand is obviously impressed by the failures of communism, but she sees it appealing to the masses and the world is collapsing into a Marxist-induced communist coma. According to her, all the lights will go out, people will starve and be forsaken, and the country will totally collapse. The picture she paints presents a degree of dysfunction challenging the level of despair in some of the Dickens' novels – and those were pointing out the evils of capitalism!

What is Rand’s relevance today? Questions abound about those who do not contribute to the society - what should they get? How should they really be treated? Much of the monetary services the American government currently provides its people goes in several different directions and is distributed to a lot of people. Unemployment insurance and Social Security payments provide money to people who spend it in grocery stores, drug stores, filling stations, etc. Cut that off and those businesses will also feel the loss. Another question is that of “entitlements”. Many of those such as Social Security and a number of retirement programs are actually deferred payments for work already done long ago but promised and agreed to be paid in the future, and with interest. Those are not “entitlements” but “postponed wages”. When Ayn Rand died, she was a recipient of Medicare and was receiving Social Security payments.

There is also a question of “need” versus “want”. Rand seems to lump these two together and treat legitimate “needs” such as clean water, air, education and healthcare for children into things that they just “want”, and they will result in the entire nation being dragged into oblivion as those “wants” suck the life out of our country. Pollution is in the book, and it IS a problem, although not discussed or even mentioned but once, and it is simply a problem for the huddled masses. “They learned it (when a mill shut down) only on subsequent nights, when they – who had cursed (my emphasis) the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise – looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.” (UnivRef .9296824) That pollution is really unpaid costs of production, which the owner converted into profit and used for his own personal use. Who cleans up the pollution later, when it gets really bad? The government, of course.

In the early 1950s, university and government researchers were finding that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer. Obviously the characters in this book just Shrugged that information off their backs. Ayn Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974 and died of heart failure in 1982, even though “Dr Hendricks had developed a method to end brain strokes and high blood pressure” (Pg. 703 UR.63288) . She actually smoked her last cigarette in 1974, but her book “Atlas Shrugged” still continues today to send the message to generation after generation of young people that smoking cigarettes is OK, maybe even good for you, and certainly a sign that you are sophisticated and “understand”.

“Heartbreak Hotel” and “Love me Tender” were already best sellers before this book was published in 1957. This was twelve years after the first atomic bombs were detonated, and B-52 bombers were already on alert ready to launch a retaliatory strike against Russia. Soldiers were coming back from Korea. Sputnik was orbiting the earth. Instead of looking into the future, this book was already adrift when it was first published.

John Galt worked as a track laborer for twelve years? From 1945 to 1957? Come ON! I did that job for three summers myself when I was a teen-ager in 1946, 47 and 48, and according to the book, that was when Galt began. It is a consuming job, a dirty, dangerous, mind-numbing job. We called it the “Bridges and Buildings Gang”. A lot of the work keeps you away from home for a week at a time and it pays at about the poverty level. He “kept an eye” on Dagny while doing this job? Sure! I got a bridge I can sell you – built by that old gang.

Return to the gold standard? Fine but the “gods” of the book will also have to figure out a new way to conduct business transactions. A lot of money (sorry, gold) will be spent just transporting all that gold around all over the place back and forth again and again. Obviously, a child could figure out a method of recording all those transactions and saving all that energy but – well, there we go again. We could use gold to “back up” our currency but that would come at a sacrifice to a growing economy, very tricky to do as a population explosion kicks the world down the road toward 7,000,000,000 people by 2045.

It is a story that revels in innuendo, at least in the first part. Not entirely bad for a writer, but too often it seems to carry the plot all by itself. It describes why organizations, unions, government and other entities work. But I feel that instead of creating mystery it contributes to confusion and by its continued usage constitutes a dereliction of duty by the author. The book does describe a civilization that is disintegrating, all facets of which are crumbling. America is falling apart and collapsing, Europe has already descended into chaos, the Middle East and Asia are missing from the book entirely, and there are no international aggressors. Why not? Are they broke too?

Art is mentioned occasionally, but it is "logical" art, like great music that is written by one great logical man, Richard Halley who is quoted: "I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart – only by someone's head." (UnivRef .671244). He continues, talking about an "artist" who "feels": ". . . all he has to do is feel – he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard!" No Picasso or John Cage there, not even Hank Williams or Elvis.

Spiritual dimensions are all encapsulated in Religions - there is no awareness anywhere in the book of spirit that is free from the monster of Religion. Galt says ". . . the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action . . . the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind . . . (and it) annihilates one's consciousness." (UnivRef.87451). The great prophets of the ages are called "mystic parasites". (UnivRef.87777) And even though Dagny's heart beats wildly over several different men, that is all right because she, her heart and those men are all very, very logical.

The book is all devoted to Good-Evil, Black-White, Right-Wrong. There is some "middle" intruding from time to time, but it doesn't have any chance at all. Galt sums it up "There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." He continues to point out that he has more respect for the man who is wrong, than he has for the man who took the middle course. (UnivRef.90472)

My final opinion about “Atlas Shrugged”? Those who profess to like it either have not read it, or they have read ONLY it, and nothing else. They would have to be people who like Ayn Rand have no use for science, art, spirituality, government, education, management, logic, economics, literature, medical arts or history.

If you think you might have been exposed to “Atlas Shrugged”, do not panic. Sit down for a moment. Remember that it was actually published more than fifty years ago and it has not really affected the world very much. You are probably going to be all right. Your prognosis generally depends on your age when you were exposed. If you are over 25 you have a good chance to enter remission next week . If you are 50 or over then you are probably safe, I would recommend a couple of good beers or a glass of wine with tapas. If you are 18 or younger then you may have problems over then next six or seven years. So go ahead and stomp and shout and rant and rave, and it would be good to wear a shirt proclaiming “Atlas Shrugged” or perhaps mention something about “Ayn Rand” so people will know what happened to you and understand.

Our Founding Fathers Would be Amazed.

2011-01-29T20:45:00.000-08:00

The constitution that our Founding Fathers left us is a liberal document, providing freedom of speech, religions, assembly and property - about as liberal as anybody was thinking back in the late 1700s. Yet, if they could come back today they would be amazed. They would also be lost. We often talk about them as if they were creatures of our world who had solved the bulk of human problems, had foreseen our mission in the world and had built our current nation. However, they would however probably feel more at home in the world of Julius Caesar than in the United States of 2011. Forget the airplanes, TV, computers, internet, forget the amazing inventions like the revolver, the repeating rifle, and nuclear weapons, forget also strange new words like “germs”, “GPS”, “Typewriter”, they might be more intrigued by words like “California”, “Idaho”, “Nevada”, “Oklahoma”, “Alaska”, “Hawaii”. They didn’t even think about healthcare since germ theory was undreamed of, inoculations were not a realistic factor, and even though some of our Founding Fathers lived to a ripe old age, the average life expectancy of the citizens of their new nation was probably around 35 years. The words that they wrote down were written with a feather from a bird with the juice from a berry, and were carried on the back of a horse or across the sea by the wind.

Our Founding Fathers lived in a world in which natural resources were an extremely serious problem - because there were way too many of them. The available resources actually impeded the nation-building process. The legacy they left us provided for the pollution and careless disregard of the world’s greatest storehouse of natural resources in less than 120 years - by then the great forests were gone, the great plains were gone and the world’s richest topsoil had blown into the sea. The great rivers were all polluted - some so badly that they would catch on fire.

The total population of the United States that the Founding Fathers created their constitution for was less than 4 million people, about the same number as now live in Atlanta or Houston or Boston or Dallas, it was only about 1/3 that number of people who now live in the greater Los Angeles area or less than 1/4 of those who now live in the greater NYC area. Almost 700,000 of them (more than 15%) were slaves, and probably about half of them couldn’t vote - why? Oh, because they were females, of course. Almost all of the population (95%) was rural and farmed for a living. The largest city, Philadelphia had 44,000 people. The entire population of the WORLD itself in 1770 was less than 800 million people or about 2.5 times that of the United States today. The legacy left by the “Founding Fathers” was a clear trail of disaster for Negroes, Chinese laborers, and worst of all for the Native Americans who were victims of genocide and subjugation.

Guns Don't Kill People . . . ?

2011-01-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

People Kill People. Yes, we all know how that goes. We’ve heard it enough. And it’s true. Englishmen kill other Englishmen, Spanish people kill Spaniards, Germans kill Germans, Frenchmen kill French people. But notice how it’s a kind of a one-on-one affair with most of the world. Not so with Americans. If an American has a problem with another American, he may take an assault rifle out or an extended clip and kill not only the person he has the beef with but everybody else around too. Not to mention the wounded, many of which will spend the rest of their lives trying to return to where they were before the bullets started flying.

This also happened in England not too long ago, and also in Norway, I think, 10 to 15 people killed and wounded - again with a gun. More and more in America these shootings don’t even seem to involve the shooter and another individual he actually knew, it is often between the shooter and other people - most of which he did not know, and could not have known. It’s just his way of screaming.

Most of these shooters - one might categorically say all of them, are people with mental problems. Other people who knew them usually say afterward that they were not surprised. Yet those shooters can still buy guns and ammunition with no problem.

Well, enough for me to say. Mark Shields has said it far better than I could in his column here referenced: http://www.creators.com/opinion/mark-shields.html?columnsName=msh

The Real Reason for the Christmas Season

2011-01-06T21:36:00.000-08:00

Now that Christmas is over we can reflect for a moment on its meaning. And I am referring not to the classical definition but to a practical observation of what the Christmas period actually produces and how it has changed over many years.

Mankind has celebrated the “rebirth” of the sun in the darkest days of the year for thousands of years. How did they know when the days started to become longer? We don’t know how that all began but we may be sure that they watched the movement of heavenly bodies much more closely than we do today. Some people probably made these observations before the general public became aware of them and thus gained a “priestly” status from their predictions.

We do know that perhaps 1000 years BC, many people in the northern hemisphere “celebrated” this change of the seasons with festivals and gifts. Pagan gods began to "have been born" around this time we now would call the third week in December. Eventually Saturn’s "birthday" became dominant and the festivals were often called Saturnalia, and his "birthday" became the main reason for celebration.

Jesus’ birth, according to the Bible is mentioned only in Matthew and Luke. Luke, like Mark, never met Jesus and did not know him personally. They were clearly writing the words told to them by other people, perhaps because Mark and Luke were literate. John apparently, did know Jesus very well but he was illiterate. His work is written some 30 to 40 years after Jesus’ death and is clearly a transcription. Matthew was not only literate, but also wealthy, and apparently knew Jesus very well. His account of the birth is entirely in the beginning of his gospel.

The possibility of jesus having been born on December 25th is very unlikely, and the stories surrounding the birth are illogical. Sheep and shepherds have never been in the fields in December in that part of the world and it would seem doubtful that any census would have been taken during that period because of the difficulty of travel at that time of year. The history of that census has been lost and no record of it has been found. Also no record remains of a star that remained stationary, and there are no independent records of angels appearing to anyone at that supposed time.

Jesus’ birthday was apparently added to the collection of pagan gods who celebrated their birthday around December 25 some time around 200 to 250 years later, and that was documented for the first time about 345 AD. Now that Jesus had been "promoted" to equal status with many pagan gods, religions struggled for dominance. A period of "holy wars" broke out, and they ended in the establishment of Christianity as the major religious force in Europe.

As the Twenty-first Century gets firmly underway, we find another new god moving in on Jesus and claiming priority as the real reason for the celebration of this season. This new entry is the god of corporate commerce. This god does not claim it was born in this season, but this season is the reason for its salvation. Merchants refer to the beginning of the Christmas shopping period as “Black Friday” because for many of them it is the “Christmas sales” that begin to move their yearly ledgers from the “red” side over to the “black”. Meanwhile, commercial preparations for Christmas have moved forward (or backward) in time. Many years ago, the first commercial signs for Christmas began appearing soon after Thanksgiving, then before, then they became visible right after Halloween. Now some of the Christmas advertisements can be seen well before Halloween. But this god is not a jealous god, it will accept Jesus, and pagan gods and other symbols too like Santa and Rudolph and trees brought into houses and decorated as long as it can use them to help push their sales.

So if you want to go to church on Christmas day, that’s fine with this new god, but just don’t take Jesus’ message to heart because that would definitely hurt sales, and of course, you should attend ONLY after you have paid your tribute to the new god.

Where Are We Going?

2011-01-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

This picture was made on our way home from the airport after returning from Europe, that land of high-speed trains, intercity trains, long-haul buses and short-haul buses, trolleys, subways and street cars.

Probably all of the cars in this picture, certainly most of them, have only one person inside, and many of them have no large purchases they are bringing home. They carry one person who could be reading a paper or book, or be perusing a laptop computer (many trains in Europe have wi-fi) if they were not driving - or starting and stopping and starting and stopping.

We are being left so far behind the rest of the developed nations of the world that we will probably never be able to catch up. It is not so much that we are “eating their dust” as it is that we are coming to resemble the concrete we have covered our land with, slowly hardening into place even as it - and we - also show signs of cracking.

And we must realize that those “third world” nations that are now beginning to flex their muscles are not going to model their infrastructure after ours, but will pass us quickly by as we remain attached to our gas guzzlers and concrete roadways and traffic jams.

Obama was going to introduce high-speed rail and inter-city rail, but great forces are determined to prevent that from ever happening. That power comes from large corporate-political organizations representing the gas, highway construction and automobile production industries.

Cost of War - Eisenhower

2010-12-18T21:41:00.000-08:00

‎"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is... spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?"

--- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953.

Cigarette Anyone?

2010-12-16T20:58:00.000-08:00

Smoking cigarettes, it seems is even worse than any of us thought it possibly could be.

I recall, many years ago reading in an American Cancer Society article about the “safe amount of smoking” Turns out that - according to them - ONE puff on a cigarette would paralyze for up to twelve hours the tiny hairs (cilia) in our lungs that constantly sweep out debris, smoke, dust, grit, mucus and so on up and out. Obviously, even if there were no noxious ingredient in cigarette smoke, that would still be enough to eventually do us in. Our lungs would slowly fill up with debris from the bottom up. Turns out that back then that was where most lung cancers started - deep in the bottom of the lungs.

Ammonia has been added now, the government says. Why ammonia? Apparently that helps the nicotine - and the carcinogenous ingredients added to the cigarettes - to pass more easily through the blood-brain barrier. Ammonia added to commercially made cigarettes can boost the availability of nicotine up to 100 times, says a new study by the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology in Portland. The process of increasing the impact of nicotine by adding ammonia is called "free-basing," which is similar to the chemical process used to heighten the effects of cocaine. Like cocaine, nicotine exists in two forms -- acid and base. When ammonia is added, the nicotine converts from acid to base form. The base form can vaporize more easily from the smoke particles into the gas phase, enabling it to deposit directly on the lung tissue and immediately diffuse throughout the body.

Why are these additives placed in the cigarette to pass so quickly into the body/mind? Ask any writer about "the hook", which is a phrase used to begin a story to catch the mind of anyone who might be glancing through a magazine or book.
Fewer drags now than previously required will get a smoker hooked.

Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known cancer-causing (carcinogenic) compounds and 400 other toxins. These include nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT.

Something new has been added recently - in addition to ammonia - flavoring. Flavors that make the cigarettes more attractive to children and people who are “thinking” about taking up smoking.

Advertisements for cigarettes have changed too. Notice the movies. How many have you seen lately featuring stories from days when smoking was in vogue. Particularly movies about World War II. In fact, how many movies have you seen lately that had NO smoking scenes in it at all?

The real warning to me about the new report concerns what we call “Second Hand Smoke”. Smoke you breath in from smokers. We call it “smoke” , it really is a gas. And it is a poisonous gas. And according to these newly published findings, it will kill you and permanently cripple your children.

Sick Call for Senator Burr

2010-12-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

I called Senator Burr’s office, (202) 224-3154, about ten minutes ago and asked how he voted on the bill today (already approved by the House) which would provide health care for 9-11 responders who suffered permanent damage providing rescue services in New York City during and immediately after the fires and collapse of the buildings.

The word from the senator’s office was that the bill had just arrived from the House and would require “reading, discussion, debate and modification before voting” so he simply voted to defer it to a later time. When I asked why they can’t do it today, I was told that you “can’t be rushed into these things”. Then I pointed out that when the buildings were burning and collapsing, these people didn’t hesitate to respond - they “rushed in” - and provided the help they could. Now when those same people are “burning and collapsing themselves” and asking for help, my senator tells me we “can’t rush in to these things”.

Then I told the lady that I though it would be a remarkable gesture if the senate convened into overnight session and worked right straight through until these important issues were resolved. AND that if any of the senators got sick from this dramatically difficult work, THEY would have the best health care in the world, whereas some of the 9-11 responders have been denied or eliminated from their own health care. She said she would relay the message to the senator.

The Real Problem

2010-12-06T20:40:00.000-08:00

The problem we are all pretending really doesn’t exist is the question of whether or not capitalism can be permitted to continue the way it is now operating. Perhaps even more to the point the real question may be, can it now be changed, or is it already too late for that?

Capitalism is not free enterprise, even though it often claims to be. It is a consumer of free enterprises. It’s purpose is to consolidate more and more capital into fewer and fewer hands, and it is very good at that. With proper governmental regulation and control, capitalism can accomplish wonderful things for a nation - but if left to “regulate itself” it can challenge and even control the governments of the nations in which it operates.

Since deregulation of American markets began during the Reagan administration, real wages of working class Americans have remained level or slightly decreased. The national wealth of our country has continued to increase but is consolidated in the possession of fewer and fewer people. The gap between “rich” and “poor” is greater now in America than in any developed country in the world. The Great American Middle Class is disappearing, a great extinction of small businesses has swept across our land, and our manufacturing investments have been farmed out to other countries where costs of production are cheaper thus increasing profit for large corporations - who pay little or no American taxes.

Now we have engaged in a tiny scratch of spit between the American president and the leaders of the Republican Party who, negotiating from a posture of electoral rejection in 2008, have engineered a fascist type of action simply by uniting and refusing to work with the new president in any area. President Obama may think he is negotiating with the leaders of the Republican Party in a democratic engagement, but in reality he is meeting the new face of a new form of government which is ready to replace constitutional governments in the way they replaced that of the old City States.

Obama seems to think he is fighting a beautiful fight - and he may well be - but he is really meeting a new revolution of which he is not even aware.

Veterans Day 2010.

2010-11-10T21:37:00.000-08:00

A movement is apparently under way to finally welcome Vietnam Veterans home. When we came back - back then - it was different. Our welcome home from combat was often publicly insulting, sometimes obscene, and then there were devastating private moments alone again with our families that were worse to us than the war itself had been. I spent more than 400 days over there, I was insulted and attacked every time I came back home from those tours, and 85% of us who served in combat there eventually wound up divorced. Whatever that means.

I suppose I should be glad to be finally welcomed home, but I feel that there is still something missing. Let me see if I can explain.

President Johnson told the world a lie about the Gulf of Tonkin. The Navy at first denied it even happened. Then the president made it clear that there would be war. The American people screamed in delight and anger as they gathered up their young men and eagerly threw them into Vietnam. We all heard the slogans: “We’re in, let’s win!”, “Our Country - Love it or Leave it!”, “My Country Right or Wrong.” There were others.

President Nixon prolonged the war. It was preferable to him to certain other things. He used the war - not a problem for him. He never even thought of trial and imprisonment.

Johnson and Nixon are dead now and beyond personal justice. But their memories still shine brightly. We were the first to engage in an illegal war started by a president who was beyond any worry of punishment and funded by a congress who pretended it had more important things to do.

George Bush plunged the nation into a war in Iraq. It was totally unnecessary, but George Bush wanted war. Dick Cheney wanted war. Rumsfeld wanted war. Wolfowitz wanted war. “Shock and Awe”, “We can be in Baghdad in a week!” They got it, but none of them went. They are not dead yet but live in peace, retired with what ever honor they can muster around them and their disastrous administration. They are still available for justice. Justice for their war, their tortures, their treason - if any occurred, perhaps other charges. But they are not worried about that. Great American corporations are making lots of money from the war which still goes on, and from that other thing in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan, and in Somalia, and other places. War has now become very easy in America. War has become a necessity for some corporations in America. There are also many young people who have no work available for them; war is an alternative. War has become easy, it makes a lot of money, it provides employment for young people and no body EVER goes to prison - even if they get caught!

So war is easy for America - and nothing ever happens to those who bring our nation into war - what can we do? Maybe we could just drop any commitment to prison for deeds already past. But we Americans NEED a Council of Review. Let’s just say at the beginning that there will be no sentences issued. The purpose of this council would be to review the actions taken by American political leaders with a view to holding them to the oath they took with their office, the constitution, and the Geneva Convention rules, among others. No one will go to prison. The people involved in the events can all come to testify freely, no reason to try to hide anything. All we will do is to open the prison that is already there and let the TRUTH come OUT.

Then - we can make it clear that any future actions like those done by Johnson, Nixon and Bush will be brought to trial and they may well face spending the rest of their lives in prison.

Then, we veterans from Vietnam can finally come home.

Election Night 2010.

2010-11-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

Election night developed into a great debacle that turned out to have been carefully constructed by the Democratic Party, itself. Voter concern turned to fear some time ago, then it deepened into distress and finally into anger as they saw the Democratic Party become the new cause of their problems.

Could anything have changed last night’s outcome? Yes. Two very simple steps would have resulted in EVERY member of the Republican Party being thrown out of congress. Here they are: 1) Not to let the republicans thwart so many bills by simply indicating they "likely would" or "might" filibuster their passage - but MAKE them filibuster EVERY bill that would have helped the American people. Put it all on camera, all the late night mumblings, all the reading of telephone book addresses, all the absurdity of obstructionism. And 2) Bring those tax bills, and funding bills to the vote and make the republicans vote AGAINST all these things, and make them vote against them again and again.

Instead, what the American people saw unfold before their eyes slowly developed into what HAD to be a joint effort, a collaborative construction by BOTH the Democratic and Republican Parties to “fool” them, and by “playing dumb on purpose” - together - to keep the American people in their misery. The mistake to force the republicans to identify who they REALLY are - by filibustering and by voting no - may well have cost America its place among developed nations in the world. The world is changing too much and too fast to accommodate a nation that is returning to the politics of the 18th century and the economic structure of Adam Smith.

What is the cause of the problem? Almost four years ago I wrote a blog article

http://theprettypenny.blogspot.com/2007/02/articulate-bright-clean-and-nice.html

saying that Barack Obama was the wrong color to become president then - he was too green. I think he has proven that observation right. (And it was not mine alone.) Chicago politics and Illinois politics are tough - no question. But they are not world class. Obama’s election was perhaps the world’s last chance to avoid sliding back into a cycle of endless wars, planned poverty increases, consumption of the planet’s resources, and honoring the Ignorance of our Fathers. Perhaps now Europe can take lead.

What to do? Well, Obama WAS green, and he IS smart. He is now clearly beginning his last two years ever in government. I would like to see him “offer the olive leaf” to the members of the Republican Party, offer to work with them and to help them. And to try hard - and visibly - to do that. THEN - when that fails, and it will, to come out publicly and force the republicans into displaying their intention to elevate corporate capitalism to control the nation and its people, and to destroy the government of the United States. Can he do it? Probably not. It was a one-time deal - just like the itty-bitty stimulus. But the world is stranger than it needs to be. It is filled with astonishing developments and stunning things constantly happen. Sometime in the next two years we will all NEED government - and we will need it quick! Will Obama be ready?

Glenn Beck

2010-09-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck’s “Honor America “event has come and gone now and what did we learn from it? First, I would like to congratulate Mr. Beck for a job very well done. He had said that he would not be another Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he did an absolutely stunning job of carrying that off.

It was a great confluence of the all-white high school dropouts and their mentors, the great robber baron corporate executives who teach those partially educated masses what they should know, especially that their great enemy is - The Government. Or maybe I should say “govermint”.

We also learned that Beck is a rich and prestigious personality. Also that he counts two main groups of people as his compatriots, some very rich people like David Koch and Dick Armey. In addition we learned that he has a substantial number of followers who appear to be reasonably well undereducated and fearful of government. In dealing with the latter group, Beck appears to appeal to their fear by invoking unnamed events and he appeals to their lack of education by teaching them some things that they all agree they should, and agree they really do know, largely based on innuendo concerning the Bible, hallowed words from our Founding Fathers, and that Capitalism is really only just free enterprise.

Obviously Beck has no serious political ambitions. That is clear. We must remember though that was also clear with Adolph Hitler - and that’s why he rose so easily at first. Personally I don’t see Beck as being a serious candidate but that is an opinion - for right now. The people who make the American President are now carefully accumulating and evaluating their list of “Possible Lords”. I would think that he must rate very low.

Beck’s role is to attract and appeal to the bottom rung of excitable and fearful people in the United States. He does that well, and for that he is paid more than a million dollars each month. One of his sponsors claims to make your penis larger (Extenz), another is a gold stock company (Goldline). Wow. Where is Shakespeare? He could have a ball with all this. You can almost see it now - the under educated, the under achievers, the under-sized underdogs. But. Gold stocks rise when times are uncertain and when the world looks to be in great trouble, especially when there is imminent threat of war or when the stock and bond markets look uncertain and particularily when panic begins to seep out. Could there be a connection? If people tune into Beck and hear that the world is floating into uncertain times, are more people are concerned about putting their money into gold? You bet - this has been going on for thousands of years.

The penis thing? You got me there. But if you think you have been deprived of your share of the worlds natural wealth, or if you think God has let you down and cut you off short, then Glenn Beck will make up for those mistakes. I think you can see that he really does feel for you. He may even cry for you.

So. I don't watch Beck. Have never seen one of his programs. Never will. But he doesn't care. He is rolling. A rich man he is and widely respected by a large group of people.

The Quran, Terry Jones, Rights, Responsibilities and Fire

2010-09-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

The First Amendment Right that is granted and guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution is an absolute right. That much is certain. Ask Mayor Bloomberg who defended the right of the Florida pastor who plans to burn about two hundred Qurans. Bloomberg should know. Well, he “should” know. Except that one is not supposed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and there are nine or so words that no one is "legally" allowed to say in public or to be broadcast to the public. Also, one cannot “incite to riot” , whatever that might mean - I guess it would depend on the circumstances, right? One is supposed to say only the “truth” when under oath - does that mean you have been deprived of one of your God-given rights when you swear to God to tell the truth, the absolute truth and nothing but the truth? All of the constructs of education and medicine would probably be weakened if teachers and doctors were to tell only the truth instead of promoting learning and healing through cagey encouragement, and of course, it would totally devastate both religion and politics if ONLY the truth COULD be spoken.

Let's face it. Rights imply Responsibilities. The "rights" we speak of were not given to us by some beneficent sovereign being, they were won through endless encounters on both fields of battle and halls of debate. Americans are not the only people to enjoy these rights but the use of them does imply responsibility for their effect. The American Way - and perhaps the Bloomberg way - to handle all this is to just ignore it and it will go away. The isolated incidents of course do “go away”, eventually. The problem is that the pattern of reoccurrence becomes strengthened . Most of the rest of the world ignores these American idiosyncrasies because those oddities don’t affect them. But now comes Terry Jones and his Quran burning.

Terry Jones, an alleged preacher from Gainesville, Florida who wants to burn Qurans, says he doesn’t want Americans to forget 9-11. Apparently he doesn’t want us to learn from 9-11 either. In programs broadcast on the air, Mr. Jones has said that the U. S. government has given up on keeping God “in the country”. He indicated that he feels God has been taken out of the schools, out of governmental activities and out of all aspects of life. Apparently Mr. Jones has attributed a lot of this perceived decline in Christianity to Islam. The Quran burning seems to be his attempt to awaken America to his understanding that Islam is evil, of the devil, the cause for all of our current problems, and bring us all back to our Christian senses.

Jones has a Doctor’s degree from The California Graduate School of Theology, an unaccredited institution in Los Angeles County, which - even though they did give him his honorary doctorate in 1993 - has now said that he never attended class there even for a day, and they are not happy with his planned Quran burning or teaching. He is a former manager of a hotel someplace in Tennessee and makes money today from renting property he owns in Pinelles County, Florida, and selling furniture through an on-line store which is located in his church. He has been in trouble with the State of Florida for several years over questions of “tax evasion” and was apparently forced out of a position as pastor of a church in Germany over the same problem. Mr. Jones is reported to have been seen recently wearing a pistol while on the church property. Seems a strange stance for a man of peace - carrying guns, evading sales taxes, burning somebody else's book they hold to be holy.

The N-word.

2010-08-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows what this word is, and the term or phrase “the N-word” is now the generally accepted substitute for that word itself. Serious attempts have been made to incorporate it into the vernacular by both black and white people of generally good intentions but it never worked and it never will because it carries a huge amount of shock value whenever it is used in any language in the world and if nothing else, it always showers the person using it with questions of distrust and suspicion.

As a kid growing up in Mississippi in the 1930’s and 40’s, I knew that the “N-word” carried three connotations with it: 1) A person with black skin. 2) A person who was lazy, shiftless, good for nothing, superstitious, and didn’t want to work. 3) A person who was protected by the government.

Today, people of black skin are OK. Well - theoretically anyway - and no one is going to denounce them for “being black” - not in so many words, at least. The “lazy, shiftless” stuff is now recognized as being a generalization and we don’t use that for black people anymore, we reserve that for people who are “protected by the government”.

So the “N-word” is now left flapping out in its own limbo, currently relegated to less acceptable usage than any of the other combinations of a capital letter, a dash and the word “word”.

Where do we go from here? We have a lot of serious problems in the world. Most of them were made to hurt someone else. Whenever we can find any success created by people working together in good will then there is still hope. What we have done with this troublesome word is not perfect but it is a result of people working together to find an acceptable solution. It is a step in the right direction.

Shirley Sherrod, the Disdainful Press, and the Fumbling Obama Team

2010-07-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

Shirley Sherrod has obviously been selected by some great invisible being to make a statement that is so important that it MUST be made. And she - and it - have made that statement. I wonder if that great being could have been the ghost of Shakespeare? This is an epic story reflecting great depth, incomprehensible interactions and innumerable dimensions of fact, emotion, honor, deceit and stupidity.

Trying to honor her murdered father, who died from a gunshot in the back by a white farmer many years ago, and then her mother and she watched crosses burn on their lawn three nights later, now she tried to reach a slightly larger audience with that story than she ever had before. It was the 20th Annual Meeting of the NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet in Douglas, Ga, on March 27, 2010. And she must have thought that would be the ultimate tribute ever made to her father. But no. Thanks largely to other unintended victims in this tornadic twist of publicity, her story is now being reported by the entire country, in print, TV, on internet and in all the major cities of the world in a hundred different languages. You can’t get an audience like that. The Pope can’t, the president usually can’t, the Queen of England can’t but Shirley Sherrod did. She didn’t intend to get that much attention but the press woke up to what they thought was a nasty little story, and lambasted it all over the country, then watched in amazement as it “developed” - much like a photographic print in its tray of chemicals (lets call those chemicals a reactive mixture of Research, Investigation and Analysis) - into a totally different story. Wow. Everybody was amazed. And still are. The press is now pretending they may have done something good, but that really was only because they screwed it up so badly they're still not sure what really happened.

There’s an even darker side though. That is the Obama presidency. Its decision- making process and its organizational structure have had a veil ripped away in a scene not seen since the Revelations of Alice in another foggy wonderland. We see now the American presidential administration making decisions much like that great marble ball in a pinball machine as it works it way down past all the dinging dingbells, rollovers, bumper caps and flippers, back up again and down again racking up great numbers of points, flashing a lot of light, and making a lot of exciting noise, all of which are only useful to the degree they obscure reality .

Ms. Sherrod resigned from her position as State Director of the USDA Rural Development in Georgia on Monday, July 19,2010, after the far-right side of the Yellow Press, including Beck and Limbaugh, published a truncated recording of her presentation. The NAACP then attacked Ms. Sherrod, believing taking the side of the Limbaughs and Becks - well, if they had found and watched the ENTIRE video that would have taken a few more minutes. The mail stream press, attempting to disdainfully ignore these bad-boys, dutifully reported the skeleton of the mess. THEN, here comes the other side of the Yellow Press, Olberman and Maddow leading the gleeful charge with their side of the story. Well, the last guys win this time because the story was on their side to begin with. Now the main stream press and the administration are still trying to appear well above the fray when they both have been trampled into ridicule by it. The president has called Ms. Sherrod to express his regret along with everybody else, except of course for those who are holding their sides as they roll in laughter.

Let's face it, the problems shown by the press and the administration reflect a vacuum in the middle of their chains of command. Somehow the sergeants and the young officers have been lost. Too many shots are being called by the top-dogs in both organizations and that’s always a checklist for disaster. The top-dogs are always out of the Loop of Facts because they live in the Loop of Pretend.

If neither the press or the Obama administration can build a strong structure (that’s the old hierarchy, remember?) of workers who live and work in the Fact Loop, and know what’s going on, and who have the authority to make and enforce decisions, then things will get worse. I predict they will.

Wanta place any bets?

A General Disgrace

2010-06-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

That’s the way our generals have been behaving lately. Petraeus apparently collapsing at a senate hearing - although I listened to the halting, mumbling, monotoneist questioning by John McCain myself and I too collapsed. I think it was some kind of a hypnotic trance.

Now the Runaway General, McChrystal breaking though the no-no’s of the military, actually the Know-No’s. He certainly knows better than to do what he just did and if he didn’t know he should be shot. Is he dumb? Probably not. He’s probably a pretty sharp guy who has come a long way by using his smarts and his puff. So - did he have something in mind?

Well, the war is not going well. Like most wars it is going somewhere else other than where it was supposed to go. It has just recently become America’s longest war in its history. Casualties are starting to soar. Iraq is spinning in and out of “control?”. Iran is smugly confident, and Israel is wild-eyed. Something is going to happen soon.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is boiling and bubbling with excitement over the possibility of kicking Obama out of the White house in 2012. They are trying to set up their new presidential guy. They have a lot of good presidential timber to choose from - like, well, Mitch McConnel, Boehner, Kyle, Cantor, Palin, Romney, Barbour, Paul or Paul, Santorum, Perry (if he hasn’t succeeded by then), Gingrich, Jindal, Armey, Coburn, Ney, or . . . hmmm Ensign?, or Sanford?, well . . . HEY, how about McChrystal! WOW. Do you suppose? And if Obama fires him then - then - then - the plot thickens, contrast happens, sides are drawn up, intelligence is implied, and . . . Sara Palin gets a new guy to run with - somebody who couldn’t finish his job either.

So. McChrystal will probably offer his resignation when he meets Obama. What if Obama accepts it, puts it in his shirt pocket, and sends McCrystal back to do his job? The drawdown (if it does happen) will run through 2011 and into 2012, and Obama will be the greater man to come out of this showdown. Will this happen? Stand by - breaking news is coming in now. Obama’s pretty sharp too, so be prepared to be amazed.

Israel's Latest Insult.

2010-06-08T22:05:00.000-07:00

I wonder if Israel can do no wrong in American eyes. We see the latest insult to world opinion being the boarding of Turkish ships in international waters as another understanding and acknowledgment that international laws do not apply to Israel. Just as they are not bound by Palestine’s property on the West Bank - in short, Israel is telling the rest of the world that Israel can draw its own boundaries as it feel necessary to fit its wishes. Israel is the only sovereign on this planet, and they need no friends. That is, as long as they have the US backing them - in fact they seem willing to turn the rest of the world against not only them but against America too.

Just as they have taken land from Palestinians on the West Bank by sending “settlers” into Palestinian land. then using the resulting conflict as rationale to send in army and construction crews and build walls for “protection” of the “settlers”, they seem to feel that international law is simply a minor inconvenience that Israel’s prior Covenant with Yahweh has already provided for.

The people in Gaza have been stranded for three years And Israel apparently is waiting for them to either die, or throw out their elected leaders, and put in pro-Israeli officials. That isolation in Gaza led to this attempt to bring in ships with food and shelter items into Gaza -and that was the ship attacked by Israel on the high seas resulting in the deaths of nine people onboard the aid ship.

The American government said that an investigation into the matter WAS needed. BUT that Israel should lead the investigation. All this following a week in which a diplomatic attempt to establish a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone was insultingly “vetoed” by Israel

It does seem strange that Jews have been so inordinately successful in world events since around 1950. I wonder to what extent that is due to American Jews. More than 55% of American Jews have a college degree and 25% possess a graduate degree. Apparently Jews comprise only about 2% of the American population yet 35% of the 50 richest people on the Forbes 400 list are Jewish, and Jews comprise about 40% of all US billionaires. They also seem well represented in the newspaper, magazine and TV world, including the USA Today, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Thirteen American senators currently are Jewish as are 30 representatives. So American Jews apparently are well educated, have money, are aware of world events and have a potential to shape American public opinion.

Why do they not display a similar skill in shaping world opinion? Perhaps it is that if they can drag America along behind them then they just don’t care. This makes it very difficult to talk meaningful peace in the middle east. Israel has all the trump cards and we all play by their rules. America is the enabling force but it is controlled completely by Israel.

Israel has also found a crack in the Christian religion that provides a privileged access to the Christian far right. That comes through a combination of what the Christians call the “Old Testament” and the last chapter of its own “New Testament” which is named “Revelation”, a mystical forecast of how God will end the world phrased in terms of Biblical mythology and allegedly end the world "soon". So now there are radical American Christians who are enthusiastically allied with Jews simply because of the reference in the Jewish bible about Jews being God’s Chosen People. Since those references are also in the Bible that these Christians believe in, it has assumed the proportion of a-priori knowledge. Now tie this in with some of the stirring words found in “Revelation” like the “Antichrist”, Armageddon, the end of the world, fire from heaven, horsemen, apocalypse - all terms that are poorly understood in Christian mythology, and they become spun into a nebula of innuendo in which those magic phrases snap and crackle like God’s own lightning. Now if such an inarticulate mass could be led by extremely well educated, literate, and united people, this great mass would have no choice but to wobble in the general direction of permissibility, begging forgiveness for being late as they are driven along.

The only force that could possibly be brought against this great tide is reason - but then “reason” becomes a trick of the antichrist. You can’t reason anymore, that is un-Christian - all knowledge is in the bible - anything else is sinful and needs to be purged and destroyed.

Does Israel have any hint of what they are playing around with?

Open Letter to Maurene Dowd

2010-06-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

Hey gal, I love you! Well, not really YOU - you know, I mean not THAT way, but I do love the way you write. Usually. But I gotta talk with you about your column on May 29, 2010, about how Barack Obama needs to get emotional to show us that he is really worthy of leading our country.

Think about it. Look at the problems now pouring down on our country. 1) There’s the immigration issue - Texas is apparently still trying to succeed from the the union, while Arizona may be the first state to get kicked out. Meanwhile, American businesses continue to undercut Mexican corporations and entice their former workers to come north. 2) Korea is in a state of accelerated crises again as “Dear Leader” wobbles around, dribbling and shooting baskets with the War-ball 3) The world’s financial structure was short-circuited under the last administration and SOMEBODY has still got to fix it - still. 4) Israel apparently thinks God actually did give all of the land in the mid-eastern part of the world to them, and they can ignore all other laws passed by any other country. 5) The supreme court has a vacancy-pending, and there will be raucous cries from republicans during that process. 6) Iran is poised to go nuclear - like as in war - maybe - unless Israel hits them first . How would you like to reason with Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad? 7) We’re still trying to begin to recover from the greatest recession since the 1930’s, and the republicans still say “NO!” and the democrats say “eh - well, yeah, maybe?”. 8) Elections are coming up - soon, and 9) oh yeah, the gulf spill, and 10) a few incidentals (* see footnote).

Not the time for our own Dear Leader to go emotional on us. If you have a major leak in your house you don’t want a plumber to show up and cry. If a tree falls on your house you don’t want an arborist to come by and wring his hands. If your car won’t run right you don’t want a mechanic to raise the hood and say “Oh, I can’t believe this!” You don’t want your dentist to look in your mouth and say “uh-oh”, or your doctor to look at you, shake his head and say “Oh my God, I feel so sorry for you”. No. Times of crises are times for leadership. Leadership means an ability to examine the symptoms we all can see, determine what the problems really are and identify the causes of those problems. And then by selecting options, developing criteria and evaluating the whole mess to build a pathway into a new world. And here we are now, figuratively taking on water, with a tree on the house, and a car that won’t run, a tooth that hurts, and a pain in the ass - or at least the body politick.

What we need in these times is a leader who can preside over a group of experts. In this case over groups of experts. Now is the time for leadership from the top and also from those panels of “experts”. Is Obama the man for this job? Well this is where we find out. The question I’m asking, is he sliding back into America’s Tea Party past or is he leading us into the new world which lies ahead? We will find out soon. And no crying please.

(* Reference is to minor wars (in alphabetical order) in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and other assorted places)

Memorial Day 2010

2010-05-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend as we pause for a moment to remember the brave troops who died for our nation, let's also remember who made these wars possible. Here is a partial list:

CACI- Interpreters and interrogation - Abu Grhraib, etc.
Halliburton - construction military bases, oil field, infrastructure

Titan Same as CACI - worth $1B

Bechtel - Construction and engineering

Aegis Defense Services - police

Custer Battles - first war contractor found guilty of fraud.
KBR

General Dynamics - tank shells, Stryker vehicles, bullets, etc.

Nour USA Ltd. Pipelines

Chevron,

Exxon Mobil

Veritas Capital Fund/DynCorp - train Iraqi police

Washington Group International - build schools, water works, utilities

Environmental Chemical - clean up battlefield

Aegis - Private security

International American Products - provide electrical services

Erinys - protecting Iraq’s oil reserves

Fluor - water sewage

Perini - Environmental cleanup (run by Dianne Feinstein’s husband)

URS - environmental cleanup (also run by Dianne Feinstein’s husband)

Parsons - Tesla Motors - reconstruction and construction of buildings

First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contraction -

Armor Holdings - Armor for military vehicles.

L3 Communications - training Iraqi law enforcement personnel

AM General - Extra wide ATVs

Cummins - power generators

MerchantBridge - telecommunications

GlobalRisk Strategies - Risk management - insurance - humanitarian aid.

Lockheed-Martin,

Northrop Grumman,

ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC

More than half of the American defense budget now goes to these companies. It is in their best interests to have war. The more wars we have the more money they make. They NEED war. They also conveniently fall outside most of the judicial requirements of the laws of our nation, the nation they are housed in, and the nation they are engaged in. They are not bound by any constitution, law, sovereign, church or any rule of law. Their only obligation is to maximize their own profit.

Let's remember these guys this Memorial Day. They even take care of those graveyards we will see on TV.

How Much Did You Spill?

2010-05-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

How much did you spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

We all know about the spill now. And we all know about the anger. We have seen a few of the tears and a lot of pointed fingers. We have heard the screams against the government, against BP, against Halliburton, against Deep Water, against all those poor pensioners in England, and against all the others involved in this catastrophe.

How about you? And me, too. What is our responsibility for this incredible mess?

My nieghborhood is well stocked in SUVs just like the ones in this picture . We have a lot of big cars that can’t get very good gasoline milage. Every house but one has two cars. Or three. Some have four, one has five (teen-agers).

We have a lot of grass in this neighborhood. Legal grass. The kind you grow in your front yard. And it is always clipped two inches high. All weekend long the ‘hood sounds like an Air Force flight line during a major launch exercise. Everybody has push mowers that run on gasoline, everybody has a riding mower. There are clippers, blowers, weed eaters, even chain saws, and mulchers. Some run on electricity - not that big a deal as far as the spill goes. Some people, like me, hire a guy to drag a mower or two in on his truck which gets 5 mpg, then cut grass, eat weeds and blow it all away. I pay him money and I think he sends some down to the Gulf to help pay for the spill. I’ll ask him next time I see him.

A Picture of Islam

2010-05-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

Today was the day to make fun of Mohammed. It was the day to draw or create pictures depicting him as an animal, insect, plant or worse. Pakistan apparently shut down access to Facebook and YouTube because of those pictures, and some of the pictures were probably broadcast. I say probably because I haven’t seen any so far and while I’m not looking FOR them I am pretty open to most stuff that crosses the net.

At any rate the entire thing has become a huge mess. Islam has a religious requirement that certain images not be created. This accounts for some of the amazing art found in Muslim mosques. There were to be no representations of any thing that was created by God. That included people, animals, plants, even earth and clouds. Significant modification to that tradition is now apparent with photographs, video and movies moving through the Islamic world on newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, computers and internet. But the requirement is basically still there, particularly with respect to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed. Any picture representing to present his likeness, even if intended to present a handsome, intelligent, pious and glorious image is still considered a vulgar and insulting sacrilege to roughly a billion Muslims on the planet

This issue resurfaced recently when a writer was innocently trying to put together a children’s book series about the various religions. She had words and pictures of Rama, Buddha, Moses, Jesus and many other religious leaders and then found out that she couldn’t put even her obviously and intentionally not-realistic pictures of Mohammed in her series-to-be. That was a minor problem that affected her project. Then Danish newspapers picked up the story and ran a series of cartoons about Mohammed to show that there was no problem, the main issue was not Islamic religious legal technicalities but the western values of Free Speech. The cartoons went hypersonic when death threats supposedly by Islamic “martyrs” were directed toward some of the Danish cartoonists. Some of those cartoonists are apparently still living in fear of their lives for that act.

Now enter a stupid American TV program called “South Park”. They spoof and make fun of everything and everybody they can find. They decided to run a series or a show which depicted Mohammed as a bear. MORE death threats came from more Islamic “martyrs”, and South Park dropped the segment the day it was to be shown.

So now comes someone on Facebook. Apparently this episode is seen as the catyclsmic collision between the great western world’s right to free speech with an Islamic religious taboo. The Muslim response has been to threaten to assassinate more of the perpetrators, now even a treat to kill innocent people as retaliation.

The western right to free speech is not a gift given by any god, it is a right that was denied by an almost endless series of kings, popes and other creatures of nobility and it was won in an almost endless series of wars. It is based on the understanding that most governments and most religions want to control all that is printed about them and their activities. Any westerner (European or American) would therefore “know” that if they were restricted from writing about or photographing some event or thing that it was probably illegal to begin with and SHOULD be written about or photographed and published.

Muslims have had a problem with the religious requirement against depiction anything in the natural world. Any showing of Mohammed cannot possibly be based on historical drawings so they would all have to be bogus. But to threaten the western people who attempt to present Mohammed, including innocent people who happen to be near the target is repulsive to all mankind and all religions.

It is my feeling that Islam should be less concerned about images of Mohammed, and more concerned about the image of Islam.

Free Speech and Islam

2010-04-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

The latest issue has arisen over a TV program called South Park which I have only seen by accident on probably four or five occasions and for a total time of perhaps forty-five seconds, probably less. I think the program is stupid and insulting. I freely admit that I haven’t really given it a fair chance, but I don’t intend to do so either. However, I understand that South Park planned an episode showing the Islamic prophet Mohammed as a bear, or depicted as a person wrapped in a bearskin - I don’t know which and don’t really care. Personally, I think that either would be insulting to anyone who might watch it whether they were Muslim or not.

But now - apparently - death threats by some Islamic organizations have cowed South Park into backing off these presentations. That is achieving a poor prize at a very dear price. The very idea that the press can be cowed into submission by threats of terrorism cannot be tolerated. Yet, on the other hand, the press must also be held accountable by some mechanism to be responsible as well as free. Personally I am not willing to go to the mat supporting South Park.

Free Speech is more than just a right. It is a NEED of any democracy or representative government. That right also imposes a responsibility to use it fairly, impartially, and with respect because the “speech” which is delivered is not important in itself. The value of free speech comes from its search for truth, and its accounting for and accurate recording of events. If it is also malicious and untruthful and done under the protection of “free speech”, then it assumes a tyrannical nature and thus constitutes an attack on the very principle of free speech itself. Indeed, to me the very allegation that South Park IS a member of the press is idiotic and out of line. Yet they cry "Freedom of the Press!"

The Danish cartoonists who depicted the Islamic prophet Mohammed in various poses and did that simply to “prove” they could flaunt the right of free speech without regard to other peoples' feelings. I have seen those cartoons and thought many of them were instructive and fair and well supported. Still, their use for that purpose of flaunting the right of free speech alone, in my opinion, was abusive.

Yet there is no way to punish those cartonists or South Park for their extravagances. They have made fun of one of our major rights and thus have belittled and threatened it. The right of free speech is extremely important and well worth defending, but I am not willing to defend those cartoonists or South Park because to my mind, they did as much harm to the principle of free speech as did the terrorists who came into our land and traditions after them.

All rights have a sword-like nature in that they can cut both ways. To paraphrase Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the press IS mightier than the sword yet if it only causes the sword to be drawn against the press, then it has the capacity to destroy all rights.

Women, Children and Gays - In a Nutshell

2010-04-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes." This from an Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi speaking in Tehran this week. He went on to say that the earthquakes were caused because immodest women had disappointed God. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes." Poor God. He's got a right to be mad. How's he going to get them ready for heaven? Especially when so many of the angels flit around in wispy scarves.

So the message from Islam appears to be an admonition to follow the lead presented by the Roaming Catholic Church and “Coverup”. At any rate, to adapt our lives to the moral codes of the church. Pedophilia may be an inconvenient truth that "can happen anywhere”, but the church will take care of it’s own pedophileers - no need to bother the police, they have enough problems with bad guys.

Meanwhile, the protestants are romping and stomping with tea bags swaying from their hat brims and pistols flopping on their hips and some of them shoot down medical doctors, and they all love to protest a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a child for the next 20 years when she can’t afford those she already has, and she had no choice in the conception of THIS one either, and they piously grimace as if they might be in prayer, indeed praying to maintain the sanctify of marriage by protesting and keeping homosexuals out of wedlock - ALL of this of course, because it is God’s desire - and God needs help from good ole' gunslingers from time to time.

And the Jews are plowing up Palestinian homes and building “settlements” for more Jews, normally an act of war - would be if they tried that in France or Italy say, but not of course, when God wills it, because God gave this land to the Jews, right? Or did He give it to the Palestinians? Depends on which "This Land Is My Land for Dummies" book you have bought into.

And they will ALL tell you that they all worship the same god. Really? Come on now, this is a joke - right? Do ANY of them really worship ANY real god? Or do they really mean they just worship their own religion?

The Gay Deciever

2010-04-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

Army Secretary John McHugh told the troops last week that the previous policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" concerning gay and lesbian soldiers currently serving in the armed forces was no longer effective.

Now he is saying he misspoke. They still can be kicked out if they tell anyone they are gay. McHugh now says that before the old policy can be changed, the Army needs to "talk with gay soldiers."

Hmmmm.

The Catholic Church Attacks. First the Law, Now the Press.

2010-04-01T21:16:00.000-07:00

Some are calling for the Pope's resignation. It won’t happen, certainly not for any sexual reasons, because the church can not begin to comprehend the magnitude of the problems felt by their victims. And also, that one pope might step down for any reason does not provide assurance that his replacement might not be associated with another fetish or two, probably also dealing with sex because anything involving sex is clearly a mystery to the Catholic Church.

Probably the best course of action for the Catholic Church to take would be 1) to permit and encourage their priests and nuns to marry, 2) to permit and encourage the ordination of women, gays and lesbians as Priests, eligible for promotion to Bishop, Cardinal and Pope, and 3) to meanwhile refrain from comments of any nature concerning matters of which they cannot - by their very own vows, willingly taken before God - have any knowledge of, or experience of, sexual acts and their consequences. That means that the church should have no voice - none - concerning matters involving sexual intercourse, conception or contraception, carrying a child to birth or abortion, nursing, feeding and taking care of young children, especially the education of young children!!! or the health care of young children. The Catholic Church is prima facie unqualified and incompetent in these matters. If the Catholic Church is to provide any such care involving children, that must be done under adult supervision.

The willful, deliberate and continual refusal by bishops and other priests - and the Pope - to notify legal authorities of crimes committed by the Catholic Priests should carry the same penalty to the supervisor as the perpetrator of the crime, as is fitting in other professions that are true professions, like medicine, psychiatry, or counseling. Archbishop Nyez has been quoted as saying the church should treat sex abuse cases very seriously. That's fine, it would be nice if the church did take some action but the most important thing is to report these allegations to the local authorities - because they indicate a possible violation of law, and legal remedies need to be applield.

Now we find the Great Church is mounting counter attacks by charging newspapers like the New York Times - and others - as being out to get the church and the pope. The pope himself has said he takes this matter as a “test of himself” - good God, he REALLY doesn’t understand what damage his church has done, does he? And as the leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was in charge of all the investigations of all the pedophiliac priests for 20 years before he “ascended”. Now the new leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Levada wrote: "I am not proud of America's newspaper of record. The New York Times, as a paragon of fairness." Certainly the Times seems to be walking closely to the edge of their cherished motto: All the news that is fit to print".

Israel Makes it Perfectly Clear

2010-03-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

Israel made the same mistake again. Twice now they have "accidentally" let slip notices to the world that they intend to continue their acts of war against Palestine by building Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. The first time was just moments before Netanyanhu met the American Vice-President, Biden, the second time now was just moments before Netanyahu met the American President, Obama. They are sorry, they say.

Netanyahu told the Israeli parliament in between the two episodes that "Jews are building in Jerusalem, and Jews were building in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago." Of course the Jews have been fighting with their neighbors over land for a lot longer than that. Probably back before Abraham, back in the time of the goddesses.

The point is that Israel is not interested in peace talks with Palestine. Why should they be? They have the best of both worlds right now. They can claim that they want peace in the middle east, then build Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, put Israeli citizens in those settlements, then fence them together and kick Palestine citizens off the lands they thought was legally theirs.

America continues pour money and military equipment into Israel as they look chagrined at having being "fooled" again. Fool is right. Israel just doesn't care anymore. They have everything they could ever wish for. Almost. Next will almost certainly be a military strike against Iran.
Of course we will HAVE to be on Israel's side then. Fooled again.

The Political ResErection of the Catholic Church.

2010-03-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

VATICAN, March 16, 2010-- In a story written by reporter Marco Bellizzi, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano claims that the American Catholic Bishops speak for the entire Catholic Church when they criticize the current health care bill now under consideration in the American congress. The Vatican claims that “the health care bill approved by the US Senate is not acceptable. . . It cannot be supported and the moral objections raised by the project cannot be postponed for a later moment.” (http://www.cbcpnews.com/?q=node/12618. 2010.0320Sa2329.)

How can it be that the Catholic Church from Rome, Italy, is weighing in on the issue of health care in America? Their main objections appear to be based on issues of abortion, birth control and gay marriage. Seems that they are now presenting themselves as friends of the court as it were, presenting themselves as expert witnesses in the matter of marriage, sex, pregnancy, giving birth and raising children.

They are, in fact certifiably incompetent in this field since by the very vows to attain their position they have renounced any intention to explore, experience and encounter the issues of marriage, sex, pregnancy, giving birth and raising children. Since they are never wrong therefore, in any of these issues, they apparently now feel comfortable in ordering their followers - especially American members of congress who are also Catholic - to do as they say.

Nuns and priests are forbidden to experience marriage or sex. Some priests and popes were married, a thousand years or so ago we are told, but that was in the ancient past. None living today have that experience. Sex is also unknown to them. Or is it? Rumors have it that priests often have sex among themselves. Of course, substantiation is hard to come by in that area, but there have also been long standing rumors of pedophilia between priests and Catholic children. That substantiation was also hard to come by until recently. Now information is leaking through an aroused world penal system that pedophilia not only HAS occurred, but that it has been APPROVED by the Catholic church, inasmuch as they not only did not report the transgressor to the proper authorities - as REQUIRED by law - and they did not punish the transgressors themselves, but instead transferred them to ANOTHER venue where they could find another garden of innocents for their immoral and illegal personal passions. And THEN, when “almost exposed” again, these pedophiles in priest's frocks would be sent on, almost as if to carry out their hideous mission in another parish, and then another. And considering that the current pope had been in charge of the council with authority to investigate such charges one can only conclude that he HAD to have taken place in that sexual abuse, either in direct action with minors or in the cover up. At any rate, it is now clear that Pope Benedict had the opportunity to resolve this issue and he hid it. We can now see clearly the Pope's attitude toward the children, the law, and the alleged teachings of Jesus. The Catholic Church trumps all of those bit players.

Now let’s affirm that probably 99.9% of all Catholic priests and nuns are committed to carrying out their duties as ministers to their congregations. But let’s also be clear that we are not speaking about priestly pedophilia as an isolated event. Let’s also be very clear that we are not speaking about an ecclesiastical or religious issue. We are speaking now as a political point of order because the catholic church has decided to bring their church pressure in a political issue and thus forfeited their right to be respected and treated SOLELY as a religious organization.

Furthermore, It is not the issue here that one priest committed a sexual abuse against a minor child. Nor is it even that one bishop covered up a sexual abuse of a minor child. Nor is it even that one supervisor of the priest and the bishop failed to detect and enforce the laws of man and of their church. Nor is it even that these repeated actions apparently became an epidemic of sexual, physical, mental, moral, religious and spiritual rape, or that it continued for more than 40 years - because those accusations apply to only one small country in christendom - Ireland - in which these events repeatedly occurred. Now a groundswell of pedophilia that was committed by Roman Catholic priests back in the 1950s and 1960s is emerging across Europe and the United States.

The present Pope, while Bishop of Regensburg referred a pedophiliac priest to a psychiatrist who stated that in his professional opinion the priest was “incurable”. That priest was subsequently reinstated, transferred to another parish where he continued his pediphilia for years. The current pope's brother said in a newspaper interview published 2010. 309Tu, that he now regrets that he used to slap pupils as punishment after he took over a renowned German boys' choir in the 1960s http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/georg-ratzinger-popes-bro_n_491858.html 2010.0320Sa2322. He has only admitted slapping; now one must wonder if he went farther than that. One must certainly wonder at his qualifications that "earned" him that post.

While a cardinal at the Vatican, Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, wrote a 2001 letter instructing bishops worldwide to report all cases of abuse to his office and keep church investigations secret under threat of excommunication. The Vatican insists the secrecy rules serve only to protect the integrity of the church's investigations, and should not be taken to mean the church should not tell police of their members' crimes. But victims' advocates in Ireland and the United States said the pope again failed to make it clear whether the church considers the secular law a higher priority than canon law when seeking to stop a pedophile priest. Unfortunately though, the Pope DID make it perfectly clear that he condones the Irish coverup. We can now clearly see that he participated in these illegal pedofilic activities if not as a perpetrator then as an accomplice. We know that because the leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Brady who apologized for "mishandling" a serial child molesting priest, said that he would not resign over the scandals and their coverup UNLESS the Pope asked him to do so. The pope has evidently agreed with Cardinal Brady that the church is more important than those kids, and the Irish law is totally inconsequential. Isn't Jesus supposedly quoted as having something to say about rendering to Caesar and to God? Seems like only the children got rendered.
Chhttp://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/21/world/AP-EU-Church-Abuse-Pope.html. 2010.0321Su0101

So we have not just the crime, and the cover up, both repeated again and again thousands and thousands of times over forty or more years, the willful and criminal defiance of the laws of many nations, the intentional and self-righteous disregard of the alleged teachings of Jesus, for the single purpose of seeking to appear to be legal, honorable, trustworthy and orthodox. One might wish for the Pope to step down but we know that would never happen, and wonder if there is anyone available for the position who understands the implications of morality, laws, and the meaning of Jesus?

Add all this to the Catholic church's discrimination against gays and lesbians who seek equal rights among human laws, the witch-hunt denouncement of a woman’s right to choose to carry and give birth to a child which she may not even have agreed to create (she was raped because God willed it, or God made the guy want her even though she didn't want any part of it, and she doesn't want and can't afford another child which she, and only she will have to care for over the next twenty years?), the attempt to prevent the use of birth control devices, preferring the spread of disease to helping prevent women from becoming pregnant from a pregnancy they did not want and cannot afford, the refusal to permit women into the priesthood, the requirement of chastity for the priests, and you have the picture of an organization that is isolated from the problems of the people they supposedly serve. The members of this isolated brotherhood clearly and obviously live an unnatural and abnormal life and view the people they serve through a distorted prism. They have been guilty of willful disobedience of national laws and they have offered no defense except to say they are sorry. Indeed they are. They are sorry that they got caught. Maybe the political message they have for the American health care system is that if you get sick it is because God wills it, and you will get well if that is his will too.

While the priests and nuns themselves have almost without exception conducted themselves in a highly trustworthy, honorable and devoted fashion, the Catholic hierarchy has behaved in a shameful, disgraceful, immoral and illegal manner.

You were a religious organization. We all urge you to clean your dirty vestments, clear your ranks of criminals and perverted priests and then endeavor to help your congregations find a spiritual dimension in their lives - and in yours also. If you wish to become and remain a religious organization you will be respected as such.

If you want to become a political organization then you are fair game and you will have to defend your statements, platforms, and intentions, and find your past transgressions investigated, all in the mud of politics. And you are no better equipped for this battle than is Mark Sanford or Larry Craig.

You can continue with your mumbling and incantations and smoke and mirrors and hocus pocus, and your faithful members can continue to contribute from their labors to your continuing calls for support because they appear to serve you more than you serve them. But if you become a political organization then you cannot retreat behind your priestly garments claiming any form of special privilege including all your buried secrets.

Israel's Declaration of War

2010-03-17T09:17:00.001-07:00

Israel’s method of waging war on Palestine goes like this: 1) Agree that East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip belong to Palestine. 2) Begin building Israeli “settlements” IN East Jerusalem, the West Bank and next to the Gaza Strip. 3) Restrict Palestinian access to those new settlement areas. 4) When Palestinians react by attacking in the settlement areas from which they have been driven, the Israeli army retaliates, kills Palestinians, walls are built around the new settlements and Palestinians are prohibited from passage through those areas between Israeli settlements. 5) American congressional and administration leaders smile sadly and say that Israel and Palestine (and the US) need “go forward from where we are now”. 6) the rest of the world kind of watches, knowing that the United States is somehow, through this process providing some restraint on Israel. 7) Repeat steps 1 to 6.

One of Obama’s stated goals was to work toward achieving peace in the middle east. Palestine has held back because of the settlements recently built on “their” territory. Finally, Palestine agreed to try “one more time”.

To pretend that we “really intend” to “move forward”, Vice-president Biden is sent to Israel to pretend to initiate negotiations. Within hours though, after Biden’s arrival there, Israel announced the construction of a new 1,600 person settlement in the Palestine areas in East Jerusalem. This is the diplomatic equivalent of Netanyanhu banging on his glass with a spoon at an internationally televised dinner at UN Headquarters, then standing on his chair and announcing “This is for the United States and President Obama, the rest of the world, and especially all Arabs!” as he shoots a bird for all the press to record. Vice-president Biden, representing the people of the United States, and who has just arrived on this pretend peace mission, is seated across from Netanyanhu as the consciousness of the world swings like klieg lights and TV cameras might have done, from Netanyanhu’s upraised finger to Biden’s downcast face.

For a number of years now, Israel has been more and more independent of American support. They have taken over the planning, organizing, and development of their action. All we need to do is just cover the checks they write. It has become more and more obvious to more and more people throughout the past ten years or so that Israel no longer needs the support of the United States. They may be willing to accept whatever aid, weapons, armament and money we might send their way but as far as matters of life and death or war and peace are concerned, we should just butt out. Israel doesn’t need us any more. Money? That’s OK, just send it and shut up. Apparently Israel realizes that the American dollar isn’t what it was a few years ago, and of course that is another part of our pretend.

This action by Israel clearly calls for a major change in the United States-Israel relationship. Not just this one action in itself, but that it comes as an obviously developing construct on Israel’s part. This is a natural result of the Gaza Humiliation to All of Mankind, which in turn grew out from other Israeli settlements built on the West Bank which followed other settlements they built in East Jerusalem. America's continued "support" of Israel is now proclaiming to all nations of the world that we are NOT INTERESTED in peace in that region but only in the support of Israel domination of the entire middle-east. One can only wonder how long it will be before Israel will strike Iran and once again throw the middle east out of its fragile, constantly out of balance alignment.

Furthermore, since it is now clear that the United States has no control over Israel, the time has come for us to prepare to cut the swollen financial, armament and diplomatic umbilical cord between us, and set Israel free to find and develop support and friends among its neighbors.

The Senate and Bunning. Wild Pitch.

2010-03-02T08:26:00.000-08:00

Let us now praise Senator Bunning. Bunning, the pitcher. Bunning, the author. Bunning, the guy who wrote a sad book. Bunning, who showed how stupid his baseball teammates and opponents were. Bunning, the U.S. Senator. Bunning, the man who now shows us what we NEED to see - how stupid his senate teammates and opponents are.

It’s not Bunning’s fault. He is probably an average man, with average intellect, and average emotional control. All he did was to show us how poorly constructed certain portions of our our constitution are, at least with respect to the Senate. Either that or he has just shown us is how badly our current senate leadership is performing.

By shutting down some portions of the legislative budget with just a simple act known as a “hold”, he has revealed how badly mistaken Joseph McCarthy was about communists and fellow travelers in the U.S. government. All the Soviet Union would ever have needed to have done to bring the United Sates to its knees in surrender was simply to get a single communist elected to our Senate. Then there would have been no more money for the military, for weapons, for Radio Free Europe, or anything. Our government would have been rendered powerless. The House of Representatives would have just sat down to wait for instructions (from the Senate). The president would have have said “Aw shucks.” as he shut down our military machine. We would have simply have just quit and let the Bolsheviks come on in. Well, apparently Bunning COULD have done that back then - eh?

OK . So now what? We have just seen senators holding up appointments, blocking laws and budget resolutions by simply saying “I forbid! (dammit!)”, as Senator DeMint of South Carolina blocked the would-have-been director of the TSA because he might lead them to form a union, and as Senator Shelby of Alabama blocked more than 300 appointees by the president in order to get a contract for a defense department airplane to be awarded to his state, and so on. Now comes Bunning, swirling around, daintily dancing and tapping his toes in a fit of pique, raising - instead of important points of order - just a finger or two. But still saying “NO!”

The American senate IS a pitiful thing. It is the greatest mistake made by our founding fathers. It is the single point that PROVES they were not led by the hand of God. This awful structure misrepresents the American people by concentrating the power of our government in the hands of only a few people, most of them prosaically rural residents of isolated states like Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and so on who have the voting power (in the senate) of half of the United State’s population, and who simply want to just raise their pistol nozzle to push the tip of their cap back on their head and believe that the world is a place in which the biggest problem is the fox that pesters their chickens, knowing they are safe behind some great ocean (whatever might be its name), and that there really ISN’T anything out there that could be a problem, except for the government! And if such a thing DID show up, their dog would chase it away, or they could shoot it.

If George Bush had had one of these peeved senators on his watch he would not have been able to invade Iraq - at least not until he had accumulated all the money he might need to conduct an eight-year long war already in the treasury.

So what is the problem now? Where are the other senators? Where is the senate leader? Where is the president of the United States now? Hmmmmm. Seems like they all want to retain their elected positions. That’s really too bad, they would all make great lobbyists.

The Problem We All Ignore.

2010-02-08T20:39:00.000-08:00

There is a serious systemic problem in the structure of the American government of which we are all aware, but which we all ignore and pretend that it does not even exist. This problem has the capability to destroy our government and has prevented the proper functioning of our government at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is now becoming magnified with every legislative session.

This problem is the United States Senate. It must be changed or it will destroy the American nation.

I am not speaking about the bi-camelarization of the legislative process, certainally not the staggered terms of the senate which provides continuinity. I am speaking about the democratic process itself and that of republican representation. This resulted from a great compromise at the beginning of our country that balanced the cities with the rural areas. Now, we have
rural states with enormously greater proportional representation than the more populated states. This results in an effective denial of proper representation for large numbers of Americans. For example, the 2.5 million members of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota and Alaska have the same voting power as the 100 million people in California, Texas, New York and Florida. To put it another way, each person is Wyoming has the same clout in the Senate as 70 Californians. Or another way, the population in the city of Tampa, Florida has the voting power as one-third of the total population of the entire United States.

As the world moves into new realms of international complexity and finds itself dealing with problems involving global pollution, nuclear weapons, international terrorism, a rapidly growing globalization of international economies, America is still dealing with a horse-and -buggy legislative structure to draft national laws largely due to a Senate that is still serving a sparcely populated, rural nation. The United States in 2009 passed the point at which most of its citizens now live in urban areas. As more and more Americans move into industrailized and urbanized areas which are concerned with issues such as light rail transportation, gun control, health care, higher education and other issues, their per-capita voting power in the Senate decreases and that of those people who remain in rural areas continues to grow in proportion.

According to Wikipedia on 2009.1103Tu2326 ,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
As of July 1, 2008, the estimated population of the 50 states and District of Columbia was 304,059,724. The top nine states in population contain slightly more than half of the total population. But they are represented by only 18 senators. The twenty-five lowest-population states contain less than one-sixth of the total population. But they have half, 50, of the total senators - the other half of the senate represents 5/6 of the US

Additionally, too often the rural states with low populations have prevented the nation from action desired by the majority of the people such as the restriction of civil-rights laws by southern states in the 1950s and 1960s. Or as we see in today’s health care debates.

So what to do? 1. become aware of the problem, of its magnitude and possible consequences. 2. create a discussion group to talk or write about it. 3. find important criteria for alternatives. 4) To explore possible alternative structures. 5) Publicize the issue.

"Chemical" Ali and "Chemical" Rumsfeld

2010-01-25T14:10:00.000-08:00

As "Chemical" Ali is put to death today in Iraq it is Interesting to review the connections between Saddam Hussein, "Chemical" Ali, Bechtel and Donald "Chemical" Rumsfeld. http://www.oldamericancentury.org/donald_rumsfeld.htm
Admittedly, this is a biased account, but it would be interesting to see any refutations. There may be none.

The photo shows Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's then-special envoy to the Middle East, meeting with Saddam Hussein during a visit to Baghdad, Iraq in December 1983, during the Iran–Iraq War. A 60 second video of the event can be see here> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shakinghands_high.OGG

I believe “Chemical” Ali is present in both the handshake photo (with his back to the camera wearing horn-rimmed glasses) and seated in the video

Obama - Year One

2010-01-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

Obama is now becoming seen as a possibly deceptive person, at the best as an uncertainty . No one really feels confident that either they or Obama understands where Obama really stands. There is a growing sense that much is taking place behind the scenes, a sense that a lot is passing under the table. He tells you something and you feel good, then he shows you something else. And while you are figuring that out, you seem to feel that you lose something that you really didn’t want to give up. But it still only “seems” that this is going on. When you hear him talk you do feel better. But I don’t feel as much better now as I did a year ago, or six months ago, or even one month ago.

There is a sense that people are beginning to back away from Obama. No longer as certain as they were - still liking him - but now wary, worried, confused, uncertain. We definitely do hear what he said but now we wonder what he meant. More and more we have to accept one of these two terms: 1) either he is a very likable liar, or 2) he is being manipulated and can't figure it out.

The healthcare fiasco is an embarrassment. It is now apparent that the Democrats could not have passed it even if they had had 110 senators and 700 members of the house. Meanwhile, the Republicans are hanging back in the wings, throwing verbal brickbats at the Democrats, and waiting to be called back on main stage in 2012. They are not risking a thing, only saying the Democrats can't govern. And Obama wants to appeal to the republicans and they publicly make fun of him for it.

Obama needs a bit of the old Harry Ass Truman about him, and PUSH his plans out before the public, stand on them and work for their passage. MAKE Landrieu, or Nelson or Lieberman HAVE to get up on main stage and expose themselves. MAKE the Republican party HAVE to come out on that stage also and MAKE them stop the health care plans that the majority of the American people want. MAKE the Republicans expose themselves as the “Do Nothing” party.

The wars need to be stopped. NOW. Nothing good has ever come out of a war, nothing ever will. The good that followed World War II came not from that awful war, but from the peace that was waged in the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. Defence is one thing, but wars take on a mind of their own, they take charge and live on words like “Honor!”, “Glory!”, “Homeland!”, and make the other guy seem evil. Then the wars can run supreme. Meanwhile, almost all of the people ever killed in any war are innocent of any sin or crime and most of them are women and children. Now, our military is worn out. The equipment is badly worn, the troops have been over 2, 3, 4, sometimes 5 times. More and more it seems, Bechtel, Halliburton, Blackwater (neé) are being used - and that is bad because those corporations make money from war - they WANT wars. They NEED wars.

So Year One ends badly. As I said sometime ago I was not in favor of Obama running for president because he was the wrong color. He was too green. Now we WILL see just how quickly he can learn. Maybe now is his time. But the Supreme Court decision has probably ended his term in office. He has much to think about when he wakes up.

Supreme Court Ruling January 21, 2010.

2010-01-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court of the United States today just changed the playing field of American politics for the foreseeable future with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Now corporations can spend as much money as they want in persuading members of congress or the administration to fulfill their needs. Already the major corporations EACH have 100 senators and 435 members of the U.S. House to represent THEM. Those 535 officials are theirs to contact and provide with money, prizes, meals, women, psychologically effective advertisements, even threats and demands (see http://theprettypenny.blogspot.com/2009/07/nra-and-sotomayor.html). You and I have two senators and one representative. I don't know how much money you have, but I can't compete with General Electric say, or Microsoft or Walmart or MacDonalds, much less ALL of them.

So now we are in competition in the selection process of our elected representatives, with the companies that have sold us cars that get 12 MPG, cigarettes, food that has led to a malnourished and sick nation, a "health-care" system that ranks 37th in the world (according to the World Health Organization) and costs two to three times the cost of developed nations, and are heavily invested in armament, bombs, land mines, and other weapons of war. Many of these corporations have substantial investors from foreign countries.

This also means that from now on every election in the United States, even one for the representative Butte County, South Dakota say (the geographical center of the country) will ring with international significance instead of the issues important to just those voters. Not only that but the money the corporations will be using to "influence" congress will be OUR money too. So we still have to pay taxes, then pay the corporations, plus pay our own special lobbies, whether they be Move On, NAACP, AARP or the NRA, and we have very little choice whether to pay any of them or not.

What can we do? Until and unless the corporations can be barred from any contributions to elections, there is no way. Some countries forbid these types of contributions and the entire cost of all elections are borne by the government and regulated and enforced with jail terms for infringement. That would mean a tax increase but would probably result in more money for the taxpayers.

Hickory Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Hearn, and Failure

2009-12-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have just read one of the most amazing statement I have ever seen in my entire life. Mr. Daniel Hearn, President and CEO of the Catawba County Chamber of Commerce, made it in the December, 2009 issue of “Hickory Living” in the column called “Inside the Chamber”.

In an article titled “Campaign for Free Enterprise”, Mr. Hearn stated that “Government . . . cannot compete in the private sector in such areas as health care, for one simple reason. In order for free enterprise and competition to work, there must be the potential for failure.”

My immediate response would come as a question to Mr. Hearn asking him which part of his own health care plan would he like to see subject to failure. Particularly since many Americans have seen their health care plan fail when they were diagnosed with serious illness, or suffered serious injury. And when you do name that part of the American health care plan you would like to see subject to failure, Mr. Hearn, please pick a part of it which has not yet already failed.

While we are at it, I would like for Mr. Hearn to also describe which part of his own retirement plan he would like to see subject to failing, particularly after he had paid into it for forty or so years, like many Americans have experienced with their own retirement plans in the past three or four years.

Mr. Hearn elaborates on his statement by claiming that if a company has no possibility of failure, “ . . . then why would you worry about providing he best quality, service and cost for that product of service?” Obviously he has not noticed that when the big businesses failures of 2009 occurred, it was the “owners” of the companies who found themselves with suddenly worthless stock, while the management floated away on golden balloons.

I think Mr. Hearn has just shown the most compelling reason why the United States Government must control the people’s health care and retirement systems. If anything in any country is too big or too important to fail, then it must be the protection of the health and well-being of its workforce.

Tiger Woods Has Company in High Places

2009-12-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

Always amazing that another great man, who appears to have everything that any man could ever desire, would fall victim to a series of sexual liaisons.

Words are slowly bubbling up and floating out across the networks that Tiger has always been a bit coarse with his language and had seemed discourteous to a number of people in the past. Those bubbles could never sail in the presence of his perfect aura - but once that is dinged, then those images begin to fit into place in the new puzzle we find before us.

The work of the National Inquirer, that media counterpart to the earthworms and vultures of nature, pays off again and it has found another one and pulled it out of the mud.

And so what? What business is it of ours that Tiger Woods screwed up? Spitzer, and Edwards and Sanford and Ensign and Baucus and Clinton (Bill), and all those countless others were different. They had taken oaths to enforce the nation’s laws. They presented themselves as candidates for offices of great worth. They sought and still seek the spotlight, they support transparency, they propound family values and present themselves as honest, trustworthy, reliable caretakers of our great values. We need to know about the personal integrity of these officeholders, but what about Tiger?

Tiger Wood’s problem is that he has come - through CONSIDERABLE effort on his own part - to present himself as one of the great role models of all time. Not just for the average golfers either, the guys who are in their twenties, thirties and beyond, but for their children and for kids in general. Fathers have pointed out Tiger Woods to their children. “You too can be like Tiger, someday.” The moral they learn is that if we work hard and learn, and do things right, we can all be like Tiger, and you can too! You can be just like Tiger is. Now what do these fathers say?

Tiger Woods also was a great participant in a significant breaking of a part of that old thing we used to call the “color barrier”. There were some things that black people just couldn’t do. Golf was one of them. Woods smashed that old concept to regions far beyond Pluto. A LOT of people, many, many of them who were white, took great pride in that, and were proud of Woods. And Tiger was such a fine man too, a wonderful role model again. And again, the role model part was played well and embellished by Woods.

One more thing. Sports itself seems to have fallen into the black hole of capitalistic commercialism. Drugs, money, advertising, testimonials and hype seem to fuel all the sports we have, reminding us all that the word "sport" has two definitions. One definition concerns the display of skill and ability, the other refers to making fun of something, to jest, to fool. So now Tiger has shown that he is making sport of us. He fools us, we pay him money, he fools us again. Then the fire hydrant appeared - or didn't appear - at least in time to avoid it.

So is it all about sex? I really don’t think so. I think it has to be a matter of power. These transgressors are people who see themselves as being beyond the masses. They can do things that “people” can’t do. Laws and values and such are for the ordinary folks. These immortals are well beyond that, at least in their own minds, and they can get away with anything because they are so good at what they do. Another thing. All these people have "protectors". These are the people who take care of the famous ones, they open the doors, make the phone calls, deliver alibis, and dispense smoke. They’re good too. But they’re not 100%, not 100% of the time.

What can Woods do now? Now that he has found that life itself is very like the game of golf in that it is also full of holes. Well, he has always been an example standing out there in the open waiting for followers to become part of his gallery. Let’s see if he has the ability to learn and play in this great new game that life has now laid out for him.

Jamie Leigh Jones, KBR, and Senator Burr

2009-12-03T21:36:00.000-08:00

Jamie Leigh Jones volunteered in 2005, when she was 19 years old, to work for KBR in Iraq. To secure the position she was required by the company to sign an agreement that any issues she might have with the corporation would be referred to binding arbitration. Shortly after arriving in Iraq she was drugged, gang-raped and beaten by her coworkers at KBR. She suffered serious injuries to her breasts and genitals, and obvious mental trauma. The KBR employees who had assaulted her then prevented her from receiving medical care and kept her locked her in a shipping container for more than a day following the assault. She was told by KBR that if she left Iraq for medical treatment she would lose her job. KBR claimed her assault was part of the job and therefore required to be resolved by arbitration and she could not sue in court. It should be noted from the start that if Ms. Jones had been serving in the United States military she would have had the entire resources of the Universal Code of Military Justice at her service. If she had been simply "visiting" she would have had other options. But because she was an employee of an American corporation serving the Defense Department, that corporation claimed that by signing the contract with KBR she could be denied the constitutional rights of an American citizen.

After 15 months of arbitration, Jones and her lawyers did sue KBR in District Court and the court ruled that the Jones assault was not related to her employment and therefore not required to be settled under arbitration and her lawsuit can go forward.

While this hearing was proceeding, Senator Franken introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill in November, 2009, providing that defense companies attempting to deny American citizens working for them their legal rights in American courts should be denied access to defense expenditures or any other payment from U. S. taxpayer funds. The measure passed 68 to 30. All 30 senators voting against the amendment were members of the Republican Party, Senator Burr being one of the thirty.

I called Senator Burr four times asking him to respond in writing to me about this vote. What did it mean to him, why did he cast it, and what was his intention?

On November 16, 2009, Senator Burr wrote to defend his vote, claiming the amendment unfairly discriminates against American corporations, because employment arbitration agreements can not cover claims involving personal injury, assault, etc. to begin with, therefore Ms. Jones could have brought action against her employer in federal court. The fact that KBR had blocked Ms. Jones attempt to do this for over a year was not discussed by Senator Burr.

Senator Burr also refers to the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which he says allows the federal government to prosecute crimes committed by U.S. military contractors working overseas. Senator Burr does not comment however, why the federal government did NOT prosecute these crimes which were committed by U. S. military contractors working overseas - these crimes against an American citizen. Senator Burr can probably still take action to see that the federal government does prosecute these crimes committed by U. S. military contractors working overseas. I hope he will.

Personally, I can’t believe that Senator Burr really wants to place the interests of corporations over justice for rape victims, but I have to read his vote as stating that while he thinks rape is serious of course, and so are some other crimes, still they are not THAT important in this war which has already cost so many lives and run about a trillion dollars. He seems to me to be saying that KBR, in this case, is too important to fail, and maybe we should not make them mad.

But at that point in his letter, Senator Burr - to my mind - rests his case. My question to him now is the same as it was back in November: Why can KBR, by virtue of the fact that it is a major defense contractor, deny access of any American citizen to the federal justice system? I really think the full impact of Senator Franken’s amendment will not fall upon Ms. Jones, but upon other victims who have not had the courage or resources to come forward until now.

This type of action allegedly carried out by KBR is not dissimilar to the attack on the United States on 9-11. It too is terrorism. It too is an attack against American citizens by an organization which is opposed to American principles.

Senator Burr’s vote is also a form of terrorism, an attack against American citizens by an individual who is opposed to American principles. Shame on you Senator Burr, may the shame you have brought to America by this vote find its final resting place on your shoulders.

National Health Care

2009-11-14T21:26:00.000-08:00

The wealth and power of any nation depends on the production that its citizens can create. One of the most important resources any nation will ever have therefore, is a healthy workforce. That resource is far too important to be left to commercial corporations who must, by their very structure, subordinate that national need to their own need for profit.

Commercial businesses operate on a short-term basis, usually from one quarter (a three month calendar period) to the next. Commercial health care corporations plan their services and operations based on that calendar system, because the well being of those corporations depend on their profit, and their sale of stock, but the health care of the nation is an on-going, long-term project requiring elaborate planning for events that will occur a generation or more into the future.

Our present system has already produced close to 50 million Americans who have no health insurance at all, perhaps 50 million more who are under-insured. Many Americans who do have health-care insurance they like, still depend on their employer to provide it and are dependent upon and bound to that company. They can’t quit their job, or look for another job or move because they may not be eligible for ANY health care if they give up their current plan. And since many American businesses also carry a portion of their employees health care costs they find themselves at a disadvantage when competing in the global economy with companies from other nations who do not carry these costs.

Will a governmental health care plan cause an increase in taxes? Probably. But America is currently paying - for its dangerously ineffective health insurance system - about twice as much as any other nation in the world and getting about half as much in return. Taxes may go up, but the price we are paying commercial insurance corporations may totally vanish! Not only will we become healthier, but we will have more money too. And even if we do pay additional taxes, we will get most of that back in care. And even if you or I do not need health care at all in any given period, we will all still realize benefits from having a healthier national workforce with more discretionary money to spend.

How do we implement this national health care? Begin with Medicare. Expand that to include ALL citizens. Phase it in over say, five years or even less. That will give us the strongest possible public option, we will then have a single-payer, single-collector system, and the prices will be set by health care providers and consumers working together under governmental regulations. Together we can improve this system as new opportunities become available. According to reliable polls the majority of American citizens want a single payer system with a strong public option, and most of the American health care providers want that system too. Medicare has been one of the most popular services our government has ever provided.

What would our founding fathers think? Well, remember they lived before the discovery of the germ theory of disease in a nation of less than four million people, aproximately 15% of which were slaves, and about half of which could not vote (because they were women), transportation depended on horses and the wind, communication was accomplished with quill pens, and the life expectancy of Americans was about 35 years. They designed a magnificant political structure for the world they lived in. We now live in a vastly different world. Hello?

Happy Veterans Day?

2009-11-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

Once upon a summertime, some forty years ago, a playful picture was made of a man and his son fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. This seems a proper way to spend a day in the good ole summer time even though on the next Wednesday, this man left his children, his wife and his country. He left to return to Vietnam. His country needed him there. Again.

Someone gave me a card today. It said “Thanks for serving our country. Our veterans are our true heroes.” I didn’t know what to say. I was actually shocked. I wasn’t expecting it. I was kind of embarrassed. Such a thing had never happened before. The last time someone commented about my service to my country was when I returned from my second tour in Vietnam. A wealthy-looking guy in San Francisco airport, wearing a hound’s tooth cap with a red feather in it, spat in my face, and he got away. Next day two people got up and walked out of my church when I attended. One of them called me “Baby Killer!” The priest said I was a hero. I had eight days before I was to return to Vietnam for another tour. Since then there haven’t been any more comments. it has been a form of don’t ask - don’t tell. I don’t tell them I am a veteran and they don’t say anything nasty. It has worked out OK. I don’t need to say anything. Or do I? There are some issues. Here are just four of them.

1) Of those who saw combat in Vietnam, 85% later divorced, leaving their children to swim in uncertain waters and to change plans they had made all their lives.
2) That tonight, like every night, some 100,000 veterans are homeless. Spending the night in shelters, under bridges, on streets, in public parks.
3) That some 2,200 veterans died in 2009, as in every year, simply because they did not have access to health care - that’s six a day, one every four hours. Because they can’t get medical care in the country they served.
4) That in America, which has more people in prison and jail than any other nation in the world, one out of every seven inmates is a veteran.

Military service to one’s country can be fatal. Sometimes it leaves a person maimed or seriously injured. Injuries to the body can be understood by Americans, because they can see and react to that to a degree. Injuries to the mind and spirit and to the soul though, are to be hidden. When they become evident they are seen as a weakness in character beyond hope or care. They obviously can’t be helped, they don’t get better and may get a lot worse very quickly. The proper response seems to be punishment or isolation. And if those people will stay out of our way, and hide and say nothing, we will continue to ignore them and pretend they really don't exist. For one more day.

Happy Veterans Day.

Senator Robert Byrd

2009-11-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

Any Requiem for Robert Byrd must include a dirge for his state.

Some comment seems appropriate as a person arrives at a remarkable achievement in our nation's records. Today Robert Byrd will have served his state longer than anyone else has ever served any other state. The people of West Virginia have elected and reelected him some 10 or 11 times either as a representative or senator, the last 56 years as senator. He’s not been around much lately because he is in poor health. So is his state.

Robert Byrd represents MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. That’s a process in which mountain tops are scraped by vehicles the size of Delaware and pushed to uncover coal that lies under the ground. The tops then slide down into and fill up the valleys that used to carry streams through West Virginia. Byrd has been “unable” to prevent this. Not only that, but his people are still dependent on coal. Not the marketing of it or the selling of it but the other end of it, digging it out and breathing it in.

As Byrd completes his 56th year as their senator, the people of West Virginia rank among the highest in the nation in low life expectancy 46, high infant mortality 40, tooth loss 50, suicide 42, poor education 37 and mental health problems 50th. These are the people who continue to vote for him.

Is it fair to blame the condition of a state on its elected official? Why not? Particularly when they have been in office for 56 years. But I am not blaming Robert Byrd for all of his state’s problems. I am blaming the electorate.

Ft Hood, the Muslim and us, and Gods Galore.

2009-11-06T20:32:00.000-08:00

There was a bad shooting on Fort Hood, Texas. Soldiers were killed by a gunman. That is not possible. How could such a thing happen on a military base? Then we find the killer was an officer. The impossible story just became totally unbelievable. More information tells us the kiiller was a MAJOR - a field-grade officer! Now we know this has to be a lie! But there is still more to come - we find out that he is also a medical doctor as well! NO- NO- NO- we can't believe that! And THEN we are told he is a psychairist! This is the craziest tale we have ever heard. Finally, word comes out that he is a Muslim. Oh Thank God!!! Now it all makes sense.

But there is still more . . . because as we learn about the killings and the prelude and the killer and the place and the emotions involved, we finally know that as a nation, that we are falling from the sky, slowly spinning down out of control. Nothing is planned anymore and then carried out, all is simply falling down to crash into the streets. Values are grimly abandoned, guns are grimly bought, hatred grimly simmers, vengence is now OURS dammit, too important to be left to some stupid lord to play around with. God can't begin to understand how MAD we have become. Allah has clearly become a pain in the rear, Yahweh revealed to be an raving child. ALL those Gods have to just cool it and go the hell away - at least for a while - when we get it straightened out then maybe, just maybe, we will give them another chance. Dammit, they just don't understand how MAD we have become!

Could it really be possible as some have already been so bold to say, that first man was created and then man created god in his own image? Are the Lord God, Allah and Yahweh only images graven in mankind's own petty likeness so he can bow down before his own imaginary creations and worship an exalted version of himself? Such a story would account for the world we have now created for ourselves, one in which we kill each other to honor, avenge and even just simply "please" our own separate gods.

Dover Air Force Base

2009-10-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

Dover is a large Air Force Base, and like many military installations it is located away from a lot of the country. It is on the ocean and smells of salt and the sea, and the wind seems to always blow in like it is so glad to finally reach land. It will embrace you and it can take your breath away.

There is a lot of traffic in and out of Dover. It connects to Germany and England and sometimes surprisingly far into Europe and also has flights to other strange places like California. It is one of several major international airports right around here, but it is not at all like Andrews AFB, or Baltimore-Washington International, both of which are close by and which also handle a lot of aircraft. Those places are mainly to receive VIPs and for real quick turnarounds for everybody else. People who land there run inside, grab a drink, a bite to eat, they race to another plane and are gone in a hurry. Dover handles a lot of heavy equipment that needs repair, worn-out trucks, beat-up helicopters, and big weapons shipped back for repairs. And it has a morgue. Things slow down in Dover. Dover is the place where time finally comes to an end and quits.

If you are flying out of Dover you will need to park your car in the Long Term Lot. You have to drive a little way past the morgue and secure your car and then walk back to the terminal. You get a good look at the Port Mortuary. It doesn’t look too different from the rest of the base in the daytime, but at night it seems aloof, as if preoccupied in its own thoughts, perhaps more like a poker player who is pretending to ignore you but you know you're being watched carefully. You can’t help notice that the left side of the building has roof that appears to be made of glass, it looks like frosted glass. And it glows in the night as if it is cold inside there. Outside, the night is warm, and the breeze off the ocean builds in intensity.

If you are there at 10:00 p.m., something strange happens. Quietly at first comes a sound that flows across the base, slowly building into a bugle call, softly playing the song we all know as “Taps”. “Day is done, gone the sun. From the lakes, from the hills, from the run. All is well, safely rest; God is nigh.”

And then all that is left is the wind.

Why Fox News IS Different

2009-10-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

Not all words can be defined. Most of Plato’s Socratic dialogs argue over concepts that were born without benefit of definition. Many other statements we use today may carry meaning for us but still cannot be defined. “Fascism” is such a word. It can either not be defined at all or else defined in so many ways that it has even less meaning than when the enquiry began.

Philosophers live in this type of world. When they examine a word, they begin with its definition. If it has none they can agree on, they begin by listing the most important characteristics that its use conveys. In the case of “fascism” a number of characteristics are readily available. And that’s where Fox News performs a great service for the rest of us.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of a fascist organization is that its entire work reflects and supports the personality of its leader, or the leading faction of the organization. We see the North Korean economy, arts, military, agriculture, education system, and ALL other institutions mimic Kim Jong-il’s beliefs and attitudes. Same for Myanmar and Than Shwe, also for Somalia, Libya, and several other nations. That means that whatever happens in the world will be reported and discussed in those countries through the personality of their leader or the controlling faction. Whether it is even reported or not will be determined by the leading group. If it is discussed it will be colored by the wishes, opinions, prejudices and goals of its leading faction.

The word “fascism” comes from the Italian, “fasces” or “bundle”, and refers to the old demonstration that one arrow can be broken over one’s knee, also two and three, even more perhaps, but eventually the number of arrows (or other items) becomes so great, when they are “bundled together” they cannot be broken. So you have a country, or an organization that is completely united, all aiming in the same direction and each supporting the other. That’s power. It may also be good business when the business is plowing, manufacturing, selling and producing. But it may be counter-productive when the business of the organization is scientific research, medical care, or collecting, reporting and analyzing the news of the day. But a fascist organization will perform its scientific research, medical care and news delivery to affirm the prejudices and justify the goals of its leader.

There are other characteristics of a fascist organization. Most of them try to generate mass movements of public opinion. Don’t most political parties? Yes, but this is where the fascist organizations have a great advantage. The U. S. Democratic Party, for example would NEVER be mistaken for a fascist organization. They may have a huge bundle of arrows but they are all pointing in different directions. Fascist organizations have rock solid discipline and are always united and walking in lock-step. They don't need debate or to ask questions, because the goal has already been determined, all they have to do is what they have been told to do. They also shine with predetermined doctrines and slogans. They almost always exhort reaction to save their country, organization, business from a declining status. They come to rescue their people from humility, and extol purity and patriotism. They need a “great power” that must be resisted to use as their recruiting tool. They have hallowed ground they refer to often, back to their (our) fathers, great historical moments and such.

So Fox News seems to be an organization that is strong and capable of doing work. No one will ever accuse it of shirking its duties. But it is clear that its duties do not include finding, reporting and analyzing the events of daily occurrence in the world. Everything they report comes with a constant, familiar and coordinated spin. Their listeners appear to be a faithful and loyal group. In this world of constant confusion, random events, stress and terror, Fox's followers are never surprised. Especially when the latest happening is explained, as it is presented to them, as having be caused by a great power they must continue to resist to prevent their nation from falling from its glorious historical past into humility, and that theirs is the cause of purity, salvation, glory and honor. And they, the Fox watchers, have important, informed, intelligent and forceful leaders who DO know what to do, even if their elected officials do not know what to do and how to do it, because the Fox reporters demonstrate what we all MUST do by reciting the necessary slogans and defined doctrines to lead our way. These comments are carefully selected and well organized lesson plans.

Balanced? No. Fair? No. News? No. Fox? Yes.

Depends on Whose Ox is Being Stimulated

2009-10-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

Concerning complaints from republicans about the stimulus spending, I commented already on the Washington Post ". . . we have fought several wars without tax increases - there has to be some 'consequenches' to that . . ." We are now fighting 2 unfunded wars to nowhere that have already given $3,000,000,000,000 largely to Boeing, Halliburton, KBR and others who are now using our money to buy our congressmen - and though many of the congressmen have been removed, in my part of the country the congressmen are still there . . . and oh yes, the wars still go on too. Still unfunded. Still open spigotted.

You Can Call Me Joe.

2009-10-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

At least I got noticed. Page 2B CHARLOTTE OBSERVER, Sunday October 18, 2009. They mentioned that "Joe" Womack, a hickory-based blogger had been de-friended on Facebook by McHenry after comments Womack made on his "Pretty Penny" blog about why even have any health-insurance companies and how McHenry had told Womack that he had a page for friends and another for "other people".

Patrick McHenry and Health Care

2009-10-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Received email from Patrick McHenry about how America has the best health care system in the entire world, and there are some minor areas that need attention. He apparently sees our system as being not-quite perfect but well on the way. My response:

Mr. McHenry, America does NOT have the best health care system in the world, but falls far short of ALL other developed nations in the world, with over 45 million Americans totally uninsured, and perhaps another 45 million under-insured. Additionally, many American businesses find themselves carrying the cost of providing insurance of their workers as they compete in the new global economy - and they are the only ones who have this cost.

Here's what to do. 1) Provide Medicare for All. All Americans would be insured and the waste and additional costs (profits) of the insurance companies could be used for American health-care. The medical profession would no longer have 100+ insurance firms to deal with, but with only one single payer. 2) Failing that, devise ANY system you want BUT provide a public option in that system. Then let the American people make the decision themselves.

John Womack

Disappearing Constituent of Patrick McHenry

2009-10-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

Patrick McHenry is my congressman. He represents me in the United States House of Representatives. He is also on Facebook where he seeks "friends" to advise him on matters of our state and nation. I became his "friend" and enjoyed making suggestions to him and asking him questions. Some of his other "friends" apparently did not care for my suggestions or questions, Both my intelligence and my integrity were called into question, then covered with contemptuous comments Finally, I began to notice that no more comments were forthcoming from Mr. McHenry, and slowly it dawned on me that I had been "de-friended". All for asking the one questions of why we even need health insurance companies at all. We have the supply-demand equation between the medical profession and the American people. All we need to add to that is for the federal government to regulate the industry and provide its own insurance to the people, since the nation itself is the real beneficiary of having healthy workers who can be efficient, effective and productive.

After I realized what had happened, I wrote an "Open Comment" to Mr. McHenry asking why I had become de-friended since I was only trying to help him as one of his constituents.

A week and a half later, Mr. McHenry answered saying that "that" Facebook page was for his "Friends", that "others" could contact him on another Facebook page. So I went there and found I still had to become a "Fan" of Mr. McHenry, and I did. Then I wrote that same question from before and sent it. I watched it after it was sent and was rereading it to make sure there were no errors when it disappeared! Wow. So I wrote another question asking Mr. McHenry I can't ask him any questions, sent it and was looking at it when it disappeared too. At least I taped the second question attempt.

Mr. McHenry wrote me again today and said "you can ask me any questions you want." Yeah, sure.

Get Rid of Health Insurance Companies

2009-10-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

Why do we even HAVE health-insurance companies? Health care is basically a supply-demand equation and we Americans know how to handle that. We buy groceries, houses, computers, automobiles, clothing, education and so on without any insurance “gatekeepers” to tell us “OK, you can have a Ford but not a Pontiac” or “no, you can’t buy a coat this winter, you bought one last year.” Or "you can't have anymore generic DVDs, you will have to buy these which cost ten times as much." And it’s not like we don’t all use health-care. Americans use health-care to get born, we use a lot of it when we die, and we all need teeth repaired and glasses. From time to time, we all have accidents and get sick and we all need health care. We "demand" medical services and we have a top-notch medical industry of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and organizations who can "supply" those services. Why do we think we need a gate-keeper to tell us we can have this but not that, or a certain procedure will cost more than we can afford so we can't have it, or that pills the doctor has prescribed will cost $600 a month?

We can take care of ourselves together as a nation like we used to do on the frontier, and supply-demand will work in this industry like it does elsewhere. All of the money these insurance companies get is money we pay to them, then they give a little bit of it back to us in the form of permission to get some medical service, and the rest goes for their own profit, to their rich CEOs and to buy off our senators and representatives. Let's get rid of ALL health insurance companies and let the citizens of the United States collectively provide for our own general welfare.

Joe Wilson and Hitler

2009-09-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson pointed his finger at President Obama, while the president was delivering a message to the American people, and shouted loudly “You lie!”. Wilson later apologized and said he was sorry. He acted “spontaneously”, he said. I couldn’t help but wonder if he would have shot at the president had he brought his gun.

Wilson’s attempt to disgrace the office of the President of the United States, cast immeasurably more contempt upon the Congress itself, and the house in which he acted. Meanwhile, before the Wilson outburst, the Republican part of the chamber occasionally resembled a snake pit, with the sound of hissing coming from there. There were occasional boos heard also. Some of the Republican representatives had placards, one wore a sign around his neck, others waved pieces of paper in the air. Apparently the Republican leaders felt all this was all part of a civil discourse, even though the only thing they have told the American people for the past seven months is the word "No!".

The Republican Party is beginning to look more and more as if they have been remade into a different political party, with the Hallway Hooligans of Miami as their Founding Fathers. Their new symbol is the belligerent shout and pointed finger, the threat, the talking points screamed again over and over - even though they contain no truth. Talk about Hitler? His real trademark was not his pathetic mustache, it was The Big Lie. That has become the New Republican marching banner. The Screamed Big Lie.

Nontheless Wilson may have really accomplished something of worth - something that President Obama couldn’t do on his own: the unification of the Democratic Party.

The New American Imprint

2009-09-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

It wasn't really the fault of the “No Child Left Behind” act, but the law was new and available, and particularly after the attacks of 9-11 it worked. Here's how.

In order to implement that program a series of procedures and tests were developed and added to the practice of education in the United States. This included a cascading series of program measures and performance standards implementing several new and different methods of teaching and providing measurement of the effectiveness of all teaching. New standardized tests were designed so any qualified manager or administrator, including those with no knowledge of the profession of teaching, could evaluate the work of the teaching professionals and these controls were fed back into the schools. Teachers and administrators who trained their students to score well on those tests were rewarded and those whose students did poorly on the standardized tests were sometimes remediated, demoted or even eliminated. Retention of teachers began to depend upon their students’ scores.

One of the results of this program is that an increasing number of students are now being taught answers rather than processes. Instead of learning to observe, analyze, test, question, evaluate, make decisions and then express their conclusions in writing, they are learning that the finding and identification of answers is the ultimate objective and goal of the education process. Too many of our children now go through school, taking tests, passing them, graduate and go on into the workforce still looking for answers without ever having ever learned how to ask important questions or to explore unfamiliar circumstances.

Now come issues into their lives. Health care for example. Not having been truly educated, they quickly look for answers. And answers are always available. News programs appear before them. Some provide an overview of applicable events with discussion and analysis, others provide authoritative answers that are often attributed into or authorized by religious, cultural or regional belief systems which also provide only answers, and which also prohibit any observation, analysis or questioning.

Now, once you know the answer (THE answer) to an issue, any counter claim is clearly specious. If people attempt to develop counter-observations, it would have to be because they don’t know the right answer. If they continue after they have been told the right answer, their purpose is deemed false, insulting and pernicious, and often tied into alien religions, cultural, regional or even racial prejudices. Scientific theories fall under the power of religious "knowledge", progress into new technologies are regulated by laws and understandings of the late 1700s, economic conquest of the free market system is OK because it is good to be selfish - economically, that is.

Thus the groundwork has been set to develop and nurture a generation of young adults who appear smart, act confident and seem knowledgeable. Yet they are also unable to function in a political, economic and social environment that is or has been filled with confusion and uncertainty. Their training leads them to provide answers, or to look for them. Under these conditions, a SMALL GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS in any country can begin to insert their intentions into a stable order. An issue is made to become contentious. An assembly of the people is called, then interrupted by demonstrations, discussion by screaming and shouting. Claims are advanced and connections are shown to traditional religious, ethnic, cultural or regional beliefs. Under conditions such as these, particularly when people have been properly imprinted during their learning years, fascism and totalitarianism can appear to be friendly, familiar, comfortable and intelligent alternatives. Here is where the answers are provided after all, and the instructions can not be far behind.

Health Insurance, or Insurance Insurance?

2009-09-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

No one should die because they cannot afford health care. No one should go broke because they get sick. No one should be denied medical care by their own insurer or because of any preexisting conditions. No one should stay in a job because they are afraid to lose their insurance.

What we have in America now is not concerned about anybody's health, or even about medical care. It is only about money. It is a way of transferring money from working people to hugely profitable insurance and pharmaceutical companies. If you can't pay money, they don't want you. You can go die for all they care. Their ONLY objective is to make more money this quarter than they did last quarter. What do they do with all that money? A lot of it goes to pay your senators and congressional representatives to "help them out" with money for fundraising in return for favorable legislation and regulations. (And if those in congress don't see it the way the companies want, that money can go for someone to run against them!)

The idea that you can only buy medical insurance from the place you work makes no more sense than if they had to approve of your wife or husband before you could get married. That you lose your insurance if you quit or move means that people who are now ill or injured HAVE to remain with that same company the rest of their life - or until they get let go. That the businesses themselves have to pay part of their employees medical insurance is to severely handicap them in the current global economy - German businesses don't pay those costs, neither do Great Britain's, or France's, or Canada's, or Spain's or anywhere in Europe.

We have a GOOD government health care now already in place. There is Medicare and the Veterans care programs. Medicare For All can be implemented quickly. The insurance companies don't like Medicare because it sets prices at a fair value, not the inflated value charged by the doctors and hospitals. The problems that Medicare is now encountering is because doctors and hospitals don't want to have to settle for that "fair" rate because they need more money so they can pay THEIR insurance companies.

The insurance companies want to continue the current program because they can now negotiate with 50 different states, and a large number of different hospitals and providers. That creates inefficiencies, inequities, confusion and forces most of the states and providers to negotiate from a position of vulnerability and uncertainty.

Let's have one payer, one collector. Let it be the United States Government. The bureaucrats will not check your pulse, palpate your prostate, listen to your lungs or anything else - they will monitor the costs, help medical people develop generally accepted medical procedures and tests, and provide for the payment of all bills.

Taxes will go up? What do you call the "tax" you now pay to your insurance companies for continued apprehension and uncertainty? With government regulating the single-payer system, you will not only have real medical care but you will also have MORE money left over. And you can't EVER get wiped out if you get really sick or have a really bad accident. All the rest of us will help you out like back in the old frontier days. How's that for REAL insurance?

Western Carolina Peace Initiative

2009-08-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

A Presentation by John Womack

A speech delivered at the
Western Carolina Peace Initiative
Western Carolina University
February 28, 2003
by John Womack

Friends, I salute you for standing out here in this cold rain and making an important commitment for democracy and world peace. Today we are poised at a great turning point in world history and we watch together in awe as great energies sweep across our country and the world. Problems seem to create more problems and we all know that something has to be done, yet many Americans are uneasy with a constant focus on war as the solution to any of those problems. Quite literally, issues of heaven and hell are being secretly decided in Washington, D.C., and the people of the world have not been consulted, and have not been listened to. Well, this is our response!

First, congratulations on the name you have chosen: the Western Carolina Peace Initiative. I applaud your important emphasis on "peace" rather than war. If someone is antiwar, they are tied to a war, and on some level they need a war so they can continue. But if you work for peace then you have a different objective, a different focus, and will build and serve a different agenda. In some ways it is too bad the Vietnam antiwar movement dispersed, but they were not able turn their great momentum into a force for peace. The message we learn from their victory and subsequent dispersal is that a lack of a war is not necessarily Peace. But those antiwar people of a previous generation did their job well and they prepared the ground for those who would follow them. Now, it is our job. Understand this: we are not trying to overthrow our own government - or any government for that matter. The only "regime changes" we seek are those that take place through peaceful and legal procedures. What we are saying by gathering here today and tomorrow, and all those other tomorrows yet to come, is that: War Doesn't Work! War is no longer a legitimate way to solve problems! Our message becomes simply this: We Must Find Another Way!

Let's be fair about it, we are not rejecting war out of hand. We are not faulting war on some theoretical concept, but on absolute empirical proof. We have tried war; we have tried and tried and tried again - all of us are guilty, every nation - Americans have tried especially hard to make war work. We gave it our best shot - and it still didn't work. We have fought everybody in the whole world: the British, the French, Germans, Russians, the Spanish, Mexicans, Chinese, Iraqis, Iranians, Koreans; we've fought Japan, Italy, Panama, the Philippines, Cuba, our own Native Americans, the black slaves and Asian coolies we imported to do our dirty work for us, and we've fought each other too. Forgive me, did I forget Vietnam? No, I will never forget Vietnam. I served three combat tours over there and it is a part of me still today and will be for the rest of my life. By the way, it didn't work either.

The war we face today in Iraq is not a preemptive war. That occurs when two belligerent nations face each other with armed troops and one of them strikes first because they think the other is about to do the same. That is how a large number of wars do start. This war in Iraq is not a preemptive war, it is an elective war by a powerful military force against one too weak to resist; it is a "war" of opportunity that is being promoted by some in our administration as a great "adventure," our president has even called it a "crusade." It is not a war we "need" to fight, it is a war our president wants to fight. It is a war of domination and imperial conquest. We have inspectors present on the ground in Iraq currently disarming the country we are preparing to attack. It is a cowardly assault on a nation that poses no real threat to us. It will not be a war with Iraq, it will be a war in Iraq. We hear about "shock and awe," a "tactic" that will scare the Iraqis into peace. The real message though, will not be for Iraq, but for the rest of the world. Last time that happened, it was called "blitzkrieg." That one scared the rest of the world so badly everybody united together to fight Germany, and six years later Germany had lost 3.5 million troops and 3.8 million civilians; their ports, autobahns, and railroads were gone. Many of their great institutions of commerce, education and religion were destroyed and their survivors were totally at the mercy of the four nations who had taken their country away from the German people. Blitzkrieg was bad; Shock and Awe could be worse. Our leaders speak of "collateral damage" and sadly shake their heads, they appear to worry for a moment about all those children who will be "left behind," then they brighten up and go forward, possibly now thinking about the "collateral profit" that will fall to them and their families from this war; important people these American rulers are, associated with international giants of corporate and imperial enterprises whose brand names are as familiar as family to those who give orders from the Oval Office.

Today, the world confronts another despicable dictator, one not unlike Hitler and those many other despots who will always haunt history. This time his name is Saddam Hussein. The difference today is that the U.N. is there. We, the people of the United Nations of the World have Iraq surrounded, and our inspectors are at work in his country destroying his weapons. Charges may be brought against Hussein, he may be indicted and tried as a war criminal either in person or in abstentia. It is said that he is "evil," and the charges against him are awful, so give him his days in court! Want to impress the rest of the world? How about that for real Shock and Awe? And how's that for sending the right message to the right people! And think for a moment how it could have been if the League of Nations had been there, on the ground, destroying German weapons in the 1930's. Think of the difference that might have made. Perhaps we could have gotten rid of Hitler and prevented the Second World War! Perhaps such a disarmament could have saved 64,000,000 people from being killed in the hatred which followed. The League of Nations was ineffective though, because of the United States. Even though the League was created largely by U.S. efforts, our senate refused to ratify the treaty because of political reasons, and the League functioned under that great disability until it was terminated in 1946 to make way for the United Nations.

Perhaps the most important aspect of our opportunities today is that such options have never existed before. Not that every nation is ready to lay down its arms, we are far from that, but at this moment the great military and political powers of the world could unite into a great force for peace that might include France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, Spain, Russia, China?, Japan, South Korea and others too. Many issues would remain to be resolved, many fights would continue to flare, but if the UN worked for peace using the resources of those nations just named, it's influence would be immense. That is the prize for which we work today, and that prize is slipping out of our grasp, not because of Saddam Hussein, but because of the United States! Our president now stands alone as the most powerful man who has ever walked the face of the earth, and he sometimes seems intent on using the power which belongs to the American people for the secret purpose of a very narrow right-wing group of extremely wealthy people.

Yet, the force that confronts the United States president is more powerful than he. That force is the people of the United Nations of the World who are forming together as one nonpolitical body, not going over the heads of our own governments, or discarding our governments, but working together with each other to fulfill the higher purposes for which each of our governments were instituted. We are calling our elected officials to an accountability for their actions, not seeking perfection or infallibility, but honesty, integrity, and devotion to our common ideals. We are affirming that Peace is a right of all people, and that none can have Peace unless all have Peace. We don't have to slide back down that gory slope into the pit of war again! Peace is possible today, but people have to make it happen. Our president says "We gave peace a chance . . ." then he pauses, raising his eyebrows and clenching his fist, the glare in his eyes implying that peace didn't work. But Mr. Bush, Peace is more than just a game of chance, it needs a home, a place to grow, somewhere it can be cared for, watered, fed and cultivated. It needs to be protected and cherished and it needs to be shared. Too many times people work hard for war, spend money for war, train young men and women for war, are always ready to fight, and then will give peace just "a chance." While wars are caused, peace is left to happen by accident. If we are ever to have real peace it will have to be wanted, prepared for, paid for, trained for and we will need specialists who can become experts in the arts and sciences of peace. Impossible? Not really. What if we did create a Department of Peace in our national government? Just started it off and gave it a place to grow, supported it and shared it? We might find a miracle there someday, instead of just more consequences. How do we get such a radical thing started? It really begins at home, right here at Western Carolina University, in Sylva, Dillsboro, Cullowhee, Franklin and the other small towns of our great southern mountains. Peace is not like a game of chance at all, it's more like planting a garden, or raising a child. Peace must be caused to happen.

Peace will not be handed to us by our government. In order to achieve Peace, we must want it enough to work for it, plan for it, and strive for it. We may have to seize that right in the same manner as the Suffragettes did in the 1920s, as Ghandi did in the 1950s and the Civil Rights workers in the 1960s. There are people who profit from war. They are rich and they possess much power and have influence in the highest levels of all governments, but they always have to work on hidden agendas and invoke false issues like patriotism, nationalism, glory, and emotional appeals to base instincts - all of which are aimed at the common fears of people. They try to divide people into groups and pit them against each other. Increasingly, we members of the world community realize that those unimportant divisions of mankind are neither significant nor dangerous. We must make our government leaders understand that war is no longer acceptable. Only then can we experience the joys and cares of Peace.
Peace will not be a state of endless bliss; it is always a balance between different forces. It will be messy. It will require hard work and will be frustrating more often than it will be fulfilling. Only when war is no longer a valid or legally accepted way of solving problems will all nations be willing to engage in the vexatious, frustrating, and often confusing balancing act of making Peace happen, and treat Peace as if it were really important. But the prize of Peace is a double prize. The first prize is that Peace will give us all those things for which we fight wars, and which war, by its very nature, also prevents us from obtaining. The second prize is the absence of war. Remember this: War kills, it is not a game like Mr. Rumsfeld sardonically implies, it kills; the people it kills don't come back, except maybe as ghosts - they don't raise their children or work for a better world. Almost every single person killed in war is innocent of any significant crime or error. Our president says that getting rid of Saddam Hussein is worth any cost, Does he mean that to include up to 100,000 Iraqis - some 99,992, of whom, presumedly are innocent souls? Maybe they don't "count" in some fundamentally apocalyptic way since they are Islamic, not Christian? Mr. President, you haven't explained that very well. Those who suffer most in any war are always the children. Children get killed in combat, they get injured by falling things, they get run over and run down, they become sick and there is no medical help available. One might shout out "No child left behind!" for a campaign boast, but in war that is a savage joke. Children get lost all the time and they are always left behind. Some die of hunger, some from lack of care, or a broken heart, some are actually scared to death. Many who do survive are raised by those ghosts who haunt such places, and they grow through childhood quickly and become terrorists with enough hatred in their souls to give their life to kill anything.

Finally, we are the first people in history to know that we live on a planet that is dying. We need to spend some time with our lovely planet and care for it with love in its days of its last, great sickness. Perhaps if we can end wars and find ways to live together, we can share not only Peace but even find ways to heal our planet together.

Friends, I salute you! Your work is important and your cause is the most noble in all of history!

Namaste.

Health Care

2009-08-20T21:53:00.000-07:00

Congress has the athority in section 8 of the constitution to lay and collect taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States. What could be more significant to the nation’s general welfare than one of the its greatest resources, the health of its citizens? Health care also provides for 1/6 of the entire national production of goods an services and is the leading cause for Americans declaring bankruptcy.

Insurance companies have been protecting the health of the United States for many years, and now almost 50,000,000 Americans have no health care at all, and an unknown number are not sure of what they have. Meanwhile, the amount of money Americans pay for their second (third?) rate health care is TWICE as much as the citizens of any other developed nation in the world pays.

President Obama and SOME members of the Democratic Party have a plan for a big change in this program. The Republican Party and the "Blue Dog Democrats" just say no. No program, no plan, no change. Just "no".

Think about this for a moment. The insurance companies are making enormous profits. Many of their CEOs are making one million dollars a month. When the republicans vote "no" - and have no plan - what does that tell us about who they represent?

Pull the Public Option? Really?

2009-08-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

One of the most important resources of any nation in the world is the health of its citizens. That is too important to be left to a commercial industry who must subordinate that resource - the health of American citizens - to its own need for profit.

Commercial businesses operate on a short-term basis, usually quarter-to-quarter. The health care of the nation is an on-going, long term project.

Our present system has produced probably 50 million Americans with no insurance at all, perhaps 50 million more who are under-insured. Those Americans who depend on their employer to provide their health-care, are dependent upon and bound to that company. American businesses who have to carry this additional cost find themselves at a disadvantage as they compete in the global economy with companies from other nations who do not carry these costs.

It will cost money in additional taxes? Probably. But America is currently paying - for its dangerously ineffective system - about twice as much for health care as any other nation in the world and getting about half the benefit that they do, Taxes may go up, but the price we are paying for health insurance may vanish! Not only will the nation begin to become heather, but we will have more money too!

Finally, health care can not be a free market service. No individual can negotiate on a free market basis with health-care insurance companies like Blue Cross or Cigna, or any of the others. Health care must be regulated by government.

Town Hall Meeting with Patrick McHenry.

2009-08-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Attended the "Town Hall" meeting of Patrick McHenry, the representative of North Carolina's 10th district. I left after about an hour and a half and there were still large numbers of people standing in the aisle to ask him questions or make comments. It was a demonstrative audience of perhaps 1,000 people and the meeting was very civil with no arguments or shouting being apparent. And of course, it was a meeting for a republican representative.

My observations: There is the presence of power here. It is evident in numerous small groups of men standing together, looking very knowledgeable. But the feeling went much farther than that, I felt an echo from my childhood back in a different place and a very different time. But there was the feeling of hidden power. McHenry made a number of disparaging remarks about the current administration but was not directly disrespectful to the president. It was apparent from the applause that President Obama is extremely unpopular with the group here present and so is the Democratic Party. Most of the derogatory remarks toward Obama were made by a few of the questioners. One man who identified himself as an MD here in Hickory, stated in absolutely positive terms that Obama's health care plan would place him in the role of advising older patients to terminate their life and he didn't like that. (I would have thought him to be a "plant" except for his claiming to be a local MD - someone in the audience mentioned though that he was an outspoken critic of Obama). A woman said that the 48 million people with no health care was due to illegal immigrants (Loud applause). McHenry himself indicated that many of those 48 million people were under the age of 25 and thought they would live forever. Another woman said that because of Obama's plan, our tax dollars would be used to pay for abortions - she didn't think that was right. (Very loud applause). McHenry made some awkward comment about there being several versions of the plan, and the abortion thing being smuggled into it while he and other men were in the rest room. (Or something like that - several times I found myself wondering if McHenry was intentionally playing the role of bumbling confused person simply to dodge an issue and change the topic - I suspect that is one of his characteristics.)

McHenry said he wants to provide tax credits so we can buy insurance, and he wants no discrimination for pre-conditions. Again my observations indicated that most of the people who were questioning or commenting seemed to be looking for help, many of them seemed open to government sponsored health care. There was a small group of people who applauded that idea on three or four occasions. Whenever McHenry seemed confused he would run to his platitudes and make a comment about Obama, or end of life screenings, or abortion and the applause would bring a satisfied-looking smile to his face. One woman asked McHenry why the administrative costs of the average insurance company was 30% of their total costs while Medicare and Medicaid were only 3%. I could not hear his answer to this because of a baby screaming in the audience.

Signs of plants? 1) Certainly when McHenry came in, a small tight group of men in the front rows stage right rose with shouts and clapping. Most of the crowd then rose too. 2) Clearly the doctor seemed to be a plant, although one wonders if an MD would compromise his position in the community. 3) When Tort Reform was mentioned, that same group of men stage right in the first several rows whopped, rose and cheered - and of course, so did the rest of the audience. 4) Again when one woman blamed the illegal immigrants for the medical problem, and 5) When a couple of women said we would all have to pay for abortions. In summary, if these were plants they fell far short of the "Hallway Hooligans" of the Florida Recount, and would have been pathetic in comparison with other contemporaneous ones we have seen on TV, and they were basically washed away by the personal stories some of the people told.

I Don't Care if I Ever Get Back

2009-08-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

“Beer!” Someone shouted loudly over to my left.
The pitch comes in hot and a little high. “Strike two”, the umpire said matter-of-factly.
Not to be outdone someone on the right called out “Cold Beer!”
The next pitch came in slow and low “Ball two” said the umpire very quietly.
ICE Cold Beer” Someone else behind me screamed out above the crowd.
The next pitch hit the batter. “Take yer base,” the ump pointed toward first.
Somebody right in front of me screamed out as if in pain, “PeaNUTS!, Get yer peanuts HERE!”
And there are “Hot Dawgs!” here, and “Coco COla!” there . . . how quaint that all seems today.

Yes, those were the good old days. Time between innings were spent in casual, sometimes elegant conversations among friends and even strangers who were sitting around you. You talked mostly about baseball, how the game was going and what would probably happen in the next inning. We were telling each other what to look for. There was some music, usually the National Anthem before the game began, and then the “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the 7th inning, but otherwise it was all pure baseball abmience, usually watching the shadows lengthen and pool into darkness as the nighthawks swooped above the brilliantly-lit playing field.

Today it is different. The game is no longer so matter-of-fact. Things are always spectacular now. The umpires dance and spin and shout out and gesture. The players hop like bunny rabbits over wrongs, whether actual or perceived. There is constant music, or just plain amplified noise, interrupted for breathless moments of pregnant silence as the pitch is delivered, then - thank God, the music starts up again with its mindless ditty which is never completed because there is always another next pitch.

The vendors in the stands too have changed their wares now, here in the year of our Lord, 2015. You still hear the cry of “Beer”, ICE Cold Beer”, and “Peanuts” but now we have come to hear “Get yer Steroids Here!” Somebody over to the left will shout out “AnaBOLIC steroids!” “Hot Dogs!” calls out somebody else, and a kid over to the far right calls out “Stanozolol! Get it NOW”. A sprightly -looking old codger carries a tray and shouts out “Human Growth HorMOAN!” A sign up on the concession stand reads “Deca-Durabolin” and beneath it is written “Need a Dr. prescription? - We GOT a doctor! Come on up! Get Yours NOW!”

Well, looking back now we can see that these performance-enhancing drugs made their entry into our society through the games played by young boys. Somewhere around the 1960s and 1970s, money got into the game in a really big way. Those who were good got paid well, those who were very good got paid very well. Then the drugs quietly tiptoed into the scene. Skinny players popped out like the Michelin Man, hallowed records were shattered into oblivion. The need to get into drugs crept down from the major leagues right onto the sandlot and highschool games. And as every sports fan knows, if you don’t begin “developing” until high school, it will be too late for you and you will miss out on glory. And worse, on the money too.

So instead of getting drugs out of the game we had to admit they were “necessary” to help the human body and mind reach the Performance-Enhanced levels required to cope in modern life. So we made them legal. Now that everybody is using them, where can you go to stand out now? “Psssssst . . . let me show you something

Sgt. Crowley Did Act Stupidly.

2009-07-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

So did everybody else involved in this mess. Dr. Gates apparently acted even more stupidly. But perhaps most stupid of all was President Obama for calling Crowley stupid after saying he (Obama) knew nothing about the issue. But talk about the perfection of stupidity will lead you to swoon in admiration over the brilliant stupidity of the nation’s press, no longer a contender for any mythical “Joe Friday Award” for patient questioning and keen observation, but now the clear winner of a “Headless Chicken Award” for most spectacular flapping and running around wild while your head lies in the dust unseeing but still screeching.

Originally, I even thought the most stupid of all was Lynn Sweet for wrapping up the press conference with her dumb question which just lay there for a moment before slowly unfolding into a Harry Potter-like death-eater, and flying with the speed of the internet through the minds of the civilized world. EVERYbody involved with this now looks stupid. Even the lady who called the initial 911 call was made to look stupid by some in the press before she caught on and started acting stupidly on her own. I’m sure I look pretty darn stupid for having even noticed it, even more so for writing about it.

But. Beer heals all. Too bad Gates didn’t offer Crowley any that night. Too bad Crowley didn’t bring any with him. It would all be different now. We all know beer will calm disagreements. Ask any bartender. Or bouncer. What will they serve? My recommendation is a beer from the Oskar Blues Brewery in Lyons, Colorado. It’s the one they call “Mama’s Little Yellow Pilz”, a smooth pilsner which makes all other things seem irrelevant.

Still, questions remain. This was presented as a pretty simple breaking-and-entering thing, right? So why did Sgt. Crowley along with an unknown number of Cambridge and Harvard police officers botch up this nonevent so badly? The police Incident Report doesn’t say how many police officers were called in to back-up Crowley but it indicates that Crowley called them all out to take care of administrative matters only. According to the report, the Cambridge police were just to question Ms. Whalen (the 911 caller)! The Harvard University police were called only to verify that Dr. Gates Harvard University identification card was valid! (Apparently Sgt. Crowley did not call the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles to verify that Gates’ drivers license was actually legitimate - at least that is not mentioned in the report.)

One More Thing - Let's remember that Dr. Gates was still in the act of returning from China. So you could make a pun and say he was dis-oriented - and I have never returned from China - but I do know that whenever I return from Europe, I am also disoriented for a day or so - it's a big change. We schedule NOTHING for the first day back. Dr. Gates might have handled the incident differently had he had not just come from the other side of the world.

Now let the blame fall where it may, but this much is to be remembered - Incidents such as this can be expected more often as police increasingly trade in their traditional constabulary role for that of the military assault team. Look out. It could be playing in a theater near you soon.

(The bottom photo - the police Incident Report will enlarge if clicked upon)

NRA , Sotomayor and Treason

2009-07-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

The NRA wrote a letter to Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnel, and copied all 100 senators calling for a "no" vote on Judge Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. The last paragraph reads:

We believe any individual who does not agree that the Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right and who does not respect our God-given right of self defense should not serve on any court, much less the highest court in the land. Given the
importance of this issue, the vote on Judge Sotomayor's confirmation will be considered in NRA's future candidate evaluations. (emphasis provided here is mine).
Thank you for your attention to our concerns. Should you have any questions or wish to discuss further, please do not hesitate to call on us personally.
Sincerely,
Wayne LaPierre Executive Vice President Executive Director Chris Cox NRA NRA-ILA
cc: Members of the United States Senate

This type of action highlights and underscores the serious problem that is - in fact - destroying the government of the United Sates of America. Our nation has become a corporate nation now. We citizens are still permitted to contact our senators, we each have two of them, and our single representative, and we can ask them to please do or not do a certain thing, maybe donate a small amount of money and that's about it. The great corporations and organizations though, like the NRA, or Blue Cross, or those in the pharmaceutical or armament industries, contact 100 senators, and 435 members of the House, and lobby the president's administration, with expertly designed propaganda, LOTS of money, and now as the NRA letter shows - THREATS.

So what is the recourse? What should we do? First - we should become aware of what has already happened. Then we should examine and verify that it has occurred. Then we need to talk with each other. We are living in a time of treason. If we act early enough we can save our nation, many in government share our concern.

Second Amendment

2009-07-22T16:02:00.001-07:00

A big vote today on authorizing people to carry concealed weapons across state lines. It was defeated but the vote was close. Why now? This seems strange in light of the number of people who have been shot and killed in our country over the past several weeks. Policemen sometimes find themselves out-gunned in exchanges with criminals, and we are shooting ourselves down far better than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda could ever do. Even the number killed on 9-11-2001 is racked up again and again about every 40 days by American terrorists using guns. And while I sit here and write this I almost KNOW that another big shooting is coming later this week or maybe next week.

What is the second amendment anyway? Believe it or not, most people don't know. What does it really say? What does it mean?

I sometimes tell people that the second word in the second amendment is the word “regulated”. That’s not quite true but it's not far off the mark. Actually the amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s pretty simple. A single sentence with two clauses. Five words immediately stand out. "Militia", "State", "people", "Arms", and "infringed". These words can be very interesting.

"Militia". This word has many different meanings, but their common connection seems to be related to a concept of “military” control, with various civilian modifications. There seems to be no doubt that all militias will perform under the authority and guidance of a responsible leader who had been chosen and deputized by the officials elected by citizens of the “state” which would be protected by these militias. It is the authorizing clause of the entire amendment and clearly the reason upon which the second clause is dependent.

"State". Almost certainly refers to the individual states who will ratify the constitution of the United States.

"People". Interesting use of the designee of this right. It does not say “citizens” or “persons”. There is no right for “citizens” to keep and bear arms . . . or for “people” to do so. The right is assigned to “the people”.

"Arms". Fascinating choice of words here with many meanings from anatomical to clothing and nautical and several others. The two main ones which probably apply to this amendment are 1) the ability to physically carry a weapon and 2) to serve as a member of a military force. Which one applies here? Obviously, the one related to being part of a military force would complete the first clause of the amendment which refers to “militia”.

"Infringed". To "infringe" is to weaken a right that has been awarded. For example, if “citizens” had been the subject of the Second Amendment instead of “the people”, all American citizens would now be able to carry their guns, concealed or otherwise, into airports, onto commercial airliners, military installations, schools, jails and prisons, the House of Representatives, the Senate, into presidential press conferences, sporting events, and many other places where the carrying of guns are currently, and traditionally have been "infringed" - by being prohibited.

Going back to “arms” we wonder about assault rifles. That would seem to be applicable to the “militia” part, but then why not hand grenades too? Or flame-throwers, tanks, rockets, high explosives, phosphorus chemicals, mustard gas, Agent Orange, atomic and nuclear weapons, missiles, air planes and so on? They could all come in handy on various occasions. Even when the amendment was written, back in the late 1770s, the scope of military “arms” included weapons sufficient to destroy fortified castles. This seems to reinforce the understanding that the right which is reserved to “the people” to “keep and bear arms” in “militias” for the purpose of providing security for “the State” is to be accomplished under the direction and control of deputized personnel who are acting under the authority of that state.

So what does this bill that would permit unknown people to secretly smuggle guns across state lines have to do with the second amendment? It looks like a way to shoot holes in the constitution. Come on Senators Hagan and Burr, you can do better than that - who do you REALLY represent?

John Womack

This post is not copyrighted and is intended to be in the public domain.

Wise Latina? Hmmm.

2009-07-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,”

Bold statement? Well, she didn't claim that those experiences WOULD lead to better conclusions but only that she HOPED they would. I really doubted that she knew what she was talking about. However, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions, John Cornyn, Jon Kyl, Orin Hatch, Mitch McConnell and several other white males who had evidently not lived very rich lives proceeded to exhaustively PROVE she was RIGHT. Boy, those senators are really good, aren't they?

Apollo - The Great Mistake

2009-07-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

40 years is a long time even in biblical terms, but it seems even longer since Apollo 11 made its journey to Tranquility. Many of us who were already in the missile business at that time felt that it was a mistake to go to the moon before we were ready, but even we had no ideal that it would turn out to be as bad as it did.

The great alternative of course was to build space stations. Not just one but several. One basic pattern called for six. Four of them would be spaced evenly around the earth more or less equatorially and two others in a general polar orbit, one north, one south. Another plan called for placing a collection of stations together in one area of the sky to be used as a storage/repair/construction/command location. From these staging stations, journeys to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system would be much easier since they would be free of the heavy lift required to escape the earth’s gravity and also free of the earth’s weather. A true Space Command would become an integral part of the United States Air Force available for both defense and humanitarian missions, and accidents like those which destroyed the Columbia could have been easily avoided.

How much money would this have cost? Not that much - considering what we did spend elsewhere. The total cost of the Apollo space program itself is commonly given as $25 billion, adjusted to 2005 dollars this would approximate $135 billion. Meanwhile, the American war against Vietnam cost $686 billion in 2008 dollars, and the American war against Iraq has cost over $900 billion in 2008 dollars. We could have several permanent stations on the moon and explored Mars for those outlays alone. And of course, the money spent on the space stations would have had positive results for our national economy, education system, military defense and opportunities for international leadership and cooperation.

But when Project Apollo reached the end of its road with number 17, the ships and rockets were taken apart, the facilities were stripped down, the engineers and scientists let go to get a “real” job, and that incredible capacity for space flight was blown into the void. Now, 40 years later, we’re still trying to build one space station. And we currently have no space ships left to even reach that one station. Russia, China, India are moving on. America is fighting needless wars and celebrating footprints in the dust.

The News Issue

2009-07-15T14:43:00.001-07:00

In a capitalistic system, if you are going to go public, your company will have to not just make a profit, but to increase that profit each quarter. To do that you will have to 1) cut expenses, 2) increase prices, 3) increase market share, 4) introduce new products, or 5) expand into other commercial activities.

Your biggest bang for your buck is to get rid of people - amazing, your productivity will always increase, current costs will drop quickly and balance sheets will rise, legacy cost decreases will lift your P & L and make your stock shine, beep, and say “howdy” on the market. You won’t have to charge customers more money for your product, become creative, try to kill one of your current competitors, or take on a new batch of competitors.

Newspapers have been in an increasing downhill spiral since the radio began broadcasting news. Now with radio, TV, internet, Twitter and all, newspapers have been shoved out of the “breaking news” business all together, and their “scoops” now come in the form of in-depth analysis and prolipsis announcements that can only come from great knowledge about the places and things about which they are reporting.

The business of news - call it The Press or The Media - has clearly changed dramatically in the last twenty years. We always long for the “good old days” to return, no matter what the issue. Truth is, they don’t - they never do - because they can’t. (And we would be miserable if they did!) News has not only become faster but also more fragmented. We’ve always had propaganda and sensational information but now they mingle with reputable news organizations. Paul Krugman publishes on the Steven Colbert program, they each have a part of the news - together they get “it” (meaning something) out to more masses.

It may be that in the same sense that IBM moved from the typewriter business into the information storage and retrieval business, so too newspapers have changed from the newsprint business into some new business. To name this “new business” will take someone who is more familiar with the issue than I.

The BIG TRICK is how to pay highly qualified people an income commensurate with the work they do - much of which requires comprehensive technical and professional expertise, and also has an extremely low productivity factor in sometimes lengthy initial stages.

There is a lot more to be said on this issue but it will have to come in another post. I need discussion from someone else.

A Meeting of Raw Emotions?

2009-07-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Wow - the computer hiccuped and published a White House statement on Facebook in Spanish, "Las declaraciones iniciales de la Jueza Sotomayor". The United States then erupted into in a great collision of comments by both erudite readers and those barely able to grunt. After reading this fascinating recital of Comments, I have a new outlook on my country. Now I see more clearly that the term “United States of America” refers not to New York, Texas, California, Kansas, Florida and such others, but rather to Schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, Rationally Normal, Narcissism, Obsessive-Compulsive, and oh yes, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Me, I’m now clinically depressed. And by the way, FaceBook says they translate through 64 languages - all but Urdu, the 6th most spoken language, I am told, on the planet.

Bob McNamara

2009-07-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

Whiz kid. Phenom. The best of the best and the brightest of the brightest. But he was wrong. Terribly wrong. Tragically wrong. Brilliantly wrong. His reasoning was right - it always was. But he was still wrong. He knew too much, but he didn’t know the story. He had facts like some people have collections of crystal, or fine works of art, or great writings in literature - Bob had his facts. And he KNEW. He really did know. But he was wrong because he couldn't see the story, and his ignorance was responsible for the deaths of more than two million human beings. Why? Because he didn’t know the story that was taking place all around him. He didn't know the story that he himself was telling. He only knew the facts.

How did this happen? McNamara was open to John Stuart Mill’s art of questioning power, he loved logic and he lived to reason with other people. He held nothing so “sacred” that it could not be challenged. “Challenge me!” He seemed to beg, with that famously confident McNamara smile which seemed to say “I want to know if I am wrong - PROVE to me that I am wrong!” But he lived in a world of facts, not a world of stories. His facts told him what he already knew was true. But that wasn’t the way things really were. There was a real big story involved here and Bob didn’t know anything about it.

He held his own with the press of the world. He answered ALL their questions and they finally shut up. He met with the congress of the United States. He answered their questions. He would sit at the table in the senate meeting rooms that became silent following all their questions and he would ask THEM - “any more questions?” They would stare at their tables. If they had questions, he had answers. And his answers all had facts. He KNEW. And he knew he knew. And they knew he knew. But he was still wrong because he didn’t know what he was really talking about - he only knew the facts - he didn’t know the story. When other people would begin telling him the story he would interrupt them with facts, and they would stop.

So, anyway - McNamara built a great edifice of Facts. Facts on how to kill, how to bomb, how to destroy, how to deny, how to contain, how to blow up. He was good at his facts. But he didn’t know the story. He didn’t know any of the stories. He had degrees in economics, philosophy and a Harvard MBA. He taught at Harvard, served in the military for three years, rose to Lt. Colonel, selected targets for General LeMay, Was Kennedy's second choice for Secretary of Defense but got the job anyway, leaving Ford as its CEO. He was the mastermind of the American War against Vietnam.

McNamara apparently died a bewildered man. He knew everything except why the war didn’t work. He was probably the most rational man who ever lived and he knew how every thing worked. That’s probably why he didn’t understand war, or people, or democracy, or life.

He knew his facts and he could string them together but what he never did know is that the world is not rational. Bob McNamara was a freak. And that is a fact. And that is also the story.