It's been a while..

It's been 4 years since I posted here. It's not that nothing's happening in the world, it's that it's all so depressing if you *really* are paying attention to the real world.

Some politicians are finally saying climate change is an immanent threat. But all they do is talk in circles while the people pulling the strings make sure they eek out yet another billion in profits. But that's 'progress' right? (sarcasm light on)

Way way back when, the big bogey to worry about was CO2, but wait.. let's talk about methane! It's 25% more potent in trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere and with the tundra/tiaga/whatever you want to call the frozen north staying warmer longer and reaching higher temperatures huge amounts are being released to help warm things up. Hurray! (See opposite day)

And the politicians talk.

Meanwhile..

The funny thing, if you want to call it funny is that solutions to have avoided this situation existed but were dubbed too expensive to implement back when. With sea level rise now recognized as a reality guess how much more expensive it will be trying to keep Boston, New York City or London from becoming like Venice, Italy. And all that buried infrastructure.. Hurricane Sandy was a bit of a preview of what a flooded NYC would be like. But those solutions were economically unsound... riiiiight. (penny wise, pound foolish)

On a separate note, zombie films.. I figure the ultra rich much see the rest of the population as something zombie like, and perhaps since most people allow themselves to be marginalized and just keep on plodding along they have it right. But only because most people aren't taught critical thinking during primary education.

There's nothing like ignorance to create a serfdom just waiting to be aimed at a target the "lord" of the manor wants destroyed. And you can pay em peanuts!

The one thing about modern zombie movies don't really deal with is how would a 40-60 year old CEO fair out in the wild fleeing a ravening horde and what would their life expectancy be?

I don't watch zombie films or series but I might if they had a "fat cat" trying desperately to convince his security detail not to cut and run as the world fell apart. If they had even a modest sense of tactics and strategy they'd be gone long before he could make an offer that was meaningless.

On the use of Polarization of Nations for Political and Financial Gain.

I'm thinking about history and how polarized societies lead to the rise of people like Lenin, and Hitler and men that believe demonizing anyone that doesn't fit their plans is an acceptable tactic.
That blaming one group for the nations ills is the best way to resolve issues.
I'm thinking about all the people that agreed and idolized those men.

I'm thinking about our country and how we all *know* it can't happen here because we all believe in justice.

Wait a minute. Hold on.. that's actually not what everyone in this country believes anymore.

Did you work all you're life for a company expecting to get a pension when you retired? Then consider that the companies that raided the pension funds for capital for jets for the CEO could care less. It was a corporate decision, yes.. made by executives that considered their workers as things, not people. Or the fund was gambled away in the stock market. And now you're on your own while lawyers argue over who's fault it is at a $250.00 rate.

In the U.S. most of the grunt farm work is done by migrant workers. Most of those from Mexico. But there's a bunch of reactionary knee jerk politicians saying these people are taking jobs away from Americans. Like you're going to find 12 million Americans that will spend 10 to 12 hours bent over in the broiling hot sun picking produce for a 1.25 and hour.

People living in urban centers usually have no clue of how much hard labor is involved in bring those coffee beans to their local Starbucks, or the lettuce in their salads so it's easy for them to leap on the 'send 'em back to where they came from' bus.

People like the Koch brothers do not have the common American interests in heart excepting how much money that citizen will generate to spend on a product that the brother's companies sell. But they back the Tea Party and have people do seminars on talking points that say that demonizing the opponent is A-OK. The Koch brothers aren't alone, but I doubt the number of wealthy people in that camp wouldn't fill one 200 unit apartment building.

When people earning less than 250 thousand dollars a year start calling people that think people whose earnings are in the multi million or billion dollar should pay their fair share 'liberal weenies' you should to look at why they're taking that stance. The likelihood that one of those 'job creators' is going to do anything for that working class liberal basher is on the same order as that of a meteor falling out of the sky and hitting you.

There's a party in our country that is using similar tactics developed by fascists in Europe to enslave nations. That should scare the hell out of anyone if they've read history. It didn't turn out well for the countries that embraced those philosophy.

This is all 'pre-coffee thought' but I wanted to get this 'down on paper' and put it out for consideration.

On joblessness and how a large population makes larger profits possible:

I have to speak out or up on a topic which people, especially in politics and business seem to gloss over or ignore.

Population and jobs.


If you have 1,000 jobs and 800 people to fill them you pay them top wages and offer them benefits to sweeten the 'pot' to attract them. And you put notices up in other locales to draw in more workers.
Similarly if you have 1,000 jobs and 1,000 workers you pay well to keep them with you.

But, if you have 1,000 jobs and 5,000 people looking for work you're no longer constrained to offer as good a wage or benefit package. That's just business. We won't talk about business ethics If such a thing were an animal now, it'd be on the endangered species list. 

Now suppose you're a  'job creator' and want to pay as little as possible for a maximum of output. What you want is a surplus of workers for every job. When you have 5,000 people fighting for each job slot you can cut wages down to whatever the legal minimum wage is, if there is a minimum.

Now you don't need to attract workers, they're pleading with you to hire them. They'll take pay cuts, cuts to benefits.
Anything to be able to support themselves and their families. Work 3 jobs, whatever it takes.

And if any state or federal regulation annoy you, blame that as a reason for not creating more jobs. It's a win-win situation for business.

Proof? Look at how many major corporations have been raking in  record profits and while the unemployment rates in in many developed countries are higher than ever.


The so called "job creators" don't want to create more jobs. That would undermine a model that maximizes profits and keeps government regulations at bay, This was the way the world ran before the New Deal but now it's been optimized.


The world population continues to grow and I can guarantee you the job market will never catch up. That would be bad for business.




That's where we are.

On How the Free Market Regulates Itself. (It doesn't)

Ok, so The G.O.P. says that the Free Market should be allowed to regulate itself.

Might I point out that so far this year we have Barclays Bank and other banks up to their eyeballs in a rate fixing scheme. (Caught with their hands in the cookie jar?)
JPMorgan traders were *still* playing russian roulette with trades in the derivatives market this year and the only time any of this comes to light... is after they've bungled big time.
Wells Fargo just got slapped for charging higher rates to 'minorities' compared to white's getting similar mortgages.

So far the only sure thing is that these banks have not and will not regulate themselves.
Their execs continually claim ignorance when misconduct is brought to light.
Are they really that incompetent?

Now JPMorgan is saying their losses from the bungled derivatives trading may be even higher than they first estimated.

And who ends up paying for all this? The consumer. They'll make up their losses by charging you higher rates, or dropping the amount of interest paid on your savings.

Essentially neither the Banking Industry nor Wall Street's upper management will ever actually be penalized or held accountable.

All the positions in the regulatory bodies and in the Fed are filled by people that are from those industries and quite often return to them in positions that give them even more wealth while the average citizen (in any country) stuggles to make ends meet.

This is what generations of Americans fought and died for? I don't think so.

(I place quotes around minorities because in fact they're actually a larger segment of the population.)

When Hollywood becomes reality or beware of bored rich people.

Simple scenario to describe our country's government and it's current predicament: the movie Trading Places.

I shouldn't need to say who the Duke's are parallels of if you know who ultimately backs the Tea Party.

Winthorp = Old Republican Party. Valentine = Tea Party. Wall Street = Congress, (that's not a large stretch these days).

I'm making a stretch here and casting Ophelia as Occupy Wall Street, (just hard working people trying to survive?).

I'm afraid you'll need to fill out the rest of the major cast rolls yourself.. I still haven't had my coffee yet.

 The Right Mantra?  : No New Taxes

When is it possible to tell people "We want you to build new roads, repair the old ones, and maintain everything, we're going to raise your cost of living, but we want you to take a pay cut since we aren't going to raise revenues to pay you to do all this"?

That is exactly the stand republicans in government have taken. Do more for less. We don't want to pay for it.

We've had two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan which were essentially paid for by borrowing money we didn't have.
On the Iraq war we had been told by the administration that got that started that 'Oil revenues' would pay for our involvement.

What 'oil revenues' are these? They never materialized.

Our population continues to grow, requiring more education for more children, but let's not raise taxes to pay for more teachers.
No, let's cut their compensation.
That's the solution that the republicans put forth time and time again.

Meanwhile, we're no longer number one in standard of living, we're no longer number one in education, we are, however, a nation that is seeing a growing disparity between the cost of health care and the quality of outcome.

We have are a nation that is rapidly gaining in the rank of infant mortality. Was that something we aspired to?

There's an old saying: "You can't get something for nothing".
The corollary is you have to pay more for quality if you want it. But if you're earning less, well too bad.

If you want to be ranked number one in education, the standard of living of your citizens, your nation's military prowess? Then you have to pay for it. As your population grows the costs to do all these things increase. It's not rocket science.
Our current crop of republicans in government believe we're living in the 1950's when in the beginning of that decade the population of the U.S. was 152,271,417 citizens. That's what we can afford under their budget plan. Unfortunately our nation's population is currently 313,883,471 and growing.

It seems that our nation is taking a giant step backward to the 19th century. Wherein, a few very wealthy families 'guided' public opinion by means of their economic clout, i.e. The Company Store.

You work for the company, you live in a company supplied home, you shop in the company store. And the company will dictate what the rent is, what the costs of goods will be and ultimately what you will earn.

And what you earn will never surmount what you owe. How many people currently live paying off the interest on their credit cards?

This is what "Corporate America" is aimed at. And to be clear many of these corporations are not truly American.

These days a politician has to have 'friends' in the corporate world to get elected. That's the nature and end result of the Citizens United ruling. A corporation is a person? I wonder what size shoe it wears? Does in eat at Denny's?

When FoxNews or any news outlet claims the problem with America is it's Entitlement programs they are lying. Straight up, and flat out lying.

The problem is that no one wants to pay what it costs to maintain them.

But funnily enough, try and take it away from them. Try and tell someone in the deep south that you have to cut their medicare.
Watch them blame the current administration.

It isn't that the current administration wants to cut any entitlement, it's that congress doesn't want to raise the money to pay for them.

So when you go out and listen to a politician and he or she says he or she is against raising taxes, that politician wants you to work for the Company.

The company doesn't care about you.
There will always be someone else to take your place when you're no longer productive. A huge population guarantees it.
It hurts the Company's bottom line to pay for your health care. So they'll make sure you pay it. They'll see to it that it's mandated.
Cost of living increases, no way.
Hire a kid fresh out of school and turn you loose.
And if you don't like it you can leave.

Am I 'painting' a grim picture?

That's the reality of what underlies No New Taxes.

 Support the Troops, Congress doesn't!

The picture below isn't factually true: Congress imposed a law that will cut all funding across all Fed departments, (I believe in January?), in order to appease the GOP's balance the budget crowd.

Leon Panetta, head of the DoD, (appointed by Obama), has been *begging* Congress to change that law. Obama wants that law changed as well. 

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-29/news/sns-rt-us-usa-defense-budgetbre85s1k9-20120629_1_defense-cuts-defense-spending-lawmakers 

Interestingly enough if you watched C-Span instead of FoxNews you'd see this unending debacle playing out before your own eyes.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/304412-1

Apparently some news services are painting this issue as one where the Obama administration is attempting to gut the military. That's the exact opposite of the truth.

Both Panetta and the Heads of the Services have repeatedly appeared before Congress. Congress expects the D.o.D. to trim the military's budget to the bone. If the D.o.D. doesn't pass the increased health care costs the service personnel the U.S. will not have a military capable of defending the nation. Unless Congress acts to support the troops. Way to go Congress!

Other right wing opponents are putting out images like the one below. (Which if you watch the c-span video linked you'll realize is a last ditch attempt to meet a requirement created by congress). It's amazing how many people in Congress claim to support our troops and yet will not actually act to support them.

 

 Drones and Privacy

I just *gotta* comment on something in the news. Drones in the U.S.
A senator is worried about your privacy because Apple and Google are using 'military grade' drones to map America. Your privacy is in danger he says.

What he doesn't mention is the fact that police departments across the nation have access to the very same tech, (if their budget allows for it).

So what's the difference if the police are spying on you or a corporation?
It's this: Apple and Google will be allowing you the citizen access to the maps and images. The police won't.

Messages from God?

 I've always loved the hypocrisy politicians (and some preachers) display when it comes to severe weather.

When ever bad weather strikes a population zone the hypocrite wants to cast as a den of iniquity they'll jump up and say, "That's God's wrath!".

But you'll notice they never say that when bad weather like tornados torrential rains or drought strike where they or the constituents live.

Then they just pray for relief.

Michele Bachman says Hurricane Irene was a message from God to Washington D.C. that they need to change.
Why then isn't the flooding in the midwest and the drought in Texas a message from God to those states that they're behaving in a displeasing manner and need to change?

It seems to me that those weather events have been much more persistent.

(I'm just askin'........)


I'd like to also observe that if you accept the premise that  severe weather is a message from God then the people living where it strikes generally ignore the idea that they might to change their behavior, because after all.. they're the Good people.

Life on earth, some thoughts.. no answers.

People are odd.

Let's consider some concepts. You have a group of people, they have the basic needs of any human, yet some of them want more than they need and will deny others in dire need access to the things that they hoard.

They follow a religion that says that it is wrong to do such things. They believe they're devout because they can recite from their book and they atone for their sins at least once a year.

Most of the holy books humans have say that how you live your life and treat your fellow humans impacts your after life (those that say there is one, if they believe in reincarnation it's a whole different kettle of fish and you should maybe try being nicer, but I digress).
People will use ideas to shield their egos from the effects of their desires on others it seems and use sophistry to make it socially acceptable it seems.

Even odder still people will kill others for disagreeing on the definition of something in their holy book.

Let's consider the entertainment industry and things like disease, poverty and starvation.
A block buster movie can take in millions or even billions of dollars world wide. It will have cost millions to make that movie.
How much of that money goes toward any of the pressing social issues the nations of the world face?

The current demand world wide for resources in fuel, food, building materials and other resources continues to grow, but the world we live on hasn't. Population levels continue to climb but the amount of arable land doesn't and the oceans will only supply so much before the stocks there collapse. But we keep on pushing forward.

Fossil fuels are finite and expected be exhausted sometime in the next 50 years or so, and yet energy producers only pay lip service to finding alternatives that would allow society to continue move at it's current pace.

And then there's climate change. Wow. Ok.. fun facts, the earth has periodic warming and cooling cycles, and certain build ups of certain molecules in the atmosphere help cause the climate to shift.

Basic information, geophysicists have known that for a while, they studied the planet, examine ice cores, they even have a rough understanding of the periodicity of the cycles.

Along come Man the tool user, the builder. The species begin to burn fuels, when there are only a few million of them it's not that big an impact to a system like the earth's. But if on every continent people begin to burn fuels they increase the output of the molecules that help shift the climate... it's a no-brainer as people say.

But wait, say a bunch of people really don't want to lose their tidy income and this information might make the rest of the humans tell them they need to find a better way.. which would mean actually making less money for them.. what would they do? Hire people to 'prove' that it's not humans at all? Why not, it worked for the tobacco industry for a while when people started to wonder if there was a link to the product and cancer.

Something I wonder about those people. I'll lay out a scenario that illustrates my view of them. Let's say you go to a doctor because you're not feeling good, and they tell you you have an ailment that can be cured,  but it's going to cast you one quarter of your savings, (we'll pretend you have millions of dollars if you live in the U.S.),  and you'll have to give up certain favorite foods. You think well, it can't cost that much  and so you go to another doctor for a second opinion and they say the same thing. You go to ten different doctors, and they all agree with the initial finding.

And then you find the one that just squeaked by and got certified. He's more interested in money he can get up front than he is his patients and he says exactly what you want to hear. "It's nothing, you'll be fine just take these pills". You die six months later.

Most sane, (ok, maybe slightly neurotic), people on hearing the second or third opinion would think, 'Hey, I'd better deal with this!".
The saying 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' comes to mind., or 'better safe than sorry'. The naysayers don't seem to know those.. though they often claim to be conservative.
Those sayings are as conservative as you can get.

Tea Party politicians vs the Old party

So, a new wave of people who will not be a part of the "Washington DC system", yeah right.

Actually they've already got their hands out and big money is lining up to fill them.

Just because the piggy doesn't sound like the other piggies doesn't mean it's not a piggy or that it won't line up at the feed trough.

I think the only way you might get competent people that weren't looking for hand outs into public office would be to draft people that hold qualification the fit the job spec. You would need to be sure that they're better off in the private sector than they could ever be by serving in government. Set it up so that they can't use any connections made in public office for 10 years after they leave public service.

Yeah, that will happen and I'll sprout wings.

Glad and sad...

 Well, the Republicans have majority control of the House of Representatives and are finally stating just what their agendas will be.. the same agendas that they had before, less taxes, less service, less regulation.

 Wait a minute, less regulation? Isn't that how the Banking Industry and Wall Street nearly wiped out the United States and World economies? Are they freaking nuts? They say less regulation will boost the economy. In the same way giving tax breaks to the ultra rich has made this a better country for the average working person.

 One thing that needs to go is the E.P.A. they say. According to their theory it's regulating the waste from industry that's making corporations send jobs to China. Oh, but wait.. China has gone and discovered that their lack of regulation of industrial waste nearly wiped out millions of the people that made their economy the giant it is and are now putting in place stronger environmental laws.

 Looks like our out sourcing corporations may have to look for some other desperate country that doesn't care if their people die from the effects of industrial pollution.

 I'm glad I'm old enough that I probably won't see the effects this has on our current crop of children, I'm sad they'll have to put up with the result of short sighted greed.

 These people have forgotten about communities like Love Canal. Where mother weren't mothers because of the incredible rate of stillbirths in that community, or the amazing number of people that developed cancer and leukemia .. or the fact that the town had to be evacuated and was declared unsafe for human residence due to the immense concentrations of pollutants that had been dumped there then buried.

 Yeah, get rid of the E.P.A. you can trust industry to not take short cuts to make bigger profits.
 In the same way you can trust Wall Street to not gamble with your pension funds.

 Probably I'm whistling into the dark and no one's reading this little missive, but if you are.. think about dioxins, lead and mercury in your water supply.. it won't kill you fast, it'll take 10 to 15 years to cause noticeable effects, your children will be drinking that same water.
 Ahh, but wait.. big industry sells bottled water so you can have a safe water supply. That shows they have your back, right? Just don't let the kids play in the back yard, or touch the soil. They'll be fine.

 Ask the coal miners how much corporations care about them. You can bet your bottom dollar that if they weren't dependent on the industry to feed their kids 99.9% of the guys that work down in the coal mines would rather do anything but mine coal.

 How many kids grow up saying I want to go work where I can get Black Lung, or killed in a cave in or methane explosion because the corporation that owns the mine can't be bothered making sure that the mine is adhering to the safety regulations because that want another fifteen cents a ton*.

  They'd rather pay lawyers millions to go to court and fight the regulations than spend that money on fixing the problems in the mine or threaten to shut down the mine and put those miners out of work. Yeah, regulations are bad for Joe the Coal Miner.

 Hey, why don't the Republicans get rid of the F.A.A. too? Let everyone decide how to they fly, and what's safe to fly passenger jet.

 Oh and then the Republicans could get rid of the F.D.A., after all a little e coli in your beef or samonella in your chicken is ok, right? And then the big drug companies would be able ship more drugs with less tests to make sure they don't kill you.. or make you even sicker than the disease they were created to treat.

 We need more deregulation like we need more thieves and murderers**.

 I'd had hoped that the Republicans would have learned a lesson about deregulation when they saw how badly things went when Wall Street had it's melt down.  They kept on saying the market could regulate itself. Could and would are not the same thing. I could jump off a bridge, but I don't think I would unless you forced me to do it.
 Even Mr. Greenspan who had preached that the market would regulate itself eventually said he was wrong.

(* Not the actual amount they save by putting their workers at risk, but you can find that information if you really want to know.)
(** We already have enough trouble, we don't need more!)

The Real Nexus One Challenge

Isn't what most people make it out to be. Many insist on comparing it to the iPhone which misses a salient issue.

The Network.

The thing is the iPhone is locked into ATt&T so there's no direct competition between the two phones. The heart of the issue is the network reliability the devices work on.

The iPhone was a revolution in it's time but by tying itself to a single carrier it tied it's user base to that carriers ability to provide service where and when the user needs it. Customer surveys repeatedly show that while they love their iPhone they are much less pleased with AT&T when it comes to area coverage and reliability.

A recent survey has Verizon ranked number one T-Mobile below that and AT&T dead last in terms of customer satisfaction. No amount of advertising singing their own praises will change the fact that AT&T needs to improve their network*.

Along comes HTC offering Android OS based smart phones to T-Mobile and then Verizon.
Suddenly people who had been interested in the iPhone but stayed away due to the carrier they'd have to go with here in the U.S. had a reason to get excited. Maybe the initial offering weren't as slick as the iPhone but they beat most of the other choices available on those carriers at the time.

Enter the Nexus One. It's sleek, the hardware is a step up from almost any smart phone around now and Google has polished the interface a bit. Still not quite an iPhone when it comes to user interaction but. it's not locked into AT&T. Initially it's going to be supported by T-Mobile and then in the spring available to Verizon customers, (at least that's Google's plan).

So, the phones it will directly compete with are.. other HTC phones and Rim's Blackberry phones.

I believe that no one familiar with AT&T's actual network coverage will buy an iPhone if both T-Mobile and Verizon have near equivalent phones available at a decent rate for data/talk time.

When you come down to it.. up until recently the only real other choice for a smart phone was the Blackberry but Droid launched last month and then the Droid Eris was released soon after for people that didn't want to spend over $100.00.  Suddenly there's a strong surge of interest in Android based phones.

That puts the ball in AT&T's and to a degree Apple's court if they want to maintain market share in the smart phone realm.

Now, if Verizon would come up with a family plan that could add an 'affordable' data plan come spring I'd likely buy a Nexus One, (if it's not over 200.00 for the phone itself). Especially if Google/HTC tweaks the few issues tech reviewers have noted. (I'm not crazy about the nickel and diming that Verizon does with their 'additional features'.)

*  As an ex AT&T customer and current Verizon customer and I can speak to the issue of dropped calls and areas where coverage just vanishes. In my current home town AT&T would at best register three bars usually at home it was two bars, and if you moved just a foot in either direction you could lose a call. On the other hand the only time I've lost a call on Verizon was when I ran out of 'juice' in the phone's battery.

Wow

I wasn't paying close enough attention yesterday.

Apparently the ceo of google (the owners of blogger!) said something roughly along the lines of if you don't do anything wrong on the net then you shouldn't need privacy... you have nothing to hide.

If that were the  case then I guess that fracas back in the 1700's here in what is now the United States of America must have been instigated by criminals if you apply that precept to their insistence on the right to privacy.

Ars Technica has a more in depth article along with the actual quote and context.

I'm hoping that his comment was just being misconstrued and doesn't actually reflect the companies attitude and policies concerning the privacy of people using their services.

Priorities

"In the days of my youth..."

Let me take you back some forty years ago. The United States had landed on the moon. We had cutting edge technology and some of the sharpest minds on the planet.

Most of our cutting edge technology was either coming from military technology or the space program.

Many people said why don't we spend that money that's going to the space program on things that matter here on earth. Like getting rid of poverty in the U.S., or hunger. Maybe spend it on education.

None of the money pulled away from the space program went to ending poverty, or hunger and let's not even begin to talk about the funding for education in this country.

We now import the bright minds to do the intellectual development work. Well we did when we could still afford to..

It reminds me of the rational that N.Y. State gave for creating a state lottery: the money would go to the education department and help maintain the schools and develop better curriculum. Yeah, like that happened.

Ok, so the few billions that were cut from NASA's budget improved life on earth how? We still have children in this country that go to bed hungry, but now we have even less well educated children.. as well as less well educated adults. So that's two areas that didn't improve.

And let's take a look at the poverty issue in this country. Are we better off now?

Some forty years ago the country turned it's back on exploration and looked inwards, at least economically. Of course the decision was made by politicians and leaders of 'industry'. But the public swallowed the rationale.

And so here we are.

Our last president said Let's go back to the moon.. let's go to mars. But now we don't have the means to do it. And even more laughable is the idea that they'll use slightly beefed up Apollo era designs to do the job.

Shoestring designing and shoestring budgets are a sure way to insure that things will fail. Because the design work will fall not to the best design teams but rather to the cheapest. Nearly every loss of life in the history of nasa can be traced back to that issue.

You get what you pay for. Just look at all the cool weapons systems our military has now. Most of it is 'just in case' weapon systems, some is 'we'll never need it, but it scares the big boys'. and all of it cost billions of dollars. Which of course couldn't be spent on education.. or food programs for the less well off, or a first world style health care system.

But let's go back to that phrase 'you get what you pay for'. It actually works both ways. If the federal state and local governments don't invest in keeping their citizens educated and healthy then that 'resource' begins to degrade. And when you need better quality output you find that it's no longer there and you need to look outside your borders for the talent you used to find everywhere inside your own.

Need a border fence built? Quite a few comedians made jokes about who would actually be doing the construction. And people laughed at those jokes because there was a kernel of truth in them. Need parts for that new cutting edge fighter, those are being made in China. Here's a fun fact. Only five percent of the clothing worn by americans, i.e. U.S. citizens is made in the U.S.A.

So. Welcome to the twenty first century, where this country is fast becoming a client state of countries we used to scorn.

Am I advocating hatred? No, I'm advocating that people should start to pay more attention to what's important for the good of their children and their communities. It's not sitting in front of a television, it's not playing Call of Duty 2.

It's not blindly going through the day and thinking that someone else will handle the hard question and do the right thing.

That has seldom happened in this country, and when it has it was only due to some dire emergency. Most of the time greed has ruled. And maybe a little greed is tolerable. But when the greed takes teachers out of the schools and leaves children hungry something has to change. And there are only a few options.

First Option: less children. With less children the strain on the education system drops, there'd be less hungry children... and eventually a smaller work force. Maybe that would be smart? Less people vying for jobs would mean less people out of work. With less children, there'd be less of a strain on the resources of the country and less goods would be needed to be imported. Our deficit would plummet!

And that scenario would go over like a lead balloon.

Second Option: Intelligent budgeting of monies and resources. By that I mean first take care of the real issues. Education, infrastructure, health care, maintaining the military services at reasonable strengths with the caveat that weapons systems development, (i.e. the wish list), can only be addressed when the needs of the citizens have been met. What's all this got to do with Space and what I opened this commentary with?
Simply this there's always been an excuse why 'we' needed to cut the budget of this or that but there's always been one area where the budget usually grows and grows.

Do we *really* need to put robot mules for the troops before educating the children of this country? Or airborne lasers to shoot down missiles which may one day exist? What ever happened to the aegis system?

Priorities. There's a magic word to conjure with, why not put the people at the top of the Priorities list.
Do that and this country might well be able to afford to go back to the moon, and on to mars. That's if we get past the climate change issue.

Subway searches

As an ex NYC resident I still pay some attention to what goes on there. One thing that caught my eye was a ruing that the NYC police had the right to without warrant or justifiable cause search the possessions of people riding on the subways.

Some background to my main point:

Now way back before the thirteen colonies formed the United States of America the Crown sent soldiers to America to protect the interests of the king and other interests. During their stay colonists were forced to house these soldiers, their personal property, their homes, their correspondence and their person were subject to unqualified search, i.e., searches at the whim of any serving soldier or officer of the king's army.


These were some of the reasons the the colonists gave for seeking independence.

Once the United States were formed they created a constitution which every elected official of a state  or the federal government is expected to uphold and defend.


Alright with that as the background I would like first to have the reader consider what uphold and defend actually means when an elected official swears that he or she will do so.

It says that the constitution is very much the heart of the nation and in the same way that we would defend our country so should the articles of the constitution be defended.
With the very breathe and blood. It was simply that important to the nation.
Now other people have wishy-washy ways of diluting that intent and since it wasn't spelled out in cold hard language they can get away with that.. it's what a lawyers do but here's the literal definitions of those two critcal words ion the oath of office:

Up-hold - verb
1. to support or defend, as against opposition or criticism.


De-fend - verb
1. to ward off attack from; guard against assault or injury
2. to maintain by argument, evidence, etc; uphold

Those are pretty clear definitions.

I suppose if the framers had thought spoiled brats would try to find loopholes that they might have written something on the the order of thou shalt not bend, spindle, mutilate or shred the articles.

But that's just an aside. With the background and those two definitions established let's take a look at a one of the Articles of the Bill of Rights which is a part of our nations constitution.

Amendment IV.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That article says clearly, no blanket grant shall be given to search people or anything belonging to them.
It does not say that if someone looks shifty or shady any agent of a civil government can demand that a citizen allow them to search their person ,(which means the possessions they have with them as well), their documents, or their homes unless they go before a judge and present good reason for the need to search then obtain a warrant that specifies what they are search for and where they wish to search for it.

A thought I had about whether the amendment covers email and text files; don't we speak of the things we write on our computers as documents?

And so I think to myself.. geez the cops in nyc are randomly searching womens hand bags.. peoples backpacks, etc. Am I glad I moved out of there in 2002? Yep, I think so.

But it saddens me beyond words.

Caveat Emptor

I'm going to give some background to this next post before getting to the meat just so that there's absolute clarity regarding the issues involved.

About 2 months ago my honey, (significant other), bought a Toyota Camry from Enterprise Car Sales, (ECS).
The sales person showed us the certification done by 'a qualified independent mechanic' that guaranteed that everything was in good working condition. The carfax looked o.k. too.
They pushed getting an extended warranty that would cover the car "bumper to bumper" excepting normal maintenance such as oil changes. We got that. Inclusive to that warranty was that enterprise would provide a rental car free of charge while the purchased car was in the shop.

Initially she drove locally just to get a feel for the vehicle. Up to that time she had been driving a Dodge Caravan. On the third day she drove on the freeway to work for the first time.. and discovered that when breaking at about sixty m.p.h. the car shuddered badly and that the shudder was transmitted violently up the steering column. She went to play a CD only to discover that the CD player in the car was non functional.

We immediately contacted ECS and spoke to the sales person who stressed that the vehicle had passed inspection and that the extended warranty would cover any problems.

Because her schedule is incredibly hectic it was nearly two months before she had a day where she could drop the vehicle off to have it checked out. Well, first off Enterprise said she'd have to pay for the rental. Then Toyata told her that there was a deductible of two hundred dollars, and even worse that the brake pads and rotors were shot and would need to be replaced/repaired.
The brakes were not covered by the warranty and cost nearly seven hundred dollars.
The CD player was covered but the repairs was less than the deductible.

The Toyata dealerships mechanic affirmed that there was no way that the brakes could possibly have become so degraded in such a short period of time. The condition of the pads and rotors has been documented.

We contacted the dealership with this information and were told we'd be called back on whether or not the would cover the costs of repairs.

It's mid-day of day two and still no return call.

Can you say Better Business Bureau? Can you say State Attorney General?

I can. Better still, ECS should have done some homework on how well connected my sig other is statewide and nationally not to mention locally. I won't toot my own horn.. I annoy some people, but they also know I tell it like it is.

The people she knows love her and know she's bright and shiny, if she asks for help on something like this I feel sorry for the people that tried bending her over a barrel.

Doh! Factor of 10 to the 10th power

Seriously. I was still living in lower Manhattan on 9/11/01 .. this is beyond stupidity.
Do bureaucrats have major portions of their brains excised before being placed in positions where they make decisions like the one mentioned in the link posted below?

If you wanted to create panic and psychological stress in people who had been on site for the afore mentioned event the official responsible for setting up the Statue of Liberty 'photo-op' did everything exactly right.
They need to not be tasked with public relations related activities or anything job operation that might impose their ham fistedness on the public at large. Just an Ex NY'kers personal opinion.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/27/low.flying.plane/

Earth Day and global warming and later on

Well, it's been 39 years since the first Earth Day and issues of dumping pollutants into the water and air supply as well as burying it in the ground are still rampant.

I've given this issue a lot of thought since I first heard about the CO2 issue 41 years ago and have reached a few conclusions.

1: Unless large corporations see immediate profits* from reducing the pollution generated by their operations they will not willingly undertake action to reduce said pollution.

2: Once people become used to a lifestyle that is comfortable they are unwilling to relinquish that lifestyle.

3: The processes of climate change can be likened to a supercargo vessel, once it gets going it's not going to stop on a dime... or a manhole cover.

4: Most of the dialog by scientists monitoring global warming trends focus specifically on the man made elements and chemicals which have accelerated a process the planet normally goes through.
I have seen no instances where they added in the 'natural' forces such as volcanic gases, methane release from oceanic clathrates and melting permafrost although I'm sure someone is probably trying to look at those numbers, (while gnawing their fingernails to the quick).

5: When I first learned of this issue way back when, I learned about the complete natural cycle.. after it gets hot.. it gets really really cold.
Of course that can take centuries but one small fun fact that should be mention is this: we're in what they call an 'inter-glacial' period. In fact according to the dating of ice cores we're actually a bit on the late side to begin a new ice age.

Isn't science fun?

But it gets better.. how do ice ages begin? First you warm up the planet, then melt the ice caps.

If you dump say, all the fresh water frozen on Greenland into the Gulfstream you essentially hit the 'off switch' for the global conveyor current.
It's only in the last decade that it became clear that all ocean currents are tied into one giant heat exchange system.
It's also the main reason we live on mostly ice free continents.
But turn that system off and the places that are getting warmed by the heat carried up from the equator begin to cool, rather rapidly.

Are we having fun yet?

Well hang on, it gets better.

So, there you are living in say.. Chicago or New York City or London or Moscow and the first year after the conveyor goes offline is on the cool side, say the next year the snows stay through too late April, May or possibly depending on the latitude of your city.

And each successive year the winters last just a bit longer. Reflecting heat back into space for every day that snow is on the ground.

Within a relatively short time the 'habitable' zone will begin shrinking southward toward the equator.. and all the creature comforts we humans have invented will be legends told to the survivors. Tales of flying machines and buildings that reached the sky..
First the fire and then the ice. It sounds like something a deranged science fiction writer would pen doesn't it?

*(inside a 5 year time period)

Now?!

Unbelievable.. the party of corporate give-aways and tax cutters extraodinaire, (does anyone remember voodoo economics and which party invented it? Think Reagan.), that party which engineered the financial morass we find ourselves in is now going to be the party of fiscal responsibility?

Wow.

Wait a minute.. where was their fiscal responsibility when they voted for more money for a war where money literally disappeared? A war that sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of tax payer pockets.

Isn't that the same party that swore the 'market' could and should regulate itself?

Are they going to keep saying government shouldn't get involved now that the rampant greed of people like Madoff have been laid in the light?

Ohh, did they mean regulate like sharks do in a feeding frenzy? Is their philosophy 'Carpe diem, caveat emptor'? I thought that was more a libertarian stance.

The dichotomy between what their party supposedly stands for and what they truly act in favor for seem to be at odds if taken in view of the last 30 years of the party as a whole.

They talk the talk, but somehow it's the CEO that gets the breaks and the average working man or woman find themselves needing 2 jobs where one used to suffice.. if they can find a job.

Talk about hypocrisy, suddenly now that they've been kicked in the figurative family jewels by the voters who actually did give the current president a real majority mandate for change, they're going to 'return to the roots' of their party.

I have an idea.

If they're so patriotic let them pay for their own health care instead of that ultra inexpensive health plan they have courtesy of every working tax payer, (some of whom are undocumented workers. You should say thank you all you congressmen and women whenever you use it). It's a health plan that every blue collar American could only dream of having.

Let them pay for their own travel without getting reimbursed by the tax payer.

And while their at it, why don't they vote to cut their pay by 20% to show some empathy for the squeeze the average worker is feeling.

Fiscal responsibility? Do more with less Mr. and Ms. Republican congress person, not less with more as you have in the past, (anyone want a Bridge to Nowhere?), and the country *might* start believing your are the party of Lincoln again.

But, and here's the kicker, if you helped create a wreck and there are people in dire need of first aid and you start crying that the bandages are too expensive you won't impress anyone with that argument that has half a brain.

Serve the nation or get out of the way.