Egypt...

The "revolution" most often goes like this:

-groundswell for "democracy" erupts, driven by several different sources with different political ends (please note that very few of these people understand or have experienced democracy, so what results from initial proposals has no real resemblance)

-after much bloodshed, dictator government is ousted

-struggle to aim and control government ensues between these different sources

-after two or three botched elections, an extremist religious group takes over

-back to square one, with a much weaker country and opposition


Too bad religion plays such a large part in the politics of the region.

Terrorists and their supporting organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and their outside backers like Hamas and Iran would love for this to turn totally chaotic. Make it easier to subvert any attempts at organized democracy and turn it into another Iranian type situation. Look for Mullahs and Clerics to start speaking for the "revolutionaries".

We'll see if the educated westernized Egyptians can pull this together, or the religious extremists will take over.

Guvmint, jobs, reading the fine print and expectations...

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/28/133249970/loss-of-solar-jobs-has-mass-rethinking-state-aid


Uhhhh... guvmint stupid. Not read fine print. But politicos be last to lose jobs...

Face it. We can't compete in a world economy without tariffs and laws that make it hard for companies selling goods in America to manufacture them outside the good ol' USA.

But we done lost that fight.

One of the reasons - outside our own greed and short-sightedness (look at our work expectations, unions, pension funds, tax structure, everything adds up to failure) - is that both corporationalists and globalists want to even the world-wide economic playing field -- and if that means a lower SOL in the USA, then so be it... So we have persons of power in our own guvmint whose ends do not meet their own constituency's best interests.

Whole thing will backfire. End up with lower SOL for everyone, everywhere.

Mebbe NO SOL for anybody.

Paradox...

People have less money to spend, so they are spending less; and with less spending, the economy is having a difficult time getting back on track.

If employers hired more people and paid better wages then people could purchase more of their products and those businesses would be better off.

However, businesses don't have the money to hire new people and pay better wages because consumers are not buying their goods and services like they once did.

If you can figure this one out, I'll buy you a beer -- and, you get my vote for president...


But... Quoting a poster "Hermit" on a local forum:

"I think our economy's big problem is that it is built on the premise that people have to buy crap they don't need to keep the wheels of commerce in motion.

When people stop buying crap they don't need, the economy tanks. I'm not so sure it's a good idea for the government to pick up the crap-buying slack to get the wheels spinning again.

I never thought I'd see the day when the act of saving was considered bad for the economy."

Succinct!

The Tucson Shooter and "Political Discourse"...

"If They Bring a Knife to the Fight, We Bring a Gun" - Barack Obama


Both sides seem to be trying to "establish a narrative" and "manufacture a meta-meme" that absolutely ignores what known facts there are regarding the Tucson shootings, and to use whatever means, including outright lies, to promote those manufactured narratives as truths...

Funny how so many of us are just pulling statements and questionable "proofs" off of these sites and pasting them into our litte spats.

Disgustingly familiar. We are thinking it's a "media" problem, while we need to look in the miirror.

Maybe if we want to throw labels and call names, we need to do so in the privacy of our own homes and in that mirror...


Amazing the number of acquaintances of the shooter who come out of the wood-work and in effect say "I knew he was going to do something like this...”

Even given the probability that half of these people are just getting on camera, I don't think that it is a violation of personal rights for anyone who notes unusual and what they might consider dangerous behavior to at least take the action of contacting local law enforcement. Not that there would necessarily be action taken, but at least this would up the odds on such people being caught and even helped before something bad happens...

I also want to say that people who are pointing fingers at heightened political discourse as a trigger for what went wrong with this young man are probably mistaken. I think they will find that he has paranoid schizophrenia and suffers from delusions -- and there may be no telling why people with schizophrenia choose to latch onto and obsess over any particular subject or object.

That said, I do believe that this will have consequences on the ease of individual purchase of weapons, especially handguns; maybe only in Arizona, but there is going to be some serious anti-gun rhetoric coming down over the next little while. Of course, that will only worsen the "heightened political discourse" that is being mistakenly blamed for a crazy man's actions...

WikiLeaks, Korea, and Goldman-Sachs...

With the release of the info that China may support a combined N+S Korea, under South rule, WikiLeaks may have brought the North closer to instigating war. That is bad. Possibly criminal.

On the other hand, I am looking forward to their promised fisking of Goldman-Sachs.

Of course, that will probably show even greater involvment and control over the FED and monetary policy and politicians by G-S, and might be worth the death penalty…

Watch – our government is going to get much more upset about any release of G-S info, than they have over compromising our diplomatic communications…

TSA Scans are not really about Terrorism...

I don't believe the TSA body scans and increased security is necessarily a reaction to terrorism, although it is being marketed as such -- as are a multitude of government invasions of and limitations on freedom.

We're seeing a continuous purposeful pushing at an extension of what is "allowable" government control -- it's the "how you cook a frog" system of getting a populace to submit.

From Red-light to public surveillance cameras, to citizens not being allowed to video or audio-record police (a one-way street there), to violations of 4th Amendment protection of search and seizure in traffic checkpoints and inventive "probable cause", to government covert tracking devices, secret warrants, indictments with withheld evidence, the information gleaned from gun sales and CCW permits -- on and on...

Thirty years ago, people would have laughed at the possibility of these steps even being mentioned... but, I'm just being paranoid.

Governments don't offer good return on tax dollars...

Now I realize that I function best as critic and pitchfork wielder -- and it's more fun than actually solving the problems.

But I keep thinking that maybe things would go better if we kept more of our tax money at home, instead of sending the bulk of it off to DC, and then waiting and wishing for the promised hand-outs...? But that would require a real revolution - not the co-opted and branded kind.

We piggies at the trough seem to forget that the little bit of local reflux we glean out of the belly of the beast consists of our own earnings - with the bulk siphoned off to who-knows-where. It's certainly not going to reduce the deficit, because GOV spending just keeps going up...

And now the FED is trying to push up inflation, which in turn, through weakening the dollar, results in rising gas prices, more expensive food (more expensive everything) and of course more dollars spent in taxes - putting even more pressure on the middle class, because ALL this is happening while most individual workers have seen no increase in earnings. In years!

A good example is this: If we can't keep things on an even keel in the little liberal hothouse that is Athens Co., then how can we expect the same policies to work at the national level?

How do we fix this seemingly endless cycle of more money for less service (look at our local township roads - and we just approved another extension and an addition for maintenance tax)? Not paying will make things worse, no one wants that, but what happens when we reach the bottom of the wallet?

And now, people like Krugman are demonizing citizens who save money instead of spending during a recession - grasshoppers who cause the probem insanely putting the onus on the ants that take care of their own.

It comes down to different views of Government. Krugman, et.al do not see Government's function as unbiased service to the citizenry, but as a tool of "moral" redistribution as they see fit. And, THIS is what we get. And it doesn't work.

Palin candidacy will be death to any revolution...

I cannot understand, and dare not imagine, the desperate straits that about half of our country finds itself in: that through collective ignorance (defined as willful stupidity) the possibility that they will nominate not only the least qualified presidential candidate ever, but one that will doom what started as a pretty good idea - before it was co-opted.

Liberals all over the country are literally praying – she’s turning stone-atheists into groveling religious supplicants – that Sarah Palin runs and is nominated as the GOP candidate for POTUS.

I also cannot believe that this movement can't find another candidate -- until I remember just how MUCH they have been sidetracked and co-opted.

Funeral Songs... Everybody needs a list.

Subject to revision, I hope.

Funeral Songs

Elegy -Bruce Cockburn
Flying Red Horse -John Gorka
You’re On Your Way -John Gorka
Love Is Our Cross To Bear -John Gorka
If I Could Forget to Breathe -John Gorka
Kind Woman -Chris Smither (Richie Furay cover)
‘Til I Gain Control Again -Blue Rodeo (Rodney Crowell cover)
Dark Angel -Blue Rodeo
Know Where You Go/Tell Me Your Dreams -Blue Rodeo
Simple Song -Lyle Lovett
Family Reserve -Lyle Lovett
Glory of True Love -John Prine
Clay Pigeons -John Prine (Blaze Foley cover)
Bear Creek -John Prine (Carter Family cover)
Long Monday -John Prine
Festival of Friends -Bruce Cockburn
Last Night of the World -Bruce Cockburn
He Came From the Mountain -Bruce Cockburn
Southland of the Heart -Bruce Cockburn
All The Diamonds -Bruce Cockburn
The Color Green -Rich Mullins
Silver Garden -The Everybodyfields
Elegy -Bruce Cockburn

Questioning Islam equals Racism... ????

Anonymous poster to HuffPost:

"Islam is a RELIGION...as such, it is fair game for criticism, lampoon, ridicule, analysis, as is any other religion--whether we're talking Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Scientology or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

And when a statistically significant number of people claiming to be faithful adherents of ANY religion engage in acts of violence in the name of that religion (or support or refuse to condemn those acts), engages in varying degrees of repression and abuse of women and girls, engages in repression of and violence against gays and lesbians--then I'd say it's fair for rational people to take a closer look and to speak out.

Whether it's pedophiles in the Catholic clergy or fundamentalist Protestants subverting the Bill of Rights or extremist Jewish settlers harassing West Bank Arabs or school-bus bombing Arabs -- if a significant number of adherents are engaged in such acts and claim to be acting out their beliefs, then their religion is open for scrutiny. Criticising Islam or poking fun at it is not "racism"; that won't wash."

Best comment on NPR...

This is what I believe is an accurate description of NPR.

Marianne McDonald made this comment on the NPR Ombudsman forum:

"...If Fox News is a hang out for playground bullies, then NPR operates like a calm, smiling Mean Girl with a hidden control agenda. As a daily listener, I believe that NPR provides a valuable public service in reporting, but no one exposed to more than one point of view on a regular basis thinks you are unbiased. By firing liberal Juan Williams for expressing a feeling shared by many non-bigoted people around the world, you just inspired a new generation to label American public radio as the voice of the politically correct intolerant Left. Even worse, independent thinking journalists might avoid NPR for the same reason. That's a loss for all of us."

NPR funding reality...

I would like to say this: despite my critique of NPR, the federal funding kerfuffle is kind of a political football -- NPR gets approximately 2% of their funding from FED money -- 1% from the FED directly and another 1% from the NEA.

Also, if you can wade through the very subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) spin that NPR puts on most stories through who it chooses to interview and the questions asked, you still get waaaaaaay more hard info from them than you get from Fox or MSNBC, CNN or any of the other major media outlets...

NPR asks more hard questions and provides more info in five minutes than the rest do in an hour.

This doesn't excuse what they did with Juan Williams -- BUT, the FED funding thing is mostly politicians, most of them working for Fox (How does that happen, anyway?), trying to score points and raise the rage level with their voting block, most of whom are not informed about the issue -- which is what the pols are counting on...

NPR FIres Juan Williams...

http://www.mediaite.com/online/npr-fire ... ly-factor/

Speaking Truth to Political Correctness

I condemn this knee-jerk reaction. WOUB will be getting a note, along with my empty renewal envelope.

Bad time to do this, with it being fundraising season and all...

I am a longtime listener to Juan since the Talk of the Nation days. I love the way he can cut through the BS to the heart of the matter. He is one of my favorite broadcasting personalities.

NPR is lately taking an even more partisan line than usual, with most of their guests/experts from far left-leaning organizations.

I am reminded of a recent Morning Edition episode, when the guest was a polling expert who is an employee of The Huffington Post. He was presented as an unbiased analyst, but through the slant to his comments and the data he mentioned it was exceedingly obvious that we were getting only the information supporting the viewpoint he wanted to promote.

Where's the damn middle, anymore? I can't watch Faux or MessyNBC, and until now I just had to put up with continually self-editing through the admittedly more subtle NPR spin.

This is just another domino down the road to partisanship totally ruling all available broadcast media, and soon I won't be able to tell the difference between NPR and MSNBC. They'll probably bring "The Olbermeister" on as an anchor. Uhhhh.

Juan was a news ANALYST at NPR - NOT a reporter.

Isn't it a reach to fire an analyst for expressing views, especially in relation to an ongoing news story or popular subject that demands analysis? Especially when half of your programming is spun one way or another, depending on who's providing the commentating?

"His status was earlier shifted from staff correspondent to analyst after he took clear-cut positions about public policy on television and in newspaper opinion pieces."

Will NPR use the emotional reaction this is generating as justification for this action?

My bet is yes. They will hide behind the fray and firestorm of dissent and keep as far as they can from honest discussion as to why they acted as they did...


Good fortune to you Juan. This is what you get for "speaking truth to political correctness".

Pipe dreams...

How about a flat income tax that EVERYBODY PAYS, along with state sales tax with each state then funding the FED based on population/sales tax collected. Nobody rides for free, but nobody gets hurt too bad. Make the FED depend on the states, not the other way around.

Lets all join hands, what a wonderful world that could be... (Come on everybody, all together on the chorus now: What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful world...)

Never happen. Too many peeps on the gravy train with free tickets.

And we'll all be on that gravy train (wonder who pays for it?) when the US defaults, they devalue the dollar, and go to a virtual credit currency (ostensibly to do away with the underground economy).

We are...

...lazy and afraid, and willingly deaf, dumb and blind; like all declining empires.

And we like cheap products more than we like being an individual country with an individual economy and culture.

And with a false monetary system invented to keep our centralized government powerful, we function (temporarily) within a false economy built not on real need, but wants and wishes.

And our government is owned by multinational interests that could not care less about people and culture and care only about the bottom line.

And the bottom line is that if you won't do the job for peanuts (or rice, or potatoes), then they can find somebody who can and will.

Huh...? SInce when is 250K/yr rich?

Amazing how the definition of "rich" changes depending where you are and your circumstances relative to those around you...

250K/yr is a very arbitrary sum. Does "rich" now equate to "evil" in common belief? Is 250K is the new jump from "hard working" to "silver spoon"?

There are many areas in our country where that salary puts you solidly in the middle-class -- not rich at all...

I think the problem is not "taxing the rich" enough (although I think most really RICH people have way too many advantages through access to knowledge and help with loopholes) -- I think the problem is a vanishing middle class.

In my area, at least, even though on average they take home much more money, most "middle-class" families are living a comparative lifestyle to the lower-middle-class of 20-30 years ago.

One thing I have noticed, though - and this is not an indictment, just an observation: people who do make good money, and have done so long enough to have gotten used to it, do not really relate to lower-middle and working class people who are just scraping by. They may say they can "relate", but in my experience they cannot; any more than I can relate to a person raised in a blighted and famine torn country.

This may be why we get so little from government for our money: people we elect don't REALLY relate to us...

I think that the Vanishing Middle-Class is the reason we are seeing "class warfare", this little bit of which is over income taxes.

If the US had a solidly growing middle-class paying a growing chunk of taxes, the economy would be healthier (Duh!) and there wouldn't be the pressure to find revenue expressed in this increase in extreme anti-rich verbiage we are seeing ("Eat The Rich", "Bring back the guillotine", etc...) lately...

Just sayin'.

Global economic equality is coming... Woo-hoo.

Most people don't realize that the "equality" they dreamed of, have fought for and voted for, didn't end up being equality with your neighbors down the street and under the protections of a beneficent government and guarded by The Constitution, but equality with the Chinese worker, the Brazilian worker, and the Indian worker.

Guess what? Surprise! The Stones were wrong -- you don't get what you need, either...

Unfortunately, like illegal immigration, the people in whose best interest lies in keeping NAFTA afloat are the people who own our government and our representatives - both party's worth. And guess what? Both GWB and Barack are globalists, neither of them has your best interests at heart, the end result that our (the common US worker) boats don't rise, but continue to sink to meet the mean.

Our economy has gone global. Most available jobs will have no protection and become more menial with longer hours and lower pay. The horse has done left the barn.

This doesn't sound very libertarian of me, but the rich will continue to get richer and the poor, poorer, but on a global scale, which means that most of us may end up poorer than we ever imagined possible.

The math says it is too late for the US. If there is much of a pre-tribulation future left, and I do not believe there is, its history will say we were just a very short-sighted people who benefited over a short period of time from our short-lived empire.

Top 10 Influential Fiction Books...

This isn't a "most important" list, although some of them are. These are books that established my likes and (fiction) reading habits for a lifetime.

The Chronicles of Narnia – Lewis
Tom Sawyer - Clemens
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Pyle
Ivanhoe - Scott
Glory Road – Heinlein
Dandelion Wine – Bradbury
The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings – Tolkien
Jack of Shadows – Zelazny
The Dying Earth – Vance
The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov

"The Amercian Dream" - George Carlin...

Ok. Discuss...

George Carlin – “The American Dream”:

“...But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never … ever … EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. … … … BECAUSE … THE OWNERS, OF THIS COUNTRY, DON’T WANT THAT! … … I’m talking about the real owners now … … … … … the BIG owners! … … … The Wealthy … … … … … the REAL owners! … The big wealthy business interests that control things … and make all the important decisions. … … … … Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. … … The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . … you don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. … They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. … They got you by the balls. … … They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying … . . . lobbying, … to get what they want . . . … Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but Ill tell you what they don’t want . . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. … … They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. … … They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting F’D by a system that threw them overboard 30 FN years ago. … … They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. … And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly Sh*tty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your … Social Security money. … … … They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? … … … They’ll get it . . . they’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this FN place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! … … … … You, and I, are not in The big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich C--K S--KERS who don’t give a F about you. They don’t give a F about you . . . … they don’t give a F about you. …. …. They don’t care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their a--holes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream, … cause you have to be asleep to believe it . . .”

Why no balanced budget ?

Why no balanced budget?

Simple everyday people, like you and me, often wonder why Guvmint can’t “live within its means”. Well, for one thing, it doesn’t have to…

Those in favour of deficit spending always say "Guvmint spending is different than household spending." - and that's true - Guvmint never has to balance the budget. Actual intake never has to equal output's perceived value because Guvmint (through the corrupt FED system) prints its own money and tries (somewhat) to control the supply.

As for your budget comparison, there isn't one - as Guvmint really has no budget - it's all a shell game... and Guvmint has gone from being a necessary evil to a necessity.

Guvmint has always been, and is still in the bizness of growing Guvmint. And the way Guvmint (lately) keeps itself in power is not really through taxes, but by regulating money supply. Guvmint operates under a mandate to do this through its several different supporting bases who believe that they each in particular will benefit from Guvmint’s action (through taxation/redistribution/provision of perceived rightful needs). Whether recipient or supplier, these bases view Guvmint as a gigantic charity, responsible, through said mandate, for all of society.

Our representative republic slows it down a touch, until everybody starts to jostle and grab for a space at the trough and our representatives become jaded and corrupt. Then the trough gets smaller and smaller and the group of piggies gets bigger and bigger.

The piggies are about to overwhelm the trough.