HOPE AND SPARE CHANGE, ANYBODY?
Everything has changed, yet it all remains the same.
The saying goes that if we do not learn from history, then we are destined to repeat it. And repeat it we do like clockwork with 223 caliber ammunition.
LET MY PEOPLE GO
There is a new Pharaoh in Egypt. He will likely build pyramids and re-enslave the Jews. This time the Persian alliance will be his facilitator. This is part of a continuum. A nuke or two could reinstate the great Persian empire across the Middle East and eventually all of Europe and then Africa.
Perhaps a new crusade is in order. Where is Lancelot when we need him?
ACCORDING TO SOCRATES
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Contemporary solutions:
Eliminate government involvement in education.
Charter schools.
Demolish teachers unions.
Transfer all texts to the cloud.
Prioritize budgets and eliminate art, music, ethics, civics, physical education and literature from the curriculum.
And, by all means eliminate those expensive social work and mental health programs. Money is tight and we have our priorities.
TECHNOLOGY IS NEUTRAL
Drive a car... pollute the earth.
Create an irrigation dam using dynamite...kill with dynamite.
Robotics take over from manual labour...millions unemployed.
Invent Kindle...burn the books...destroy the historical record.
It's all relative.
So we live longer lives. Is that a good thing? Do we, the boomers have greater wisdom as a result of our longevity. Is the world a better place?
HEALTH CARE, A RIGHT OR A PRIVILEGE?
It really doesn't matter. It is not an ethical dilemma. It is an economic nightmare. We are born and we die and we suffer our fragility and our flawed design.
When we pass through our life transitions, we incur financial repercussions.
If we use tobacco, it is not just about the individual, the family or society in general. It is about an industry. From the tobacco farmer to the cancer surgeon to the grave digger and all of the intervening steps. There are deep and extraordinary economic factors involved.
If we unintentionally inject a moldy steroid shot for back pain and suffer the repercussion, who is to blame? Who pays the piper?
If we fall asleep at the wheel and injure an uninsured child, who pays the shot? In fact what if an uninsured child gets shot?
If we acquire a hospital born infection or get a lyme tick bite in the park, what then?
Ban tobacco, ban the big gulp, ban trans fats, ban coal fired power plants, ban genetic seeds, ban ban ban.
And the ban plays on. Perhaps the "ban" thing doesn't work.
But while America considers the legalization of pot, Holland is reversing theirs.
Round and round we go. Coke is the real thing.
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
That was the one in 1914. About twenty million people died.
There is a civil war right now on the streets of the cities of the USA. It remains a daily decimation, without comment, without concern and without press. That is of course unless a newsworthy event involves middle class white people. Then we might hear about it for a minute or two.
While about 150 people died during the recent eight day war in Gaza, how many people died on the streets of American cities? How many were wounded? Why don't we give a shit.
At least based on the annual average, 300 people were murdered on the streets of America in those eight days, double the number in Gaza. An uncountable number beyond that were wounded.
Why don't we care?
Why is Gaza more important?
Perhaps homeland security should start at home.
ANNEXATION
A recent tour of the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's plantation home in Tennessee, left me horrified. The man's legacy is akin to a Stalin or Hitler.
He was a murderous, megalomaniac, racist bastard responsible for unforgivable crimes against humanity.
Much of the nation-based structure of the world is founded on the annexation of territory. We claimed a hunk of Mexico not too long ago, and act surprised when the American-Hispanic vote displays an agenda with numbers and authority.
The West Bank and Jerusalem is a whole other thing. We hold the Jews to a higher standard. America carried out ethnic cleansing against the entire Native American population. Andrew Jackson was an executive director of that final solution. The U.S. also annexed a huge slice of Mexico; Turkey can decimate the Kurds; Armenia once was; Tasmania even had a population of Native Australians at one time.
But that was then, and this is now. We are more moral in the twenty first century. We have better ethics and we will start with the ‘Jewish problem’ by making an example of them. The effrontery that these people display in their claims of territory goes against all human, civilized behavior. They must be stopped and sent back to where they came from. Boycott that West Bank settlement humus immediately!
Somalia be damned; Congo be damned; Yemen be damned; the south side of Chicago be damned and the Mexican and Colombian drug -lords be damned. Afghanistan and Iraq be damned. Syria is currently experiencing cosmic damnation.
Because, ultimately, it is all about those pesky Jews. Solve that Jewish problem and everything else will be okay. Let’s start with the humus.
SANDY?
Pompeii.
Regardless of Darwinism, Creationism, Global warming, Environmentalism or any other “-ism”, the financial and economic repercussions that result from the earth doing its thing are monumental.
We can accommodate the earth's ego, or we can ignore it to our loss and at our peril. When subways flood, the power-grid fails, the nuclear facility leaks and the bridge collapses, we all lose.
Do we need regulation? If we have children, the answer is hell yes.
The problem is that the American constitution is sixteen pages long. Obamacare is 906 pages long.
I would like my steroid shot to be clean. I would like San Onofre to survive the big one. I would like Monsanto to stop re-designing my seeds and poisoning the essential molecular composition of my food.
But it is a mystery to me how any of this can be regulated without destroying the essence of freedom. That is why "Citizens United" sailed through SCOTUS. The New York Times is a corporation. They are permitted to influence millions of people as a direct result of "Citizens United".
How are we to regulate the New York Times corporation and their voice differently from the Monsanto corporation and their voice?
Would a PAC survive scrutiny in any other industrialized civilized democratic nation on earth? Perhaps only in Sweden, the bastion of feudal legislation.
A totally free-market economy becomes feudalism. An overly-regulated economy becomes Communism. Where is the middle?
CULTURE
"Gaming" is a term, a culture and an industry that defies my comprehension.
It began with pong and is now a 100 billion dollar industry occupying time, energy and emotion.
Backgammon is a game. Chess is a game and table tennis is a game.
Chasing down and destroying evil -do-ers through animated environments on a screen accompanied by dramatic soundscapes is not a game. The principal concept is flawed on multiple levels. We play against people that we never see beyond the virtual world. We learn virtual skills. We experience adrenaline rushes as a result of virtual experiences and we experience loss and gain in solitude. The adrenaline is not virtual.
100 billion dollars per year could perhaps be put to better use on the south side of Chicago. That is where some real killing and real adrenaline is happening. Forget the virtual stuff, that's for pussies.
INNOVATION
My house has vinyl siding. I would prefer brick or anything with better fidelity.
I type text on a QWERTY keyboard. I prefer the older technology of voice to voice communication. But telephones are so eighteen eighties. (((::: WTF , LOL.
Grass-fed beef. Now there's an innovative concept. Free- range chicken. heirloom tomatoes mercury-free seafood would also be a nice novel concept.
But plumbing made of lead is said to have destroyed the Roman empire. Their only excuse was that they were not aware of cause and effect. Contemporary Mad Cow disease has been attributed to turning cattle into carnivores. We should know better. Let them eat grass
There are references to the use of coal for energy in Greek texts dating back thousands of years.
Coal is still the world’s largest energy source for the production of electricity.
Perhaps another two or three thousand years of development will discover a less damaging source of energy. Coal is cheap to source. Yet, coal creates extraordinary damage that seems never to be considered in the larger economic paradigm.
It is not about politics. It is not about religion and it is not about ethics. It is about the money.
Here’s my short list of economic black holes:
The free-enterprise health-care system is wasteful, unsound and inefficient.
Coal is dirty. It creates economic damage.
Forty-eight characters are not an efficient means of communication.
Monsanto and the NRA should not be permitted to buy my government.
One hundred thousand surveillance cameras over Manhattan invade my privacy.
Nintendo and Playstation are the Colosseum, gladiator distractions for the masses.
We are dancing on the deck and the ship isn’t sinking........yet.
What happened to hope and change? It expressed itself in a dogmatic fundamentalist insane interpretation of the second amendment of the American constitution. There is intention, and there is interpretation.
Misinterpretation... “from my cold dead hands” to Sandy Hook.
Watch out! The drones are coming, the drones are coming.
