The End and Beginning of All Things

Friday July 24, 2009

. . No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. . . .
Liberty means personal liberty, individual liberty; liberty for your mind and your spirit, quit being part of the herd.

. . . .Today marks the beginning and end of my year, I'm going to go away for a week or so and remember why I'm here, what I have to be grateful for, and how much, who and why I have to pray about. All things working out, I'll be back in this space writing, agitating, being a gadfly, ranting and raving in the first week of August sometime.

. . . .The playlist? Well, everyone needs a soundtrack for their lives. This one's mine. It's the closest glimpse that a lot of you will ever get into who I really am, there's very, very few people who know the real me, all of me. People who know me well know that I'm the human equivalent of Bumblebee, and that those songs, which I believe to be living, breathing things find their way to each of us, and taken together make one big symbolic sentence along with the words and images here.

. . . .I never know what's going to happen, all I know, is that some things will be different, very different for me, when I return. They always are, I can never predict just which ones.

. . . .I know this much, and it's in large part why I do this, write this column

. . . Somewhere along the line, probably around 30-35 years ago, something went terribly wrong. A fundamental shift happened in this country, it was subtle and it took a long time to develop, but it was all for the worse.
- The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, born under the guns of slavers, the party that was an inclusive party, that party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a two-term president who built the Interstate Highway System, expanded the New Deal programs, rolled them into the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, strengthened Social Security, signed the first two Civil Rights Acts, and sent the National Guard into Arkansas to enforce integration of schools; that party became the very thing that Barry Goldwater warned about, a party dominated by "religious kooks" (Barry's words) and extremists, a party of obstructionists, the Party of No.
- The Democratic Party, the party of Give-'Em-Hell Harry Truman, the party that found it's strength in the populist firebrands of the Midwest, of Kansas, Missouri, the Industrial Midwest, the party of skilled trades and organized labor; the party of Democratic "hawks", who were far more prone to send troops anywhere, to Korea, to Vietnam; became a party that couldn't get out of it's own way, couldn't build a consensus if there was one of them in the room, and decided to adopt the philosophy of that party that had been in power before them, that they know better than us what's best for us, and they'll by god pass laws to enforce it, and even with majorities can never come up with a majority vote!
-Truman's dream of a National Health Care program was shot down by the AMA back then, and it's only gotten worse. The United States health care system is broken, and doesn't work, period. Health Insurance, bought by an individual, can't be done, it's unaffordable. Decisions about people's lives and well-being are made, not by doctors, but by an insurance underwriter, from half a country away, not based on the patient's medical condition but on what the particular rules of the negotiated fees are. Prescription drugs, the exact same drugs, cost $600 in the United States, and across the border in Canada, the same drug costs $170. That the system is broken isn't of an argument. While health care is being addressed in Washington, health care industry lobbyists have poured $1.6 billion into Washington in campaign contributions and lobbying money. At no point, are the American people mentioned. The Democrats view pushing health care through as a "win for the party". The Republicans view stopping it as a "win for the party". At no point, are we the people mentioned in their press conferences and statements.
- Banking regulations put in place during the 30's in response to the greed and avarice of Wall Street then, began to be eased in 1982 in response to the Keating Savings and Loan scandal, with the signing of Garn-St. Germain by Reagan, and further relaxed throughout Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2; all in the stated purpose of letting free markets be free. Instead; Goldman-Sachs, AIG, Countrywide, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Shearson-Lehman and Merrill-Lynch created heretofore unheard of credit instruments, mortgages were underwritten at subprime interest rates, a ludicrous propostion at best. The banks and investment houses raped the American economy, and when it collapsed, turned to Washington to and said "we need money" and "don't regulate us, we won't do it again".
- The American manufacturing base, it's strength, was completely undermined and eroded by NAFTA, written and crafted by Bush 1, and signed by Clinton, sealing America's doom as a manufacturing power. More and more of our manufacturing and technology was exported offshore, as we became a nation of "knowledge workers" and a "service industry".
- The last true newsman this country had, Walter Cronkite, died this last weekend. The advent of Rush Limbaugh on the radio and CNN on cable/satellite television ushered in an era of mind-thieves, ass-clowns and media whores who masquerade as news people. Somehow, when it came to the media and news the citizens of this country became nation of sheeple, a bovine populace who stopped thinking for themselves and started accepting every damn thing they heard on the radio, saw on television and read in a forwarded e-mail sent to them by their friends. Everyone forgot that an employee of a media corporation has one job and one job only. To pull in viewers or listeners, hold that audience in whatever way possible so their numbers can be counted and prices given to advertisers based on those numbers.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you during this break. I've recapped details of everything recounted above during the last two weeks, and if you scroll down, you'll see the last 10 posts. Read them, disagree with them, agree with them. Get angry, get outraged. Try to prove me wrong. I've provided hyperlinked jumps to back everything up with fact.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate and war.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .I do it for the Doug's of the world. Doug and I were exactly the same age, and got sober and clean around the same time back in the early 80's. For a long time, it was just he and I and Lee, the ringleader, running around the country and state, helping one another stay clean. When Doug stumbled after 22 years, I was one of a small group of people who helped carry him back into Brighton Hospital, put him up on our couches, kept him in our homes, until he could clean up again. I got the news last night that Doug's body was found in a wooded area, and the death wasn't pretty. The police are trying to rule out foul play and a homicide, and I know Doug well enough to know which way he picked to go. I'm pissed at him, and sad, and grateful and thankful to him for reminding me that there are people who, for whatever reason, just don't have it in them to get up and fight one more time, who just give up. So I do this everyday for those folks, maybe somewhere, somehow, one of 'em will read it and get up and fight that one more time that's necessary to put it over the top and keep on keeping on. Love you Doug, and miss you. See you further on up the road brother.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal and balls to the wall, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .No guru, no method, no teacher. . . . .you don't need 'em.

. . . . .Outta here for a week or so

. . . .Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
[where: Gregory, MI 48137]

Tuesday - Schmuesday

Tuesday July 21, 2009
In which our intrepid, stalwart young lad trudges on . . . . .
Free your mind. . . No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. . . .liberty means personal liberty, individual liberty; liberty for your mind and your spirit, quit being part of the herd.

. . . .Have I ever mentioned just how much I absolutely cannot stand the Moody Blues song Tuesday Afternoon? Or, for that matter, just how much I cannot stand the Moody Blues.

. . . .Yup, playlist is the same, all Michigan people. Gonna be that way for a looong time, it's good to know just where my soul is, and where it finds it's most happiness.

. . . .Speaking of happiness, which to me equates with rock 'n roll. . . .Bruce Springsteen just announced fall tour dates, and you can check them out here, most tickets go on sale on Wednesday July 22, so get on it quick. Kid Rock's summer tour continues, and the dates are here. Check that show out if you get the chance to.

. . . . . .Reflecting back on last week, and a lot of the things written there, I'm damn glad I did it, and will keep it up here. Here's why. . . anyone, anyone at all who tries to divide us, the American people, and keep us separated based on race, based on someone's choice of religious practice, separate us based on class or income, based on political party preference or political, religious or social philosophy is very simply making a direct assault on our personal freedoms.

. . . .Here's the point, I'm trying, very deliberately, to make you angry, to get you outraged, and to wake you up from your animated somnambulism (that's sleepwalking for the rest of you). I want you to use that beautiful mind and creative intelligence that your Creator gave you and start to live a life of No Guru, No Method, No Teacher.

. . . .Quit letting Fox News, CNN and MSNBC do your thinking for you. Quit letting Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, Wolf Blitzer, Joe Scarborough, Lou Dobbs and the rest of the media whores that masquerade as information people do your talking and thinking for you. They're lying, all of them. They only have one job, and that job is to get an audience, grab it, hold it and keep it for the advertisers, so they can bring in revenue for their corporate employers. Quit letting the ass-clowns and mind thieves in the media fill you with their bullshit. Quit being part of a group, and learn what it means to be an individual.

. . . .Here's the deal, and in reality, I don't think you're up to it. Shut your goddamn television and radio (if it's tuned to a talk station) off for 30 days!!!!! Start to think, investigate and draw conclusions for yourself. If your favorite media person tells you something is so, assume it's a lie. If your favorite media person tells you something isn't so, assume it's a lie. Do your own thinking, your own investigation. Pull your own data, and do the math, find out what's truth and what's fiction. What you'll find out, if you dare do it, is that if you're of the conservative/Republican bent, your media idols and political heroes have been lying to you. If you're of the progressive/Democrat bent, your media idols and political heroes have been lying to you.

. . . .All the data you need is publicly available, through non-partisan websites. Do the underpaid, underappreciated teachers you had in High School proud and do some of your own work.
Google the following:
Open Congress
Open Secrets
Political Party Time
Fact Check
Snopes
Do the work and find out what you've been missing and how much you're being lied to, and how much of what you think you know is wrong.

. . . .Personally, I'd like to take all the folks from both MoveOn and the Tea Party groups and dump 'em all up in Alaska, and they all can yammer at one another ad infinitum from now on, and leave the rest of us alone to try and get some work done to progress this country forward.

. . . .Jefferson's and Paine's (the two most radical, and most democratic of the Founding Fathers, so, of course, my favorites) entire idea was for the clash of ideas to exist in the first place!!! It was only the forge of disagreement, wherein the people worked through what was best for the common good of all around policy, legislation and program that the founding principles of democracy were hammered out. It never was an idea to have two groups of extremists at either end of the political spectrum stand around and piss in one another's shoes having blamestorming sessions to try and "properly" provide perspective as to why one thing or another "is failing", "will fail", "won't work", etc.

. . . .I invite you to do that with any aspect of your life. Take 30 days away, do your own investigation and fact-finding. I don't care what it is; spiritual, religious, psychological, social. Stop it, walk away from it, and then concentrate, using your own mind, on finding fact. You'll be amazed at the result.

. . . .Take a look up in the upper left hand corner, that's how many people are on right now with you reading. My experience says that less than 1% of you will actually take the 30 day challenge. It's too uncomfortable and too jarring to actually do the math and find out what's really going on.

. . . .That's my beef with the Republicans and the Conservative movement. They absolutely cannot speak for me! Cannot, did not ask them too, am not going to, they're wingnuts, who have become the obstructionists, whose entire existence is predicated on being the Party of No, no matter what. On being in opposition to anything at all that the majority party, the Democrats, are trying to build, not because they're representing the people or what anyone wants, but in an effort to be anti-anything and have it all fail, so they can get back in power the next election cycle.

. . . Wait, I'm not done, the other side gets it too. Quit screwing around!! I cannot stomach the current version of the Democrats. These are not the Dems of Harry Truman, not the fire-brand populist hawk Dems that built that party, the Democrats that represented the manfacturers, industries and skilled, working people of the Midwest and America's heartland. Those were Democrats; these folks? Posers, at best.

. . . .It was proven by Galbraith and Keynes, men far smarter than you or I in economics, and proven by the basic regulations that Roosevelt put in place that the banking and finance sector needed outside, uninvolved regulation, due to a couple of very simple & very human traits, greed and avarice. On a personal note, what amazes me is everyone standing around acting like the rape by Wall Street of your wallet is somehow something new, take a look at the '20's folks, and remember your high school history, history is repeating itself here, or did you just stay high and sleep through that class? Those regulations started getting eroded in 1982 with the signing of Garn-St. Germain, and the assault on everyone's finances began in earnest as amoral, greedy sucks like Goldman-Sachs created bubbles, took money from everyone, and then kept it. (No, I haven't forgotten what Countrywide and AIG did to you all, but at least they're bankrupt, or near bankruptcy, not handing out bonuses). The point. . . .it's time for Geithner, Summers, Rubin, Bernanke, Rohmer and Volker to step aside. They're in bed with Goldman-Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. Can it be proven? No, they're too good for that, but it's time to stop focusing on the stimulus packages and health care, neither of which will amount to a hill of beans, if the robbery that began last September with Paulson-Bush and continues now the Geithner-Summers-Obama doesn't stop. Everything will be meaningless if they're allowed to create another artificial bubble with oil speculation (which is where they're headed) and do nothing but Hoover up money. The Democrats need to grow a set and show me something.

. . . .That is the entire problem with politics in this country today. The election cycle starts the day after and election, there is absolutely no governance, no work done for the people. The second anyone gets in office, their entire job consists of (1) get campaign money from contributors to see how to vote and start the re-election cycle to (2) automatically oppose anything proposed by the other party, without examination, in order to ensure their failure to (3) get campaign contributions and lobbying money from corporations to see how to vote, in order to set the next election cycle up and point out how opposition "failed".

. . . . Politics and governance are no longer about the people. My disgust with both parties has reached an all-time high. The Repubs, the Right and the conservatives proved just how arrogant, and how bad they could be, they were given 8 years. No back to the future for them, time for them all to leave town as the traitors and treasonous pigs that they are. The Dems, the Left and the progressives are proving, rapidly, just how badly they can screw things up too right now.

. . . .Maybe, just maybe we've got a chance to throw off the yoke of the electoral college, and the two-party system and get to what we need in this country, which is 5 or 6 major coalition parties, the country is diverse enough, and adult enough, and educated enough, and smart enough, that we no longer need the imperium of the Republicans and the nanny-state of the Democrats. The Right proved just how useless they were, the Left is proving it now. Time for them both to go. After 200+ years, it's time for the grandparents to go home, and let us run it ourselves.

. . . .No, I absolutely do not support or agree with just about anything that Congress and G.W. Bush did during those 8 years, in fact, there's quite a bit that I feel is treasonous, starting with killing 4,000 young American troops in Iraq on a lie and letting the jihadist criminal bin Laden and his gang of terrorist thugs, al-Quaeda, roam free and unpunished and grow stronger in Afghanistan the entire time.

. . . .Suspending the Bill of Rights, and letting Countrywide, Goldman-Sachs, Bank of America, AIG and JPMorgan Chase rob the country blind would be right up there too, running up the largest Federal deficit in history and building the largest Federal government in the history of the United States would all be on that list.

. . . So, I'm not advocating a return to anything, that would be a return to absolute insanity.

. . .The Democrats whined and whined that they could do better if given a chance. The American people have given them that chance, through the Constitutional electoral process. It's time to show me something now. I don't think they're gonna though, the Dems completely punted today when it came to Finance reform and protecting the American consumer/citizen/voter. As you can read in the letter below, these trade associations and industry groups, through their lobbyists and campaign contributions, as Senator Dick Durbin (R-Ill.) says "owns the Senate" and the House:

Dear Chairman Frank and Ranking Member Bachus:

We write today as a broad group of trade associations representing millions of businesses of all sizes across the country from diverse sectors of the economy, in regard to H.R. 3126, the "Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009."

While we commend your commitment to passing comprehensive financial regulatory reform legislation, including enhanced and effective consumer protection, we are very concerned that this legislation could advance without sufficient time to fully assess the cost to consumers and impact on businesses from all sectors of the economy. The scope of the legislation is very broad, granting unprecedented power and authority to a new agency with very few checks on that agency's power.

For example, there are numerous questions that have not been sufficiently answered regarding which entities and types of business activities are covered by H.R. 3126. In addition, the intended benefits to consumers of many of the bill's provisions are unclear. Both of these shortcomings raise a very real probability that there will be significant dangerous, unintended consequences if the legislation is enacted in its current form. In fact, it appears that many of the most critical decisions about the full scope of and manner in which this agency will define and exercise its expansive authority are delegated by Congress and left up to the new agency without significant oversight.

While we understand the importance of moving forward in response to the current economic and financial crisis, we urge you to pursue a thorough deliberative process on this legislation. There needs to be adequate time for all stakeholders, including Congress, the business community and consumers, to fully understand this bill's implications, how it will impact consumers and their access to credit, the true costs of creating such an agency, and whether a new stand-alone consumer protection agency is necessary or whether enhancing the regulatory power of existing regulators can accomplish the same goal. The precarious state of the economy makes it a particularly dangerous time to enact legislation without a clear understanding of its full impact on the business community at large.

On behalf of our members, we strongly urge you to delay your Committee's consideration of H.R. 3126 until after the August recess in order to provide due time for all stakeholders and decision-makers to fully understand the legislation's scope and its potential economic and legal impacts. Thank you for your consideration of this request.

Sincerely,

American Association of Advertising Agencies
American Financial Services Association
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants
American Land Title Association
American Resort Development Association
Association of National Advertisers
Building Owners and Managers Association International
Business Roundtable
Consumer Bankers Association
Consumer Data Industry Association
Consumer Electronics Association
Direct Marketing Association
Financial Services Institute
Financial Services Roundtable
Interactive Advertising Bureau
National Automobile Dealers Association
National Association of Home Builders
National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies
Property Casualty Insurers Association of America
Real Estate Roundtable
The National Business Coalition on E-Commerce and Privacy
U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform
U.S. Chamber of Commerce

. . . .Wall Street's goal? It's simple. . . .kill any meaningful reform that would bring some accountability back to finance and banking. The word from the Hill now is that any financial regulatory bill work won't come until September.

. . . . Personal note here: Why the hell is it that every conservative I know is acting as if somehow the Democrats stole the elections, Congressional and Presidential. The numbers were the numbers were the numbers, period. The American people spoke, at the ballot box. It doesn't matter how or who I voted for, or how or who you voted for; the ballots were counted and it's over, accept it and let's move on to what's next. Simple logic. You cannot call yourself an American citizen who supports the Constitution of the United States and the flag and at the same time, make seditious and treasonous suppositions and statements. Very simply, someone who does that is a traitor, by definition. It really is that black and white.

. . . .Disagreements and discussion around policy, around legislation, around programs, yes, around those, we need loud, pure and healthy debate, vigorous public debate that crafts it for the people. But this bullshit we've gotten into for the last 30 years of somehow trying to make supposition around people's personalities? C'mon, get out of junior high! I never met either of the Bush's, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan, don't know them, didn't grow up with them, so I can't reasonably draw conclusions as to their personalities, their motive or their intent. That's clinical insanity and mouth-breathing inanely moronic to do.

. . . .Hey, sideways jump here. . . .my buds in Cross Canadian Ragweed, one of the hardest working rock and roll bands out there are getting ready to release a new CD on Sept. 1st. These kids from Oklahoma are 4 dudes who got stuck back somewhere in a 1970's era LP bin and couldn't get out. Just 2 guitars, 1 bass and a drum kit with no digital enhancement, no tape back-ups, no Auto-tune pitch correcting software, it's just them. They tour relentlessly, and give a damn good show, and know rock and roll. Pre-order their CD here. Check out their music at their website here. C'mon and support these younger kids, the way we supported bands when we were younger.

. . . .Speaking of that, if you grew up in the Midwest in the 70's, you knew who Michael Stanley was, well, he's still at it, and you've read me before go on in this column about him and the Michael Stanley Band. Thanks to the way the internet has reshaped the music business, Michael is still at it with his band, The Resonators, many of whom are from the old Michael Stanley Band, and is still putting music out. I fervently, absolutely believe in musicians owning and distributing their own music, give him a look here, and support local Midwestern musicians and buy some music.

. . . . Because at the end of the day, I am such a science and math geek, and to me the entire universe really can be seen as simply logic and mathematical equations, a reminder that our petty political squabbles and petty concerns are just that, petty. A reminder that there are a whole lot of things in the universe bigger than us, video of yesterday's complete solar eclipse.

. . . .I want to call out a friend out in Idaho, who was inspired to start his own column, based on reading and contributing to this one, and this one centered around education reform. He's right on there, the only way we can turn things around in this country will be to start educating again. And by that, I mean, simply, math, sciences, history and language, from the get-go and make it tough, make it meaningful. Please give him a read, and check it out here.

. . . Which brings me to. . . .yes. . . . . .health care reform (and how it ties back into last week's discussion, as it is just another strand in the spider's web.) Health Care Reform and a comprehensive health care program was Harry Truman's (the last truly great President, every one since then has been a poser) fondest dream and wish for the American people, but it was killed by the AMA back then.

. . . .One of my favorite current unmedicated wingnuts, Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann of Anoka, Minnesota apparently opposes the public option because it will be cheaper, and to her, and her cronies, that's a bad thing. From the House floor Monday evening:

Approximately 114 million Americans are expected to leave private health insurance. Why? Their employers will drop the insurance because the taxpayer-subsidized plan will be 30 to 40 percent cheaper. This action will collapse the private health insurance market.

. . . .Scroll down through and see the posts below today to last Friday. I put the spreadsheet up last week that shows precisely how the 5 major players in the health care industry have spent nearly $1.6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions, in order to make sure that health care reform legislation got crafted to their approval.

. . . . . Note here kiddies - I'm trying to make the point that whatever you're hearing in the media, no matter what it is, no matter what position it takes, about health care reform legislation, is bullshit!! All of it, no matter what. It's a smokescreen, because in the end, there will be health care reform legislation, and it will be in the shape, manner and form that the insurance companies, the hospitals and health care centers, the pharmaceutical industry and the doctors and health professionals want. They have the money, and you don't. They've been spending it to influence the vote and you haven't. You don't have a say - get it??? In this case, as in all cases, your opinion doesn't count, and you're not represented.

. . . .Think that the Republican caucus is looking out for you and your wallet? The "Centrist 6" that is supposedly blocking health care reform legislation? Think again boys and girls, they're all owned, heart and soul, and will vote whichever way their lobbyists and campaign contributors tell them too. In 2009 lobbying money alone:
- Pharmaceutical Research & Mfrs. of America - $6.9 million
- Pfizer - $6.1 million
- American Medical Association - $4.4 million
- Blue Cross/Blue Shield - $4.3 million
- American Hospital Assn - $4.3 million
- Eli Lilly - $4.3 million

. . . .As always, I use Open Secrets, the non-partisan investigators that track lobbying money and campaign contributions, and The Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time, which tracks lobbying, dinners, lunches, breakfasts and exactly where the money is flowing and who it's flowing to cut through the bullshit of the news and get a real idea of what's happening, and how legislation is being influenced. This is America, and this is Washington, it's all about the money, and it's not about you, take that to heart.

I always use Open Congress, another non-partisan, to track legislation, between the three you can cut through the lies and misinformation that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and MSNBC hand out as your daily pablum and fix that somehow makes you think "you know something". Because if you heard it from any of them, it's a lie, plain and simple. Corporate entertainment media whores whose job, by job description, is not to tell you the news, but get an audience, hold it, and bring in advertiser revenue. Free your mind and quit being one of the sheeple or just another member of the bovine populace of America.

. . . .And by the way, hats off to Rick Perlstein, a writer for Newsweek, who managed to not only survive the wrath of Bill O'Reilly's army of bovine, non-thinking, cognitively dissonant sheeple but also, through their and his (O'Reilly's) own actions and words, reveal just how stupid they, and he, are. Story here.

. . . .There is one bright spot in all of this. The current Administration and Congress finally did something, in knocking down the F-22 on Monday. Sen's McCain and Levin worked together, with McCain leading the charge, (bipartisan, that's shocking) to strip $1.75 billion for the F-22, that can't be used in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, and is completely unsuitable for any American campaigns, out of the budget. Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned future administrations and congresses about long ago. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell speech was brilliant, and we tend to forget what he had to say that day about the "military-industrial" complex, and just how smart he was:

"Every gun that is made, every warship that is 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....This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

. . . .And for those who would dismiss the above, or try to parse it, unless you had the responsibility for leading and planning the D-Day invasion of Europe and turning the tide of WWII, and the resulting ultimate sacrifices of thousands of G.I.'s that day, you ain't got shit to say.

. . . .And going on with what I can't stand, have I ever mentioned my total distaste, disgust and dislike for cops? And I never have to look far, or look long to always get another example. Over the weekend, the Ann Arbor PD provided yet another sterling example of racial profiling and physical abuse. Situation: Party in Ann Arbor on Friday night, scuffle ensues when drunk, ignorant, racist, asshole neighbors show up uninvited and proceed to call two young men "n*****s" and tell them that "they don't let 'n*****s talk to them", fight starts, fight gets broken up, everything calms down. Same young man who was called "n*****r" is standing peacefully, with his back to the street, arms in the air, palms open, explaining to the young lady who lived there what happened. Ann Arbor cops show up silently, run up behind him, throw him into a submission strangle hold and start to take him down, all before assessing situation, or asking anyone at anytime what had happened. Young man standing there watching the scene yells at the cop and tells him to take his hands off him and let him up. 2nd young man, the one who yelled at the cop, is threatened with arrest and thrown in the back of the car, then once cop has him in the car, cop tries to make like everything is cool, had to throw him in the back of the car to save face, keep respect, it was wrong of him to assault the first kid, yada, yada, yada. . . . . .I hate cops.

. . . .And don't give me any damn lecture on "yeah, until you need one". I've never needed one, never had any use for one, been thoroughly screwed by them more than once, always been able to handle any situation on my own, and to better satisfaction, and any cop I've ever met is always someone who just wanted a badge, a gun and the law backing them up because they felt like such a minor player in life anyhow. . . .useless people on the Darwinian food chain of life, generally men compensating for incredibly small dicks.

. . . . .And I think the young folks involved handled it rather well, and in fact, probably let the ignorant neighbors off the hook. Since I know everyone involved, and the young man being called by that name practically grew up in my home, I'd of been more prone to take a baseball bat to the entire group of neighbors, and the cop when he showed up, too, for what he did, and been making a plea for bail money now through this column.

. . . And yes, racism is alive and well here in the good old U.S. of A., don't kid yourself. Riot police in full gear stormed Paris, Texas today when groups of blacks and white supremacists clashed in the street over a black man being chained to a car and dragged to death. Like the cops did any good being there.

. . . .I'm sometimes amazed at the number of faux-Libertarians around me. That would be the folks who cherry pick the precepts of Libertarianism for what the want, or what fits their belief system, refuse to apply the rest, and then call themselves Libertarians. They're not, and you're not, it that's what you do. You're a poser, a dilettante.

. . . .A true Libertarain cannot stomach discrimination in any form, whatsoever. It's an economically unviable option, that isn't healthy for the long-term solid economic growth of a community, a people or a Nation. A true Libertarian doesn't care if you're a man, a woman, what race you are, what your sexual orientation is. What you do in your own home and who you do it with is your business, not anyone else's and not the Government's. Libetarianism isn't a theory about how people can be "tolerant" or "friendly". It's an ethical system, based in logic, of justice, in all it's forms; economic, social and criminal. It's precepts go back before the American Revolution to the philosophies of John Locke, and the American Revolution was a natural outgrowth of Libertarian thought. For some education and background, I suggest you read For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, which is the foundational underpinning of today's Libertarian movement.

. . . . .Which brings me to my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Kalamazoo has gone back and forth on a non-discrimination housing ordinance (based on sexual orientation), approving it in December 2008, repealing it in January 2009, and then voting it back in at the end of June of 2009. It's opponents are working the streets, working at repealing it again, after exemptions for religious organizations were made, in order to be able to discriminate in selecting housing residents.

. . . .Point 1, it's economic suicide for a city and a state already hard hit by the depression.
. . . .Point 2, there is no room, period, for religion, or religious beliefs in economic equations; two completely cognitively dissonant concepts.
. . . .Point 3, by introducing the religious argument, and attempting to make one of the underpinning legs of the ordinance repeal religious, it introduces the state, the municipality into one more area, expanding the ordinance, which in a truly economically just society should have absolutely no need to exist, instead of reducing it's involvement.

. . . .One more shining example of cognitive dissonance by a bovine populace and the inability to equate simple logical statements and do the math.

. . . .I have a lot of people around me who are intensely interested in December 21, 2012. For those of you living under the nearest rock, that's the date the Mayan calendar ends, the date of the Winter Solstice that year, the subject of Nostradamus' predictions, and a very significant date in many, many calendars from many cultures. Being of an inquisitive mind, and trusting no one, (yup, that'd be me), I've done my own research, and I'd like to introduce you to Charlie Frost, who, of all the folks that I've investigated, seems to have the biggest clue as to what's going on, and what will happen. Charlie can be found at his own Facebook page, and his own Twitter feed, and is making it his mission to let people know what's going on. This link here will take you to a short video that Charlie has made to introduce people to some of the concepts.

. . . .Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments, before they're snatched from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive, no one. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, regrets, guilt, should have's or could have's. It's about right fucking here and now. The curtain's gone up, and this ain't a dress rehearsal. This is the sight, the words and the sound of me taking charge of my own life, and changing my own world. What in the blue hell have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel
[where: Gregory, MI 48137]

Monday (wherein he finally remembers who he is and where he's from)

Monday July 20, 2009

. . . . . .On Saturday night, I had a rock and roll epiphany. I remembered why I love it so much, why I so fervently believe in it's power to bring about redemption and salvation. . . . .and finally, after a couple of years of bumping around, remembered who the hell I really am, where I'm from, and where I belong.

. . . .Some of you are churchgoers, are good Christian people and I'm cool with that, for you, that's where you find it.

. . . .Some of you practice other religions, and that's where you find it, I'm good with that.

. . . .Me? I've always believed in the ability of a screaming 3-chord lick, a hot riff and full double-bass drum kit to save my soul and make me remember why I'm alive.

. . . The playlist today, and all this week? Michigan people, plain and simple, and nothing but Michigan people, if you hear them here, they were born here and cut their chops here. We've put more musicians out into the world than any other state, and we own rock and roll, funk and R & B, period. And we've got a pretty damn good grasp on country, hip-hop and rap too.

. . . . .Kid Rock brought it back to his home, to Detroit this past weekend, and it wasn't a concert, it was a block party for 40,000 of his best friends both nights, a block party that kicked some serious ass and was the best, most high-energy spectacle that I've been to in a while, and it helped me remember some things.

. . . . .I was lucky enough to be there Saturday night, and Kid hit the stage with the Twisted Brown Trucker Band (now up to 10 members) with both barrels blazing, full balls to the wall, pedal-to-the-metal and didn't let up for 2 1/2 hours. 40,000 people on their feet for the whole time, dancing their ass off and never stopping moving. It was loud, it was spectacular, constant pyro, lasers and there were as many spotlights on the crowd as there were on the stage, and that was on purpose. Kid loves his home, he believes in it, and he believes in the people of this State, and it was a block party, because the place was full of home folks, people from Michigan, you knew the people sitting next to you, behind you, in front of you, even if you'd never met them before that night. You know that they understood it, and that they, like everyone else from this State, they had your back.

. . . And by the way, The Twisted Brown Trucker Band was in full form, and sounded tight and damn good. Stefanie Eulinberg is an absolute demon on the drums. I've seen a lot of bands in my time, and she, very really, is as good right now as Bonham or Moon ever were. Kid made it a point to let the crowd know that the music was courtesy of the TBT, and only the TBT, with no enhancement, no digital back-up, no tape machines, and no damn Auto-Tune (the pitch correction real-time software that has become the weapon of choice for a lot of pop artists). As Kid said, "This is American Bad Ass, not any damn American Idol".

. . . . .If you've never been lucky enough to get turned on to Kid's particular love of, and combination of rock and roll, country, hip-hop, rap and funk; you're missing out period. He's very typical of everything we are up here in Michigan; high energy, cocky, never say die, never say quit, profane, funny, intense, works hard and plays even harder, funky and tougher than hell, and knows where the hell home is and isn't about to abandon it, no matter how bad it gets.

. . . .He gave everyone what they wanted and more, playing his hits, playing Rock and Roll Jesus, Rock and Roll Pain Train, (Long-haired Redneck Rock and Roll) Son of Detroit, So Hott, Cowboy, American Bad Ass, You Never Met a Motherf***** Quite Like Me, I Am the Bullgod, All Summer Long and a ton more. During Amen he ran a slide show that contained images of shut-down Detroit factories, unemployment lines, abandoned neighborhoods, Katrina. He and the band did incredibly hot covers of Tumbling Dice and Everyday People. During Lowlife, he and the band ripped over into Keep Your Hands to Yourself by the Georgia Satellites. During a cover of Dobie Gray's Drift Away, the slides on the side of the stage ran memorial pictures of musicians that we've all lost over the years, ending with the most appropriate and incredible tribute to Michael Jackson, leading right into Kid doing a smoking hot cover of A-B-C with one of his back-up singers. During Picture he brought up, instead of a guest singer, or Sheryl Crow, a local girl, from the front row people, a waitress from Ferndale, who was so damn good it almost looked staged or like a ringer. Through the night's set the crowd was treated to a version of the theme from The Dukes of Hazzard, Good Old Boys, during Wasting Time, he and the band lit the stadium up with the instrumental riffs from Guns 'n Roses Paradise City. Throughout the evening, the band managed to hit riffs from ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd. At one point, Kid played keyboards, guitar and got behind Stefanie's drum kit, then hopped up on the turntables to give us a taste of his still very intact scratching skills, while managing to pour himself a drink and light a cigar. About 1/2 hour - 45 minutes in, Kid stopped the show, and in a moment that could only happen in Detroit, at a Kid Rock block party, had everyone high-five and shake hands with the people around them, and get to know them. It wasn't a 30 second church moment, he truly wanted everyone to meet everyone else and look them in the eye and he made damn sure that everyone took the time to do it, and it was well worth it. He took the time to thank everyone for spending their hard earned money, which is tight to come by in Michigan right now, to come spend the evening with him. When he hit the final number of his main set, Bawitdaba, done heavy and loud, with it's incredible hard-hitting rock and funk, complete with pyro, 40,000 people turned Comerica Park into one big mosh pit and danced their asses off. For his encore, he introduced a new song that he's been working on, In Times Like These, that will be on his new album this fall. A song written for, and dedicated to his home state, our home state, Michigan, and what's happening now, here in the hardest hit state in the Nation. He closed the night as only Kid can, with a cover of Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA, done Kid style, hard and heavy, and leaving everyone feeling good, and proud to be from Detroit and Michigan.

. . . . .So back to that rock and roll epiphany thing

. . . . .I was born here, in 1957, in the one and only Kalamazoo, Michigan. Born in Michigan, like my Dad was, like my Mom was. I can take you to James Street in Kalamazoo where my dad grew up, take you out to Crooked Lake Delton, where my granpa and grandma's cottage was, my other grandmothers house, in Bangor, on the way to Lake Michigan is still there. I grew up here, and we never roamed far. I think we took one vacation to Florida, a couple of other trips. There wasn't a reason to go anywhere else, Michigan is the most beautiful state in the Nation, with 5 of the Great Lakes surrounding it, and more inland lakes than any other state in the Nation. Deep woods and rivers everywhere, and even if you lived in Detroit, all of it was no more than an hour's drive away. Everyone had a house or a cottage "on the lake" or "Up North" and that's where we spent our weekends and our summers, growing up on the water, learning to swim, ski and fish. That Kid Rock song "All Summer Long", it's simple, to the rest of you all it's a song. We all lived it, and for us, it's a memory.

. . . . .Michigan was a perfect place to be a teenager in the 60's and 70's. You could hang out at the local McDonald's on a hot Friday night for a while, catching the hot cars and chicks. There was always a kegger going on somewhere in a field or the woods somewhere just out of town, and you could stop at the local improvised drag strip on the way there. On the west side of the state it was a stretch of old US-131 just out of Plainwell. The local cops knew about it, and helped shut traffic down.

. . . . .There isn't one of us that wasn't taught how to fish and hunt by our fathers and grandfathers. We were all taught to handle guns, to handle weapons by them. Michigan still puts 3/4 of a million hunters in the field every opening day of deer season.

. . . .We watched Detroit burn in the summer of 1967, and just as importantly, we all pulled together as a state one year later, and supported and watched the Detroit Tigers improbably beat the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson in the 1968 World Series and helped to rebuild a city's and state's spirit and gave us names that will live forever to us; Bill Freehan, Denny McClain, Willie Horton, Gates Brown, Ray Oyler, Norm Cash, Mickey Stanley and the rest.

. . . . .We watched, and grew to love and revere, a football coach named Bo Schembechler come to the University of Michigan, and absolutely own Woody Hayes and the hated Ohio State Buckeyes during the 10-year war, a sting they've never gotten over yet, and define what it means to be a "Michigan Man".

. . . . .The most important thing about growing up here? We learned and remembered. We learned that this is the state that put the country on wheels, the state that made this country what it is, the state that answered the call when Roosevelt asked us to, and became the Arsenal of Democracy. This is the state that built manufacturing in this country. I worked for Ford Motor Company for 20 years, the greatest company in the world to work for. The home of the Rouge, and legacy of the man who gave the country high speed, automated manufacturing and assembly. The man who started a company that made an affordable car, so everyone could own one. The company that built the middle class, paying the highest wage in the country at the time, 5 dollars a day, and it didn't matter if you were white, black, brown, yellow or purple; if you could do the damn job, you got paid.

. . . .The Rouge at it's height employed 10,000 people in one complex. It had it's own police force, it's own post office, it was a city in itself. Henry Ford invented the concept of womb-to-tomb manufacturing, owning the iron mines in the Upper Peninsula, the ships that brought it to Zug Island and offloaded, melted it in the steel ovens, and turned it into cars. If it wasn't for Henry Ford, none of you all would have Kingsford Charcoal for your grills, that was a byproduct of the steel mills. Henry placed small factories all along the Huron River, heading west out of Detroit, making sure that the smaller communities had a manufacturing center to build around.

. . . .Rosie the Riveter? She was born in Detroit. When the men of Michigan answered the call in WWII and Roosevelt asked the automotive companies to start turning out tanks and bombers, Detroit did, and put women to work in factories. The B-25 plant that Ford had that put bombers in the air is still there, it's a GM Hydramatic plant now, out in Ypsilanti, and I can take you there any time you'd like.

. . . .Michigan was the birthplace of organized labor. On May 26, 1937, labor organizers, including women, were severely beaten, kicked in the face, had ribs and backs broken as thugs from Down River gang, paid under the table, tried to deter union organizers. This is Michigan, it only served to strengthen people's resolve, and the automotive work force, organized and unionized, built the middle class wage in this country and set the model, built and enforced retirement plans, health insurance, and guaranteed safe working conditions for people.

. . . . .Rock and roll? Funk? R & B? Michigan is the birthplace for that too. We gave you all Del Shannon, Tommy James and the Shondells, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Motown, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, The Temptations, Jackie Wilson, Wilson Pickett, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, the MC5, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, The Amboy Dukes, The Frost, George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Jack White and the White Stripes, Eminem and two of the supreme names in rock and roll; Bob Seger and Kid Rock. The list goes on and on.

. . . . .When the J. Geils Band, Kiss and Aerosmith all were first cutting their bones, they used Detroit and Michigan as the gauge; once they knew they could cut it in Detroit, and be accepted and draw good crowds there, they knew they were good enough to cut it anywhere.

. . . .Detroit, Michigan gave this country the car that revolutionized everyone's life in the 60's. The 1965 Mustang was the watershed mark in the culture and society of the United States of America. We gave you Chevelle SS's with 454 Police Interceptor packages, Charger RT's, Camaros, Firebirds, Roadrunners, SuperBees, GTO's, Novas, and El Caminos. We built the car culture that you grew up with.

. . . . .You can give Kid Rock and Bob Seger all the shit you want to, but they never left here, and they believe in this state. You can give Jeff Daniels all the shit you want to, but he never left, and he still believes. You want to know what kind of place Michigan is, and what kind of person Jeff is? Jeff is from Chelsea, still lives there. His sons are exactly the same age as my sons, and played the same sports. Chelsea is in the same conference as Ypsi Lincoln, and Jeff came to every game and was a normal dad, and treated as such, by everyone.

. . . .So here's the deal. Since working for Ford Motor Company, I've had the opportunity to work all over the country, and I do, got bills to pay, and people ask me where I'm from, I tell 'em. . . and they want to know where I worked. . . . and I tell 'em.

. . . .I'm then privileged to hear their "opinion". I've heard everything goddam thing I care to hear about "drunk auto workers", about "union labor", about "domestic cars", about "why do you still live there?".

. . . .Here's my answer, to everyone who thinks they know what's best for me:

. . . . Shut up!!

. . . .If you didn't work in those factories, side by side, day after day, with some of the best people I've ever met on the face of this Earth, people that always had my back, people that I still trust to this day to have it, shut the fuck up. If your father, grandfather, uncles, brothers, didn't work there, putting food on the table for a family and providing, shut the fuck right up.

. . . .Here's the thing, it doesn't matter if the rest of the country has turned it's back on us, has forgotten the people and the industry that built this country, it really doesn't. There's something different about us, we truly are the toughest people on Earth, we can get back up one more time than anyone can knock us down, we've always done that, and taken care of another. We've done it, we'll do it, and we'll continue to do it. I've traveled this country enough to know, and met enough people to know. There ain't nothing like Michigan boys and girls, Michigan men and women, nothing.

. . . .Those same people, who always want to ask me about living here, and moving somewhere else? Down South, out to California, out West somewhere? Kiss my ass. I love my home, and I love my state and it's people. I love having all 4 seasons. I love living in a State that is a National attraction for it's fall color tours, because we kept our woods and didn't log them off for cheap land . I like living in a state that in the course of one year can go from 10 below to 95 degrees. I can always put another coat on in the winter and get outside and enjoy myself. I've worked enough in the South to tell you, there ain't a damn thing, not one more piece of clothing that you can take off, when it gets to be 2 weeks worth of 100 degree plus weather and 98% humidity. You can keep the bugs, the snakes and the heat.

. . . .Get your ass back home, you know where you're from, and where you belong. That's the way this state is, we'll make sure you're OK, and welcome you back home. You're needed.

. . . . .My great-grandfather is buried here, my grandparents were born here, died here, buried here. My Dad was born here, died here and is buried here in Augusta National Cemetery. My Mom was born here, and will be buried here. My sons were born here and live here. I was born here, raised here, here's where I'll make my stand, I'll die here, and be buried here. This is where my heart, my soul and my blood are. I know who I am, where I'm from, and where I belong.

. . . .Thanks for reminding me Kid

. . . .Outta here for the day, got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive, and we don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right fucking here and right fucking now. This ain't no dress rehearsal, the curtain's gone up and you're on. Make a stand and believe in yourself, otherwise you'll fall for any piece of crap that someone tries to lay on you.

Kip
[where: Gregory, MI 48137]

Friday wrap-up

Friday July 16, 2009

. . . . .Ok. . . .Hey, over here! . . . . Yes, Mr. Thompson, that's right. . . .over here!

. . . . . .Ever notice how long the night gets sometimes? . . . .Personally, I like it.

. . . . . .I love it when thunderstorms roll in across the horizon, they're my friends.

. . . . . Movie moment of the week:
- "Your friends are here" - Legolas (Orlando Bloom) to Aragorn (Viggo Mortenson) in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers as thunderstorms roll in from the West just before the Battle of Helms Deep.

. . . . .So, we've covered a lot of ground in just a week, but it's only scratching the surface, and we're just starting to really get rolling in the intro for The Grand Unified Field Theory of Damn Near Everything. If you're a once a week reader, or new to this, absolutely none of this will makes sense unless you scroll down to last Thursday/Friday and read back up to today.

. . . . .And if you've recommended this to someone and they're reading it, tell them the same thing, unless they get caught up on it, it won't make sense at all. What it isn't is an expose of a conspiracy that consists of Men In Black, Crystal Skulls and Reptoids running the government. It is an exploration of the vast influence of money and power coming from an organization that's out in the open and has some stated goals and objectives.

. . . . .So, it's Friday, and what we'll do is summarize what we know for fact so far, but after we've covered some more financial items that do some more justice to the background on the current global financial crisis and Goldman-Sachs role in all of it, as well as their role in becoming another arm or organ of government, and their role in putting people in key positions in the World Bank, in the International Monetary Fund and in every level of the Federal Government's Financial arm. . . . .and, of course, those same people's ties back into our old friends the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

. . . .One other item that needs to be addressed first. The Health Care Reform packages came out of committee on Thursday morning, and before we even start to cut through all the media misinformation that is streaming out around them, there is one particular item that needs to be born in mind. According to the folks over at the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures and their website Open Secrets and The Sunlight Foundations (another nonpartisan organization) Party Time a website that tracks political parties and lobbying, 5 industries; pharmaceuticals/health products, insurance, health services/HMO's, hospitals/nursing homes and health professionals, spent somewhere in the range of $1.38 billion dollars in those campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures between 2007 and first-quarter 2009. Be assured, whatever form health care reform takes, it will be in the form and fashion that those people want it. You and I do not have that kind of clout or pull with lawmakers. The good folks at Open Secrets, Douglas Weber and Matthias Jaime have broken down the lobbying money for the years, 2008 & 2009 alone and campaign contributions for 2010, thusly, in this spreadsheet:

Players	Lobbying, 2008 and 2009	Contributions 2008 and 2010 cycles	Dems	Repubs	Policy Positions
PHARMACEUTICAL/HEALTH PRODUCTS	$300,639,923	$31,354,413	50%	49%
Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA)	$27,200,000	$272,610	54%	46%	Supports individual mandate to buy insurance. Opposes public health insurance plan.
Biotechnology Industry Association	$9,600,000	$225,479	51%	49%	Has not endorsed or opposed public health insurance plan.
Pfizer	$18,320,000	$2,121,298	52%	48%	Represented by PhRMA
Eli Lilly & Co.	$15,925,000	$1,201,573	50%	50%	Opposes public health insurance plan. Opposes taxing health care benefits. Supports expanding Health Savings Accoungs (HSAs).
INSURANCE	$93,159,247	$19,275,744	56%	44%
Blue Cross/Blue Shield	$18,037,017	$2,843,620	50%	50%	Supports individual mandate to buy insurance. Opposes public health insurance plan.
America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)	$9,570,000	$429,750	54%	46%	Supports individual mandate to buy insurance. Opposes public health insurance plan. Proposed ending practice of charging higher premiums to people with a history of medical problems.
MetLife Inc.	$6,020,000	$1,221,116	59%	41%	Represented by AHIP
UnitedHealth Group	$5,990,000	$1,447,882	62%	37%	Represented by AHIP
HEALTH PROFESSIONALS	$99,420,589	$101,562,394	53%	47%
American Medical Association	$24,910,000	$1,961,268	56%	44%	Undecided on public health insurance plan. Opposed plan outlined in June by Senate Finance Committee. Supported measures outlined by House Democrats, which includes a public health plan. Opposes 21 percent cut in Medicare fees to doctors. Supports malpractice reform.
American Dental Association	$2,290,398	$2,422,990	55%	45%	Supports funding for community-based prevention measures and the recruitment of dentists. Supports improving the Medicaid dental program, especially for low-income adults.
American Nurses Association	$1,540,847	$834,891	79%	20%	Supports single-payer system in which the government finances medical coverage.
American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons	$2,427,000	$1,260,353	51%	49%	Opposes increasing Medicare payments to general practitioners only, especially if it means it would be paid for by reducing payments to specialists.
HOSPITALS/NURSING HOMES	$124,803,155	$24,504,498	62%	38%
American Hospital Association	$23,890,090	$2,419,431	64%	36%	Supports individual mandate to buy insurance. Opposes public health insurance plan. Opposes cuts to reimbursements to hospitals.
Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care	$2,616,879	$35,500	76%	24%	Opposes reducing senior citizen's Medicare funding.
American Health Care Association	$2,140,000	$1,279,670	64%	36%	Opposes reducing senior citizen's Medicare funding.
Federation of American Hospitals	$3,295,000	$529,037	54%	46%	Opposes public health insurance plan. Supports co-op option.
ADVOCACY
American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)	$31,980,000	$55,172	90%	10%	Has not endorsed or opposed public health insurance plan. Supports more "comparative effectiveness studies"
Health Care for America Now	$80,000	$500	100%	0%	Supports public health insurance plan.
Families USA	$42,000	$78,735	100%	0%	Supports public health insurance plan.
BUSINESS (PACs only)	$3,527,887,757	$361,506,716	50%	50%
U.S. Chamber of Commerce	$107,091,000	$277,912	30%	70%	Opposes employer mandate.
Wal-Mart	$8,190,000	$1,966,766	43%	57%	Supports employer mandate.
National Federation of Independent Business	$4,765,262	$860,797	15%	85%	Opposes employer mandate.
LABOR (PACs only)	$50,739,666	$83,177,674	92%	8%
AFL-CIO	$3,890,000	$1,372,973	90%	10%	Supports public health insurance plan. Opposes taxing employer-provided health benefits.
SEIU	$3,161,809	$2,809,153	95%	5%	Supports public health insurance plan. Opposes taxing employer-provided health benefits.
AFSCME	$2,580,000	$2,810,504	99%	1%	Supports public health insurance plan. Opposes taxing employer-provided health benefits.
Blue font indicates that this organization is among the top 20 groups to spend money on lobbying since 1989
Red font indicates that this organization is an all-time top contributor since 1989, designated as one of CRP's "Heavy Hitters"

Pasted from <http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/07/health-cheat-sheet-moneyinpoli.html>

. . . .And if anyone, any one of you, anyone at all, can make sense of that goddamn incomprehensible health care reform flow chart that is making the rounds of conservative politicians and conservative media, please do so, I'll even give you a forum for the demonstration. I do flowcharts for a living, for the real job, and that fucking thing no more resembles an actual, real working process flow chart than it resembles a wheel of Gouda cheese.

. . . .I highly recommend clicking the hyperlinks above and doing some exploring on your own to see just how pervasive and extensive the influence of lobbyists and campaign contributions are, and it also makes a pretty good predictor, allowing for a cut straight through the political theater that dominates the 24-hour pundit driven news cycle these days, of how your Congressperson will most likely vote on any given issue long before it even comes out of committee.

. . . .Now back on track with those pesky greedy guys at Goldman-Sachs. A quick summary of the news the last few days. Goldman-Sachs, despite the American taxpayer holding a $56 billion dollar I.O.U. over their heads, posted blowout first quarter profits, has no intent whatsoever of paying any TARP funds back yet, and is going to pay out $19 billion dollars of that profit in bonuses, that average out to $600,000 per employee. This of course, also comes with some pass-through profits straight from AIG, whose bad credit default swaps Goldman owns. As well, Goldman pretty much owns the United States Government, being the single largest campaign contributor on Earth, and having their alumni placed all through every level of government. Paulson, Bernanke, Rubin, Geithner & Summers are just some of the prominent names, there are many, many more.

. . . . .Remember the Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone that started this closer look at G-S? Along with other criticism, culminating in a Wall Steet Journal, the Bible of capitalism, op-ed piece that took G-S to task? Max Keiser has the strongest words yet for G-S:

"Goldman Sachs are scum– that’s the bottom line. They have basically co-opted the government; they’ve co-opted the Treasury Department; the Federal Reserve functionality; they’ve co-opted the Obama administration. Barack Obama dances to Goldman Sachs tune. And they are really crooked and abominable in what they’ve done. Just remember, Hank Paulson took Congress hostage– took them in the backroom and said ‘give us $700 Billion or we’re going to crash this market. He’s an arsonist; he’s an outlaw– and yet he’s praised."

Max Keiser didn’t stop there. He continues, naming only SOME of the names from Goldman Sachs now dominating the political-economic sphere in government. Keiser continued: "If you go down the list, they’re all Goldman Sachs scum: whether it’s Hank Paulson, Geithner has very close ties to Goldman Sachs, and all these banking bonuses are paid out to their cronies, who are Goldman Sachs scum. And America for some reason has allowed this coup d’etat to take place– this silent coup d’etat where Goldman Sachs and their friends now control the U.S. Government and manipulate prices…"

Strong words for strong villains. Fair enough, as far as I can see.

. . . .Krugman, in his column on Friday in the New York Times on G-S:

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. Other banks invested heavily in the same toxic waste they were selling to the public at large. Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

. . . .Full article here.

. . . .Now, the issue is this. The economy isn't doing that well, and no, we're not in a recovery, only the blindest fool would believe that at this point, it's not even gotten to it's lowest and worst point yet. 6,000 jobs a day lost says that we are far from recovery. This hyperlinked map from the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics shows where the damage is the worst for job losses. Go ahead and click the link and get a good look at where you live, and where others live, it's grim.


. . . . . .So, the question remains, why is Goldman-Sachs doing so well? We covered some of it yesterday, that G-S is allowed to operate with impunity, having $56 billion of taxpayer money to support it, with no attempt or request to repay it. They are allowed to operate as a commercial bank, having the same access to the Federal Credit Window as other commerical banks, yet they're not a bank, but the basically the world's largest hedge fund.

. . . .The tale gets deeper. Reuters picked up and ran an article today that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, it appears the Bank of America has been operating under a secret memorandum of understanding from the Feds telling it to clean up it's management structure and it's liquidity problems, which appear to be quite severe, having it near insolvency, and basically a zombie bank right now.

. . . . The same goes for Citi, which is even more severe trouble, as in a day to day basis.:

CIT Group Inc (CIT.N) was in discussions on Thursday with potential lenders to secure financing, after the collapse of rescue talks with the government left the company on the brink of bankruptcy.

CIT stocks and bonds plunged as the 101-year-old lender to hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses faced a worsening liquidity crunch that some warned could worsen the effects of the economic downturn for some firms.

. . . . .Now, this is only speculation on my part, but should Citi and BofA fail, any guesses as to who might hold the credit default swaps on those? You've got three guesses, and the first two don't count.

. . . .The true question that slaps you in the face is simple.(1) Who does it benefit to further deepen and prolong the global economic depression, which will assuredly happen should two of the five banks "too big to fail" go under and (2) why would anyone want it to occur, to the point of allowing it to happen, even after last September's Paulson-Bush rodeo of "if we don't save these 5 banks, the world will implode in the next 24 hours". What wasn't said, or is often overlooked is that Paulson (a) let BearSterns fail, and forced BofA to buy MerrillLynch, even though it was a completely insolvent company.

. . . What that did do was eliminate Goldman-Sachs competition, and saddle BofA with a liquidity problem that only added to it's woes and helped turn it into a zombie bank.

. . . .Now, the other winner to come out of this week on Wall Street is JP MorganChase, which if, you've been paying attention this week at all, you'll recognize as the "other" name, Chase being the funding source and family heirloom of our old friend David Rockefeller, the scion of the Chase Manhattan family, and the founder of the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations member. From the New York Times on Thursday:

A new order is emerging on Wall Street after the worst crisis since the Great Depression — one in which just a couple of victors are starting to tower over the handful of financial titans that used to dominate the industry.

On Thursday, JPMorgan Chase became the latest big bank to announce stellar second-quarter earnings. Its $2.7 billion profit, after record gains for Goldman Sachs, underscores how the government’s effort to halt a collapse has also set the stage for a narrowing concentration of financial power.

“One theme here is that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan really have emerged as the winners, as the last of the survivors,” said Robert Reich, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.

Both banks now stand astride post-bailout Wall Street, having benefited from billions of dollars in taxpayer support and cheap government financing to climb over banks that continue to struggle. They are capitalizing on the turmoil in financial markets and their rivals’ weakness to pull in billions in trading profits.

. . . For the answers to these vexing, nettlesome questions, we have to go back to last Monday's column (see below for previous day's postings), Brezinski's philosophy and book that serve as the underpinning for the Trilateral Commission and David Rockefeller's careful manuevering of Goldman-Sachs alumni and people into positions in the Fed, the Treasury; and Trilateral Commission members into positions at the World Bank, the United States Trade Representative and the IMF.

. . . .Why do all that? Why go to those lengths, that effort and take that long? Let's go back to last Friday and the start of the week, and Brzezinski's seminal work that is the foundational underpinning of the Trilateral Commission's activities, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era. In it, Brzezinski states:

"Realism, however, forces us to recognize that the necessary political innovation will not come from direct constitutional reform, desirable as that would be. The needed change is more likely to develop incrementally and less overtly...in keeping with the American tradition of blurring distinctions between public and private institution.. . .
. . . . .The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."

. . . .From Patrick Wood's work in the August Review:

"What was the economic nature of the driving force within the Trilateral Commission? It was the giant multinational corporations - those with Trilateral representation - which consistently benefited from Trilateral policy and actions. Polished academics such as Brzezinski, Gardner, Allison, McCracken, Henry Owen etc., served only to give "philosophical" justification to the exploitation of the world.. . . . .
. . . .The most important thing of all is to remember that the political coup de grace preceded the economic coup de grace. The domination of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government provided all the necessary political leverage needed to skew U.S. and global economic policies to their own benefit. . . . .
. . . . .In the end, the biggest crisis of all was that of the American way of life. Americans never counted on such powerful and influential groups working against the Constitution and freedom, either inadvertently or purposefully, and even now, the principles that helped to build this great country are all but reduced to the sound of meaningless babblings.. . . . . .
. . . . . .It would have been damaging enough if the Trilateral domination of the Carter administration was merely a one-time anomaly; but it was not!

Subsequent presidential elections brought George H.W. Bush (under Reagan), William Jefferson Clinton, Albert Gore and Richard Cheney (under G. W. Bush) to power.

Thus, every Administration since Carter has had top-level Trilateral Commission representation through the President or Vice-president, or both!

It is important to note that Trilateral domination has transcended political parties: they dominated both the Republican and Democrat parties with equal aplomb.

In addition, the Administration before Carter was very friendly and useful to Trilateral doctrine as well: President Gerald Ford took the reins after President Richard Nixon resigned, and then appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. Neither Ford nor Rockefeller were members of the Trilateral Commission, but Nelson was David Rockefeller’s brother and that says enough. According to Nelson Rockefeller’s memoirs, he originally introduced then-governor Jimmy Carter to David and Brzezinski.

How has the Trilateral Commission effected their goal of creating a New World Order or a New International Economic Order? They seated their own members at the top of the institutions of global trade, global banking and foreign policy.

For instance, the World Bank is one of the most critical mechanisms in the engine of globalization.¹⁷ Since the founding of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, there have been only seven World Bank presidents, all of whom were appointed by the President. Of these seven, six were pulled from the ranks of the Trilateral Commission!

• Robert McNamara (1968-1981)
• A.W. Clausen (1981-1986)
• Barber Conable (1986-1991)
• Lewis Preston (1991-1995)
• James Wolfenson (1995-2005)
• Paul Wolfowitz (2005-2007)
• Robert Zoellick (2007-present)

Another good evidence of domination is the position of U.S. Trade Representative, which is critically involved in negotiating the many international trade treaties and agreements that have been necessary to create the New International Economic Order. Since 1977, there have been ten USTR’s appointed by the President. Eight have been members of the Trilateral Commission!

• Robert S. Strauss (1977-1979)
• Reubin O'D. Askew (1979-1981)
• William E. Brock III (1981-1985)
• Clayton K. Yeutter (1985-1989)
• Carla A. Hills (1989-1993)
• Mickey Kantor (1993-1997)
• Charlene Barshefsky (1997-2001)
• Robert Zoellick (2001-2005)
• Rob Portman (2005-2006)
• Susan Schwab (2006-present)

This is not to say that Clayton Yeuter and Rob Portman were not friendly to Trilateral goals, because they clearly were.

The Secretary of State cabinet position has seen its share of Trilaterals as well: Henry Kissinger (Nixon, Ford), Cyrus Vance (Carter), Alexander Haig (Reagan), George Shultz (Reagan), Lawrence Eagleburger (G.H.W. Bush), Warren Christopher (Clinton) and Madeleine Albright (Clinton) There were some Acting Secretaries of State that are also noteworthy: Philip Habib (Carter), Michael Armacost (G.H.W. Bush), Arnold Kantor (Clinton), Richard Cooper (Clinton).

Lastly, it should be noted that the Federal Reserve has likewise been dominated by Trilaterals: Arthur Burns (1970-1978), Paul Volker (1979-1987), Alan Greenspan (1987-2006). While the Federal Reserve is a privately-owned corporation, the President “chooses” the Chairman to a perpetual appointment. The current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is not a member of the Trilateral Commission, but he clearly is following the same globalist policies as his predecessors. . . . . "

. . . .So reaching back to last Friday, what do we know for fact? (Please scroll below for previous day's posts and their attendant hyperlinks and fact-check the data)
- We know that the U.S. Government installed the Ba'athist party into power in Iran, with Saddam Hussein at the head of it, to keep Iran in check after the Iranian Revolution, which he did successfully, decimating Iran's population by around 1 million people
- We know that the U.S. Government armed a young Saudi royal, Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bin Laden and his al-Quaeda counterparts eventually successfully driving the Soviets out, and considerably weakening their economic and military power, helping to drive the break-up of the Soviet union.
- We know that there is 42.6 years to the "end of oil", and that Saudi Arabia, Iran, & Iraq are the 3 major producers in the region of oil.
- We know that the United States, drilling everywhere possible that we aren't drilling now, holds only 3% of the world's oil reserves in total, but consume 25% of them on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. OPEC countries control 2/3rd's, 66% of the world's oil reserves.
- We know that the United States Government, two administrations, up to the day of the attack were warned repeatedly about the terrorist attack on 9/11 by the criminal jihadist bin Laden and al-Quaeda, yet did not respond and 3,000 people lost their lives that day.
- We know that the U.S. prosecuted a war against Hussein in Iraq, and left the Saudi terrorist bin Laden free to strengthen himself in Afghanistan.
- We know that the new Iraqi government, with the help and skills of Halliburton, now controls the Iraqi pipline, feeding Aramco, the joint Saudi-U.S. oil production company in Saudi Arabia.
- We know that Ahmadenijad and the High Cleric, the Mullah Ayatollah Khameini, without Hussein to keep them in check, now are one year away from developing nuclear weapons, and we know that their oil revenues continue to fund the jihadist terrorists of al-Quaeda.
- We know that one party, the Republican Party, of a restricted two party system is deliberately committing suicide and driving the bus right off the cliff, leaving only one party for governance.
- We know that the stated aim of the Trilateral Commission is the establishment of a "New Economic World Order".
- We know that the Trilateral Commission has placed members throughout every administration including the current one.
- We know that the Trilateral Commission, in partnership with Goldman-Sachs is (a) the single largest campaign contributor in history (b) through placement of alumni and members basically owns and operates the United States Government and (c) through JPMorgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs now not only controls the flow of currency, but the partnership with Goldman-Sachs, who now has the full faith and backing the U.S. taxpayer, cannot lose, with Goldman holding both the credit default swaps, the bad loans from A.I.G., and continuing to make money on the positive side as a speculating hedge fund, primarily last year in oil, and now beginning to go into it again.
- We know that the Trilateral Commission, and it's "action arm", the Council on Foreign Relations uses a work as it's foundational underpinning that gives, to them at least, a logical, scientific argument for the abolishment of politics and goverment, and argues for placing power, money and mankind's future in the hands of a "power elite", who can take the "long view" about what's best for the bulk of mankind on a global basis.
- Key phrase, bulk of mankind. The United States has less than 5% of the world's population and consumes 25% of it's resources. One guess what the rational-humanistic view of Brzezinski and the Trilaterals would be of this particular equation.

. . . .So. . . again. . . .why do this? It's simple. I've traveled with, been in and part of, several communities, and here's the way it works kiddies. There isn't going to be a space ship, there isn't an advanced race of beings, there's no portals, there's no Rapture, there isn't a way out, and it's time for everyone to grow up. It's just us, and it's just what we're going to do with it, period. There's only one Earth, and there's only us and there's isn't an escape hatch, just because it gets scary.

. . . Haight-Asbury is over, done and gone. There's no big, imaginary friend for adults. What there is left is the mind thieves and ass-clowns in the media, the buffoons in Washington, ones who want to run away, the ones who want to pray it away or wish it away; and then there's the rest of us.

. . . .On Monday, we'll start in on Health Care Reform, Education Reform, and Immigration Reform and how those threads weave into this big tapestry.

. . . .And on that whole Health Care Reform, and Brzezinski's 4th plank - transhumanism and rational humanism? Back in the February-March timeframe, we wrote and warned in this column of the real threat presented by H1N1, the tripartite mutant influenza virus (avian, swine and human) and the the threat that is would present once it had circled the globe a few times and mutated. Most of you blew it off as media hype. The World Health Organization and CDC now say as it circles the globe and gets ready to come back to us this fall, that it is the fastest spreading pandemic in history, and that there isn't enough vaccine, as it's numbers spread. On Monday, we'll do some data and some charting on it.

. . . .Remember, just because the rest of the world lives on a 24-hour, pundit driven news cycle, doesn't mean I do, here's where you come for analysis, reasoning and the big picture.

. . . Outta here

. . . Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped from your hands. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, positively no one gets out alive. There's not trap doors, no magic tricks, and we don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This is not a damn dress rehearsal, the curtain went up and we're on. So it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right fucking here, right fucking now. It's not about regret, guilt, hope, fear or wishes. It's the real fucking deal, and it's about what you do right now. This is the sight, the sound and the words of someone's who's changing his own life, and changing his own world. What in the blue hell have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Wednesday/Thursday (Just keep on chooglin')

Wednesday July 15, 2009

. . . .Check 1, 2 . . . Check 1.2 . . . .Check, Check

. . . .Hey Dave, can I get some more monitor over here on mine? . . . Thanks, dude.

. . . .Yet another fun-filled day dawns here on Day umpteen-thousand of the American era.

. . . .We'll keep going today with another chapter in the Grand Unified Field Theory of Every Damn Thing that's going on. But first, a word on things both relevant and irrelevant.

. . . .I'm going to write Denis Leary and ask him to quit following me around to script my life for his firefighter, Tommy Gavin. Rescue Me was, and is, consistently week and after week, absolutely brilliant television. And scary close to home.

. . . . .D'ya ever notice that people truly don't want to be taken out of their comfort zone? That they may tell you that they want to know, but when you present them with the facts and the data, and it doesn't fit the paradigm and reality that they've constructed for themselves and it involves a deconstruction and an acceptance of something new in reality, they just go into denial, and retreat back into fantasy. Oh well. . . .it's their fantasy, their denial and their choice to live that way, and, in my own personal belief system, it's not my job to stop it for them, it's only my job to present the facts as they are, if you want to deny fact and hasten your own destruction, not my job to stop it.

. . . . .Today's playlist is sticking in the mold that I went into at the start of the week, pretty hard rocking, and for those of you who are regular readers, I listen to this as much as I listen all the other stuff that I put up on regular basis. And I like it when I have the time to put a voiceover intro in the podcast, forces me to get a little tighter on the broadcast.

. . ."Come with me if you want to live" - Kyle Reese Terminator (1984) & Kyle Reese Terminator:Salvation (2009)

. . . .The Grand Unified Theory of Damn Near Everything, (all posts down below):
- Last Thursday, the assertion that the current global economic collapse can be traced back 30 years if not further; that Iran/Iraq/both Gulf Wars/Afghanistan/Pakistan are inextricably tied in; that climate change is real, and there are very real reasons that it's being either ignored, or any attempts made to address it fall far short; that there has been for the last 3 decades, absolutely no difference between Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals; that it's all ridiculous labels and part of a political theater that it's absolutely vital to keep the illusions up on, in order for the reality not to be seen; along with being able to tie in health care reform, education reform and immigration reform.
- Last Friday, some history and factual background on the Mideast, the religion of Islam, the difference between that and jihadists, the amount of oil left before we run out, some historical background on both Gulf Wars and 9/11
- Last Monday, a short summary background on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, which is one half of the true background players in all of this.
- Yesterday, a refresher on Goldman-Sachs, the other half of the government-that's-really-the-government; because they own the country.

. . . . .We'll just keep going down that road, after a couple of check-ins on the news of the day.

. . . .First up - the Sotomayor Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings, which are, have become the absolute essence and embodiment of spectacle and theater. She's already been assured of being seated, and the hearings are a non-event that are a showcase for the Senators who make up the Judiciary committee's constituents. What I find fascinating is the particular set of circumstances surrounding her nomination and the hearings:
- Remember that Sotomayor was nominated for her Federal Circuit Court of Appeals seat by Bill Clinton, with the Republican majority congress seated at the time in 1998 doing her confirmation hearings for that seat. A quick analysis of the 1,294 Constitutional law cases that came before the 2nd Circuit while she sat there showed that she voted with the majority in 98.2% of the cases, and in 94% of the cases the vote was unanimous. She is, by record, solidly a centrist judge, not an "activist" judge, and who interprets the law, rather than makes law and policy.
- Possibly the most entertaining part is listening the Republican members of the Judiciary committee assail her and attack her, while on camera and on record, but off record on the morning news shows, stating that "they're only doing it for their voting base", but don't dare go too far in it, for fear of alienating what women and Hispanics they have left in their party. As a matter of fact, they are apologizing for the abortion protestors that keep breaking into the confirmation hearing, and TV "Sotomayor terrorism" ad.
- Since her record can't be assailed, the Party of No can only attack her gender and her racial background, thus outing themselves once more, and reinforcing their position as a hostile, minority party that only exists now on the fringes of American life. Further reinforcing the position they took this weekend while electing a racist hate-monger to the head of the Young Republicans, with yet another rumored name, Bobby Jindahl, the Governor of her home state, Louisiana, for Republican candidate for President in 2012, refusing to comment on this issue.
- We can add to that another of the GOP racist wingnuts, Pat Buchanan, who along with another former Congressman, Tom Tancredo, form their own little club that is on another planet. Buchanan's advice to the GOP Senators, forget her record, forget the process and forget the Hispanic vote, attack her on race, period:

"What they must do is expose Sotomayor. . . .Sonia is first and foremost a Latina"

- This would go along with Republican Senator, who during the confirmation hearings, channelled Rick Ricardo and told Sotomayor that she'd have "a lot of 'splainin to do." (Snort, moron!)
- Which ties directly to Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele stating, for the record, that he will draw African-Americans back into the Republican Party with "Fried Chicken and Potato Salad".

. . . .I've assailed these morons often enough, and their actions are now so insipid, so vapid, so base and so hostile and antithetical to their own interests that it appears, at times, on a daily basis, a useless exercise. It's not.

. . .The question then becomes, given that there may still be some modicum of intelligence left in their leadership, why deliberately commit suicide? Why deliberately drive one political party off a cliff?

. . . .Here's where we start tieing things back together somewhat. Remember Monday's column (see below) with the direct quotes from Brzezinski's work that serves as the foundational philosophical framework for the Trilateral Commission about the need for an organization that transcends Washington and the American political system. For that to occur, for that to be brought about, it would be necessary for one political party to self-destruct, to commit suicide, in order to leave one overwhelming majority party.

. . . .Now, here's where, if you're with me to this point, it gets really, really overwhelming, and for some of you, you're beginning to see not the picture, we're far from that, but you're starting to see the framework.
- A flood of immigrants to this country, legal or illegal, that identify with one political entity.
- One political party, of a two-party electoral college system self-destructing

. . . .Just as importantly, a global economic meltdown, which achieves several purposes.
- I refer to Goldman-Sachs, who just made $19 billion dollars in profits that really is the taxpayer's money, but is keeping it to distribute as bonuses. I'm going to ask you to scroll below and read Monday and Tuesday's columns for Goldman's extensive ties and ownership of the United States Government. Glenn Greenwald of ABC News:

The embattled Goldman Sachs investment banking firm and its employees have spent more than $43 million dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to cultivate friends and buy influence in Washington, D.C. since 1989, according to an ABC News analysis of campaign finance records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

As a group, Goldman Sachs bankers have been the country's top political campaign contributors this year and have given $29.5 million in contributions since 1989, according to the Center.

"They are almost in a class by themselves," said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director for the Center for Responsive Politics.

"Their top executives are in a class that is way above the clout and name-dropping that most other American businesses can achieve," says Krumholz.

. . . Now, continuing on Goldman-Sachs, who continues to rob us blind (refer Monday and Tuesday's columns below) and now just as actively involved in high-risk trading as before. While the rest of the world was obsessing over Michael Jackson's death and memorial (not this column), and Sarah Palin's resignation (yes, I am guilty of being obsessive about that) Goldman-Sachs and AIG were actively involved in their thievery. Peter Daou, Political Consultant and Internet Adviser:

Now to my second point: the tsunami of negative Palin coverage would be better directed at the legions of evil people around the world, child molesters, killers and human rights abusers who are destroying lives as we speak. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about Palin, I'm doing it here, but some of the oxygen sucked up by Palin-mania could go toward egregious human rights violations and violence around the globe, a topic desperately in need of more attention. I've written numerous posts making the case that there is a mystifying and distressing dearth of focus on the horrors committed against women and children every minute of every day in every corner of the planet: HERE, HERE, HERE & HERE.

Or how about spending more time discussing the brazen theft going on under our noses, the robbing of the poor to enrich the richest? How on earth is Palin a bigger topic of discussion than this, courtesy of Les Leopold:

I'm starting to wonder about the mental health of our nation when I read stuff like, "Analysts estimate that [Goldman Sachs] will set aside enough money to pay a total of $18 billion in compensation and benefits this year to its 28,000 employees, or more than $600,000 an employee. Top producers stand to earn millions." (Update from Reuters: "That puts the average Goldman employee on pace to earn more than $900,000 this year. Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein, senior officers and star traders will likely receive tens of millions of dollars.") Are we out of our minds? How can we sit by and let this happen?

In sum, after paying off TARP, Goldman Sachs is still in hock to us for $52.6 billion. No wonder they can pay $18 billion in compensation. Correct that: We're actually paying the $18 billion. Which brings us back to the problem of holding on to reality. When we bail out an entire sector to the tune of trillions of dollars, eliminate many of the competitors, make money available at near-zero percent interest rates, change accounting rules to make toxic assets appear less toxic for profit and loss purposes, and guarantee everyone's remaining assets -- after we've done all that, what does it mean to book a profit? What did Goldman Sachs actually do that was useful for society, after having helped to drive our economy off a cliff? And why aren't our elected leaders doing something about it?

And this, from Robert Reich:

Goldman's resurgence should send shivers down the backs of every hardworking American who has lost a large chunk of retirement savings in this economic debacle, as well as the millions who have lost their jobs. Why? Because Goldman's high-risk business model hasn't changed one bit from what it was before the implosion of Wall Street. Goldman is still wagering its capital and fueling giant bets with lots of borrowed money. While its rivals have pared back risks, Goldman has increased them. And its renewed success at this old game will only encourage other big banks to go back into it.

Goldman's greed is being rewarded at our expense while the media, punditocracy, and online commentariat rail against a soon to be ex-Governor of Alaska. Next time Palin writes an op-ed or makes an announcement, hopefully we put her in perspective, keep the reaction appropriately muted and stay focused on more significant things.

. . . .How blatant is Goldman? The absolute capitalist Bible, the Wall Street Journal, on Wednesday morning, absolutely took Goldman apart for their abuses and theft on their op-ed page:

Wall Street's meltdown fueled the most profitable quarter ever at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which snatched business away from weakened rivals and churned out huge trading gains by revving up risk taking.

With competitors such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. gone, and others like Citigroup Inc. flailing, Goldman appears to be pulling off one of the biggest market-share grabs in Wall Street history.

Goldman will surely deny that its risk-taking is subsidized by the taxpayer -- but then so did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, right up to the bitter end. An implicit government guarantee is only free until it's not, and when the bill comes due it tends to be huge. So for the moment, Goldman Sachs -- or should we say Goldie Mac? -- enjoys the best of both worlds: outsize profits for its traders and shareholders and a taxpayer backstop should anything go wrong.

We like profits as much as the next capitalist. But when those profits are supported by government guarantees or insured deposits, taxpayers have a special interest in how the companies conduct their business. Ideally we would shed those implicit guarantees altogether, along with the very notion of too big to fail. But that is all but impossible now and for the foreseeable future. Even if the Obama Administration and Fed were to declare with one voice that banks such as Goldman were on their own, no one would believe it.

If there is a lesson in this week's tale of two banks, it's that it won't be enough to give the Federal Reserve a mandate to "monitor" systemic risk. Last fall's bailouts are reverberating through the financial system in a way that is already distorting the competition for capital and financial market share. Banks that want to be successful will also want to be more like Goldman Sachs, creating an incentive for both larger size and more risk-taking on the taxpayer's dime.

One policy response to the incentives created by last fall's bailout is simply to restrict the proprietary trading done by the subsidiaries of bank holding companies that enjoy both FDIC deposit insurance and an implicit government subsidy on their cost of capital. This is what Paul Volcker proposed, only to be overruled by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Another answer would be an FDIC-style bailout tax, perhaps tied to leverage ratios, for those in the too-big-to-fail camp. Developing a template to facilitate the seizure and orderly winding down of failing financial giants is also an essential element of whatever reform Congress cooks up.

. . . .Full story here.

. . . . .The Health Care Reform bills come out of committee on Thursday morning, I've got plentyof opinions, have had them, but I don't want to talk about them until there is a background, and there won't be one until there are some bills and paperwork to use as a springboard for discussion.

.. . . .I'm going to refer you to Monday's column below for David Rockefeller's, Zbigniew Brzezinski's and George Herbert Walker Bush's work on a "New World Economic Order", one of the 4 necessary components in Brzezinski's work towards "The Technotronic Era", as he phrases it.

. . . Now in reference to the Council on Foreign Relations and it's governing body, the Trilateral Commission, let me go out on a limb and say that we will be at war with Iran within 90 days to 6 months. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State, CFR member and married to a standing Trilateral Commission member, Bill Clinton today in an address to the CFR:

With this in mind, I want to say a few words about Iran. We watched the energy of Iran’s election with great admiration, only to be appalled by the manner in which the government used violence to quell the voices of the Iranian people, and then tried to hide its actions by arresting foreign journalists and nationals, and expelling them, and cutting off access to technology. As we and our G-8 partners have made clear, these actions are deplorable and unacceptable.
We know very well what we inherited with Iran, because we deal with that inheritance every day. We know that refusing to deal with the Islamic Republic has not succeeded in altering the Iranian march toward a nuclear weapon, reducing Iranian support for terror, or improving Iran’s treatment of its citizens.
Neither the President nor I have any illusions that dialogue with the Islamic Republic will guarantee success of any kind, and the prospects have certainly shifted in the weeks following the election. But we also understand the importance of offering to engage Iran and giving its leaders a clear choice: whether to join the international community as a responsible member or to continue down a path to further isolation.
Direct talks provide the best vehicle for presenting and explaining that choice. That is why we offered Iran’s leaders an unmistakable opportunity: Iran does not have a right to nuclear military capacity, and we’re determined to prevent that. But it does have a right to civil nuclear power if it reestablishes the confidence of the international community that it will use its programs exclusively for peaceful purposes.
Iran can become a constructive actor in the region if it stops threatening its neighbors and supporting terrorism. It can assume a responsible position in the international community if it fulfills its obligations on human rights. The choice is clear. We remain ready to engage with Iran, but the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

. . . Full speech here.
. . . .The 4th component of Brzezinski's technotronic era is transhumanism, a little understood term. One futurist who does extensive work on transhumanism is Ray Kurzweil over at KurzweilAI.net, a forum for futurists who discuss the future course of human evolution, which of course, ties in the framework for health care reform that we'll start to bring in tomorrow. Now, the ideas that the folks who have the money and power have for the future of human evolution may be radically different than yours. Kurzweil's focuses on nanotechnology and how it will tie into biotechnology.
. . . .From Humanity Plus magazine:

As de Grey points out, gerontologists have discovered seven biochemical causes of aging. The last cause was discovered in 1981, and considering how immensely far our knowledge of biology has come since that time, it seems quite likely that these seven causes are all of them. De Grey calls these causes of aging the “Seven Deadly Things.” They are: (1) cell loss, (2) death resistant cells, (3) nuclear DNA mutations, (4) mitochondrial DNA mutations, (5) intracellular junk, (6) extracellular junk, and (7) extracellular crosslinks. That’s it. If we find medicines or therapies that can clean up this damage, we could extend our lifes pans to great lengths and achieve negligible senescence in humans.

A word on a philosophical point of view: many world philosophies and religions teach, or strongly imply, that the body depends on some immaterial animating force, a soul or chi, to give it life. Scientists disagree: the functioning of the body seems entirely rooted in atoms, molecules, and forces between them. As recently as 1907, French philosopher Henri Bergeson wrote about an élan vital, or vital force, that animated all living things and drove their evolution and development. This was closely connected to the idea, common at the time, that organic molecules could not be synthesized by inorganic precursors. Unfortunately for Bergeson and other vitalists, Friedrich Wöhler, the father of biochemistry, had already synthesized urea from inorganic precursors as early as 1828, and scientists were becoming more and more convinced that the same laws of biochemistry that govern inorganic molecules govern organic molecules as well.

Because the laws of chemistry apply to both life and non-life, aging is an entirely chemical, non-mystical process of degradation with specific physical causes. Although it is a matter of preference whether you consider aging a “disease” or not, from the perspective of the body, aging is like a disease -- a life-destroying biochemical phenomenon occurring in the body. And like diseases, aging is treatable.

It is due to the complexity and the aura of inevitability around aging that people have only recently begun to look at it this way. Some say that aging is something mandated by God, and we have no right to mess with it, but these very same people have used this same argument throughout history to protest against vaccinations, the dissection of cadavers, organ transplants, and numerous other therapies or techniques of extreme medical value. Is it so radical to say that being healthy is a good thing, and that we should use whatever ethical strategies are available to pursue that end?

. . . Full article here.
- Now, for something that isn't science fiction, and is viewed as step forward, may I present to you this particularly gruesome advancement, work on a battlefield robot that will eat corpses for fuel. No, this isn'ta joke, and it's being worked on now by an outfit in Maryland for a defense contract, Robotics, Inc. "Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot", yes, it really is called EATR, will be fueld by "biomass", yes, corpses.

. . . .Where are you John Connor?

. . . Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. So kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This is not a dress rehearsal, the curtain's gone up and it's real. So it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right fucking here and now. This is the sight and the sound of me taking control of my own world. What in the blue hell have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Tuesday (and the Grand Unified Theory just keeps building steam)

Tuesday July 14, 2009

. . . . .Good morning or good day or good afternoon or good evening, whichever it is for you.

. . . .Tuesday, always an important day. Why? Every day is an important day, that's why!

. . . . .Yup, threw curve balls back into the podcast and playlist, you'll find me back doing intro's and doing some voice-over commentary. The music? . . .I actually listen to this just as much as a lot of the things that you're used to hearing on a normal day-to-day basis for cuts, I just don't put it up there that much, possibly because I'm one of only 2 or 3 over-50 people I know of who actually enjoy from a musical standpoint bands like Audioslave, Nickelback, Five Finger Death Punch, Bullet For My Valentine, Hellyeah or Hollywood Undead. (Psst! I really need to thank Cody for this playlist and turning me on to a lot of these bands). If it was me, read as much as you want to or need to, in order to get caught up to wherever you last were, and leave the music UP!!!! TURN IT THE FUCK UP!!!! Enjoy and listen, if you've been caught in the trap of listening only to what our generation did and are stuck in that groove, loosen up. It's the same paradigm that we had as teens and 20's; our parents didn't like what we listened to, and we tried to explain to them that it was something that expressed us. Hey, let's learn from that OK? Take a listen to what these kids are going, it kicks ass and they've got a lot to say, and oh, by the way, just in case you didn't notice. . . .they're pissed. They aren't stupid and can see what a mess we're leaving them and they ain't happy about it.

. . . .I hope, I fervently hope, for those of you who are new(er) readers that you're catching on to what I'm doing here. It's very calculated outrage and there is an agenda, I'll admit that. I want you to disturb your worldview, I want you to question what you think you know, I want you to get angry. If you disagree with me, that's fine. I want you to go do your research, do your homework and come back with fact. I want you to turn off your TV and quit getting your news from the opinions of ass-clowns and mind thieves. I want you to realize that what you're being fed is bullshit, and an insult to your abilities as a thinking, rational human being. I want you to be so angry that you want to prove me wrong, go find facts, historically recorded fact and data, numbers and come back to me and prove it, use logic and build the logical equations so they can't be denied. . . . you won't be able to. Then I want you to get angry at the right people, the ones who've been manipulating you as if you were a meaningless chess pawn and start to make a plan, a rational plan.

. . . .In fact, that's the point of this whole damn thing. It's a lot more than just the words here, it's the concepts that it's trying to get you to see, a different way of seeing things, or thinking about them, that'd be the point behind the voice-over intro, which should help that transition, and every, absolutely every playlist has a narrative hidden inside it, a story, that if you don't listen to from the first sound of my voice, to the last note, you'll miss, period, that all works on another level of the brain while you're reading this. In other words, it's an old Jim Morrison trick, it ain't nothin' new. Give it a try.

. . . . .Wake up!!!

. . . .I get comments and feedback constantly. There's one reader in Idaho who constantly challenges me, and it reinforces my need, my necessity to ground anything I say in proven fact and reality. He's sent another good one in this morning, and yes, a fishing rod is truly the staff of life, and absolutely the best philosophy is the one you presented. The matrix has become so ever present and twisted, the only way to get back to that simplicity is, therefore, to tear it all down, hit the reset button and go. Than, we might possibly stand a chance of building the Jeffersonian ideal. Go enjoy the sunshine and fish. Then, there are others. . . .

. . . . I got one yesterday from someone who called him or herself Britannicus, out in Tarzana, California. Obviously someone who was doing a broad Google search for one phrase, found me, and very, very obviously, didn't read one fucking word of what I write, and especially what I wrote yesterday. The particular note sent concerned illegal immigration, and as is always the case, anymore sadly, when it comes from the Right, typical. Very reminiscent of the Sarah Palin anti-intellictualism school of random capitalization and random wrongly used punctuation and grammar and the constant thread of victimhood/martrydom that comes from the Right these days along with alarmist hysteria. No data, no numbers, no listing and linking to a bill that supposedly is coming up "for a battle" this week, somehow magically, in both the House and Senate at the same time, same week. (Another one who slept through Civics 101) And of course, topped off with a heaping helping of the vague warnings of some revolt or another of average citizens, and references to a number of organizations that "the media isn't reporting". (Hint, never, never reference the tools at The Heritage Foundation to me.) Coming from California didn't help it either, when that State was rolling in it, being the vacuum that was sucking every dollar out of America to pump it to Japan, Korea and China and everyone in that state was rolling in dough, the illegals were a necessary part of their population to do their laundry, cut their lawns, do their gardening, do all the "manual labor" that needed to be done from construction to road work, whilst everyone else in that state was busy in their "knowledge worker" jobs preparing for the 23rd century. How'd that work out for you, huh? Since I was born, raised and still live in Michigan, and California was the biggest offender, bar none, of states that buried the American automotive industry, which was the arsenal of democracy that saved this Nation and the world, and made sure that their corporate masters in Japan got all that profit, you have no sympathy from this quarter. Welcome to life as we know it. You may have to give up a latte or two.

. . . .One of the saddest parts for me is when one of these mouth-breathers writes, and the subject is illegal immigration and of course, there's always a reference to English as the language of America lurking somewhere in their missive. Unfortunately, as was the case here, it was about a 5th grade level of the use of the English language, and even then, with the misspellings and the incorrect punctuation would have graded out about a "D". Most of the illegals I know work damn hard at using the language of the land properly, since they have a ton of skin in the game.

. . . .One other large piece of cognitive dissonance and logical incongruity when discussing illegal immigration from the labor workforce standpoint. Illegal immigrants are the very essence of free market capitalization, living and working in a cash economy, and working at the prevailing wage as set by the business owner. To advocate for an external governmental control of the workforce is . . . .(gasp of horror). . . ."socialism". Look it up. Can't have it both ways, folks, just doesn't work that way, if you advocate for governmental control of the population and workforce, then you advocate for governmental regulations and controls in all phases of the process of work, and you cannot call yourself a free market capitalist in the same breath, just doesn't work that way.

. . . .And isn't that what the wingnuts spend 24/7 accusing the President of? . . .Just wondering.

. . . .Let's get something straight here, and that's the history of this country. It was a country built by thieves, whores, robbers, thugs and every ethnic minority from every prison across Europe. When the good Brit and Dutch lords and masters got here, yes, there was a small, very small minority who came here seeking religious freedom, to worship as they chose. (Note; vast difference between that, which is the reality, and the myth that attempts to resurrect itself that the country was exclusively founded by people seeking to found a Christian nation.) The driver for the settlement of America was land, and the ability to own large tracts of it and establish a business. Once workers were needed, they didn't send back for more royalty. First, they went to another continent, grabbed a bunch of people, kidnapped them and brought them here to work. Next, they emptied the British and the German/Dutch/Austrian prisons; and lo and behold, the next two minorities in were the Irish and the Italians. I'm Irish by lineage and bloodline, and let me tell you, those of us they couldn't force here through indentured servitude or magistrate's sentence, they starved out of Ireland and made sure we had passage here, to gain control of Irish lands Once we got pissed at the royalty, we did what all good Irish, Scots and Welsh people do, we started a fight, and we won because we could get back up more times than they could knock us down. As the country expanded West, and more people wanted more land, we did what was done when the first folks got here, told the original inhabitants that it wasn't their's anymore, and when they objected to it, we killed them, so we could have the land we needed. There, the short one paragraph history of the United States.

. . . .Bottom line, I'm American citizen because I was born here, but that doesn't give me a moral leg up on anyone else who wants to come here because, despite all it's flaws, it's still the greatest country on Earth, and still affords anyone the chance to better themselves. I don't blame them one bit for wanting to be here.

. . . And one other thing that tells me yesterday's letter writer didn't read even one sentence of what I write about. Yesterday's post, of all days, in explaining the roots of the Trilateral commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, made it pretty clear that the globalisation of America will occur as long as things remain as they are, and right now, there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. The forces at work making it happen are far too great right now.

. . . .My favorite wingnut, Republican Representative Michell Bachmann, despite warnings from her own party leadership has introduced an anti-census bill. More power to her, and I hope it speeds through committee and passage. Then the good people of her district, who elected her, won't be counted, will disappear and will no longer receive state or federal services. So. . .shut their power, their water, their natural gas off. Stop the postal service, don't let them drive on state built roads or federal highways, and they'll move, her district won't exist anymore, nor will she. It's a win-win.

. . . A Seattle entrepenuer and independent businessman, Nick Hanauer, wrote a great piece addressing health care this morning. His accomplishments, among others, are helping to start Amazon, not a bad little business to have lent your entrepenuerial expertise to:

Does the current health care reform debate sound like a broken record to you? U.S. spending on health care is $2.6 trillion -- 17% of GDP and headed toward 20% without a dramatic fix. Yet not one radically new idea has been proposed to fix the current system. The health care system is so far gone we don't need reform -- we need a disruptive business transformation.

In Washington State disruptive and transformative business models are our bread and butter. Think: Amazon, Costco, Starbucks, aQuantive, Expedia, Zillow - the list goes on. It is this kind of thinking that will uncover a better way to deliver health care to every American for less money than we spend today with 46 million uninsured. We need to do what Costco did for retailing, what Amazon did for the Internet, and what Expedia did for travel.

Washington State already has the disruptive business model that will fix health care. It will ensure that every American has access to quality, affordable health care that allows for one-on-one access to a primary care doctor who can spend more time to fix what ails you on a timely basis.

It's called direct primary care. These practices are not to be confused with pricey concierge practices that also take insurance. Direct primary care practices in Washington State replace insurance with membership fees ranging from $39 to $79 per month, depending on age, for unrestricted access to comprehensive primary, preventive and chronic disease care. Most will also coordinate specialist and hospital care, offering a direct version of what policy experts call the "primary care medical home."

Direct primary care practices were invented in Washington State in 1996 and have now spread to at least 18 states. They are already transforming local health care by eliminating the two most pernicious consequences of the traditional insurance-based system -- first, the massive amounts of needless overhead expense on the 90% of health care issues which are routine and not catastrophic or even expensive, and second, the inverted system of incentives that drive doctors to treat us, rather than cure us.

Direct practices are transformational in four key ways:

1) No insurance means lower upfront costs. Without insurance reimbursement requirements on the 90% of health care issues that should be handled by primary care physicians, we can remove 40 cents from every $1 in primary care that currently goes toward insurance and related overhead. Individuals and businesses in direct primary care practices report savings of 20% to 50% on comprehensive health care costs by adding a wrap-around insurance plan.

2) Monthly care fees align incentives. Direct primary care practices replace the "fee-for-service" insurance-based incentive system where doctors make more money by doing and charging more. An affordable direct monthly fee system means doctors make money by keeping you healthy, not sick, and making sure you see value in your relationship so you don't quit. This fee includes all primary, preventive and chronic illness management for everything from vaccinations and pneumonia to minor fractures and ongoing treatment for things like diabetes, hypertension, obesity and elevated cholesterol.

3) Coordinated, high-quality care and downstream savings. By eliminating the time and cost burden of insurance, providers can break even by seeing 10 to 12 patients a day as opposed to 25 to 30 under the high overhead, low reimbursement insurance-focused model. This allows for unhurried 30- to 60-minute appointments versus the average eight-minute appointment, providing ample time to diagnose and treat patients and coordinate any necessary care throughout the rest of the health care system. This shifts the focus of care away from expensive specialists and hospitals to inherently inexpensive primary care from a provider who knows you best.

4) Increased provider and patient satisfaction. Direct primary care practices provide doctors and nurses with a great living and a great job. With salaries replacing the reimbursement process, doctors can get off the conveyor belt of unmanageable patient loads and reclaim the close long-term patient-provider relationship for which they trained. This shift will re-attract doctors to the practice of primary medicine -- in an era where the primary care doctor is rapidly becoming an endangered species.

Under this model there is still an important need for insurance, but for what it was originally intended -- to cover the rare occurrence of expensive, unpredictable care. Based on how the current insurance-centric, fee-for-service system operates, we estimate that shifting to direct primary care practices, coupled with a wrap-around insurance plan for catastrophic care, could save $1,000 to $2,000 per person per year. That's a total savings of $300 to $600 billion per year, which could go toward providing similar health care to the 46 million uninsured today.

By bundling direct primary care with a lower premium wrap around insurance plan -- either private or public -- the Washington State direct primary care model has the potential to transform our broken health care system. Direct primary care practices offer the potential to revitalize the direct doctor patient relationship without the needless Kafkaesque burden of the insurance reimbursement system. We must be bold and rethink health care if we are to achieve true reform. The time for this health care transformation is now.

Nick Hanauer is a Seattle-based entrepreneur and venture capitalist and the founder of the True Patriot Network. He has helped launch over 20 businesses including Amazon, aQuantive, Insitu and most recently, Qliance Medical.

. . . . . The Sotomayor hearings continue today, you can catch them here.

. . . .Now, on to what I wrote yesterday and how the current economic depression is (1) manufacured (2) planned for and (3) done with an agenda.

. . . . .Goldman-Sachs reported 2nd Quarter profits this morning of $3.4 billion with another $19 billion coming in to Goldman-Sachs profits from AIG pass-throughs from credit default swaps.
. . . .. Goldman-Sachs received a total of over $23 billion last fall in the political theater that Paulson (a former Goldman CEO) and Bush with it's high sense of drama and "financial collapse within 24 hours". (Remember that one? McCain "stopped" his campaign to fly back to Washington, along with Obama, God knows what "help" either one of them was) $10 billion in direct funds, and $13.5 billion as an AIG counter-party. Goldman-Sachs, nor AIG either one have paid not one penny back in TARP funds, so essentially, the American taxpayer is still funding both outfits, yet the profits go back directly to those companies, and G-S is planning on paying out $18 billion in bonuses, or $600,000 per employee in 2009.
.. . . . .What was heartening this morning was listening to the Morning Meeting on MSNBC and hearing the "mainstream media" start to ask the same questions that Matt Taibbi first asked in his now-famous G-S article. Why are Goldman-Sachs and AIG treated differently than General Motors? When the government took over GM, it took a look at it's books and bankrupted it , the corporation coming out at about 35 cents on the dollar. The same doesn't hold true for G-S or AIG, which are still essentially taxpayer owned bought and paid for corporate entities, so thos profits, which should have gone back to the taxpayer, instead go into corporate profits for the two firms that are at the very core of the $50 billion dollar real-dollar hole punched into the fabric of the universe last fall, 100 cents on the dollar.
. . . The other issue that is finally, finally starting to be taken up is how riddled with Goldman-Sachs alumni our government is. There are Goldman alumni all through every level of government. The phrase "Goldman owns the government and runs it" actually tumbled from the lips of the table on MSNBC's Morning Meeting this morning.
. . . .Bear in mind that Goldman-Sachs was the single largest campaign contributor to Barack Obama's campaign last year (long before September's financial collapse debacle).
. . . . .During last fall's debacle and "thumbs up-thumbs down" sessions that Paulson and Bush held on which banks would stand and which would fall, then Goldman CEO Blankfein was part of those blame-storming sessions and money passouts with Paulson and Bush.
. . . .From the New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks noted last fall "Over the past few years, people from Goldman-Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the Federal Government, over the next few years, they just might take over the whole darn thing."
. . . A short list:
- It has to start with Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman, and former Treasury Secretary and the architect of the bailouts and TARP.
- Robert Rubin, former Secretary of State under Clinton, and current economic advisor to the President.
- Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner pop up time and time again throughout 2007 and 2008 as being paid consulting fees and speaking fees (handsome ones at that) from Goldman
- Gary Gensler, the newly appointed head of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission.

. . . .You might want to rethink and go ahead and read that Matt Taibbi article.

. . . .Charlie Gasparino on Goldman's Outrage:

They will never admit to this at Goldman Sachs (they don’t really fess up to much over there at the Big G) but in the fall of 2008, just after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy gave the world a lesson in systemic risk, Goldman, the world’s greatest risk taker, was finished too.

That’s right, it was toast. Finished. Kaput. Until, that is, the firm that was built on wheeling and dealing in some of the most esoteric investments the world of high finance had ever seen, needed a government bailout to stay afloat, which included $10 billion in cash from the Treasury Department (granted by its former CEO, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) and more importantly, full access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window to be a commercial bank.

Goldman, of course, is a commercial bank like no other. You won’t confuse Goldman with the ol’ Bailey Building & Loan. It has no customer deposits—which are what the access to the discount window was first set up to protect—and you won’t be getting a toaster or a debit card from Goldman Sachs anytime soon.

But being a bank has its rewards. With full access to the discount window, Goldman can now borrow cheaply and massively from the Fed in a pinch, and because of that access, it can borrow more cheaply in the credit markets. It’s a loophole that has allowed Goldman to turn back the clock and once again resume much of its risk-taking activities, only this time it’s being financed by the American taxpayer.

The question I have, of course, is why is the Obama administration, which has decried corporate greed whenever it’s politically feasible, allowed Goldman all the advantages of a bank, when it is really a big hedge fund?

The Treasury Department won’t say and it's obvious why Goldman is doing what it is doing: Money, and lots of it. The firm announced Tuesday morning that net income for the second quarter was $3.44 billion, while its biggest rival, Morgan Stanley, is likely to announce a quarterly loss.

Of course, there are lots of reasons for Goldman’s success. . . It also knows how to game the system better than any firm on the face of the earth. Case in point: In mid-September 2008, when the world was crashing following Lehman’s bankruptcy, Goldman held $13 billion in highly risky mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations. These bonds were insured by American International Group, which itself was about to go bankrupt.

Without that insurance, Goldman itself would have imploded because the bonds would have been marked down to just pennies on the dollar. The rescue of AIG was supposed to prevent a large-scale crash of the financial system, but it also prevented a crash of Goldman Sachs, which bought those crappy CDOs from Merrill Lynch, which was forced to find a buyer (Bank of America) because it too held the same sludge.

Now with all the government help, Goldman is marching its way back up to $235 a share—trading at around $150 Monday—by embracing much of the same risk that nearly led to its demise. It would be nice, though, if the next time Goldman losses money taxpayers didn’t foot the bill.

. . . .Read the whole piece here.

. . . . .From the Wall Street Journal this morning, M. Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, 10 reasons that this depression/recession and the economy are far, far worse than you think it is:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:

- June's total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That's 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

Job losses may last well into 2010 to hit an unemployment peak close to 11%. That unemployment rate may be sustained for an extended period.

Can we find comfort in the fact that employment has long been considered a lagging indicator? It is conventionally seen as having limited predictive power since employment reflects decisions taken earlier in the business cycle. But today is different. Unemployment has doubled to 9.5% from 4.8% in only 16 months, a rate so fast it may influence future economic behavior and outlook.

How could this happen when Washington has thrown trillions of dollars into the pot, including the famous $787 billion in stimulus spending that was supposed to yield $1.50 in growth for every dollar spent? For a start, too much of the money went to transfer payments such as Medicaid, jobless benefits and the like that do nothing for jobs and growth. The spending that creates new jobs is new spending, particularly on infrastructure. It amounts to less than 10% of the stimulus package today.

About 40% of U.S. workers believe the recession will continue for another full year, and their pessimism is justified. As paychecks shrink and disappear, consumers are more hesitant to spend and won't lead the economy out of the doldrums quickly enough.

It may have made him unpopular in parts of the Obama administration, but Vice President Joe Biden was right when he said a week ago that the administration misread how bad the economy was and how effective the stimulus would be. It was supposed to be about jobs but it wasn't. The Recovery Act was a single piece of legislation but it included thousands of funding schemes for tens of thousands of projects, and those programs are stuck in the bureaucracy as the government releases the funds with typical inefficiency.

Another $150 billion, which was allocated to state coffers to continue programs like Medicaid, did not add new jobs; hundreds of billions were set aside for tax cuts and for new benefits for the poor and the unemployed, and they did not add new jobs. Now state budgets are drowning in red ink as jobless claims and Medicaid bills climb.

Next year state budgets will have depleted their initial rescue dollars. Absent another rescue plan, they will have no choice but to slash spending, raise taxes, or both. State and local governments, representing about 15% of the economy, are beginning the worst contraction in postwar history amid a deficit of $166 billion for fiscal 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a gap of $350 billion in fiscal 2011.

Households overburdened with historic levels of debt will also be saving more. The savings rate has already jumped to almost 7% of after-tax income from 0% in 2007, and it is still going up. Every dollar of saving comes out of consumption. Since consumer spending is the economy's main driver, we are going to have a weak consumer sector and many businesses simply won't have the means or the need to hire employees. After the 1990-91 recessions, consumers went out and bought houses, cars and other expensive goods. This time, the combination of a weak job picture and a severe credit crunch means that people won't be able to get the financing for big expenditures, and those who can borrow will be reluctant to do so. The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending.

This process is nowhere near complete and, until it is, the economy will barely grow if it does at all, and it may well oscillate between sluggish growth and modest decline for the next several years until the rebalancing of excessive debt has been completed. Until then, the economy will be deprived of adequate profits and cash flow, and businesses will not start to hire nor race to make capital expenditures when they have vast idle capacity.

No wonder poll after poll shows a steady erosion of confidence in the stimulus. So what kind of second-act stimulus should we look for? Something that might have a real multiplier effect, not a congressional wish list of pet programs. It is critical that the Obama administration not play politics with the issue. The time to get ready for a serious infrastructure program is now. It's a shame Washington didn't get it right the first time.

. . . . .I would hope that you were paying attention yesterday, the author of that piece, Mortimer Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report? Yes, a member of the Trilateral Commission.

. . . And yes, trying to tie everything together today, Paul Volcker, the former Secretary of Treasury, the former Federal Reserve Chairman, the current head of the Council of Economic Advisors is a Goldman-Sachs alumni, and the former North American Chair of the Trilateral Commission, and currently sits on it as a member emeritus.
. . .And going there, check here for current Trilateral Commission membership rolls, and match them up against former Goldman-Sachs alum. I did, you know what you'll find.

. . . .Start putting it together people, this was chapter 2 of trying to get you educated in the fact that the government you thought you had for the last 30 years has become nothing more than political theater. It's owned and directed by people you don't vote for, who have an agenda that they'll cram through, no matter what.

. . . .Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, seize the precious moments before they're snatched from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right here, right now. Do something! Change yourself, change your world and change the world at large around you. This is the sight, the sound, the ideas of someone who isn't afraid to piss you off, and isn't afraid to make a stand and find the truth. What the fuck have you done for yourself lately? Hmm?

The Desolation Angel

Monday (The balloon's gone up)

Monday July 13, 2009

. . . .Good morning and happy, happy Monday to everyone!!

. . . .Hope everyone had a good weekend and enjoyed the time.

. . . .Playlist has definitely changed. Enjoy it, it will change up even harder over the course of the week. For now, it's rocking out just a little bit more.

. . . .Movie magic moment Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
- Tyrese Gibson - "I hope those F-16's aren't that good"
- Josh Duhamel - "Why?"
- Tyrese - "Because I told them to hit the orange smoke"
- Josh - "That orange smoke? Right next to us?"
- Tyrese - "It wasn't my best toss."

. . . .Alrighty then, we set the stage on Friday (see post below) for the Grand Unified Field Theory of Every Damn Thing with some background on the religion of Islam, oil, and events in the Mideast that pertain to us as a Nation. That sets the stage for what comes next. It'll take all this week, a chunk at a time, to understand how the stage got set over 30 years ago for what is happening now on a global scale to the world economy, to your money, and what some of those ultimate aims are, and why labels like Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, Red, Blue are essentially meaningless; and the more participation there is in that particular political theater, the better the magic show goes of having everyone concentrate on the left hand while the right hand pulls the sleight of hand.

. . . One other item that relates to Friday's post and will blow up big over the next week. The story emerging that Dick Cheney had his own personal "death squad" that reported to only to him, as reported in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
. . . .No lesser a Republican and consevative light than John McCain, on NBC's Meet The Press on Sunday said that this CIA secrecy story involving Cheney is just beginning, as picked up by CNN.
. . . .Remember that this death squad was working for Cheney while the 1st and 4th amendments, the writ of habeas corpus and posse comitatus was suspended by the sitting President of the United States at that time, George W. Bush and the American Military was deployed on U.S. soil under the Northern Command for National Defense.
Please fact check at the underlined hyperlinks and provide evidence, if found, of a contrary set of circumstances.

. . . .Given that, and given what we're going to talk about, it's eerily prescient that Goldman-Sachs is going to announce on Tuesday, "Blowout" profits, this after only recently paying back their bailout funds. Full stories here from the New York Times, and according to this same article, JPMorgan Chase is about to announce record profits as well. It's going to be vitally important over the next few days to remember these two financial institutions. They're at the center of many, many things here.

. . . .Nothing in recent investigative reporting can match Matt Taibbi's series on Goldman-Sachs, as reported both in Rolling Stone online and in Rolling Stone Issues 1082-1083.
. . . .It's fearless and scary, and it's required reading if you want to know what happened to your 401K , your kid's college fund or your grandkid's trust. You don't want to read it, and want to hang on to your illusion? Fine, it's your choice, but don't whine to me, or talk to me about it.

. . . . .What we need to talk about first is a conspiracy, but an open one. Not a conspiracy made up of Roswell aliens, a Reptoid race running government, UFO coverups, MIB's and crystal skulls. Nope, this one is far worse, it's an open conspiracy, so out in the open that it's in everyone's face every day, is an accepted part of the fabric of society and is made up of people so powerful, so rich, so influential, and so out in the open, that there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. As a matter of fact, you wanted them to do what they did, and helped them do it.

. . . .I believe, fervently, in the American democratic political process. It is still the grandest experiment on the face of the planet. It's taken a long, long time and a lot of research for me to reach the point I've gotten to now. The political theatrics that the curtain was pulled up on over 3 decades ago are just that, theatrics. Your labels, your tea parties, your circle of conservative friends, your group of progressives are all meaningless, unless you begin to go after the core of the problem that sits in the Beltway right now. It doesn't matter if it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, it doesn't matter who sits in the 535 seats of Congress, right now, and for the last 3 decades, it's been a sham. Everything you know is wrong, and you've been lied to.

. . . .I believe in the power of the free market, of unrestrained capitalism. If you're under the age of 40, you've not lived in a society that had free market capitalism, period.

. . . .The Council on Foreign Relations is not a shadowy, behind the scenes group of unknown individuals. It's a well-known name in America and the world. First formed in 1918, and finally taking it's shape as it's known today in 1921 with it's incorporation and charter, the CFR is a highly influential group, made up of invited people, well-known bankers, industrialists, politicians and statesmen. From the CFR's website:

The vision that stirred the Inquiry became the work of the Council on Foreign Relations over the better part of a century: a program of systematic study by groups of knowledgeable specialists of differing ideological inclinations would stimulate a variety of papers and reports to guide the statecraft of policymakers. What began as an intellectual response to a juncture of history grew into an institution that would thrive through all the diplomacy of America’s twentieth century. Perpetually renewing its membership and its mission, reaching out beyond an elite circle to help educate the entire public, the Council grew into a model that is now emulated by a host of newer research centers, in the United States and abroad. Their common challenge is to stimulate concerned citizens in their thinking about power and politics among nations.
MORE THAN TWO YEARS before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the research staff of the Council on Foreign Relations had started to envision a venture that would dominate the life of the institution for the demanding years ahead. With the memory of the Inquiry in focus, they conceived a role for the Council in the formulation of national policy.

. . . . .The Council on Foreign Relation's reach and influence has only grown more powerful over the years. The detail of their discussions in-house was chartered to be, and remains, exclusive. None of us, no journalist, no citizen has access to their proceedings, to the recorded minutes of their meetings. I will not belabor, or retype their own open history, which is quite startling to read, I recommend, that you follow the links and read for yourself what their history, their goals, their agenda are.

. . . .In it's current incarnation, the CFR's Board of Directors includes Robert Rubin, Richard Salomon, Madeline Albright, Tom Brokaw and Colin Powell among others. I suggest you click the link to read the entire current Board of Directors and the member list for the International Advisory Board.

. . . .It was with the addition of David Rockefeller, the chair of Chase Manhattan bank and heir/scion of the Rockefeller family in the 70's, the opening of it's Washington offices, and it's stated purpose to "inform" and "influence" American foreign policy and aid in the formation of geopolitical and geoeconomic policy that the CFR truly stepped into the government-behind-the-government role that it now enjoys, along with one other well-known institution.

. . . . .It was with the formation of The Trilateral Commission in 1973 that American life as we had known it, up to that point in time, was irrevocably changed, forever. David Rockefeller, through his chairmanship of the Council on Foreign Relations, saw a need, in his paradigm, for an "action arm" of the CFR (Note: Bear in mind, that the Trilateral Commission was ostensibly the vehicle for CFR policies, it didn't take long for the Trilateral Commission to become the "senior" body, the one whose decisions and actions were ultimately the "decider".) Their published house vehicle Trialogue and other writings make clear their one stated goal, a "New International Economic World Order", the phrase "New World Order" being first used by President George H.W. Bush openly and often.

. . . .The Trilateral Commission was co-founded by David Rockefeller, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy intellectual emigre and professor at Columbia University. Brzezinski is the author of many books that serve as the guide posts for Trilateral Commission policies and actions.
. . . . Brzezinski, whose name should be familiar to you, was it's first Executive Director, from 1973 to 1976.
. . . .Membership on the commission is by invitation only, since it's inception, at least one of the people in the White House, President or Vice-President, have been a member.
. . . .Since it's inception, 10 Secretaries of State have been Trilateral Commission members, and all 3 Federal Reserve Chairs; Burns, Volker and Greenspan. Ben Bernanke is not presently a member, but his invite is expected soon.

. . . .The commission's charter and work are based on a book written by Brzezinski in 1969, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic Era. Some selected passages are below:

"nation-state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."
"Realism, however, forces us to recognize that the necessary political innovation will not come from direct constitutional reform, desirable as that would be. The needed change is more likely to develop incrementally and less overtly...in keeping with the American tradition of blurring distinctions between public and private institution.”
“Tension is unavoidable as man strives to assimilate the new into the framework of the old. For a time the established framework resiliently integrates the new by adapting it in a more familiar shape. But at some point the old framework becomes overloaded. The newer input can no longer be redefined into traditional forms, and eventually it asserts itself with compelling force. Today, though, the old framework of international politics - with their spheres of influence, military alliances between nation-states, the fiction of Accordingly, the internal authority of the state supersedes that of all other bodies.', Sovereignty, doctrinal conflicts arising from nineteenth century crises - is clearly no longer compatible with reality.”

. . . From a Brazilian newspaper interview:

“When I speak of the present international system I am referring to relations in specific fields, most of all among the Atlantic countries; commercial, military, mutual security relations, involving the international monetary fund, NATO etc. We need to change the international system for a global system in which new, active and creative forces recently developed - should be integrated. This system needs to include Japan. Brazil, the oil producing countries, and even the USSR, to the extent which the Soviet Union is willing to participate in a global system.”

. . . .From an absolutely brilliant piece of investigative work by David Wood on the Trilateral Commission:

When asked if Congress would have an expanded or diminished role in the new system, Brzezinski declared "...the reality of our times is that a modern society such as the U.S. needs a central coordinating and renovating organ which cannot be made up of six hundred people."

Understanding the philosophy of the Trilateral Commission was and is the only way we can reconcile the myriad of apparent contradictions in the information filtered through to us in the national press. For instance, how was it that the Marxist regime in Angola derived the great bulk of its foreign exchange from the offshore oil operations of Gulf Oil Corporation? Why did Andrew Young insist that "Communism has never been a threat to Blacks in Africa"? Why did the U.S. funnel billions in technological aid to the Soviet Union and Communist China? Why did the U.S. apparently help its enemies while chastising its friends?

A similar and perplexing question is asked by millions of Americans today: Why do we spend trillions on the “War on Terror” around the world and yet ignore the Mexican/U.S. border and the tens of thousands of illegal aliens who freely enter the U.S. each and every month?

This hardly suggests the Great American Dream. It is very doubtful that Americans would agree with Brzezinski or the Trilateral Commission. It is the American public who is paying the price, suffering the consequences, but not understanding the true nature of the situation.

. . . . . . .Brzezinski (BTW, a noted conservative and father of conservative talk-show host on Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski) was, in some ways, not that different than many of my friends, who speak of the times we live in now as the birth throes of a kind of evolution of human consciousness. The difference is this, and uniquely human. You, me, each of us, may have our own concept of how humanity and society is evolving, and in so doing, build our own paradigms. It becomes the problem then, when another paradigm is envisioned and built and by someone with the means, the financing and power to carry them out. Brzezinski saw humanity as in the fourth and final stages of it's evolution in building culture and society. This fourth and final stage he envisioned as The Technotronic era, thus the title of his book, and saw it as the ultimate triumph of rational humanism.

. . . .Please note, that I have not even begun the touch the time period since this last January of '09 and hated or revered (depending on who you are) Obama. All of what I've written so far is groundwork that was laid for Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2. Eight years altogether, between 2 of them, of conservative, Republican rule, and I use the word "rule" deliberately. Again, depending on who you are, they either were exactly what you thought they were, or you are now having your eyes opened up and finding out how badly you are being used.

. . . .One person, one man tried to raise a warning flag back in 1979, Barry Goldwater:

“The Trilateral Commission is international and is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power – political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical.”

. . . .I'm going to make a note here, and ask you not to raise your hands and yell "Hallelujah" at the above quote if you now identify yourself as, or have identified yourself within the last 10 years as a Republican or a Conservative. Barry would have hated you. He warned consistently about his party, The Republican Party that was born of an anti-slavery President, that was once the inclusive, all under one umbrella party of the people, the party of inclusion and progress; being taken over by the "religious kooks" and becoming the travesty that it's become today. (I can only imagine him spitting fire, screaming and kicking at the election of Audra Shay, that hate-mongering racist queen, as the president of the Young Republicans this weekend. See posts below from the previous days for that story).

. . . What I'm hoping that you're seeing by now, is that it's necessary to lay groundwork, a basis of fact, to try and explain to you what's happened, why it's happening, and how ridiculous the political posturing and political theater that everyone is participating in right now is. I'm hoping by putting it out small chunks that are easy to digest to be able to put the narrative together for you, that it really is all related, that is really is all one big spider's web. Everything, from both Gulf Wars, the revolution in Iran, the current global economic depression, health care reform, immigration reform, Russia, China, and America's position; the whole kitchen sink.
. . . .Yes, there's a book or two's worth of research behind it. But today's society and attention span demand that it get put out in small, digestible chunks, so who knows how long this will take, but the committment is this, I'll put it out there every day. You read it, click the links, do your own research, and when it's done. Prove me wrong.

. . .You won't be able to.

. . . So for the rest of this week along, all we'll do is look at members of the CFR and Trilateral Commission, past and present, and what positions they've been in at different crisis points in our recent history.

. . . .To try and give you a clue as to globalisation, catch this Washington Post piece on the opening of India's first Wal-Mart.

. . . .The Sotomayor hearings open today. Catch them here.

. . . . . I've covered Sarah Palin ad nauseum, but yet one more pertinent fact puts the meat behind calling her reasons for resigning, as she stated in her announcement, her press conference and on Facebook, a lie. By leaving, she's actually going to cost her State of Alaska more, by cleaning up behind her narcissistic, self-absorbed ass. As reported by Max Blumenthal, her resignation has caused a Constitutional crisis in Alaska that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that weren't in the cash-strapped states' budget to clean up.

. . . .Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . . .Kiss your kids; Tell the ones you love out loud that you do, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday, or tomorrow, it's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This ain't no dress rehearsal, the curtain's gone up and you're on baby, there's no turning back. This is the sights, the words, the sounds, of my taking charge of my own life and changing my own world. What the fuck have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Sunday (Morning, and it ain't comin' down easy)

Sunday July 12, 2009

. . . . .Goooooood Morning Vietnam!

. . . . .I need to straighten out a couple of misconceptions that some people have picked up right away. (1) I do this for free, I'm not owned by anyone's monetary contributions, influence or sway, what you get is my brain, free from someone else's influence. (2) I'm not some namby-pamby writer, closeted away somewhere. Not some nancy-boy corporate type salesman or corporate lap dog. (3) I'm an electrician, someone who was taught his trade by his father, an independent contractor. I've always been able to provide for my family with my own skills and talents, produced by my hands. I've built nuclear power plants, worked in the Automotive industry for Ford Motor Company (the only one of the Big 3 who didn't need bailout money) and work out now at sea on oil platforms, drilling and producing oil and gas. I do this in my free time, not work time that I'm paid to work for, and have the time to do it because I turned my fucking TV off!

. . . .In other words, at the center of the storm. So. . . .if you want to talk to me about nuclear power, alternative energy, the national electrical grid, American manufacturing, the automotive industry, union labor, oil drilling, oil production, oil depletion, the economies of American manufacturing, America's oil consumption you're free to your opinion!!!! But that's all it is to me, opinion, and, if you haven't worked and lived in those industries, day in and day out, using your talents and skills, all it is to me is uninformed opinion - unless, and this is huge, unless you have done your research with fact and can bring logic to the debate with some critical analysis and rational, logical reasoning. My friends, my close friends, the people that I associate with know this! That's why they're my friends, they use their mind and are to a fault, brilliant people who constantly challenge me and force me to stretch my mind and be able to use fact to present the position.

. . . . .I suppose that's why polls as so meaningless to me. Every thinking, sentient being is entitled to an opinion. Opinion is not fact, and if it is uninformed opinion, it's dangerous.

. . . .It's also why I ride Fox News so hard. Rupert Murdoch's group of ass-clowns are, as an entitity, some of the most dangerous mind thieves in America.

. . . But I have no sympathy for you if you're one of their slavish minions. All that indicates to me is that you very willingly, very consciously have decided to turn your mind off and let a group of corporate entertainers do your thinking for you. My friend Dave uses the term "bovine population" when referring to the American public at large. I think it's apt, though personally I prefer the word "sheeple".

. . . .It's worse if you proudly refer to yourself as a "Dittohead". That sweaty, treasonous, traitorous drug-addled gasbag is one of the most dangerous liars in America.

. . . .I very, very deliberately left a couple of things out of Friday's post (see the posts below this one) about Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan and the 1979-1982 time period. More than one reader did some homework and filled in the blanks. For everyone else here are the two things deliberately left out:
- The Vice-President of the United States who told Saddam Hussein how to deploy his Air Force against Iran during the Iran-Iraq was and oversaw the covert U.S. aid and helped fortify his (Hussein's) position during the Iran-Iraq War? George H.W. Bush.
- The Vice-President of the United States who aided Rep. Charlie Wilson and the C.I.A. in arming and helping the Afghan Resistance against the Soviet Union; a resistance led by a young Saudi who was a member of the Royal Family, one Osama bin Laden? George H.W. Bush.

. . . .Tomorrow will start Chapter 1 of the Grand Unified Field Theory of Damn Near Everything that's going on. Friday's column (below) on Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan and 9/11 was the intro, since those events set the stage for one of 4 distinct things going on right now, 4 things that are distinctly separate, but are part of achieving one common goal. In prep work, I've asked a couple of times what happened in 1982 that became the linchpin behind today's current global economic crisis. Here's a hint, it was the signing of a bill. Now, that was the event. It's precursor, it's nodal point, happened back in 1976, and actually boils down to two people and a book. Enough tease, the chapter starts tomorrow.

. . . .Let's hear it for the Republican Party, who faced a Judgement Day yesterday, and who passed with flying colors. The Young Republicans met in Indiana yesterday, a group of Republicans under 40. Their convention was to elect a new leader, the front-runner Audra Shay, had been in the spotlight all week long due to her Facebook (captured forever) racism; (referencing her support of a friend of hers referring to the Obama Administration as a bunch of "coons") and her Facebook (captured forever) references herself to "Obama in a noose". Yay and thumbs up for the Republican Party, last night they chose hate over inclusiveness, they decided to finally "out" their own racism, their own hatred and exclusiveness and elected her chairperson, overwhelmingly. Thank you, thank you, thank you for finally, on a National Stage showing your true colors. May this be yet another flat tire on a bus that truly needs to be driven off a cliff. These victims of Obama Derangement Syndrome, which will be listed in the DSM-IV soon, I swear, exhibit the same characteristics as those victims of Bush Derangement Syndrome did for those 8 years. It's often accompanied by comparing Obama to Hitler, (which would make old Adolf roll in his grave, a mixed race person for God's sake!) and calling him a "socialist" in the same breath. See what Cognitive Dissonance does to a person?

. . . Speaking of Cognitive Dissonance and Obama Derangement Syndrome, the queen of both of those Sarah Palin and Peggy Noonan, one of the best conservative minds around and her column in the Wall Street Journal this week with the last word on Palin and her resignation:

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

o wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.

We are going to need the best.

. . . . .Paul Krugman, in the New York Times, one of only 3 economists who has it together on the National scene right now, Roubini and Zandi being the other 2, cutting through the fog and bullshit of misinformation, half-truths, misconceptions and lies around health care:

The Congressional Budget Office has looked at the future of American health insurance, and it works.

A few weeks ago there was a furor when the budget office “scored” two incomplete Senate health reform proposals — that is, estimated their costs and likely impacts over the next 10 years. One proposal came in more expensive than expected; the other didn’t cover enough people. Health reform, it seemed, was in trouble.

But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.

And even if we didn’t have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured are disproportionately young adults, whose medical costs tend to be relatively low. The big spending is mainly on the elderly, who are already covered by Medicare.

Second, even now the uninsured receive a considerable (though inadequate) amount of “uncompensated” care, whose costs are passed on to the rest of the population. So the net cost of giving the uninsured explicit coverage is substantially less than it might seem.

Putting these observations together, what sounds at first like a daunting prospect — extending coverage to most or all of the 45 million people in America without health insurance — should, in the end, add only a few percent to our overall national health bill. And that’s exactly what the budget office found when scoring the HELP proposal.

Now, about those specifics: The HELP plan achieves near-universal coverage through a combination of regulation and subsidies. Insurance companies would be required to offer the same coverage to everyone, regardless of medical history; on the other side, everyone except the poor and near-poor would be obliged to buy insurance, with the aid of subsidies that would limit premiums as a share of income.

Employers would also have to chip in, with all firms employing more than 25 people required to offer their workers insurance or pay a penalty. By the way, the absence of such an “employer mandate” was the big problem with the earlier, incomplete version of the plan.

And those who prefer not to buy insurance from the private sector would be able to choose a public plan instead. This would, among other things, bring some real competition to the health insurance market, which is currently a collection of local monopolies and cartels.

The budget office says that all this would cost $597 billion over the next decade. But that doesn’t include the cost of insuring the poor and near-poor, whom HELP suggests covering via an expansion of Medicaid (which is outside the committee’s jurisdiction). Add in the cost of this expansion, and we’re probably looking at between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion.

There are a number of ways to look at this number, but maybe the best is to point out that it’s less than 4 percent of the $33 trillion the U.S. government predicts we’ll spend on health care over the next decade. And that in turn means that much of the expense can be offset with straightforward cost-saving measures, like ending Medicare overpayments to private health insurers and reining in spending on medical procedures with no demonstrated health benefits.

So fundamental health reform — reform that would eliminate the insecurity about health coverage that looms so large for many Americans — is now within reach. The “centrist” senators, most of them Democrats, who have been holding up reform can no longer claim either that universal coverage is unaffordable or that it won’t work.

The only question now is whether a combination of persuasion from President Obama, pressure from health reform activists and, one hopes, senators’ own consciences will get the centrists on board — or at least get them to vote for cloture, so that diehard opponents of reform can’t block it with a filibuster.

This is a historic opportunity — arguably the best opportunity since 1947, when the A.M.A. killed Harry Truman’s health-care dreams. We’re right on the cusp. All it takes is a few more senators, and HELP will be on the way.

. . . .Outta here for the day

. . . .Got your back

. . . . Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do; seize the precious moments, before they're taken from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, no one gets out alive and we don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. So. . .it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right fucking here, right fucking now. What are you doing about it?

The Desolation Angel

Saturday Mid-July (The Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything continues)

Saturday July 11, 2009

. . . .Enjoy the playlist, there will be a radical change-up coming at you. Fair warning, by Monday, if you don't like rock and roll, and I mean real rock and roll, you're probably going to want to turn your speakers down. Don't let the fact that I revel in the Red Dirt category of music, or what's called Heartland Rock, or singer-songwriters fool you. This is one over 50 guy who also loves Five Finger Death Punch, Metallica, Saliva, Drowning Pool, Hellyeah and Hollywood Undead and they full well match my mood lately. Get ready!

. . . .I said it yesterday, and I'll keep repeating it. You can say what you'd like, but this isn't "conspiracy theory", that's far too convenient to throw out there. This is fact, easily found and easily verified, that's why I provide the links to it, for you to do the fact checking and truth finding for yourself. Truth be told, there is a minority of you who won't back check the facts and will continue to live in denial.

. . . The real problem with finding fact out? It's easy to become disillusioned quickly, and to give up. Me, I don't know how to give up, I don't know how to quit.

. . . .I've said it before; I live in a world where the Laws of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry reign supreme. Simple reason, that's how the Universe works. Behind everything is an equation. Like all equations, it can be put together a number of ways, but it will only prove true one way. Now, remember that logic is an equation as well, and can be put together any number of ways, but will only prove true one way.

. . . .Cognitive dissonance:definition - psychological conflict resulting from holding two incongruous ideas simultaneously. Simple definition - Your brain misfiring because you're attempting to maintain the reality of two completely oppositional ideas about something at the same time in your head, flying in the face of logic and evidence.

. . . .Yes, the posts go up everday, with new and different items, commentary and links. The bulk of what's happening now (The Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything Damn Thing That's Going On Now; TGUFTEDTTGON for short, try and pronounce that) is a piece that I started a long, long time ago, and didn't know what I'd do with it. I set the stage yesterday with a prelude; that prelude being the stage that was set between 1979-1982 with the event(s) that set the table for something much, much larger. Again, links were provided to give a factual basis for everything listed.

. . . .Here's the deal, we're about to launch off into the actual "thing" itself. Yesterday, with the events of 1979-1982 listed and a complete listing of the pertinent events afterwords, up until 2008 was that introduction, today and tomorrow are an interlude, a deep breath, before plunging off on Monday into the meat of it.

. . . . . What you'll find, if you stick with me, over the next few weeks, no matter who you are; everything you thought you knew is wrong and that you are being lied to, have been lied to. You'll find out that your participation in the daily political theater known as Red vs. Blue; conservative vs. liberal; Democrat vs. Republican is precisely what's needed to keep the theater going, the outrage and anger are channeled against one another, as opposed to focusing on it's true sources. You'll find out that the game is rigged, you never knew the rules, and you can't win, at least with the game, it's rules and it's parameters the way they are now. You'll find out what you can do, and what's useless to do, and you get to make that choice, once you know. You'll find out, if you define yourself as Republican and conservative, that you've been lied to and used for the last couple of decades; if you define yourself as a Liberal, a Democrat, a Progressive, you'll find out that you've been lied to and used. If you call yourself a Moderate, an Independent or a Centrist, God help you.

. . . .I've had several friends who've asked me to put this together over time. For various reasons, most of it being the paranoid society that we live in, and everyone's ability to Google someone's name and find out what they're associated with, will never be given the privilege and the acknowledgement necessary, but since they deal with the public and make their living that way, completely understandable. Know that this wouldn't have happened without you.

. . . .What I'm going to do is this; I'm going to ask you to re-read Friday's post, just below and let it sink in, let the facts as they lay out in the timeline sink in. I'm going to ask you to do some of you own investigation, as we go along over the next few days and weeks, into nodal points, the periods of time where everything changed, where the course of human history, society and culture changed. It was never an event itself, it was always the period of time beforehand and the events that helped shape it. I'm going to ask you to spend some time doing some background work in chaos theory, the mathematical theory that looks at complex systems and supposedly chaotic, random events to find out that everything can be influenced and there are mathematical equations behind everything. I'm going to ask you one questions today? What happened in 1982 that changed the entire game? That changed absolutely everything, and you never knew it happened. Over this week, along with the normal everyday "stuff", we'll take 7 days, starting on Monday to show, with facts and evidence, how the current global economic crisis was planned for, was manipulated, and how it's being manipulated now, and at great profit, and with an endgame in mind.

. . . .I'm going to ask you, regardless of anything else, to send this along to your friends, either by e-mail, by link, by Facebook share, regardless. Anyone who knows me well knows a few things, I'm going to write what I write regardless of what anyone thinks, I'm going to be able to back it up and prove it with facts, figures and numbers, and I really, really don't care if you agree or disagree, the idea would be for you to think!!!!

. . . .WAKE UP!!!!!

. . . .Outta here until Monday

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the one you love out loud that you do, seize the precious moments, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate terms and conditions around how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday, or tomorrow, it's about right here, right now and it isn't a dress rehearsal. The curtain's gone up, it's real, it's right now, and you're on. Change yourself, change your life, and change the world. This is the sight and sound of someone who isn't afraid to put it out there, what in the Blue Hell have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Friday (The Grand Unified Field Theory of almost everything Part 1)

Friday July 10, 2009

. . . . .Yup, the first couple of songs in the playlist are the same, hope you stick around long enough to find a couple of surprises down the ways a little. My favorite? Seether, of all people, doing an absolutely killer cover of "Careless Whisper" by Wham, the old George Michael band. Who'd a thunk it?

. . . .So yesterday, actually the last couple of days, I spent haranguing you that you, well, not you personally, but a whole bunch of folks didn't have a clue as to what was going on, because you let your media heroes, be it Fox News, the distortion kings or MSNBC or CNN spoonfeed you exactly what they wanted you to hear and believe. I'm not backing off that position. I said, there's actually a way, with facts and figures, historical data to start connecting dots and putting a picture together, a Grand Unified Field Theory of What There is going on today, the whole ball of wax and it's roots lie back 40 some odd years. By the way, the underlined hyperlinks lead back to sources, and you won't find a Wikipedia, Huffington Post or Daily Kos entry in the bunch, fact is fact and it can always be found, once a foundation of fact is laid, then logic easily follows. I said I'd start with the Mideast; specifically, Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan, but most importantly, the one left out of the picture, Saudi Arabia, and that's what we'll do.

. . . Remember, this is the Grand Unified Field Theory of What the Hell is Happening, so be sure to check back tomorrow and the next days for more installments.

. . . . .I've talked ad nauseum about nodal points in history, those points where everything changed; the years 1979-1982 were one such point.

. . . .For a complete, rational, logical understanding of the Mideast and how the situation developed. There are some parameters that have to be defined. The first understanding has to come from a religious basis, not a governmental one, since that is the driving force behind the conflict in that region. What is going to happen here today is a small lesson in geopolitics, the larger political picture in the world. You'll be smarter when it's done.

. . . . . .The dominant religion in the Mideast is Islam, the world's second largest religion. Islam, Christianity and Judaism are very closely related and are referred to collectively as "Abrahamic" religions, since they, all 3, trace their roots to the covenant that Abraham made with God in the Old Testament. Islam is more closely related to Christianity than Judaism. Both believe in Jesus' virgin birth, and his crucifixion. The subtle difference is that in Islam there is not a belief that Jesus died during the crucifixion and was resurrected 3 days later, but instead ascended into Heaven during the crucifixion, and both affirm the second coming of Jesus. One interesting twist is to a true Muslim, Christians and Jews are respected as "People of the Book", while Christianity rejects Islam. I suggest doing some more factual comparison here, at Religion Facts.

. . . . Not all Muslims are radicals and terrorists, it is the world's second largest religion, behind Christianity and will soon eclipse it in numbers, due to population growth, and become the world's largest religion. This is being driven by higher birth rates in the portions of the world that are currently Muslim. Some fast facts to bear in mind about Islam. Only 18% of Muslims live in the Middle East, are the people referred to as Arabs; in fact, 12% of Arabs, Middle Eastern residents are Christian. The four countries with the largest population of Muslims are Indonesia (171 million), Pakistan (119 million), Bangladesh (100 million) and India (100 million). There isn't a "growth curve" with Christianity. The number of Christians as a percentage of the world's population has remained flat for some time. By population growth curve projections, Islam will pass Christianity as the world's dominant population, by sheer numbers, around the year 2025. You can, if you choose, fact check here and/or here. For reference, check the work of Samuel Huntington, an American historian and probably the most respected foreign policy expert of the last 3 decades.

. . . . The criminals and terrorists belonging to al-Quaeda are Muslim, as are the members of Hezbollah, Hamas and various other terrorist groups that are the enemies of the United States. The Taliban are Muslim religious fundamentalists, who demand that anywhere they have political sway, the entire populace live under Shariiya law, and a comparison, if any can be drawn, would be to the various radical, fundamentalist Christian sects here in the U.S., much like snake-handlers or Mormon polygamists.

. . . The 2009 estimates of recoverable oil reservoirs (remember that all data is self-reported, or extrapolated in estimates by geologists) for the pertinent countries we're talking about here are:
Saudi Arabia - 266.75 billion barrels
Iran - 138.4 billion barrels
Iraq - 115 billion barrels
Fact check it here.

. . . .These are the extremely important numbers to remember as we move forward. The United States, even if we opened up every available reservoir, even if we drilled everywhere possible that we aren't drilling now, even we somehow managed to start pulling oil from the fabled Barret reservoir, which we don't have the technology to do, has only a total available reservoir of 20.97 billion barrels.

. . . .The American public, good patriots all of us, participates daily in the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, lining the pockets of the Saudi royal family and Ahmadenijad and the Ayatollah Khameini everyday, people whose long term geo-political interests are not those of the United States. The United States consumes oil at the rate of 20.7 million barrels per day. At current consumption rates, assuming no growth on the part of China or India, the two fastest rising industrial economies, the world has 15,488 days left to the end of oil, remember, oil is not a renewable resource. Doing the math, that's 42.5 years.

. . . .Everyone lived through last summer's oil spikes and attendant gas and diesel prices when the speculators drove the price of oil per barrel up to over $140 a barrel. Currently, as a matter of fact, today it's trading at $58.87 per barrel. Now, imagine what's going to happen as China and India, the world's two fastest growing industrial economies ramp up further, and as the end of oil gets within the 40 year mark, about 2 1/2 years from now, and what's going to happen to the price of gas per gallon and diesel per gallon, all pertinent facts as we go into the global economic depression and market manipulation over the next few days.

. . . .The other last pertinent is the Iraq-Turkey pipeline, built during the Iran-Iraq War, designed to allow Iraq to export oil without going through Iran, or risking freighters in the Straits, and go straight to market for export. The pipeline was closed during the first Gulf War, but is now reopened. In 2001, Saudi Arabia, through ARAMCO, the Arab-American Company, the primary oil producer in Saudi Arabia, took over ownership of the pipeline. They are a joint business venture that extends way back whose ownership is the Saudi royal princes, Total oil and ConocoPhillips. Check the date. 2001.

. . . .Alright, now we've set the base, and can go back to 1979.

- Jimmy Carter was President of the United States
- Very late in 1978, the Iranian Revolution had stopped production of oil in Iran.
- The price per barrel of crude oil jumped from $14 per barrel in 1978 to $35 per barrel in 1980.
- The Iranian Revolution, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, led to the overthrow Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran and his Secret Police, the Savak, the installation of the Shariiya law, the installation of the High Cleric (Khomeini), and the installation of the High Council, the Mullahs.
- After Pahlavi left the country, the American Embassy was stormed on November 4th, and the Revolutionary Council took 66 American hostages.
- Carter unsuccessfully negotiated for the remainder of his term for their release, which did not occur until 444 days later, the last 52 hostages being released a few hours after Carter left office, and Reagan was sworn in.
- In 1980, a secret military mission to free the hostages ends in total disaster in a sandstorm in central Iraq.
- In 1979, a young member of the Saudi royal family, an educated engineer, traveled to the United States to Indiana and Los Angeles; Indiana to meet a Palestinian radical named Abdullah Azzam. The member of the Saudi royal family who traveled here? Osama Bin Laden.
- In 1979, the Soviets invade Afghanistan, and the Soviet-Afghan war begins.
- In 1979, Saddam Hussein took control of Iraq. A Ba'athist, Hussein was an entirely secular man, who had no use for Islam, and it's tenets or Christianity. Hussein was only concerned with power and money.
- In 1980, concurrently with the Soviet-Afghan War, the Iran-Iraq war begins.It last until August 20, 1988. It is essentially a war with the Shi'ite sect of Islam, which since the revolution has been the dominant sect in Iran. The United States supplies 4,508 missles to Iraq to aid in it's efforts to achieve victory over Iran. Iran acknowledges over 300,000 dead; but military strategists put the actual figure at near a million. Iraq loses approximately 375,000 dead. In both cases, the extreme loss of population and oil production inevitably alters the course of history for both countries.
- In 1988, oil price per barrel slips below $14, despite curtailed production from both Iran and Iraq, due to the war, decimated populations and damaged facilities.
- In 1988, the terrorist network of the criminals known as al-Quaeda is established by Osama bin Laden, the member of the Saudi royal family, bringing together Sunni Arabs who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Based in Afghanistan, al-Quaeda helped recruit, train and finance Jihadists for the Soviet resistance.
- In 1990-1991, the First Gulf War is successfully fought by the United States in defense of Kuwait, led by President George H. W. Bush. Baghdad is not invaded, and Saddam Hussein is not removed from power. [Presumably, a brilliant strategic move on Bush's part. Hussein was the balance of power in the region, keeping Iran and it's Cleric and Council of Mullahs in check. As well, Saddam Hussein had expressed antipathy and outright hostility towards Al-Quaeda and Osama bin Laden. Hussein, being an entirely secular Ba'athist had no understanding of, nor use for, bin Laden's jihadist brand of fanaticism. His Revolutionary Guard was able to maintain both borders, Iran and Afghanistan, and keep the region in line.]
- In 1993, Ramzi Yousef leads a terrorist cell in the unsuccessful truck bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. The group, presumably, is al-Quaeda backed.
- In 1996, the terrorist group of criminals, al-Quaeda, with a suicide boat, successfully attacks the U.S.S. Cole.
- In January of 1997, President Bill Clinton begins his second term.
- In 1998, the Indonesian intelligence service identifies al-Quaeda and Osama bin Laden as the leader of that group, plotting an attack on the United States.
- In 1999, The British Intelligence Service tries to warn the U.S. that al-Quaeda has plans to use "commercial aircraft" in "unconventional ways" "possibly as flying bombs".
- March 1999, Germany's intelligence service provides the name of phone number of one of the hijackers to the CIA.
- August 12, 2000 the Italian Intelligence Service wiretaps an al-Quaeda cell in Milan, Italy and learns of a plan for a massive aircraft based strike on U.S. soil. With FBI help, the conversations are translated. In early 2001, the FBI and the Italian Intelligence Service learn of a pair of brothers headed to the United States for a large attack, a "very, very, secret plan".
- In January of 2001, George Walker Bush begins his first term as President.
- In June of 2001, the Germans warn the CIA of a plan to use aircraft on U.S. soil in a large attack, in the summer of 2001, the Israeli intelligence service warns of a plan to use aircraft. On June 4, 2001 three Afghans are overheard discussing a large surprise attack on New York City.
- On June 13, 2001 Egypt warns that Osama bin Laden wants to assassinate President Bush with a large explosive-filled plane.
- In July of 2001, India tries to warn the U.S. of an attack.
- On July 16, 2001, the British intelligence agency, MI-6, tries to warn the U.S. that al-Quaeda is in the final stages of preparing for a massive attack on the U.S.
-In late July 2001, the Taliban foreign minister tries to warn the U.S. of an attack. In that same month, Eqypt tries to warn the U.S. of 20 al-Quaeda operatives in the United States, 4 being trained to fly. The C.I.A. isn't interested.
- In late July 2001, Argentina's Jewish community receives a warning that a major attack is planned inside the United States, the information is relayed to the CIA
- In the late summer of 2001, Jordan warns the U.S. that there will be a major aircraft based attack inside the U.S. from information picked up by their intelligence agencies.
- In August of 2001, a Morrocan intelligence operative who had infiltrated al-Quaeda warned U.S. intelligence agencies of a large scale, imminent attack in New York.
- In August of 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin warns the United States that suicide pilots are training for attacks on U.S. targets.
- August 23, 2001 Mossad gives the CIA a list of terrorists living in the United States, 4 of the hijackers are on it, followed on Sept. 4, 2001 that a massive attack is imminent
- On September 7, 2001 the French Intelligence Agency gives very specific information to the CIA about the WTC attacks.
- On September 7, 2001 an Italian priest is told of an attack using airplanes against the U.S., he immediately relays the information to politicians and police, consciously breaking his vows, so the information can be relayed to the CIA
- On September 11, 2001, two employees of an Israeli based corporation are given instant text messages two hours before the attack, working in the Towers, warning them of the attacks.
- September 11, 2001 19 criminal terrorists, members of al-Quaeda, men between the ages of 19-35, fly two airplanes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and the one destined for the White House is brought down by it's passengers, killing all aboard, before it's deadly mission can be accomplished. al-Quaeda is led by a Saudi national, a member of the Royal Family, Osama bin Laden. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. 3,000 American citizens are killed in the attacks.
- On March 19, 2003 the bombing of Baghdad begins for the second Gulf War, with invasion following soon after. Saddam Hussein, an open critic of Osama bin Laden, who had barred bin Laden from the country, and refused, with great anger all overtures to meet, is said by the Adminstration in power to have ties to 9-11. When this proves false, it is stated that Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction, again proven false. Over 4,000 good, brave, American soldiers, of an all-volunteer army lose their lives in the war. Their sacrifice and their service under the flag needs to be respected and honored. Our wounded need to be cared for and honored. Every young man or woman who volunteers to put that uniform on, serve under the Flag of the United States needs to be thanked and respected.
- Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, the mastermind of al-Quaeda, fades back into Afghanistan, his traditional base for over 3 decades now, and al-Quaeda, the criminal terrorist network of Jihadists grows stronger, in strength, numbers and financing over the course of 7 years, while the campaign in Iraq continues.
- On October 23, 2001, President George W. Bush suspends the 4th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America as it applies to U.S. citizens, through executive memorandum. It is in place until October 6, 2008. President George W. Bush suspends the 1st Amendment of the Constitution of the United States on October 23, 2001 through executive memorandum, in place until October 6, 2008. President George W. Bush suspends Posse Comitatus with the same set of executive orders.
- Osama bin Laden still remains free, and al-Quaeda and the Taliban have now infected Pakistan, and are 60 miles from Islamabad, in the Swat valley, and are 60 miles from a nuclear arsenal.
- The Saudi royal family, of whom bin Laden is a member, enjoys the profit from oil trading at over $140 dollars a barrel in the summer of 2008, up from it's 2001 price of $28 dollars a barrel.
- Iran runs roughshod over it's populace, and continues to develop a nuclear program, free from Saddam Hussein keeping them in check.

. . . . .The timeline and factcheck for the above listed foreign intelligence sources can be checked here, at History Commons.

. . . .I've tried to leave the hyperbole and invective out, what's there is facts, simply facts. I won't draw your conclusions for you. When things are based on fact, the logic becomes easy to draw conclusions. Use your own mind.

. . . .On a personal level, I hope this begins to explain to some of my readers my complete distrust of any member of government of the United States of America in the last 40 years. I really have no care whether or not they be Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, Red or Blue, as far as my personal convictions are concerned, they turned their backs on this country and it's citizens. I also hope it begins to explain my particular derision for those who identify themselves as Republicans, or Conservatives and now clamor like small children squabbling over a popsicle that somehow "Obama is wrong" and rail and squeal for a return to what we had. What we had in the previous Administration sacrificed 7,000 American citizens and soldiers in the name of securing a profit for themselves in the future, with no thought or conscience. What we had in the previous Administration suspended dearly fought for rights and amendments with the stroke of a pen and no notice to the American people. What we had in the previous Administration betrayed you, yet you clamor for them to return. Just like they wanted all along. I cannot blame a President, I've not sat in that seat, nor can have any idea what the responsibility must be; but as a group, the previous Republican administration betrayed the American people. The money being banked now is blood money, stained with the Red of the American flag.

. . . .Outta here

. . . Tomorrow and over the weekend, the short form of the roots of the current global economic depression, where it came from, and what can't be done about it, and how those dots connect to these above.

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're snatched from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive. We don't get the luxury of dictating the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right fucking here and now. This ain't no dress rehearsal and the curtain's gone up, you're on. This is the sight, the sound, the words of one man changing his own world, changing himself, and not being afraid to take a stand. What the fuck have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Thursday (Storm's coming - but you're not paying attention anyhow)

Thursday July 10, 2009

. . . . .Got to put a mention in here of Rescue Me, my one hour of entertainment television a week. Tommy Gavin remains my hero (or my doppelganger), I'm not sure which. The writing is brilliant, and again, the final few minutes of the show were twisted, smart, funny and touching all at the same time. But, just to be clear, my one hour a week of fall television is on the same network, and every time an ad for The Sons of Anarchy comes on, I do get a little damp and sweaty. I'm especially excited to find out that Henry Rollins has joined the cast of that show, another one of my heroes. It's like Piney said to Jax in last season's finale with the show's final line for the season. . . . . . . . . . "Time for a change"

. . . . .First one up in the playlist today is from the new Michael Stanley CD, Just Another Night. The cut is called "Tupelo Rain", and it's one of a number of brilliant cuts on the album. Ranging from the opening cut "Just Another Night" with it's poignant look at growing older and trying to go home to it's final masterpiece "Winter" a 9 minute look at growing older, and it's final "hidden" track, which will be played at my funeral, thank you very much; all the tracks are Michael Stanley work. His backing band on this one is the Resonators, which contains a few members of the old Michael Stanley Band.

. . . . .If you're one of the regular readers from the North Coast, then you know who Michael Stanley is, and have always known it. Flashback to the latter half of the 70's and growing up and graduating at the exact mid-point of the 70's in Comstock, Michigan. I was the kid in High School who played Football, was in Drama and Debate, got great grades, but also hung out with everyone down in auto shop, and partied hard on the weekends (well, weeknights too, sorry Mom). Long, long curly hair past my shoulders, tinted wire rim glasses, and hung out at the record stores in town. Boogie Records to be specific, the clerks knew me on a first name basis, and held the new releases for me. The musical scene was in complete flux at that point in time; Janis, Jimi and Jim were gone. Duane and Barry Oakley had just died; the Faces had broken up; EC was in the throes of heroin addiction and there was a lull. Disco was threatening to take everything over, after the BeeGee's and the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever had infected the nation's consciousness like some kind of alien virus. The only salvation was a skinny kid from New Jersey, whose first two albums I had, and who had released Born To Run, a kid from Ann Arbor named Bob Seger, who played and toured locally absolutely relentlessly and who played a particular to the Midwest hard-driving funk and R & B influenced kind of rock and roll, a skinny kid from the farm town of Seymour, Indiana who was called John Cougar at the time, but who was a rebellious little bastard back then who knew what he thought rock and roll should sound like, and a guy named Michael Stanley from Cleveland, Ohio who was good enough on his first two solo albums to have a backing band made up of people like Joe Walsh, Todd Rundgren and Dan Fogelberg. After his first two solo albums, the Michael Stanley Band was born and I was an acolyte already. Michael Stanley and MSB played rock and roll that felt like, sounded like, smelled like, what it was like to be a teenager and hanging out at the McDonald's at the corner of Riverview and Gull Road on a hot Friday night. Hanging out over the hood of a '72 Nova or a '70 Charger RT for the evening and checking all the hot girls out. The other half of the songs on any given album of the first 4 especially, were epics, that at that point in time, I didn't have the life experience (translate relationships) to appreciate, but I sure did as they got older.

. . . .I was resentful that Michael Stanley never got the national attention, other than a couple of songs that broke the charts nationally, that the other 3 did. In the corporate world of radio programming, he played "heartland rock" like they did, and remained, and still remains a favorite up here in the Midwest. He doesn't know how to quit, and thank the Creator for that. Keep on rockin' Michael, keep on.

. . . .I'm consistently amazed by the number of people in this country that like being stupid. That's the only explanation I can come up with for what I hear, and read every day. People seem to generally fall into two categories; those who somehow believe that there is a political process in this country that works, and that somehow, someway "their person", whether it be a Republican, a Democrat, a media figure is telling them the "truth" and will, if they can only get people to see it their way, lead the situation to a "better" resolution, and actually believes the scripted political theater that they willingly participate in every day. The other group knows that they're screwed, that there isn't any difference at all between the Republicrats and the Demicans, but somehow believe that some imaginary friend for adults will miraculously make everything alright.

. . . .At one point in time, I actually believed that somehow, if people got rid of the emotion, got rid of the hyperbole, stopped getting their news from the entertainment channels that are corporate media outlets, got rid of the belief that somehow there's actually a difference between Republicans and Democrats; instead started using logic, and actually understood that numbers are numbers and the laws of finance, physics, chemistry, mathematics and logic are immutable and will always, always, always, always beat human intention or human wishes and hopes; that somehow people would take their own governance back and begin doing the things that would, on a very personal level, make a difference for their grandchildren and children, and start taking the long view, instead of the short-sighted, "what's in it for me and my wallet in this lifetime" view; start demanding policy that would benefit future generations. The American public's adoration of Sarah Palin is proof to me that we have embraced ignorance and stupidity as somehow being the way to go. Her hallmark of saying that she's just like everyone else is frightening, it means that the phrase the "dumbing down" of America really is true.

. . . .Sarah, oh Sarah. After her rambling, incomprehensible, non-specific resignation statement, speech and Facebook message, her state's newspaper did it's job. This may be a little incomprehensible to most of you that believe a free press's job is to be a dancing lap dog for whatever Republican bullshit spews out of their lying mouths, which appears to be any Republican or Right wing person I happen to run across. It's not however, a free press's job is to investigate and find fact. The one thing that dear little Sarah gave as a reason was the "costs of fighting frivolous ethics charges". The Alaska Daily News did it's job, investigated, and, Lord have mercy!. . . . .Sarah was lying, can you believe that? Lying! Greg Sargent from the Plum Line over at Who Runs Gov reported in:

One of the chief reasons Sarah Palin has given for resigning as Governor of Alaska is that her state’s taxpayers are being forced to spend money defending her government against ethics complaints that would otherwise fund teachers, cops, and road repair.

But in response to our questions, a spokesperson for the Alaska governor’s office just gave us new information that casts serious doubt on this assertion. The revelation makes the resignation episode even stranger, and raises fresh questions about the real reasons for her abrupt departure.

During her resignation speech last week, Palin presented herself as a heroic defender of the taxpayer. She said that money being spent on government lawyers to defend against these “frivolous ethics violations” could be “going to things that are very important, like troopers and roads and teachers and fish research.” Palin repeated exactly the same point this week.

But David Murrow, a spokesperson for the Governor, said in an interview that much of this money was budgeted to the lawyers in advance and would have gone to them anyway, even if state lawyers hadn’t been defending against these ethics complaints.

In response to our questions, the Governor’s office provided us with a detailed breakdown of the millions Palin has claimed has gone to defending against ethics complaints. It does list roughly $1.9 million in expenditures.

But Murrow, the spokesperson, acknowledged to our reporter, Amanda Erickson, that this total was arrived at by adding up attorney hours spent on fending off complaints — based on the fixed salaries of lawyers in the governor’s office and the Department of Law. The money would have gone to the lawyers no matter what they were doing. The complaints are “just distracting them from other duties,” Murrow said.

In other words, while these lawyers might have been free to do other legal work for the state, the ethics complaints have apparently not had the real world impact Palin has claimed, and didn’t drain money away from cops, teachers, roads and other things.

Similarly, TPM reports that there are only three ethics complaints outstanding against the Palin administration in any case — which, combined with the above, casts serious doubts on one of her chief stated reasons for quitting.

Murrow has not responded to folllow-up questions asking him to explain how this squares with Palin’s claims. We’ll update you if he does.

A large chunk of that work went into the personnel board "Troopergate" investigation, which Palin herself initiated on the grounds that a legislation investigation was politicized.

. . . .Someone please tell Sarah, her lawyer and her Daddy that yet another member of the Internet media is unfairly gone after her, please, please.

. . . .I'm astounded, Nancy Pelosi showed some common sense today when she knocked down a resolution honoring Michael Jackson. "It's not necessary" she said.

. . . .Ever wonder why I have so little respect for organized movements from the Left? Here's why. Again, someone didn't do their homework and remember that a President's job, from an executive standpoint, is to represent all the people, which in a Nation as incredibly split as ours involves trying to find a workable, moderate, centrist stance, which despite the disbelief of those of you on the Right who don't do your own homework, don't find your own facts out and listen to Rupert Murdoch's mouthpieces over on Fox, he has done from the beginning. However, the entitlement mentality that exists on the Left is finally reaching a head. From the beginnning, there were grumblings from the Left that he was putting the same old faces in, that he wasn't being progressive enough, that he wasn't giving them what they wanted. Well, the folks over at MoveOn, the grassroots movement that helped elect him, have suddenly forgotten that they live in a Nation of people, some of whom don't share their political sentiments. MoveOn is now taking on Rahm Emmanuel for his remarks over the 4th of July weekend when he indicated that there are "triggers" that would allow the public-plan option to be on the table for negotiation. This after the President asked outside groups to stay out of the debate. It's why I've always said that the current version of the Dems (who definitely aren't the balls-out hawk Dems I grew up with in the 60's) and the Progressive movement consistently does, and will always shoot itself in the foot.

. . . . .Brian Kilmeade, one of the primary reasons that every time Fox & Friends comes on in the morning, a little bit of vomit comes up in the back of my throat, (he's the brown-haired one that sits on the end of the couch and talks and makes his co-hosts wince) opened his mouth and talked again, once again displaying his dazzling intelligence and wit, and proving once and for all, conclusively, on digital tape, captured forever, that Fox News hires the mentally disabled. This incredibly insightful and profound statement? . . . . Americans "keep marrying other species and other ethnics" It keeps our society from being "pure". The subject under discussion? A study that proved that couples who enjoyed long marriages showed a reduced tendency towards Alzheimer's. WTF???

. . . . . The American public's attention span is incredibly short, and incredibly gullible.

. . . .Proof: I hear the phrase constantly from Fox News, from Republicans and the Right "transfer of wealth" and piss my pants laughing. They, along with everyone else participates gladly, smilingly and willingly every day, day in and day out in the largest transfer of wealth in human history every time they, we, I pull up to a gas pump and absolutely pour money into the coffers of countries that aren't exactly friendly to the long-term interests of the United States and it's citizens. But you all damn sure ain't about to switch to biodiesel, or ethanol grown from kelp and the acid found in the stomach of termites. Nope, no sir, you'll keep on pumping.

. . . . .Short form (and I'm gonna get in trouble for this, I don't care) We're fucked! There is a nuclear strike headed right to the heart of everyone's lives, an Armageddon like impact of a perfect storm, and everyone instead is blindly whistling through the graveyard, hoping that it doesn't impact them. It will, it is and it's going to happen within the next 10 years. Your lives will be inexorably, inevitably, altered, for the worse, and it won't do much good to look back at 2006-2009 and say "I wish I'd known" as you're digging graves for your family members.

. . . .I've talked before in this column about chaos theory, the mathematical equations behind massive system change, which is the ability to factor in numerically, the myriad, various factors influencing a system and being able to accurately predict the probabilities behind any event.

. . . .I've talked about nodal points in history; that they're not at the exact point of an event, but happen sometime before. They are the points that influence the destiny of human society and culture.

. . . .We're at the end of one of those nodal points now, and the ability to shape or influence the destiny of future generations is quickly slipping by.

. . . .There is a perfect storm here, it's on us right now, and instead of seeking shelter, most people are out in the storm holding up 20 foot tall metal poles, insisting that the lightning won't strike them, and if it does, well, then that's someone else's fault that lightning is attracted to the nearest tall metal object, it certainly can't be theirs. For the last 8 years, it would President George W. Bush's fault; since January, it'd be President Obama's fault. Blaming either one is idiocy, and proof of ignorance, and further proof that everyone slept through Civics 101, and didn't think it was important.

. . . .Pop quiz: Who is the one person in the government of the United States that doesn't have a vote, and doesn't pass policy through committee, and doesn't craft legislation?

. . . .Answer: The President of the United States

Wake the fuck up!!!!!

. . . .So what do Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan; the current global (don't be so fucking ethnocentric) economic depression; climate change; health care reform; the insurance and financial ubercorporations; the entertainment channels that masquerade as news; the Republicrats and Demicans and current legislation; and religious hypocrisy masquerading as social norms all have to do with one another?

. . . .Absolutely everything, that's what. They are all tied together in a Gordian knot that is unbelieveable. The numbers and evidenced are there.

. . . .So here's the deal on this little masterpiece, call it the Grand Unified Field Theory of what the Hell is happening - tomorrow, Friday, we'll explore first the basic facts behind Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan, Al-Queada, the Taliban and the threat they all currently present to national security and how it all could have been easily avoided, but very intentionally wasn't. (Hint, we're losing in Afghanistan right now, just like the Russians did)
- Over the weekend - The roots of the current global economic depression, why it will continue, and why you don't have a damn thing to say about it, or policy to deal with it. (hint, it goes back to the 1920's, and it has nothing to do with whether or not it was a Republican or Democrat in office, and everything to do with Congress and the Treasury)
- Starting next week - Climate change (I don't use the phrases global warming or global cooling, and there are numbers to back it up. Turn off your TV and ask yourself "Why does the world's largest oil company have a PhD climatologist at the head of a "Climate Change Division"?)
- Health Care and the Insurance and Financial ubercorporations.
- Policy as decided by the 535 money-hungry maniacs on the Hill and the Gang of 100. (Psst! It really doesn't matter whether or not they're Repubs or Dems.)
- Religious (the core of the human experience) hypocrisy and how it influences you and your world.

. . . . .In all cases, there'll be facts, numbers and easily researched and open to the public record history behind each of it.

. . . .My hope, that if I can wake just one person up, if just one new person sees what's going on around them in a new light, maybe, just maybe, we can reach "critical mass" in the consciousness of the American public. Maybe, just maybe wake people up from the Fox News induced coma and quit having them repeat the phrase "Obama is a socialist", maybe just maybe wake people up from the Olbermann induced "It's all George Bush's fault" mantra. As long as people keep believing either one of those, "they" won. That means they've got you believing in the political theater you see every day, and that somehow you still believe that there is some difference between Republicans and Democrats. They're happy, since you don't see that there really are villains in all this, but it isn't who you think it is.

. . . .I challenge you. I challenge you for the next few days, to read, to not prejudge before reading about any of this, I challenge your intellect and your inherent ability to discern fact from fiction. I'll provide facts and numbers. I'll tie it all together for you, and I challenge you to prove me wrong, without invective, name-calling, trite, tired phrases stolen from a talking head and I defy you, when it's all said and done, to prove me wrong. And I do mean prove, as in logical argument, as in facts, as in statistics, as in empirical proof. The rules of logic dictate it. One slip over into "but Rush said", "But Olbermann said", "but Beck said" and you've lost. One slip over into hyperbole, and away from logic and you've lost.

. . . . .See you tomorrow, looking forward to it.

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one, gets out alive. Seize the precious moments before they're taken from you. This ain't no dress rehearsal, the curtain's gone up and you're on baby. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how, when or why our ticket gets punched; so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, either one, they ain't real. It's only about right here, right now and what you're willing to do. Change yourself, change your world, change your life and it will change the world. This is the sight, the sound, the reality of me changing myself, taking a stand, being fearless and not giving one good goddamn what you think. What the fuck have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Mid-week thoughts

. . . .Midway through another week

. . . . .Unfortunately, there is a presupposition amongst most of the Left that somehow the Democrats are in office to carry out their wishes. They're not.

. . . . .Right now, as we sit here, the insurance and medical ubercorporations are pouring $140 million dollars a day into lobbying efforts with Congress. It, in the end, really doesn't matter whether or not they, "they" being elected Senators and Representatives are Republicrats or Demicans, since at the end of the day they are both part of the same power structure, a two party system, and two party only exclusive club, guaranteed to be that way by the Electoral College.

. . . . .In the end, what we get is the legislation that starts with the 535 money-hungry maniacs in the House of Representatives and the 100 cash-starved Senators.

. . . . .As for the reference to $140 million a day in lobbying, Google the Washington Post from last week with their article, it wasn't reported widely.

. . . . .I would suggest using websites like The Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time.org (http://www.politicalpartytime.org) or Open Secrets (http://www.opensecrets.org) to see exactly where the money is flowing into which Senators and Reps pockets and campaign coffers and who is contributing it.

. . . . .This will give, unfortunately, a much, much clearer picture of what eventual legislation will look like.

. . . . I try to remember, that all I provide is the vote, the money, the heroin that Washington runs on, is provided by people who do the real shaping of policy in this country.

. . . . .We can bandy about the the labels "conservative" and "liberal", "Democrat" and "Republican" all we'd like. In the end, they're all the same party and same philosophy, that of making a lifetime career of out of being a public servant, and belieing Jefferson's initial ideal, that of a private citizen, who already had a job, sacrificing 4 years of their lives, at a reduced wage, to serve their country.

. . . . .Why is it so different that a liberal looks at the Obama administration and says "we aren't getting what we voted for".?

. . . . .The evangelical Right, the so-called conservative movement, the "base" of the Republican party, looked at the Bush Administration for 8 years and said "we aren't getting what we voted for". There was no overturn of Roe V. Wade, there was no making English an official language, there was no immigration reform in the shape they wanted, there was no installation of Christianity as the official religion of the United States.There never was any intention to, it was a lie designed to garner votes, pure and simple.

. . . . .In the end, it's all smoke and mirrors, if those in the positions of power can keep the crowd squabbling amongst themselves and continually throwing rocks at one another, then they won, since no one ever sees that, in the end, no matter what, no matter who is in power, the people are not served.

. . . .Picked this one up from FireDogLake, concerning the health care debate and single-payer, public option discussion right now from a physician, Kirk James Murphy:

Do I want single-payer? Hell, yes. After over a decade spent in high tech health care, I'm one of thousands of physicians with horror stories about the patients who lost capacity, lost organs, and even lost lives because they were denied health care. Single payer would bankrupt the insurance megacorps who've colluded and lobbied to keep that deadly "system" in place. As hideous as Al Qaeda's attacks were, they killed slightly more than 3,000 Americans. Once. Every year, nearly 20,000 Americans die because of the deadly system our insurance megacorps now spend over one million per day to maintain. The megacorps executives don't deserve mere corporate bankruptcy: they've killed and maimed so many of us to deserve a fate worse than Gitmo. In a world free of human rights concerns, I'd cheerfully nominate them all - and their in house / outside legal counsel and lobbyists - for mandatory total organ donation. Though these heartless bastards don't have anything to offer those awaiting cardiac transplant, the rest of the transplant lists could use the relief.

Fortunately, we live in a world (though not a nation) that offically upholds human rights and forbids execution and crimes against humanity - like involuntary organ donation. Unfortunately, in the part of the world called America, the megacorps own our political process. The guy who sits in the Oval Office came to bend his knee when the finance/insurance megacorps hatched out their own megafunded lobbyist group, the Hamilton Project.

So no surprise that when the guy in the Oval Office picked his OMB director, he picked another megacorp servant. Before he was OMB director, Obama's pick Orszag not only directed the Hamilton Project, he'd actually co-founded it...with Robert Rubin. This will be good news for anyone who thinks Robert Rubin helped our economy when he took time out from helping loot America as Goldman Sachs' co-CEO, and continued the task as Clinton's Treasury Secretary...and then continued the looting when he rejoined our socialized finance sector as Citibank's CEO. Hey - nothing succeeds like success, right?

. . . . .Read the entire piece here.

. . . .If you haven't caught up with it, the piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone that points the finger directly at Goldman-Sachs, and their progeny for the roots of the financial mess that this country is in, and doesn't look like it will be out of anytime soon, can be found here. I go beyond highly recommending it, it's mandatory reading if you want to speak with any clarity and facts about what happened, and why.

. . . .Roubini, the economist besides Mark Zandi and Krugman that I listen to during this for the "what happened, what's really happening now, and what the projections look like" isn't real hopeful about the this turning around anytime soon:

It’s clear that even if the recession were to be over anytime soon – and it’s not going to be over before the end of the year – job losses are going to continue for at least another year and a half. Historically, during the last two recessions, job losses continued for at least a year and a half after the recession was over. During the 2001 recession, the recession was over in November 2001, and job losses continued through August 2003 for a cumulative loss of jobs of over 5 million; this time we are already seeing more than 6 million job losses and the recession is not over.

The details of the unemployment report are even worse than the headline. Not only are there large job losses right now, but as a way of sharing the pain, firms are inducing workers to reduce hours and hourly wages. Therefore, when we’re looking at the effect of the labor market on labor income, we should consider that the total value of labor income is the product of jobs, hours, and average hourly wages – and that all three elements are falling right now. So the effect on labor income is much more significant than job losses alone.

The details also suggest that other aspects of the labor markets are worsening. If you include discouraged workers and partially-employed workers, the unemployment rate is already above 16 percent. If you consider also that temporary jobs are falling now quite sharply, labor market conditions are becoming worse. And the average duration of unemployment now is at an all-time high. So people not only are losing jobs, but they’re finding it harder to find new jobs. So every element of the labor market is worsening.

The unemployment rate rose only marginally from 9.4 percent to 9.5 percent, but that’s because so many people are discouraged that they exited the labor force voluntarily, and therefore are not counted in the official unemployment rate.

. . . .Along those same lines, I often get e-mails from both sides. I'm sick of 'em.

Dear conservative/liberal friend, you’ve just got to read this latest forwarded e-mail about that damn President Obama/Bush. I cannot believe the fascist/socialist direction that he’s taking this country in. A true American understands just what kind of patriot/traitor he is.

Obama/Bush has a Master Plan in place to ruin America. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he’s being manipulated by the influences of the Right/Left. The mainstream media/masters of Big Business are on his side and are backing him. He is surrounded by his cronies, all of whom are of the same fascist/socialist bent and nature, and don’t get what those of us in the real America want!

We all know that Obama/Bush isn’t in touch with what a true American wants/doesn’t want. As member of the conservative/liberal elite he just doesn’t get it, and isn’t like you and me.

What’s most important is that he needs to something/nothing, and he just doesn’t seem to get that, not like real Americans do.

Thanks for caring and being a “real” American.

Some Made Up Name.

Whoo-hoo! this kid/woman/man is for real, my cousin/aunt/brother/sister/friend met them and they’ve really got it on the ball/care about this country/are a true patriot. We all need to pay more attention to them!

Does that look or sound depressingly familiar? It should, because e-mails just like it have been circulating for the last 10 years around this country.

They’re all pathetically familiar, a diatribe against whomever the sitting President is, with some patriotic sounding drivel behind it, no facts, no thought, no logical argument to enter into the debate, and in fact, no true position, other than some ridiculous brand of outrage.

And of course, your friends just forward it along, and there truly isn’t an original author, or thought, in the entire text. Just some made-up name that everyone will swear is real, some fuel to add to the already-burning fire, and not one solution or answer anywhere in it.

. . . . .As a writer of a political/cultural/the whole kitchen sink column, I get a lot of e-mails. Being the person I am, I’ve made a lot of friends throughout my lifetime, most of whom couldn’t figure me out politically if you were holding a gun to their dog’s head and threatening to shoot unless they got it right.

. . . .Here’s the deal. I’m a true Libertarian, and not a self-declared, self-made one. Degree from the only Libertarian university in the United States, and live a life that reflects it, and with values that reflect it. What does that mean?

It means this – in short form; socially so liberal it’ll make your head swim, and fiscally so paranoid, I see conspiracies of greed and theft if there’s two people in suits sitting at a Macdonald’s together. That’s a true Libertarian.

Socially, what does that mean? It means this; if you’re a man, marry another man and raise kids, not my business I don’t care, and it sure as shit is abso-fucking-lutely not government’s or anyone else’s business. Same goes for a woman, marry another woman, raise kids, I’ll support that decision, because it’s yours and uniquely yours, and it is no other person’s business at all, period.

Hold orgies, smoke dope, take as many drugs as you want, drink as much as you want to, screw a goat in your front yard, do whatever you want to do with your body and your life, and any other consenting, informed adult – I don’t damn well care, and I’ll support your right to do it, any of it, because it’s not government’s business, society’s business, or any other person’s what you do with your time and the money you’ve earned.

Do I own guns? 2^nd Amendment of the United States of America says I can, and the right to privacy says you’ve got no business at all inquiring, and no say in it.

Do I pay taxes? Constitution of the United States of America, as amended, says I have to. I’ll decide what portion of the wages I’ve earned go towards three things (1) what’s necessary to insure that commerce between states can occur and be enforced (2) what’s necessary to provide for a common defense of the confederation of states and (3) what’s necessary for commerce and interaction with other countries and foreign states. Anything else is mine, I earned it, I’ll keep it, and if necessary, prove that in a court of law.

Fiscally, I believe that what I’ve earned is mine, period. And that applies to a lot more than just government in the complex society that we live in today. That means if you’re one of the investment giants, or one of the megabanks, and you’re skimming off society and other people’s wages in order to make your profit, than you need to be stopped, period. Either provide a good or service that you can provide with your own skills, your own hands, or there is no reason for your existence.

It’s a Darwinian society in my world, and there’s far too many parasites that want to masquerade as viable, profitable entities, just as in Nature. I have as much use for national corporations, any national corporation, as I do for any other thief, murderer or rapist. If you're not a small, privately owned local business, I have no respect for you as corporate entity. If you're employed by a national corporation as an employee, and not willing to risk forming your own LLC and subcontracting based on your own skills and abilities, you're a bought and paid for puppet, accepting blood money every week, it's that simple and that black and white.

. . . .Now, my friends run the entire spectrum, from right to left, conservative to liberal, Red to Blue, Democrat to Republican.

. . . .And yes, they forward those e-mails. Sorry folks, most of the time, I read them and they’re pretty pathetic and ridiculous and I just hit the “delete” button, to at least take the waste of electrons out of my data stream. I’m not particular, I don’t care what they say, what position they take, whether they’re from a conservative source or a liberal source, they get deleted unless they fit some criteria; (1) they must contain fact, data, information and numbers that can be verified; (2) they must examine both sides of the issue, or issues depending on what’s presented, in other words, they’ve got to take a look at both sides of the debate; (3) there better be some alternatives presented, some proposed solutions or answers; rational, realistic ones. Anything, anything other than that gets trashed immediately, and if you’re real, real lucky, you may see the piece of drivel you forwarded me in the column, but I’ll leave your name out as I trash it.

The most pathetic piece of it of all? As long as everyone is engaged in the 21^st century version of American politics, which is voting against something, which is amping up the emotion and outrage, then “they” get away with it all. American government, politics and the media are no longer about building anything, about serving the people, the politics of America, party identification, governance, the whole shot are dictated strictly by emotion, innuendo, hyperbole, invective and being against something. Critical analysis and logical reasoning, with some depth of fact and thought went out the window a long time ago. The guilty party in this? Us. We're the ones who clamor for it, because it's a lot easier to be angry than to put thought, logic, analysis and reasoning behind anything.

You got screwed a long time ago. What you never, never seem to realize is that they’re all the same. Educated in the same schools, same universities. They’re two sides of the same coin, and as long as this country operates in a two-party system, with the electoral college in between, then you can’t seem to get it that it’s all been a sham, since the 20’s, and it’s all the same guys. They quite actually get together, off camera, and decide who is going to conservative, who is going to be liberal, who is going to be outraged, who is going to win what vote, and most importantly, decide which arguments to have so that you can look at the one hand, so you don’t see the other hand at work.

Wake up, as long as you keep picking sides, as long as you keep believing that somehow, there’s a difference between the two sides and don’t see how badly you’re being ridden by the ones you think are on your side, well, that’s stupid on your part, and it’s what they’re depending on.

. . . .They're depending on the fact that you've forgotten your High School Civics 101, and have joined the howling mob in forgetting that the one man, the one person, that doesn't have a vote in this government is the President of the United States.

. . . .They're depending on the fact that you won't pick up a telephone, write an e-mail to your Senator or Representative, or use some fact finding to figure out what's going on in terms of how a bill is actually worded, what it really contains, where the lobbying money is flowing from and to.

. . . .They're depending on the illusion that somehow you believe that there's a difference between Republicans and Democrats, that there's a difference between conservatives and liberals. There isn't, they're all part of the same power structure, one you're not part of and sit on the outside of, you will never be allowed access to that party, don't fool yourself.

. . . .They're depending on the fact that you actually believe the political theater that goes on around you all the time. It's theater, with a script. Remember that when the cameras are off, and the reporters aren't around, these buffoons all golf together, all go to dinner together, some even live in the same houses in Georgetown together, have breakfast together before heading off to another day of political theater.

. . . .They're depending on the fact that you'll get your "news" from "news" channels like Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. They're depending on the fact that you believe these clowns are actually there to tell you something. They're not. They're employees of a media corporation, all of them, whose sole job, whose sole reason for existence is to grab and hold viewers or listeners, so that they can count audience numbers, in order to pull in advertisers. They're whores, pure and simple. There's absolutely no difference between Bill O'Reilly and Bill Maher; no difference between Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann; none between Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow; none between Rush Limbaugh and Ed Schultz. They are, all of them, attention-starved entertainment whores who will do or say anything to keep their audiences, since that's what their paycheck is dictated on.

. . . . What can we do? It's simple, either turn it all off, or watch all of it, it's the only way to get to the one or two grains of truth behind everything. Most importantly, get past the theatrics, the appearances and the media and realize that, in the end, they're all the same, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives. They've got the power to make policy and you don't. They're the recipients of the lobbying money and campaign money, and you're not.

. . . .Forget the third party meme that's running around society right now, it's an essentially useless option. As long as the Electoral College exists, it will always be someone from the same group. The day that a registered Republican, Ron Paul, called himself a Libertarian, that party and that option were co-opted. As a national political entity, they just got assimilated and became part of the Borg.

. . . .Some sites I always use to do fact checking:

- Open Secrets.org ( a site that tracks lobbying money, and who's funneling money to whom)

- Open Congress.org ( a site that tracks every, and I mean every bill in the House and Senate, from it's first introduction on the floor, through committee and floor vote, including the discussion around it, what riders are introduced and which are thrown out.)

- Party Time.org ( a site that tracks every salon, open house, cocktail party, and lobbying bash in Washington, who threw it, who was there, what money got thrown around)

- Fact Check.org (This one I use for absolutely everything. If it's said in the media, I instantly don't believe it, and go check it out.)

. . . .Turn off your fucking TV!!! Learn to read again. Subscribe to The Economist, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone (yes, Rolling Stone, some of the best investigative journalism right now is being done there.) Time, Newsweek, National Review, Wired.

. . . . Me, I choose to use my own mind, and I don’t follow any party’s schtick. I don’t believe in Red or Blue, conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican. What I believe is that they all are corrupt, every last one of them; owned, bought and paid for by the financial and insurance megacorporations. All I can do is continue to remain alert, do my own thinking and not let someone, either from the broadcast media or the Republicrat/Demican political system, who doesn’t deserve to hold my dirty socks do my thinking for me.

. . . .Outta here

. . . Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're snatched from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's not about regret or guilt, it's not about hopes or dreams, it's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This ain't no dress rehearshal, the curtain's already gone up. This is the sight, the words, the sounds of my changing my own life, taking a chance, being fearless and taking a stand. What the fuck have you done for yourself lately?

. . . .Jim Morrison said it a long, long time ago: Wake up!!!!!

The Desolation Angel

Monday (or just what the hell am I doing?)

Monday July 6, 2009

. . . .I have my hands on the new Wilco, and a new one from Michael Stanley, I'll start doing some tracks from them tomorrow.

. . . . .The Sci-fi Channel's Twilight Zone marathon over the weekend. I sometimes forget how truly great that show was, and how edgy and prescient it's topics were, but then I have to remember that Rod Serling, and his chief writer, Harlan Ellison, were brilliant minds, who were futurists long before William Gibson or Ray Kurzweil

. . . .Every so often, I'm struck that there are true conservative minds I admire; Christopher F. Buckley, Andrew Sullivan, Peggy Noonan, George Will; that do have it together, and refuse to knuckle under to the Neanderthal knuckle-dragging idiocy of the members of the extreme Right of their constituency.

. . . . .Just yesterday, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about specifically health-care; and the well-crafted use of language that has been bandied about in it's argument. He was asking me about the difference between "single-payer" and the "public option". In a well-crafted, well-thought out use of George Orwell 1984-speak; single-payer, despite it's name, is the government-run option that has already been thrown out. The public option, however, is not the government run option, but instead, is the same plan that members of Congress have access to, all in all, a pretty good plan. The rest of the conversation concerned health care and how to pay for it. Lo and behold, George Will turns up yesterday, and finally admits, with facts and numbers, that the public option will actually save money long term, and in the course of the piece, puzzlingly, argues that somehow, a cheaper option for people for insurance, and thus, competition for private insurers will be bad, a position that somehow, I believe doesn't befit a free market adherent:

The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America "starting from scratch" he would favor a "single-payer" -- government-run -- system, insist that health care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? [...]

Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible. Government is incapable of behaving like market-disciplined private insurers. Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers. Besides, unless the point of a government plan is to be cheaper, it is pointless: If the public option conforms to the imperatives that regulations and competition impose on private insurers, there is no reason for it.

Nate Silver, from 538, analyzes thusly:

Insurance, in other words, is a volume business, the main requirements for which are that (1) you have a lot of money pooled together and that (2) you've been around for awhile.

CIGNA and Aetna have a lot of money pooled together and they've been around for awhile -- but they don't have as much money, nor have they been around as long, as the federal government. It's possible, certainly, that the profit motive in the insurance industry has driven more innovation than we're giving it credit for. But that isn't my bet, and it isn't George Will's: There's no obvious reason that the government couldn't provide more for less. And if we are wrong, we would find out soon enough: if the public option can't deliver more bang for the buck than private insurers, it wouldn't gain much market share from them, and Will will have nothing to worry about.

What Will's position reflects instead is ideology: who cares that the federal government could build a better mousetrap? They're the government and that's bad. His argument is really no more sophisticated than that. If a libertarian conservative wants to make this argument, more power to them, but they absolutely should not be turning around and suggesting that a public option would raise health care costs. They're saying, rather, that they're morally opposed to the cost savings that would ensue.

If you've been reading me for a while, you'll know that, as compared with most self-described liberals, I'm unusually sympathetic toward the notion of the profit motive and private industry; I've defended Wall Street bankers and the AIG bonuses at various points during the financial crisis, among other things. It's my belief that private industry is usually able to deliver more efficient outcomes to the consumer than the government could.

But usually isn't always. And health insurance, as Will seems to admit, is one of those exceptions.

. . . .How important is the debate and the policy crafting right now? The health-care industry is spending $1.4 million a day on lobbying efforts.

. . . .In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard has assumed control of the country, but the schisms are deepening, greatly. There is a 3 day general strike by the populace planned. The problem with it is how to get you to care that it's happening. It does matter, more than you know. Most people don't acquaint themselves with geopolitics or geostrategy, nor take the time to understand the Middle East and what each country's peoples represent, or how important it is to have someone other than Ahmadenijad and Ayatollah Khameini in charge of a country that is one year away from nuclear capability.

. . . .Noriel Roubini, whose praises I constantly sing loudly, as one of only 3 economists, the others being Paul Krugman and Mark Zandi, that (1) saw this coming, Roubini as far back as 2006, and were derided by Wall Street, Paulson, Bernanke et al, Roubini being labeled "Dr. Doom" (2) said back in the fall that the "zombie" banks should be nationalized, re-valued and sold back to private firms at their new base price before they dragged the entire economy down (look what's happening now) and (3) said all along that the stimulus package was not large enough, the Administration would only have one shot at it, and they needed to make it large enough to stop the matching of the Industrial output curve with 1929, which is exactly what's happening now, had more to say over the weekend, and it's not good:

The June employment report suggests that the alleged ‘green shoots’ are mostly yellow weeds that may eventually turn into brown manure. The employment report shows that conditions in the labor market continue to be extremely weak, with job losses in June of over 460,000. With the current rate of job losses, it is very clear that the unemployment rate could reach 10 percent by later this summer, around August or September, and will be closer to 10.5 percent if not 11 percent by year-end. I expect the unemployment rate is going to peak at around 11 percent at some point in 2010, well above historical standards for even severe recessions.

It’s clear that even if the recession were to be over anytime soon – and it’s not going to be over before the end of the year – job losses are going to continue for at least another year and a half. Historically, during the last two recessions, job losses continued for at least a year and a half after the recession was over. During the 2001 recession, the recession was over in November 2001, and job losses continued through August 2003 for a cumulative loss of jobs of over 5 million; this time we are already seeing more than 6 million job losses and the recession is not over.

The details of the unemployment report are even worse than the headline. Not only are there large job losses right now, but as a way of sharing the pain, firms are inducing workers to reduce hours and hourly wages. Therefore, when we’re looking at the effect of the labor market on labor income, we should consider that the total value of labor income is the product of jobs, hours, and average hourly wages – and that all three elements are falling right now. So the effect on labor income is much more significant than job losses alone.

The details also suggest that other aspects of the labor markets are worsening. If you include discouraged workers and partially-employed workers, the unemployment rate is already above 16 percent. If you consider also that temporary jobs are falling now quite sharply, labor market conditions are becoming worse. And the average duration of unemployment now is at an all-time high. So people not only are losing jobs, but they’re finding it harder to find new jobs. So every element of the labor market is worsening.

The unemployment rate rose only marginally from 9.4 percent to 9.5 percent, but that’s because so many people are discouraged that they exited the labor force voluntarily, and therefore are not counted in the official unemployment rate. . . . .

. . . . .

The other important aspect of the labor market is that if the unemployment rate is going to peak around 11 percent next year, the expected losses for banks on their loans and securities are going to be much higher than the ones estimated in the recent stress tests. You plug an unemployment rate of 11 percent in any model of loan losses and recovery rates and you get very ugly losses for subprime, near-prime, prime, home equity loan lines, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, leverage loans, and commercial loans – much bigger numbers than what the stress tests projected.

In the stress tests, the average unemployment rate next year was assumed to be 10.3 percent in the most adverse scenario. We’ll be already at 10.3 percent by the fall or the winter of this year, and certainly well above that and close to 11% at some point next year.

So these very weak conditions in the labor market suggest problems for the U.S. consumer, but also significant increasing problems for the banking system as these sharp increases in job losses lead to further delinquencies on loans and securities and lower than expected recovery rates.

The latest figures – published this week - on mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures suggest a spike not only in subprime and near-prime delinquencies, but now also on prime mortgages. So the problems of the economy are significantly affecting the banking system. Even if for a couple of other quarters banks are going to use the new Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rules and under-provisioning for loan losses to report better-than-expected results, by Q4, with unemployment rates above 10 percent, that short-term accounting fudging will have a significant impact on reported earnings. And this will show the underlying weakness in the economy. So banks may fudge it for a couple of other quarters, but eventually the effects of very sharp unemployment rates and still sharply falling home prices are going to drag down earnings and have a sharp effect on losses and capital needs of the banks and of the entire financial system.. . . . . .

. . . . .The job market report is essentially the tip of the iceberg. It’s a significant signal of the weaknesses in the economy. It affects consumer confidence. It affects labor income. It affects consumption. It affects the willingness of firms to start increasing production. It has significant consequences of the housing market. And it has significant consequences, of course, on the banking system.

. . . . Read the entire report here.

. . . .The problem is not that the stimulus package isn't working. The stimulus money, despite the news coverage of the President, didn't even pass the House and Senate until 4 months ago, and the money is still tied up in committee and budget offices and the Republican Senators and Representatives that so staunchly fought against it, now fight like a pack of hungry hyenas over larger and larger pieces of it going to their State or District; fighting with the very same Democrats who so adamantly stated that the money needed to go out now. The first checks haven't even been cut. Combine this with the job numbers and the increasing mortgage defaults and, eventually, failing banks, and we are definitely looking at 1939. Sorry, hate to say it, but it's true.

. . . . .Hell, even Fox News is turning on Sarah Palin now. Liz Trotta, a Fox News contributor today -

Frankly, "the woman is inarticulate, undereducated," Trotta said, arguing that for once liberal criticism was "well-deserved."

"I think all the liberal stylists ... really have a case. She just begs for adjectives like flaky and wacky." When pressed, she added, "We're talking about somebody who, right from the get-go, has been a flashy person who gets into a lot of trouble and really has no credentials for any job."

Video of the same here.

. . . .More on Sarah Palin. My own opinion, which may be off base, but I really don't think so, is that Caribou Barbie, in her own twisted mind, somehow believes that she beat the media, has somehow gone "rogue" or "maverick" and can somehow build her own Presidential candidacy from Facebook and Twitter, speaking directly to her fan base.
. . . .Now, there is already someone who's done that, he's sitting in the White House now, as a singular piece of an overall campaign strategy. Again, one component of an overall campaign. And, it takes the "rogue" out of the equation. Again, Palin's style, completely clueless and brainless would be to try and convince people that it's not been done before.
. . . .Second point, there is no one, absolutely no one around Palin like David Axelrod, or Plouffe, both geniuses in their own right and in their provinces.
. . . . Third point, and this is personal, I pray daily for a Palin-Bachmann ticket in 2012, or a Palin-Cheney ticket, so we can finally, finally, watch this century's incarnation of the GOP burn completely down to ashes.

. . . . . Fred Barnes, one of the Republican apologists over at The Weekly Standard:

Forget about Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and probably ever. She may have no interest in seeking the GOP nomination. But if she does, her chances of winning the nomination have been minimized by her decision to resign as governor of Alaska. She's knocked out one of three legs of the presidential stool and a second one is wobbly. [...]

. . . .Greg Mitchell:

It's been amusing to observe, in the past few days, Sarah Palin hit the media (from blogs to the New York Times) for causing all of her troubles, even threatening to sue some of them for "defaming" her. She's even tweeted the charges, repeatedly. It's been equally fun to read some of those who backed her and John McCain last fall now admitting, after her resignation speech, that she is a true lightweight. This was apparent to most Americans within days of her emergence on the national ticket late last summer.

Ross Douthat, one of her old boosters, in the Times this morning writes that her wacky I'm-outta-here speech disqualifies her from running for president for years to come -- but still manages to blast the media for coming to this conclusion months before he did. Douthat even suggests that the "elite" takedown of Palin ruins it for any other folksy, non-Harvard candidate to run again--and ruins the notion that anyone-can-grow-up-to-be-President. Of course, this is nonsense. For one thing, we generally insist that "anyone" display some degree of brain power and judgment, and also not quit when the going gets rough.

Can't wait for David Brooks to weigh in. Remember that he said on a panel last autumn that she was thoroughly unfit for higher office, but refused to state that flatly in his column.

In fact, in the months after the November election, we heard from pundits and disgruntled GOPers that the media helped elect Obama by attacking, or mocking, Sarah Palin. These critics still allege that she gave John McCain a big boost in the polls when first named and that she would have help drive him to victory--if not for the allegedly unfair treatment by Katie and Tina Fey and those mean bloggers and all the rest.

But this is not true. The myth should be put to bed once and for all.

. . . .And can we call up some video from an August 2008 press conference in which Caribou Barbie says that "whining" about media coverage is bad for the image of women as politicians?

. . . .Tim Pawlenty, the Repub governor of Minnesota, another name bandied about for a possible 2012 run, ripped into Ms. Palin today:

But it is another question mark for a party that is clearly in a rebuilding year. If we were a sports team, if I was the manager or the coach sitting here, we would say we got to get some new draft picks, we are going to have to make some trades, do some things differently, because we are clearly in a rebuilding process."

. . . .Governor Rendell, the Dem from Pennsylvania, ripped into her as well, today, calling her move "ridiculous".

"To resign after two-and-a-half years in office and somehow to say that she was going to be a lame duck and lame ducks can't get anything done and governors just go on junkets during her lame-duck period is ridiculous," Rendell told MSNBC. "First of all, she's a first-term governor, not a term-limited, second-term governor, and if she hadn't announced she was leaving, she wouldn't have been a lame duck, she would have been in a pretty strong executive position, number one. Number two, this is not the time for governors to abandon their states.... Everyone of us is facing severe financial challenges brought about by the international recession and this is not a time to leave. We pledged to our folks when we asked them to elect to us, we pledged that we were going to serve four years and we serve in the good years, but we also serve in the bad years as well. And for her to leave and turn the state over to a lieutenant governor with less than a month's notice, in the midst of difficult financial times, I think it's just dead wrong."

. . . All in all, you just have to love the Republican party right now, and the conservative Right. The economy is in shambles, the environment and climate are changing more rapidly than we can cope with, Iran and North Korea both are becoming nuclear capable, Iran in revolt, and N. Korea shooting missles; the Taliban and Al-Quaeda are winning Afghanistan right now, because we ignored them, the true architects and perpetrators of 9-11 during the Bush years; we removed the only person in the Mideast capable of stopping Ahmadenijad during that misadventure. China will absolutely become the world's economic superpower sometime in the next 90 days, and I can always depend on the Repubs and the Right to provide with a good belly laugh with some buffoonery or another during the day.
. . . .The latest one? Well, after "Barack the Magic Negro", the watermelon patch e-mail, the Presidential "spook" portrait e-mail; you'd have thought they'd have learned. But Nooooooo! Yes, they really are as dense, as bigoted and as closet racist as advertised.
. . . .The leading contender for the chair position of the Young Republicans, a woman named Audra Shay, it's current vice-chairman and the leading contender for it's chair this Saturday, was too stupid to realize that electronic transmissions are forever, especially on Facebook, which owns all of it's content, all of your content, period, once it's posted, and can do anything it likes with it. (Read your service agreement folks, instead of just checking the fucking box and moving on. It's all perfectly legal, and you agreed to it, once you checked the box.)
Cutting past all the chaff, Audra posted on her wall, and one of her friends, Eric Pike, who uses the name Piker, commented:

“Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals.” [Note: Great grammar and spelling here, another fine example of the intelligence level of the Right.]
Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker’s comments: “You tell em Eric! lol.”

. . . . . That one speaks once again, to the "base" of the Right, and the problem, noted yesterday in this column that Colin Powell voiced yesterday morning on This Week that the Republican Party still has with race, and speaks volumes when tied together with Ms. Palin's "master plan" to get to her constituents through Facebook and Twitter. If Ms. Shay is who the Young Republicans want as their chair, they deserve her, and they will deserve every stereotype thrown their way as well.

. . . .Lot to do today, talk to you later.

. . . .Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances around how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, stop looking at tomorrow or yesterday, it's right fucking here, right fucking now. Do something, and change your life. Don't be afraid to take a stand, don't be afraid to let someone down, don't be afraid to piss someone off, it's not about what other people want from you, or want you to do, it's about what you need to do for you to make yourself better, and the world around you better. It's not up to anyone to understand it, it's yours to do, period.

The Desolation Angel

Independence Day Weekend

Sunday July 5, 2009

. . . . .Gooood Morning! Welcome to the second half of the year, and to the annual weekend birthday celebration that we call Independence Day.

. . . . .Hope you've enjoyed a barbecue or two, some sun and some time with friends and family.

. . . .Take the time to catch up on the last few columns, they're all down below. There's all the normal exploration of the current news around politics, the economy, the national electrical grid, some work on human evolution and A.I. the normal eclectic mix.

. . . .The most important news of the day isn't Caribou Barbie, though that's near the top. The most important news comes out of Iran. The Mullahs have declared the election "illegitimate", a very serious setback for Ahmadenijad and Ayatollah Khameini.

. . . .The second most important news, that of North Korea firing seven missles off on July 4th, may on the surface seem important. But really it isn't. (1) Their missles have the annoying habit of basically just falling into the Sea of Japan and (2) anyone, anyone at all who thinks that if China believed that North Korea was about to piss in the pool, considering China's stature as the world's largest economy, and it's growing strenth and it's positioning itself to become the world's dominant superpower, (watch, the Yuan will replace the U.S. Dollar as the International Reserve Currency this month) is truly a mouth-breathing idiot. Follow the money, that's what counts. So, no, North Korea will never present a true threat, China's not gonna let that happen.

. . . .On ABC's "This Week with George Stephanolous Vice-President Joe Biden made an admission that will probably, bar the last item below, be one of the most discussed statements of the week: "We misread how bad the economy really was". My question is - how could you? Nobel Prize winning economists tried telling them before the stimulus package was presented just how large in size it had to be, and tried telling them afterwards that the package just plainly wasn't large enough to jumpstart the economy.

Host George Stephanopoulos pointed out that "a lot of people were saying that you needed to do something bigger and bolder" when it came to the stimulus package. He named New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as one example. There are many others.

The prize-winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz not only warned that the stimulus was too small during its construction, the day after Obama signed it into law he predicted how its shortcomings would make themselves apparent.

"I think there is a broad consensus but not universal among economist that the stimulus package that was passed was badly designed and not enough. I know it is not universal but let me try to explain. First of all that it was not enough should be pretty apparent from what I just said: It is trying to offset the deficiency in aggregate demand and it is just too small," Stiglitz said. "The shortfall in state revenue [is] probably in the order of 150 to 200 billion dollars a year. And the states have balanced budget frameworks so if you follow the newspaper you know the drastic problems that California and New York are in, these are really serious problems and because of their balanced budget frameworks they have to reduce their spending... if their income comes down. So that would be a negative stimulus of 150 to 200 billion unless there is federal aid. And the stimulus package there was a little of federal aid but just not enough. So what we will be doing is we will be laying off teachers and laying off people in the health care sector while we are hiring construction workers. It is a little strange for a design of a stimulus package. You ask, why do you want to hire construction workers and fire teachers. I don't know what is the rationale behind that."

Stiglitz was joined by a whole host of liberal economists -- from the University of Texas' James Galbraith to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research -- who warned that the stimulus package inexplicably underestimated the size of the crisis.

Several weeks after the stimulus passed, economist Nouriel Roubini, known affectionately as Dr. Doom, made the case that the administration's approach to stabilizing the economy lacked an effective international component.

"You have to have a set of concerted, coherent policies done not just by the U.S. but by Europe, Japan, China and everyone else," he said. "The credit crunch is just massive. One thing that's needed is much more aggressive monetary easing. The second dimension is that you need much more fiscal stimulus -- in the countries that can afford it -- that is front-loaded. The U.S. [stimulus package] is $800 billion, but only $200 billion is front-loaded. Of that $200 billion [in stimulus] this year, half of it is tax cuts. That's going to be a waste of money, because people are not going to spend it."

In mid-June, weeks before the latest round of poor job numbers came out, U.C. Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration official Brad DeLong was arguing that "the Obama administration's federal fiscal stimulus programs are on the low side of what is appropriate by a substantial margin."

"This is the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression and the standard tools of expansionary monetary policy are tapped out and broken right now," he wrote.

The day that June's job numbers came out, meanwhile, Nassim Taleb, principal of Universa Investments and author of 'The Black Swan,' offered a far more grim interpretation of what was transpiring, though one relatively consistent with what he had said in the past.

"We're in the middle of a crash," said Taleb during an appearance on CNBC. "So if I'm going to forecast something, it is that it's going to get worse, not better."

Certainly Krugman himself has aired his share of skepticism. In late June, he reminded his readers that his early concerns had not been misplaced.

"[S]ome of us warned about what might happen: if unemployment surpassed the administration's optimistic projections, Republicans wouldn't accept the need for more stimulus," he wrote in the Times. "Instead, they'd declare the whole economic policy a failure. And that's exactly how it's playing out. With the unemployment rate now almost certain to pass 10 percent, there's an overwhelming economic case for more stimulus. But as a political matter it's going to be harder, not easier, to get that extra stimulus now than it would have been to get the plan right in the first place.

This past week, meanwhile, he declared once more that the Obama stimulus plan, while "better than nothing" needs to be supplemented with something more.

To be fair, the process of economic forecasting is, as Taleb noted in his CNBC segment, an inherently tricky proposition. In October 2008, for instance, Roubini was arguing that the government needed a $400 billion stimulus package, which ended up being just more than half of what the Obama White House settled on.

But among those who were sounding the loudest alarms about the potential inadequacies of the economic recovery plan, the consensus seems to be emerging that more now needs to be done. Later in his ABC segment, Biden - who is responsible for overseeing the stimulus - was asked if a second package was in the offing. No, he replied, without dismissing the possibility outright. "I think it's premature to make that judgment. This was set up to spend out over 18 months. There are going to be major programs that are going to take effect in September, $7.5 billion for broadband, new money for high-speed rail, the implementation of the grid -- the new electric grid. And so this is just starting, the pace of the ball is now going to increase."

. . . .All it takes is the barest recollection of freshman year college Econ 101 to remember that to keep an economy moving, when private investing bottoms out or dries up, then public investing has to take up the slack. It didn't take a genius to look at what was occurring when the false bubbles created by Reagan's signing of Garn-St. Germain back in 1982, creating the first false bubble, and his breaking of the first union, PATCO; the artful and deceitful Clinton recrafting of Bush 1's North American Free Trade Agreement which further gutted American manufacturing and hastened outsourcing, and began the largest transfer of wealth in history as money began flowing out of the United States to China & Venezuela, then the Bush 2 years of Paulson completely deregulating the banking industry to allow them to buy into AIG's Joseph Cassano's craps table bid with heretofore unknown derivative securities to see what was going to happen. There was no money, there never was any money, it was built on a pile of sand and once the first part of the foundation went, it was easy for the remainder of it to keep on sliding.
. . . The stimulus package needed to be much, much larger. On a percentage basis, it needed to be equal to the WPA or CCC, back in 1933-1939 in order to do much good. Instead, the idiots who want to see this nation destroyed started their fucking "tea parties", much to the delight of all those rich elites around them who make $250,000 a year or more. The incoming President Obama signs into law the largest tax cut in history, asks those criminals who have been moving their money offshore and into tax havens to start ponying up for what this Nation has given them, what they stole from working people, and those who got the tax cuts take to the street to protest it. God, no wonder the rich think everyone is a sheeple, they got Joe the Plumber, and mind slaves just like him, to do their dirty work for them again.

. . . .On CNN's State of the Union with John King this morning, one of this country's most decorated soldiers, and respected Republican elder statesman, Colin Powell stated very clearly and factually that Rush Limbaugh's comments, both past and recent, demonstrate very clearly and "are evidence that the Republican Party still has a problem with race."

. . . . .So, back at it. And of course, you know the Angel just is going to dig right into Sarah Palin, and her surprise resignation as the Governor of Alaska.

. . . . .Let me start right off by saying that, in my opinion, the estimable Ms. Palin has done more to set the image of women in American politics back singlehandedly than any other woman in recent history. She reinforces the stereotype of being erratic and unable to handle pressure, and not being suited for a top job.

. . . .Bear in mind that we are talking about someone who couldn't even complete a full term as the Governor of a State that has essentially the same number of citizens as Columbus, Ohio.

. . . . .It's like the mayor of Albuquerque quitting their term early to help spread their message on a "national stage". WTF????

. . . ..Her resignation letter was a long-winded, rambling piece; grammatically incorrect, random punctation and capitalization throughout. Her resignation speech was the same, and her Facebook message yesterday was the same, rambling and incoherent. So typical of the extreme fundamentalist Right wing of her party; no facts, no substance, no coherent logical argument. All ephemeral hyperbole, with the issuer of the same a victim of some nefarious liberal source. Cognitively dissonant. All 3 can be checked at the links provided. In each case, she tied her resignation to a "higher calling". We'll talk more about that later.

. . . . . . There have been a number of reaction pieces in the last 24 hours; so. . .on to some of those first:

. . . . . .Geoffrey Dunn:

Anyone who is in any way surprised by Sarah Palin's announcement today that she will not be seeking re-election, and, even more significantly, is stepping down as Governor of Alaska, has not been paying close attention. The signs have been everywhere.

Palin has absolutely zero interest in running the State of Alaska. She steadfastly refused to live in Juneau after her first year there, had the gall to charge the state for residing at her home in Wasilla 600 miles away, and she basically mailed in her performance as the state's top administrator during Alaska's most recent legislative session. She has alienated virtually all the key legislators in her own party -- that's right, Republicans -- and had failed to move any key legislation forward since her return to Alaska from the national campaign trail last November.

In fact, her bizarre appointment for Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross, was rejected nearly unanimously by the state legislature -- a first in Alaskan history. Even in respect to energy policy, her supposed bailiwick, she has been categorically ineffective. When I asked those in-the-know what role Palin had played in putting together the recent pipeline deal between TransCanada and Exxon, their response was simple: "None."

None. That about sums up Palin's accomplishments as Governor of the Last Frontier.

The evangelical right can wallow in denial all they want about Palin being victimized by liberals or Democrats or even George Soros (some illiterate wingnut recently tried to link me to him), but the fact is that most of the people with really bad things to say about Palin -- from John McCain's staff to conservatives in Alaska -- come from the Republican Party. The charges of a left-wing conspiracy are so ridiculous as to be absolutely absurd.

Some pundits have said that Palin's resignation is out of character. Hardly. Don't forget that she resigned from her last statewide office -- that as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Sarah Palin is a quitter. She fancies herself something else. But, in the end, she quit her position at AOGCC and she has now quit her governorship. That's two-for-two at the statewide level. In Wasilla, there was nearly a recall launched against her as mayor. Trouble and turbulence have followed her everywhere.

More importantly, there are rumors in Alaska that more Ethics Act charges are in the works and that there is also a more serious Federal investigation focusing on Palin during her tenure as mayor in Wasilla and the building of her home and a sports complex in Wasilla, long speculated to have been linked. It's the one very touchy subject whenever you bring it up in the MatSu Valley. As someone who is writing a book on Palin, I can attest to the fact that there are always rumors flying about her, not all of them true, but this seems like a real possibility, especially given the timing of her announcement today.

Palin also has a multi-million dollar book project for Rupert Murdoch that she needs to complete in time for a spring release. That's some serious cabbage, and there were grumblings in Alaska about the book deal as well. There will be other lucrative, high-visibility media options for her shortly down the road. Don't be surprised to hear of one of those popping up soon. This frees her up to reach for the gold ring without her minions being able to register any complaints. In that respect, it's a logical move.

All of the recent public donnybrooks have taken their toll: First the article by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair and then the even nastier revelations of emails leaked by the McCain campaign which showed her to be an utter liar regarding her husband Todd's membership in the Alaska Independent Party. Even the seemingly innocuous interview in Runner's World, with its bizarre, braggadocio boast of her having more endurance than Obama, revealed her penchant for duplicity at every turn: the assertion that an injury she had sustained while jogging in Arizona had been kept top-secret, a contention thoroughly disputed by the inimitable Mudflats.

One of my favorite lies spewed by Palin today in yet another poorly scripted speech was that she campaigned for governor "four years ago...," when she, in fact, ran for governor three years ago and held her position for little more than two-and-half years. It's the little lies she always tells, the twists of truth, the distortions. Four years sounds like nearly a full term; three feels incomplete. So why not just call it four?

For all her projected toughness, Palin loves to play the victim. "Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt," she whined, implying that her problems are from out-of-state (yet another big lie). "Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations..." It wasn't quite Richard Nixon's "Checker's Speech," but it was close. In her own awkward vernacular, the Governor was essentially saying to Alaska, "You won't have Sarah Palin to kick around any more."

. . . . .Read the rest of the piece here.

. . . . . .Paul Begala, well-known CNN contributor and analyst:

I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.

As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.

It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.

Let's stipulate that if there is some heretofore unknown personal, medical or family crisis, this was the right move. But Gov. Palin didn't say anything like that. Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."

Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:

*((Gotta put First Things First))*

Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.

I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is all a ruse. Perhaps Gov. Palin wants us to believe she's an intellectual featherweight who is slightly shallower than an actor on High School Musical. Maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail.

Naah. A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.

. . . .Read the rest of the piece here.

. . . .Cenk Ugyur, of the Young Turks:

There is a lot we don't know about Sarah Palin's decision to resign. But there is one thing we do know: She thought it was politically damaging.

No one announces good news late on Friday before Fourth of July weekend. That is someone who is trying to bury bad news as much as possible. With Michael Jackson and Mark Sanford stories still lingering around, everyone on vacation, and as little reporters working as possible, she releases this bombshell. That's someone who obviously thinks what she is doing is not going to help her, at least in the short term.

. . . .Read the rest of that piece here.

. . . . . From Michelle Goldberg, conservative blogger and commentator, and especially insightful into Sarah's ties to Alaskan Independence Party, a violent secessionist group. (For me, personally it was her two keynote addresses to their convention that provided the proof for me that she is a traitor, guilty of treason, and should now be in Leavenworth and not in the Governor's mansion in Alaska).

On the face of it, it seems preposterous that Palin might think she could maintain any political credibility at all after walking away from her job simply because she has her eye on bigger things. But Palin has long had an almost dementedly inflated sense of her own destiny. In one of the most quoted passages of Todd Purdham’s eviscerating Vanity Fair profile of Palin, he writes that, in traveling through Alaska, several people told him that, in trying to understand their governor, “they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Said disorder, Purdum points out, is marked by “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

As a description of Palin, that sounds about right. It also sounds about right as a description of Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, and maybe even Bill Clinton. There is nothing new about politicians who are staggeringly egotistical and heedlessly dishonest, politicians with fantastic reserves of self-righteousness and self-pity but a shriveled capacity for loyalty. But we don’t usually see this particular kind of craziness in women. Palin is the rare female politician who is as much a megalomaniac as her male peers. Maybe more.

By the time she’d emerged on the national stage, her confidence—had had a unique chance to grow and flower.

But it also metastasized into deluded arrogance. Palin’s public statements have been full of petty, easily refutable mendacity, delivered with the vehemence of a compulsive liar. Purdum’s piece reveals one tiny but telling incident, in which Palin told McCain aides that she and her husband had been without insurance of any kind in the early years of their marriage. “Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along,” Purdum writes. “This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small.”

On Thursday, CBS News had a small scoop revealing a similarly cavalier attitude towards the truth. After McC