Cutting off your nose to spite your face

As you are all aware, I think that things aren't going to turn out all that well. So when the "opportunity" arose the past couple of days, I took the chance to see how operating under extreme weather conditions went without the air conditioning turned on.

Well, I will have you know I did reasonably well. I lived through two or three days of 105-degree heat up here and survived easily. Granted, nothing much got done, and I would have been a hurtin' unit if I had to go out and do a lot of work. But for the current workload and structure of my life, it was nothing but mild discomfort.

So the lesson today is that you can get by easily without what a lot of folks consider basics.

In a very real sense, this is just the converse of my North Dakota piece a while back. Surviving heat just takes a different strategy that surviving cold. I would recommend that you all do this occasionally in order to assure yourself it is doable. Good training that.

But I think I have made my point to myself now. Yes I can live under these conditions and even operate at a decent efficiency, but now the question is, will continuing the lesson actually add anything to my knowledge base?

Fuck it, the answer is no...the air conditioning goes on so that I can sleep comfortably.

Yes, I am a puss.

114 today

When I picked up the car today, the temp at the parking lot was 114.

Thats why the posts are thin.

Folk's, its 105 outside

So the fat kid is hiding at work in the air conditioning and down the basement where the temperature is tolerable. 

 

One of the things about heat is that it saps your drive to get anything done.  Yesterday I tried to get stuff done, but the slow motion needed to get by pretty much ensured that not everything got finished.

 

So, If you are in the heat, take care, get into shade, and make sure you drink water.

 

Nothing to report, nothing to bitch about. 

I, for one, don't give a shit

You know, golf is crap.

When one of the premier events of a sport is nearly won by a geezer four years older than myself, there is good reason to suspect the athletic and aesthetic underpinning of said sport.

Hell, I would even argue that it is a sport. I would give such a title to other activities as lawn mowing and competitive tatting.

Mostly it is a means for poseurs to escape their wives for a while.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez

Guys...I'm in too good a mood to be picky about anything. Friends are coming into town and the Portland International Beer Festival is on this weekend.

A well known curmudgeon such as myself needs bad stuff to happen to be truly interested in writing this crap. If I am happy, the quality of the bitchin' just goes to hell.

I'll be hungover Sunday. Expect better work after that.

Tests Prove Bad Kool Aid Being Served at the Boeing Leadership Center

Tests Prove Bad Kool Aid Being Served at the Boeing Leadership Center

From Aviation Week & Space Technology, 07/20/2009

Did I misunderstand this? Boeing decides to build an airplane having performance not previously achieved, using engines not yet built, claiming fuel specifics not yet attained, and constructed out of materials never before used for a similar purpose. It specifies a barrel-fuselage structure never before used on a large plastic airplane. It uses vendors not familiar with the material and designs using computer models that aren’t verified. It outsources nearly all work using vendors inexperienced with them and their processes.

It specifies an electrical system having three times the power of existing aircraft systems, designed using the wild frequency technique not previously used, operating at twice the voltage of previous airplanes, using a system designer who hadn’t previously designed such systems.

It guarantees to do this with top-level management that has never built an airplane or managed outsourcing, on a schedule never before achieved on a conventional airplane, and plans not to pay the vendors until the airplane is delivered.

What could possibly go wrong?

Aviation Week & Space Technology, 07/20/2009

Correspondence

Author:Stephen Incledon

O I got this in e-mail today

You're a 19 year old kid. You're critically wounded, and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley , 11-14-1965, LZ X-ray, Vietnam . Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8–1, and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the Medi-Vac helicopters to stop coming in.

 
You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you're not getting out. Your family is half way around the world—12,000 miles away—and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.  

 
Then, over the machine gun noise, you faintly hear that sound of helicopter, and you look up to see an un-armed Huey, but it doesn't seem real, because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.  

 
Ed Freeman is coming for you. He's not Medi-Vac, so it's not his job, but he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come.  

 
He's coming anyway.  

 
And he drops it in, and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 2 or 3 of you on board.  

 
Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire, to the doctors and nurses.  

 
And, he kept coming back…13 more times…and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.  

 
Medal of Honor Recipient, Ed Freeman, died  Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at the age of 80, in Boise, ID…May God rest his soul.

 

 

Medal of Honor Winner Ed Freeman


Since the Media didn't give him the coverage he deserves send this to every red blooded American you know.

THANKS AGAIN ED FOR WHAT YOU DID FOR OUR COUNTRY. 

 

Please pass this around to all those who do not know a real hero passed away this past March and very few heard a thing from the mainstream press. He was not Michael Jackson or Farah Fawcett so he did not "rate" the spotlight. Who do you think made the greater contribution in their lifetime? I was in S. Viet Nam while this battle took place. Fortunately for me, I was in a safe place at the time and not in the same situation. I lost a classmate in that battle. He remains one of my heroes! Keep it real folks!

 

Jim

 

Somebody else's writing

Look Out, Are You About to Join the White Underclass?

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted July 18, 2009.

"We're starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass... Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it."

"White underclass" is a term I've used often in my writing, and most American readers seem to know what I mean. They've got eyes and live in the same nation I do. But in a sudden burst of journalistic responsibility, I decided that if I am going to throw around the word underclass, then I should offer some clearer, perhaps more scientific definition.

So I started writing this with a pile of published research papers before me. Now they are in the trash can by my side. Looking down on them, I can see the gobbledygook titles, the stuff of which government policy and political platforms are made. They run together in slurry of the language of our society's commissars: Concerning-Prevalence-Growth-and-Dynamics-Concentrated Urban Poverty Areas- block-level vs. tract-level segregation-800-tract-tables-urban abstracts-Defining-and-Measuring-the-Underclass-from-The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management-statistical-summary-of…

What I find is that nobody in social science seems to agree on the term, or, being firmly placed in the true white middle class themselves, even agree if such a thing as a white underclass exists. You can't smell the rabble from the putting green. To others, some blacks for example, the term white underclass is an oxymoron, or maybe yet another new white social code word to be deciphered. I can't blame them for their wariness. You have to be an American to even get these code words. For instance, for all practical purposes and to most Americans, regardless of race, the term "middle class" means "white." Plain and simple. We all know that, even members of the "black middle class."

Middle class also has implications of people's occupations, usually white collar occupations, though it also includes some of the ever thinning ranks of blue-collar workers. But this comes down to describing human beings solely in terms of their jobs in the capitalist labor marketplace, and assumptions about income and whether one takes their daily shower before they go to work or after they come home. By that definition, anyone of working age who doesn't have a steady job of the right type, for whatever reason, is in some sort of "economic underclass." In other words, they are the people that middle class folks feel should damned well be working, if they are over age 18 and have a pulse. ("If I gotta do time in this meaningless workhouse of a nation, you do too!") This underclass includes any people of color seen on the street at midday during the week, single mothers, and paraplegics too, now that the middle class is paying taxes for handicap parking spaces and wheelchair access to the public shitters.

Another way we define underclass is as "losers." People who cannot talk, think, or act like middle class professional and managerial workers, people who cannot even be posers. There is absolutely no excuse for these people. We've got television 24/7 to show'em how to behave. They could learn to act like the blue collar workers we see on the endless reruns of The King of Queens (an American sitcom about a parcel service delivery truck driver.). They could at least be funny and amiable fer godz sake.

From reading the studies, I can see that social scientists dislike plural nouns, and thus shun the word losers. So they call this the "educational underclass." Either way, it comes down to folks too wooly and uncurried for office water cooler society. Nobody is denying that they all should have jobs, of course, just nowhere near the water cooler.

Yes, eight to eighty, crippled blind or crazy, Americans generally agree that every man or woman in America should have a full-time job, except those women who manage to snag a wealthy man. They are exempt, as are the middle class commissariat's own beer guzzling spawn keeping the pizza delivery and the all-night video arcade businesses thriving in college towns across the republic.

Then you've got your moral underclass. Like the rest of us, they come in two major varieties -- male and female. Females who don't bother to get married before they have babies (the non-technical term is "welfare sluts"), and men who have things more serious on their national police state blotters than a parking ticket. "Non-mainstreamers," in socio-demographic speak. Many of these are men who say, "Screw it, I ain't gonna even bother to work my ass off and be treated like dirt for six bucks an hour. I'd rather shoot pool." Me too.

The unwed mothers come in two varieties. There are those who decide they want children, but are choosy about the husband that traditionally comes with the deal. And there are those who are so young and naive due to cultural circumstance and environment they do not know what this country does to, not for, single mothers. They often find themselves working at least part time (workfare), yet permanently institutionalized into poverty by our social services industry, instead of being lifted out of it. More than 45 percent of U.S. single mothers are poor, compared five percent in Sweden and Finland, where no stigma is attached and substantial public resources are applied to child health and development. But research done in Europe shows that even if U.S. women had a zero rate of single motherhood, poverty among American women would still be higher than in European and other socially advanced nations.

Armchair sociologist that I am, I have a theory about this: Millions of American women are in poverty because they are paid poverty wages. I could be wrong, I often am, but there seems to be a connection between poverty and money. I started developing this theory when I was in a Melbourne, Australia hotel and learned from a single mother hotel housekeeper there that she made $19 an hour, had government assisted childcare and was going to college at night toward becoming a medical technician. Hmmm Over here we tell single mothers, "Get a six dollar an hour job or get married bitch! Workfare, baby, workfare." Then too, contrary to the American middle class belief system, out-of-wedlock babies are increasing at all levels of white American society. Even more contrary to popularly held notions, as many of these children turn out to be as well adjusted people as do children of the middle class. But for damned sure poorer in most cases.

And finally we have simple snottiness as a line of underclass demarcation -- one's manner of physical gesture or accent. Believe me from personal experience, a Southern accent in America is no ticket to the top. But even with a Southern accent, if you talk like a college grad, don't wear bib overhauls or gang banger gear, and appear to know where South America is on a map, Americans will deem you middle class. Actually, if you smile a lot, and sound like any sort of white customer service type, it will fly. It's called having the appropriate social and cultural skill set. Yeah, right, appropriate to be hired as a telemarketer so you can piss people off by interrupting their dinner hour.

But even if you gather aluminum cans from dumpsters for a living, with effort, you can "pass" like light skinned black folks used to do in this country. As testimony to this, I, who am a high school dropout with a Southern accent, have successfully managed entire magazine publishing groups for a living. (The secret is balls). If I'd been black or Hispanic though, I'd have been distributing the urinal cakes in the rest rooms at night. So yes, there is a slight edge to whiteness, though not nearly as much as minorities assume. Still, you gotta make the most of that little edge.

In the end, race, gender or sexual preference are just moving parts of the class machine, with middle class perceptions setting the standard. You can indeed be black or queer, but with the properly buffed patina of white middle class mojo you can make it to the top, or near to the top of the heap (in America, proximity to the top of our cultural garbage heap is everything. All the rest of us are mere consumer refuse, as the Michael Jackson Morbidity Festival demonstrated. You can even be celebrated as an icon of diversity if you act white and middle class enough. Obama is Harvard white guy enough, Ellen DeGeneres is going strong ten years after coming out, gay Congressman Barney Franks still gets reelected. They've all got white middle class mojo. Al Sharpton on the other hand, has cootie mojo. (Tip for Al: They need golf cart drivers at the Congressional Country Club. A year of that and you'd know all you need to know about the white mojo shtick. Because you can watch Obama play golf there).

When it comes to the underclass, there is no arguing that some people are members because they are so damned uneducated they cannot count their toes or read well enough to fill out a job app, the causes of which are too deep and tangled to go into at the moment. Others just don't care to do the smiling grammatically correct wimp assed customer service zombie thing. They prefer swinging a bigger hammer than that -- doing real work, like America used to do. And doing it without kissing ass, which is why they are called the "permanently jobless." As sociologist Christopher Jencks points out, "There is no absolute standard dictating what people need to know in order to get along in society. There is however, an absolute rule that you get along better if you know what the elite knows than if you do not." He also cautions that "the term underclass combines so many different meanings that social scientists must use it with extreme care."

Which is fine. But I'm no social scientist. If in my travels and experience in American life I see that tens of millions of Americans being screwed silly by a handful of chiselers at the top, or if I see one percent of Americans earning as much annually as the bottom 45 percent of Americans, then that 45 percent is an underclass. When I see a 70 year old man on his second pacemaker limping through Wal-mart as a "greeter" so he can pay at least something on last winter's heating bill this month, then he is part of an underclass. When I see the humiliated single mom waitress tugging downward on the ridiculously short red plastic skirt she must wear at the Hooter's type joint so her crotch won't show, she's part of an underclass of humiliated and socially oppressed people. Screw the hairsplitting about who qualifies as underclass and what color they are. Just fix it. Or reap the consequences.

We're finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We've got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.

Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won't be the first. I was on a National Public Radio show last year with a couple of political consultants, demographers as I remember. One, a lady, was obviously part of the Democratic political syndicate, the other was part of the Republican political mob. The Democratic expert said dismissively of my remarks, "Well! Some people here seem to believe anecdotal evidence is relevant." Meaning me. I held my tongue. But what I wanted to say was this:

Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who's drinking himself to death because, "I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I'm all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I'll never have another one and I've got four more years to go before Social Security." He doesn't need scientific proof. He doesn't need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness.

And furthermore, Sister, we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people's scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you're fucked, you know it. You don't need scientific verification.

I wanted to say that on the radio. But I didn't. The little white guy mojo voice in my head told me not to. So I just laughed good naturedly. Like any other good American.

May God forgive me.

Homemade Canned Pork and Beans

Yield: 14 pints

Dry Ingredients



• 6.5 cups of white navy beans

• 2 pounds of hot dogs cut into slices

• 1 pound of good polish sausage cut into slices

• 2 large onion, chopped

• 1 pounds salt pork, cut into thick (about 1/2) inch slices and around 2 inches across

Sauce Ingredients



• 8 .5 cups water

• 1 12-ounce can tomato paste

• 2 teaspoon dry mustard

• 2 teaspoon paprika

• 2 tsp garlic powder

• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (the kind that is good on pizza)

• 1/4 cup molasses

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 1 teaspoon black pepper

• 3 teaspoon salt

• 1.5 teaspoon ground ginger

• 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar NOTE: To be added to the sauce just prior to putting jars together

Instructions

Allow beans to soak overnight. Drain water off and rinse a few times. Bring beans to a boil and boil another 2 minutes. Let cool for around three or four hours to partially cook. Drain and rinse again.

Place beans in large bowl. Add chopped onions, hot dogs, and kielbasa and mix well.

Mix all ingredients for sauce together and bring to boil.

Meanwhile, place once piece of salt pork on bottom of pint jar. Fill with to about 1 inch of the top of the canning jar with bean mixture and place another piece of salt pork on top.

After you get all the beans arranged, put the balsamic vinegar into the sauce.

Arrange all your jars of beans on counter and then fill with hot sauce.

Seal with two piece lids and arrange in pressure canner.

Process at 11 pounds pressure for 75 minutes. Allow canner to cool on it's own.

When pressure is completely down, pull jars and allow jars to cool, adjust lids again.

Dog Days

It is the hot part of the summer here. Yesterday was 95 F and I was hunkered down in the basement. Sorry about not posting, but sometimes you just aren't in much of a mood.

I think that the squawking today will be about restaurants and going out to eat. A couple of my friends told me that when it is hot, they always go out to eat because it is just too hot to cook. I approach it differently and just go and buy some cold cuts and bread and we eat sandwiches. It gets even better when the tomatoes ripen and you add sliced tomatoes to the sandwich.

Anyway, lets talk about restaurants. Growing up poor, we didn't have much experience with restaurants. The China Night on 28th was a get dressed up occasion. We would occasionally order out a pizza from the Circle Inn up on the old highway. As I grew up, I added more and more restaurants to my eating habits. Then when I got poor again, I removed them.

But the removal hasn't really affected my life badly at all. I think that when I was in Thailand it hit me after eating out for a week of so that most places really didn't cook any better than I did, and more importantly, most of them are not appreciably better than the one next door. It seems that an important part of any "dining experience" is a certain amount of preening for those around you. Quite a number of folks choose where they eat as an assertion of status, not a good place to get some chow.

The restaurant industry is currently taking a big hit. Folks have better things to do with their money. Displays of wealth are getting more and more passé. I don't think that we will be worse for the loss. Sure, there will be a loss of jobs for young hotties working for tips, and rude waiters will have to become government officials, but we will be just dandy.

Might want to tighten up your finances a bit

Comex are the folks who run the securities exchange. Now, for the most part, this is just a casino for the big boyz to play with. Nothing for us low-lifes to concern ourselves with.

Jesse's Cafe Americain brought this to my attention. Lately some strange things have been happening. Comex has now decided to allow delivery of fund certificates as delivery of physical gold. So now, when you buy gold futures, and you decide to take possession of the gold, they can pay you off in paper.

Now, maybe I am just an untrusting tin-foil hatter, but that strikes me as a con game gone pro.

Things are getting strange indeed.

the sun is out and the beer is cold

Now this is my idea of a post

Bilious

You know, maybe the news once a week is too much. Maybe I ought to drop to a once every two week schedule. Nothing exciting ever happens in a single week.

Hmm...then maybe after letting this stuff sit for a week or so, I can look at it with the amount of thought that it is deserving of.

Too much news makes you crazy

Yes Virginia, It Will Be a Class War

We are dancing around the idea that there are no classes in America. We, as a country and a culture are clinging doggedly to the manufactured myth of American equality. But the truth keeps raising its ugly and inconvenient head and intruding on our consensual hallucination.

We have manufactured an elite. At first, it was an open elite, with the GI Bill educated vets from WWII being added to the old guard, then the college-educated boomers came in and swelled the ranks to the bursting point. So we have a well-off, educated, and smugly self-satisfied upper class of prius liberals and hummer neocons looking down their noses at the unwashed workers and trying desperately to figure of means of barring the door so that they can keep the gains that they have clawed out of an unequal system.

We are sitting at an unemployment rate of around 14%. Oh, the government claims that it is only 9.5%, but when they don’t choose to count around three million or so folks because they aren’t on regular unemployment, they are on extended unemployment benefits, you know that things are dicey.

The way that I see it, we have managed to atomize ourselves into a a conglomeration of self-serving individuals instead of a nation of free men. We worship at the altar of Mammon, calling it the “free-market” to throw off the unwary. We sneer at the unsuccessful and categorize them under the ruthless sorting of social Darwinism.

That the folks at the bottom of our society are there because they deserve it is the overarching belief of the country. Their lack of education and intelligence, their weight and drug problems are not the fault of the elite who have jealously cornered the gifts of the society, but the contempt of an angry God who finds the proles lacking.

Needless to say, I find none of this appealing. I am certain that Jesus spoke of the rich in very unkind terms. I am certain that the rich would not feel at all ashamed for letting a child starve to lower their taxes. So with the confluence of the end of the bubblish excessive gravy train of the past twenty years, and the desire of the winners to consolidate their gains, we will see an increasingly angry mobile and an increasingly nervous set of folks who are going to slide into the lower class from their perception of being in the upper class.

Things aren’t going to be pretty.

Anode to degeneracy

You Know, Sometimes a spot of vulgarity is just what the doctor ordered

If you feel a bit prudish, please do not click the link below.

http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2005/01/non-kinky-sex-is-waste-of-time.html

Sorry folks, sometimes prurience is just what the Doctor ordered...I laughed out loud

The Party’s Over

 

I for one am sick of the guvmint talking about “green shoots” and the return to the way things were. 

It ain’t gonna happen. 

Things are going to have to find a new level. Folks are going to have to live within their means and save their money.  No other way around it.  There is going to be a lot of taking care of our own and just getting by for quite a while. 

Can we please stop promising things that can’t happen and start living like adults.

Another Time

 

---

Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

---

Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040

My fellow Americans:

Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.

Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.

My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.

II.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

III.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

IV.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial 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.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present

• and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

V.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

VI.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

VII.

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

The Kine That Tread

OK,  It would appear to me that around 11% of the population is receiving food stamps

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDhdHJrK42P0

Think about that.  One out of nine is taking money to make ends meet.  There are some chiselers here, but not that many.  There are a bunch more folks who need it.

So, for the next bit, I think that we ought to gird our Christian loins and take care of our brothers.  Now is not the time for welfare reform.  Now is the time to help our fellow citizens eat and live. 

Sure, some of it is going to get wasted, but I will accept that to in order to make make to attempt to keep a child from going hungry.  I will be happy to take this less than optimal solution and keep things going rather than deny benefits and perhaps do harm.

Right now we are handing the banks a trillion bucks or so.  I think that we can afford to spring for the three billion that is going into the food stamp program.  Hell, lets throw in six billion.  Even if it is money down the toilet, at least it will go through some folk's bodies on the way there.

You know

I think that maybe things have to change in a big way when a washed up, fucked up, pedophile draws a half million people to his funeral.

Nuff said

Hektēmoroi

On July the Second, the national debt is $11,489,560,999,310.74.

When the eldest was born, the debt was $4,988,438,189,998.39.

That works out to be $500,086,369,947.07 a year increase

It looks like BHO is telling us that he is planning to slap another 5 trillion on the tab that Gabe will pick up. That is what he is admitting to, I have a sneaking hunch that it will be quite a bit more than that.

So in 2016, when Gabe turns 20, he will be the proud owner of his share of about $16,500,000,000,000 dollars.

There are 304,059,724 people in the US.

His share currently, if we only bill him for the time he has been alive is $21, 381.07.

His full tab is $37,787.18

His share in 2016 will be $54,265.65

So, if we are looking at paying off the debt, he will be on the hook for $291.31 a month for his thirty-year working career. Now, that isn't all he will pay, nosireebob, he will also have to pay the normal day to day taxes that we pay now and then have this plopped down on top of it.

Remember, these are approximate figures. Things will probably get worse. The number used to divide the total debt will be lower. The actual debt number will be higher.

So, my question now is.....

Gambling

I don’t think that legalized casino gambling should be allowed to exist in the United States. The morality of such an enterprise is, at very best, mixed. The great majority of the time, they teach lessons that no one needs to learn.

That being said, casinos are big money makers for the city/counties/state governments where they are located. Gambling is heavily taxed and the profits are high. So the venal and shortsighted politicians in the aforementioned governments see the dollar signs and let the poison in.

Now, let us speak of the commodities options market. This is gambling pure and simple. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have heard the crap about farmers using the options market to hedge the chances of price rises etc., etc., etc. Well, it is still gambling. If you gamble as part and parcel of your business, you are no better than the goddamn banks who got us into the pickle we are in.

But most options traders aren’t farmers. I would even venture a guess that farmers constitute <10% of the overall option trades. My guess is that it is a lot lower than that. I would even venture to say that if, as a country, we had and agricultural policy that didn’t consist of shoveling money into big agribusinesses pockets as fast as the politicians can shovel, we might even find a better way to stabilize seed and crop pricing.

So what we have is a bunch of well connected white boys in Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and New York trading on the goodwill that the rest of the country lavishes on an image of a farmer that has long since departed. These are Ivy-league MBAs with a greedy streak as wide as any investment banker you have ever met.

So I say that we oughta tax the bastards. Oh I am not proposing anything big. I really like what Peter DeFazio ((D) Oregon), has proposed for the oil/transportation complex. I think that he is proposing too small a tax on these greedy bastards, he only wants 0.5% on the option for a futures contract, 0.002% on a futures contract. I think that we could do a lot better than that.

Now I can just hear some of you squealing about how this is a new tax, yada, yada, yada, new taxes are all bad, yada yada yada. Well, piss off. We are in debt up to our eyeballs as a country. We gotta pay it off.

I say let the rich pukes who are making money gambling on our food and heat and shelter pay more than their fair share.

Think about this one

Read This

1918 Influenza Pandemic | CDC EID

OK Here is the reading material.

1918 Influenza Pandemic | CDC EID

In a nutshell, you are looking at infection rates of 33%. Of those infected, you are looking at a mortality rate of around 10%. The numbers don’t quite add up for me, but they claim a case fatality rate of 2.5%, but it appears from the numbers that 500 million divided by 50 million is a case fatality rate of 10%. But maybe I am not looking at things correctly.

It appears to me that in a pandemic such as this, if you have a one in three chance of catching the disease, and a one chance in ten of dying if you get it, you are looking at a 3.3% death rate, or approximately a one chance in 30 of dying.

So, lets assume that we get a bad boy like this going around again. We have a population of 300,000,000. A 3.3% hit on that population would be around 10,000,000. Bad news that.

Another thing to consider before getting too cocky is the way that the pandemic waves hit. Take a look at th UK's data during this period

So the thing hit, then took a breather, then hit big. Keep your guard up.

Outrage Exhaustion

Maybe it is just me, but I am so sick of the news coming out of everywhere that I am just ready to throw up my hands and go water the garden. I now am officially diagnosed with outrage exhaustion. I guess that it being sunny and nice and the garden does need work has something to do with it.

But mostly it is the insipidity and duplicity that come out of the "official" and mainstream channels that is driving me to distraction. There is also the energy draining angst of the blogosphere. We have gotten so used to seeing the hidden motives of the world around us that it is difficult to bring up the possibility that things are maybe going to be something other than the Götterdämmerung we have been so carefully crafting in our group psyche.

I am going to keep the process going, but I think that I going to spend a bit more time on the day to day parts. I will leave to the Norns the task of weaving the rope of destiny.

There are..

Periods of time when the brain refuses to engage in any useful activity.

Currently, your patient correspondent is in the middle of one of these periods. I think that taking a vacation threw me completely off my groove. I haven't been inspired whatsoever these past couple of days.

I'll give it a try tomorrow, but I ain't holding my breath.