Tourist/Racist Charity

Putin has gone and done it.  Told folks here in the US that they won't be able to adopt the Russian children.

Now, there are scads of children here in the US needing to be adopted.  But they are usually the wrong color for the folks wishing to adopt.  So heading over to nominally white Russia allows folks the color option they so desire.

I agree with Vlad on this.  Russia is fully capable of taking care of its own children.  It is us here in the US who need to look at our mirror.  I would agree that, if there were no children available for adoption in the US, going to another country and adopting is a fine gesture, but if there are children here in the US who need adoption, it is absurd to let folks get away with looking around for different models.

I can here the screaming now.  Mostly from the lawyers and caseworkers here in the US who make their living charging absurd sums for the paperwork and bureaucracy-management needed for this venture.  The sums are staggering to most folks.

Naw, I am good with this.  Keep it up Vlad.  I think that it is more important to fix our problems than try to go off and save the rest of the world.

Venality of office

By this, I do not mean the venial nature of the people currently holding public office in America (though I think not enough can be written on that particular issue), but rather, the way that certain professions are held in this country.

Consider for a moment the medical professions.  Doctoring, Nursing, Medical Tech's, CNA's and such.  The schools that run them are extraordinarily profitable, the tuition to enter one prohibitive, and the desire of these guilds to keep supply low and wages high out of the realm of public discussion.

The medical profession as a whole is an endless stream of self adulation and self promotion, all being accomplished by guild-masters whose purpose seems to be the continuation and enhancement of the status, perquisites, and incomes of the guild.  Patient care is taken care of only after the doctors, nurses, techs, etc have been taken care of in a manner that makes them some of the best paid people in America.  We don't even have to bring up the vagaries of the pharmaceutical industry to reinfoce this point.

No, one of the big reasons that we have such an out of control medical cost structure is the featherbedding, overpricing, and insanely lucrative practices of the guilds that control the professions.

Blue Christmas

I, for one, am quite happy that Christmas is over.  It is not that I am Scroogy, and I understand the holiday and it's roots, but it is just getting kind of stale.

This was a pretty decent year.  Yes, I spent more than I should have on the boyos new iPods, but it placates them as phone replacements and they have been good this year.  I got everyone else reasonable presents that they appeared to enjoy and managed not to feel to sorry for myself and didn't buy myself a placation present.

The deal with Christmas is that it all about gifts here.  It is a simulacrum of the holiday, with consumption being a replacement for celebration.

I always have been surprised that in a country/culture such as ours, which claims Christianity as its core tenet, that we make such a huge deal out of Christmas.  Granted, a virgin birth is a trick, but seeing as turkeys, sharks, and other critters can pull off the trick, I don't put it up there at the top of the miracle heap.

But man, can we go out of our way to completely ignore the meaning of Christmas, replacing the birth of a savior with the charting of economic trends as the savior of our economy.

Nope.  I am waiting for Easter.  

Watch The Red Tops

Found this in the wood pile that is the drafts of Blogger's interface.

OK...this is a petty bitch.

The eldest son brought home some tomato plants last May.  Grew them himself with his horticulture class and they did fantastic.  I am actually sick of fresh tomatoes at this point.

Which brings me to my "looking a gift horse in the mouth kind" of bitch.  I really need to remember next year to plant a mix of determinate and non-determinate strains.  What I have is four non-determinate bushes, merrily flowering and growing tomatoes on a continual basis.  I get tomatoes by the grundles, but they are all spaced out so that I never get a whole bunch at once to do the canning/preserving thing.

But I will be trying a trick that a friend just told me that I haven't thought of;  Just pull off the little green thingy, dip the tomato in boiling water, then stick the whole tomato in a gallon baggie and pull the frozens out for sauce.

Nope, next year I will make sure to plant some determinant strains.

Chinese Food For Christmas

Still haven't fixed the damn thing

I am, and have been, putting off the repair of the washing machine.  Some of it is money driven, finding extra coin around Christmas to bring in a repairman is problematic and the desire to actually tear the damn thing down and fix it myself is astonishingly low.

But, the other night I sat down and searched the net to find out that the fix is actually quick and quite simple.  Shit.  A fourteen dollar part and maybe fifteen to thirty minutes of work.

I hate running out of excuses.

If you have a chance, take the time to watch this

The fiscal cliff is a joke.  I say let's just go over it.

I think that it is the only way that we will be able to get any meaningful taxes on the rich.  The amount of tax increase will just put me back at 1990 levels and last time I looked, I got through that just fine.

The fiscal cliff is nothing but a false flag that will offer a way for the conservative Obama administration to gut Medicare and Medicaid.

I have good money down saying that they will do just that.

Here Again

Students dig up cobblestones to throw at police [Photo by Serge Hambourg/via NPR]

Been out for a while. Might leave again soon...who knows.

I haven't been reading that much on-line lately.  The main dystopian thread is centered around the financial world, and to be honest, I am sick of rich white folk bitching about how they are going to become poor white folk.  I have been saying for years that there will be a reckoning, with the short-term thinking of the last thirty years giving way to a more constrained set of long term goals.

What is happening now is the rich are trying to break the poor to their place.  The laws being placed into play are being placed by the wealthy to conserve that wealth.  From the point of view of the wealthy, this is a very good investment.  Politicians have a marvelous return on investment, but so do all cheap whores.  The laws dumping the losses on the rich onto the taxpayers will continue until there is pushback.  We aren't ready for that yet.  The laws giving the rich privileges will continue until there is pushback.  Again, not ready.

The wealthy are constructing their redoubts in plain sight.  The subordination of the military and security apparatus is nearly complete.  The levers of wealth are in secure control.  The legislative and Executive branches of government are in their hip pocket.

The draining of the bourgeois and the middle class have quite a while to run.  They are starting to feel the pinch, but they aren't ready to join the poor for the run at removing the "master class" currently riding us.

Need

So, why is it so important for folks to feel like they are prophets?  I include myself in the mix.

As a species, we seem to pride ourselves on our ability to say “I told you so!”.

I know no one who can truthfully say that they have been right about the future without serious weasel-wording and self delusion.

I wonder if there is a DSM category for this type of behavior.

Funding the Cause

Or: Making the best of it (11/18/12)

The Elder and the Younger are both of an age where, in my humble opinion, they need to have computers available for their homework and other such nonsense. So, I am faced with a funding dilemma that may well be a blessing in disguise.

The old warhorse Pentium-powered Compaq which I have been using to produce this screed was purchased on sale for $299.00 approximately five years ago. The network card just gave up the ghost, and as this card is not replaceable, the computer is now an excellent word processor. This also leaves me with no way to hook to the Internet at my preferred working location of the kitchen table.

I have the new Dell laptop purchased a year ago, but the Youngest uses that for his homework and is now a traveling computer, going back and forth between the two households. The Eldest has his own little convertible tablet, but he is truly loathe to allow sharing by any others. Finally, there is the behemoth tower hooked to the plasma which is a gaming terminal for WOW and other such wasters of time. It definitely cannot be taken to the table for my use.

Now, in the salad days, I would have toddled down to the Dell store and purchased a replacement. But even cheap computers aren't so cheap and shelling out $300.00 to $500.00 for a device primarily used for the occasional post to a not-very-well-read blog seems to be a bit of a waste.

So, here I am, plugging away in LibreOffice Writer, creating an HTML document to be posted in the near future. I get to sit down at the table, write to my heart's content (and my reader's dismay) and not really have any differences in my lifestyle other than an odd little bit where I take the computer and plug it in to charge it, check to see if there are upgrades to the OS (thank you Linux Mint) are available, and do a mail fetch.

Now, the point of this excess of detail is pretty damn simple. What is described in the above paragraphs is not in any way, shape, or form a difficult process. What is also implied is that a lot of folks would have gone the other way, went out and bought a new computer in order to save themselves a very minimal effort and inconvenience.

When I think about it, this is the core of our problems here in the Western world. We are just too damn lazy. I place myself in that group, so please don't accuse my of hypocrisy, I am fully aware of my myriad faults, but the core of this post is to point out that the laziness, and its handmaiden "convenience" are not our best cultural attributes.

We are also getting poorer as a country. Despite the protestations of the impassioned, the rich getting richer is not the issue, the money being hoarded by the wealthy is ephemeral paper, kind of a consensual hallucination or inside joke, signifying status but in a pinch, worthless.

Nope, we are becoming poorer because in our last little oil-fueled orgy of self-gratification (or as I call it, the last twenty-five years of my life) we burned too much the fuel that runs things and used too much of the resources needed to keep the party going.

We are going to be getting poorer. No way around it. We will be poorer in real terms, as we won't be able to go out and buy something every time a notion strikes us, the real costs of everything will increase (read here inflation and/or wage deflation) until their cost to consumer matches the scarcity of resource.

Our lives will change, we will work longer into our declining years, and current retirements will be changed radically. Our dreams of old-age leisure are built upon paper wealth. As the resources underlying this paper wealth are currently being depleted, the value of the paper wealth itself will become progressively more attuned to its real worth (do your really think that Apple is worth $600+ a share?). The golf and the travel will gradually fade away, and the current retirees will find themselves in the standard condition of old people everywhere. Worried and tight with money.

Maybe I dwell to much on all this, It really won't change my life all that much. I know that I will work until I am seventy or so. I will become poorer like the rest of the country and weather the process with as much style as I can manage. I will watch political charlatans come and go, promising things that they cannot deliver. I will endure.

testing.

Testing Testing 1, 2, 3

Hostile Saviors

Found this picture here.   I was giggling so hard at the end of the posting that I nearly old-manned myself.
I was looking for a picture to have at the top of the posting about how, as Americans, we are currently absolutely dependent on the Chinese and the Arabs to support the ideas that "the American lifestyle is not negotiable”.  This little blog came up and what was I to do.  I have a feeling that it is all a bunch of shit by a snot nosed brat of a middle manager, replete with delusions of grandeur, but it might actually be true which makes it that much richer.