Dateline Chamesa: A Revolutionary Weblog

News Factoids for December 2011 & January 2012

2012-02-08T16:46:00.003-07:00

"At this point, the Republican candidates for U.S. President can be referred to as 'The Four Stooges'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

Notice arrived that I am getting a C.O.L.A. increase (Cost of Living Adjustment) of $40 on my monthly Social Security check, which started in January – after no increase for the last three years. Thank you, President Obama!

About a third of all land on the planet is now desert, almost 20 million square miles, which increases every year.
~~ per New Yorker Magazine

If you are looking for a replacement for WebRing, try Nexus Links

Apparently, the Gingrich gang are paying to destroy Romney by promoting the half-hour docufilm "King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came To Town". What I've seen of the film is all anti-Romney and does not promote anything or anyone on the Republican fascist side of U.S. politics.

The percent increase in [people on food stamps] during Mr. Bush's presidency was higher than it has been under Mr. Obama.
~~ CBS News, January 2012

General Motors sold only 7,671 Chevy Volt hybrid electric vehicles in 2011, and Nissan sold only 8,729 Leaf electric cars.
~~ news item

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

January 2012 Quotations

2012-01-27T05:53:00.003-07:00

"The people have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
~~ Frank Norris [1870-1902]

"I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, 'I don't know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor'."
~~ Warren Beatty

"While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
~~ Eugene V. Debs [1855-1926]

"You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do."
~~ Kilgore Trout character, in "Timequake" novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
~~ Noël Coward [1899-1973]

"Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn't work."
~~ economist Allan Meltzer

"The most miserable possession [that] a man can have is the thing [that] he hurt somebody to get."
~~ writer & cartoonist Frank A. Clark [1911-91]

"No one changes the world who isn't obsessed."
~~ Billie Jean King

"It is impossible to go thru life without trust. That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
~~ Graham Greene [1904-91]

"Law is not an instrument of politics but the other way around."
~~ octogenarian Russian activist Sergei Kovalyov

"Ask not what America can do for women, but ask what women can do for America."
~~ Geraldine Ferraro [1935-2011]

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"The man who dies ... rich dies disgraced."
~~ Andrew Carnegie [1835-1919]

"Truths are illusions [that] we have forgotten are illusions."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82], in "Circles" 1841

"Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price."
~~ Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]

"Ambition is a dream with a V-8 engine."
~~ Elvis Presley [1935-77]

"The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007] in 2004

"Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor."
~~ Stephen Sondheim

"A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many people want in ... and how many people want out."
~~ Tony Blair

"I honestly think that it is better to be a failure at something [that] you love than to be a success at something [that] you hate."
~~ George Burns 1896-1996]

"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf."
~~ Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]

"The only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate."
~~ Milan Kundera

"Any girl can look glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid."
~~ actress/inventor Hedy Lamarr [1913-2000]

"Expressing anger is a form of public littering."
~~ Prof. Willard Gaylin

"Moral indignation is just jealousy with a halo around it."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]

"What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we loved deeply becomes part of us."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"[The internet] is a vanity press for the demented, the conspiratorial, or the merely self-important."
~~ Lars-Erik Nelson [1941-2000], New York Daily News reporter

"I find the argument that we need lower taxes to create jobs mystifying, because we've had the lowest taxes in this decade and about the worst job creation ever."
~~ Warren Buffett

"Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can think of no milder term to apply to ... the general prey of the rich on the poor."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Hope is the raw material of losers."
~~ Fernando Flores

"Every act of love is a change in the universe."
~~ Aleister Crowley [1875-1947]

"Enough is better than too much."
~~ French proverb

"The biggest thing [that] you can do for kids is [to] give them the ability to figure things out."
~~ musician Frank Zappa [1940-93]

"Lying about the future produces history."
~~ Umberto Eco

"When I am happy I am always good, but when I am good I am seldom happy."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"It is said that paradox is a Truth standing on its head to attract attention."
~~ Allan W. Watts [1915-73]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

2011 Websites Statistics

2012-01-07T13:07:00.002-07:00

The editing software on Blogger does not work well with table structure code, so the prior attempts to display the annual statistical accomplishments on my two main domains were pulled away from the blog back in April 2008 and consolidated on www.genordell.com/webstats.htm.

The stats for 2011 are now posted on that page. In summary: Ye Olde Webmaster created 142 new pages & coded 2,571 new covers (books, albums, DVDs, etc.) during the calendar year 2011.

2011 Year-End Bonus Quotations

2011-12-26T18:55:00.001-07:00

"One of the good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]

"Talent hits a target [that] no one can hit; genius hits a target [that] no one can see."
~~ Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860]

"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it."
~~ Robin Williams

"The best diet is having to pay for your own groceries."
~~ Aaron Karo

"When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt."
~~ Henry J. Kaiser [1882-1967]

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"
~~ Jean Kerr [1922-2003]

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"God may have had fun at creation, but he really didn't think things through."
~~ filmmaker Lars von Trier

"It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism."
~~ activist Malcolm X [1925-65]

"Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68], from "Where Do We Go From Here", 1968

"In Hollywood, you're as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production within the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved [before] this."
~~ Erich von Stroheim [1885-1957]

"Food is an important part of a balanced diet."
~~ Fran Lebowitz

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women."
~~ Margaret Thatcher

"Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us."
~~ minimalist sculptor Carl Andre

"Circumstances make man, not man circumstances."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"The pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful."
~~ Edgar Allan Poe [1809-49]

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."
~~ Margaret Atwood

"Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion."
~~ Franklin Pierce [1804-69]

"He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]

"Newt Gingrich embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive."
~~ conservative columnist George Will

"Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs."
~~ Ann Landers {Eppie Lederer 1918-2002}

“In the war of ideas, it's not enough just to be against something; you have to be for something that is sound as well.”
~~ Lech Walesa

"The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes."
~~ John Le Carre

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]

"I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good."
~~ Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn [1891-1958]

"Capitalism must be holy because religion is a business."
~~ minimalist sculptor Carl Andre

"Saving is a very fine thing. Especially if your parents have done it for you."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Character is much easier kept than recovered."
~~ Thomas Paine [1737-1809]

"Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides."
~~ Margaret Thatcher

"Intelligence requires that you don't defend an assumption."
~~ physicist David Bohm [1917-92]

"Wishes cost nothing unless you want them to come true."
~~ cartoonist Frank Tyger

"No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the rights of minorities."
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]

"The man who does more than he is paid [for] will soon be paid for more than he does."
~~ Napoleon Hill [1883-1970]

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
~~ Virginia Woolf [1882-1941]

"Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but dreadfully uneasy to take."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

December 2011 Quotations

2011-12-04T18:27:00.002-07:00

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
~~ Frederick Douglass [1818-95]

"Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve."
~~ Tehyi Hsieh [1884-1972]

"One person speaking up makes more noise than a thousand people who remain silent."
~~ Thom Hartnett

"Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic."
~~ Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]

"Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?"
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude."
~~ novelist Cynthia Ozick

"Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people."
~~ boxing champion Joe Frazier [1944-2011]

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
~~ Herbert Spencer [1820-1903]

"It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of a spider."
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]

"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."
~~ Shirley Chisolm [1924-2005]

"The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it."
~~ journalist Mignon McLaughlin [1913-83]

"Being a celebrity is probably the closest to being a beautiful woman as you can get."
~~ Kevin Costner

"Our government is in our education."
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]

"If we are to reach real peace in this world, we shall have to begin with the children."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
~~ Frederick Douglass [1818-95]

"Your silence will not protect you."
~~ Audre Lorde [1934-92]

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]

"Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"As individual fingers we can be broken, but together we make a mighty fist."
~~ Native American leader Sitting Bull [1831?-1890]

"Make cornbread, not war."
~~ Charleston, South Carolina chef Sean Brock

"If people actually knew what was happening, they would be really pissed off. They should be."
~~ activist Barbara A. Brenner

"Old age is not a disease, it is a triumph."
~~ Maggie Kuhn [1905-95], founder of the GrayPanthers

QUIDQUID LATINE DICTUM SIT, ALTUM VIDETUR
("Anything said in Latin sounds profound")

DIEM DULCEM HABES ("Have a nice day")

"Virtue is necessary for the good life but not sufficient for the good life."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]
"Money is necessary for the good life but not sufficient for the good life."
~~ mis-attributed to Aristotle

"We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community ... Global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering."
~~ eco-activist Paul Hawken

"The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"It is better to live rich than to die rich."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."
~~ explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes

"He who fights for his rights can lose; he who does not fight has lost already."
~~ German labor slogan

"The freedom of Mankind does not lie in the fact that [we] can do what we want, but that we do not have to do that which we do not want."
~~ per Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-78]

"You are master of your words, but, once spoken, they control you."
~~ author uncertain

"Life is a four-letter word."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for November 2011

2011-11-25T06:24:00.004-07:00

Due to the small crop (global warming!), U.S. peanuts tripled in price this Fall; expect the price of peanut butter to double or worse before the end of the year.

Use this free online refinance calculator to see what future interest rate will be the optimal one for refinancing your old fixed-rate mortgage:
zwicke.NBER.org/refinance

Last year, total U.S. student loan debt exceeded U.S. credit card debt for the first time ever. — Time Magazine
The cost of college has increased 538 percent over the past 30 years.
— Time Magazine

There are around 5,000 privately-owned Bengal tigers in the U.S., more than the 3,600 that are living in the wild in Asia. — Xian Science Monitor

Just 147 interlocking companies control 40 percent of the world economy; the top 25 companies include Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Vanguard Group, United Bank of Switzerland, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Walton Enterprises, Bank of New York Mellon, Goldman Sachs, T. Rowe Price Group, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. — per New Scientist Magazine, Oct 2011

Several U.S. Senators & candidates are promoting a Constitutional amendment that would declare that only humans are 'persons' under U.S. law.
'Reverse Citizens United' Constitutional Amendment

Income for the poor rose 18 percent between 1979 and 2007 (in inflation-adjusted dollars), while middle-class income rose 40 percent and the income of the top one percent rose 275 percent.
— Congressional Budget Office report, October 2011

Commercial helium gas is extracted from natural gas, mostly in Texas and China. At the present rate of consumption, we will reach peak supply in twenty years, after which the supply will drop sharply.

Movie attendance dropped to a 17-year low in Summer 2011, and more viewers chose 2-D tickets over 3-D for expected blockbusters "Pirates of The Caribbean" #4, "Harry Potter" #8, "Green Lantern", and "Kung Fu Panda 2".

Information on the Occupy Movement
Progressivism / 'Occupy Movement' at Working Minds Philosophy website

There are 65 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S.A.; 48 of them are leaking radioactive tritium.
— two federal reports, 2011

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

November 2011 Quotations

2011-11-11T05:04:00.002-07:00

"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
~~ President Herbert Hoover [1874-1964]

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."
~~ Ben Hecht [1894-1964]

"Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity/"
~~ adventurer Thor Heyerdahl [1914-2002]

"An expert is [someone] who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a narrow field."
~~ physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962]

"When dealing with people, remember [that] you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity."
~~ Dale Carnegie [1888-1965]

"Finance, like Time, devours its own children."
~~ Honoré de Balzac [1799-1850]

"Story is the shortest distance between people."
~~ Jeffrey Courion

"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things."
~~ Antoine de St-Exupéry [1900-44]

"Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle."
~~ Igor Sikorsky [1889-1972]

"Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes."
~~ Charles A. Lindbergh [1902-74], in 'Autobiography of Values' 1978

"God gave us memories that we might have roses in December."
~~ J.M. Barrie [1860-1937]

"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."
~~ rock legend Jimi Hendrix [1942-70]

"Don't declare victory at halftime."
~~ Stephen Windwalker

"Why should we believe [that] the private sector will take care of poverty? It never has in our history."
~~ Gene Nichol

"Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another. ... Inequality undermines democracy."
~~ George Packer, columnist at The New Yorker Magazine

"[The United States is] a dysfunctional plutocracy serving the biggest corporations and the billionaires behind them."
~~ Dave Johnson, Campaign For America's Future blogger

"The creative process is a process of surrender, not control."
~~ Julia Cameron

"Two dangers threaten the universe: order and disorder."
~~ French poet Paul Valéry [1871-1945]

"Everybody wants to save the earth. Nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes."
~~ P.J. O'Rourke

"The only true voyage of discovery would not be to visit strange lands but to behold the universe thru the eyes of another."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"We always want the best man to win an election. Unfortunately, he never runs."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"The key to success isn't much good until one discovers the right lock to insert it [into]."
~~ Chinese author & lecturer Tehyi Hsieh [1884-1972]

"Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral."
~~ Rosalind Russell [1907-76]

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
~~ Charles Dickens [1812-70]

"Don't get it right, just get it written."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you $50,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul."
~~ Marilyn Monroe [1926-32]

"The clowns have finally taken over the circus ... [The Republican Party] is now overwhelmed by its own nonsense."
~~ Timothy Egan, in The New York Times

"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"In this country, everything is possible."
~~ Shakira

"The lure of flying is the lure of beauty."
~~ Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for October 2011

2011-10-26T19:29:00.003-06:00

Albertson's and Walgreen's have already put out a row of Xmas decorations, in the middle of October! The Halowe'en candy has been on the shelves for weeks, so long by now that it is probably already stale.

The Film News Briefs free weekday newsletter is full of information that is useful for anyone in the movie or TV business, or wanting to be. There is so much info on new movies and casting deals (I skip the TV deals and the executive hiring announcements) that I am often a day or two behind in updating that data to my various websites. free signup here

"The average real weekly earnings of a typical [American] blue-collar worker are lower today than in 1964." == Time Magazine

Taxes at the end of the Reagan administration were 18 percent of GDP; today taxes are 15 percent of GDP. Spending under Reagan averaged 22.4 percent of GDP "well above the 1971-2009 average of 20.6 percent", while spending today is 24 percent of GDP. == per Time Magazine, August 2011

The wealth gap between white and black American households doubled in the last two decades, to a ratio of twenty to one. == per a Pew Study, 2011

Internet Explorer’s overall share dropped from 56% in July to 54% in August while Firefox’s market share increased from 19% to 20% and Safari’s share grew one point to 9%. Between July 2010 and July 2011, however, Microsoft’s browser share remained steady at 56%.

The world human population reached 7 billion sometime during the month of October 2011.

Median income of U.S. college graduates declined 9.6 percent since 2000, a difference of more than $4,000 in salary. == per Time Magazine

"The U.S. collects less tax as a percentage of national income than any other leading economy." A graphic showed Denmark at the top with 48 percent and the U.S. at #16, with half that rate. == per Time Magazine

The U.S. Postal Service announced that the price of a basic stamp is going up a penny, to 45¢ on January 22 in 2012.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

October 2011 Quotations

2011-10-20T17:01:00.001-06:00

"The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible."
~~ financier Bernard Baruch [1870–1965]

"It's just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there."
~~ TV curmudgeon Andy Rooney

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
~~ eco-activist Edward Abbey [1927-89]

"You will not become a saint thru other people's sins."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth."
~~ Thomas Mann [1875-1955]

"The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference."
~~ Bess Myerson

"The expression 'as a matter of fact' precedes many an expression that isn't."
~~ Laurence J. Peter [1919-90]

"You are made in the image of what you desire."
~~ Thomas Merton [1915-68]

"Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good [that] we often might win, by fearing to attempt."
~~ activist Jane Addams [1860-1935]

"We must try to contribute joy to the world. I didn't always know this and am happy [that] I lived long enough to find it out."
~~ Roger Ebert, in 2011

"Racecar spelled backwards is racecar."
~~ Kevin Kennedy

"I do want to get rich, but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich."
~~ Gertrude Stein [1874-1946]

"History keeps repeating itself. That's one of the things wrong with history."
~~ Clarence Darrow [1857-1938]

"Character is like a tree and a reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
~~ Maya Angelou

"The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born."
~~ theologian Wm. Ralph Inge [1860-1954]

"Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time."
~~ Malcolm Forbes [1919-90]

"There are some days I practice positive thinking, and other days I'm not positive [that] I am thinking."
~~ John M. Eades

"Age is mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"To have joy one must share it."
~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]

"An idea that isn't dangerous is hardly worth calling an idea at all."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. / Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world. / ... / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."
~~ W.B. Yeats [1865-1939], in "the Second Coming" 1919

"If someone thinks that he does not live by a philosophy, then what he really lives by are the scraps and tail-ends of other people's broken and discarded philosophies."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

"The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile."
~~ Italian journalist Corrado Alvaro [1895-1956]

"There can be no happiness if the things [that] we believe in are different from the things [that] we do."
~~ Freya Stark [1893-1993]

"The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]

Zuckerberg's Law: "The amount of sharing by a Facebook user roughly doubles each year."

"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"[Steve Jobs] revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing."
~~ biographer Walter Isaacson

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011], in 2005

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is.”
~~ Mary Pettibone Poole [?-??]

"Hóka-héy, today is a good day to die!"
~~ Sioux leader Crazy Horse [c. 1840-1877]

"The only good Indian is a dead Indian."
~~ General Phillip Sheridan [1831-88]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

The U.S. Beer Monopoly

2011-10-13T12:02:00.002-06:00

The United States ranks 13th in per capita beer consumption at 81.6 liters, and is second in total volume against #1 China.

Beer accounts for roughly 85% of all alcohol volume sold in the United States and annually generates over $91 billion in retail sales. South African Breweries-Miller became the largest brewing company in the world when it acquired Royal Grolsch in 2002; InBev was then the second-largest beer-producing company in the world, and Anheuser-Busch was third.

But when Anheuser-Busch acquired InBev in November 2008, the new Anheuser-Busch InBev company became the largest brewer in the world.

2010 statistics from Beverage Industry Magazine, March 2011

Anheuser-Busch InBev places first:
#1 Bud Light – 28.5% market share
#2 Budweiser – 11.4% market share
#5 Natural Light – 6.0% market share
#6 Busch Light – 4.0% market share
#7 Busch – 3.6% market share
#10 Natural Ice – 1.9% market share
— for a total of at least 55.4 percent share of the U.S. beer market

Molson Coors places second:
#3 Coors Light – 10.2% market share
#9 Keystone Light – 2.6% market share
— for a total of 12.8 percent share of the U.S. beer market

SAB-Miller places third:
#4 Miller Lite – 9.1% market share
#8 Miller High Life – 2.7% market share
— for a total of 11.8 percent share of the U.S. beer market

... which adds up to three corporations controlling at least 80 percent of the U.S. beer market.
Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

A Walter T. Foster Story

2011-10-06T15:33:00.003-06:00

Walter T. Foster published a series of large-format books about art, such as "How To Draw Horses". The books were priced at a dollar each in the 1940s and 1950s, were displayed on racks at hobby and stationary stores, and were so popular that he became very wealthy. His daughter Margaret was my mother's best friend, and Margaret and her son Lyle lived only a few miles away from us in Culver City. (Lyle was the age of my two younger brothers, so he and I never connected.)

Walter Foster was a character. He made his fortune and allowed himself to indulge himself in fun ways. He had a Christmas list, and my mother was on that list. I remember one year Walter sent out a limited edition phonograph record of him singing Christmas carols, backed by something like a 25-piece orchestra. The platter itself had to be 78rpm and was about ten inches across and made of clear red plastic, sorta like ruby glass. (I do not remember any impression of Walter's singing.)

Another year he sent out limited edition prints of a watercolor by one of the artists presented in his art books, mailed in a tube. My father was a cabinet maker and he liked the print, so he framed it under glass and the picture hung in my parents' hallway for many years.

The painted portion is on ecru? paper; measures twenty-one inches wide and 14 inches high; and the signature is in red in the bottom right corner. The subject is a road in India, the trees look like California sycamores, and three oxcarts are moving along the sun-dappled road. Dad scotch-taped a label from 'Walter Foster Art Services' on the back, with the handwritten date 1962.

When I was in the Air Force, my permanent station was Las Vegas, Nevada (with visits to Thailand and Vietnam), and when I was discharged, I got a job as the systems programmer for Howard Hughes (the I.B.M. 360 was brand new then). At some point during that two years, the artist of my parents's watercolor print had a one-man showing in Las Vegas, and I went one afternoon. I do not remember where that event was, but I can see the house and the driveway, it was a commercial gallery that appeared to be adobe and was in a residential neighborhood. The artist was there, a medium-size man from India; he was surrounded by art people and I was not very comfortable in that setting, so I did not speak to him. His other paintings on display were very good. That would have been in 1969 or 1970.

Around 1980, Margaret and Walter died close together in time and Lyle inherited the company and hated being an executive, so eventually he sold it to a corporation and moved to Northern California and became a taxidermist.

Fast forward. Mom was changing the decor at the house, one of her hobbies, and she asked me if I wanted the Foster watercolor, and I agreed and that print has been in my possession ever since. After I moved to New Mexico, I hung the framed picture in my hallway; I began to wonder what it is that I have, but cannot decipher the signature, which seems to contain the initial letters G and something and A and R. I began wondering what the picture might be worth during one of my visits to Santa Fe, which is infested with art galleries of all types. (I figure that identifying the artist will shorten the door-to-door hunt up Canyon Road, etc.)

I tried emailing the present company, but got no reply. The official website boasts of their 88-year history, and they are keeping up to date with such products as an iPad app about drawing with digital software. I might also be able to identify the artist by slogging thru the books about watercolor, but I do not have access, nor is the website anywhere near complete in presenting old issues.

I plan to take a photo of the framed painting and a close-up of the signature, and when I do that, there will be two blue-colored hotlinks in this sentence.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

September 2011 Quotations

2011-09-20T16:05:00.003-06:00

"Spouting Tea Party propaganda does not make you a patriot, the same as getting athlete's foot does not make you an athlete."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Privatization is fascism, period."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"There are no rules in filmmaking, only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness."
~~ Frank Capra [1897-1991]

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Man is the only animal that plays poker."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

"Politicians are people who, when they see the light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy more tunnel."
~~ London banker Sir John Quinton

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."
~~ John Locke [1632-1704]

"All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear."
~~ beat writer Ambrose Redmoon {real name James Neil Hollingworth} [1933–96]

"The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas of enthusiasm."
~~ Thomas J. Watson [1874-1956], founder of I.B.M.

"In Art, as in love, instinct is enough."
~~ Anatole France [1844-1924]

"I thought drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries."
~~ Frank Capra [1897-1991]

"Thunder is impressive, but it is the lightning that does all the work."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Didn't we settle the question of Divine Right in 1776?"
~~ Susan S. Pastin of Chicago, Illinois (in a Letter to Time Magazine, August 2011)

"Cynicism ... follows whenever malefactors of great wealth escape the consequences of their deeds."
~~ Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor & publisher of The Nation Magazine

"Know the true value of time; snatch, sieze, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no delay, no procrastination; never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
~~ Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield [1694-1773]

"Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly."
~~ playwright Edward Albee, in "Zoo Story", 1958

"I will keep working until every [American] who wants to work has a job."
~~ Congressman Martin Heinrich [Dem-NM01], Labor Day 2011

"When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
~~ Jack London [1876-1916]

“At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”
~~ Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"There is no labor [that] a person does that is undignified, if they do it right."
~~ Bill Cosby

"Confidence is what you have until you understand the problem."
~~ Woody Allen

"What we think or what we know or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do."
~~ John Ruskin [1819-1900]

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88] (in 1965)

"I intend to live forever - so far, so good."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends."
~~ J.K. Rowling

"If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]

"All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner."
~~ Red Skelton [1913-97]

"Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful."
~~ novelist Kathleen Winsor [1919-2003]

"History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened."
~~ historian Hugh Trevor-Roper [1914-2003]

"If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime."
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]

"What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending."
~~ William Dean Howells [1837-1920]

"The drought in New Mexico is so bad that the big-ticket show at the arena in Albuquerque last month was 'Disney On Dirt'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for August & September 2011

2011-09-14T16:53:00.004-06:00

U.S. ECONOMIC NEWS

The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line in 2010 was 15.1 percent, the worst since 1993.
~~ per New York Times, 9/2011

Meanwhile, Rick Perry brags about his policies as Texas governor, and 18.4% of Texans were living below that same poverty line in 2010, up from 17.3% a year earlier – 21.9 percent above the national statistic!

How's the economy? Game hardware and software sales were down 26 percent in July over July a year ago, and down 23 percent in August over August 2010.
~~ per Zach Epstein of Boy Genius Report blog and The N.P.D. Group

Here in New Mexico, the Valencia County Building Inspection Department has shut down, due to lack of housing starts this year (less than a dozen, from hundreds per year before Bush); any new permits will be handled by the state, with the regular inspectors (plumbing, electrical) keeping an eye out for non-permit work.

"Between 2004 and 2009 median net worth of white households in America fell 24 percent, [while] median net worth of black households fell 83 percent."
~~ per Economic Policy Institute, in 2011

"Eleven states earned more revenue from lotteries than from corporate income taxes in 2009." ~~ Reuters

"They [the energy industry] claim that the economy is being smothered by regulations designed to keep our air and water safe. No iota of evidence is being offered, and in fact the record profits of big energy companies indicate a spectacular lack of suffering."
~~ Miami Herald journalist Carl Hiaasen

About one-fourth of the world's aluminum is stored in Goldman Sachs warehouses in Detroit, Michigan; the raw materials are being released as a daily trickle that has shortened the supply and driven up the price. Goldman Sach makes $165 million in storage fees per year, as well as profits from trading the essentially-cornered commodity. ~~ per Reuters, July 2011

3-D movies made $6 billion worldwide in 2010, which is 20% of box office revenue.

ECOLOGY & CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS

"U.S. electric utilities [use] seven times more water than all U.S. homes, 1-1/2 times the water used by all the farms in the country. In fact, 49 percent of all water use in the United States is for power plants ... And 16 percent of water pumped into water mains by U.S. utilities simply leaks away, back into the ground."
~~ Charles Fishman

U.S. POLITICAL NEWS

Eric Cantor outlined the Republican vision in a recent memo – they will gut environmental regulations, repeal health care reform, and attack workers.
~~ Guy Cecil

Republican hypocrisy: Newt Gingrich's campaign T-shirts are made in China, and Herman Cain's campaign T-shirts are made in Honduras.

91% of donations to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads this year came from billionaire donors bent on destroying unions and the democratic process: Texas oilman Trevor Rees-Jones, Texas billionaire Robert Rowling, Ohio billionaire Carl Linder, and billionaire TV exec Jerry Perenchio. ~~ per various news sites in June 2011

John Ashcroft, formerly U.S. Attorney general under George W. Bush, was hired in June by Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) as their 'ethics chief'.

BOOK INDUSTRY NEWS

Retail bookseller Borders Group filed bankruptcy in February, and began liquidating their stores in July.

Books-A-Million, now the second-largest bookseller, reported an 11 percent decrease in sales in the last quarter.

B&N reported that key indicator 'revenue in stores open at least one year' fell 1.6% at regular stores and 1.8% at college bookstores. ~~ per Reuters

Barnes & Noble's sales of the Nook device rose 140 percent last quarter, and Toys & Games showed large increases, but the overall sales results were still negative.

If on January First you had decided to invest $100 in Amazon, $100 in Barnes & Noble, and $100 in Books-A-Million, your investments would now stand at: Amazon up 14.75%, B&N down 26.20%, and Books-A-Million down 55.63%.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

WM Essay #96 "U.S. Corporations Hoarding Profits"

2011-08-30T06:34:00.006-06:00

        Capitalism is here defined as the creation of jobs, products, and services. This does not include the anti-capitalism practices of union-busting, off-shoring, asset-stripping, down-sizing, or cash hoarding that is claimed as the Divine Right of the Robber Barons who have the sheeple convinced that feudal economics is capitalism.
        George Dubya Bush's economic Great Recession continues to deplete America's net worth, while increasing the share of the Oligarchs (top one percent) and the Wealthy Class (top twenty percent) and shrinking the net worth of the rapidly-disappearing Middle Class.
        The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual. And the Oligarchs are winning. (Because they lie and cheat, and it works.)
        The Master Class is intentionally hoarding their unearned profits, both within domestic corporations and in foreign bank accounts, because they already make plenty of money churning trades on the Stock Market Casino (40 percent of G.D.P.!). By keeping capital in short supply they can charge higher interest and also prevent the Middle Class small business person from producing anything (thus no profit to them) and also prevent small businesses from hiring fear-driven workers.

One element of the Reason-Based Taxation proposal is that corporations be taxed at a rate of FIFTY percent for profits in excess of 10 percent of revenue. Reason-Based Taxation encourages actual Capitalism by providing the incentives of raising wages, lowering prices, domestic expansion, or buying treasury shares as simple methods to reduce profits below that 10 percent boundary. What you will see below is the extant of the greed that is today in violation of the Reason-Based Taxation proposal parameters.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        This data is based on a January 2011 Atlantic Monthly article and other sources; revenue and profit figures are a consensus of projections for 2011. Notice that the Top Ten are made up of three banks, three computer companies, two oil companies, one drug company, and Wal-Mart.

Exxon Mobil
Projected 2011 profits of $32.3 billion on revenue of $417.6 billion equals 12.93%
Exxon Mobil also has $35 billion in untaxed foreign profit
Per Fortune Magazine, Exxon Mobil does so much international business that over 80% of its 2009 profit came from overseas. Due to excess profits at the pump, Exxon Mobil, while second to WalMart in total revenue, nonetheless managed a 2010 net profit nearly double that of Walmart's – $30.5 billion to $16.4 billion.

Microsoft
Projected 2011 profits of $21 billion on revenue of $73.4 billion equals 28.6%
Microsoft also has $29.5 billion in untaxed foreign profit

Chevron
Projected 2011 profits of $19.8 billion on revenue of $247.23 billion equals 8%

JPMorgan Chase
Projected 2011 profits of $19.1 billion on revenue of $101.57 billion equals 18.8%

Pfizer
Projected 2011 profits of $18.3 billion on revenue of $66.09 billion equals 27.7%
Pfizer also has $48.2 billion in untaxed foreign profit

Apple, Inc.
Projected 2011 profits of $18.2 billion on revenue of $103.3 billion equals 17.6%

Bank of America
Projected 2011 profits of $16.3 billion on revenue of $109.7 billion equals 14.9%

Wal-Mart
Projected 2011 profits of $15.7 billion on revenue of $444.2 billion equals 3.53%

I.B.M.
Projected 2011 profits of $15.6 billion on revenue of $103.15 billion equals 15.12%
I.B.M. also has $31.1 billion in untaxed foreign profit

Wells Fargo & Co.
Projected 2011 profits of $15.3 billion on revenue of $84.8 billion equals 18%

* *          * *          * *          * *There are, of course, large and even smaller corporations that are making huge profits percentage-wise without being on this list. Such companies in the 'also ran' category include:

AT&T
AT&T had higher net profits than Wal-Mart in 2010
AT&T reported 2010 profits of $19.86 billion on revenue of $124.3 billion equals 16%

Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems is hoarding $31.6 billion in untaxed foreign profit

Citigroup
Citigroup is hoarding $32.1 billion in untaxed foreign profit

General Electric
General Electric paid NO U.S. corporate income tax for 2010 on revenue of $150.2 billion

Goldman Sachs
2010 profits of $8.4 billion on revenue of $39.16 billion equals 21.45%

Merck
Merck is hoarding $40.4 billion in untaxed foreign profit

Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is hoarding $30 billion in untaxed foreign profit

* *          * *          * *          * *        There is right now a gigantic pile of cash stashed away by U.S. corporations in European banks and elsewhere, waiting for another 'free pass' like the Bush Administration set up for them in 2004. Instead of paying the then-current 35% corporate income tax rate, $362 billion was repatriated at a 5¼ percent tax rate, at a loss to tax payers of $70 billion. But, as is typical of shenanigans devised by the fascist Oligarchy, the stated purpose for the special rate of hiring more workers did not happen: virtually the entire low-tax repatriation of 2004 resulted in payouts to executives and shareholders (and a few purchases of treasury shares) - no jobs were created.
        The Oligarchs are singing the same song and dance this time; anyone who believes them is a fool. And since the hoard is much larger – estimated at one trillion dollars of the pharmaceutical industry, one trillion dollars of the banking & finance industry, and one trillion dollars of the insurance industry – the loss to taxpayers could be as much as $900 billion.

[copyright 2011 by Gary Edward Nordell, all rights reserved]

Snowjob and The Seven Dwarfs

2011-08-14T03:18:00.001-06:00

The debate in Iowa this week between the eight Republican presidential candidates displayed what can only be described as 'Snowjob and The Seven Dwarfs'. On that same day, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that he is running for the 2012 G.O.P. nomination – fellow Texans describe him as "dumber than George W. Bush". And Sarah Palin flits around the country, cheerleading for the Tea Party fools. Not one of the bunch can manage a two-year-old, much less a bankrupt country. This does not mean that Barack Obama will win a second term, because there are more idiots in America than there are sentient voters.

August 2011 Quotations

2011-08-11T22:18:00.003-06:00

"What's the difference between Congress and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision."
~~ variation on an old joke

"The United States has many problems at the moment: a high-and-stubborn unemployment rate, a foreclosure catastrophe, a slowing economy that has not recovered and will not recover from the Great Crisis, and the ongoing challenges of infrastructure, energy and climate change."
~~ James K. Galbraith

"The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe."
~~ Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]

“In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist [that] they be cheerleaders.”
~~ Steve Allen [1921-2000]

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas upon which the women paint their dreams."
~~ Rudolph Valentino [1895-1926]

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"He who opens a school door, closes a prison."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
~~ Malcolm Forbes [1919-90]

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money [is] a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men."
~~ Robinson Jeffers [1887-1962]

"The only ends for which governments are constituted, and obedience render'd to them, are the obtaining of justice and protection; and they who cannot provide for both give the people a right of taking such ways as best please themselves, in order to [affect] their own safety." ~~ Algernon Sidney [1623-83] in 1672

"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
~~ (Michel Eyquem de) Montaigne [1533-92]

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."
~~ Iris Murdoch [1919-99]

"There are few things more liberating in life than having your worst fear realized."
~~ Conan O'Brien

"Progress is not created by contented people."
~~ cartoonist Frank Tyger

"There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere."
~~ Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
~~ John W. Gardner [1912-2002]

"Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

“I think it’s bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension."
~~ Norman Mailer [1923-2007]

“You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.”
~~ Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield [1804-81]

"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something."
~~ Frank Capra [1897-1991]

"Take the course opposite to custom and you will always do well."
~~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-78]

"A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself."
~~ columnist Doug Larson

"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
~~ Martin Buber [1878-1965]

"Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken."
~~ David Hume [1711-76]

"All great innovation is built on rejection."
~~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline [1894-1961]

"All writing is a sin against speechlesssness."
~~ Samuel Beckett [1906-89]

"Corporations are people, my friend. Of course they are." ~~ leading fascist presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in August 2011

"A great deal more is known than has been proved."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"The only problem with country music is that it kills plants."
~~ former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, trailing presidential candidate

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

July 2011 Quotations

2011-07-07T11:07:00.004-06:00

"There is justice in the truth because they are the same thing."
~~ Ross Macdonald [1915-83] in "The Three Roads", 1948

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
~~ Warren Buffett

"I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
~~ Gen. William T. Sherman [1820-91] on 5 June 1884

"It's our job to know what people want before they do."
~~ Steve Jobs

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
~~ Maya Angelou

"Film has stopped being central to American life."
~~ Stuart Klawans, The Nation Magazine film critic, in April 2011

"The problem with Fox [News] is not that it's conservative. It's that it lies."
~~ Eric Alterman

"One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]

"It is really rather pathetic how simple the big things like love and war seem until you start to go into detail."
~~ Ross Macdonald [1915-83] in "The Three Roads", 1948

"Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish."
~~ English naturalist John Ray [1627-1705]

"No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why."
~~ journalist Mignon McLaughlin

"Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings."
~~ Charlotte Bronté [1816-55]

"The real menace in dealing with a 5-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a 5-year-old."
~~ writer Jean Kerr [1922-2003]

"Sports is the toy department of life."
~~ sportswriter Jimmy Cannon [1909-73]

"It's not enough for journalists and broadcasters to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding and revealing the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it. We ought never to be agents of power, always of the people."
~~ John Pilger, British journalist

"God created man with a penis and a brain, but only gave him enough blood to run one at a time."
~~ Stephen E. Ambrose [1936-2002]

"The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]

"A country without a memory is a country of madmen."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

"The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone else [that] he can blame it on."
~~ author Robert Bloch [1917-94]

"Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self."
~~ poet May Sarton [1912-95]

"Happiness is a perfume [that] you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on oneself."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Strive not to be a success but rather to be of value."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"True irreverance is disrespect for another man's god."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"If Jesus is a Jew, why does he have a Mexican name?"
~~ John Lahr

"If you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all."
~~ Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]

"Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]

"The time [that] you enjoy wasting is not time wasted."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Everyone does better when everyone does better."
~~ W.F. Hightower

"No man is ever free, and he couldn't stand it if he were."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Some people see things that are and ask Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too."
~~ actress Helen Hayes [1900-93]

"Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure."
~~ Bill Clinton

"The only way to let your dreams come true is to wake up."
~~ Paul Valéry [1871-1945]

"The strongest argument for religion is not that it is in touch with God but that it puts us in touch with one another."
~~ Adam Gopnik

"We are all fighting for our sanity in this crazy age of the disposable person."
~~ Michael Vansickel of Pontiac, Illinois

"Paul Ryan's ['Path To Prosperity'] plan is both ridiculous and cruel."
~~ Paul Krugman

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007], in "Hocus Pocus", 1990

"My life is an ashtray."
~~ Airman Hal London, circa 1968

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
~~ Anaïs Nin [1903-77]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for May & June 2011

2011-06-29T17:43:00.002-06:00

"Cats kill about 500 million birds each year in the United States – more than 1,000 times the number killed by power-generating wind turbines."
~~ per New York Times

After President Obama announced the death of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the 'Osama Clock' on this blog's front page was moot (and thus removed). The clock displayed the fact that bin Laden was eliminated 3,513 days (9½ years!) after feckless President George Dubya Bush swore to get bin Laden 'dead or alive'.

In 1961, college students reported studying for an average of 25 hours per week; the average is now 12 to 13 hours per week, with more than a third of the students reporting that nthey spent less than five hours per week studying.
~~ per book by Arun & Roksa

In the first quarter of 2011, the number of 'smart phones' that were sold surpassed for the first time the number of computers sold.
~~ per Time Magazine

On 20 June 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck another blow for fascism and against freedom and liberty in the Dukes v Wal-Mart Stores [2000-2011] case by eliminating class action lawsuits against corporations.

The war in Afghanistan is now the longest in U.S. history and has cost $445 billion (not including debt on money borrowed). 1,400 American soldiers have been killed, and 10,000 were wounded.
~~ per Center For Strategic & International Studies, 3/2011

Got a problem with the mandate for energy-efficient flourescent lightbulbs? First, you can't blame Obama because the bill was signed into law by George Dubya Bush in 2007. Only the 50-watt & 75-watt incandescent bulbs are being phased out, gradually over some years. The law requires manufacturers to produce bulbs that are 25% more efficient than currently, so a switch to halogen incandescent technology is solving that problem. Stockpile incandescents if you want, but there really is no need.

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE

Researchers say that Greenland's ice sheet shrank four times faster between 2004 to 2009 than it did in the five years beginning in 1995.

More than 600 tornadoes were reported in the U.S. in April 2011, the most-active month ever recorded, causing 369 deaths, the worst since 1925.

After the Joplin Tornado on May 22nd, it took the Joplin South Post Office three weeks to clean up and reopen. In two days they received 4,000 change of address forms.

GROCERY DISCOUNTS

Just discovered that the Albertsons grocery chain (at least here in New Mexico) has a new policy giving ten percent discounts to shoppers on certain days: on First Wednesdays the discount is for Seniors, and on First Saturdays the discount is for Veterans (with V.A. etc. ID).

THE ENEMY HAS NOT SURRENDERED

Coal Education Development and Resources foundation, known as CEDAR, offers a video to teachers called "The Greening of Planet Earth", which says that 'our world is deficient in carbon dioxide, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is very beneficial'. Mainstream scientists widely dispute that assertion.

REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY

In June, The Washington Post revealed that at least 30 new G.O.P. congresspeople are carrying more than $50,000 of personal debt, and at least seven freshmen have credit card debt exceeding $15,000. Politico and C.B.S. News confirmed that pseudo-candidate Newt Gingrich owed Tiffany Jewelers at least $300,000 (as of 2007).

JOBS & THE ECONOMY

The United States lost 5 percent of jobs from 2007 to mid-2010.
~~ per Mother Jones Magazine graph 6/2011

"Paul Ryan's ['Path To Prosperity'] plan is both ridiculous and cruel."
~~ Nobel-winner Paul Krugman

"The percentage of two-earner families (in which the husband and wife [were] employed in a given year) doubled from 2007 to 2010."
~~ Louis Uchitelle

"The number of millionaire households rose 14 percent worldwide in 2009 to include 11.2 million people, and China alone saw a spike of 31 percent."
~~ per Boston Consulting Group

Median pay for CEOs of large U.S. corporations rose 27% in 2010, per federal data, while pay increases for all workers in private industry averaged 2.1%

During the critical first 100 days of the Republican-led 112th Congress, they neither proposed nor passed a single job-creation bill.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

WM Essay #95: “How Bankrupt Is America?”

2011-06-25T12:22:00.012-06:00

U.S President George Dubya Bush ran up more debt than any other person in the history of Mankind. The Republican National Debt stands today at 25 TRILLION dollars, which is not being discussed anywhere. The hooferaw about the annual U.S. Budget Deficit is a diversion, so that the population of America has no clue that they are Indentured Servants to the fascist Oligarchy.

* * * * * * * *
SOME HISTORY
The U.S. National Debt stood at $1 trillion dollars when Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. That figure included the entire VietNam War.

At the end of the twelve-year Reagan-Bush Era, the National Debt had been quadrupled, to $4 trillion. (The Republicans complain about imaginary ‘tax and spend’ policies while their actual program is to cut taxes and borrow and spend.)

Bill Clinton’s first term saw the National Debt increase slowing down to only 25 percent, and in his second term, he produced a balanced budget AND a budget surplus.

Republicans cannot get around these facts as facts, so they yell and scream about false ‘smokescreen’ issues such as the annual budget and abortion and gay marriage and Social Security.

When Dubya became President the official Republican National Debt stood at $5.7 trillion. The official U.S. National Debt is today $14.8 trillion. So how is the Republican National Debt up to $25 trillion?

Simple.
The Reagan-Bush-Bush team stole all the money from Social Security. They stole $2.7 trillion from the very solvent Social Security fund. The reason the Republicans scream (falsely) that Social Security is bankrupt is because they traded the money for Treasury Bills, which must eventually be paid back. Somebody has to pay that debt, and if the Republicans shut down Social Security, then the Oligarchy won’t owe a dime to the U.S. Treasury.

The September 2008 bailout of quasi-governmental mortgage lenders Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac left the U.S. government holding $5.4 trillion in bogus loans. The Republicans’ solution is of course to blame Barack Obama, who wasn’t even elected to be President yet.

So far that makes a mere $22.9 trillion dollars of Republican National Debt.

The bailout of Wall Street of $700 billion became law in October 2008, and helped Obama get elected. The bailout of the U.S. automobile industry was $1 trillion, mostly between Barack Obama’s election and him being sworn in as President. (The Republicans blame him anyway, and that works because the Sheeple are willfully ignorant.)

That makes $24.6 trillion of Republican National Debt on the day that Barack Obama became President. This does not include consumer debt, real mortgage debt, or various off-the-books debt run up by Dubya, such as the cost to bring troops and equipment back from Iraq and Afghanistan, or the $3 trillion that Bush refused to spend to repair U.S. infrastructure. It also does not include the $3 trillion debt of local and state governments, or the $1 trillion in shortfalls on state & local pension funds.

MEANWHILE
The interest on that $25 trillion Republican National Debt (over-simplified calculation of 4% per year) comes to a minimum of $1 trillion each year, thus $2.5 trillion so far in interest added to the Republican National Debt.

The interest itself is merely extortion money paid to the Oligarchy. Their lobbyists prevent levying the taxes necessary to pay down the Republican National Debt, and we hand the Oligarchy a trillion dollars a year – for nothing in return.

RECAP
President Bush 43 arrived at the White House with $5.7 trillion in National Debt on the books and when he left the White House he handed debt of at least $24.6 trillion to Barack Obama. That increase of $18.9 trillion is indeed the all-time record.

The total of $25 trillion debt can only be paid down from revenue received by the U.S. Treasury. There is no option to default: The American and Chinese and Saudi oligarchs will not permit any such thing. So the U.S. taxpayer is stuck with ‘paying the piper’.

The ultimate solution is Reason-Based Taxation, but that is not yet in force, and in fact is little known. Which leaves the decimated U.S. Middle Class and-or the U.S. Wealthy Class to pay that bill.

* * * * * * * *Or how about making the Republicans pay off all that debt racked up by Dubya?

There are just over 300 million people in the United States - men, women, and children; Working Class, Middle Class, Wealthy Class, and Oligarchs.

Simple division results in a figure of $417,000 per Republican voter, $167,000 per Republican citizen, or $83,000 owed by every man, woman and child in America.

Yup, that includes hospitalized seniors, imprisoned felons, toddlers, illegal aliens, Aryan skinheads, members of Congress, and the fascist Oligarchs – and every Libertarian and Communist and Green and Democrat and Republican voter, and every non-voter, too.

Every single resident of the United States is an Indentured Servant, and the Republican National Debt grows by a trillion dollars each year because the real issue of a bankrupt America is getting no attention by our government, nor by our media, nor by We The People.

Your children and your grandchildren today each owe a minimum of $83,000 as their share of the Republican National Debt. Plus accrued interest until the debt is paid off.

Go ahead, tell your kids and grandkids this fact. And be sure to tell them how your vote for Republican candidates pro-duced this legacy. The hard part is going to be telling them how YOU are going to pay off YOUR $83,000 share.

No idea how? Corporations now pay ten percent of the taxes that they paid during the Fifties economic boom. The net worth of the Oligarchs grew by thirty percent since the Bush Tax Cuts began.

Reason-Based Taxation starts from the premise that since the Wealthy Class (of every country) owns 85 percent of everything, they should pay for 85% of the government’s activity.

The Wealthy Class has all the money, so the People have the right to bill them for the Republican National Debt. Republicans whine, but there is no recourse. If the folks with all the money do not pay the debt, how can the folks with no money pay it?

Oh, yeah: Indentured Servitude! A return to feudalism, with the aristocracy getting all the benefits and the peasants working hard their whole lives with no end in sight, no relief – their children and grandchildren doomed to the same and worse.

We already have rollbacks on the right to unionize, roll-backs on health and safety laws, rollbacks on pollution stan-dards, assaults on Medicare and Social Security and health care and pensions, rollbacks of personal bankruptcy law.

The fascist U.S. Supreme Court is cancelling the Bill of Rights and class action lawsuits – there is no way to stop their Federalist & P.N.A.C. agenda short of impeachment. (Revolution is necessary, violence is wrong!)

And the Republican agents of the Oligarchy have plans to cut the minimum wage in half, and to eliminate the Department of Education, shut down the Environmental Protection Agency – pollution is good? – and defund the Food & Drug Administration - E. Coli for all!

Given that the Republican Party ran up all this debt and avoids any possible solution by shouting about their ‘smoke-screen’ issues, the knee-jerk response is to shout back. Not a bad idea, but not enough either. Congress shouts back and forth, delaying official appointments, fiddling with the budget and cutting funds for the starving poor, for returning veterans, for fire & police & libraries – they have earned the label ‘Do Nothing Congress’.

The Republican Party will not listen, their attention is on campaign funding from the Oligarchs, and their shouting drowns out legitimate and fact-based commentary, while the Oligarchy happily racks up more trillions.

* * * * * * * *
The Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America is running just under fifteen trillion dollars per year. Comparing that figure to the 25 trillion of the Republican National Debt gives the outstanding debt as 165% of G.D.P.

The problem? If you have an annual gross income of $50,000, the equivalent would be unsecured debt of $83,000; if you have annual gross income of $100,000, then your equivalent unsecured debt would be $165,000.

In either case, you will never pay that off from your existing income. You can no longer file for bankruptcy. And neither can the U.S. of A. So the U.S. must bring in revenue from new sources – regardless of the annual budget – and the Oligarchy and the Wealthy Class are the folks who have all the money.

We The People have to wake up. We must Speak Truth To Power. The Class War is perpetual, and to do nothing is to surrender.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

June 2011 Quotations

2011-06-04T16:13:00.003-06:00

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap."
~~ Napolean Bonaparte [1769-1821]

"Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice."
~~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]

"Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It’s about as simple as that."
~~ James L. Brooks

"Sex and television are the opium of the people."
~~ Ross Macdonald [1915-83] in "The Barbarous Coast" [1956 novel]

"It isn't that jazz musicians die young, it's that they get older quicker."
~~ Geoff Dyer

"Men change, but seldom do they."
~~ old saying

"Earth provides for every man's need, but not for every man's greed."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"There is a time for work and a time for love. That leaves no other time."
~~ Coco Chanel [1883-1971]

"Those only are happy who have their mind fixed on some object other than their own happiness."
~~ John Stuart Mill [1806-73]

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."
~~ Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]

"A Nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a commnon hatred of its neighbors."
~~ Wm. Ralph Inge [1860-1954]

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"A healthy adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
~~ John Updike [1932-2009]

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage doesn't need to be lived again."
~~ Maya Angelou

"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something."
~~ playwright Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]

"Don't judge each day by the harvest [that] you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"Maybe when Obama gets back from Ireland he can chase the snakes out of Washington, DC."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy."
~~ broadcast journalist Edward P. Morgan [1910-93]

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."
~~ Stephen W. Hawking

"A house without books is like a room without windows."
~~ Heinrich Mann [1871-1950]

"Never judge a book by its movie."
~~ J.W. Eagan

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"What, O Lord, was the point?"
~~ Anthony Lane

"My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me."
~~ painter Georgia O'Keeffe [1887-1986]

"It is best to act with confidence no matter how little right you have to it."
~~ playwright Lillian Hellman [1905-84]

"The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little."
~~ Thomas Merton [1915-68]

"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment."
~~ Oprah Winfrey

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin."
~~ Ivan Turgenev [1818-83]

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault."
~~ Henry Kissinger

"Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Recipe of The Day

2011-05-16T19:16:00.002-06:00

OATMEAL FLOAT
Make a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Drop in a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Eat.

OATMEAL SUNDAE
Make a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Drop in a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Add chocolate syrup. Then eat.

OATMEAL BANANA SPLIT
Make a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Drop in a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Add chocolate syrup and banana pieces and whipped cream and a cherry. Then eat.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

WM Essay #94: Wal-Mart Bad, Local Businesses Good

2011-05-09T13:06:00.003-06:00

Radio entertainer and author Garrison Keillor said awhile back that "Wal-Mart kills small towns like we used to kill the buffalo", and Wal-Mart has not stopped.

The imminent closing of the Alco store in Belén, New Mexico is directly related to Wal-Mart's policies. The Alco store in nearby Socorro closed just months after the Wal-Mart opened there in 2005.

We can't blame Wal-Mart for everything, though. The three car dealers in Belén disappeared two years ago – Baca Auto shut down, Auge Brothers sold their showroom and service building to the school district, and Tillery moved from Rio Communities to Los Lunas on the I-25.

But empty store fronts do indeed abound in Valencia County, due to the economic policies of Wal-Mart and the Bush administration. Family-owned businesses teeter as county residents patronize the enemy – to the detriment of their friends and neighbors. And the local stores that are still open rarely have full parking lots.

Why is Wal-Mart under constant attack or resistence by pro-labor, pro-America, and pro-fair deal folks? Here is a sampling:

•• Wal-Mart imports often-shoddy goods from China, made by slave labor, which intentionally eliminates jobs for American workers.

•• Wal-Mart's policy is to play King Kong and demand special incentives from local governments to build facilities. That all took place in Valencia County before I moved here, but whichever city and county officials gave away our local tax revenues should be ashamed.

•• When opening new stores, Wal-Mart policy is to undercut prices until local businesses collapse, then pull their advertising from the local paper so that it too folds, preventing the people from having access to freedom of opinion. (That likely did not happen here simply because there is no local radio and TV media in Valencia County for Wal-Mart to bully by threatening to cancel their ads.)

•• Wal-Mart's labor policies are notorious, and readers here have no doubt heard tales from their neighbors and family of the workers fired for saying the word 'union' or because they had too many raises. (Wal-Mart practice is to fire longtime loyal employees and replace them with untrained and scared new employees at minimum wage and zero benefits.)

•• One Wal-Mart policy that is seldom understood is that each and every Wal-Mart store sucks money out of the local economy. The recent hoohaw about New Mexico Gov. Martinez and film production incentives pointed to the residual effects of movie dollars spent here, with the usual statistic being that each dollar spent repeats thru the economy 10 to 12 times. Wal-Mart policy is that the local economic effect of store revenue repeats zero times.

Every dollar paid at the counter at every Wal-Mart store on all 365 days of the year is sent by pouch to headquarters in Arkansas. Every day, every store, every dollar. Bills like electric and water and taxes are paid from Arkansas. Payroll checks draw on Arkansas banks. (Readers who have paid Wal-Mart by check can read the bank of deposit on the back of each cancelled check.)

The intention is that all revenue is kept out of the local economy. As local businesses dry up, Wal-Mart expects to rule more and more of the economy.

* * * * * * * *
It is always sad to see a local gas station or clothing store or restaurant close, especially if one knows the owners or employees. But the larger problem is that Wal-Mart is only the locally most visible of the robber baron corporations.

The national economy is likewise being sucked dry. The price of gas for every reader's car has given the oil companies record-breaking profits – extortion without representation.

There is a pile of three trillion dollars in cash (likely invested in gold and eurodollars) sitting in European banks, keeping American wages low and keeping loans tight and keeping taxes unpaid.

One trillion belongs to the insurance industry, another trillion belongs to the pharmaceutical industry, the third trillion belongs to the financial industry (banks and Wall Street hooligans.).

The last such 'tax holiday' was in 2004, when U.S corporations were allowed to pay a mere 5¼% levy (instead of 35%) on $362 billion in repatriated foreign profits. The 80% tax reduction cost U.S. tax payers $70 billion.

These trillions of offshore dollars are being held hostage while lobbyists and the fascist U.S. Chamber of Commerce pressure Congress to reduce taxes paid on cash brought to America by corporations. Their record-breaking unearned wealth is swelling on the backs of labor, and all that ill-gotten gain is not enough.

* * * * * * * *
The invisible managers of the Belén Supercenter Store #1414, the Los Lunas Supercenter Store #3596, and Distribution Center No. 6084670 in Los Lunas may choose to rebut this letter (in the local newspaper), but they had better supply verifiable facts. "We never do that" statements are merely public relations spin in the face of cold, hard facts, which we can expect to be supplied by fellow readers.. (What do you want to bet: The newspaper will recieve a P/R letter from Arkansas with no factual content.)

Meanwhile, the best thing that Valencia County residents - and others across America and across the Planet - can do for the local economy is to boycott Wal-Mart – that is, not set foot in their stores – and buy from local businesses. The dollars can then percolate 10 to 12 times thru the local economy and increase tax revenue and create jobs, all of that.

Wouldn't it be cool if Wal-Mart shut down and Alco and Bealls and all the rest re-opened?

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

May 2011 Quotations

2011-05-02T20:41:00.003-06:00

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
~~ Marshall McLuhan [1911-80]

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing."
~~ Bernard Baruch [1870-65]

"The best form of communication – the most powerful – is Action; the second best form of communication is Telling The Truth; the third best form of communication is Listening."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The world is governed by far different personages than what is imagined by those not behind the scenes."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"For every action there is an equal, and opposite, government program."
~~ David Veal

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world – no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government of conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."
~~ Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924]

"Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks."
~~ Henri Bergson [1859-1941]

"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious."
~~ Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly . . . it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
~~ Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
in "Henry VI", Act IV, Scene II: spoken by Dick the Butcher

"Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process, and make him something less than a man."
~~ Arthur Hays Sulzberger [1891-1968], American newspaper publisher

"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
~~ Adolf Hitler [1889-1945], in "Mein Kampf" [1925-26]

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them."
~~ Montesquieu [1689-1755]

"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired."
~~ Jules Renard [1864-1910]

"Whenever there's chaos, there's ambiguity, and where there's ambiguity, there's fear. And fear gets manipulated."
~~ Robert Redford

Napier's Maxim: "When you have a bottle of champagne, you will have something to celebrate."

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
~~ Michelangelo [1475-1564]

"Is there no place safe from the white man?"
~~ Western author Tabor Evans {real name Harry Whittington} [1915–89]

"To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth."
~~ H.P. Lovecraft [1890-1937]

"God must have loved the plain people, he made so many of them."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
~~ Walter Lippmann [1889-1974]

"It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong."
~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-82]

"I am a believer in punctuality, though it makes me very lonely."
~~ Edward Verrall Lucas [1868-1938]

"The free flow of information is the oxygen of democracy."
~~ Walter Isaacson

"The job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time."
~~ David Foster Wallace [1962-2008]

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"To succeed in this world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty."
~~ John Finley

"Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty."
~~ Jacob Bronowski [1908-74]

"The true engines of economic growth [are] human ingenuity and productivity."
~~ economist George Horwich

"Those who say [that] they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it."
~~ T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]

"The worst possible outlook is indifference... Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to be outraged."
~~ Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]

"To create is to resist. To resist is to create."
~~ Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]

"Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."
~~ Nadine Gordimer

"In quantum mechanics, the Universe, at its most elemental level, is random, an idea that tends to upset people."
~~ Rivka Galchen

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but to comprehend those things which ARE there."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

April 2011 Quotations

2011-04-16T11:40:00.005-06:00

"You may think [that] your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse, you must still act."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by a decay of its principles."
~~ Montesquieu [1689-1755]

“The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption."
~~ William James [1842-1910]

"Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"The last Christian died on the cross."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Be kind to dumb people."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

“The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.”
~~ William Gilmore Simms [1806-70]

“At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.”
~~ Italian Proverb

“At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

“He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious.”
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
~~ Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]

“An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
~~ Orlando A. Battista [1917-95]

“You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.”
~~ Baron Neil Gordon Kinnock

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.”
~~ Plato [428?-327? B.C.E.]

“The intelligence of the world is a constant. The population is increasing.”
~~ Unknown

“We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”
~~ Vince Lombardi [1913-70]

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”
~~ rock legend Jimi Hendrix [1942-70]

(When asked if fascism could come to America) “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascist.”
~~ Huey Pierce Long, Jr. [1893-1935]

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.”
~~ Georg Lichtenberg [1742-99]

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”
~~ comedian Emo Phillips

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]

“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”
~~ Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara [1909-99]

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”
~~ Abba Eban [1915-2002]

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]

“Fascism: The conservative notion that killing people makes them work harder.”
~~ Anonymous

"[The U.S.A.] is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the über-rich. Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people ... now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined."
~~ filmmaker Michael Moore, March 2011 speech in Madison, Wisconsin

"[Social Security ] is not in crisis at this stage. Leave Social Security alone. We have a lot of other places we can look that is in crisis. But Social Security is not."
~~ U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [Dem=NV] in March 2011

"Give me a woman who loves beer and I'll conquer the world"
~~ Kaiser Wilhelm I [1797-1888]

"Any salaried employee who works more that forty hours per week is anti-labor and a willing victim of corporate greed."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.”
~~ Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.“
~~ John Lennon [1940-80]

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." ~~ economist Douglas Casey

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
~~ Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954], U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1941-54

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for March & April 2011

2011-04-08T18:15:00.006-06:00

Part 1 of the long-awaited movie version of Ayn Rand's classic Objectivist novel "Atlas Shrugged" is due in theaters on April 15th. Further details on the Ayn Rand Film Festival at Magic Lantern.
-----------------
WISCONSIN PROTESTS
The outgoing Democratic governor of Wisconsin left a $100+ million budget surplus for fiscal 2011; the new G.O.P. governor used the G.O.P.-controlled legislature to hand over $180 million to the Wealthy Class in three bills in his first month in office -- sound familiar? Then Gov. Walker reported that the $137 million budget shortfall was caused by greedy union members, and refused to enter contract talks with public sector unions, even cancelling the Memo of Agreement that allowed state employees to continue working without a contract.

The G.O.P. legislature forwarded a bill ending state employee pension funding to the State Senate. After 30,000 or more worker and citizen protesters (plus many supporters from out of state) massed in the state capitol of Madison, the Democratic members of the state Senate went into hiding, eliminating the quorum needed to vote on the new anti-union bill. Gov. Wanker has two obvious options: call out the National Guard or concede defeat.

Wisconsin does not allow recall elections until an official has been in office for a year; Gov. Wanker will be recalled next year, but meanwhile, the election for Supreme Court went Democratic, the turnout April 4th set records, and the signatures accrue steadily for the 4 to 8 recalls of legislators (only 3 seats need be turned Democratic to return to constitutional rule).
-----------------
'WE ARE ONE' PROTESTS
As a reaction to the idiocy in Wisconsin and Ohio and elsewhere, a new movement has appeared, the 'We Are One' Movement, whose website is the oddly-spelled www.we-R-1.org. The group was formed to honor Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, in which he used the phrase 'we are one' to generate support for the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis, Tennessee; but he was assassinated the next day, on 4 April 1968.

On 4 April 2011, the We Are One organization generated 1,000 rallies held across America in support of all unions (especially beleaguered public unions). The timing is handy: The 2012 election will begin soon enough and We Are One is poised to hold their second annual national rally day amidst caucus fever on 4 April 2012. It will be rather like participating in Earth Day Two, decades ago.
-----------------
ECONOMIC ISSUES

2010 third-quarter U.S. corporate profits of $1.6 trillion represented the biggest one-year jump in history.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, construction of new homes {'housing starts') in February 2011 dropped by 22.5 percent from January; the statistic was also down 20.8 percent from the same period a year prior.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and it spends more money on lobbying than the next five biggest lobbyists combined. == per eco-activist Bill McKibben, March 2011

The all-time high average U.S. gasoline pump price of $4.11 per gallon occured in July 2008; in April 2011, the average U.S. pump price has risen to 3.71 per gallon - for no actual reason and with no end in sight.
-----------------
Home Depot has changed their policy on the veteran's/military discount: Now the 10% discount on everything at checkout is given only to active duty folks (with ID) and to veteran's with a V.A. card that shows 'service connected'.

Some Congresses deserve their very own name, such as the 80th 'Do Nothing' Congress of 1947-48. The present idiocy of the 112th Congress, with Republican Speaker John Boehner drunk at the helm, should be called the 'Bonehead' Congress.
-----------------
I am about to celebrate six years living here in rural New Mexico. I am proud to say that I never signed up for trash pickup here, and have recycled 95 percent of all my trash, by driving it to the yard behind Los Lunas City Hall, or even the 40 miles up to Albuquerque, whenever I went up for some other reason (movies, Mensa, Landmark). What I am unable to recycle - avocado peels, egg shells, some packaging - is put in a plastic grocery bag and taken to the trash can where I buy gas for the car, which amounts to a bag smaller than my head every week or two.

Six years times 12 months times $50 per month adds up to $3,600 that did not get paid out of pocket to the Big Green corporation. Many of you can do the same, and should. (However, if you live in an incorporated city, this may not be an option, as most cities and towns who provide trash service either bill each resident or fund from tax receipts).

But then I take it even further: I pick up other people's trash & litter, such as beer & soda cans or bottles in parking lots (tossing'em in the back of my car to avoid D.W.I. problems), or armloads of empty plastic water bottles at the gym, and recycle them, too. With the solar array in my back yard paying me money each month, and being 'Negative To The Landfill' as far as trash (I recycle more than my own stuff), my carbon footprint is almost as tiny as Ed Begley Jr.'s.
Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

March 2011 Quotations

2011-03-15T06:41:00.003-06:00

"The American government is a rule of the people, by the people, for the bosses."
~~ Austin O'Malley [1858-1932]

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-44]

"Secrecy is the freedom [that] tyrants dream of."
~~ Bill Moyers

"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
~~ A.A. Milne [1882-1956]

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again."
~~ André Gide [1869-1951]

"The marketplace is democratic."
~~ John Perkins

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?"
~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero [106 B.C.E. – 43 B.C.E.]

"I do not always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Moose Drool." He is ... Annoying Man. His latest exploit? "He goes ballooning ... with his pet bald eagle."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.”
~~ Dennis Prager

"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

“There are two laws of the universe — gravity, and everyone likes Italian food.”
~~ Neil Simon

"Patience is a minor form of despair disguised as a virtue."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Anything [that] you're good at contributes to happiness."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"The great thing about unrequited love is that it's the only kind that exists."
~~ Allison Pearson

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exception."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"[A movie] that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate."
~~ Vincente Minnelli [1903-86]

"In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God."
~~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinquishes man from animals."
~~ William Obler [1849-1919]

"Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying."
~~ William Pitt [1759-1806]

"The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them."
~~ Edgar Allan Poe [1809-49]

"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window."
~~ Burton Rascoe [1892-1957]

"What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art."
~~ Augustus Saint-Gaudens [1848-1907]

"Which is it? Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders."
~~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Man has made his bedlam; let him lie in it."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]

"Do not put off till tomorrow what can be enjoyed today."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"Invention is the mother of necessity."
~~ Samuel Butler [1835-1902]

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
~~ George Jean Nathan [1882-1958]

"A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
~~ Niels Bohr [1882-1965]

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]

"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
~~ President Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"God means us to be free. With divine daring, He gave us the power of choice."
~~ Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

February 2011 Quotations

2011-02-07T08:01:00.002-07:00

“The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government ... rise above the interests of one class alone.”
~~ Robert L. Heilbroner [1919-2005]

“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63]

"Darrell Issa is the most evil man I ever met."
~~ Franklin Porath, former business partner

"Nothing gets done in the United States because it's the right thing to do; it gets done because it's the profitable thing to do."
~~ Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter columnist

"The thing that impresses me most about America is the way [that] parents obey their children."
~~ Edward, Duke of Windsor [1894-1972]

"[The NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment] is one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word 'fraud' – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
~~ former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, in 1991

"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it."
~~ Oliver Goldsmith [1728-74]

"When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters."
~~ George Savile, Marquis of Halifax [1633-95]

"Jehovah has always seemed to me the most fascinating character in all fiction."
~~ Oliver Herford [1863-1935]

"If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics of the chips that were left."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"Pretty much all the honest truthtelling there is in the world is done by children."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again."
~~ Jean Renoir [1894-1979]

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"The best you get is an even break."
~~ Franklin P. Adams [1881-1960]

"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."
~~ Alfred Adler [1870-1937]

"An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]

"It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider [that] the real vice is making losses."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Learn all the rules, every one of them, so that you will know how to break them."
~~ Irvin S. Cobb [1896-1944]

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing."
~~ Jean Baptiste Colbert [1619-83]

"Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers."
~~ John Churton Collins [1848-1908]

"All modern men are descended from wormlike creatures, but it shows more on some people."
~~ Will Cuppy [1884-1949]

"Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive and express what we really are."
~~ Don Miguel Ruiz

"He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still."
~~ Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu [IVth Century B.C.E.]

"Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance."
~~ educator William Wirt [1874–1938]

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"Wine is the drink of the gods, milk the drink of babies, tea the drink of women, and water the drink of beasts."
~~ John Stuart Blackie [1809-95]

"God is always on the side which has the best football coach."
~~ Heywood Broun [1888-1939]

"The better part of valor is indiscretion."
~~ Samuel Butler [1835-1902]

"I spent a year in that town, one Sunday."
~~ Warwick Deeping [1877-1950]

"Judge a man not by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes."
~~ British distiller Thomas Robert Dewar [1864-1930]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"All generalizations are dangerous, even this one."
~~ Alexander Dumas, fils [1824-95]

"YouTube ... is a kind of Special Olympics for show-offs."
~~ critic James Wood

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

"Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes."
~~ Robert Maynard Hutchins [1899-1977]

"It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."
~~ Henrik Ibsen [1828-1906]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for January 2011

2011-01-24T15:53:00.002-07:00

The White House Oil Spill Commission's final report is released, and includes the statement "Drilling offshore is a privilege to be earned, not a right to be exercised by private corporations."

A new N.O.A.A. report of October 2010 concludes that the existing damage to the Arctic caused by the climate crisis is likely permanent.

"Interest on the official national debt is $571 billion for fiscal 2012, making debt service roughly equal to the base budget for the military."
~~ per Admiral Mike Mullen, in July 2010

"Twenty percent of the world's vertebrate [species] are threatened with extinction, according to a study in the journal Science."
~~ per Time Magazine, October 2010

"According to the N.O.A.A., the first half of 2010 was the warmest January to July on record. And this is just the beginning. Owing to the inertia of the climate system, the warming that we're experiencing now is only a fraction of the temperature increase that's already guaranteed."
~~ reporter Elizabeth Kolbert

Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, big truck unloading Xmas trees to a vacant lot in my tiny town. (It's not even December yet!)

There are 1,011 billionaires in the world and forty percent live in the USA
~~ per Forbes Magazine

Global phytoplankton has dropped 40 percent since 1950.
~~ per Nature Magazine, in July 2010

MESSIN' WITH PEOPLE DEPT.
Put up a sign in your office or cubicle that says "Cliché free zone" and then live up to it. When someone asks 'How was your weekend?' -- Then. Tell. Them.
When someone asks 'What's new?' -- Then. Tell. Them.

Amazon sales in 2009 topped $24.5B (over all products) while 2008 sales at all U.S. bookstores was less than $17B. According to publishing industry statistician Bowker, 2005 saw 172K books published in the U.S.A.; by 2009, that had increased to 288K 'traditional' titles, plus the addition of 'self-published and niche books' for a total of one million new books published in 12 months.

[Carbon diozide] is responsible for roughly three-fourths of the global warming effect [of greenhouse gases] ... Globally, agriculture is responsible for 90 percent of nitrous oxide emissions (296 times more heat-trapping potential than CO²) and two-thirds of methane emissions (with 23 times more heat-trapping potential than CO²)
~~ per Anna Lappé

The amount of arable land in developing countries was one-third of a hectare per capita in 1961, reduced to one-fifth of a hectare in 1992 (35% reduction), and is expected to decline to 1/10th of a hectare by 2050 as population increases (a further 50% reduction)
~~ per a United Nations report in 2010

An annual income of $250,000 puts you in the top THREE percent of U.S. households, and is almost five times the national median wage.

In 2007, the top one percent captured 23 percent of the U.S.'s total income.

The top 0.1 percent of earners saw their share of national income triple between 2002 and 2007, earning as much as the bottom 120 million taxpayers.

Coding movies & books for Amazon most of the day on my various bookstore websites, I have noticed lately that VHS is making a comeback. New & old movies that had the VHS versions go out of production are being remade and sold newly on Amazon. The probable cause is the dire post-Bush economy: shoppers did not trash their video players, and the common VHS prices of $5 to $12 are a great savings over $20-25 for DVD or Blu-ray.

State governments lost 30% of their revenue in 2009.
~~ per The Washington Post

The classic Chinese list of Seven Emotions includes: anger, desire, fear, happiness, hatred, love, and sadness.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

January 2011 Quotations

2011-01-22T03:27:00.003-07:00

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
[In regione caecorum rex est luscus.]
~~ Desiderius Erasmus [1466-1536]

"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. But to win it requires total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence, which is man, for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth."
~~ John Galt quote ending last public speech by philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82] in New Orleans, November 1981

"If there’s one piece of economic wisdom [that] I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole."
~~ Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, in January 2011

"Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries."
~~ Anne Herbert

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Deregulation [of broadcast media] has made celebrities of the loudest asses in the barn."
~~ Diane Simon

"When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere."
~~ François de La Rochefoucauld [1613-80]

"The name of the game is not Social Security. What an error! Social Security is an entirely different game. The name of the game is Give All."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965], in a speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947

DICTA by G.E. Nordell
• Dream like you're going to live forever.
• Plan like no one can stop you.
• Act like the deadline is today.
• Be very thankful when anything actually works out.

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
~~ Twyla Tharp

"Life is too short to have anything but delusional notions about yourself."
~~ rocker Gene Simmons

"Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers."
~~ Alan King [1927-2004]

"To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all."
~~ Helen Rowland

"Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all."
~~ Jean Genet [1910-86]

"Experience is the teacher of all things."
~~ Julius Caesar [100-44 B.C.E.]

"Speech is of time, silence is of eternity."
~~ Thomas Carlyle [1795-1881]

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63], Inaugural Address on 20 January 1961

"Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance."
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?"
~~ French filmmaker Jean Renoir [1894-1979]

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."
~~ battlefield photographer Robert Capa [1913-54]

"Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains."
~~ bandleader John Philip Sousa [1854-1932]

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?"
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], in 1919

"Death is nothing to someone who knew how to live."
~~ French outlaw Jacques Mesrine [1936-79]

"Information wants to be free."
~~ Stewart Brand, in 1984

"Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders."
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]

"Wit, perhaps, might find many interpretations, but wisdom none."
~~ Samuel Wesley [1662-1735]

"This is business. It's the best game in the world."
~~ John Dickson Carr [1906-77]

"Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]

"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all of the answers."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

“A progressive believes that society can be made better, that it can be made better by informed people acting in concert, and that it can be called 'better' only when it is better for everyone.”
~~ Garret Keizer

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Essay #93: "On The Barricades"

2010-12-29T07:41:00.002-07:00

        I was very surprised that I got ultra-depressed after the recent U.S. national elections. The fascists grabbed further control of the structure of government. This year, they basically took My Country away from We The People. A very real bummer.

        The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual. The workers and Middle Class take some ground now and then, usually after some screw-up caused by the incompetent Master Class. Screw-ups such as the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown move the economy backward, reducing the Quality of Life for America, and for the World. The net gain seems never to near the goal line.
        The fascists and tea-baggers and fundamentalists of the Republican Party sold out to the Oligarchy long ago, and act in their behalf against The People. The weenie liberals of the Democratic Party are cowardly and ineffective. The metaphorical ball moves a little this way, then a lot that way – lately, the robber barons of the Oligarchy are winning.
        Neither party has the courage or integrity to take on the Oligarchy. The Republicans are on the side of the Master Class, and the Dems ran a defense strategy in 2010 that lost 6 seats in the Senate and 64 seats in the House.

        Short of a real Third Party alliance against the Oligarchy, there are only masses of uncoordinated ecologicals, progressives, off-the-grid people, constitutionalists and other issue advocates – those FOR well-being, FOR education, FOR peace, FOR justice – floundering around trying to pry any and all benefits from the clawed mitts of The Pirates In Charge. The workers work, the Oligarchs steal, the politicians make it legal.

        While the vile Oligarchy has us being worried about an imaginary conspiracy of outside enemies who are going to take away our freedoms, we fail to notice that our day-to-day freedoms are eroded by each victory of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy wants a return to feudalism and slavery. They rail against progress and safety and well-being and education, and Congress caves in and hands them what they demand, with the fiscal and lifestyle cost always being borne by The People. We worry about the latest diversionary witch-hunt – Commies, Mooslums, immigrants, liberals – while the real enemy buys up pieces of our national commons, by privatizing our national and local governments.
        ‘Privatized’ means that the Oligarchy owns it. They can then charge exorbitant amounts for services and goods that we were getting (just fine, thank you) from unionized government workers.
        No Unions? No problem.
        After privatization, we pay more for less, and the results are either contaminated, or of lesser quality, or both.
        And Congress hands those pieces to them, in return for campaign-financing dollars, which are then deftly paid over to the Oligarchs who own the media.
        And 58 percent of registered voters failed their country in November, and of the 42 percent who did vote, a majority voted to reverse the emergency repairs needed to fix the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown that President Obama inherited from Dubya.

        What we need is a union. We could call it the United Federation of Indentured Servants. (Your grandchildren will be paying off the Republican National Debt, so they get to join, too.) Everyone who is a citizen or a taxpayer or resident of the United States is eligible. Fascists will not want to join; all Republicans and a sizeable portion of Democrats and Independents are likewise opponents of The People. The Oligarchs don’t and won’t care about these concerns – until there is a significant voice interfering with their propaganda and their fiscal raping and pillaging.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Mark Zuckerberg was just named Time Magazine’s “Man of The Year” – at age 24. The articles in Time and the fictional tale in the movie “The Social Network” describe the future that MarkZ is living into. He set up Facebook as a virtual community that will be and is building itself. The current game is to reach a billion members, which is predicted to happen some time in late 2012. Facebook is already nearly twice the size of the U.S. population. And (hee, hee) the Mafia can’t get in, the Oligarchy can only rent ads, the fascists have no way to make a computer system afraid, and MarkZ is already merrily inventing the next stages of society, to be located in cyberspace.

        Facebook is the New Society, just as the American Revolution established the existence of a constitutional democratic republic. There may be skinheads and tea-baggers and anarchists and perverts and numbskulls scattered among Facebook’s membership, but that will sort itself out – small nodes of idiocy, wasting some teeny fraction of cyber resources (like cold germs: always there).
        America is a free country, a free society; so is Facebook, albeit a functional benevolent monarchy.

        As happened on Planet Earth eons ago (or six thousand years according to Biblical retards), the ectoplasm of the internet will form into clumps, then into cells, then into micro-organisms made up of human individuals. The New Society already exists, and it is forming into cyber-entities that eventually will take on a Meaning & Purpose because that is what is needed to win the Class War.
        Where there is oppression, Liberty must light the dark.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        During the Revolutionary Era, only about 25 percent of the population of the Colonies stood behind the Declaration of Independence. About 25 percent fought all change whatsoever – they supported the aristocracy and were known as Tories. The 50 percent in the middle were the sheeple, who tried to stay out of politics – they had farms & crops to tend and stores & businesses to run. (Many sheeple did eventually get involved, once the British started shooting American civilians.)

        That’s pretty much how the Body Politic lines up today – even around the World. The 25 percent on the Progressive end versus the 25 percent on the Regressive end, with the ignorant sheeple in the middle.
        But everyone – left, right; upper, lower; insider, outsider – in the United States has been stuck by the Oligarchy with paying off the Republican National Debt. Every single resident of the United States of America is liable for that debt.

        Reason-Based Taxation solves that problem, but the big roadblock is the political will to solve such a problem, or any of modern civilization’s many current crises. The Oligarchy does not want their raping and pillaging regulated, nor do they admit to any liability for the 25 TRILLION dollars of the Republican National Debt.
        The Oligarchy will quickly realize that Reason-Based Taxation ends their joyride on the backs of honest workers. We must generate, somehow, the political will to institute Reason-Based Taxation, just as Roosevelt’s New Deal was an uphill battle. We also need to stand on the barricades and prevent destruction of plans for energy independence, mitigation of climate changes, peace initiatives, and environmental sanity.

        We need a Third Party whose revolutionary purpose is to regulate the pirates of the Oligarchy and to restore the Constitution of the People and to ‘promote the general Welfare’.

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
United Federation of Indentured Servants official website
U.F.O.I.S. Facebook Page

December 2010 Quotations

2010-12-26T04:28:00.003-07:00

"Our real enemy is cynicism."
~~ British folksinger-activist Billy Bragg

"If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys."
~~ Chief Dan George [1899-1981]

"Certain things catch your eye, But pursue only those that capture your heart."
~~ old Native American saying

"An artist is a creature driven by demons -- he usually doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Let us hear the voice of reason, singing in the night"
~~ line from song in "Muppet Christmas Carol" [1992]

"Losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good."
~~ baseball manager George 'Sparky' Anderson [1934-2010]

"A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Wonder is our need today, not information."
~~ Elia Kazan [1909-2003]

"With thought, all problems can be resolved."
~~ character Hercule Poirot (as written by Agatha Christie [1890-1976])

"I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."
~~ Kahlil Gibran [1883-1931]

"A revolution is not a dinner party, [it is] an insurrection, an act of violence."
~~ Chairman Mao [1893-1976]

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-1965]

“Goodbye Mr. Zanuck: it certainly has been a pleasure working at 16th Century Fox.”
~~ auteur Jean Renoir [1894-1979] of France

“The person who has never seen movies by Satyajit Ray is like a person who has never seen the moon and the sky."
~~ Akira Kurosawa [1910-98]

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], Labor Day speech, 1903

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]

"Where there is oppression, Liberty must light the dark."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods."
~~ Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford [1676-1745]

"Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit bottom."
~~ Gen. George S. Patton [1885-1945]

"If you make any film that accurately portrays the world as it is – that portrays people's lives the way [that] they actually are – by definition, that's a political film."
~~ movie director Steven Soderbergh

"Life is a series of adjustments to plans that didn't work out."
~~ mystery author Margaret Coel

"An aristocracy is bad manners organized."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up."
~~ British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard

"Whoever established the high road, and how high it should be, should be fired."
~~ actress Sandra Bullock

"Truth exists, only falshood has to be invented."
~~ Cubist painter Georges Braque [1882-1963]

"A work of art is a thing that requires as much cunning and viciousness as the perpetration of a crime."
~~ painter Edgar Degas [1834-1917]

"Coyote is always out there waiting, and coyote is always hungry."
~~ old Native American saying

"We should always have goals. If you don't have a mountain, build one and then climb it. And after you climb it, build another one; otherwise you start to flatline in your life."
~~ Sylvester Stallone

"An educated person is one who has attained a rational understanding of the pros and cons mof the major problems facing society during his[/her] lifetime."
~~ Walston Chubb, in 1978

"As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"What you see with your eyes shut is what counts."
~~ Sioux shaman Lame Deer [1903?-1976]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

November 2010 Quotations

2010-11-30T08:56:00.003-07:00

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than that proportion."
~~ Adam Smith [1723-90], in "The Wealth of Nations", 1776

"For [Adam] Smith, the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the soveriegn state to restore, fair play."
~~ Adam Gopnik, in 2010

"Faith has wings but reason crawls and often in the wrong direction."
~~ Leonard Wibberley [1915-83]

"The definition of a Republican is: Someone who can't enjoy a meal unless they know [that] someone else is starving."
~~ Mary Karr, quoting her father in the great memoir "The Liar's Club" [1995]

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
~~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty."
~~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"What constitutes a freak when nearly the entire culture has become a freak show?"
~~ Charles Taylor

"Politicians should dress like NASCAR drivers so [that] we know who their corporate sponsors are"
~~ bumper sticker

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
~~ Martin Mull

"Unlimited corporate funding of candidates is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy."
~~ Bill Moyers

"There is a time for departure, even when there's no certain place to go."
~~ Tennessee Williams [1911-83]

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
~~ Baruch de Spinoza [1632-77]

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"Doubt is the father of invention."
~~ Galileo [1564-1642]

"i've got my faults, but living in the past isn't one of them. There's no future in it."
~~ baseball manager George 'Sparky' Anderson [1934-2010]

"If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Life is a series of suicides, divorces, promises broken, children smashed, whatever."
~~ John Cassavetes [1929-89], line from movie "Love Streams" [1984]

"The Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves."
~~ David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, on "60 Minutes" in October 2010

"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
~~ Euripedes [circa 480 B.C.E. – 406 B.C.E.]

"The texture of a film is affected very much by the honor with which you make it."
~~ movie director Danny Boyle

"God, there's got to be another way"
~~ The Who band, line from "Who Are You?" song, 1978

"No government is ever perfect. One of the chief virtues of democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic process can be pointed out and corrected."
~~ Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]

"I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play – but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem."
~~ Arthur Miller [1915-2005]

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]

"Physics is the universe's operating system."
~~ Steven R. Garman

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
~~ old saying, as well as 1990 country-western hit by Aaron Tippin

"I learned a long time ago that reality is much weirder than anyone's imagination."
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
~~ Samuel Butler [1612-80]

"I'm not surprised you're a lawyer. You probably couldn't make a living at much of anything else."
~~ Rex Stout [1886-1975]

"The price of failure is death; the price of success is death. Seek to succeed."
~~ G.E. Nordell, in the {unfinished} book “Warrior Mind”

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

October 2010 Quotations

2010-10-16T06:54:00.003-06:00

"You're going to face a choice in November. This is a choice between the policies that got us into this mess in the first place and the policies that got us out of this mess – and what the other side is counting on is people not having a good memory."
~~ President Barack Obama, 8 July 2010

"The Republicans are fear-mongers, when in truth the only thing we really need to fear are the Republicans and their owners, the Oligarchs."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The T.E.A. Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America ... because of the movement's self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault."
~~ Michael Kinsley

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.“
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

“All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences.“
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]

“Never separate the life you live from the words you speak.”
~~ Sen. Paul Wellstone [1944-2002]

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you."
~~ movie auteur Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"I wish we had been able to obstruct more."
~~ G.O.P. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, August 2010

"The education of our children ... is the most noble thing in the world to do."
~~ Aaron Stern

"They're always flying these flags at half mast. Why don't they just make the flag poles shorter?"
~~ New Mexico state employee in 2010

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem shorter."
~~ character Iago, as written by William Shakespeare [1564-1616]

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
~~ William Arthur Ward [1921–94]

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
~~ Maria Robinson

"Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!" {original: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!"}
~~ from the 1933 German play "Schlageter" written by Hanns Johst (and not uttered by either Hermann Göring or Julius Streicher}

"The policy elite ... are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods."
~~ Paul Krugman. in 2010

"The community should guard the rights of each individual member, and (in return for this protection) each individual should submit to the laws of the community, without which submission of all it is impossible that protection can be extended to any."
~~ William Blackstone [1809–81]

"Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can't be ignored."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"Live your life as a singular, existential work of art, never to be repeated."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"DUM VIVIMUS, VIVAMUS" (While we live, let us live!"
~~ as quoted by Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"[New York is] fun city. If the pollution doesn't get you, the traffic will. If you live thru those two, you're fair game for the street hunters."
~~ Mickey Spillane [1918-2006], in "Survival ... Zero", 1970

"The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my Administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened. By god, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake [that] any government can make."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88], in 1963

"There are no poor politicians."
~~ Mickey Spillane [1918-2006]

"Integrity has no need of rules."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

“Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.”
~~ Victoria Holt

"I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust."
~~ Geronimo [1829-1909]

"What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one."
~~ Sitting Bull [circa 1831-1890]

"Re-examine all that you have been told. Dismiss that which insults your soul."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]

"Painting taught me to make not beautiful images but necessary ones."
~~ French filmmaker Robert Bresson

"Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness."
~~ French writer Sacha Guitry

"The United States] gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens."
~~ President George Washington,
in a letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790

"Sometimes [writing] comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"In three words I can sum up everything about life: It goes on."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"The art of dining well is no slight art, nor the pleasure slight."
~~ Michel de Montaigne [1533-92]
]
"Be yourself, everyone else is taken."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Progress has little to do with speed and much to do with direction."
~~ old saying

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

August-September 2010 News Factoids

2010-10-10T16:52:00.006-06:00

The United States was once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees; the College Board now finds that the U.S. has fallen to 12th place among 36 developed nations.
~~ per New York Times

Hishi {seashell disk} necklaces are back in fashion, after 40 years. But the local kids that are wearing them never heard of the word 'hishi' before.

President Obama was in Albuquerque last week, meeting with Lt. Gov. Diane Denish (the next New Mexico governor!), after which she took him to Barelas Coffee House for posole.

ECONOMIC NEWS
"The 137,698 bankruptcy filings in July represent a 9 percent increase from a year earlier ... Last year, there were 1.4 million consumer bankruptcy filings in the U.S., a 32 percent increase from 2008."
~~ Bloomberg News

In response to a $28 million budget gap for 2010, the City of Colorado Springs in Colorado is turning off as many as one-third of its streetlights.

IMMIGRATION NEWS

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants are down more than 60% since 2005, to 550,000 per year; violent crime in U.S. border counties dropped more than 30% in the past two decades.

CLIMATE & ECOLOGY
In August 2010, "An island of ice 4.4 times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland, potentially threatening shipping lanes and oil platforms."

"The planet just logged the warmest decade, the warmest year, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, may & June on record."
~~ National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, July 2010

"Nine nations recorded their all-time high temperature records in 2010."
~~ National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, July 2010

In 1964, the annual global [fishing] catch totalled around 50 million tons. In the late 1980s, the total world catch peaked at around 85 million tons. [And] for the past two decades, the global catch has been steadily declining.
~~ per New Yorker Magazine

2010 ties global heat record. The Hill: "The first eight months of 2010 tied for the warmest combined global land and ocean surface temperatures since records started in 1880."
~~ per the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

NATIONAL SECURITY
"As many as 854,000 people [in the U.S.] ... hold top secret security clearances. [And] fully a quarter million holders of top secret security clearances are employees not of the government but of private, profit-making businesses."
~~ Hendrick Hertzberg

'THANK A REPUBLICAN' DEPT.
One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

As of June, the number of Americans on food stamps had set a new all-time record for each of 19 consecutive months.

Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many as were receiving it in 2007.

Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending June 30th.

More than 25 percent of all Americans now have a credit score below 599.

One out of every five children in the United States is now living in poverty.

CHANGES AT AMAZON
While spending most of the day coding new material on my websites, especially the five bookstore sites, I have lately noticed that Amazon now has long-out-of-production VHS tapes back in stock as *NEW* product, often for under $5. My only guess to account for this phenomenon is that it has to do with the economy: DVD & Blu-ray prices are too high, and-or the studios are able to make a buck without much overhead by reproducing VHS tapes; the other possibility is demand thru kiosk sales.

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Essay #92: Reason-Based Taxation 2010

2010-08-29T13:12:00.005-06:00

*          *          *          *        One percent of the population now owns 65 percent of everything in America. Twenty years ago, they owned only 35 percent of everything in the country: in the years since Dr. Ravi Batra established that base-line, the One Percent – the Oligarchy that rules this country – used the anti-democratic principles of Reaganomics to accrue 30 percent more of the totality of the assets in this country.
        But they do not have enough: they want it all.
        This One Percent, the Oligarchy, has spent millions of dollars to prevent any levy that might approach having them pay their fair share, the result being the Bush Tax Giveaway that was fast-tracked thru the U.S. Congress, the Republican National Debt that today stands at twenty-five trillion dollars, the 'G.O.P. Economic Meltdown', and the still-worsening worldwide Great Recession.
        What is the Oligarchy's fair share? The calculation is quite simple and direct:
        The U.S. Defense Department spends certain monies for doing their job. which includes protecting the 65% of all the land and property and assets owned by the Oligarchy, so therefore the Oligarchy should pay 65% of the Defense Department budget every year.
        The Oligarchy would insist that they are good patriots, so they should be willing to pay a 65% share of the Homeland Security and Interior Department budgets every year.
        The Oligarchy owns 65% of all business concerns, big and small, so they should pay 65% of the Commerce and Transportation and Energy and Agriculture Department budgets every year.
        The Department of State probably goes overboard in fulfilling the wishes of the Oligarchy, but I say that the Oligarchy need only pay a 65% share of the State Department budget every year as well.
        The Oligarchy, the One Percent, should be paying 65% of the entire Federal Budget every year. The same calculation applies to every U.S. federal department and bureau and section.
        This principle applies also to each and every country around the world, to each and every state or province or canton or arrondissement, to each and every local government entity, down to each and every school district and water district.

*          *          *          *        The Oligarchy that rules this and other countries owns sixty-five percent of everything, so they should pay 65% of the taxes required to supply the benefits that they derive from government in all its overlapping jurisdictions. Any other plan or assessment will concede to them the means to achieve their ultimate intention, which is to own one-hundred percent of everything – a return to feudalism. After the Oligarchy has achieved that intention, they have only your 'soul' – your Self – to take away from you and yours.
        The Oligarchy has already taken away your vote, 'without firing a shot', in the ChadGate fiasco of 2000: the U.S. Supreme Court anointed George W. Bush as President of the U.S. of A. in complete disregard for due process or for the will of the people, based on the wrong-headed certainty that it was right to do so and in the clear knowledge that no one could stop them.
        They ignored the U.S. Constitution in a 'dog and pony show' that was broadcast on national television and radio. Most Americans made no effort to watch or listen to this show, settling instead for the 'sound bite' camouflage served up by – you guessed it – the media conglomerates owned by the Oligarchy.

*          *          *          *        Previous iterations of class are disappearing, and are being replaced by a structure of Economic Class. The Oligarchy has replaced the Aristocracy, while assuming the same attitude of Divine Right that triggered the French Revolution of 1789.
        The lower economic classes, the 'proletariat', are defined as those who have no capital, nor means of production, and thus are required to sell their labor in order to survive. The Upper Middle economic class deals with the lower classes only while the latter are employed as servants.
        The entire economy works – or does not work – on the backs of the middle and lower classes, whose primary role in the latter XXth Century evolved into that of the Consumer Class: Notice that virtually every middle class American household is in constant debt (even disregarding mortgage payments), which means that they are encouraged – maybe 'required' is a better term – to spend more than they earn, so that the Oligarchy can reap their Divine Right profits on goods that the Consumer Class does not need and cannot in truth afford. The Consumer Class has an envious lifestyle, but in actuality owns less and less: because the Oligarchy owns more and more.
        This is not exactly news. The system of Economic Class ensures the giving away of power to the Oligarchy, in the form of debt, under the constant and compelling threat of job loss. If the middle class worker does not purchase 'the latest', then the economy will collapse and the Consumer will be out of work and thrown into survival among the lower economic classes. The Consumer Class has been taught to spend in order to earn.
        This is in effect worse than the 'indentured servitude' that was common around the time of the U.S. Revolutionary War. A British or other freeman could get passage to America or an apprenticeship in a trade in exchange for an agreed-upon term, often three to five years. The difference between indenture and today's economy is that the Consumer Class owes the Oligarchy and there is no expiration date on the deal: The Consumer Class is required to stay in debt by the pressures of the consumer economy, of which the primary beneficiary is the Oligarchy. (Think not? Did your real net worth – exclusive of housing – increase by anywhere near 50% since 1985?)
        The Oligarchy has done such a good job of fulfilling their devious intention that labor union membership in the U.S. has been down to 15% of the work-force for a long time. President George Dubya honored his idol, Ronnie Reagan, by ordering the Northwest Airlines mechanics union not to strike, just as Ronnie busted the air traffic controller walkout in August of 1981. And the media soon began reporting that George Dubya would prevent a strike at Delta Airlines.
        The later years of Bush's reign saw the entire economy collapse, in the U.S.A. and around the world – the historic 'G.O.P. Economic Meltdown'. (American consumers no longer have jobs or spare money to spend or save, and U.S. consumer spending accounts for 25% of the world economy.) Dubya's agenda included looting the U.S. Treasury, and he did such a thorough job of screwing up America's future that (in typical Dubya incompetence) he screwed up the screw-up. The subprime lending debacle caused the banking crisis that caused the disappearance of half the net value of the stock market indexes, in a matter of months after the 2008 election. And the almost-funny part is that Dubya was supposed to leave the mess for his successor, but he screwed up so badly that the collapse happened before the November 2008 election, and Barack Obama swept into the White House charged with cleaning up Dubya's mess.

*          *          *          *        Until the structure of the Economic Classes is redesigned so that the middle class, the now 'Consumer Class', is able to acquire wealth as a result of their labors, then matters can only get worse. The only remedy is to increase the taxation levied on the Oligarchy so that they pay their share for the government services that they receive, all down the line.
        The One-Percent, the Oligarchy has already acquired two thirds of this country's total assets; the Wealthy Class (the top 20% of taxpayers) owns 85% of this country's total assets. The Wealthy Class have more than enough money to bribe Congress and local officials to do their bidding, but We The People showed the world in November 2008 that true Power lies with us. The Wealthy Class will fight 'tooth and nail' against Change, so Americans must remain steadfast and vigilant and never back down.
        Like it or not, America and the world are now engaged in Economic Class War.

* * * * There are three parts to the policy of Reason-Based Taxation, which in combination will solve the over-long debate on the legitimacy of the income tax as well as solving both the annual budget deficit and the perpetual Republican National Debt.

        FIRST: Restructure the personal income tax so that whatever the Federal Budget from Congress might be, that the Oligarchy is billed for 65% of that budget, that the Wealthy Class (top 20% of earners, including the Oligarchy) is billed for 85% of that budget, and the Middle Class is responsible for the remaining 15% of the budget. (The lowest 40% of earners, the Poor and the Working Poor, pay enough in sales taxes, etc.)
        Might be a good idea to set a tax bracket for the top 10% of earners, too.
        Such a plan enacted into law will include a review each of the first five years (for fine tuning), and then every five years or so. That way, as the Republican National Debt is paid off, and the Wealthy Class's holdings are drawn down, then they will be paying less in taxes: When the Oligarchy owns only, say, 50% of everything, and the Wealthy Class owns only 70%, then they need to pay for only 50% and 70% of the Federal Government's budget.
        And certainly, once the Middle Class / Consumer Class is again thriving, they won't have a problem with paying for their 30% share.
        The present annual Federal Budget includes an automatic deficit (since the Oligarchy is so anal-retentive); this Reason-Based Taxation plan would have the first budget be something like two trillion dollars for operational costs & economic stimulus and another trillion dollars to pay down the Republican National Debt.

        SECOND: The corporate income tax will also need to be restructured. The Working Minds 'Benchmark' for executive pay is that the President of the U.S. is paid $400,000 per year, plus perks like travel and dinners at foreign embassies, so a good baseline measure is half a million dollars in compensation to the Leader of the Free World.
        No executive of any corporation is worth a nickel more than that.
        So compensation of executives above the 'benchmark' half million will be taxed at 50% to the corporation.
        A corporation is allowed (NOT entitled) to a profit of, say, 15% on total revenues. All loopholes are cancelled; any pre-tax profits above the legitimate 15% are taxed at 50% also. (See Part 3)

THIRD: Corporations will be forced to practice actual Capitalism -- see Working Minds Essay #40 "Paleo-Capitalism" [February 2004].
Reason-Based Taxation gives the corporation four choices for not paying the 50% tax.

Just don't pay executives over half a million dollars per year, all-inclusive, no loopholes.

Reduce the profit to 15% by expanding the business, which will take the form of reinvestment: building new plants, offering new products, and such – which actions qualify only if located within U.S. borders.

Reduce the profit to 15% by lowering prices or raising wages. Wage increases can include salary changes, bonuses, shorter hours or increased vacation time (for same pay), and employee retirement and E.S.O.P. plans. Qualifying wage increases or bonuses must be a single percentage rate for all employees, pro rata against their annual earnings for the year or the quarter. Naturally, this option may not affect the situation until the following year or quarter, but the job of the executives will be to plan ahead.

Reduce the profit to 15% by purchase of treasury shares, i.e. retirement of stock shares available on the market by trading excess cash for stock owned by outsiders. The goal in Paleo-Capitalism is to eliminate debt in the form of outstanding shares being day-traded by speculators within the Stock Market Casino [WM Essay #18 December 2001].

*          *          *          *        We The People can take back control of our country and our economy and our lives by instituting Reason-Based Taxation. This may have to begin with local or state legislation, but until the Federal Government is brought to heel and wrested away from the Federalist Society and P.N.A.C. people and the right-wing media and the Oligarchy – the anti-American Forces of Dis-empowerment – there will be no rest for the Progressive forces that are the only hope for a return to rule under the Constitution.
        Discover that you still have power as a Voter and as a Citizen, wherever you live: Simply by USING that power you recreate its existence. By retaining your Natural Power, you keep the Oligarchy – the Culture Structure in its various forms – from stealing from you the Natural Power that was established by the Declaration of Independence and is the basis of the U.S Constitution, and the most precious gift of America to the world.

[copyright 2010 by Gary Edward Nordell, all rights reserved]

        The preceding is an excerpt from Chapter 20 of my forthcoming book, "Working Minds: A Philosophy of Empowerment".

July 2010 News Factoids

2010-07-27T14:06:00.001-06:00

Bush's Legacy: The F.D.I.C. took over 25 insolvent banks in 2008 (including giant Washington Mutual), 140 in 2009, and have already taken over 68 more insolvent banks in the first four months of 2010.

Sales of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" doubled in 2009.

Went to the local Movies Ten the other day, a Tuesday. Since school is now out, they changed from 4pm weekday start to Noon or 1pm matinees; they raised the matinee price 25 cents; I saw 1245 show "Robin Hood" with two other people in the theater and then "Iron Man 2" 4pm show with a couple behind me only. Also, the local ads are gone: instead of the stream of slide ads for area businesses, there is one actual ad (for a senior services outfit) and the rest of the slides say 'you can have your ad here, call us'.

"Eight percent of major bills [in the U.S. Senate] were subject to filibuster in the 1960s. That number has climbed to an unprecedented 70 percent today." (2009}

Sign up to participate in 350.org's worldwide 10/10/10 Global Work Party - A Day To Celebrate Climate Solutions

Ninety percent of emails sent every day are spam.

"Great catastrophes - 'act of God' weather events that cause more than a billion dollars in damage - have tripled since 1950." ~~ insurance company Munich Re

Total movie theater box office in May 2010 was down 11 percent from same month last year, and attendance was down 19 percent. ~~ per Time Magazine

"The recession has directly hit more than half of the nation's working adults, pushing them into unemployment, pay cuts, reduced hours at work or part-time jobs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey."

When it came time to get a new bottle of merthiolate -- great on bug bites, scratches, etc. -- I found out that this OTC remedy is being removed from the market, period. (Same as with quinine, which was removed around 2005, so that even the doctors at the V.A. are not supposed to prescribe it.) But Albuquerque has a major Hispanic population, and so I found a nice replacement for tincture merthiolate at a 'yerberia' in the South Valley. This product (hecho en Mexico) is Mertodol Blanco Jaloma, a clear topical antiseptic that is also good against herpes blisters; Jaloma also makes Mertodol Rojo, a red-colored version.

According to the Labor Department, the unemployment rate among people in management, business or financial occupations was 4.8 percent in June, compared to 9.5 percent over all, 18.2 percent in construction and 12.1 percent in production.

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

July 2010 Quotations

2010-07-19T18:01:00.003-06:00

"One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language."
~~ Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran [1911-95]

"Melancholy men are of all others most witty."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"You have zero privacy... Get over it."
~~ Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (in 1999)

"If we continue on the current path of Reality-avoidance, Mankind will be extinct in forty years. And good riddance!"
~~ G.E. Nordell

"During the [George W.] Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse."
~~ Esther Kaplan

"Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact."
~~ Richard Dawkins

"The choice is clear: either we do nothing and allow a miserable and probably catastrophic future to overtake us, or we use our knowledge about human behaviour to create a social environment in which we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardising the chances that those who follow us will be able to do the same."
~~ B.F. Skinner [1904-90], in 1948

“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The opposite of hope is empowerment."
~~ Tim De Christopher

"If it is true that the human mind leans at one extreme toward the bounded, material, and useful, at the other it naturally rises toward the infinite, immaterial, and beautiful."
~~ Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59]

"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest."
~~ writer Ralph Ellison [1914-94]

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work."
~~ Émile Zola [1840-1902]

"It was possible. And possible was all [that] I needed."
~~ movie director Julie Davis

"Unsung, the noblest deed will die"
~~ Greek poet Pindar [c.522–443 B.C.E.]

"If you're going thru hell, keep going."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world."
~~ columnist Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal, in 2004

"Andrew Jackson believed that you don't measure the health of a society at the apex but at the base."
~~ U.S. Senator Jim Webb

"I was not a guy writing deep-dish revelations. If people see a picture of mine and then sit down and talk about it for 15 minutes, that is a very fine reward, I think."
~~ movie director Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it."
~~ poet Ezra Pound [1885-1972]

"To remain neutral in situations of injustice is to be complicit in that injustice."
~~ Bishop Desmond Tutu

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, a sense of humor to console him for what he is."
~~ Francis Bacon [1561-1626]

"Free market ideology [has] evolved from simple, old-fashioned greed into the sociopathic culture of looting [that] we see on Wall Street today."
~~ Ruth Conniff

"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]

"The greatest enemy of mankind is ignorance of the inherent money power in all of us. When the realization of this comes to man he will, like Sampson, push down the walls of his prison..."
~~ E.C. Riegel [1879-1953]

"It takes a million dollars to beat the system, to pay your own ransom, to buy back your own life."
~~ mystery author Tony Hillerman [1925-2008], in "Blessing Way" (1970)

"There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard."
~~ Martin Scorsese

"the difference between being stubborn and being principled is being right."
~~ Don Yacktman

"Growth is the only evidence of life."
~~ John Henry Newman [1801-90]

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
~~ Victor Frankl [1905-97]

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."
~~ John Wayne [1907-79], from his controversial 1971 Playboy Magazine interview, and carved onto his tombstone

"Just Do It"
~~ Nike athletic shoes ad campaign, circa 1990 (The inspiration was convicted killer Gary Gilmore, who said "Let’s do it" just before he was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1977.)

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. [1841-1935]

"It don't mean a thing If it ain't got that swing."
~~ Irving Mills [1894-1985]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

June 2010 Quotations

2010-06-05T18:33:00.002-06:00

"To paraphrase the Christian Bible (Matthew 16): For what is a man profited if he shall make beaucoup bucks while transforming the planet into a cesspool."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these."
~~ Ovid [43 B.C.E. – 17 or 18 C.E.]

"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]

"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity ... the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish."
~~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe [1749-1832]

"It is well remembered that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
~~ John Andrew Holmes, circa 1927

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail."
~~ Abraham Maslow [1908-70]

"Science has proven the existence of global warming. So our position is like the moment in the old tales when you smell the dragon. The only question is which way to run – run or die! Mankind must reverse global warming or die."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty."
~~ physicist Lise Meitner [1878-1968]

"A distributed system is one that stops you from getting any work done when a machine you've never even heard of crashes."
~~ Leslie Lamport

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"Women have not yet achieved the right to be mediocre."
~~ Anonymous

"All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness."
~~ Richard Lamm

"It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word."
~~ Andrew Jackson [1767–1845], in 1833

“We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense.”
~~ Carl G. Jung [1875-1961], in "Man and His Symbols", 1964

“Almost every desire [that] a poor man has is a punishable offense.”
~~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline [1894-1961]

"A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"The decrease in the number of mature persons in the world is a shocking indictment of our civilization."
~~ Katharine White [1892-1977], in 1938

"The hard truth is that [the climate movement] has failed not because conservatives are stupid, but because liberals are cowards."
~~ Tim De Christopher

"Silence is so accurate."
~~ painter Mark Rothko [1903-70]

"Reason should direct and appetite obey."
~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero [106 B.C.E. – 43 B.C.E.]

"Virtue and riches seldom settle on one man."
~~ Niccolò Machiavelli [1469-1527]

"Enthusiasm is the fever of reason."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-1885]

"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"For writers the most important question is simply, What is interesting?"
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

"Nobody likes to eat his own beef."
~~ New Mexico saying, as quoted by Tony Hillerman [1925-2008]

"Die dulci freure" (Have a nice day)

"Non illigitami carborundum" (Don't let the b*stards grind you down)

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"The best director is the one you don't see."
~~ movie director Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Join the Army, meet interesting people, kill them."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear-end collision."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

Bumper Stickers & T-shirts
"We have enough youth, how about a fountain of smart?"
"Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot."
"Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."

"This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom ... Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. [In an earlier era] the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy ... Democracy only works when we claim it as our own."
~~ TV journalist Bill Moyers

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books, what other men do not say in whole books."
~~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [1844-1900]

“Money talks. And writes. And publishes. And reviews. But it can't read.”
~~ Jack Woodford [1894-1971]

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]

"This would be a cleaner, better world if mankind had been omitted from the scheme of things."
~~ S.S. Van Dine [1888-1939]

"I just made pictures I would've liked to see."
~~ movie director Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

May 2010 News Factoids

2010-05-19T09:02:00.004-06:00

The ECONOMY

"When Reagan became president [in 1981] manufacturing was 20 percent of G.D.P. Today, manufacturing is 11 percent of G.D.P."
~~ per radio talk show host Thom Hartmann

"In 1965 [when Medicare became law], health care consumed just 6 percent of U.S. economic output; today, the figure is 18 percent."
~~ per New Yorker Magazine, April 2010

"In 1956, 56 percent of profits in the U.S. economy derived from manufacturing, while 8.3 percent came from the financial sector. in 2007, manufacturing produced 10 percent of profits, while the financial sector produced 26 percent of profits." per The Washington Spectator

Minor Factoid: Sales at my Amazon online bookstores dropped sharply in April; I made more that month from the solar panel array in my back yard (after zeroing out my electrical usage) than I did from my websites.

While the 290,000 jobs added to U.S. payrolls in April are a good sign – after all, Dubya's policies were eliminating 500,000 and more jobs each month at the end of his term as President – the problem is that 800,000 new workers enter the U.S, job market each month. While Barack Obama's Stimulus Package has corrected the one statistic, there has not been nearly enough repairs to the economy that was inherited from Bush for anyone to breathe easy.

"The Social Security trust fund is projected to show a surplus of close to $100 billion in 2010 and will remain in the black until after 2020."
~~ Dean Baker, Campaign For America's Future { full article }

ENERGY

U.S. energy consumption is 44 percent coal, 24 percent natural gas, 20 percent nuclear, 7 percent hydroelectric, and 5 percent other (including wind & solar).
~~ per Time Magazine pie chart, Feb 2010

ELECTIONS & POLITICS

"Senate Republicans used the filibuster to delay 80 percent of legislation in 2009." per Time Magazine

"Forty-four percent of members of Congress are millionaires. Of the 237 millionaire legislators, at least seven have a net worth greater than $100 million." per Center For Responsive Politics

ARIZONA, PART 1: The Arizona Legislature passed and Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law requiring police officers to question anyone who they suspect of being in the country illegally and to require proof of their immigration or citizenship status. Liberals were appalled, since many police jurisdictions in Arizona are already practicing racial profiling.

ARIZONA, PART 2: On the same day, the National Marijuana Policy Project announced their plan to gather the minimum 150,000 signatures required by July to get an initiative on the November 2010 ballot to legalize medical marijuana in Arizona. The local organization's website is www.stoparrestingpatients.org

Interesting to note the election results of the May 18th U.S. primaries. While each race is now a battle for November, the numbers of votes in the four significant races were strongly pro-Democrat:
Arkansas Senate primary Dems 326,187 & GOP 139,303
Kentucky Senate primary Dems 513,659 & GOP 348,680
Pennsylvania Senate primary Dems 1,041,971 & GOP 815,432
Democrat Mark Critz beat Republican Tim Burns to fill out the term of the late Jack Murtha [PA-12], Dems 71,684 to GOP 59,476

CLIMATE

India and Bangladesh have long fought about sovereignty over New Moore island in the Bay of Bengal; the matter became moot in March 2010 when the 1.4 square mile landform was immersed by rising seas (another clear result of global warming & climate change).

"Insurers are probably the only people I know who are more worried about climate change than the environmentalists ... The [insurer] companies know that the weather patterns are changing. And they know that there's real risk out there."
~~ Joel Ario, chair of the Climate Task Force of the Natl Assn of Insurance Commissioners

B.P. MEGASPILL

Halliburton/Dresser Industries, the scourge of the invasion & occupation of Iraq, screwed up the installation of a concrete plug where the Deepwater Horizon attached to the seabottom – just twenty hours before the explosion that set off the worst oil spill in history. { full article }

While the servants of the Oligarchy blame each other at the Congressional show trial about the tragic mess in the Gulf of Mexico, fault is quite easily assigned: call it the Republican-B.P. Megaspill, so that our grandchildren know who helped kill the biosphere.

OTHER MATTERS

Modern Consumerism: Earth Day expanded into Earth Month, and Target stores held a big Earth Month Sale.

"In the U.S., there are more arrests for marijuana possession each year than for all violent crimes combined." per Marijuana Policy Project

"If the same book is available at Amazon in both paper and e-book formats, 40 percent of their customers now order the electronic version."
~~ per New Yorker Magazine, April 2010

"There are 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S, or 753 per 1000,000 – the highest rate in the world." per Time Magazine

Human population on Planet Earth has increased over 10,000 years from roughly four million to nearly seven billion today, and is expected to add another billion humans in the next 15 years.

"Worldwide, paper consists of from one-third to one-half of the content of landfills."
~~ David Owen

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Gulf Megaspill

2010-05-17T06:57:00.002-06:00

While the servants of the Oligarchy blame each other at the Congressional show trial about the tragic mess in the Gulf of Mexico, fault is quite easily assigned: Call it the Republican-B.P. Megaspill, so that our grandchildren know who helped kill the biosphere.

May 2010 Quotations

2010-05-02T09:56:00.003-06:00

"Someone once said life is hard. I say, compared to what?"
~~ Harvey Mackay

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

“There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.”
~~ Ed Howdershelt

“The cure for writer’s cramp is writer’s block.”
~~ Iñigo de Leon

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be a chess player, not the chess piece."
~~ Ralph Charell

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them."
~~ Lou Holtz

"Love is something you do, not something you feel."
~~ Gordon Atkinson

"Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night."
~~ William Blake [1757–1827]

"The only thing high-definition television will do is provide sharper pictures of the garbage."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are always happy."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]

"Becoming the champion is often the luck of the draw, but being a contender, a somebody with promise, is about hard work and character."
~~ Robert Lipsyte

"Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy."
~~ Janet Long

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."
~~ Thomas J. Watson [1874-1956], founder of I.B.M.

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"It is never too late to start early."
~~ Anonymous

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."
~~ Peter Drucker [1909-2005]

"Whether you think you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]

"If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up someplace else."
~~ Yogi Berra

"If you always do what you have always done then you'll always have what you've already got."
~~ Anthony Robbins

"Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else."
~~ Donald Knuth

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
~~ Howard Aiken [1900-73]

"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."
~~ Muhammad Ali

"If everything's under control, you're going too slow."
~~ racecar driver Mario Andretti

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"Even when people are more successful than they had imagined, nothing is ever achieved without giving something up."
~~ Dr. Judith M. Bardwick

"Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire."
~~ Irish poet William Butler Yeats [1865-1939]

Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae
(To know what to ask is already to know half)
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
~~ Cyril Northcote Parkinson [1909-93] (aka "Parkinson's Law")

"Chance favors the trained mind."
~~ Louis Pasteur [1822-95]

"The value of the average conversation could be enormously improved by the constant use of four simple words: 'I do not know.'"
~~ André Maurois [1885-1967]

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound)
~~ Anonymous

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe."
~~ Lord Salisbury [1830-1903]

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1859-1915]

"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
~~ Matt Cartmill, PhD

"At age 65, this gettin' old thing is gettin' old."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"The bigger the goal, the bigger the obstacle. The bigger the obstacle, the bigger the achievement. So blame the failure not on obstacles but on the absence of relentless effort"
~~ Dr. Ravi Batra

"There is an art to science, and science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"This is my way. What is your way? THE way doesn't exist."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
~~ Bill Gates, in 1981

"Hopelessness springs eternal."
~~ Ben Greenman

"Work is much more fun than fun."
~~ Noël Coward [1899-1973]

"In The Field, there is no Soap Opera; Soap Opera occurs only In The Stands. And the same for Gossip."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"To be a writer one learns to live like one."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

April 2010 Quotations

2010-04-12T20:12:00.003-06:00

"In times of change, the Patriot is a scarce man; brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a Patriot."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Don't let so much reality into your life that there's no room left for dreamin'."
~~ Texas Bix Bender

"The time has come for us to stand up for the American people and to hold the insurance companies accountable."
~~ Congressman Martin Heinrich [Dem NM-01]

"Sartre preferred reading serie noir crime novels to Marleau-Ponty, and who could blame him?"
~~ Gary Indiana (in Los Angeles Times Times Book Review)

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Every great man is unique."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths."
~~ neon art piece by Bruce Nauman

"Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"History happens only once."
~~ John Cassidy

"Be careful to leave your sons well-instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant."
~~ Epictetus [55-135 A.D.]

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
~~ Maya Angelou

"There are idiots. Look around."
~~ economist Lawrence Summers

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, [then] the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
~~ Dresden James

"The growing wealth aquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses."
~~ President James Madison [1751-1836]

"Never do anything against conscience -- even if the state demands it."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"More often than not 'fair' and 'balanced' may be mutually exclusive."
~~ Neal Gabler, in Los Angeles Times op-ed

"When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective', all else is `propaganda'."
~~ Studs Terkel [1912-2008]

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
~~ President Ronald Reagan [1911-2004]

"Yes, our regulatory agencies are incompetent. But they are incompetent by design."
~~ writer David Goldstein

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

"When one hundred million people don't vote, the nation is not bitterly divided. The nation mostly doesn't give a sh*t."
~~ Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone writer

"The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
~~ Thomas Paine [1737-1809]

"You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore."
~~ Cesar E. Chavez [1927-93], in 1984

"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away."
~~ Elvis Presley [1935-77]

"Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people."
~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-1969]

"Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past, while we silence the rebels of the present."
~~ Henry Steele Commager [1902-98]

“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?"
~~ Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"It's time for Congress to go cold turkey and stop feeding at the lobbyist-funded trough."
~~ U.S. Senator Russ Feingold [Dem-WI]

"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."
~~ F. Lee Bailey

"Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy."
~~ David Korten

"It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable."
~~ Molière [1622-73]

"I figured out why carbon credits seem like a bad idea: It is like an overweight person paying a friend to go to the gym and exercise for them."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Anyone who has Republican parents should run away from home."
~~ radio talk show host Mike Malloy

"Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles isn't a realist."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"The history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor."
~~ Howard Zinn [1922-2010], in 2006

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids January-March 2010

2010-03-29T14:01:00.005-06:00

THE ECONOMY
"Median household income in 2000 was $52,500; in 2008, it was $50,303."
~~ Time Magazine

In 2008, the Dow fell nearly 34%, the worst since 1931; the S&P was down 38.5%, the worst since 1937.

"The stock market is down 26 percent since 2000. (Inflation-adjusted, it's even worse.)"
~~ Time Magazine, Nov 2009

"There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings."
~~ Paul Krugman, New York Times, Nov 2009

"The Bureau of Labor Statistics employment-to-population ratio of 80.6 percent in November 2009 is the lowest since B.L.S. began keeping track in 1948."
~~ Time Magazine

"One recent survey shows that 44 percent of U.S. families experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year."
~~ Don Peck, The Atlantic Magazine, March 2010

Want to know where you can move your checking and savings accounts away from the Big Banks? Check out free website www.MoveYourMoney.info

"In November [2009], 19.4 percent of all men [in the U.S.] in their prime working years of 25 to 54 did not have jobs, the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the statistic in 1948."
~~ The Atlantic Magazine

"Twenty-four percent of U.S. workers between 18 & 34 do not earn enough to pay monthly bills, up 10 percent from 1999."
~~ per AFL-CIO 2009 survey

"The average amount of equity that Americans have in their homes has dropped from 59 percent in 2005 to 41 percent [in 2009], by far the lowest level on record."
~~ Newsweek Magazine

A young worker at a local Burger King volunteered the information that their most popular menu item is the Dollar Menu.

Over 100 U.S. banks failed in 2009 (the last time was in 1992, during the Bush 41 administration), which emptied the coffers of the F.D.I.C.

POLITICS
On 21 January 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court struck another blow for fascism and against freedom & liberty in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. case reversing a full century of election campaign finance restrictions on the ability of corporations to purchase any elected office that they want. The principle that they stood for is "One million dollers, one vote".

"I figured out why carbon credits seem like a bad idea: It is like an overweight person paying a friend to go to the gym and exercise for them."
~~ G.E. Nordell

Wealthy motor-mouth Sarah Palin's grandchild is receiving federal A.D.C. (Aid to Dependent Children) money.
~~ per several news reports

On 9 March 2010, Limp Rushbaugh threatened to leave the country if ObamaCare passed in Congress. Bye-bye, dirtbag, and good riddance.

"With only half of taxpayers having filed thus far, refunds are already up nearly 10% from last year, thanks to a broad array of tax cuts in the [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009]."
~~ U.S. Congressman Martin Heinrich [Dem NM-01]

LIFE IN AMERICA
"U.S. schools rank 32nd internationally in math scores, tenth in science, and 12th in reading."
~~ Time Magazine, January 2010

"The U.S. incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prisoners while having only 5 percent of the total population."
~~ Peter Stoup of Wisconsin

Modern Consumerism: There is now a $30 hearing aid disguised as a Bluetooth earpiece.

Not a lot of labor union activity out here in the boonies, and New Mexico does not have an overtime law. (California law is time-and-a-half after 8 hours in the day, or after 40 hours in the week.) The result here is many obviously worn-out workers at the local grocery and several local fast-food stores. The cashier at Taco Bell was dead on her feet and could barely make change, and co-workers in the back were way behind, and no manager in sight. (Current corporate policy seems to be to burn the workers out and throw them away, the next in line will beg to obey the corporate slave-masters.)

OTHER MATTERS
"The U.S. Brder Patrol has almost 17,500 agents stationed along the southern border, or the equivalent of 8.8 agents per linear mile."
~~ A.C.L.U. of New Mexico

Recently discovered the IndieGoGo.com incubator platform for independent film, music and other artisitic and community projects. Artists who join can then seek funding, collaboration, distribution – whatever is needed to realize the project. And IndieGoGo just acquired the online distributor Distribber.com which will (for a fee) add your video content to the iTunes and-or Amazon Video-On-Demand and-or Netflix Watch Instantly streaming sites, and then pay royalties on sales.
IndieGoGo official website • Distribber official website

"There are 600 coal-fired power plants in America, as against a hundred nuclear-powered ones."
~~ The Atlantic Magazine

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

March 2010 Quotations

2010-03-10T21:51:00.005-07:00

"You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."
~~ Henrik Ibsen [1928-1906], in "An Enemy of The People" (1888)

"The next step [in a Fascist movement] is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, Americans have consumed more than we produced and have made up the difference by borrowing."
~~ Fareed Zakaria

"All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."
~~ Karl Marx [1818-83]

"About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop."
~~ Elihu Root [1845-1937]

"I ain't Martin Luther King. I don't need a dream. I have a plan."
~~ filmmaker Spike Lee

"The Buddhist approach is 'Don't just do something, sit there'."
~~ cartoonist Brian Crane

"Ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism."
~~ former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], in August 1910 speech

"The wastebasket is a writer's best friend"
~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer [1902-91]

"It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone."
~~ Stephen King

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."
~~ Robert E. Howard [1906-36], in "Beyond The Black River"

"it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936], in "The Ballad of The White Horse"

“The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual – which side are you on?”
~~ G.E. Nordell

"A nation without the means of reform is without means of survival."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-1797]

"I believe ... that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer."
~~ U.S. President William Henry Harrison [1773-1841], on 10 October 1840

"Understanding is the booby prize."
~~ Werner Erhard

"Here's the best truth [that] I know for certain: Never attribute to 'evil' that which you can chalk up to ineptitude."
~~ author Harlan Ellison

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all."
~~ Judeo-Christian Bible, Ecclesiastes 9:11

"It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that is the way to bet."
~~ Damon Runyon [1880-1946]

"Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple."
~~ Willy Wonka (character created by Roald Dahl [1916-90])

"When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take, choose the bolder."
~~ William Joseph Slim [1891-1970]

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616], in "Twelfth Night" (Act II, Scene 5)

"The wise make proverbs and fools repeat them."
~~ Isaac D'Israeli [1766-1848]

"The gods too are fond of a joke."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

February 2010 Quotations

2010-02-20T10:00:00.006-07:00

"Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."
~~ Michel Foucault [1926-84]

"Cinema deals more fatuously with religion than with any other human enterprise."
~~ critic Anthony Lane

"It's noble to be good. It's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?"
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"The next time I want some dumb son of a bitch to do something, I'll do it myself."
~~ movie director Michael Curtiz [1886-1962]

"Even the best writer has to erase."
~~ Spanish proverb

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
~~ J.D. Salinger [1919-2010]

"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
~~ Joseph Conrad [1857-1924]

"More than Any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand, my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: "Huckleberry Finn", "The Great Gatsby", and "The Catcher In The Rye".
~~ Adam Gopnik, in "The New Yorker", February 2010

"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"The best life is one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possesive impulses the smallest."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"I would agree with Luis Buñuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt."
~~ Carlos Fuentes

"Common sense is genius with its work clothes on."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders' money for such purposes; and, more-over, a prohibition of this kind would be, as far as it went, an effec-tive method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts."
~~ Republican President Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], in 1905

"The future is a race, a race between education and catastrophe"
~~ H.G. Wells [1866-1946]

"Like gravity, [the petroleum industry] influences everything that we do."
~~ Peter Maass, author of "Crude World"

"Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights – the coldness increases, the responsibility increases."
~~ Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"It's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead, and find no one there."
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]

"Cable 'news' [is] largely preoccupied with the trivial, the tactical, and the tawdry."
~~ Richard Norton Smith

"The only thing that reliably grows in our economy is public debt."
~~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

January 2010 Quotations

2010-01-21T18:56:00.003-07:00

"The only reason for Time is so [that] everything doesn't happen at once."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of Man."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

“There is no such thing as 'common sense': If common sense were common, things would make sense.”
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."
~~ Wall Street arbitrageur Ivan Boesky (in a speech given at the commencement ceremony at University of California Berkeley in 1986; he later spent two years in federal prison for insider trading crimes)

"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past."
~~ Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]

"The optimist thinks [that] the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks [that] the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources."
~~ Dale Andreatti

"The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions."
~~ Claude Lévi-Strauss [1908-2009]

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
~~ James Joyce [1882-1941]

"The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection."
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]

"One of the greatest tasks of my life has been to teach that the colored man can be anything."
~~ pioneer Afro-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux [1884-1951]

"Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back."
~~ Texas Bix Bender, in the book "Don't Squat With Yer Spurs On"

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was catastrophic. But we have to realize that the United States bombed New Mexico first."
~~ Joni Arends, anti-nuclear activist

“Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”
~~ P.T. Barnum [1810-91] {see also H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]}

"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
~~ Winston Churchill [1864-1965]

"The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."
~~ Arthur Miller [1915-2005]

"A book is a loaded gun."
~~ Ray Bradbury, from "Fahrenheit 451" [1953]

"Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but also in the ability to start over."
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]

"We have each other and we have the truth."
~~ David Ray Griffin

"Culture is like money, it comes easiest to those who need it least."
~~ Nero Wolfe character, as written by Rex Stout [1886-1975]

"Music is my life at the expense of everything else in my life."
~~ Stan Getz [1927-91]

"Luck is the residue of design"
~~ Branch Rickey [1881-1965]

"And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow."
~~ Jerry Chin

"The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
~~ physicist Marie Curie [1867-1934]

"Golf, golf, golf. It's ruined more good men than whiskey."
~~ Charlie Chan character, as written by Earl Derr Biggers [1884-1933]

"Progress in physics is achieved by denying the obvious and accepting the impossible."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

December 2009 Quotations

2009-12-13T08:06:00.002-07:00

"Technology keeps changing, but the minute any technology appears it becomes indespensible."
~~ E.L. Doctorow

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1981-1973]

"A good story cannot be devised, it has to be distilled."
~~ Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

"In the reality-TV era, unstable behavior [has] become a valid career choice."
~~ James Poniewozick

"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second-best time is now."
~~ African proverb

"The most beautiful thing [that] we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"The human ability to innovate out of a jam is profound. That's why Darwin will always be right and Malthus will always be wrong."
~~ K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy

"Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80], in 1876

"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Your mother has to be there when you are born, but nobody has to be there when you die."
~~ William Campbell Gault [1910-95]

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"If you look at the suffering around you, you can't be happy."
~~ Austrian film director Michael Haneke

"Contradictions are what make a writer interesting; consistency is for cooking."
~~ critic James Wood

"It has so happened in all the ages of the world that some have laboured and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82], in 1838

"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
~~ Theodosius Dobzhansky [1900-75]

"History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us."
~~ Julian Barnes

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."
~~ Anton Checkov [1860-1904]

"There are worlds of money wasted, at this [Holiday Season] time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got."
~~ Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-96], in 1850

"When nothing is tried nothing will happen."
~~ Joost van Steenis

"The measure of a man is how he deals with tragedy."
~~ Troy Duffy

"Somebody always has to be the n*gger."
~~ half-Jamaican author Malcolm Gladwell

"These days you don't run into all that many people who make use of a moral compass."
~~ Stephen Greenleaf

"There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means."
~~ Calvin Coolidge [1872-1933]

"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"The map is not the territory / the menu is not the meal / the score is not the music."
~~ Dutch composer George Overmeire

"If a story is in you, it has got to come out."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it."
~~ James A. Michener [1907-97]

"The great cause of this [financial] crisis is the incredible greed and selfishness that exist in the ruling elite of America. They have no shame."
~~ Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in 2009 speech

"Why must the show go on?"
~~ Noël Coward [1899-1973]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for November 2009

2009-11-29T18:04:00.004-07:00

The Christian-fascist right has shown their true colors, now selling bumper stickers and t-shirts calling for President Obama's assassi- nation and citing Psalm 109:8 as their justifying sacred text (also check verse 9).

The feature film "Fair Game", based on the book by Valerie Plame Wilson is scheduled for release in 2010, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (click for latest info at IMDb).

As-of 2007, 300,000 acres of Colorado aspen trees were dead or damaged, per government aerial surveys, with more in adjacent states.
~~ per Smithsonian Magazine

42 percent of American adults are single nowadays.

PLUMBING DEPT. HOUSEHOLD TIP
When I moved into my new house in New Mexico, one of the toilets had a really bad leak, you could see the water moving. So I emptied the tank and dried it out and put nearly a full tube of sealer in the bottom, and that got 90% of the leak. Then recently, the tiny leak looked like it was growing, so I devised a plan. I went to AutoZone and bought a container of Bar's Leak Radiator Stop Leak, which said 'safe with plastic, rubber, aluminum & metal'. Didn't say porcelain, but I figured that the risk was small. So I poured half the bottle of Bar's Leak into the tank and let it set (using the other bathroom for a few days) and sure enough, the toilet leak seems to be gone. I also poured the second half into the tank a couple weeks later, just to be sure, and again waited a couple days. The leak appears to be totally fixed!

ECONOMICS DEPT.
Jobless rate reaches 9.8 percent in September, the highest since June 1983.
~~ internet news headline

"Poverty rates rose in 31 states and the District of Columbia to a national high of 13.2 percent (the worst in 11 years) and the number of Americans receiving food stamps rose by 13 percent.
~~ Time Magazine, Sept 2009

"Since March, the dollar has lost about 15 percent of its value against other currencies."
~~ Justin Cox, Time Magazine, November 2009

"There are fewers jobs available today than in 2000, [and] about 12 million additional workers have entered the job market since then."
~~ Jim Hightower

"According to U.S. Conference of Mayors reports, no one in the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom apartment at the current federal minimum wage."
~~ Richard R. Troxell, National Coalition For The Homeless, 2009

"In 1946, one in 17 thousand Americans declared bankruptcy; [in 2008], one in three hundred did."
~~ Jill Lepore, in New Yorker Magazine

November 2009 Quotations

2009-11-10T19:22:00.002-07:00

"The problem isn't left versus right, it's up versus down."
~~ Michael Chute of the Second Maine Militia, 2009

"All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise, not from defects in the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation."
~~ President John Adams [1735-1826]

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
~~ Frederic Bastiat [1801-50]

"This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations."
~~ President Rutherford B. Hayes [1822-93]

"Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn't work."
~~ Allan H. Meltzer

"The balance of power has shifted in recent years from territorially bound governments to companies that can roam the world."
~~ Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, in the book "Global Dreams" (1994)

"The Federal Reserve [Banks] are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers."
~~ Rep. Louis Thomas McFadden [1876-1936], circa 1933

"History shows that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain control over governments by controlling the money and the issuance of it."
~~ President James A. Madison [1751-1836]

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes the laws."
~~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild [1744-1812]

"Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to."
~~ Benjamine A. Rooge

"The few who can understand the [Federal Reserve] system will be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class; while on the other hand, the great body of the people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."
~~ Rothschild Brothers of London

"He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave."
~~ Montaigne [1533-92]

"Experience is just another word for losing hope."
~~ Scott Adams (in "Dilbert" Sunday strip, 2009)

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
~~ Thomas Mann [1875-1955]

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, sh*t detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"The possible ranks higher than the actual."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
~~ Frederic Bastiat [1801-50]

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.”
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"It's better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears."
~~ Robert W. Sarnoff [1919-97]

"The stock broker services his clients in the same way that Bonnie & Clyde serviced banks."
~~ William Bernstein

"What is robbing a bank compared to the founding of a bank?"
~~ Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956]

"With an evening coat and a white tie, even a stockbroker can gain a reputation for being civilized."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"I spent my youth worrying about corporate power. Now I worry about corporate incompetence."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"The best way to rob a bank is to own one."
~~ William Crawford

"What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor."
~~ Gore Vidal

"Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm."
~~ C. Wright Mills [1916-62]

"Finance is the art or science of managing revebnues or resources for the best advantage of the manager."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842–1914?]

"The business of government is to keep government out of business – that is, unless business needs government aid."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"It's a good thing that aliens have not abducted Limp Rushbaugh or Sean Vannity or Karl Rove or Glenn Beck. If they ever do, they will find sufficient justification to incinerate Planet Earth."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"A photograph doesn't have to be pretty to be true. But if it's true, it's beautiful."
~~ photographer Roy DeCarava [1919-2009]

"We should be worrying about Wall Street-run health care."
~~ Wendell Potter

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

October 2009 Quotations

2009-10-23T17:13:00.002-06:00

"The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these."
~~ Paul Harvey [1918-2009]

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia."
~~ Charles M. Schultz [1922-2000]

"Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans."
~~ John Lennon [1940-80]

"Where there is no consideration nor use of reason, the is no Liberty at all."
~~ John Bramhall [1594—1663]

"I've been on a calendar, but never on time."
~~ Marilyn Monroe [1926-62]

"Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The human species ... has outlived the name homo sapiens."
~~ Wendell Berry

"Language is the house of the truth of Being."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists”
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"Discussion in America means dissent."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"Immanuel Kant is the real villain of our age."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82], in 1979

"This strange economy produces in the ordinary course of business products that are destructive or fraudulent or unnecessary or useless, or all four at once,"
~~ Wendell Berry

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."
~~ Alexander Hamilton [1755?-1804], in 'Federalist Paper 79'

"A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778], in 1764

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
~~ English philosopher Herbert Spencer [1820-1903]

"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep, voting on what to eat for dinner; Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]

"Life is so much more meaningful if you take the time to hunt down and strangle twits who post blather to inappropriate newsgroups."
~~ Henry Spencer

"An unbiased person is someone who has the same bias as we have."
~~ Mason City [Iowa] Globe-Gazette, in 1998

"They [corporations] cannot commit treason ... for they have no souls."
~~ Sir Edward Coke [1552-1634]

"Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important."
~~ T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]

"It's not ... how you play the game, but how you design the playing field."
~~ Trevor Marshall, in 1988

"I worry about my judgment when anything I believe in or do regularly begins to be accepted by the American public."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"Courage is resistance of fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"A camel is a horse designed by a committee and an elephant is a mouse built to military specifications."
~~ Caxton C. Foster

"The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one."
~~ William Shenstone [1714-63]

"No man is competent unless he can stalk alone and armed in the wilderness."
~~ Townsend Whelen [1877-1961]

"There are only three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder 'What happened?'."
~~ Zig Ziglar

"It is force, not opinion, that queens its way over the world, but it is opinion that looses the force."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62], in 1670

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"I have lived some thirty years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"A newspaper is not just for reporting the news, it's to get people mad enough to do something about it."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"At times like the present, when the evils of unsound finance threaten us, the speculator may anticipate a harvest gathered from the misfortune of others, the capitalist may protect himself by hoarding or may even find profit from the fluctuations of values, but the wage earner – the first to be injured by a depreciated currency – is practically defenseless."
~~ Grover Cleveland [1837-1908]

"It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan."
~~ Thomas A. Edison [1847-1931]

"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
~~ Alan Greenspan, in 1966

"If you can't stand solitude, perhaps others find you boring as well."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for September 2009

2009-09-29T15:10:00.005-06:00

EMPLOYMENT DEPT.

467,000 jobs cut in June; jobless rate at 9.5 percent
== internet news headline, July 2009

"In December [2008] Detroit's jobless rate was 21 percent."
== Richard Florida

"Between 1975 and 2007, the real wages of the average production worker ... decreased by 18 percent."
== Les Leopold

"The number of Americans receiving food stamps increased 22 percent over the previous summer."
== Time Magazine, September 2009

The Walgreen's Drugstore chain is cutting employees. They dropped a percentage of management at headquarters, and are dropping higher-level positions at each store. My local Walgreen's was already understaffed, and in July cut or combined three supervisor positions.

Salaries in the U.S. are up only two percent, the worst in 27 years
== Fox Radio News, July 2009

"Since 1950, the US manufacturing sector has shrunk from 32 percent of non-farm employment to just 10 percent."
== Richard Florida

The Bush fiscal year 2009 federal budget asks for almost 100 times more to regulate labor unions than to make emmployers comply with labor laws.
== per Economicv Policy Institute

"Productivity in coal mines has tripled, but the wages of coal miners has dropped 20%."
== Jeff Goodell

FINANCE & BANKING & TAXES DEPT.

"Foreclosures rise 15% in first half of 2009"
== internet news headline, July 2009

"[In 2008] imposing consumer fees became the main business of banks, totaling 53 percent of the industry's income."
== Jim Hightower

"The share of homes purchased with 100 percent financing went from 3 percent in 2003 to 33 percent in 2006."
== Dean Baker

"In 1970, the ratio of the top 100 corporate CEOs and the average worker's pay was 40 to one. By 2007, it was 1,723 to one."
== Les Leopold

"In 1970, the top one percent received 8 percent of the national income. By 2007, [the Oligarchy] was gobbling up 28 percent of the national income."
== Les Leopold

Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid NO federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005. About 68 percent of foreign corporations doing business in the U.S. paid no federal income taxes over the same period.
== per AP News and the General Accounting Office

"Between 1940 and 1960, the [U.S.] homeownership rate rose from 44 percent to 62 percent ... By 2004, a record 69.2 percent of American families owned their home."
== Richard Florida

MEDIA DEPT.

"In the first half of 2009, 123 TV news shows were cancelled, 106 newspapers folded, 110 bureaus closed, 556 magazines died, and 12,000 [U.S.] journalists lost their jobs."
== Mother Jones Magazine

"Americans buy more than $57 billion worth of lottery tickets a year, or $500 per household, [which is] more than is spent on movies, music and books combined."
== Mother Jones Magazine, March 2009

ECOLOGY & GLOBAL WARMING DEPT.

"A century ago, there were 15,000 kinds of apples in America; now there are 1500. Among the varieties that have disappeared are 96 percent of corn, 95 percent of cabbages, and 81 percent of tomatoes, Today, four giant suppliers (Monsanto, Syngenta, Limagrain & DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred) control more than half of the seed market."
== Novella Carpenter, in Mother Jones Magazine

"Climate change has shortened the New England timber [harvest] season from six months to four."
== Mother Jones Magazine, March 2009

The mining industry produces one-third of all toxic waste released to the U.S. environment.

GENERAL NEWS DEPT.

Have you noticed that a half gallon isn't, anymore? What used to be a half-gallon container of ice cream was shrunk some time ago to 1.75 quarts. Recently, ALL of the local supermarkets have switched to 1.5 quart containers of ice cream, without notice or fanfare – nor reduction in price. By 'all local', I mean the Smith's/Kroger's and Albertson's national chains, the Lowe's grocery chain out of Texas, the Breyer's & Dreyer's & Kemp's national brands, and even the local Creamland Dairy brand. Given that the change was industry-wide, how can this not be a conspiracy?

In Afghanistann in May 2009, there were 38,000 troops, with 21,000 more being sent there, while the same overpaid mercenaries used in Iraq numbered 71,000.

Roughly 40 percent of imported U.S. consumer goods come from China. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recall for Chinese manufacturers was 69 percent in 2007, and 53 percent in 2008.
== per 'The Progressive' Magazine and Reuters

In less than 24 hours after Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouted his rude "You lie!" outburst during President Obama's historic healthcare speech on September 9th, concerned Americans donated $400,000 to Democratic opponent Rob Miller, with more expected. The one-day campaign funding deluge amounted to more than the entire pharmaceutical industry gave to Rep. Wilson during the last election cycle.

On 5 September 2009, the Valencia County News-Bulletin local newspaper printed a very nice article on my solar generation hardware (and about me) with two photos , in which the reporter anointed me with the title 'microcosmic energy mogul'. Text and both photos posted on my website.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

September 2009 Quotations

2009-09-24T22:02:00.003-06:00

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Here's a new internet acronym: BOO! (Blame it on Obama!)".
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"Empire is the only way to honor avarice and morality, the only way to be good and wealthy."
~~ William Appleman Williams [1921-90]

"One of [Reagan's] great gifts to America was the public rebirth of bigotry."
~~ Jonathan Valin

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then applying the wrong remedies."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"One cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. One must choose."
~~ Jean Anouilh [1910-87], in the stageplay "Cecile" (1954)

"There are more fools in the world than there are people."
~~ Heinrich Heine [1797-1856]

"Half of knowing what you want is knowing what you have to give up to get it."
~~ Sidney Howard [1891-1939] {not Calvin Coolidge}

"The God worth worshipping is the one who pays us the compliment of self-regulation, and we might return it by minding our own business."
~~ Roger Rosenblatt (Time Magazine essay 12/2001)

"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"There can be no progress if people have no faith in tomorrow."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63]

"All the world over I'll back the masses against the classes."
~~ William Gladstone [1809-98]

"Our age ... needs people capable of real heroism – not the kind of heroism which ends up in glory – but the kind which ends up bringing out and making available the truth, what works, what is honest and real."
~~ Werner Erhard

"Getting down to the bottom of things, this is a pretty raw civilization of ours – pretty wasteful, pretty cruel ... And in a lot of respects we Americans are the rawest and crudest of all. Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distribution – all wrong, out of gear. We've stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we've got to start to make this world over."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931], in 1912

"We need to fix the climate, and we need to start yesterday."
~~ Kevin Drum

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; and inside a dog, it's too dark to read."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"New Orleans isn't a city, it's an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge."
~~ James Lee Burke

"It is time [that] men allowed their imaginations to infect their intellect."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985], in 1956

"Republicans are worried about voter fraud – [it] seems there is not enough of it."
~~ Kate Clinton

"All we want is to be completely human and in each other's company."
~~ Joseph Campbell [1904-87]

"Friendship is like peeing in your pants – everyone can see it, but only YOU can feel its true warmth."
~~ viral email, 2009

"To me, philosophy is everything. It is the way [that] one lives."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Here's a new and useful word: 'Re(publi)tard'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"They is a very vague term."
~~ Agatha Christie [1890-1976]

"Familiarity breeds contempt only among [movie] critics."
~~ Richard Corliss, in Time Magazine

"The gullibilty of the public [has become] an economic resource."
~~ Wendell Berry

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence"
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Modern conservatism has decayed from the positive, pragmatic force [that] its founders envisioned into a bitter resistance movement that's given up on fresh ideas."
~~ Randy James, in Time Magazine

"Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing."
~~ Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931], in 1915

"The economy is so bad that Baskin Robbins is down to 22 flavors."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”
~~ J. Robert Oppenheimer [1904-67]

"I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. ... Not this time. Not now."
~~ President Barack Obama, on 9 September 2009

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
~~ Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]

"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
~~ Martin Heidegger [1889-1976]

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

“Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everybody else?“
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

August 2009 Quotations

2009-08-15T10:09:00.004-06:00

"Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. Let us dare to read, think, speak and write".
~~ John Adams [1735-1826]

"The future ain't what it used to be."
~~ Yogi Berra

"Wine is bottled poetry."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"A good traveller has no fixed plans."
~~ Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu [IVth Century B.C.E.]

"We live in the world as it is and dream of the world that might one day be and consider ourselves fortunate to have reduced, even modestly, the distance between the two."
~~ Peter Beinart

"Old, in America, is not a good thing to be."
~~ Katha Pollitt

"Even if you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough people long enough to do irreversible damage."
~~ Joseph Schumpeter [1883-1950]

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"These days it is not 'the economy, stupid' but the stupid economy."
~~ motto of the Green Festival Project

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.”
~~ Rachel Carson ]1907-64]

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right."
~~ Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing."
~~ Tennessee Williams [1911-83]

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Liberty is not the means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
~~ Lord Acton [1834-1902]

"It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life."
~~ Declaration of Arbroath by Scottish leaders, 1320 A.D.

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize [that] they can bribe the people with their own money."
~~ Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59]

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65] in 1838

"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"We, the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts; not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Live Free or die; death is not the worst of evils."
~~ Gen. John Stark [1728-1822]

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
~~ Justice William O. Douglas [1898-1980]

"The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets."
~~ Lysander Spooner [1808-87]

"There is no such thing as an achieved liberty; like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out."
~~ Justice Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954] in 1953

"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical."
~~ Yogi Berra

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation."
~~ Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924]

"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will be certainly be lost."
~~ William Lloyd Garrison [1805-79]

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
~~ C.S. Lewis [1898-1963]

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
~~ James Madison [1751-1836] in 1822

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."
~~ Patrick Henry [1736-99]

"There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]

"Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance."
~~ Oprah Winfrey

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

WM Essay #91: "Meaning & Purpose"

2009-07-26T07:03:00.005-06:00

        Virtually nothing that most people do is from Free Choice. The Culture-Structure has pre-programmed you all since birth to be a mindless cog in the machinery of Consumerism. Your primary desires are Materialistic or Hedonistic, collapsed into a false merger with Survival.
        Like over-populated lemmings, the societies of Planet Earth charge toward the precipice, never stopping to Reason, to Choose, to seek the guidance of one's Self – much less guidance from Silence. If you do attempt any such contemplation, you will be pushed aside or trampled by the mindless mob behind you.

        The Universe is Existential; the Culture-Structure of Mankind is not. A plethora (love that word!) of False Meaning is crammed into every subservient individual, which is the supreme False Purpose of each and every local segment of the Culture-Structure. This False Purpose is to keep you running the proverbial treadmill, the Rat Race. And as Lily Tomlin has pointed out: "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

        The first requirement of becoming a Free Individual is setting aside ALL of the (False) Meaning that was forced upon you by the Culture-Structure, of the Culture-Structure and for the Culture-Structure. All of it, each and every, one at a time, now and forever.

        This is not to say that you should reject all such meaning, for that is merely knee-jerk resistance. Refusing to pay taxes, refusing to marry and-or propagate, refusing to participate in the marketplace or the election process – these are negative actions and such re-action merely gives the same power away as does blindly obeying the dictates of the Culture-Structure. You play the game by refusing to play the game: switching to 'not that' is not any different.

        What has to take place is giving up Meaning itself. All Meaning. The existential act of choosing 'No Meaning' is the eye of the needle thru which you – all Mankind – must go. Not easy, but Life is not easy, nor standing as an Individual against the (False) Meaning machine that is the Culture-Structure.
        Besides, how easy is your life now, going along with the Culture-Structure? You have no Self, no Choice, no Satisfaction in life, Life is empty of real Meaning while you agree to and settle for the False Meaning that the Culture-Structure is built on.

v                    v
        A simple methodology for setting aside all False Meaning is to live from the context of Empowerment. When you stand on Empowerment, you cannot act from False Meaning, the two realms are mutually exclusive – just as the self-generated context of Love displaces Hatred, and just as the self-generated context of Purpose displaces Hope.
        For some of you, this can be a memorable day, The Day when you threw off the shackles of False Meaning. For others, it will be an on-going struggle to discover another damn False Meaning and turn loose of it – by standing in Empowerment and maintaining each new opening, and then searching for another False Meaning, an on-going search.
        What becomes available after the commitment to existential Self-hood [No Meaning] is that you can then begin to construct Freely-Chosen Meaning and Purpose. You will then call the shots in your Life as an Individual using Reason, which to the extent that you invoke it, will displace the silly and dis-empowering anti-Reason [False] Meaning provided by the Culture-Structure.

v                    v
        The Universe provides no a priori inherent Meaning for Life. The quest for the Official Meaning of Life is a distraction, so that you and all Mankind have no access to Power.
        All this False Meaning that you inherited was made up. If some Official Meaning actually existed, then why has the Culture-Structure not located it? Folks have been pretending to look for the Official Meaning of Life since Mankind first walked upright, so where the hell is it??
        The good news and the bad news is that no such Official Meaning of Life exists. Bad news for the Oligarchy when this knowledge becomes widespread, because all the meaningless crap – the treadmill, the rat race – that drives ancient & modern societies becomes visibly meaning-LESS!
        The good news is that Meaning, like Wealth, can only be created by the Individual. Meaning exists only because you say so: If you parrot some inherited False Meaning, then nothing is created. But notice the pressure from the Culture-Structure to lend credence to 'benefits' of you committing to their False Meanings: if you had no inherent Power, then why would they brainwash you to do their bidding?
        ONLY an Individual can create Meaning, and it is as simple as speaking that Meaning into existence.
        The other good news is that you surrendered your natural right to create Meaning by parroting all those empty False Meanings of the Culture-Structure – money, fame, 'fun', status, security – none of which have or will produce a satisfying Life. But if you once surrendered it, all you have to do to regain your Power is to say "No more!".

        You all have no idea how to create Meaning. What is required to create Meaning is giving up all the inherited False Meaning and stand in existential Nothing, or 'No Meaning'. From there, the Individual Self can invent Created Meaning – Freely-Chosen Meaning and Purpose.
        One way to clarify this process is to choose freely to create Empowerment. Standing in Empowerment, the Meaning that you create will not be False.

        So even if what you create seems to appear the same as before, you will be in an entirely different ballgame. Take 'family', for example: the inherited False Meaning of 'family' has no Power, things don't work, grudges persist, the concept comes with a ton of baggage – mothers are such a way, fathers & sons & daughters are this way, relatives are like this or that. What the Culture-Structure provides as Family is a messy soap opera – surf across the cable channels and the news – or some pseudo-deal like "Father Knows Best" which is delivered in the context 'not real'.
        But the Freely-Chosen Meaning of Family is fresh and clean when invented from No-Meaning. What you create from there has no baggage, you can create Family as it should be: Family as Love, as Communication, as Warmth, as Laughter, as Contribution – down the generations past & present.

        The other good news is that once you invent yourself as a Free Individual, nobody can take it away from you. They can kill you for it, but they can never take it from you. In point of fact, the Culture-Structure is designed so that you all surrender Meaning & Power on-goingly: Stop giving it away, halt the surrender of the Self, and you will retain all the inherent Natural Power that you can possibly need. While you create and maintain Freely-Chosen Meaning and Purpose, nobody can take it away – no way, no how!
        Your Self-hood cannot be taken away. The only reason that you lost it was because the Culture-Structure cheated you by offering their False Meaning in its place. All you had to do in return was to surrender your Power . . .
        All that is necessary to recover your Power as an Individual is to Stand AS an Individual from this time forth. The Individual can then throw off the shackles of False Meaning by the mere existential Act of Will of saying so, and then inventing freely: creating bright and shiny new Meaning, which cannot be taken away.

v                    v
WHY BOTHER?
        During the Summer this essay was created, I was party to a one-on-one conversation on this subject (in the context of homework from a Landmark Education seminar). And when the other person asked "Why bother?", my ad hoc response went over quite well. In writing it down later to append to this essay, it evolved into a poem. (I don't try to be a poet, but I never argue with my muse.)

the world takes no notice
as I strap on my rusty armor
(that chafes at every joint)
and clamber up to sit upon
the skittish steed
that is my Purpose

the windmill takes no notice
as I lower my wobbly lance
and jab my spurs against the flanks
of my tired and wheezing mount
and point myself hell-bent toward the looming giant

the world may take no notice
or if it sees, not care
but for a moment or two
my Purpose is my Self

and for a moment or two
my Life is such
that I feel the wind upon my face

v                    v
        How you will know that you got this done, that you have chosen a Meaning that is sufficiently challenging, is that your new Freely-Chosen Meaning sings in your veins, and when you are In Action per your Stand In The Matter, you will experience the sharp thrill of the wind upon your face – and experience that you are empowered.

        How you will know that your new Freely-Chosen Meaning will provide Power is that only YOU can get this job done, and that the outcome is not certain, that if you do not take this on, to completion, then it will not happen.
        Save the whales? World peace? Other people are doing something about these matters, though much more needs to happen. But what about that book or invention that you've been thinking about for years, that you 'put on the back burner', what about that? Or what about doubling the reading scores at the school that your kids go to? Or what about organizing your neighborhood to replace the blight of poverty with the presence of Pride – those are big enough Meanings that you will have to generate Power, by empowering others.
        Said another way, your new Freely-Chosen Meaning isn't big enough unless it requires you to give it away to others.
        The bigger your commitment, and the more daunting it may seem at first, the more that will be required of you, the more empowerment your commitment will generate, and the less you need care about the rancid, not-working False Values of the Culture-Structure – standing in Empowerment, your choices will empower others, and the satisfaction in your accomplishment increases accordingly.

        This Working Minds Philosophy of Empowerment thing is what I have taken on, and it won't get done unless I generate a far greater reach, get a huge conversation started, put billboards along the freeways here and there, get written up in Time Magazine or be interviewed by Oprah – like that.
        The central Meaning and Purpose of the Working Minds Philosophy of Empowerment is the Fulfillment of Mankind's Potential; in order to do anything about that I must ongoingly get off my butt and fulfill MY potential, which automatically requires that I enroll legions of others in fulfilling THEIR potential. Tough job, but there is no better Life than living into a Future that requires your Self to push the proverbial envelope, to expand beyond your comfort zone, to risk possible failure, to Put Your Life On The Line for a Freely-Chosen Meaning and Purpose.

        Once you generate and maintain momentum in such empowering activities – in each and every area of your Life – then there can be no turning back.
        Your Life has Freely-Chosen Meaning!, and the Oligarchy has lost another mindless minion – you are free!

        Once you are empowered – once you empower your Self – nobody can take it away.

        Just step off the treadmill of the Culture-Structure and you will be free.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

News Factoids for June 2009

2009-07-01T06:20:00.004-06:00

"Only 21% of registered voters now identify themselves as Republicans"
~~ Washington Post / ABC News poll of April 2009

"Marijuana accounts for 47% of all U.S. drug arrests."
~~ Time Magazine

Japan’s economy contracted by a record 4 percent quarter-on-quarter in the first three months of this year, as domestic demand declined and an export deficit continued.
~~ Financial Times sub-headline, May /2009

The next American military quagmire will be in Turkey, most likely in the Kurdish region in the south, which abuts northern Iraq. Second choice: Africa.

Had my old Maytag washer repaired recently and the local appliance repair guy told me that his business has increased a lot lately, because people are getting household gadgets repaired rather than tossing them and replacing them with new units, which are often seen as being of lesser quality. {Hooray!}

TIP FOR OLD PEOPLE
A doctor at the V.A. hospital told me that vitamin D is now considered the best treatment for 'bone pain', which is the common vague soreness of feet and ankles in older people. Daily vitamins usually have 400 units or so of vitamin D, assuming that at least another 400 units will be gotten from actual food. The new theory is that after a certain age (50 or 60), the body needs 2000 units per day of vitamin D, which is readily available as capsules at your local drugstore. I was told that 'you cannot overdose on vitamin D'; for example, the theorists on this are treating patients who need to catch up with an injection of 50,000 units of vitamin D per week, for 6-8 weeks.

Americans spent 83% more time on social-networking websites in April 2009, as compared with the same time in the prior year.
~~ Time Magazine

Theaters are already showing trailers (previews) for the Robert Downey, Jr. version of "Sherlock Holmes" [due in December 2009], directed by Guy Ritchie. In researching that film for my Sherlock Holmes Film Festival Page, I discovered that there is a real listing on Internet Movie Database for an "Untitled Sherlock Holmes Project" designated 'in development' with Sacha Baron Cohen set to play Holmes and Will Ferrell set to play Watson – Hollywood, have you no shame?

Prohibition in the U.S. lasted 14 years. At the end (1933), arrests for drunk & disorderly were up 41% and the prison population was up 366%.
~~ Mother Jones Magazine, June 2009

"It is unsafe to swim or fish in nearly 40% of U.S. rivers and streams."
~~ Mother Jones Magazine, June 2009

The new motto around recycling is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink"

U.S. building permits are at the lowest since 1960.
~~ A.P. Radio News

Home prices fell 19% in the first quarter of 2009.
~~ Schiller Index

DVD sales for April 2009 were down 11% over the same period in the prior year.

Forty percent of 2007 births in U.S. were out of wedlock.

122 million movie tockets are sold each month in the U.S.A.
~~ on-screen ad June 2009

"I don't think [corn-based ethanol] has proven itself of any value except to Archer Daniels Midland."
~~ Michael Pollan

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

June 2009 Quotations

2009-06-24T08:08:00.001-06:00

"We must know what we are, before we can know and use what we inherently possess."
~~ C. Larson

"Every artist was first an amateur."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882]

"I like myself better when I'm writing regularly."
~~ Willie Nelson

“It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.”
~~ Errol Flynn [1909-59]

"Courage is grace under pressure."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Amateurs hope. Professionals work."
~~ Garson Kanin [1912-99]

"A firm grip on reality is not a critical component of happiness."
~~ David Hempy

"Count [the minutes] by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"Reach high, think big, work hard, and have fun!"
~~ motto of Disney Channel's "Imagination Movers" children's TV program

"The future is already here, it is just unevenly distyributed."
~~ William Gibson

"A kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt."
~~ old saying

"The trouble with the motion-picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise."
~~ Garson Kanin [1912-99]

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"It's no fun being a century ahead of the times."
~~ L. Frank Baum [1856-1919]

"There is a constant struggle between the spirit of free inquiry and the spirit of fundamentalist dogma."
~~ Adam Gopnick

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."
~~ Woody Allen

"If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself – ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity – before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly."
~~ Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job."
~~ Woody Allen

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

“Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”
~~ Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common."
~~ Satchel Paige [1906-82]

"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

Essay #90: "The Festival of Stupid"

2009-06-22T20:13:00.005-06:00

Stupid, as a commodity, is not in short supply.
Stupid is quite plentiful, much like the kudzu vine of the American South, as both are ever attempting to take over Civilization.

        George W. Bush is not as stupid as he appears. It isn’t so much that he IS stupid, but that he does stupid. The entire premise of the Bush 43 Administration was to wreck the economy, to really screw it up worse than Reagan-Bush did, so that the political takeover of America by the Robber Barons and the Fascists would be easier (for them).
        But Dubya screwed that up! The economic crisis was scheduled to happen after the Democrats got control of the Executive and Legislative branches, so that the Oligarchs could then blame the Democrats – those terrifying Liberals – for the mess.
        But Dubya screwed up the intentional screw-up, and the People woke up and Barack Obama won by a landslide in many precincts and states, and Dubya gets the blame by present and future historians for the Recession, Depression, Meltdown that is the current and future economic plight of America and the world.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        While a significant portion of the U.S. population were infected by the sleep-inducing propaganda of the Culture-Structure, the sheeple let the Party of Stupidity run the country using obvious strategies of stealth, plunder, Mafia-style ethics, talk-show alarmists, and an insane disregard for the consequences that always arise from such actions.
        (And the Tea-Bagger sheeple even mindlessly protested President Obama’s tax CUTS for the Middle Class!)
        The Corporatists and Fascists and Oligarchs and Conservatives and Religionists and bigots and Federalists have continued to work in concert, with the full intention of producing a mess just like the one that we are in. The anti-Reason gangsters always move in the same direction – to benefit from the exploitation and degradation of We The People.
        And the sheeple let them.
        And it never works. The mess gets dire and the People rise up and re-establish Progressive programs, and clean up the mess from the new Festival of Stupid.
        And the Master Class sits back and complains about taxes – taxes that had to be raised to pay down their recent fiscal crimes – and the Master Class bides their time. And when the economy and civil rights are restored, or at least repaired, then the Master Class invents some new imaginary monster to make afraid those infected with Stupid, and here we go again.

        Freedom is the result of Reason. Locke and Hume and Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson and the American Revolution set in motion a Progressive ideology that will eventually prevail.
        But it is tough work keeping Freedom alive. There are indeed those who oppose Freedom, who cannot tolerate rule by The People. They seek a return to feudalism, where in their view the Master Class (aristocracy) owns the peasants and is entitled to anything that it wants.
        So Stupid exists in two places: the Master Class thrives on doing harm, and the sheeple suffer the consequences of their obliviousness.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        To be truly free from something is to not need it. I cared that the First Amendment was torn to shreds by the Bush Administration, but those freedoms still were alive where I was anyway because I do not need a piece of paper behind glass in Washington, DC to give me those freedoms. I am free to exercise my rights at all times because living from those Unalienable Rights ensures their existence. I am free, the Constitution says so, and that is a matter that is worth risking one’s life for.
        Reason gives Progress. Action creates opportunity. Persistence delivers results.
        Meanwhile, Stupid just creates more Stupid: messes to clean up, lives ruined, a planet despoiled, mindless waste, perpetual violence, and pain for everyone involved.

        Reason is the antidote for Stupid. The Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand [1905-82], the Existentialist philosophies of Albert Camus [1913-60] and Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80], transformative education – all are based on Reason and lead to solutions that benefit Mankind as a whole.
        We are all in this together. (Except for the Stupid, who are not IN anything, except failure.)
        Reason has a person seek Progress; Stupidity can be defined as the lack of seeking or striving or thinking.
        Reason is an act of Free Will; Stupid is based on a want or a wish, often for some fantasy, such as An End To Fear.
        Reason seeks Progress; Stupid makes a mess. The act of cleaning something up is always a result of a cause that was sourced by Stupid.

Federal cleanup sites are the result of Stupid behavior: atomic radiation, mining poisons, industrial pollution, the Texas-sized (literally) mega-pile of trash in the Pacific Ocean.
Economic rescues (bailouts) are the result of Stupid behavior, and the bailouts themselves are Stupid behavior.
The conflation of gambling and finance is the result of Stupid behavior: commodities futures, money market funds, indexes on indexes, convoluted ‘instruments’ – none truly exist (have equity) and are therefore sold only to suckers (stupid people with money).
Economic failure or meltdown is the result of Stupid behavior: when hardworking regular folk find themselves homeless from tidal changes in The Market which they do not understand and had no hand in, and when their 401K or pension is now worthless after being touted as foolproof.
Corporatism, which is based on the Stupid value of Growth For Growth’s Sake, which like pond scum will eventually suck all the oxygen out of the system.
Ill health is the result of Stupid behavior: Reason-based healthcare prevents breakdown, as a boon to all, for a smoothly-running society and economy; single-payer healthcare makes prevention affordable. The economics of Stupid makes healthcare hard to get, with their proffered ‘solutions’ overpriced and with unwanted side-effects.
Crime is Stupid, and not in any way Progressive. Crime is quite costly: lost equity, lost time, and waste of resources – the chase, the meting out of justice, the incarceration, the restoration of plundered goods, the parole system. Crime is an industry in America, and that fact is the result of Stupid behavior.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The very fact that a cleanup is required means that a crime or assault on Liberty, or a crime of simple greed or survival has been committed.
        The evidence of that dis-empowering act is whatever needs to be cleaned up.

Poisoned eco-systems
Poisoned social systems, like healthcare and the military and police and justice systems, and the election system
New Orleans
The Rust Belt
Chernobyl
North Korea and Darfur and Somalia
Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and the rest of the $25 trillion Republican National Debt
America’s labor unions
America’s automobile industry
America’s housing industry
America’s healthcare industry

The internet is contaminated but not yet poisoned. Attempts were and will be made to mess it up, to remove the {small D) democratic elements, the We The People freedoms that exist in cyberspace, and are hard to come by in other venues.

Politics is revitalized by Barack Obama’s campaign and his landslide victory. We the People did some cleaning up, got the election system working again, and President Obama has eight years to implement his planned repairs and improvements, his Vision For America.
What the Obama Administration will leave behind is a better world, even for the sheeple contaminated with Stupid. That Progressive agenda (hated by the pro-feudalism talk-show gasbag pundits) includes better healthcare for Americans, better education, more jobs and more union activity (better jobs), Reason-based taxation, and a reduction in death by warfare on the planet.

War is stupid. Feudalism is stupid. Hunger and starvation are stupid. Pollution is stupid. A frenzied life is stupid.

But the pathogen of Stupid bides its time and looks for chinks in the armor of the Progressive Life Force. No matter that Obama won in 2008, the Bad Guys are still loose and making their Stupid-based plans.
Stupid causes pain and death and suffering.

Empower whoever you can, wherever and whenever you can.

Essay #89: “The Evil of Dick Cheney”

2009-06-01T13:22:00.004-06:00

The most evil person in America today is Dick Cheney. So that there is no mistake, I mean Richard Bruce Cheney, the former Vice President.

He is more evil than the idiot George Dubya Bush, cowardly slime-bucket Karl Rove, and p*ssant Alberto Gonzales combined.

(Limp Rushbaugh & Sean Vannity and their pack don’t count because they are the political equivalent of the old Chatty Cathy doll – push the button and hear pre-recorded clichés.)

* * * * * * * *
As preface to Dubya’s first speech as a former President, at a private event in Calgary (Alberta, Canada), he stated that he would not criticize President Obama, and that “President Obama deserves my silence.”

There is room for conjecture here.

President-elect Obama met privately several times with then-President Bush as part of the transition, and it looks like Obama offered Bush a ‘cease-fire’ treaty: that if Dubya kept his mouth shut and did not attack the Obama administration in the press, then the Obama administration would not attack Bush in the press.

You will notice that statements from the Obama administration might talk of mismanagement and failures of the ‘previous administration’, but Bush has not been blamed by name during these several months by any major figure of the White House or of the Cabinet. (Congress can say what they want; the accusations need to get stronger, such as with subpoenas to testify and with criminal indictments.)

* * * * * * * *
Whether any such offer was made to Cheney is more than conjecture. In any case, evil Dick Cheney has no intention of halting his assault on the U.S. Constitution, now that being out of office hampers his ability to give direct orders to frightened underlings. Dick Cheney has not gotten that the People voted his gang out of office, because the People have never mattered to Dick Cheney. That a former U.S. Vice President is pumping the airwaves to attack the new administration has never occurred before; most VPs have just faded away to write their memoirs.

But evil Dick Cheney has an agenda to fulfill, so what if the damage already done to the country will take years, even decades to correct, that damage is not enough for him. There are so many evil tenets of the Federalist Society and of P.N.A.C. {Project For The New American Century} that need to be implemented and re-implemented so that the fascist Oligarchy can reign over a feudal America. It is as if every progressive movement and law since the Magna Carta just has to be repealed, so that the Oligarchs can restore their tradition of taxing the poor, making wars for easy profit, and torturing anyone that gets in their way.

Dick Cheney is a traitor to the U.S. Constitution. There are many incidents where he did so, but the key one is the Valerie Plame affair. For those with lousy memories, the Scooter Libby defense team put into evidence a memo in Dick Cheney’s handwriting telling Libby that ‘The Pres’ approved the public disclosure of C.I.A. agent Plame’s covert identity. (Brilliant move: Libby’s prison sentence was commuted by Dubya.)

Even if the content of that memo was untrue, that still leaves Dick Cheney as the person who authorized the undoing of twenty years of C.I.A. intelligence work, an event which got several foreign agents killed and ruined America’s future chances of recruiting new ‘intell’ sources in foreign lands.

That single matter requires that Dick Cheney be called to testify under oath before Congress and put on trial in Federal court and sentenced to hard time in prison.

* * * * * * * *
But Dick Cheney's evil nature includes the fact that he has no shame. So he breaks precedent and tirelessly appears on the TV faux news shows and hate-talk radio programs upbraiding President Obama for making decisions that endanger America’s military security.

Oh, sure. The same guys who let the bin Laden family fly away on September 11, who let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, who dismantled the Osama bin Laden unit of the C.I.A. (until an outcry made them rebuild it), the same guys who started an unnecessary war in Iraq and lost it (i.e. did NOT win it, after more time than it took to defeat Imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany) – these guys, in the person of Cheney, are going to give President Obama advice!

* * * * * * * *
Cheney is guilty of treason and murder, he is guilty of arrogance and self-importance, and then there is a whole list of personal failings. But what keeps him on the airwaves is that none of the so-called journalists that grovel at his feet will call him on his hypocrisy.

The first major action by George Dubya Bush when he took office was to begin illegal wiretaps of American citizens – that was in January of 2001. The first major action by Dick Cheney after he took office was to call meetings with the oil companies to plan the invasion of Iraq – that was in February of 2001.

One of Dick Cheney’s assignments as the new Vice President was as the head of the Counter-Terrorism Task Force. Though he found time to meet and conspire with oil company executives, he held no meeting of the C.T.T.F., ignored hundreds of written warnings about potential attacks by bin Laden and others, and finally called the first meeting of America’s Counter-Terrorism Task Force on 12 September 2001!

Whatta guy!

He is actually getting no pushback for blaming President Obama for the failures of the Bush gang in the specious War on Terror. That the evil Dick Cheney has any traction at all on TV news and radio talk just goes to show whose side the fascist-Federalist propaganda machinery is on.

Congress unfortunately failed its Constitutional responsibility to impeach the traitors of the Bush administration. Congress needs to investigate the long list of obvious crimes against the U.S. Constitution, and then to follow all the evidence as revealed and indict and prosecute any and all who conspired to subvert our precious Constitution.

And Dick Cheney belongs at the top of the list of suspects.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Essay #88: "The Party of No"

2009-05-21T18:12:00.003-06:00

Recent writers of letters in the local newspaper avoid certain facts, because objective reality is their enemy.

1) Barack Obama won the election for President in November 2008. That an African-American won the popular vote is a major accomplishment (in this racist country), and the landslide in the electoral college is equally important. The People are now back in power.

2) The Japanese surrendered in 1945, but the permanent opposition to the People did not surrender in November. Those seeking to render the U.S. Constitution worthless continue to spew their propaganda, as regularly appears in local newspapers across the country, as well as on national hate-talk radio and on the faux TV news channels.

The Party of No – no facts, no rights, no healthcare, no accountability, no security, no jobs, no education, no solutions – is made up of the Republicans, fascists, racists, Federalists, Wall Street barons, members of P.N.A.C., all the unindicted traitors and criminals of the Bush Administration, the war profiteers, and just plain demagogues plotting together and separately to reverse the intent of the Constitution and to further destroy the Nation. Their evil job is not done.

3) The Republican National Debt today stands at 25 trillion dollars. If – and that is still a very big IF – Barack Obama and his team saves America and the world from suffering the decade-long Second Republican Depression that looms on our horizon, then he will have done a greater thing than F.D.R. did, because President Obama has only eight years to rescue the country. The matter is extremely urgent.

4) The economy of America and the world has not yet reached bottom. We have yet to go thru the turmoil that awaits from the Credit Card Crisis. If President Obama makes the right choices AND his plans get enacted in time, then the economy won't get too much worse. If what needs to be enacted is faulty or is blocked or watered down by the Party of No, then the Republican Great Depression of 1929 to 1938 will look like a picnic in the park in comparison.

5) A recent national poll by A.B.C. News found that only 21% of American voters will admit to being registered as Republicans. The Party of No has lost power because their lies are both the cause and the result of believing their own propaganda.

* * * * * * * *

Barack Obama and his team are the only chance that America has to restore Constitutional law, to survive the Republican economic meltdown, and with a little luck maybe even prevent your grandchildren from living as slaves to the Oligarchy.

May 2009 Quotations

2009-05-17T07:50:00.005-06:00

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
~~ Peter De Vries [1910-93]

"If you are unhappy before fame, you will probably be unhappy during fame."
~~ Haing S. Ngor [1940-96]

"Part of the loot went for gambling and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."
~~ actor George Raft [1895-1980]

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"A nation glued to the television screen ... can fill up every 'unforgiving minute' with enough trash and preoccupation to still forever the deeper voices of the soul."
~~ Adlai Stevenson [1900-65], in 1959

"My activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet."
~~ Alice Walker, in 1989

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-63]

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"News is what someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know. Everything else is advertising."
~~ Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe [1865-1922]

"We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!"
~~ Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832]

"Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote."
~~ William E. Simon

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"All good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."
~~ Norman Maclean [1902-90]

"[Sociologist C. Wright] Mills is half forgotten -- perhaps because much of what he said is now taken for granted."
~~ Norman Birnbaum

"We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."
~~ Cyril Connolly [1903-74]

"This is the worst economy since the Great Depression."
~~ Richard Stengel, Time Magazine

"The problem with 'going with the flow' is that the flow is always downhill."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"The world has been slow to realize that we are in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history."
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], quoted by James K. Galbraith in written testimony to Congress, February 2009

"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes."
~~ Washington Irving [1783-1859]

"A useless life is an early death."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1842]

"There is a purpose to our lives that each day tugs at our sleeve as an annoying distraction."
~~ Robert Brault

"When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]

"Is it weird in here, or is it just me?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the price of a song?"
~~ Lou Reed

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valley of silliness."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them."
~~ Frank A. Clark

"Higher education in America is designed to fashion plowshares into doorstops."
~~ G.E. Nordell

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for April 2009

2009-04-19T09:05:00.003-06:00

ECOLOGY / GLOBAL WARMING

The Pacific Ocean garbage patch is growing ... It's now bigger than the state of Texas.
== AP news headline April 2009

"In 2006, the greenhouse gases produced by U.S. farm animals exceeded the emissions of the iron, steel and cement industries combined."
== Lisa Morgan, The Atlantic September 2008

LOST JOBS IN AMERICA

595,000 jobs lost in January 2009, worst in 35 years
== AP News headline February 2009

Jobless rate jumps to 8.1 percent in February, highest since late 1983; employers cut 651,000 jobs...
== AP News headline March 2009

3.6 million jobs lost since the beginning of the recession

The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since late 1983, as a wide range of employers eliminated a net total of 663,000 jobs.
== AP news 3 April 2009
{double that number for the real figure of 17% unemployemnt}

Americans lost 742,000 jobs in March 2009.
== Air America Radio newsletter

OTHER ECONOMIC CONCERNS

"17% fewer dot-com and other standard web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter of 2008 than in the same period in 2007."
== Time Magazine

Chinese exports dropped 17.5% in January 2009 compared to a year earlier
== Time Magazine

Household debt in the U.S. soared from 60% of income in 1982 to 130% in 2007.
== Time Magazine

THE OLIGARCHY

"Over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent [of U.S. taxpayers] saw their share of the nation's income double, from 11.3& to 22.1%, but their tax burden shrank by about one third [from 33.1 percent to 22.8% percent]."
{ **emphasis added } == The Nation Magazine

"From 1973 to 1985, the [U.S.] financial sector never earned more than 16 prcent of domestic corporate profits ... [During the Bush Administration] it reached 41 percent."
== Simon Johnson, in The Atlantic

Essay #87: "The 2012 Hoax"

2009-04-12T22:36:00.005-06:00

        This whole thing about The World Is Gonna End! on 12 December or 21 December of 2012 is just another manipulation to instill more fear into the population.
        The purpose? A population that lives in fear – about anything, and especially when the fear is about everything – is to that extent paralyzed and diverted from addressing the very real dangers that continually threaten the existence of Mankind here on the Blue Planet.
        War, pestilence, famine, death, cancer, droughts and floods, hurricanes, Chinese toys, exploding auto tires, vampires, unions and-or management, white supremacists, Muslim extremists, Christian extremists, atheist extremists, illegal aliens here to take your job, environmentalists here to take your job, Democrats who want to take your guns, rednecks who carry guns to the grocery store, wolves who eat your stock, deer who eat your crops, homeless people who just want something to eat, bankers who want to foreclose your home, a ‘healthcare’ industry that makes people sick – the list goes on and on.

* * * * * * * * Remember the Y2K phenomenon? At least that non-event got a few retired COBOL programmers put back to work updating software badly designed so as not to handle the four-digit year and-or the rollover to first digit of 2. Other than that, what actually happened? A peak in sales of bottled water, camping supplies, and Meals Ready To Eat. Lots and lots of fear that ended in a gigantic fizzle.

        And the big frenzy about Jesus Is Coming, soon swept aside by celebu-tart news stories. (My favorite from back then was the “Jesus is coming – and boy is He p*ssed!” bumper stickers.)
        At one company where I worked in the 1990s, some of the Christians spent their weekends up in the mountains training for the End Times; what was most amazing to me was that one of my Jewish co-workers was training with them.
        Nothing really happened, Jesus is still missing, it was all simply another fear-based ruckus in the media about nothing, as will be the increasing hooferaw about the 2012 farce.

Each of these media-driven programs of fear-mongering will often run for years. The Y2K thing was lengthened by the silly furor over when exactly the Millennium changed. The big Millennium parties were held in Las Vegas and Tokyo and elsewhere on 31 December 1999 (the False Millennium) and then the B Team held further parties on 31 December 2000 – because they could. (The facts are simple: the artificial First Millennium began 1 January in Year One, therefore the Second Millennium began on 1 January of the year 2001. Duh!)

* *          * *          * *          * *        And let us not forget the decades-long Baby On Board fad. This spread to the U.S from Germany about the time that Reagan was running for President, and still flourishes in the U.K. It began during the same time period that the unthinking religionist sheeple masses were first organizing their political shenanigans, and the very unconscious meaning behind the whole deal was connected to the ‘Jesus Is Returning At The Millennium’ myth.
        Using no logic whatsoever, if Jesus returns in 2000 or 2001, then he’d have to be twenty or so, so he’d have to be born anywhere from 1978 to maybe 1980, or if by 1982 then he’d be 18 years old, that could work. So any child of a Christian family could be very, very special, there’s no way to know, so for a couple years, let’s not kill babies and let’s all drive real carefully, because anyone could be the proud parent of a kid who survives being a teenager in America and is revealed by hosts of angels to be the Son of the Christian God-head. (Film at eleven!)
        Logic? What if Jesus comes back as a girl? Or even better, someone born into the LGBT community? And the arrogance of us Americans: we are 6% of the overpopulated planet, any such godling is three times more likely to be Chinese.
        Well, those yellow diamond-shaped signs that were stuck inside millions of car windows got old after a while, but the kitsch-dealers kept it going. ‘Pet on board’ and other variations, then ‘Driver carries no cash’ (as if robbers and car-jackers might obey the sign), which eventually evolved into ‘Baby carries no cash’, which was kind of the end of the silliness here in America.
        We protected all those babies and then none of them grew up to be Jesus. Bummer!

* *          * *          * *          * *        This whole Mayan calendar 2012 myth is just more of the same, a waste of time designed to distract and divert the populace from Reality.
        Forests will be cut down to report opinions for and against this Mayan myth from dozens of uninformed opinion-mongers who will promote their worthless books on the boob-tube and will draw millions of dollars out of the pockets of the ever-eager fools and idiots that live right in your neighborhood.
        Nothing much can be done to prevent the meaningless frenzy, as the idiots are too many among us. It will all play out as the previous such phenomena did, including the people with nothing better to do who will buy tickets and take time off work and get happily drunk at End of The World parties around the globe – “Fox News On The Scene, Live!” – and when they wake up on December 15th they will still feel hangover-ish, and in the next week or so will receive the charges for their excesses on their credit card billing statements.

If you want to have a little fun with these dolts, then any time anyone brings up the subject of 2012 as The End of The World, offer them ten dollars for their automobile or $100 for their house, based on a written & notarized contract that becomes due on, oh, January First of 2013. If they won’t sign such a contract, then they are fools for promoting a mythical event that they don’t really believe in. And if anyone does sign such a contract with you, then they are truly major idiots who deserve to be thinned from the herd, and they truly deserve their comeuppance in 2013 when you show up with the paperwork to collect your new house or car.

April 2009 Quotations

2009-04-07T09:34:00.005-06:00

{{ NOTE: This is post #150 on this blog }}

"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film."
~~ Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]

"Gluttony is not a secret vice."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]

"Why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?"
~~ Morton Smith, professor at Columbia University

"I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay."
~~ Pres. Barack Obama, 23 February 2009

"Real hell is there in the office."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

"Nothing in this life happens without a before and after."
~~ Doris R. Meredith

“We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.”
~~ author Philip Pullman

"This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid."
~~ George V. Higgins

"People try to alter my grumpy, curmudgeonly ways by telling me that 'You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar'. But why would I want to attract flies at all?"
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, nbut not against art."
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1919-2008]

"I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short."
~~ actress Shelley Winters [1920-2006]

"It's okay to be fat. So you're fat. Just be fat and shut up about it."
~~ Roseanne Barr

"We rarely repent of having eaten too little."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness is the reward of character."
~~ George Santayana [1853-1962]

"Life, of course, is without meaning, and if you find something that gives it meaning, you're very fortunate."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]

"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]

"Barack Obama was elected President because the governing philosophy of the last 30 years, arrant Reaganism, proved itself bankrupt."
~~ Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist

"Stay alert: The Republicans and the fascists lost the election in 2008, but they did not surrender."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The world is illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and [real] in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of comprehending. Our business is to wake up."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

"Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect."
~~ Thomas S. Monson

"You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself. The height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. And this law is: the expansion of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others."
~~ Leonardo Da Vinci [1452-1519]

"The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62] (in the "Pensées")

"Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]

"For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world."
~~ writer Dawn Powell [1896-1965]

"The logic of business is coersion, monopoly and the destruction of the weak, not 'choice' or 'service' or universal affluence."
~~ Thomas C. Frank

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Where there is no vision, the people will perish." ~~ Proverbs 29:18

"In Hollywood, they'll forgive you if you're two-faced, but not if you're two-chinned."
~~ actress Colleen Dewhurst [1924-91]

"Always forgive your enemies. Just don't forget their names."
~~ David O. Selznick [1902-65]

"A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car."
~~ Kenneth Tynan

"When a child abruptly quadruples her family's income, some changes may be expected."
~~ Shirley Temple

"When I was young, I was terribly concerned with what people thought of me. But now I'm more concerned with what I think of them."
~~ Bette Davis [1908-89]

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
~~ Lucille Ball [1911-89]

"A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is someone who talks to you about yourself."
~~ actress Lisa Kirk [1925-90]

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"Beautiful young people are random acts of nature, but beautiful old people are deliberate works of art."
~~ actress Butterfly McQueen [1911-95]

"To survive [in Hollywood] you need the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony."
~~ actress Billie Burke [1884-1970]

"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."
~~ Colette [1873-1954]

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. ... The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
~~ Ken Kesey [1935-2001] (in 1994)

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Essay #86: “Reason-Based Taxation (Redux)”

2009-03-18T15:43:00.004-06:00

        What was brilliant about the creation of the United States of America, beginning from the Declaration of Independence in 1776, was the boldly inventive statement that the individual always has the right to act in his/her best interest.
        This is also the root of Objectivism.
        But Man's inherent right to the good services of his/her government, along with other basic and unalienable rights, is prevented by the intentions of the extant Political System, in each & every country across the globe, in each & every hamlet, across each & every national border.

        Present government institutions seldom get the job done, whatever their stated purpose: the most grievous misfeasance here in America has been in the schools and in the Legal Industry. An entire generation are now adults who on average cannot read or write effectively and cannot think their way out of a paper bag. The American Legal Industry's top leaders in December 2000 and again in December 2004 handed over the U.S. Presidency to a usurper who sold his term of office to the oil & timber monopolies, and to who knows what other special interests.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        One percent of the population now owns 60 percent of everything in America. Twenty years ago, they owned only 35 percent of everything in the country: in the years since Dr. Ravi Batra established that base-line, the One Percent – the Oligarchy that rules this country, also known as 'The People Who Count' – accrued 25% more of the totality of the assets in this country.
        But they do not have enough: they want it all.
        This One Percent, the Oligarchy, has spent millions of dollars to prevent any levy that might approach having them pay their fair share, the result being the Bush Tax Giveaway that was fast-tracked thru the U.S. Congress, and the Republican National Debt that today stands at twenty trillion dollars.

        What is the Oligarchy's fair share? The calculation is quite simple and direct:
        The U.S. Defense Department spends certain monies for doing their job. which includes protecting the 60% of all the land and property and assets owned by the Oligarchy, so therefore the Oligarchy should pay 60% of the Defense Department budget every year.
        The Oligarchy would insist that they are good patriots, so they should be willing to pay a 60% share of the Interior Department budget every year.
        The Oligarchy owns 60% of all business concerns, big and small, so they should pay 60% of the Commerce and Transportation and Energy and Agriculture Department budgets every year.
        The Department of State probably goes overboard in fulfilling the wishes of the Oligarchy, but I say that the Oligarchy need only pay a 60% share of the State Department budget every year as well.

        The Oligarchy, the One Percent, should be paying 60% of the entire federal budget every year. The same calculation applies to every U.S. federal department and bureau and section.
        This principle applies also to each and every country, to each & every state or province or canton or arrondissement, to each & every local government entity, down to each & every school and water district.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The Oligarchy that rules this and other countries owns sixty percent of everything, so they should pay 60% of the taxes required to supply the benefits that they derive from government in all its overlapping jurisdictions. Any other plan or assessment will concede to them the means to achieve their ultimate intention, which is to own one-hundred percent of everything – a return to feudalism. After the Oligarchy has achieved that intention, they have only your 'soul' – your Self – to take away from you and yours.
        The Oligarchy has already taken away your vote, "without firing a shot", in the ChadGate fiasco of 2000: the U.S. Supreme Court anointed George Dubya as President of the U.S. of A. in complete disregard for due process or for the will of the people, based on the wrong-headed certainty that it was right to do so and in the clear knowledge that no one could stop them.
        They ignored the U.S. Constitution in a 'dog and pony show' that was broadcast on national television and radio. Most Americans made no effort to watch or listen to this show, settling instead for the 'sound bite' camouflage served up by – you guessed it – the media conglomerates owned by the Oligarchy.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Previous iterations of class are disappearing, and are being replaced by a structure of Economic Class. The Oligarchy has replaced the Aristocracy, while assuming the same attitude of Divine Right that triggered the French Revolution of 1789.
        The lower economic classes, the 'proletariat', are defined as those who have no capital, nor means of production, and thus are required to sell their labor in order to survive. The Upper Middle economic class deals with the lower classes only while the latter are employed as servants.
        The entire economy works – or does not work – on the backs of the middle and lower classes, whose primary role in the latter XXth Century evolved into that of the Consumer Class: Notice that virtually every middle class American household is in constant debt (even disregarding mortgage payments), which means that they are encouraged – maybe 'required' is a better term – to spend more than they earn, so that the Oligarchy can reap their Divine Right profits on goods that the Consumer Class does not need and cannot in truth afford. The Consumer Class has an envious lifestyle, but in actuality owns less and less: because the Oligarchy owns more and more.

        This is not exactly news. The system of Economic Class ensures the giving away of power to the Oligarchy, in the form of debt, under the constant and compelling threat of job loss. If the middle class worker does not purchase 'the latest', then the economy will collapse and the Consumer will be out of work and thrown into survival among the lower economic classes. The Consumer Class has been taught to spend in order to earn.
        This is in effect worse than the 'indentured servitude' that was common around the time of the U.S. Revolutionary War. A British or other freeman could get passage to America or an apprenticeship in a trade in exchange for an agreed-upon term, often three to five years. The difference between indenture and today's economy is that the Consumer Class owes the Oligarchy and there is no expiration date on the deal: The Consumer Class is required to stay in debt by the pressures of the consumer economy, of which the primary beneficiary is the Oligarchy. (Think not? Did your real net worth – exclusive of housing – increase by anywhere near 50% since 1985?)

        The Oligarchy has done such a good job of fulfilling their devious intention that labor union membership in the U.S. has been down to 15% of the work-force for a long time. President George Dubya honored his idol, Ronnie Reagan, by ordering the Northwest Airlines mechanics union not to strike, just as Ronnie busted the air traffic controller walkout in August of 1981. And the media soon began reporting that George Dubya would prevent a strike at Delta Airlines.
        The later years of Bush's ignoble reign saw the entire economy collapse, in the U.S.A. and around the world. (American consumers no longer have jobs or spare money to spend or save, and U.S. consumer spending accounts for 25% of the world economy.) Dubya's agenda included looting the U.S. Treasury, and he did such a thorough job of screwing up America's future that (in typical Dubya incompetence) he screwed up the screw-up. The subprime lending debacle caused the banking crisis that caused the disappearance of half the net value of the stock market indexes, in a matter of months after the election. And the almost-funny part is that Dubya was supposed to leave the mess for his successor, but he screwed up so badly that the collapse happened before the November 2008 election, and Barack Obama swept into the White House charged with cleaning up Dubya's mess.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Until the structure of the Economic Classes is redesigned so that the middle class, the now 'Consumer Class', is able to acquire wealth as a result of their labors, then matters can only get worse. The only remedy is to increase the taxation levied on the Oligarchy so that they pay their share for the government services that they receive, all down the line.
        The One-Percent, the Oligarchy has already acquired more than half of this country's total assets; the Wealthy Class (the top 20% of taxpayers) owns 85% of this country's total assets. The Wealthy Class have more than enough money to bribe Congress and local officials to do their bidding, but We The People showed the world in November 2008 that true Power lies with us. The Wealthy Class will fight 'tooth and nail' against Change, so Americans must remain steadfast and vigilant and never back down.

        Like it or not, America and the world are now engaged in Economic Class War.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved