MERRY CHRISTMAS WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Wishing the readers of this blog a very Merry Christmas, free of political correctness or flacid intent.

Yes I know that our government has limitations on staffers using the term "Merry Christmas" instructing the PC Happy Holiday-ism so as not to offend anyone else, even though we put "In God We Trust" on the coins and printed currency which surely offends some cultures out there; however, since I do not work for the government, let me wish you a MERRY CHRISTMAS.

MisterWriter




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POOR, DUMB AND DOWNTRODDEN; WHAT WOULD THOMAS JEFFERSON SAY? I’LL TELL YOU!

Just a glance at the headlines of the day makes you wonder why we allow the people in charge (congress) to be in charge when they are apparently lacking in skills required. Click the pictures to read the stories behind them.

It is a sad reflection on our country when you throw in the insanity of the Republican primaries where potential presidential candidates show how little they really know, how much less we really know and how the system is dysfunctional.

“When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.” - Thomas Jefferson.  A shame that our politicians make far more money than the average “poor” American, and for what end? What have they achieved? Iraq: 9 years, nearly 4,500 soldiers died and untold billions of dollars (I believe the figure is around $800 billion). You decide if it was worth it! Of course we still have Afghanistan and Iran looks promising for the future.

Jefferson was no fool to corrupt politics and the dangers that lay ahead for this country. “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country,” he also said. And: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Reading the headlines it appears we have fallen into the very clutches Jefferson warned about. Big corporations run this country explaining why the pharmaceutical industry can use people as guinea pigs for drugs that later get pulled. Sure they are entitled to profits but when those profits are in the billions of dollars and the American people are not improving from their ailments, something is wrong. It explains why our air and water and soil is getting more toxic by the day and why the industry likes to offer platitudes about “naturally occurring levels” of toxins to offset their damage. Do we hear about the Gulf oil spill? Nope old news.

We hear about testing in schools and yet, according to the headline above, our schools are failing and how No Child Left Behind left every child behind. If you know me you know that I have been harping on this subject for about a decade. The testing is stupid because that is all they do. It was designed to be one of many measures but because lazy bureaucrats and politicians (politats) like quick fix numbers it became the ONLY measure.

Soon we may find ourselves tranquilized as a nation. Forget Orwell’s “1984” because reality proved that novel tame at the best. I keep thinking of Charlton Heston in the movie “Soylent Green” yelling out the discovered truth about the future food of humanity; “Soylent Green is people…”

The presidential debates appear to be about incompetencies and lies, something that smiling make-up faced politats like to pretend does not exists until some zealous media person digs up old tapes and pictures, hookers and arrest records, lawsuits and more. It seems like the bottom of the barrel has been scraped and what we have on the spatula is a mound of rancid fatty oil that offers no value, no sustenance and can be itself labeled toxic. That is not how a presidential campaign should be run. It is not a Kardashian’s night out. It is not a cousin of Lindsay Lohan. But it sure is close.

Jefferson was no fool. Neither was he perfect. “Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”  We rely on talk-everything. Talking political heads. Talk-therapy. “Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have. The course of history shows us that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”  Sound familiar?

“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” Another Jefferson quote.

And for the current Republican candidates, another Jeffersonian tidbit: “I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged.”

And as for our current $15.12 Trillion in National Debt, Jefferson said: “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.” By the way each taxpayer owes $134,176.

Offhand I would imagine the founding fathers if this country would be pissed off right about now!  Click the below image for an eye-opener. It might explain why we are poor!

-MisterWriter

SOPA: Washington Vs. The Web

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." Thomas Jefferson. There is a strong erosion of the foundation­s of Constituti­onal rights going on, but as usual, the country sits complacent to the changes taking place one drop at a time!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

MAYANS AND THE END OF THE WORLD IN 2012 – DO YOU HAVE YOUR TICKETS YET FOR THE BIG EVENT?

Here we are a mere stone’s throw from 2012 and I’ll bet none of you are ready for the end of the world. We have Mayan’s with their faulty calendar, and we have asteroids, and we have a Presidential election –maybe the next president launches a nuclear attack, and we have terrorist threats, Nostradamus’ cryptic predictions, Biblical end times, economic collapse as the dollar loses its place as the currency standard, and much, much more.

I can’t lie in bed and watch TV anymore without some show focusing on the end of it all, and that is not including the dearth of reality shows that plague us like a case of the shingles. Is it the end? Does it really matter? We all die sooner or later! Is it fiction? How do we know?  At least Harold Camping now shuts his mouth having failed in 3 of his end of world predictions.  And like that old cartoon of the seer wearing a sandwich board with the words “The End is Nigh” on it, people like to point to the Book of Revelations as proof that we are in the end times.

And maybe we are, but hardly from any of the above aside from terrorism or economic collapse.  If you want an explanation then I direct you HERE to NASA which explains it all somewhat rationally.

So why the fascination with the end times? It could well be that we are fed-up with the societal decay that we long for something cleaner, safer, more optimistic. It could be that we are starting to recognize the self-indulgent generation that used credit like cocaine only to wind up struggling to make the bare minimum standards of a halfway decent life. Things have changed for the 99.5% of the country; the hard workers who get little beyond sustenance.  Certainly the Occupy groups are correct in their assessment of the situation even if they have no plan of attack beyond squatting and littering. Those future movies about the big, bad corporations ruling the world are not far off. Especially in this capitalistic society where the right to make a buck supersedes everything else.

I was watching the total eclipse the other night and today the near full moon in the morning sky, and I thought how easily it could be gone. We talk about asteroids hitting the Earth but never do we talk about it hitting the moon. How would the loss of the moon affect our planet? We rely on the gravitational pull for our tides, and even the effect it has upon us. But that was not the main thought; the main thought was how much we assume it will all be there; the moon, our country (still young on the scale of countries), our lifestyle, our families. In fact we wrap ourselves in a blanket of blind faith because we do not want to face the negative possibilities, including those of the country as a whole.

It made me realize that even now, in our vast civilization and history, we forget that we are our own worst enemy, a species split with the ability to be great, creative, inspiring and helpful, while also able to be ruthless, merciless, corrupt and beyond salvation.  The Mayan mystique with their long cycle calendar tells you nothing of their primitive aspects; their savagery which included child sacrifices toward the end time of their civilization.  Likewise Romans believed their empire would prevail; the gods demanded it, after all. They did not clue in to the same belief with the Egyptians, as well as other great empires that, at one time, thrived before being relegated to the history books.

2012 – it has a nice sound to it until I remember that it means I have aged another year and that the years ahead are fewer than those behind me. One thing that I do believe is that we have lost the ability to be more than just some statistical number used in an illusionary economics statistic. We have become so enamored with the illusion of substance that we have allowed it to be taken from us. Shopping malls, Black Friday sales, holiday spending and debts, we forget that all the crap we import comes cheaply and at a price; that being loss of local jobs to lead contamination. We forget that we have allowed arsenic in apple juice, and potentially dangerous industrial chemicals in our drinking water – you know you can no longer drink from streams without boiling the water; that is a development in this lifetime.

Schools talk about dumping lessons in handwriting, while math facts do not need to be memorized. And yet we still cannot advertise at schools in order to raise funds to offset state government’s rape of the system even as we dumb down the learning while claiming it has been toughened with those idiotic testing standards. And the kids that go on to college and get their $15,000 - $140,000 student loans wind up working at K-mart for minimum wage, certainly no longer experiencing that former glory of working hard for advancement. Twenty-somethings are moving back with their parents while older workers are getting laid off and well on their way to ever lower social security benefits.  And so on.

So we do not need the Mayan calendar to tell us the end is nigh; we just keep doing what we have been doing and we’ll take care of ourselves far quicker.

MisterWriter

THE LUNAR ECLIPSE IN ONE MINUTE

Lunar Eclipse in 1 Minute

MisterWriter

KNOW THY ROCKS IN SPACE – CHECK OUT WHAT THIS WAY COMES

Just a short post today to let you know that if you ever wondered how many Near Earth Asteroids are catalogued along with their paths and proximity to meeting the Earth in an e-Annihilation.com scenario, then click HERE to see the list below (only a few of the rocks) in it’s entirety and be humbled by all the things in space you do not see (and usually do not know about.) – MisterWriter

A SURGE OF TOILET PHONE CALLS

Recently I have noticed a rash of people holding phone conversations while using a public toilet. I do not know if these people are just too lazy to wait or just ignorant of the fact that a cell phone amplifies all their bodily noises, as well as the sound of flushing toilets and hand dryers; yet business people seem to enjoy having long conversations while otherwise occupied including, but not limited to talking during body gaseous discharges of their own making.

I have been tempted to yell out “Would you mind shutting up as I’m trying to take a ****,” just to add to the ambience for the recipient of the phone call, but unfortunately I cannot bring myself to do so. It’s a bathroom, let alone a public bathroom, a questionable place at the best of times. I would never think of calling my wife up… “Hi Honey – yeah, I’m on the pot at Target. How you doing?” 

And yet a 2010 Harris Interactive poll showed that 40% of Americans admitted to using the phone while in the bathroom with a 19% loss rate as the phone is dropped into the toilet. You can read that HERE.

As if that was not bad enough, another study found 1 out of 6 cell phones was contaminated with fecal matter.  Read that HERE.  The cause – people not washing their hands after using the bathroom. Well how could they – they have their hands full!

In case you are feeling glad that you are not one of the above included individuals, do not relax yet.  The same article points out.,.. “Stop and think about every place scientists have ever turned up fecal bacteria — grocery store carts , swimming pools , fast-food restaurant soda fountains and kids' play areas , ATM keypads , your purse , your washing machine , prewashed salad greens , food court trays , and pretty much everything in a hotel room — and it makes it hard to lay your hands on anything again.”

Now go have a great day!

MisterWriter