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How much would you pay yourself …

if you were in charge of your own salary?

HYMM

If the truth were told I suppose most of the good,
hard-working, honest, God fearing people of this
nation would be embarrassed to pay themselves
more than $100,000 per year.

They would dedicate their life and limb to doing
the best job possible for that kind of money. They
would pay their taxes, make their mortgage
payments, pay their bills on time, send their kids
to college and in general be good neighbors and
good citizens.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough 100 K jobs left
to support a village anymore. In fact, there aren’t
enough 40 K jobs, or 20 K jobs, or minimum wage
jobs either. You can still find plenty of work to do
for free.

The top dogs make an average of 400 times the
average base pay per hour. That means if you
make $10 an hour they make $4000. Heck, that’s
still less than $1 million a year. That’s mere pocket
change to the boys with the big appetites on the Street.

I’m not the first to suggest that maybe, just maybe
something is rotten in America. Somewhere over the
past century Denmark started smelling like tulips
and we started smelling like, well, industrial waste.
(Hello New Jersey)

The average serf hasn’t gone far since he crossed
the pond.

To a 20-year-old looking forward 20 years seems

like looking into eternity.

To a 60-year-old looking back 20 years seems

like looking back a few weeks, months at most.

To a 20-year-old the time till your 21st birthday

is forever. Time passes so slowly you can count

the seconds.

By the time you reach 60 time is moving so fast

the days are a blur. You wonder what became

of  last week or last month.

At 20 we have ants in our pants and can’t stay

still for more than a minute. At 60 we sit down

to read a good book after breakfast and the next

time we look up it’s lunchtime.

If we could only have that longtime perspective

during our youth and realize that 20 years down

the road is far shorter than it appears. Long time

is just a trick of time’s perspective.

Looking backward through time’s perspective is

similar to looking at things in your car’s rear view

mirror… Things appear closer than they really are.

Looking forward in time we get tunnel vision and

things seem much further away than they really are.

Somewhere in time we hope our perspective

balances out. Eventually our internal clock slows

down enough that things behind us in life are no

longer stretched out of proportion; and the future

isn’t compressed to the point where you think you

can just jump ahead in line in no time.

You mellow out.

You get to relax for a while.

Hopefully/Maybe.

Interesting concept.  Taken at face value I guess it could mean laundering the dirt from our brains.

But brains don’t have dirt.  I know this from watching Grey’s anatomy.  So it must mean something else.

How about this? Brainwashing means replacing either what was already in your brain with something else or placing something in a space in your brain formally unoccupied.

The result of washing anything is supposed to be a positive experience.  In actuality brainwashing never is.  I can say that because I know brainwashing either modifies ideas gained by your own experience, or brainwashing puts ideas of others in your head which you now claim as your own.

In either case you are now no longer your own man.  Pieces of you, or more importantly pieces of your brain, are now in the care and custody of other’s thoughts.

All people are good people at birth and most people manage to stay that way through life.  Most people just want to live and let live.

But some of us are really sick, and who can say why.  When good people fall victim to brainwashing from extremists and sickos and don’t have the advantage of contrary points of view bad things happen.

Fighting terrorism with an army is ridiculous.  Armies never get inside anyone’s head; they only destroy their bodies. Fighting terrorism is a one-on-one business.  You must win over people by example.  You can only show them a better way; you can’t force them to follow you.  We must lead by example, not try to force compliance.  One must show respect, not contempt, for people of different faiths and their beliefs.

Everybody has one.  Nobody’s is the same.

Some say let the sun shine in.  Others don’t

want anything more than a single ray to get

through their filter.

So what happened?  Who won?  I guess you

could say two opposites developed. Google,

on one side, said give me all your mail, spam

and all.  I’ve got storage for everything.

AOL, on the other hand, said they needed

permission from their client’s to forward anything

at all to their inboxes.  “Unless you, the sender,

are white-listed by our client, your mail will be

forwarded to the trash can”.

Every other mail service like Yahoo, MSN, AT&T,

etc. all have different tolerance levels.  This

spawned a whole bunch of bad grammar. All of a

sudden money became mo*ney, and free became

fr*e or fr.ee.  I am an agreeable guy but I don’t

like my lexicon mangled.

Here is my open letter to my provider:

Dear filter screen thwarter,

I like reading the Queen’s English.  I like to

connect with what I am reading and I don’t

connect with fr.ee, or fr*e or some other spam

filter frustrator abomination of the English

language.

If what you are trying to sell me you need to

sneak past my filter, I want your message to be

screened. If you can state your pitch clearly and

I like don’t like your pitch, I want you to be

spammed, damned, and banned forever more!

If, on the other hand, I like your message, I want

to be connected immediately to your server, so my

order can be processed without delay. 

And I expect you to know the difference.

Any questions?

President Obama and Prime Minister Brown touched upon the need to create a world regulating agency which would oversee all financial institutions — banking — everything, tracking all money moving anywhere.

So the bankers really blew it for themselves this time. No more international safe havens. No more protection from prying eyes.

What if all of a sudden, follow the money actually lead somewhere?

What if we could see the red stain of cash making a trail all the way from our pile in the desert back through Halliburton to Dick Cheney’s pocket? But that will never happen. Who would be brave enough to dip his toe in that river of molten lava. For all we know the last guy to disagree with Dick got his face shot off.

But maybe big oil, and big money, and the big guns got too big for their britches. (I hope — I don’t want this to pi** off anyone still important) Just maybe world government is the only way to effectively regulate big world-wide businesses.

Let’s see; from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. I make $18(average country wage) and the guy responsible for losing trillions received just shy of a half a million for that same hour. Assuming we both have weekends off, of course.

Yeah, right, I want protect this guy’s right to put all that money into his pocket at the expense of my kids education, health care, clean air and the environment. Or do I?