Archive for the 'Human Interest' Category

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.

Medical research is getting a huge $5 billion grant which will create

good paying jobs and will result in a huge health reward for the country

and the world. The fact that this grant is only 1% of our military budget

should give us pause, but it is better than a sharp stick in the eye.

Hopefully a good portion of these funds will find their way into the

emerging science of epigenetics. Epigenetic therapy may become the

best words in medicine since vaccine.

First, here’s what the dictionary has to say about epigenetic therapy.

In biology, the term epigenetic refers to changes in phenotype

(appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than

changes in the underlying DNA sequence.

What that means is:

Over the last century scientists have discovered that we share most

of our genes with all other life forms on this planet. We actually have

genes in common with worms, snails and other unsavory creatures.

In fact, our closest relative, the chimp, has almost 99% of our genes.

The remaining 1.1% account for all of the differences between humans

and apes… OR SO WE THOUGHT.

Recently we have discovered that genes are only our genetic framework.

The final touches to our body chemistry are environmentally derived.

The things we feel and are exposed to emotionally affect who we

eventually become. Epigenetics concern a plethora of molecules which

attach themselves to our genes in response to each person’s individual

physical and emotional environment These modified genes affect our

looks, abilities, and lifetime health tendencies. This new science

explains, for example, why identical twins aren’t identical.

We now know were to look to unravel the rest of the “where do we

come from” story. What a fascinating generation we are living in.

Soon we will be able to zero in on and possibly reverse commonplace

maladies like cancer or organ disease and failure.

One effect of these gene modifications is they are multi-generational.

That is, we pass our environmentally modified genes on to our future

generations based upon the dramatic events that occur to each of us

individually during our lives.

The consequences from world traumatic events like the Holocaust will

take many generations to fully manifest themselves. Scars from wars

and other atrocities we afflict upon each other alter our core genetic

makeup by causing some genes normally turned off to be turned on

and others normally on to be turned off. These switches, from birth on,

affect each one of us differently and are what really make us different

from each other.

In other words, who we are is as much a result of the stresses, or

happiness, or emotional content, be it nurturing or otherwise, that

surrounded our parents and our grandparents during their lives as we

are a result of what we eat and breathe and drink today.

Behavioral science now has a foundation in chemistry and biology.

As more sophisticated instruments are built to decipher our genetic

encoders, clues are discovered and unraveled which have led to an

understanding of our body’s organic response to our physical environment.

We had best get to cleaning up our act if we expect future generations

to avoid our missteps. Apparently to error is human and also inherited.

What a brave New World we will soon live in. Through genetic

modifications to every living thing, including ourselves, we may be

able to eliminate hunger and disease in the next 50 years.

I wonder if we will still be able to find an excuse for war.

You know who I mean. Companies who rely on “small print” to steal your money.
Banks and insurance companies are probably the biggest culprits. Somewhere
in page after page of legalese they slip it to you. The contracts you are forced
to sign because you are required by law to purchase services, like auto insurance for example, are written entirely in the company’s favor. After all, they are the ones paying the attorney fees. A common tactic of lawyers is to design run on sentences whose content is so convoluted only company lawyers can figure them out. Somewhere within those often paragraph sized sentences they provide themselves with “weasel clauses” giving them the right to screw you somewhere down the line.

How about credit card companies? These are my personal favorite leaders in the legitimate thief category. They offer what appears to be a good deal up front and then allow you to develop self-destructive habits like overspending. If you were doing fine without something yesterday, chances are you can manage without that something today. But if you own a credit card, why wait? Once you’re in over your head these companies increase your rate. You go “hey, how come my interest jumped from 10 to 20% overnight?”, and they go “read the fine print”. If you have a credit card and have never read the small print I will summarize it for you here. Essentially they can do whatever they want and you are stuck with it.

Then came the Internet. I try to be careful but at least several times a year I get “educated”. The most recent example of internet screwing came to me by way of a company called Ryder Marketing. They offered a “how to make a million online” CD which had some brilliant sales copy and a cheap price, $7.95 delivered, so I decided I might learn something. I was right! About three weeks later I received my disk and before I even opened the package my account was charged an additional $105.00. Long story short, by ordering the disk I was automatically
enrolled in a $1260 year long course payable in 12 easy $105.00 payments. I attempted to have the charges reversed but apparently somewhere in the video “fine print”, which I hadn’t even viewed prior to the charge, I “agreed” to accept one additional disk per month.

Agreed my ass. Moral of that story (and we can thank the Bush banking gangsters for this) is if you don’t know who you are dealing with online, cancel your card after every online transaction. It is your only protection. It turns out even a punk like Ryder has a better attorney than the banks do. (My personal moral to the story is if my money is with Chase, it is no longer safe.)
An interesting note to the Ryder ripoff was my attempt to destroy this guy by posting a scam alert. To my chagrin I had to get in line, and the line was, at that point in time, almost three half-million people long. The guy wasn’t lying. He really is making millions online… by stealing! The worst part was his video wasn’t worth the substrate it was printed on.

I’m not even going to get into health insurance legitimate thievery except to say the only way for us little guys with small money to survive is to align ourselves with bigger money than the legitimate thieves can muster. Unfortunately, and in spite of all the pitfalls and potential for disaster, the only bigger money in Washington than lobby money is the government’s money itself.

We need a government option to keep the health-care legitimate thieves in line.

Preview: Obama may tank faster than the Titanic.

He is championing the right causes but…
Put simply, people are not as gullible as they used to be.

On the war front:
The administration is expanding our wars on and off budget,
increasing the use of agencies like Prince’s Blackwater militia in areas
like Afghanistan. Blackwater is part of the CIA assassination program
which uses a private militia to fill in where official government action
could be called into question. They operate above the law, courtesy
of policies established in the Bush administration, and they cost
at least 10 times what our own military personnel would cost.
And the deaths of their forces don’t enter into “official” statistics.

On the health front:
It is hard for many Americans NOT to hold obese people
or drug addicts or people with unwanted pregnancies responsible
for their condition. While aids has lost steam as a major contributor
to death in our nation, to fight the disease costs a fortune and it is hard NOT to hold the indiscriminate drug user or sex deviant responsible for the consequences of their actions. People who live on Big Macs and dingdongs at the expense of their bodies earn little sympathy from those who protect their body’s health with a proper diet. Unwanted pregnancies are a result of raging hormones, but are also a result of a disgusting head in the sand approach to sex education on the part of our government. The backward facing Bush administration and religious communities can be held directly responsible for the lack of responsible sex education but we all share the burden of these irresponsible policies.

We can’t trust the government to solve our problems since they are in many respects enablers. We can’t expect “for profit” businesses like insurance companies not to capitalize on opportunities created by our own personal lack of self discipline or self-respect.

So our only answer is to rely upon ourselves, our own good judgment,
and the hope that wisdom and experience will win out.

Geez we are in trouble.

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?