Archive for the 'Human Interest' Category

Which type of cook are you?

Posted by Bob Parmelee at 12:33 AM 0 comments

Imagine walking through the forest one day and discovering an apparently unguarded or abandoned bee’s nest hanging within easy reach. Thinking a snack of rich honey can be had for little or no effort, you approach the nest. Suddenly your plan is interrupted by an angry buzzing.  You look around you and discover a hornet buzzing about your feet.  Following your first instinct you attempt to stomp on the hornet, and after several misses you successfully squash the pesky bugger.  However, without you noticing, your stomping has shaken the ground and you now have several angry hornets buzzing about your feet.  You immediately launch into an Indian war dance, hooting and stomping around, until you feel the sharp pain of a sting.  This angers you further so you increase your efforts to exact revenge upon the culprit and his cohorts by flailing madly in all directions.  You attempt to obliterate the source of these angry hornets by closing the hole from which they came.  However, by now you are not fighting just one or several angry hornets, but the entire nest has erupted around you and you are getting stung repeatedly. Too late you realize that although you easily stomped the first soldier who attempted to defend his nest, and the several that followed, they are striking back.  Further, you realize they are coming from more than one hole in the ground, and they appear to be everywhere.

The moral of the story is simple.  Although our daydreamer was infinitely superior in size and weaponry, and although he was able to inflict serious damage to the pesky tribe, er nest, his victory was never accomplished, and in the meantime, he incurred some serious damage. The longer he stays the more damage he suffers until he leaves with his tail between his legs.

Mission accomplished.

             In one of the great movies of the last century, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise gave us a glimpse of the state of mind of the military in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The tour de force is called “A Few Good Men”.  I mention this movie only to repeat one of the greatest lines in the movie, shouted by Jack Nicholson’s character as he was backed into a corner on the witness stand.  He shouted, and I quote, “You can’t handle the truth!” , referring to the American public.  And in another award winner, Bart Simpsons’ writers noted, “It takes two to lie.  One to do the lying and the other to do the listening”.  Unfortunately, these two statements are spelling doom for the economic state of our nation. The American public is doing the listening, and the leaders of our nation are doing the misleading. If we don’t know the truth, we certainly can’t be expected to handle it.

           American’s government debt has crossed the 9 trillion dollar mark this year.  This roughly equates to 30,000 dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country. If you are a family of 5, your family’s share of this debt is 150,000 dollars.  Are you feeling a little poorer? Neither is anyone else, and that is a huge portion of our problem.  In 31 of the last 35 years the government has operated in the red.  For some reason, we all feel that the government’s lack of financial responsibility has nothing to do with us individually. Just wait until our social security and Medicare programs are cut back drastically and I guarantee you will feel the effects of ridiculous financial policies.

             This year GW Bush proposes pushing the deficit up by an additional 400 billion dollars.  The budget he proposes is over 3 trillion dollars and the deficit he proposes does not include the cost of the of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor does it accurately reflect the loss of revenue which is certainly forthcoming from a rapidly faltering economy. These items alone could easily add another 200 billion dollars to the deficit.  Before we see another balanced budget we will go over the 10 trillion dollar mark. If GW has his way, we will cross the 10 trillion dollar deficit level in another two years. Further, we get these figures from the office of under estimators. We have taken a flight from reason in this country.  When our president can propose adding 400 billion to a 9 trillion dollar deficit, and in the same sentence call this a “good” budget, he has joined Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter is at the helm! The public must be held partly responsible for the cataclysmic state of the nation’s economic affairs.  The president can only propose a budget; the Congress must approve it, and between these two branches of government it is hard to say who wears the bigger dunce cap. But we elect them all.

            Remember the crisis the government faced as we approached the end of the last century.  Some predicted the end of the world as we know it, because the computers which run everything didn’t have the year 2000 available to them.  Well guess what? We are there again.  Government computers don’t have enough room for 10 trillion dollars of red ink.  That requires room for 14 digits.  No one ever expected us to need more than 13 digits of room in the dollar column to run the government.  The plus side to the equation is that the thousands of pages of line items will be compressed to just a few pages.  That’s right.  The entire projected revenue of the United States government will barely cover just three line items; social security, Medicare, and interest on the national debt.  By 2040 there will be no money for any other government programs or expenses.

           As the largest group of voters this nation has ever seen, the baby boomers must accept a large portion of responsibility for this travesty.  If we continue to elect, through ignorance (by this I don’t mean stupid…we are not stupid, just uninformed) or apathy, a group of people who put their own agendas above those of the nation, we will have in the not-too-distant future a dollar worth less than a peso.

            Here is an example of what I mean by an ignorant electorate.  On Bill Moyer’s Journal, a brilliant author, Susan Jacoby, astounded me, and I hope everyone in this country, with the following results from a recent Roper poll about geography.  Young people between the ages of 18 and 25 were shown a map of the world and asked to locate four countries; Iraq, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.  This map, by the way, had the initials of every country printed within each country.  Only 23% of college graduates and 6% of high school graduates were able to correctly identify these countries. This area of the world is one of the most explosive on the planet, and is consuming a tremendous amount of our nation’s resources. The real shameful part of this poll is that these graduates didn’t even know where the Middle East is in the world, or presumably they would have been able to identify the countries by their initials.

            It is hard to suggest a course of action to correct these crippling problems.  While YouTube, Facebook, Myspace and the latest video games consume our youths’ time and attention, a monster of biblical proportions is building strength just outside the monitor screen.  Our country is only a small portion of the world population.  Even as we protect our shores from a military invasion, the financial invasion of our country continues unabated.  The economic overthrow of our way of life is just around the corner.  Hopefully our children and voters will see this threat in time and elect officials up to the challenge.  “The good people in this country are at their best when things are at their worst” is another great movie line by Jeff Bridges in the movie Starman.  I hope the writers were correct.

          Whether we choose to believe it or not, the facts are in.  America has a split personality.  For the most part, the good people of this country are in denial.  While we deserve to be congratulated for the good deeds we do as free citizens, we refuse to acknowledge the evil done by our government in our name.  Our hearts and our money pour out to the less fortunate, and to the victims of atrocities like genocide perpetrated by misguided regimes in Third World countries. Meanwhile these lawless regimes are more often than not supported by our own state department.  We then invade sovereign nations whose religious convictions run contrary to ours, under false pretenses. After blowing up our ”alleged” enemies, at a cost in the billions, we then follow up by spending even larger amounts  to rebuild and repair the damage we did.
 
          Private institutions and individuals provide massive assistance to the malaria and HIV victims in Africa.  We are in the process of providing laptop computers to the most remote villages on the planet to speed their arrival into the 21st century.  We give aid to disaster victims everywhere; no disaster worldwide goes without our support and assistance. These are great acts of kindness done by private people and institutions in our country’s name.
 
          Our alter ego, on the other hand, invades countries (Iraq is not the first and more than likely not the last) in an attempt to steal their natural resources.  Our rich corporations export pollution and take advantage of cheap foreign labor.  We export our jobs solely to take advantage of the poor and starving in less developed countries.  Our continual military campaigns cause death, destruction, and dislocation to millions of innocent civilians. For our trouble we get a gross and bloated military budget.  We give lip service to a war on terror in spite of the fact that we haven’t had a terrorist attack in over six years in our own country.  We commit war crimes in the name of national security; crimes which were deemed so heinous they were banned from use by the Geneva Convention during World War II.  We send our children to die in countries which were our allies and imprison and spy on our own citizens.
 
          While the good people in this country strive to do the best we can for all people everywhere, a few disgrace our country and give us a black eye the world over.  Their sole ambition is to increase their own wealth and power at everyone else’s expense.  They manipulate our government and our media and seek to undo the very principles which made our country the envy of all the world a few short decades ago.
 
          We need to regain control of our evil twin, before all is lost.  We need to dismantle an ever larger war machine.  A machine which is being used as an instrument of destruction and mayhem. A machine which is sucking up so many resources we are bankrupting ourselves and putting the entire world economy at risk. We need to put our resources into projects like clean air and renewable energy resources. Projects which will provide a secure and constructive future for our next generations. If we learn nothing else from history, we must learn the consequences of a government with an irresponsible military agenda, and which is controlled by big business interests. This could be the first generation of a lasting peace throughout the world.  But first, we must put Mr. Hyde behind bars where he belongs, and throw away the key.
 
 
 
 

As cable TV and satellite TV hard drives proliferate an interesting consequence is developing.  Originally TiVos were offered as a way to record favorite programs while people were away from the TV.  Also, they enabled viewers to watch one program while recording another, so no one needed to miss any of their favorite shows because of programming conflicts. What is developing as a result of this versatile service is becoming a nightmare for advertisers.  TV viewers can control the content of their programming through the use of the fast forward button.  Major networks which depend upon advertisers for all their revenue are facing the fact that their viewers are no longer forced to sit through 15 to 20 minutes or more of advertising every hour.  A press of a button compresses 20 minutes of advertising to 20 seconds.

While commercials are a good time for bathroom breaks when needed, the majority of the viewing public still sits through most advertising. The only way to avoid losing 25% to 30% of your viewing time to ads is to pay for premium channels like HBO and Showtime.  But with TiVo, network TV can be as ad free as you want it to be. For busy or  impatient people the option to fast forward is irresistible. 

What does this mean for the future of free TV?  When the cost of reaching customers races past one million dollars per minute, can companies afford to get less and less ad viewing for their buck?  While some people enjoy watching commercials (especially those on Super Bowl Sunday), as a general rule, most people (at least those I know) consider commercials a nuisance or a waste of time.  For a while the networks will be able to increase revenues with price per ad increases.  Eventually this will have a negative impact since only the biggest corporations will be able to afford the price. 

My prediction is that TiVo will spell the death of free TV within a decade.  Those connected to the tube by cable or satellite have already kissed the days of free TV goodbye.  Those in rural areas will be forced to hook up to one box or another, or face the reality of snowy encrypted TV. Free network TV will go the way free satellite TV did in the 1970’s.

 Bob Parmelee             parmsplace