Archive for the 'Politics' Category

Lets face it…War is a racket!

President Obama has, I suspect in order to relieve his incredible work load, turned over the war to the generals. (Eventually he was bound to follow the path of least resistance.) The generals will, without question, continue GWB’s domino plan. His plan, if you’ll recall, was to go from Muslim country to Muslim country on a Christian Jihad dedicated to eradicating the Taliban. (More truthfully
perhaps, eliminating Muslims.) Evidently, that’s still our plan.

What should have been a rabbit hunt, where a few thousand of our elite special forces troops chase a few hundred of the 9/11 perpetrators into the mountains and caves, will be blown into $100 billion annual expenditure. The generals will attempt to justify a MacArthur style sweep throughout the Middle East. The fact that
Osama bin Laden, the ALLEGED target of our pursuit, has been dead these last 8 years doesn’t seem to dim the generals enthusiasm to hunt down and capture him.

The generals will fight this war phony with overworked, worn-out, suicidal troops. At least one soldier, when faced with yet a third tour to the Middle East, elected to end his own life rather than return. The suicide rate among the military is increasing monthly!

We will pay for this war on credit at our most critical economic point, when the stability of the nation’s economic and financial well-being is still in question. We will neglect the needs of this nation in favor of another useless and unproductive war on the other side of the planet. In spite of what our leaders tell us, it doesn’t take a big brain to realize what’s going on outside our borders has nothing to do with our national security. No country on the map today is crazy enough to take on the USA.

If our national security is weak it is because our National Guard is overseas. The rationale behind sending our national defense troops overseas is as substantial as fog. The really stupid part of what we are being expected to swallow by the war council is that the people in these countries subjected to our bombarding appreciate us. It really
takes a complete moron to even consider we may be able to win over the hearts and minds of a people by using guns and bombs on them.

We might stand a chance of winning over a nation’s people if we helped them to build schools or hospitals. If we helped the poorest of the world’s nations with their infrastructure; their roads or electrical grid or water resources. If we did so I suspect they would learn to love us in double quick time. As long as we abuse their country they will never love or even appreciate us. But imagine the noise and uproar the good citizens of this country would create if it were known we were upgrading their country before upgrading our own infrastructure. It is much more politically correct to bomb them first.

The insanity of continuing to do over and over what has failed in the past will continue to plague our future.

The people in this once great nation are either too poorly informed, too misguided, too greedy, or too apathetic to care what is done in their name.

We follow blindly the actions of our leaders for one overarching reason. We all believe our nation’s deciders know more than we do. We sincerely believe they have secret knowledge which, were we privy to it, would convince us the course we are on is true.

However, after watching the Bush/Cheney parade of people spouting the same lies over and over, I am convinced otherwise.

Fact: we are alienating the very people we are supposedly liberating. By indiscriminately killing them we couldn’t possibly do more harm to our long-term interest.

We have allowed our generals to bring to full living color the popular board game RISK. One huge difference between a game and real-life is at the end of the game the troops, with no enemies to face, presumably get to go home. Our troops will never come home.

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.

It seems impossible to believe that the President’s

mandate has been squashed already.

But facts are facts.  The party of “no” can’t

promulgate any policies worth following but

they seem to be able to torpedo anything

which may benefit the “average” American.

The “average” American, by my definition,

is a person who works for a living. This precludes

the “fat cats” who have already earned or inherited

enough money to live forever.  It does include

the “low cats” who can’t afford the price of a cup

of coffee at Starbucks.  It includes about 300

million Americans.

It includes everybody everywhere who contributes

to the “industrial nations” statistics, or those who

belong to the wealthiest nations category

of which we are, temporarily, number one.

It includes those nations (28 of them) who have

better standards of living than ours.  It includes

all those nations who have better health care

then we do.  It includes every nation who educates

their children better than we do.  It includes virtually

every nation included in the third world category…

It is time to change our statistics.  Any politics

which contributed to the previous 40 years of failed

policies need to be jettisoned.  Those who seek

to perpetuate those policies are either in the top

1% of income earners (it would be ridiculous to

suggest to these winners that they change what

works for them– voluntarily) or are those brain-dead

among us who have never have enjoyed the Eureka

moment which accompanies an original thought.

In other words, the incredible majority of Americans

who have been brainwashed into believing the drivel

of past administrations or current lobbyists are not

in a position to move us into a better place.

Either we get ahead of the curve or we will suffer

the disgrace of losers who populate the rubble of history.

This could be a fitting eulogy:

Fellow Romans,

We learned nothing from your failed republic. In fact,

we took your arrogance to a whole new level.  We actually

try to outspend the rest of the combined budgets among the

planet’s various militarys on a military offensive budget

(misnomer = “defense”) against no certain enemy.  Your

losing strategy to conquer the world we proudly embrace although

it will bury us in the rock pile of past great civilations like yours.

President Barak Obama needs to bully this nation into

the 21st century. And he needs to stick by his campaign

promises. All the arguments to the contrary are

assuring our speedy descent into a has been super power.

We are not far from Russia my friends.  They are currently,

if not always, in the grip of gangsters who pillage and plunder

their economy at will.  We’re on the edge.

Bob Parmelee                       Robert-Parmelee.blogspot.com