Texting All the Time

IT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN, if you think about it. And if you think about it, its bound to happen again, and again. Somebody in a movie theatre was killed in a dispute involving texting. You can almost write the script. During an expensive, crowded movie, in an important, quiet part, somebody starts texting, somebody else gets mad about it, and somebody has a gun, or deadly weapon. In a country filled to overflowing with cell phones, guns, and angry people, what else would you expect? Will we soon have a another new class of psychotic behavior to add to our thickening texts books: texting rage? Will it be a uniquely American phenomenon, or will it manifest globally, like road rage? Road rage is highly concentrated in these United States, but not unknown anywhere where cars are driven. But, somehow, road rage just seems, so...."American". You literally cannot drive down any street in America without seeing somebody's car within inches of your rear bumper. Nor can you, in these United States, engage in a face to face conversation of any length, on any topic, with anyone, without being interrupted by a damnable cell phone. And we almost always choose to take our calls, don't we? Or rather, we expect other people to take our calls, but we reserve for ourselves the sacred right to screen. We never really finish our conversations in this country. Maybe if enough of us walk into walls while texting, we'll rediscover the beauty of the world around us.

Arousing the Ire of the Wolves

PRESIDENT OBAMA is doing a magnificent job of apologizing to us all for presiding over the most missive surveillance police state in world history, and subjecting us to it. The President is doing an equally masterful job of assuring us that no, indeed, we are not being spied on, and there is nothing to worry about. The United States of America isn't spying on anyone, foreign or domestic, really. Just a few phone and email lists here and there. Nothing to get all upset about. So first Obama apologizes, then reminds us that he is apologizing about nothing. Barack Hussein Obama is as good and true a apokesperson for the military industrial surveillance complex as ever America has had, in the land of the free. Whatever it takes to keep the masses in their places, harmlessly seduced and sedated, innocuously surveilled. In the end, it really doesn't matter what our overlords know about us; it only matters what they do to us. Two hundred emails and phone calls to the Pesident and every member of Congress should be enough to get somebody's attention. If the people become inattentive, said Jefferson, to the affairs of government, the legislators and magistrates will divide society into two classes: wolves and sheep. That already happened, a long time ago. The most that we the sheep can hope to do now is to bleat with such unamimity, intensity, and consistency that the wolves become fearful, and lash out too fiercely at us, and inspire a strong response.

For Not Giving Lincoln a Chance

OF THE TWO GREAT UPHEAVALS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, neither was necessary. The English surely would eventually have released the colonies, because they (the colonies) would have grown so large, population and economically, that independence was unavoidable. And the Civil War could have been avoided, if the southern states which made up the Confederacy had only given Abraham Lincoln a chance. They left the country when and because Lincoln was elected; they didn't even wait for him to become president, let alone give him a chance to announce his policy on slavery and state's rights. Ironically, his views on both would have been very acceptable to the south. He was opposed to neither. True, Lincoln did not like slavery, but he had no intention of abolishing it when he became president, and he accepted the principle that in the United States, the States control their own destinies. But breaking up the country through secession led to war, which led to the abolition of slavery and states rights. Similarly, at the end of the war, a southerner murdered Lincoln, out of anger and bitterness which many southerners felt towards Lincoln. But in so doing the south brought down upon itself the wrath of Andrew Johnson, the vindictive President from Tennessee, long twelve long years of "reconstruction", aka oppression. Lincoln would have been far more lenitent towards the south than Johnson. The loss of Lincoln set the tone for a hundred years of sectional and racial bitterness and hatred, tragically. Great leaders must be given a chance to lead. But its hard to know who the great leaders are, until they are gone.

Raising Pay, Conservatively

THERE IS A GOOD CONSERVATIVE ARGUMENT for raising the minimum wage. A good, solid, common sense conservative based argument, and you wouldn't expect that. Seems like arguments for raising the minimum wage always come from liberals, and arguments against it come from conservatives. But yes, there is a good conservative reason for raising federal and state minimum wages. It is as follows; the working poor receive a great deal of government assistance, overall, to compensate for their lack of income, and subsequent inability to pay the costs of food, clothing, and shelter for their children and families. By raising the mimimum wage, workers with children will once again be able to afford their children, and the government can step out of the picture. All of the poverty in America, and there is a considerable amount of it, has inspired government growth, in terms of spending and bureacracy, in the social spending sector. Traditional free enterprise theory says that it is natural and normal for businesses to seek to maximize profit by keeping labor costs as low as possible. Its that simple. As long as society is willing to refrain from using government to aid the impovished workers, free enterprise flourishes. But when society insists on government intervention in poverty, then the creation of poverty through low wages is counterproductive to business interests. It becomes burdensome for business, in the long run, to thrive in an environment in which the middle class is burdened with big government. Better to have an economic system in which all jobs are good jobs, with reasonable remuneration, and economic growth is sufficient to keep full employment. There is no economic theory which says this is impossible.

Seeing Gender Equality

ACCORDING TO BEYONCE, gender equality is a "myth". Technically, a "myth" is a widely told story or fact which may or may not be true. Usually myths are untrue. That was Beyonce's meaning. All you had to do was read of couple of sentences written by Beyonce, and her meaning was perfectly clear. Men must step up and insist on equal pay for their female co workers. Fathers and husbands must advocate for the women in their lives to get equal pay and equal respect and treatment from society. No argument there. Case closed. Its easy to look at gender equality, or the lack of it, in terms of men's pay and women's pay across the board nationwide. The facts are there, available to all. Inequality adheres, flat out. And the reason gender equality is a myth, is that there are many people, incredibly, who claim that we have achieved it, even now. There are those who seem to believe that men and women are equal in modern society, modern America. And that's the myth, the untrue myth. There are those who would insist that gender equality is not only a myth, it is an impossibility, and undesirable at that. Men and women are simply different, and unequal, and no man- made law or social custom can overturn the law of nature. Besides, how can you put a price tag, how can you assign value, accurately, to child raising, to motherhood itself? Housewives, raising kids, and doing it well for, say, eighteen years, should probably be the highest paid people on the planet, shouldn't they? Well, maybe women can never be paid what they are worth, which is priceless, but surely we can see our way to pay female cops the same as male cops, and elect female leaders as often as we elect males. Equality and inequality, sometimes, is easy to see.

Knowing What Matters

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS are the coolest, most interesting people on the planet. They usually have a solid scientific background, are well educated in general, and have the creativity and imagination of any good writer. SF writers are perhaps the best people to listen to in terms of talking about the current state of planet earth, homo sapiens, and their mutual probable futures. Usually, its neither all gloom and doom nor all utopia. Its a combination. It was a science fiction writer who pointed out that it really doesn't matter what the U.S. government, and its police state surveillance security monstrosity knows about us; what matters is what they do to us, how they use the info. And the solution to that, as one writer quaintly put it, is to "strip 'em down". Enforce complete and utter transparency on all government activities, national securuty be damned. But of course, we all know, do we not, that this lame alibi of "national interests" and "national security " is all bogus, nothing but a lame alibi for greed, power, and control. That's the line they trot out every damned time: we regretabbly had to do this (drop atom bomb, kill citizens, lie, cheat, steal, etc) because it was in the best interets of, it was vital to the security of, it was absolutely necessary for the prosperity, happiness, and welfare of; our beloved U. S. of A. Like, yeah, right. I am so totally sure. One other thing most science fictoin writers agree on; humanity has achieved remarkable success and progress, and yet stands on the verge of total extinction, which can either be brought about, or avoided, by our own actions.

Quitting Smoking

SEEMS LIKE WE HAVE HAD a lot of fifty year anniversaries lately. Today's fiftieth anniversary is of the announcement by the U.S. Surgeon General that smoking tobacco is hazardous to your health. That changed everything. Prior to this announcement, in nineteen sixty four, cigarettes had been seriously glamorized in American culture, and everybody smoked, and the death rate from lung cancer was astronomical. How long could society not notice that? Cigarettes were marketed in the nineteen twenties as health supplements, incredibly. I remember how cigarette commercials on television used to make smoking cigarettes seem like the coolest, sexiest activity available. I honestly think that if television advertising for cigarettes hadn't been banned in 1970, nobody would smoke cigarettes today. Who would dare advertise cigarettes today? People know how fake, dishonest, and deadly it is. Still, some people still smoke cigarettes, incredibly. They would be, like, infinitely better off smoking marijuana; nobody has ever been killed by it. My dad started smoking when he was fourteen, and died from lung cancer at sixty eight. Not bad, considering. When he realized it was killing him, he didn't care, he just kept on smoking. My mother started smoking cigarettes at eighteen, and quit when she was seventy eight. She live to be ninety three. Not bad either, all things considered. The war on smoking which began fifty years ago coincided with the growth of the whole health industry; health food, vegetarianism, vitamins, etc. Here's to your health.

Correcting the Free Market

THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT of 1938 was the first minimum wage law enacted by the government in the United States. Economists will tell you that even without government intervention, a minimum wage tends to establish itself, through market forces. Economists will tell you a lot of stuff. And market forces? Well, depending on what "arket forces" happen to be unleashed and in play, people, jobs, and productivity have all kinds of interesting differences in value. For instance, if you play for the Yankees, and hit three hundred, with forty homers and over a hundred runs batted in, you're gonna make about twenty million a year for several years, and you will be worth every penny of it, from the viewpoint of the person paying your salary. But try teaching first grade, and see how long it takes to make twenty million dollars. The free market is a reflection of what people freely buy and sell, and directly reflects the relative importance, value, of those things being bought and sold. So, in America, baseball is considerably more important than first grade. And don't try to tell me that in a true free market, with private shcols instead of publc socialistic schools, the value of teachers would surpass that of ball players. In America, Entertainment is way more important than education. So much for the free market. Are we sure we really want to trust and rely on the free market to make our decisions for us, every time? Do we really want to eliminate government minimum wage, and watch fast food restaurants all across America's frutied plain start to pay desperate jobless people five dollars an hour? Or, do we want to maybe use reason to correct the abuses in free market economics brought about by insane cultural values? Because one thing for damned sure; we sure aint gonna correct our insane cultural values.

Fighting Poverty, Growing Business

THE WAR ON POVERTY began fifty yeas ago today, and we still haven't won it. We still haven't lost it either; not as long as we keep fighting. President Lyndon Johnso hated poverty because he had been born into it. He had been a powerful figure among his younger brothers and sisters, and he wanted to be a powerful president, wanted to be all things to all Americans. So, he gave the war mongers their war, and he gave the bleeding heart liberals his bleeding heart. When Jesus said "the poor will always be among you", fifty years of evidence would seem to indicate that what he said is true; but we don't have to accept poverty as some mysterious but irrevocable law of nature. One of the problems with the war on poverty might have been its timing. When Johnson gave his war on poverty speech, the coundty was still in shock and mourning over the loss of President Kennedy. Another problem with it is that it might've been, so far, more of a skirmish than a war. A war is an all out effort. Unemployment insurance and food stamps are great ideas, but, like our conservative brethren and sistern like to point out, vulnerable to abuse. What America needs is a steady storm of new small businesses! Let the government provide micro business loans to any person or group with a viable small business plan. And heres'a quick thought for anyone wanting a jump start on a small business; Colorado, marijuana. Let the economic growth begin!

Lamenting the Loss of Lincoln

THE MOST TRAUMATIC EVENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY, the civil War, and the second most traumatic event, the history of the United States after the Civil War, can be traced to a single cause; the unwillingness on the part of the American south to give Abraham Lincoln a chance. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President, in 1860, the southern states seceded because, and only because, of his election, not because of anything he did after being elected. Hell, he never had a chance to do anything. The minute he was sworn in, out walks the south. Which is ironic, because if South Carolina @ the others had stayed in the Union, and not seceded, they could have kept slavery; Lincoln had no intnetion of abolishing it. But they chose a war instead, which they lost, which ended their precious states rights independence, forever. When the war was over, Lincoln planned to treat the defeated Confederacy compassionately, with dignity; but he was murdered by a southerner who assumed, as did most southerners, incorrectly, that Lincoln would exact revenge on the south. With Lincoln dead, the south got Andrew Johnson instead; a southerner, who hated the confederacy, and inflicetd "reconstruction" upon the vanquished south, which lasted for tewlve miserable years. In a sense, all the racism, all the resentment, all the negative struggle which has happened in America since the civil war can, in theory, be traced to the life, and death of Lincoln. If only we'd just let him do his thing, and not gotten in the way.

Fighting Paranoia, and Losing

WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, people started telling me that I should spend more time hiding beneath my desk at school, or other furniture at home, because some bad people called "Russians" were going to start droping bombs, big powerful bombs, on us, very soon. Scared the shit outta me. And, as it turns out, it almost happened for real. The story now is that a Russian naval commander refused to obey an order to fire upon an American warship during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I already knew what death was. I found out about that when I was four years old, seeing my grandfather in his open casket. I can only guess that my mother took me with her either because she couldn't find a baby sitter, or she thought it was a good idea to learn about life, and death, early. One of the two, I honestly do not know which. But there he was, and I retained my outward composure, while freaking out inside myself. Hint; never take a four year old child to a mortuary. The Kennedy assassination, Viet Nam, and the burning of American cities in the nineteen sixties, all on television, might have played a role in tirggering my paranoia. Of couse, it also could have been "The Twilight Zone", with Rod Serling. Helluva television show. Maybe a bit intense for little kids. then too, the Flying Monkeys and the wicked witch scared me just like every other American child. Why do we continue to subject our children to that nightmare? Would the last one out please shut and lock the door? Oh! And when anybody firgures out whether we're doomed, or global warming is a hoax, could you maybe come and help me out, from under my bed?

Freezing In America, For Now

BY NOW, THE REST OF THE WORLD is probably getting a bit tired of listening to Americans complaining about their cold weather. We Americans are certainly getting tired of complaining about it. But honestly, we truly have something to complain about this time. Are we experiencing global warming, or global freezing? It makes sense to assume that the more energy you put into the atmosphere, the more energetic your weather will be. The problem with the climate change "debate" is that it is always expressed in terms of extremes. It seems that we are either headed directly towards complete disaster, or, that we have absolutely nothing to worry about, and any climate crises is purely imaginary. The idea that climate change is a hoax is particularly interesting, because it calls into question how millions of people can conspire to perpetrate a hoax of any sort. Over the past few summers, I have started to wonder what it would be like if the temperature hit one hundred degrees fahrenheit in early June; and stayed there for the entire summer, in normally moderate middle America; weeks at a time. You know its possible. Wasn't it in eighteen seventeen when there was no summer whatsoever in the American Northeast? The summer months were mostly rain and snow that year, with only a tiny amount of plant growth, near the end of the "Little Ice Age", which happened from about thirteen hundred to eighteen fifty. So, you never know. No single weather pattern can be used to substantiate climate change. But we certainly seem to have a great deal of unusual, extreme, and energetic weather these days.

Managing Anger

THE UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA did battle in junior ice hockey the other day, with the Russian team emerging victorious. Either during the latter part of the game, after the game, or both, the Russians taunted the Americans, it was reported in the American media. For all we know the Russian media reported something else. Fortunately, no fighting ensued. These kids are big strong teenagers, who don't need to be fighting. A few days later, Russia played Sweden, and Sweden won. ON this occasion a post game brawl did in fact break out, and the fact that the common denominator was the Russian team stands out rather plainly. You all got an anger management problem over there? It would've been less surprising had it been the Americans involved, both no, it was the cerebral, civilized, intellectual Russians. Or perhaps our perception of civilized Europeans omits a few other qualities, such as aggression and violence. Anger management must be a global concern. It certainly is in the United States, where there seems to be an unusually large number of angry people, an unusually large amount of anger rippling through society. Maybe as the economy improves so will the anger level decrease. but you have to believe that the Russian junior hockey players are not being coached to taunt and fight with opponents in international competition. What would they have to gain by doing that? Feel the anger, draining away. OM

Determining the Price of Pot

THE PRICE OF MARUJUANA in Colorado is skyrocketing. Its even higher than the people purchasing it, and that's saying quite a lot. But of course, there are only about twenty four marijuana stores in the entire state, and you can assume that many smokers are coming from other states and standing in line with the Coloradans. The demand is simply way too high for the supply. The eventual number of pot stores in colorado, or anywhere else in the United States, should properly be similar to the number of liquor stores or even convenience store/gas stations. This is one area with great potential for economic growth. And that's exactly what we need in America; jobs and economic growth. Accoridng to former labor Secretary Robert Reich, there is one job available for every three unemployed Americans. A labor surplus, just the way the corporations and business community want it. Doesn't everyone agree that big corporations have a large enough share of wealth and powr in America, and that the more small businesses we have, the better? Marijuana can be grown in anyone's home, and sold in a small business. The whole industry has the potential to be small business oriented. Our corporate masters will find it tough going if they attempt to sieze control of an monopolize tha marihuana industry. For once, the little people have a way to fight about, to compete. The pioneering Colorado pot shop owneres are reaping the benefits of getting in early on a business with great future potential. It will be interesting to note future prices and profit margins. Competition will increase, and prices will come way down. It will be interesting to see how well paid future employees of pot shop owners are. Probably about like other low wage workers. May the free market, in its infinite wisdom, determine the price of marijuana!

Straying From the Herd

MOST AMERICANS LIKE TO think of themselves as nonconformists. So deeply rooted is the value of rugged individualism in our culture that we all claim to be independent thinkers and doers. It isn't always true, but there's a lot of truth in it. When I was in first grade, six years old, I found out about something called the "World Series". Everybody seemed interested in it, so I asked questions, and learned a lot. I learned that everybody hated one of the teams, the one called the Yankees. I had no idea why. I assumed that since everybody hated them, they had little or no chance of winning, so I felt sorry for them. I started rooting for them, and, lo and behold, they won. By the time I found out why everybody hated the Yankees it was too late; I was a Yankee fan. A nonconformmist. Just a few years later I was learning about religion, and church. Once again, the fact that everybody in my life seemed to have about the same attitude towards it, a pro Christian bias, I decided to go in another direction, a less traveled religious path, a journey of my own. I just plain did not want to be like everybody else, period. Still don't. During the time, oh, about twenty years ago or so, when everybody wore all black clothing, every day, I couldn't do it. I tried it for just one day, and kinda liked it, but, still, it felt strange. Another teacher walked up to me and said "now you are one of us." Yes, but only for a day. And so now here we are in the age of texting and tweeting, and Facebook, and once again, I just can't seem to get into it. E mail and a portable phone are enough for me; don't need no fancy smart phone, and all that. Maybe someday.