The White House today issued a statement virtually confirming that President Barack Hussein Obama is neither an American nor a terrestrial. This is evidently the first time a public building has ever issued a statement of any kind.

When asked to specifiy the President's likely origins, neither the House or any human beings in or around the House was available for comment.

The controversy arose during the 2008 presidential campaign when conservative Obama detractors accused Obama of lacking a passport,or any reasonable facimile thereof.

Said an unnamed conservative source "it feels good to get his origins out of the country, and even greater to get them off planet". 

Marriage Proposal

Mexico is evidently considering passing a law that legalizes short term marriages. People would be able to get married for a specified period of time, spelled out in advance, ten years, five, two, or one, or whatever. Marriages could last a lifetime, if desired.

Three cheers for Mexico! For this tradition oriented conservative Catholic country to even consider such an idea is remarkably open minded. And open mindedness, in individuals or cultures, a willingness to honestly give consideration to new, different, and even scary ideas in the hope of progress; is truly laudable.

And this idea seems to make sense, seems to reflect a realistic approach to the traditional, yet troubled institution of marriage. Surely anyone can see that merely considering such an alternative, looking at it as a fair minded idea, hurts noone.

Get married, then take it as it comes. renew and extend it as circumstances warrant, instead of promising in advance something which cannot be knowingly promised. Why not? Why not at least think about it as an option? It needn't do any harm to any traditional, lifelong contract marriage. 

And let us hope that this Mexican movement is indicative of the future open mindedness of humankind...

We all need to plant trees. Many trees, perhaps one tree for every person, or about 7 billion trees.

I've done 25 so far, with I hope more to come. Everywhere I go I see great places to plant trees

where there are none now. There appears to be plenty of room, almost everywhere, for new trees.

That might be our best chance of surviving. Wouldn't it be lovely if the Worldwide Organization of

Ordinary People on the Internet (WOOPI) launced a global campaign of tree planting? More CO2

absorption, more clean fresh air, less global warming. Let's git 'er done! Let our rallying cry be:

                                 More Trees and Fewer People!

Jesus, Guns and Money

They are what Gore Vidal called the "Jesus, Guns and Money" crowd.

They are devout Christians who are equally devout gun owners and capitalists.

They belong to the "tea party".

My impression is that Jesus was neither an advocate of gun ownership nor wealth accumulation.

My task is to become open minded enough to understand exactly how  they reconcile all this.

EvidentlyThe Chinese recently launched a satellite, and the event was shown on national TV. Unfortunately

the TV station made a terrible mistake, and during the lift off they played background music "America The

Beautiful". This evidently enraged the Chinese people, and many made calls and sent messages condemning

the atrocity, and expressing outrage that such hateful music accompanied such a glorious event.

As an American citizen and operator of an American blog, I would like to take this opportunity to express

my sincere condolences to the people of China for what they had to endure. One can scarcely imagine how

horrible it must have been to endure this sordid American garbage during such an illustrious moment for

China.

But, on the bright side, it really isn't a half bad tune. I mean, it could've been worse, and, well, there really

is SOME beauty in America....but even so, the nightmare must have been simply unendurable...

Tone of Voice

Capitalism is competition. America is capitalism, and America is competition. And the level of competition keeps going up, decade after decade, as the economy grows, technology advances, and opportunity beckons. You see it all the time. Forty years ago, when I was in high school, the traffic light would turn green, and my classmates would race to get off the starting line ahead of the classmate in the other lane. I could swear the same people behave the same way, forty years later.

Maybe our competitive spirit has something to do with our angry aggressive political rhetoric.

Of course, its nothing new. In George Washington's day American politicians were calling each other adulterers, drunks, miscreants. Only they did it indirectly, using surrogate sources.

Now we just do it straight up, and the names include modern versions such as "dork", and "moron"...

When my friends email me to argue with me I wish they would use a slightly smaller, lighter font. 

I wish President Obama would lower his voice just a bit, and accuse the Republicans of wanting to do something a bit less harmful than "cripple" the country...

I certainly wish the conservatives wouldn't call Obama a traitor, and accuse him of not being an American citizen...

If we could all just maybe tone it down a tad, and keep making our points clearly, but just a little bit less...let's see now...LOUDLY!

Please pardon the puny print on the previous page. This new website has not yet "worked out all the kinks", but intends to, and appreciates your patience.

For the sight challenged among you, the previous piece, yesterdays last blog, brought into existence a new global organization called "the Worldwide Organization of Ordinary People on the Internet (WOOPI)..

...the purpose of this organization is to bring about an absolute, direct, global  democracy, or to at least talk about it...

You would think that eventually almost everyone would have a web site. Why not?

What's not to like about a web site? Is the internet among the most wonderful achievements of humanity?  Indisputably. And of course it is also a very powerful
tool, with potentially lethal uses...
...Demonstrably, the world needs an ever increasing number of open minded, good hearted thinkers,communicating with each other, sharing their ideas and solutions.
Its possible that the recent revolutions Egypt, Lybia, and Syria were initiated by some tenth grader in New Jersey!

The Internet allows everyone among the world's masses of ordinary, powerless people to have a voice, a voice with which it is possible to exert influence on global society.

It is alleged that the world is controlled by a small, highly secretive group of ultra wealthy and ultra powerful humans, who have for centuries run the world from behind the scenes such that the few profit at the expense of the many.This elite group is called "The Illuminati".

I hereby propose, indeed, I proclaim, a counter group. A group to oppose the Illuminati, to fight for power for the common people, an organization of the
masses, rather than the elite .

I hereby proclaim the formation of THE WORLDWIDE ORGANIZATION of ORDINARY PEOPLE
on the INTERNET, or  "WOOPI!"

Quagmire

Willingness to consider all options is the definition of  "openmindedness", and this attitude can lead you into a quagmire of options. Imagine being totally openminded about your religion. Why, you'd have 11000 to choose from.

Pick any issue. Marriage, for example. Willingness to tolerate any kind of marriage could result in a kind of marital chaos. You, with your traditional Christian marriage, are quite content, for instance. Your next door neighbor is an equally happy gay couple. Across the street live a pair of lesbians. Down the block a bit a half dozen folks maintain a group marriage.  Across the railroad tracks some guy has declared his marriage to a statue of Madonna. (He recently divorced his flagpole). Who among us is sufficiently open minded to even tolerate that, let alone accept it!

Other than this website, probably noone...

It has often been pointed out that it does little good to identify problems without offering solutions.

It is hoped that solutions and opinions will appear often on this site and that they will come from many sources.

What about this? Let's form a consortium of billionaires, pool assets, and invest in clothing and shoe factories, television factories, and motorcycle manufacturing. America needs manufacturing, more of it, correct?

Can the United States import prosperity, or must it be manufactured in the country?

I received an email from a good friend of mine, who happens to be a staunch conservative, expousing the virtues of school voucher programs. He based his support on the idea that competition will improve pubic schools, and will help families afford to send their shildren to private schools.

Public schools, because they are public, are socialistic, and were never  intended to engage in competition. If competition is needed to improve public schools, let us simply improve them, cooperatively, as a community, in exactly the same way that competition with privates schools, in theory, would.

I have no objection to private schools. They are great. The more the merrier. But is it necessary to regard them as "competing" with public schools?...perhaps we could see to it that they work together, for the same goals.

Private schools are free enterprise capitalism, and capitalism should not be interfered with by the goverment, say my conservative friends. Where do vouchers come from?  (the gov)....

There will ensue here many comments about American culture, and global culture, written by many people. Each comment will reflect an openminded approach to life, and it is hoped that the comments will prove interesting, illumanating, original, and thought provoking. .

Current global circumstances seem to indicate a need for open minded, creative discourse.

What I've seen in my 56 years is enough to convince me that we all need to be talking about what's going on in this world, and how to improve it.

I've never been outside the U.S.A., but my opinion is that American culture, strong in many ways, is also so sick that were it a horse it would be shot...

and what information I get about the situation in various parts of the world indicates to me that
things are not much better anywhere else...

We , the human race, could make this planet a paradise, even more than it already is...anyone who wishes to participate here is invited to do so...

Religious Open mindedness

If one wanted to be truly open minded in religious matters, one would have to be an agnostic, correct? To choose a religion, and to steadfastly adhere to it, is a form of closed mindedness, isn't it? So perhaps open mindedness isn't always the answer. I, for example, believe in God. But I'm open minded enough to respect agnosticism as well as all other religiosity. In fact, I think I respect agnosticism more than any other form of belief, including my own, precisely because of its inherent open mindedness.

No human can ever prove or disprove the existence of God. Many have tried, none that I know of have succeeded, though ostensibly convincing proofs have been offered on both sides of the issue.

Our personal beliefs are, ultimately, a matter of choice. I choose to believe in God because I simply want to so believe.

I received an email from a person who said  he noticed two candidates who expoused no liberal viewpoints, and were therefore "probably worth watching". By this he meant that they might possibly be good candidates, precisely because they showed no signs of liberalism.

I used to be the same way, only in reverse. If someone demonstrated an ounce of conservatism, forget 'em. I went the whole nine yards. I called conservatives bad names, and so forth, and so on.

But then I got tired of it. I got tired of myself for being that way. And thus, the whole purpose of this blog is to celebrate my newly open minded attitude towards conservatism, and my new desire to view it as something other than stupid or evil.

We all create our ideologies, and then spend much more time expousing them than questioning them, or augmenting them by changing, or being willing to change them, after giving full consideration to contrary opinions. 

When we openmindedly give credit  (for being valid and understandable) to opinions with which we disagree,  we expand and enhance ourselves.

Surely this is preferrable to resolutely standing our ground, discounting all with whom we disagree, and never augmenting, and thus enhancing ourselves.

I went to donate blood at a high school, and while on my back struck up a conversation with several of the students. One thing led to another, and before long we were betting on who would be finished bleeding first. I won, but was a little amused at myself for caring, and for "trying" to win. (I squeezed the rubber ball a bit more often).

Our culture is obsessed with competition. We parade 6 year old girls on stage, and vote on the best one. Student pianists take their turn before judges who award trophies. Singing and dancing contests dominate television. One television program features a man who challenges himself to eat a huge amount of food within a time limit.

Bela Bartok said "competition is for race horses".