Musings

When I was a child, and needed to see the Doctor, he would come to our house, giving me a thorough examination, prescribe something, or usually, take it out of his black bag, and charge my folks ten dollars. Times were tough then, and if we didn't have the money, he would wait, and later take some trout that we caught or a few fat pheasants if they were in season.

As I got older, I had to go to his office instead, and after his thorough exam, sent me a bill for twenty bucks or more; but not much more. He got to know the workings of my body as well as I knew the workings of my car.

Now, when I go to my ‘Primary Care’ Physician, she hears my complaint, promptly sends a blood sample to the lab, and refers me to a specialist. She has yet to put a stethoscope anywhere on my body, or even look at my pupils or shine a light in my ear. Why? Because, she is fearful of a malpractice lawsuit. And, my simple visit costs my insurance company hundreds of dollars, not including lab fees. I don't think she even remembers my name after five or ten minutes elapse when I leave her office.

This is industrial modern medicine in America at its finest.

Bean counters are in charge of health care. The idea is to maximize income. It means cutting staff until the cleaning crew is more numerous than trained RNs. Whole wings in hospitals are shut down and patients moved to save a buck. Every floor has one RN, a couple of CNA's, and the patients' only advocates are their relatives who stay to watch them.

Right now the health insurance companies have a protected market that is anything BUT A free market. They choose who we may see for help, unless we buy the gold-plated policy. And, uninformed ideologues like to bleat on about their right to do this. But in our current system, that decision is made for me: I go to who ever my insurance company says to go to. I pay whatever they pay for (or whatever the doctor charges). The lobbyists have fooled most people into believing their right to run the health care system as a private unregulated institution is beyond reproach.

The malpractice suits arise, because Doctors and their minions make plenty of mistakes. And they conspire with each other to suppress the evidence. To have true reform of our health care system, this information should be advertised and made very public. And as patients, we should have these facts to consider before seeing any given physician or going to a particular hospital. We might want to see what the norm is both regionally and nationally, and then choose wisely based on this information. Do not expect mistakes to decrease with Obama's socialized medicine; remember, the government does a lousy job of running any enterprise. The changes needed are with the whole methodology of patient care and services.

In Utah, the state started tracking these mistakes in 2001, after a landmark study estimated that 98,000 Americans die from medical errors each year. “Though no state policy required Utah hospitals to inform their patients of serious errors, patients and families typically are informed”, said Deb Wynkoop, Director of Health Policy at the Utah Hospitals and Health Systems Association.

Hogwash!

They go to extremes to protect one another, and when lawsuits are filed, medical records are mysteriously misplaced or are erased. Doctors are not magical nor are they gods. And the lab work is generally atrocious.

A lab worker that I won't name is one of the last qualified and trained personnel left in this particular lab. She had this to say:

“In an effort to cut costs IHC doesn't want to hire qualified people anymore. Get a two-year degree from a technical college and you're set.

They also have things set up so that everyone works crummy inconsistent shifts. No responsible and college educated person would want to put up with the shifts there. Next, the management: The manager of the lab is ... get this ... an ex football coach. Doesn't know a thing about what a lab does but is a buddy of one of the higher level managers. So, if anyone wants to know why people die unexpectedly or why they get treated for the wrong disease, there's your answer.

This so called non-profit organization that is IHC is only concerned about the bottom line. Patient care is only necessary to bring in the profits. Screw the patient. All the on the job training in the world isn't going to turn a burger flipper into a microbiologist without a handful of people dying first. But that, my friends, is what it takes to get quality health care in Utah.”

So what can you as a patient do in the meantime? The following are some suggestions that are broadly applicable no matter what country you reside in:

Most important of all: You either need to be firm advocate for yourself or if not able to (unconscious, elderly, afraid to) have someone with you who WILL BE. This is crucial and DO NOT BE AFRAID TO SPEAK UP. It very well may save your life or that of your loved one.

First, question anything you do not fully understand. And don't let anyone – Doctors included - leave the room until you do - regardless of any attitude they toss off. They are mechanics for the body and you are EMPLOYING them for the expertise only.

1) Know the pecking order. Most of the time, you will not be attended by a MD at a hospital. You will first be seen by a nurse, physician's assistant or (if it's a teaching hospital) by an intern or a resident. While I respect the people who possess these titles, they are not doctors. If you feel like they don't know what they are doing, ask for the attending physician.

2) Know your rights. You can refuse treatment, or ask for a second opinion. That's your right, so exercise it.

3) Ask lots of questions. You may feel dumb questioning someone who you think knows so much more than you do, but it is vital that you understand what they are doing to you.

4) Go with your gut. Once again, it may feel odd to contradict someone who has studied medicine, but you know your body and your instincts best, so follow them.

5) If the test results are anything very serious, ask to have the test done again to make sure the results are accurate.

6) Never agree to surgery without getting a 2nd or 3rd medical opinion before you do anything. Mark the appropriate surgery sight yourself with a permanent marker before you go and they look at marking you up.

7) Be your own best advocate for your medical needs. Know exactly what they are going to do to you, why and what to expect after. It might be the thing that saves your life.

8) Never go alone to anything serious such as surgery and make sure the person with you is fully informed as to what you are having done, what it means, what to expect after, and is not afraid to speak up and advocate for you if necessary.

9) As consumers we need to demand their error rate go down and hear back from the medical community as to what they are doing to improve it. If there are errors made by your Doctor or other medical staff that work for the hospital, talk to them about your bill. You should not be paying for errors that end up raising the cost of the medical treatments.

And if there is a mistake, and you decide to start a lawsuit, my lawyer friend says that you are better off hiding the lawyer from view in the beginning since the hospitals erase records when you lawyer up even though that isn't kosher. Have all of the records on disc by asking the right person at the right time.

And, remember the statute of limitations that protects doctors and hospitals in America. In most states it is only one or two years. You have to act fast! Hospital red tape will slow you down. It is a strategy; They hope you wait and wait and wait for over a year so you then lose your chance to file a suit. Fact is, if you want real action, hire an attorney immediately, even if you are not looking for a settlement, but simply want action. Letters rarely get action, but potential legal threats will.

If you are timid, or can't afford a lawyer, you can engage in a letter-writing campaign. It likely won't do much good, but you can try. Write letters to the director of the hospital, to the physician in charge of the doctors at the hospital, and to the guilty parties themselves.

In the first two letters you outline your complaint and request that the hospital head and the physician head write letters to the offending doctor/s with your complaint. In the letter to the offending doctor you tell him/her what you have done and why and you ask them to review what steps they took to identify where they might have erred. Be aggrieved, not overly confrontational; be persistent; get everything either in writing or on disc or both, don't rely on promises made verbally; and make sure you know everyone's names and job descriptions. Your best contact is the doctor overseeing the other doctors because he can become your advocate for better care from the doctors who had erred.

As I review the forgoing before I hit the ‘Post’ button for this blog, I am reminded of my days in the National Ski Patrol System, an unpaid volunteer organization. At one time, before I was appointed the Intermountain Division First Aid Advisor, I was the First Aid Advisor for the Park City Ski Patrol, and had trained all of the patrolmen/women.

One late afternoon on one of the expert slopes, I was cruising down through the powder between the pine trees, as I preferred it to the icy moguls on the main groomed runs. One of the senior patrolmen came to get me to assist with a very bad accident. He reported that a woman had taken a very bad fall and had a compound Femur shaft fracture, with the exposed bone sticking out of her ski pants, and she was bleeding heavily.

“So, why are you here with me, instead of handling it?” I demanded.

He said, “Her husband's a doctor, and he won't let me touch her. He's fiddling around with her, and I think she might bleed to death!”.

I got in a tuck and raced down the hill to the scene. I could see in an instant, that the ‘doctor’ had zero experience in dealing with trauma patients. He hadn't even started treating her for shock. His practice must have been confined to some inner sanctum in a hospital filled with gadgets and gizmos.

I skied up to them and shoved him roughly aside. “Let me deal with this.” I said firmly.

“I’m a DOCTOR!” he screamed, “And that is my wife! I won't have you buffoons even touch her!”

I lost my cool, and grabbed the front of his ski parka in my clenched fist. “On this hill, I AM THE MEDICAL AUTHORITY!” I shouted, “Now GET YOUR ASS OVER TO THE TREELINE!”

My patrolmen escorted him out of the way, and I commenced to start shock treatment, and while the assisting patrolman applied direct pressure to the wound, I applied traction and reduced the fracture. The bone slipped back into her leg, and we applied a fixation traction splint. All the time, her husband was shouting, “I’LL SUE YOU, YOU BASTARD!” We ignored him, loaded her in a toboggan, and took her down the hill.

In short order, she was in the E.R. of the nearest hospital, where they told me that she was almost a gonner due to blood loss. She had arrived in the nick of time. Her husband was in the waiting room. I walked over to him and gave him my card. “Your attorney can contact me at this address,” I said, “In the meantime, you are banned from skiing EVER at Park City. If I see you there again, I will personally kick your sorry ass off of the mountain!”

Of course, I never saw or heard from him again, nor did I get a thank you note……

As Russia and the United States return to the nuclear negotiating table, we need to cross our fingers or pray, as the case may be, that somehow Russia will drop the artificial minimum limit they have set at 1500 warheads. I am pretty sure that the USA would like to take it down to zero, if possible. The reality is that a zero tolerance can only be achieved if all of the other nuclear powers on the planet do likewise.

In thinking about this, I recalled a poster I saw some time ago in my local computer store pitching, ‘Duke Nukem’, a game offered by Take Two Interactive. As I think video games are an idiotic waste of time, I never play them, but the title sure tweaked my curiosity.

A more interesting (to me) variant is an exploration of real world effects of a nuclear blast on your own hometown that is being offered by Google Maps. You can select the weapon used, and then set it off and see what happens. Find it at: Ground Zero

Now, I have blogged in the past that nuclear weapons are as useless as teats on a boar hog. 1st use would invite massive retaliation and there would be no winners. And, as I mentioned, even a ‘regional’ use of nuclear weapons would have a very negative global impact. They represent a sort of military pissing contest and have no strategic or tactical value. Here is the straight skinny on the global effects of regional use: Nuclear effects

I hope the nutcases in Iran, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, and China read this (doubtful), and consider other means to becoming a world military power.

I am not too concerned about the countries that have had these weapons since the 1950s, because they already know the futility and danger of hanging on to them. But, self-preservation requires that they do so until everyone else is convinced of this truism. Unfortunately, the Islamic countries, and some Christian ones as well will be the last to embrace this reality as they need global destruction and the subsequent descent of a Savior or Imam to fulfill their religious prophecies.

As I write this, North Korea has apparently turned their weapons-bearing cargo vessel around rather than risk confrontation, and we can all be grateful, as the USA would likely move to a hair-trigger status had they not done so. It seems to me that the world’s mass media needs to get on the non-proliferation band wagon and write articles and broadcast educational videos about this until we are all sick of it, and thoroughly indoctrinated.

The first thing they should do is to demand that the governments involved in the open air tests, as shown below, release their estimate of the lives lost around the world over time as a result of the testing:



And, it would be a lot more interesting than the Michael Jackson tributes or the latest misadventures of television or movie stars and fashion bimbos.

I read a news release today from UCLA that reported a major advance in our understanding of how memories are formed. According to the report, the researchers used a fluorescent protein that can change from green to red when exposed to ultraviolet light. They flashed the cells with light, so that any proteins that already existed turned red. But when the scientists induced the cells to form memories, they saw new green proteins appear under the microscope.

Interestingly, the new proteins were created on both sides of a given synapse, and the affected synapses were not contiguous, but appeared to form a random pattern in the brain. Unlike a computer, the brain appears to do its thing by manipulating such patterns to form thoughts and perform computations. By distributing the stored patterns across the brain structure in a seemingly random way, nature has provided us with some protection if a specific region of the brain is disabled or damaged. This is absolutely amazing to me, and it made me think about the near-term potential for artificially reprogramming the brain.

This means creating memories of events that never happened, or inducing ‘education’ without the need to study or attend lectures. You become an instant expert in any discipline or art. This is accomplished by injecting RNA that is ‘preconfigured’ to create and fold proteins in a specific sequence that would attach to unassigned synaptic junctions.

I can see a likely new discipline that would be hotly pursued: Conditional Psychophysiology. Think about the ability to rehabilitate criminals through ‘reeducation’, the removal of long-term conditioned reflexes due to emotional trauma, or the more Orwellian aspect of making citizens more accepting of social or political philosophies. I have no doubt that such a ‘medical’ technology will be available within the next twenty years.

Like gunpowder or the atom bomb, this enabling technical advance is fraught with immense promise and immense danger as well. In fact, all aspects of the coming ‘Singularity’ are bipolar in this respect; the greatest danger being the demise of the Human race as it may become supplanted by selfish thinking machines that are more intelligent than we are. Perhaps the ability to ‘flash reprogram’ the Human brain will buy us a little time to deal effectively and fairly with our mechanical progeny.

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories was completed and dedicated recently. Its purpose is to further the development of practical, economical fusion power, but it may also be used for an entirely different experiment, with unintended consequences.

NIF, the world's highest-energy laser system, consists of 192 laser beams that will focus nearly two million joules of energy and create temperatures and pressures that exist in the cores of stars and giant planets. By harnessing the massive power generated by its lasers, NIF will be able to create conditions and conduct a wide range of experiments never before possible on earth.

Before I retired, I served at different times as the Vice President of two of the major laser manufacturers in the United States, and directly managed the development of high-powered scientific argon ion lasers. In the process, I was exposed to the research activities of a number of laser physicists and photonics researchers around the world.

None of them, to my knowledge, were pursuing lines of research connected to a little-known aspect of Einstein's special theory of relativity. The following short video discusses in layman's terms the possibility of using this laser system as a time machine:



Note that ‘information’ can theoretically be passed from the future to the present time with the proper instrumentation on the receiving end. Of course, the question is, will anyone be there to initiate communication? And, what might they communicate?

Well, let's explore these issues briefly.

Because the future appears to be unbounded; that is, it will go on forever, and presuming the ‘Big Crunch’ theory of Cosmology is incorrect, the communication can be initiated from any point in time in the distant future. It will not matter where the Earth is located spatially; the two-way communication is, after all, local in space-time.

The next question is a big one: Will it be Humans or our replacement species doing the communicating? If it is our human descendants, it is likely they will know from their history books that the NIF existed, and that an attempt to listen to the future was made. If it is the little green men from the UFOs, such communication might be by happenstance, and its intelligibility might be an issue for us, or for them for that matter. They would have to choose from a multitude of present era languages and symbolics. It could come in Cuneiform, Kanji, or Hieroglyphics instead of Alphanumeric symbols. Setting these issues aside, what might they communicate?

If it were our human descendants, it could range from dire warnings about present-day activities (or lack thereof) with respect to the environment for example, or it could be instructions about some as yet undiscovered technologies that have great importance for the future of mankind.

If it came from the UFO guys, it should be regarded as highly suspect. After all, they would want to ensure that humans died out, leaving the planet to be inherited by THEM.

Nonetheless, I think it is a worthwhile use of the facility after they get through cooking up a sustainable fusion power system. Who knows what wondrous information that we might receive? It might lead to an exciting new era of peace, plenitude, and growth, exactly as described in their history books.

The Rolling Stones wrote a classic song with the lyric, ‘Gimme Shelter’. They could have been referring to the homeless in America.

In 2007, families constituted around 41 percent of America's homeless. Of the remaining 59 percent, statistics show that between 23 and 40 percent are veterans, and persons with mental illness make up around 25 percent. One study in Los Angeles determined that women constitute 49 percent of America's homeless population. This same study reports that children under the age of 18 represent 39 percent of the overall homeless population.

Homelessness in America is on the rise at an alarming rate, and homelessness has not been given the recognition it deserves on any level, local, state, or federal. Government agencies turn the other cheek regarding solutions to homelessness.

In 2009, it is estimated that 3.5 million Americans are homeless, and 1 million more will be joining their ranks. Sadly, the homeless include displaced senior citizens taxed out of their retirement, homes foreclosed, again from taxation (due to property valuations), and now living out of their cars.

Official government statistics state that the current unemployment rate is 10. 5%, but the actual number is around 18%. Projected economic growth though 2013 is about 2% on an annual basis, so these folks will be without jobs for a very long time. Soon, many more millions will be added to the tent cities in the parks and outskirts of major cities around the country.

What can be done to help them? More FEMA trailers won’t do the job (by the way, these are now being sold for as little as one dollar).

I have an idea that occurred to me in my power place: The bathroom. Like Native Americans, we white men have one. In it, we ponder weighty matters on the toilet. In the shower, we are compelled by some strange force to burst into song, usually a tune from the ‘Sound of Music’. We stare into the mirror above the sink to detect any emerging flaws of appearance or character.

But, I digress.....

I propose we move them all to Florida. It is a temperate and usually benign setting (except for the occasional hurricane). With no need for winter heating oil, it is an ideal location. But, you might ask, how do you propose to provide them with permanent, low-cost, hurricane proof lodging?

Well, here it is:

Researchers at the Kassel University are exploring new synergies of constructions and materials - including a combination of membrane constructions and concrete. To create this lightweight building out of concrete, a flexible skin with an embedded membrane structure is inflated with air and filled up with a special concrete mixture such as UHPC (Ultra High Performance Concrete). Once the substance is hardened a solid concrete skeleton allows the building to be finished from the inside.

Now, to feed them all, we simply turn a lot of swampland into rice paddies.

Speaking of innovative thinking, I am preparing for the remote possibility that I might survive into my late seventies or beyond. Among other things, I foresee a lot of soiled underwear or diapers. Therefore I have on order an amazing new invention for my power center.

Here is a picture of my new combination toilet/washer:

This morning, North Korea announced that they are considering a ‘preemptive first strike' on the United States, and emphasized that it’s O.K. since they have decided to no longer observe the armistice that they signed 50 years ago.

Well, I think they have been over-indulging in some of those meth tabs that they manufacture for the international market, or perhaps some of the opium from their vast fields of poppies.

Why are we not concerned? Because we can take them out without even being there. Sure, our politicos gnash their teeth or wring their hands in despair, but the fact is, our military is primed and waiting for the go order.

If there are any generals in North Korea that aren’t high at the moment, here are a couple of videos for your viewing pleasure:





Now, let’s discuss the Neuton Bomb for a moment:



This little devil in its present incarnation weighs less than 1000 Kg, and has a programmable blast radius. The intense dispersion of radiation eliminates most forms of life in the blast radius. As opposed to other forms of nuclear weapons, neutron bombs are designed to have more radiation, instead of a larger blast radius. So instead of destroying buildings and infrastructure, its use is to wipe out life forms, such as humans, in a particular area.

Your friends, the Chinese, cannot complain too loudly as no radiation or fallout is available to spread beyond your borders or into South Korea. And it has the added advantage of penetrating and flooding deeply buried bunkers with a lethal dose of neutrons and Gamma rays. And how would we deliver them? Well, after viewing the first two videos, you probably get the idea.

Are these weapon systems available today? Are you willing to chance they are not?

Rachel is a heroine in my eyes.

This remarkable woman really has her act together. Now, this is not to say that I don't love my wife, but hey, this lady is something else.

The following video says it all. It reminds me of me and my beloved Mercedes 380SL (a photo of this magnificent machine is in my photo albums). When I bought this marvel of engineering and craftmanship, I opened the owner's manual, and it said, "This is the last car you will ever own". Now, 25 years later, it is still true. As the odometer is just turning over 122,000 miles, the engine is still just being broken in.



The last time I took the Mercedes on a high-speed run to Las Vegas (420 miles away), I made it in four hours flat, and averaged 20 miles to the gallon. It is perhaps the most cost effective purchase I have ever made (it cost $40,000 in 1983). Considering that my investment was returned long ago, I don't mind paying $4.00 per gallon for gas. I defy any planned 'Green electric car' to meet or exceed this kind of performance and payback. Now, like Rachel, I have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, so any potential carjacker will get a big surprise.

Now, on the kitten front, here is an updated photo of the little rascals. My wife and I love every one of them, and may keep a couple instead of finding good homes for them with strangers.


As for the others, perhaps I will gussy them up a bit like the one in the photo below, just to ensure they go quickly:

I have been reading an interesting tome entitled ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ by Jared Diamond, a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA. I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants a clear understanding of how we got to where we are today as a ‘civilization'.

For me, the most interesting part was his efforts to trace the root cause of the rise of our technical civilization. To do this, he journeyed to Papua New Guinea, an island that has been inhabited for over 40,000 years. A native acquaintance that he met there posed the question that is the title of this post. By ‘Cargo’, he meant the goods and technologies that produced them. Dr. Diamond did not have a ready reply, and thus began his globe-hopping search for the answer.

In brief, he determined that it was a geographically fortuitous circumstance. You see, 11,000 years ago, in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, there existed an ecosystem that was unduplicated anywhere else on the planet: protein-rich cereals and 80% of the animals that exist today as domesticated food sources. From this, sprang agriculture, animal husbandry, and village life. All are required precursors to civilization as we know it, and none of the foregoing has ever existed in Papua New Guinea. The same is true for most of Africa, the island ‘continents', and most of North and South America.

I made a post recently that discussed the probability for extra-terrestrial technical civilizations, and I neglected to include this fun fact in my commentary. Not only do you need all of the things I discussed, but you also need a happy accident of geography. Therefore the probability for such civilizations becomes even more minuscule.

The thing that is alarming to me right now is how badly mankind has managed this hospitable oasis (Fertile Crescent) on planet earth. It is now a vast wasteland, devoid of the lakes, rivers, and lush vegetation it once had. And, ‘Nature’ is not to blame. It is solely the result of human overpopulation and gross over-exploitation.

It is a microcosmic history of what is happening today all around the globe as a result of our evolving technical civilization. The Bible and Koran describe all of this with the religious fable of expulsion from the ‘Garden of Eden’.

Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past?

Apparently so. No matter how clever we are in ameliorating the effects of climate change, little is being done to restock the oceans or rehabilitate the land, and our demise as a species will still be certain unless we deal with the issues of overpopulation and local environmental remediation. Sadly, we are technically unprepared to deal with either issue.

Dr. E.O. Wilson (the ‘Ant Man’) from Harvard University has pointed out that we only know of about 1.5 million species out of a possible 100 million on our planet, and that most of those species that are undiscovered are concentrated in only 2% of the regions around the world at present. They were far more widespread in the distant past.

Therefore, any attempt at remediation is like asking a doctor to diagnose and cure some physical problem when he only knows and understands only 10% of the organs in the body.

The continued existence of life as we know it depends on our understanding of the true extent and composition, as well as the underlying interdependency of the life-forms with which we share the planet.

If humanity is to survive, we must immediately turn our war machines into microscopes, and test tubes, and our armies into scientists. We must stop all industrial development that is not focused on the manufacture of machines of remediation, and we must do what we need to do with our excess population and halt its growth in the future.

In Biblical terms, we must return to the Garden of Eden, and do it quickly. We have the means--- all that is lacking is the will to do so. While the resulting society won’t necessarily be at the level of the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, we must learn from them, nonetheless. After all, they have been at it for 40,000 years, and counting.



Now, on a different matter, I have always wondered if women are born this way. Now I know---check out this video I received from my older and wiser cousin: Babytalker

For some, it is a happy Monday. For me, it is time to freak out. You see, I came across a website that is unpublicized, and if it were there would be riots in the streets of America. I am sure our government does not want you to view it on a regular basis. This post will be short and to the point.

Wondering how things are going? Panicked about the coming prospects for our country? Dismayed about the future value of your savings? Are you not buying the glib statements by the politicos about the prospects for inflation?

Well, here is a clear view of all of these matters, with real-time data for your consideration:
U.S. Debt Clock

Here is in interesting commentary fro a columnist at Pravda, the Russian newspaper that is famous for publishing serious reports about demons, ghosts, UFO’s, state-sponsored rants, and outrageous observations about the USA.

This was forwarded to me by my older and wiser cousin. The original article can be found here: Pravda article

04-27-2009 Source: Pravda, Russia
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American
descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against
the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I
meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past
century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds
were conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we
Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our
souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of
the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American
populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims
of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and
substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the
classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the
drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for
their "right" to choke down a McDonald burger or a Burger King burger
than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and
lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blindeth
the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens
of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the
most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists
and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out
their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo
Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when
explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were
ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our
Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His
speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending
and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's
short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another
year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will
resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breathtaking of all. First
came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine
tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts,
losses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our
Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs in
comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the sheer
volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of
appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen
who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in
one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties
and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has
put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president
step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear
reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now
has the power, the self-given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume
other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go
thither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise that the American president has followed
this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of
unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive
industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am
sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it
for the whole of the world, too.

Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair
not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently,
even though we suffered 70 years of this Western-sponsored horror show, we know
nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, and so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools
find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but
a "free man" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democrat-controlled
Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would
give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum
salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give
out pay raises and bonuses?

Senator Barney Frank, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course,
amongst the modern,enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general
West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice,but is often
praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort.
He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies,
but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any
company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look
thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down
and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words,
divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight,
beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is.
The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author.

My response is simply that Americans are notorious for tinkering with things, especially, cars and their government. We make lots of mistakes, but usually fix them quickly. No movement toward Marxism exists in the USA. We are simply trying to adjust to a very serious short-term situation while we figure out what to do for the long term.

I am very encouraged by the extent to which the Russian public values their freedoms and liberty from oppression.

Now, on a lighter note, here is the latest in animal rights activists versus ‘The Machine’.