Month: May 2016

Will It Happen Again?

Just a little FYI for my readers…….

Remember back to 2007…..that was the year that the economy dropped like a rock…..and the housing market lead they way…..and we have been clawing back ever since……lots of lost money and lots of anger by the people of this country.

The president and the Congress worked hard (sorry that is the wrong word but for the sake of sanity I will let it go) to make sure that this type of crash never happens again…..do you believe that? (then I have a bridge I would like to talk about)…..

Here are some other troubling anecdotal signals on the housing market:

1. A major financial website recently ran a guide to the best cities to “flip” houses in. (I don’t want to encourage the behavior.) Real estate speculation via house “flipping” was another early sign of trouble ahead.

2. A few days later, news arrived that home prices in the Bronx had shot up by an astonishing 30% in the first quarter. Crazy advances in home values were, a decade ago, also a signal of trouble ahead.

3. Ads, then as now, were running on TV for “quick mortgages.”

All of these signals raise a serious question: Are we getting closer to another housing meltdown that will once again damage your investment portfolio?

Source: The seeds of the next housing crisis have been planted – MarketWatch – Linkis.com

Here we go again sports fans……

Veterans And The Choice Program

I have been an outspoken critic of the services that this country is withholding from its veterans…..and as usual Congress, especially the conservatives are looking for a “better” way for the vets to get what we owe them….

The Veterans Choice Program?  What is this?

For Veterans who have faced unacceptable waiting times for needed medical care, or for whom a regular VA medical facility is inaccessible, the Veteran Choice Program (VCP) will make it possible for you to receive the needed care from a non-VA health care provider in your community.

The Veterans Choice Card (Choice Card) has been distributed to all Veterans enrolled for care at VA. Veterans will receive a letter in the mail along with the Choice Card and information about eligibility. The cards were mailed first to those VA believes are in immediate need and meet the eligibility requirements. If you have recently moved or your primary residence has changed, complete VA Form 10-10EZR to update your information and contact your enrollment coordinator at your nearest VA medical facility.

The Choice Card will enhance other treatment options already available at VA and is designed to improve wait times and access. It does not impact existing VA health care or any other VA benefit – it just offers other options for care when VA cannot meet Veterans’ health care needs.

There seems to be a bit of a push back against this program by several veterans groups……

The nation’s largest veterans groups have lined up to oppose any expansion of the Veterans Affairs Choice program that would allow all veterans who are eligible for VA medical care to use it.

The stand, by the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and others, places the groups squarely in the corner of VA Secretary Bob McDonald, who has called proposals favoring private care for veterans over VA facilities, a “dereliction” of department duties, and at odds with seven powerful U.S. senators, including Arizona Republican John McCain, who have proposed legislation to lift restrictions on Choice.

Source: Veterans groups oppose Choice program expansion

There seems to be a gimmick when it comes to the health of our veterans….why is that?

I am not very knowledgeable about this program but if there are any vets out there that would like to shred some light on this for the readers of IST……I would appreciate the help understanding.

The Anti-War Origins of Mother’s Day – Truthdig

I am breaking a tradition by posting more than one post on the weekends.

To all my Mothers out there…Happy Mother’s Day!

I am unapologetic anti-war….and there is a precedent with anti-war and Mother’s day……

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe responded to the horrors of the Civil War by issuing her “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling on women around the world to rise up and oppose war in all its forms.

It would be decades before Americans officially began celebrating Mother’s Day, and much of the original spirit of the proclamation has since been lost.

Source: The Anti-War Origins of Mother’s Day – Truthdig

Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On

Here we have hurricanes and we know when they will hit but California has earthquakes and few know for sure when they will pop up and shake the crap out of the state.

There is a small one almost everyday in California and in the past have had some butt busting ‘quakes and many seem to think that a really big one is not far off……

It’s the most well-known US fault, but the San Andreas Fault’s southern section hasn’t been behind a major earthquake since a 7.9-magnitude temblor in 1857—and that’s got Thomas Jordan worried, the Los Angeles Times reports. “The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight,” Jordan, the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, told Wednesday’s National Earthquake Conference. “And the southern San Andreas fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded, and ready to go.” The area (which includes Los Angeles on its periphery) is due for a major quake, Jordan says, adding it’s imperative Southern California continue to prepare, following the example of LA in pushing quake retrofits for buildings, as well as protecting telecommunications and water systems. “An earthquake on the San Andreas would really affect all of Southern California,” said Jordan’s SCEC colleague, Mark Benthien, per CBS Los Angeles.

In tectonics-speak, the San Andreas Fault—which Curbed Los Angeles calls a “ticking … time bomb”—is where the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate meet, and the Pacific Plate is shifting northwest of the North American one at a rate of 16 feet or so every century, ScienceAlert notes. That’s a lot of tension that needs to be released, which would be devastating: A 2008 USGS study found a 7.8-magnitude quake on the San Andreas Fault’s southern portion could cause 1,800 fatalities, 50,000 injuries, and $200 billion in damage. Other parts of the fault have also remained dormant even longer, including in San Bernardino County (no major shakeup since 1812) and near the Salton Sea, more or less steady since the late 1600s. “We are fortunate that seismic activity in California has been relatively low over the past century,” Jordan said last year. “But we know that tectonic forces are continually tightening the springs … making big quakes inevitable.”

Buy some desert land in western Arizona…..for one day it will be beachfront property…

You Are What You Eat

The sun comes up on another weekend….I shall tend to the garden and enjoy some down time for a couple of days…..

Speaking of the garden….the radishes are in and the tomatoes are starting to come in also……yet another tomato sandwich with mayo and a little red onion….yum.  Nothing better than a home grown tomato.

Back in my more youth days I was always trying to be the perfect “bod” to attract the ladies…..I even ventured into vegetarianism…….but that lasted until my first pang for a filet…..never tried the vegan path or the paleo path….both just sounded too trendy for my liking.

Back to the vegetarianism thing……

In case you’ve forgotten the section on the food web from high school biology, here’s a quick refresher

Plants make up the base of every food chain of the food web (also called the food cycle). Plants use available sunlight to convert water from the soil and carbon dioxide from the air into glucose, which gives them the energy they need to live. Unlike plants, animals can’t synthesize their own food. They survive by eating plants or other animals.

Clearly, animals eat plants. What’s not so clear from this picture is that plants also eat animals. They thrive on them, in fact (just Google “fish emulsion”). In my new book, “A Critique of the Moral Defense of Vegetarianism,” I call it the transitivity of eating. And I argue that this means one can’t be a vegetarian.

Source: Why it’s impossible to actually be a vegetarian – Salon.com

Me?  I am a meat eater….my eyes are in the front of my head…..that makes me a predator….period!

“My First 100 Days”

Now that the GOP has it “presumptive” nominee, Donald trump…..he has started trying to sound like a presidential candidate…..he has even given his adoring public his itinerary for his first 100 days…..

With Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee, there’s now a stronger-than-ever chance that President Trump will be sworn in next January—and his first 100 days in office will have just finished by this time next year. The New York Times interviewed Trump three times and spoke to aides and analysts to find out what those 100 days might be like. Some highlights:

  • Inauguration Day will involve some “beautiful” galas, but also the rescinding of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration, Trump says.
  • Trump says on Day 1, he will also speak to military and Homeland Security officials about sealing the border with Mexico. Talks with wall-builders will soon follow.
  • Trump says his first day in office will also involve phone calls to the CEOs of companies like Ford and Nabisco, warning them that they will face 35% tariffs for moving jobs out of the US. “The markets would be fine,” he says.
  • Trump knows which foreign leader he would call on his first day: none of them. “I wouldn’t be calling them up right away and getting more entangled,” he says.
  • Trump and his advisers say the first 100 days will be all about negotiations, most of which will take place in his new office. “The Oval Office would be an amazing place to negotiate,” he says. “It would command immediate respect from the other side, immediate understanding about the nation’s priorities.”
  • By the end of the 100 days, Trump plans to have a ban on Muslim immigration in place and to have made progress in delivering other major campaign promises, including repealing ObamaCare.
  • It’s still going to be the White House, not the Trump House: He “had no ambitious renovation plans,” the Times notes.
  • Trump says he is going to make big changes fast and not everybody will like them—but there’s nothing to worry about. “I know people aren’t sure right now what a President Trump will be like,” he says. “But things will be fine. I’m not running for president to make things unstable for the country.”

And the peasants danced.

Cute slogans and great applause lines….but that is about as far as any of it will go.

Please do not get too excited….you do recall that there is a Congress that does little to nothing and all his “plans” must go through the Congress.

Do you really see much of his “promises” being law in the first 100 days?

Thanx everyone for your attention this past week….now I begin my weekend of solace and meditation…..hopefully you will enjoy yours also.

Charter Schools: The Perfect Con

Since the announcement of the great idea for solving the problem of education in the US, the Charter Schools, I have been telling my readers the news that the media will not tell them about this con job on the American public.

The media has taken it upon itself to use the issue to brain wash the public into accepting the perfect con….originally I called it “education by lotto”……thanx to the media the idea of this con had grown into a major solution for public education….the problem is the MSM only reports on the successes that they can isolate and seldom mentions all the failures and snags in the program.

Charter schools pretend to be public and non-profit while pocketing big bucks and paying no taxes.

Charter schools are big business, even when they are run by “non-profits” that pay no taxes on the revenue they receive from public taxes or other sources.

Take KIPP, which describes itself as a “national network of public schools.”

KIPP (an acronym for the phrase “knowledge is power program”) operates like a franchise with the KIPP Foundation as the franchisor and the individual charters as franchisees that are all separate non-profits that describe themselves as “public schools.”

Source: Big Business Charter School Chains Seek Millions in Taxpayer Dollars With No Accountability | Alternet

So they get a states tax revenue to operate?  But these same states cannot find the cash for public education……now are you not glad you voted GOP?

This is the perfect con on the voters…..propaganda and indoctrination works and works well.

Education is too important to allow it to be a profit making enterprise……the US educational system has been suffering for decades thanx to the idiots that slash budgets in an attempt to make it fail so privatization will be the only answer……but will this solve all the problems with education……like why our math scores suck?

For years now, America’s elementary and middle school students have been showing steady gains in test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This has happened even as the underlying demographics of the public school population have shifted to include a larger mix of poor kids, nonwhites, and kids whose parents don’t speak English.

High school test scores, by contrast, stagnated during the early years of this process. But optimists hoped and assumed that when the higher-scoring elementary school kids got older and moved into the high school population, we would start seeing results. It’s now become clear that’s not happening. On the contrary, even as America’s ninth-graders keep doing better and better, its 12th-graders are doing worse and worse.

Source: The biggest mystery in American education, in one chart – Vox

This is just one problem……but turning it into a corporate enterprise is NOT the answer.

The War on Drugs Failed, So Why Isn’t It Over?

With all the interests in the legalized marijuana trade we need to talk about the War On Drugs……

Could the US use a trillion dollars?  Or how about $15 billion a year?

That is the approximate cost of the war on Drugs a year….$15 billion and over 1 trillion has been wasted over the past 40 years with little evidence that the War is being won.

I have been a verbal critic of this “War” for the last 40 years…In the beginning I said it would be waste of money and resources….and NOTHING that has happened in those years has changed my opinion….I am shown the “busts” over the years and they are substantial…..i the same period the flow into this country has not dried up….with that equation one can only surmise that it is a FAILURE!

What could be the benefit by ending this worthless “War”?

Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard who studies drug policy closely, has suggested that legalizing all illicit drugs would produce net benefits to the United States of some $65 billion a year, mostly by cutting public spending on enforcement as well as through reduced crime and corruption. A study by analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California research organization, suggested that if marijuana were legalized in California and the drug spilled from there to other states, Mexican drug cartels would lose about a fifth of their annual income of some $6.5 billion from illegal exports to the United States.

If there are such benefits then why keep the fight going?

Why are politicians so far behind, even as calls for legalization go mainstream?

At the request of Latin American leaders who have grown weary of bloody battles over drugs, the United Nations held a summit last week on the “world drug problem” at its headquarters in New York City. For a moment, it seemed as if the global war on drugs was beginning to crumble under its own weight.

Before the summit even began, the UN officials were under fire for making concessions to powerful countries with harsh drug control regimes and failing to push the global discourse beyond the decades-old treaties that laid the foundation for international drug prohibition. Hundreds of political leaders and policy groups condemned the summit’s guiding statement for refusing to recognize that decades of prohibition have done more harm than good, fueling mass incarceration, organized crime, infectious diseases and general bloodshed across the world while failing to reduce supply or demand.

Source: The War on Drugs Failed, So Why Isn’t It Over?

I said 40 years ago and I feel the same today…..legalize, tax and be done with the waste…..there are worthy programs that could use an infusion of funds.

Whistleblowing As An Art

Whistle Blowers in our history have been hailed as heroes and traitors…..these people take transparency and the public’s right to know the facts seriously…..

Back in my youthful days the hero was Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon Papers….a report that told the story of our involvement in Vietnam and it was not the “approved” version the government fed to the media.

Then there was Manning who released a bunch of “classified” stuff that told a different version the the accepted one…..

Finally, the latest whistle blower to make the news has bee Edward Snowden……

In this foreword from The Assassination Complex, a new book about drone warfare, the whistleblower explains why leaking information about wrongdoing is a vital act of resistance….

I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much – and to be irrevocably changed – by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency; who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: what begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

Source: Edward Snowden: ‘Governments can reduce our dignity to that of tagged animals’ | US news | The Guardian

Legal or not….I still support people that have the gonads to buck the system and release information that they public needs to know……most of the condemnation comes from people that have no idea of what has been released other than what some high paid pundit tells them….it is usually a different story when they learn that their rights are being violated….then their tune usually changes.

Personally, I do not want to be in the dark about the actions of my government……but that is me.

How America enables its allies’ bad behavior

While I was lecturing I was always having an exchange with this history professor or that…..basically it was always about the US allowing its allies to do extreme things and stand by them when it is proven to be a horrific act….

The worst violators are Israel and Saudi Arabia and the list will grow now that we have the beginnings of a new Cold War…..

Thankfully I have not had that debate in a couple of years and then I read a pretty good article in Vox……

It is satisfying and certainly trendy to complain about America’s allies. President Barack Obama unloaded on them recently in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, calling them “free riders” who rely on the US for security but refuse to pay back. The commentariat has piled on, with a special focus on deteriorating relations with such perennial malcontents as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.

The truth is that our allies behave the way they do because we let them. We provide billions of dollars in military and other aid to countries in order to protect and advance US interests, yet we fail to use this leverage to induce the recipients of this aid to behave in a way that actually advances US interests.

Source: How America enables its allies’ bad behavior – Vox

All in the name of profit……they do not care how or where the weapons are used….only that once used they need to be replaced….and that means more profits….a vicious cycle…that benefits NO one but the M-IC.