News Factoids for May & June 2011

"Cats kill about 500 million birds each year in the United States – more than 1,000 times the number killed by power-generating wind turbines."
~~ per New York Times

After President Obama announced the death of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the 'Osama Clock' on this blog's front page was moot (and thus removed). The clock displayed the fact that bin Laden was eliminated 3,513 days (9½ years!) after feckless President George Dubya Bush swore to get bin Laden 'dead or alive'.

In 1961, college students reported studying for an average of 25 hours per week; the average is now 12 to 13 hours per week, with more than a third of the students reporting that nthey spent less than five hours per week studying.
~~ per book by Arun & Roksa

In the first quarter of 2011, the number of 'smart phones' that were sold surpassed for the first time the number of computers sold.
~~ per Time Magazine

On 20 June 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck another blow for fascism and against freedom and liberty in the Dukes v Wal-Mart Stores [2000-2011] case by eliminating class action lawsuits against corporations.

The war in Afghanistan is now the longest in U.S. history and has cost $445 billion (not including debt on money borrowed). 1,400 American soldiers have been killed, and 10,000 were wounded.
~~ per Center For Strategic & International Studies, 3/2011

Got a problem with the mandate for energy-efficient flourescent lightbulbs? First, you can't blame Obama because the bill was signed into law by George Dubya Bush in 2007. Only the 50-watt & 75-watt incandescent bulbs are being phased out, gradually over some years. The law requires manufacturers to produce bulbs that are 25% more efficient than currently, so a switch to halogen incandescent technology is solving that problem. Stockpile incandescents if you want, but there really is no need.

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE

Researchers say that Greenland's ice sheet shrank four times faster between 2004 to 2009 than it did in the five years beginning in 1995.

More than 600 tornadoes were reported in the U.S. in April 2011, the most-active month ever recorded, causing 369 deaths, the worst since 1925.

After the Joplin Tornado on May 22nd, it took the Joplin South Post Office three weeks to clean up and reopen. In two days they received 4,000 change of address forms.

GROCERY DISCOUNTS

Just discovered that the Albertsons grocery chain (at least here in New Mexico) has a new policy giving ten percent discounts to shoppers on certain days: on First Wednesdays the discount is for Seniors, and on First Saturdays the discount is for Veterans (with V.A. etc. ID).

THE ENEMY HAS NOT SURRENDERED

Coal Education Development and Resources foundation, known as CEDAR, offers a video to teachers called "The Greening of Planet Earth", which says that 'our world is deficient in carbon dioxide, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is very beneficial'. Mainstream scientists widely dispute that assertion.

REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY

In June, The Washington Post revealed that at least 30 new G.O.P. congresspeople are carrying more than $50,000 of personal debt, and at least seven freshmen have credit card debt exceeding $15,000. Politico and C.B.S. News confirmed that pseudo-candidate Newt Gingrich owed Tiffany Jewelers at least $300,000 (as of 2007).

JOBS & THE ECONOMY

The United States lost 5 percent of jobs from 2007 to mid-2010.
~~ per Mother Jones Magazine graph 6/2011

"Paul Ryan's ['Path To Prosperity'] plan is both ridiculous and cruel."
~~ Nobel-winner Paul Krugman

"The percentage of two-earner families (in which the husband and wife [were] employed in a given year) doubled from 2007 to 2010."
~~ Louis Uchitelle

"The number of millionaire households rose 14 percent worldwide in 2009 to include 11.2 million people, and China alone saw a spike of 31 percent."
~~ per Boston Consulting Group

Median pay for CEOs of large U.S. corporations rose 27% in 2010, per federal data, while pay increases for all workers in private industry averaged 2.1%

During the critical first 100 days of the Republican-led 112th Congress, they neither proposed nor passed a single job-creation bill.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

WM Essay #95: “How Bankrupt Is America?”

U.S President George Dubya Bush ran up more debt than any other person in the history of Mankind. The Republican National Debt stands today at 25 TRILLION dollars, which is not being discussed anywhere. The hooferaw about the annual U.S. Budget Deficit is a diversion, so that the population of America has no clue that they are Indentured Servants to the fascist Oligarchy.

* *          * *          * *          * *
SOME HISTORY
The U.S. National Debt stood at $1 trillion dollars when Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. That figure included the entire VietNam War.

At the end of the twelve-year Reagan-Bush Era, the National Debt had been quadrupled, to $4 trillion. (The Republicans complain about imaginary ‘tax and spend’ policies while their actual program is to cut taxes and borrow and spend.)

Bill Clinton’s first term saw the National Debt increase slowing down to only 25 percent, and in his second term, he produced a balanced budget AND a budget surplus.

Republicans cannot get around these facts as facts, so they yell and scream about false ‘smokescreen’ issues such as the annual budget and abortion and gay marriage and Social Security.

When Dubya became President the official Republican National Debt stood at $5.7 trillion. The official U.S. National Debt is today $14.8 trillion. So how is the Republican National Debt up to $25 trillion?

Simple.
The Reagan-Bush-Bush team stole all the money from Social Security. They stole $2.7 trillion from the very solvent Social Security fund. The reason the Republicans scream (falsely) that Social Security is bankrupt is because they traded the money for Treasury Bills, which must eventually be paid back. Somebody has to pay that debt, and if the Republicans shut down Social Security, then the Oligarchy won’t owe a dime to the U.S. Treasury.

The September 2008 bailout of quasi-governmental mortgage lenders Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac left the U.S. government holding $5.4 trillion in bogus loans. The Republicans’ solution is of course to blame Barack Obama, who wasn’t even elected to be President yet.

So far that makes a mere $22.9 trillion dollars of Republican National Debt.

The bailout of Wall Street of $700 billion became law in October 2008, and helped Obama get elected. The bailout of the U.S. automobile industry was $1 trillion, mostly between Barack Obama’s election and him being sworn in as President. (The Republicans blame him anyway, and that works because the Sheeple are willfully ignorant.)

That makes $24.6 trillion of Republican National Debt on the day that Barack Obama became President. This does not include consumer debt, real mortgage debt, or various off-the-books debt run up by Dubya, such as the cost to bring troops and equipment back from Iraq and Afghanistan, or the $3 trillion that Bush refused to spend to repair U.S. infrastructure. It also does not include the $3 trillion debt of local and state governments, or the $1 trillion in shortfalls on state & local pension funds.

MEANWHILE
The interest on that $25 trillion Republican National Debt (over-simplified calculation of 4% per year) comes to a minimum of $1 trillion each year, thus $2.5 trillion so far in interest added to the Republican National Debt.

The interest itself is merely extortion money paid to the Oligarchy. Their lobbyists prevent levying the taxes necessary to pay down the Republican National Debt, and we hand the Oligarchy a trillion dollars a year – for nothing in return.

RECAP
President Bush 43 arrived at the White House with $5.7 trillion in National Debt on the books and when he left the White House he handed debt of at least $24.6 trillion to Barack Obama. That increase of $18.9 trillion is indeed the all-time record.

The total of $25 trillion debt can only be paid down from revenue received by the U.S. Treasury. There is no option to default: The American and Chinese and Saudi oligarchs will not permit any such thing. So the U.S. taxpayer is stuck with ‘paying the piper’.

The ultimate solution is Reason-Based Taxation, but that is not yet in force, and in fact is little known. Which leaves the decimated U.S. Middle Class and-or the U.S. Wealthy Class to pay that bill.

* *          * *          * *          * *Or how about making the Republicans pay off all that debt racked up by Dubya?

There are just over 300 million people in the United States - men, women, and children; Working Class, Middle Class, Wealthy Class, and Oligarchs.

Simple division results in a figure of $417,000 per Republican voter, $167,000 per Republican citizen, or $83,000 owed by every man, woman and child in America.

Yup, that includes hospitalized seniors, imprisoned felons, toddlers, illegal aliens, Aryan skinheads, members of Congress, and the fascist Oligarchs – and every Libertarian and Communist and Green and Democrat and Republican voter, and every non-voter, too.

Every single resident of the United States is an Indentured Servant, and the Republican National Debt grows by a trillion dollars each year because the real issue of a bankrupt America is getting no attention by our government, nor by our media, nor by We The People.

Your children and your grandchildren today each owe a minimum of $83,000 as their share of the Republican National Debt. Plus accrued interest until the debt is paid off.

Go ahead, tell your kids and grandkids this fact. And be sure to tell them how your vote for Republican candidates pro-duced this legacy. The hard part is going to be telling them how YOU are going to pay off YOUR $83,000 share.

No idea how? Corporations now pay ten percent of the taxes that they paid during the Fifties economic boom. The net worth of the Oligarchs grew by thirty percent since the Bush Tax Cuts began.

Reason-Based Taxation starts from the premise that since the Wealthy Class (of every country) owns 85 percent of everything, they should pay for 85% of the government’s activity.

The Wealthy Class has all the money, so the People have the right to bill them for the Republican National Debt. Republicans whine, but there is no recourse. If the folks with all the money do not pay the debt, how can the folks with no money pay it?

Oh, yeah: Indentured Servitude! A return to feudalism, with the aristocracy getting all the benefits and the peasants working hard their whole lives with no end in sight, no relief – their children and grandchildren doomed to the same and worse.

We already have rollbacks on the right to unionize, roll-backs on health and safety laws, rollbacks on pollution stan-dards, assaults on Medicare and Social Security and health care and pensions, rollbacks of personal bankruptcy law.

The fascist U.S. Supreme Court is cancelling the Bill of Rights and class action lawsuits – there is no way to stop their Federalist & P.N.A.C. agenda short of impeachment. (Revolution is necessary, violence is wrong!)

And the Republican agents of the Oligarchy have plans to cut the minimum wage in half, and to eliminate the Department of Education, shut down the Environmental Protection Agency – pollution is good? – and defund the Food & Drug Administration - E. Coli for all!

Given that the Republican Party ran up all this debt and avoids any possible solution by shouting about their ‘smoke-screen’ issues, the knee-jerk response is to shout back. Not a bad idea, but not enough either. Congress shouts back and forth, delaying official appointments, fiddling with the budget and cutting funds for the starving poor, for returning veterans, for fire & police & libraries – they have earned the label ‘Do Nothing Congress’.

The Republican Party will not listen, their attention is on campaign funding from the Oligarchs, and their shouting drowns out legitimate and fact-based commentary, while the Oligarchy happily racks up more trillions.

* *          * *          * *          * *
The Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America is running just under fifteen trillion dollars per year. Comparing that figure to the 25 trillion of the Republican National Debt gives the outstanding debt as 165% of G.D.P.

The problem? If you have an annual gross income of $50,000, the equivalent would be unsecured debt of $83,000; if you have annual gross income of $100,000, then your equivalent unsecured debt would be $165,000.

In either case, you will never pay that off from your existing income. You can no longer file for bankruptcy. And neither can the U.S. of A. So the U.S. must bring in revenue from new sources – regardless of the annual budget – and the Oligarchy and the Wealthy Class are the folks who have all the money.

We The People have to wake up. We must Speak Truth To Power. The Class War is perpetual, and to do nothing is to surrender.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

June 2011 Quotations

"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap."
~~ Napolean Bonaparte [1769-1821]

"Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice."
~~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]

"Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It’s about as simple as that."
~~ James L. Brooks

"Sex and television are the opium of the people."
~~ Ross Macdonald [1915-83] in "The Barbarous Coast" [1956 novel]

"It isn't that jazz musicians die young, it's that they get older quicker."
~~ Geoff Dyer

"Men change, but seldom do they."
~~ old saying

"Earth provides for every man's need, but not for every man's greed."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"There is a time for work and a time for love. That leaves no other time."
~~ Coco Chanel [1883-1971]

"Those only are happy who have their mind fixed on some object other than their own happiness."
~~ John Stuart Mill [1806-73]

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."
~~ Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910]

"A Nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a commnon hatred of its neighbors."
~~ Wm. Ralph Inge [1860-1954]

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"A healthy adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
~~ John Updike [1932-2009]

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage doesn't need to be lived again."
~~ Maya Angelou

"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something."
~~ playwright Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]

"Don't judge each day by the harvest [that] you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"Maybe when Obama gets back from Ireland he can chase the snakes out of Washington, DC."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read."
~~ G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy."
~~ broadcast journalist Edward P. Morgan [1910-93]

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."
~~ Stephen W. Hawking

"A house without books is like a room without windows."
~~ Heinrich Mann [1871-1950]

"Never judge a book by its movie."
~~ J.W. Eagan

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"What, O Lord, was the point?"
~~ Anthony Lane

"My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me."
~~ painter Georgia O'Keeffe [1887-1986]

"It is best to act with confidence no matter how little right you have to it."
~~ playwright Lillian Hellman [1905-84]

"The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little."
~~ Thomas Merton [1915-68]

"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment."
~~ Oprah Winfrey

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin."
~~ Ivan Turgenev [1818-83]

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault."
~~ Henry Kissinger

"Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Recipe of The Day: Oatmeal Float

OATMEAL FLOAT
Make a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Drop in a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Eat.

OATMEAL SUNDAE
Make a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Drop in a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Add chocolate syrup. Then eat.

OATMEAL BANANA SPLIT
Make a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Drop in a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Add chocolate syrup and banana pieces and whipped cream and a cherry. Then eat.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

WM Essay #94: Wal-Mart Bad, Local Businesses Good

Radio entertainer and author Garrison Keillor said awhile back that "Wal-Mart kills small towns like we used to kill the buffalo", and Wal-Mart has not stopped.

The imminent closing of the Alco store in Belén, New Mexico is directly related to Wal-Mart's policies. The Alco store in nearby Socorro closed just months after the Wal-Mart opened there in 2005.

We can't blame Wal-Mart for everything, though. The three car dealers in Belén disappeared two years ago – Baca Auto shut down, Auge Brothers sold their showroom and service building to the school district, and Tillery moved from Rio Communities to Los Lunas on the I-25.

But empty store fronts do indeed abound in Valencia County, due to the economic policies of Wal-Mart and the Bush administration. Family-owned businesses teeter as county residents patronize the enemy – to the detriment of their friends and neighbors. And the local stores that are still open rarely have full parking lots.

Why is Wal-Mart under constant attack or resistence by pro-labor, pro-America, and pro-fair deal folks? Here is a sampling:

•• Wal-Mart imports often-shoddy goods from China, made by slave labor, which intentionally eliminates jobs for American workers.

•• Wal-Mart's policy is to play King Kong and demand special incentives from local governments to build facilities. That all took place in Valencia County before I moved here, but whichever city and county officials gave away our local tax revenues should be ashamed.

•• When opening new stores, Wal-Mart policy is to undercut prices until local businesses collapse, then pull their advertising from the local paper so that it too folds, preventing the people from having access to freedom of opinion. (That likely did not happen here simply because there is no local radio and TV media in Valencia County for Wal-Mart to bully by threatening to cancel their ads.)

•• Wal-Mart's labor policies are notorious, and readers here have no doubt heard tales from their neighbors and family of the workers fired for saying the word 'union' or because they had too many raises. (Wal-Mart practice is to fire longtime loyal employees and replace them with untrained and scared new employees at minimum wage and zero benefits.)

•• One Wal-Mart policy that is seldom understood is that each and every Wal-Mart store sucks money out of the local economy. The recent hoohaw about New Mexico Gov. Martinez and film production incentives pointed to the residual effects of movie dollars spent here, with the usual statistic being that each dollar spent repeats thru the economy 10 to 12 times. Wal-Mart policy is that the local economic effect of store revenue repeats zero times.

Every dollar paid at the counter at every Wal-Mart store on all 365 days of the year is sent by pouch to headquarters in Arkansas. Every day, every store, every dollar. Bills like electric and water and taxes are paid from Arkansas. Payroll checks draw on Arkansas banks. (Readers who have paid Wal-Mart by check can read the bank of deposit on the back of each cancelled check.)

The intention is that all revenue is kept out of the local economy. As local businesses dry up, Wal-Mart expects to rule more and more of the economy.

* *          * *          * *          * *
It is always sad to see a local gas station or clothing store or restaurant close, especially if one knows the owners or employees. But the larger problem is that Wal-Mart is only the locally most visible of the robber baron corporations.

The national economy is likewise being sucked dry. The price of gas for every reader's car has given the oil companies record-breaking profits – extortion without representation.

There is a pile of three trillion dollars in cash (likely invested in gold and eurodollars) sitting in European banks, keeping American wages low and keeping loans tight and keeping taxes unpaid.

One trillion belongs to the insurance industry, another trillion belongs to the pharmaceutical industry, the third trillion belongs to the financial industry (banks and Wall Street hooligans.).

The last such 'tax holiday' was in 2004, when U.S corporations were allowed to pay a mere 5¼% levy (instead of 35%) on $362 billion in repatriated foreign profits. The 80% tax reduction cost U.S. tax payers $70 billion.

These trillions of offshore dollars are being held hostage while lobbyists and the fascist U.S. Chamber of Commerce pressure Congress to reduce taxes paid on cash brought to America by corporations. Their record-breaking unearned wealth is swelling on the backs of labor, and all that ill-gotten gain is not enough.

* *          * *          * *          * *
The invisible managers of the Belén Supercenter Store #1414, the Los Lunas Supercenter Store #3596, and Distribution Center No. 6084670 in Los Lunas may choose to rebut this letter (in the local newspaper), but they had better supply verifiable facts. "We never do that" statements are merely public relations spin in the face of cold, hard facts, which we can expect to be supplied by fellow readers.. (What do you want to bet: The newspaper will recieve a P/R letter from Arkansas with no factual content.)

Meanwhile, the best thing that Valencia County residents - and others across America and across the Planet - can do for the local economy is to boycott Wal-Mart – that is, not set foot in their stores – and buy from local businesses. The dollars can then percolate 10 to 12 times thru the local economy and increase tax revenue and create jobs, all of that.

Wouldn't it be cool if Wal-Mart shut down and Alco and Bealls and all the rest re-opened?

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

May 2011 Quotations

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
~~ Marshall McLuhan [1911-80]

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing."
~~ Bernard Baruch [1870-65]

"The best form of communication – the most powerful – is Action; the second best form of communication is Telling The Truth; the third best form of communication is Listening."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The world is governed by far different personages than what is imagined by those not behind the scenes."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"For every action there is an equal, and opposite, government program."
~~ David Veal

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world – no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government of conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."
~~ Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924]

"Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks."
~~ Henri Bergson [1859-1941]

"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious."
~~ Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly . . . it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
~~ Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
in "Henry VI", Act IV, Scene II: spoken by Dick the Butcher

"Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process, and make him something less than a man."
~~ Arthur Hays Sulzberger [1891-1968], American newspaper publisher

"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
~~ Adolf Hitler [1889-1945], in "Mein Kampf" [1925-26]

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them."
~~ Montesquieu [1689-1755]

"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired."
~~ Jules Renard [1864-1910]

"Whenever there's chaos, there's ambiguity, and where there's ambiguity, there's fear. And fear gets manipulated."
~~ Robert Redford

Napier's Maxim: "When you have a bottle of champagne, you will have something to celebrate."

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
~~ Michelangelo [1475-1564]

"Is there no place safe from the white man?"
~~ Western author Tabor Evans {real name Harry Whittington} [1915–89]

"To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth."
~~ H.P. Lovecraft [1890-1937]

"God must have loved the plain people, he made so many of them."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
~~ Walter Lippmann [1889-1974]

"It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong."
~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-82]

"I am a believer in punctuality, though it makes me very lonely."
~~ Edward Verrall Lucas [1868-1938]

"The free flow of information is the oxygen of democracy."
~~ Walter Isaacson

"The job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time."
~~ David Foster Wallace [1962-2008]

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"To succeed in this world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty."
~~ John Finley

"Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty."
~~ Jacob Bronowski [1908-74]

"The true engines of economic growth [are] human ingenuity and productivity."
~~ economist George Horwich

"Those who say [that] they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it."
~~ T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]

"The worst possible outlook is indifference... Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to be outraged."
~~ Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]

"To create is to resist. To resist is to create."
~~ Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]

"Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."
~~ Nadine Gordimer

"In quantum mechanics, the Universe, at its most elemental level, is random, an idea that tends to upset people."
~~ Rivka Galchen

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but to comprehend those things which ARE there."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

April 2011 Quotations

"You may think [that] your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse, you must still act."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by a decay of its principles."
~~ Montesquieu [1689-1755]

“The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption."
~~ William James [1842-1910]

"Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"The last Christian died on the cross."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Be kind to dumb people."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

“The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.”
~~ William Gilmore Simms [1806-70]

“At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.”
~~ Italian Proverb

“At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

“He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious.”
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
~~ Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]

“An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
~~ Orlando A. Battista [1917-95]

“You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.”
~~ Baron Neil Gordon Kinnock

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.”
~~ Plato [428?-327? B.C.E.]

“The intelligence of the world is a constant. The population is increasing.”
~~ Unknown

“We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”
~~ Vince Lombardi [1913-70]

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”
~~ rock legend Jimi Hendrix [1942-70]

(When asked if fascism could come to America) “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascist.”
~~ Huey Pierce Long, Jr. [1893-1935]

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.”
~~ Georg Lichtenberg [1742-99]

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”
~~ comedian Emo Phillips

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]

“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”
~~ Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara [1909-99]

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”
~~ Abba Eban [1915-2002]

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]

“Fascism: The conservative notion that killing people makes them work harder.”
~~ Anonymous

"[The U.S.A.] is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the über-rich. Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people ... now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined."
~~ filmmaker Michael Moore, March 2011 speech in Madison, Wisconsin

"[Social Security ] is not in crisis at this stage. Leave Social Security alone. We have a lot of other places we can look that is in crisis. But Social Security is not."
~~ U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [Dem=NV] in March 2011

"Give me a woman who loves beer and I'll conquer the world"
~~ Kaiser Wilhelm I [1797-1888]

"Any salaried employee who works more that forty hours per week is anti-labor and a willing victim of corporate greed."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.”
~~ Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.“
~~ John Lennon [1940-80]

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." ~~ economist Douglas Casey

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
~~ Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954], U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1941-54

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for March & April 2011

Part 1 of the long-awaited movie version of Ayn Rand's classic Objectivist novel "Atlas Shrugged" is due in theaters on April 15th. Further details on the Ayn Rand Film Festival at Magic Lantern.
-----------------
WISCONSIN PROTESTS
The outgoing Democratic governor of Wisconsin left a $100+ million budget surplus for fiscal 2011; the new G.O.P. governor used the G.O.P.-controlled legislature to hand over $180 million to the Wealthy Class in three bills in his first month in office -- sound familiar? Then Gov. Walker reported that the $137 million budget shortfall was caused by greedy union members, and refused to enter contract talks with public sector unions, even cancelling the Memo of Agreement that allowed state employees to continue working without a contract.

The G.O.P. legislature forwarded a bill ending state employee pension funding to the State Senate. After 30,000 or more worker and citizen protesters (plus many supporters from out of state) massed in the state capitol of Madison, the Democratic members of the state Senate went into hiding, eliminating the quorum needed to vote on the new anti-union bill. Gov. Wanker has two obvious options: call out the National Guard or concede defeat.

Wisconsin does not allow recall elections until an official has been in office for a year; Gov. Wanker will be recalled next year, but meanwhile, the election for Supreme Court went Democratic, the turnout April 4th set records, and the signatures accrue steadily for the 4 to 8 recalls of legislators (only 3 seats need be turned Democratic to return to constitutional rule).
-----------------
'WE ARE ONE' PROTESTS
As a reaction to the idiocy in Wisconsin and Ohio and elsewhere, a new movement has appeared, the 'We Are One' Movement, whose website is the oddly-spelled www.we-R-1.org. The group was formed to honor Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, in which he used the phrase 'we are one' to generate support for the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis, Tennessee; but he was assassinated the next day, on 4 April 1968.

On 4 April 2011, the We Are One organization generated 1,000 rallies held across America in support of all unions (especially beleaguered public unions). The timing is handy: The 2012 election will begin soon enough and We Are One is poised to hold their second annual national rally day amidst caucus fever on 4 April 2012. It will be rather like participating in Earth Day Two, decades ago.
-----------------
ECONOMIC ISSUES

2010 third-quarter U.S. corporate profits of $1.6 trillion represented the biggest one-year jump in history.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, construction of new homes {'housing starts') in February 2011 dropped by 22.5 percent from January; the statistic was also down 20.8 percent from the same period a year prior.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and it spends more money on lobbying than the next five biggest lobbyists combined. == per eco-activist Bill McKibben, March 2011

The all-time high average U.S. gasoline pump price of $4.11 per gallon occured in July 2008; in April 2011, the average U.S. pump price has risen to 3.71 per gallon - for no actual reason and with no end in sight.
-----------------
Home Depot has changed their policy on the veteran's/military discount: Now the 10% discount on everything at checkout is given only to active duty folks (with ID) and to veteran's with a V.A. card that shows 'service connected'.

Some Congresses deserve their very own name, such as the 80th 'Do Nothing' Congress of 1947-48. The present idiocy of the 112th Congress, with Republican Speaker John Boehner drunk at the helm, should be called the 'Bonehead' Congress.
-----------------
I am about to celebrate six years living here in rural New Mexico. I am proud to say that I never signed up for trash pickup here, and have recycled 95 percent of all my trash, by driving it to the yard behind Los Lunas City Hall, or even the 40 miles up to Albuquerque, whenever I went up for some other reason (movies, Mensa, Landmark). What I am unable to recycle - avocado peels, egg shells, some packaging - is put in a plastic grocery bag and taken to the trash can where I buy gas for the car, which amounts to a bag smaller than my head every week or two.

Six years times 12 months times $50 per month adds up to $3,600 that did not get paid out of pocket to the Big Green corporation. Many of you can do the same, and should. (However, if you live in an incorporated city, this may not be an option, as most cities and towns who provide trash service either bill each resident or fund from tax receipts).

But then I take it even further: I pick up other people's trash & litter, such as beer & soda cans or bottles in parking lots (tossing'em in the back of my car to avoid D.W.I. problems), or armloads of empty plastic water bottles at the gym, and recycle them, too. With the solar array in my back yard paying me money each month, and being 'Negative To The Landfill' as far as trash (I recycle more than my own stuff), my carbon footprint is almost as tiny as Ed Begley Jr.'s.
Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

March 2011 Quotations

"The American government is a rule of the people, by the people, for the bosses."
~~ Austin O'Malley [1858-1932]

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-44]

"Secrecy is the freedom [that] tyrants dream of."
~~ Bill Moyers

"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
~~ A.A. Milne [1882-1956]

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again."
~~ André Gide [1869-1951]

"The marketplace is democratic."
~~ John Perkins

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?"
~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero [106 B.C.E. – 43 B.C.E.]

"I do not always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Moose Drool." He is ... Annoying Man. His latest exploit? "He goes ballooning ... with his pet bald eagle."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.”
~~ Dennis Prager

"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

“There are two laws of the universe — gravity, and everyone likes Italian food.”
~~ Neil Simon

"Patience is a minor form of despair disguised as a virtue."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Anything [that] you're good at contributes to happiness."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"The great thing about unrequited love is that it's the only kind that exists."
~~ Allison Pearson

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exception."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"[A movie] that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate."
~~ Vincente Minnelli [1903-86]

"In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God."
~~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinquishes man from animals."
~~ William Obler [1849-1919]

"Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying."
~~ William Pitt [1759-1806]

"The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them."
~~ Edgar Allan Poe [1809-49]

"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window."
~~ Burton Rascoe [1892-1957]

"What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art."
~~ Augustus Saint-Gaudens [1848-1907]

"Which is it? Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders."
~~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Man has made his bedlam; let him lie in it."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]

"Do not put off till tomorrow what can be enjoyed today."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"Invention is the mother of necessity."
~~ Samuel Butler [1835-1902]

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
~~ George Jean Nathan [1882-1958]

"A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
~~ Niels Bohr [1882-1965]

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]

"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
~~ President Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"God means us to be free. With divine daring, He gave us the power of choice."
~~ Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

February 2011 Quotations

“The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government ... rise above the interests of one class alone.”
~~ Robert L. Heilbroner [1919-2005]

“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63]

"Darrell Issa is the most evil man I ever met."
~~ Franklin Porath, former business partner

"Nothing gets done in the United States because it's the right thing to do; it gets done because it's the profitable thing to do."
~~ Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter columnist

"The thing that impresses me most about America is the way [that] parents obey their children."
~~ Edward, Duke of Windsor [1894-1972]

"[The NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment] is one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word 'fraud' – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
~~ former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, in 1991

"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it."
~~ Oliver Goldsmith [1728-74]

"When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters."
~~ George Savile, Marquis of Halifax [1633-95]

"Jehovah has always seemed to me the most fascinating character in all fiction."
~~ Oliver Herford [1863-1935]

"If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics of the chips that were left."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"Pretty much all the honest truthtelling there is in the world is done by children."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again."
~~ Jean Renoir [1894-1979]

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"The best you get is an even break."
~~ Franklin P. Adams [1881-1960]

"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."
~~ Alfred Adler [1870-1937]

"An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer."
~~ Fred Allen [1894-1956]

"It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider [that] the real vice is making losses."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Learn all the rules, every one of them, so that you will know how to break them."
~~ Irvin S. Cobb [1896-1944]

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing."
~~ Jean Baptiste Colbert [1619-83]

"Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers."
~~ John Churton Collins [1848-1908]

"All modern men are descended from wormlike creatures, but it shows more on some people."
~~ Will Cuppy [1884-1949]

"Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive and express what we really are."
~~ Don Miguel Ruiz

"He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still."
~~ Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu [IVth Century B.C.E.]

"Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance."
~~ educator William Wirt [1874–1938]

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"Wine is the drink of the gods, milk the drink of babies, tea the drink of women, and water the drink of beasts."
~~ John Stuart Blackie [1809-95]

"God is always on the side which has the best football coach."
~~ Heywood Broun [1888-1939]

"The better part of valor is indiscretion."
~~ Samuel Butler [1835-1902]

"I spent a year in that town, one Sunday."
~~ Warwick Deeping [1877-1950]

"Judge a man not by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes."
~~ British distiller Thomas Robert Dewar [1864-1930]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"All generalizations are dangerous, even this one."
~~ Alexander Dumas, fils [1824-95]

"YouTube ... is a kind of Special Olympics for show-offs."
~~ critic James Wood

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

"Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes."
~~ Robert Maynard Hutchins [1899-1977]

"It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."
~~ Henrik Ibsen [1828-1906]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

News Factoids for January 2011

The White House Oil Spill Commission's final report is released, and includes the statement "Drilling offshore is a privilege to be earned, not a right to be exercised by private corporations."

A new N.O.A.A. report of October 2010 concludes that the existing damage to the Arctic caused by the climate crisis is likely permanent.

"Interest on the official national debt is $571 billion for fiscal 2012, making debt service roughly equal to the base budget for the military."
~~ per Admiral Mike Mullen, in July 2010

"Twenty percent of the world's vertebrate [species] are threatened with extinction, according to a study in the journal Science."
~~ per Time Magazine, October 2010

"According to the N.O.A.A., the first half of 2010 was the warmest January to July on record. And this is just the beginning. Owing to the inertia of the climate system, the warming that we're experiencing now is only a fraction of the temperature increase that's already guaranteed."
~~ reporter Elizabeth Kolbert

Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, big truck unloading Xmas trees to a vacant lot in my tiny town. (It's not even December yet!)

There are 1,011 billionaires in the world and forty percent live in the USA
~~ per Forbes Magazine

Global phytoplankton has dropped 40 percent since 1950.
~~ per Nature Magazine, in July 2010

MESSIN' WITH PEOPLE DEPT.
Put up a sign in your office or cubicle that says "Cliché free zone" and then live up to it. When someone asks 'How was your weekend?' -- Then. Tell. Them.
When someone asks 'What's new?' -- Then. Tell. Them.

Amazon sales in 2009 topped $24.5B (over all products) while 2008 sales at all U.S. bookstores was less than $17B. According to publishing industry statistician Bowker, 2005 saw 172K books published in the U.S.A.; by 2009, that had increased to 288K 'traditional' titles, plus the addition of 'self-published and niche books' for a total of one million new books published in 12 months.

[Carbon diozide] is responsible for roughly three-fourths of the global warming effect [of greenhouse gases] ... Globally, agriculture is responsible for 90 percent of nitrous oxide emissions (296 times more heat-trapping potential than CO²) and two-thirds of methane emissions (with 23 times more heat-trapping potential than CO²)
~~ per Anna Lappé

The amount of arable land in developing countries was one-third of a hectare per capita in 1961, reduced to one-fifth of a hectare in 1992 (35% reduction), and is expected to decline to 1/10th of a hectare by 2050 as population increases (a further 50% reduction)
~~ per a United Nations report in 2010

An annual income of $250,000 puts you in the top THREE percent of U.S. households, and is almost five times the national median wage.

In 2007, the top one percent captured 23 percent of the U.S.'s total income.

The top 0.1 percent of earners saw their share of national income triple between 2002 and 2007, earning as much as the bottom 120 million taxpayers.

Coding movies & books for Amazon most of the day on my various bookstore websites, I have noticed lately that VHS is making a comeback. New & old movies that had the VHS versions go out of production are being remade and sold newly on Amazon. The probable cause is the dire post-Bush economy: shoppers did not trash their video players, and the common VHS prices of $5 to $12 are a great savings over $20-25 for DVD or Blu-ray.

State governments lost 30% of their revenue in 2009.
~~ per The Washington Post

The classic Chinese list of Seven Emotions includes: anger, desire, fear, happiness, hatred, love, and sadness.

Copyright 2011 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

January 2011 Quotations

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
[In regione caecorum rex est luscus.]
~~ Desiderius Erasmus [1466-1536]

"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. But to win it requires total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence, which is man, for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth."
~~ John Galt quote ending last public speech by philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82] in New Orleans, November 1981

"If there’s one piece of economic wisdom [that] I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole."
~~ Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, in January 2011

"Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will."
~~ Goethe [1749-1832]

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries."
~~ Anne Herbert

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"Deregulation [of broadcast media] has made celebrities of the loudest asses in the barn."
~~ Diane Simon

"When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere."
~~ François de La Rochefoucauld [1613-80]

"The name of the game is not Social Security. What an error! Social Security is an entirely different game. The name of the game is Give All."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965], in a speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947

DICTA by G.E. Nordell
• Dream like you're going to live forever.
• Plan like no one can stop you.
• Act like the deadline is today.
• Be very thankful when anything actually works out.

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
~~ Twyla Tharp

"Life is too short to have anything but delusional notions about yourself."
~~ rocker Gene Simmons

"Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers."
~~ Alan King [1927-2004]

"To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all."
~~ Helen Rowland

"Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all."
~~ Jean Genet [1910-86]

"Experience is the teacher of all things."
~~ Julius Caesar [100-44 B.C.E.]

"Speech is of time, silence is of eternity."
~~ Thomas Carlyle [1795-1881]

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63], Inaugural Address on 20 January 1961

"Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance."
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?"
~~ French filmmaker Jean Renoir [1894-1979]

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."
~~ battlefield photographer Robert Capa [1913-54]

"Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains."
~~ bandleader John Philip Sousa [1854-1932]

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?"
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], in 1919

"Death is nothing to someone who knew how to live."
~~ French outlaw Jacques Mesrine [1936-79]

"Information wants to be free."
~~ Stewart Brand, in 1984

"Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders."
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]

"Wit, perhaps, might find many interpretations, but wisdom none."
~~ Samuel Wesley [1662-1735]

"This is business. It's the best game in the world."
~~ John Dickson Carr [1906-77]

"Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]

"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all of the answers."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

“A progressive believes that society can be made better, that it can be made better by informed people acting in concert, and that it can be called 'better' only when it is better for everyone.”
~~ Garret Keizer

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Essay #93: "On The Barricades"

        I was very surprised that I got ultra-depressed after the recent U.S. national elections. The fascists grabbed further control of the structure of government. This year, they basically took My Country away from We The People. A very real bummer.

        The Revolution is never over, the Class War is perpetual. The workers and Middle Class take some ground now and then, usually after some screw-up caused by the incompetent Master Class. Screw-ups such as the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown move the economy backward, reducing the Quality of Life for America, and for the World. The net gain seems never to near the goal line.
        The fascists and tea-baggers and fundamentalists of the Republican Party sold out to the Oligarchy long ago, and act in their behalf against The People. The weenie liberals of the Democratic Party are cowardly and ineffective. The metaphorical ball moves a little this way, then a lot that way – lately, the robber barons of the Oligarchy are winning.
        Neither party has the courage or integrity to take on the Oligarchy. The Republicans are on the side of the Master Class, and the Dems ran a defense strategy in 2010 that lost 6 seats in the Senate and 64 seats in the House.

        Short of a real Third Party alliance against the Oligarchy, there are only masses of uncoordinated ecologicals, progressives, off-the-grid people, constitutionalists and other issue advocates – those FOR well-being, FOR education, FOR peace, FOR justice – floundering around trying to pry any and all benefits from the clawed mitts of The Pirates In Charge. The workers work, the Oligarchs steal, the politicians make it legal.

        While the vile Oligarchy has us being worried about an imaginary conspiracy of outside enemies who are going to take away our freedoms, we fail to notice that our day-to-day freedoms are eroded by each victory of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy wants a return to feudalism and slavery. They rail against progress and safety and well-being and education, and Congress caves in and hands them what they demand, with the fiscal and lifestyle cost always being borne by The People. We worry about the latest diversionary witch-hunt – Commies, Mooslums, immigrants, liberals – while the real enemy buys up pieces of our national commons, by privatizing our national and local governments.
        ‘Privatized’ means that the Oligarchy owns it. They can then charge exorbitant amounts for services and goods that we were getting (just fine, thank you) from unionized government workers.
        No Unions? No problem.
        After privatization, we pay more for less, and the results are either contaminated, or of lesser quality, or both.
        And Congress hands those pieces to them, in return for campaign-financing dollars, which are then deftly paid over to the Oligarchs who own the media.
        And 58 percent of registered voters failed their country in November, and of the 42 percent who did vote, a majority voted to reverse the emergency repairs needed to fix the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown that President Obama inherited from Dubya.

        What we need is a union. We could call it the United Federation of Indentured Servants. (Your grandchildren will be paying off the Republican National Debt, so they get to join, too.) Everyone who is a citizen or a taxpayer or resident of the United States is eligible. Fascists will not want to join; all Republicans and a sizeable portion of Democrats and Independents are likewise opponents of The People. The Oligarchs don’t and won’t care about these concerns – until there is a significant voice interfering with their propaganda and their fiscal raping and pillaging.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Mark Zuckerberg was just named Time Magazine’s “Man of The Year” – at age 24. The articles in Time and the fictional tale in the movie “The Social Network” describe the future that MarkZ is living into. He set up Facebook as a virtual community that will be and is building itself. The current game is to reach a billion members, which is predicted to happen some time in late 2012. Facebook is already nearly twice the size of the U.S. population. And (hee, hee) the Mafia can’t get in, the Oligarchy can only rent ads, the fascists have no way to make a computer system afraid, and MarkZ is already merrily inventing the next stages of society, to be located in cyberspace.

        Facebook is the New Society, just as the American Revolution established the existence of a constitutional democratic republic. There may be skinheads and tea-baggers and anarchists and perverts and numbskulls scattered among Facebook’s membership, but that will sort itself out – small nodes of idiocy, wasting some teeny fraction of cyber resources (like cold germs: always there).
        America is a free country, a free society; so is Facebook, albeit a functional benevolent monarchy.

        As happened on Planet Earth eons ago (or six thousand years according to Biblical retards), the ectoplasm of the internet will form into clumps, then into cells, then into micro-organisms made up of human individuals. The New Society already exists, and it is forming into cyber-entities that eventually will take on a Meaning & Purpose because that is what is needed to win the Class War.
        Where there is oppression, Liberty must light the dark.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        During the Revolutionary Era, only about 25 percent of the population of the Colonies stood behind the Declaration of Independence. About 25 percent fought all change whatsoever – they supported the aristocracy and were known as Tories. The 50 percent in the middle were the sheeple, who tried to stay out of politics – they had farms & crops to tend and stores & businesses to run. (Many sheeple did eventually get involved, once the British started shooting American civilians.)

        That’s pretty much how the Body Politic lines up today – even around the World. The 25 percent on the Progressive end versus the 25 percent on the Regressive end, with the ignorant sheeple in the middle.
        But everyone – left, right; upper, lower; insider, outsider – in the United States has been stuck by the Oligarchy with paying off the Republican National Debt. Every single resident of the United States of America is liable for that debt.

        Reason-Based Taxation solves that problem, but the big roadblock is the political will to solve such a problem, or any of modern civilization’s many current crises. The Oligarchy does not want their raping and pillaging regulated, nor do they admit to any liability for the 25 TRILLION dollars of the Republican National Debt.
        The Oligarchy will quickly realize that Reason-Based Taxation ends their joyride on the backs of honest workers. We must generate, somehow, the political will to institute Reason-Based Taxation, just as Roosevelt’s New Deal was an uphill battle. We also need to stand on the barricades and prevent destruction of plans for energy independence, mitigation of climate changes, peace initiatives, and environmental sanity.

        We need a Third Party whose revolutionary purpose is to regulate the pirates of the Oligarchy and to restore the Constitution of the People and to ‘promote the general Welfare’.

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
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December 2010 Quotations

"Our real enemy is cynicism."
~~ British folksinger-activist Billy Bragg

"If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys."
~~ Chief Dan George [1899-1981]

"Certain things catch your eye, But pursue only those that capture your heart."
~~ old Native American saying

"An artist is a creature driven by demons -- he usually doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Let us hear the voice of reason, singing in the night"
~~ line from song in "Muppet Christmas Carol" [1992]

"Losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good."
~~ baseball manager George 'Sparky' Anderson [1934-2010]

"A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Wonder is our need today, not information."
~~ Elia Kazan [1909-2003]

"With thought, all problems can be resolved."
~~ character Hercule Poirot (as written by Agatha Christie [1890-1976])

"I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."
~~ Kahlil Gibran [1883-1931]

"A revolution is not a dinner party, [it is] an insurrection, an act of violence."
~~ Chairman Mao [1893-1976]

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-1965]

“Goodbye Mr. Zanuck: it certainly has been a pleasure working at 16th Century Fox.”
~~ auteur Jean Renoir [1894-1979] of France

“The person who has never seen movies by Satyajit Ray is like a person who has never seen the moon and the sky."
~~ Akira Kurosawa [1910-98]

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], Labor Day speech, 1903

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945]

"Where there is oppression, Liberty must light the dark."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods."
~~ Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford [1676-1745]

"Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit bottom."
~~ Gen. George S. Patton [1885-1945]

"If you make any film that accurately portrays the world as it is – that portrays people's lives the way [that] they actually are – by definition, that's a political film."
~~ movie director Steven Soderbergh

"Life is a series of adjustments to plans that didn't work out."
~~ mystery author Margaret Coel

"An aristocracy is bad manners organized."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up."
~~ British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard

"Whoever established the high road, and how high it should be, should be fired."
~~ actress Sandra Bullock

"Truth exists, only falshood has to be invented."
~~ Cubist painter Georges Braque [1882-1963]

"A work of art is a thing that requires as much cunning and viciousness as the perpetration of a crime."
~~ painter Edgar Degas [1834-1917]

"Coyote is always out there waiting, and coyote is always hungry."
~~ old Native American saying

"We should always have goals. If you don't have a mountain, build one and then climb it. And after you climb it, build another one; otherwise you start to flatline in your life."
~~ Sylvester Stallone

"An educated person is one who has attained a rational understanding of the pros and cons mof the major problems facing society during his[/her] lifetime."
~~ Walston Chubb, in 1978

"As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"What you see with your eyes shut is what counts."
~~ Sioux shaman Lame Deer [1903?-1976]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

November 2010 Quotations

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than that proportion."
~~ Adam Smith [1723-90], in "The Wealth of Nations", 1776

"For [Adam] Smith, the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the soveriegn state to restore, fair play."
~~ Adam Gopnik, in 2010

"Faith has wings but reason crawls and often in the wrong direction."
~~ Leonard Wibberley [1915-83]

"The definition of a Republican is: Someone who can't enjoy a meal unless they know [that] someone else is starving."
~~ Mary Karr, quoting her father in the great memoir "The Liar's Club" [1995]

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
~~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty."
~~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"What constitutes a freak when nearly the entire culture has become a freak show?"
~~ Charles Taylor

"Politicians should dress like NASCAR drivers so [that] we know who their corporate sponsors are"
~~ bumper sticker

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
~~ Martin Mull

"Unlimited corporate funding of candidates is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy."
~~ Bill Moyers

"There is a time for departure, even when there's no certain place to go."
~~ Tennessee Williams [1911-83]

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
~~ Baruch de Spinoza [1632-77]

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"Doubt is the father of invention."
~~ Galileo [1564-1642]

"i've got my faults, but living in the past isn't one of them. There's no future in it."
~~ baseball manager George 'Sparky' Anderson [1934-2010]

"If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously."
~~ Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"Life is a series of suicides, divorces, promises broken, children smashed, whatever."
~~ John Cassavetes [1929-89], line from movie "Love Streams" [1984]

"The Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves."
~~ David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, on "60 Minutes" in October 2010

"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
~~ Euripedes [circa 480 B.C.E. – 406 B.C.E.]

"The texture of a film is affected very much by the honor with which you make it."
~~ movie director Danny Boyle

"God, there's got to be another way"
~~ The Who band, line from "Who Are You?" song, 1978

"No government is ever perfect. One of the chief virtues of democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic process can be pointed out and corrected."
~~ Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]

"I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play – but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem."
~~ Arthur Miller [1915-2005]

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
~~ Socrates [469-399 B.C.E.]

"Physics is the universe's operating system."
~~ Steven R. Garman

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
~~ old saying, as well as 1990 country-western hit by Aaron Tippin

"I learned a long time ago that reality is much weirder than anyone's imagination."
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
~~ Samuel Butler [1612-80]

"I'm not surprised you're a lawyer. You probably couldn't make a living at much of anything else."
~~ Rex Stout [1886-1975]

"The price of failure is death; the price of success is death. Seek to succeed."
~~ G.E. Nordell, in the {unfinished} book “Warrior Mind”

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

October 2010 Quotations

"You're going to face a choice in November. This is a choice between the policies that got us into this mess in the first place and the policies that got us out of this mess – and what the other side is counting on is people not having a good memory."
~~ President Barack Obama, 8 July 2010

"The Republicans are fear-mongers, when in truth the only thing we really need to fear are the Republicans and their owners, the Oligarchs."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The T.E.A. Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America ... because of the movement's self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault."
~~ Michael Kinsley

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.“
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

“All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences.“
~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]

“Never separate the life you live from the words you speak.”
~~ Sen. Paul Wellstone [1944-2002]

“If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you."
~~ movie auteur Billy Wilder [1906-2002]

"I wish we had been able to obstruct more."
~~ G.O.P. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, August 2010

"The education of our children ... is the most noble thing in the world to do."
~~ Aaron Stern

"They're always flying these flags at half mast. Why don't they just make the flag poles shorter?"
~~ New Mexico state employee in 2010

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem shorter."
~~ character Iago, as written by William Shakespeare [1564-1616]

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
~~ William Arthur Ward [1921–94]

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
~~ Maria Robinson

"Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!" {original: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!"}
~~ from the 1933 German play "Schlageter" written by Hanns Johst (and not uttered by either Hermann Göring or Julius Streicher}

"The policy elite ... are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods."
~~ Paul Krugman. in 2010

"The community should guard the rights of each individual member, and (in return for this protection) each individual should submit to the laws of the community, without which submission of all it is impossible that protection can be extended to any."
~~ William Blackstone [1809–81]

"Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can't be ignored."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"Live your life as a singular, existential work of art, never to be repeated."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"DUM VIVIMUS, VIVAMUS" (While we live, let us live!"
~~ as quoted by Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"[New York is] fun city. If the pollution doesn't get you, the traffic will. If you live thru those two, you're fair game for the street hunters."
~~ Mickey Spillane [1918-2006], in "Survival ... Zero", 1970

"The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my Administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened. By god, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake [that] any government can make."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88], in 1963

"There are no poor politicians."
~~ Mickey Spillane [1918-2006]

"Integrity has no need of rules."
~~ Albert Camus [1913-60]

"All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

“Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.”
~~ Victoria Holt

"I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust."
~~ Geronimo [1829-1909]

"What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one."
~~ Sitting Bull [circa 1831-1890]

"Re-examine all that you have been told. Dismiss that which insults your soul."
~~ Walt Whitman [1819-92]

"Painting taught me to make not beautiful images but necessary ones."
~~ French filmmaker Robert Bresson

"Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness."
~~ French writer Sacha Guitry

"The United States] gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens."
~~ President George Washington,
in a letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790

"Sometimes [writing] comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"In three words I can sum up everything about life: It goes on."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"The art of dining well is no slight art, nor the pleasure slight."
~~ Michel de Montaigne [1533-92]
]
"Be yourself, everyone else is taken."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Progress has little to do with speed and much to do with direction."
~~ old saying

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

August-September 2010 News Factoids

The United States was once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees; the College Board now finds that the U.S. has fallen to 12th place among 36 developed nations.
~~ per New York Times

Hishi {seashell disk} necklaces are back in fashion, after 40 years. But the local kids that are wearing them never heard of the word 'hishi' before.

President Obama was in Albuquerque last week, meeting with Lt. Gov. Diane Denish (the next New Mexico governor!), after which she took him to Barelas Coffee House for posole.

ECONOMIC NEWS
"The 137,698 bankruptcy filings in July represent a 9 percent increase from a year earlier ... Last year, there were 1.4 million consumer bankruptcy filings in the U.S., a 32 percent increase from 2008."
~~ Bloomberg News

In response to a $28 million budget gap for 2010, the City of Colorado Springs in Colorado is turning off as many as one-third of its streetlights.

IMMIGRATION NEWS

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants are down more than 60% since 2005, to 550,000 per year; violent crime in U.S. border counties dropped more than 30% in the past two decades.

CLIMATE & ECOLOGY
In August 2010, "An island of ice 4.4 times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland, potentially threatening shipping lanes and oil platforms."

"The planet just logged the warmest decade, the warmest year, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, may & June on record."
~~ National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, July 2010

"Nine nations recorded their all-time high temperature records in 2010."
~~ National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, July 2010

In 1964, the annual global [fishing] catch totalled around 50 million tons. In the late 1980s, the total world catch peaked at around 85 million tons. [And] for the past two decades, the global catch has been steadily declining.
~~ per New Yorker Magazine

2010 ties global heat record. The Hill: "The first eight months of 2010 tied for the warmest combined global land and ocean surface temperatures since records started in 1880."
~~ per the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

NATIONAL SECURITY
"As many as 854,000 people [in the U.S.] ... hold top secret security clearances. [And] fully a quarter million holders of top secret security clearances are employees not of the government but of private, profit-making businesses."
~~ Hendrick Hertzberg

'THANK A REPUBLICAN' DEPT.
One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

As of June, the number of Americans on food stamps had set a new all-time record for each of 19 consecutive months.

Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many as were receiving it in 2007.

Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending June 30th.

More than 25 percent of all Americans now have a credit score below 599.

One out of every five children in the United States is now living in poverty.

CHANGES AT AMAZON
While spending most of the day coding new material on my websites, especially the five bookstore sites, I have lately noticed that Amazon now has long-out-of-production VHS tapes back in stock as *NEW* product, often for under $5. My only guess to account for this phenomenon is that it has to do with the economy: DVD & Blu-ray prices are too high, and-or the studios are able to make a buck without much overhead by reproducing VHS tapes; the other possibility is demand thru kiosk sales.

Copyright 2010 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved