I just walked around our house opening blinds – it is 6:40 AM and it is pitch black outside. This time of year we normally subscribe to television, but mainstream fare is too laden with advertising to be palatable, no matter the quality of the programming inserted between the commercials. I do from time-to-time hop around those channels, often hitting five or six channels before finding one not in ad mode. What I see is pretty silly, even stupid.

Sitcoms are so poorly written and acted that they merely highlight the sham of laugh tracks. Unless openly perverse and mocking and having no intent of offering a serious message (Seinfeld in the 90’s, Two and One-Half Men more recently), they are either cheesy soap operas or lurid tales of hyper-sexual twenty-somethings. I haven’t sat through serious drama – I refuse to believe that beautiful men and women become brilliant doctors, police and lawyers, and at young age to boot. Have you been to a hospital? People of physical beauty do not have to work or study hard to succeed.
Continue reading “Deadland” →

If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)

If the strategy of the Pew Charitable Trusts is divide and conquer, it has succeeded. Pew has systematically over the past few decades become one of the most active funding sources for mainstream environmental groups. As a legacy of the Sinclair oil fortune, its activities might represent a guilty collective conscious. More likely, it’s an ongoing effort to neutralize opponents.

This article, by John S. Adams in the Great Falls Tribune, demonstrates divide and conquer success. There are deep divides now among environmentalists in Montana.

The divide is not philosophical, at least on the surface. All parties involved claim to have conservation as their primary goal. However, since the late 1980’s there’s been a split, and this coincides with the dominance of Pew as a primary funding source. The split is best described as “activists” and “collaborators.”
Continue reading ““And we won.”” →

Travel is a good thing. It allows us to experience foreign cultures first-hand. If done without stereotypes interfering with impressions, it can be a rich experience.

On the other hand, being in a country for a short time, experiencing mostly the tourist interface, tempts us to form far-reaching conclusions based on scant evidence.

That in mind, I wanted to share a couple of experiences, not direct interactions, with Chinese people on our Asia trip.
Continue reading “Chinese exceptionalism” →

Give me time please. The mountains are Annapurna and Annapurna South in the Himalayas, which were our backdrop for our recent six day trek. I like that photo because we took it ourselves, however, the foreground is overwritten. I have the ability use others, but not today.

Too much sky – maybe cropping would help. But then too much white? Accountants do not do good web page.

• Truism: A claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device and is the opposite of falsism.
• Falsism: A falsism is a claim that is clearly and self-evidently wrong. A falsism is usually used merely as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device. An example is “pigs can fly.”

“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy. (Former President Jimmy Carter)

Falsism? If so, evidence would include the matter being open for discussion, with raging debate, condemnations, discussions at high levels, and television and radio pundits blowing wind from all directions.

Truism? If so, the matter would be ignored in all mainstream media, and only reported in the foreign country where it was made (Germany), not even in the English-language section of the Spiegel website, which printed the original interview.

Truism.

Part of the problem with Swede coming in here as he does with his link-farts is that various topics of discussion are not explored in a rational manner. Worse yet is that his demonization of all that is non-American causes an equal and opposite reaction. Such is the case with our neighbor to the south, Cuba.

Swede has the American propaganda model firmly in place, that of evil terrorists (Oops! Wrong century) communists and their firing squads as noble Americans try to rescue them. In the face of such blather one must face the reality of Cuba, good and bad on all sides. But in Swede’s mind, any evil on the part of Castro makes his argument a slam-dunk winner.

Back during the time of McKinley and JP Morgan’s stooge Teddy Roosevelt, a Cuban revolution to oust Spain was hijacked by the Americans. A courageous revolution of liberation was diverted to the benefit of a new oppressor.
Continue reading “It all goes back to the Bay of Pigs” →

From Big Swede, a man who apparently stops reading when he is a the point where he can clip and paste:

“Long live the Cuban Revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro… Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist campaign designed to destroy the advances of the Cuban revolution. We too want to control our destiny… There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.”
— Nelson Mandela

He has no idea why Mandela praised the Cuban leadership. I do. Most of my readers do. That’s what separates us.