Monday, January 19, 2009

American Presidents

The earliest president I can remember is Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was born in Denison, Texas as the third of seven sons. He graduated from Westpoint. He had been a real powerful man even before becoming president. A five-star general in the United States Army. During the Second World War, he had served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, so he was regarded as a war hero from WWII.

Even with all the power he was not corrupted. He had very successfully retained his dignity and the feeling of being one of us. A common man. Ike was a very decent man with a plain looking but very decent wife. Here was the most powerful politician in the land warning the American people to beware of the growing strength of the “military industrial complex.” Eisenhower was well liked. My little brother was named after him. He was an honest, hard working guy who had made a success of his life.

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John F. Kennedy was magical. In many ways he was much like Obama. An inspirational figure who wasn’t just out for the rich. Camelot and all of that. He also was a war hero and his wife Jackie (Jacqueline Bouvier) was a genuine beauty queen. Both were from the “upper crust.” JFK’s father had made his money illegally during prohibition, but that was easily forgiven. The fact that he was a Catholic and might have the follow the orders of the Pope in Rome was harder for the American people to accept. They finally did though. Of course this idea was complete hogwash, but the American people didn’t realize it at first.

No one realized that he had some serious issues with abuse of prescription drugs because of his WWII back injury. It also was successfully kept quiet that he was friends with the Mafia, using their help to procure women for him (like Marilyn Monroe) and maybe even getting them to try and assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Here was a guy who cared about things like civil rights. A prince. And people had no idea that the little unrest over in French Indochina would turn into the nation-busting Vietnam War.

JFK was idolized, and when he was killed in Dallas the American people felt sort of like on 911. Maybe the Ruskies did this. Maybe the country is under attack. I remember being sent home from school, and not just because of respect for JFK. It was also very much the idea, if this is the end then the kids need to be at home with their families.

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Lyndon B. Johnson was the vice president when Kennedy was killed, so he automatically became president. He was more successful at getting legislation passed than any president in my lifetime. He talked like a hick, but you can’t have everything.

LBJ got the strongest civil rights legislation passed of any president ever. He tried to solve poverty with the great society program. Overall he would have been well remembered except for one little issue. The Vietnam War.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. It was just various people in the government trying to kiss LBJ’s ass and please him. Sort of like Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq under Bush II.

The biggest and most violent protests in the nation’s history took place because the youth of America wanted the Vietnam War ended. Right now. But LBJ was determined to win. Of course at the end the U.S.A. lost it's ass, and we had to retreat with our tail between our legs.

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Richard Nixon was really smart. But he was a weirdo. No friends. The kind of guy who didn’t ever drive hot rod cars, go out drinking or chase women with bad intentions in mind when he was young. He was a dishonest and crafty crook. A lawyer with no regard for truth and justice, just winning at all costs. I hated him back then and I still do today.

Instead of just allowing him to resign and sending him back to California, the son of a bitch should have been hung. Literally. The impeachment process should have continued, and he should have received the death penalty for treason.

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Gerald Ford was a good guy. Pleasant. Lots of dignity. Honest. An ex-football player who was a bit of a clutz. Fell down snow skiing, etc.

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Jimmy Carter was another guy who had never chased pussy or gotten drunk as a young man. A very devout Christian. He cared about all the right things, but he was incompetent as a leader.

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Ronald Reagan was an actor. He could read his lines well. Not a very bright man, but he had worked hard and was well known and a big success long before becoming president.

He is the one who started this now discredited right wing malarkey of trickle down economics, deregulation, etc. But he made us feel good about ourselves and our country.

I called him Ray Guns back then, but when he turned on that voice he could lead you right off the cliff. A good leader but unfortunately not at all smart. He got dememtia. Lots would say that he sort of already was afflicted when he was president.

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George Bush the First had a real high pitched voice. He talked like some kind of wimpy faggot, but his wife Barbara was a real sweet, grey haired, old fat lady. Bush I had been fairly successful in his own right, having been head of the Republican national committee, Ambassador to the United Nations, and head of the CIA before becoming president.

He was smart, just had no idea at all what normal working class people were going through. He was clearly through-and-through a member of the Eastern Establishment. He was the son of a rich and famous senator.

Papa Bush said to the American people when he was in an arrogant, foul mood one day, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” And then the dishonest dumb-ass implemented new taxes. So he didn’t get elected to a second term.

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William Jefferson Clinton was a lawyer who was married to a lawyer. They had one child. Clinton was raised by a working class single mother in Arkansas, and he later became a Rhodes Scholar. He smoked dope during the Vietnam era and chased lots of pussy. His big problem was that he never grew out of the era of chasing women. Maybe a shrink would say that he was some kind of a sex addict. He even got involved with some horny, fat young intern who worked in the White House.

He was dishonest. Slick Willy. The kind of guy who you would buy a used car from but later would regret it. He abused his power as an elected official to get women and to get rich.

He and Hillary had very good ideas about universal healthcare and civil rights, but they were hopelessly incompetent at getting their ideas implemented. Basically an insecure loser posing as Mr. Big Man On Campus. He managed to avoid doing any military service during the Vietnam war.

The rest of the world loved and still loves Bill Clinton. Americans really understood the guy, and they sort of tolerated him. He certainly was never "respected" or thought of as a leader and role model by the American people.

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George W. Bush tried to get into Law School at the University of Texas but was not accepted. He later graduated from Yale and got an MBA from Harvard. Positive proof that you don't need to be smart or hardworking to graduate from these two Ivy League schools. He got out of serving in Vietnam because his daddy was rich and powerful. He flew fighters in the National Guard (when he showed up for work sober).

He worked out and was in good physical shape. He tried recreational drugs when he was younger, but no longer even drank alcohol. He was a Republican who believed that business should be allowed to make money without any pesky government interference. In other words he embodied many of the most deeply held beliefs of lots of Yuppies.

But George Bush II spoke with the accent of a hick from Midland, Texas. So did his wife, as did their two a little bit wild and probably sluttish daughters. No one wanted to think of the first family as trailer park trash, but it was a nagging thought in the back of everyone’s mind. George Junior was a little rich kid who had a powerful daddy. But he was a loser who had never been successful at much of anything except choosing a famous father. At one time some rich friends of his father arranged for him to own and manage a baseball team. He ran it right into the ground.

Bush didn’t read. Didn’t read books, didn’t read briefing materials.-- Just a total fucking loser. The reason that this wanker was elected for a second term was because the Democrats ran an equally unattractive candidate against him, and also because Bush Jr. just happened to be president on watch when the Muslims knocked down the World Trade Center on 911. He didn’t care one bit about civil rights or the U.S. constitution. He and his vice president Dick Cheney authorized the use of torture. They did it a lot. Cheney seemed to get off on it. The country had a bush and a dick in charge. But not a brain.

Bush the Second got the country into a horrible and completely unnecessary war in Iraq that killed thousands of people and almost bankrupted America. And his economic ideas of deregulation destroyed the country’s financial system and shortly thereafter the real economy too.-- This threw the country into the worst recession/depression since the 1930’s.

Baby Bush is the most disliked and biggest loser of a president since Richard Milhouse Nixon. The entire country is heaving one big collective sigh of relief to see this fuckwad finally leaving Washington. As expected, he chose to move to the city where JFK was killed.

Good riddance you misearable asshole.
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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Circuit City

Bankrupt Circuit City Stores Inc. is going into complete liquidation. Thanks to the collapse of the U.S. economy, which was brought on by grossly excessive deregulation and the policies of the disgraced American President George Bush Jr., Circuit City is having to close all of its 567 U.S. electronics stores. This means that 34,000 employees will lose their jobs. Lots of marriages will break up. People will lose their homes. Children will not have health insurance.

But the self centered Republicans don’t care one bit about these “common” people. They just want for the rich to get even richer. Cynical? Yes a bit. But sadly it is true.

Unintended consequences. Bush and his cronies thought that by letting business get away with murder they would prosper and get even wealthier. But the unintended result of this Republican chicanery was the complete collapse of the American financial system and shortly thereafter the collapse of the real American economy too. And as interconnected as the world is in the 21st century, China, India, Europe, Russia, and even the sheiks in the middle east are now suffering too.

I went in my neighborhood Circuit City store this afternoon. Today was the first day of the liquidation. The store was full, but the prices were lousy. They were giving 10% off on cameras. Even at that price you can buy most items a good bit cheaper through Amazon.com

I guess I have gone into Circuit City 6 or 7 times in the two years since I moved back to America. Every single time I went there, the staff were rude to me. It seemed like I knew more about their products than they did. So frankly I’m not terribly sorry to see them go.

One lesson that American business needs to take forward from this Bush Recession-Depression: The customer is KING. -That means be polite; kiss his ass just a little. Treat him with the same common courtesy that you would expect someone to give to your own Mother. --And be honest with him. Genuine honesty is appreciated even more than common courtesy.
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Wal-Mart and Best Buy better wake up too. Be nice to your customers, because if you are not they really do have lots of other options and other places they can go.
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Thank You For Giving Us Hope Again Mr. Obama


With the inauguration of Obama coming up in two days I thought it would be appropriate to go by the Good Will store on Alameda in El Paso, Texas and take a picture of the mural painted on the building.

It seems like lots of people are suddenly feeling more hopeful. Even some of my cynical, greedy Republicans friends seem to be getting in the mood a little.

President Obama has restored the sense of hope to many people. Thank you Barack!
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Orphaned Roll Of Film

At the flea market this morning I got a good deal on a Pentax F5 camera. This is a 35 mm film SLR which was brought out around 1986. It has TTL metering, has a long zoom lens mounted on it, and the digital displays even still light up. The camera probably works fine.

When I got home I opened it up and found that there was a used roll of film inside of it. This has happened to me before, and I have always just thrown the film away. But today I got a really weird feeling. Sort of a Twilight Zone feeling. I thought, “What if this old roll of film contains someone’s baby pictures?”

So I took the roll of 35 mm film over to Walgreens and had it developed on a one hour basis. I have read that it is a good idea to have one’s film developed as soon as possible after taking the pictures. The film developed pretty good, and sure enough, it did have some baby pictures on it!

One’s mind tries to fill in the story. What were all these young men doing out there in the forest? My mind can write either a sex filled horror story or a novel with a happy ending.

How old is this baby now? Where was this beach? I’m sure it is not Loch Ness in Scotland, but the rocks kind of look the same.

What happened to this guy? Probably he was the father. Maybe he was killed in Iraq.

If anyone knows who these people are, please e-mail me. I will mail the pictures to them the old way via stamps and the post office.
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The World Is Getting Smaller

The world is getting smaller all the time. Instantaneous communication to the other side of the globe is now almost ho hum.
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Late yestereday I removed the old counter from this blog and changed it to one which records what country each visitor is from. Don't ask me how it knows. Cookies? Couldn't say. But I know that when I log onto the BBC from a location in America, it knows that I am not in the UK and it won't allow me to view certain videos!
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One thing is certain. Communication by e-mail is not the least bit private. And it is 100% permanent. No matter how hard you try to delete a message you have sent, once you click the SEND button you may as well have published it in the classified ads of the local newspaper.
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This is what the counter looks like right now. If you scroll down a bit, on the left hand side you will see the latest results. Twenty four hours after installing this counter I see that people in 27 countries around the world have already visited my humble blog.
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I would like to extend a most sincere welcome to all yof ou citizens of the world!! Please come back.

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Extreme Home Makeover - El Paso, Texas

The television show called Extreme Home Makeover on the ABC network in America finds worthy people and either rebuilds their house or starts over completely and makes them a new and really nice place to live.

They are in the process of building a house in El Paso, Texas for a very worthwhile family. The lady of the house has done a great deal of charity work for the orphans in Juarez, Mexico. I haven’t met her, but I certainly have heard and read a lot of good stuff.

So this morning on the way to the flea market I drove by there. There must have been 75 pickup trucks parked nearby, and the police had the streets blocked off so that gawkers like me couldn’t get too close. But the house they have built is visible from a distance. I have no idea when the show will air, but it looks like the house is almost finished.

It is a two story palace. My goodness, this house must have 4,000 square feet of living space. It is absolutely enormous!

I got to thinking about the property taxes on my modest little energy efficient house, as well as the cost of homeowner’s insurance, and the utilities like electricity, water, trash disposal, and natural gas. Without even having a mortgage payment, she will need to earn a pretty good income just to manage to keep that house.

But who knows, maybe there is some independent wealth there or another source of income that is not readily apparent. I hope so, or they have not done her any great favors by building this mansion for her.
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p.s. I was talking with some friends yesterday and they said that these guys tore down an almost perfectly good two story brick house to build this new stucco one. So I guess paying the utilities and property taxes isn't a big problem after all.
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I received the following email on 21 January from a lady who knows the people who had their home redone so I am adding her email to this post:
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Mr Garland

I was reading you review of the Ruiz home in El Paso, Tx. I know the family and I can tell you that their house may have looked fine on the outside, which if you had looked at it close up, it was falling down around them. In fact, the city inspectors said that they would have condemned the house because it Was in such bad shape inside. The Ruiz family had personally built this house with the assistance of their family over 12 years ago. They never finished the inside because they chose to use every bit of their money to help people in need - both in Juarez as well as in Socorro, Tx and the neighbors around her area.

It is so easy for people to speculate without knowing the family - I just wish I was even a fraction of a bit as giving as they have been. I was also a volunteer and spent the entire time working to help give them a house that would give them the tools to continue their ministry.

I just wanted to share this with you. If you would like to talk to me, please email me and I would love to have a further conversation with you.

Frances



LINK: http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/index?pn=index
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Petri 7

Yesterday the UPS guy delivered my brand new, 40 year old 35mm film camera. It was made from 1963 until 1976. The Petri 7 was the very first 35mm camera I ever owned, and I shot a lot of pictures with it. So I was happy that I could buy one on e-bay for just $5.99. I really didn't expect it to work, I just wanted one on display in my camera collection.
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But after examining the camera closely it looked to me like it probably would work fine, so I loaded a roll of 35mm film in it. This is a neat camera for several reasons. It is light weight and has a f/2.8 lens.
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It has electronic metering but the camera doesn't need any battery. It is not a stretch to say that this camera was solar powered. I have read that during the 1960's the Petri 7 was as good as what was being made by Nikon, but at about half the price. I don't know. At the time I certainly couldn't afford a Nikon. But the Petri 7 is a rock solid camera which takes great pictures.
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This camera didn't have true TTL metering; it was "around the lens" metering. It has a place to mount a flash on top, but it is not a HOT shoe. There are no electrical connections. You change the switch on the camera depending upon whether you are using flash bulbs or an electronic flash. And you run a cable from the lens to the flash unit.
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I went over to the park with the dog, and I shot a roll of film right quick. I have to be honest, it didn't take me long at all to realize that I sort of missed automatic focusing and automatic adjustment of aperture and shutter speed. Oh, yes, I also missed having a zoom lens and the camera automatically adjusting light sensitivity (ISO or ASA or DIN).
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And what I missed more than anything was the ability to see the pictures immediately and then edit them on my home computer as soon as I got home. Back when this camera came out in 1963 the concept of having one's own "home computer" was not even a fantasy. It was completely outside the realm of reality. Computers at that time which are much less powerful than my laptop is today (or maybe even my solar powered digital watch or one of my cell phones) took up a full room of space and had dangerously hot vacuum tubes. They were unreliable, required constant maintenance by technicians, used an outrageous amount of enegry, and were not even the least little bit user friendly. You controlled the computers of that day using punch cards and reel-to-reel tape.
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The other thing I missed in using this old film camera was the ability with just a couple of mouse clicks to send the photos instantaneously and completely free of charge at the speed of light to my sister across town, and to my friends in Dallas, Belgium, and Venice, Italy.
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The technology used for communication has made great strides in the last 40 - 50 years. Satellite TVs and cell phones. But has communication really improved? Not much it seems like to me.

I was at the summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany in 1972 the day that the Palestinians killed all the Israeli athletes. Both sides of this conflict really hated each other when I toured the middle east in the 1970's. And it seems to me that this hate has not diminished much if at all over the last 40 years.

The richest 1% in America now control a much larger portion of the country’s wealth than they did forty years ago. The super-rich still feel the same way about working people that the Masters on the plantations felt towards their slaves in the 1800's. A much smaller percentage of working people in America have health insurance today than was true when I was growing up. White Americans still dislike dark skinned immigrants almost as much as they did 40 years ago.

So technology is not always the answer or the solution to the problem. Sometimes it is as simple as sitting down face-to-face, talking politely and honestly, and really getting to know each other.
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After shooting 24 pictures I took the roll of film over to the one-hour processing at Walgreens. When I returned an hour later on my trusty little Honda I got a nice surprise. The pictures came out really great.
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LINK: http://www.photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/index-frameset.html?Petri7s.html~mainFrame-
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Friday, January 16, 2009

President Obama


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---- Good luck Mr. President!

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Michael Dwight Garland


Oct. 8, 1952 - January 17, 1996


Honor Graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso in Electrical Engineering. One really nice guy. It is such a shame that his life ended in his mid-forties.

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You had a lot of people who loved you Mike.

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The Virgin Mary


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In Santiago, Chile some Christians are outraged because an attractive model has dressed up as the Virgin Mary.

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First Off: Anyone who thinks that the mother of the carpenter from Nazareth was a virgin is delusional.

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Second: Would they prefer that his Mom be portrayed as a really ugly chick with warts all over her face, no boobs, and morbidly obese? -- Of course she had boobs. And lets hope for her sake that she was a normal, healthy woman who enjoyed sex. -- Big deal.

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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Airbus Ditches in Hudson River


After apparently striking some birds and losing all thrust in both engines, the pilot, Sully Sullenberger, landed his Airbus airliner full of people and fuel in the Hudson River right in New York City approximately due west of Times Square. It gradually drifted downstream near to where the Twin Towers used to be.

How wonderful people can behave sometimes still amazes me.

This is not April of 1912 when the Titanic sank.-- In the self centered “me first” 21st century, the male passengers on the downed airliner apparently insisted that all the women and children exit first when the rescue boats began to arrive.

After all passengers were rescued the pilot insisted on walking the length of the airplane twice to make absolutely certain that no passengers were still on board.
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---------------------- Well Done To All!
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LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/nyregion/16pilot.html
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Homeless In America

While I was out walking the dog this morning I came upon some homeless people. I guess in the 1930’s you would have called these people hoboes. I remember my grandmother talking about them. They would come up to the door asking to do any kind of work, just for a little food. Just decent people who are down on their luck.

At other times people like this would have been called vagrants or even bums. Maybe in these politically correct times they are supposed to be called “dwelling challenged individuals.”

Maybe these guys are drug addicts, or alcoholics, or military veterans who are all screwed up emotionally and mentally. In any city in America homeless people can be seen.

Frankly it makes me feel a little uncomfortable to see homeless people. I guess that I am a little concerned that they may be sort of crazy and might be a little dangerous or make a scene. And probably down deep I worry a little thinking that but for the good luck I have had in life, that could be me.

In the almost twenty years that I lived in Europe I never once saw a homeless person. I saw plenty of poverty, lots of tenements, and slums galore. But not one person who was so far down that they actually had to live on the streets.

If these people had the chance they would be sleeping in a place with a little more security from teenage punks and racists. Maybe a roof over their heads. And if they could, I have no doubt that they would prefer to have running water, a flush toilet, central heating, a refrigerator, and a stove or maybe a microwave oven.

Sleeping on the streets of El Paso, Texas is not like backpacking in the Swiss Alps or the Gila Wilderness. I have backpacked to both places. Camping out like this in an unbelievably beautiful place for a few nights is great. It is wonderful to sleep under the stars out in the wilderness. But eventually you sure get a strong urge for a shower, a real bed, and a washing machine.

In the other parts of the world America is known as a very hard land where most people are just out to get rich. A place where the average person no longer cares about people who are less well off than they are.

How sad that America has fallen so far.
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Secretary of the Treasury

Congress is deciding whether to let Timothy F. Geithner to serve as Treasury secretary. My guess is he is very smart and a good man.

But he apparently doesn’t pay attention to enough detail. Or his accountant is a crook or incompetent. Or in fact Geithner is a crook. Any of the above is a problem.

If you want to be the Secretary of the Treasury, and you keep year-after-year not properly paying your FICA and other self employment taxes, this just plain looks bad.

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America vs. Europe

When I moved back to America at the end of 2006 I had been living abroad for fifteen years. I came back to the good old U.S.A. almost exactly two years ago.

This was the second time in my life where I had lived in Europe. The first began not long after I got out of college. I had an Honors B.A. degree in political science. The Vietnam War was still raging, and the draft was very much alive. I had been active in the anti-war movement. One time I even marched in an anti-war demonstration carrying some sort of a sign, where I kept walking by General Westmoreland. He was only about 15 feet away from me, and we kept establishing eye contact almost every time I would come around. Of course there were white guys in dark suits, white shirts, dark glasses, and ear buds talking into their finger tips all over the place. Several of them kept taking my picture. I couldn’t help noticing what really fine government-issue Nikon cameras they were using.

I wasn’t prepared to renounce my U.S. citizenship and slink off to Canada or Europe. If I did nothing I would have shortly been drafted, probably sent to Vietnam, and today I very likely would be nothing more than a white cross planted in the ground somewhere. The chances of dying were fairly high if this option was exercised.

At this point in time the U.S. Army was running low on young boys to use as cannon fodder, so their marketing people were coming up with all sorts of innovative ways to get innocent kids to go off to war and at least get mentally scarred for life, perhaps die. One was a program they had whereby instead of being drafted for two years, you could join up for three years. In return for you giving the U.S. Army one extra year of involuntary servitude, they would guarantee you a location where you would serve. So I joined up in late 1971 to be stationed in what was called West Germany at the time. Later the Berlin Wall came down, the east and west were reunited, and this all became simply Germany.

Back to the most recent adventure of living abroad. For 15 years I was the General Manager of the European Division of a multi-national food processing company. An interesting and well paying but high pressure job.

When there are adequate financial savings to be gained, I believe in buying in fairly large quantities. It is like money in the bank. But only of those things which have a long shelf life, and things that you will for sure need in the future. For example toilet paper, tooth paste, coffee beans, shampoo, hand soap, deodorant, laundry detergent, fabric softener, socks and underwear, etc. Over the last two years I have gradually used up most of these routine supplies which I brought with me from Europe.

I still have some of the European laundry detergent left. This morning I finally used up all the European sized office computer printer paper.

In America one normally uses 8-1/2 inch X 11 inch paper. Unless you work for the U.S. Government where they use a special, somewhat smaller size of paper. Of if you are greedy, corrupt, and dishonest (in other words a lawyer) you use paper of the same 8-1/2 inch width but longer (14 inches) which is called Legal size.

In much of the rest of the world, where the metric system is employed, office paper of the A4 size is used. A4 and 8-1/2x11 are pretty similar, but different. If you take a piece of the really large A2 paper and fold it in half, what you get is called size A3. When you fold A3 paper in half you get A4, etc. It is a very logical system.

So this morning I went about changing my standard default printer settings from A4 to Letter sized paper. Of course my European purchased HP printer runs on 220 VAC power, so I have a small transformer powering it.

Over the last two years I have had several friends ask me, “Don’t you miss Europe?”

The 300 kilometer per hour (186 mph) high speed train stopped at a train station a few miles from my house in the south of Holland. So I could get on the first train of the morning around 8:00 a.m., spend the entire day in Paris, France and then return in the evening in time to get a good night’s sleep in my own bed.

I had full coverage health insurance at a very reasonable price. No deductible, no co-pay, everything 100% paid. No waiting to get an appointment, and very competent docs and technicians. The freeways in nearby Germany are constructed to a much higher standard than the interstate highway system in America. The roadbed is twice the thickness, and the specification for the radius of the bends is much more gentle. Thus they are designed for high speed travel. So very often, quite legally, I would set the cruise control on 130 miles per hour. Not KPH, yes MPH. And the BMWs and Porches would absolutely fly past me. The German highway patrol police would sometimes zoom past me too. At 130 mph I needed to stay in the slow lane most of the time.

The European people are far more compassionate than us Americans are. So people who are down on their luck are taken care of. So are old folks. One sees very little hard core poverty. Even the poorest have full health care, a roof over their heads, their kids go to decent schools, and they are not starving.

In Europe they have the Parliamentary form of Democracy. The wishes and needs of the normal people are better represented under this system of government. In America we have the Representative Democracy form of government. Under this system the elected officials primarily represent the interests and needs of their large campaign contributors, rather than what the normal citizens want.

Museums are much more abundant in Europe. If you like to see really old things, like things from the time of the Romans 2,000 years ago, then Europe far surpasses America. If you enjoy viewing paintings and sculpture from people like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Johannes Vermeer, Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro’, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Magritte, or Salvador Dali you can be sure that there are several art museums nearby that you can go visit on a Sunday afternoon where you can see original art by these men.

The politicians in Europe are mostly arrogant and pompous. Just like in America.

Yes, to be perfectly honest a great many things are nicer in Europe. But some things are nicer in America too.

Where I live in the Southwest of America the weather during the winter is much better than in Western Europe. The sunrises and sunsets are glorious here. The taxes are somewhat lower, and the gasoline is much cheaper. So in America even poor folks can afford to drive gigantic pickup trucks and big SUVs. Fast food restaurants are everywhere, so lots of people seem to get a bit overweight. Just a few miles from my house in El Paso, Texas there are vast wide open, undeveloped spaces. It is much easier to get a driver's license or a pilot's license in America. In America you can graduate from High School with a diploma and manage to be almost functionally illiterate.

I am certain that there are many other wonderful and great things about America. The American Dream and all that. If I give it some more thought I’m sure that I will be able to come up with lots of other advantages that America has over Europe. I’ll get back with you on that.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

You Say You Want A Revolution?

Sir Paul McCartney was on the ABC television show called the View this morning. Thank heavens that my niece called me to alert me. I don’t normally watch the View. Barbara Walters makes me want to vomit. On the other hand if Whoopi Goldberg (Caryn Elaine Johnson) had been running against Obama it would have been a real hard call for me. I think Guinen could run for President of the Universe and win easily.

If you didn’t get to see Macca on TV this morning check YouTube because it was wonderful.

I am a real fan of Sir Paul. I guess he is about the only celebrity where I am sort of a groupie. I own two different original signatures of him, one with him signing solo, and the other includes Linda, Denny Lane and all the other members of Wings.

On July 19, 1972, not long after the Beatles had broken up, I rode my bicycle 20 miles (each way) to see him and Linda perform in a small club in Germany. I was new to Germany, didn’t speak the language, and didn’t even know how to ride the trams and buses. And this certainly was many years before GPSes.

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Linda was wonderful and beautiful… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06kohfV1v1I&feature=related

So, you say you want a revolution, huh?

Well, lets give Mr. Obama a chance first. Kind of like "Give Peace A Chance" but now it has changed to "Just Give Barack A Chance."

But if the system totally kicks Obama’s ass and neutralizes him, then certainly I think it will be about time to think about taking some kind of more extreme action. The big problem with revolutions is, many times they begin with ethical leaders and worthwhile goals. But there is no telling what will come out the other end. Sometimes things work out fine, but many times all the power corrupts and you end up with a Dictatorship.

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LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT4MPMjRwIU
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The Hobby of Photography

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I am now old and retired. My day job never was officially a photographer, but this has been one of my more pleasurable avocations for the last half a century.

In the late 1950’s and in grade school I was the nerdy kid who knew how to operate all the movie projectors and how to splice movie film. Before I began high school I was developing my own film at home and printing my own pictures.

In the early 1970’s I took pictures of the ancient ruins at Baalbek, Lebanon the great pyramids of Giza just south of Cairo, Egypt and the Parthenon on Acropolis hill in Athens, Greece.

My first camera was a Kodak, but the first 35mm camera I ever owned was made by Petri. The first SLR with changeable lenses I owned was a Yashica. I still have four old Nikon film SLRs, and I guess a total of about thirty of these old 35mm cameras. Also about five old medium format film cameras. The brands of these old cameras include Petri, Kodak, Pentax, Yashica, Cosina, Nikon, Nikkormat, Canon, Olympus, Argus, Minolta, Vivitar, Ricoh, Bell & Howell, Wollensak, Voigtländer, Ensign, and Mamiya.

After WWII all the German patents for cameras and photography were invalidated and thrown into the public domain. The Japanese took full advantage of this. For the next fifty years they made the entire gamut from the very cheapest cameras to many of the finest quality.

I learned basic computer programming in college in the late 1960’s and got my first computer in the late 70's or early 1980’s. When digital photography first became available to consumers it was interesting, but for anything larger than snapshots it just didn’t have the resolution to compare with film and chemicals.

But by the mid to late 1990’s digital film technology had reached the point where I went fully digital. The advantages were tremendous…instantly being able to review your picture. You could take 100 pictures and throw away 99 to get that good one. To be perfectly honest, I did the exact same thing back in the film era, but it was very wasteful of film, chemicals, and photo paper.

In the early 21st century I occasionally play with medium format film photography, but even for enlargements as big as 20” x 30” I find that my Nikon digital SLRs provide adequate resolution and sharpness.

There are many software programs to edit digital pictures. I happen to prefer Photoshop, but lots of others are just fine. High dynamic range photography is fun to play with too. This is where the computer combines several under and overexposed pictures into one really wild, psychedelic picture.

Over the years I have sold a few professionally framed enlargements, and my pictures have been in few books, on wedding cards, several places in Wikipedia, and most recently in a European travel guide published in Great Britain. But the hobby has never come anywhere near to breaking even or paying for itself. It is kind of like being a professional athlete, artist, musician, scuba diver, or pilot. These are all wonderful and pleasurable pursuits, but only the top one half of one percent of all people can manage to put beans on the table if this is their only day job.

I find it far better to just to pursue the hobby of photography for pure pleasure. To me the greed of trying to make money from it corrupts the beauty and wonder.

It costs a lot of money to have all the finest gadgets and equipment. Kind of like with golf, or owning a horse, or a boat. That is fine. I accept this. I cannot paint or do much of anything else artistic. I am more of a nose-to-the-grindstone, show-up-everyday type of guy. And this is the one area where I can be a little bit creative and artistic. Once in a while I even manage to make something a bit beautiful too. Photography sure is a nice hobby.
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Museo del Prado

Several years ago I visited the Museo del Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. It has about 1,300 paintings on display, making it one of the world’s top art museums. The Prado has the world's finest collection of Spanish painting, with large numbers of the finest works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya.

While not as big or magnificent as the Louvre in Paris, it still is REALLY nice. In fact it is a little more manageable than the Louvre. I have been to the Louvre at least seven or eight times, and I still have only seen a very small part of what is there.

Now thanks to the magic of Google Earth you can see extremely high resolution pictures of some of the paintings in the Prado. I have one of the top digital cameras that Nikon makes, and these pictures in Google Earth are way beyond more than 1,000 times higher resolution.

Go to Google Earth. Fly to coordinates 40.413713,-3.692593 ---- Then enter the museum and be prepared to be blown away.

LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_del_Prado ----- or ----- http://www.museodelprado.es/
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Sunday, January 11, 2009

Drain The Bottom Of Your Water Heater


About twice per year I drain all the calcium and magnesium gunk that collects in the bottom of the hot water heater. What happens is that the fire has to heat through all this stuff, so it takes more energy to heat up the water.


It only takes a few minutes!
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Hyper Inflation

This morning at the flea market there was an old man with a large pile of Mexican coins. He was selling 15 Mexican coins for $1 United States Dollar.

It made me think about the gold standard, currency devaluation, and runaway inflation.

During the Roman Empire the Roman currency kept having to be changed because gradually the leaders were making the coins thinner and even mixing in cheaper metals. The Romans learned well about inflation and how money can be devalued.

The loony dictator Mugabe in Zimbabwe understands hyper inflation, and the Germans certainly learned about it before the war. Wheelbarrow loads of currency needed to buy one loaf of bread, etc.
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I gave the guy one American dollar and counted out 15 of the Mexican coins. It is fascinating to me how one Mexican coin used to be worth $1 (one peso). Then it a bit later it was worth $5, then $20, and later $100, and $200 and so forth. --Greed and living beyond one’s means.

When Bill Clinton ended his presidency America’s economy was in a surplus situation. The Reagan Republicans had run up a terrible deficit, but the fiscally responsible Democrats had finally paid it off.

Now after 8 years of the Republican George Bush incompetency, the county is back in a really disastrous deficit situation. Spending vastly more than we make. Or as it is sometimes called, just running the printing presses day-and-night printing more dollars. Of course nowadays it is done with mouse clicks, but the concept is the same.

I worked to get Obama elected. I think he is smart, ethical, and I agree with his ideas.

Obama’s economic plan employs classical intentional deficit spending as outlined by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. I think this is probably the right thing to do; but we do need to recognize that this is a bit of an experiment. There is a small chance that it won’t work, and that the U.S. Dollar will become as worthless as the Mexican Peso.

This is all thanks to the greed of the Republicans, and their dismantling and refusal to obey financial laws and regulations. They called this “de-regulation” and said that it was a good thing. Their philosophy was to let the rich get away with virtually everything, even not paying hardly any taxes. The Republicans said that these rich jerks would finally make so much money that a little bit of it would eventually trickle down to the middle and working classes. This was complete hogwash. It just legitimized their greed.

No two ways about it, over the long term, both the country and it’s citizens need to start living within their means.
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IN THE NEWS:
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* Zimbabwe releases 15-figure banknote
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The Zimbabwean central bank has announced it is to bring a new banknote into circulation, with a face value of 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars - or 1 followed by 14 zeros. New 10, 20 and 50 trillion dollar notes will be released at the same time. The billion dollar notes introduced last week no longer meet the demand.

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On the black market the new 100 trillion dollar note is worth around 230 euros, but by tomorrow its value is likely to have dropped considerably. Zimbabwe has the world's highest inflation rate. The most recent official figures, from July last year, put inflation at 231 million percent, but experts say the real figure is much higher
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Colored Doggie Poo

My little friend eats mostly Pedigree brand dry and canned dog food. Although at lunch he does get a little super-lean ground beef cooked in the microwave and mixed with some dry dog food.

But occasionally he does get a treat of a little human food. He really likes barbacoa burritos. After going to the flea market on Sunday mornings we many times get some menudo. He likes the tripe. Yesterday we bought some red chile pork tamales. These are among his favorites. So at lunch yesterday we both had the genuine pleasure of eating these red tamales.

I don’t usually pay too much attention to his poo, as long as it is out-of-doors; i.e., not on the nice white woolen carpet that I brought from Europe.

This morning when we were out on our walk in the desert my little buddy had a nice bowel movement. Not too lose or anything, completely normal. Except I happened to notice the coloration of his poo…distinctly orange-reddish.

Exactly the color of the red chile in yesterday’s tamales!
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