Lost and Found - That First Cup of Coffee

.

So I got up three times this morning, meaning I went to bed three times as well.  It was a typical sleep with my brain running wild when it was supposed to be resting.  That is a curse I face which I suspect ties in to the Salem Witch Trial curse already inflicted on my ancestors.

Let me explain.  Tests indicate my brain never goes to sleep like it should every night when it is supposed to go into a REM (Rapid Eye Movement) state and recharge your batteries.  Somehow it tricks my body into a REM state and then the wily brain is off to Alice's Wonderland where nothing is as it seems.

So while you might spend the midnight hours safely asleep and restoring your body and mind, my mind is off in the Land of Oz, Wonderland, Camelot, or where ever my fantasy wants to go.  Now who would want to miss a chance like that?

As for the Salem Witch curse, if you check the real records of what transpired in the Salem Witch Trials back in 1692 you will find many, far too many, references to my paternal ancestors.

For a time they were suspected of providing a sanctuary for the witches and wizards from the Puritans and several times they came close to getting caught.  But it was other family members, part of the Church hierarchy, who falsely testified, were part of the trial or part of the clergy condemning the witches.

Thus the sins of the father, mother or whoever most certainly can result in a powerful spell being cast against the accusers, and all future generations of that family, like me, for something that happened 320 years ago.

At least I used it as an excuse for failing to do something, like homework when in school or chores at home.  You need some bizarre family stories to make for a decent genealogy and to be able to mesmerize the kids with your spell.

Now back to getting up.  Here is my routine.  Pour a cold cup of yesterday's coffee.  Check my face in the mirror to make certain some alien walk in did not take place overnight.  Grab the remote control and sample the various cable news shows listening until I'm certain they are still in a mindless babble mode.

Then I ask my brain what I did last night and wait for the download.  My next physical activity, (until this point I only walked down from the bedroom to the kitchen, poured the coffee, and staggered to the front room to remote cruise the cable), is my daily radiation fix.

This is my second concession to modern technology having already subjected myself to the television radiation.  So I wander to the pc and check my emails, the comments and stats on my newspaper, and confirm that I again failed to win the lottery so my routine will continue ad infinitum.

Then I think, I write, I fantasize just so I can check my options, and finally eat lunch.  From that point on all measure of predictability, planning, foresight or productivity can and most likely will be thrown to the winds.

When we were kids my kid brother, one year younger, would get bored and come find me to conjure up our next adventure, we called them "capers"  Finding something to do was never a problem for my mind.  It did not matter if I was alone, with my brother or in group, an endless series of "what to do" possibilities were always waiting on the tip of my tongue.

I think that is missing from a lot of kids in today's world.  The desire for adventure, a thirst for knowledge, a hunger for understanding and a motivation to learn what you don't know and experience what you've never seen.  We should all help them.

Right now kids are trapped into delegating all their knowledge, wisdom, time, maturity and truth to the viral world of the Internet.  Talk about peer pressure.  If you don't have the latest I Phone, I Pad, Smart Phone and Apps then forget it, you are ostracized from society.

Add to that the parental pressure to keep up with technology, network with all those kids in case any of them might be kids of rich people who can help you some day, to finally to compete and do all those other things parents seem obsessed to do with computers.

So the phone can replace your teachers and social media replaces society, it has now become viral.  With the Internet you never need to personally know your best friends.  In fact, with the Internet, you can create any kind of persona for yourself you want, thus insuring you can never interact with people lest you expose who you really are.

Losers can have friends.  The lonely can find lovers.  The dumb can act smart.  And we can all live happily ever after as long as we never expose the person behind the facade.

The Internet has ruptured the fabric of family and societal structure leaving real people dependent on a machine for communication, companionship, knowledge, entertainment and all the creativity in your life.

On a national level we need to Take Back America and on a personal level we need to Take Back Our Kids from the precipice of self-destruction which comes when the mind becomes a useless thing and only follows instructions from the God in the Cloud of Cyber Space.

Save a kid.  Unplug him or her.  Teach them the real life meaning of knowledge, wisdom, caring and love.  Teach them their responsibility to be creative, sing, dance and be happy.  In the process we just might remember our long lost responsibilities as well.

Teach them to think, to be sociable, to be articulate and to be humble and all those other things our technology has not quite mastered yet.  Video games should be an occasional diversion, not a constant obsession.  Life is more than being bombarded with the latest videos, movies and music that somebody else decided you need.

I mean we can still do things for ourselves, can't we?

.

Obamaville, February 7 - President Obama's True Colors?

.

It is only Tuesday and it has already been a weird week in Obamaville.  Maybe it is the weather?  Maybe the fact the Super Bowl is over?  Maybe because today, February 7, is a full moon and the spirits are mischievous?

No matter, with the attention off the Republicans the Obama administration has a strange way of using the available air time.  So far the policies and decisions of the Obama gang the past few days has threatened traditional Democrat bases long taken for granted by the Democrats.

The Roman Catholic Church

First his Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Kathleen Sebelius lowered the boom on the Roman Catholic Church by telling them the federal government now required all Catholic Charities and hospitals to offer free birth control through health insurance (Obamacare) to hundreds of thousands of Catholic employees.

The agency has the noble motto "Our goal is for all Americans to live healthier, more prosperous, and more productive lives."  Notice they say nothing about religion, morality, religious freedom, censorship, or politics.

It is important to note that one out of every six Americans get their health care from the Catholic Church.

Then the Obama Office of the Chief of Chaplains of the U.S. Army forbade Catholic chaplains from reading, in Sunday masses, a letter about a controversial Obamacare mandate from the Catholic Church’s military archbishop. The censorship move, which resulted in the head of Roman Catholic military chaplains calling the Obama administration un-American, sets the stage for a philosophical conflict between Catholic soldiers and their commander-in-chief.

Okay, so now the Obama boys have threatened to drive away the Catholics.

Wall Street and our Super PAC Populist President

Then there is Obama's wavering relationship with Wall Street.  Goldman Sachs led the way in getting Wall Street money to elect Obama in 2008.  In return Obama spent the last three years demonizing Wall Street, corporate America and big business and castigating the Supreme Court for allowing such demons to fund political campaigns.

Today, our trustworthy president who is devoted to his people's agenda reversed himself yet again and decided those demonic Super PACs have found God and can now fund the Obama political campaign.  So he has now gone full cycle, from pro Wall Street in 2008 to anti-Wall  Street in 2009-2012 to pro-Wall Street on February 7, 2012.

I'm not sure how all those liberals that he promised to take on the 1% fat cats will react to him once again embracing the very fat cats he characterized as demons.  This year is so crazy that the Wall Street Occupiers will have to occupy the White House next.

That means the Obama boys have threatened to drive away either the Wall Street fat cats or liberal populists or both.

Latinos and Immigration

The traditional support for the Democrats is also fading away as Obama has failed to bring about immigration reform, has failed to deal with illegal immigration, has failed to move the Dream Act giving illegal kids who attend American schools the right to become citizens, along with broken promises like helping Mexico with the drug war.  Isn't 45,000 innocent Mexican deaths from our drug war about enough?

The Latino population of the United States is expected to exceed 50 million, or roughly 1 in 6 Americans; among U.S. children, Hispanics are now roughly 1 in 4, according to Pew Hispanic Center analysis of U.S. Census Data.

The population numbers released by the Census show the Hispanic population on track to be 900,000 higher than expected as their ranks surpassed census estimates in roughly 40 states. Many of their biggest jumps were in the South, including Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina, where immigrants made large inroads over the last decade.

With over 60% of the 50 million Latino people Roman Catholics, whether they are from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba or South America, this powerful electoral force also is interested in the Obama handling of the church on birth control and abortion.

I guess this was a week the president missed a few bases.
.

Super Bowl or Social Blabfest - You Decide!

.

The day after the Super Bowl is usually dominated by following the MVP to Disneyland and the David Letterman Show followed by a ticker tape parade through the Canyon of Legends in New York City.

This year was a classic battle of strength between gladiators and cunning between rival coaches, both of whom were out of the New York Giants organization and destined for the NFL Hall of Fame.

So what happened?  The Internet social network overwhelmed the Main Street and Lame Street media and drop kicked  the follow up stories about the game through the goal posts. Instead, Face Book and Twitter ruled the next 24 hours and we are still feeling the lingering impact 48 hours later.

What football game Super Bowl Sunday?  According to the Viral Jabbernet the Super Bowl was really the Social Bawl where people, millions of people, trashed about every trivial aspect of the event having nothing to do with anything.

Madonna lip-synching?  Gisele's lips moving?  Clint Eastwood endorsing Barack Obama?

Come on, I'm a Giants fan and watched the game and none of those three dominant game topics of our Internet social network bothered me.  I was interested in the terrific game between great rivals and the uncanny ability of New York teams to win the big ones, even when not the favorite.

Young Madonna

As for Madonna, she fought her way to the top of the pop world and people could always dance to her music.  I thought her show was great entertainment.  Now some of my friends in the music business pointed out some technical problems but they were things I didn't notice. I was focused on the game.

Madonna today

And Gisele, well I had heard about Gisele Bundchen as a model and just vaguely in the far corners of my memory banks I thought I had heard something about Tom Brady and a supermodel but I never put the two together.

I thought her pre-game prayer Tweet thing was kind of refreshing.  Asking her circle of friends to pray for her husband when he was going to go out and be beat up by the best, meanest and strongest linemen in the world seemed a good idea.

So after the game some Giants fans are hassling her, and no one is better than New York and New Jersey Giants fans at heckling, and she shots off a four letter word while defending her husband saying "he can't throw the @#@#ing ball and catch it."

Are you kidding?  She was dead right.  The Patriots receivers dropped four critical passes, including two huge gains on the last drive to try and win.  And how many men in America wouldn't be thrilled to have one of the world's most popular supermodels as their wife and come to their defense after such a stressful game.  What WAS wrong was someone eavesdropping on her private life and recording her private conversation on a cell phone, then posting it on the Internet.

The Internet is a great tool but it is also the greatest assault on the right to privacy in the history of the world.

Finally, we come to one of my favorite movie actors and courageous movie directors, Clint Eastwood.  The Quiet Man in the saddle did a Super Bowl ad for the City of Detroit about how the city was halfway recovered from the recession thanks to the recovery of the Detroit auto industry.

Before the next commercial started the viral airways were filled with Tweets about how Clint Eastwood, a well known and respected Republican supporter and office holder, a mayor, was suddenly backing President Obama.  Of course that was not said in the ad, just in the subconscious minds of the media manipulators.

Today Clint came out and said it was nonsense, he has no intention of supporting President Obama.  And he had every right to support the auto industry recovery and Detroit.  Damn right Dirty Harry!

In the end, maybe the tweeters had it right.  Just look at this Reuters news story after the Super Bowl.

(Reuters) - Quarterback Eli Manning and his New York Giants may have beaten superstar Tom Brady and the New England Patriots at Sunday's Super Bowl, but none them could outmuscle Madonna -- at least, where TV audiences were concerned.

A record 111.3 million U.S. viewers watched the Giants defeat the Patriots in the professional football championship, but 114 million watched the halftime performance by Madonna that drew mostly mixed reviews and a firestorm of controversy over a rude gesture by rapper M.I.A.

Ratings tracker Nielsen on Monday said the Super Bowl on the NBC network was the most-watched TV program in U.S. history, eclipsing the 111.0 million who watched 2011's game. An extra three million tuned in for Madonna's glitzy, Cleopatra-themed performance, giving the Material Girl the distinction of having the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show ever.

.

Madonna's Super Bowl Show

.

I commented on the incredible difficulty of staging a show like Madonna did at the Super Bowl and the pressure of performing before 111 Americans live.  Even watching the show did not allow the time or the close ups nencessary to see the massive scope of the production.

For that reason we are presenting a series of photos highlighting various elements of the production.  It givews you a much better understanding of the process.

In addition, as for the controversy about whether she sang live or lip-synched, perhaps there was a little of both.  For certain there was use of a backing track which can compliment a live performance but it is rather standard in concerts and still allows the lead singing.

In earlier TV intereviews she insisted she would be singing live at the Super Bowl so the backing track would seem to allow that to happen.

No matter what, for a 53 year old to perform for just 13 minutes in a program full of such energy and physical movement, it was quite a production.

.

Health Care in America - "Corruption at the Core of the Collapse

.

The Broken American Health Care System

What is the driving force behind the failure of the most expensive heath care system in the world to provide a better quality of life?  A lot of us have opinions.  So do the media, politicians and academia, but none seem to be addressing the reason behind every failure of an institution like medical care in society.

There comes a point when the institutions no longer serve the purpose they were created to address.  They evolve to a position where they believe the survival of the institution is more important than the mission of the institution.

When that happens, and inevitably it will when all good causes become their own bureaucracy, we have the seeds of corruption planted.

In America we spend about 9.9% of our disposable income on food.  Thirty years ago we spent 15% of our disposable income, meaning we spend over 5% less today on food than thirty years ago.

Now compare that to our experience with health care costs.

An article  was written June 28, 2009 by George Will titled: "Americans Will Regret Health Care Fix".  It described the cost of health care in America as follows.

The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey, writing in The American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed -- 55 percent. But the health care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care -- and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

During the past thirty years health care as a percentage of our gross domestic product has grown by more than ten times.  That does not include your taxes paid for the government expenditures on health care.  The cost now is over $2.6 trillion a year and rising, both in terms of treatment and insurance.

Make no mistake, health care, long a public service through churches, non-profit organizations, government owned facilities and other resources, has now become BIG BUSINESS.

Pharmaceutical corporations led the way into making health care a profit center, not a public service, and now virtually every aspect of our health care system is privately owned, profit centered, and financed by Wall Street.

Wall Street may be reasonably good at financing new businesses like the Internet companies and health care industry but once Wall Street takes control of the industry through controlling the financing, that company serves a new master, Wall Street profitability.

Before you get out your protest banners and decide to occupy hospitals, I mean it is fashionable to protest against anyone we think is ripping off the public, look in the mirror because you are the one embracing a system now under the control of the financial institutions.

My point is this.  Health care is more about serving Wall Street interests than the people's interest.  Of course this is America and we encourage capitalism and these health care capitalists are operating within the framework of the law.  I guess if you owned stock in enough health care companies you would be profiting from the gouging of the American public with excessive health care costs, but most of us don't own health care stocks.

Our health care industry has evolved to the point where moral and financial corruption permeate the entire system, even corrupting those in the industry who really want to help people.

The medical industry is dependent on funneling millions in campaign funds to politicians who have to vote on their funding, in bribing doctors to prescribe drugs, in bribing universities to compete on a cut throat basis for grants from private corporations for survival, and for encouraging doctors to own testing equipment which in turn has to be justified to keep.

Conflicts of interest and ethics issues dominate the health care landscape.  It has become so financially competitive that excessive and unnecessary treatment is the order of the day as a simple and nearly undetectable way to pad the revenue stream.

Why X ray a single tooth if you can X ray the whole mouth?  Why take one or two spinal X rays when you can take multiple X rays of the spine?  Why not set up follow up doctor appointments for reasons of billing for the office visits rather than transmitting test results?

If a drug company pays a doctor to prescribe their drugs, and the more drugs prescribed the more the doctor makes, don't you think more prescriptions will be written?

How can FDA employees fairly evaluate a New Drug Application (NDA) worth potentially billions of dollars in new revenue if the same employees can quit their jobs and go to work for the same drug companies for far more money?

The top five drugs in terms of sales revenue in America all make between $3 and $5 billion a year for the owners, the pharmaceutical company.  If new health research or treatment does not generate profits first and foremost, it is of little value to a profit driven health care system.

If congress or the president eliminated conflicts of interest in the industry, both in terms of the relationship between government workers and the industry and between the industry and practitioners, it would be a great start to cost reduction.

The same conflict of interest exists when doctors are convinced to own expensive equipment like CAT scan and MRI machines, blood laboratories, pharmaceutical offices and others.  If Medicare or a health insurance company allows excessive CAT scans and MRI analysis for the purpose of making sure people are diagnosed and the doctors own the machines, don't you think more screens will be prescribed?

There are a thousand and one ways to get caught in a conflict in an industry that is barely regulated.  Usually there are industry watchdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission assigned to keep an eye on the system.  However, even they are subject to the same conflicts because the SEC failed to see the housing and banking crisis coming.  More than likely they just turned their back to it.

A comprehensive and fair conflict of interest law could be proposed by the president and approved by congress and a thorough ethics law could be adopted by the medical and health care industries and that would start to unscramble the layers of conflicts and ethics violations we face today.

Unfortunately, such leadership by our politicians and health industries is nonexistent and will be as long as the industry finances the political campaigns in Washington and through the nation.  So we also need campaign financial reform, meaningful reform, to fix that inherent problem.

Fix the conflict of interest, draw up enforceable ethics laws, and clean up the campaign finance mess and it will lead directly to reduced health care costs.  Once again, nothing has been proposed by politicians to correct this mess.

Isn't it about time to REALLY start fixing things?

.