Gun lobby ?

Here it is, 2009 and we have a new president and a largely sympathetic congress. This whole new bunch of beurocrats are supposedly progressive and could take on the gun lobby but are afraid to do so citing past defeats of mega-proportions after doing battle with the N.R.A. and the like. Where are the folks that support getting assault rifles, automatic weapons and the like off the streets? Where the hell is the " People who don't want to get shot" Lobby ? There must be literally millions fo folks who would like to live thier lives without the fear of some insane person or criminal spraying them with bullets while they are just walking down the sidewalk. All of these folks saying that they need thier guns for hunting need not fear, they can keep hunting rifles , handguns, reloading equipment, whatever. None of these hunters need an AK-47, Uzi or any of these murder-specific firearms. Having such weapons in a neighborhood is pretty much saying to your neighbors : " I don't trust you, I don't want to trust you and I would just as soon gun your ass down before I give up my 20-shot clips". It's pretty obvious what happens when you get a totally unregulated supply of automatic firearms to a community.......you get Mexico, Richmond, Tons of places in the Moiddle East.....too many to name. A stance on keeping these assault weapons legal is undefensable and downright inhuman.

Seen on the road leaving St. Patrick's day parade

The irony of this obviously hand-made tailgate sticker is that this truck was just leaving the scene of a huge drunken party that lined the street in the town of Montauk, Long Island during a St. Patrick's day parade. Everyone there was stumbling around with a large beer in hand, either looking for more beer or possibly a place to puke. This guy figured that he would beat the rush and get in his big-ass truck and hit the road. Needless to say, he didn't beat the rush and we were suck behind him in traffic for at least a half an hour reading his proclamation : " My 2 Son's are in Iraq so yours can party" . Bad grammar aside, the notion of his two sons in harms way to preserve the party lives of others dosen't speak well of this particular fathers grasp of what is really the reason, or reasons his sons are sadly stuck fighting in Iraq. Here's a few of the reasons we came up with while we were suck behind him. # 1, your sons are in Iraq so that you can keep filling the tank of your giant gas-guzzling v-8 behemoth.#2, your sons are in Iraq because you didn't save for their education, you spent the money on yourself and your stupid truck.#3, Your sons are in Iraq to fill the pockets of some of the people just down the road from Montauk. # 4, your sons are in Iraq to get the fuck away from you and your bad grammar. #5, Your sons are in Iraq because the weather in New York sucks. And finally # 6, your sons are in Iraq so that you can party, then drive home drunk in your big-ass truck .

Blame it on the poor....

I get so tired of hearing right-wing pundits and even some friends say to the effect that the current economic downturn was caused by people at the bottom defaulting on home loans. This is absolutley rediculous to assert that now or in any time in civilized history that the poor have had control of any economic turbulence. The poor are hurt more by this current situation in the economy so why is it that right-wing pundits and well-to-do types assert that this is a product of the actions of carless lower classes living beyond their means ? Worse yet are the claims that the labor unions are to blame for the whole crisis in healthcare costs.....the heathcare business is just that, a business and the folks that control it are just as greedy as any other folks in any other CEO level position-it's just different that other buisnesses by and large do not effectively kill people who can't afford their products. The root cause of the economic downturn is greed at the highest levels of buisness and government , not the actions of the poor and certainly not the result of labor unions trying to protect thier members from getting the shaft by management, a tradition as old as civilzation itself. Labor unions may suffer from the same beurocratic corruption as government and buisness to some degree but the benefits of the unions far outweighs the problems that a few corrupt union officials might cause. The wages of working people has not kept up with the price of goods but the cut that the top of the food chain gets has increased dramatically, even in companies that are losing money and asking the government for aid in the form of taxpayer-funded bailouts. The greed at the top accounts for the billions lost in the two current wars, the billions lost on the stock market and the billions that we, the working class will have to pay for generations to come. Who got all of this money ? The poor ? -Get real, even the most reactionary facist zealot could go to any poor community across this great country and see that the money didn't go to those communites, the greed didn't help these folks at all.....pretty much the greed of a few folks at the top has ensured that the poor stay poor and that the working folks,the ones fortunate enough to have work at this time will not have much of a chance for advancement and more likely will have a good chance of any savings they may have scraped together get wiped out-wiped out to pay for the greed at the top, the corrupt politician , the bonus for the executives who shafted the workers, the stockholders and eventually, the taxpayers. Our only hope is that this new administraton will consider the outcome of the progression of this modern feudalism and turn it around so that we all do not wind up living in another dark age, especially after so many people have worked so long to get as far as we have to give a chance to the working class and the poor to be able to live a life worth living.

I get it.....sorta

What is the American dream ? What is the nightmare? Maybe it depends where you live. The American dream is just that-a dream that we all have regarding how it will all turn out for us when we are grownups.......house with a picket fence, a perfect marrige, beautiful kids that are destined to change the world and realize our dreams just like we did......or not. What if it turned out that our dreams were fed to us like injections of heroine , making us think that all of our imagination efforts and aspirations were amounting to something, something for ourselves and our immediate community. In the last few years I have begun to think that maybe we all have been junkies on the dream-trip and missed what was really happening.....our efforts and aspirations were not effecting out lives as much as they were used to prop up something that resembles a hunger with no end, a bottomless pit of greed, an ambition that cannot be satisfied. It's not our ambition but we serve it daily just by living like ordinary folk, going shopping, going to work, filling the tank and emptying the garbage. We all feed the beast - I am doing it right now by using the electricity and internet to write this piece. I have been feeding this beast since I was born as were all of my ancestors...it's unavoidable. Right now the death of innocent people around the world is feeding the beast and we have a hand in that , even if we find it unthinkable. The wars, the killing of innocent civilians is the by-product of the appetite of this beast and it would like to have us believe that we can dream and be anything in this life.......anything ? Telling us what we can be is another form of telling us what we need......we need to go to war, we need a flat-sceen t.v. , we need a larger house , we need new everything all the time , we need to not question those that we entrust with our lives...........we need to not feel good about ourselves until we spend , work , pray or do something that we are told we need to do. This really flies in the face of reason- needs are obvious and we need not be told what they are...we need to eat, sleep , have shelter and some community. We need to express ourselves, not some catchphrase or rote nonsense fed to us. We lose sight of this and the result is that we are manipulated into serving the needs of someone else, someone we do not know, someone who cares not at all about us other than what use we can be to the enrichment of an already grotesquely bloated being. Maybe waking from the dream is what we need to do......perhaps this dream is one that was never supposed to come true , it was only there to fool us.

Warren Buffet just took my retirement...kind of.

I guess the fact is that the shit may flow downstream but the money flows the opposite way. Case in point: When I was much younger my grandfather died and left my sister and I some stocks. Being in our twenties much of the money went to paying overdue bills and some really serious partying but we did make a few good choices and even saved some of it. I saved one stock in particular, baltimore gas & electric. I figured that if I sold it I would no doubt be broke so I kept it....and kept it...and kept it, through splits, mergers, recessions and whatever came along. I was confident that this company was a good bunch of folks that had been around since long before I was born and they wanted to continue on long after I'm dead. That formula was good until this year when a certain Lehman brothers went belly up. It turns out that my company had certain financial ties with Lehman and as goes Lehman, so goes the other unfortunates that had ties with them........my company was almost in bankruptcy after all these years. Along comes Warren Buffet......I assume he saw what I saw in the company, a good bunch of folks who want to continue doing what they do for the forseeable future. I'm sure that Mr. Buffet felt that if it weren't for Lehman bro's , this stock would be worth three times what it was currently selling for . This was an opportunity to purchase a company and save it from financial ruin and possibly make a major killing in the process. There was only one sticking point - the shareholders. People like me who wanted to continue owning the stock with the thought that it might some day recover from the current crisis and be worth what it was before Lehman took it down. Maybe folks like myself could also benefit from mr. buffet's investment.........this was not to be the case. With his purchase of the company mr. Buffet ( or his advisors ) decided to make the company private.....this means that all of the shareholders got a check for the current value of the stock, no option to keep the stock and the price was essentially 1/3 of the stock's value as of nine months ago. Want my retirement, mr, Buffet ? Well, now you have it....mine and everyone else that had much or all of their savings with the former Baltimore gas& electric. Yes, there are risks in the stock market and yeas, I did come out with some money instead of none but what angers me is that Lehman bro's downfall was a result of wreckless speculation and human failing, the likes we haven't seen in decades-not only that but the people who are at the root cause of this financial meltdown are probably untouchable by any court of law and have made damn sure that they didn't go broke when the shit went down. The same people who are causing this mess are the ones most likely to financially benefit from it...ironic indeed. And inbetween the worlds of the working stiffs and the corporate crooks there is mr. Buffet , who merely sees an opportunity and takes it. If the money I lost had been money I had personally physically worked for I would be much angrier....but it was money that my grandfather worked physically for and now twenty six years after his death it has been taken. I'm glad he wasn't alive to witness it.

Blinded by the lord

Talking to a friend tonight I got a big whiff of the good word, or at least what some people call it. I don't have anything against whatever makes people feel better about themselves , be it religeon , Thier job, circle of friends or whatever. Everybody needs someone to lean on, right ? Maybe some of us are leaning a little harder than others......maybe a lot harder in some cases. A lot of us have things in our past that we would sooner wish to forget....painful stuff-failings of a most personal nature . It is a common thing for a lot of folks to not just try to forget these painful episodes but to smother them with a declaration of faith. Let the lord into ones life and all the bad stuff is forgiven...not just forgiven, maybe it wasn't really bad at all, just the path that led you to the lord. If my asked my firend :"How did you find the lord ?"he could reply:" Well , I did crack for about 15 years and praise be, he showed up and changed my life ! " I find it kind of odd, I guess-all those years of drugs, staying out all night buying the shit while the wife and kid are at home wondering where the rent money went, not to mention the food money.... then Shabang ! Here comes the lord letting you off the hook and giving you another chance. How the hell did that happen ? Was it the lord or did it finally register that the 'path' was going directly to a grave and a very dismal future for his family....maybe it's better to pretend that a lot of the past is non-existant and that the future is the only thing to look at from now on. The same patterns of anger, abuse and misunderstandings are still there....living on the edge and always being ready for a confrontation with anyone who might bring up the past. Praise the lord and pass the blinders. A painful past cannot be changed but if it is dismissed then it is likely to be repeated . One can pray all they want but the lord cannot save you from yourself.......you have to do that on your own-make the decision to deal with whatever darkness lies inside you . The way I see it is that the 'lord' isn't some guy with a beard up in heaven giving us all another chance , the lord is like a handbook on how to not fuck up. Go by the book and your less likely to kill someone, cheat on your wife , steal some stuff or get mixed up in a number of temptations that could cause your undoing. I think its completely weak for people to say that the positive changes they might have had in their life came about because of some devine intervention......rather than steps that they took themselves after realizing that nobody else would do it for them.

how much dumberer can we get ?

Nice to know that whatever lows we have gone to in regards to our policy makers and leaders, there are always new lows that can be acheived by the rapidly advancing wave of stupidity-speak on the political arena. Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is working the 'common man' angle to tap into Americas working class voting block, a justifiably very disenchanted group. The working and middle classes of the country will no doubt be paying for the excesses of government spending and corporate greed for many years to come. These are not stupid people-they are for the most part educated, skilled, hard working and honest.......utterly the opposite of how Palin is characterizing them with the moniker 'Joe Sixpack". This 'Joe Sixpack' blanket generalized dumbed-down catchphrase pretty much takes working and middle class america and dumps them onto a couch in a living room with no identifying feature other than a sixpack,assumably of some cheap beer from a convenience store . There is no recognition of skills, dedication , resilience or even some sort of identity....only the picture of some guy with some beer, probably looking at a television screen waiting for some sort of pat on the back message from a supposedly understanding political candidate , but in this case the candidate isn't showing any understanding of the plight of the american worker......she is painting a picture of a uniform , static featureless entity listlessly sitting on a couch with no apperant value other than being a consumer of cheap beer . If I follow Palin's logic here, Joe Sixpack will find an ally in the Republican candidates , a true friend that will not raise taxes and help revitalize the working class....the problem is that the Republican party has been pillaging everything the middle and working class have been working for......jobs, savings, education , retirement , medical care ,property....even thier children ( being sent off to war ). If we are to fall for this fairy tale we will indeed all be reduced to Joe Sixpacks, working at Walmart if we are lucky, unisured, eating chemical laden crap and staring at a T.V. screen, wondering what happened to our identity, not to mention dignity.