The Ubiquitous Flying Blue Blog

2011-10-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Cost of Exceptionalism.

In Chris Matthews’ ad, he talks about American “Exceptionalism” and how one of the primary examples of this is the man sitting in the White House right now, a man of different nationalities, who didn’t have a father growing up or special opportunities handed to him, yet, today, he sits at the pinnacle of power.

Pretty heady stuff!

When I was a kid growing up, I thought everything about America was exceptional. It was exceptional that me a poor kid growing up in Spanish Harlem could spend his afternoons visiting at the governor’s house, that he could get not only a good undergraduate education but a graduate one at that and could go on to run seven different businesses and make all the relevant “Who’s Who” books? What a great country!

I also believed that my good fortune required someone of my ilk to give back and I have tried to do that all my life in all possible ways.

But what Chris Matthews failed to address is that American exceptionalism is undergoing deep-rooted change! People of narrow vision and a meaness of spirit have taken over our government and steered us away from all the things that made us great in the past and pushed us towards balancing the books over greatness. And, sadly, the archetype for this American exceptionalism, president Obama has bought into their view of the world and is not only allowing them to have their way, he has been hard at work finding ways to cut back those areas that contributed to our exceptionalism!

Oddly, that nobody has connected the dots to see that ‘exceptionalism’ that we tout, did not simply fall from the heavens fully formed, but was the product of sacrifice, hard-work and commitment.

It is disappointing that America has listened to their claptrap and not declared it unfitting to a resurgent America; instead, we take it like lap dogs. In fact, it is astounding to me that we are so compliant that we are already sliding down the flag pole into a state of benign mediocrity. And that’s particularly troublesome for me having visited many of America’s cemeteries around the world where people fought and died to protect what we stood for.

How easily we forget!

I think about how dad spent most of his life in VA hospitals after five years on the front lines and wound after wound that sent him to the hospital and then back to the lines, only not to recognize all of his mates because they had been killed; and even after the War when he couldn’t adjust to civilian life, joined the Army air force until he crashed into a lake and spent a year recuperating. He had believed that America was worth the sacrifice.

I think about my own experiences visiting all the America cemeteries through-out the world, from northern Europe to Hawaii. I think about what I knew from my service during the Korean War and Vietnam era and the trips to Washington to see the black granite and weep openly for names I didn’t even know….

And I ask myself how is this happening after the passage of so few years. What we have failed to real;ize is that you have to work for exceptionalism; it is not a free gift.
And our particular brand extends back more than two hundred years to the founding of this great country. And I shed a tear to think that a blind-sided Congress which such little vision could somehow set the tone for an America I can no longer be proud of.

2011-10-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

The People’s Movement Escalates….

First observations:

Today, I watched and listened as they covered the build-up to the protest on Wall Street. And I came away with a few observations . For one, I disagree with most of the critics and especially Obama strategists, who see the election in terms of independents and democrats, and the black and white issue.

The Obama strategists recognize that their hopes rest on the Independents. I agree with that, but I do not feel based on what I’ve seen up ‘til now with the burgeoning protests anything that indicates color as an issue. What in fact I do see is not based on party politics, but issues. And it is to the credit of the planners of the protest that they have left it open ended, because under those conditions “one size fits all.”

As a result, people of every political persuasion and perhaps no persuasion at all are finding a place in this big tent where it seems everyone represents a different perspective, a different point of view that inveighs against the party in power.

Mostly, if we were to generalize the themes that come through have most to do, it seems to me, with politics and business in bed together and the dissonance it produces among the people who make up this country of ours.

What is most moving is the fact that the people are showing far more common sense, far more in common with each other than apart, and that the politicians, per se, don’t come close to representing their interests. And nowhere have I seen the specter of black and white politics introduced.

As a result of this open-ended spectrum that only invites more dissatisfied people into the tent, I don’t think it is a movement likely to fold any time soon….quite to the contrary, it seems like a movement that will continue to grow as long as there is dissatisfaction among the rank and file, and until the parties learn to talk with each other.
For them, the danger is that this kind of a forum could replace either one or both parties and it could happen relatively quickly if politicians forget the powers of the people to replace them.

I will have more to say in coming days.

In the meantime, I am getting pangs of deja=vu from old movements and old marches and having the Unions cover my back; maybe even plant a little time capsule at the foot of the Big Bull outside the Big Board to remind myself that the last decade was the decade of terrorism and big government controlled by business, and, now, ten year’s later, we are at the beginning of the Fall of those “Too big to fail!”

And, so, in these final moments in the lead up to 2012, the people are speaking out. When that happens, both sides of the spectrum should be paying close attention; their survival may depend on it.

The people are speaking.

And that most ephemeral of things, hope, is in the air again! Makes me feel like I’m back in the 60’s.

The question is will the rest of us listen.

2011-09-30T04:53:00.000-07:00

The Zombies of the GOP cannot settle on anyone they like enough…

Whew!....These repugs are tough; they’re apparently not happy unless they are eating their own!.... Case in point, the darling of the Conservatives, Bachmann is now scoring below Huntsman in the latest popularity polls. And the newer lover boy to come along, Perry is showing more cracks than a Tokyo skyscraper after the Tsunami.

What’s the operative word here, heartless, fickle? Call it what you will, but it seems that candidate popularity in “the party that takes no prisoners” lasts no longer than a cigarette between coffee breaks.

Front runner, Romney still holds the lead he has had in the last four years, give or take a blip here and there, but the faithful are not running out chanting Romney. Apparently, they are not sure that he is conservative enough and his Mormon credentials label him an unknown outsider even though he seems to have been running since I was knee high to a milkshake….Ask a southern believer what he thinks, and his expression tells you all you need to know.

But that seems to be the way it goes!

Now, the punjabs of the pocketbook are trying to reel Christie in, figuring him to be a populist and the next best thing to a serious candidate who can come on strong next to an Obama who is seen right now as stronger than their front line which seems to shift daily depending on the barometric reading.

Christie seems to be a plain talker but he may be vulnerable to the more radicalized right’s view of what a real conservative is….that hasn’t been determined yet; while one suspects that the whole Bush family is foaming at the mouth to get the real inheritor of the Bush mantle up and running, the one that is said to still have a few live brain cells, Jeb. How that is going to materialize is beyond even Swami-like prognosticators of the party’s future to comprehend.

Meanwhile, the most responsible of the GOP’s candidates lapses in obscurity, John Huntsman, who one could say, “he makes some sense….” But the mainline gurus think that Huntsman does not have enough of anything to endear him to anyone except perhaps intelligent independents and disenfranchised democrats who don’t see their future with Obama.

Even Newt has a good day now and then but lags behind virtually everyone. In fact, the other day, Santorum got off a good one that appealed to the GOP crowd and for a moment, he had a fleeting touch of fame that came and went. And the other day, the former Godfather pizza chairman razzle dazzled the onlookers by winning the latest straw poll and then alienated the minorities by referring to them as brain-washed.

By the end of this contest, it seems like they will all collapse into a hopeless mass of used up bodies and somebody will appear out of the woodwork to save the Republican’s proverbial backsides, yet, it seems that the party, influenced by the chronically intolerant would rather applaud death in the electric chair a la Perry and their anti-gay credentials than actually be taken seriously by anyone.

Les Aaron

2011-09-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

Manifesto for the Common Man...

or Kick-starting Democracy!.... A Way Forward!

I believe that change is compatible with a changing and growing America. It is especially critical at this time, when we find ourselves having endured ten years of special interests, an arrogant and intractable posture from Congress and a retreat from real world concerns by the bulk of the population who feel beset upon by the powerful moneyed interests who control increasingly the legislation and the dialog that is pervasive in America today.

In short, it’s time to take the government back for the people who have suffered a double, if not triple indemnity at the hands of the ruling class as the rest of us watch our democracy evanesce into wisps of smoke and democracy looks more and more like the faded symbol of what was once the beacon to the tired, and poor of half the world.

This foundation document is a work in progress; as such, it is not set in concrete, but may be easily modified, customized, adjusted to to suit individual needs; I am making it available to activist organizations at no charge who are interested in bringing positive change to government that benefits the people…

A Rationale;

Dear Activist/Reformer:

As a citizen concerned for the future of the Middle Class and Democracy, I have prepared
The following document, which I call a Manifesto for Change for the People.
The Manifesto incorporates three parts: an Introduction; Rationale; and the recommendations for a Manifesto for the people which I hope will be used as part of the foundation of a program to move Democracy from the present level of stasis, and confusion as to what is in America’s best interests, but also to stem what I see as an increasing drift towards surrendering to the agendas of the rich and powerful and the subordination of legitimate democratic concerns..

Thank you for this opportunity.

Here's the accompanying preamble:

The Democrats do not have a plan for the Nation much less the middle class. What we’ve seen has been not only amateurish but lacking in drive, continuity and commitment. What we have seen has proved to be sketchy—not fully drawn or articulated, uninformed, demonstrative of a lazy intellect, it suffers from being advanced serially as opposed to in parallel—as part of a total program. After three years, it is clear that the senior advisers Obama has selected are much more aligned with the status-quo than reformers; they know nothing about the needs of the people; nor do they seem to show sufficient angst about the problems we face. It is clear that despite their credentials, they operate more like a group of disjointed amateurs rather than those who had promised to change the status quo, too ready to accept what is on their plate than prepare a serious, real attack on the challenges we face. Out of a need that began when I put together the book, “A Blueprint for Change: Taking Back the White House,” we changed parties, and administrations only to discover that the past looks unfortunately like the present. More importantly, we have a party that doesn’t represent the people and an Admin that is on disconnect and needs life support! We have allowed the GOP to speak for us and there is no blow-back; this is irresponsible and insufferable.

Les Aaron

August 25, 2011
D

Respectfully submitted,
100 Committee
By Les Aaron, Chairman

Facebook (1) | Les Aaron

2010-12-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

Facebook (1) | Les Aaron

News and Notes: December 1, 2010

2010-12-01T19:48:00.000-08:00

News and Notes for December 1, 2010:

Governor Ted Strickland, Ohio, said today that if the democrats can’t get their act together over defeating the tax extensions for millionaires, then “…they should pack it up!”

Mitch McConnell said in a speech today that he had received assurances from other republicans in Congress that nothing will be approved until they get what they want. That means, unemployment extensions and the Start treaty will be held hostage until the democrats agree to go along with republican tax extensions for the rich in the over
$250,000 category….

Adam Green, Bold Progressives.Org said that president Obama has not said one word in the one month since the mid-term elections as to what exactly he would find important enough to fight for….and this is very troublesome for his base.

Bold Progressives ran an ad today that said that president Obama should not forget his promise to those who voted him into office.

Big Ed, on MSNBC, said that many democrats are ready to bolt if Obama agrees to extend tax breaks for the rich.

A Republican spokesman stated that president Obama admitted to being a Blue Dog Democrat. Dear Mr. President, may we remind you that the Blue Dogs were successfully defeated in the mid-term elections.

The GOP has made clear their goals which include raising retirement to 69, meddling with health care, and SS, and dropping the tax rate from 35% max to 29% for the wealthiest people in America. It is clear that they although they preach fiscal responsibility, they are out to destroy government.

Leo Gerard of the United Steel Workers said that the Right Wing is holding a gun to the head of democrats who are, in effect, saying give us what we want or we’ll bankrupt America.

We must remember that they said nothing when America closed down 40,000 plants and cut back on 8 million jobs! Now, they want to abolish taxes on multi-national firms!

Senator Simpson attacked democrats over wasteful spending on things like Medicare and Social Security. Leo Gerard asks where was he when Bush was running the biggest deficits of all time.

Robert Reich says that the Republicans can’t have it both ways . They want fiscal responsibility and continued tax breaks. Reich says that the president has to stand firm and not extend tax cuts. The rich are already taking home one quarter of all income and not contributing anything to paying down the debt.

.
Racial Discrimination Reinforced by two Republican Representatives: Republicans Steve King and Michelle Bachmann attacked black farmers today in reaction to the settlement of Dept of Agriculture claims.. King said that they were drug addicts making dishonest claims who were encouraged by an Urban Senator who became president.. And Bachmann accused them of black farmers being “frauds” in making claims to the government. In truth, the payment of claims was made after a settlement with the Department of Agriculture that admitted that they had been guilty of discrimination in denying loans to black farmers.

Damn the Butterflies

2010-11-30T11:55:00.000-08:00

Damn the butterflies

The folks in a small town in Western Mexico, not far from the coast, used to hail the annual migration that used to bring the Monarch butterflies from all over North America to their humble community. For some reason, the Monarchs assembled there. Maybe they liked the climate; maybe it was the special trees; maybe it was the fact that this place had been programmed within them for countless generations.

And it happened every year like clock-work. The Monarchs came from all over North America taking the 1700 mile or longer migration in stride, stopping along the way to eat and rest..

And then one day, it virtually stopped. The Monarchs came but in falling numbers—numbers that were noticeable.

And the humble folk asked, ‘what happened?”

Nobody seemed to know.

So the microbiologists and entomologists and others within the scientific community who were involved in the habits of different species started to inquire.

What had happened?

The scientists started retracing the routes of the Monarchs and discovered that many of them seemed to stop in the mid-west on their way down to Mexico.

They would go to the corn fields and feed themselves and rest and then join the rest of the migration.

Only, it wasn’t happening the way it always happened.

And then someone had a bright idea, it was their food.

You see, the Monarchs were eating corn on the way down. Only this time, it wasn’t providing the nutrition and the Monarchs were literally unable to digest the corn.

Why?, they wondered.

It turned out that the concerns of the people had been realized. In order to give the corn disease resistance and the ability to grow faster, scientists at Monsanto had developed a hybrid corn that they promised would not get mixed up with the natural corn.

It was now clear, that the hybrids were out of control and that there were inherent problems with them; they produced results that were indigestible to the Monarchs.

Science can be a two way street. In many cases, it can be used to produce a desirable result; but, in this case, it may be responsible for wiping out a butterfly.

Fewer people seem alarmed by such developments; but in Europe, anticipating that such a result—or something like it could occur—they banned agricultural imports from America that involve chemical or agricultural tampering with Nature.

Clearly, they knew something the rest of us chose to ignore.

And now we stand to pay the price.

It is not only corn, we have tampered with the genetic structure of many crops—including wheat, barley, oats—in order to give the crops important disease resistance. We add hormones to cows so that they produce more milk. We grow fish now in farms and when they escape the nets and mix with regular fish, they produce off-spring not as disease resistant as the natural fish in its environment.

In so doing, we have gone along far enough to affect natural diversity and some wonder whether in providing what we presume to be a stronger, more distant strains, we have also tampered with diversity, leaving us open to the hazards of unforeseen ravages that we yet don’t know about.

We won’t know the answer to that question until it happens but some in the scientific community are worried. To guard against such an eventuality, there is a massive ongoing program now to find original seedlings, with all of their diversity, and store them away against any emergency that might befall our lands—from draught to excessive rain-fall.

For the time being, this is all we have as back up against the possible loss of our primary food supply. For without grain, we will be unable to feed cattle, chicken, or the pigs that constitute our fundamental supplies of meat.

Something to think about as we tamper with Nature.

But we didn’t just mess around with grains and other basic food supplies. No, we were to clever for that. We even got down to the basics.

We messed with the equivalent of the canary in the miner’s cap….and then we blinked.

No kidding!

2010-11-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Cost of War!

Here’s where we have to draw the line folks.

It sickens me near to death to hear the same specious arguments being made over and over again by those who not delight in War but profit from it. Shouldn’t there be a place in Dante’s Inferno just for them?

And sadly, when they take up their false arguments, they argue against us for wanting peace. The implication is that we mournful wusses who think that war is dishonorable and a sickening display of macho power, do not understand the true meaning of war—as if there could be any logic in wanton destruction; nor do they mention that most sacrifices are made by the innocents on both sides.

Well, many of us, myself included, are here to tell you that War isn’t what you think—it’s either bloody or boring and it is the worst way for man to solve his problems. That being said, don’t say that to a republican who thinks war is some kind of sacred relic, yet when they come to balancing the budget, the republican never suggests touching the war budget as if to do so would guarantee immediate defeat for America.

I’m here to set this whole conversation right through the simple expedient of examining its costs, in terms of dollars and cents only, not the cost in terms of lives and suffering and pain. I’ll leave that for another day.

Truth to tell, while our army has grown smaller, the military budget keeps growing as if it has a life of its own until today it approaches 1 trillion dollars. If ever there was a place to cut back, it is the military budget!....
‘
Yet, few people in the Pentagon are willing to face facts. And those who review such budgets have an axe to grind. Meanwhile, the public, brain-washed and anaesthetized as it is, believes that if we were to cut one cent from the budget, the sky would fall upon our heads; there is no underestimating the stupidity of the American public.

Why are we where we are?

The fact of the matter is when Clinton closed out his tenure, we were ahead in every category . So, how did we go from a budget surplus to where we are today.

Well, of course, we gave the rich a tax break and we went to war in Iraq.

A war that was not only unnecessary and had nothing to do with 9/11, it was based on speculation and rumor and make-shift research with no basis in proof. But we’ve discussed that elsewhere. But what we haven’t fully discussed is the fact that Americans are saddled with a 1 trillion dollar debt for Iraq and by the time we exit Afghanistan, another trillion dollars in debt….all the while, extending tax breaks for the rich.

Now, this may not seem like much, but consider what we could do an extra 2 trillion dollars in our budget.

Consider just the suffering areas, like education and infrastructure.

In Education, let’s assume that you could put up a pretty nice school for ten million dollars and that you can budget a new teacher for 50,000 dollars. If you spent a trillion dollars on teachers and a trillion dollars on school infrastructure using those guidelines, you would come away with the following:

20 million new teachers and 100,000 new schools! We’ll, realistically, we probably don’t need that many schools and teachers but we could use about 25% of that and shuffle some of the left-over money into needed infrastructure.

Or let’s look at it another way.

Let’s take that same amount of money, and divide it evenly across the board in each state, although the smarter way would be to divide it by population; but for the sake of example, what that would mean is that each State would average out at about 20 billion dollars per state. That would put us a long way back to rebuilding an infrastructure that for the most part hasn’t been improved in decades and set us on a path to modernization that’s been lagging for all too long.

That, my friend, is the price we are paying to conduct unneeded wars in places that as soon as we leave will return to what they have been doing for generations.

I’m sorry for that, you can be sure. But I also do not see America cast permanently in the role of the world’s policeman and you can reinforce what I’m saying when you write the president, your local newspaper and your elected officials and remind them of that.

In the meantime, nothing we say or do, will return the more than 4,000 who gave up their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and the more than 100,000 wounded who may never be fully rehabilitated. That, my friend, is the true cost of War!....

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2010-11-29T13:25:00.000-08:00

In figuring the equation for War, did the planners intentionally leave out “x?”

Take a step back from War, and think about the saber rattling that took place and the larger arguments for going to War in the last decade and you may be surprised.

If you examine it, you will discover that the overall rationale for war, it seems that there are no contradictions with the well-being of the Military Industrial Complex. Both enterprises seem somewhat conjoined at the hip. In fact, like the buzzard that is dependent on dead things, the MIC could very well not survive if War wasn't a constant threat--even though at times, the seriousness of the threat had to be enlarged upon and expanded in order to keep the contracts flowing. Nevertheless, the MIC never looked a gift horse in the mouth when it came to filling its larder and, thank you, today they are very, very profitable to the tune of almost a trillion dollars annually—give or take the upkeep on a much smaller military presence.

Without the generosity of these and other companies who's longevity has a direct correlation with War and, needless to say, benefits immensely from that unstable condition, it would be very hard to generate the kind of dollars that sustain Republicans in office. For it seems that there is also a mutual relationship that assures those who press for War, or at least the threat of it, there is a continuing supply of manna to underwrite those efforts.

Thusly, the formula is in place, when we come out with new technology, the idea is to sell the next best technology to all those countries seeking to arm themselves against their possible oppressors. And since we have supplied so many of them, it seems that we are by ourselves the largest contributor to that state of affairs.

So, the demand goes unabated.

Of course, nobody thinks of the American people who underwrite all of these undertakings? Or whether they feel that they could not survive without an F22, despite the fact that there is no real competition for the F18; but those are simply trivial considerations, it seems, in the larger context of keeping the world on its toes and its fingers poised just above the trigger.
But, nevertheless, the game continues.

Of course, this never changes from theatre to theatre, but in areas like the Middle East, there are other considerations.

For example, the Saudis and some other Middle Eastern power bases tend to see us as the equivalent of their hired “hit team.”

And the arrangement is well understood. It works this way, our government provides the protection they need, and they will sell us oil at an optimum rate.

This, of course, endears the Saudis and the other oil potentates, to the Oil barrons and others who profit from Arab oil wealth--thanks to decisions made more than a hundred years ago when the Brits decided that they would decide who owned what land irregardless of the fact that Bedouins had no idea what land ownership implied or inferred-- and one doesn’t have to look too hard, to see all the Western businesses that are dependent on this brisk one way trade that Americans are willing to underwrite in order to drive their cars to the tune of 800 billion dollars annually.

Interestingly, we spend about as much on oil as we do on weaponry!

In exchange for Arabic courtesies, we get to protect their countries against the threat of Iraq and Iran and other ambitious foreign powers while they sit around and make deals to pass our money to their terrorist friends so that the cycle can continue ad infinitum.

There is only one little thing left out of the equation, the “x” factor, the people.

For the people seem to be the least of those to benefit from these elaborate arrangements. Nonetheless, it is the people who furnish the “cannon fodder” for this country’s real enterprises which are to keep the military industrial complex, the oil companies, and, thusly, the government happy, which in turn translates into happiness for the Arab countries who make the whole thing work.

It seems a wonderful arrangement until you wonder what was the role of the people in making these decisions in our democratic society and you have to wind up shaking your head.

It is perhaps one of the best examples of why democracy seems to work so well for business and government; but not so well for the people.

Tocqueville warned us about how easily transformed democracy was and how difficult it was to understand what it can morph into before our eyes. This must be true because it’s been going on for so long without anybody raising a whisper about it.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2010-04-28T10:50:00.001-07:00

Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

Bite your tongue; cross your fingers.

Elections are coming up.

And the prognosis is not good for progressives at this time if I read the tea leaves correctly.

After eight years of the Teflon kid, it turns out that responsibility for everything that has gone wrong, including the weather, has floated around aimlessly until it found a target in Obama.

According to the prophets of “know nothingness,” the Republican Party, the real culprit is Obama. He is the anti-Christ, the angel of doom and destruction, the Hitler of our time. Obama has become the convenient excuse of the Right Wing. And the cause of everything that is wrong in America today.

Blotto, you might say, what has happened to memory?

It must be something in the water, you say.

No, the truth is that the public wants easy answers.
Nobody wants to think, to exercise judgment, to take the time out to figure who is really responsible and Obama is such a convenient target.

Never would they consider the truth: That maybe, just maybe, they were the guilty ones for ignoring what was happening on their doorstep.

Who cared, after all, they were making money. And that’s all that counts!

And in the process, GWB got the pass he needed.

The pass to push legislation that would give him and his buddies everything they wanted. From expanded powers of State to muscling the big guys who make money out of war to fill their war chests and their portfolios.

And so it goes.

Where we are wrong is in believing government is fair and represents the people.

That’s not the way the Right views it at all.

They see it as simply a way to build portfolios and eliminate taxes.

The hell with what goes on; sooner or later, the dems will have to clean up the mess!

And so it goes.

Today, Obama although a hardened realist who straddles the middle and strives for consensus with those who hate the left, is between a rock and a hard place.

No matter what he does, republicans find fault.

It is a “no win” proposition!

The party of “No” gets ecstatic every chance they can turn something around to their advantage.

Obama is wrong for wanting health care for people. No matter that the nay=sayers have the best programs because it’s part of the deal of being a rep.

Then there’s the tea baggers who bitch and moan about everything the dems do. One might ask where were they over the last eight years when Bush screwed everyone with programs for his buddies….

Where were they when Bush invested billions in a Star Wars program that never worked and had to fake results?

Where were they when Bush did nothing to keep insurance rates down, when he created the Medicare bill that sent the cost of pharmaceuticals through the roof?

Where were they when he condoned the off-shore movement of jobs?

Where were they when Education costs went through the roof?

And where were they when housing foreclosures forced millions of homeowners give up home and hearth.

That was the democrats’ fault, too?

We could go on.

Did we need to spend two trillion dollars for a War that we didn’t need?

But that was okay!

Everything Bush did was okay….because he was an American, a white boy who told dirty jokes.

And he was a conservative.

Only, he was a Reagan conservative who grew government faster than any democratic president ever.

And he never missed an opportunity to take care of his friends.

If these tea-baggers are serious, which I doubt, they need to rethink what they are saying and start considering the facts.

It’s not health care that’s going to put them into the poorhouse, it’s eight years of self-serving policies and bad legislation that has virtually pushed us towards the brink.

Be that as it may, the real problem staring us in the face is that we are in danger of losing too many seats to the opposition.

If this occurs as it now seems likely, there is a very real possibility that all democratic initiatives will be halted and that the republicans will continue policies of increasing debt,
supporting banking programs that are aimed at keeping the rich in power, and dismantling efforts taken by democrats to impose rules and control on business while putting the brakes on programs for small business and home town America.

If the republicans take over, and nothing else changes, we may be surprised to find democracy subjected to a bloodless coup and overlaid by a kind of authoritarianism that operates behind closed doors to continue the advance the interests of the few over the many and continuing the attack on the middle class and the erosion of the concept of America as the last best hope of mankind.

The only unknowable in this equation is whether man has the capacity to bring about change. And make the tough decisions.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2010-04-16T07:26:00.001-07:00

Snookered.

Every day, there is more evidence that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over!

We naively thought that when the term of the Bush presidency was fulfilled, we could go on and repair the damage he did and get back to business. In virtually every way, the optimists have been proven wrong.

It is beginning to appear as if Bush is the present from the Right Wing that keeps on giving. More evidence of that slipped out in the past few weeks. Remember, our ally Pakistan; a country that took the term “weaponizing” to new heights?… Well, after America caught up with a ship loaded down with components for Libya’s nuclear weapon-building program, our government pressured Musharef to put Kahn under the equivalent of house arrest. Kahn was blamed for putting together nuclear programs with others on our enemies list, including North Korea. In this, they had been aided and abetted by China who saw Pakistan as the enemy of their enemy, India.

What we didn’t know at the time was that it was Musharef’s government that had been and continued to double deal with our enemies. While they were taking money from us and seemed to have their own nuclear weaponry under control, the truth was that they were working with terrorists governments, like Iran, to help them build their nuclear capabilities.

The Bush’s government’s failure to apply critical pressure to Pakistan during this watershed, when we could still had sufficient clout to do so, encouraged Pakistan to continue with its program of aiding and abetting the enemies of the West. As a result, all of the organizations and policies in place aimed at preventing nuclear expansionism were never used and are now after the fact. We now know through secret sources that many of these countries listed on the most dangerous lists, now have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to Pakistan and the aid of the Chinese, making the world a much more dangerous place than we could ever imagine.

While Cheney has harped on Bush’s success in keeping us out of War, he never touches on the truth that the democratic government of Obama has inherited a much more dangerous world and that the Bush government has set the stage for a much more dangerous outcome than we might have ever expected or anticipated.

2010-04-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

Have the Winds of Change Been Reversed?

The Middle East.

We have enough information available to make a prediction

But first, let’s take a look at the background.

When we first became engaged with Iraq during the First Gulf War, it seemed that we would be in and out in a matter of months and that would be it.

We will have made our point, returned the borders to what they were, and kicked Saddam in the pants.

But it has not worked out that way.

Yes, we accomplished our short term goals.

It is the longer term one’s that have eluded this country.

While the American people sat still for all of the reasons for wanting to go to War, the murkiness never went away and although we skirted around what really happened, the troops were content to believe that we went back to Iraq to settle for what happened on 9/11; that was the immediate reason.

Only, it never happened; it was a fiction created by the Pentagon and the “inner circle” of Neo-cons to justify their intentions of bringing Iraq under the power of America. For what reason?

It is hard despite all of the smokescreen to think that this is about anything but commodities, the power and riches that oil infers.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and anyone who understands the positions of both leaders, Saddam and bin Laden, would have no trouble understanding that these two men were polar opposites.

The unceasing hunt for more resources, however, is another matter.

Few know or recall that the allies of the Al Qaeda who controlled Afghanistan would be important allies in any program to transport Caspian Sea oil to other locations throughout the West…

We also seem to forget that the president of Afghanistan was an operative with Unocal; or that Iraq has the world’s fourth largest supply of oil remaining in the ground. Therefore, this author believes it was only a matter of time before we would find a way to take what they had. We saw it at the off-limits Energy session sponsored by Dick Cheney. We saw the motivation popping up in Neo-con references and comments…
And if 9/11 hadn’t happened, it would have had to be invented!

Because it opened Iraq to being victimized by public relations aimed at linking the country with events in New York.

Everyone who was objective and fair thinking objected to the assumptions but only the president, exercising his rights through Executive Privilege and whatever he was able to take away from Congress, was able to speed through the arguments for going to War and setting up the Pentagon to become his new research branch, the branch that rubber stamped everything he, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted.

That was eight years ago!

We are still there.

We’ve had an election since and voted in a democrat, a democrat who won because he had the support of the Left and the Progressives and many of the Independents who were turned off on Bush conservatism and bad policies….

If the best the Left can do is to continue with Bush policies, especially in the Middle East, we should all take a long break and ask ourselves what that really means.

Keeping abreast of the latest news, we see that Al Qaeda is far from dead in Iraq.

In fact, they are seeking to keep Iraq alive and on our front pages with plots to steal a plane and use it to attack one of Iraq’s most cherished mosques.

What does this mean to us?

It means that we may be forced to reexamine our plans to depart Iraq on schedule.

As part of the exit strategy, we had agreed to reconsider if Iraq asks us to stay….

Will we? Should we?

We are now approaching having as many Allied troops in Afghanistan as we had in Iraq.

And we are winding down in Iraq, according to Cabinet Secretary Gates.

As I see it, if our present commitment is the best the representative of the Liberal Democrats can expect, it looks to me as if we have another Cuba on our hands, and a much deadlier one that will outlive many American presidents.

I say this because president Obama seems to be listening intently to Gates, and his generals including McCrystal who seems to believe that we need to perform a hands-on role of pacifying what is generally considered impossible to pacify, the northern provinces of Afghanistan and the border regions with Pakistan.

If this is all we can hope for in light of the new clamor being made by the followers of Al Qaeda, our tenure in both countries is not going to end next year, or the year after or the year after that.

Consider that we have been in a peacekeeping role in Korea since 1953….more than fifty years!

I would be willing at this time, based upon what we know and suspect, that our participation with troops and money will last at least until 2025…and there is no guarantee it will end there….

What will this mean?

It will mean we will continue to play a subservient role to China.

It will mean that our institutions at home will suffer.

That jobs and futures will be affected.

That there will not be enough money to support both our schools and our troops.

That prison populations will increase.

That recidivism will increase proportionately considering our present record.

And that more and more of the Western world will be influenced by Arab voices seeking the destruction of the West.

I don’t personally see any solutions over the short term.

And there are few great men, or women, on the horizon to change our direction
As a nation.

I may be perilously wrong; but I don’t see it based on experience and historical perspective.

The only qualifier here is the people, themselves; whether they will wake up and recognize their power to change things.

And alter the course of events.

And that could be the game-changer we are all after.

Respectfully submitted,

2010-03-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

No Time For A Breather!

Now, that we’ve passed the House Bill on Healthcare Reform, the temptation is to sit back and take it easy. But that would be just the wrong thing to do for any number of reasons.

We are not at the finish line yet; --not by a long-shot.

We still have a long way to go to make Healthcare all it can be.

There is no doubt, either, that the “Party of No” is committed to impeding the bill any way they can.

Moreover, the time to prepare and strike on other issues is long overdue.

I think Obama was reluctant to play that card because he felt that there was still hope for support from Republicans; but he now must realize that bending over backwards to accommodate Republican recalcitrance accomplishes nothing; and that no matter what he does, the Republicans will still not support an Obama initiative.

Therefore, let’s keep the momentum going.

Let’s reverse all of the Bush legislation that put America on its present chaotic course, a course that the Republicans with their traditional short memories are blaming on Democrats.

They seem to have forgotten that most of the problems arising today began during the reign of Bush.

Remember, under Clinton we had a surplus; it seems that message was lost somewhere in the mix.

We have a whole list of unfinished business, from reform of Wall Street and the “big lenders” to consideration of promulgating alternative energy programs. We need to address the challenge of global warming as well which now most scientists agree is a reality. We need to fix the economy with bold programs that will return us to our former leadership position. And we need to put an end to wasteful spending.

We are told that we are tax and spend liberals; but let us not forget the disastrous Star Wars program that Bush continued to support with falsified information that cost America an estimated 264 billion dollars; And if we are worried about democratic overspending, consider who will be responsible for over 2 trillion dollars and the blood of our youth invested in an unwarranted War based on speculation and misdirection and what many believe is naked imperialism in order to lock up natural resources for special interests!

We also need to address the questions of justice.

We need to investigate the former Attorney General’s use of Federal Prosecutors to go after Democrats.

We need to examine the efforts of his staff to justify torture. We need to investigate the NSC’s continuing efforts to snoop on innocent people without the FISA’s court’s sanction.

We need to punish those who have arbitrarily violated our Constitution and evaded the penalty of the laws to show favoritism to special interest. We have only scratched the surface here, but there can be no closure until such issues are addressed and subjected to a legal test.

And we must go on, build our relationships with our fellow man, and seek peace in a world where America once before seemed like a global bully and a 19th Century Colonial power. We must revoke NAFTA in its present form so that private interests cannot supersede America’s government. And we must reduce the power of lobbyists to continue to exercise their clout over our government leaders and remind our leaders that they don’t represent business, but the people.

There is much work to do to save America and re-imagine the American dream. And the best time to begin is now!

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2010-02-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

The Dichotomies Stirred up by Obama

I think if nothing else, Obama has been successful in stirring up a swirling riptide of dichotomies within us, especially those who claim a liberal bias, because we are uncertain of his commitment and/or follow through and whether he would trade off our loyalties for one republican vote.

Elusive success is more a measure of action than honeyed words. What troubles me is that beyond the words, the tangible stuff that begins with a good foundation, does not seem terribly keen or well thought out. And we don’t have to go very far to see examples of that. Consider the bail-outs and the rescue attempts, the job programs and health care. Although they represented an improvement over what had transpired in the prior eight years—which amounted to nothing, they seemed almost taped together with baling wire and spit. And who are the architects responsible? The experts. Think about it. Perhaps what was most surprising was the fact that he showed his talent for accommodation by selecting those who were most commonly associated with the disasters of the past. These were the experts on fiscal policy, banking, and massaging the numbers. Well, to the rest of us, those bona fides are in question today.

Will Obama’s programs be rejected for being unclear, not fully thought out and open to distortion or misinterpretation? That’s bad enough but when you factor in the pressure from Republican obstructionists it seems that we, the people, will never wind up with a fair shake. Mind you, that it is clear that our minions in Congress have not gathered their forces or shown their spleen. Is this a precursor to some impending great movement that still does not have its standard bearer? It’s hard to say.

Truth to tell, Obama is a fascinating and beguiling character. He is at once the Renaissance man, a man of style and dignity and representative of the penultimate “coolness; ” yet we still harbor reservations that are not quite tangible enough to put a finger on.

And yet, when you reflect on it all, the tendency is to say, “Now, come on. Don’t be so hard on the guy. After all, nobody’s perfect.”

Yes, I know he has been the most visible, most intelligent spokesman that this country has had in recent memory and most are thankful that we got rid of the cowboy in Toy Story at any cost. Obama, is clearly no ideologue; but a pragmatist willing to negotiate to cut a deal. Overall, he humbles us with his ability to hit just the right tone in his messages and convey the feeling that “you get it.”

So, in the final analysis, what could it be that nags at us?

Could it be that what he considers a plus is for us a failure of will or commitment? Do we question whether his heart and his mind are traveling in the same direction?

For me, I resonate with what he says. It is in the methodology and the execution that I take issue with. Is that a real concern or something that my paranoid self has dreamt up? It is almost as if I am concerned that he is so anxious for acceptance, that what will be left of any proposition is the bones with the meat having been shredded off in his attempts to please the rival cabals of special interests. Yet, despite all that he is willing to do, he has been largely unsuccessful at winning converts from the other side of the aisle. Is this instructive? Are the Republicans such obstructionists, that they will stab themselves in the foot before they even give one droplet of their special bodily fluids to serve the people. Put in prosaic terms, are they even worth the effort?

Let me cite an example, in the beginning of his term of office, Obama made it quite clear that his government was going to be moving forward and not seeking to dredge up the past or pin blame on others. This was going to be a positive administration committed to addressing the problems of America in 2009.

That might have been the noble thing to do, or maybe the most expedient considering the the number and complexity of critical issues on his plate and our own doubts as to whether anyone could make Humpty Dumpty whole again.

But how exactly was he going to win over a recalcitrant republican party to his side when it seemed crystal clear that they were unable, or unwilling, to agree on anything; when they looked more like the Katzenjammer kids willing to throw a monkey wrench to fowl up the works wherever they could. Moreover, despite their dysfunctionality, they all had developed long term amnesia and saw little connection between the events of the last eight years and their own commitment to conservative principles.

Take this a step further. The model of Republican chutzpah was set by Paulson, who insisted that we would have to cough up over 700 billion dollars for bail-outs of the banks or the whole country would surely face a looming disaster of unbelievable proportions. (He seemed to forget that by our vote, we had already given the administration carte blanche to commit murder and mayhem in our names.) Anyway, we bought it, accepting the Henny Penny outlook in order to avert disaster.
If anything, Paulson has to be the poster-boy of what can be done through brinkmanship combined with the narrowest perspective that believes anything outside of Wall Street is not worth thinking about. After all, it is all about profits; and always has been.

And Paulson pulled it off without extracting good terms or the cooperation of the banks to buttress up Main Street, a coup that will be long remembered by the left for leaving the rest of us hanging.

The Devil seems to be in the details of this administration.

In bringing in those responsible for the abuses to address the abuses, Obama set a tone indicating that the platform of the left was no longer relevant to the kind of compromises and good guy tactics that were necessary to placate the big money and the “influentials” he needed on his team.. Maybe there is some logic to that because they are probably the only one’s left who remember how the system can be made to work. But that is more cynical than truth.

What came out of it was the fact that even we, lowly peons, discovered that we know as much as the experts. Who can forget the two leading experts on finance sitting before Charlie Rose with their eyes glazed over and their mouths hanging open . It was not pretty.

I do remember that at the height of the Wall Street collapse, all of the Wall Street gurus started to speak in tongues; no one had a solution and it was clear, that words alone were not going to change the outcome. Moreover, it was clear that self-interest was alive and well, and that all of the guilty were not as interested in Redemption as they were hoping for the chance to live another day. And it worked! (Unless, you include Lehman Brothers.) You don’t have to go much further than the way AIG managed to get bailed out with its scheme of insurance for the banks something that nobody could understand or do without, it seemed.

So, it seems, that beginning with day one, we were compromised by the Wall Street gurus now popping up on “our side.”

And this kind of failure seemed to resonate through all legislation.

Yes, it wasn’t long before the new Administration came out with a rescue program to get business up and running again. Only, in the application and methodology, it didn’t seem to accomplish anything. It turned out that some audacious States even used the money not to build jobs but to balance the budget. To date, no discussion of accountability.

Where were the jobs?

And what kind of programs were being envisioned for small business?—the largest employer of the nation’s work force. Despite how some of us tried to get through, it was clear that this search for new ideas was not going to go much beyond Somers and company.

This gave even more reason for us not to excuse the past.

Whether we liked it or not, the facts were known to us. Government had allowed the private sector to go “off-shore” to lower costs and overhead.

A loss to American workers!

Never mind, we were still buying into the idea that services could replace manufacturing and that services were “clean” and manufacturing “dirty.” In short, we had been sold a bill of goods that our media never picked up on or investigated. The trouble with that idea was that it was wrong from virtually every angle. Service sector jobs did not displace manufacturing and never would. And any of the government’s accountants should have been able to tell him that. Nor would the promise of “off-shoring” help Americans keep their jobs or maintain a quality of life.

The fact that companies were acquired, merged, and disenfranchised virtually overnight, or bought out by foreign interests, didn’t seem to penetrate; neither did the concept of “down sizing” which was heralded as being in the best interests of American business and industry; when, in truth, it was simply another device to make the rich richer. And the American people in their naiveté, simply lapped it up.

And this development which raged for years, in combination of all of the other slipping and sliding that the Bush people allowed, only set us up for what was to come.

The truth was that we were rapidly morphing into a retail nation with Walmart leading the pack. Today, over 1700 of Walmart’s top 1900 suppliers are based in Asia.
And we might say, well, they’re only one example. It’s not as simple as that. Walmart is a retail category unto itself. It does more business in sheer volume than all of the other major retailers combined. So, it’s a decision that should weigh heavily on those who decide policy at the highest levels.

Nor does current policy pay attention to the Immigration problem. More than 12 million illegal aliens perform all kinds of jobs in this country and for the most part, who happily for the die-hards, weaken the strength of unions. And isn’t winning what it’s all about?,

Then, too, America, under Clinton, had jammed through legislation called NAFTA that was supposed to level the playing field for business; but it had just the opposite effect. In fact, few Congressman read the legislation prepared by the lobbyists before the vote and, today, we have to live with it.

Sadly, I doubt whether anyone has read the small print. NAFTA has resulted in many jobs going to places like India and China with no corresponding bounce for American manufacturers.

Further, most of the companies who have left our shores are no longer paying taxes to the US further depriving our country of the benefits that allowed these companies to arise and become successful in the first place.

But this is only the beginning. Our schools are being tapped into by private interests so that the great research efforts that spawned a good part of our growth in the fifties and sixties are no longer functioning as pure research facilities despite the fact that they operate here, receive government funding that comes from taxpayer sources.

So, we need to look into that as well.

For the most part, America is in hock to its creditors. For most of the advanced world, America simply exports raw materials, natural resources and agricultural products and imports manufactured goods. We do not make a TV in the US any longer and we do not even have a machine tool industry even if we wanted to start a new industry.

It is disgraceful. We owe China over 8 trillion dollars. And we are indebted to Japan, England, Saudi Arabia. Under the present way of looking at trade, America has become a colony selling its natural resources, scrap and agricultural products and importing finished goods. Sad beyond words!

Here’s what I propose to get America moving again. We reverse the polarity of our sinking fortunes and cancel all of the policies of the last eight years, dismantle NAFTA and the South American agreement and take our country back from those who would sell us down the river to satisfy their own self-aggrandizing interests.

In the interests of a kind of harmony and a spirit of working together, we have set aside the past; by the same token, those who could move health care and other concerns forward, have chosen to ignore what’s happened in the past and have not let down their
aggressive obstruction of all pending legislation in health care, control of banking, approval of executive appointments, global warming, etc. Perhaps, they need to be reminded of what they condoned over their last eight years when they were responsible to the American people’s protection and welfare.

It is my thesis, that if we want jobs, if we want respect, if we want to reconnect and kick-start our business and industry, we need to get back to fundamentals and that means getting rid of all of the programs of the last eight years and changing the way America does things. And if the Republicans don’t like our kick-ass posture, tough!

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2010-02-10T12:03:00.001-08:00

Reviving the Small Business Miracle:

Letter to the Editor:

Bob Herbert’s recent assessment of the job market and whether Obama gets it is right on target in my estimation. I have been a fan of Herbert’s views for a long, long time even though I disagreed with his argument that the service sector and manufacturing were almost interchangeable (93 editorial).

Part of the problem is that there have been no magic bullets, no grand ideas proffered by our expert leaders; in my mind, that may be because they are drawn from companies who practice the status quo which is totally opposed to the kind of bold thinking that we need now if we are to return to the innovative path we had pursued so successfully for so long. Instead, there is too often a play it safe and assume no unnecessary risk attitude that inveighs against creative thinking and the kind of breakthroughs we need. It is unfortunate that the prevalent thinking and the better minds have drifted into service sector rather than areas that make things happen, that spark ingenuity that translates into new products that can lead us back on a path of product manufacturing where our ingenuity and creativity has made us successful in the past.

And I believe that I understand that Obama’s views are shaped by those who have a very unique view of business and industry and the service sector. He has proven the mediator, the play it safe guy who rebels at anything that let’s say goes beyond the status quo. Therefore, it is impossible for him to do the kinds of things we need to do to kick start business and industry. We need a maverick, a Steve Jobs type appointed to the task who is not scared of taking risks or innovation. Today, our government gurus are by products of companies that dominate their particular industries or service sectors; they do not represent where the majority of jobs are located, the small business sector. In truth, I have heard very little in the way of imaginative solutions to regenerate this vital and essential segment of business. We have, in a sense, overlooked small business’s contribution to the economy along with our failure as emblematic of our lack of vision.

Although I am not an economist by training, I have been a consultant to some of the leading international companies over forty years, a writer, educator and activist. I sent to Obama some tracts from two recent book where I lay out the reasons for our current malaise, which I believe occur through decisions made over some forty or fifty years and our failure to recognize that our future’s has always been closely related to our acceptance of individuality and creativity in manufacturing and technology and our willingness to assume risk.

While we are committed to two trillion dollars indebtedness to fight an unproven war in a part of the world that only remotely affects us, we have not had the courage to invest in our small business.

In one of my recommendations to president Obama, I established the idea that we should invest merely eight billion dollars as seed money in new businesses that must meet the ordinary tests of acquiring capital from venture capitalists. Believe me, this would not be throwing money away because the entrepreneurs would have to show that their ideas have merit and lay out plans explaining how their companies would move forward through the early stages and beyond.

Moreover, the amount they would need would be petty cash to most big companies especially if you consider what we have already handed out with no contingencies to banks and insurance companies with no expectations of getting our investments back.

Consider that the average outlay by a venture capitalist is under 50,000 dollars which they typically consider sufficient to reach the first milestones.

Those who might be charged with reviewing the quality of the small business ideas could be the forcibly retired, those who were making too much money and replaced or simply saw their jobs evanesce when we made it so easy for American companies to move off-shore to avoid high labor costs and taxes. (The Greening of America syndrome.)

I venture to say that such a process would provide millions of new sources of employment and create as many as ten million new jobs at the very least during the first years, with rapid expansion afterwards for those who reach their first milestones.

We need to see a rebirth in entrepreneurial spirit, risk taking and creativity and nothing on the drawing boards of today reflects. We also need to deal with the fundamental problems that we have inherited: A negative predisposition to risk taking, the problems of “off shoring,” our economic indebtedness to China, the fact that we have allowed ourselves to become servants of China and a retail nation.

We need several Crusades across the board to promulgate the tons of new opportunities that abound ranging from gene research to miniaturization to the varying demands of “green” industries to reawaken the great giant that is America. . And if it requires a little seed money to reawaken our taste for innovation and creative solutions, what is taking us so long. My book, entitled “Democracy, Debacles, and the American Dream” delves into all of this and offers solutions that our current class of managers and gurus seems to not recognize as being essential and valid.

Thank you.

Les Aaron-Friedlieb
Author and resident futurist

2010-02-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

Cehalopod mollusks and mental midgets of the family Hymenoptera.

It is a strange time to be alive.

When I left to go north to Canada before New Year’s in 1999, I had a premonition that we were in for a time of bizarre unpredictability which at the time, was mainly fueled by our failure to consider a few digits on the computer calendar. To offset that possibility, I put together one of the most comprehensive survival kits that did help me survive two blizzards and other hazards during that trip north.

Interestingly, as we approached 2000, it occurred to me that we had not made provision for anything that might happen in a new millennium. How could that be? How could our gurus of the computer been caught so short.

It made little sense.

Nor has much that has happened since.

In fact, it has become in my view at least, a pretty senseless world.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that perhaps I was being prophetic but not really knowing the reason why.

I guess I could be considered the kind that sees a Conspiracy around every corner, and, if anyone will listen, I will bedazzle them with the facts I’ve garnered that support my various cases.

But most people have the common sense not to subject themselves to raving, foaming lunatics like myself. I don’t know why I had this level of suspicion about everything. I wasn’t brought up to be paranoid; yet, I was at the confluences of many things that have still be unsettled or never resolved to my particular satisfaction.

And I could quote chapter and verse.

But now I am preoccupied with still another thought.

And that is a feeling that has gradually taken precedence over my incipient paranoia, and that has to do with the way most people look at things and who they decide to elevate to iconic levels and our willingness to accept everything that our leaders tend to tell us. It seems that we can not be bothered to generate the mental energy to have to think our way out of anything.

What is even more frightening than my conspiracy addiction is the fact that I am being moved more and more into the camp that believes our society has lost its good sense.

There is no other way to put it.

Our leaders spout answers or positions that seem to me so backwards, so distant from our real challenges and needs that they no longer reflect any ties to reality.

What’s more people listen to them and seem impressed.

Why, pray tell.

What makes this all possible are two things; A lack of concern for objective facts and overly short memories.

For example, Sarah Palin is intent upon informing the rest of the world of her knowledge, which if anything, is probably the one thing that she seems to lack in abundance.

The other progenitor of this kind of mental myopia that we all seem to be afflicted by is the fact that the Republicans are blaming everything that happened over the prior eight years on Obama and the Democratic party.

How could these kind of mental gyrations take place in a civilized world? Is it me? Or have we just lost our ability to think?

Someone once told me that if you say something strongly and often enough, people will believe it.

I now think that is more often the case than not.

But those two single examples exemplify what I am going through.

I can’t be bothered listening to all of the lies and contrivances of the right that persist to this day.

Fox has more listeners than CNN. How could that be.
Is it that people don’t want real NEWS. They just want to be supported in their presumptions, in their inherent biases. And who does that better than Fox?

Why?

Has the democratic desire to be non-partisan silenced all of the republican critics so that we don’t offend the right wing?

I don’t know.

But increasingly, like I said before, little is making any sense these days. For the last five years, I’ve discovered that in order to have objective discussions, I’ve had to leave the country. Maybe it’s time to see if my old Canadian citizenship is still valid. Or maybe time to reactivate it.

I can barely watch TV any longer because of the anger it generates in me.

If we are a democracy, shouldn’t we be worried about the survival of the Middle Class?

Be we are not!

In our willingness to accommodate even those who beat us up, we dare not rock the boat when the boat should have been allowed to sink and a new contract for a new boat issued to American boat builders without inherent bias. . Never mind that the boat that we keep afloat has been brought to the point of cap-sizing with policies that no democrat ever got close to.

It is literally maddening for me and I believe any thinking person, who, like myself, finds himself mired in meritless arguments that hold no water and understanding that barely skims the surface. You can’t hold an argument with people who are incapable of understanding issues, of people who are more affected by inherent biases and party affiliation that common sense.
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Therefore, the best one can do, is try to bring clarity to the fore. Expound on ideas and common threads in the hope and expectation that you will find some brain cells around somewhere that are still alive and can be encouraged to regenerate.

For now it doesn’t seem hopeful.

Instead, I am focusing on the Octupus who seems to have his/her purpose quite well thought out, has the ability to reason, at least enough to survive long enough to do its part to repopulate the oceans with its progeny. There is nothing quite like a protective Octopus mother.

And looking about as to how our great minds are working hard to destroy society, it is quite a change of pace.

Maybe we could learn something from our friends in the deep.
Les Aaron

2010-02-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

American Taxpayer: Beware, the US Army is preparing to seduce your child.

If you think I am kidding, then you simply haven’t been paying attention to an Army that has not only updated its notion of soldiering but also its recruitment techniques.

The fact of the matter is that US tax funds are being used for the keenest form of seduction.

The Army has finally figured it out.

The way to build up its might, is not to try to pressure young men and women to give up their lives and join the Armed Services. No way! Not today. Today, the entire recruiting focus has been reshaped and modernized and woe unto them who do not fully understand what today’s military recruiters are up to and how sophisticated the new subtle pitches are.

The Army has put the past behind them in every way possible. They know that the pitch Be All You Can Be has a limited life-span and appeals mainly to the conscious mind, and if you want to meet your quotas, you have to probe beneath the conscious mind. They understand, therefore, that ingratiating one’s self and providing sermons about the advantages of Army life has grown old to savvy young people and new tactics were mandated. But who would have believed that they would use state of the art techniques that combine the mind and pleasure principles to seduce young minds; yet it is happening and now.

Somewhere along the line, you can bet your bottom dollar that they have meetings up the yin-yang with psychiatrists and motivational planners and three card monte players to assess what a young man or woman want in their young lives; more so, what they find irresistible. And this time, they are right on the money.

The success matrix of possibilities employ a new kind of enticement using motivational tools that run the gamut from technologies that produce pleasure, the competitiveness and mastery demonstrated by gaming, the latest visual and computer technology, and other forms of stimulation that appeal emotionally and viscerally to young minds.

Rooted somewhere in that generalized profile is the knowledge that young people today are obsessed with the idea of computer games.

It does not take a brain surgeon to realize that American children are possessed from an early age with the desire to use the computer for the simple pleasure of playing games.

That’s why the new Recruitment Centers the Army is opening up without fanfare is nothing like the places of old, cold, gray places with lot’s of American flags and pictures of massive weapons.

No way. Today, in fact, they look like the updated penny arcades of old, but instead of featuring viewing machines and different kinds of games of toss, these arcades are models of what it takes to seduce a young mind. What they feature are the latest and most sophisticated military games incorporating everything from being inside a jet plane to bombing an enemy with weapons that look and sound like the real thing. Never mind, that the simulations are of people dying or being blown to smithereens.

What is the issue is that young people are being sucked in at the age of thirteen or fourteen in a relationship with a seductive looking military machine.

I’m not sure what that does to one’s sense of morality or ethics or how it inures a young mind to the conception of death and destruction; that will take years of study to decipher but for now, it looks like the military’s approach is working.

And no one seems to be disturbed by the whole thing.

If I had teen age children—or even pre-teens—I would warn them with every fiber of my being that such places of “play” should be rated x, requiring a parent’s permission.

And I am sure that if that ploy were used in certain parts of the world, parents would be up in arms for trying to manipulate young minds, but here it seems that anything goes and nobody much cares….or if they do, they are not saying anything at this point.

And who knows what the future holds.

What’s especially troubling is not only are Americans being deceived, their tax dollars are going to fund such enterprises. Woe is us, it seems. The Devil has found a new way to rob us of our children when some blindsided self-serving demigod decides it’s time for a War.

An aside here, that vouchsafes my feelings: War should not be left up to politicians, I believe, or people with personal agendas but should be made by those who have experienced the rigors of War up close and decided by the population at large in public meetings held around the country. It is that important.
Remember, Wars tend to distract us from everything else and it comes at a huge expense in terms of our futures and our well-being and should not be decided to win natural resources, “get even” for past affronts, or as a means of winning votes.

As a qualifier, I should add that I am not against a young person performing service for their country, but I find it bone-chilling to see such deception, especially when no one knows what the implications are for mind and body and to understand that it is being done behind our backs, without our permission.

Perhaps Americans will need to rise up for once. For, surely, this seems important enough to rise up about.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2010-02-04T13:57:00.000-08:00

Hi Gang:

For those of you who asked to be updated re
what we are offering this Winter and Spring,
I am pleased to supply my book list.

Please forward any questions to my attention.

The LAACO Press
Lewes Delaware
WINTER & SPRING 2010

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEVERAL NEW OFFERINGS….
Books for thinking people in a wide range of genres
Mystery, Sci-Fi, Adventure, Detective, Spy, Assassinations, Jihads, Environmental Adventures, Black Humor, Satire, Narrative Fiction, and Nonfiction Editorials, Commentaries, Essays

Dear Book Club Member.
Thanks for tuning in: This has been a most exciting season for us and made possible a number of new editions to our existing library of current fiction and nonfiction with FREEDOM LOST, a story of how close we came to the transformation of America and the loss of freedom. It is the story of the ultimate form of globalization—the country that is transformed into a corporation. And it almost happened here.

From the Introduction to Freedom Lost:

I am pleased to report that the first two books in the HazMat for the Mind Series and the publication of “Before We Wake Up,” probably as close as well get to the truth about what Al Qaeda is planning..

We’ve also taken on the Immigration problem with the publication of “Welcome to America; now Go Home!”—a tongue in cheek approach to the Immigration problem based upon the inanity of the Congressional bill on Immigration and the president’s tone deaf response; some have termed this satire a comic mix of “The Russians are Coming” and Catch 22…..

This is what’s in inventory and on the docket for the next six months… Complete book orders received within the next ten days should arrive in time for Christmas. Many first editions still available and books may be inscribed by the author upon request.
New Editions and Other Editions Published In the Last Eighteen Months…
Among them,

( USA ONLY; DOES NOT INCLUDE HAWAII OR ALASKA OR TERRITORIES OF THE US)

Adventures in Antiterrorism
A Novel:
NEW!: Before We Wake Up

From the Introduction:

A young unsmiling man in a dark tailored suit stood outside and greeted each of the men in turn, asking for their identifications, before passing them through . All of the men there wore dark, somber suits with neutral or dark ties with white shirts and plain toed black shoes…

Proceeding from the doorway, it was like going through a funnel opening up to a dark mahogany door on the far side…

The three men entered the darkened hallway in silence… Inside, they saw maroon wool carpeting covering the floor of what appeared to be a windowless room square in dimension and undistinguished except for a long table and a rack of chairs standing alongside.

Another man dressed the same way stood in the back with his hands clasped. A speaker phone was clipped on to his ear.

The men filed in one after the other.

Each proceeded to pick up an aluminum chair and move it to one side of the table. The only sound was the squeaking of chairs.

There was nothing on the functional office style table except a single white phone and three pads with pencils. . The short blond man stared at the phone as if he could will it to ring…

The men sat in silence and avoided each other’s eyes. It was as if they were participating at a wake and in some ways, it was precisely that…

You could literally hear a pin drop.

After several minutes, the older man with the black rimmed eyes and sorrowful look spoke,

“The Dutchman said they were missing….”

None of the men’s expressions changed.

The shorter, solidly built man with the blond hair and the brush cut sitting at the opposite end of the table twisted in his seat and said, “We should have known. ”

“Even then what could we have done about it?,” replied the man with the dark rimmed eyes…

Nobody responded. The other man just sat there.

There was a heaviness in the air that was tangible.

The tall man with the gray hair, who had not spoken before, opened a little leather bag that he had been holding as if it contained precious jewels, he said, “It is time to act.”

He did something cryptic to the little box with the stylus he was carrying and then returned it to his pocket.

The other men looked at him and nodded imperceptibly but said nothing. Their eyes seem to say it all. They had failed to stop the attackers before they could launch; now their work would be cut out for them—all three bore a responsibility and it was taking its toll..

The tall man, and the apparent leader, looked around to make sure the door was closed and the room secure and said, “I expect you all to go to Zulu now on my count. “3, 2, 1 go.... The mechanisms must be put into place immediately.”

He looked around somewhat wearily declared: “We can accomplish nothing further here, gentlemen…”

That seemed to be a signal for the three men to stand up and leave the gray colorless room without uttering another word.

After the other two men left, the tall man with the gray hair made a call on his cell phone to a number he had memorized a long time ago….

“Hello, Dave here…”

“David, this is Connelly….
It has begun.”

First edition. Available signed on request:
22.95 plus s&h;
Not available on disk

A Novel of Insanity and Outrageous Humor Describing the Impact of the Immigration Bill on everyone from Washington to the Kremlin—from Rome to London’s M15. Read it and roar…..
.
NEW!: “Welcome to America; Now Leave!”

By Les Aaron

Doing the impossible. Trying to make sense out of an incomprehensible, illogical and mindless Immigration Bill that attempted to be all things to all people and was not only after the fact, but so unrealistic and out of touch with reality that it caused people to die from extensive and uncontrollable laughter.

Clearly, it was the proverbial elephant created by committee.

A sop to all of the parties that evidently had an interest in the outcome, despite the fact that the bill seemed compiled by some kind of alien faction recruited for that purpose from a parallel universe.

“There was no question that the Hispanics were here; the real question was what we were going to do about it. A subject treated cavalierly in the bill, itself. . It was during its brief lifespan a comedy of errors with points so irreconcilable that they were almost laughable. I mean did anyone ever think of following the logic of some of the key elements of the bill? For example, who was going to send home 12 million illegal immigrants so that they can pay a fine of $5,000 for something that they are already benefiting from at no cost! This is definitely Woody Alan material. These were laborers, not entrepreneurs sitting on their money. Did anyone even consider that the fee might be more than their life-savings? Or that if we followed through with our threat, the wheels of commerce would inexorably grind to a halt. .

Seeing the humor and the possibilities in the true dysfunctional character of Congress, I have hopefully pulled together a funny story that I hope will be viewed as a ‘Catch 22’meets ‘The Russians are Coming’—in an attempt to shed some real light on not only the plight of the Mexicans but also those affected by the Mexican unauthorized immigration….

A fun way to get your news on what is after all a most serious problem.

Prelisting Price Special
24.50 plus s&h
First Editions Available
Signed upon request

ADVENTURE: Brooklyn, the Middle East, Chaos in the telling of this New York based Detective Story….

“All Fall Down.”

By Les Aaron
Another adventure featuring “Fearless” Freddy Black, Brooklyn ad-writer turned private investigator…

FROM THE PRELUDE TO ALL FALL DOWN…

“It was your typical Monday morning, I was tired, cranky, irritable as hell. It seemed that everything in my life was going down the tubes, Rose was ready to tell me to pack up my suitcase;… my devoted kids were writing me off and the boss was totally pissed-off about what I hadn’t done for him lately. I thought about how my life was falling apart in little creeping increments as I sat on the john reading the paper and feeling sorry for myself.

“And then something grabbed my attention.

“It was one of those sardonic headlines that button hole you and don’t let go. It ready simply: “Girls lose their heads in Crazed City.”

“What?”

“ That was my first reaction. I figured I had missed something profound in the headline which caused me to read on.

“ It turned out that this was a bizarre story about some serial killer on the loose whose signature was to separate young girls from their heads..

“I had heard some rumors about a loony being out there but passed it off like the dozens of other rumors I hear every day all week long.

“According to the desk Sergeant, a guy named Owens, a big fat Irishman with no sense of humor, there was something to it but the Commissioner and the Captain were trying to keep a lid on it. Nevertheless, a little voice inside was telling me, ‘ Freddy, somehow, some way, they’re getting ready to punch your ticket again!’ And deep down, I knew my instincts were right!

“No, it was not a big dose of ego, it was just the way my life worked.

“And sure enough, when I walked back to my desk, I knew I had been right. …

And the action begins….

A story you can’t help but love for its irony, its insights, its compassion and its knowledge of Brooklyn….

Introductory Price
First Edition 22.95 plus s&h
Signed upon request

Adventure Series:

The Costume Party
Author: Les Aaron
_______________________________________________
From the Introduction:

The time had come. Alex Schnerkin had made his decision. It was now only a question of how he would do it. Damon would be the means. He already knew that. And he knew that if he were going to go through with it, he would have to act quickly. Time was running out. If he hesitated, especially now, he knew it would be over for him. What was even more disturbing was that he had placed the others in jeopardy. He couldn’t live with that thought. He was out of time. And out of options..

Alex put the evidence in his case and walked out the door of his apartment. For some reason, he felt feverish yet it was nearly freezing outside. He walked briskly, yet cautiously, his eyes darting from side to side as he boarded the subway for the hour’s ride into the city. In the cold winter days, it grew dark early. The rush hour had been over for nearly thirty minutes now and he found the trains were mostly deserted. The detritus of the crowds still clung to the seats. The half finished coffee cup; the orange rind; newspapers scattered around the floor.

Once again, he checked the case under his arm as if to assure himself that everything was still there. He wiped his brow with a crumpled napkin that he found in his jacket. He looked out into the night and breathed a sigh of relief. Deep down he was feeling good about what he was doing. It would free him at last.
___________________________________________________________________________

Priced at 18.95
Plus s&h

First Editions Available
Signed copies upon request

SciFi & Adventure

The Lottery
By les Aaron …
EXCERPTS FROM CHAPTER ONE…

It was while working as an administrator for the Executive department at Channel One Thousand that Lonnie began to notice certain odd things happening. At first, he dismissed them out of hand. First, it wasn’t that he could actually put his finger on. Nothing specific like that. Only that a lot of little things were happening around him that didn’t seem to add up. He kept his observations to himself and wondered possibly if he wasn’t imagining these seeming contradictions and that possibly they were more the result of psychological stress brought about by his former drinking binges.

The truth was, however, that after a year of therapy, he had managed to get his compulsive drinking under control, and, as a result, was wending his way back from the precipice. He had taken to an exercise regimen that had restored his muscle tone and he was hard at work attempting to rebuild musculature. As evidence of his comeback, he had started dating again, this time with another Channel 1000 newsperson...and he was making good progress on putting his past where it belonged.

A few days before the Annual Media Awards ceremony. Lonnie was working late trying to catch up with some back paperwork. He noticed one of the files he had been working on was missing and speculated that his boss had inadvertently taken it when he had slipped out earlier to get a breath of fresh air.

He didn’t think his boss would mind if he retrieved the paperwork so that he could continue his report.

As it turned out, Lonnie’s boss had apparently stepped out for a few moments, leaving the door open. He knocked on the door but there was no answer. Lonnie stepped inside gingerly and spotted the file he had been looking for sitting where he expected to find it, on the top of his boss’ desk.

Quite by accident, he also happened to notice a memo that obviously was not for wide distribution sitting atop the in basket. He read it quickly...and his face grew pale. It was true! Something was obviously going on. He knew that now. He also realized that it would not be good for him to be caught in a compromising situation, reading memoranda addressed to his supervisor.

Lonnie took the memo and left the office, his mind racing. What could he do now? Who would believe him now? He needed proof. He could let his boss see him in this mood. Lonnie was feeling his insides go into overdrive. It would be a dead giveaway. He needed to go home...to have a calming drink. Yes, that was it. He grabbed his jacket, slipped the files under his arm and left.

He sat staring at the telecommunicator. He felt dazed.

It was blaring out lie after lie. He couldn’t take it anymore. He leaped out of his chair and kicked it as hard as he could, causing it to explode sending out shards of glass across the room.

“Those rotten bastards,” he screamed out. “I can’t believe they are doing this….”
On the pocket scanner appeared the following: “Fourth Annual media Presentation Awards Scheduled for Friday:...”

Priced at…..19.95
Plus s&h
First Editions Available
Signed upon request

A Novel of Secret Agencies With Secret Agendas
And A Plan to Change the World As We Know It….

“All the Good Men...”
Les Aaron

FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO ALL THE GOOD MEN:

In Classified File:

In recorded time, extraordinary events have often begun in very ordinary ways...Such was the case with the ASOP file labeled Top Secret: Infinity.

____________________________________________
Prologue:
It was a day unfit for either dogs or cats. The tail end
of the hurricane that had spent most of its power wrecking havoc and destruction along the Carolina coast still contained strong winds and driving rains when it reached New Jersey.

The wind drove the rain horizontally through the open bedroom window of the large four bedroom house sitting atop the hill. As far as houses go, it would have been considered distinctive in many other localities. But in Short Hills, it was just another rich man’s home in an community of rich men’s homes.

Pablo Guzman went to the window to close it to keep the rain from coming in and spattering against the floor; then went back to sit on the bed. He had been oblivious to the wind and the rain until he noticed that his expensive alligator attaché was getting wet.

That was unlike Guzman, a methodical man, a scientist by trade with a government Agency that performed exotic research at a secret North Jersey site.

He sat on the bed motionless for nearly five minutes. Two open suitcases of expensive leather sat open by his side. Although the temperature in the room was a controlled 68 degrees, beads of sweat stood out on his temples.

Finally, he got up, in a labored way, as if he were in physical pain, and headed towards the mahogany chest. He pulled open one drawer after another, throwing the contents into the open suitcases. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. He worked as if his mind were somewhere else.

It didn’t take long to clean out the drawers. When that was done, he reached down by the side of the bed and hefted the heavy $300 attaché onto the bed and opened it by twirling the dials on a combination lock. He tossed aside a couple of papers to lay hands on a file
marked “Top Secret.”

Pablo removed the file from his case and looked at the pages as if to convince himself that it was all there. Then, somehow reassured with what he found, he returned the file to the case. As he did so, he could not help notice the gleaming 38 nickel plated revolver sitting next to it.
.
He removed the revolver from the case. He sat again on the bed and stared at it. He felt its heft in his hand. In some ways, it felt comforting to have it next to him. If anything, he would not go out without a fight. Not this time. He knew that. There was just too much at stake.

He returned the revolver to the attaché case, closed it and spun the dials. Then Guzman checked his watch again; it was the fourth or fifth time in less than five minutes. Hurriedly, he got up and stood over the suit-cases. He realized he was missing some things. He walked as if in a daze to the closet and pulled out two jackets, a windbreaker and an overcoat. Except for the overcoat, he threw the rest haphazardly into the larger case.

With that, he closed both cases, threw his coat over his arm and picked up the attaché. And with his other hand, he checked to see if he had his car keys.

He patted the pocket and then took one last look in the mirror. He couldn’t believe what he saw reflected there, mumbled something under his breath and walked out of the bedroom without looking back.

On the way out to the front door, he stopped at a desk, removed a single piece of white paper and wrote a brief note.

It read:

Dear Leah,

Something terrible has happened and I don’t have time to explain now. I apologize for having to tell you like this but there is no other way.

If you should hear that something has happened to me, go the bank and take out everything. Make sure you include all of the papers from the safe deposit box. . I have made sure that there is enough money in our accounts to tide you over.

You will find a notebook among the papers which you must read carefully. It will explain everything. After you’ve read the book, put it someplace safe. Say nothing to anyone.

I implore you to take the children and stay with your mother until you hear that everything is alright. If everything goes as planned I will call you in two weeks time.

If I fail, remember that I always loved you and the children. I am sorry for putting you through this, but it is out of my hands.

With all my love,
Pablo

He realized it wasn’t a very good letter but he couldn’t think very clearly now and it would have to do until he could call to explain.

He folded the note and placed it where Rhea would be sure to see it. Just then, he thought he thought he heard a sound like a footstep on a loose board. He whirled around, all of his senses at fever pitch. He pressed himself against the wall. He was sure of it now. It wasn’t something he was imaging..

But where did it come from? He couldn’t be sure. He reached down to the attaché, spun the dials, and reached for the revolver. His hand was sweaty on the cool handle.

Now, it was quiet. Nothing.

He could feel his heart beating like a drum. Then he detected something funny, a strange kind of pervasive odor that assailed his nostrils. . It made him slightly dizzy at first. Almost instantaneously, he started to have trouble breathing. He clutched at his throat and then collapsed. It had taken less than a minute.

Three figures stood in the shadows. Two came forward wearing masks to protect them from the invisible gas. One took a small black kit from his pocket and removed a syringe, tested it and then injected the contents into the vein of Pablo Guzman. Then both men carried his limp figure into the connected garage.

The third man, still wearing the gas mask, moved into the room, picked up the folded slip of white paper, glanced at it and then stuck it into his jacket. He then moved into the bedroom. He opened all of the doors and didn’t find anything he was looking for. He returned to the living room and took a small package out of his pocket and made some adjustments. Then he picked up Pablo Guzman’s two bags and attaché and walked back in the same direction as the other two men.

Five minutes after the car pulled away, there was a loud explosion that sent fingers of fire reaching into the sky. People scattered in all directions. But the three men continued on their way, a slumped figure between them, without even so much as a backwards glance.
Priced at…..
20.95 plus s&h
Available in First Editions
Signed upon request

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Twenty Years After Vietnam, Our Misadventures Catch Up With Us With a Cabal
That Aims To Change Our World in Very Fundamental Ways…
This begins as a Spy Story and Morphs into a Threat That Literally Challenges the World. From Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan to the Halls of the inner chambers of the top level planners ensconced behind their screens at the White House, this story transcends the commonplace with the challenges it portends and a turn of events that is beyond our wildest imaginations. Yet, it plays out before our eyes in events unfolding around the world that bring us to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates for a chilling climax—the place where civilization began may also be where it ends!....

A Failure of Will
By Les Aaron
___________________________________________
Forward to a Failure of Will….

Place: Danang
Time: December 1968

Adam crawled out of his foxhole. Incoming rounds were dropping all around. The Viet Cong were zeroing in their mortars. The last one was so close he could literally feel the “whoosh” before it landed.

He crawled as fast as he could to the huge medical tent across a hundred yards of open ground. His knees were scraped and bleeding. Breathing hard, he got into a crouch, and made the final ten yards to the tent in a series of dashes…. It was like the old days when he was a broken field runner for his school team, except now he was running for his life. And there were shells exploding all around, kicking up dirt and debris as the shrapnel ripped through anything still standing….

Adam reached the tent just as a mortar round dropped about 20 feet off to his left; he lurched towards the flap, lifted it and rolled inside compressing himself into the smallest possible target. He realized he had assumed a fetal position. He shook uncontrollably, trying to catch his breath. All he could hear was his own panicked breathing. His heart was pounding like a drum. After what seemed like minutes, he raised his head to look around. It was hard to see. What little light there was came through the jagged holes from mortar fragments and projected inside like a movie camera gone wild. Strange, he thought, the shelling had stopped the moment he entered the tent. Now, everything seemed too quiet, almost serene.. He guessed that the last round had damaged his hearing at least temporarily. He couldn’t be sure. He applied pressure to his ears with the cup of his hand but it didn’t seem to matter. No sound seemed to come out of the seemingly unending line of bodies wrapped in bandages, hooked up to intravenous bottles, that seemed to stretch out as far as the eye could see.

It was a GM assembly line but instead of cars, it was people wrapped in bandages as far as the eye could see: The ultimate visual symbolism of man’s technological world gone berserk. In their eerie stillness, the inert bodies seemed like some archeological find. A tomb of the Kings with their mummified remains in almost perfect perspective. What would be their end, he wondered. And was he witnessing it now. He knew that beneath their homogenizing bandages, there were young boys who had never been away from home before; boys who were frightened and unsure of what would happen to them. There were real people under those bandages who
had lives and families and friends. It was too sad to contemplate rationally. He noticed something else: There was no staff. What had happened? Had they fled? Were they trying to save their own skins? No. In all good conscience, he couldn’t believe that. That was too cynical, even perverse.. Doctors don’t just leave their patients. His first thought was whether they were okay. Had they simply taken refuge during the shelling. He didn’t know. He had to find them. He suspected that they might be down at the far end of this tattered worn piece of canvas that barely sheltered its charges. It was too dark to see anything clearly..

He squinted trying to make out something, anything. He could barely make out a single light bulb burning in the distance. It was one of those cheap exposed bulbs. It seemed far away, all the way down the other end of this tangle of conjoined tents that seemed to be a hanging onto each other like a couple of old drunks trying to keep from falling. The pin-pricks of light shining through accentuated the free-form shape of the tents giving the interior the semblance of a darkened cathedral with rays of light criss-crossing back and forth across each other. In the reflected light, the countless bodies swathed in bandages seemed to form a strange kind of eerie perspective vanishing off into the darkness. There was a surreal quality about it all.

. . It was clear that he stood in the middle of a large area, maybe used for processing new patients. Openings led off to passageways left and right.. As he kept walking on rubbery legs, the path seemed to converge and become increasingly constricted, as if he were heading into a funnel formed from an endless wall of beds on either side. He had always hated confined spaces as a child; now it was all coming back to him. He started to sweat even though it was cool outside. He looked down the constricted aisle and observed how odd it seemed in the reduced light. Still, he could hear nothing.

The bulb appeared further away than he had first thought. He called out hoping that someone would hear his voice.. But there was no answer. As he moved down the narrow corridor formed by the lines of half-filled cots, he heard a sound from behind. That was a good sign. He hadn’t lost his hearing fully…and that was encouraging.

. It was a high pitched sound, a grating noise like metal rubbing against metal coming from far behind him. He turned around but saw nothing. That’s odd, he thought. And then he heard it again. The strange squeaking sound seemed to be growing louder and shriller. He could feel the vibrations through his skin and it made him shudder; yet still he saw nothing.

Without realizing it, he found himself moving at a quicker pace down the darkened corridors to the light ahead. He looked left and right into the makeshift quarters but could make out little.

The noise that had started as a barely discernable sound now seemed to be growing in intensity. He tried to control his feelings but could not quell a growing sense of unease. He turned to face the strange sound hoping to discover the source. . Now, he could see something. There was something tangible there, blurry but tangible. He was sure of that.. He strained hard trying to make it out. But it was a vague shapeless form. However, that didn’t describe it fully. It was more than that. There was something familiar there. From a distance, it appeared something that resembled the wide spiraling limbs of an eight armed beast ...or a swirling cluster of tentacle-like arms connected in some inextricable way to a central vortex that moved in its own right, something that was somehow fluid yet solid.. He knew his eyes were playing tricks on him in the reduced light and he suspected he sustained some trauma from the mortar barrage.

It had to be something he could understand; something he could mentally integrate. . He was letting himself be carried away by his emotions. He knew he was making more of it than he should; he intuitively knew that it had to be an optical illusion of some kind. Nevertheless, in spite of himself, he found his legs moving faster towards the uncoated light bulb down at the end of the hall.

No matter how fast he walked, this strangely shaped thing seemed to be gaining.. He turned again, trying to define what the shape was. He tried blinking; but his eyes began to water, clouding his vision even more. There were too many shadows that cast strange shapes, making it impossible to know what was real and what was imagined. He called out again but it did not answer. Just the continuing sound from before. Suddenly, he discerned another noise that was quite different from the one before. It was a sound that tore at his insides. It was horrible. It reminded him of the moans of those hopeless souls depicted in a Bosch triptych. It was worse than anything he had ever heard. That ungodly sound combined with the increasingly shrill sound of before started to work on his growing unease. He could feel his heart beginning to race. He realized that he needed to regain his control. None of this made any sense. He had to be experiencing a form of shock; he had seen it happen to others after being shelled. He did not believe in the supernatural; and he was too old to start changing his ways. He realized, too, that there had to be a rational explanation for all of this. Get a grip on yourself, boy, he admonished himself. Hesitantly, he turned again fully expecting what he had thought he had seen to be gone. But it was still there and gaining. There was, of course, a rational explanation and he knew it. In fact, it was beginning to seem as if all of the little dots were coming together to form faces that he knew. .

The light was still far away. So he couldn’t make things out too clearly but his fear was subsiding. But his chest was still clamoring and he hadn’t slowed his pace. Moreover, now he was angry with himself. He had let his sense of dread take over his common sense. What was wrong with him, he wondered. . . Stop this nonsense, he repeated to himself. You are a grown man acting like a child. He turned again to face down the shape. The shape was not of another world; it was something real, something tangible that he could wrap his mind around. He made it out to be a conveyance of some sort. Yes, now he realized that it was simply a battered old wheelchair. The squeaking was undoubtedly due to the fact that one of the wheels looked twisted and probably never made it to maintenance.

He looked closer. Yes,he was sure of it now. It was a wheelchair filled with two wounded GI’s pushed by three others, also wounded. He breathed a sigh of relief. How silly was he to have let his imagination get the best of him.

My God, they were safe after all. Why didn’t he know that. Why hadn’t he been told. But, no, now he remembered. They had all been given up for lost. So how could they be here? Was God pulling a trick on him. Was he being intentionally mislead? He didn’t know but now he was impelled to find out….And then as he approached the rusty old wheel chair, it all faded to black….

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Black Humor: the Adventures of Freddy Black

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: FOR THE NEW READER.
The first of the Freddy Black Series.
A tour de Force of Real World Brooklyn and its People!.....

Authors Choice: If you love the New York of the 50’s and 60’s, you’ll love the people and the places in this book and this fast paced novel aimed at dethroning an entire cabal of new criminals who seek to take over…BUT CLEARLY THEY DIDN’T KNOW THEN OR WOULD THEY EVER KNOW THAT NOBODY OWNS BROOKLYN!....

Alfie and the Big Brooklyn Bagel Blow-Out!...
By Les Aaron

Introduction

Alfie Buys It Big Time....

It was sort of like that.
Who would have believed it?...
But they yanked it out of his throat, Pudgy said. A big doughy mass. Big Alfie, the terror of Bklyn. Croaked on a bagel and not even a schmeer in sight. Was that justice or what?

They said that they found him down by the Cadman Street exit off the bridge. Not any bridge you understand, “the Bridge!” You know the one I’m talking about...the one that goes to Brooklyn-- the one that proved to all the “naysayers” that strands of wire, tightly woven and formed into cables could support just about anything --even Aunt Lee with her stiff corsets and all the gold she brought over from the old country -- the Bridge that brought two cities together to form the biggest city in the world....the one that city slickers thought they could sell to the out-of-town rubes and oftentimes did. The icon that stands for the place in most people’s minds...

Look! Lots of people talk about it; but nobody understands it.. Most have it all have it wrong. Brooklyn is literally beyond comprehension. Even though it’s bigger than most places, including it’s neighbor Manhattan… even though its real population is more than 4 million people (nobody knows the real population)...even though its made up of some ninety ethnic groups....and its immigrants come from every place in the world every year to get lost in the countless ethnic barrios that crisscross its geography like so many veins and arteries and swell its ranks till it almost implodes, it is still the ultimately unknowable place.

.But, of course, the die-hards will tell that Brooklyn’s not what it was...now that the Dodgers are dodging palm trees instead of trolley cars....and Ebbets Field has transmogrified from a ball park into a housing project....and George Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park is no longer where you can ride a metal horse , tumble down onto a spinning turntable, get your skirt blown over your head and even get poked by midget clown with a cattle prod. No, we have been spared all of that. Now that the Brooklyn Eagle--the paper that was prescient enough to fight the union between Brooklyn and the city across the river-- has been reduced to a Brooklyn pigeon...and the downtown Brooklyn Paramount-- where if Rock and Roll was not born it was nurtured-- is busy saving souls...and nothing else is what it was except for a few aging Brooklyn Polar Bears who still jump into the waters off Coney every January to prove that they are alive despite the fact that most of their kids have written them off as being hopeless romantics.

...Nevertheless, the endless boardwalk of dreams is still there,... the elevated line still deposits you on Stillwell,...the crunchy, crispy, juicy original Nathan Handwerker hot dogs across the street still beckon….Prospect park is still playing host to lovers even though they may whisper sweet nothings to each other in recondite languages ....... the Gowanis ,with its enduring stench, is still the unofficial cemetery for half of Brooklyn’s mobsters,... the tawdry VFW hall is still there, the one that straddles the site where a few hearty Marylanders forfeited their lives so that our country’s leader could escape to fight another day and, in the process, create a county the likes of which the world has never seen. And the Heights’ promenade, if anything, has the one thing that Manhattan does not, unparalleled views of a city without parallel, an ever-changing montage of buildings, harbor and a skyline that stretches to infinity with its vertical twinkling lights that make heaven and earth look the same,.... And the famous and not so famous are still being interred in Brooklyn’s own Greenwood cemetery in condo-like mausoleums festooned with everything except the ubiquitous TV antenna (we are assured that that will not be long in coming) ... the no longer cobble stoned streets of downtown Brooklyn still exist in their myriad permutations, although today the trolley cars that earned the Dodgers their name are missing; nevertheless, they masses yearning to be free still come in record numbers speaking every language and dialect known to man,...and Bay Ridge is still fundamentally alive and hopping with its scores of gaily festooned Irish bars serving its myriad brews distilled from oats and grain and even rice until the last standing Irishman falls off his stool and calls it quits...and South Brooklyn is still as colorful as ever with its scores of Italian clubs where grown men sit around all day and gossip or play bocce at the local park....and there are still hundreds, maybe thousands of little restaurants that now cater to the invading Yuppies from “the City” and points west --except now they serve up a world stew of sushi, empanadas, grits and greens, mulligan stew, Norwegian meatballs, kasha, blintzes, won tons, crepes, bracciola, sui mei, mei fun, noodles a thousand different ways, borscht, hibachi steak, angel hair pasta, Lebanese pizza, burritos, gnocchi….and who knows how many other concoctions too wild too imagine--and make no mistake about it, Brooklyn is still home to more churches than anywhere else....only, today, some of them have been transmuted into condos, or offices, or play centers for urban kids. That’s the Brooklyn of today....the Brooklyn of lawyers, judges, artists, accountants, carpenters, retailers, techies, and even the Big Alfies of the world -- the bedroom community for countless wealthy New Yorkers and working class strivers and the misfits who don’t fit in anywhere else and the immigrants of every nation on earth making it one of the most colorful landscapes in America. But that’s a whole other issue and not why we’re here today.

Today, is Alfie’s day....or should I say more accurately, Alfie’s last day. And that’s what we’re here to remember.

Not that too many people will record it as any great loss to humanity. If there was ever an archetypal hero, Alfie was not it

Of course, there were no witnesses.

There never are when the best you could hope for is cement overshoes. Anybody who wonders how there can be no witnesses out of 4 million people obviously misses the point and certainly doesn’t know Brooklyn.

The simple fact is, as any Brooklyn native will tell you, when you decide to give someone up, my friend, you’d better make out your will and say good-bye to everyone you know and love, because it is all over. The big mucky-mucks who pontificate about certain inalienable rights, would have you believe that you will be protected under “the system,” at least until the next cutback and then you are so much dead meat. Even if you move to Peoria, the guys with the swarthy complexions and drooping mustaches will find you. In point of fact, being a witness is probably the unhealthiest line of work there is.

In the old neighborhood, Alfie was called a bad news guy. That’s kind of Brooklyn shorthand for the kind of guy you didn’t want to cross. A lot of guys who did wound up not breathing any longer with their faces down in a bowl of pasta.

(It’s funny how that works. You never of anyone getting blitzed over a bowl of borscht...or pot roast or jumbalaya. It’s always pasta. And the victim’s head is always in the sauce.. Knowing the statistics, it would seem that the way to a long life and good health is to eliminate pasta and sauce from your diet completely and never give up anybody, ever. . Then you would be onto something. . I know for a fact that Brooklyn insurers already provide discounts in premiums for those who elect to stay out of Italian restaurants. It’s the mystical clause number 17; nobody ever talks about it and seldom is it written up but when they write your policy, and if you fit the bill, clause number 17 is definitely something you should haggle over. . And if I’ve given away a big secret, well that’s how it goes.)

Anyway, Big Alfie was known as the Brooklyn bagel king.. I mean if you wanted anything to do with those indigestible “cheerios” with thyroid trouble, you had to go through Alfie. It was like a right of passage. And if you hit it off, and the kick back was good, you were in business... And from then on out, you had it made. Alfie took care of you and you took care of Alfie. And that’s the way it always was...or so it seemed. And that made the world go round. Which by itself was not all that bad a deal. See what I mean? You can rationalize virtually anything; that is if you’re motivated enough..

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Environmental Challenges, Global Warming and the Crisis of Fossil Fuels

An Environmental Thriller: What is Really Happening Out There as Our Government’s Secret Agenda Clashes with the Real World. How Science is demeaned and derided for taking issue with Government’s Total Dependence on Fossil Fuels.

The Whole Shebang: Who profits; Who Doesn’t in a World Out of Control.

“FINAL WARNING”
by
Les Aaron
Introduction:

Buddha rules

The Secret Pentagon Report was in. The secretive think tank, The Office of Policy Review, headed up by the guru of the Pentagon—a visionary planner who has never publicly revealed his identity—a man whose life is made up of shadows and is only known through his code name “Buddha”, had not only prepared but also affixed his personal imprimatur on the following report summarized here and submitted with full documentation to the said subject of the report

NEED TO KNOW

FOR THE PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY

FROM: OFFICE OF POLICY REVIEW

SUBJECT: CLIMATOLOGICAL ALERT

PRIORITY: ONE

Background:
Following conclusions are the result of an exhaustive and systematic review conducted by this department over the last six months. See full report and documentation attached. Appropriate footnotes and attachments are provided... Timeline on this is marked “Urgent.”

SUMMARY CONCLUSIONS:

The probabilities of occurrence are so high, that it is necessary that we move up the time line.

Reason: To withhold such data this office would deem reprehensible in view of what we now know. According to our best estimates, all affected parties will require maximum time allowance in order to design, develop/ implement plans and procedures to augment their own prospects for survival at a time of great uncertainty.

. Findings: As per research, fully documented and enclosed, there is a very high degree of probability of the following scenario taking place within the near term. The probability is in the range of 80% with an error of approximately 10% according to the credibility of the current data projections.

Findings: Europe will be subjected to conditions that are unimaginable in today’s terms. In effect, we project that a kind of nuclear winter will descend upon Europe. The expected factual occurrences include the following: -- extreme and unique weather conditions unlike any seen before in Western Europe...

One of the greatest challenges should these projections come to fruition: severe flooding. . Our estimates of what life will be like should these projections come to pass are summed up as follows: Life will change dramatically for all those within targeted areas. In addition to flooding, calculations reveal that temperatures could plummet to levels emulating what might be termed Siberian conditions. Such catastrophic events will most likely trigger consequences unseen before. Nuclear wars, famine, mega droughts and other disasters may be among likely consequences. We repeat that these conclusions are the result of our best projections based upon the existing data and while the outcome spelled out here cannot be ruled a certainty, there is sufficient data to suggest that all of those inhabiting target areas be forewarned in order to deal with the high probability of such an occurence...

Consequences:
If these events come to pass, it would be highly likely that supplies of everything from food to energy would run out. Conflicts could be expected to be far-reaching and beyond our ability to conceptualize. And the resulting devastation could be worse than nuclear war.

The projected time line: there is an 50-50 probability that the timetable for the above could be accelerated so that such consequences could impact the target area in as little as six months. There is a better than 80% chance that the above occurrence will occur within twenty years. While twenty years may seem like a reasonable time to take remedial action, the possibility that this catastrophic event may occur in a much shorter time frame, makes the need for timely action much more immediate.

Measures: With a window that is tragically narrow, we recommend the calling of an immediate emergency conference, that the efforts of this conference should be oriented towards mobilizing all necessary services and counter-measures to assist our allies abroad and to provide support and aid for the affected populations. The need for positive action in the light of these projections is imminent and potentially overwhelming.
We await your instructions...

See attached report and complete documentation.

Office of the Director
Buddha”

The president seemingly annoyed with the intrusive nature of this report, glanced at it, mumbled something indecipherable under his breath, put it back in its folder and left it on his desk as he hurried out under Secret Service guard to the waiting helicopter that would take him to Air Force One for his overdue trip to the Southern White House and a week or two of sports-fishing and skeet shooting.

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NEW BOOK….NEW BOOK….NEW BOOK….NEW BOOK….

A Surprise Peak at Where Power Corrupts, the new novel about how a corrupt government uses loopholes ad lies to operate outside of the law and the Constitution to pursue its own agenda with little concern for the people and consequences that are devastating.
Follow a small group of men, called the Guardians, who are sworn not to allow that to happen and the inevitable clash between the forces of good and the forces of Evil that have unpredictable consequences.

Here’s a quick peak:

From the introduction:

“Mark, I don’t know how you’re going to believe this unless you see it for yourself with your own eyes….

Mark looked down at the fast-moving ground from the open door of what he had remembered as the Jolly Green Giant, the helicopter that had saved many a GI who had crashed behind enemy lines in Nam. The new version was larger and expanded and seemed more powerful than he remembered.

it was growing dark and they were over an obscure area of the Midwest. He guessed he was somewhere over Northern Wisconsin, near the Dells, and not that far as the crow flies from the border. This was an area largely unfamiliar to him, making it hard to pick up recognizable details from the large maps that we’re stretched out over the navigators panel and fluttering in the turbulence stirred up by the whirling blades above that made it hard to talk.

“There you go, amigo!” pointed out Scott pointing over to the southwest.

“What am I looking at? It’s hard to make out,” asked Mark.

“That’s it, baby. The new roadway, the super highway that the government says doesn’t exist.”

“What the hey? My eyes have to be playing tricks on me. …I don’t believe it.”

Mark removed his high speed digital Nikon with the powered advance out of his camera case and proceeded to take shot after shot of the locale beneath him. Fortunately, it was outfitted with a special low light lens that would make the terrain easier to interpret than with the naked eye under darkening conditions.

“Okay, mates. We’re going to land up north near that border and switch to land transportation.”

Where we headed?”

“I’m going to keep that a surprise.”

“Okay, okay.”

The giant Bell copter made a perfect landing and shut off its engines. The men filed out single file through the sloping rear doors onto the flat terrain that gradually rose over about a quarter mile to form what appeared to be foothills to the steeper slopes behind. The trail seemed to head into a copse of thick pines that limited vision further north. The descending grayness was getting thicker now and it became more difficult to see the gradients between land and sky.

They had reached their target window and now it was time to move.

Scott told the combat team that there were uniforms and night goggles in the van and they should change now. Footwear changed to insulated mountain boots with heavy duty wool socks. .

A Land Rover was then lowered from the copter.

“Where we going now?”

“Guys, from here, we’re headed over the border. I’ll give you coordinates once we’re on the road. I will give you a signal when we approach the enemy territory. Please keep it down; we will go silent when I signal you—then we move according to hand signals. Am I clear on this. Let’s not forget this is a mission to observe; not to take action!

“You are all professionals; I don’t want any slip ups here! Any questions?”

Let me remind you, chaps, we are doing this mission without approval of the Secretary. We are on our own here. If we are caught, we cannot count on outside help. Do you read.”

“Yes, sir, major.”

Scott, the highest ranking trooper among them, looked around.

“Okay, guys, lets shake a leg.”

The Land Rover, equipped for silent running, started to creep forward.

After nearly a half hour of difficult off road driving, it was clear to them that they had crossed an unguarded border crossing.

Mark was surprised that the border was unguarded.

“Mark, there’s a lot of these—there are just not enough Immigration folks to man most of the posts so they depend on the honor system; up til now, there has never been a problem.”

“So much for the security promised by Homeland,” replied Mark.

“It was always a joke, Mark. Just nobody talked about it. It was the Emperor has no clothes all over again. We made believe that everything was okay by ignoring it. Many of the serious guys took this the hard way. But the ‘kiss ups’ had no problem with it….”

Most of the driving was through undergrowth aided by a special night goggles and a global positioning system. The drivers and the special squad had night scopes and glasses which projected the foreground in a fuzzy green color that made everything look unreal and two dimensional.. Even though the newer models were much improved over the original versions, the glasses still took some getting used to unless used regularly.

The squad traveled light. Each man was outfitted with binoculars and special night goggles; each was equipped with two weapons, a 9mm Beretta and a folding stock Israeli manufacture submachine gun. One man, Carter, carried a scope and sniper rifle with flash suppressor. Each man also carried both a stun and a smoke grenade to be used only if necessary, a commando knife with serrated edge, a compass, water, compass, matches, a light folding blanket, a flash light with special filters and light weight poncho, water and a sleeping bag with net in the event of extreme weather conditions or finding themselves without a way home. They also carried enough food for two days. After that, they would have to revert to their hunting skills…..

Beyond that, they were on their own.

Their instructions were to get in and out without being observed and that’s what they trained for. They hoped that they would not have to fire a weapon but if they did, they could give a very good accounting of themselves. Most had been rangers or special ops troops who had volunteered for this assignment because of their personal relationship with the man, the Commandant of all Marine forces…. They knew they were taking chances; but there was no other way to get the information they needed..

“Okay, mates, we are going to debark here and head up to the target area by foot.
We have by my reckoning another three miles to go but this is as close as we can afford to get by vehicle. All out, on my count…”.

Scott led the group. Carter with his snipers rifle, the latest one out of the lab and an advanced scope, came up the rear.

In the indistinct light, it seemed that the patrol was headed for a covered rise judging from the incline they were traversing. It was a gradual rise climbing up about twenty feet for every hundred feet covered horizontally. And it was covered by underbrush.

It took them the better part of two and a half hours of hard climbing and cutting through bush to stop and assess their progress…

Scott, up front, had signaled for the rest of the squad to halt.

The scout posted advance of the main body of the squad had spotted something and they wanted to reconnoiter.

The scout back tracked to the head of the squad speaking in low tones to Scott.

Scott told him to return to his position. In the meantime, he would brief the rest of the men.

It appeared that from their position they were overlooking a cluster of buildings in what appeared to be a clearing that began about 300 yards out from the beginning of the overhang.

The cluster of buildings was contained with some kind of fence network. Several men were seen in what appeared to be guard positions.

Scott asked Clark to accompany him with his camera.

They moved to the edge of the clearing.

Clark tried to adjust his eyes to the greenish images.

The scout had been right. There were a half a dozen squat looking buildings resembling chicken huts but higher that could contain people. Outside of the fence was another square- shaped building and what appeared to be a guard post.

“That’s it, said Scott.”

“That’s what?”

“That’s what we’ve been searching for. There have been rumors that men who were getting ready to report on the NAU or had spotted the roadway had simply vanished.
I will bet anything we will find them here.”

“I don’t believe it.”

‘You will.”

“Let’s check it out, said Scott.”

‘How close can we get without being spotted, asked Clark.”

“We’ll head for that clump of trees about 75 yards away from the main gate. We should be okay.”

“Okay, your call.”

They crouched, then crawled to the treed area. There Clark saw another building. He was also close enough that he could make out voices.
“I can’t make out what they are saying.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“Spanish?”

“There are armed Mexicans at the Canadian border guarding a prison camp for Americans? Is this somebody’s idea of humor.”

“No, afraid not, Clark.” .

“Mother would never believe this….
But why?”

“/Because they are the one’s who can spill the beans.
They were caught at their game and as a result they were whisked away.”

“Holy cow!”

“And you asked ‘why?’ Do you really want to know?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, here goes: We are here to save them from taking over America…..”

Due for publication September 2008.

Advance orders accepted now.

Those who reserve will receive an advanced,. Personally inscribed FIRST EDITION….

18.65 plus h&p in advance

Please use the built in order form or send your check to LAACO, 239 Lakeside Drive, Lewes, DE 19958. If you are not completely satisfied, you may return the book within seven days for your refund (exclusive of s&h)….

The book that takes no prisoners
“A Political Tour de Force that nobody had the courage to say!”

A Blueprint for Winning: Taking Back the White House

CAUTION: IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE CHANGE IS WARRANTED BY A GOVERNMENT IN DISARAY THAT OPERATES IN THE DARK TO FULFILL ITS OWN AGENDA WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED, THEN DO NOT PICK UP THIS BOOK OR READ IT.

This book is an unalloyed attack on the regime that has controlled Congress and the White House for twenty of the last twenty eight years. America was founded on the concept of representative government and the rule of law.
We are a nation based on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Before our eyes, we are seeing all of our gains reversed, all of our beliefs sacrificed as secret agendas and the desire to monopolize all fossil fuels drive us to the edge of insanity. Americans do not need to be controlled with the use of abject fear; We need our country back and this monologue reminds us of what has occurred in the past and what we need to do to restore American Democracy; it also features a twenty point program to promulgate America’s leadership in the world and regain our standing among nations. It is packed with need to know information for the political activist who is tired of this Reign of Terror…

..

Progressive Politics and Program for Change

A BLUEPRINT FOR WINNING!
Taking Back the White House in 08!
uthor: Les Aaron
published by
LAACO LLC Publishing Company

Author’s note:

This limited initial edition is being produced for those who have understood and tolerated six years of my grumpiness, “bah humbug!” attitudes and anger at the insulting indignities and abuses that this government has heaped upon us and their willingness to sacrifice our hope for their own short term gain. …. It is my humble way of saying “thank you,”…”thank you,” and “thank you” for being there when I was feeling as if the world had imploded, that Americans had to be either the dumbest or the most disconnected people on earth after I’d kicked in my fourth TV. If nothing else, this book is designed to give it back in spades and constitutes a reason to feel good, to believe that there is a God and there is hope and maybe, just maybe we will be able to undo eight years of self-interest in government. It leaves few stones unturned; everything is fair game; it talks tough; and it is as frank as I can make it. So the cathartic effect is well earned!. .I’ve hopefully left nobody off the hook!...

If you’ve followed my editorials, I’m sure you know that this tome has riveted my attention for the last five years and dominated most aspects of my life. It has also cost me the affections of some of the members of my Republican family and a few friends who I knew less about than I thought and has added a dimension to the way I look at things now.

Nevertheless, I have been guided by the two essential truisms that I learned from my dad: Bullies and liars should be exposed for what they are and simply not tolerated. And the truth shall govern everything. He also warned me against those who like to wear their religion on their sleeves and are perhaps a little too anxious to point out the faults of the rest of us…. He has been right on both scores!

Most of those who denigrate others religion or values, tend to be hypocrites themselves. If we need to be reminded, Jesus rose above self-importance; he served to show the rest of us that the path to salvation was compassion and understanding. But this book is not about religion or phony values or promises or anything else. It is about revealing the truth and laying the groundwork for our future.

The book has finally come together after many missteps, two computer crashes, my own hyperactive involvement in trying to fix all of the bad stuff
that goes on, an obsession with the big picture and the corresponding avoidance of the detail aspects, much introspection and a good deal of hand wrenching. After the initial run, we shall self publish and make the book available to everyone who has ever foamed at the mouth, cursed in frustration or otherwise felt ashamed to be represented by this cabal of liars, crooks and phony heroes who think only of themselves and their own personal agendas. The decision has been made to release this unexpurgated, uncensored CONFIDENTIAL EDITION.

We renamed the book in the final count down to the midterms in recognition that the Democrats would win the first round,’ …“ A BluePrint for Winning: Taking Back the White House in 08!”
This is book is as much an indictment of democrats as it is a chronicle of what republicans have done to dismantle our Great Society programs and other legislation that benefits special interests. Make no mistake about it, a democratic win will have to be earned over the next two years; it will not happen automatically because the Republicans will be working doubly hard to blame us for everything that could possibly go wrong and they have the “clout” and the dollars to become a serious roadblock—if we let them!.....

Where possible, we have updated the text to reflect the changes just up to the mid-terms in order to make this book as current as possible in the light of the current republican confusion and malaise with everyone seemingly scurrying for cover.. We have also made this book both harder hitting and more incisive while hopefully providing hope for change.. One thing you will know is that it is as faithful to the truth as I was able to make it. I hope you will help it circulate word of it among those who care what happens to this country and the rest of us who feel so defiled, violated and “dirtied” by our association with this regime of self-centered, Cold Warriors who have shunted the people aside in their rush to have us believe their own view of the world…

A part of profits from this book, incidentally, will be used to further liberal causes through the Committee for Positive Change, an organization that I formed to give backbone and tangible support to progressive and liberal causes.. Thank you for standing by me all this time….

Les Aaron

PREAMBLE:

WARNING:
This book will not make you more popular.
This book will not make you better looking. It will not give you Abs of steel! And it will not put you on the “A” list for parties sponsored by the rich and the beautiful. It will not give you thicker hair, make you more regular or strengthen your bones. It will not keep you from running to the bathroom less. It will not make you more potent, eliminate Erectile Dysfunction or help you to sleep better.

What it will do is make you think.

We guarantee that you will think about politics in a way that you never did before. This book will help you to see how politics much to the surprise of most people influences everything. From who picks your orange juice to who gets your information age job. It determines whether your kids or grand kids go to war, and how we protect our cities against natural disasters. It decides whether Uncle Charlie or Aunt Millie get the medical coverage they need—whether we drill in pristine wilderness or destroy the face of America. It determines whether our children will grow up free and clear of international debt or whether they will be saddled for a debt that they had no responsibility for. It will decide whether you get your monthly social security check and whether the management of that system will remain in government hands or the private sector. It will determine whether we remain a retailing nation or discover our innovative spirit to again lead the world with our technology. It will decide whether we turn the other way when government tells us that air pollution and poisoned water are our legacy and good for America or whether we shall have the courage to view things through fresh eyes, whether we shall commit to recyclables that are non-toxic and good for the environment. It will be responsible for whether we are viewed as a pariah in the world or a partner who is committed to the betterment of mankind. It will decide whether we participate as an equal in the UN and work towards a better, more cooperative world or turn to bullying and aggression as a continuing instrument of policy. It will help you understand that the people who run for office may not have our best interests in mind. Or have the skills or aptitudes to govern justly. All things that we never deemed possible in a land where the poor could become rich and the ugly duckling become beautiful.

Today, all the options are on the table and it is up to us, the people, to decide what we intend to do with them. Unfortunately, because of events, many of these decisions cannot wait…and therefore your involvement cannot wait.

In the end, you will realize that there is only one person responsible for all that happens: YOU

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HAZMAT FOR THE BRAIN

A compilation of editorials, essays, poems, short stories, commentaries, black humor, satire, tongue in cheek, and hard-hitting opinion that you won’t find elsewhere compiled from the Internet websites, Blogs, guest editorials, forums and mailing lists, online and off line journals and magazines and after ten months as editor of the Democracy Chronicle…

NEW!: Hazmat for the brain:

The Red and Blue Editions are now available.

81/2 x 11 edition:
First Editions
Signed copies upon request.

These are editorials produced for online and off line papers, newsletters, Blogs and in newspapers and magazines pertaining to issues of concern to all voters—from the environment to the current wars and span the Bush presidency through 2005. . The articles included are unexpurgated. They cover a broad swath—from the environment to government abuse of our rights-- and reflect the point of view that in the end we belong to a representative democracy and it is our right and obligation to speak out when we feel that our rights are being violated. It is a book that uses humor and satire to point out the foibles of our leadership and to promulgate voter activism….…

Prelisting Special Price:
RED BOOK: 22.95 plus s&h
BLUE BOOK 23.85 plus s&h

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Not available on disk

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2010-02-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

Have No Fear, Keith;
We're Here!....

There are rumors flying that Keith Olbermann is under a lot of heat from the Network and that his ratings have done a tailspin.

The question is "Why?"

Are the preverts from FOX on his case for being too good at what he does?

The fact is that when the news looked bleak.

That I along with tons of others were not going to take it anymore, Keith came out of nowhere to assuage our injured sensibilities.

Okay, you may not love everything Keith does, but that doesn't change the facts one iota.

Keith is our man, and if you don't like him, get out of our way.

We are the faithful and we are with Keith to the end.

And if Keith ever has a need for a fan club, he need look no further.

End of story.

Keith, we love yah, baby! Keep up the good work...you have given a lot of us the courage to go on!

Les Aaron
Hubmaster

2008-07-31T13:42:00.001-07:00

Imagine: Primaries as an Alien Might See Them

Every wonder how “they” might see it?

If you saw “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” you’d know what I was talking about.

Poor Michael Rennie was trying to level with us all along; but we didn’t get it.

Do we get it now?

The question: How would other extraterrestrials think about what we were doing on our planet.

Would it be worth studying? Worth thinking about?

Or would they deem us hopeless and send in the robots to start life over again on this planet?

To assess this, let’s consider just our Primary which was watched intently by most of the world.

To them, a Primary might seem like a good excuse for one “Earthling” to say bad things about another “Earthling.”

To them, they might think it’s odd that gender and color seem to be such a big deal.

Imagine outsiders viewing our Primary.

If they didn’t know any better, they might even believe that these were the defining priorities of our Election:

Something called “Surges” would be right up there at the top of the pecking order.

After all, that’s about all John McCain has to say.

It would seem to strangers, no doubt, that Surges are things you do when you’ve botched everything else up. And a “Surge” can be used to mean anything.

Military decisions? Well, it seems from the face off’s that there are two points of view: One is the importance of winning; the other, how fast can we get out of there.

And if that doesn’t get our “visitors” perplexed, there is always the second topic, of course, something called “fuel” that allows us to go from one place to another.

This is critical because if you can’t go from one place to another cheaply enough, it’s time to blame the democrats. Don’t ask why? That’s just the way it is.

And an entire election could turn on that.

These ‘visitors’ might also be shaking their heads because as anyone can see the policy makers have contributed to making Earth a good place to leave. Our NASA group, it seems, will have no shortage of volunteers to test out Mars—our nearest neighbor.

And our Visitors might have a good laugh over that one….

They would have to be wondering how even an animal, much less people, could befoul their nests as much as we do our environment.

The third topic that would leave them reeling of course is the matter of our “nests” or domiciles. They would undoubtedly have trouble understanding why those who arranged for people to buy these domiciles at unrealistic rates knowing full well that they would lose them, would be shored up the government, while those people taken advantage of by the system are virtually ignored.

It must seem to them that our government supports illegal actions and awards those who are guilty of them.

These and other observations might trouble a “visitor” to our Earth.

They might even begin to wonder how we, the richest country on our planet, treats its needy and its aged, while countries less well insulated seem to show compassion in their concern and care for those less fortunate.

They might also wonder why we persist in our war-mongering attitudes knowing full well that wars bleeds a country of its assets and its resources.

They might also question why we seem so diametrically opposed to discussing our differences with our neighbors and so willing to go to extremes with weaponry to wipe them off the face of the planet.

They might also wonder why the richest of nations exports scrap and imports manufacturing goods to the tune of a 55 billion dollar deficit monthly or why we buy from a store that only sells us products that are made by slave labor or prisoners and may not be clean or healthy when we could build those same products better ourselves.

And before they leave they might ask themselves why if this nation is so great, we have so many diseases that are advertised on our TV’s and why there are different views on Restless Leg Syndrome and four hour erections that only the doctor can address.

And why we accept products where you have to read the small print not to poison yourself.

Such confusion could only cause them to speed up the return leg of their journey.

The Armchair Curmudgeon
Les Aaron

2008-07-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

An Ode to John

Dear John McCain

Was it all in vain

Your intentions, that is,
To refrain

From conducting a dirty
Campaign…

Or was it just

More of the same….

Lies you obscure,

Dear John

Make the rest of us

Only mourn

For what might have been

An end to hypocrisy and sin

And a campaign

Where truth can

Win….

Sad to say,

You may come

To rue the day,

That you shied away

From what you did say….

For you sure can’t win

And you can’t go Heaven

If you depend

On the nasty words

Of a “527”

That you claim

Not to indorse,

Of course…..

Making you sound

A good deal more

Like the proverbial

Media Whore…

Some may say Repent!

But I imagine the Devil

Prefers the new John McCain

And your evil intent.

2008-07-31T10:37:00.000-07:00

Pyrric Victory: The Environment

When this administration is judged, we will all play witness to the fact that it has waged ceaseless war against mankind with its self serving policies and practices; it is a battle that we have virtually lost collectively and it will be one that is already coming back to haunt us.

The subject is the environment and the “talking heads,” the media heavyweights and the ‘think tanks’ who exist to promulgate special interests and pay no taxes for the privilege will have won their Pyrric victory--a short term victory at the expense of our futures.

If we need any proof of that, all we need do is see the confusion and the doubts that persist whenever anyone brings up the subject of the environment.

As a result, the government has been able to put off clean air/clean water considerations; it has defanged OSHA, and it has given eight year’s of passes to Detroit. It has ignored transportation entirely while promulgating endless consumption and self-interest.

It has failed to adopt a policy of Global stewardship despite the fact that we are one of the leading polluter in the world. If anything, this government had demonstrated an affinity for supporting the status quo at the expense of the people, their health and the health of the planet.

From the very beginning, they have thrown a monkey wrench into the Kyoto Accords. They have enlisted scientists on the payroll to broadside their doubts about Global Warming and they have done little or nothing to take positive action to protect the environment. They have failed to get behind sequestration, they have encouraged the burning of coal who’s effluents include heavy metals and carbon that heats the oceans and dirties the air that we breath. Nor have they thrown their weight behind a policy to promote clean-burning fuels or develop smart alternatives.

As a result, America’s efforts lag the world. Instead of now javing to join the battle at this late date with diminished resources, we might have been able to reverse what now seems assured: the melting of the Greenland Cap and parts of South West Antarctica relating to the Ross Shelf along with the melting of glaciers in South Asia that provide much of the drinking water to that part of the world. At present, unless Draconian measures are adopted immediately, and quite frankly that is an unlikely outcome, my own state, according to projections from the Marine division of the local college, indicate that we will be under water in less than one hundred years. And those projections are conservative!

During the next generation, if we don’t seize the initiative, we can only expect increasing draught, the emergence of new invasive species, destructive patterns of rain and storms that will make Katrina look commonplace, rising coastal tides, loss of flora and fauna, the loss of species and rising temperatures.

There is also data that suggests that a continuation of our policy could also lead to “Snowball Earth” a series of events that might take place according to the best estimates if the underwater rivers that circle the globe—and bring moderate temperatures to most of the Earth—fail and shut down.

Such a development could make Earth mainly uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. To prevent such a tragedy, we as a people must mobilize our resources and act where our government has failed.

To paraphrase Vice President Al Gore’s words, it is better to be wrong about our assumptions than risk imperiling the earth through inaction.

Les Aaron

The Hubmaster

2008-07-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

Hillary for Governor?

I wonder what her true motives are: Is it to elect a democrat or to start planning her own next moves?

Almost a conundrum for the Ages?

The trouble is that Hillary's influence is still significant among many women who feel that they have cheated.

However, when it comes to party politics,
Even from the point of self-interest, it would be wise to back Obama.

He is the Party's candidate and if she doesn't throw her full weight behind him, she stands the risk of being construed as not only a "sore loser" but as someone who has an interest in splitting the party.

There is little advantage in that especially while she is young enough to entertain the idea of another office.

I suspect that if Obama doesn't reward her with something suitable to her own sense of self worth, she will go for the top job in New York State.

If that's the case, it will constitute the contest that New Yorkers were deprived of when Giuliani decided not to run against her.

However, the rumors are already flying that Giuliani will be running for Governor of New York.

He is a dyed in the wool New Yorker, even though many of the voters don't like him for the way he ran the Mayor's position and took all the credit for everything.

I think Hilllary would do well against him.

She is one of the few democrats who managed to do well upstate and down, which is a political impossibility in New York where upstate is like a different world from Westchester, Manhattan, the Boroughs and Long Island.

Most upstaters are conservative republicans and don't like "Flatlanders."

In any event it would be an interesting contest.

And no question about it, Bill would be there to lend his support which is considerable.

I personally think that that's the way it will go.

That is, unless Hillary throws her full weight to support Obama.

She hasn't done anything that I've noted to help him since she was introduced and mollified by the Obama forces.

Personally, I think she is still doing a slow broil.

There are still almost one hundred days left.

And she can make a big difference among those who voted for her.

But personally I think there are many republicans who would just love to see her get the vice presidential nod.

But I can't see it happening given her "high negatives" and the position of the Hillary folk before and during the second half of the Primary.

Les Aaron

2008-07-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

Counting your Chickens….

Is Obama assuming a little too much at this stage of the game?

One might think so based upon his recent statements and a couple of presumptuous moves that have left heads shaking.

Some have even suggested that Obama’s over-reaching may be just the wrong strategy at this juncture.

Being presumptuous has its place but not when you are just points apart from your adversary. Some consider it even a display of unwarranted chutzpah at this stage.

To many, it seems as if Obama has moved from a successful trip to Europe—where he appeared like a president “in waiting”—to meetings yesterday and today with leaders in the present government. A move that many think was a little over the top. Instead of courting the voters, for example, he chose to spend his time with Bush advisors and others in government.

The fact is that he is not the president yet and too look overly confident may just send out the wrong vibes to a voting base that has not made up its mind about the candidate.

To make matters worse, he has even stated in remarks that the election “looks good.”

Of course, most of this confidence is premature and Obama should remember that meetings with Angela Merkle, the president of Germany, and Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France, does not a presidency make.

True, he was treated as a potential president.

And, yes , his speeches were strong and reminded us of a former president’s visit more than forty years ago, but that visit was by a president; not a candidate.

To stir the pot a little more, in discussing his performance, some of my own friends criticized Obama for being too good an Orator which caused me to get my Irish up.

What do you mean?, I asked defensively.

They explained: Orators don’t win elections!

They cited Kerry and Gore….

And that gave me pause.

I think what they were really saying was that both of these candidates seemed to be above the fray, perhaps too intellectual and not the kind of guy you might feel comfortable kidding around with at the local pub.

And I see that as a real danger with Obama.

He is not that guy.

Yes, he smiles a lot and he pats a lot of backs, but does he pass the kind of personal litmus test that most people seek and want in a president?

The answer to that question is not clear.

But what can be a turn-off is the fact that he already seems to have inherited the mantle of president without the approbation of the public.

In the end, it is after all, the voter who makes that distinction by casting his or her vote.

And too much confidence too early in the game can keep people home on Election Day.

Just a thought or two but perhaps Obama needs to surround himself more with real people who have their fingers on the pulse of what the voter is really seeking in a candidate….and get out there like the candidates of old and press the flesh.

It wouldn’t be beneath him.

Les Aaron

2008-07-29T15:12:00.001-07:00

Out, out damned Spot!

This was the report on John McCain.

He has had skin cancer before and he’s being on the safe side.

Hmmm!

This may not be anything to fool around with….

Skin cancers can be some of the most deadly forms of cancer and he shouldn’t make light of it.

I had a case of it years ago and we caught it early, I guess.

Because I’m still around.

It’s a bit embarrassing after going through Korea that I could be brought down by something so small you can’t see it.

I empathize.

So, good for you, John.

Now, with that cancer gone, maybe you can get back to thinking like a normal person and forget all that crap you’ve been dishing out.

And become a rational candidate.

I mean up to now, John, I have to admit that you’ve been scaring the Hell out of me….especially after saying that you were going to run a decent campaign without the negativity.

But John you went back on your word.

Your latest foray into the “nasties” was on exhibit for all to see yesterday.

And it makes you look like a mean-spirited little man who has trouble with the truth.

So with “spot” gone, we hope you will turn over a new leaf.

And rejoin the human race.

What do you say, buddy?

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

Historical Signposts:

As I grow older, I realize more and more how much what happens today is influenced by the past. It seems that things have a cycle of their own. As of now, it seems that what happened in twenty year increments seem to provide kind of a yardstick—and in many ways—a perspective for today. It goes without saying that we as Americans, unlike the Asians who tend to think in perhaps 100 year increments, are inclined to think more in terms of day to day when they should be looking at things longer term.

Such thoughts impel me now to think of those early days of the Cold War when General Curtis LeMay headed up SAC, which was the Strategic Air Command. At the time, there were always a number of bombers in the air ready to take out the Soviet Union. Blunt, but true.

You may have seen Dr. Strangelove which was the tongue in cheek version of a movie that depicted what could happen if both our countries got our signals crossed and moved forwards towards confrontation..

Fortunately, wiser men prevailed in those days.

And when SAC transformed itself into what was to become NORAD to which I volunteered, I had often wondered what would happen if a foolish, shallow person addicted to limited thought and macho to a fault would have assumed office.

That was more than fifty years ago.

Now, we know. And make of it what you will, it does give us reason to pause.

In those early days, we have something called the “football,” the red phone that an aide carried everywhere.

In only a matter of minutes, waiting Russian ICBMS could be targeted at a diversity of US Cities.

I thought about this as I tracked Khrushchev’s plane from our engagement point, mid Atlantic, until the time it arrived in New York where he was attend a session of the UN.

Khrushchev was no fool; neither were any of the presidents from Eisenhower thru Bush I.

Nobody wanted to start a nuclear war and have that on their conscience.

But there were incidences.

On one chill morning in the mid-1980’s, a radar observer noticed aberrations on the radar.

It seemed to indicate that American missiles had been launched.

The generals wanted to go to duty stations and launch their own missiles in order to survive. And they had only fifteen minutes to make the decision.

Fortunately, a cool colonel of the Russian Air Force was in charge and he urged caution and argued effectively against making a pre-emptive strike.

As it turned out, it was a false alarm, geese flying through the radar net.

Such a miscalculation could have surely brought around Armageddon if the Russians didn’t have such a cool and rational man at the helm.

Today, he lives an obscure life in an obscure hamlet.

And so it went.

Again, I wondered what would happen if cooler heads did not prevail.

And that we voted into office a hip-shooter; someone who liked to play the fast-draw.

Well, we’ve gotten to find out.

One of the first thing Bush did in taking office was to end SALT, an agreement that had lasted 37 years and kept us at peace.

Next, our cowboy president talked about preemption, going to War on the suspicion that our adversary was planning to strike.

No proof; no nothing.

Fortunately, the Russians were not headed by an adventurer; nor, at the time, were they so predisposed to challenge the US.

But times change, today Russia has resumed its role as counter-balance to adventurism and the world is much more complicated than it ever was back in the fifties.

In the early days of the Bush chutzpah, he had no hesitation in calling North Korea, Iran and Iraq “Evil Empires” which nearly destroyed the democracy that South Korea had built over so many years.

Nor did it help America smooth over relations with Iran with its large moderate population. Again, we seem to forget was that it was we who armed the Iraqis to fight Iranians and it was we who in the fifties disposed their premier because he wanted to nationalize his own oil industry.

The Persians, a culture that goes back some five thousand years and proved to be culturally advanced then, did not forget our interference into affairs of State and our pushing the Shah and his dreaded secret police, Savak, on them.

Yet, we blunder forward without so much as a thought to historical imperatives or the actions of the past.

If we had, we never would have made so many mistakes in Iraq. And we might have come out without our tail between our legs.

In all of this, the blame should never be cast on the troops. Their efforts have always been exemplary; however, as in Vietnam and other unnecessary adventures, it is the government that calls the shots.

In this case, it was pure egomania combined with cultural ineptitude combined with arrogance that has cooked our goose and we are still too preoccupied with all the wrong things to see it.

As we approach an election, but before we can take a deep breath, it has become increasingly clear, that we need to clean house; that we have to remove the brain-dead, the egoists, the blind, the self-aggrandizing and the meek before we can turn things around.

If there were no other purpose to education than just knowing how to conduct our affairs and to protect the people, that would be sufficient to justify PhD’s for all.

And though some might laugh at such a magnanimous gesture, perhaps if we had done so, we would not have spent nearly one trillion dollars to promulgate a War that seems to have no end and no definition of “victory.”

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

When Worlds End

It sounds like the same thing that Monica did for Justice, the government did when it decided to populate the Green Zone in Iraq.

Instead of having all of the promised specialists to restore order and services in Iraq's major cities, they populated the Green Zone with young incompetents who were adjudged to have voted "right" and to have paid appropriate homage to their master, the Bushmeister....

It is sad and embarrassing to see our government so incompetently managed and it is worse when the idea that lives are being held captive by political decisions that have no place in governing a country.

So one wonders why we were to expect a different outcome in Iraq when we couldn't even mobilize properly to handle a hurricane in one of our oldest and most well loved cities.

When our own government puts unqualified people into responsible positions, it says more than we need to know about the contempt our leadership has for doing the right thing. That by itself seems to be a violation of one's oath of office.

Instead of doing what is right, our government is more concerned about achieving its lopsided agenda that benefits the few, the rich, those who donate over those who need help, the poor, the uneducated, the infirm.

In some ways, it seems to me that there is just degrees difference with a totalitarian system that takes, takes and takes.

We have fallen a long way and we have learned some things perhaps we didn't want to know.

Among them, our government doesn't care one whit for us.

Our Supreme Court is political.

Our Media is compliant and subservient.

Our Congress is weak, weak, weak and an embarrassment

Our protective agencies do not protect

Our Military is only valued when it serves and forever after neglected by those who should know better

Most of the government is incompetent and does not know what it is doing...

That our leaders are only concerned with filling their larders....

And they don't care if the storms and the rising tides destroy what is best about our country....

They don't care if the flora and fauna die....

They don't care if species end....

Or the air and water kills us......

Even a totalitarian system might not go that far.....

But the lesson to them is simple: We don't care enough to do something about it.

And that's the rub.

Les Aaron

2008-07-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

Picking through the Detritus….

There’s a lot of stuff going on….and much of it doesn’t add up to a hill of beans. But there are things that seem to be generally overlooked by the public at large.
Among the most disturbing developments, there is growing evidence that Congress is not going to find the gumption that it needs before it goes down as one of the least effective Congresses ever—despite what Nancy says.

My main complaint is against her considering Impeachment for the most impeachable president ever.

Her reasons do not resonate with me; nor should they with you.

Because it gives Bush a pass and allows him Congress’ blessing for violating the Constitution.

Do we need to repeat that?

What is about that message that Nancy and Mr. Reed do not understand?

Do they not realize that this is just another nail in the coffin of democracy?

What is wrong with this picture?

Now, they are investigating the failures of the Justice Department to follow the law and the Constitution.

Somewhere along the way, Gonzalez, the Attorney General (Ex.), did not understand that his loyalty is to the law not the president.

And while everyone in the White House serves at the pleasure of the president that does not mean that all are to cater to him over the law.

Today, two high level people in the Justice Department were identified as using extreme political bias to choose lawyers to serve in that department.

Attorney General Gonzalez claimed again that he didn’t know anything about it….as he had said in confused testimony again and again.

Clearly, Attorney General didn’t know much about anything—especially what his obligations were under the law.

Wouldn’t the president be embarrassed to allow this charade to continue.

Add to this the latest testimony re the FISA courts and the free pass he has received for getting the telecommunications to break the law.

We are on a downside spiral in virtually everything these days, but it is clear to any observer that what has suffered most is respect for the law.

When the whole country collapses from Inertia, will Bush claim Executive Privilege.

That would be a fitting dénouement for a government unable to govern and a White House oblivious of the law.

Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-28T13:36:00.001-07:00

La Vida Es Sueno

Some times it’s like that…

Life is like a dream according to Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s allegory on life.. .

It is a dream inspired by what we like; not necessarily reality.

Don’t believe it?

All you have to do is bring up a topic that is unpleasant to hear a resounding “I don’t want to talk about that!” or something equivalent.

The fact is that the recipient of the communication has already turned off his or her brain.

The truth is that we are remarkably adept at such contrivances.

The brand people say that we can only accept so many impressions. Our minds can only acknowledge a few brands in each category so if you’re not in the top seven in people’s recall, don’t bother to search for funding or expect great leaps forward on the Big Board.

It just won’t happen.

The prophet of TV had it right: The medium is the message. But what he didn’t say but implied was that the Message is taking over.

And why not.

It tells us what we want to here. It doesn’t fill our heads with painful facts.

And that is both the blessing and the curse of our society.

Why is it a curse?

Because the powers that be know that anybody who is addicted to TV is a great subject for their own brand of persuasion that may or may not include the truth.

Someone said to me that the Revolution is coming.

I said I doubt it.

Why? Too often, I find the residue of the Cargo culture.

These are the inhabitants of Western New Guinea who sit on rocks and wait for the “great birds” to come to deliver nice things like food and clothes.

And some are still waiting for America’s return.

That was more than fifty years ago.

We, too, in our own way are waiting to for a savior to come along.

To bring back all of the things important to our conception of democracy.

But there are few figures great enough to fill the bill.

No Adams or Washingtons along the way.

Yet, we wait for the deux ex machinas to come along and save us from ourselves in the Third Act.

But low and behold, it never happens..

Why?

It seems that the passivity required for TV watching is directly proportional to the apathy we find in everything else.

Why bother to read; it is too much work—especially when you can passively watch a made for TV movie without exercising a mental muscle.

Why bother to listen to a heroic piece of classical music. It takes too much effort.

Why bother to research the truth; it requires too much sweat and hard work.

The fact is that largely we have become apathetic because it just takes too much work to get involved, too much patterning of the frontal lobes one would suspect..

Therefore, no Washingtons.

No Revolution.

No nothing.

Just more programming to keep us in our somnambulant state.

So the arbiters of what is right and wrong go about spinning their cynical webs and we all suffer from inertia.

Imagine.

Two hundred years ago who would have thought?

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon.

2008-07-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

The Obama Outlook:

Claudette, I think your question is very apt right now, so if you don’t mind, I am going to broadside what I am finding out there in the world of the wealthy, the red-necks, the partisans in this fight and the “undecideds” –the real minorities, the ethnic “haves” and “have-nots” who are legitimately undecided for the reasons I will get into shortly.
Since you asked, here is what this old curmudgeon finds and hears from his vantage point and in his travels.

So, strap yourself in.

First off, I do see racism as an underrated threat that is evident from the little clues and the innuendos that I am privy to and am receiving from those who I have been close to which does, in a way, both surprise and trouble me.

I had hoped and prayed that we had moved beyond the race riots, the fires in Newark, the stuff that I had seen during my service days. In those days, my bunkmates were black and they had their friends over at night and I like everyone else listened and enjoyed the music. But there was always that undercurrent that never went away.

And although we had come a long way, there was that cross-current in the air.

I sensed it back when I was covering South Carolina and the rest of the deep south. I sensed it when I sat with my customers and they were reminiscing about those good old days during the Civil War….

But, now, there is something else in the air.

People who claim to be fair-minded and progressive are not.

I don’t want to feed the flames of what we saw in the primaries but many folk who we suspect of being progressive in their views, I am finding to be coy or dishonest.

It’s the little things that are starting to add up.

In short, people don’t trust anything they are not familiar with.

And they are not familiar with a child who is neither black or white, a child of the world.

And I find it disturbing but it is almost the language of the herd.

If you are from outside, you are not adopted by the herd; you are left to fend for yourself or die. And I see much of that here..

But I also think that this is an issue that is divide by education and age.

The younger, more educated among us are falling on Obama’s side or so it seems.

There are still “idealists” among us but perhaps more than idealism, per se, the modus operandi seems to build around the idea that one, we either cannot survive any longer as a country unless we change or ways; or, two, the time is right for change in every way possible. The old have botched things so badly, that the young have to come in and set it right. The symbol of the young is Obama.

And I concur.

But that does not mean that McCain will just go away.

And as we’ve seen, no matter how outlandish the opposition, they still always score at 49% of the population plus which gives the lie to the polls that never seem to tap into the real truth because the public will never admit it.

To the young and the educated, McCain is just another old man who thinks the wrong way.

I believe the educated, too, sense that Obama is the vehicle for bringing about change; someone who with a wave of his own personal magic will transform the world before us.
He is the deux ex machine who comes in to save the world in Act III.

But there are concerns.

I was talking about such things to two young black men from the Geek Squad who came in to install some Best Buy equipment I indulged in.

We spent most of the day talking politics.

These young men were eye opening in their intelligence and candor. They had seen it all unlike most of us. They grew up in places that I knew to be “pits.” Yet, they had escaped its pull, moved to green Delaware for new lives and pulled it off. They pulled it off because they were bright and wanted more out of life.

Yet, it was clear to me that they didn’t see Obama as one of them. To me, it seemed that though they didn’t say it outright, for them, Obama was an elitest. He didn’t know what they knew; he didn’t have to fight their battles.

My guess is that they probably won’t vote and that is sad.

But their feelings run deep and for them, Obama is really nothing but a white man.

It seems an odd point of view; nonetheless, there are other incongruities in this election that have been barely discussed or scrutinized.

Obama is really in an impossible role.

A close friend of mine said he is worried about Obama although he is supporting him and believes that we are desparate for change. He is 83 and much my senior, but his mind is very adept. He said that the problem is that Obama fits into the role of a Kerry or a Gore. He is an orator. But as evidence shows, orators don’t win elections. They are too often perceived as above the fray, elitists who don’t relate to the average person.

And there is something right in what he says.

For my own tastes, I would have preferred a street fighter, somebody I could relate to, perhaps a Jackson for these times.

But truth to tell, Obama doesn’t come off that way.

Ah, he is bright; oh so bright that I have probably never heard a more gifted candidate.

But he also seems to be above the rest of us, mere mortals, and knows it.

Nor does his wife, despite her attempts, seem to get down and dirty and comforting.

Part of the problem is that nobody has ever seen anyone like him.

Moreover, nobody can really understand the complexity or the diversity of experience and backgrounds that this unique individual draws from.

He is truly representative of almost a new species of being as crazed as that may sound.

And the rest of us are not sure how to identify.

The trouble is that he has trouble playing the common man; he is not of that ilk.

And theirin, like a Shakespearean protagonist, may be the seeds of his karma.

He is not everyman; he is “special man” and he makes no bones about it.

But the rest of us don’t know him and there are fewer than a hundred days left.

John McCain, however, is comfortable like a squeaky old shoe, like a grand-dad who says dumb things but people can overlook that because they think they understand him—whether that’s really true or not.

I think that McCain is not as nice as he’d like us to believe.

But he has the background that we like.

So, therefore, is kind of Taoist challenge that we face.

Do we buy into something many of us feel comfortable with; a war hero who has been around a long time and seems to be the kind you might feel comfortable with or do you buy into something you don’t really know and don’t feel comfortable with.

I think it will ultimately boil down to the numbers—even if Obama says nothing wrong!

And that will be whether the educated and the young and the black progressives and the desire for fundamental change can overcompensate for those traditionalists who prefer something they know over something they don’t.

Elections have been decided for lesser reasons.

Meanwhile, McCain will still harp on familiar themes, whether he gets them right or wrong; and Obama will soar with his rhetoric but not interest us enough to want to go out and have a beer with him.

In the end, few things change and this by no means is going to be a slam dunk—no matter what the experts say.

And those of us in the party who think so are simply missing the point.

Les Aaron, the Armchair Curmudgeon…..

2008-07-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

Poor John.

He has been acting more and more like a dodo bird.

You would think he would have learned by now.

But oh no, if nothing else, McCain is stuck in the groove of a lack of imagination rubbing against self-interest. In the end of course, the story is more of the same.

Self-interest rules. And if necessary, the past will be reinvented to fall into line.

And so we find ourselves back at square one amongst those who look upon John as the Chosen One….

But there is a consistent flaw in the stolid face that Original John tries to present to the world and that flaw seems to become engorged every time John opens his mouth.

You see, in case you haven’t noticed, the Senator seems to have one phrase in his vocabulary and when you build your campaign on one phrase, you’d better have it right.

But even that is beyond John’s abilities to render.

Some say, John’s slips are due to his age…..and some say it is because John is no different than most in his party who think nothing of transposing the facts to help solidify his position.

Either way, he is reinventing the past.

That past has to do with something called “The Surge.”.

And if we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times. In fact, it supersedes everything else in John’s inventory from the economy to health care; from jobs to the loss of home mortgages….

It is the defining terminology if one were to describe what McCain is all about.

Therefore, it is only fair that someone address it as, it turns out, Keith Olbermann is doing with great pleasure. Keith is expert in probing his vulnerabilities with red hot pokers and then twisting them for all to see.

Meanwhile, John doesn’t seem to be bothered as he proceeds to reinterpret history virtually every time he tries to explain it. .

Now, SURGE has become a composite term that refers to what happened before the real SURGE, before that was authorized by Bush which was, in effect, no more than the generals wanted in the first place, more boots on the ground.

And then under Bush, the phrase took on a new meaning, the Surge now—according to the beneficent leader-- was to provide the time that the government of Iraq needed in order to get its house in order as a precondition for our troops leaving the country. (Of course, at the time, we didn’t realize that our tax dollars were being used to build sixty permanent bases all over Iraq.)

But McCain’s definition conveniently leaves that out…as he does everything that happened before. He never questions the need to have gone into Iraq; he never questions why we didn’t mount an aggressive effort to get bin Laden, and he seems to go along with Bush’s ability to not only dispense with all of the motives for going into Iraq in the first place—from WMD to “yellowcake,” the UN charade, the fact that he had already made up his mind to dispose of Saddam before going into Afghanistan, our initial failures at keeping the peace, our obvious attempts to protect the oil as opposed to the people, or the banks, or the Nation’s antiquities and on and on.

It all revolves about “the Surge.”

In his flexible interpretation, the Surge is what happened before the actual SURGE took place. And he mentions it over and over again. In his own mind, he has attempted to incorporate the Surge into all that happened that had heretofore been referred to as the Anbar “Awakening” when the sheiks realized that they wanted to end the bloodshed and end the attacks on the Sunni by Al Qaeda and other dissidents. The Shieks had claimed that they had seen enough and were willing to cooperate with local commanders. . .

McCain points to his interview with the general in charge of Remaldi at that time and suggests that the SURGE really refers to that time; but that was long before Bush’s decision to send troops to Remaldi or Anbar.

It was not until January 2007 that Bush announced the decision to move thousands of more troops into Iraq. And the first troops did not begin to arrive until March 2007; meanwhile

In March 2007, before the first of the new troops began to arrive, Colonel John Charlton, the commander responsible for Remaldi, a city in Anbar Province, reported that thousands of new Sunni police on the ground in concert with friendly Sunni Sheiks had already cut the rate of crime in half.

McCain is quick to include that result in what happened after Bush’s Surge took place.

On another note, McCain’s raving about the concept of SURGE omits the fact that it was initiated for a single purpose and that was to allow the government to organize in order to allow the American troops to leave Iraq.

It has also been a proven way to positively skip over all that had gone wrong in Iraq and give it a happy if inaccurate spin. It is simply wrong to use the SURGE as a synonym for the Iraq experience, a way for the government to stop talking about their failures over more than five years---from inadequate planning to an inability to govern the country.

Most sensible people will not be so taken in and will recognize that John McCain is trying to write a history that is too fresh in most of our minds to be so manipulated.

If this is all McCain can bring to the table—a kind of “blindness” to real events—it will have even loyal Republicans shaking their heads in wonderment. Nonetheless, as we have seen before, by repeating the same inaccuracies over and over again, John McCain will benefit from his own re-invention of the facts. We have seen that before and we shall see that again.

On the other hand, John McCain might do well to consider the polls that show that 80% of the population already believe that when it comes to the leadership in this country, we are going in the wrong direction.

Hint! Hint!

Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

On Streisand

For the short time I spent Stateside, I was stationed at Fort Wadsworth, an old fort that was said to have gone back to revolutionary days. On the days when I wasn't tied up with assignments, I would file down to New York City via bus and ferry (before the Verazzano was built), and line up for free tickets at the USO.

One of the first shows I saw was "I can get it for you wholesale," in which my next store neighbor played the key female role until somebody I had never seen before took on the role of secretary in the musical and proceeded to steel the show.

That somebody was Barbra Streisand in her first stint on Broadway.

Before the Show, she had opened for a folk singer I knew, Sylvia, at a local club.

Okay, flash to 1999, it had been more forty years since that day.

I had went on to serve my career, raise a family and then take on odd jobs after losing my job when my boss, the owner of the company, sold off my division after promising a life time of work.

I was standing on line among seventeen stalwarts for Al Gore.

That was our biggest turn-out then after weeks of trying to drum up enthusiasm for Al.

It was in the Spring and pre-Convention.

Then the Hollywood producing brothers came out....
and the Unions and even the junior Senator from New York.

Harvey Weinstein read a message from Barbra Streisand that ignited us all.

With Harvey, came the music and the sound systems.

And before we knew it, we had filled Broadway from 42nd Street to 38th Street on Seventh Avenue.

No longer could Rudy Giuliani's minions hind us behind yellow stanchions.

We had jelled into a movement.

I will never forget those days of feeling really alone as if no one cared and then like a flash of lightening, it all changed.

The Democrats had come together.

We had all been saved.

Something to think about as we enter a new election.

And must remember not to take victory for granted.

Les Aaron

2008-07-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

Think Positive

Under the rubric of keeping an open mind, I’ve discovered that there is always hope.

And those of you with a historical perspective will appreciate this little story.

Some may recall me saying that I got to know three of those in Nixon’s inner circle.

One of those was a classmate, a young man from a blue collar republican family who despite being committed to conservative causes, was a decent, hard-working and fair person with exceptional abilities and intelligence whom I had known since the early days of school.

Dick was chosen by Nixon to be first a strategist and a speechwriter, and then appointed to be his first press spokesperson.

Dick lasted less than a week in that spot and then opted out of his own accord.

The big question was “why?”

It turned out to be no surprise. He couldn’t stand those who surrounded Nixon and didn’t mind saying it including Erlichman, Haldemann and the whole motley crew of Nixon’s “Nazis.”

And when Nixon chose Agnew, Dick Whelan left the Administration and decided to write a book called “Catch a Falling Flag.”

He was the first of the loyalists to break with the pack.

Dick Whelan had already achieved a modicum of fame with the Founding Fathers, the authoritative and best seller about the Kennedys. Later, he became a consultant to the republican party and then a senior editor at Fortune.

This legendary advisor to the republican party announced last month that after fifty five years of being a stalwart of conservative republicanism, he has decided to switch parties.

His reason?
The republicans have veered from their original party platform and that he has been very disappointed in the Bush presidency of the last eight years.

This shows that there is still hope that the rest of the republican party will still find its soul and return to its fundamental philosophies that have been abandoned in the last eight years.

Although Dick and I virtually never agreed philosophically, I always did respect him for who he was, his integrity and his honesty.

And now I am especially proud that he has found his core. And while the party has changed, Dick remains the point man on honesty and integrity and that with his grit and good sense, he will remain a beacon for others who recognize that the Grand Old Party has lost its way.

Les Aaron

2008-07-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

Another look at oil

It seems to me that the big Oil Companies are thinking very short term.

And they are not the only ones…..

Think about the big mid-eastern producers, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and Russia.

They are keeping the prices high.

Artificially so.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia seem to forget who bailed them out.

But that’s okay. We remember.

What will they do they do when Americans can no longer afford to buy their oil.

And start taking their electric cars to work….

Or start using public transportation.

You know, at one time when people moved from oil light for their lanterns and home lighting, the oil industry didn’t know what to do. That was a hundred years ago.
It could happen again!.....

But the oil industry got lucky.

They were bailed out by the automotive industry.

What happens to the oil industry if everyone uses electric cars?

Have they thought about that?

Saudi Arabia has a fortune invested in the West.

What happens to their investment when we have to borrow more and the value of the American dollar goes down?

What happens to the big American oil companies? The processors?

Not that I care.

They’ve had their opportunity and they showed themselves to be greedy pigs.

Now, T Boone Pickens is moving to renewable energy.

And the smarter money is moving to alternatives.

GE has sold its major investment in plastics and packaging in order to increase its investment in renewables. So have other European giants who see the future apparently with greater clarity than our own government.

In the next ten years, I expect you won’’t see an SUV, a Hummer or an unnecessary truck on the road. They will become the dinosaurs when oil was affordable.

In the next twenty years, perhaps fifty percent of the fuel will come from grass plants and sugar cane.

In the next twenty years, new hybrids may make up half the marketplace.

And what will happen to Saudi Arabia and Iran once the oil goes?

And who will care?

That is if we get smart.

And do the right thing.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-15T15:40:00.001-07:00

It’s time to get rid of the “Nay-Sayers!”

Have you ever noticed?

The world is full of people who will tell you what you can’t do.

They tell you: “You are no good at this….”

“You are not capable of doing that….”

“You will never be as good as me…..”

And on and on….

The insults and disparaging remarks are endless.

That kind of negativity come in all shapes and sizes and I call them “put downs” and they come from those who only know one thing how to discourage enthusiasm, and eat away at hope.

They are the people who discourage you because they don’t want you besting them.

They are the people who prefer the status quo.

They don’t want to see anyone get ahead.

And they don’t want anyone to get wise to them….

And their little scams that allow them to get away with doing nothing….

And they are endemic; you find them everywhere.

I literally despise such people.

I hate people that feel sorry for themselves.

Who blame the world for not being good to them.

Who feel a sense of entitlement.

I have known them all my life.

I grew up with them, in fact.

Their modus operandi is that they don’t want to see you get ahead—especially ahead of them!

They love to take the credit for everything….

And to my mind, they diminish life.

They are always the “negativists.”

They only see what can’t be done.

And what you can’t do.

And they’ve probably been around since the beginning of time.

They are the ones who laughed at Noah!....

Who thought that leaving Africa would be a waste of time….

Who said to others, “Why build a shelter, it will never stand up to the elements.”

We all know who I am referring to.

What if Christopher Columbus listened to the nay-sayers?

What if Thomas Edison was told: “Why try all those filaments; it will never work anyway?”

What if somebody said, “Why bother, Mr. Pasteur: What’s the big deal anyway about homogenizing milk?”.

And that kind of myopia and narrowness of view has not gone away. In fact, only a few years ago, somebody said that there was an end to history….Nothing else new could happen under the sun…..

Another person at the end of the nineteenth century said that every invention that was going to be invented was already invented.

The point is that you can’t listen to anyone when it comes to charting your course.

Only you decide.

And that’s how it should be.

When people tell me “it can’t be done,” I enjoy proving them wrong.

We Internet people should know about such things.

Back in the sixties, the big Communications companies laughed at the
“black box” makers saying these things will never work!

IBM said why bother with these kids toys, the pc, the future is in the big IBM mainframes….

And you wonder how people can be so wrong….

Here’s my little motto: Most people are mostly wrong most of the time.

And whoever says there isn’t room for innovation is simply an obstacle and should be fired.

If they worked for me and thought that way, they would be gone in twenty four hours.

I like a “can-do” atmosphere.

I don’t want to hear it can’t be done because, mostly, it can.

If you have the moxie to do it.

And it’s that kind of spirit we have to find again.

The spirit that we can do anything.

I think it will come back if we can wrestle power away from the negativists and those who tell us it isn’t worth doing.

There’s plenty of us out there; all we have to do is find our courage once again.

Les Aaron

2008-07-15T11:01:00.001-07:00

"There’s no place like America.".

That one expression seems to codify the popular myth.

Maybe that was true once, but I am not so sure about that today.

In light of the last eight years, America has been transformed.

We don’t have to go much further than what we see with our own eyes….

The housing industry has been crippled; it was the only leg that the economy was standing on and the government ignored its role and its impact on the rest of the economy.

The mortgage market is a disaster. Another million homes went up for foreclosure.

This will not only destroy the home-owner but ruin communities all over America.

More and more what you see are Foreclosure signs up or For Sale signs; this is not a healthy sign for the economy.

More and more, America no longer makes things…..

There is no American TV maker anymore. Zenith, RCA and Magnavox are now owned by Asian companies…..so is the IBM key pad pc.

Our jobs move over the borders.

And to respond, we buy from Wal-Mart which has forced more and more American companies to fold or move, taking their jobs with them.

And still we buy from Wal-Mart reinforcing their message: Buy in China; Sell in America.

They are America’s largest retailer, accounting for more than $400 billion in annual sales.

If you added all of the value of all of the retailers in America, they would not add up to 400 billion dollars.

And Wal-Mart’s purchasing policies have literally forced all of our suppliers overseas, mostly to China.

We import 65 billion dollars more from China than we export.

The Chinese hold nearly one trillion dollars of our debt.

China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and England own America today.

That’s how we are financing a one trillion dollar war; make no mistake about that!

I benefitted from the programs of FDR and the GI Bill.

Although the democrats finally reintroduced the GI Bill, there is nothing left of FDR programs to put America back to work.

The jobs that are available are usually service-oriented and part time. And to the pundits who are trying to tell us they are just as good as manufacturing jobs, be assured that they are lying. Service jobs do not have a multiplier effect on the economy as manufacturing did where one dollar turned into six dollars.

Service sector jobs don’t begin to replace manufacturing jobs despite what they say in the Greening of America.

Those top level “white collar” jobs we were supposed to be heir to have also disappeared to places like India where the workers will strive for one-quarter domestic wages.

Many of us have trained our own replacements because we were “over qualified”==read earning too much—only to have our jobs acquired by special Green Card holders.

To reassert our leadership, we need to have the best education in the world; but the only one’s who do have that kind of access are the one’s who can afford twenty five to thirty thousand dollar a year tuitions.

There is no equal education any more.

The Republicans want to privatize it and the Federal government has focused on No Child Left Behind because of Bush, which only teaches children how to prepare for a known test. It teaches nothing about learning.

To be a top rated Western country, we should have a health care system that we can be proud of; yet, we don’t. We don’t even have a middling health care system. Most of the world’s healthcare systems do not put the burden on the people; ours does.

And most people cannot afford to have a catastrophic illness.

The fact is that in America today, 40 million people do not have access to decent health care.

Worse yet, although we account for 5% of the population, we account for 20% of the pollution. What does that augur for our well being and health in the future?

It signals that we have not seen the half of it.

Our advisors tell us not to drink tap water; we are told not to consume fish more than once a week. Our FDA does not inspect our food. People die because cattle are not inspected. Produce and fruit comes into this country untested. Our pets die from toxic materials in the dog food. Our kids get sick playing with lead-painted toys.

And nobody does anything to correct it.

More and more people are coming down with strange cancers and other health conditions brought on by air and water pollution and neglect.

This is not the America I remember.

When I was young, the air was clear and the water drinkable. Today, you are warned to have your water checked regularly.

At the same time, the coal burning monoliths continue to spout their residues into land and water, heating up the water and contributing to Global Warming and nobody seems to care.

Our representatives don’t respond to our letters and the media seems indifferent to our plight.

No, this is not the America I grew up and it’s not the one I would like to remember.

I’m a Veteran of a Foreign War as was my dad who sacrificed everything to live here and save democracy from the "enemy."

Well, today, for the first time in my life, I am thinking of packing my bags and moving.

If no one is going to do anything to save this country, our Constitution and our Democracy, then it is merely landscape undifferentiated from anywhere else in the world and it would behoove me, or you to look for a home that will see that we don’t die in the streets from malnutrition and neglect and that my kids get a decent break.

I am tired of living in a monarchy where 1% of the population owns more than sixty five percent of its wealth and the top tier five percent own virtually everything. i don't want to live in a country where the executive on the floor earns 400 times an hour what I make.

That's not Democracy; that's a theocracy.

And if that means leaving, so be it.

Les Aaron

2008-07-14T08:10:00.001-07:00

SHIFTING DYNAMICS REFLECT CHANGES ESPECIALLY IN THE WEST

i THINK WHAT MOST OF US FAIL TO UNDERSTAND, AT LEAST THOSE OF US WHO HAVE COMMITTED THE OLD ELECTORAL MAPS TO MEMORY, IS THAT THE WORLD NO LONGER FALLS IN LINE WITH WHAT HAPPENS IN THE EAST, THE RUST BELT STATES AND CALIFORNIA, TEXAS OR FLORIDA.

IN FACT, THERE IS A NEW DYNAMIC SHAPING AMERICA.

THE TRUTH IS THAT THE MAP HAS BEEN REDRAWN TO GIVE GREATER EMPHASIS TO THE ROLE OF THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST, THE SOUTHWEST. BEFORE THOSE STATES WERE FIGURED TO MAINLY GO REPUBLICAN.
\
BUT IMMIGRATION AND CHANGING ATTITUDES AND AN INFLUX OF NEWCOMERS HAVE CHANGED THE DYNAMICS.

FIGURE THAT UNTIL LAST YEAR, NEVADA WAS THE FASTEST GROWING STATE.

ALL OF THESE CHANGES AND IMMIGRATION HAS GIVEN THESE IMPORTANT WESTERN STATES ADDED CLOUT.

AND THOSE LOCKED IN THE PAST ARE GOING TO HAVE THEIR COMEUPPANCE IF THEY DON'T TAKE THESE CHANGING DYNAMICS TO HEART.

I THINK IT WAS BRILLANT THAT THE DEMS SHOWED THEIR UNDERESTANDING THAT THESE CHANGES ARE NOT TEMPORARY BY HOLDING THE CONVENTION IN DENVER INSTEAD OF NEW YORK OR CALIFORNIA.

WE ARE SEEING A RE-EMERGENCE OF NEW DEMOCRATS WHO ARE SPEAKING MORE FOR THE CHANGING DISPOSITION OF AMERICA, TOO, AND THESE CHANGES MAY BE PROFOUND IN THE OVERALL SCHEME OF THINGS....

CONSIDER SOME OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS WHO ARE NOW RUNNING STATES OR ACTIVELY REPRESENTING THEM. FOR THE MOST PART, THEY REPRESENT VOTERS WHO ARE FED UP WITH THE UNPARALLELED EMPHASIS ON CLEAR CUTTING, DRILLING AND MINING THAT IS DESTROYING OUR LEGACY.

AND THEY ARE SIMPLY UNHAPPY WITH THE STATUS QUO.

PHIL GRAMM'S UNTIMELY AND INSENSITIVE REMARKS ONLY HELP TO EXACERBATE THE GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE TRADITIONALIST REPUBLICANS AND THE CHANGING MOOD AND DIRECTION OF THE COUNTRY.

AND WHAT HAPPENS IN THESE AREAS MAY JUST CHANGE THE OUTCOME OF THE ELECTION.

LES AARON

2008-07-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

Swiftboating 2008

When it comes to politics, us old timers like to refer to a shaking of the bones, old witches brews, gut instincts, experience and being out there on the front lines…..

We know that the republicans know how to use innuendo and unproven claims to hobble the opposition and they do a damned good job of it.

Over the last thirty five years, there has always been a dirty tricks contingent laying the mines and serving as the zappers of the castle…. And they are always good at it. It seems that politics has become entwined in everything else but the issues. “Who was your minister?” “Do you have the right values?” “Are you a patriot?” It’s almost as if the non-sequiters, per se, have taken over.

And it’s depressing that we have veered so far off the mark.

Nontheless, it has become republican tactic and strategy inasmuch as there are very few positives they can point to and the Atwater strategy was so effective at the time of nailing Dukakis, why not keep using it to death.

To accomplish the mission, the republicans pay to maintain a PR engine that knows no equal in the history of politics; an engine that mobilizes the media, advertising, direct marketers and PR specialists to hit on everything they can to raise questions and doubts about the democratic opposition.

At some point, men of good conscience, if there are any left, must come together to say enough is enough. And if the whole matter isn't ugly enough, new fuel is being added daily.

Now, the New Yorker, has come out with a cover that they claim satirizes Obama by picturing him as a Muslim and his wife as a militarist with the appropriate AK 47 on her shoulder. They call this satire; well, I tend to think of it as pandering to the lowest common denominator, and if I hadn’t already cancelled my subscription, I would do so again.

It’s bad enough that people tend to believe all of the bad and unjustified stories out there but for a legitimate and serious publisher to pick up that argument accomplishes nothing other than give credibility to all of those mindless bigots out there who mask their other agendas with biased claims . It is unfortunate, it is ugly and it panders to our darkest side. Again, yesterday, the McLaughlin Group, aggravated the potential schism between the old and the new, by claiming that the old-timers among black activists tend not to see the young inherit their mantle especially when they are viewed as an “Oreo.” This is race baiting of the worst kind and designed to pander to the lowest common denominator. Yet, it is what we are going to see a lot of right up until the Election.

McCain said he was going to run a completely different kind of election; to many of us, it seems like business as usual.

After thirty five years, it is time that well-intentioned democrats realize what is going on and fight fire with fire.

Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-13T12:24:00.000-07:00

Discontent Brewing: Will it Stiffle Democrats Chances?

The former editor from Slate, Michael Kinsley, was right on the money.….

There is trouble brewing on the democratic side that could affect the outcome of the Democratic convention and possibly the race.

And while he mainly talked about the Hillary—Obama snag, there are other potentially volatile issues. Let see if we can chronicle the more important ones that do not seem to be going away quietly as many of us had hoped at the end of the Primary.

Part of the problem has to do with the fact that Obama supporters are disinclined to toss money into the pot to help Clinton pay off her campaign debt which they felt was unnecessary to incur since it was clear that she wasn’t going to win months before.. Also, many are troubled by the waves created by the Clinton campaign—including the remarks by Bill Clinton and Hillary’s campaign remarks that seemed to have given McCain and the republicans sufficient ammunition to carry them through the campaign.

Hillary’s supporters are unwilling to put aside their bad feelings claiming that they have been mistreated by the media.

And her supporters feel that a delegate count at the Convention would be justified as would her appointment to the Vice President spot although ardor seems to have cooled on that particular issue in recent weeks..

The second problem is the move by Obama to the center which has alienated many from his firm base of support. Liberals and progressives are troubled by his willingness to allow the telecommunications companies to get a free pass by his vote for the FISA bill and what that means to the Fourth Amendment. Others, feel that Obama’s embrace of the center has meant compromise on other issues important the left including what seems to be a shift of position on Iraq although Obama attests that his positions have not changed from the original debates.

The republicans seem to be having a field day with this. And they are trying to build a case that increasingly Obama is starting to look like any other politician.

Red-blooded republicans are starting to taste blood and are gathering around the presumptive leader even though they may not care for him particularly. Nevertheless, McCain is doing well raising money for himself and his party.

Many are also troubled by Obama’s failure to take on the republicans more aggressively---especially in light of Phil Gramm’s claims that Americans are wrong headed thinking negatively about the economy.

The left wing and the progressives feel that he should not have been allowed to get away with some of the things he said and that Obama should have been more aggressive in presenting his case.

Obama is headed to Iraq and the republicans are using this opportunity to tout John McCain’s experience in having made the trip eight times despite the fact that he still can’t seem to differentiate a Shia’ from a Shiite without Joe Lieberman’s help.

All in all, many spot troubles ahead and that seems to be reflected in the fall-off of campaign donations that seem to coincide with further charges of
“flip-flopping….”

It will take time to sort this out.

But right now, the threat of disharmony in the party and other factors have leveled out Obama’s advantages in the polls. Now, the latest poll show only a four point advantage for Obama nationally, down from double digits.

It is not a good sign; on the other hand, it is still early in the game. It is quite possible that all of these concerns may be solved before the Convention and that there is harmony in the party come the Fall. Most of us democrats who have sat through eight years of pain and discomfort certainly hope so….

Les Aaron

2008-07-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

To the Hon. Mr. Phil Gramm,
Economic Adviser to John McCain,
Candidate for President of the United States

Dear Mr. Gramm,

I am one of those people, I guess, you characterize as a “whiner” with mental problems about the idea of an economy that’s bankrupt and a government that’s indifferent to working people and those without power.

I am one of those “whiners” you talk about who whined way back when we were told that we were going to become a white collar nation and business got the the green light to move their businesses off shore.

I saw that we were being set up for an exodus and the substitution of American workers by illegal immigrants and green card holders which the Republican government never adequately addressed.

And I whined when those special “white collar” jobs started going to holders of special Green cards or , instead wound up being shipped to Bangladesh or India or China.…

And I “whined” when Bush assumed the powers of Fast Track which allowed him to give away our nuclear secrets in exchange for fruit from India.

I “whined” when the colleges we support with our tax dollars allowed their research to flow to foreign countries without penalty so that foreign countries could out-compete us globally with the products of our own invention.

I whined, too, when they asked me to train my replacement, a Green card holder from India; my boss claiming that I was “over qualified. ” which was republican code for a democrat making too much money.

I whined when the government never set up a realistic energy policy for the people. And I was outraged that a cabal of energy profiteers was running our country. I whined some more.

I whined, when we the greatest nation earth, could not help our less fortunate brothers and sisters in New Orleans because of an act of Nature; yet managed to turn the aid over to developers to build new gambling casinos and expensive homes..

I whined, too, when they cut back my children’s scholarship while this selfish, blind-sided government went ahead with a Star War’s program that never worked and never would and robbed our children of a misspent 240 billion dollars. I didn’t hear any one on the republican side that that was stupid or unfair. No, isn’t it nice when everything’s so one-sided, Mr. Gramm..

I whined when the credit card companies, acting collusively, raised my interest rates and the mortgage companies increased my payments because they could get away with it with a government that has at least in the last eight years always settled on business’s side.

And by the way, I understand that you had something to do with that and profited nicely from others’ pain so I can understand why you call the rest of us in the real world “whiners.”

I also “whined” when I was on the receiving end of the “doughnut” in the pharmaceutical plan for most Americans that the lobbyists worked out with Congress and that I cannot afford to pay; I whined, too, with the increases in my medical expenses that leave me hobbled with inadequate money to cover my old age or the resources to protect my wife.

And I whined about a lot of other things that your candidate seems unwilling and too disconnected to care about. Like the absence of positive measures to deal with Global warming and air and water pollution that comes from the burning of fossil fuels that endangers our health and our futures. Your boss claims that he is right on economics and what’s good for us, but I whine when I view his record of second guessing and non-accomplishment!

And I whine because our government has dropped its mandate to inspect the foods we eat….the toys we import and the feed we give to our pets. It should be no surprise that people are being poisoned, animals have died and many of us have become sick because our government no longer does the job it was entrusted to do….

And I whine because we have sold out to foreign interests like Japan, China, Saudi Arabia and India….

And because our exports to China, mostly scrap and agricultural products are dwarfed by imports that are in imbalance to the tune of over 60 billion dollars a month….

I whine because our government lies to us…..

And ignores the Constitution while moving forward with programs that go from eavesdropping illegally to torture of innocent people that we won’t even acknowledge but that the rest of the world knows about and condemns us for….

I whine about the fact that my kids will not know the benefits we had known….

That they will have to struggle to put food on the table, pay their mortgage and pay for their gasoline because of “dumbed down” selfish policies that emanate from your government, Mr. Gramm, the kind of government you made possible when you were in the House and it was then okay to rubber stamp corruption, illegal fund raising, and adding “add-ons” to bills to pay back your friends and donors.

Yeah, I’m angry that as a tax payer, I am the one who helped underwrite a War that was unnecessary and resulted in the deaths of many thousands, and others not reported, and the virtual end of the careers for thousands more….I think there is no greater sin!

I’m angry about all of that. Angrier than you’ll ever know.

And I whine about the fact that my representatives don’t represent me any longer and I whine because I see the America that my family has fought for going down the tubes precisely because of selfish, heartless, greedy creatures like yourself. And, frankly, Mr. Gramm, I don’t give a damn what you think!.

Les Aaron

2008-07-10T11:37:00.001-07:00

WHAT’S WRONG WITH US?

Why are we so ungrateful?

Why do we see things as out of whack?

Why can we not appreciate our blessings?

Well, I guess now we know.

McCain and Company has given us all the answers we need.

We are in “mental depression, ” according to the republican pundits who know about such things.

“The trouble dear heart, is not in our stars, it is with us.”

We should have known better.

And I guess we owe an apology to the powers that be.

After all, if God didn’t want GWB in power, he would have done something
About those hanging chads….

Thanks for clearing that up.

It is not the government that needs to get straightened out, it is the American people who need to get our heads screwed back on right.

I suspect that next the Bush-McCain government will allow the GI bill to be used for our mental problems….

One wonders how we could have allowed ourselves to sink to such a level and acquire such distorted views.

Where had we gone wrong?.

Were we too questioning? Were we too mistrustful of our sacrosanct leadership?

It may take time to diagnose where so many of us could have misjudged everything so badly.

Clearly, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were only interested in the welfare of the people, not in their own self-aggrandizement.

Those secret oil meetings were really for our benefit…

And the snooping on our telephone calls and emails, also to help us fight terrorism.

And can you imagine if we had to fight them over here, instead of over there.

Why did we not see that?

And of course they were right to blame Sadam for being in the pocket of bin Laden.

And we were right to talk about Crusades in order to inflame the hatreds against Western Christians….

So what if we haven’t found the WMD; it doesn’t mean that they’re not there. Does it?

And we were all wrong to make such a big deal about clean air and clean water and all of that Global Warming malarkey.

I mean so what if a few species like polar bears and penguins have to go….that’s the way the world works, in cycles, don’t you see. And so what if the water levels rise.

That will only mean that more of us will have waterfront property.

Let’s dwell on the good side. Let’s get those flag buttons out, even though they’re made in China. And lets look for those photo ops so our neighbors won’t think we’re malingerers…

The real trouble is that we don’t appreciate what this government has done for us.

Therefore, I would like to propose a Government Appreciation Day…..January 20th 2012. Isn’t that the day the Mayan calendar comes to an end?

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron
The Power of One Society

2008-07-10T10:24:00.001-07:00

The Wonderful World of George:

What a wonderful world George has passed along to us…

Even the makeup of the government he bestowed on us would be laughable if we examined their qualifications and merits if it weren’t so damned personal.

To spare us that agony, let us just conclude that virtually every Cabinet appointment was either a sinecure or an appointment from the industry that said appointee was supposed to monitor and control. (Didn’t we all know that they were going to return from where they came as soon as George returns to the ranch?)

All along, we folk, naïve as we are, had assumed that the Interior Secretary would have a stake in being concerned about the interior.

That would seem to have a certain logic to it.

We did not dream that the Interior Secretary would be hard-driving advocate of economic development of the Interior with the focus on drilling, clear-cutting, and mining—three things considered inimical with the Secretary’s obligations.

And you can go right down the line and find the same parallels in virtually every Cabinet appointment made by our Pasha of self-interest.

Look at FDA, populated by people from the food and drug industries, they are sworn to monitor and control the industries they oversee, and if that gives you fits, it is quite reasonable under the circumstances. These are the same folk who allow medicines, food supplements and other consumable products into our country that are not tested or inspected at all. And when approached about their obligations, simply blow it off!

Of course, Americans are big believers in trust so we have to factor that in….that is until there is some kind of a National scandal as there is now, and as there was over the past eight years of fumbling the ball.

You can look at Treasury. We just appointed a new Attorney General who thinks of water boarding as a sport and would rather be somewhere else than having to make legal decisions….. Seems rather incongruous wouldn’t you think?

At least there’s OSHA. What about OSHA? Aren’t they the folks who postponed the clear air and clean water acts for another ten years. And postponed legislation already on the
books because the dirty industries were not quite ready to clean up!

Nothing so irregular with HUD.

Really, didn’t they just ask the Chair to resign for money irregularities…..i.e. bribes and kick-offs which were vehemently denied until the wealth of evidence was overwhelming….

How about the past?

Well, Christy Whitman—a Bush appointee-- swore on a stack of bibles that the air right after 9/11 had been tested and there was nothing to worry about.

We wonder why then so many “first responders” are now coming down or dying from air-related diseases?

And need we mention, Mr. Brown, who distinquished himself according to GW for doing such a great job of bailing out New Orleans and helping “the locals.” That’s the place John McCain would have visited if he had known about the disaster although he was said to be right next store in Arizona celebrating his birthday with G.W. Bush, who later realized it might be necessary to fly over the destroyed city and wave a flag or something for a photo op on his way back to the ranch.

As a postscript, if I recall, all the money went to developers, when it did come and they used that money to bring in new businesses and gambling ventures.

And then when we had to do something, they gave everybody who bitched and moaned about the government’s failings, a mobile home that would eventually kill them off from the fumes they inhaled. I guess that’s one solution.

I mean you and I both know we could go on and on and quote chapter and verse about this government of personal economic opportunity and ensuing chaos.

But why bother. We all know that already.

PS Dennis has been patently unsuccessful in lining up support for the Impeachment of George W. Bush for lying to Americans about starting a war against Iraq.

What will they then do about Iran?

Was that the Statue of Liberty shedding a tear?

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron
The Power of One Society.

2008-07-09T20:23:00.000-07:00

Doing Something!

Again, the specter of war with Iran confronts us.

But what can we do about it?.

For the last year or so, we wrote to each other expressing our disdain for such a cock-eyed idea. War with Iran seems so crazy to any rational person. Some of us wrote to our representatives. Others tried other means.

Overall, whatever we did seemed to have little or no effect.

Obviously, one thing is clear: Our conventional approaches accomplish nothing.

We may feel better about complaining or screaming to our friends, or beating our chests, but in the end, what does it do?

Nothing!

Where we have gone wrong is in complaining to the choir.

We are all sitting in the same pew.

What we need to do is externalize our activities so that they become much more visible among those who don’t use the Internet.

This is a hard to grasp. It’s hard for me.

I’ve been working with the Internet since 94.

But didn’t really get involved til around 98.

I can’t believe everyone isn’t caught up in this new powerful new medium.

But the fact is that they aren’t.

So, while we may feel somewhat relieved knowing that we have gotten our frustration off of our chests, in fact what we have only succeeded in doing is telling each other.

But how can we really be effective in reaching beyond those who live, eat and sleep the Internet.

Ah, that’s quite another story.

I saw that happen when Howard Dean lost in the primary.

The legions of "Deaniacs" regrouped.

Many formed into the grass roots movements of the day.

They started their own progressive movement.

A few got into office at the local level.

Some of us went to work trying to change things locally.

Let me tell you that if you didn’t do any more than work on your local party, you would be accomplishing something.

Some of these local parties are so far behind the times it would be laughable if it weren't so sad.

Some are led by people who’s only qualification is that they show up regularly.

Many don’t seem to have a clue about what’s going on politically or what they should do to mobilize the local troops.

We started the Power of One Society to get involved in such "reawakenings."

And other projects to improve things—even on a micro scale.

Frequently, we join with others to leverage our strength and power; sometimes, we form coalitions to get the job done.

One thing is sure: If we don’t do something---anything, we can be sure that nothing will change.

That should be incentive enough.

Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon

For the Power of One Society

2008-07-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

America’s Three Dumbest Companies….

IBM, Xerox and GM were once touted as some of the smartest companies on earth.
Everyone paid them tribute. We took our management lessons from them; they were featured in the Harvard Business classes as examples we could learn from.

Since then, the shroud of ignorance has been lifted from our shoulders. We have poked, picked and examined them from every angle and discovered that we were wrong in our assessments. Over time, we had learned how wrong we had been by following the popular culture. Instead of being the smartest companies in America despite their longevity, they are perhaps the dumbest.

The amazing thing is that at the time, everybody thought that they would remain at the top of their industries. Nobody thought they could do any wrong.

In this brief essay, we will just touch the highlights but no doubt, anyone who was not intimately familiar with these companies and how they operate, companies once believed to be juggernauts, should come away with a new perspective and revised perceptions about what makes a company great..

Let’s begin with IBM. When I first became involved with computers, IBM was the model for us all to study. There were some ten to twelve competitors at the time, but IBM controlled the lion’s share, something like 88% of all business. The rest divided up by the competitors including GE, Honeywell, NCR, Burroughs, Control Data and Sperry.

Sperry had been the first in the field and the original leader. However, it’s marketing department had sat down to anticipate the size of the market for computers and arrived at the number twelve. They were superseded by IBM almost immediately who sold something like 140,000 of their 1401 Series by 1964.

IBM made the mistake along the way of ignoring those who were outside the company and that brought about their fall from grace. To them, the people who played with the little black boxes, then called Commodores, weren’t worth thinking about.

However, when IBM went outside to find its Operating System, it went to one of those who happened to see a future in those “little black boxes.” His name was Bill Gates and he owned nothing but bid immediately on providing an operating system for the IBM behemoth. Bill Gates then went to the owner of the system in San Francisco and bought the rights. It changed the computer industry forever and it lost IBM its advantage.
All the rest was history, Bill Gates formed Microsoft and built a fortune by just offering operating systems and software and staying away from hardware.

A brilliant move by a brilliant and futurist, Bill Gates.

But IBM didn’t end the tomfoolery there. Tom Watts decided that they no longer wanted to build their own chips so that they would go outside. Subcontractors were all the rage.
They offered the opportunity to a small company called Intel with a very smart president who understood what IBM was putting up for grabs. Today, Intel is the largest manufacturer of chips worldwide. Moreover, both Intel and Microsoft earn more than IBM ever dreamed of.

At the time, Xerox was riding high. It held all the patents on xerography and the company based in Rochester couldn’t keep up with demand. It had also started an R&D venture in Palo Alto, California. But the distance between research and the suits that drove the business was far greater than any physical geography.

The engineers at Palo Alto had really come up with something big.

But the suits simply didn’t get it.

Word got out to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and they came to visit.
What they saw, also changed the physical face of computing forever.

It was something called the “graphical interface.” Up til then, all computing was very prosaic: lists of numbers and alphanumeric characters, no graphics!

Jobs seized the idea for use with his new “black box,” what was to evolve into the Apple pc.

IBM still thought of the pc market as something not to be taken too seriously.

The “Killer Applications” came following the development of the graphical interface and the market for Apple computers exploded.

Xerox never got it.

By the time they went to court, their hold on the computer industry was little more than a moot point. They had lost out big time to become the leader of the computer industry.

GM was always a hidebound company. It hired from Detroit, people who knew the car industry. It never went outside to get outside viewpoints, as explained by the former head of the Cadillac Division, Delorean, who built his own car company and the fabulous Delorean, with its stainless steel body and gull-shaped doors.

Delorean wrote in his book, On a Clear Day, you can see GM, about how GM developed policy and how really isolated its managers were.

For example, to review a new idea, management had to see it three times. First, it had to be sent to the managers for review before a meeting could be planned.

Then the managers approved the meeting but usually fell asleep during it because they had already seen everything and then there was a final wrap up which nobody paid attention to. It takes time to see every idea three times and between that and their isolation and identification with a world of their own making, they fell behind in the important task of knowing what their customers sought in an automobile.

The Japanese, however, not so smug or complacent, came to this country and asked questions and talked to the consumer and changed the nature of the automobile industry once and for all times. Get this: They actually built the car the driver wanted.

(I was a former GM customer who decided to quit after a Buick purchased in 1984 from the dealer was delivered without the right shocks, the right PCV valve, faulty door opening devices and a bumper that was only bolted on and then stolen. I had the car in service for every day for the first six months…)

Today, GM is in shock. The market for its big juicy oil guzzlers has evaporated.

My God, isn’t that a surprise especially with fuel costs at over $4.00 a gallon.

China is currently turning out 9 million cars a year; a country that was in the backwoods hardly twenty years ago.

In ten years, they will be producing as many cars as we produce in the US.

The Japanese are making hybrids and have been for years.

And the Japanese have just completed the first hydrogen operated fuel cells for commercial use in cars….

The Indians are already building a $2,000 car.

Where does this leave the smartest automotive company on the planet?

I posited these three alone because we can learn from their mistakes.

In this case, the beneficiaries have been Apple, Microsoft, and Toyota.

Without Xerox, Apple wouldn’t have realized its potential; without IBM, Microsoft might still be just an idea and without GM, Toyota wouldn’t have conquered the auto race for first place.

Hard lessons to learn that counter the prevailing intelligence but vital if we are to ever move forward again.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon.

]

2008-07-09T07:40:00.001-07:00

Through a Glass Darkly

There is something seriously out of whack here.

I read what so-called liberals post and it leaves me speechless.

Aside from a few participants, I have never heard such sophistry, some overarching misunderstanding of the facts or emotional swings that seem to be all over the place.

It seems as if the infinitely small has become magnified and taken center stage. The same arguments get dissected over and over again, especially among the Talking Heads.

“Did he part his hair on this side or that side.”

Clearly, if you prefer parting your hair on the one side opposed to the other, you are no longer a patriot or worth voting for…

No matter whatever the inanity of the question—and believe me the range of the dumb questions is paralyzing-- some expert would be conjured up to argue the “pros” and “cons.” It seems truly ludicrous.

And the afternoon broadcasts are worse with the reporters being even more amateurish, more uniformed.

While people gloss over this, it really points out that most people’s understanding of the issues is seriously flawed. Thanks to each miscreant giving their own little spin to the question depending where their loyalties lie.

And it only get’s worse when you get the Hannity’s and their ilk from the Fox Network on. Trying to match them up with the facts is a Herculean feat not to be attempted by the weak at heart.

In the rush of all this, the real issues get glossed over and the charges back and forth are mostly allowed to stand.

When a Republican critic challenged Chris Matthews with Obama’s flip flopping, he should have known that those charges were bogus. He never called him on it but switched topics.

It seems that the real issues take last place.

And it may be worse on the outside.

Long time friends show me that the race is not about the issues, it is about race……and gender.

This submerged biases and long dormant feelings are going to count for a lot more than we give them credit for.

We saw that in the Primary where good democrat beat good democrat and it got progressively ugly.

In the process, the real issues got buried.

Can’t we think better than that.

Are we not capable of separating fact from fiction?

Then why do we tolerate such nonsense?

What is wrong with Americans today?

Too many video games, too much dumb program, too little mental gymnastics?

I don’t know….

But I’ve literally seen college graduates unable to parse the language….

Unable to discern what is hype and what is fact…..to not understand the nature of propaganda when it’s thrust in their face.

Don’t ask anybody about what’s worth fighting for either in a democracy.

You’ll get blank looks.

The people who will tell you they’re educated cannot add two and two….

The world traveled seemed to have learned little.

The communicators do not write a word that helps.

Those who judge our military preparedness have never served a day….

And they put kids in Justice to tell them that they should only hire right-wingers like themselves….and then wonder why Justice can’t seem to find answers to anything.

Under our supreme justices, torture is not torture….It’s water sports.

Words change meaning before our eyes….

They’re not really spying on us, they are protecting us against “terrorists.”

We have a government that if they are trying to con us are doing a pretty feeble job of it; yet they don’t mind robbing us blind or dismantling government as concerned citizens stand around and applaud.

What the hell is wrong with America today.

Why can’t we knock some sense into the people who vote.

Why aren’t the votes ever counted?

Why are there “hanging chads?”

Why will most republicans vote to sustain a third term of George Bush….

Why will Hillary supporters vote for McCain when Obama’s and Hillary’s positions are virtually the same….

Why do we listen to a man who as governor thought it was funny to tease a prisoner on death row who held out hope for a change in sentence, a woman who was mentally ill. And it never came. Bush wanted to teach her a lesson….Is that the kind of mentality we want running America?

This sick mind inhabited by the resident of the White House believes literally in every word of the bible—even words that weren’t in the bible. And from his words, Armageddon sounds like Chevy Chase’s Summer Vacation.

And we turn over to such a man the power to launch ten thousand missiles and end the world.

Tomorrow, democrats will end the Constitution by destroying the Fourth Amendment.

Democrats, mind you, will vote to give the communications company a pass because Bush said it was okay to snoop on your fellow citizen without a court order.

We have sacrificed 4,000 plus men and allowed to be wounded more than 100,000 of our best and brightest and we say it’s to end terrorism—even though the country we invaded had nothing to do with bin Laden or his threats.

We have sold our land to China and Japan and Saudi Arabia….

To the tune of billions of dollars, all of which were used to fund an illegal war and Congress stood idly by….

We, once the most powerful nation on earth, have morphed into a debtor nation surrounded by 90 Nations who mostly hate us.

To me, we have all gone crazy….

And to my poor dead father who sacrificed so much so that others would not have to take his place, I issue an apology.

Dad, you sacrificed so that a bunch of morons could ruin your country into the dirt and the people you sacrificed for have not had the courage to lift a finger to save your democracy.

It is sad that we kill everything worthwhile and save only the detritus.

It is a suitable end for a place that has no meaning anymore.

An America that has become fascist in eight years and nobody seems the wiser.

It is time for the French to take back the Statue of Liberty.

We don’t deserve it any more.

Les Aaron

2008-07-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

A Chance to Show What You Can Do...

Feel frustrated?

Want to get involved in doing something?

Want to run your own show?

Don’t have much money?

Here’s the opportunity to do all of the above….

It’s called the Power of One Society.

What we do is find opportunities to get involved.

Usually its some kind of symbiotic involvement with another group or, at times, it can be a solitary level of involvement.

What can someone without much money do?

There’s lots of opportunities to make an impact….and it doesn’t take more than chimp change to do. That’s your call.

For example, you can build an internet group, have meetings with friends and discuss opportunities, or you can look for opportunities over the Net or via local radio or newspapers.

Wherever you live, there is something going on that is politically driven, that emotionally involves you, impacts your life one way or the other, ie. Clean air programs, alternative energy, infrastructure, transportation, land use, political activism, or whatever happens to be your hot button. For me, it’s Veteran affairs, the environment, land use and alternative energy.

But be that as it may, the Power of One Society does not dictate. It coordinates, offers advice, lends emotional support, and ask if you would tie in with more national programs; nevertheless, if you choose to be an agent of the Power of One Society, it is up to you to choose your own priorities for your area or needs.

All that we ask is a level of prudence before committing our name to any enterprise and that projects of a national nature be discussed in advance.

As far as the way to get involved, there are many:

You can write a letter to the editor

You can enlist your friends or garden society members, or whatever to your cause…

You can prepare an editorial to send to your newspaper….

Or participate in a forum

You can do some research

Prepare a report

Call your representative

Contact your governor

Communicate with your State government

You can host a fundraiser for a worthy politician

You can augment the efforts of someone running for office

You can become an active member of your Democratic party

Chair a committee

Host a move-on meeting

Set up a Meet Up group to discuss challenges

You can influence your local radio station, petition your local movie house to show films of a progressive nature….

You can email your friends and family

You can run for office

Encourage others…

You can raise money to get people to vote

You can mobilize a blood drive

Agree to drive seniors to the voting polls

Offer to become a poll watcher

Attend a State Convention

You can lobby for better land use

Argue for improving infrastructure

Plan for better land and more efficient land use…

Raise money to buy hats and gloves for war Veterans

Arrange to take them to appointments….

These are all simple things that any one of us can do…..

Over the course of the last five years, I and my friends and neighbors have done most of them….from persuading our local movie house to show Michael Moore to fund raisers for Howard Dean. We have raised money for Veterans causes and attended State wide meetings to improve infrastructure and land use, writing reports and sending out press releases to argue our differences. We have fought for alternative energy programs when the coal lobby was thought to be impossible to beat. We have held Meet Ups for candidates, and Meet and Greets for new people joining the political process.

We have done virtually all of this with only minor expenditures. I have funded my own participation with book sales and my costs have only been minimum.

Next year, we hope to expand our efforts.

There is much work that lies ahead and Obama will need all the help he can get.

If something we’ve said here resonates with you, we invite you to participate.

We don’t ask you for dues or money.

But we do ask that you take a pledge to get involved—at your own pace.

We also ask that you stay in touch and submit periodic reports and, if possible, participate on a larger scale when needed.

That’s about it.

If you are interested, submit your name, number, street address and email address.

Most of our communications is conducted via Internet and Email.

Our next big project will be developing a presence on the Internet and we may do some solicitations for that purpose.

But we hope to keep everything voluntary and move this program forward with good will.

Thank you for your interest.

Les Aaron

The Power of One Society….

2008-07-08T09:40:00.001-07:00

Yahoo Rules

Over the last eight years, we have sat back and let the Yahoos run the show.

And they have fumbled badly.

After all, what can you expect from Yahoos!

In the meantime, we have bitten our tongues, held our tempers, reserved judgment, and sought shelter in being good patriots.

This didn’t change the disposition of the Yahoos one iota!

And they still rule.

But now the message has changed.

As the blame game moves into high gear, it turns out that most of the problems were due to someone else: The Democrats, the terrorists, the weather, the Iranians and those damned Tailiban.

But how long can you legitimately blame the other guy?.

When do we take responsibility for what we do?.

Sure, we know that if it weren’t for the Republicans, we would probably have been attacked over and over again.

And if it wasn’t for the sure handling of our government and economy, things would be much, much worse.

And the economy isn’t as bad as we think.

And our export picture is improving daily.

And more jobs are coming online.

All in all, the picture is much improved if we could only see it through republican eyes.

What’s more, the presidential candidate from the right tells us that things are much better in Iraq and that you can walk their without the need of armor or cover….

Just ask him.

And if we stay there for “100 years” it will only be because we have achieved peace.

So that’s why we can afford to bring even greater tax relief to the rich….

And help the people by giving them an interim break of thirty dollars a week, irrespective of what happens to the cost of a gallon of gasoline.

And add to those facts, the fact that dinosaurs and people once lived happily together on earth.

After listening to those arguments, I would love to find out what they are taking.

Because if that’s the case, and they really believe that stuff, they are the most deluded people in America, bar none.

Les Aaron

2008-07-08T09:05:00.001-07:00

What about the other 99%?

We hear every day about the great job our Armed Forces are doing around the world and how they are protecting the folks at home against terrorism.

And while our brave troops are to be applauded, the fact remains that those so engaged represent about 1% of the population.

What about the other 99%?

What kind of people are our American patriots really protecting?

Well, for the most part, we get clues from all over the place.

And, an observational platform may be a good place to start.

For the most, Americans still fill their gas guzzlers and still parade around as before—but perhaps not as much ….

Most Americans are still not dissuaded from eating out when they can afford it….

Although there is a growing gap between “haves” and “have nots.”

Educationally, intellectually, culturally, well there are clues about that, too.

Most Americans have sacrificed their reading habits for the movies or video games so let’s see if we can form a picture from what we see around us.

Studies show that few children read on a regular basis and that in the average family, TV watching has grown to 5 plus hours per evening.

At one time, children had loads of homework to do and assignments and while some still do, most tend to spend their time playing games and watching TV.

The current movie fare may be a good barometer of where we are as a society.

The other day, in local theatres, the movies that are bringing in the crowds are Iron Man, a cartoon about a Panda, Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk, Get Smart, and another superhero film with Will Smith; not an adult film among them!

Look at the video games that kids and adults occupy themselves with. Virtually all involve violence with every kind of weapon imaginable. One wonders whether that has had something to do with the desensitivity among our Armed Services as reported in the media.

Check out the media fare. Nobody watches the news anymore. And there is very little creative writing. Most of the new shows are contests of some kind pitting one person against another or game shows.

Most of them are at the eight year old level.

TV being what it is, a passive, yet controlling medium, does not encourage thinking or motivate activity. Therefore, it is easy to adapt to, doesn’t require much of a response and, many think, deadens the mind in the long run. What we know it does is rob children, and adults, from doing other things…..like sports and out door activities or, dare we say it, reading a book.

But that’s only one aspect of our society.

What are we accomplishing as a people? What do we take pride in?

Let’s see: First off, we as a people have been unable to rebuild one of our premier cities or address the fact that our infrastructure is crumbling with our bridges and highways falling apart.

After seven years, we can’t seem to get our act together enough to have rebuilt the buildings at the World Trade Center.

Our schools are inadequate and we are told that there is no money for improvements; yet, we do not hesitate funding trillions to keep the war in Iraq going, a war that has shown no progress or tangible benefits for either the Iraqis or us.

Our schools graduate students who perform at the bottom of the list of all civilized nations routinely, not a good sign.

Our numbers of patents are down and it seems that we are not motivated enough to change the status quo.

What has happened to America?

Have we lost our pioneering spirit? Have we become an also ran?

With crime up and the number of homes being padlocked for nonpayment of mortgages and jobs exiting faster than they can be created, these are all reasons for concern.

At times, we seem irritated and tired, unable to digest the vast quantity of information that an informed public needs if it is going to change the world for the better.

Clearly, hope has gone out the window.

Yet, as the polls show, virtually half of the population seem to believe that more of Bush is better and support him through his surrogate, George McCain.

It is worrisome. And uncharacteristic for a great country to have fallen so far with so little outrage.

Perhaps, what we need to do is understand that the future belongs with us.

If we take the path of least resistance, if we do not do our homework, if we do not come together for the common good, we will become all the things we dread---a third world nation that only knows how to consume until the money runs out.

If we allow that to happen, woe on us!

It is clear, at least to me, that it is time for our 200 year overhaul.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon.

2008-07-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

After We Put Away the Flags…

Now, that we’ve eaten all the hot dogs and burgers we can stand…Now, that the parades are over….Now, that the parties have wrapped up, the grandparents feasted, the volley ball games won or lost, the picnic baskets returned to the garage for another year, the speeches applauded, and all the rest, we can sit back and objectively consider what really happened this Fourth of July.

Was democracy furthered? Have our freedoms been strengthened? Are we any closer to World Peace? An end to Global Warming? Cheaper food and fuel? This is what really counts and now that the holiday is over, it may be an appropriate time to see how far we’ve come…

From where I stand, it doesn’t seem that we’ve come very far at all….

In other words, if you take away all of the hype and glitz, it does not seem that we are one step closer to any of our goals after remembering our Founding Fathers, their sacrifices and the contributions of all of our Armed Services over 200 years….

That may be for you, as it is for me, quite a sobering thought.

In fact, if anything, what we’ve seen over the last several weeks tells a much different story.

To sum up briefly, Congress gave the telecommunications company a pass despite the fact that they violated our Constitution. And Bush’s use of the FISA court allowed to stand despite the fact privacy continues to be invaded without the permission of the courts….

Executive privilege seems to be invoked now more than ever…

NAFTA still stands….

Fast Track is still in force….

The economy if anything got worse…

The head of the Stock Exchange was allowed to keep his excessive salary despite the fact that the salary he earned raises more questions than it ever answered; and that the violations continued under his leadership sending out the worst possible signal to investors….

The mortgage companies, rather than the people got bailed out despite their deceptive practices and manipulations……

Global Warming, despite Bush’s presence at the G8 Summit, will stay the same and I predict it will not get any better until he is gone…

And, still after the Fourth, “water boarding” is still not construed as torture by our standing White House “Inquisitors” and the Attorney General of the land….

The war in Iraq is still ongoing and the candidate for the third term of Bush is still convinced that it’s safe to revisit the streets of Baghdad in all your finery without the battalions of troops, armor and a few Black Hawks over your head….

Gasoline consumption has not changed and we still guzzle the stuff at more than 4.00 dollars a gallon as the Bush family calculates their percentage gains and laughs at how easily Americans are manipulated….

And the media is still covering the president’s backside with its irrelevant reporting…..

In other words, on Monday, July 7, 2008, it’s still business as usual in the land where honesty is seen as a weakness and commitment to change as a delusion.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les AaronThe Ubiquitous Flying Blue Blog

2008-07-06T12:06:00.001-07:00

Short Memories….

The Fourth of July is a celebration of freedoms--ours, and it is a reminder that nothing comes without a cost..

And that "cost" may have consequences.

Consider the fact that talking about freedom can get touchy inside the Beltway because it brings back unwanted memories of those who would take it away. And almost did.

It’s almost like the belief that if you ignore something long enough it will go away.

One thing that hasn’t gone away, however, as much as they may choose to ignore it is the leadership of Al Qaeda and the bin Laden of nine lives. And that is the penultimate thorn in the side of Bush-Cheney—especially considering that he was within their grasp and they didn’t allocate the 10th Mountain Division to finish the job because of the Pentagon’s big egos….

At that precise point, if I were running things, Rumsfeld the egoist would have been long gone and with cause.

Nonetheless, these panjandrums of self-importance believe by talking about how successful republicans have been at avoiding another 9/11, it’s a sure sign that Al Qaeda has been driven aground. Talk about wish fulfillment.

And with little else to point to, the inheritor of the Bush heritage, John McCain, has already made it one of the legs of his campaign.

If the White House’s hypothesis, however, were shown to be false, let’s face it: McCain’s campaign would fall apart like a house of cards.

Instead, our protective services go around proud as punch with their chests thrown out. Why? Because they will be quick to tell you that we have avoided the fates of London and Spain. We have avoided disaster because of our republican tactics of going after them where they live.

Snicker. Snicker.

It seems to this author that taking credit for something that hasn’t happened because you mysteriously intervened somehow seems to be serious stretch of credulity and the least convincing form of back-patting.

It is too reminiscent of Bush’s applauding Brown for the great job he didn’t do to bring relief to New Orleans. Even Brown blushed.

But in my humble opinion as a researcher and processor of information, it is too soon to gloat. The reports drifting in from overseas are not good! The Tailiban are back and growing. And Al Qaeda has entrenched itself in many additional countries since we last checked.

Now, the latest reports show that bin Laden has rebuilt his organization in north western Pakistan, in the Tribal Territories free from intervention of American might.

But what about here? Is it fair game to ask what has happened? Or to hypothesize what might happen if bin Laden were to get his wish?

Here’s one scenario:

It would be highly doubtful that bin Laden has not already secreted or won over dozens of sympathizers who live within our borders and stand ready to do their masters bidding when he commands it.

And it is downright impossible for a democratic system to police every possibility.

Consider the train bombing in Madrid that caused the Spanish voters to distance themselves from America.

The disaster was easy to pull off because the trains weren’t being watched carefully or the passengers searched.

The terrorists simply carried on their explosives in back packs rigged with timers that were set off by cell phone calls.

Nothing could have been easier if you were set on pulling off a disaster and life meant little to you.

Yet, it changed the politics of Spain forever.

Is something like what happened in Spain even possible in the US?

From what we know and can project, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

What we do know is that bin Laden is still seeking carnage over here on a massive scale; he has said as much. And he wants to teach us a lesson.

Moreover, if one rides the train, there is little evidence that anyone is checking backgrounds or passports or that security has been improved..

Yes, to my mind, it is possible and it would wreck havoc if they were to risk it.

And that means only one thing: We have not learned anything from 9/11.

The simple fact is that aside from our closer scrutiny of flight passengers, no other measures seem to have been taken to improve the level of protection within the US.

Our borders are not safer; anybody can come in by ship or by crossing the border and infiltrate our country.

And there seems to be little carry over from the 9/11 incident.

All we have done, it seems, is increase our snooping on innocent people that has accomplished nothing.

I don’t mean to raise unnecessary concerns but it is quite clear from all of the messages received from Europe and our friends in the rest of the world that Al Qaeda is entrenched and they want to strike us again.

With that kind of a backdrop, at the very least, you would think that Homeland Security would pull out all of the plugs; yet, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, we have not advanced in preparedness beyond what we were on 9/10.

I mean it is painful to hypothesize such a scenario but from my own experiences, it does not seem as if our hydra-headed Homeland Security System has changed all that much from what it was before except now it is joined together in some bizarre antediluvian form that doesn’t seem to match what our European counterparts have managed to do when it comes to being informed and responsive to any threat.

When was the last time that you heard a legitimate seizure of foreign terrorists in our country?

Not often, I’m afraid.

And that is cause for worry even though our present government would have us believe that things are getting better all of the time….

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

2008-07-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

Tunnel Vision:

It seems kind of totally blind-sided that the managers of Starbucks would miss the point that a cup of Latte Grande with espresso costs the same as a gallon of gasoline.

And with the big play-off between gasoline and a cup of coffee, a product that is increasingly viewed as an unaffordable luxury in today’s tight money environment, guess who’s going to win.

Meanwhile, the great minds at Starbucks keep blaming themselves.

You hear that the big mistake was the coffee equipment stands too high, therefore, the consumer is deprived of the rush that comes from seeing his designer coffee being made with the appropriate flourish and respect, something that one would guess would make up for the fact that he can no longer fill his tank to go to work…...

Others say it’s because the beans are being ground elsewhere so you don’t get the compelling smell of the beans when you enter the establishment. They may have something there…..I do miss the smell of the roasted beans being ground in anticipation of their going to their just reward.

But there is something else.

And it’s not Dunking Doughnuts getting into the act (their coffee still sucks!; and it’s not McDonalds rising to the occasion—Starbucks people would never consider the absurd notion of mixing brands…. You are either a McDonalds user or a Starbucks user and never the brands shall meet! That something else I am referring to is conjured up by Jackie Mason’s routine about Starbucks. Who the hell can imagine paying five bucks for a cup of coffee with a name you can’t pronounce and then having to squeeze onto an uncomfortable stool by the window?—especially when you can still find a cup of coffee for about a buck elsewhere….

But the simple truth remains, with coffee at the cost of a gallon of gasoline, which do you jettison first. And the truth should have been obvious at first glance.

It seems to me that Starbucks, like so many other American institutions—including that monolithic symbol of inflexibility and inscrutability that stands in Detroit, called GM, that thinks it speaks for the automotive industry, or did, and now faces bankruptcy, all suffer from “not getting it.”

GM staffers were famous, or perhaps infamous, for having everything told to them three times at meetings as deLorean explained in his famous book On a Clear Day, You Can See GM described in great detail how disconnected this giant really was.

America’s plight, today, is built on many things.

One of them is that we seem that too many of our most visible presences simply do not understand the environment as it exists today with a thriving China and India ready to pick up on the mistakes and bad judgment that our domestic enterprises seem to ignore or miscalculate in their rush to the banks on Friday evening.

We would all do better, it would seem, with a real infusion of reality.

In the end, may I remind you, it’s the people who decide; not those who inhabit the big boardrooms and shuffle money around but never get out there to talk to their customers.

And, therein lies their dilemma.

Perhaps their guiding mantra should be simply, “Get Real!”

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

It is our Right this Fourth of July:

Seems like a good time for all the hypocrites to come out of the wood work, shake the flag for awhile and retreat into their domiciles and call the rest of us “cowards” and “traitors” because we don’t agree with their positions or buy into their particular brand of dogma..

It is as if not agreeing with their positions, the positions of those who talk the good game, is the penultimate sign against nation and God.

Listen to McCain. We should be in Iraq for the next hundred years, or if the Mayans are right, at least til Doomsday, 2012.

Most of the rest go around and speak in hushed tones because someone who is so loud must be right.

On this day, July 4, 2008, I am here to say, “hogwash.”

If it’s time for anything, it’s time top set the record straight.

Most of these guys who tell us how to be good patriots have never served a day in their lives. Like Cheney, they were too busy, too self absorbed, too full of their own focus on making money so that someday they could tell us how to live our lives.

Looking for the good photo op doesn’t mean a thing, when you’re consorting with the enemy on the side to fatten your wallet.

These phony patriots who we’ve appointed to tell us what to do need to be exposed for what they are—even if it’s a holiday!

And just for good measure, these armchair patriots need to check the Constitution to see what it says.

It is not against the law or the Constitution to disagree with our government or even those who wave the flag in your face.

America is all about the freedom to disagree, the freedom to ask these patriots what their own credentials are and what gives them the right to legislate anyone’s else’s views or the audacity to comment on our patriotism.

My dad served every chance he got beginning when he was fourteen and got wounded six times and received a laundry list of medals so that some fat phony patriot can tell me that he knows what’s right for this country?

Phooey!

I followed my dad into service and I served my country. But at the same time, I don’t agree with everything it does—nor did I ever. And that’s the great thing about this country, my voice counts as much as the self-proclaimed hero’s does.

And that’s the way it should be.

And I would go back again to keep it that way.

So, dear Americans, remember that America is about you lifting your voice to disagree when some blowhard tells you how it is.

That is your right!

And never forget it—especially today, the Fourth of July.

And have a great holiday….you and your families….

Les Aaron

The Power of One Society

2008-07-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

The Times they are changing….

It’s no secret that nothing stays the same, nor should it.

But if you really want to mourn over the past, you might consider

that most of the people who taught college over the last thirty years or two generations are beginning to retire in droves.

With their loss to the educational firmament, we can begin to put an end to the kind of college activism that characterized the sixties and shaped most of our lives.

Most of the people who are entering the practice of teaching today have no recollection of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, the deaths of Bobby and Jack, Kent State, the takeover of college campuses, the protests or any of the influences that we grew up with.

According to an article in the NYTimes, this is leading to a teaching body who’s main orientation is what is referred to as Moderatism, a word not in vogue in my day.

But it exemplies a move from our liberalism and progressivism to an atmosphere where there is little activism (compared to the past where 17% of teachers were engaged to some degree in politics).

When you consider that this change will eventually affect 675,000 teachers in 4,100 colleges, what we will see in the near term future will reshape students and new graduates’ view of the world.

Maybe it is time for the past to fade, but, hopefully, not be forgotten and for a new brush to sweep clean. Clearly, the support for Obama among the young is an indicator that while the new of body of college teachers want “change,” they are not seeking to tear down everything that’s been built up over time to achieve it…..

It seems to me that the jury is out until we learn more about where this new educational trend will be headed. But it is clear that the outrage we felt is over. That the Nation’s teachers will be responding to new challenges ahead. That most seem concerned over many of the same things that concern their more activist parents and grandparents, global warming, global relations, war, the economy, jobs, America’s status in the world, health care, the plight of the poor.

We hope that Obama’s aim to involve the young in public service will take root. That the young will recognize their obligations to the old and the less fortunate. And that we will return to the values that we so cherished before. And that people will be free to believe in what they want without risk of being ostracized by their peers.

If that’s the case, I’m primed. Bring positive change.

We are ready!

Happy Fourth of July to all!

From the Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

The Power of One Society.

2008-07-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

The Pain of a Long Memory….

It’s an exhausting thing.

My mind switches back to all the dark horses I’ve stood for.

There was Moe Udahl, a great Congressman with the best white papers I ever saw.

The guy that called “Moonbeam Jerry,” but to me seemed like the incarnation of Bobby—the candidate I believed could make a difference; but he barely got out of the starting gate..

There was McGovern, the quiet, reasoned candidate for president, too intellectual to ever be considered seriously in this good ole’ boy society…..

Humphrey, the first great liberal who the liberals rejected because they didn’t know who it was they were attacking.

There was Jackson who self destructed in front of those who came to pay to homage including the rich and faithful, a man who brought his party down around his feet with his uncalled for remarks and his bad judgment.

Hunter had it pretty well down when he wrote Fear and Loathing....

Then there was Hart who thought he could play “gottcha” with the media and lost!….

Who would have thought that the good senator from Maine would cry?

Who would have thought that Eagleton’s depression would have lost him any hope for the VP spot?

Dukakis with his elitist, Bostonian bent who couldn’t see the forest for the trees. A candidate too inner directed to earn much traction against an entrenched dirty tricks cadre given new life by the peripatetic Atwater, the dream of the Republican party brought to an early end by brain cancer….

John swiftboated….Bobby assassinated…..Eugene, the stalking horse….

All of them haunt me now….. Howard, Wes, big Al, who picked the wrong VP and got snookered by a compliant media and a government that couldn’t count the votes & the rest over so many decades….it is hard to remember them all.

Where have they all gone?

What did they lack or fail to realize? What were their weaknesses that brought their individual houses down?

Could we see a repeat of that now….

That’s why I wrote the book, A Blueprint for Winning….

Trouble is not enough people in power knew about it or read it.

It was all there.

All the warnings, all the dangers, what they needed to do to win!….

After thirty five years, I do believe that democrats are powerfully good at aiding their opponents by shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot and working their way up to their brains…and never understanding “why!”

Maybe I have become cynical.

Maybe I have reason to be that way.

But after thirty five years, they have never figured it out.

I hope I am wrong; but I never believed that God was necessarily in the democrats corner when it came to winning elections.

And, sadly, I’ve often been right!

But I keep trying

Les Aaron….

2008-07-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

In Navigating the Shoals of Politics,

Do You Run the Risk of Alienating Those Who Support You, Mr. Obama?

General Clark has been a hero to many of us for a long time.

I have known him to be spare in his remarks and always faithful to the truth.

He has a brilliant record as a military leader and an expert on military issues.

In point of fact, we know him better than we know you.

Let’s revisit what happened last Sunday during Bob Shieffer’s interview with General Clark on Face the Nation.

Bob Shieffer actually prompted his response by stating that Obama was not a pilot or shot down in a plane.

I believe that since Shieffer posited his point in such a way that inferred that Obama was the not the man that McCain was, that Clark was well within his right to say what he did which to my mind was not only justified but legitimate.

What troubles me Mr. Obama is that you threw General Clark under the bus.

This is not just some flunky; General Clark is a man who has the respect of many of us considered liberals and progressives.

We know him to be wise and judicious in what he says.

He does not invent stories or enhance the facts. He is very careful as to what he says and you failed to take his side..

It worries me that Obama, a man who claims to offer a new kind of politics, can throw General Clark away because he thought that what he said might damage his standing among those he’s trying to win over.

Well, Mr. Obama, you’d better learn now and fast that you can’t be all things to all people or, too quickly, you become nothing to nobody.

It was a mistake to cast aside this valuable asset you had on your team just as it was a mistake to excuse the communications companies when they in fact violated the law of the land because Bush told them to do so.

We are beginning to worry about your “brand.” You have deviated from the message that you expressed early in the campaign and we are concerned that you are not standing tall enough to deal with the mega issues that will confront the next president. We are beginning to wonder whether you are up to it.

Mr. Obama, you are one of the wisest candidates who has come down the pike in a long time, don’t make us sorry that we are supporting you.

Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-07-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

The Human Spirit….

Who would have guessed…

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen many of my old chums from the old neighborhood.

That was a long time ago.

At the time, I recall that we were all poor as church mice. We didn’t even have two nickels to rub together.

We had no connections, nobody to open doors and most of us were on our own pretty much from morning til night.

We were most likely the most ordinary of kids, I guess…. We weren’t the handsomest. We weren’t the brightest. We weren’t the children of the rich. And the majority of us had strict parents…

One of my favorite guys, Dave, who dropped out of high school, and decided on a music career well, we didn’t have too much hope for him.

More than a few of us, the adults had pegged for juvenile courts and eventually jail.

There were guys in the neighborhood packing “heat.” And there were great opportunities to get into big trouble.

My dad wanted me to get a good job at the local supermarket and someday, I might grow up to be the manager. That sounded okay to me. What did I know.

Most of the rest, we’ll, there wasn’t much hope.

But surprise after surprise….some of us really managed to move above our station in life and become something in life.

One of my friends, Fred, became bankable as a comedian and even had his own show on ABC; my friend, Dave, the one I mentioned, became one of the leaders of the folk revolution, a mentor to Dylan and the Mayor of Greenwich Village. One of the local toughs, Rudy, became the head of Dreyfus’ Marketing operation. Another one, a leading world publisher (I have to admit, that he was a little different). One of the guys I went to art school with became a Director in Hollywood; another, who I was sure would crash and burn, a medical illustrator and quite good. I never listened to my dad and struck out on my own, joining the Army as a correspondent. Later, starting a few businesses of my own and allowed me to raise kids who had opportunities I never had. Today, they each have three lovely kids, and great husbands.. The sad part was some of us did go to jail. But, overall, most managed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make something of themselves. As I look back at our backgrounds, histories, home lives, there was little to indicate that we would make it or survive at all. But the lesson here is that you can never underestimate the human spirit. Something for all of us to take heart about.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

2008-06-30T14:52:00.001-07:00

News Flash: War With Iran Likely

For those of you who believe that any operation at this stage of the game is a dead deal, be forewarned, you’re wrong.

At least, if you accept the arguments presented by Seymour Hersh in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

Hersh explains that the Special Operations Command, our most elite special forces, taking orders from the president, is already, and has been, conducting operations against Iran to destabilize the country.

These and other operations involving agents and special forces are taking place in Iran with the mission to discover as much as possible about the Iranian nuclear program. They are even talking about kidnapping Iranian scientists.

Hersh says that he has it on good authority that forays into Iran are being made from other countries and involving troops from Afghanistan and bordering countries.

According to Hersh this has been going on for quite some time and was the reason Admiral Fallon, who objected to such tactics, was fired from his position as head of CentCom.

Moreover, Hersh points out that everything is primed and ready to go, the submarines, the cruisers, the aircraft carriers, the missiles and the carrier based pilots along with other assets.

It seems that it is Bush’s intent to increase critical mass until there is an explosion which will destabilize the country and result in not only another war, but another win for Republicans who will support the War under McCain.

It is a cynical view but predicated on what we know, all too credible and it is time now for the Democratic Congress, the media and the people of this country to tie Bush’s hands before he can go any further in bringing about the Armageddon that he desperately seems to want.

The Power of One Society,

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon.

2008-06-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

fROM MY INTRO TO CONSPIRACY THEORY:

Are Conspiracy Theorists the Victims of a Conspiracy?

June 29, 2008

On the Trilateral Commission and the NAU

A Work in Progress Series:

By the Power of One Society

Les Aaron

Intro:

I wonder if the whole idea of framing of those of us with an interest in conspiracies would have resulted in the invention of the term, “conspiracy theorist” by those who are up to their necks in conspiracies and wish to deflect attention from themselves.

Preface:

Let me preface my remarks:

Some time ago, in a kind of Brownian motion familiar to most chemistry students, I discovered that if I were going to get to fundamental underlying truths, I would not be able to escape delving in conspiracy theories or investigating what was available through research on secret societies and their relationship to real time events. In the process, I was framed as a conspiracy theorist even though I seldom give voice to my views.

Why were my views so ardently dismissed as conspiracy theory with all of the pejorative associations? What puzzles me is that the reaction to what I have reported seems intentionally focused and repetitive and far outweighs my findings or comments.

Were there those who were potentially frightened by what an investigator might discover?

And, by the way, what is a “conspiracy theorist?”

According to the Encarta Dictionary, a conspiracy theory is the belief that “event is plot—a belief that a particular event is the result of a secret plot rather than the actions of an individual person or chance.”

My involvement with what many consider to be a near cousin of phrenology or something equally ersatz, unsubstantiated or lacking in credibility, was the result of my attempt to understand what the Bush administration was all about because nothing else I could uncover seemed to fill in all of the blanks.

If anything, most engaged citizens candidly thought that our new resident of the White House was simply inept or inefficient. That never did jibe with my suspicions which were predicated on signposts and associations from the organizations he was party to and his history. In fact, if you look at his performance predicated on some pre-existing agenda, it seemed to me that he was, if anything, uncompromising, absolutist, focused, unyielding and with virtually no peripheral vision.

During the first years of the Bush presidency, I became aware that the agenda of this administration, which was still a mystery to me, had little to do with the care and welfare of the people he was sworn to protect. In fact, it seemed to me, at least, that everything America stood for—from its Constitution to the precepts of the law—and the day to day operating rationale for this government coexisted in two separate, parallel universes.

Bush was unconcerned about the conventional issues of the day; instead, he was intent on his own agenda that seemed to be propelled by some kind of dark matter, an unknown substance that is known only because of its influence on other known matter but yet makes up more than 96% of the Universe. I chronicled in the first several years more than 400 different forms of legislation, policy, and action that seemed incompatible with what the rest of us thought of as priorities with many of them violating Constitutional law or side-stepping what we may have considered to government for the benefit of the people..

It was known that Bush was an oil man through and through.
And while that may have explained much of his behavior, it did not explain it all. It was also known that Bush had a cowboy “Don’t Tread On Me,” mentality and an absolutely unswerving commitment to what he intuited. He was never a ‘deep study’ or a contemplative man; conversely, once he had formulated a thought he was quick to delegate its implementation to others.

Clearly, few of us activists at the time had any understanding of the president and his inner-circle’s intentions or motivations at the time. We tended to write it off as inefficiency, a lack of focus and a failure to grasp the issues of the day. It was none of these things of course that motivated the behavior and actions of this White House.

And our first clue may have been the nonchalance and inattention that were evident in the outcomes after Katrina in New Orleans. Never before had any American president failed to shore up a city as Bush did after extending promise after promise and waiting until the weight of public opinion forced him to take some kind of positive action.

We should have known at that time what we were facing, especially when Bangladesh, the poorest nation on Earth volunteered to help out the richest country in the world, a country that couldn’t afford to bail out a city devastated by a natural phenomenon.

In trying to assess this nebulous “dark matter “ that seemed to define this government, we continued to probe to ask “why” were some of government’s actions approved, executed and implemented. And the larger question became “Why we’re we willing to jettison a system of government that had lasted two hundred years to build, and, at the same time, risk alienating the rest of the world?” What was our operating premise? Why were there all of these inconsistencies between the “compassion” and the deed? What did America stand for in the age of Bush?

These were questions that deserved answers and the media wasn’t providing them. In fact, that had reversed their former role of truth teller and subordinated it to becoming a lever for the Executive to influence the reader in a kind of inversion of the media’s perceived role in way too many situations. Did discovering this truth make us conspiracy theorists? .

Even in the government of Nixon, there was always a part of government that recognized its obligation to the public good, and, at the very least, a rationale for service; not so with the Bush II government. And Nixon never controlled the media as Bush managed to do by using “access” and the FCC, and licensing as “hammers” to keep the media in line..

There had to be a reason for what was happening that seemed so at odds with what we might of suspected of a new president considering the challenges we faced at the time.. And the reason seemed short-term special interests; but this alone didn’t seem to explain it all. I would have to go fishing in another pond for answers.

Moreover, it was also clear that this government did have an agenda, an agenda in fact that resulted in a flood of new legislation. There seemed to be no coherent core to this government aside from self-aggrandisement and perpetuation of its aggressive posture. I looked to the legislation to see if I could find traces that linked back to some kind of ideology, something that was invisible, yet powerful enough to have its own agenda.

What emerged were the following observations:

That legislation at first seemed to be unique and discrete, unconnected to a larger scheme other than control springing out of a right wing orientation. It seemed to be ; that is, until you began to think of it as part of a cohesive plan with strands to preexisting philosophies and ideologies that seemed to have less to do with a democracy than a despotic form of government. What we were beginning to as “policy” seem to emanate from a type of government that condoned aspects of totalitarianism, economic imperialism, corporatism and untrammeled unilateralism that eschewed or ignored those documents that formed the foundation of democratic belief.

If I was on the right track for diagnosing this “dark matter,” I was truly wading in over my head. And was discovering these things painting me as a conspiracy theorist; if so, I had only scratched the surface.

However, none of this could be expressed with certitude but as inferred or implied based on the nature of the legislation that evolved from the Executive power base, grown stronger and more convinced of its mandate than the popular vote would have suggested to any rational being.

Without the benefit of an insider’s perspective, what I conjectured was educated speculation. Again, I was stuck trying to find out who’s cohesive plan was it? And what end did it serve? The answers to these questions gained in importance because they would be helpful in defining a government who’s actions seemed to indicate that democracy’s best days were behind it and that there was a subtle movement to morph democracy into something else, a kind of corporatist elitest, unilateralist form of government reflecting the will of one person rather than the body politic.

I started doing some research but never seemed to be able to get beyond the Neo-con’s focus of exporting American beliefs and methods by force, if necessary. I was like Kafka’s protagonist trying to reach the castle but only finding myself getting further away from my goal with every step.

It seemed to me that the Neo-cons intent was not as stated to export America and democracy as they would have liked to have us believe, but, to, in fact, benefit from economic imperialism under the guise of exporting democracy. Certain wise Arab minds seemed to see America’s new stance as a kind of religiously-motivated Crusade to rid the world of terrorism, where terrorism seemed to be a kind of code word for Islam . No wonder the Islamists were worried. Others, with a democratic bent, saw in the ostensible endorsement of fundamentalism and literal interpretations of the bible along with acceptance of the End of Days scenarios as being literal, as clear indications that this government had veered seriously away from the heart and spirit of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

2008-06-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

"This is my weapon; this is my gun...."

Supreme Court Justice, Scalia, proves he is the moron I always thought he was.

Too bad he’s from Queens.

His appointment was a dark day for what I hold dear.

Well, at least, the Mario (MC) comes from Queens, too.

Anyway, have you ever seen such a big to do about being able to shoot your neighbor…or being able to carry a hand weapon that can blow your friend away?

La Pierre was actually foaming at the mouth.

I have never seen this gun crazy nut so ecstatic.

I guess with good reason.

He’s going to have the NRA’s wet dream: Everyone in America waving a fire arm.

Doesn’t it make your little heart go pitter patter?

Next, we’ll need a holiday to celebrate. National Shoot Something Day.

It’s amazing that grown men can act like children with a new toy; only this is a toy that kills and maims.

Most people who have been in War hate any associations with War.

And the one’s who cling to their weapons, are probably the one’s needing therapy.

One has to question whether we as a people really need to bear handguns.

That was okay when we needed a militia and there were only flintlocks available, but now they have 9 mms that can fire an entire clip within seconds.

Look at what happened to that poor citizen in New York who was shot at by mistake by police officers over 51 times and he didn’t even have a weapon.

What’s more, all this seeming exultation over a weapon of death makes you think.

Have you ever seen anyone so excited about a new book? A book that could tell you how to live a good life, help your neighbor, improve the world?

No, of course not.

Reading is down, and one suspects that it holds an inverse relationship with hand gun ownership.

Chances are if you use a gun, you don't read the book that tells you how to use it with restraint.

Why tell a real man anything? .

That should show you where we’re coming from.

We all think how wonderful Americans are.

And then you hear that Americans cannot live without their weapons.

And then as if to flesh that idea out, a recent poll pointed out that we, as a people, approve of torture.

Yes, true. 48% of Americans in the latest poll outright approved of torture. (The other sympathizers simply wouldn’t admit it.)

I’ve seen more care and compassion in some of the poorest places on Earth.

In the Domincan Republic where those who’s homes were flattened by hurricanes and tornadoes helped others they thought in worse shape. They didn’t have any guns, they didn’t have anything; yet they did what they could to help others…

In China, families routinely helped one another and I found that to be true all over Asia…..

In Korea, where we saw one family take in another because the father had been imprisoned for staying out after curfew. And they raised their eight kids for six months….no questions asked!

One of my best friends in Korea, a high ranking government official, showed humanity in every instance even though he had very little to give and I learned more from him about kindness and compassion than I ever learned from any weapons totting freak over here..

And on and on.

Only in America will people steal from a homeless man.

Only in America will our government throw somebody on the scrap heap because they can’t afford to pay their medical bills; or turn them out of their homes….

Only in America will our government deny benefits to a Veteran.

So enjoy your victory, wave your guns around and remember to keep your safety on.

Les Aaron

2008-06-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

Taking Back America One Step at a Time

Some might ask why can’t we inherit a better world where people

Can enjoy a better life?

Take a page from Obama: We are the problem; we are the solution.

But what can one person do?

Here’s an example that may help solve the Global Warming problem and it was started by a small group of us who believed that although nobody seemed to care, that we could make a difference.

Tonight, I was invited to a small reception of Bluewater Wind.

We were told that each of us there contributed to BlueWater Wind’s success that produced a signed contract sealed and delivered yesterday..

Three years ago, we suspected that we may be blowing in the wind. But that wasn’t reason not to take on the big guys.

And that we did.

It all began when our utility told us that they were going to have add capacity to accommodate the increase usage of energy in the State.

Their solution: Double the coal usage.

A few of us who had been active in environmental organizations realized that already our rivers were becoming polluted from the effluents emitted from the chimneys and the air had more than its share of heavy metals and other toxins; not to mention the fact that doubling the coal usage would increase CO2 emissions and Global Warming.

This did not sound like a solution.

Some of us had remembered that a professor at the local university had posted a paper and some research about the effects of continued carbon emissions on the environment and trotted out the professor.

We looked over his papers which also included computer simulations of what would happen if global warming increased.

And it was shocking.

In fifty years, the land would shrink by about fifteen percent due to a rise in ocean levels; in fifty years, there would be virtually nothing left of the State.

The people had to find out about this….

Yet, the politicians and the utility were happy with the choice of coal and people seem to accept whatever was endorsed by the in place power structure which was also supported by the government and its officials.

But, we reasoned, this couldn’t go on.

The fish would die and people’s health issues would kill the Golden Goose in this state considered a natural wonder.

What could we do?

A small group of us contacted the professor.

We agreed to write papers and editorials.

One of my colleagues used her organization to serve the ends of spreading the word as to the dangers of enhancing our coal burning would result in.

We got together and started to plan how we could move in another direction.

One of the bidders for an alternative energy program using clean energy was Bluewater Wind, an independently owned subcontractor that was planning to use European wind energy technology as an alternative solution.

We didn’t have the money to buck the coal lobby in our state and they were willing to spend millions to support their choice..

Nevertheless, we arranged to hold forums at the local churches to which we invited the professor and several of his students and also obtained a movie on energy savings that could be generated through prudent management. consumption.

We wrote press releases and sent out email invitations.

In the beginning, it was very slow.

But eventually people started to come out.

They were reading our letters and our editorials.

At the same time, we told members of both houses how we felt as well as our County Board.

We were ignored for the most part; but, finally, we got a couple of members of the House of Representatives to consider a clean air/water bill that we had proposed.

The Utility and the Public Service Commission were not very helpful.

And told us that the cost would be prohibitive.

But what they did not honestly factor in was the prospect of an increase in the cost of coal as well. (In the last year, coal cost has increased more than 80%).

After nearly three years of struggle, we finally convinced the Lt. Governor and others in both houses that the people were willing to support clean air/water.

This did not happen overnight and not without a struggle.

But tonight, the whole thing came full circle.

Bluewater Wind received a signed contract from the major utility for between 12 and 14 megawatts of energy to be controlled by alternative clean wind energy generated 12 miles off shore.

This will be the first installation of off-shore wind energy.

We hope to be able to sell excess energy to New Jersey and Maryland.

And the company has promised to make this their regional base creating both jobs and outreach.

This was wonderful news for what seemed just three years ago virtually impossible.

We started out fighting a company that spent fourteen million dollars to defeat us, a rabble of amateurs trying to fend off the beast of commercialism with no money and no power base..

And we won.

I send you this as an incentive to prove to you that one person can change the world.

Become empowered. Do it in your own State.

And we shall take back America.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron The Ubiquitous Flying Blue Blog

2008-06-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

A little baggage included with your vote

The Washington Post on Sunday proffered an editorial that should have every thinking Democrat scared to death.

What they were writing about was McCain’s likely choices that he, himself, has floated around.

And just two of them would be enough to rethink my actions….

One set of appointments would involve two of McCain’s old buddies.

One of them, Dick Armitage, would be a likely choice for Secretary of Defense according to this pundit. He was deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell and he, himself, was having issues with the conduct of the Iraq War.
That choice isn’t too bad; it’s the second choice that could send me back to therapy.

The second choice might be reason to rethink any lingering thoughts that some may have about voting for McCain.

It is rumored in the editorial section of the Washington Post that a good bet for Secretary of State would be one-time democrat, Joe Lieberman, the hawk on Iraq.

With Joe Lieberman, with his outsized ego, it may be hard to reel him in from the prospect of branding Iran as having WMD or stepping up the tempo in the Middle East.

It would be déjà vu to go over this same territory again, but, also, and some seem to forget, potentially a death blow when one considers that Iran has been lining up with China and Russia. Need we remind anyone that Russia still has more than 10,000 missiles in its inventory.

World Wars have started over less.

And with Russia’s nuclear arsenal that could be retargeted in a matter of minutes, voting a hawk into a situation calling for the finesse of a diplomat’s touch, seems like a vote for collective suicide. For anyone with grandchildren, a vote for McCain has to be regarded as foolhardy and short-sighted in the extreme.

Say “no” to Joe Lieberman as Secretary of State. Vote your good sense.

Vote Obama.

Les Aaron

2008-06-23T11:54:00.001-07:00

Caution:
If you believe in
government’s ability to protect the people, or that
that is even their first priority,
don’t read this message.

A Slide into Irrelevance

I can’t be sure when it first happened, but I suspect it was when I was seeing strange things happening in the Islamic Section of Brooklyn and over dinner at Middle Eastern restaurants, but I knew something was cooking…and it wasn’t my kabobs….

It began with payback for Rabbi Kahane’s death at the hands of an assassin that resulted in one of my favorite restaurants, a Tunisian place on Atlantic avenue, being blown up in daylight that kind of led me to believe that the FBI wasn’t paying attention.

Subsequently, it was the follow up to the 1993 explosion at the WTC that convinced me that the FBI didn’t get it.

This was confirmed later when we learned that none of the pages of text in the file drawers acquired by the FBI on their raid of the Muslim terrorists who set off the first explosion were ever read.

And if that wasn’t beyond plausibility and immediate grounds for dismissal what was?

The reason given: no one spoke the dialects of the Middle East….Farsi and the like.

Let me play that back one more time.

In a world where the Middle East have repeatedly threatened the West and attacked some of our fortresses including the Marines barracks in Lebannon, the FBI, our principal anti-terrorist group, cannot read Farsi or Pashtun.

Therefore, for years, the FBI kept tons of files that had not read.

Now, let me say that we spend billions of dollars of regular and black budgets to keep these organizations going.

Why didn’t they address the need to have people who spoke the language on staff?

It’s way too late for post mortems but I thought that these actions, or lack of them, was symptomatic of the way they did business; not the exception; much the same way that Katrina exemplified the way Washington took care of business, not the exception.

Unfortunately, we learned that those files contained the blueprints for future actions on the WTC.

Later on, John ONeill’s own experience with his overlords at the FBI further reconfirmed to me the Ole’ Boy nature of our premier investigative unit.

In case, you don’t know the background.

When the Cole was hit and it was clear that the followers of bin Laden were involved, ONeill volunteered to return to the Middle East.

You see, he had lead the investigation of the attack on the Embassies and he knew where the bodies were buried.

However, the US Ambassador and then Louie Freeh, the FBI Director conspired to keep ONeill out of Yemen and the rest was history. He was deemed a “show boat” and not a “team player” that ruled him out.

In one thing or another it was clear that the FBI’s incompetence was overpowering.

They installed a hundred million dollar computer system. It didn’t work.

Their agents were connected with organized crime in Boston and on and on.

The final blow was that they did not act on the fact that the known terrorists were living in LA and that Saudis were training at various airports to learn how to fly; not to land.

John ONeill warned everyone and nobody listened.

Why?

At the time, Aaron Berg had asked me to become his Vice President. He was starting up a new publication on politics called “The Democracy Chronicle.”

What we learned from a high placed source at the CIA was that Louie Freeh’s agents were preoccupied with other things.

What things?

Clinton. They were trying to get the goods on Clinton and assigned more than 200 of their best agents on that task while, at the same time, Philippine Security tried to tell us that there were plans in the computer of the first bomber at the WTC stating that they were planning to take down the WTC by flying passenger planes into it.

We were too busy to listen.

And on and on.

The joint committee then formed to follow up after 911 comprised of the former Governor of New Jersey and a former democratic senator seemed to get very little cooperation from the White House.

And some subjects were treated as virtually taboo.

Why did it take so long to convene a panel that would help to pinpoint blame for the worst attack on America in history?

The Pearl Harbor investigation started immediately and was over before we could agree to convene the first investigation.

And why did Bush try to get Henry Kissinger to head it up?

That was too much of an outrage.

So, today, we limp forward trusting none of the answers that came our way as a result of a crippled panel, a panel thwarted in its attempts to get testimony from the White House.

The idea of putting the various data intelligence agencies together is like trying to suggest that if you put a bunch of bad apples together, you will get something better out of it.

You are lucky to get applesauce.

And I think this has already been proven.

The point is that the FBI’s rationale for its own existence is that it has saved America from terrorist attacks that we don’t know about.

Really?

If that were the case, don’t you think that Bush would be touting them? Let’s get serious. Has Bush ever passed up a photo op?

The truth is that nobody knows nothing about anti-terrorism in these organizations and they should be held accountable for all of their past failures…not to mention the deaths of all the innocents at the WTC.

The other day, in the Washington Post, there was an article about the failures of intelligence and this chronology came to mind as I read the article.

I don’t know what the answer is but I do know that a group that was formed to get rid of booze smugglers in the thirties and run with an iron hand by J. Edgar Hoover is probably not what we want to deal with the challenges of today.

And that’s the point.

If we were attacked today, we would be any better at averting the challenge than we were seven years ago?

The Armchair Curmudgeon
Les Aaron

2008-06-23T06:19:00.000-07:00

“Those Who Can’t Get Over It…”

This weekend, I went to see our old friends from the company Rose retired from.

These are a group of people that we not only worked with but have become dear friends who we see socially and for whom we would do anything.

Anyway, we seldom talk politics but this weekend was the exception.

One of the gals in the group has a new boyfriend and his views, which he didn't mind expressing,are extreme to the rest of us, a balanced group of both democrats and republicans.

He slams Americans because he believes Islam hates us and would destroy us if possible. He also believed that Obama is a Muslim.

Him we could ignore.

But then his girl friend, one of the inner circle said that she was a Hillary supporter and she would sooner vote for McCain than Obama.

To me, I was shocked and I wondered how many women out there felt the same way.

It is hard to integrate that great leap of thought if you are well balanced and unbiased and can handle the truth.

The facts were simple: Obama won fair and square because Hillary didn’t know how to handle the caucuses. And in those states that Hillary won, many of us were left wondering what won’t Hillary say or do to win.

I was a Hillary supporter but I backed away knowing that I could never support anyone who’s vision seemed to be blurred by self interest. Why would I not believe that she could interpret everything though a distorted lens?

In any event, what galls and infuriates me is that McCain is the polar opposite of Obama and Obama and Hillary were virtually identical on most issues.

That leads me to believe that my friend is not thinking clearly or totally biased something that is very troublesome to me who stood by her side during her despair when her first husband died and through other personal travails. We will work with her to help her see the light. We will not give up on her.

This won’t ruin our relationship but it does make me wonder how many are suffering similar delusions. And could the democrats face loss and ruin because not enough Americans are willing to lay their prejudices aside?

Les Aaron

2008-06-20T19:05:00.001-07:00

Pakistan and the Truth!
If you follow K Street and the conservative think tanks, it is hard not to come away with the impression that Bush still defines the world through his own myopic lens. This is the lens that attempts to bend light to reflect a very different reality.

For the most part, we acknowledge that the smoke and mirrors fabricated by those great K Street conjurers does an excellent job of shielding the media from having to look to deeply into their own motivations.

Take the Middle East.

We hear great news about the Surge from time to time with an occasional road side bomb tossed in but, mostly, the news is Pollyannaish and defracted by commentary to appear as if we are on the verge of some great victory..

But prey a little deeper and it becomes clear that these sleight of hand image makers are concentrating on those few good spots in Iraq that seem to be out of sync with what is happening in the rest of the Middle East.

Let me cite an example.

In Afghanistan, it is hardly a secret that the Tailiban have regrouped and moved out of North West Pakistan and have retaken villages and communities in Southeastern Afghanistan. Moreover, bin Laden’s forces and the Tailiban are working together with other incipient terrorist organizations to retake vital parts of the country for their own. Their undying threat: To wipe out the foreigner from Afghanistan. And since we were distracted by an unnecessary war in an unnecessary place, they have strengthened their hand and gained more importantly the leverage needed to fight back against the government successfully.

All of this is either played down or ignored one might suspect by edict.

This was partially etched in stone the other day with a major suicide bombing that killed and wounded civilians and NATO forces. There was very little talk about it but it brought to the fore one of the leading Tailiban leaders who was thought to have been dead or wounded. Clearly, he is not.

Surprisingly, there was virtually no coverage.

Secondly, at about the same time, we see that our ally, Pakistan, may not be the ally we had hoped for despite our pumping billions of dollars into their economy to keep it afloat. Many suspect it wound up in the hands of the corrupt military that at least part of it was used to pay off the militants in the northwest. If so, it was one of our worst investments.

But what might be of even greater concern is the fact that while the Pakistani who developed their nuclear weaponry has been surrounded and we were told, isolated, it has been discovered that aides of his in Europe have been peddling information on nuclear weapons to pseudo-terrorists around the world. Also, that he, himself, might be freed in the coming weeks as an accommodation to all those nativists who see him as a national hero!

This is very unsettling.

As it turns out, Pakistan has traditionally played both sides against the middle.

And, increasingly, we are seen as the middle.

It is not good news for either us or the rest of the world.

Yet, the media obediently stays away from the truth like the good little obsequious creatures that they are.

It is a very sad time for the truth.

And without the truth, we are nowhere.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

.

2008-06-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

A Rubber Stamp for the Snoops!

What’s going on?

At this point, I’m missing something.

It seems to me that when push comes to shove, what’s the big deal about Congress voting to keep the Constitution on the back-burner again?

To me, it seems like a vote for the communications companies and the president; not the people. What does that do for my rights?

And to see so many democrats falling into line is more than a little troublesome.

The president’s argument is that in order to catch the bad guys, we need to know what they are saying to each other.

Wow! Brain science not.

What is unsaid that this doesn’t involve a Court order.

In short, it’s blanket authority to the president and his NSA snoops and FBI to find out who’s talking to who.

And why should they have that right?

Is that the only way we can catch terrorists?

To me, this seems to condone the continued violation of my privacy and the privacy of others.

Obviously, this continues to suggest that the only way we can catch “terrorists” is by snooping on everyone because as near as I can tell, lot’s of telephone calls are lumped together with the so-called potentially suspicious ones. ( All calls going overseas as near as I can tell are considered suspect!)….. That means innocent people’s calls are tracked the same way as so-called potential terrorists. And nobody’s been able to prove otherwise, especially after a telephone consultant explained how the system tapped into regular phone lines and diverted them through the government’s snooping equipment.

Why then would a Congress who knows the president’s rationale is a crock, would rubber stamp its continuation.

Unless there’s something else here that defies scrutiny, I am wits end to figure out why the guys I elected are saying this kind of behavior is “okay.”

It’s not okay for me.

Maybe because I’m a stuffed shirt who believes in the Constitution.

Maybe because our ultimate sleuths, the FBI, had all the information they needed before the WTC from conventional means and still did not operate on it that I have such little faith in this broken system.

I would rather see our primary law enforcement system broken up and replaced by people who think and communicate; that would do us more good than all of this phony malarkey that Bush tells us we need to save America!

And maybe because I haven’t heard of a single terrorist we”ve caught because of the millions and millions of phone calls we’ve snooped on, I think the whole Mickey Mouse system sucks..

It’s one thing being the collegial type in Congress; it’s quite another to condone running rough shod over our principles.

Let’s return to the rule of law and the Constitution.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

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2008-06-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

Good News/Bad News….

In The amazing adventures of the Man Without a Brain, it seems that in his parting gesture, an attempt to travel the world and say good-bye to all his friends, GWB’s chronicles have been included in the Pew World Project—a project to assess the world’s attitudes.

And that’s where the fun begins.

You see, because the results of the survey has shown instead of barricades being put up at every corner and famous people hiding their silver upon arrival of the American motorcade, the fact is that the reaction has been better than anyone suspected.

How can that be?

To understand the infinite complexity of what this all means one has only to turn to the ultimate Codex, the puzzle that unlocks what the Pew Study really means.

Here’s the nitty gritty, a study that will probably be preserved for future generations….well, at least to chuckle at.

Are you ready?

The study undertaken by the Pew Global Attitudes project has revealed that Europe’s impression of the US has rebounded over the last year. Well, at least somewhat.

If that seems hard to figure in the light of Surges, bad economic numbers for the world, Global Warming and the direction that most see the country going in, don’t shake your head.

Ordinarily, this might seem like a reason for the president to add bounce to his already self-important strut or to smile about his entirely myopic view of the world.

But it’s not.

Before one takes this too far, and extends the credit to Mr. Bush & Company, what we discover from the survey is that it seems that the brighter outlook is due less to GWB than the fact that he is viewed as getting ready to leave office soon. Please God. The optimism come’s from the perceived prospects for the presumed new leader, Obama, in the term ahead.

I secondary survey should perhaps focus on how come the Europeans seem to know so much more than we do. What do they listen to?

The fact of the matter is that the current view is that their assessment of GWB has changed little over the intervening years since his election. He was viewed as an oaf in charge then, and in the ensuing years, no one was disappointed. Pew doesn’t choose name-calling; that’s reserved for the pundits of the Pew who don’t mind calling a spade a spade.

The improvement in the poll results has to do with “more confidence in Obama to do the right thing” than the republican candidate, George McCain, who is seen as more of the same…..

While the survey goes on to point out that the hard economies of many countries over the past year, with the exceptions of China, India and Australia where 82% of those surveyed see the current economic information as good.

Conversely, in the US, 70% express pessimism that includes a prognosis of the economy but extends beyond it to embrace to our continual success in achieving one foreign policy disaster after another.

More to the point, In 11 out of 10 countries surveyed, concerns about Global Warming is on the rise. (Guess who they blame?)

When asked which country is hurting the environment most, majorities or pluralities point to the US—something that GWB simply blows it off in a way reminiscent of the protagonist in Taxi Driver: “Are you talking to me?”
(Sorry, the last phrase was a little ad lib.)

The survey of 24, 717 is the seventh study of global attitudes undertaken by the Pew Research Center.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

2008-06-18T05:57:00.000-07:00

"Want to Buy Some Sand?"

I cannot wait til I can say,

“Suck it up, Mr. Oil Guys.”

And that time is getting close…

First a little dose of economics: It’s been proven that whenever a resource becomes too rare or too exclusive the market reacts and replaces it.

This is fundamental.

And we are getting close with oil.

Clearly, the Saudis with all of their oil revenues and our US leaders were simply too greedy to get the message…or believe it. Or even do anything about moderating its price.

Therefore, it’s becoming too dear, too exclusive!...

And something has to change.

It is always self-interest that trumps longer term economic survival….

What did the oil merchants care whether old folks had to decide between driving their car and eating….

But here’s the lesson, guys on whatever end of the equation you’re on, producer , processor or marketer.

You’ve taken advantage of us long enough.

Time to rethink oil at 140 dollars a barrel.

What am I referring to?

The death knell for the oil industry.

You knew as sure as night followed day that it was about to happen, you just didn’t know when.

Well, you greedy short term thinkers may have helped turn it into a reality.

Yes, it’s started with not much more than a whimper but if you’re paying attention, you will realize its significance.

The Honda folks have started it all and it will not end with them.

They have come out with a car that runs on hydrogen.

Of course, the trick all along has been to reduce battery size and cost.

And the Japanese said that they have done it.

Not only that, they say they can commercialize their battery for mass production.

Now, that was just a sidebar in the paper the other day.

But guaranteed, it is the first step in depleting oil’s power of life and death over the rest of us.

Why?

Because it is the automobile that is the principal user of oil products.

Take the profits out of the equation, and lo and behold, Saudi Arabia is just another boondock.

And they can forget about building ski slopes in the desert and paying 500 dollars an ounce for perfume to be used as embalming fluid.

And guess what?

It won’t end there.

The flood gates have been opened.

And don’t be surprised if the Toyota people aren’t right behind.

While the American market refused to consider the realities of insane oil pricing or the needs of the marketplace, the Japanese did not.

These guys see the future and they know it’s not oil.

Thanks to them, the senior citizen may not be forced to choose between food and fuel….

Because of them, a lot more people will wind up surviving as against expectations….

And while our president luxuriated in those quick profits and keeping his oil friends happy, we’re pleased to say that he and his ilk will be gone by January of next year...and a new generation will take over!....

And as we say an extended good bye to oil, we can now begin to focus on our real options for the next hundred years: wind and sun….

I am pleased to let you great panjandrums and self-inflated egoists know that your days are happily coming to an end and the world of people is about to begin….

I’ve been dying to say that for the last ten years.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

2008-06-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Care and Feeding of the Enemy.

Two questions: How do you make a McCain republican?

Answer: You hide behind a rock and ask them three questions:

“What is your name?”, “What is your party affiliation?” And “What is your issue?”

And if he replies “I dunno” run out from behind the rock and hit him in the head with a soft brick. .

Question Two:

If you were a McCain republican, what would be the absolutely best news you could have right now?

That’s easy:

To learn that the Democrats are scrambling to see who can be nastiest .

That seems to reflect the truth at this point in time.

Democrats are attacking each other and Republicans are loving it to death.

If the democrats really wanted to, they could set a new high for hubris.

Half the democrats elected a candidate; and the other half don’t want him. You guess who….

Point in fact, McCain can literally sit on his butt and rave on since the democrats are likely to do all the work of self-destruction themselves.

We are talented that way.

The man who has no following might actually win in this climate of default.

Let me take a step back, it’s not that he has no following; it’s just that his following is shrinking in total brain cells; so that is always misleading.

We’re not totaling IQ’s here but just counting those who don’t have enough sense to figure anything out. Still, there’s a large chunk of followers who will follow Bush right off the cliff..

Even better than 2004 when self-professed values of the right seemed to carry the day and there was no need to talk about all the failures of the Bush team.

As long as this mood is hanging over our heads, the republicans need to do nothing to explain why the War was not won despite the expenditure of a trillion dollars, why bin Laden appears stronger than ever….why there are one million plus mortgage holders facing the loss of their homes…..why people cannot afford to commute to work…..why jobs are fleeing our shores….why our schools are crumbling and so much more…

To our friend who says, “duh! I don’t know” welcome to the McCain camp and remember your brain dead vote counts just like a real vote…

The way things are going, McCain may waltz himself into the White House without having to do much more than stick to his story of another hundred years in Iraq and that he doesn’t know a damn thing about the economy….

Now, a vote for the cast of the Living Dead….

The Armchair Curmudgeon,
Les Aaron

2008-06-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

Battling Dead Horses!....

We’ve won, the primaries at least.

Shouldn’t we be celebrating.

Instead, we are still at each other’s throats.

What worries me is that there seem to be as many different types of democrats as there are democrats.

And that is frightening.

Democrats seem to be grouping in camps; not unlike all of the nationalistic segments we saw with the Rainbow Coalition.

But this is different.

Here we’re seeing groups set up to reflect special prejudices and biases….

Some are threatening not to vote for Obama because he’s an elitest; he’s black; he’s got a crazy pastor (never mind, that he left the church a month ago!), that he doesn’t wear an American flag pin, you name it. Almost any reason will do to reinforce one’s prejudices….

Others, especially women, are up in arms about the fact that Hillary didn’t win and that the entire world treated her unfairly; never mind how she treated others. But when you are confronted with disappointed zealots who’ve been carrying their baggage for as long as anyone can imagine, one suspects that there are reasons why objectivity may not appeal to them.

What’s especially troubling is that dems are so busy blaming each other for what is going wrong, or has gone wrong in the Primary, they don’t realize that we are playing into the hands of the Republican party that stands to gain by doing nothing, promising nothing to help the people.

It would indeed be a tragedy if this scenario plays out and that a scenario might play out that was totally unexpected just six months ago when collegiality seemed to rule the day and all was sweetness and light. At first, we thought that these two could find a way to transform a republican world of selfishness, dishonesty and ego-centricity into one of hope and purpose..

Boy, where we wrong.

Goodness and light has morphed into I’d like to tear your eyes out..

McCain must be drooling into his pablum with the continuing hostilities that plague the democrats. What better news could he hear?

The sad part, in the midst of all this, the issues are suffering the most.

With five months, more or less, left before we cast our votes, the issues have taken back seat to feverish dialogues debating who said this, who did what, why a woman is best-suited to run the country.

Wake up, America!

The Primaries are over. Whether you like it or not, we have a candidate.

And it would be nice if the party came together in some kind of cohesive movement before the election.

Sadly, the job to be done is monumental at the very least.

Obama, not only has to address the fact that few really know him or what he stands for, he also has to focus on the principal issues that define our society and our place in the world including all of the tangential issues that describe what we want to be and how we get there, he needs to provide answers to the following challenges….

The schools are in a shambles.

40 million people are without healthcare.

We are rapidly becoming a two tier society

Most people can’t afford the commute to work

Over 1 million homes are in foreclosure

Jobs are fleeing our shores

And we have simply ignored the challenges of Global Warming

And that’s without even mentioning Iraq

Instead, we are focusing on mundane trivialities. What did Obama’s wife say?; What’s going to happen to Hillary’s career.

The economy is not being addressed; nor are the solutions for the War of Choice that plagues us all but especially the 1% of the population who are actually doing the suffering and the bleeding.

Bush and his cronies, after destroying the environment, ruining the budget, neglecting the environment, stealing left and right to push through their Iraqi objectives will more than likely go free and be able to take that high level college advisory job or be a consultant to Arab nations for tons of bucks and justice will not be served—a lesson not lost on young impressionistic minds. What’s more, they are likely to come out of this revitalized and mesmerized by democrat’s stupidity.

You see, crime does pay, is the mantra will all know by heart.

In a country that makes capitalism and money the measure of who is better or even best, this can not go down well among those who have committed to justice and fair play.

In the meantime, the rest of us struggle to get through this Election in one piece with our values intact and some semblance of rationality—not easy to do with the strong feelings evidenced in the field.

It is time, however, to put all of the pettiness and biases aside for the sake of the country.

And the time is running short.

It’s up to the wisest among us to pave the way if we hope for victory this November.

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Les Aaron

The Ubiquitous Flying Blue Blog

2008-06-14T11:57:00.001-07:00

Justice Takes A Back Seat Again!

Hey, for all those politicians who wrap themselves in the flag, here’s something to think about:

The Army has gotten rid of over 40,000 troops since 2001.

Why?

They claim it’s due to pre-existing conditions or misconduct.

That’s government-speak for let’s dump the problems on society.

The fact is that these are troops who have exposed to road side mines, seen their friends killed in front of their eyes and other scenarios too horrible to repeat..

Most try to deny their feelings but find themselves coming down with all kinds of symptoms like sudden flashes, blinding headaches, bad nightmares, temper tantrums.

The military physicians see them and usually prescribe some pills….

But when that doesn’t work, their CO calls them cowards and uses other indignities.
And when they go to their Army physician again, they ask him/her to sign a “release” which automatically releases them from the service as they are sent home.

Only, they are returned to the States, tossed out of the Army they love and forced to pay back their bonuses.

They lose their benefits; they lose their pay; and they are denied the care they need.

This is the way we have treated 40,000 plus “heroes” who have given all they could to serve their country.

Nice work, folks!

To make things worse, they are said to have pre-existing conditions (in some cases, the military has stumbled over itself trying to explain how soldiers can be in the service for twelve years and pass each psychological test and then suffer from a pre-existing condition or misconduct).

The fact is that this is a mechanism for saving tons of money—estimated at 8 billion dollars throughout the Military.

A point of fact that these GI’s are suffering from PTSD and the government is denying it to save the Army from having to pay the cost of putting our young people in harm’s way.

It is short-term thinking to think that this problem will go away by itself.

It won’t.

It will come back to haunt us in many ways. From an increased incidence of crime to increased demands on the VA to provide essential services.

And in the end, it will mean higher taxes for all.

And that doesn’t even begin to consider the human costs.

The injured GI who returns home to a wife and family that no longer understands him. A GI who cannot adjust to society and takes his own life. A former Vet and mother who can’t seem to find contentment with her loved ones. All of these are the byproduct of a government that won’t fulfill its obligation to those who willingly forfeited their quality of life in service for their country.

It is the saddest of commentaries and unbefitting a great nation like America.

And it is a black mark against us all for ignoring the problem….

The Armchair Curmudgeon,

Les Aaron

2008-06-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

A Return to Constitutional Law and
Other Miracles....

Hey, if you've had your fill of the Courts, today is a good day. And it's a day that the Courts have taken a major step in the right direction.

They wisely ruled that you can’t detain people in our Cuban facility without bringing charges against them.

Simple. But a right denied is like a right not possessed..

In other words, Habeas Corpus is to be extended to those Prisoners of War withering away in our prison system against whom no charges have been brought.

This victory for Civil Rights will mean that all detained prisoners of War, held without access to Habeas Corpus in the past, can now appeal to have their case heard at the Federal level.

It is a victory for Civil Rights and a slam at the president who seemed to think he had the right to detain prisoners without placing charges against them.

The bottom line: Unless the Government is prepared to charge the accused, they should be free to return to society.

Sometimes, even justice wins one!

May it be the first of many Court decisions against the arbitrary decisions of the man who thinks he resides above the law and the return of justice to these tired shores.

From the Armchair Curmudgeon,

Les Aaron

The Power of One Society

2008-06-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

Katrina the rule; not the exception?

What’s their beef?

It seems that the Koreans are up in arms about their agreement with the US.

About Military bases?

No, nothing quite so prosaic—after all, they’ve enjoyed mostly good relations with the US since the 1950’s. The real crux of the problem is something that most of the rest of us take for granted: The quality of the beef that we send them.

It seems that the Korean people are worried about an incident of Mad Cow Disease that occurred in 2003. And the protestors complain that little has been done to lift the standard to assure customers for their beef, that it is beyond reproach. In fact, they charge that the Department of Agriculture’s inspection standards are unequal to the task and lax at best, boosting concerns that diseased beef could be shipped to the Korean people without their knowledge.

The rest of us should agree. The Agriculture Department until recently, in fact, allowed cows that could not stand, to be slaughtered. This is beyond the pale.

At present, our tests are one for ninety cattle slaughtered and the test results indicate a very low level for the presence of Mad Cow disease.

As a result, many countries have lowered their standards to accommodate American imported beef and it has been the cause of rising friction between the people and their government..

But while the government’s have been willing to accept Western beef, the people have not.

In point of fact, doubts about the quality of western beef have triggered a firestorm of controversy that has spilled over into the streets of Seoul, endangering our relationship as never before...

It seems that fifty years of friendship between America and its Korean allies is to go out the window because the Korean people think we may be shipping them poisoned beef.

On the wings of a “new pragmatism,” newly elected president, Lee Myung-bak had made building a political and economic alliance with the West his top priority.

And now it may be all out the window.

In fact, just yesterday, the Korean president suggested that he might consider dissolving his government.

More than 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Seoul last night to underscore the seriousness of their concerns.

Who would have thought that our relationship could turn into well, let’s say, hamburger over something so pedestrian when we are face to face with an aggressive nuclear power just over the border.

In effect, American power has been circumvented, in some respects, by our insensitivity to the needs of our allies for reaffirmation that the meat they receive from us is free of disease.

Not too much to ask.

And although this may seem trivial and minor to many, the stakes are exceptionally high for both ourselves and South Korea who by its geography plays a pivotal role in the world in keeping the peace with its edgy and war-like neighbor to the north.

It is too bad that more often than not, our Secretary of State and the rest of the White House crew seem too self-involved to put out fires before they become conflagrations. This is just another instance that Katrina was not the exception but the rule.

And while the temptation is to make light of the people’s concerns, the fact is that if the Koreans reject us, in the longer term, this may be one more ally who has turned against us for our aloofness and contempt.

Les Aaron