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Showing posts from 2010

One Man in Two Faces

Near as I can tell, the pastor who wants to burn Korans and the Imam who wants to build a "Cordoba House" on the edge of the hole in the ground created by his coreligionists are kind of the same man. Two different religions and slightly different beards--but in all the ways that count they are identical twins and identically repulsive. Too bad we can't join them at the hip, force them to live with each other, and the rest of us not have to deal with either of them. I have to say, I can never approve of burning books. History makes book burning just too uggy for words. By the same token, I'm tired of those who would control the American people and government by throwing temper tantrums and threatening violence. And in the meantime, even if we appease those who threaten, their folks commit violence anyway. If we just stopped trying to appease them--if our government declared that we would no longer attempt to appease them--if only their threats and violence didn...

Percentage of Terrorists

Terrorists constitute only a small percentage of the Muslim population just as Nazis originally constituted only a small percentage of the German population. But in both cases the small percentage of evil individuals are adept at silencing any opposition from the majority population using fear tactics. Then, given time, the evil minority attracts the admiration and approbation of growing numbers of the silent majority because that evil minority are evil in ways that flatter the silent majority. Given enough time, the silent majority is willing to give lip service to evil even if they are not willing to participate in evil actions. Every society has some tiny percentage of evil people. If the majority are not willing to rise up against evil, the society itself is lost and the silent majority inevitably pays a steep price for the actions of the evil few. That is not unfair. If you do not stand up against evil, you are as guilty of the deeds of the evil as t...

Chinese Chicken

The Chinese are suing us in the WTO because we don't import Chinese chickens. They want to force us to let them kill off yet another American industry using their usual unfair trade practices. I happen to know a lot of people whose dogs and cats died as a result of contaminated Chinese components in pet food sold in America. I don't for a moment believe that we could import Chinese chicken without Americans eventually dying from contaminated and unsanitary chicken. Even if they just feed their chickens antibiotics--as they feed the shrimp they sell here--that would be enough to produce new health risks for Americans.  Eating food containing antibiotics encourages the development of antibiotic resistant bugs We have enough of a problem with American farmers using antibiotics in livestock feed. We can't hope to control farmers in China and we can't expect the Chinese government to try to deal with the problem. As for the WTO, it makes me ...

The Threat of Nuclear Attack

Once again we are under threat of nuclear attack--this time from North Korea. We've lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation since I was a child and I'm having increasing trouble taking it seriously or caring. Of course, I'm too old now to die young should North Korea or someone else carry out this threat. (And I have enough food for at least a week in my basement.) When I was in grade school in Chicago, we were taught to hide under our desks if the Bomb hit our city. Later we moved to Clayton Missouri where children were given dogtags that we were required to wear to school every day; each morning the teachers checked that we had indeed worn them. My father, who did not deal well with his own anxieties, enjoyed telling us that if we were dead the dogtags would be shoved between our front teeth to identify us. The Missouri plan for nuclear attack was to send children home to evacuate with their parents.  My par...

Aspiration, Achievement, Adrenaline Addiction and "A"s

I have to begin by confessing that my mother made clear to all three of her daughters that love was earned as a reward for accomplishment--not given out simply for being alive.  Wait-For-Me and I bought mother's teaching without question, I fear. Both of us have worked hard for assorted certificates and to get "A"s on anything in life that could be interpreted even remotely as an exam. Our-Baby (yes, she's in her fifties but she'll always be Our-Baby to us) rejected mother's teachings and spent her entire life insisting on her right to be without accomplishment even if/when failure to accomplish cut off her nose to spite her own face. The world rewards aspiration and achievement and grades of "A" as a general rule. Less obvious is the reward inherent in living in active war zones and other situations that allow you to have adrenaline addiction. The element in common is that you get to feel alive. If you aspire, you are alive as long as you haven...

Me and the Queen of England

I feel better to know that the Queen of England has to pinch pennies, too. Most of my adult life I earned a comfortable living. I was never rich but I didn't have to skimp on anything I really wanted. I wasn't a spendthrift exactly, but I spent freely and saved, too.  Unemployed since 2003, I've been on my private austerity plan for the last seven years. I've tried to treat it like a game. I give me points for skimping and doing without. Just surviving makes me a winner in this game. I give me points for doing better at skimping every day in every way. Still, it makes me feel better to know that the Queen is in this with me, minding her utility bills and not redecorating as she'd like. Pity that nice ladies like us have to live on the tight edge in the final years of our lives, but clever of us to manage it. And at least I can feel that I'm in good company. Misery does love company....  

Wisdom from Jessie Jackson:

A few years ago Jessie Jackson explained to the nation that the poorest African-American neighborhoods suffered because shop owners in those neighborhoods came from the suburbs and took their profits home with them at night. What those neighborhoods needed most, according to Rev. Jackson, was local ownership of commerce that would keep the money circulating in the community. Most of us heard him and intuitively realized he was right. So if Rev. Jackson was right about the impact of money draining out of a few block area of an American city, how much more right must his thoughts be as applied to the entire nation? There was more than one reason why the housing market overheated and then collapsed. But certainly every construction job that substituted Illegal Alien workers for American construction labor meant at least one less American able to buy a house while the Illegal Alien construction workers had no interest in owning homes in America. At first cheaper construction labor d...

Where've I been

I haven't been posting because I've been sick with something like a cold or flu for about 10 weeks. I'm starting to hear from friends and relatives that they've suffered from the same malaise: lo-grade temp, dry cough, fatigue, and maybe periods of tummy trouble at the start. I'm wondering if everyone who had these weeks and weeks of feeling crummy took the H1N1 vaccine like I did. Is this crud that's going around a milder case of swine flu or a side effect of the vaccine--or just an unrelated virus.... Modern medicine is not just expensive. You never know if it is helping or harming. But I'm a Luddite at heart.   

Nuclear Power in America

Once upon a time America was well on its way to having cheap and clean electricity from nuclear power plants. Then we had a problem with one power plant and that was pretty much the end of nuclear power in America. One after another we closed down the nuclear power plants that we had and we built no more. Instead of looking for ways to build better and safer nuclear plants, we fled from the field. Now we wish we had electricity from nuclear power as people do in Europe, but we are so far behind that it will take us years to catch up. Drilling for oil off our own shores looks like it will go the same route as nuclear power. We're watching a sickening spill cause terrible destruction, so we will withdraw from drilling rather than look for ways to drill better and safer. We will buy oil from nations that hate us, giving them money to injure us, because we fear drilling on our own soil or off our own beaches. We will run scared instead of taking a t...

If you see something, say something vs corporate culture

I am positive that Tony  Hayward genuinely regrets the accident that is currently costing BP  a fortune, destroying his career at BP after a life of climbing the corporate ladder, and possibly ruining the company that funds his pension plan. I'm one hundred percent certain that sitting in front of our congressmen and women today, he wished someone had said something about the problems with drilling that well before the accident happened. Today, if he could go back to before the explosion and be told what would happen, he would certainly believe that he'd have welcomed the news and given that prescient employee a medal and a big bonus. But the truth is that "If you see something, say something," just isn't the way most corporations operate. Most corporate cultures operate on, "Go along to get along." Of course the person who fails to predict a disaster may be sacrificed after a disaster. But most people who predict disasters are also sacrificed--or...

Lots to say but not about aging

I haven't been writing and posting here because I'm most absorbed by socioeconomic issues in our society and I do realize that those topics are not primarily about issues of aging. On the other hand, maybe aging B aby B oomers are more likely to suffer from the current economy and more likely to recognize the dangers in the ways society is changing. After all, those among us who were paying attention certainly had an opportunity to understand the socioeconomic conditions in Germany right before WW II broke out if we cared to know. The other day there was an article on the Internet that reviewed newspapers for 1930 and concluded that no one recognized then that the world was in the Great Depression. In fact, people were writing optimistically about the economy in 1930.

Wisdom of Aging

Things I would teach myself if I could go back to my youth and give me a lecture: avoid possessions as much as possible to travel light and free--only acquire things that are really really wanted after waiting to see if they'd be forgotten with the passing of time--only acquire the best to be found even if it means waiting longer--always pay cash. A friend has promised me the location of a place to sell some of my junk and I do plan to take her up on it when she gets back to town next month. There are things I own that will pain me to part with but I shall part with them. I own too much and the excess feels more and more like an anchor around my neck rather than wealth.

Why Talk About It

I started writing this blog to talk about lifestyle issues of the aging Baby Boomers. So why have I been writing so much about the economic issue of cheap labor? Cheap labor impacts the lives of aging Boomers more than most other Americans. Employers are eager to dump Boomers whose experience in the workforce results in them being more expensive than younger workers. Boomers age also raises the cost of health insurance for all the employees at companies that provide health insurance. The new health insurance reform does nothing to protect the jobs of aging Boomers. Companies that don't opt for paying the penalty instead of offering health insurance will be more eager to dump the older workers. The current economy is a great excuse for layoffs. Most employers no longer offer pensions. Government jobs that promised generous pensions may renege on that offer. Many Americans talk about working until they drop and save little or no money for the future. Now the option of...

The New Slaves -- Caregivers

In theory seniors should benefit most from the presence of Illegal Aliens in America. We need low cost caregivers: first to care for our parents so that we can continue to work, later--should we live long enough--to take care of us. No one works cheaper than Illegal Aliens. The problem is that you get what you pay for. I've had close contact with Illegal Aliens in more than one setting, but most of all I had contact with dozens of illegals in my mother's nursing home. When my mother first entered the nursing home, the staff were citizens in all the colors of America or, in the case of nurses, temporary guest workers from around the world. My family had problems with the nursing home management that I'll leave for another posting, but the original staff included some definite nominees for sainthood. That staff held difficult, draining, exhausting, dirty and sometimes stinky jobs and those staffers did those jobs with dedication and skill. Then new owners...

Words to live by....

Caryn, an Australian acquaintance, put these words of wisdom on her Facebook Wall and I've fallen in love with them: "Don't make someone a priority if all you are to them is an option." Acquaintance is a word all of us should probably use more often to describe the majority of our relationships. The word friendship should be reserved for warm, supportive, reliable, mutual relationships. Friendship should mean something more than just anyone who usually answers the phone when it is your name on the caller Id.

The New Slaves—Basics of Illegal Alienhood

There is no country on the face of the earth that doesn’t have an illegal alien problem. No matter how impoverished and miserable life may be in a poor nation, someone is standing on one of its borders seeing greener grass on the other side of that imaginary line. Refugees are not illegal aliens. A refugee is fleeing from darkness to live in the light at any cost. Illegal aliens leave behind life in the light expecting a big payoff in return for years spent hiding in darkness. Some countries treat illegal entry as a far more serious crime than the United States has. Until very recently Mexico had draconian jail terms for illegal aliens. U.S. citizens who entered Mexico to work generally could not get jobs and could be jailed for trying. Illegals entering Mexico from Central America were either tortured, raped or slaughtered or received prison terms. Only recently has Mexico lightened up a little on the required prison sentences for Americans, presumably because American...

The New Slaves--Temporary Guest Workers

America has many different kinds of temporary guest worker visa programs. There's even a separate visa for models and actors.  I don't think there is a cap on how many famous models and actors can enter America to work, but there is a limit for all the other occupations. And it is a good thing there is a limit because once a person enters the United States on a temporary guest worker visa, the federal government does nothing to insure that person will ever leave after the visa and its legal extensions run out. A few guest workers apply for green cards after enough time passes, but most just stay around as illegals to make more money to send home. Most guest workers are not interested in becoming immigrants. They simply want to keep working in America until they have accumulated as much money as they believe they need to start their real life: as rich young retirees in their homelands. Working here is their get-rich-quick scheme.   Many count...

The Arizona Border

In the past, if you were undocumented, it cost $150 to pay a coyote to bring you from Mexico into the United States at any point along our mutual border.  Now it costs $2,500 or more and the easiest place to cross with a coyote is along the dangerous border with Arizona. California, which is being so holier than thou over the new Arizona law, built itself a fence to keep the worst of the illegals out of its cities. Today it is cheaper, easier and far safer to get the paperwork required to enter the United States as a tourist rather than risk dying while walking into Arizona. The United States government does nothing to track the exit of people who enter this country as tourists. There is no reason not to prefer entry as a tourist to walking across the border if you can qualify.  So who enters the United States by walking into Arizona? Criminals walk into Arizona. People who have been convicted of crimes such as murder ...

Going Deaf

One thing that starts happening as we age is going deaf. It'll be worse for aging Baby Boomers than earlier generations because we've listened to so much loud music and other noise. Television is an early problem because the actors mumble. Most televisions will allow you to display closed captioning but I'm convinced that the person who types in the words for closed captioning can't hear much better than I can. Next we start having trouble hearing women because their voices are higher in pitch. Actually we hear everyone--men and women--just not clearly enough to know what that person said. More and more the people around me produce sound without meaning. Yesterday I went for a jaunt with a soft-voiced friend. She had to repeat at least one sentence out of every five. I heard her voice--just could not break all the sentences down into meaningful words. I begged the doctor to clean out the wax plugs from my ears, but he insisted my ears were clean all the wa...

The New Slaves – The Arizona Law

I’m a news-junky tuned into cable news all day long. So I’m very aware of the brouhaha resulting from Arizona passing a law that attempts to put state control over the problem of illegal aliens. A state law is by definition a second-rate solution to a national problem, but what is Arizona to do? The federal government demonstrates daily that it is totally impotent to deal with the problem and totally unwilling to try to deal with the problem. The citizens of Arizona are suffering. Citizens live in fear. Citizens die at the hands of illegal aliens. People are kidnapped as part of drug wars. Perhaps most importantly, hospitals are closing, bankrupted by illegal alien patients who walk away from their bills without paying. I live next door to illegal aliens. I’ve witnessed the local hospital being defrauded. One of the boys living next door went to the emergency room for an itch on his scrotum and gave my address as his own. I received his bill. I’m sure he thought he was very clever ...

The New Slaves--Offshoring Office Jobs

American business now offshores a wide variety of office jobs: Customer Service, Information Technology, Accounting, Financial Analysis, Engineering, Architecture and maybe more fields that I am not aware of. Someone decided that these were jobs that could be done from a distance and never gave any thought to the fact that people working in other countries never get feedback for the work they do. When I created a computer program in America for an American company, the co-workers who used that program were quick to let me know if it failed in any way. I was the one who had to fix my own errors, but I had the privilege to learn from my mistakes. If someone in India writes code for America and the code bombs, someone in America has to try to fix the error. The person in India never learns from experience. Of course, if I were sitting in America writing programs for Indian companies in the same way, I wouldn’t learn from my mistakes either. Distance does impact results. When I produ...

The Library Survey

I live in a small suburb. My village of about 17,000 souls is surrounded by larger suburbs, each with about three times our population. We have a better than adequate library, but our village library board lusts to keep up with the Joneses of the larger suburbs whether we can afford it or not. Tonight the library held a survey about future upgrades and I got one of the phone calls. It left me with a tension headache. The first issue in the survey was an attempt to get hold of the youngest male in the house. I didn't qualify. Then she asked for the oldest female so I could take the survey. At no time did the young woman attempt to determine if she was talking to the person who paid the real estate taxes so that annoyed me from the get-go. The very next question on their list was an attempt to determine my race. Now this town has a population of about 17,000 people and about 16,900 of those people are middl...

BTW--Offshoring manufacturing and the Palestinians

By the way--manufactured goods from China and other cheap labor countries have played a big role in recent Middle Eastern events. The absence of peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis has become--as Americans know only too well--the most convenient excuse for terrorism by any group anywhere in the world. But the truth is that Palestinians have a bigger problem than just the fact that Israelis live next door and continue breathing. The Palestinians used to have an economy that included many small factories making excellent products for sale to Palestinians, Israelis, and tourists to the Holy Land sites, as well as for export to bring in dollars to buy goods from abroad. Cheaper manufacturing in China and other Asian countries destroyed the Palestinian factories and eliminated the jobs those factories provided. Cheap imported goods replaced locally made goods of better quality, eliminated hope in the hearts of multitudes, and perhaps eliminated any hope for ...

The New Slaves--Offshoring Manufacturing

The people who provide the cheap labor for offshored manufacturing are far away. We don’t see them or hear much about them on television. Sometimes we find out that they are children or prisoners. More often they are people who have fled poor farm villages looking for a better standard of living. I have seen television programs about the living conditions of people in Chinese factories. They worked very long hours without good food or breaks. Their dorms were cramped and dirty and uncomfortable. The workers who were interviewed had the same opinion of those living conditions that an American would have, but they were willing to put up with the discomfort they suffered because jobs were hard to come by and they wanted the money. It is a big planet we live on but it is overpopulated and there are not enough jobs to go around. Unemployment is extremely high in all those places where people are doing jobs for less and less money. Wherever wages start to go up, factories leave and mo...

The New Slaves--Offshoring v. Triple Revolution

It may not be possible to bring offshored manufacturing jobs home even if we were to bring manufacturing home. Years ago, as an undergraduate, I hung out at a campus coffeehouse where the professors and graduate students in sociology and community development gathered. I never actually read the books they discussed; I simply listened in on the conversations of the local intelligentsia. I was not expected to contribute anything intelligent to the conversation. That was not my role. I was a sweet young thing—curvy and curly—and I was there to be seen but not heard. The group in the coffeehouse talked about something called The Triple Revolution. The Triple Revolution predicted a future (around now) when robots would do all work. Comes the (Triple) revolution, only a few people would earn the honor of real jobs that would allow them to earn real wealth. The rest of the population would live on a generous government dole. The government would pay unemployed people to be consumers to k...

The New Slaves--Who They Are

America's current use of foreign labor--here or abroad--is only the latest in an assortment of arrangements to obtain cheap labor and make some Americans filthy rich. The original colonists came from England and Europe around the time that peasants were shaking off the yoke of a feudal society organized to hold those peasants in various degrees of serfdom. The earliest colonists brought indentured servants along when they sailed to the new world. Soon after their arrival, colonists began to import slaves from Africa and over time tightened the yoke of slavery as farming with slave labor became increasingly profitable. When we had an agricultural economy, those who suffered worst from slavery were clearly the slaves. Racism rationalized popular indifference to the slaves' plight in a system of bondage that grew increasingly inhumane over time. Free citizens who did not share in the profits of...

Second Acts--part 1

I've just read a very good book by Bruce Frankel called What Should I Do With the Rest of My Life. Frankel located a handful of people whose life's had second acts that fit his criteria of success. He tells us about these people, covering their earlier lives as well as how they found the path to their second acts, giving a picture of the frustrations and tribulations they dealt with before they turned their lives around. His subjects' lives took new directions at any time from age fifty to ninety--so their stories say that it is never too late for new adventures. One very interesting aspect of Frankel's book is that he recognizes that making a great deal of money is not the prime criteria for judging a life to be a success. Several of his subjects found acclaim in the arts. One man developed an interest in modern dance in his fifties and is dancing with a professional troupe in his seventies. Another woman went to college and became a grade school teacher whose work w...

Local News

Last week--before my inability to access Blogspot to work on this posting threw me into Ludditish panic--there was a lot of news about the impact of the economy on Chicagoland. This week the media has officially transited from woe-is-me over the economy to better-days-are-on-their-way and yet the news reported by the media last week included a sudden flush of layoffs worth consideration and comment. First, a number of Chicago communities announced that they are laying off teachers because the state is not subsidizing school districts as it did in the past. Revenues from income tax are down. The state doesn't have the money to spend on education. The school boards still hope to recall some of the laid-off teachers if funds materialize over the summer, but right now it looks like classroom sizes will go up. Naturally some parents are freaking at the thought of classrooms of thirty children. There were at least thirty children in every Chicago cl...

A Quasi-Luddite Perspective

I will publish this right away without even checking the spelling because I'm having so much trouble getting into Blogspot. I was planning on writing next about some depressing local news--and I will do that after this posting--it is news that disturbs me too much to ignore it--but then I couldn't get into this blog or any other. Either Blogspot had a connection problem--which happened once before in Scandanavia according to the help screens or some addresses have changed and my list of past links is not going to the correct server anymore. But the important thing is that in my house I have no tech support team to call to come fix the problem. I'm lucky that I have some computer skills, albeit not particularly internet oriented skills. I can't afford to call the Geek Squad every time my own fumbling around doesn't solve a problem. And I, for all the limits of my skill set, have a short list of people who call me regularly in a panic over what is happening on...

A Sucker Born... A Fool and His Money... etc...

There is an ad running on television that drives me nuts because a man describes his profits from investing in gold and urges you to buy gold, too. I'm sure that man is telling the truth if he did buy gold five or ten years ago. Anyone who bought gold five or ten years ago when prices were low would now, thanks to the recession, be making a big profit (on paper). However, the truth is that it is probably too late for you to make the same profit buying gold now. Gold always goes up in value when people are panicking about the economy, but it also drops like a rock as soon as the general economy recovers. Anyone who buys gold now, with the price of gold already inflated, is more likely to lose almost every penny of his or her investment (assuming the economy improves) than to make any profit at all. Even if the economy continues to worsen, the price of gold may well have reached its limits. Every word the man on television sa...

Options and Ideals

The original inspiration for this blog came from discussion of the ideal lifestyle for aging in America. The truth is that anyone who can manage daily life independently doesn't need special accommodations for age. As long as you can walk and drive, if you can hold a job or manage investments, if you can write checks to pay the bills and balance the checkbook at the end of the month, if you can wash the floor and shop at the grocery store, if you remember to take the kettle off the fire before it burns, if you remember to shower and brush your teeth, if you remember to prepare and eat meals, and if you have the energy to mow the lawn or shovel the snow as the season requires--then your age is not important. Anyone who can do all those mundane chores can decide for himself or herself how to live according to personal tastes. There are people in their nineties who can manage all those chores and people in their fifties who can not....