So Then We Really Don't Need So Many Cops In The First Place

Most of the crimes the cops go after and most of the "criminals" in jail are there for small time drug problems. I guess it's the cops causing the problem. Leave people alone and you don't have nearly as much crime.

Good, get rid of the cops so we don't end up with more of these.

Two years ago I witnessed 100 jackbooted armored thugs walking arms locked down Derby Street in Salem. They would have beaten me senseless if it weren't for "the pin" I was wearing on my jacket. One good cop pulled me aside and said stand here with me. He was an older gentleman. Kind of like that pilot who ditched into the Hudson a while back. He struck me as someone who was good and decent and tired of the shit his job has become but powerless to do anything about it and so now just want's to quietly run out the clock until pension time.

The two cops on two separate occasions who were really disappointed when I blew significantly below intoxicated can fuck off.

Nothing Changes

One of these photographs was taken 15 years ago. The other one appeared in the New York Times yesterday. They're both starving children. Both from Western Africa. Both depending on UN food aid for survival. No one knows what happened to the baby dying in the field. Not even the photographer who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for taking the picture.

I don't know what's going to happen to that baby in the tent. It's even more horrific though. This baby has made it to the place where food should be. This baby's fate isn't going to be as solitary as the others. That hand in the picture belongs to the baby's mother. She'll watch her child die.

I have no right to complain about anything in my life.

I Hate Being Right All The Time

Back in the day when I used to talk to people face to face, you know before the blog, I said to a friend who was pissing all his money away on Internet Stocks that turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking that I thought the DOW should be 3000. This was back when the DOW was giddy over hitting 11,000 for the first time. Now it's not fair to try to compare the DOW today with the DOW of yesteryear. Afterall, if the stocks don't perform the newspaper that counts the DJIA just drops them and replaces them with stocks that do perform.

You can't run a proper experiment if you keep changing variables whenever you feel like.

SS-21

Been nice knowing you. It seems that in our lust to bring peace to the Middle East at the point of a gun we've pissed off the only country that can stand up to us without loosing every dime they have. China is not about to fuck with us. We owe them too much money. Besides, they're actually smart. They're capable of planning things ahead of time and actually following it through to successful completion. Christ! They eat 1000 year old eggs. I don't know what I'm going to have for dinner tonight and I don't remember what I just ate for lunch. Some where some Chinaman is sitting down to a snack planned for him ten dynasties ago. Don't fuck with a Chinaman. They know how to get things done.

So do the Russians. They know they don't have to take shit from us. Guess what, they're about to deliver a big spank if we get uppity again. I've seen a Scarab missile up close. The instructions stenciled on the side are printed in Russian and English. It's so that they can give them out like candy to their allies in the Middle East without having to worry if their allies can't read Cyrillic.

The SS-21 is nuclear capable and has a range of about 75 miles. Now you're not going to be chucking H-Bombs between Hartford and White Plains and expect to survive. You can however drive that thing through Armenia in a weekend and render 40% of the worlds oil useless. No soldier now matter how ordered is going to want to strap themselves into an M-1 tank knowing that the gasoline they're sitting next to is throwing neutrons in every direction like Rip Torn at Hiroshima. I'm pretty sure the nuclear free zone we call Cambridge isn't going to welcome MobilOne with Tritium when they go to pump dead soldiers into the Prius.

Cold Dead Hands

A very good friend of mine just gave his bride a small pistol as a wedding gift. She gave him a big sword. The firearm was a Walther something. I don't know much about guns. I don't need to. I live in a safe little bubble free of confrontation and securely removed from the bad side of town. I don't have to worry much about crime in my neighborhood. The buses don't run out here. You have to have the means to afford a house and a car to live here. That puts a mountain range that only elephants can cross between me and the Mongol hordes of tweakers and welfare cheats looking to kick in my front door and grab my wife's jewelery box. It's simply too cold and far to walk and by the time someones lifestyle grinds them into petty thievery they've lost the car if they even had one to begin with.

So I live out here un-armed with enough food to last 3 weeks and water to last 3 days if something goes wrong. I have enough gas on hand to drive a week of my regular habits. I have enough oil to last 3 weeks but the system depends on electricity to run. If there's a blackout I have what I need to turn the lawnmower into a crude enough generator to keep the HVAC system going. I have enough propane to heat one room for one week. I'm surrounded by trees and swamps. I could probably keep myself, Lisa and her grandfather alive 10 days if society collapsed outright. That's if the lower class doesn't get hungry enough to walk over here. I have too many sliding glass doors and low windows to protect this place from even a slow moving zombie attack.

In any event, if I had a gun or even a dozen, I wouldn't be able to defend my Bastile from an army of similarly armed and hungry neighbors. A gun would be worth having to defend myself from one determined criminal but not swarms. And a gun certainly wouldn't protect my family from this. But they are fun. They make a big noise and you see holes open up in a target or cans fall over. They make a big difference to those who live closer to the criminal element or have to deliver pizza or staff the grave yard shift at 7-11. I'm very in favor of letting 'the help' have guns.

I often wonder if it would be wise to arm teachers since the epidemic of school shootings is such a great meme right now. I wouldn't have a problem taking the training and openly carrying a side arm. America has a longstanding tradition with offering the duties of a sheriffs deputy to the local citizenry when needed. I see no real difference between myself and our school resource officer who carries her sidearm into school every day. However if you ask me, if I would draw my weapon on a child and fire my answer would be where his weapon was pointed would make all the difference in the world. If it was pointed at me, probably not. I would talk. If the weapon was pointed at another child than yes I think I would fire and feel remorse afterwards.




A lot of people see this picture and think that guy has balls. I see the compassion in that first tank drivers heart. I know my friends in the military are smart and decent people. I don't think they'd turn fire on me if ordered. Not even if their commander in chief was a total douchebag. That tank driver didn't want to harm his countryman. It's a different story when your enemy are foreigners.

How About A Nice Warm Glass Of Shut The Hell Up. You're In My World Now, Gramma!

Fuck. I guess I'm lucky. My run-ins with the police merely end with a ticket or an apology.

Then again, I'm white, middle-aged, educated and affluent. Samuel L. Jackson would say that I'm "A mutherfucking pillar of the mutherfucking community." I get respect where ever I go. But if that's what it takes to get some simple dignity I'm surprised the underclasses haven't stormed whatever passes for the Bastille in 21st century America.

Perhaps it's time they should. I'm tired of apoligising for my privilege and peerage. I yearn to be free and I know I'm not if you aren't.

Uh Oh Over Flow

It's Friday morning. The world is still here. Some folks believe the world is going to end this morning.

Bin Laden Trades

Missing Nuclear Bombs

Bush was on TV last night. He reminds me of how worn down Lincoln looked after a couple years on the job. Being president grinds you up physically. I don't think Bush was all that healthy to begin with. Now he looks like he's ready for hospice. Something's got him worried. It shows.

I've been wrong before but I'm calling today a red herring.

There is a missing nuke. It was transferred on presidential orders. It was to be used against Iran. Someone noticed the nukes were gone and talked. That man is a hero.


Plan B?

Now the missing nuke will be squirrelled away for a rainy day. We'll all have forgotten about today in a few months. When the bomb is used we'll say see I told you something was up last september. No one will care by then. They'll say sure. Neocons stole a bomb and hid it just to make you look like chicken little. They spent billions of dollars to fool you into thinking something was up in the stock market. Then they hid the bomb for months knowing they could be caught with it. And they're using it now? Who has money to spend on the Bin Laden Trades just to fool a bunch of tinfoil hat bloggers looking for conspiracy theories.

Plausable denialability. Limited hangout. Sound bite.

The Fed injected cash into the banking system a couple weeks ago. Right around the amount of money that the Bin Laden Trades cost to issue. And right around the settlement date. Sounds crazy doesn't it?

It probably is crazy.

Plan on going to work Monday.

Pop Goes The American Dream

2 weeks ago I applied for a home mortgage with LendingTree. I did it mostly because I'm curious what a teacher is worth. I know roughly $46K is a dollar value but it's just a number this year, it goes up every year thanks to the union and DOE regulations. Now a teacher is considered one of the big three professions. You always hear Doctor Lawyer Teacher as the gold standard of professional status. Throw in the fact that this is going to be my first home, my FICA is over 700 and I have 10% down. I also own my car and have no student loans (I am carrying a large balance on my credit card but it is coming down now that I'm working.) One would think that I could get a loan for whatever I asked for. Not so. I asked for $300,000 which is the low end of the price for a single family detached within 10 miles of the school I teach at. There were fewer then 20 houses on MLS to choose from. I got two calls, not the 3 advertised. One offered me $94,000 and the other never called me back.

Now I know there are lots of complaints about LendingTree but I thought they'd be a good ballpark estimate. Perhaps if I went to the bank I'd have a better idea of my financial prospects. I'm going to leap to conclusions anyway.

A teacher, considered one of the pillar of the community jobs* can't get a loan on their salary to purchase a home in the community they work in. That's fucked up. It's not like there's no money in the system to loan, $400 billion dollars is a lot to inflate the currency supply with. That's pretty damn close to half a trillion. So I should be getting that loan right?

Who's going to give a loan now? It seems that there are no mortgage houses left standing. All that money with no one willing to hand it out.

A couple years ago Lisa tried to get in with some bankers to handle their forclosure listings. Nothing came of it. Now you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a house in preforclosure and Lisa is still only representing buyers. Looks like the banks have to come to her now. There are some folks who will survive the market and end up with a lovely home. They'll never get back what they paid for it but people pay 3 times in mortgage interest anyway. What they sell it for will just be a number to boast about. Only Baby Boomers who bought a house for $15,000 in 1970 will actually make money on top of what they paid in mortgage interest. It's too bad the dollar they sell their house for isn't worth what it was in 1970. The rest of us are screwed. In the mean time, there is no middle class left when a married, college educated, pillar of the community professional can't get a loan to purchase a 2 bedroom house on 10,000 square feet of land.

American dream? I'm dreaming about moving to Croatia. By the way, that house would have cost $60,000 a year ago, it works out to $120K today.

What kind of job prospects can I expect in Eastern Europe? It turns out that Croatia is desperate for teachers that speak english. I'll bet the banks there would be happy to give me a loan especially since I'll have a 35% down payment. And for those Americans who don't know where Croatia is it's two countries north of Greece on the coast of that splash of water just behind Italy's knee. And for those Americans who think it's dangerous there. The civil war is over. Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are all joining the EU. They've got no place to go but up.



*(not my words, one of the mortgage brokers called it that.)

BZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzz

Could it be from genetically modified crops?

Remember, this is a republican noticing this. So consider the canary long dead and the mineshaft collapsing.