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by the way, if and when I see any comments posted (negative, positive, neutral) and I know someone is reading, I will begin posting very often. For instance, the new head of the CIA testified for several hours, most of the time was spent on china and north korean threats. the u.s. media took a few sentences of his testimory before congress and blew it up into "al-Queida is still dangerous" - well, duh. Just goes to show the media and government conspiricy to keep fear the dominant feature of the modern united states. One profits by being able to generate ad revenue while the other gets to tax us and scare people into permitting any and every violation of the bill of rights immaginable by what would be the lunatic paranoid fringe if it weren't for things like The Patriot Act which show that they are neither paranoid or lunatics for claiming that democracy has been stolen away from the citizens of the united states.

UnReality TV

A few years back people were up in arms over the way the news programs were adopting so many of the entertainment tools of the rest of TV. That battle was lost as anyone can see by comparing what appears on local American TV news programs with what is considered news in Canada . While other countries news directors look at how taxes and government decisions will impact the lives of citizens, in the U.S. we are fed a constant diet of fear, murder, and disasters. “If it bleeds, it leads” isn’t a joke, it’s how TV news works in this country. That plays into the constant efforts of the federal government to keep the citizens in a state of near panic so they will let the government do whatever it wants with little interference. But the tide turned a few years ago and News is now affecting entertainment TV in the guise of “reality” TV. Reality TV pretends to show what happens to real people in real life situations or even fantasy situations but th

War Profiteering

This is one of my weekly columns from The Punxsutawney Spirit daily newspaper in Groundhog Central.This is an older piece but it still makes a lot of sense to me. A politician is a strange and wondrous creature. Consider if our brave volunteer firemen acted like Congress. When your house was burning they would rush to the site, wave their arms, and shout loudly and repeatedly that the building is on fire while you stand there watching your home burn. The chief and his staff would wait in their cars until a TV news crew showed up to photograph the fire, then they would rush up and join the fire crew. Someone would propose pouring water on the fire and the rest would yell, "Great, that's what we should do." But then the guy who wants to be chief next year says, "Wait a minute, we could do this much faster if we had a new fire engine." Then they fall to squabbling and choose up sides. One small group wants to just start pumping water on

Social Security Plan

From what I have seen of it, the Bush proposal for reforming Social Security goes as follows: At a cost of unknown billions of taxpayer dollars people under 55 will be allowed to put some of their SS tax money into private accounts and invest it. When they retire the government will take that money and give some of it back in a slow trickle. Even the Administration admits that this will do absolutely nothing to ease the so called SS crisis. Now, to me, this seems to make as much sense as promoting the collecting of Elvis memorial plates as sound retirement planning.