Fort Knox

“Goldfinger” is one of my favorite movies, the plot is a little bit difficult to swallow, but suffice to say that the villain, Auric Goldfinger, really does believe that Fort Knox is the biggest repository of gold in the entire world and his sinister operations center around compromising that gold, and thereby making Goldfinger’s gold much more valuable and he, much more powerful.  Now fifty years later, questions have continued to be asked as to whether Fort Knox has as much gold as it purports to have.

Fort Knox is estimated to have 147.3 million troy ounces of gold, in which with gold priced at about $1250/ounce this is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $184.1 billion.  Incredibly, the reserves at Fort Knox have not been audited since 1953, and it is questionable what that audit even accomplished.  What should be done at Fort Knox is a complete and thorough audit of the gold, to determine not only its quantity, its weight, but also its purity, as urged by Ron Paul and so many others.

The audit of Fort Knox is a no-brainer.  Yearly physical audits are a requirement for most companies and not to have an audit for over sixty years of a task as straightforward as determining how much physical gold Fort Knox contains is inexcusable.  The lack of transparency and the absence of an up-to-date audit is prima facie evidence that all is not sound at Fort Knox and the estimates of the gold that is contained there is thereby highly suspect.

Our government has an obligation to be a good steward of our money and to be forthright and honest in regards to what or what isn’t contained at Fort Knox.  If there isn’t a story at Fort Knox, that all the gold that is supposed to be there, is there, than why not take the steps to document that information in such a manner as to prove that to the American people beyond a reasonable doubt.  

In fact, the government for its own purposes, even if not publicly disclosed, should desire to know how much gold is or isn’t at Fort Knox.  Quite frankly, I don’t believe that anyone alive actually knows how much gold is at Fort Knox and apparently those in power deliberately do not want anyone to know.  Smoke and mirrors can only work for so long and I am amazed, that Fort Knox, gold, and how much or how little gold there is, has survived this long without the ghost being given up.

Gold has been currency in many civilizations over long periods of time, because of its scarcity, its malleability, its lack of oxidization, and its desirability.  Any government can print reams and reams of paper money, can create fiat currency, but that currency will at some point become worthless or nearly so because governments come and governments go through conquest, abandonment, or decay. In fact, gold is the real deal and that is why alchemists tried so hard to change base metals into gold for so many years.  Is Fort Knox the real deal?  In absence of any verified proof, the answer is clearly no.

Federal Deficits

This is a country that lacks both the courage and the conviction to raise taxes on its population in order to balance its budget and thereby run a sound and fiscal federal government, nor does our country have the will to reduce expenses, expenditures, and budgets in order to help accomplish that goal.  While there are plenty of other nations that suffer from the same problem, none are of the size, the girth, and influence as the United States.  Additionally, there are numerous countries that don't run a fiscal deficit; in fact they currently have surpluses, in which of note we have South Korea, Norway, and Brazil.   America has not always been this profligate, and we need only go back to as recently as the years of 1998-2001 in which our federal government actually ran a surplus in each of those years to demonstrate that, but since that time American has become especially imprudent as in each of the years of 2009-2012, our deficits were the highest the country has ever experienced since its creation, even adjusting for inflation for the World War II deficit spending years.  That obviously bodes very poorly for our country's fiscal responsibility going forward.

These massive federal deficits are essentially an unfair and unauthorized taxation on our youngest generation and on generations of Americans to come.  America has borrowed again and again against its future to pay for guns and butter today.  To make matters worse, the United States simply won't own up to the fact that its spending and deficits are out of control and fiscally irresponsible.  To hear House Minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, recently state that: "the cupboard is bare, there's no more cuts to make," in regards to the federal budget is to know that America is morally bankrupt and on firm footing for complete fiscal bankruptcy. 

Business cycles of booms and busts are pretty much the historic norm, despite the belief that government can control or mitigate these cycles.  Consequently, in lean years, it is not surprising that our federal government will run a deficit that is to be expected, but within those lean years, there should be mandated a fiscal tightening on the government itself, but in fact that isn't happening at all.  While incomes for the majority of Americans have been stagnate for almost two generations, those that live and work in the surrounding areas around Washington DC have seen an explosion in their income gains.   The reason for this is as simple as the closer you are to the power source, the further up in the food chain you are especially to the contracts, contacts, and to the lobbyists, the bigger the slice of pie that you will reap and those that touch the money first always get the most benefit from it.  Those that are connected will reap the biggest benefits of a federal budget currently in the neighborhood of $3.5 trillion. 

America is playing a shell game with its taxpayers, it's rigged, it's wrong, and it can't go on forever.   No child likes to be told "no", no man likes to be denied, nobody really likes to lose, but the reality of the situation is that when anybody tries to be all things to everybody, in-discriminatory, undisciplined, unprincipled, unscrupulous, self-centered, and double dealing, it will end with everybody receiving a really raw deal.

Drugs

One of the biggest scourges in America is the abuse and over-prescription of drugs, be it legal or illegal.  What is this lure that gets reasonable men and women to keep making decisions that are poorly thought through, with detrimental effects, and devastating negative consequences?

While there are a lot of reasons why people voluntarily take drugs I will discuss some of the most prevalent.  For some people, there is somewhat of a misimpression that drugs will help them to cope better, to feel better about themselves, and/or to function better in society.  The error in this type of thinking is not to acknowledge that life itself will have its up and downs, its highs and lows, and its challenges.  Drugs don't necessarily solve the inner problem, but more often than not help to mask the problem, but the problem still remains.

For most people, you don't need drugs to feel better about yourself or your situation.  You may think you need drugs but that judgment is often erroneous.  People who consider themselves to be in dead-end jobs, or a dead-end life, or dead-end dreams, often turn to drugs because their life is so humdrum, but the taking of the drugs doesn't improve the life or the situation, it only possibly helps to alleviate it temporarily but the underlining problems are still there, unaddressed and unanswered.

To take away the need for drugs, often you must find a purpose in life that is outside of yourself, a drive to better the world, or to improve your neighborhood, or to help someone in need.  When you have a determined purpose in life, when life has meaning to you, the need or the desire for drugs is dissipated.  Additionally, one must stand up and take responsibility for their decisions and their life in order to beat-down the lure of drugs and its culture.  A man with a purpose in life, a man with focused goals, will not allow himself to get sidetracked by the smokescreen and falseness of drug intoxication.

Man has a yearning desire to feel peace, to be blissful, and to be calm and centered.  He wrongly believes that through drugs he can achieve these goals but in fact drugs deadens the senses, deadens the mind, and turns off the very light that man needs most.   The lure of drugs is the delusion of shortcuts that man wrongly believes will bring lifelong bliss with little or no effort.  Every time that you take a shortcut, you have in fact, wandered away from the straight and narrow path and have instead taken a side path to nowhere and to darkness. 

While drugs rightly prescribed and taken under supervision have their place and their effectiveness, recreational drugs seldom do.  While taking these recreational drugs you feel fortunate if you achieve euphoria or even bliss, but this will dissipate to be replaced once again with emptiness and hollowness.  Therefore you will desire to repeat this cycle again and again, but like a rat in a cage that gets up on his exercise wheel and falsely believes that he is running to freedom or better days, you will instead be on the wheel of life that goes nowhere, takes you nowhere, and ends nowhere.

Annoying Do-Gooders

Doing good and being good is a wonderful thing.  Your life is made up of the decisions that you make each and every day.  If you consistently make good decisions, you will grow as a human being and will be a net benefit to society at large.  This doesn't mean that making good decisions and doing good deeds will always bring beneficence to you; you can most definitely do the right thing and die for it that is the unfortunate nature of this fallen world.  Still it is well worth your while to be true to yourself and to be a virtuous person of good heart, good deeds, and good faith.

What, however, is an annoying do-gooder?  An annoying do-gooder is someone that insists that they know what is best for you and to show their conviction of that attitude, they will do everything within their power to compel you to conform to what they perceive to be the right behavior for you.  While the intent may be to improve that person's character and to straighten out that person's ways, unfortunately that vision often comes from someone that has "a beam is in thine own eye." (Matthew 7:4).

To make matters worse, do-gooders have taken to changing the game from simply one-to-one consultation, whether desired or not, to utilizing the force of government to compel so-called right behavior from recalcitrant individuals.  For instance, while there may be valid reasons why people that smoke should not be allowed to do so inside buildings in which the ventilation is inadequate or the like, it makes no logical sense that people can't smoke outside in the open air.  The do-gooders will claim it's a health hazard but there appears little or no hard empirical evidence to support this accusation, and if you allowed this fallacy to be swallowed, than where do you draw the line as there are probably an infinite amount of activities that people engage in that are both annoying and possibly harmful.  

The do-gooders of today's world want you to conform to their particular brand of group think.  They want you to listen to their music of choice, dress like they do, talk like they do, visit and frequent the places that they do, weight the same weight as them, think like they do, and be just like them.  That's silliness of the highest order but to makes matters worse, the do-gooders will stop at virtually nothing to see that their thinking is the law of the land.  That is why each year we have more and more laws that circumvent our freedoms, our choices, our desires, and our free will.

People will make bad decisions that are obvious to us, and probably are just as obvious to the people making those decisions.  That is their choice, as a good neighbor we can help them to see other choices,  but ultimately sometimes you must first do the wrong thing before you can learn how to do and desire to do the right thing.  We call that behavior: free will; the do-gooders, however, are the opposite of free will, they are our regulators.

Server Minimum Wage

Most of us visit a restaurant at least occasionally in which as part of the final payment of the meal, a tip is typically left for the server.  The tip is left to the discrimination of the patron in most parts of the United States and as a consumer I do prefer having that discretion as to how much tip amount to leave for a given meal, depending on service and performance.  However, there is the other side of the tip equation and that is the server's side.  Many of our laws have exceptions, and in the case of waitresses the minimum wage has an exception in which instead of making at least the federal mandated minimum of $7.25/hour, their minimum wage is set at $2.13/hour as a "tipped minimum wage" and it has been set at $2.13/hour since 1991.  While the law states that your server must through tips and their hourly wage make at least the minimum wage per hour, in practicality any server making the "tipped minimum wage" is going to get $2.13/hour and the balance of their pay, no matter how little or how much, will come from tips, and that is pretty much the end of the story.

Obviously, the lower minimum wage for employers is a great benefit as their labor costs go down, and they can afford to overstaff their restaurant because of it.  Also, since their servers are making such a paltry rate per hour, it is easy to make as a condition of employment, hours in which the server must be at the restaurant in order to help set up tables for the opening of business as well as closing tables at the close of business.  It seems to me that it is hypocrisy of the highest order when people that are making sub-minimum wages are put into a position in which they are working at the restaurant in a particular duty in which there is no possibility of making a tip (e.g. setting up tables before the restaurant is even open to the public).  That isn't fair and the personnel that are making less than minimum wage while doing these duties should be compensated at full minimum wage or better.  For instance, if on a normal day of an 8-hour shift, there are two hours in which the restaurant was either closed to patrons, or no longer were serving meals to patrons and you are working in various job duties for the restaurant during that time, it should be mandated that you receive the full minimum wage or better.  Making just this small change would be fairer for the servers in general, and it would also necessitate management to be more efficient in utilizing its labor resources because they would be more cognizant of the true costs involved.

Of course, there is another more straightforward argument which is whether servers should be paid less than minimum wage to begin with.  There are seven states in which that question has been answered: NO, and one of those states is the largest in the Union, which is California.  The last I checked, California has many, many restaurants and doesn't seem to suffer from not having too many, which implies that restaurants can do just fine by paying their servers a full minimum wage. 

I do not believe that it is step too far to update our minimum wage laws to reflect that tipped employees should make the full minimum wage.  While you could make the argument that this change should be done immediately, I would not be opposed to it being stepped in over a period of three or possibly four years to give those states and restaurants enough time to adjust to the new labor law.

Genetic Modified Organism (GMO)

Science most definitely can get ahead of the curve and in the case of genetically modifying organisms, they have.  I don't believe that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that GMOs in and of themselves are bad or necessarily dangerous but they are an artificial change to an organism and when it relates to humans and their consumption of food products, human beings have a right to know whether the food that they are consuming has been modified by a GMO, and further that the given GMO has been tested by an independent panel to determine its safety and appropriateness before being offered as a substitute or alternative for non-GMO products.

Quite frankly, there isn't any compelling reason why GMO foods need to be offered for human consumption as our current yield on crops is quite impressive without GMO products and creating GMOs merely for the convenience of large chemical conglomerates such as Monsanto and DuPont is arrogant and incorrect.  GMOs are a fascinating area of study, of interest, and of potential, but within this field, there is an absolute obligation to match man's brilliance and invention with concern and consideration for the safety to the public at large.

Another way of looking at GMOs is acknowledging that although man has developed the capability to genetically modify organisms, it therefore does not follow that all organisms should be modified.  It would be far better, to be far more selective in the modification of organisms, and to recognize the purpose of said modification.  Modifying crops so that they are more resistant to certain insecticides sounds like a great idea, but a better idea is to modify the insecticide so that it is less toxic to crops, the environment, and humans.

The food that we consume is the fuel that powers our bodies.  It is quite possible within the consumption of GMOs that the danger becomes not from the occasional digestion from GMO foods from time-to-time but from the accumulation over a lifetime of such consumption.  Why should humans be subjected to such a potential risk if there isn't any valid or real compelling reason to do so?  Additionally, it seems quite fair and reasonable that consumers be allowed the choice of whether to ingest GMO products by proper labeling being provided to them because without such labeling and transparency, humans may unintentionally be consuming products that they would not willingly and voluntarily be signing up for.

The creation and release of pharmaceutical medicine goes through an extensive vetting process within the FDA, but prescribed medicines are something that you take ultimately at your discretion and with a doctor's supervision.  When it comes to food, however, we have to eat in order to live, those decisions are made by individuals, and it is important that we are knowledgeable about the food products that we consume.  It therefore seems reasonable that GMO products must be labeled and also tested in such a way that they are known as being truly safe for human consumption.

Victimless Crimes

What are victimless crimes?  There are several ways to define this, with the best way, to simply state the obvious, a victimless crime has no victims and therefore the only reason that it is a crime is because the State has decided to make it a crime.   The most common victimless crimes would be: prostitution, illegal drug use, and gambling.  However, some people believe that euthanasia is a victimless crime, I don't agree and it is implicit that if someone assists you in committing suicide, that that is a crime, but even without assistance, euthanasia has a victim, which is the person himself committing suicide.

In regards to gambling, many people have an interest in playing cards or dice or sports betting in which they get pleasure out of the possibility of winning money and are willing to take the risk in doing so.  Most states now have some form of legalized gambling, with regulatory authorities and licensing.  Gambling that is on the up and up has no victims, because the choice to gamble is left in your hands.  However, in the case in which a gambler is being cheated, for instance the cards are marked, or the dice are loaded, or the sport event has been fixed, there most definitely is a victim, and therefore that would not be a victimless crime, but in absence of such cheating, the choice to spend your money gambling should be your choice alone.

I am somewhat amused by illegality of certain drugs in America.  The reason I say this, is that there is a misimpression in America that if a drug is legal that it is OK to safely take, and that if a drug is illegal that is unsafe to consume in any amount, but that isn't true at all, because some legal drugs are quite toxic and some illegal drugs are not. The State arbitrarily decides which drugs are legal and which are not and the decision should not be the States to make in the first place.   The choice should be made by the individual and most informed individuals would have a preference to take drugs that are manufactured with controls, clinical trials, and oversights as compared to "street drugs".  It is not for the Government to decide what you should or should not ingest into your body and certainly it is unfair and a waste of community resources to incarcerate people that use or take so-called illegal drugs.   As for those that sell drugs in which they have not been licensed to do so, that should be a crime and there should be appropriate penalties for doing so depending upon the danger and dosage of the drugs sold. 

As for prostitution, this is typically a transaction between two or more parties in which each performs their part as part of an agreed upon verbal contract.  As long as each party does their part, it isn't the business of the State to interfere in the transaction.  There isn't anything wrong with people or the State considering the act to be immoral, but I do take exception to it being treated as a crime though.

Crimes in which there is no victim should not be criminal acts.  Adults should be able to make decisions as adults, we may not approve of all of them, we may not agree with all of them, but those decisions should be left up to the individual for better or for worse.

The For-Profit College Scam

It's always about the money and it doesn't help that the government shoots itself in the foot time-and- time again.  Perhaps the government has noble goals by promoting higher education with Pell grants, Stafford loans, Perkins loans, or various other governmental loan programs out there that ostensibly were created to give opportunity for low-income students to attend college.  The problem with these loan and grant programs however, is that they are structured in such a way that the for-profit colleges utilize them again and again as their "go-to" formulato model their business educational program.  For instance, in Tom Harkin's investigation of for-profit colleges in 1992, the report concludes that for-profit colleges received about $32 billion in taxpayer payments thru Pell grants and Stafford loans for 2011.  In fact, the general consensus is that these grants and loans make up around 85-90 percent of for-profit college revenues so that their business model is purposely constructed around these taxpayer-backed monies.

For-profit colleges have minimal interest in actually educating their students, as their incentives are built around recruiting specifically students most likely to need funding by Pell grants and Stafford loans since this money supply is guaranteedor granted by their respective government agencies.  The budgets of for-profit colleges are built around marketing and recruiting, and their incentives are structured specifically around those incentives.  For-profit colleges spend considerably less than traditional colleges for teacher's salaries and the costs for students of attending for-profit colleges are significantly higher than traditional colleges.  The success of for-profit colleges comes down to an insider knowledge of working the system to their advantage and the utilization of massive amounts of monies spent specifically recruiting the student base that they are seeking, which are their primary goals to the virtual exclusion of all else.

If the government was serious about putting an end to the abuse of the for-profit college system which is detrimental to students for the inferiority of the education, the expense of the education, the lack of discretion of students qualifying for the education, and the unnecessary debt burden of students for this education, the government would amend their rules for Pell grants and Stafford loans immediately.  The fuel that feeds for-profit education is the grants and loans that the taxpayers of America are stuck making good on.  For-profit colleges would take a significant blow, they would have to re-invent themselves if these funds were severely restricted or removed from their business model.

The government has the power to give and the government has the power to take away, it need only exercise those powers to correct this injustice to students, to the taxpayers, and to the educational system in general.  If for-profit colleges want to exist or co-exist into the future, they will have to morph from their present state of marketing and recruiting scams with little real emphasis on valid education, to become true institutions of higher learning that help to create prepared minds that are of service not only to themselves but to society at large.

Rich Man's War and a Poor Man's Fight

If you ever really wonder whether this is a land of equality without the peerage of England, you need only study the civil war to get a perspective.  While there were many men who volunteered on both sides of the conflict to fight in the civil war, because of the length of the war, each side was unable to get enough men to volunteer to fight and was therefore forced into conscripting men into the armed forces.  As you might imagined, there were propertied people who had little or no interest in volunteering to fight out of sheer survival instinct, cowardice, greed, inconvenience, selfishness, religious concerns, or other various excuses.  Both sides accommodated these people, probably because of their power within their respective communities.  In the South, there was no class of people more dependent on slavery than the rich property owners themselves with large slave plantations.  These specific people, in of themselves, were the primary impetus for secession and war in the first place, so it is a disgusting hypocrisy to find out that propertied owners having at least twenty slaves on their plantation were exempt from the confederate draft.  Consequently, many of the soldiers fighting on behalf of the confederacy were not slave holders or involved in any aspect of the slave trade, yet they were fighting  and shedding their blood to uphold slavery and their Southern traditions.

The North was far more populous, far richer, much more educated, and when conscription came to the North, there was given to certain privileged peoples andthoseof class and power, the opportunity to forgo the draft by substitution or commutating money for a deferment.   While in principle this substation or commutation was given to all peoples of conscription age in the North, in practicality, it only applied to those that had ready money or ready power.  So in both cases, of the North and of the South, privileges were extended to those who were already privileged to begin with.

None of this is particularly unusual, it is the history of the world after all that those in power, of influence, of the right family, have privileges that the commoners do not have.  However, in a country as young as the United States, in which our Declaration of Independence proudly proclaims, that "all men are created equal" it is quite disappointing to see this discrimination.  Additionally, it's disappointing that a man of the people, such as Lincoln, would allow such a thing to be offered, but the fact of the matter is that substitution is a historic practice, which has been utilized time and time again in wars of all ages.  This does not, however, negate the unfairness of such a condition, nor does it make it right as a matter of principle.  In fact, the point is this, if the rich, the elite, the American aristocracy, the propertied class, know that their brood will not be hurt or harmed during a war, but instead can profit from it, or by it, than it is all that much easier to support war for their purposes.

The civil war was justified, but it was still very much a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

Insider Trading

The market capitalization of all United States stocks is about $18.6 trillion dollars with nearly 50 percent of all Americans owning stock or equity of some sort whether in their own accounts, their IRAs, or their pensions.  The stock market is news Monday through Friday when the markets are open and there are at least three television programs that dedicate their operations to it (Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox Business).  Additionally, there are plenty of media that essentially cover the equity, bond, and investment markets such as Barrons, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune.   Finally, the richest of the rich in America are almost certainly invested in equities and their return on investment on these equities is of material concern to them.

Not too surprisingly, the nature of the game is to make money on money and for those skilled brokerage firms, mutual funds, and hedge funds that are able to maneuver successfully and to create market-beating returns they are richly rewarded for doing so.  It is common knowledge then, that the powers to be will do whatever it takes to get every competitive advantage, to work every angle, to nurture and create networks and connections that will give them an edge over the other players, recognizing that the more successful you are the better the compensation and perks.

Having said that the Securities and Exchange Commission rule § 240.10b5-1 states that you are engaged in Insider Trading when you: "… purchase or sale of a security of any issuer, on the basis of material nonpublic information about that security or issuer, in breach of a duty of trust or confidence…"   That rule seems to put a damper on the party but in fact, it hardly slows it down, as anytime that you are dealing with human greed, money, power, and billions upon billions of dollars, where there is a will there will be a way. 

It doesn't take a genius to recognize that in order to get ahead of the competition you need some sort of edge on them and while there are plenty of avenues to pursue, there doesn't seem to be any better road to take than the one that will enable you to receive or solicit pertinent news that is of material use and is known ahead of others in which they too would desire to obtain that same sort of news.  This then becomes the opportunity to work from facts rather than suppositions or rumors and doing so will give you that material advantage over your competitors and will often make you money.

Of course, the above reflects a violation of the securities trading law and is considered to be "Insider trading", but like it or not, Wall Street is always about trading on knowledge that is not available to the general public.  After all, for the movers and shakers on Wall Street your job has always been to act upon actionable information.  Your contacts, your moves, your conversations, your connections, are all about a symbiotic relationship in which one hand helps the other hand and those that are able to access material information on either side of the aisle are highly desired.

The SEC would have you to believe that a few rogue traders are acting on illegal insider information, but in reality it is pervasive, common, and part and parcel of the equity industry.  Insiders of Wall Street have privileged information, connections, and access to power that you will never achieve and that's just the way it is.   In fact, truth of the matter is, our life revolves around giving and receiving insider information in our personal relationships, at work, or in the public.  Insider trading is more of the case of those not in the know, not so much seeking justice, but suffering from the pangs of envy.

Democratic nominee is new President for foreseeable future

In the last six Presidential elections, each President has gone on to win a second term.  The last time his happened was at the beginning of our republic with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, each serving two terms for his country.  In all elections, incumbents have huge advantages and this recent trend of two-term Presidents in America should continue.  Of our last three Presidents, two have been Democrats, and one has been Republican.  Offhand, that doesn't sound like any real dominance by the Democrats but those results are deceptive.  In 2000, Republican Bush barely won in a disputed election and his follow-up in 2004, was also very close.  In fact, if in either of those elections, Bush had lost Florida he would have lost the election.  The most important trend is that the Democrats have so many electoral votes that are solidly in the democratic camp that their chances are losing any upcoming Presidential elections are slim.  The following eighteen states and DC have voted democratic in each of the last six elections and they are in alphabetical order:

                California             55 electoral votes

                Connecticut        7

                D.C.                        3

                Delaware             3

                Hawaii                   4

                Illinois                   20

                Maine                   4

                Maryland             10

                Massachusetts11

                Michigan              16

                Minnesota          10

                New Jersey        14

                New York            29

                Oregon                 7

                Pennsylvania     20

                Rhode Island      4

                Vermont              3

                Washington        12

                Wisconsin            10

                Total:                     242 electoral votes

Additionally, the following eight states in alphabetical order have voted Democratic in the last two elections:

                Colorado              9 electoral votes

                Florida                  29

                Iowa                      6

                Nevada                                6

                New Hampshire 4

                New Mexico      5

                Ohio                      18

                Virginia                 13

                Total:                     90 electoral votes

The President needs but 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency, so it is a long shot to believe that the Democratic nominee could not continue to win enough of the electoral votes of the democratic leaning states to win the election.  In fact, the probability of the Democrats not winning at least 28 electoral votes is very slim.

While, no doubt, the Republicans are quite aware of these numbers and perhaps believe a strategy of running a Republican from a Democratic stronghold state such as New Jersey might succeed, the fact of the matter is that Romney was unable to carry Massachusetts and therefore it is quite conceivable or even probable that someone like Christie would be unable to carry New Jersey.

The bottom line is that the Republicans don’t stand a realistic chance against any Democratic candidate that doesn't carry a great deal of negative baggage, therefore any Presidential election is the Democrats to lose and they are a prohibitive favorite over any candidate from the Republican party.  In fact, there isn't any real reason to expect the Republicans to win the Presidency over the next twenty years at a minimum.  The Republicans are left to fight for governorships, senate seats, and house seats; the executive position is simply a bridge too far.

In regards to the highest position in our land, the United States has become much like one-party states of repressive countries, the result is foreknown, and inevitable.

Day trading

Never underestimate man's greed, especially when it comes to a country that celebrates and idolizes people with money as much as the United States.  The trading platform for equities changed when the fixed commission structure that brokerage firms charged was terminated in 1975.  As you might suspect, the higher the cost of a commission to buy a stock the more serious and long-term oriented an investor would be.  It took a while for brokerage firms to recognize that lower commissions could equate to higher commissions in aggregate if the investors would simply trade more, and trading volumes have risen exponentially since 1975.  Additionally, the door for individual investors became wide open with the advent of the internet and the additional competition that online brokerage firms brought to the forefront.  Now, unfortunately (depending on your point of view) individuals have the power to exercise their own trades at their own discretion without using a full-service broker.  Not too long afterwards, some "genius" came to the conclusion that trading in and out of stocks rapidly was the path to untold riches with their attitude being why wait all year to get a paltry 15% annual return, when by making the right moves you might get 15% in one month, month after month!

The advertisements for day trading classes hit their peak over a decade ago but those classes and advertising still exist today but not with the same in-your-face prominence.  The lure, the line, the song and dance, are still beckoning however, because who wouldn't want to sit in front of their computer screen and with a few clicks of their mouse, make thousands of dollars each and every day.  Now that really is the good life!  The problem with this fantasy is that reality helps to clarify everything.

The structure of day trading is setup in such a way that the opportunity for you to lose a lot of money in a very short period of time is hiding in plain sight.  First off, to make the real money you need a margined account which essentially means that you can leverage up your cash deposit with your brokerage firm.  For instance, if you deposit $50,000 (and day traders that margin investments must have a deposit of $25,000 or greater in order to margin) you are allowed to make trades of up to 4x your investment amount (i.e. $200,000) as long as your close out your positions at no more than 2x (i.e. $100,000) before the end of the trading day.  Because of that leverage, moves up and down, are much more pronounced when compared to the actual money deposited with your firm.

Also, keep in mind, that while day trading you have costs that will accrue against your account each and every day.  The commission cost of the trade, the margin cost of the money you are borrowing, and the tax costs for all of your trading.  Still each and every trading decision is yours to make.  You have the flexibility to invest using a real-time ticker into highly leveraged ETS, common equities, options, and you can short those investments too, thereby making it possible for you to play either side of the table to your perceived advantage.

The problem with day trading, however, is that you are an amateur with no insider information, trying to beat professionals and insiders at their game in which they have all the tools and connections.   That, I submit, is a very hard nut to crack.  It's the lure of that easy money and the belief in your own infallibility that gets you into the game, and once in it's hard to get out, not without an almost complete beat-down.

Compromised credit cards

Credit cards are a great convenience and I use my credit cards to purchase just about everything that I do purchase as I hardly ever use cash or my debit card and I don't carry any checks with me.  Fortunately, I have quite a few credit cards, probably too much in fact, but it is important to have credit card backup for those times when your card is declined for some reason.  Typical reasons that your credit card would be declined are that you have exceeded your credit limit, the usage of your card looks suspicious, or your card has been compromised and any subsequent purchases will not be allowed.  These types of annoyances can be quite troubling for a consumer if you don't have an alternate form of payment available. 

When I have an issue with my credit card in which I have been declined, experienced has shown me that phone calls to the credit card provider are best made from home or from my office.  I've done the phone call from the vendor's phone before in which I've attempted to unfreeze my account but that has often not gone well and it's rather embarrassing when you are unable to succeed in unfreezing your account, so I'd rather save that potential embarrassment for absolute emergencies.

The compromising of your credit card is inconvenient for the consumer as one has to call and talk to the "fraud prevention line" and go over your most recent charges; also you're no longer able to log onto your credit card account which can be a real disservice because often looking at those charges online will refresh your memory over the most recent charges made.  Additionally, you will have to upon receipt of your replacement credit card activate your card which sometimes is automated and sometimes not, for some re-issued cards this will also mean a new user ID name, and finally you will need to re-enter your credit card number for any sites that have previously memorized your card for automatic payments or the like. 

The most amazing part of what I have written above, is in all my recent cases of my credit card being compromised, I have not had my credit card stolen from my wallet, therefore that probably means my credit card number has been taken either through some online site in which almost all of those sites nowadays claim that they have sophisticated encryption techniques that are utilized, or it has been stolen by a human being at a restaurant or possibly through a verbal phone credit card transaction.   The compromising of my credit cards is so frequent, that I cannot remember a year in which I didn't have at least one credit card compromised.  In fact, I recently had a credit card compromised, got it replaced, and then within 10 weeks, got the replacement card compromised.

If my case is typical for Americans, the amount of credit cards that are compromised each year in America must be a truly massive number.   You would think that the credit card issuers would want to alleviate this problem by providing credit cards that entail utilizing PIN # and/or having a chip embedded in the credit card itself.  It’s puzzling to me why this hasn't occurred in America, whereas it's pretty much standard in Europe and Asia.  You would think with all the technology that we have available today, that fraudulent credit card transactions would be on the decline, but this doesn't appear to be the case at all.

Comcast as Big Brother

In order to get onto the internet, you have to utilize an Internet Service Provider (ISP).  The biggest players in the field are Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision, Time-Warner, and Verizon.  This article deals specifically with Comcast only because they are my ISP provider, but I suspect that the other major ISPs behave in similar ways.  Each time that we utilize the internet our computer, or our network, is identified by an Internet Protocol (IP) Address which is unique to our computer network.  This IP Address is assigned by our ISP provider and although our IP Address doesn't have our actual name and address directly on it, that information is certainly known and can be provided by our ISP provider without our consent or knowledge. 

Clearly, our privacy is under assault and as always it starts with so-called "good intentions" in which the major media companies which have suffered under the loss of revenue from illegally pirated copies of movies, television programs, music and the like have joined forces with the major ISP providers to setup the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) and "through a progressive series of alerts called the Copyright Alert System (CAS), ISPs will make consumers aware of possible illegal activity that has occurred over peer-to-peer networks using their Internet accounts."  If that sounds innocent to you, it certainly isn't in any form or content whatsoever.  Essentially, the biggest media companies in the world want to turn the ISP that you utilize to access the internet against you and thereby to incriminate you by associating your IP address with you as a person.

There are two basic types of warnings that Comcast will issue.  The first warning type which I believe can pretty much be ignored, is the "Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringement", in which you are admonished to not infringed upon copyrighted works.  Therefore the first warning type is really just a shot across the bow, however, the second warning type is the dreaded:  "Alert #1: Potentially Improper Use of Copyrighted Material" which is the real deal when it comes to alleged copyright infringement and the alert number which is part of that heading certainly counts against you.  To date, I have received two alerts against me, and you are allowed a total of six alerts under this Copyright Alert System (CAS) before you are subject to some sort of punishment in which the most likely sanction is that your connection speed will slow down to a crawl for some period of time to be determined by your ISP, but the penaltyt meted out to you could be far more significant including fines and termination of your account without notice.

For those law and enforcement types, they may see this all as some sort of well-deserved punishment and necessary enforcement for cheating malcontents, and perhaps it is.  However, the big picture is far, far worse.  Everyone wants to believe that back in the day when letters were actually sent through the USPS that our communications were not tampered with and were treated confidentially except when a federal warrant was issued specifically to open a certain piece of mail.  Fast forward to the present day and virtually everyone in America expects that their activities on the internet, their e-mails, their web views are private but if ISPs are so willing to accommodate and join up with media companies to arrest our activities, how much easier is it for them to justify doing the same thing for patriotic or more sinister reasons for the Government.

What Ever happened to Small Family Farms

Farming today is almost a pejorative term, as if farmers are considered to be so backward, so rural, and so country, that they are by definition completely out of touch with time and modernity.   If that is so, so much the shame for Americans, because this great country was once a nation of farmers and it still is a great nation of farmers.  At the time of our revolution, nearly 90% of Americans were employed in the farming industry.  Most farming back then was subsistence farming, simply providing enough for one's own family to live and survive on, with any extra harvest being stored, bartered with, or perhaps sold.

There are a lot of advantages to small family farms, because it gives those that work the land a sense of purpose, of responsibility, of worthiness, and of self-sufficiency.  That in of itself provides most of the object lessons that you need in order to negotiate life.  While small farms will not have the economies of scale that large farms bring to the forefront, the small farms of today bring tradition, history, sustainability, and are the bedrock and foundation of local economies.  The United States owes a lot to its farmers, and placing an undue burden on them, is not one of the legacies that should ever be permitted.

Laws are ostensibly setup to make things fair, but the FDA consistently makes laws that benefit the big conglomerate farmers as opposed to the small farms.  The fact of the matter is, it is only the big conglomerates that have the money, the legal staff, and the lobbyists that can stay in step with the FDA, so that when laws are passed, they are structured in such a way that the conglomerates will benefit at the expense of the little guy. 

The FDA claims that its rules are put in place to protect the public at large, but these rules are often an unfair regulatory burden on the small farms and a specific unfair burden upon them.  Certainly, health and food safety should be a concern for all Americans, but that concern needs to be addressed almost solely with the big conglomerates and not with the smaller farms. 

The FDAs' belief that one size fits all is something that is not realistic and it's not right.  Large conglomerate farms differ significantly than smaller farms in the following ways:

1.       Chemical fertilizer usage

2.       Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)

3.       Groundwater contamination

4.        Antibiotics

5.       Mandated contract agreements

While there is a lot of be said for the benefits of large farms in the sense that their products provided are often quite cost competitive, there are plenty of negatives that go along with that territory, and that is why it is to our credit that we still have locally owned small farms that provide choice, local employment, variety, and sustainability to society at large. 

Small farmers care about the land, the food that they grow, the livestock that they feed, because they have a direct vested interest in doing so.  Their self-interest benefits us in many ways and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, especially if the government gives them a fair deal and doesn't over- regulate them.

Surrender

One of the key words in the Christian religion is surrender.  It’s a word that people often don’t want to hear, especially in a country in which freedom is held in such high respect and is so prominent, but God doesn’t demand that you surrender to Him.  God only suggests to you that you surrender to Him; this will bring you the peace, the satisfaction, and the love that you seek.

The Christ story is an amazing story because it doesn’t fit in well with our perception of what a King should be all about.  A king who dies crucified?  Like a common criminal?  Christ was no rebel, was certainly no threat to the Roman Empire, nor was he a particular threat to the Jewish religious hierarchy.  There really wasn’t anything about Christ that couldn’t have been worked out.  Christ sought no earthly power; He came to save His people, to bring salvation to the world, and to show that path and that way to the people.  Christ spoke in parables, not to confuse the population, but to give them the opportunity to quietly contemplate and to savor upon his words and their inner meaning, in which their full enlightenment is revealed by God’s grace.  The truths that Christ taught are the timeless and eternal truths that are the foundation of life itself and the cornerstone of understanding God and His wisdom.

Christ’s crucifixion was not only to fulfill scripture, but to show the truth that God, God above all, knows the meaning behind the Passion play.  If Christ merely died a physical death, his life would have been a tragedy and a prime example of man’s inhumanity to man; but as Christ struggled down the path to Golgotha, having been scourged and beaten, and ultimately to meet his physical death by crucifixion, He also was to bring salvation to man.  Christ demonstrated that His sacrifice, should also be your sacrifice, that His surrender should also be your surrender, that in order to be one with God, you must dissolve your will into God’s will.  The body, after all, just encloses the soul; the body by nature cannot escape the ravishing of either time nor of death, nor can it overcome the laws of the physical form.  The soul, however, can either grow towards God or shrink away from God, or even to seek banishment from God.

However, the story doesn’t end with the crucifixion of Christ, as that merely set the stage for the re-emergence of the victorious Christ.  AChrist that could not be vanquished, could never be vanquished, could never be destroyed, could never be silenced, could never be defeated by man’s law.  Christ rose again in three days to fulfill the prophecy and to demonstrate to the world and to all mankind, that complete surrender to God, binds you entirely with God, makes you one with God, makes your soul and spirit entwined with God, so that there is no differentiation, there is only the truth and the love of God.  Only in surrendering to God, can we become truly in one body with God and fulfill our true destiny to be one with God.

Sobriety Checkpoints

I was recently driving when I had to come to a stop because there was about five or six police cars congregated in the same area on the surface street that I was driving on.  I really didn't think anything of it except to believe that there must have been a bad car accident and therefore the police were out in force to direct traffic and to take care of keeping the public safe.  I was therefore quite surprised when an officer approached my window and asked for my driver's license.  Normally, I make it a policy to have my driver's license out of my wallet as a matter of course when dealing with the police as my attitude has always been, I'm not looking to have a long conversation, or to give an officer more time to gaze inside my car, I'm going to hand over to the officer exactly what he is requesting before he needs to request it.  In fact, previously, when pulled over on a summer night, I simply rolled my window down and place my arm out the window with my driver's license in my hand.  It's not like you have a lot of options when you are pulled over.  Anyway, getting back to the story at hand, when I began to reach into my back pocket to retrieve my wallet, the office said: "why don't I check your license plate and verify your registration is up to date."  It wasn't just the words that he said that disturbed me but also the tone of voice, the matter-of-factness and the principle behind it.  If this was in fact, a sobriety checkpoint, which I believe that it was, than the checkpoint shouldn't be an excuse to check all manner of things about me and my vehicle.  As it was, my registration was up-to-date so it was a moot point and I was soon on my way, but this unnecessary stop wasted my time, inconvenienced me, and was nothing short of dealing with a police state mentality in action.

Sobriety checkpoints are a violation of our 4th Amendment rights to be secure in our persons.  If you aren't in violation of any traffic offence and there isn't a probable cause to pull your vehicle over in the first place, you should simply be left alone by the police.  Subjecting citizens to mandatory and arbitrary sobriety checkpoints are an unfair and inappropriate burden upon American citizens and a disgrace to the principles that Americans shed their blood for.  No society will do well that lives in any sort of police state, because once a police state has been formulated, that police state will always find reasons to arrest, harass, or compromised citizens for any reason or non-reason whatsoever.  Police are an instrument of force often used by those that are in power to assert control and dominance over the population, whereas the true purpose of police work is to serve and to protect the general public.  There is no service in treating all drivers as potential criminals for simply driving their vehicle on a public road, and there is no protection for the common good when resources are wasted for such purposes.  A man with a badge who was been given the responsibility to serve and protect the people must honor that principle at all times, even to putting themselves in harm's way, or dishonor their position by violating it.

Multi-national Power

Corporations are in business to make money.  The largest corporations in America are huge and mighty international conglomerates in which they are operating and making money twenty-four hours a day, every day, in countries located all throughout the world.  Corporations typically aren't really interested in what a given sovereign country provides or doesn't provide for its citizens or the nature of their internal politics, except when it comes to their particular business at hand.  Corporations care about themselves, that is their business, and as long as they can continue with business as usual, they are typically satisfied.

But what if a given sovereign nation has issues with a multi-national corporation?  The response by the multi-national corporation depends upon the issues at hand.  Whereas, virtually no corporation has much respect for countries that wish to unilaterally renegotiate contracts that have already been set in stone with a previous administration or whatever, these corporations are typically willing to be accommodative if the public hue and cry is loud enough, or public sentiment is vastly negative towards them, or if they fear that failure will seriously threaten their long-term profits.  

The problem with these "negotiations" between a country that is negotiating for the benefit of its constituents against a multi-national corporation is that the multi-national is vastly more experienced in all aspects of negotiating, including the art of dirty tricks.  Unfortunately, for smaller countries, they often don't have the infrastructure, the sophistication, good democratic principles or the like, to possibly match their wits against the multi-nationals.  Therefore, the result is often a given and well within the cost of doing business, but what if a country sticks to its principles and stands firm against a multi-national?

Perhaps nothing will happen but that is a very long shot.  Nobody likes to be jilted, and when dealing with entities that are the largest, the most powerful, the smartest, the most determined, and the richest corporations that the world has ever known, you typically will not see them go down quietly.  So a few elite people and media within a given country don't want to play ball with a particular corporation, well, that really is no big deal, because if you dig a little deeper there are bound to be other players within the same country that are eager to move up and to make the necessary accommodations to become the new power brokers.

In reality, when a multi-national corporation makes an offer to your country, it isn't going to be the type of offer that you are going to be able to readily refuse.  This isn't a negotiation between equals, and these small sovereign nations are almost compelled to go to bed with one or many of the multi-nationals that wish to exploit their country and their resources.   Whereas years ago, tribute was paid by occupied countries to their vanquishers, today only the names have changed as the concept is alive and well.  Pay tribute to the multi-nationals that control the worldwide economy, the access to money and wealth, or suffer the consequences of banishment and darkness.

Microsoft is Evil

There are a ton of different businesses that someone, anyone, could come up with and as in all business ideas, some will be good, some rather poor, but there are a few that will be real juggernauts.  Microsoft is one of those businesses that makes an incredible amount of money, has impressive jaw-dropping gross margins, and a market share to die for.   While Microsoft is involved in several businesses in which not all of them have been that successful, its core, its raison d'être, is software.  Software is the greatest business model of business models because it is something that is very easy to replicate for practically no cost, and the revenues that one receives from it, can continue indefinitely.

Microsoft is a master at receiving and utilizing patents.  According to Microsoft's own Patent Tracker, Microsoft has over 40,000 patents.  This intellectual property, the patents, and Microsoft's software is how Microsoft makes billions of dollars each and every year.  For instance, most people do not realize how profitable, Android is to Microsoft. Because Microsoft owns the patent to the File Allocation Table (FAT) which is used within the Android cell phone, Microsoft is allocated a payment for each Android phone sold.  These royalty payments to Microsoft, in which the gross margins must be in the high 90 percent, have been estimated to be as large as $3.6 billion dollars for 2013(George). 

The fact that software is patentable, for twentyyears or even longer, and the fact that software patents are fiercely protected, litigated, licensed, and used as a legal form of extortion is troubling.   Patents for software should be limited, severely restricted, and for very short periods of time.  A patent's place is to protect the cost and expenses made by a given entity, and to reward that entity with exclusivity for its investment of time, labor, and money.  In return for this exclusivity or privileges, society reaps the general benefits when innovation leads to breakthroughs or improvements in product development.

However, the continual payment, the continual royalty, and the restriction of access that patents create, are a grand disservice to society at large.  Software companies, software itself, do not, and should not receive lengthy patent protections.  These patents hurt innovation, raise the cost of products, and distort the benefits of capitalism. 

All companies, should have to prove themselves day by day, and should not be permitted to reap royalty payments as a form of tribute as kingdoms did in the past.  Quite frankly, there isn’t any valid reason why Microsoft must be paid time and time again, for code and for software in which they have made back all their monies invested thousands upon thousands of times over.  That certainly isn't fair, that isn't competitive, and that isn’t innovation.  Software patents have become a protection racket, in which the elite shake down the commoners.  It isn't right and it isn't American.  Benjamin Franklin said it best, over 200 years ago, "that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously”.

Labor Unions

Wars are fought under the principle of divide and conquer.  There is always a lot more power in a group of people, or fellow countrymen, banding together as one in a revolution, in the workplace, or in the public square.  America has many jobs that pay minimum wage or slightly better in which that mass of employees are resigned to the merits of just having steady employment.

The fact of the matter though is that lower paid employees are ignorant as to what they should be making or how that it is even determined.  Consequently, most low paid employees are more of the mindset to accept the offer that is made as being what the market appears to be offering and to accept it with little thought or question.  That, of course, is what big management wants you to think.  They want you to believe that you are receiving in pay all that you are ever able to achieve in pay and that the deal is fair. 

Part of the struggles that unions have in recruiting members is the semantics of the labor battle in the 21st century, in which the opponents support the "right to work" law.  Offhand, right to work, sounds like something that is pro-labor, but in actuality it is a smokescreen and anti-labor union.  A "right to work" law is essentially a direct knife thrust into the belly of labor unions.  States that have "right to work" laws are allowing their unions to weaken under the erroneous contention that employees right to free association supersedes the compulsory payment of union dues and union membership in which collective bargaining has previously determined the rules of the road for employees.  Right to work laws undercut union authority, union monies, and union power. 

While I do have some sympathy for a worker's right to free association, right to work laws, are the wolf in sheep's clothing in which ultimately those that take union jobs but do not contribute to their union through their dues will find after a period of time, that their collective bargaining position to have been severely weakened and therefore exploitable by management.

With the rise and relevancy for social protests of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets, and the fact that real-time organization has never been more cost effective or easier, there is a new opportunity for labor unions to become relevant.  Therefore it is up to the biggest labor unions in America to focus their attention on areas of businesses that are most in need of the power and bargaining strength of labor unions.   If I was to make a suggestion I would concentrate on Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, and McDonald's, our nation's largest fast food employer.   If these two companies were to fall into the union camp, the lesser competitors of these fine multi-national companies would also capitulate. 

Union organizers can ill afford to sit back and let nature take its course.  The labor numbers of the last fifty years have shown a steady and profound erosion of both union numbers and union strength.  If unions want to remain relevant in the 21st century their fight must begin now, it must be well planned, well executed, and absolutely relentless in its purpose.  Unions have been badly outplayed in recent history, yet, still, even today, the fat lady has not sung.