Katrina, New Orleans and Levees

Most people are well aware of the disaster that struck New Orleans in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina, a category 3 storm made landfall, but most media outlets were deceptive or outright wrong as to where Katrina made its biggest impact, its category 3 impact, which was not New Orleans, but east of New Orleans, and on the Mississippi gulf coast.  It was primarily the Mississippi gulf coast, not New Orleans that suffered the true category 3 damages of the Katrina hurricane.  In actuality, Katrina first made landfall near Boras, Louisiana, before traveling north and making landfall again at the Louisiana/Mississippi border.  Hurricane Katrina did not directly hit New Orleans, yet within 24 hours, New Orleans began to flood. Why?

The answer to that question was studied and evaluated by several different groups and agencies, including ce.berkeley.edu, a group made up of researchers and professional engineers from academic institutions, private sector entities, and government agencies, with extensive forensic experience and knowledge.  Their report states succinctly that "the flood system surrounding New Orleans was pervasively flawed."  Further that, "the flood protection system was characterized by embedded flaws and inadequacies.  This is a result of a dysfunctional organizational system that created it."  The conclusion is obvious that although Hurricane Katrina was an enabler of the flooding that inundated New Orleans, it was also a manmade disaster that could have and should have been prevented had monies and engineering allocated to the maintenance of levees within New Orleans been properly administered.

This means that rather than looking at Hurricane Katrina and the loss of lives, property, and the flooding of New Orleans as an "Act of God" which was not preventable, we would be far better served to see it for what it really was, a disaster because of man's inability to take the steps and to appropriate the engineering and knowhow to fix or to design the levees to take care of the situation ahead of time.  The basic problem that New Orleans has, is that a significant portion of the city, lies below sea level, consequently it doesn't take a genius to understand that water, storm water, flood water, any type of water in excess is a significant problem that needs to be addressed ahead of time.

Consequently, the only real things that prevent New Orleans from flooding or being susceptible to flooding are levees which hold the waters back in conjunction with the needed ability to pump water out from the city when excessive water gets into it.  In both of these cases, New Orleans was unprepared or inadequately prepared, yet it had all the time in the world to prepare, so that on a fundamental level New Orleans and its disastrous flooding along with its aftermath of 2005, was a preventable catastrophe with tragically real human death and property damages.

New Orleans is the lesson that America must learn from.  Throughout all of America, there is infrastructure to which a basic assumption is made that it will always work, until it doesn't.  The fact of the matter is we usually have a very good foreknowledge of infrastructure that needs to be amended, addressed, fixed, maintained, or repaired.  As the old saying goes, "a stitch in time saves nine", New Orleans demonstrates the folly of ignoring this sage advice.

Food Distribution for the Poor

In America, we don't lack for food; its availability and its general pricing are excellent.  While we should be concern about food and good, clean water in a real emergency, for the most part we can take food for granted, because the process and logistics of food distribution are without parallel.  The long and short of it is, that we eat food that is about as fresh as you could possibly imagine giving that most of us neither live on farms nor have vegetable gardens or fruit trees within easy walking distance.  Therefore, we take the eating of food for granted, which is a fortunate attribute for Americans, but certainly has not been the norm in history, to which the fight for food and survival, has often been virtually the sole drive of human existence.

Today, there exist many countries or pockets within countries that lack both easy access to food or to clean water, and therefore starvation is a real and frightening problem.  One way to help alleviate this problem is to look at new and unique ways to feed populations.  For instance, fresh food is often both bulky in conjunction with limited shelf life, but food product life can be enhanced tremendously and compacted enormously when food is processed in such a way as to freeze-dry it or to dehydrate it which reduces the bulk size of the food to minimal and manageable dimensions which is the exact way that food is handled for astronauts.  For our military under "Meal, Ready-to-Eat" (MRE), food was created and packaged for a very long shelf life in that it was pre-cooked, consequently this food can be eaten without access to clean water, although the availability of water is highly desirable for its palatability and sustainability.

When it comes to easy access to food that will sustain human life, the main considerations should be cost and the logistics of accomplishing this goal, as compared to the far lesser consideration of taste, texture, or content of the food itself.  This should be a very high priority for our charitable missions along with anything else that can be provided that will help in the ease and usage of good, clean, sustainable water. 

The nutrients, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in food that are needed to sustain human life are known factors and consequently there isn't any reason why pre-processed food can't be utilize for not only short-term but in exigencies of need, for the long-term survival of humans.  In times of war, of disaster, of famine, of governmental corruption, of persecution, of civil unrest, it is needlessly inhumane for civilians to be starved to death.  It is therefore our duty, as the leaders of the free world, to provide the necessary assistance and the humanitarian aid to preclude the unnecessary genocide of certain peoples.

The right to food is a basic human right, we are fortunate to live in such times as to be able to provide food to all, and we should make it a high priority to see that we are doing all that we can to take care of our fellow brothers and sisters, in their time of need.

Darwin's Most Famous Book and its Complete Title

The teaching of evolution is an integral part of our public school system and the acceptance of evolution as being a biological fact is accepted by most scientists.  This does not mean, however, that evolution is a fact, accurate, or even pertinent to mankind itself.  Take for instance, the infamous hoax of Piltdown man, "proving" the vital link between apes and man and "discovered" in 1912 in the United Kingdom.  The fact that this hoax was so easily perpetrated on so many esteemed scientists and experts  for so long is proof positive that evolution in regards to apes evolving into modern man is a theory lacking foundational proof, to wit the missing link that is so richly sought has still yet to be discovered.  The man most often championed for the evolutionary theory is Charles Darwin and his most famous book, still widely used and discussed today, is "On the Origin of Species".  But in fact, the full title of the book as originally published in 1859 was "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."  Later, Darwin would follow up this tome with his "The Descent of Man and Selection in the Relation to Sex".

I suspect that there are few Darwin defenders that are fully aware of Darwin's complete title, to which its meaning is both chilling and very real.  The complete title of Darwin's book is hardly happenstance, it is there for a very valid reason which is to emphasis and to clarify to the reader of the book what the book is actually about, which is that evolution as expounded by Darwin specifically supports the superiority of favored races in the struggle for life.  Consequently, Darwin's book is meant as a clarion call specifically to the Caucasian race that it has evolved far further than, for instance, the aborigines of Australia or the native Africans and that therefore these "less-favored" species of man would consequently either at best be subservient to the Caucasian race or, even better, would be exterminated or replaced in their entirety at some future period of time.

The greatest and grandest disservice which Darwin did to mankind was to lower mankind from being just "a little lower than the angels" to replacing God's handiwork with the thought that mankind was nothing more than an advanced ape to which some of these primates had the right to marginalize or to annihilate other primates because this was all part of the struggle of life, to which the superior species would invariably win out if they only asserted themselves.  This is the true meaning of Darwin's thesis and this is the template that was subsequently successfully used by the eugenics movement in the United States and throughout the world, most notably in Nazi Germany, to justify man's inhumanity to other men, and consequently the liquidation and the cold-blooded killing of unarmed civilians, whose only crimes were their faith, their skin color, their physical disabilities, their sexual orientation, or their tribal or social affiliations.

The legacy of Darwin's evolutionary theory are clear in the horrors and the aftermath of these truest believers.  Those that believe that Darwin deserves a place at the table of knowledge, that Darwin deserves to be in our classrooms, must have the intellectual honesty and candor to title his book as it was titled upon its inception so that his true agenda is out in the open for all to see and to recognize.

Abortion Allows Endless "Do-Overs"

Just about everyone wants to have the power or the ability to turn back the clock and to change circumstances or results to something that is more amendable to what they really desired or didn't want in the first place--sometimes known as a "do-over".  When it comes down to first-trimester abortions, the three basic ways of inducing abortion are either via medication, injection, or vacuum aspiration, depending upon the length of time since conception.  In regards to medication and injection, these procedures essentially fool the body which consequently results in a medically induced "miscarriage" which will often involve discomfort, bleeding, and the discharging of fetus tissue.  However, in most cases no surgical instruments will have been used inside the cervix or uterus of the woman, which means that any possible internal injury will have been averted.   On the other hand, for vacuum aspiration, typically a local anesthesia is used on the cervix for the ease and comfort of the insertion of the medical instrument which will essentially vacuum out the fetus from the woman's uterus.

While none of these procedures sound very pleasant and while none of them seem very comfortable, they are, in the end, almost always totally effective in producing the result that is to be expected and typically within a very short period of time, the woman is able to essentially go back to living life as if none of this had ever occurred.  For some women, there may be significant psychological issues that bother them from their abortion, for others there may be nothing, and for most there is probably a combination of a multitude of feelings, but none of this will change what has happened, which is in essence, as if the pregnancy never existed, by virtue of the fact that no child was born.

While many may applaud that "pro-choice" is a wonderful modern construct that allows women to take charge of their bodies, one could make a very valid argument instead that the ability to get an abortion "on-demand" with a relatively small monetary cost is an avenue best left unexplored.  According to guttmacher.org "in 2011, 1.06 million abortions were performed" in the United States, a statistic that is especially troubling considering that the availability, reliability, and variety of birth control items have never been greater than they are here today.  This then begs the question, why would any woman, of any age, willingly put themselves into a position to which they might become pregnant?  The obvious answer to that question is that women are obviously quite aware that they can take advantage of the fact that abortion is fairly easily available in much of America and consequently they have a relatively good "fail-safe" method of un-doing what has been done.

Because abortion is legal, readily available, relatively inexpensive, and physically safe, women are allowed to make the same weak decisions or non-decisions over and over again, because apparently the consequences of said decision have been found to be not so bad.  If, on the other hand, abortion was a procedure that was either illegal, dangerous, very expensive, or with high social costs, then women really would take charge of their bodies and of their decisions.

USA Superpower

According to The Mainspring of Human Progress, in the 1940s the United States while occupying only six percent of the world's land area and representing less than seven percent of the world's population, owned 85% of the world's automobiles, 54% of the world's telephones, 48% of radios, 46% of the electric power capacity, 35% of the railway mileage, 30% of improved highways, and 92% of modern bathtubs.  America was also the sole country that had harnessed the awesome atomic bomb, until August of 1949. In the mid-1940s, the United States was far more advanced than the European continent, which had been completed ravaged by the destructiveness of the world war, which nearly too brought the Soviet Union to ruin, and left the empire of Japan utterly defeated and devastated.  At that time, the USA was second to none, a true global phenomena, and essentially the greatest superpower the world had ever known in the sense of military strength, in technology, in knowledge, and in wealth, to which there was no part of the known world that America could not claim as it own, should it but desire to do so.

While today, America remains still the sole superpower in the world, its power, its influence, and its wealth, are fraying at the edges, to which America's greatest strength at this point are its military, its technology, its higher education, and its currency, which is the world's reserve currency, giving America untold additional strength and influence.  However, history has demonstrated time and time again, that no single country, no single power, can remain powerful forever without touching, remembering, focusing, and re-invigorating the very characteristics that brought them to the pinnacle of power in the first place.

America's Achilles heel, is that far too many in this country have lost their initiative, have lost their desire to achieve anything of real worth, to be self-sufficient, to understand and embrace the merits of actual work, and would in fact prefer to be kept as wards of the State in perpetuity, which is counter to the founding principles of this great country which has traditionally embraced hard work and responsibility to themselves, to country, and to family.  The more people within our country that will not work, cannot learn, are unable to function as cogs within the system, the more the few must work harder to support the many.  Consequently, America has become a country that must drag an increasingly heavier and heavier weight for each American that is unable, unwilling or seemingly incapable of standing on their own merits or abilities.

The other countries of the world, especially countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) have their tails up and their appetites are certainly whetted, seeing their opportunity to take market share, to command market space, and to nibble away at the big superpower that seems incapable of rousing itself from a deep slumber. 

What America has failed to recognize, is that when you are the sole superpower, you can make the rules whatever that you want to make them, fair or not, and the rest of the world must march to your command, however, when your influence begins to wan, those that were once under your heel, will have something to say, something that you may very well not want to hear, but are incapable of countering, because your influence and your power are suspect, vacillating, and poorly reasoned.

Many that are alive today will not live to see the humbling of America the great, but its humbling is already written and its disgrace only a matter of time.

The Rise of Women

In America, we take too many things for granted, to which there was often a long, hard, and arduous road to get there and the rise of women was one of those long winding roads that took lots of time, sacrifice, and perseverance.  At the founding of our great nation, married women were subordinate to their husbands, no matter how good or bad he was, how drunk or sober, how industrious or lazy, which meant that the husband was the master of his wife, he owned the property, not her, and he owned her labor, not her.  All voting rights were in the hands of men and not women, and the literacy rates of men was far higher than women during our colonial times.

Slowly, however, laws and traditions adjusted within America, to which the literacy rate of women began to rise significantly, and in the mid 1800s on, property rights were given to married women on a State-to-State basis.  Additionally, there had always been men who recognized the worth and wisdom of having a good woman by his side and their liberality helped to slowly forge change in employment and opportunities for women in general. 

Through it all, women recognized the vast importance of the vote, something that had been won for the black male through the 15th Amendment to our Constitution in 1870. Woman's suffrage would not be won until 1920, but once won, the progress of women within this country was significantly changed, and to wit women were now permitted a far greater opportunity for higher education and for additional employment avenues such as teachers, librarians, and for clerical work.  World War I and the rapid industrialization of America gave an early opportunity for women to be employed in the factory and in nursing.  While World War II opened up additional doors for women to work in fields previously dominated by men such as "Rosie the Riveter" and other military jobs in which it was a necessity to hire females to accomplish work previous done by males who were now part of our fighting force.  In fact, it has been said, that part of the reason that Hitler's Germany was defeated in World War II was because of Hitler's bourgeoisie belief that a woman's place was in the home.

Over the last fifty years, barriers for female entry in regards to higher education and for employment in jobs that necessitate an advanced degree have been nearly completely torn down.  Women dominate males in high school by grade point average, in University in the achievement of both Bachelors' and Master Degrees, and have essentially closed the gap in Doctoral and Professional degrees.  There is absolutely nothing to indicate that this trend will be averted anytime soon and with blue-collar jobs on the wane in America, there has never been a better time to be well educated, which positions females very well for more meaningful contributions and achievements.

The rise of women has been a tremendous benefit and boon for America, because their knowledge, their worth, and their industrious have been utilized to benefit not only themselves but more importantly to help advance our country and our lifestyle.   Those countries that have yet to understand the value and importance of a liberated woman have placed themselves into a hopeless situation, to which their males' heads are in the collective desert sand.

The Muslims and Internment

Before America was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, suspected Japanese aliens and citizens had already been identified as enemies of the State, merely awaiting official Executive Orders to exercise their arrest and eventually internment.  Even though there were far more Americans that were of German or Italian descent, Japanese made wonderful and convenient targets for the US Government and military, because of their particular ethno racial characteristics and their overall small size in quantity of peoples.  When it came to the actual internment of the Japanese on American soil, the United States did not hesitate in treating them as enemies, without documentation that substantiated such claims, without due process, and without a care that their actions against the Japanese would eventually be overturned or overruled.

Some seventy-odd years later, the United States since the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 have a new "bogeyman" and that are Muslims.  While the playing field has been leveled a little bit in the sense that America jurisprudence has asserted civil rights, this is wholly mitigated by the government's massive database apparatus and its desire to vilify and scapegoat Muslims as a religion and as a people.   The domestic enemies list has already been created, manipulated and processed.   Muslim mosques have already been infiltrated and compromised on virtually every level, with actionable information sorted, locked and loaded.  The US Government cares little if the information that they have is inaccurate, distorted, or erroneous, it cares only that an enemy has been identified and that that enemy will bow to civil authorities, one way or another.

US authorities are only awaiting a true domestic treasonable and terrorist event in America of scale, to which they can instantly react with swift and sure "justice".  The United States is no fool, they prefer the terrorist act to be real, and not manufactured or faked by our government itself, but should they have to help aid such an action, and are assured that there is no possibility that there would be any leaks that they have done so, they would seriously consider doing such.  The powers-to-be are itching, to use all of their massive might against these perceived enemies of the State, and for once and for all, to take control of Muslims, and the Muslim religion in America. 

America interned a few thousand Muslim non-citizens and citizens in the wake of the 9/11/01 attack, with estimates ranging to as many as 15,000, and eventually deported a few thousand of them.     America has already tested the waters of how the public will or won't react to such an aggressive policy of our homeland and have concluded that only a small minority of the population really care.  Young Muslim males make excellent targets for this ethnic cleansing, especially if they look, behave, or wear clothes that are considered to be "out of sorts" with the norms of America.  Consequently, if you are Muslim or a Muslim sympathizer, regularly attend mosque or are a member of a suspicious group or organization that is connected with Muslims, keep a long beard, are dark skinned, you are an excellent target to be monitored and classified.

The United States is ready, the target is known, and the execution will be like sure, swift lightening.

The fallacy of More Laws

In America, each year, far more laws are passed, as opposed to laws being repealed and the ratio isn't even close.  I suppose the ostensible theory behind all these laws that are passed year after year after year, are that we need these laws for better justice, to make us safer, and to ensure our tranquility and happiness.  The thing is the more laws that are passed, means the more laws that you can be arrested or fined for without you ever really being cognizant of some of these obscure laws, as well as these laws essentially transferring sovereignty of yourself to the arbitrary power of the State.

First off, there isn't a really a positive correlation between more laws and justice or more laws and safety.  There is, however, a correlation between more laws and oppression, and more laws and injustice.  Cicero said it right, over 2,000 years ago, "the more laws, the less justice."  This is true because too often manmade laws are read and enacted upon depending upon the prevailing winds of the times which has little to do with justice and a lot to do with those that hold the power.  That is why the Supreme Court Chief Justice could rule in the Dred Scott case in 1857, that the black man had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."  That case was not refuted until the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, but despite that Constitutional Amendment, the black man, primarily in the South, was held in bondage, serfdom, or servitude for another 100 years, even though the law now argued for his equality.

America doesn't need to be refereed for every possible perceived infraction that may or may not have occurred.  God has graced nearly all of us with common sense and common sense often is good enough to tell us what is right and what is wrong. Too many people falsely believe that a given law is clear and unequivocal, but the fact of the matter is whether through creative legal theories, devious minds, or the like, those that practice the art of our justice system, have the ability to take a law and bend it, curve it, and manipulate it as if they were magicians in a Kingly court.  The law is whatever the masters of that dark trade tell us that it is which is why justice is neither fair, impartial, nor equable in this country and never will be.

The more laws that are passed, the more power that is relinquished to those who administer the laws, whether they be politicians, bureaucrats, executives, lawyers, or similar.  These elite, privileged, and powerful people will decide the rules and limits of the game, while we, the poor subjects will be fleeced, shorn, and discarded, as mere servants to the State. 

Remember this, in reality the law doesn't protect you; good citizens protect you; good people protect you.  Those that believe that they are their neighbor's keeper make the very best citizens, because they understand that as they treat others is how they will be treated in return; laws are a poor substitute for this because too often laws serve the State and are utilized to oppress the people, rather than to be a good neighbor.

Thank you for Smoking

There is an old adage about a fool and his money parting ways, and the bigger the amount of money that is dissipated, the bigger the fool.  In 1998, the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between big tobacco and the 46 States (four States had already signed separate agreements) and territories was agreed upon.  The MSA covered a lot of ground, including specific restrictions on big tobacco in regards to advertising, sponsorship, and youth targeting.  The big kicker to the whole deal, however, was the truly massive payments to the signatories, based on cigarette sales, to which it was estimated that the States would receive in the neighborhood of $200 billion dollars in the first 25 years of this settlement.  While the ostensible reason for the payment to the States was to help setup programs to discourage youth smoking and to set aside funds for medical needs that addressed smoking health issues, there was nothing mandated to the States which would force their hand in doing so.  Not too surprisingly, most States have spent little money on smoke cessation; instead, they have used this "found money" to help cover budget deficits, to replace school bonds, and to provide general health and elderly care.

Unfortunately, the States have also run into some problems with the bonds that they issued for this revenue stream.  While the States were wise to project that smoking rates would decline in America, their projections of the decline in smoking was too pessimistic, in other words, the amount of cigarettes being consumed in the United States has been declining at a far higher rate than anticipated, which has a material impact on the amount of money to be received and consequently impacts negatively the worth of their bonds issued.  Additionally, whenever there are massive amounts of money involved; one should thereby anticipate that there will be novel legal disputes.  Big tobacco has fought against the States in regards to how much money that they should be paying as part of the MSA because they are allowed to reduce their payment based on market share that has been loss to manufacturers that were not signatories to the MSA, especially when the States have been lacking in "diligent enforcement" of collecting those payments from the other cigarette manufacturers.   This means, that most States will not collect as much money as they anticipated from big tobacco, because in actuality they are settling their disputed payment amounts for less than full value to the dollar.

As disappointing as the foregoing has been to the States, many States have done their constituents a far greater disservice through the securitization of these cigarette-based bonds in exchange for upfront and discounted money today.  This is the same type of problem and ill-thinking that brought down the mortgage and housing industry in 2008 and is threatening to wreak havoc in State governments today that have already spent their tobacco money and now are on the hook in the future to make good on their payments to the bondholders, sometimes with massive balloon payments.

Consequently, it isn't any real stretch of one's imagination, to conclude that States do have a vested interest in the amount of smoking and the annual consumption of cigarettes in their State, and they might well conclude that they need more smokers.

Nuclear-powered Automobiles

The United States receives some of its essential energy from nuclear power plants.  Nuclear energy also successfully powers some of our naval submarines, which it has done for a number of years, proving the point and the validity that a nuclear reactor can be scaled down to the size needed for transportation, even in the trying conditions of being both underwater in an incredibly stressful environment of vibration, pressurized conditions, and the pitching conditions of oceanic salt-water itself.   The brilliance, ambition, and success of building nuclear submarines should not be underestimated, with our first nuclear submarine being commissioned sixty years ago in 1954.

Therefore, not too surprisingly, well before nuclear power was vilified by the mainstream press, the automobile industry took a look at providing an automobile powered by nuclear, as opposed to our conventional fossil fuel of choice, oil.  The Ford Nucleon concept car of 1958 was the furthest that Ford Motor got to developing a nuclear car, but the effort was soon given up, mainly because it was thought that the nuclear power needed to power that car would both be too large and too powerful, but times have changed in the ensuing years.

Today, the American public seems enchanted by Tesla and its cars that run on electricity in which the power to run their cars are stored within batteries.  While electric cars are hardly a new novelty, it is gratifying to see that a certain portion of the American public is enamored by it.  Nuclear energy, on the other hand, especially given how little would be needed in order to successfully power up an automobile, is something that is far more intriguing to the transportation world, because it offers the opportunity to drive without re-fueling, without re-charging, whatsoever.

While most people associate uranium and plutonium with nuclear energy, there is another element, thorium which is far better suited as nuclear energy because it is: more abundant than uranium, far less viable for nuclear weapons (if at all), has significantly less nuclear waste, and demonstrates a much higher energy power than uranium as a source of energy.  This element, thorium, is the key for our transportation needs now and into the future. 

The engineering and logistics behind producing an automobile that runs on a scaled-down version of nuclear power would be challenging, but at the same time, achievable, with the additional positives of significantly less pollution, an end to our need or dependence upon oil, and the scales of geo-political power trending significantly to the country or countries that are able to scale up the fastest in bringing this product successfully to market. 

Our world today depends upon energy, without it, without access and the reliability of relatively inexpensive energy, nothing would remain the same, our world would soon become, within a matter of months, pure hell and chaos.  There are over 1 billion cars on our planet, none of those cars have any usefulness without fuel, wars are fought continually to gain access to fuel, nuclear fuel is the answer, it is the future, and it must be pursued with all deliberate speed.

Education

America wastes far too much money and resources on schools that do not do an adequate job in teaching students how to think, how to learn, responsibility, and moral guidance.  It certainly isn't a money problem because America spends billions on educating its youth, but the return on the dollar is poor, to which America consistently scores outside the top ten in virtually every educational achievement category against other countries in the world.

Hands down, the best way to educate someone, anyone, is one-on-one education that is to say, tutoring or home schooling with a competent teacher.  Anytime that you have a classroom of thirty students, there are going to be students that fall to the wayside because they don't concentrate, they aren't able to assimilate or to process the information effectively, they grow bored because the pace of the class is too slow, too erratic, or too disruptive, or they simply don't have a passion or an interest in the subject being taught, amongst various other pertinent reasons.

It is a grave mistake to punish good students, by slowing them down to the lowest common denominator of the class at hand, it is also equally a grave mistake to not make a full effort to provide to all students the basic necessities of education which amounts to having the functionality to read, to write, to do basic math, and to have a clear knowledge of social responsibility as well as a firm basis of an appropriate moral code.

The answer to most of our current problems within our school system, is to have a lot more of one-on-one education, a lot more of peer-to-peer interaction, a lot more usage of computers and specifically programs that will aid and abet learning, and a lot less of bureaucratic waste, wasted motion, and wasted resources. 

Our current educational program is broken and it will not fix itself.  It is a mistake to try to get every student to fit some sort of arbitrary mold to which the objective is for everyone to be just about average, to just kind of get by.  If we truly want our students to excel, to become educated, to achieve, and to utilize their God-given skills, they must be nurtured, developed, and motivated by hard work, discipline, and a deep desire to accomplish something of real merit.

Man could not have progressed so far, so quickly, without the great aid of tools.  In this modern age of computers and the internet, information has never been as readily and universally available as it is today.  A computer program will work for you, 24/7, it will be patient, it will be accurate, and it will help students to achieve.  Tutors are available for students through mentoring, through consultants, through the internet, through family, and through the school system itself, should it desire to set this up.

If the United States does not see that good education is important and vital to the continuing success of this country and for what this nation represents, America will fall back into chaos, and will dissipate, becoming just another country that degenerated and declined into failure and chaos.

Eating out

According to thesimpledollar.com "The average American eats an average of 4.2 commercially prepared meals per week."  That's an incredibly high frequency of eating out, in which the fast food business is a multi-billion dollar business in the United States alone.  While there wouldn't be anything wrong with so many Americans eating out so frequently if we were all materially wealthy, the simple fact is that we are not.  Consequently, money that is spent at a restaurant is money that could have been utilized more efficiently at a grocery store, or a corner store, if we only took the time to preplan and to prepare.

A lot of people will tell you that the reason that they eat out so frequently is because that they are too busy to prepare food at home, or they work too hard and don't have enough hours in the day to cook, or they are buying the meals for the children, and so on.   Most of their reasons have validity, some more than others, depending upon the situation, but the truth of the matter is, transportation, logistics, information, and efficiency when it comes to most everything in this country, including meals, has never been better or more readily available.  In America, there are plenty of grocery stores that are both convenient in the sense of location, convenient in the sense of choice, and priced reasonably in which the cost of making or preparing those meals at home, hands down, is going to be cheaper than virtually any restaurant choice that you could possibly think of.

Consequently, the eating out for so many meals isn't a necessity or requirement for so many people in order to be fed, but in reality it is a preference that has become a habit.  But just like any habit, it can be unlearned, reformulated, and changed, if one puts their mind diligently to the task at hand.  The reason that you should take the time to do so is that the cost of eating out eats into people's disposable income, their money, their budget, and their overall lifestyle.  Most people do not take the time nor have the interest in calculating the amount of their money of theirs that is spent eating out, nor are they willing to do so, but they should.

In America, most everyone loves a bargain, most everyone likes a discount, and certainly everyone wants to feel that they deserve a little extra consideration.  What most hi-volume restaurants are selling are what you, as an empowered individual are capable of doing yourself, for the most part, with various degrees of success, but in all probability, enough success that at a minimum, it will allow you to get by and to survive. 

Perhaps you feel that you deserve your own servant, that you have earned the right to be served, or that you just feel like being spoiled a little bit, that is all well and good, but one shouldn't fool oneself, because you are the individual who is paying the piper at the end of the day.  Do yourself a favor, go without eating out for one entire pay period, and then at the end of that experiment, check your bank account, check your expenditures, and determine whether you have saved yourself some money or not.  You might just find that you have, that you are still alive, and that you are doing alright after all.

Cell Phones in a True Emergency

There are a significant amount of children in our present generation that aren't real familiar with a landline telephone, it's something they have seen at school, or perhaps over at a friend's house, or on TV, but in their own experience they have never actually seen or utilized one in their own household.  This trend of no traditional landlines (I'm not speaking of VOIP telephones) is becoming a real rout, in which the landline phone appears to be going the way of Faxing or telegraphs but there is one significant reason why a landline should have a place at the table and that is in true emergencies.

As it stands right now, cell phones are a great convenience, fairly reliable, and ubiquitous.  The most significant problem with cell phones, however, is that in an emergency situation, in which there has been a bombing, a tornado, a hurricane, flooding, fire, blackouts, or the like, your cell phone has only a minimal chance of being used as a traditional telephone, and even texting will be queued up in which text messages may not be sent or be received for long periods of time, depending upon capacity usage on the carrier's service.

There is something disconcerting and frightening that when you reach for a device that must work for you that it doesn't.  However, your corded landline will often work in situations in which your cell phone has failed you, because your landline capacity works with almost 100% certainty to which the capacity and automated routing of phone calls are part and parcel of the service provided by the landline corporations.  Additionally, even with a power outage, your landline will almost certainly work because it draws its power from the telephone line itself in which that power source has redundancy built into it, that allows it to continue to work, or to draw upon emergency back-up power, if required.

This would strongly imply that most families should seriously consider having a landline as their emergency line, just as you are suppose to have an emergency kit and supplies which include water, batteries, food, and fuel.  Even in the best of times, cell phone batteries go out, cell phones freeze up, cell phones drop calls, and cell phones simply break.  At the present time, cell phones are simply not setup to handle true emergency situations, and it simply isn't a priority for cell phone providers to do so.

Communication is an absolute key in trying circumstances, to which you are either attempting to reach someone to help bring solace or calmness to the situation, or to contact some agency that can bring you the necessary help.  When the communication lines are down, panic and frustration is soon to follow.  At that point, it doesn't much matter how good life was before, what matters is what is happening right then and there.  If by having a landline, you could be better assured of a more successful resolution, than by all means you should seriously consider doing so.

Bank Holding your Deposit Funds

People work for money, if they didn't, they wouldn't work, so when it comes to money, whether that money is a physical check, wired funds, smart phone deposit, direct deposit, cash, or whatever, when you make that deposit into your banking institution the fact of the matter is, you consider those funds to be your own.  However, that isn't necessarily true for physical checks, especially if the amount is over $5,000 and the check hasn't come from the US Treasury or similar.  In those cases, the big checks, which perhaps you have worked long and hard to achieve, aren't available to you on the day of your deposit, but instead are put into some sort of bizarre "holding" period by the bank.  It's akin to scoring a goal in an important game, only for the video review process to be interminable.

The ability of a bank to essentially freeze your deposit distinctly shows you who the boss is and who the boss isn't.  The law supports the bank so that when you make a deposit of $4,000, by law, they only have to release a paltry $200 of it to you on that day, or on the next business morning depending upon the time of your deposit, and then depending on the time that you made the deposit they can hold the balance of your deposit for an additional day, so that the funds won't be fully release to your bank account until the third business day.  If, the check is larger than $5000 and/or suspicious, they can hold the amount above $5,000 for a "reasonable period of time", making it a calculated gamble for the consumer as to when the full amount of your deposit will be credited and available in your account.  As you might imagine, this can be a real inconvenience for people that have already earmarked that money to pay for tuition, home upgrades, or for a down payment on their car, bills, or the like. 

The height of frustration for a consumer is knowing for a fact that the check that you have deposited is good, but not being able to get your hands on those funds, especially when the news of your bank deposit being on hold is both unexpected and unwelcomed.  While you can certainly try to get the funds released earlier, whether that occurs or not, has a lot to do with the person that you are talking with, how accommodating they are, and your overall "mojo."

The tragic thing is that every physical check has a MICR line at the bottom of the check, which is scanned at the end of the day, sent to a processing house for clearance of said check, and quickly processed through the respective bank systems, to which your bank knows for a certainty whether the check that you have deposited is good and has thereby cleared the funds from the other bank, well before the time periods that they have put your deposit on hold.  The fact of the matter is, it doesn't take longer than 24 hours for a check of under $5,000 to clear in virtually all cases, nor does it take much additional time, if any, to verify whether a check of over $5,000 has cleared or not. 

While banks have the right and fiduciary duty to protect themselves from fraudulent checks and deposits, the game is rigged entirely in their favor, consequently that is why they avail themselves of the flexibility of using other people's money for "float" to enhance their profits while cheating the consumer out of his.

Umbrellas in the Sunshine

I always consider this to be a real-life oxymoron whenever I see someone on a bright, sunny day, walking with an umbrella to protect themselves from the "harmful" sunny rays.  I mean really!  From what I can gather, these sun-phobic people are almost exclusively women, additionally umbrellas do appear to be far more prominent amongst Asians, but I've seen all races "protecting" themselves from the sun with an umbrella.  It just seems like a total waste, rather odd, as a good sunscreen could accomplish as much with no one the wiser, with a scarf to protect your hair from "bleaching", or a sunhat would serve this purpose just as well.

While I can appreciate the dangers of too much sunshine, or too much exposure to the sun, the fact of the matter is, there would not be any earthly life without it.  Adequate sunshine is essential for good health, because it enables us to increase our Vitamin D levels; the warmth of the sun feels good both physically and emotionally, it boosts our immune system, and your overall health is improved by your exposure to sunlight.

That said I get that the real general reason why people utilize umbrellas in the sunshine is to eliminate or to minimize their exposure to sunlight so as to either to maintain their present skin color or to not allow their skin color to get any darker.  This follows the unfortunate rule that within certain cultures that those with pale skin are considered to be of a higher social status than those that have been exposed to the sun.  When in actuality those with wisdom know that you should only judge a person by the content of the character and not by the flawlessness of their skin, neither should you assume that those that work with their hands outside in the sun, are somehow people born of a lesser God or with lesser talents or with lesser love.

However, I do believe that people are free to choose, and further that they are free to believe what they want to believe, the line is only crossed, when cliques are created that separate people by color, or by creed, or by politics, which in order to assert how righteous or privileged that these particular people are, they have to as a matter of faith also put down others who are non-believers by birth or by virtue or by inclination.

People should be careful for what they wish for, for those that wish for the sun to never touch or to blemish their precious skin, it is easy enough to accomplish, by simply staying inside your house, and minimizing your time outdoors, along with also taking precautions to utilize umbrellas, hats, gloves, clothing, sunscreen, and the like to protect yourself at all costs when outside in the sunlight.    Perhaps by doing so, your life will be more fulfilling, perhaps not, either way the decision is yours to make. 

Remember though that if your beauty is skin deep, so must be your soul.

The Internment List

Most Americans are somewhat aware that during World War II, Americans or aliens of German descent, Italian descent, and Japanese descent living within the contiguous 48 states were interned in concentration camps as possible enemy aliens, or as possible enemy combatants, or as punishment for their heritage, or as a convenience for the government, or for purely racist reasons, despite their actual US citizenship in about two-thirds of these cases.  Was there any American organization that was able to prevent this unjustified and hysterical internment of thousands of civilians who had committed no crime, without trial, and prejudged by their adopted country or their country of birth?  There was not.

What most people are completely unaware of; however, is that the process of identifying and arresting these men, women, and children for relocation was already well identified prior to our entry into World War II.  In other words, organizations and communities of these people were infiltrated, monitored, or reported upon, so that upon the military decision to round these certain people up, the process had already been well laid out.  The decision to intern Japanese, who were for the most part small businessmen, fishermen, and farmers, was premeditated and deliberate, to which, our entry into World War II only served to implement plans that were just waiting for the go-ahead.

That was then, and this is now.  Our country today, encompasses the largest military budget in the world and is second only to China in regards to actual manpower.  Additionally, virtually all communities within America have a well-armed police force.  America is state-of-the-art, in which there is probably no country worldwide that has the sophistication of our monitoring equipment, our communication equipment, and our massive databases as America has today.  Never has this country known so much and in real-time about your name, your location, your habits, your assets, your bank accounts, and your friends and family relations. 

Within America, a list has already been created, dividing each citizen into certain categories.  America is already prepared at a moment's notice to declare martial law, to arrest and to intern citizens or residents that they deem to be problematic, not sufficiently patriotic, or a general nuisance, and to move these people efficiently and effectively to their designated concentration camps. 

You say that this can't happen in America, it already did, and it will happen again.  You say that this time is different, that civil rights organizations, media outlets, and the people in general, will rise up and defend our rights; they won't, because they can't.  Civil rights organizations and the few good people of America that care to make a stand won't have the wherewithal to do so.  While they may have tremendous moral courage, they lack firepower, core efficiency, money, assets, and justice.

When the government freezes your bank account, what will you do?  When the government identifies you as a "dangerous domestic insurgent" where will you run?  When the government already knows where you are, where will you hide?  When the government promises that after these few million peoples have been properly processed and interned that all will be back to normal, who will complain?

All the power in this country is contained with the government's hands; executive, judicial, and legislative are totally in their domain.  You, as a good citizen, will willingly obey their edicts or you will surely suffer the consequences.  No worries though, after they have broken you completely, you will be free to go.

The bogus land of Opportunity

America has the greatest multi-media in the world, to which one is lead to believe that anyone can achieve or have those things that are so readily displayed in those formats.  If one is mobile and lives in or about a major city, in America you will thereby discover great edifices, wonderful houses, beautiful parks, and natural delights, that are truly awe inspiring.  While our streets are not paved in gold, the richness of America is fairly easy to behold, but there is a problem with this vision though and that problem is that this vision primarily holds for certain sections and certain peoples of America, but with others, many others, their vision is blurred and nightmarish.

From the day that you are born, you will discover that America is not a level playing field, and for way too many of us, you will start out behind, having no real opportunity to make up ground for being behind, and consequently you will forever be behind, forgotten, kicked aside, and shunned.  In fact, for far too many people there won't be even one day when you have personally lived in a land of real opportunity, your dream was aborted at birth, and in its place you have the substitute of pipe dreams, wish fulfillments, and lottery tickets.

There are a multitude of reasons why America cannot hold itself out as being a true land of opportunity.  For instance, there is the geography of failure, to which if you are born in an impoverished, underserved, dangerous, and forsaken part of America, such as certain sections of inner cities, you pretty much have signed a warrant which stipulates that you will be distinguished as nothing more than a menace to society and treated as such.  If you are born within an unstable family structure, such as a stressed-out single-parent household, or a dysfunctional family, or a family unable or incapable of making reasoned and mature decisions, those faults will transfer onto yourself.  If the school that you attend in order to receive your free public education,  isn't a real school at all, but is, in fact, more akin to a war zone, under budgeted, malnourished, and hopelessly inept, you will quickly fall behind, never applying yourself, and consequently giving up.  If your peers and mentors are people on the fringes of society with little of the pluck and virtue that make up great character, but instead are dealers of shortcuts, scams, and hustles, your vision will be circumscribed by what you see as the evidence in front of you.

America has done a great disservice to some of its citizens, by emasculating them, so that in return they can hand them food, shelter, and other entitlements without expecting or desiring anything in return.  It's a poor bargain for those citizens, because that trade effectively makes them wards of the State, with little or no marketable skills and nothing to realistically aspire for or to achieve.  Their dream of equal opportunity has been canceled out for these people; most of them having had their dreams effectively nullified upon their birth, in which they have committed no sin and no offense. 

For some, America is still a land of real opportunity, but for far too many, it's a house of mirrors, a fog of hope, and a promissory note forever unpaid, in arrears, and perpetually in default.

Sumptuary laws

I suspect most people are completely unaware that there was anything like a sumptuary law back in the Middle Ages, laws that were pass, in order to primarily maintain class distinctions and to control, modify, and to keep in their place the middle as well as the lower class as to what was or wasn't allowed to be consumed for food, or worn for clothing, or purchased in general.  It material life wasn't unfair enough already, the ruling class, wanted to make it quite clear that only they could wear certain clothes or to consume a particular food, so that class distinction was readily maintained by certain visual clues. 

The ostensible reason for these laws was to encourage thriftiness in purchases by these unentitled peoples, to maintain social structure, and to enforce humility upon them.  Although sumptuary laws are a thing of the pass, their application in certain ways is still relevant today.  For instance, top line foreign cars are made for a specific type of person and aren't suppose to be driven by those that don't have the appropriate status to purchase them, that is to say that those people aren't really the intended buyers of said vehicles.  This also applies to housing in certain areas of cities, and to other hi-end personal purchases, their advertisements, their catch, is all meant for a certain segment of the population and to a certain extent, to a particular further segment of the population that includes "up-and-comers" and to a small extent "wanna-be's".

The class distinction in the Middle Ages was not something to be trifled with and the sumptuary laws were meant to make sure that people knew their place and that they did not have the effrontery to assume that they were equals at any level with the ruling class.  Furthermore, trade and other areas of commerce help to make some of the more common people, successful, perhaps a little too successful, but the ruling class wanted to make it quite clear that no matter the money, nor the intelligence, nor the accomplishments, nor the work ethic, that you could not demonstrate outwardly your positive change in fortune.

After all, the ruling class was accorded a specific respect as were those in the clergy that often worked in conjunction with the powers-to-be, so that neither had an interest in seeing their authority challenged or confused in any way, form, or function.  After all, if somebody else dressed or ate in the manner of the ruling class but wasn't part of that class, the rulers believed that therefore the entire edifice was threatened by this breach of decorum, in which it might be shown, that those not of that class, could comport themselves in such a way that they appeared to be of that class, indicating or implying perhaps that there was not such a huge distinction between peoples as the ruling class would have you believe.

This means that in the Middle Ages there was no room for a true Cinderella story, that your upward mobility was not only limited by station, but also by what you were permitted to wear, or to eat, or essentially how you were able to comport yourself.   While official sumptuary laws are a thing of the pass, fragments and images of them still exist in our world today.

Informants

A true informant is somebody on the inside, engaged in some sort of criminal activity or the knowledge of such, that for either selfish motives or for the greater good, feels a necessity to inform police authorities of this activity and after such communication will either continue in his former role as he was with the oversight of a particular police agency or will be essentially immediately utilized to turn State's evidence against the alleged perpetrators of the crime or crime in process.  The other type of informant, which unfortunately is far more prevalent, is the fake informant, an informant created by circumstances and selfishness, that is either incapable of doing the time for a particular crime that he has been charged with, fearful of retribution by someone or something, and in return for a lesser sentence, or being let go, is given the assignment of infiltrating certain crime targets and reporting such to appropriate law enforcement agencies.

Informants are only valuable to law enforcement agencies if they have actionable activities to report, if they do not have these, any funding that they receive for expenses, for their cover, for their lifestyle, and for compensation for their "work", will be reduced or cut-off completely, to which they may have to return to jail or be relieved of their duties with little chance of employment opportunities that pay well.  A significant portion of informants are selfish, desperate, and of less than a worthy character, which is a significant downfall of informants in the first place.  I mean, if you take a lowlife liar and make him an informant, what sort of real actionable information will he provide you that isn't already compromised in some way, form, or manner?

Further to the cause as why informants are a contradiction in action, is their ability to help instigate and to plan criminal activities in the first place.  From my viewpoint, an informant should never be permitted to engage in criminal activity as aiding and abetting a crime in progress, is a crime, no matter the cover, and so unless the informant is essentially passive in his actions, he is literally changing history by participating in it.   In today's hi-tech world, the need of physical informants should be at a new low, as recording devices and the like have never been more prevalent and more effective than they are today.  Police should be satisfied with a hands-off role in which they merely observe and record activities and then make a conscious decision on what to do base on their real-time observations and experience. 

Law enforcement should be very particular about the informants that they work with and there should be a strict oversight committee monitoring the activities of such.  There are always going to be people that will trade information for money, information for freedom, information for their beliefs, and those communication lines should therefore remain open and vibrant.  What really isn't needed is the manufactured informant, in which law enforcement insists that they must have an informant to keep tabs on a certain non-desirable organization or people because they lack inside information about said target and then go out and actively seek an informant of dubious value and integrity.  Doing so creates a very slippery slope, a slope that isn't good for America, isn't good for Americans, or its ideals, or its standards. 

Remember that two wrongs don't make a right, it's far better to hold yourself responsible and accountable to that higher standard.

Guantanamo bay

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is in the news a lot, mainly because of the notoriety of the foreign alleged enemy combatants that have been imprisoned there by the United States military forces, but that is a story for another day.  What is of more interest, however, is the fact that Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba, and Cuba is a nation that we have had an official economic boycott with since 1962, despite the fact that Cuba lies a mere 90 miles away from US soil.  Additionally, Cuba is a communist nation, but somehow the United States, has an active naval base in Cuba, its only naval base in a communist nation, to which Cuba is a sovereign nation and is not partnered with the United States in the usage or maintenance of this naval base.

The Cuban-American treaty was signed in 1903 ceding control and a lease of 46.8 square miles of Cuban land and the bay surrounding its naval base to the United States.  In 1934, a new agreement was signed, which essentially permitted the United States to maintain its presence in perpetuity because of the clause which stipulated that: "… until the two Contracting Parties agree to the modification or abrogation of the stipulations of the agreement…" to which the United States has no intention of changing this anytime soon. 

Despite Castro's protests that:  “The Republic of Cuba repudiates and considers as null and illegal those treaties, pacts or concessions signed under conditions of inequality or which disregard or diminish her sovereignty and territorial integrity,”  no tribunal, no International Court, has invalidated the current treaty, nor is this a realistic hope for Cuba.  The fact of the matter is, the United States is physically in Cuba, and it isn't leaving, and while the port has a strategic purpose, in the scale of things, it really isn't necessary for our naval exercises or our fleets, since we have excellent ports state-side as well as in Puerto Rico.  The main purpose of our continued presence there is basically to be a thorn in the side of Cuba and nothing much more than this.

Once the United States gets a foothold in a country, it doesn't like to retreat from it, as America pretty much follows the format that once in, they will leave at their own volition and on their own terms.  As a small sovereign island nation, Cuba has basically no recourse to remove the United States from its soil.  There isn't any country that will help Cuba, because the risks of doing so are simply not worth it, but Guantanamo Bay does serve as a bargaining chip for the normalization of the relations between our respective countries. 

The fact of the matter is that America trades with virtually every country in the world, no matter its political affiliation and it is therefore high time that America removes its trade embargo with Cuba through some sort of quid pro quo basis.  Perhaps America is waiting for Fidel Castro to die in order to initiate these changes, let us hope that this is the case, because if America truly wants to be looked upon as a world leader, it should start first with its relations close to home of a former friend, later to become an enemy, but no doubt amendable to burying the hatchet in recognition that our proximity to each other necessitates friendlier and more amicable relations.