RANDOM ELECTRONS, LIGHTNING BOLTS OF IDEAS, UPDATES AND RANTS FROM THE PUBLISHER:
SEPTEMBER 20, 2008- - - CHICAGO: CUBS WIN!
JULY 13, 2008 - - - COMEBACK CITY: The Chicago Cubs blow a 7 run lead to the lowly Giants. New acquisition Rich Harden mows down the opposing team like the ground crew on the outfield grass. Harden was 31-0 when his team gave him a four run lead. Welcome to the Cubs, Rich. History and baseball and trends and suspense all have a weird cosmic vortex at Clark and Addison. The Cubs scrap an 11th inning win which puts the team five and one-half (5.5) games ahead in the Central Division standings. This is a record lead for the Cubs since divisional play was instituted by the league. Repeat, this is a RECORD lead for the Cubs. The die-hard dread meters are overloading at this point of the season.
JUNE 23, 2008 - - - FLASHBACK: I gained entry to see the show by presenting my ticket, which was wrapped around a bar of soap. It was August 6, 1985. A national celebrity was coming to the suburban dive to do a Show. This was the height of the comedy club era, where waiters, dishwashers, homemakers and students thought they were as funny as the people on the television show cases. But on that night, in a crowded room that barely had a soap box stage, he arrived. He was a small, short, thin, frail and pale man in a gruffy pepper beard and ponytail. His entrance was as fast and jittery like a panicked squirrel; the true signs of an extremely introverted person. Most entertainers are secret introverts. He was an American comic: a master of language, meaning, observation and satire. He came from the character and skit comedy of the 1950s and breached through to the dark side: pushing the boundaries of taboo subjects like religion and obscenity. In the end, it did not matter that he was a celebrity or a cause celeb; he was a performer, a humorist cut from the cloth of Mark Twain but tailored to the strife and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. You could tell that he respected and worked at his craft as he weaved observation to observation, language nuance to language absurdity. Young comedians often today use vile language to pull guttural laughter from their audience, but George Carlin never had to; his use of language was the bait on the hook to catch you with his observational humor. With Carlin's passing, America is left with a very few original comedy masters.
JUNE 22, 2008 - - - AT THE CROSSROADS OF HELL AND HIGHWATER: While America's political leaders oil their loins by mandating that 30 percent of the US food crops be diverted to 3 percent of the energy supply (ethanol) at an additional cost of $5 billion tax payer dollars (plus hyper inflation of food prices on the general consumer), the entire first layer of the State of Iowa is relocating to the silty floodplains of Baton Rouge. While global politicians are salivating about the prospects of diverting $1 trillion in the name of the scam of carbon foot print taxation (global warming, the first non-theological, non-scientific religion), mad men across the globe are trying to acquire nuclear weapons so they can print their names in the last history textbook of mankind. The gulf between the reality of the average person's life and that of their so-called elected representatives is as wide as the Grand Canyon, no, wider than the Gulf of Mexico. So much so that the sun soaked leaders on their yachts cannot see the shores of Common Sense. When gasoline prices have skyrocketed to $4 per gallon, Congressional reaction was to blame the oil companies. But at the same time, the federal, state and local governments are reaping a huge windfall from sales taxes on expensive oil. In Chicago, 20 percent of the pump price of gasoline is taxes. That is a higher profit margin than the gasoline retailers. Instead of becoming a domestic producer of its own oil, the United States is allowing the world to hold it for oil ransom. New petrostates like Russia and Brazil continue to drill for new oil. The new petrostates are acquiring wealth faster than the US Treasury can print $20 bills. In turn, the U.S. dollar continues to fall because it is not the monetary beacon of the past. Oil and oil futures contracts have become the new international default currency. U.S. leadership is brain dead to the current realities of what is happening to the American economy because they are so far removed from it that they are clueless. America has slowly lapsed into an ancient form of neglectful governance, a feudal system of an elitist and arrogant ruling class, which represents only self interests over public policy or public trust. In this election year, the only solution offered is to spend more tax dollars. But as noted above, the criminal waste is so high and the incompetence levels so strong, why believe anything anyone says to you? The whole American system is backwards: instead of the people telling the government how to much money to spend on public welfare and defense, it is the government that extracts as much money it deems necessary from the people under the threat of lien and forfeiture. For example, a person who buys a home with a 30 year mortgage will pay in real estate taxes the full value of that home in less than 25 year to the government agencies. When a prorated real estate tax bill is larger than your mortgage payment, there is a problem within the system. And this is on top of increasing sales taxes. In Cook County, Illinois, local sales taxes will increase next month to 10 to 11.5 percent on most goods. Ten percent of a person's purchasing power (with the dollar also declining in value) is lost. These are the practical burdens facing middle class Americans. These burdens will not change because the incumbent leadership has created these burdens for the leadership's own benefit.
