RANDOM ELECTRONS, LIGHTNING BOLTS OF IDEAS, UPDATES AND RANTS FROM THE PUBLISHER:
JANUARY 8, 2012: THE TRACK: BBC American suddenly popped up as a channel on the local cable. One of my new favorite shows is TOP GEAR. There was an American version of the show which was okay, but BBC American was running a holiday marathon of Top Gear UK shows. I may have been spoiled by the Best Of films, but the original is far better than the duplicate. The Top Gear presenters are outrageously mad gear heads with a daft sense of humor. The show is like Monty Python hosting a car review program. Excellent.
NOVEMBER 13, 2011: Why is my tin of Coke now White?!!!!
OCTOBER 25, 2011: CLARK & ADDISON: The new Cubs owner introduced the next Savior of the Franchise, Boston's Theo Epstein,to the local media. Epstein, the boy wunderkind who helped lead Boston to two World Series championships, came to Chicago in the wake of the historic Red Sox September implosion that rivals any past Cubbie Occurrence. Epstein inherits a dysfunctional franchise with foxholed and stubborn Tribune holdovers, a marginal farm system, a roster of dead weight contracts, a lazy player attitude and a ball park that cannot yield any sustainable revenue growth. It will be much more difficult to turn around the Cubs than the Red Sox.
OCTOBER 8, 2011: IN MEMORIAM: The Passing of Steve Jobs.
OCTOBER 1, 2011: MENTAL ABBACUS: After this evening's steak house dinner, the check arrived. As guests began to reach for their smartphone calculators to divide the check up dutch, I looked at the receipt, rounded up the bill, then added ten and five percent to the bill, then divided by five and announced the verdict in less time than the others had to locate their calculator utility. Not trusting the mental calculations fully, one crunched the numbers and turned her phone over to reveal the same number I had mentally calculated a minute before. The brain stem may have been energized by a good steak dinner, or the fact the brain clicked into basic math routines that were awakened by the fact that several tables were surrounded by high school homecoming dance groups prior to their big event.
SEPTEMBER 24, 2011-- THE CAIN MUTINY: Ex-Godfather pizza CEO won a stunning straw poll victory in Florida. The black conservative businessman, Herman Cain, crushed the media's two frontrunners, Milt Romney and Rick Perry, by double digit margins. Some national correspondents were quick to opine that Cain's victory was merely a “placeholder vote,” of a “protest vote” against Romney and Perry. The media would not state that tea party favorite Cain actually WON the event. The Florida straw voters must be out of their minds to think Cain is electable in a general election. He is a novice; a political neophite. He has no chance of beating Obama. But whatever negative spin on puts on Cain, one would have to DOUBLE it on Romney and Perry for losing the straw poll to Cain. Perry's inconsistent rhetoric on illegal immigration from the last debate doomed him with conservative voters. Romney's own record on big government state health care programs and the lack of business specifics to get the country back to work are hurting across all segments of the Republican party. Cain throws out specifics like his 9-9-9 plan (which many do not believe is feasible or passable in Congress), but at least Cain is getting credit for proposing something except the tired old political playbook lines. So Cain has a new slogan which could make the old guard nervous: It's Cain or More of the Same!
JUNE 21, 2011 - - - CROSSTOWN: The Cubs and White Sox have renewed their annual in-season rivalry. There is no city buzz this year. The teams are underrperforming to failing after the first third of the season. The first game at the Cell was not a sell-out. Major League attendance is down throughout the nation, a lethal combination of high ticket prices and soft economy. The highlight so far is Ozzie Guillen kicking Geo Soto's catcher's mask through the uprights like the locked out Bear kicker Robbie Gould.
MAY 30, 2011 - - - IN MEMORY BANKS: Well, the site has not been updated in a while. What really has happened the last few weeks? Nothing earth shattering except maybe the debt ceiling breached, Blaggo taking the stand under oath to dictate his autobiography to a court reporter, Mother Nature being angry throughout the entire country, or and that Bin Laden thing. News is fleeting, and so is time at one's real job.
APRIL 9, 2011 - - - WASHING TONS OF FEE C: Congress may have the media believing that they were wrestling hungry lions in the latest federal budget battle. But when the hour hit midnight on a potential government shutdown, the reformers turned into Boehner shaded pumpkins and a budget deal was formed to solve the faux crisis. An alleged spending cut of $38.5 billion is hailed as significant, but it is less than 0.0028 percent of the current federal deficit. It is less than the interest accruing on the federal deficit. It is a drop of savings in an ocean of debt. But the politicians go before the cameras like conquering warriors feasting on a victory from battle. It is another pompous delusion that feds the incompetence of the current governing class.
MARCH 6, 2011- - - THE PUMP OUTHOUSE: Gasoline prices for 87 octane just went over $3.75 in suburban Chicago. Blame the unrest in Libya, the supplier for two per cent of the world's oil supply, to jack up the price per gallon by another quarter. Also blame the Obama administration's defiance of a federal court order to allow resumption of deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. With those reserves off line, America's dependence on foreign oil imports is greater. The unrest in the Middle East and the weakness of the President is a potent combination to bring the United States crashing back in the deep recession crater.
FEBRUARY 6, 2011--- FROM THE SNOW BUNKER: The weather forecasters said light
flurries for this weakend. Except, three inches of snow drifted in by dawn.
The streets are unplowed and rutty as snow plow crews are still exhausted from
the 72 hours of blizzard fighting last week. Snow fell this morning in Northern
Mexico. Instead of the faux science of global warming, should not the alarmists
begin to scream about the coming of a second Mini-Ice Age?
JANUARY 14, 2011 - - - EQUATOR CONSTELLATION: It has come to really nobody's attention that those who are not numeralogists find starglazing to be a more useless hobby to foretell the future. The 12 Zodiac signs in the changes of the star charts is supposed to make predictions to those born when the sun crosses their constellations. Well, many people are now shocked, SHOCKED, by the news that the earth's tilt and orbital wobble has changed the real pattern of the zodiac star calendar. No one I was screwed up, my ass-trilly-ollie-gee, was a-kilter. To add to the relative confusion, there is now a new Zodiac sign, some man holding a serpent. I wonder if newspapers will have to go back and print 50 years worth of horoscope corrections, or whether fortune tellers will have to give clients 50 years worth of refunds.
JANUARY 11, 2011 - - - - 1-11-11: I used to know a professor who went all nutty over numbers and dates. He would calculate that this occurrence would not reappear for generations. 8-8-88 for a forebearing date in history. Now, January 11, 2011 comes along as a series of all ones. Say them real fast in a row . . . sounds like waiting in line for a bathroom stall. Yes, people do put a lot of stock in the appearance of number keys, such as the doomslayers with the Mayan calendar ending in the pattern of 12-21-12. Neat.
NOVEMBER 6, 2010 - - - GYM RAT CENTRAL: I was at a local gymnastic club meet. In the stands were some high school gymnasts and one former club member who was a freshman in college. Sitting next to them was like sitting next to a crowded orthopedic physician's waiting room. One said her ankles are in constant pain, even when she walks around campus. The high schoolers complained that their backs always hurt. The repetitive twists, turns, leaps and full body weight landings take a real toil on their bodies.They discussed other girls who last season had broken bones. They were glad to see them back on the equipment where they injured themselves. During the meet, one girl almost landed her vault twist with her head smashing into the back of the vault itself. A sigh of relief from the stands. Indeed.
OCTOBER 31, 2010 --- TRICK OF THE TALE: As we wait for the little trick or treaters to arrive at the doorstep this afternoon, during the village regulated hours, we find that the political tricksters have only two more days to sell their snake oil advertisements and robocalls to the general electorate. Incumbents have a worried look as the traditional 95 percent retention rate appears to be in jeopardy this midterm cycle. People are mad at both national parties because they have melded into a uncaring, unlistening, monolithic bureaucracy which is costing the average family financial stability. People with the American spirit of getting up after being knocked down works only if big government does not sit on their chest to keep them down. This election could be the call to rewind the Obama liberal agenda. It may be the exit strategy for Obama himself not to run for a second term; tricking history with the notion that he completed his list of accomplishments in his first term so there was nothing left for him to do but ride off on a secret service valet retirement. His election would be seen as the ultimate trick on the moderate electorate who bought the theory of hope and change in 2008 - - - and finding not sweet candy but bitter taxation and loss of personal freedoms.
JUNE 7, 2010 - - - GREECE ON A SILVER PLATTER: On this day, America was changed forever. For the first time, the United States federal deficit surpassed its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). We are now beyond a debtor nation. We are bankrupt; this country owes more than it can produce in a single year. And this deficit does not include the massive amounts of state and local borrowing. Only a few weeks ago, the television pundits claimed that the Greece default would never, ever occur in the USA. The fuse has been lit, and there is little chance to stop it from exploding in the inept leaders faces. They sang joy for the latest employment numbers, where 411,000 new government jobs (temporary census workers) buried the measy 41,000 new private sector jobs. 41,000 private jobs can never pay for 411,000 federal jobs. The system has imploded onto its self. This may speed up the nationalization of more and more of the private sector under the guise of a stimulus recovery pump. More government costs more money from the people; money that is all borrowed at this point with no generational hope of repaying . . . with unemployment permanently perched at 10 percent, and underemployment near 20 percent, this is a job depression in the midst of a government entitlement gold rush.
MAY 17, 2010--- SOAP BOX JUNCTION, USA: A recent NBC-WSJ poll was a wake up call to the national media. In the poll, it found 75 percent of Americans don't trust what Washington D.C. politicians have to say on any subject. That is a staggering amount of distrust. Also in the same poll, 83 percent wished that they had an independent third party to vote for, meaning that Americans do not believe in the current two party system. For decades, we have believed that there is no two-party system: it is merely in name only because public corruption and incompetence is institutionalized in both major parties. Viable third parties like the Libertarians have been legislated into hibernation by state election laws that have favored incumbents retaining political office. The road blocks to open candidates and real choice has come home to bitterly roost as more and more states are collapsing under huge budget deficits.The current two party system is designed to perpetuate the special interest, sausage making, elitist member legislative agendas. There is no real statesmen in Washington to stand up to the system. By July 4th, there may be more distrust and anger directed at Washington DC than the patriots had against King George just prior to the American Revolution.
APRIL 12, 2010---- TAXACHUSSETS: The week begins with the last dash for filing one's personal income tax returns. The annual plight of the middle class citizen fearful of the Internal Revenue Service. Panic to be on time. Anxiety over doing the math correctly. Each year, the tax code gets more complicated and convuluted because Congress really has no clue. Most Americans now believe that Congressmen do not read the bills they vote on; and fewer have any grasp what the bill actually means. If there was a qualification test to be a lawmaker, we propose a simple one: a candidate would have to correctly complete a random taxpayers tax return. We doubt if any one would pass.
MARCH 8, 2010- - - CARDBOARD BOX, USA: The Illinois political scene is so screwed up that the in-power Democratic machine forced off their own Lt. Governor nominee, who spent $2 million of his own money to campaign to victory, because state leaders did not like the rumors of his personal past (no criminal record). With a vacancy, the party is moving toward eliminating the position, which is currently vacant because the past Lt. Governor Quinn is now acting governor because the former Democratic governor, Blagovich, is pending a federal corruption trial and was impeached by the Democratic legislature. Any candidate will say anyrhing to get re-elected, including Quinn, who one week before the hotly contested primary, pledged to city and village mayors that he would not cut state tax revenue sharing as part of his new budget. Now, after winning the nomination, Quinn floats the idea of stripping $200 million from cities. The state is bloating rotting corpse in a river rapids of red ink. The state universities have not been paid $750 million in state payments this year. Chicago has underfunded pensions in excess of $18 billion. The state's underfunded pensions exceed $20 million. There are no more public property to sell, no more money to borrow because the state and local governments have no way to pay their creditors back. The state unilaterally cut 21% of the amounts owed to Medicaid providers. A normal person would be sent to debtor's prison if the country had one, or forced into bankruptcy and a financial whipping outside the wood shed. But none of this phases the candidates, who continue to run mindless, nonsensical campaigns of cheery optimism.. Why are so many people run for office now. State unemployment and underemployment is more than 25%. Government jobs pay better than private sector jobs, with no accountability. And those fat sweet six figure politican pensions are vested upon election.
JANUARY 31, 2010 - - - ROBOVILLE: The Illinois primary is two days away. The robo calls are filling up our answering machines. The daily onslaught of telephone messages has gone beyond the nagging stage. Everyone we have talked to hates them. But now on the eve of the election, the attack ads are getting vicious: calling opponents unethical, corrupt, unqualified and smear artists. Back and forth the taunts and allegations. For what? Membership in the same unethical, corrupt, unqualified political system. Sample ballots came out with a half dozen candidates for state wide office for each party. Illinois is bankrupt financially and morally. But the candidates are pouring millions of dollars of campaign money and personal loans to get the seedy job of allegedly representing the people in government affairs. But the only national affairs that grab the headlines are the personal sexual transgressions of the power elite, the missing stimulus money and the total lack of any accountability. The reason why so many people are candidates in this cesspool is that a career in politics pays . . . pays well. Even bankrupt states like Illinois will give lawmakers and elected officials six figure pensions when they leave office - - - before age 65, before a person retires, in a cumulative windfall that is eating up the vast majority of every state, county and local budget. The onslaught of robo calls is turning off the electorate - - - which is exactly what helps incumbents retain power.
JANUARY 24, 2010 - - -SEPTIC TANKVILLE: The gagging smell of corruption fills the air like the worst smog alerts of the smoke stack 1960s. The Illinois primary has taken its turn to starving wolves fighting among themselves over the rotting corpse of the State of Illinois. Illinois is officially bankrupt. It cannot pay its current operating expenses. Current payables are long overdue, and there may be a growing $5.5 billion cash deficit. There is no balanced budget. There is an estimated $80 billion shortfall in pension obligations. Agencies and universities are not getting paid their grant and capital dollars. This giant municipal ponzi scheme is about to collapse under the weight of political fraud and dishonesty. Yet, there are dozens of individuals screaming at the top of their lungs to become part of this Titanic voyage into the Damned. They are spending millions of dollars to get positions which pay only 1/10th or less in salary. It is the power and the perks of the ruling class, as set forth with a six figure public pension for life, no matter one's age. It is something you cannot get in the private sector: to the victor goes the gross spoils of ransacking the treasury. At least the Huns, Mongols and Vandals were up front when they sacked European villages and Rome.
JANUARY 10, 2010 - - - ROBOVILLE: The local candidates are piling on robotic telephone political messages for the February primary. An entire answering machine filled with the long winded drivel of people no one has heard of and for whom most voters could care less about. The primaries are heavily contested because many of these candidates appear to have no steady job prospects. Politics pays in more ways than one. Robocalls is an expensive means to the end. Candidates are getting desperate: one called his opponent a pedophile. That's beyond political speech; that's slander per se. But it does not matter. The political system has gotten so sleazy and dirty a normal person is offended by the prospect of even being tangentally involved in it. this makes incumbents happy because it makes their position easier to get campaign donations and to keep their power base through political favors.
AUGUST 2, 2009 - - - MALIBU CORNFIELD, IL: It was been a hectic summer, busy with work trips. Last weekend there was a trip to the former hog capitol of the world, through the back roads of Northern Illinois. As we sojourned through the small towns of the Midwest, I found it odd that in the past 5 years, crop prices have more than doubled, but in the mean time, the small town centers continued to die and fade away. Only a few towns hanging to the sentiment of the past, like Dixon, the Boyhood Home of Ronald Reagan, maintain an overt sense of community. However, the birthplace of Reagan, Tampico, was a ghost town. Any stimulus will never hit the vast majority of middle America, especially the small farm towns of the Midwest.
MAY 30, 2009 - - - DETROIT: General Motors, 100, the American industial icon, died today. The preliminary autopsy results are that GM died of unionitis, mismanagement, government interference secondary to chronic obsese debt loads. GM was fathered by William C. Durant, who gathered together a group of small automobile companies in 1908-1909. But by 1910, Durant was forced out because of large bank trust debt during a weak sales market. He later secretly bought GM stock to regain control briefly, but lost the company for good when the new vehicle market collapsed. GM was once described as the Heartbeat of America; what was good for General Motors was good for the United States. As part of the foundation of the heavy industrial base of the US, it supplied the key components of American security during the World Wars and present international deployments. In the end, the American industrial philosophy was so outsourced to the rest of the world that higher homeland costs would soon lead to massive stroke and bleeding of red ink. In massive infusions of taxpayer dollars for life support could not stem the bleeding, or revive GM. It is clear that the plug on the old free market capitalism machine was pulled, and the old GM quietly passed into the pages of history.
MARCH 15, 2009 - - - THE IDES OF MARCH: The economic collapse of the Free World occurred around the time the Cubs did the historically impossible: clinched another divisional title. nature is all about balance. Good things are balanced out by Bad things. So the nature and extent of the global collapse will have to mean that there will have to be some balanced bounce back; something so monumental to make the Pain worth it. A Cubs World Series, perhaps? Beware the Ides of March. And the pundits of spring training.
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.
