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Don't buy "Government Motors"

Posted by grad_1986 on Friday, July 10, 2009 12:54:47 PM
   We Americans need to send our politicians in Washington a clear message that we will not go quietly into the night when it comes to the separation of "Government and Business".   Even if that means those businesses are going to fail. 

   GM should have gone through a normal bankruptcy that left out the federal government.   There was no need for Obama to step in and "help out"  (I always remember what Ronald Reagan once said, "The words that Americans should fear the most are, ' I am from the government and I am here to help'" ).   Government never gives help for nothing.  there are always strings attached which are used to manipulate others to do their bidding. 

   We need to write GM and let them know that we will NOT be buying their cars until they give the government the "boot" and become "General Motors" again.  If congress won't listen to us then hopefully GM will!

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Obama takes a lesson from Madoff

Posted by grad_1986 on Thursday, June 18, 2009 12:47:49 PM
    Lately we have been hearing a lot of "economic data" being released from Washington. Some of that data is OK and some of it is not (depending on your perspective).   One piece of data brought it is the ever debatable, Consumer Price Index which measures inflation.  I have written an article in the past on this meaningless measurement from our government and how it has been twisted and mangled over the years to where it measures absolutely nothing we care about.  Yet we refer to it as some infallible yard-stick.  We are being told today that if you remove FOOD and GAS from the equation, our inflation is practically ZERO.   But who on God's green earth can live today without FOOD and GAS? 

   Now today more economic data is being spewed from DC to help try to spur on the markets.   But what does this have to do with Bernie Madoff?   Simple, Madoff played off of peoples desires to be financially secure.  Madoff was able to provide his investors with complex reports showing earnings of 12% or more year after year even though the markets as a whole where not doing nearly that well (and lost money in some quarters).  People were willing to turn a blind-eye to these discrepencies because inside they desired "security" over "reality".   Now the government is doing the same to us as Madoff did to his investors, by giving us dishonest numbers that are not based in reality but a desire to make us feel better and more positive about our futures. 

   One thing I have learned over my years as an engineer is that numbers can be made to say whatever you want.  You just need the right data and the right charts.  Even more easily skewed are so-called "survey numbers".  These numbers are extremely suspect as they are totally dependent on who and how you survey.  What companies did you call?  Ones that got stimulus money or ones that did not?  What questions did you ask them? 

    If your gut is telling you things are not well and you see people being laidoff left and right, do the numbers jive?  Probably not.  Washington is playing the same game as Madoff did.  Crossing their fingers and hoping things don't get too bad and people start bolting for the door.  Madoff was able to keep his investors duped only as long as ONE thing did not occur and that is the markets did not fall too much.  He knew that not even HE could pull a rabbit out of his hat and provide earnings high enough to keep his investors from leaving and emptying their accounts.  That is when he knew the game was over and turned himself in to the authorities.

   I think most Madoff customers today would tell us all one thing:  TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS AND NOT THE NUMBERS!!

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A cold front moving into Washington DC

Posted by grad_1986 on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 1:57:27 PM
   The weather forecast for Washington DC is "cold with little chance of change" as  a cold front has moved in on Jan 20th of this year and looks to worsen as time moves on (despite all the global-warming alarmists).  So far no connection to the Obama himself as the cause although some (mostly from FoxNews) are still investigating.   The latest indication that this cold-front is worsening and has no end in sight  is the most recent firing the the Investigator General Gerald Walpin who was investigating the misuse of funds by our very own Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.  Oddly, this firing came without the required 30 days notice to Congress of why he was to be fired.   Intead Walpin was given a full 1 HOUR to decide if he was going to resign or be fired.  Now the Obama administration has informed his media suckups that the "aging" Mr Walpin was "confused and disorientated at meetings" and no doubt trying to make the case that he was too old for the job and needed to be replaced.  Most likely Mr. Walpin was resisting the "high pressure system" of the administration and the only solution was to remove him.

    Forecasters say this firing will have a chilling effect on on IG's whose job is to insure that money spent (and we have been spending a LOT lately) is not misused or mis-directed.   They will feel the chill in the air and stop investigating any programs that are even remotely connected to the Obama's.   These freezing conditions will persist until light can be shown on who made the  decision to fire Mr Walpin and what were their REAL motives in doing so.  But given the "foggy" conditions in our mainstream-media that supplies "cloud-cover" for the Obama administration there is little hope of a warming trend any time before the 2010 elections.  

   All I can say to the people in Washington DC is:  "Welcome to Chicago! Now put on a coat!!"


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Billy Mays to the rescue!!

Posted by grad_1986 on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 6:20:53 PM
   Well its too bad  Billy Mays has already endorsed a Health-Care company or else he would be the perfect pitch-man for Obama's one-size-fits-all health-care system.   He could pitch how "inexpensive" (if you are a millionaire) it will be and how Obama will cure all the major diseases (after all if he can make the ocean levels fall, why not cure all the sick while you are at it too!).  

   But instead, Obama will have to do his 1 HOUR infomercial on ABC without Billy's help.  We are told that everyday people will be able to submit questions to the president via their web-site, but who here believes that we will here actual people.   Gone are the fireside chats of Rosevelt and Reagan to talk to the people.  Now we will have an over-glorified commercial filled with heartache cases of people with no insurance because the big-bad-insurance-company dropped their coverage ( little will be said that these people smoked 2 packs a day and ate bacon-eggs-and -gravy every day of their life)  We will see the president put his arm around an elderly person or cancer victim and tell them that he is going to make sure they get the coverage they need.   Music befitting a tear-jerking Hollywood drama will play in the background and pull on our heart-strings (and later our wallet-strings).   No debate over taxes or costs will be mentioned, for we should not belittle the debate with anything so petty as money (after all whats a few trillion among friends and family).  We will be urged that, "We are our brothers keeper" and that BIG-brother needs to make sure that all the litte-brothers are taken care of.

   I won't be watching this infomercial.  I think it's egregious to have government in bed with our media.  This is a replay of the progressive movement in the 20's and 30's where newspapers and movies did the dirty work of the government and painted rosy pictures of Rosevelt as sort of god-like figure that could do no wrong.   We are being sold a bucket of crap and we need to let them know we aren't buying.

   I urge everyone to call or write ABC and let them know you are NOT WATCHING the Obama infomercial


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The Strategy

Posted by grad_1986 on Monday, June 15, 2009 6:01:34 PM
   The enemy has told us their game plan of the other team.  They have talked about it in great detail in speeches.  Their strategy for victory is to strangle the other team into submission.  To cut off all support until until all their allies fall one by one and there is no left standing except them. 

   Sound like something from a WWII or Vietnam movie?   Or maybe another message from Al Quaeda?  

    No.

    This is the strategy for our government  to take over health-care in America.  The plan is quite simple.

    1) First announce you just want a plan that will cover only those who don't have a company sponsered health-care.

    2) Tell everyone that they can KEEP their plan if they want to and that you will actually penalize companies for NOT having healthcare (sounds great doesn't it?)

    3) Tell employers that you are going to TAX their health benefits to pay for those who don't have health-care.

    4) Employers will grow tired of being taxed (increasing their costs) and will find it cheaper to pay the penalty of NOT providing health-care.

    5) This will wipe out virtually all the health-care providers as eventually everyone will be on the government dole

That's their plan.  I didn't think this up.  Its out there in plain view for all to see.   Yet what are we going to do about it?  Are we going to just sit idly by and let this happen?   This will bankrupt our nation and leave us waiting for months to see our doctor or to have operations.   We will be the ones hurt by this snake-oil salesman Obama.  We  need to get the word out to all who will here us.  Like the "WHO" on "Horten Hears a Who"  we need to make as much noise as possible to all in congress that we will not sit idly by. 

Wake up America!!!


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Contracts are meaningless

Posted by grad_1986 on Thursday, June 11, 2009 1:42:49 PM
It used to be that a contract meant something.  Whether it was an agreement between an investor and a company (ie secured-bond-holder) or a warranty from a manufacture.  But the Obama administration has shown that when the government is involved, contracts mean NOTHING. 

   Just look at how the whole GM and Chrysler deals have been done.  With Chrysler, secured-bond-holder who are by contract supposed to get 100 cents on the dollar in the case of bankruptcy ( that is what "secured" is supposed to mean ) are told that they have to accept 26 cents on the dollar.   This screws the investors (many of them are pension plans) and sends a chilling effect to all future investors in our markets.   GM on the other hand, with the governments help, is indiscriminately closing down dealers and telling them that if they don't accept their deal that they will invalidate their warranty's (contracts) leaving thousands of people who have purchased vehicles from them equally screwed.

   This is illegal and unconstitutional and needs to be stopped!  With each breaking with the rule of law the Obama administration is amassing more and more power and thanks to our weak-kneed congress it looks like nothing will.

   We need to urge our congress to stand up for our rights as citizens. 

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Scaring our youth

Posted by grad_1986 on Wednesday, June 03, 2009 2:22:03 PM
    Last night I happened to watch the environmental show called: The World: 2100.   Not only was I aghast at the large number of lies this program promoted as "truth", but also at the over-the-top scare tactics that were used.  My hope is that children under the age of 12 were not up to late watching it.  It could easily be the cause of nightmares and depression in young children (I found it funny that one of the advertisements was for an anti-depressant).  It might even be a good case for a lawyer seeking a class-action-suit as one could argue the show created undo stress on young children and a general loss of hope for a future. 

    When Bush was in office, the left argued that the right was using "scare tactics" related to 9-11 to get us to go to war against Iraq and Afghanistan.  But now the left is using even worse scare tactics to get us to "go green" and "consume less", by showing a hypothetical world of: no water, no food, no clean air,  no borders and rampant chaos.  It literally advertised for various solar and wind technologies being developed today as viable solutions when in fact they are not even close to filling our needs.  No mention was made during the entire show of real solutions like nuclear fission or fusion.  It was like they didn't even exist. 

    Another thing that bothered me greatly abou t this program was how they re-wrote the history of both the Myan and Roman empires.  So called "experts" claimed that the Myan's fell apart because they out grew their resources when in fact many do not know what caused the extinction of the Myans.  Some suggest it was disease that destroyed their people and not famine.  We really don't know.  Later another expert claimed the Roman Empire collapsed due to it exhanding beyond what their resourses could handle, when in fact any person who has read anything about the Romans' knows it was the relentless attack by northern barbarians who eventually saw Rome's Achilles' heel was its aqueduct system bring water into the city and disrupted their flow.   For without water,  Romes' population quickly shrank from over a million down to a few thousand.  It was terrorism and weaker and weaker emperors that sought to negotiate with them, that destroyed the Roman Empire and not some environment collapse as claimed by this show.  But now millions of people have been MIS-educated by this program for years to come. 

    Fear has been used for generations to rally the "uneducated masses".  Hitler did by making people fear the Jews and their corruption of the german gene-pool.   By using the pseudo-science of eugenics, Hitler was able to create the illusion that the German race was under attack and that in some future point in time it would be too weak to sustain itself.   That fear made millions of Germans do unthinkable things against millions of Jews, elderly, mental and physically disabled people, for there is no greater fear than the fear your future family will not be able to live on.   Now some are using the pseudo-science of climatology to scare our children into believing thar we are on the brink of disaster. 

    Now I am not saying that we shouldn't try to conserve more and recycle what we have.  I, myself, was raised in a Midwest-Lutheran-German family and the word waste was not in our vocabulary.   But we do not need to whip our children into a frenzy like a bunch of cattle.  For no decision made in a state of fear and anxiety is ever a good one.  We have all experienced those poor decisions in our lives before such as when we are sitting in the car dealers showroom and the good deal is going to vanish in minutes if we don't sign now (or the car will magically disappear tomorrow off the lot).  We regret those decisions for years mostly because we eventually wake up and see that we were duped by slick salesmen only interested in lining their pockets with our hard earned money.

   And who are these "salemen" or "fear-mongers" today who are saying we are all going to go to hell in a handbasket?  Could it be "General Electric" selling us windmills and solar panels?  One has to wonder....

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White Men Can't Judge

Posted by grad_1986 on Monday, June 01, 2009 8:52:19 PM
     Remember the movie with Woody Harrelson: "White Men Can't Jump" ?   In this  movie Woody teams up with another street ball player who is black.   During the movie, Woody (who is a good shooter and ball handler) is poked fun of by his counterpart saying he can't dunk the ball because he is white (as if dunking is all the basketball is about).   This movie epitomizes the whole one side can prejudice but the other cannot. 

    Applying this to Judge Sotomayor, Obama has already warned those who will be grilling her on her past, to "not go there".  Pardon me, Mr Obama, but since when are you the head of the Senate too?    We have every right to find out how "fair" this judge will be.   We need to kno w that if a case is sent her way where race is involved, she will side with the law and the constitution and not her ethnicity.  Is she Latina first and American second?  

    I am angry that white men are being treated as if their skin color gives them some sort of priveledge when we know that today, being white is a disadvantage to most.   I know lots of very poor "white folk" who have to work their butts off just to get by.   Why is being latina supposedly worse?   Why is it even important at all?  

    One of my most favorite episodes of Seinfeld is where George is trying to convince the apartment board to let him have the nice apartment  instead of an older man who is a vet.   He and the vet square off at the board meeting by telling their life stories and trying to be more pathetic than the other.   Seinfeld cheers George on saying "You go George. No one has a more pathetic life than you",   Today this  odd story is playing itself out on the American stage.  Each ethnicity is trying to look more pathetic than the next to get the larger share of government pie.  Each one claiming that their "life story is more compelling" (Obama's words... not mine)  than the others.   What a sad sad world we live in now.  Rather than fighting for the top, we are climbing over each other to get to the bottom.

   Maybe when we have to fill the next spot on the Supreme Court, we can hold a similar competition using the American Idol judging system to find the most "pathetic person in the country" to insure that person has the most empathy possible.   Wouldn't that be great!




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Testing the elasticity of a country

Posted by grad_1986 on Thursday, May 28, 2009 5:33:32 PM
   In physics the elasticity of a material is its ability to retain its previous shape after being deformed.  Virtually all materials has some form of elasticity.  Glass can flex to some small degree and come back to its original shape.   Pushed too far and it breaks.  Rubber has great elasticity.  It can be stretched many times its own natural length and bounce right back.   Some materials however when stretched never go back to their original shape.  Take thread used in cloth for example.  Stretch a shirt too far and it remains stretched forever (I did this once to a sweater my wife wore which had gone through the dryer by mistake.  I tried to remedy it by stretching it, but instead I got a sweater that only orangutan could wear). 

   Today our country's elasticity is being tested by the Obama administration.  I believe that they are racing as fast to the left as possible using every excuse under the sun to do their dirty work.  By pulling our country hard to the left they hope that it will forever be forced to stay that way.  The so-called "moderate" Obama was a lie sold to the voters by a media that was in love with the "man" and did little to investigate his past or his views.  Now we have an administration that can't be questioned on any decision.  Whether its an 800 billion dollar stimulus plan that puts us reclessly in debt, changing the rules of bankrupcy to put Unions in the front of the line for payoffs, or his nomination of a justice who is anything BUT just in her decisions.  He also now wants by the end of this year to have nationalized healthcare and most likely also a federal sales tax as well.  To question him is to be a racist (look at how the tea-party-goers were treated). 

   I think that Obama is hoping our country isn't resiliant enough to "snap back".  He is hoping we are all just lazy moronic buffoons who will just roll over and accept the direction he has pointed this country in.   Maybe he has spent too much time in Europe and thinks that we will respond the same way as the French have.  My hope is we are MUCH more elastic than what he thinks and that in 4 years we will snap him and his administration out of Washington for a very long time. 

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First they came for...

Posted by grad_1986 on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 4:50:56 PM
  There is a famous poem by the a Lutheran pastor named Martin Niemoller who lived during the Nazi regime.  The poem goes as follows:
  When the Nazis came for the communists 
  I remained silent
  I was not a communist

  Then they came for the social democrats
  I remained silent
  I was not a social democrat

  Then they came for the trade unionists
  I did not protest
  I was not a trade unionist

  Then they came for the Jews
  I did not speak out
  I was not a Jew

  When they came for me
  There was no one left to speak out for me

     This famous poem speaks of how we are all in this together and that when one persons freedoms are taken away then eventually all freedoms are lost.   Today our freedoms as Americans are slowly being whittled away by activist judges (one will soon be on the Supreme Court) who care very little for the "will of the people" but more about their own "wills".  And like the poem shows, it all starts somewhere and progresses like a cancer until there is nothing left for each "right" we have is based on other rights.  Take any of them away and the whole system collapses like a house of cards.

    To illustrate this I have written a similar poem called:  "First they took away.."

First they took away peoples property and gave it to others to use and called it PROGRESS
I said nothing
I wasn't a property owner

Then they took away the freedom of speech and called it "Hate Speech"
I said nothing
I was not a writer or a journalist

Next they took away the right to own a gun and called it unnecessary in the 21st century
I said nothing
I was not a gun owner

Then they took away the freedom of religion and called it science and evolution
I said nothing
I was not religious

Then they arrested me and took away my right to a trial calling me a home-grown-terrorist
And no one was able to do anything about it







 

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The right to your own body

Posted by grad_1986 on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 4:51:54 PM
   In the 1970's women every where were claiming the right to control their own bodies.  Roe-v-Wade seemed to cement the deal with liberals that a women's body (and any "thing" inside) was her "property" and therefore not controlled by the government.  Every time a law is passed or proposed to set limits on those actions, women with coat-hangers-in-hand rush to the Capital building to protest claiming this very right.

   But now a new case is raising eye-brows.  Apparently the right to ones own body does not commute to 12 yea-old boys.   A 12 year old GIRL can march into any Planned-Parenthood and claim this right and have an abortion without ANY parent being notified.  But a 12 year-old boy who wants to have a tumor removed by natural medicines does not have the right to make that call.  Instead a judge sitting in a court room can FORCE him to have medical treatment he does not want.  Why is his body (and his tumor) not his property?   If a fetus, which clearly is a separate human being (right down its DNA) is considered to be the "property" of the women, then why is the tumor (which is HIS tissue and HIS DNA) not considered to be his property as well?

    If you listen to the Glenn Beck program you have probably also heard about the other Minnesota law that says the state does not need to destroy the DNA sample of blood they take from every baby that is born in Minnesota.   These samples apparently become the property of the state and can be used for whatever purpose they so choose.  Parents are not even allowed to "opt-out" of the program and have no choice in the matter.  (Frankly speaking, Minnesota is the LAST place on earth I would every want to move to.... and I live in California!).   What will these samples be used for? 

       Crime investigation or crime setups? 
               - How did your DNA get at the murder scene?

       Disease prevention or Health-care prevention? 
               - Insurance company:  We're sorry!  We don't cover people who are predisposed to cancer. 

    Time and time again, parents and patients are losing their rights as citizens to live the life they choose.  As our country becomes a nanny-state of epic proportions, more of these BASIC rights will be lost until we have none left.  Just look at what happened to the Mormon group in Texas with one simple phone call from an anonymous person.  Now I am not Mormon, and while I don't agree with their view of the Bible and other matters.  I do respect their right to live their lives the way they choose no matter how strange they seem to us.   Their right to raise their girls to wear long dresses and long hair  and look like they came out of a "Little House on the Prairie" episode is their right.  Just as much as its my right as a parent to raise my children as Lutheran's and to go to church every Sunday.  We need to realize that we are all in this together.

   My hope, as I have written before on this matter,  is that this boy bites, kicks, punches every medical professional who gets within 10 feet of him with a needle.   I don't care HOW "caring" or "compassionate" they may seem.  They are violating his most prized possession.... HIS BODY.  

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What the low turn out REALLY means

Posted by grad_1986 on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 12:27:22 PM
   Let me first say that measures 1A-1F were some of the most convoluted propositions I have ever read.  Not in so much they were hard to understand, but instead were hard to pin down as either budget cuts or tax increases.  The geniuses in Sacramento, purposely wrote the measures this way in order to "con" both sides of the voting aisle to think they were getting something out of this.  As our California politicians try to read the "tea-leaves" of yesterday's voting my hope is that they will take note of the just how pathetically small the turn out was.  Of course the big spenders will say the vote was against cutting the budget and the less-big-spenders (for in fact they are almost the same) will say it was a vote against tax increases.

   But the fact that there was such a low turn out for these measures says something more.  Something I have been saying for a long time myself, and that is, "It's YOUR job... now DO IT!".     As I have written before, these weak-knee-ed kiss-up politicians (and I include Arnold in this list as well) are not wanting to make the hard choices all of us vote them into office to make.  We are not buying their arguments that, "the prisons will be opened,  your child won't have a teacher, your house will be robbed and then burned to the ground if we don't get the tax increases we need".    That's like me cutting off my water, gas and electric to save money, but keeping my cable, internet, fitness-club and golf memberships.   Sorry Arnold, but your as bad of an actor in real life as your are in the movies.   Maybe you should hire Tom Cruise to do your speaking engagements.... I hear he's available.

   Here are some suggestions:

   1) Stop the defined-benefit payments to so-called "retired" state workers.   No one in the real world has these anymore and neither should you.  These retirement programs are bankrupting the system as you only have to serve 10 years to qualify for it. 
   2) Stop paying welfare to illegals.  Times are tough and Americans deserves jobs.  Its time for them to go home.
   3) Redistribute the money for the "bullet-train" and "T-cell research" that we don't need and use it to pay for the prisons, police, fire and schools.  Times are tough and the first thing you do is get rid of non-essentials items.
   4) Open up your oil fields on land and off-shore and use that money to help pay for the budget.
   5) Lower your corporate taxes to entice businesses to come back to California.  It takes more than cute commercials with Arnold asking people to "Come to California" to make companies to want to move here.  Right now people are exiting this state faster than the Israelites left Egypt following Moses.

   In my opinion, specific budget issues NEVER belong in the voters hands.   The average voter is incapable of determining what is right or wrong.  Most do not understand the basics of economics and money.  Many voters see the words "Bond Measure" and think "Oh, its not my money" or "Oh its not a tax increase".   But in fact it is very much a tax increase.  Not now, but sometime in the very near future.   To me these props were a big waste of time and money.  Money we don't have and I hold Arnold responsible for this.      

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I did it my way,..... until the government said I couldn't

Posted by grad_1986 on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:30:14 PM
    The old classic song by Sinatra that he ended all of his concerts singing was: "I did it my way".   This song speaks of the freedoms we have as individuals to make choices in our lives whether they be to our good or to our detriment.  I sometimes wish the founding fathers had put in an 11th Bill-of-Right called, "The Right to be Stupid".   I use the word "stupid" with some tongue-in-cheek here.  I am not saying that the people in the following story I am going to comment on are stupid in any way.   Instead, I am meaning it in the view of the judge and our government who must be by all means viewing these people as "stupid".

    I read a story of a boy in Minnesota who is refusing to receive Chemotherapy for cancer which his parents also disapprove of.  But according to state law, the medical profession can declare the parents as being "unfit parents" if they are not providing the medical care that they deem necessary.  This case has made its way all the way up to a Minnesota judge who has sided with the medical profession and is "ordering the child to receive chemotherapy".   This ruling cuts at the very hart of our rights as citizens from many angles. 

   First there is the rights of the parents.   For decades our country has sided with parents on how to raise their children.  We may not always agree with their decisions, but we respect (there's a word not used much anymore) their place in our society.  We know what goes around comes around eventually back to us.   From the top to the bottom our country has lost all sense of respect for lower forms of government.  The federal does not respect the state, the state does not respect the local and it seems no one respects the family.  But respect is a two way street.  If the government does not show respect towards the family, then families will stop teaching their children to respect the government.   From there its a quick trip from democracy to anarchy. 

   Next there is the rights of the child.  The government in this case has decided that the child has no rights to his own body and no rights to his own privacy.   They have determined that they "know better" and the rights of the child must take a back seat to smarter, more intelligent people such as judges and doctors.  If this were a 12 year-old girl and she was being forced by a judge to get an abortion or NOT get abortion, this would be front page news!!   My hope is this boy bites, claws, kicks, punches every medical person who gets within 10 ft of him and that his parents get it on video for all to see.  I find it ironic that some in our nation are worried about harming some terrorists with "waterboarding" but we will strap down a 12 year old boy to inject him with all kinds of chemicals that will make him vomit, lose his hair, feel weak and rotten inside and maybe even kill him.  What a strange world we live in today.

    But I doubt it will end here.  We have been sliding down this very slippery slope of government "intervention" for a long time now.  While to some degree I understand "no man is an island unto himself", but I do believe we all reserve the right to build moats if we so desire.  Activist judges and nanny-state politicians will continue to push their "government knows best" agenda until all of our freedoms we enjoy are lost.   Most of these decisions will affect parents and children.    Imagine a government which no longer values religious education and decides that a child will be unduly harmed by his parents decision to put their child in what they deem to be a less qualified religious school?   Can they be considered to be "unfit parents" as well?  What if the child says they want to attend the religious school?  Can the government declare (as they did with the boy in this story), incapable of making his own decision? 

   We all think none of this will ever effect ME. Its always the other guy.  But if this can be done to a 12 year old boy, what about

   1) The mentally disabled
   2) The elderly (we will all fall in this category sooner or later)
   3) The disabled
   4) The different (looks, culture or ideology).
 
    Will they lose their rights as well?

    Think about it.
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Who NEEDS Who!

Posted by grad_1986 on Sunday, May 17, 2009 11:56:22 PM
   Watching the movie Rocky (which I must have seen a dozen times now) and found it interesting in the scene where Rocky's love interest is arguing with her drunk and abusive brother.  He argues that she is NOTHING without him, but she fires back at him and shows him who REALLY is in charge by pointing out all the things she does for him such as:  cooking, cleaning, washing, paying the bills.  She tells him, "You need ME!".    This scene I believe plays out in many abusive homes across the country when the abused wake up and realize they have a lot more power than they are made to believe by their abusers.

    Today, I believe our states are in a similar relationship with the Federal government.  For years they have taken it on the lip from an out of control federal government which constantly orders them around with their unending lists of "mandates".   Washington says "JUMP" and the states yell back "HOW HIGH?"   But now there is hope that some states are beginning to wake up and fight back for their rights.  Some states such as Montana are introducing gun laws to challenge the federal governments intra-state regulations.   Even if such laws fail, having more states like Montana standing up against the Washington will send a chilling message to our inept lawmakers who today have ZERO understanding of the constitution and the founding fathers original intent that the federal government was to be small, limited and a PART-TIME-JOB! 

    Who knows where this will lead in the near future.  Maybe states will wake up and see that without their help the federal government is incapable of implementing most of their so called mandates and federal regulations.   Let's say, hypothetically, a state were to declare that a person not paying their federal taxes is a "federal issue" and therefore the federal government must be responsible for the job of collecting those taxes or prosecuting those individuals.   The federal government would be incapable of enforcing even the most simplest of laws without the support of local law enforcement from those states and would quickly realize WHO REALLY NEEDS WHO in this relationship. 

    This may be the reset button our country has been needing for some time now.  As I mentioned earlier, uur founding fathers vision of our country was one with a small limited federal government, followed by a larger state government and then ending with larger local governments.   The idea was that local governments could raise their own revenues to tackle the issues that were plaguing them the most.  Individual local governments would then be able to insure that corruption was limited to that locality and would be fixed by residents removing those who would misuse their tax dollars.  They would also be able to tailor the solution to meet their specific problems and solve the problem in their own unique way.

    But today, our federal government steals so much of our local revenue their is little left over for their use.  Often money goes to Washington and trickles down to the states through various "agencies" who all take their small slice of the pie.  By the time the money makes it to the local towns and cities it resembles the flow of the Colorado River by the time it reaches the Mexico border after it has passed a multitude of dams and dikes.  Trickling like a stream instead of roaring like a river. 

   Finally, because so much power is concentrated in so few people, corporations, unions and other political manipulators wine, dine and bribe our officials.  This corruption festers like an untreated flesh-eating bacteria eating the body of our country from the inside until there is nothing left.  Often the American people just throw up their hands in frustration and say "That's Washington for ya".  But had we stayed with our founding fathers original blue-print, there would be too many local governments to be wined and dined to make any progress by any one group or company. 

   Let's hope more states like Montana and Texas stand up their (and our) rights as a free people!


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String Theory and God

Posted by grad_1986 on Thursday, May 14, 2009 9:03:36 PM
   A few days ago I was viewing on YouTube a video of a show I had seen several months ago on PBS dealing with the a new physics idea called "String Theory".   In the show, theoretical physicists (which for brevity I will refer to as TP's) had started studying an idea of these extremely tiny energy-strings that would possibly merge the main laws of physics (also called Unification Theory or the theory of everything).  For decades, the area of physics was broken into seperate areas of study.

    First you had gravity in which all matter is attracted to each other according to the equation of   FG = G m1 m2 / r2    This says that the force between any 2 objects is equal to the mass of the 2 objects (mulitplied) and then divided by the distance between them.  So the greater the masses or the smaller the distance, the larger the force pulling them together.
 
    Next, you also had electical forces in which tthe force between them is   FE = e0 q1 q2 / r2  .    This equation looks eerily similar to the previous one.   But unlike the gravitational force, electrical forces can be attractive ( opposite charges ) or repulsive (like charges).

    Third, you had magnetic forces that were similar to electrical forces and are inverse to the square of the radius r ( 1/r2 ) and like electrical forces could be attractive ( North to South ) or repulsive (North to North or South to South). 

    Finally you had "strong nuclear forces" that hold protons together in the nucleus.  These forces are incredibly strong to overcome the repulsive electrical force between the protons, but only occur under a very short distance. 

    Without going into much detail, the show discussed how these scientists believed they had solved the riddle of these similar and yet distinct realms with a complex equation that involved or 11 variables or "dimensions".  But the concept of something that has 11 dimensions is very difficult to grasp for the human mind.  We can imagine 3 dimensions because we live in 3 dimensional world of heitht, width and depth.   For something to have 11 dimensions is unfathomable to the human mind and near impossible to grasp.

    These TP's went on and on about the concept that multiple universes could be filling the same "space" at the same time without our knowing and pass right thru us without our detection.   The also talked about how these strings will never be able to be detected or proved by any amount of scientific testing.  But, because they had an equation staring at them on the black board, they were certain they had it right. 

     But doesn't that sound much like our assertion as Christians that there is a God who loves and cares for us, whom we cannot see, hear or feel but we know he is because has has told us: "I am that I am".   But who has greater proof?   The TP with a mathmetical formula on a sheet of paper, or the person who has personal testimony of followers who have given their lives in the defense of that a man died on a cross and rose again from the dead 3 days later.   

     And why does the Christian get percecuted as a "nut job" for believing in a God who he "can't see or prove exists" but a scientist gets the Nobel Prize for writing an equation he cannot prove is real?   Why is scientific "faith" heralded with applause and accolades but religious faith is met with ridicule and bewilderment?   In my view, my faith has more "substance" than the scientists, as mine has stood the test of time and trials whereas theirs has hardly any of either behind it.  (Actually I believe most of these Theoretical Physicists are playing a game on us similar to the Emperor's New Clothes"  where they, like the tailors for the king ,hood-wink the public into thinking they have solved it when they don't understand it either .... but don't want to admit it). 

   So the next time someone says your crazy for believing in a God, just tell them that you are in good company with many of the best scientific minds of today.
 

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