Posts Tagged ‘foreign policy’

Homo Sapien Prevaricator

Posted: September 23, 2016 in News and politics
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(A New Sub Genus of Human Beings)

Prevarication means that the subject under scrutiny is a lie. A prevaricator is the person or persons extolling the lie. In this case I am using it to describe a whole new species of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Yes look it up, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the correct nomenclature for modern humans, to differentiate us from our direct descendants, Homo Sapiens Idalta. We are mistakenly called carnivores. We are of course carnivores, but since we also each veggies, we are more accurately described as omnivores, basically we eat everything!

So my premise is this. Since we can be classified by what we put in our mouths, we should also be classified by what comes out! Now all mammals, which includes humanity, also expel air, mostly carbon dioxide, in some cases spittle, and in extreme cases vomit when we have either contracted an illness or omnivored ourselves on just a little too much too fast!

However this premise will be based on the vocal content of what comes out of the mouths of modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens either vocally or in certain cases in writing to be vocalized later! Since the dawn of time, or since men and women learned to speak, and then later to write, prevarications have been told. Now sometimes this is just a storyteller’s way of making the story more enjoyable for his audience, the audience is generally aware, so we call this fiction or artistic license! It is generally accepted, even encouraged in writers of novels of fiction. Even plays and literary works based on actual historical events will have fictional sub plots to make them more interesting or exciting! All of this is expected and accepted.

But there is now a more sinister Homo Sapien out there. It is a Homo Sapien belonging to the family Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but does not know what the truth is anymore, or even if they did know they where lying the first time they told the prevarication, after they repeated it two or three times, their brain flips a switch and accepts that what they are saying is the truth! Unbelievable you say! Well there is more! There are receptors to this kind of vocal prevarication within the same classification. Although they did not invent the lie, just like the originator, after they have heard it two or three times they also believe it! Even when evidence to the contrary is given, if it does not align with what they prefer to believe, they still cling to the prevarication. The truth has no weight with either the originator of the prevarication, or the receptor of such information!

So these individuals need a new classification, because there are millions, maybe even a billion or so of the 7.8 billion on the planet who fall into this new classification! This new classification would be Homo Sapiens Prevaricator! Now this classification can be variable! Just like some choose to be vegetarians and give up being carnivores, education can protect you from this affliction. Education in world history is of particular importance, in geology, the study of early man and how we eventually evolved into what we are today can effect whether or not we will become a member of this new classification. And please forget monkeys when considering evolution, we did not evolve from monkeys, and no real scientist ever said we did! We can get into that some other time! Other sciences such as biology, physics, chemistry, aerospace, all are important! All education in general, so you will know that Columbus did not discover America, for example! Never even laid eyes on it or set foot upon its shores! The educated in the time of Columbus did not even think the world was flat; it had been common knowledge that it was round a long time before Columbus set sail. He was actually looking for a faster way to the East Indies by heading west rather than all the way around Africa! They just did not know there was a whole continent in their way, or the vastness of the planet earth! So if all of these things are understood by having an education system that is not rated near the bottom of the pile compared to other industrialized nations as ours is, it will help you understand the world around you! Most importantly it will help to better recognize the prevarication as it is uttered!

I will give an example of why just history, the real history of the world is so important. It can shed light on why our enemies are our enemies and point to ways to alleviate at least some of the animosity! Ancient Persia was a center of science, math, and language, education was alive and flourishing in what is now Iran! Our modern plumbing and irrigation, road building, almost all science, was influenced by Persians, or some of the greatest scientists of the time who lived and worked in Persia. You see, when it was one of the greatest and largest regions on the planet; they welcomed all religions and all nationalities of people, including the Jews, into their schools, universities, and halls of science. Then as time passed they had what we are now experiencing, their versions of Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, and yes their Trumps. Science and education was placing religion on the back seat and power was not concentrated as it once was. So in order for a small percent of the population to gain control of the empire, this smaller influential group taught them to fear their neighbors, to ignore science and education, put all their energy into their religion! Education of all types was frowned on because they did not want thinkers, they wanted a large force of people they could control and prosper from. Then they concluded that it could only be one specific type of religion, this so that even a smaller percentile could concentrate their power over the rest of population! Everyone in the empire, even the known world for that matter, had to accept their particular brand of religion or face holy war! So now you have what is now called Iran instead of the largest most powerful forward thinking empire on earth. Sound familiar? You bet it does! We have our 1%, the methods of control are more subtle, more in tune with mass media outlets and politicians who can be bought to maintain their control!

So register to vote, all of you! There is no such thing as two bad choices when it comes to this presidential election. No matter how much you dislike Hillary, she is at the very least qualified for the job! We must reverse the trend I have been talking about in this article or this nation is headed for a downward spiral we will not be able to recover from. And you also need to pay attention to your senate and house seats. We cannot have a do nothing congress again! We need to get moving and Trump is not the man to it. He will run this country into the ground. He is a con man, an egotistical narcissistic one at that, and cannot be given the reins of power! As my story points out, he wants to rule with intimidation and fear. He wants to narrow the power in this country to a very specific group by fomenting hate of anyone not like himself! We have to learn to fact check, not just think someone is what lobbyists or talk show host says a person is. Ask for actual proof, if all you get is, well I feel this must be true, or I heard this, I heard this a lot, that means that what you just heard is made up! It is a prevarication by that new portion of humanity I call Homo Sapien Prevaricator. Just keep in mind that none of our living Presidents, both Democratic and Republican, will endorse Trump. That every major country in the world does not understand why Trump is even being considered for President! That he changes policy every week or so as his old ones get him into trouble, that he knows nothing about world politics, or the history that goes along with understanding it. He knows no science, he is not well read, well he does own a copy of Hitler’s speeches, if that is any indication! Almost all of Trumps bad actions can be verified with facts. Almost all of Hillary’s supposed bad actions have no basis in fact. Email is one, I give you that, but not as bad it is being made to seem. Benghazi, well even the House Intelligence Committee, controlled by Republicans by the way, exonerated Hillary completely. She actually had been trying to get congress to increase the monies for the security at Embassies and missions for months on end, but was always stopped by the GOP. So who is responsible again? Actually that report, over two years in the making torched all the conspiracy theories put forth by the GOP members. You go down the list of supposed Hillary crimes there is no evidence of any kind! Just the innuendo and prevarications told by her enemies and her political opponents. A crime in itself!

The Toxic Empire of the Koch Brothers Oligarchy

Posted: September 25, 2014 in News and politics
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I am gleaning this information from multiple sources. However most of what you will see in the this first section was suggested to me by an article in the Rolling Stone magazine entitled “Inside the Koch Brothers Toxic Empire” by Tim Dickinson.

Each Koch brother is worth approximately 40 billion. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year’s midterms. So far in this cycle alone, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate. Here are some examples of why it is so important to them to keep the GOP in power.

Koch is now a key player in the fracking boom that’s pushing the United States past Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer, even as it’s endangering America’s groundwater. In 2012, a Koch subsidiary opened a pipeline capable of carrying 250,000 barrels a day of fracked crude from South Texas to Corpus Christi, where the company owns a refinery complex, and it has announced plans to further expand its Texas pipeline operations. In a recent acquisition, Koch bought Frac-Chem, a top provider of hydraulic fracturing chemicals to drillers. Thanks to the Bush administration’s anti-regulatory­ agenda – which Koch Industries helped craft – Frac-Chem’s chemical cocktails, injected deep under the nation’s aquifers, are almost entirely exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. And why would they bother, if, as they claim, there is nothing to worry about! According to them, fire coming out of faucets in the areas of tracking is coincidental and nothing to do with them. Livestock has been found dead, fish in ponds floating lifeless, but it has nothing to do with fracking! So then why did they spend so much money and time to exempt themselves from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Legislation that was put in place to protect us from this exact type of activity.

Here is another example, the Koch brothers own the richest – but also the dirtiest and most carbon-polluting – oil deposits in North America: the tar sands of Alberta. The company’s Pine Bend refinery, near St. Paul, Minnesota, processes nearly a quarter of the Canadian bitumen exported to the United States – which, in turn, has created for Koch Industries a lucrative sideline in petcoke exports. Denser, dirtier and cheaper than coal, petcoke is the dregs of tar-sands refining. U.S. coal plants are largely forbidden from burning petcoke, but it can be profitably shipped to countries with lax pollution laws like Mexico and China. One of the firm’s subsidiaries, Koch Carbon, is expanding its Chicago terminal operations to receive up to 11 million tons of petcoke for global export. So it is illegal for use in the USA because we don’t want to contribute to the worlds pollution any more than we have to, but all right to sell it to the rest of the world out of an American port? That, my friends, is the perfect example of the definition of “oxymoron”! I have been accused of defending President Obama too much of the time. Of course most of my readers would prefer I never did! So what! I only did that when people started up with the birth nonsense, what color suit he wore, doctored pics depicting him and wife in every derogatory way possible. So sue me for wanting better healthcare and my social security I paid in since I was thirteen. So here is one of the things I do not like. President Obama is on a big anti pollution and climate change crusade. However he lets people who can buy votes sell pollution for profit and lets them use our infrastructure to do it! You have to set your boots down on one side of the barb wire or the other and dig in your heels. Can’t blame Obama for everything, well the same goes for the GOP. Of course their slice of blame pie is a really big sloppy piece!

Charles Koch, the 78-year-old CEO and chairman of the board of Koch Industries presents himself as a man of moral clarity and high integrity. “The role of business is to produce products and services in a way that makes people’s lives better,” he said recently. “It cannot do so if it is injuring people and harming the environment in the process.” I’ll bet after he repeated that bullshit three or four times, he actually believed it. Another example if you will. A company called Universal Oil Products invented a way to crack the heavy crude oil into the usable fuels and chemicals for plastic, etc. It made the process at the refinery faster and far cheaper. Fred Koch teamed up with a former engineer from Universal and copied their cracking engineering almost exactly, with only one or two small differences, then set out to under sell them. Universal eventually took them to court for intellectual piracy and tied up the operation. So undaunted, Fred Koch just went to Stalin who was financing his communistic agenda and the cold war with their oil fields. Their oil, it turned out, was even harder to refine than American oil. So Fred supplied Stalin and the USSR with all the cracking expertise and equipment the country needed to crank up its petroleum industry and helped to directly finance our biggest and most dangerous enemy! They have a word for that, and I don’t need to tell you what that word is. But money shoved in the right pocket allows you to pretty much do whatever you want, even collaborate with the enemy.

So one last thing. Almost all the ads you see denying climate change come out of the coffers of the Koch brothers. This fact alone should tell you two things right away. First, they are one of the top three polluters in North America so it behooves them to deny that man is effecting any climate change. And two, you don’t spend millions upon untold millions to convince someone of something that does not exist. The summit to discuss climate change at the United Nations recently was one of the highest in attendence ever. The protest event outside demanding something be done about climate change was one of the largest in history. Not only that, the same day, world wide, 2,646 other events took place in 162 countries. Cleaning up the environment cost money. The Koch brothers can’t have that even though currently they take in 115 billion in annual revenue and want to double that in the next ten years. We need to get them and their ilk out of politics. Well they should get to vote, scream and yell like the rest of us, but their money should be unwelcome in politics. Every politician for a specific office should have the exact same amount of money available to them to run for office. Any ads must come from that fund, not the Koch brothers deep pockets.

Our Nation; what our youth know about it!

Posted: May 25, 2014 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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Our nations independence was July 4, 1776. Eight out of ten people on the street could not tell me the year, and almost half could not tell me the damn day! Which means they have no idea what July 4th is all about. The ones that did mostly referenced the movie Independence Day. When asked about why, most said it was over tea. After the successful conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British government decided to make its North American colonies pay more of the costs of governing and defending them. Over the next 12 years Britain imposed a series of new taxes and other revenue-raising measures on the colonies that aroused heated opposition. The American colonists resented the trade regulations by which Britain utilized American economic resources to its own advantage, and they likewise resented their lack of representation in the British Parliament. British intransigence to these grievances spurred a growing desire for independence on the Americans’ part. When was the civil war? The civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865. Not one single person was able to tell me the correct answer to that question. Most thought Washington was president during that conflict! They also thought the war was about political and economic issues not connected to slavery and that the only reason Lincoln freed the slaves was to help win the war and for no other reason. The truth is in the 1860 presidential election campaign led by Abraham Lincoln, he opposed the expansion of slavery into United States’ territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8% for the six.[5] Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln’s inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on “King Cotton” that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America. Watch the movie that came out a year or so ago about Lincoln. It is historically accurate and a good history lesson.

The history of WWI and WWII, well I might as well have been asking questions about molecular biology. No one knew when, why, or how we got into each. WWI began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. The great powers in Europe had been at each others throats, so to speak, for about 4 decades. The defining moment that started WWI was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, an ethnic Serb and Yugoslav nationalist from the group Young Bosnia, which was supported by the Black Hand, a nationalist organization in Serbia. The more immediate cause for the war was tensions over territory in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary competed with Serbia and Russia for territory and influence in the region and they pulled the rest of the Great Powers into the conflict through their various alliances and treaties. WWII was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, though some related conflicts in Asia began before 1939. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people, from more than 30 different countries. In a state of “total war”, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust, the Three Alls Policy, the strategic bombing of enemy industrial and/or population centers, and the first use of nuclear weapons in combat, it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities. This made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history. The Alls Policy was something I was not familiar with. It was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three “alls” being kill all, loot all, destroy all! I will stop there, as my conversations with individuals about Nam and current or recent conflicts is something I am still studying. The history of the world in general gets into the age of the earth, evolution, religion, and would take volumes, plus is not a popular subject where I come from. So I may tackle that, as I have some strong opinions based on facts, science, and yes, the bible, but does not need to be discussed to prove my current point. My point is, people I talk to have never taken courses in local, state, and federal forms of government. They have no accurate sense of our history, or how we came into being. This includes people who are proud to cite parts of the constitution, especially certain amendments, but have no idea of how or what was going on when they were drafted. They think they do, and are sure they have the straight of it, but when pressed, actually have no clue. These, I believe, represent the majority of our voters. It is also why we follow whoever inundates us with the most information prior to our elections, and couches this information in a way that catches our imagination, but is neither factual nor true in even a minor way in most cases. Yet we follow like lemmings with no true idea of why we are running off of a cliff by the millions.

I have no problem with rich people; I think the fact that you can become rich is part and parcel of what America is about. But it cannot happen at the expense of the vast majority of the American public, the poor, or the middle class!  Their spending power is what makes the economy work, now, in the past, and in the future. If they don’t have extra coin in their jeans to spend, our economy will not grow. Plain and simple folks, it is how it is. So basing a company on profit only at the expense of the worker will cause economic failure. Shipping jobs overseas, hiding money offshore to keep from paying taxes here at home, this all has to stop, must stop. Most people do not even understand the difference between the national debt and deficit, they think it is one and the same. They also do not understand that the deficit comes first before the debt even comes into consideration, and the middle class pays the bill, not big business, and it never has except to create a growing prosperous middle class, not disassembling it. Understanding this means you have to also be a student of history, a student of the local, state, and federal governments and how it is supposed to work. Without both you cannot understand economics. And listening to a powerful rich person is also a mistake. Study after study shows most know nothing outside the realm of the business they are succeeding in. This means they should not be advising you, so you need to advise yourself. So take a careful look, if you cannot see the majority of the population thriving, not just existing, then the policies that make that scenario a reality are absolutely wrong.

There is a dumbing down of America. We have dropped to the bottom of the pile of industrialized nations in education. We are not one of the countries where the population is happy with its countries policies, and we are fast sliding down that list like an out of control bobsled on the Matterhorn. If you are a conservative, you need to round off the sharp corners, if you are a liberal, you may need to accept some realities that are harsher than you would like. But if you look at things with no preconceived notions, and try to improve the basic education I think is necessary, I firmly believe your decisions will be different, and better, regardless if your political beliefs are conservative, liberal, or other leanings that proliferate out there.

The Love Chronicles: Just Some Thoughts

Posted: March 8, 2014 in News and politics
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Just Some Thoughts

I know, OMG, right? I will try and refrain from politics and just try for some history, geography, and of course, some basic editorializing by yours truly. Hey, it’s my blog! Just been thinking about the human condition and trying to understand it.

Let’s start with Ukraine and the Crimea since it is in the news right now. I have been checking news reports from Crimea itself, most of the people there, as far as I can tell, are of ethnic Russian descent and feel like they are not treated the same as most of Ukraine’s citizenry. Now if you look at Crimea, basically it is a peninsula, connected to the main part of the country by a fairly narrow strip of land. The Crimea has always been an area of contention; today’s problems are actually old hat.

Way back in the 13th century Crimea was the capital of the Golden Horde. Under the protection of the Ottoman Empire for about 300 years until Catherine the Great snatched it up in 1783. As you will see if you peruse the maps I have included, you will see that all of Ukraine has been passed around like vodka at a toga party. You will notice also that Ukraine shares a common border with Russia, and that it has changed in size and shape several times. During world wars it seemed to change owners much like a used car with bad brakes. So changing various political entities and countries have claimed the Ukraine and it’s peninsula off and on throughout history, leaving their stamp on the population.  This in turn has caused confusion about who it is and what it stands for.  This is my uneducated opinion of course, but I think accurate.

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So not surprising that since Ukraine was a Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991 that this is still a pebble in the shoe of Mr. Putin, who is old school and used to be KGB right up to 1991 when it was still the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Wow, that was a mouthful! Hard to type too! Vladimir also has control issues, just look at him strut when he walks, and has to broadcast himself kicking some protagonists butt in a personal defense demonstration. If you poll Russians on who they voted for, you cannot get a lot of response, but out of the response you do get, very few people seemed to have voted for Vlad, but he still wins with comfortable majorities, go figure.

So what should we do? Well whatever we do it should not be trying to play the blame game. As I have stated, I think the President is weak when it comes to foreign policy, but part of that problem is our congress and president not speaking with one voice when it is critical that we do so. Recognizing when that needs to happen is something congress should know and do, but not this congress.

Do we have a right to interfere? That is the debate isn’t it? You see most of the demonstrators in Crimea wanting to return to Russian rule. So who are we to tell them different? Did Putin send in troops to protect ethnic Russians? I think not, my opinion is that he would like the borders of Russia to start to revert back to the way they were when it was the Soviet Union.  With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine. Crimea’s communist authorities proclaimed self-government in 1992, which ultimately led to the territory being granted expanded autonomous rights by Kiev. Just today they voted to return to Russian control, but of course that is not the way Kiev wants it. So just be aware that this author thinks that it is important not to let Putin have whatever he wants without opposition, he is a dangerous man. Better to pay attention now than later.