SeniorJunior

It all started as I was grinding my teeth yesterday, listening to RWR (right wing radio). Senator James Inhofe was a guest on the Sean Hannity program. Inhofe is the "flat earth" senator from Oklahoma. He was saying environmentally-oriented people worried about global warming "want us to give up our cars, stop building new homes and buildings, sacrifice our way of life for this hoax they call global warming." Etc. So I was thinking, what's an uninformed person to think? Probably "Is this true? Damn those lefty tree huggers." I mean he IS a U.S. Senator. Would he lie? Well you betcha, but unless you know his history, how would you know? Can you believe, for instance, when a critic of the Iraq war says there has been huge fraud and theft by war profiteers? Maybe they are all liars, righties and lefties, saying whatever it takes to make their points. I still believe that solid Journalism is the antidote to this kind of debilitating cynicism. The Wall Stre...

[From Reuters.com] 440,000 Deaths per Year By Jason Szep BOSTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - The amount of nicotine that smokers typically inhale per cigarette rose by 11 percent from 1998 to 2005, perpetuating a "tobacco pandemic" that makes it harder for smokers to quit, a Harvard study said on Thursday.……….. "Cigarettes are finely tuned drug delivery devices designed to perpetuate a tobacco pandemic," said Howard Koh, the school's associate dean for public health practice and former Massachusetts commissioner of public health. …………. "The end result is a product that is potentially more addictive," the study said. …………. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers cigarette smoking the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. About 440,000 people die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to tobacco use. Whole story at: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=...

HOORAY FOR THE SENIOR GENERATION A very self-important college freshman at a recent football game, took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his own. "You grew up in a different, actually almost primitive, world," the student said loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. "We young people today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon, our spaceships have visited Mars... We even have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light speed processing ....and uh.." Taking advantage of a pause for breath in the student's litany, the "wize senior citizen" said, "You're right, Son....We didn't have those things when we were young........so we invented them...... you arrogant little shithead!!!

(From The Wall Street Journal – my favorite newspaper) "...The worried industries and their trade groups are responding by hiring new lobbying talent, planning mass-market ad campaigns and, in some cases, focusing on getting goodies attached to legislation that they would rather see killed but know they can't stop. The petroleum industry, for example, is preparing an ad campaign that seeks to justify oil companies' huge size -- and profits. The drug industry is weighing a mass-media counterattack of its own, emphasizing the good performance of the Medicare prescription-drug program. Student-loan titan Sallie Mae is rallying grass-roots support from college administrators. Small-business representatives are talking up tax breaks to offset what appears to be an inevitable increase in the minimum wage...." That excerpt from: Business Mobilizes to Defend Turf Firms Plot Campaigns to Counter Effects of Democrats' Agenda (I’m not sure if you can li...

Just had my first yesterday. Very high tech; very expensive. 893 bucks for 24 minutes in the chair. But think of the fringes I received. 1. Good looking people - handsome young dentist, gorgeous young tech. 2. Great ambiance - Japanese decor, snow falling on bamboo garden with smiling Buddha . 3. High tech stuff - digital X-rays, fast acting anesthetic. The dentist was charming but very succinct - after all, at $37 a minute, one mustn't dawdle. The practice "Advanced Endodontics " has two dentists, two techs, two receptionists and does nothing but canal roots and coin money. My tooth is "calming down," still painful but a helluva lot better. The only moral to the story is "Get dental insurance."

The “We stand down when they stand up” slogan has bothered me for some time, especially in the light of all the news reports about how inadequate our training efforts have been. Why the heck haven’t we done this right? Suddenly an argument broke out in my brain – the left side against the right side, the optimist against the pessimist – I don’t know. I do know that in this little colloquy lies the seed of inaction: W E SPOKE.... Put more and better military and police training personnel to work training the Iraqis. (Shoulda been doing that for two years.) WON’T WORK. THOSE PEOPLE ARE LOYAL TO THEIR MULLAHS & THEIR MILITIAS, NOT TO THE “UNIFIED GOVERNMENT.” Equip them better. Give them decent body armor, vehicles and communications gear. WON’T WORK. THEY WILL JUST USE THE GEAR IN ATTACKS ON US. Get them paid their salaries on time – might win a bit of the loyalty back to the government. WON’T WORK. THEY WILL FUNNEL MUCH OF THE MO...

From today’s (12/06/06) Wall Street Journal Online (my favorite newspaper): WASHINGTON -- Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month. Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare. The collapse of the appropriations process will be felt soon in the Justice and Commerce departments, food-safety agencies and veterans' health care. "It's not just a mess. It's a mountainous mess," complained Wisconsin Rep. Da...

Amid cheers from insurance companies (and their stockholders) at this being a no- hurricane hurricane season, we U.S.-ers have hardly noticed that the big storms seem to have moved to the Pacific. I’m sure you caught the horrific news of the “supertyphoon” that hit the Philippines and buried many villages and villagers in mud on Thursday. Here’s an excerpt from Bloomberg.com: Durian brought 249 kilometers an hour (155 miles an hour) winds and heavy rain that caused floods and mudslides in southeast Luzon, the nation's main island. It is the ninth tropical storm and typhoon to make landfall this year in the Philippines. The rainfall reached 466 millimeters, the country's largest since 1967, and exceeded the monthly amount in Albay, one of the provinces hardest hit, a government official said. ``The storm poured in one day an amount of rain that's greatly more than what that area gets in a month,'' Renato Solidum, director at the...

Well, one thing's for sure. Blogging is not for sissies... or procrastinators. Look how long it's been since my last posting. Shame, shame. I received this from a friend: Checked your blog today. How disappointing -- nothing written about the Dem's election sweep. Where's that "I told ya so & the GOP deserves it's whipping" article? Now something like that will get you off your duff. Fact is, nearly all the Republicans I know pretty much agree with that, so where's the fun? Here's my one substantive thought on the new Congress. BE TOUGH ON THEM. THEY'RE OUR FOLKS, SO EXPECT A LOT AND HOLD THEM TO THE HIGHEST EXPECTATIONS. Speaker Pelosi's "first hundred hours" sounds good, but there is so much more to do. First among that is to try to repair the foreign policy catastrophe the no-oversight-gang allowed the W administration to create. Initiate REAL election reform. Clean out the locust hordes of lobbyists. Put the screws to the ...

Imagine you’re a business heavily dependent on your advertising for your success. Then your ad agency goes sour. The copy becomes banal, the art boring, the sales results dismal. So you think, “I better change ad agencies!” Well, if you are in Britain that might be a really unproductive move, all because of a new rule The rule, imposed by the British government in April, could require an advertising agency taking on new business to hire employees who worked on the account at the client's former agency, lawyers say. While the law is intended to protect workers, they add, it threatens to make advertising account shifts prohibitively expensive, or simply counterproductive. Agencies worry that they will be unable to pitch for new business, and they fear that clients won't want to move their accounts. "Clients move from one agency to another to get new people, not to keep the same ones," said Marina Palomba, legal director at the Institute of Practitioners in Adv...

A touch of Latin American Socialism… kinda like Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, if you will, is looking good these days. Brazil has been on a tear to stamp out hunger. The Christian Science Monitor has a progress report in yesterday’s online edition. I like Brazil for several reasons, so much so that I even invest a bit in them as a promising “emerging market.” I like the fact that they have done a lot to utilize ethanol without the kind of huge subsidies we give here in the U.S. I like their growth rate and sensible (for Latin America) business policies. Of course, there’s a lot not to like, but hey… One of the things I don’t like is their poverty level. So here’s the good news (excerpted from the CSM). Brazil is the world's fourth-largest food exporter, but more than 40 million Brazilians - a quarter of the population - lived below the poverty line, prompting President Lula da Silva to vow (in 2003) to stamp out hunger by December 2006. This June, the g...

Journalism is both the Sword of Truth and the Cloak of Invisibility as you might gather I believe based on some of the commentaries below ( News You Didn’t See Much Of , Coverage Suggestion ; etc.). The stories NOT covered constitute the invisibility powers of journalism. Not covered = not real to much of the American public. A reporter named Sarah Phelan of the San Francisco Bay Guardian , http://www.sfbg.com/ an old line, kick-ass “alternative” paper, wrote a very impressive piece called “Censored.” It’s in the current on-line issue. There’s a lot of good stuff in that piece (like how the media obsesses over trivial stories), but the part I like best is her list of the Ten Biggest Stories the Media Ignored. The actual list is developed by Sonoma State U. My favorite of the ten starts with: 2. Halliburton, the US energy company, sold key nuclear reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using...