When i Grow up.

I have found myself lost in thought time and time again these last few days pondering a single question ...”What do you want to do?” We ask children all the time, “And what do you want to do when you grow up?” So here I am, all grown up, and I look around and I wonder to myself, how did I get here?

I’m not saying that I am unhappy with every facet of my life, not by a long shot, I have more to be thankful for than most. I would even put myself in league with the blessed ... and yet, and yet I am not doing what I want to be doing. Are you? I call out to all you prisoners of the cubicle and ask you, what happed to the plans to be a doctor, lawyer, soldier, policeman, fire fighter, race car driver, actor, model? How did it all go wrong for us all? I work in a place where I watch the homeless, the forgotten, the discarded of our society shuffle past the windows in an endless stream of humanity ... what happened to them? They had dreams once too and I can guarantee that no youngster’s dream is to be dirty, sun burned and hungry walking down Florida Ave just south of Busch Blvd.

So I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know what I want more of ... freedom, time with my daughters, money ... mostly I want to work for something meaningful, something other then profit. I feel like I’ve sold out most of the time, like I’ve sold out and the price was far too cheap.

I have been an opinionated loud mouth all my life, I spent more time in trouble for voicing my opinion than I did out of it, and now I hold my tongue to hold my job ... I have mouths to feed before you judge me too harshly. Mouths to feed and school to pay for and shoes and clothes and dentist appointments and minivan payments to make.

How many of us give up our ambitions to change the world to provide for our children when in reality they would be so much better off to be poor and to have a parent fighting for a better world. My children will not be proud of how many tires I sell tomorrow, but they might grow up to believe that anything is possible like I tell them if they saw me doing it. When I start thinking of turning the world on its ear one of the little cherubs comes to me with a smile and a twinkle in their eye and announces that they want to go to dance class, and we buy the dress and the tights and the shoes and the little dear looks so cute with her hair in a bun .... what’s a little more overtime to give the angels their dreams? Less time to think, less time to see them, less time to do anything ... working to get right where we started.

What's the point?

I started the blog because my lovely wife got interested in blogging and I thought I would find out how hard it was to start one and then I starting posting because I thought it wold be fun and then I started doing actual research because something inside me told me that if I was going to spout my opinions I should be able to back it up ... and then it all went wrong.

What had once be cathartic was giving me heart burn. Finding out that the US was going to invade Yemen was stressful, watching the media help by making Yemen out to be evil gave me high blood pressure ... and then when I realized that noone really cared, I had a heart attack. I wrote about and tell people about Bechtel’s involvement in war in central Africa and noone cares. So now I have to ask, why?
What is it about our collective psyche that allows us to worry about sports teams and gas prices and gay marriage and the “immigrant problem” and simultaneously allows us to shrug off the deaths of innocents? Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan ... we deliver death all over the world.
Muslims want to build a mosque at “ground zero” and we are outraged. I don’t really care, but one of the reasons given for the Imam behind the project being a “radical islamist” is because he once suggested that the United States shared some of the blame for 9-11. I’m sorry but if you come to my house and kill my wife and then my kids grow up and decide to kill your kids to avenge the death of their mother you share some of the blame! Do we really think that the orphans we leave behind are going to love the west?
I don’t know. I wish that you cared about war crimes and death, I wish that you could see that your government has used your patriotism and the blood of your children to “open markets” for profit expansion ... I wish you didn’t believe it made any difference who the president was ... I wish you saw that the entire system was broken and desperately needed to be torn down and rebuilt rather than clinging to history and the sacredness of Americanism. I wish you cared that the “news media” kept you in the dark on purpose to pacify you ... I don’t know if there’s any point in writing, delivering a message that you neither want or intend to allow to change your heart or priorities.

Ode to Houdini

I am a sovereign nation state.
I train soldiers to defend me.
I arm them.
I put them in harms way.
And if you hit them with pipes and stab them and throw them off boats I want them to shoot you to death.

Multinational corporations risk the health of the entire earth in the name of profit and wealth and when all goes terribly wrong ... they shrug and buy commercial air time to let you know that they’re responsible. I believe them ... don’t you?

I am a privileged Dutch boy.
I kill girls and my daddy “fixes it”.
I hide,
Behind a smirk and an expensive lawyer and lies.
Until Peru.
Now I go to prison,
Guilty as charged.

The war rages on, soldiers are killed and maimed and terrorized, villagers are bombed, crops are burned to stop the drugs. New President, new party, same war. The nation grinds to a halt ... states go bankrupt, banks stop lending, the factory closed, the mill isn’t hiring and the unemployment check isn't going to cover the bills. New President, new party, same economy. I wouldn’t care if they all didn’t tell me it was Bush’s fault, if they didn’t tell me they would fix it. I know they’re all the same, do you? You can’t vote them out, it’s being “in” that makes them this way. The war rages on, jobs ... gone, and the oil isn’t going to stop flowing.

The media tries to use slight of hand (look, over here, a Dutch boy and Israel, BP ...) Did you see it? The trick? The war rages on with no end in sight, the oil is filling the gulf and congress is trying to get reelected, don’t look now, but it’s all happening.

American Corporation Aides Genocidal War Criminals

People who actually stand still while I talk (as opposed to running away) often ask me why it is that I am opposed to corporations. After all, corporations are great, aren’t they? They provide jobs, they pay for vital research and development, they donate money for charities, and on their quest for profit maximization they bring some useful things to market. All of that is true. And they also kill, maim and destroy on their quest for profit maximization, they bastardize the democratic process and use their massive wealth to direct our nation, they use their influence to create laws and to create wars. They use the media outlets they own to shift public opinion. It is their absolute moral ambivalence that makes them dangerous.
Nicaragua is one good example, a nation whose government we opposed and overthrew multiple times because of the “restrictive attitudes toward foreign access to Nicaraguan natural resources” ... a nation that we occupied militarily from 1912 until 1933 (is that in your history book?) just so American corporations could profit.
And then there’s WWI (that is in your history book), at the time our President was Woodrow Wilson, an outspoken pacifist who refused to get involved in the European war, or to commit American resources to the effort ... until he changed his mind and we entered the war on the side of England and France, which was no big deal, I mean ONLY a hundred sixteen thousand American soldiers died, ONLY two hundred thousand were wounded. Why the change of heart? JP Morgan had loaned England and France money to fight the war and they were losing, if they were defeated Morgan would be out $500 million in 1915 ($10,474,837,854.01 in 2009 dollars), and wouldn’t you know, all of a sudden, President Wilson wasn’t such a pacifist after all. And if you care, the repayment of the loan was passed on to Germany alone at the close of the war, bankrupted them, created hyperinflation and massive unemployment and allowed a little known architect to become Chancellor in 1933 on the promise to stop paying the loan ... Adolph Hitler.
If you want more examples of corporations acting out on the geo-political stage, read Howard Zinn’s “The People’s History of the United States”
Which brings me to Bechtel. If you want the entire history of the company click HERE but suffice to say that they are a massive, family run corporation with major political ties all over the world and a penchant for secrecy.


According to the Wall Street Journal, Bechtel established a strong relationship with the rebel leader Laurent Kabila during the First Congo War of 1996-7 in central Africa, compiling "the most complete mineralogical and geographical data of the former Zaire ever assembled, information worth a fortune to any prospective mining or oil firm" and commissioning and paying for "U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite studies of the country and for infrared maps of its mineral potential." According to government officials, some of the satellite data provided to Kabila by Bechtel was "militarily useful information." Just to make it clear when a corporation establishes a “strong relationship” with a African rebel leader that means that they gave him lots of money. And if they are willing to pay NASA to take very expensive pictures of the country it means two things; one, they are going to get something in return if Kabila is successful in his revolutionary efforts ... and two, they are NOT GOING TO ALLOW HIM TO FAIL. It’s called return on investment, and you don’t become a massive multinational corporation by making risky investments, in revolution of all things.

Who cares about Bechtel or Laurent Kabila?

Well, lets go back a little further, with out writing a book on all of African history or launching into a course on African geography, remember Rwanda? When you think of Rwanda you probably think of genocide. In 1994 Rwanda exploded into ethnic violence, the ethnic minority (having formed an army in Uganda) invaded from the north and the majority (incited by state radio and community leaders) began a massacre that would leave somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 dead in one hundred days, as the killing went on the perpetrators (nearly 2 million people) were forced out of the country into neighboring Zaire by the advancing rebel army. One hundred days of INSANITY! The war criminals set up “refugee” camps in eastern Zaire and received humanitarian aide from the UN.
Two years later Kabila mysteriously had the resources and the men (after being a revolutionary for 35 years) for the first time to begin his offensive against the entrenched government he despised. The rebels first action was to expel the refugees from the camps, push them back to Rwanda, to an uncertain future (that thankfully turned out to be peaceful). Amid stories of slaughter and torture, 60,000 from the camps went missing at the time and have never been accounted for, you see, his army was ethnically the same as the minority from Rwanda (or at least sympathetic). He received support from the Rwandan government as well as Uganda, and ... his new friend Bechtel. I know that there is no good guy in any of this, war criminals killing war criminals, forming armies, invading countries, overthrowing governments ... but as complicated as politics in central Africa is, certainly we hold American corporations to a higher standard. American companies are not supposed to be financing revolutions to overthrow governments, they are not supposed to give money to armies that slaughter 60,000 people so that they can continue on their rampage, just to get mineral rights to sell to mining companies. NASA is not supposed to sell satellite images to companies that then turn around an give “militarily useful” information to Marxist revolutionaries ... we (as a nation) were part of it too, NASA is us. And then there is the dismal job done by the New York Times reporting on the revolution ... Kabila was the savior of central Africa, all would be right with the world. No mention of Rwanda refugees being killed wholesale, no mention of foreign aide ... it was a populist movement, no mention of Kabila’s previous political activity, his involvement with Ernesto “Che” Guevarra, who left Zaire in disgust at Kabila’s incompetence decades earlier, and no mention of Bechtel, no mention of the satellite photos being provided, no mention of mineral rights. According to the New York Times this was pure. Kabila was the real deal, and upon his victory Zaire would be a paradise.
So the question becomes, why? And although there are many possible answers, the only one that makes any real sense is that the New York Times (and probably other papers) were fronting for Bechtel, paving the public relations highway for them.
So in summary we have an American corporation (Bechtel) giving aide to an army that, as it’s first act killed “refugees” from ethnic violence in Rwanda, forcing the survivors back into the country they fled, the rebels (funded by Bechtel) then overthrow their government and fight a war to do so, killing tens of thousands of their countrymen and eventually installing a non-democratic government in the capital. The New York Times who praised this movement had nothing to say once the war ended, there was no half page expose about the corruption rampant in Kabila’s government. Kabila was assassinated by his own bodyguard less than 5 years later and replaced by his son, typical chaos for central Africa in recent years. An American corporation, who gets sweetheart deals from our government for contracts with regularity, who own airports and builds massive construction projects, crossed the line and financed Marxist revolutionaries (who actually succeeded) then meddled with international politics, they indirectly killed and maimed and displaced people ... all in search of the almighty profit. They never thought twice, it was the means to the end, they wanted those mineral rights and the mapping and the price was money and “militarily useful” information ... you want a cup of coffee and the price is $1.95, and that’s that. Business as usual.

Just FIX It!

So here is how for-profit companies work (for better or for worse), they determine a good to produce or a service to provide and then they make every effort to do so in a way that creates profit. For those of you who do not function daily in a business setting profit is income - expenses. So to achieve the optimum profit such a company would have to maximize income and minimize expenses, right? It is a fine balancing act in a “free” market economy, you can’t charge $4345.78 for a loaf of bread, the guy down the street is selling bread for $2.49 a loaf, and if it costs you $1.78 to bake the bread you can’t sell it for $1.77 either. In a competitive environment cost cutting becomes a key to remaining in business. So, why in the world would an oil company who has the best and brightest business minds on the payroll decide to build a floating city out in the middle of the ocean in order to extract oil? A floating city that is exposed to hurricanes and all the hazards and unpredictability of the open ocean. If you think it is because they have to because that is where the oil is, you are wrong. Decades ago oil companies developed very complex drilling techniques that allow for horizontal drilling, it was done to maximize production out of a single well, but the technique would allow a rig close to shore drill in to a well out at sea. It would be safer and more importantly (for the oil company), it would be cheaper. So why the floating uber-expensive city?

The answer to why a company would spend millions of dollars just to make production more difficult baffled me when I first heard the details of the spill in the gulf. I am responsible for a automotive repair facility (a garage) we fix cars and trucks inside and I would not buy a million dollar elevator just so that I could have my crew fix vehicles on the roof ... it’s not the business way. The business way is how much can we get out of how little, not how little can we get for how much. That’s why there are layoffs, someone decides that a reduction in payroll expense outweighs the loss of production ... and sometimes the someone is right.
So oil companies just decided to drill for oil in the most expensive way possible, in a manner that is rife with risks and peril?
Regulation.
They have to. If they could oil companies would set up shop in the shallows and still drill a mile deep, but they cannot. Regulation forced them out to sea, forced them to buy three different $500,000 emergency shut off valves (that were never tested in the field until the Horizon disaster), forced them to build floating cities, forced them to pay higher wages, buy helicopters to supply the rigs ... forced them to take risks. So it looks like “mistakes were made” and I’m not trying to say that it is the regulation’s fault that the valves failed, that the rig burned and sank, I’m not trying to say that I want to take my kids to the beach and look out and see hundreds of oil rigs ... don’t misunderstand me. But also know that if they could BP would build their drilling site ON the beach and drill from there, I don’t want them to, but they didn’t chose to drill a mile deep in the ocean, they bought and installed the valves that the regulation told them would prevent a disaster like the spill they cannot stop now, all three failed.
Over the past 42 days BP has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stop the flow of oil, and they have failed at every turn, I am not an oil company apologist, I’m not even a “free market” economics apologist, and of all the oil companies BP is one of my least favorites for an entirely different reason. It has become a balancing act, like so many businesses. Consumers demand oil and oil related products, they demand that they can purchase them at low prices, they demand there be no adverse environmental impact from their mining or use, and they demand not to see any part of that mining or the refining process. The oil company is left to extract oil and make it magically appear in the gas pump with out anyone noticing.
Deep sea rigs operate every day without failure, so we must assume that SOMEONE on this drilling platform is at immediate fault for the disaster (let us not forget the men who died the day the rig burned), we all share in the guilt of forcing them to work in the most difficult circumstances, consumers are at fault, government is at fault and big oil is at fault.
So, now that the blame game is out the way ... let’s figure out how to stop it and clean it up!
I, for one, am not comforted by a speech telling me how terrible oil companies are and how the government is going to “make them clean it up”. Someone needs to resurrect Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller and get this thing fixed. Then give me the speech.

Vaccines Cause ... Healthy Children

It is Monday and that means ... well, lately it doesn’t mean anything, but it USED to mean that there was a new Pinko’s World post to read. And what do you know, here’s a new post to read.

I had to write about this, it is very close to my heart ... because I have children. Do you have children? Really? Awesome. So anyway, intelligent people have had their children vaccinated against terrible diseases for generations, schools require it, international travel requires it ... and it saves millions of lives (mostly children) the world over. This is how it works, a guy named Jonas Salk figured out that if you take some of the virus that causes polio and kill the cells and inject a little bit of it into a healthy person, that person’s body builds up a natural defense to the virus that has been injected in to them. It’s exactly like actually getting polio except that the virus does not multiply, because it is dead ... so the healthy person does not die. Genius and simple and world changing. So, research scientists set out to create all kinds of vaccines and have done so with amazing precision and results. It is one of the few true success stories of modern medicine.

That was until an idiot from England (coincidence?) came along and told everyone that he had done research and found that these life saving vaccines were the cause of autism. He published a paper in a medical journal and people the world over bought into the idiotic theory, which was presented as fact. Vaccination rates dropped and most notably measles, all but eradicated, broke out all over the developed world. An unvaccinated 13 year old boy became the first person in Britain to die from measles in 14 years. In the aftermath of this widely publicized medical hoax countless medical journals published the work of real doctors and scientists showing that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. The real science was ignored. Ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield is a pariah, a pariah who is willing to put his own fame ahead of the children of the world’s health. Praise God that Britain's General Medical Council, which licenses and oversees doctors, found Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct and stripped him of the right to practice medicine. By the way, Wakefield is not a researcher, he is not a vaccine expert, he is not an autism expert ... he is a gastroenterologist. Unfortunately, there are still people spreading his lies, most notably Hollywood actors, and if you get advice on how to keep your children healthy from Hollywood ... then your kids deserve better parents and you deserve to nurse a measles patient back to health. So let’s make it clear once and for all. Vaccines do NOT cause autism, vaccines do prevent deadly diseases. British doctors who make claims to the contrary are IDIOTS.
I asked at the beginning if you had children, because if you do then someone, somewhere has come to you and told you not to vaccinate them because your child will get autism, right? Well, next time someone does that please slap them so that they will understand that DISEASES kill children, and that VACCINES (composed of dead viruses, remember) DO NOT cause AUTISM.

The Forgotten

You farmed your fields,
You raised your children,
You toiled.
You walked to the ballot box, elected a government.

The leaders democracy chose ,
Chased from the capital,
Retreated to safety,
Remain still, silent, chose peace.

When the throngs arrive,
Bangkok recoils.
When the throngs burn and riot,
The world passes their righteous judgement.

“Unruly peasants.”
“Anti-government protests”
What government?
They legitimize the regime that stole your country.

Your leaders surrender.
Red shirts folded up and put away,
You go home to toil,
Empty handed.

Behind you, in the distance,
Bangkok burns,
News cameras roll tape,
And when the fire goes out, the camera goes home.

You will farm your fields,
You will raise your children,
You will toil,
The ballot box, like you, will be forgotten.