The Bremo Beacon

During WW II, Navy Yard Puget Sound repaired twenty-six battleships…some more than once…eighteen aircraft carriers, thirteen cruisers, and seventy-nine destroyers. In addition, the 30,000-plus shipyard workers built fifty-three new vessels, including five aircraft carriers, thirteen destroyers and eight destroyer escorts. They also overhauled, repaired, or fitted out another four hundred warships. What a truly monumental accomplishment!

Bremo's Armed Forces Festival in May is the largest and longest running Armed Forces Day parade in the United States. Other events that week in 2005 included: an Armed Forces Festival Golf Tournament, an Advanced Acoustic Concepts demonstration, and a Military Culinary Arts Competition.

It starts in downtown Bremo at Fourth and Chester, goes up Warren Ave to Burwell, Burwell to Pacific, and along Pacific Avenue to Sixth Street. It began at 10:00 AM, and last year consisted of over one hundred and forty entries including bands, floats, military units and much more. Third Street was renamed Burwell Street one hundred years ago in January of 1906. It was named after Rear Admiral William Turnbull Burwell, who as Captain Burwell was Commandant of the shipyard from July 02, 1900 until August 29, 1902.

The battleship USS Missouri, site of the Japanese surrender treaty signing that ended World War II, was assigned to the Pacific Reserve Fleet at PSNS in 1955. For thirty years, she served as the city's primary tourist attraction. Hundreds of thousands of visitors walked the ‘surrender deck’ before the ship was recommissioned in 1985. The Mighty Mo is now proudly established in Pearl Harbor. Everyone here hated to see her go, but realize that she is now where she needs to be.

Despite this illustrious, exemplary and glorious past, Bremo fell on hard times, especially in the past few decades. Not long ago, a husband and wife team of morticians from Bainbridge Island, also a part of Kitsap County along with Bremo, somehow managed to get a permit to operate a crematorium, right here in Navy Yard City behind the beautiful West Hills Elementary School. [Kitsap County has more shoreline than any other county in the country, and a population of about 265,000. It was named after Chief Kitsap, the most powerful of all the Chiefs from 1790 to 1845. As war chief of the Suquamish Tribe he held sway over territory from what is now Olympia, Washington all the way north to the Frazier River in British Columbia. The renowned Chief Seattle was one of his sub-chiefs.]

This crematorium fiasco eventually surfaced and the general outrage was augmented by that of the school’s attorney, the Bremo City Attorney, and many others. The panel that heard the Appeal at the County Seat in Port Orchard ruled that a crematorium at that location would be most illegal, inappropriate, and objectionable in a virtual myriad of ways.

The entire Olympic Peninsular is mostly under populated. Kitsap County is more wilderness, mountain, and water, than anything else. Bainbridge Island…[Adrienne please look up that reverse sexual harassment suit movie w/ Michael Douglas and Demi Moore…and plug in here. Danke!] >>> Disclosure (1994) <<< Michael Crichton's best selling novel was made into a movie that was directed by Barry Levinson. The movie local is Bainbridge Island / Ferry / Seattle. [Ferry: www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/] Bainbridge Island has a median home price of $500,000 and is sparsely populated. So, despite hundreds and in fact thousands of square miles of rural area, these unenlightened ones from Bainbridge Island demand to stuff a crematorium into a residential neighborhood in our City by an elementary school…and at last report, despite overwhelming and fierce opposition, were fighting on via their attorney to do just that. As if the long enduring ‘real’ patriots of Navy Yard City deserve any part of such an atrocity.

Bainbridge Island and East Bremo are separated only by the Port Orchard Passage, but to drive you need to go north the entire length of the island, over the Agate Pass Bridge, through Poulsbo, Keyport, and then over and south all the way past Silverdale, Tracyton, and on down to Bremo. These people would travel that far, just to burn human bodies and spew the smoke over a residential city neighborhood and elementary school. The irrationality of people never ceases to amaze me.

Of course the place would itself be cremated by the justifiably enraged local citizenry, I would suspect in rather short order, were these Bainbridge Islanders ever to be successful. The locals say that this woman looks and acts just like Olive Oyl, except that she is mean and nasty. I have no comment.

I backpack past the quietly notorious National Bar…established in 1944, Crazy Eric’s Famous Burger stand, the home of Harvey’s Butter Rum Batter, and the Fleet Reserve Association Branch 29 - Meeting second Tuesday of every Month 18:00 – NAV / USMC / USCG. One could write a book about each of the above.

Took Veh#5, Yellow Dragon: Yellow & Black 2000 Honda Valkyrie Standard six cylinder/six carburetor motorcycle, to the Kitsap Family YMCA [www.ymca.net/] in East Bremo. The original YMCA was dedicated in Bremo on May 01, 1911. I meet with Glen Godfrey the Executive Director and cut him a personal check for $5,000. That makes $10,000 and should put me where I need to be in March when the Teen-Youth Room Expansion Project is dedicated. This is also a perfect way to rub shoulders with a Listee or two.

Amazing what you can do with an unlimited budget. Or almost unlimited…the first quarter mil is pre-approved and that should more than do it, but additional funds are certainly available if circumstances require them. I will not pad…I will not pad…I.

I have dealt with large budgets and big cases before, but nothing like this, not with all these disparate and desperate elements.

It has been raining for the past couple of months. A record rain of 18.69 inches fell in January, second only to 20.02 in 1953. Nevertheless I consider that Western Washington weather is the finest for me in the USA. Great to be back on the Valk!

The Olympic Peninsular however, houses that rarity, a temperate rain forest. The main Union River Reservoir that plentifully supplies Bremo’s drinking water is so clean that it requires virtually no treatment mandated by the State. Reference the Olympic National Park [www.nps.gov/olym/].

One thing about living on Whidbey Island that managed to surprise even an old cynic like me was the division between North Whidbey and South Whidbey residents. I lived on a sand spit in the southernmost bay. There was a most definite island people connection, a we are all in the same boat mentality that was beautiful and would manifest itself in numerous ways. This was most welcomed by us escapees from Los Angeles.

But I was really surprised that this feeling did not extend itself to North Whidbey. At that time in 1994, South Whidbey had no traffic signals or fast food outlets, whereas North Whidbey had a number of each. It was as if they were two separate islands. It reminded me of that cartoon, perhaps a Dr. Seuss where there were two identical sets of odd looking critters except that one group had a star on their forehead, while the other group did not. That was all it took to divide them into opposing camps.

The oldest rule in politics is to divide and conquer. It is hard not to get a kick out of how prisoners will do their damnedest to divide themselves along racial lines; while they are kept prisoners by guards of all races who are working together to keep them locked up. So many are doing time, not so much for being criminals but for being hotheaded and stupid.

Item: Yes, Long Island, NY is longer than Whidbey Island; it just isn’t an island, as was determined by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a little known fact that to be an island, the surrounding water must be of approximately the same depth. Long Island is in fact a peninsular that has a river cutting across the top of it. The depth of the river is not of the same order of magnitude as the surrounding ocean and sound.

Bremo also has a general hospital, Harrison Medical Center [www.harrisonmedical.org/]. Other popular Puget Sound islands such as Bainbridge, Vashon and further north, the San Juans, are notably lacking in this regard. Harrison is undergoing and planning major expansions over the next twenty-five years. It will draw patients not only from Kitsap County, but also from Clallam, Jefferson, and Mason Counties. The community is also home to Naval Hospital Bremo.

Both auto and passenger only ferries run between Bremo and Seattle. It is a beautiful run that takes one hour on the slower auto ferry. The ferry terminal is part of the new Bremo Transportation Center and is combined with the main local bus terminal.

Our good Mayor Cary Bozeman started his ‘bringing back downtown’ campaign almost immediately after taking office in 2002, cleaning up dusty streets and planting flowers. He has been on quite a roll ever since.

The adjacent area has already been developed as the Maritime Park and Memorial Plaza. This includes the Public Gardens, the Kitsap Conference Center, Hampton Inn and Suites, a marvelous fountain that goes through almost endless patterns of water including cylindrical arcs of water with amazingly distinct and sharply defined beginnings and ends, several interesting eateries, the Open Spaces area and Great Lawn, Galleries, and Anthony's HomePort Restaurant is due to open there this Spring. Another redevelopment project is a countywide Mosquito Fleet Trail. The term Mosquito Fleet requires an explanation. Before Washington State Ferries was established, private ferryboats ran all over the place and were known as the Mosquito Fleet.

The February 12th edition of the Kitsap Sun [www.kitsapsun.com/] reports that Hotel Concepts Inc. of Seattle plans to pay Bremo $930,000 for three parcels near 4^th Street and Washington Avenue and including the old City Hall. This will increase downtown hotel rooms from nada in 2004 prior to the Hampton Inn and Suites, to about 280 upon completion of this new facility.

One of the biggest projects was a new regional government center on Fifth Street, a combined $72 million effort completed in 2004. The Norm Dicks Government Center was named in honor and appreciation for our Congressman for the 6th District of Washington State. [www.house.gov/dicks/]

Next come the Harborside Condominiums [www.harborsidecondominiums.com/] and a new marina. Thus, one will be able to live on the new waterfront in a scintillating Harborside condo, walk on a covered walkway to the ferry terminal…and cruise in and out of downtown Seattle. That is two hours per day not fighting traffic but rather, reading a book, preparing a business presentation, studying for a class at the University of Washington, UW, or sipping a specialty coffee purchased onboard or picked up at the new Starbucks just prior to entering the terminal.

In line with this development is the hotly debated ‘Tunnel Project’. The Washington State Department of Transportation, WSDOT, is designing a tunnel to separate downtown Bremo pedestrian traffic from offloading Washington State Ferry traffic. The periodic surge of ferry traffic through downtown Bremo is interfering with pedestrian and local traffic flow including access to and from the Bremo Transportation Center. This project is in partnership with the city of Bremo, Kitsap Transit, the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration. Other organizations have also participated in its development, including the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and local emergency services.

A tunnel that connects the Transportation Center to Burwell Street will improve pedestrian safety and local traffic flow in downtown Bremo by removing approximately 65% of offloading ferry traffic from Washington Avenue. The final tunnel design will be completed in the spring of 2006. Right of way acquisition will be completed in the fall of 2006, with the construction contract awarded soon afterward. Such a tunnel will mesh nicely with the overall plan to make downtown Bremo a pedestrian friendly place.

The Washington State Legislature has not directly allocated funds for this project. The transportation improvement portion of this project is funded primarily by federal funds from the Federal Highway Administration, and the Federal Transit Administration. WSDOT is providing matching funds in the form of ferry toll credits issued to it by the Federal Highway Administration. City funds will only be used to cover 45% of the cost of the associated Combined Sewer Overflow Reduction project.

Moving north along the boardwalk the USS Turner Joy, a Vietnam-era destroyer, is open for tours daily throughout the summer. The USS Turner Joy played a major role in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Actually it was a pair of alleged attacks by North Vietnamese gunboats on two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy in August of 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin that sparked the full U.S. engagement in Vietnam.

The first attack was a heavy gun fired upon the USS Maddox by a North Vietnamese patrol boat. The second attack was originally thought to be perhaps eight torpedoes fired on both of the above ships. Later research, including a report released in 2005 by the National Security Agency, indicates that the second attack did not in fact actually occur at all, but consisted of misread sonar readings by nervous operators.

The USS Turner Joy can even be rented for the evening. There is nothing like having control of a U.S. Navy destroyer to make for a memorable bash!

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, which occupies much of the Sinclair Inlet waterfront, is something of a mixed blessing, presenting an industrial facade that feeds Bremo's long-standing reputation as a funky blue-collar town.

The shipyard itself is in the midst of an upgrade that would help change its industrial exterior. It has moved historic Building 50 to an area adjacent to the ferry terminal, where it will anchor a new Maritime Park and house the Bremo Naval Museum. In its new location, the building will provide a more attractive first impression for ferry passengers, in stark contrast to the ‘plate yard,’ an outdoor storage area for raw steel that has been greeting arriving visitors.

The city's showcase Louis Mentor Boardwalk, actually a wide concrete walkway, is linked to the new Kitsap Conference Center and will be connected to an expanded marina to provide waterfront amenities.

Also downtown are the Kitsap Historical Museum on Fourth Street [www.kitsaphistory.org/] and The Naval Memorial Museum of the Pacific aka Bremo Naval Museum that has yet to move into Building 50 from Pacific Avenue. The downtown waterfront boardwalk is the site of summer evening concerts and the wonderful Labor Day Blackberry Festival, both sponsored by the Bremo Main Street Association.

Across the Port Washington Narrows from downtown, in East Bremo, a new ice arena opened to much fanfare last year, and has added recreational opportunities to the existing Kitsap Family YMCA, the Bremo Ice Rink, and city pool. A new skatepark is now also a reality in Eastpark.

When the WW II war work ended, Bremo's population plummeted to 27,000. It has ebbed and flowed ever since. Today, there are about 37,500 residents. That makes Bremo, Kitsap County's largest city by far. And if location, location, location, are the three most important aspects of real estate, then Bremo has it all.

But the kicker is that the entire city core is covered with these slapdash homes of every possible description. There is hardly any homogeneity to be found anywhere. Even if you do find a nice house that you like, next door may be one that hasn’t been painted in over a half century; bare wood. How can this city possibly get the total upgrade that it needs and so richly deserves?

Looking at the opposites poles of this dilemma, the yin and yang of it, we have at one extreme the following. An entity buys up the whole city, bulldozers it all down and rebuilds Bremo in the finest manner commensurate with its prime location, bountiful attributes and natural resources. This would in one giant fell swoop, increase the real estate value perhaps tenfold. Who or what could finance such a huge project? Well…you really don’t have to look that far away. How to do it, how to make it fly is another question. As soon as the city began to be bought up, prices would skyrocket out of practical reach.

At the other end of this spectrum, you have slowly expanding waves of demolition and rebuilding emanating out from the newly developed waterfront and the other designated centers of renewal around town. What this basically means is that these local folk, these hardworking, hardscrabble, strong, tough, talented, highly skilled, loyal and patriotic, blue-collar, shipyard workers and their families will be slowly driven out by ever increasing property taxes. This process will be excruciatingly slow and painful, and never will it result in a proper redevelopment.

Either way there are always holdouts that will never sell. I have a favorite photo, an interesting picture that I took in Beijing in 2003. It is on the grounds of a technical university, perhaps the University of Transportation or something like that. My traveling companion and translator, Xiao-Ping, lived there as a child when her father taught there. Just an outline of the foundation of her former home remains. It looks about the size of one regular sized room that was sub-divided into four tiny rooms. A fruit or nut tree that helped keep them alive during the very worst of times somehow survives.

After the Korean War her dad was sent to the Chinese Embassy in North Korea. He later became the head of the China Science and Technology Museum and brought an exhibit on tour to the U.S. and Canada. He gave me the most beautiful Commemorative piece you can imagine. It honors the 15^th Anniversary of the Opening of said Museum, 1988 – 2003, and is a gorgeous hunk of Lucite with engravings, a clock and hydrometer, all packaged in a typically marvelous Chinese case.

At age sixteen, Xiao-Ping, during the so-called Cultural Revolution was sent on a train one thousand miles north to Siberia to work on a manual labor farm. Eventually she escaped that fate, found her way to Seattle, worked five jobs; throwing newspapers, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant kitchen, tending an old guy, tying wire [construction rebar ~ and she is tiny], and I forget the last one; and simultaneously taught herself English. She saved twenty thousand dollars and talked her way into the University of Idaho at Moscow even though she flunked the language test. There she ended up with a Masters degree in Biochemistry and passed on a doctorate program as she was by then more than ready to enter the fray.

Many years ago this Beijing University needed to remove all of these rural-like dwellings so that it could expand into that area with high-rise buildings of learning. Ms. Zhu’s family had three bedrooms so the University exchanged this humble abode for both a two bedroom and a one bedroom modern apartment. But the picture I took is of a multigenerational family that incredibly is still there. They simply refused to ever move.

A Westerner will be quick to wonder why a totalitarian government that shoots people right after sentencing and then sends the family a bill for the bullet; why such a power could not move this family…and what about eminent domain? But the property is on University grounds and there must have been some loophole in the documents. They are still right there today, with their corral and rural patch, surrounded by new modern buildings. Holdouts can holdout for amazing lengths of time.

Everywhere we went in Mainland China capitalism was rampant. People here still think in terms of Communist China or Red China. Nothing could be further from the simple truth. When you have a totalitarian government and capitalism, that is fascism…the opposite of communism. There is a Bumper Sticker that says, Ever Stop to Think…and Forget to Start Again? But really, that is not the problem; most people are just too busy and overloaded these days to find the time to stop to think about such things at all.

Like the Russians, the Chinese used communism as a means of transition from feudalism to capitalism, but the Chinese never were the true believers in the same way that the Soviets were. One more thought, most people are aware of the one child policy in China to control and reduce population, but how many realize that this means a whole huge country consisting of families that all contain an only-child…and the ramifications of that?

Getting back to the Art Walk, I eventually checked out another gallery and then slipped down around the corner, across from the Ferry Terminal to the funky Westside Burrito Connection, 208 1st Street, next to the South Pacific Sports Bar at 218. I order a huge Regular Burrito and an Alaskan Amber draft. Some fledgling musicians have taken up the vacant tables in the back but I give the pregnant food assembler two bucks and she consolidates them, and frees me up a table.

20:00 and I am at the Admiral Theatre for the Children of Uganda. It is all quite lovely. I missed my siesta and have to will my eyes open. I dig the drums, singing, and dancing and wonder if there is any way that I could possibly steal a small portion of the energy possessed by these marvelous children.

When you come right down to it, we are all Africans, either stay-at-home African, or wandering Africans. Let me explain. Years ago during the Cold War that pitted the two super-powers against each other, the Soviet Union and the United States, it eventually occurred to me that what it really was, was a battle between the Stay-at-Home Russians, and the Wandering Russians.

When humanity moved up into the Caucuses Mountains, hence the name Caucasians, the tribe eventually became so large that it had to split in two like a giant amoeba. Roughly half stayed behind, while the other half left. I think they moved up into what is now Germany and on down into what became Greece, Italy, Spain, France and so forth.

Then about a thousand years later, the original tribe had once again grown to the point where it had to split in two. These wanderers followed the same valley pathways as before and they also descended south into Rome and elsewhere. This time they were described as the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and just plain nasty barbarian tribes.

Later these Caucasians set sail from Spain, Portugal, France, England, and all the rest to populate the New World, including the United States. Despite the time lags and long journeys, they are still emanating from the same original tribe; hence the Stay-At-Home Caucasians vs the Wandering Caucasians; i.e. the Russians vs. the Americans.

Back to the Africans. I sent my DNA to the National Geographic’s Genographic Project and just got back the results. My Y-chromosome shows that I belong to Haplogroup R1b – M343.

This means that my ancestors left Africa in group M168 about 50,000 years ago. By 45,000 years ago they had crossed onto the Arabian Peninsular and the Middle East as M89. 40,000 years ago as M9 they passed through Northern India. Recall that Sanskrit is an ancient Hindu language from Northern India. It is a member of the Indo-European family.

Then 35,000 years ago as M45 they expanded through Central Asia and the Caucuses. 30,000 years ago, now as M173 they migrated across Northern Europe and finally as M343 they ended up in Lisbon. A bit earlier they broke off into a Great Britain Migration, the Magdalenian Culture, the Lascaux Cave in France, and the Altamira Caves in Spain.

Interestingly to me is that when I was wandering over Europe and North Africa is 2002, I surmounted considerable difficulty in reaching the Lascaux Cave and I also found that the food that was most to my liking in Europe, was in Portugal in general and Lisbon in particular.

I have since traced my male French ancestry back to one Noel Blanchette, born circa 1608 in Saint Omer de Rosiere de Santere, Amiens, France. By the mid 1600’s my antecedents had arrived in Quebec, Canada. Later they drifted down into New England to work in the mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

And so, we are all either Stay-at-Home Africans or Wandering Africans, or hauled off into slavery Africans. There is only one race…the human race. Differences in skin color are merely a result in the various gradations of melanin.

Melanic pigmentation is advantageous in many ways: It is a barrier against the effects of the ultraviolet rays of sunlight. On exposure to sunlight, for example, the human epidermis undergoes gradual tanning as a result of an increase in melanin pigment. It is a mechanism for the absorption of heat from sunlight, a function that is especially important for cold-blooded animals.

It affords concealment to certain animals that become active in twilight. It limits the incidence of beams of light entering the eye and absorbs scattered light within the eyeball, allowing greater visual acuity. It provides resistance to abrasion because of the molecular structure of the pigment. Many desert-dwelling birds, for example, have black plumage as an adaptation to their abrasive habitat.

Stay-at homes seem to be generally more into the status quo and authoritarianism, while wanderers are, not surprisingly, more open and flexible. Next time you go to a high school reunion, compare those that never left the old hometown with those that moved about the country and the world.

The African Continent is a toughie. We have so many images of those emaciated starving children. To be honest, after the first sympathetic reaction, many feel that they shouldn’t have babies that they can’t feed and if others feed them; that will just produce even more starving babies than before. It is far from being that simple but the reaction is understandable.

Couple that with such enormous atrocities like the Rwandan Genocide, which was the slaughter of almost a million Tutsis by Hutus during a period of 100 days from April 6th through mid-July 1994. But then you read, Left to Tell a book by Immaculee Ilibagiza about discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, and you have to think that this beautiful young girl who survived against all odds is a living saint.

Africa is such a contrast in beauty and ugliness. The HIV/AIDS situation is another monster. Many African men for misguided reasons of so-called purity, prefer that their women be dry during intercourse. The females can accomplish this with one powder or another but this naturally leads to vaginal tearing and that is HIV’s best friend. Even more grotesque is the disgustingly ignorant belief that if you have AIDS you will be cured if you have sex with a virgin. It is obvious where that leads. In addition they still have such barbaric practices as female genital excision, often called female circumcision; a procedure that is as uncalled for as it is painful and risky.

Twenty-three of the poorest twenty-five countries in this world are in Africa and getting poorer all the time. Extreme poverty is killing minimally thirty thousand daily…that is one child every 2.88 seconds. The death toll of the Great Tsunami of December 2004 was around a quarter of a million people. That is about an average week’s death toll from extreme poverty!

Regarding that Tsunami, can anyone actually believe that those who died were all bad people who had it coming? Or must one see all these deaths for what they were, a statistical occurrence arising from an act of nature. In this case a monstrous wave generated by a great undersea earthquake. No more and no less. True the dead were mostly Muslims and it occurred the day after Christmas…what does that mean? It means nothing, absolutely nothing.

People die when churches collapse or catch fire and Muslims have a penchant for trampling each other to death during their mass pilgrimages to Mecca. None of this is the work of a higher power; this is man making his usual mistakes.

All life on Earth collectively is known as Gaia [www.gaia.org/] and she is hurting right now. One could think of her as an aspect of Mother Nature. Can you be healthy if your body is perfect except for one leg that is terribly ill? Can our planet be healthy if one continent like Africa has such severe problems? Worldwide, eight hundred million people are living on less than a dollar per day. Meanwhile every cow in the European Union is being subsidized at $2.50 per day.

Above I mentioned Lisbon. That is what we call that city but its real name is Lisboa. This is a real pet peeve of mine. Why in this day and age do we not call and teach our children the true names of other countries and cities? Habit? The world is quite small now, and many will travel. There is no Rome, Florence, or Venice; they are Roma, Florencia, and Venezia. Those are not that far off, but how about Vienna? If you are waiting for a train to Vienna you will have a long wait…the name is Wien. Prague…no such place, it is Praha…and so on. What sense does it make to teach the names of major world cities by deliberately misspelling them, sometimes beyond recognition?

The same thing occurs with other words like the Muslim holy book the Quran, or Qu'ran, or Quoran, why do we call it the Koran? Just to confuse ourselves? And now that it is so much in the news we are forced to start at least trying to spell it correctly. At this time I do not know which spelling is correct. Then there is the misuse of words. The absolute worst is the use of the word miracle.

In my sixty-four years I have never seen or heard of an actual miracle. But it is used more and more often in the media to describe anything and everything. Well let me correct that, all existence and life is a miracle. How about this entire world arising from nothing? Talk about a free lunch. Everything about life should be seen as the miracle that it is.

But let us say a busload of twenty-nine kids goes over an embankment and one survives. It is guaranteed that this survivor will be called a miracle. Excuse me? What about the law of averages? The above is no more a miracle than if you drop a dozen eggs and one or two don’t break. If you want to pretend that some divine power personally altered reality and the laws of nature in order to save that one child…if you want to put the credit for that there, than you must lay the twenty-eight tragic deaths at that same doorstop. You can’t reasonably expect to have it both ways.

Another word used a lot is decimated. It comes from deci as in decade and decimal, and it means ten. It has been said that the Italian Military performed so poorly in WW II because they were too civilized. Well, they used to know how to do it. Decimated was the term for a brutal but effective practice of the Roman Army. When the boys really screwed the pooch they were decimated. They were formed up and every tenth man stepped forward. These men were then put to death. It didn’t matter what they had done or not done, or how good or bad they had performed as soldiers. They were slaughtered. An army of 100,000 was now only 90,000; but after that demonstration they didn’t hesitate to fight boldly and to work together as a team.

But now it doesn’t matter what the loss is, it could be 1% or 90% or anything and the talking head newscasters will go on about how this or that was decimated. These same mindless newsreaders will also misuse language and reel off numbers that are off by orders of magnitude without batting an eye.

Adrienne, I feel another rant coming on. But if I understand your feedback correctly, you are tripping on these streams of consciousness. They certainly help me on these lonely surveillances out in the cold and dark. You know how I feel about waste and cannot even think about leaving the motor running. Besides, it would attract too much attention. Just as time can pass quickly when you are absorbed on a computer, so too with organizing thoughts and recording them. It works great and has a cathartic effect by getting this stuff off my chest.

Yes, you are right about the lack of humor. Humor is such a part of my everyday existence, and my writings are often a scream, but I too have noticed how that is lacking here. Sitting in a cold vehicle may have something to do with it, but it is more than that. Obviously I am venting but that too could be done with more humor. To tell you the truth, it is more like I am, I don’t want to use a New Age word like channeling, it is more like this stuff is coming to me from a muse and that this particular muse is really pissed-off at current events and the state of humanity. My job is basically just to speak these messages out as they come to me.

I lived in the black community in Los Angels for thirty years, although the last five were spent mostly in Mexico. I have a great love and affection for black folk in general. They are a very gifted and generous people. In Africa, a hungry man with only a piece of bread to his name will often share half with you if you are in need, even though you are a total stranger. Nevertheless their grasp of public relations and introspection is often tragically lacking.

Let’s take the stereotype of the lying, stealing, non-working, ghetto Black male. What is this all about? Imagine that very powerful extraterrestrials have taken over the Earth and are enslaving the human race. What would we do? Well the best of us, the strongest, bravest, and most intelligent among us would form an underground resistance movement.

At every opportunity we would steal whatever we could from these oppressors. We would habitually lie to them. We would whenever possible not work for them. In short our ideal behavior would be to lie, steal, and to not work. Once those well-justified and practical ideals became an admired facet of our culture, how long would it take to undo those aberrations once the threat was removed? It would take many generations, and then only with much introspection and great effort. Is it any wonder that the horrors and oppression of slavery in this country had the same effect on some African-Americans?

Add to that the enormous and lasting damage done by welfare systems that required the man to leave the home in order for the woman to be eligible for AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. These forces made the woman the most powerful person in the family as she controlled the purse strings. The men were damaged beyond measure.

The black community in the U.S. is comprised of so many individuals of great talent and accomplishment, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, as well as musicians and athletes. Yet how often when the news media want a ‘black perspective’, do they produce some inarticulate, hostile, total ignoramus from the streets? This situation does seem to be getting better over time, but it still happens. Were the media doing this deliberately to make African-Americans look bad? It sure looks that way but then the media is supposed to be liberal leaning.

Certainly no other group would stand for it. Can you image a major news event that called for a White or Asian perspective, where the media would interview some smuck off skid row and advance this numb-nut’s mutterings as gospel? Such a travesty would never be tolerated, but it happens all the time with Black Community issues.

There is also a continuous perversity by the Black Community to make cause celebs out of the worst possible material. A young girl who gets shot while stealing from a mom and pop store, a retarded axe murderer, an underage killer, a wife-murdering ex-football star, the list goes on and on. So self-defeating. The broader community could care less about such people. What about the good Black Americans who are the victims of horrible injustice? They seem to get passed right over.

And the ‘n’ word thing. Blacks demand that we not use that word…give me a break, anyone can say any word that they want to. It reminds me of when my little sister would demand that I not do or say a certain something or she would get very upset. Who could resist that? Even if I had no intention whatever to do or say that thing that would get such a rise out of her…I was compelled to do so. She was begging for it.

The ‘n’ word is used in many different ways by many different people. The range is from a term of endearment to a vicious epithet. Even at its worst use by Whites, except for a few hopelessly ignorant crackers, it refers not to Black people in general but to characterize a lazy, lying, thieving type of character. In this regard there are plenty of White people that it can be and is applied to.

Blacks have also managed to bulletproof themselves to criticism. Almost no non-Black will criticize a Black person to their face. The attitude is that if you criticize me, we will gather and protest you or boycott you or whatever reprisal is in vogue. All that accomplishes is to deny them constructive criticism…and we can all at times sure use some of that. The result is that they are often treated like dangerous children, not reasonable adults.

The same sort of thing is happening with the Great Muslim Cartoon Riots going on. They riot and demand that we not make cartoons of Mohammed. Again, anyone can draw whatever cartoons they want to. The results of the riots beyond the death and destructions is that the whole world is now transmitting Muslim cartoons in print and on the Internet. That, plus unfortunately the world now views Muslims more than ever as mindless morons. The above arose in part because Islam does not allow any physical representation of Mohammed. If you think that is strange, Orthodox Jews don’t even allow the name of God to be spoken.

Respect is not something that can be demanded, it must be earned. If you demand respect in an infantile way, what you get is ridicule, hardly the desired outcome. If your religion or culture prohibits certain words or pictures, that is fine for you, just leave the rest of us out of it. You simply give away your power by allowing anyone to control your reactions to a word or a cartoon. It is also considered a really big insult if you show a Muslim the bottom of your feet or shoes. Oh really, how quaint. And do they expect the rest of the world to take note and observe this particular eccentricity?

Blacks have a great potential advantage in their skin color. New immigrants to the U.S. have traditionally spent their money within their close-knit community as much as possible. The Koreans who settled in Los Angels around Olympic Boulevard, New Seoul, are a case in point. In three short decades they have built that area up from nothing, to shopping malls and high-rises. All of this was accomplished by hard work and doing their darndest not to let their money out of that part of town.

But as time goes by, the immigrants become second, third, and beyond generations and that cohesiveness is lost as the subsequent generations join the mainstream. They no longer even recognize each other. This is where blacks would have the advantage. They can always instantly recognize each other by skin color. So if only they had the common positive trait of trading with their own, ethnically speaking, they would always have that advantage. The tragedy is that in fact, Blacks at many levels traditionally go out of their way not to give their business to other Blacks.

That is why the Black ghetto corner stores have been traditionally operated by outsiders. In Los Angeles it was first by Jews, then Koreans, and now some are from India. I mentioned a young Black girl, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who was shot dead by a female Korean shop owner, Soon Da Ju, for stealing a small item. There was massive Black outrage when Superior Court Judge Joyce Harlin gave probation to the shooter. The judge ended up being recalled. The actual facts are quite interesting.

Many of the Koreans who enter the New Seoul Community in Los Angeles are in fact from North Korea, not South Korea. When they escape from North Korea and arrive in the South, their extended families ship them to Los Angeles. Talk about a culture clash. If a North Korean shopkeeper shot a thief, they would probably be given a medal and a village celebration.

At the other end of this tragic event, the small shops in the ghetto overcharge so much for everything, that it is all but the shoppers duty and obligation to periodically ‘pocket’ some items in order to help even out the relationship. Both the young Black girl and the Korean woman thought that they were doing the right thing.

So inner city Blacks continue to eye each other suspiciously and their predators prey upon their own community. Meanwhile other groups get off the boat not knowing English, and by working together for the common good, soon sail right by some African Americans who have been here for centuries. How tragic.

I never did quite get Jesse Jackson. But he is right-on about pushing for the economic side of the problem and that the only color that really matters is green. I do know the Black community. I rode my BSA 650 Lightning Rocket from New Haven to Los Angeles in September of 1964. I had been a Repo Man in the New York Region for GMAC. I thought that I was doing really well when I quickly got a job as a bill collector in South Central with Watts as my territory. The first Watts riots were in ’65.

I attended the 1967 Watts Festival featuring H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and others, with James Brown entertaining. I lived the civil rights movement in Los Angels, in the Black community. I was there. In fact I drove to that festival with a black coworker. Just because we were a vehicle with a Black man and a White man in it, we were pulled over by the LAPD and thrown over the hood of my car.

Another time a Black friend named Melvin had his head shaved for medical treatment. Unfortunately for him there was a militant Black group at the time called US that shaved their heads as a symbol of membership. One night Melvin was driving to work in his caddy, minding his own business when his bare head was spotted by the LAPD. They beat him so severely that he ended up in the LAC USC Medical Center on the jail ward. As the saying on the street went, “LAPD don’t play.”

I was originally negative on Reverend Al Sharpton but have come to respect his intellect, savvy, and good sense of humor. But why are the most talented and developed Black leaders in the public eye so few and far between? Why in 2006 do Black kids have mostly gangsta rappers and the like to idolize? Is this more fallout from the slavery experience? Children are afraid to do well in school lest they be called acting White or being oreos.

As if knowledge should be White and ignorance should be Black. This inverted sanity must be taken head-on across the board. It is all fallout from the slavery era. Bill Cosby has gone out on a limb to try to deal with it and has run into all kinds of flak. As if ignorance, stupidity, and self-defeating tactics must be preserved at all costs. Ignorance needs to be eradicated, not protected.

Minister Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Black Muslims, for all his faults has many things correct. He stresses the economic development side of the divide and the Black Muslims are known for shunning alcohol and tobacco, good personal hygiene and being well dressed. They used to sell the most healthy and delicious pies on the streets of LA, especially near the Mosque on Crenshaw Boulevard. The vendor would be all but formally attired. The last time I was in LA I scoured the ghetto looking for one of these mean bean pies, but to no avail.

Then you have Black English as a major problem. I lived long enough in the Black Community that I speak Black English. Actually I often prefer it, and it is slowly seeping into the main stream via White kids due to its expressability, but that is not the point. Unless you are going to be the one in a million that becomes a pro ball player or a rap star or the like, you are most probably going to go nowhere unless you can speak mainstream English.

The whole notion of doing well in school being White is ludicrous. Who invented basketball, baseball, football, golf, or tennis? White people did…so what? Black youths don’t shun them. Black people invented jazz and blues, and rap. Do you see White people avoiding them because Blacks invented them?

There is no time to waste. Our society is spending many, many times the amount of money needed to provide splendid inner-city schools and associate support, in order to incarcerate Blacks and Hispanics. Worse yet, prisons are universities in crime and brutality. When you expect people to act like animals…you can be sure that many of them will do just that. But you can’t spend the money on the schools if the students think that learning is dumb and refuse to apply themselves.

There are many signs of deep progress. Blacks in movie roles is one of them. Originally their depiction was horrible and humiliating at best. Then during the Civil Rights struggles the Blacksploitation flicks came along. As bad as they were, it was a great leap forward. Today many Black movies are being made with excellent role models. These movies are fun and entertaining while still transmitting healthy attitudes and outright wisdom to their viewers.

Decades ago I was riding the ‘extra car’, the RTD, the bus. I noticed an ad along the inside top row where they string them. I will always remember what it said. It was sponsored by the Los Angles Times and it read, “If the Truth Hurts…It Should”.

17:00 ON
02-04-06 Saturday - I arrive again at the Amy Burnett Gallery. Judith Kay, a transplanted New Yorker via Southern California, is doing a splendid job on the piano. A raffle is underway in support of the Opera Guild. This is the staging area for the Kitsap Opera Guild’s presentation of A Night in Italy. It starts at 19:00 across Pacific Avenue at Filippi’s Pizza Grotto.

The evening begins. A buffet is laid out. The Chianti flows and the music begins. Hannah Blackburn is on this piano. Linda Mattos is the Lyric soprano and Froiedrich Konstatin Schlott the Bass-baritone. I am in a perfect groove.

At the break, the raffle tickets are drawn. Various offerings including beautiful baskets of goodies, some prepared perhaps by Amy, are won and received. Then comes the main prize, an Art Talk by Amy Burnett in your home for up to twelve guests. Topics are: Home Design, Artwork Critique, Art History, Painting, and Feng Shui.

Man do I ever need a Feng Shui. The bidding begins. I am the second bidder and the two of us go a few rounds and then I jump the bid and take the item. This goes over very well as Amy is so well liked and her Herculean efforts on behalf of Bremo very much known and appreciated. I am urged to join the Kitsap Opera Guild. I will of course, do so. I am suddenly quire popular with these total strangers. Not as popular perhaps as the only guy with jumper cables at a Kabul wedding, but I do go over.

Adrienne: Find A Night in Italy program in your inbox. Run names on Lists A & B.
17:00 OFF

Super Bowl XL – What a rip. Worst officiating I have ever seen in a major game, let alone the Super Bowl with the world watching. Final score: REFS 21 HAWKS 10. I have yet to hear that the refs rigged the game…but my ear is to the ground.

02-06-06 Monday - USA Today reports that the largest U.S. long-distance carriers had cooperated with the NSA’s, National Security Agency's, wiretapping of international calls without warrants, according to a published report that cited unnamed telecommunications executives and intelligence officials. MCI, Sprint and AT&T grant access to their systems without warrants or court orders, and provide call-routing information that helps physically locate the callers.

This has been going on for a long time. The old time switchboards, PBX and other equipment of AT&T and the Bell Systems were designed to enable surreptitious monitoring of telephone calls. We even spread this system around the world often without the knowledge of the receiving countries…the knowledge that we could listen in.

The Bush Administrations states that FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is too outdated to handle the monitoring of all international calls to and from Al-Qaeda. This is probably true. Doubtless they are using supercomputers to filter every international call being made, looking for keywords and such, in order to home in on and give more attention to those calls that raise red flags.

To process millions of calls through a court, whether before or within seventy-two hours after the fact, would require tens of thousands of judges. Not workable. But it has to be made legal with congressional oversight. Checks and balances to unbridled power are absolutely essential.

Item: Recently it was revealed that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! complied with Justice Department subpoenas to turn over search data. Google has made a very high profile statement that it will not do so without a fight. Good for you Google!

I woke up this morning to find that Teddy ‘The Wonder Dog’ has flown the coup! Teddy, a Black Lab had promised me that if I left one of the gates ajar, he would stop dumping on my gravel walkways and trot across the road to relieve himself by the edge of the forest. This he did for about a week but now he is gonzo. I drove around looking for him, nada. On my morning walk to the post office I covered the immediate area, nada.

About noon I notice messages on the answering machine. One is from Janet with the City of Bremo. She is at the Public Works Yard up on Oyster Bay Road and so it seems is Teddy. The maintenance crew has accomplished little so far today as Teddy has been running them ragged all morning with a fetch the stick game that he has improvised. Teddy is an obsessive-compulsive ball player, but any port in a storm.

Janet has read the rabies tag number on Teddy’s spiked collar, called our vet and thereby obtained my home phone number. They love Teddy but he is a distinct impediment to their mission. This is one more reason why I love Bremo. The common sense and good will in this town is viscerally palpable.

I pick up a small package of 61%, now deemed healthy, cocoa chocolate disks from the just opened Amy’s Decadent Chocolates shop in Charleston. If you want to see my face in your establishment, just work the word decadent into your logo…and sooner or later I will be there. I gave Janet the chocolate, picked up Teddy, took him home…and gave him what for.

Muslims are still rioting, burning, and killing worldwide because they object to those cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. It is a mistake to think that these people are like us, just of a different religion, or culinary tastes, or lifestyle. I was in Morocco, in a rug shop in a souk in the Casbah in Tangier, when I was apparently too slow to make a purchase. Someone then dropped a large rolled Berber carpet down upon me from the floor above.

I sprung up with the expletive, ‘Jesus Christ’. In retrospect, that may not have been the wisest utterance given the location. The merchants then attempted to inform me that getting pounded like that was ‘good luck’. Yeah…good luck and good-bye! The upside was that I was sufficiently agitated that I ended up eating couscous with the most lovely Kanako Oya traveling alone from Osaka-City, Japan, at the tender age of twenty-two.

I recall a scene outside that souk in the street on a steep cobblestone hill. A very heavily laden cart was going by. The brakes for this monstrosity was a huge guy in the back wearing large thick rubber boots. He was hanging on, and dragging his feet on the roadway. I began to wonder what century these people were living in. Hard to tell but it was many many centuries ago. I keep hearing lately that they are living in the seventh century. That sounds a bit early to me, but then a Theocracy that lops off hands and heads is way back there somewhere. Either way we are in living in different millennia.

While modern man is urged to think globally but act locally, in furtherance of the common good…These Arabs are thinking locally and acting globally, to the world’s detriment and horror.

There is an item circulating on the Net regarding Muslim outrage. It lists many outrageous and horrendous acts committed by Muslims that provoked in them no outrage; from 9-11, to Muslim officials blocking the exit where schoolgirls were trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed, to Muslims slaughtering hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia, and so on. But when newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed…Muslims are outraged to the point of worldwide rioting and destruction! Hello?

And these very same people who are burning and killing over what are not only quite innocuous cartoons, but also accurately relevant cartoons; these same people conceive, create, and publish, practically on a daily basis…the vilest, most disgusting, and untrue cartoons depicting Jewish people that you could possibly imagine. They are even now running a worldwide contest to see who can come up with the dastardliest anti-Jewish and anti-Christian cartoons. Do they really think we will riot? Or even give a damn.

What a shame! It was Arabs that gave us Arabic numerals. Did you ever try to multiply and divide Roman numerals? The Arabic numerals along with the essential concept of the Hindu zero allow us to function as we do. They also gave us algebra, and that beautiful Moorish architecture you see in Spain and elsewhere. The word most used in the Quoran, after God, is ilm. Ilm means knowledge and was so very highly respected. Mohammed was first motivated to act by being distressed at the treatment of women, slaves, and the down trodden. Muslims originally helped to liberate and raise women up.

What happened? In general they are in desperate financial shape. But have you ever heard of an Arab car, or boat, or train, or plane, or TV, or computer, or anything modern? Globalization is not passing them by; they have lain dormant for well over a thousand years. They often fight against progress, when everyone knows that you cannot stop progress. Whose fault is that? According to the Quoran: “God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in themselves.” Amen to that.

Mahatma Gandhi showed the oppressed people of the world how to overcome their situation. Martin Luther King Jr. used these same techniques to successfully lead African-Americans to full citizenship. It is a shame that Osama or Usama Bin Laden didn’t have the wit to follow their examples. He might well have already been successful in his mission. Instead he chose hate and death and hate and death is what he reaps.

People are basically good. Expose a grievous injustice and the world will come together to right it. If all of those suicide bombers were doing what the Buddhist Monks of Vietnam did, that is to say, if they were committing suicide publicly to protest policies that they objected to, and not killing or harming anyone else…they would probably have accomplished their goals before now and had the entire world on their side.

Adrienne, I hope all the yammering is not putting you over the edge. But with all this surveillance time and these DW-90s, what’s a guy to do? I keep trying to stay off religion but now accept that I cannot.

I can tell that a lot of religion bashing is struggling to break free and come forth. Let me say right now that I am not against religion per se. If you pay attention you will see that what I will be examining is what so often happens after a beautiful spiritual movement is launched by a wonderful prophet. What happens is that the more the movement is organized into a religion, the more it becomes incorporated and bureaucratized, the more it accumulates power and feels the need to control its practitioners and to expand; the more likely it is that it will then turn into something that is not only often counterproductive but it becomes the exact opposite of what its founder would have wished for.

I realize that religion is transformative for culture and the people living within that culture. Religion has transformed primitive societies from matriarchal to patriarchal. Religion has transformed societies from polytheistic to monotheistic. All of that has probably been necessary for our development and evolution into what we are today. But I see no reason why we need all the lies and horrid practices today to reap the beneficial results of religion.

Today we may well be transitioning back to more of a matriarchal scheme of things, if in fact we really ever changed that much. Certainly we are becoming feminized in the developed western societies. Have ever you noticed that the Fundamentalist, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Mormon, that they all make a major effort to suppress their women? They are well aware of the natural power of women and fear it.

Frankly, I don’t think I have ever met a married man in this country that I can recall who wasn’t at a fundamental level, petrified of his wife. This is not as surprising as one might think. Men in our culture are raised by their mothers. Once grown, they marry and their new household is again ruled by a woman. Little girls are naturally bossy, at least in the U.S. They get an early start, and practice wrapping their fathers around their little fingers from about age three if not before.

When elderly men die, their wives generally live on for many years. When elderly women pass-on their husbands often join them in short order.

President Lyndon Johnson, a master intimidator if there ever was one, once said, “There are only two things you need to know about your wife. First you have to make her think that she is the boss. Second you have to realize that she is the boss.” It may be a cliché that, “Behind every successful man there is a woman”, but there is a lot of truth to that.

Sure some young and macho guys demand to be in charge and are very jealous and controlling. To do so they have to beat their woman until either she leaves, kills him, or he kills her or is incarcerated. Naturally there are exceptions and permutations of this but I am sure that you get the cut being made here.

If your society is polytheistic as the Greeks and Romans were, how do you control behavior? There is a God for everything. One God may have you doing something that the rulers want you to be doing but suppose you want to go up into the hills and get drunk at a wild orgy? No problema, just follow the God Bacchus and that is definitely the way to go.

But once you introduce the concept of only one God, now you have full control. One God can be extremely sexually repressive and that tremendous energy can then be sublimated and directed to the ends that the leaders want. Of course there is no free lunch. When you suppress a prime mover like the sexual urge you are going to get a lot of mental and physical fallout, illness, and crimes.

The USS Ohio has returned to service at the nearby Bangor submarine base. This sub is the first of four ballistic-missile subs now known as SSGNs, G means Guided. They now carry up to 154 mid-range guided Tomahawk missiles, and up to 102 Navy SEALs or other Special Forces. Before conversion they were SSBNs, B is for Ballistic, and carried nuclear ballistic weapons for the Cold War. Under the START II Treaty, four of our 18 SSBNs had to go. This was an alternative to scrapping them and fits in nicely with anti-terrorism plans.

The three year conversion was accomplished in Bremo at the PSNS. PSNS is also converting the USS Michigan. Both will operate in the Pacific. The USS Florida and USS Georgia are undergoing conversion on the East Coast and slated for stationing in Europe and the Middle East.

13:30 ON
02-09-06 Thursday - Veh#5 - It is finally time to see Greta at Affinity Massage at 532 5th Street, just west of Pacific Avenue. Every two weeks is too long to wait. Some doctor made up a Death Calculator wherein you start with age 79 and add one year for good things that you do and you subtract a year for no-nos. Having a pet like a dog or cat gets you another year added to your lifespan. The same with a regular massage, it adds a year to your life. Greta points out that Bob Hope had a weekly massage and lived passed one hundred. That works for me.

I am in heaven for one hour. At my age this is better than sex. Greta is great. Surprisingly to me, she likes old movies like the Bob Hope ~ Bing Crosby On the Road stuff, black and whites. These Bremos are endlessly full of surprises, as is the whole town.

It has been said that only two strata of a society really know what is going on. One is the President, the other are the prostitutes. Well, I have found that much is also said to one’s masseuse. I go to Greta for the best massages in town and someone else there for much local intel.

The building housing Affinity Massage has some interesting antiques, books and wall paintings. Just west of this building is the downtown Bremo branch of the Kitsap Regional Library system [www.krl.org/]. It was once the main library but that distinction moved to East Bremo to a new 35,000 square foot facility on Sylvan Way in 1978. This 1930s building has undergone $400,000 worth of improvements since September and will reopen in March as the Martin Luther King Branch.

I walk over to the Amy Burnett Gallery. The lady operating the adjoining Made in Bremo store advises me that Amy is only scheduled full time on Tuesdays. Her assistant, Stewart, is not on the premises. I continue on over to the Patriot newspaper office on Burwell. No one is there, and a Will Return Clock has its hands pointing to some really oddball time.

Back on the Valk, I rip over to the YMCA and drop off two XL magnetic knee tubes for Director Godfrey. These things saved me about eleven years ago. I could not walk without them. After exhausting medical treatment in Los Angeles and Seattle, including the UW Bone and Joint Clinic, a nurse at a Whidbey Island Clinic in Clinton told me, “The doctors have told us not to mention this as they say it is quackery, but many of our patients swear by magnets.” They made all the difference in the world for me. I even sold them on the Net for a few years in order to share the relief.
16:30 OFF

My knees have been shot for over twenty-five years. I started running marathons at age thirty-eight. It was all the rage at the time and running in general was widely touted as the path to good health. Big mistake. That, plus arthritis and a torn meniscus pulled me to the curb. Some years back a Swedish masseuse on Whidbey Island told me to try cold-pressed peanut oil on them. Well I did once or twice, probably months apart.

Then a year ago I picked up a bottle of HAIN 100% Expeller Pressed Peanut Oil, and began using it twice a day. What a marvelous result! My knees no longer crack so badly when I bend them. I noticed an immediate increase in my stationary bike performance numbers. In 2000, before purchasing the Valk and to aid my being able to hold that big baby up, I had three shots in each knee to lubricate the cartilage. Originally the material was made from rooster combs, but by then it was synthesized and sold as SYNVISC®. It worked fairly well but only lasted about a year. In some the ways peanut oil is better.

To keep going I spend most of each and every morning exercising. It begins with yoga and weight lifting. Then a half hour on the recumbent bike, followed by a daily walk to the West Hills Post office. Cool-down periods are spent on the computer.

At noon I eat my first meal of the day. I am a confirmed contrarian. I collared over a million in the stock market with one stock that way. Every diet or nutritional plan that I have ever heard of emphasizes that the most important meal of the day is breakfast. I have found that eating breakfast is the absolute worst thing that you can do.

Maybe if you get up at three AM to start plowing the back forty you should eat a big breakfast, but not us sedentary people. Do animals get up, go to the refer and eat breakfast? I don’t think so. More likely they have to go out and work and hunt down their daily meal. With some luck they will be successful by midday. They eat then and leave a little for their supper.

I lost forty pounds in 2004, and the key was not eating before noon. That plus exercise and my special evening drink. The drink was basically, spirulina from the deep waters off the Kona Coast, flax seed from North Central Dakota, bee pollen from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, all put in a blender with apple juice and a banana.

An appetite grows when fed. The more you eat for breakfast, the hungrier you are at noon. The more you eat at noon, the more you want for supper. Eat as much as you want, but only healthy foods at noon, then in the evening a light supper. Forget breakfast…that is one major reason why this country is so obese. This advice is for adults, children are another story.

It is simply about Mother Nature. As Jack LaLanne, the fellow who swam pulling boatloads of people at age eighty-four or something like that says, “If man makes it…Don’t eat it! That covers cakes, pies, cookies, candy, and a plethora of products ubiquitous in the U.S. All Mexican restaurants offer either corn or flour tortillas. The traditional corn is whole grain and healthy, the flour is usually of unhealthy bleached white flour. The status trend now in Mexico is to switch from corn to flour. How sad. A good rule of thumb is, do what the old people used to do.

Another health factor for women is their bras. Bras can lead to breast cancer, especially the ones with wire in them. They cut off the proper blood flow. Once again it is a matter of spending money to be unnatural. Trust me, I have made a very careful and extensive hands-on study of this subject!

I have lost almost all faith in the AMA and doctors in general. I say that despite the fact that I have had some wonderful doctors in my life and for my children. I have an excellent doctor that I really like right now. A few years back my blood pressure was way too high. I went to doctors in Los Angeles and Seattle. All attempted to put me on medication, i.e. pills…drugs. Drugs that later proved to be highly dangerous. None suggested that what I should do was simply improve my diet and exercise more. But that is what I did and the blood pressure problem vanished naturally.

All day long now on TV there are these terribly annoying drug commercials. They have gone beyond, if you are sick…take drugs. Now they show a healthy woman who eats properly, jogs daily, and appears to be the picture of health, but no, not quite good enough, she also should be buying and ingesting their drugs. And our children, put them on drugs whenever possible as well.

The new Medicare Drug Program is deemed necessary because so many older people can no longer afford the ten, twenty, or thirty prescription drugs that they have been put ‘on’. They can’t afford their hundreds or thousands of dollars a month ‘nut’ for drugs.

The conservative Bruce Bartlett who worked for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush 41 the Elder, has now written a book, Imposter, in which he rips the current President George W. Bush. The final straw for him was the Medicare Drug Program. He states that the White House deliberately withheld statistics on how much it would really cost.

The unfunded liability for Medicare Part D is now computed at eighteen trillion dollars! That is seven trillion more than Social Security’s eleven trillion in unfunded liability. So even if W. had been able to accomplish his mission to ‘save Social Security’ completely, he would have already made the situation far worse than it was…had he done nothing.

This year, 2006 is the tipping year for Medicare; the first year in which more money will be spent then comes in. Last year the Medicare Trust Fund was predicted to last another fifteen years. This year they say it will last only another twelve years. I wonder what they will say next year?

This legislation makes the drug companies and stockholders rich, while making it so much easier for the elderly to be frightened onto a plethora of drugs. Before the War on Drugs you didn’t hear about drugs all day long. People were not organizing busses to go to Canada to purchase them. If you interview people who have lived to be over one hundred years old, what do they most often say? Avoid doctors and hospitals! Work, be useful, be curious, and stay connected.

When Social Security was enacted, the life expectancy was sixty-five years for a male. On average you would draw very little before your ticket was punched. These drugs are not to prolong our potential normal lives. What could be more unnatural than filling our cells with all these foreign chemicals?

Drugs are still very crude. Someday they will be perfected and actually just solve your genetic flaws or whatever. But that is not the case today. Yes, they accomplish their main goal but create numerous deleterious side effects. So you first get on one drug and the side effects lead you to a second drug, and then the third. By now your body chemistry is so altered and screwed up that you must continue to add more and more drugs until you are a total wreck, heading for a stone wall.

I know someone whose policy is, “Just say no to drugs…unless they are recreational.” At first that seems outrageous, but when you come right down to it, occasional street drugs are probably safer than daily taking all this crap that the drug companies are pushing. And pushing is indeed the right word. They push far harder than anything going on along Pusher Street in the Christiania section of Copenhagen. If you can handle the truth…follow the money. Always follow the money!

The naïve perception of what makes a medical doctor tick is often of an individual who wants to help their fellow man. I’m sure this is true in many cases, but a more realistic appraisal is often of someone who as a kid, liked to take things apart. Someone who likes to see how things work, an engineering type.

A very cranky gent in a local tavern recently advanced a rather shocking theory as follows: “The human body is comprised of trillions of living cells. Each day we lose billions of red blood cells to maintain ourselves. Do we care that they die to keep us healthy? Not really. Moving up a level, a society is comprised of living people. Do doctors care that some must die to maintain a healthy society? Not really. Well, that is the nature of things. The health of the overall community is what really counts.

The more old retired people there are who live longer and longer, the less robust and sick the overall society becomes. Cigarette smoking used to be the perfect answer. About the time one’s useful working life was over, lung cancer would frequently finish you off. Recall that the AMA invested heavily in tobacco stocks until public knowledge and outrage brought that to an end. It wasn’t the government that pushed the current non-smoking environment. The government happily subsidized the tobacco industry. It was public opinion in the U.S. that pushed the government. Now we export more of these coffin nails to cover the domestic loss of consumers. If we can’t kill more of our own citizens, by all means let us kill more foreigners.

The only way to stop the drain on the economy, Social Security, and the health of the nation caused by the ever-expanding longevity of the senior citizenry is to bump them off. What better way then by making billions while drugging them to death?”

The above is certainly harsh, cynical, and possibly paranoid, but still he has a point. When I was a kid, the old folks would do just about anything to avoid going into a hospital. Why? Because they knew that would probably mean curtains for them. And very often it did just that. Twenty years ago while living in Mexico, it was the same situation. When an elderly citizen living in San Felipe could no longer hold off a trip to a Mexicali hospital, the family figured they had three days to plan the funeral. Just like clockwork, in about three days, back would come the corpse for the wake. No longer a productive unit…zap!

But even aside from these drug issues, in my lifetime the accepted medical advice has time and time again been through 180-degree reversals. First one was suppose to put hot packs on new injuries and later that was changed to cold packs. We were told not to eat butter but to switch to margarine. Now we are told to not eat margarine but to switch to butter. Fat was bad and carbohydrates were good. Now carbohydrates are bad and fat is actually all right.

Drinking was bad but now it is seen as healthy in moderation. Running and jogging was wonderful exercise in the 70’s but now it is seen as destructive to your joints. The pyramid depiction of what constitutes the proper food groups has just been changed radically. A doctor now is telling me that the best thing to cook with is pig fat…lard! One can only conclude that despite the authoritative pronouncements that thunder forth, that they really don’t know what they are talking about a great deal of the time. Better to listen to your body and do what the old people did. Doctors call what they do practice, for good reason.

We have had the War on Drugs now for decades. After years of wasting untold billions of tax dollars on this so-called war, what do we have? Illegal drugs are more plentiful, widespread, cheaper than ever before, and corruption is rampant everywhere, including politicians, the military, law enforcement, the judiciary, and elsewhere.

A few years ago, my son Tommy and I returned to our spot on Punta Estrella, Point of the Stars, below San Felipe in Baja California. It had been more than ten years since either of us had been there. Young soldiers were everywhere. Our friends told about smugglers dropping off large stacks of bails of white, shrink-wrapped marijuana, and storing them in vacant structures in the campos. It seems that the U.S. gave the Mexicans some beautiful new boats, ostensibly to interdict drug smugglers. But you guessed it, these very boats were what were being used to haul in the drugs. In fact the Mexican Army frequently violates our southern border to protect their drug traffickers.

The Mexican Drug Czar is widely known to in fact be the head trafficker. The Mexicans used to simply be paid by the Columbians to transit the cocaine and other drugs to the U.S. Eventually they woke up and realized they could make a lot more as a principal. Today it is estimated that Mexico receives about US$30 billion from Mexican workers in the U.S. sending money back to their families and about US$300 billion from the drug trade. This consists mostly of cocaine and marijuana but now also the output of super-meth labs in Mexico and both Mexican black tar and higher grade Chinese white heroin.

Combine this availability of illegal drugs, with the increasing push by Big Pharmaceuticals to start our children out on prescription drugs at an early age and it is not difficult to predict future trends. Our entire culture is now awash in harmful drugs, both prescription and otherwise.

Kids who have trouble paying attention in class are put on drugs. Having trouble paying attention in class is normal. Children want by nature to be outside running around. To sit at a desk for hours and pay attention to whatever irrelevant uninteresting material is being promulgated…that is what is not normal.

Certainly the onus is not entirely on the medical community. The thing that a doctor can legally give us that we can’t get elsewhere is a prescription. We pay to see a doctor…we want a prescription. They know that…and they give us one.

In the 1970’s Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., an early advocate of the natural approach to health and the author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, stated in a medical speech, “When you are looking at any medical study, don’t just look at what the authors want you to look at; always look at the funeral rates, too. It doesn’t just matter if blood pressure or cholesterol levels went down more on the drug group than the placebo group. It also matters whether more people died in the drug group than in the placebo group. If they did, then who cares if the blood pressure or cholesterol was lower? The mortician?”

I really do not want to leave the impression that I am dumping on all medical doctors. I have needed them in the past and will probably again in the future. Many are the most splendid human beings among us. They run the gamut from a veritable saint like Doctor Albert Schweitzer to a true monster like Doctor Joseph Mengele. There are really good doctors and those that perform unnecessary operations in order to make their Mercedes’ notes. We have excellent physicians and those that specialize in Medicare fraud.

The ones I am thinking of are the garden-variety doctors who took the Hippocratic Oath with the best of intentions. I had thought like many others that said that the Oath required doctors to at the very least do no harm. But I have just read the Classical version and wouldn’t you know it, there is a new modern version updated by the Declaration of Geneva, and I don’t see that provision in either one of them. What I did find was: Some doctors who recited the Hippocratic Oath as medical students now call it the ‘Hypocritic’s Oath’.

The point I am trying to make is that an awful lot of harm is being done to patients by doctors who are putting them so readily on all of these Big Pharmaceutical drug products. According to the VIOXX legal trials, that one drug alone actually doubled, that is correct it doubled the risk of having a heart attack!

It is estimated that during the five years that VIOXX was on the market, it was related to somewhere between 88,000 – 139,000 heart attacks and strokes! Other NSAIDS including many sold over the counter can also increase your risk. Even worse may be deaths attributable to drugs commonly used to treat Type II diabetes.

Item: Bremo’s Olympic College is beginning a new era with groundbreaking on February 11, 2006, today, for a new $22 million Science and Technology building. This is part of a $75 million dollar campus overhaul. Originally designed in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was created for easy convertibility into elementary schools in case the community college concept failed.

This is as good a time as any to touch upon the Bremer Trust. A Google search produces the following from the local Chamber of Commerce: Profile: Bremer Trust - Golden Anchor Member - no picture - no info provided - Rich McDonald, General Manager - member since 11/7/1950. Seems a bit mysterious doesn’t it? Further digging reveals: 409 Pacific Avenue - Suite 301, in Bremo: bremer@telebyte.net : tel 360.377.5533 : fax 360.373.7098

The Bremer Trust’s role is to annually contribute its proceeds to Olympic College. The Trust’s $20 million portfolio includes nine office buildings and a three-story parking garage in downtown Bremo. In December 2005, the trust gave $300,000 to the college. Much of that came from this Burwell Parking garage.

Many failed proposals were made at redevelopment in the early '70s, including discussions of a waterfront hotel and the erection of a large canopy over the central business district. Meanwhile, most of the city's office and retail space remained in the hands of Edward Bremer, son of the city’s founder William Bremer and the sole remaining heir to his wealth.

Incredibly, to receive their inheritance, William Bremer's three children were honor-bound to never marry. Bremer began to neglect his properties; never increasing decades-old lease rates, and failing to make necessary maintenance upgrades. In 1978, the Bremo City Council passed an ordinance declaring that the entire downtown was legally a blighted area!

Upon the death of Edward Bremer in 1987, the Bremer properties were placed under the complete control of The Bremer Trust, a trust held by Olympic College. Not being in the real-estate business, the college did not actively market its holdings and downtown was composed almost entirely of very large empty storefronts.

Recently the Bremer Trust hired a commercial real estate firm and an asset manager to handle the details formerly managed by a staff member. Bradley Scott Inc. was hired to manage the Trust’s real estate holdings. Jim Smalley of Smith Barney was hired to manage securities. Adrienne, please see what else you can unearth on the Bremer Trust.

A big hometown welcome was in store for Bremo native, Marvin Williams. He was the number two pick in June’s NBA draft. He had just played his first pro game in Seattle. His Atlanta Hawks lost to the Sonics 99-91. Locals are very proud of those who have gone on to big things. Another is jazz legend Quincy Jones who moved to Bremerton at the age of ten. As a teenager, he first met up with Ray Charles when he began frequenting the nightclubs in Seattle.

Four area school bond issues just passed by a large margin. These people are so well grounded that no doubt the local schools are well run. Bremo’s Early Childhood Program was named Tops in the State. Bremo is one of only six districts in Washington State to be recognized by the League of Education Voters this year.

I am forever ruined concerning U.S. school financing after my experience in Mexico. I raised my youngest son, Tommy, in Baja California and he attended grades one through five at an Escuela Federal in San Felipe, the Professor Domingo Carballo Felix.

One year the peso had by then lost nearly half its value and thus the teachers had no choice but to go on strike. The local fishermen donated a huge amount of fish and we gave as many kilos of chicken as we could. The kicker is, that while on strike, the teachers painted the entire school and made various improvements. Can you image that ever happening in the U.S.?

The total administration consisted of a Director who was often seen building and repairing playground structures, pruning trees and doing whatever else was required. The teachers had virtually absolute authority. If a boy was acting-out she would merely have to point to the door and he was suspended. He would sit on the doorstep for days. He got back in when the teacher decided that it was time. In this way, disciplinary problems were kept at a minimum.

Some years we hauled down a truckload of paint from a Home Depot in Los Angeles. The teachers and students would paint the outside of the various buildings, the inside of the classrooms and the desks. Even the first graders would paint their own desks. Sure they ended up covered with paint, but there was such a pride of authorship that I knew of no incident there of defacement of school property by a student.

The State of Baja Norte did have oversight responsibilities. They inspected the facility once a year and provided a monthly-standardized test. This test both provided the basis for the students’ monthly grade, using the European system of 1-10, and allowed for statistical monitoring by the State.

Contrast that with what we found when we left Baja to retuurn briefly to Los Angeles County. Tommy completed the sixth grade under the gargantuan beauracracy of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I got involved as there was suppossedly a major improvement project underway.

It all turned out to be an extrordianrily expensive and wasteful farce. In downtown Los Angeles there was an administrative building filled with people bent on undermining any possible changes to the system. Soon I was receiving daily mail from them. Talk about a snow job, this was a blizzard.

Oh they had elaborate meetings including one gigantic one where Willie Brown, still the major force in the California Legislature and prior to his becoming the Mayor of San Francisco, was the main speaker. But the upshot of everything was that absolutely nothing constructive ever happened.

The best thing that could possibly have happened would have been the firing of everyone at the central administrative building and then having that building razed. Meanwhile the answer to all the school problems was always the same. Throw more money at them.

The real problem was too much money supporting a bloated bureaucracy that sucked away the teacher’s authority while at the same time requiring the classroom completion of ever more data sheets so that these same bureaucrats could make charts and reports to justify their own destructive existence. Charts and reports that would naturally be documenting the decline of the school system….that of course would require…more money.

Meanwhile students were so alienated and undisciplined that they were smashing brand new tennis rackets on the way to PE class, and defacing property at every opportunity. When I compared this to what the Mexican schools were doing with almost no money at all by our standards, I was absolutely disgusted.

Adrienne, please see what the requirements are for me to join the Bremerton-Olympic Peninsula Navy League.

NASCAR has become the big buzzword hereabouts. On November 30, 2005 ISC, International Speedway Corporation, released its financing proposal for a $345 million motorsports facility in Kitsap County on 950 acres near the Bremo National Airport. The plan is for an 83,000 seat stadium and luxury boxes, with a 1.2 mile oval. It would host two major and one minor race annually, along with other smaller racing and non-racing events.

While the County has not yet received a formal proposal from ISC, the Board of County Commissioners is revving up. They are sorting through what they do and do not know, formulating a list of questions and soliciting the opinions of residents and businesses in other parts of the country that have been impacted by NASCAR. NASCAR operates at thirty-two speedways, raceways and motor sports parks nationwide.

The financing plan proposes a public-private partnership where Great Western Sports will pay $166 million, or nearly half the project costs, plus any construction overruns and all costs related to the regular maintenance and operation of the facility. Kitsap, Pierce and Mason Counties will form a tri-county Public Speedway Authority, PSA, and will issue bonds to help finance track construction. The bonds will be repaid through a sales tax credit issued by the state to the PSA, and from a local tax on the facility. The remaining $13 million would come from event ticket taxes.

The biggest drawback with NASCAR is that it will create very few permanent jobs, one estimate is sixty, but have a substantial negative impact, particularly on the local highway system, at least twice a year when the racing actually comes to town. The Pacific Northwest International Trade Alliance just approved a resolution endorsing the NASCAR project.

The USS JOHN C. STENNIS - CVN-74 is a dual nuclear reactor powered multi-purpose aircraft carrier that is home-ported to Bremo. It will be featured on a Navy sponsored Busch Series car on February 25 at the race in Fontana California. The Navy began sponsoring a NASCAR team in 2004 for a full season. The 88-Car is owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr. The name of the USS JOHN C. STENNIS will be on the hood. It is considered to be an excellent recruitment and motivational tool by the United States Navy.

The Home Builders of Kitsap County have just now also endorsed NASCAR, concluding that the economic benefits to the county would be enormous.

The racetrack would be in an area known as SKIA, South Kitsap Industrial Area. The 3,400 acres have 1,690 designated as an Urban Growth Area. 9,350 jobs have been envisioned and the purpose is to diversify the economy with less dependence on defense industry employment. Both the SKIA and NASCAR developments would put tremendous pressure on the currently inadequate local area traffic systems.

02-11-06 Saturday - I attended the Stand-up Comedy at the Admiral Theater. The second and final hour was performed by the headliner, an obese female comic named Jen Kober [www.kobercomedy.com/]. Her act revolved around a Skinny Bitch routine. She began by picking out at random a lady seated at a front row table. It turned out to be Kathryn Quade, the Mayor of the neighboring City of Poulsbo. Jen was good and funny but her Skinny Bitching the Mayor all night was hilarious.

Everyone should do stand-up at least once in his or her lifetime.

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02-14-06 Tuesday – I rode the bike to the Amy Burnett Gallery and spoke with Amy about five prints. Three were there. The other two should be at the new shop in Charleston at 322 Callow Avenue. The Grand Opening is Sunday, March 5th, but she will be there this Sunday, February 19^th from 11:00 to 18:00. I agreed to be there.

I brought up the Art Talk in Your Home that I had taken at auction with the Opera Guild. She was a bit stunned, as she does not do Art Talks in private homes. Yikes! I have already invited my neighbors! She mentioned an upcoming Art Talk she would be giving at Olympic College. We talked it out. She knows two of my neighbors sitting Judge Anna and her husband, former City Councilman Dave. We agreed it would be fun and scheduled it for about 6:30 on Sunday, March 12, 2006.

She will come right after closing the Callow store at 18:00. She confided in me that she had just that day successfully concluded negotiations to move her downtown gallery next door where the Naval Museum now is. The museum is moving to their new home in the remodeled, with the help of $750,000 in federal funds, Historic Naval Building 50. That will become a centerpiece of Maritime Park. Once she vacates her current gallery location, it will be the new home of a major antique enterprise.
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02-14-06 Tuesday - Fleet Reserve Association Branch 29 - Meeting second Tuesday of Month 18:00 – NAV / USMC / USCG
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This winter has been unseasonably warm but that ended last night when frigid Artic air came roaring in. I found an ice cover on Dragon Pond. I have a small bird sanctuary in the northeast corner of the backyard. A waterfall keeps everything moving. The goldfish that I bought as four-cent feeder fish are now humongous and hibernating out there. They love it so much outside that they have begun breeding.

The raccoons were quite the problem. They are of the bear family and a whole lot smarter than your average critter. I grew up being taught that animals can’t think, that only man can reason. What rubbish…these guys did a very good job of out-thinking me! We went back and forth in an ever-escalating war over the fish. Finally I sunk a large plastic underground electrical cable box. It has a mouse hole at either end for a cable, holes that the fish can use as doorways. On top of this I piled four large round concrete and pebble stepping-stones. The combined weight makes it seem permanent. The raccoons don’t realize they could possibly topple it and the goldfish know enough to take cover within.

A family of small rats insisted on living under this pond. I ended up running a four-inch flexible perforated drainage pipe from the pond over to the fence. This allows them to come and go without undue pressure from the various predators whose list they are on. This includes, cats, hawks, owls, and eagles. My splendid cat Gravity will only drink from this pond. Squirrels abound here and some will eat from my hand.

Damn! Read yesterday’s paper today and saw that Black stand-up comic Dave Chappelle is to appear at the Paramount in Seattle this Sunday. Tickets went on sale at 10AM yesterday. I go online and call immediately but it is Sold Out. No surprise there. Dave Chappelle had signed a massive deal with Comedy Central that would have returned the comedian's hit the Chappelle's Show to the network for two more seasons. Sources familiar with the deal indicate it could be worth about $50 million, vaulting the 30 year-old Chappelle into the rarefied realm of television's top earners.

The new contract is believed to mark not only a steep increase for Chappelle as star, writer, co-executive producer and co-creator of Chappelle's Show, but more significantly, reward him with a hefty chunk of the series' robust DVD sales. Chappelle's Show has become an important series for the Comedy Channel, scoring a trio of Emmy nominations last month and ranked as the highest-rated cable program for the network's demographic sweet spot, men 18-34, who comprised much of the 3.1 million total viewers that the series averaged in its second season.

Dave is brilliant, insightful, and tells it like it is. What really makes this fellow interesting is that he ended up turning down the $50 million. He felt they were trying to control him and he said that he felt like a whore. How ravenous the younger generations are for wisdom and truth. If it weren’t for stand-up, where would we get the real truth? Not newspapers, not regular TV, not politicians, and not normal classes.

On the subject of schools, either the shipyard or the naval station seems to have regular whistles. One is 07:15 in the morning, one mid-day at 12:115 and another at perhaps 16:20.

Many years ago I read somewhere an analysis of the K12 school system as it has existed since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Never since have I ever seen this ‘take’ repeated or mentioned…but it makes perfect sense.

This is a classic example of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. The children have to get to school Monday through Friday and arrive before the final bell rings. They must obey the teacher and line up and eat lunch peacefully without fighting. They then continue on until the final bell, when they may return home. It is recorded whenever they are tardy or absent.

After years of this conditioning, the grown child then gets a job in a factory where they must show up for work Monday through Friday before the final whistle, obey the foreman and line up and eat lunch peacefully without fighting. They then continue on until the final whistle, when they may return home. It is recorded whenever they are tardy or absent.

This Pavlovian conditioning is what it is all about, most of the class content, which varies form country to country, is by and large, irrelevant. Now a Presidential Commission is considering standardized testing for college and university students. When the focus is on passing standardized tests, true learning plummets.

I was just reading an article that listed some Collage Dropouts: Bill Gates, Soichiro Honda, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Barry Goldwater, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Ted Turner, David Geffen - DreamWorks SKG, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lawrence Ellison, Michael Dell, Ralph Lauren, Woody Allen, Julie Andrews, Steve Martin, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Dan Aykroyd and the Grammy winning Kanye West, among many others.

Another thing is the repeated uproar over child labor in developing countries. Certainly there are abuses but do we not recall that England and the United States also used child labor at the beginning? The plain fact is that at the onset of industrialization, only the children will do repetitive, indoor, highly supervised, and boring work. The adults who grew up in an agrarian society, who worked outdoors, in fresh air, on their feet, and at their own pace, refuse to do these jobs.

Sure they have quotas or get paid based on their production, but within that framework, they are on their own. It is only after future generations are conditioned by the schools as above, are these programmed adults willing to work in a plant, on an assembly line.

Additionally, when the sweatshops are closed, the kids are forced into far worse situations like slavery and child prostitution. Either provide a better option or keep your nose out of it.

The cover of the January 30, Newsweek is The Boy Crisis. It claims that boys are falling behind at every level. A lot of material is presented. Most of it struck me as so much bullshit.

The first boxed stat is that the number of male undergraduates on college campuses is down from 58% thirty years ago to 44% now. That means simply that more girls are going to college. This is a good thing, and nothing against the boys. When my youngest son was in middle school I noticed that the girls where making major efforts to win regional sports competitions of all kinds. And they were doing much better in the rankings than the boys were.

This is to be expected, as the opportunity to participate was much newer for the girls. Like in boxing, first the champions were White, than Black, and then Latino. Just as in Los Angeles ghettos, the homes were first occupied by Whites, then Blacks, and now Latinos. No mysteries anywhere here.

After endlessly being relegated by the sports world to being cheerleaders for the boys, is it really any wonder that the girls have all this momentum to strive now that they finally have the opportunity to take to the field themselves? And now even the cheerleaders are doing ever more daring stunts and routines, to the point where injuries and even deaths are occurring in this pursuit.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission reported an estimated 4,954 hospital emergency room visits in 1980 caused by cheerleading injuries.  By 1986 the number had increased to 6,911 and in 1994 the number increased to approximately 16,000. The figure I have for 2004 is about 24,000.

Does this mean boys are lazier or dumber? I don’t think so. When you realize how many men today are hobbling around on bad knees and other injuries sustained in High School sports, it could well be that the boys are just getting wiser.

Another highlighted finding: “Boys love video games because when they lose, the defeat is private.” That is just horseshit…pure and simple. Humans and particularly males are all about hand and eye coordination. Video games are a wonderful way to organize young minds for the new millennium and at the same time, engage in primeval slaughter that is in itself, harmless to their surroundings.

The original Atari games were compatible with my generation. A player was almost always gunning for the other guy, like our Cowboys v Indians, or Cops and Robbers…all two-player games. But when the Japanese entered the market with Nintendo, it all changed completely and became more right brain then left, more random than linear. These were highly suited to single players.

I recall back in the 70’s when my kids were cadging quarters to go to the local liquor store to play the video games that were then making their appearance. It eventually dawned on me then that the end of the Cold War was in sight. Our youth were spending their own money to in effect, train themselves for future combat, while at the same time the Soviet Union not only had no such thing going on, but they were actively restricting computers as an internal security measure. Game over.

My youngest son was raised on Atari, then Coleco, followed by Nintendo, Sony Play Station, and so on. He started making web pages at age thirteen and could solve computer problems in minutes that had me baffled for hours. When I would ask him how he knew what to do, he would simply say, “I know how programmers think.” Now with no formal training, he makes very good money in Los Angeles as a computer wiz.

I recall a neighbor on Whidbey Island once bragging about the great education his child was receiving at a private Waldorf School. He was particularly impressed that the school not only didn’t use computers, but also forbade its students from using them at home or anywhere else. I noticed that some of these Waldorf School advocates seemed to have almost a cult or religious attitude toward these theories. Now I agree that book reading and acting in plays and classical training is a very good thing, but to keep kids away from computers during their formative years is an unredeemable disaster.

Naturally they want to do what their friends are into, like video games and computers. Totally crippling their computer literacy in this day and age is horrid and largely irreversible. It would almost be better to just cut off a finger rather than to deliberately handicap them for life. Waldorf or Steiner Schools were inspired by Rudolf Steiner. I agree with much of what he was all about but let us keep in mind that he was born in the small village of Kraljevec, Austria, now in Croatia, in 1861 and died in Dornach, Switzerland in 1925.

On the bright side, a very bright side indeed, is the development of a computer for less than one hundred dollars. Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, was on Charlie Rose with a model of it. This laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply. He came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.

His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year. Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get one. The following year, Mitt Romney, Massachusetts’s Governor, plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in his State.

Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007. It is virtually indestructible and encased in rubber. The Linux-based machines are expected to have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory, instead of a hard drive that has more delicate moving parts. They will have four USB ports, will be able to connect to the net through wireless technology, and will share data easily.

It will also have a dual-mode display so that it can still be used in varying light conditions outside. It will be a color display, but users will be able to switch easily to a monochrome mode so that it can be viewed in bright sunlight at four times normal resolution.

The project has some big-name supporters on board, including Google, which is working on a system where these machines can share programs when linked to a central server. He said that he is committed to the idea that children all over the world should be equipped with this technology so that they can tap into the educational and communication benefits of the Internet.

This marvel can also act as a light source in homes or huts without electricity. Further it functions as an electronic book. The funds saved by these updateable books alone will allow developing countries to finance them out of their normal school budgets.

Who knows what remote village will produce the next Einstein? Now he or she will have an electronic highway out of there to the world at large. Will many Muslims forego this marvelous technology and instead concentrate on teaching hate in their madrasas? I hope not.

Returning to the Newsweek article: “Middle-school boys may use their brains less efficiently than girls.” The nimrod that wrote that didn’t even have the conviction to state his conclusion without the weasel word ‘may’. In fact there are two distinct schools of thought on the nature of intelligence.

The proponents of one general intelligence have a theory that explains the biological reasons for intelligence. Given that they see neural processing speed as the root for intelligence, their theory has an effective causal explanation. A drawback to the general intelligence school of thought is that it is heavily dependent on psychometric evaluations. Consequently, it cannot take into account the vast array of different talents that people have. As for multiple intelligences, there are many theorists who believe in that school of thought.

Sure when I was a youngster we did better on school tests, but we never even dreamed about doing things with our basketballs or bicycles that they do now, and skateboarding and snowboarding had not even been invented. All of these things require the use of one type of intelligence or another.

And video games! Every day, ghetto kids who are doing abysmally in school are reverse engineering video games, taking apart the code, line by line, and sharing and swapping the info gleaned with their buddies. It is all about relevance and desire.

For decades a constant lament has been about the younger generation’s failure to read books. This is indeed unfortunate, and politically scary…what with all the mind control going on. But stop and think about how much data these kids have to process in today’s world.

Books became popular after 1436 when Johannes Gutenberg came up with a press with its movable type. It remained the standard until the 20th century. Just think how primitive that is to today’s digital generations. The very thought of reading War and Peace by physically running your eyeball from letter to letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter, for hundreds and hundreds of pages; that very thought is utterly abhorrent to the average youngster. If anything they would want to watch the movie.

A movie is so much better, quicker, with much more information, and so…not so Fifteenth Century. Really, they have no choice but to generally shun books, considering the amount of data that they must process in their lives. TV and video condition them to absorb information tape to tape or digitally, so to speak. Printed words be damned.

Where do they get their news? Many get it from the Daily Show on the Comedy Channel. Why? Because it is more insightful, honest, and relevant. This may be a very good thing indeed. I used to read a major newspaper every day until about thirty-five years ago. I noticed two things, firstly that ingesting all that bad news had a negative effect on my health and secondly that the mildly toxic ink was being absorbed through my skin.

I also concluded that over time, most of the information was useless, spun, or just plain wrong. Near the end all I read were the fillers. When news stories are laid out in columns for printing, there are often gaps at the ends. These gaps must be filled, so newspapers keep available what they call fillers of various sizes. These fillers must hold true for a long time. A filler might be something that states what the projected population of Mexico City will be in 2025 and how it will rank with the largest cities at that time. So fillers have to be informative, factual, and truthful over time.

Bad news trumps good news and travels fast for a reason. It has survival value. It is in our DNA. If someone falls into a pit, the sooner the rest of the tribe found out, the less chance that the same fate would befall another. Good news is not that important or urgent. But to take in on a daily basis all the bad news occurring on the entire planet…this is way out of proportion to what our systems were ever meant to tolerate. That much bad news has a negative effect on your body chemistry. What you want to input are positive thoughts and good news.

When I became aware that the bulk of the younger generations were not reading books or newspapers, I assumed that they would fall easy prey to the spinmeisters and professional deceivers. And so I am heartened to see that they are going to the Comedy Channel and Jon Stewart, and Dave Chappelle, and the magnificent Bill Maher.

These kids are smart enough to let these geniuses digest all the news and give them the unvarnished crystalline truth. And in a time saving and wickedly humorous way. They also have ever more BLOGS as sources. BLOGS that cannot be corrupted or silenced by the powers that be. Nope…these youngsters are not as dumb as we might think that they are.

Item: My spell checker goes crazy when I read this in a WORD.doc. Take the word spinmeisters that I used in the above paragraph. The spell checker says there is no such word, but when I Google it, I get 112,000 references to it. But then according to my spell checker, there is no such thing as Google! The only thing that is not changing is change itself.

Back to the article: “A boy without a father figure is like an explorer without a map.” Maybe so. Maybe not. Two of the most amazing men to become President of the United States in the Twentieth Century were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Both had alcoholic fathers who were not only habitual drunks but they were abusive to their mothers. Both rose from poverty and obscurity to become the most powerful person on Earth. Huh?

Reagan’s middle name was presidential, Wilson; Clinton’s was also presidential, Jefferson. So may we conclude that if you would like your son to rise to the top, your best bet is to stay drunk, beat your wife habitually, and don’t forget to give the kid a presidential middle name? Now that is interesting, it might work but we do not advocate trying it at home.

Life evolves in mysterious ways. There is a Chinese folktale where what appears to be good news turns out to be bad and vice versa. Some raiding Mongols sweep into the area and take a man’s daughter and both of his horses. All the villagers commiserate with his misfortune. A year later the abductor, who is the clan chief’s son, returns with the daughter. He has fallen in love with her and wishes the old man’s blessing for the marriage. He brings a bunch of horses and gifts.

Now the man is happy but the villagers are all beside themselves with jealousy and shun the old man and his wife. And so the story goes, back and forth, good becomes bad, bad becomes good, over and over.

02-18 Saturday - Amy calls to say that a fire in her Callow shop must cancel our appointment mañana. Some moron plugged in an antique radio and left it on causing an electrical fire. She can’t touch anything until she meets the insurance adjuster there on Monday. She will take my pictures to the downtown gallery afterward and I will meet her there on Tuesday.

Item: Newsweek quotes Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger as saying, “I don’t think I got it in.” re one of the controversial calls that had ruled his run a touchdown on Super Bowl XL. The Steelers had a 3-4 point spread in their favor but the word was that the Seahawks would either beat the spread or take the game outright. A lot of late money was going on the Hawks. Not a good smell to this one at all.

02-19 Sunday - Turino, Italy - Shani Davis is the first African American man to ever win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. He won the 1,000 meters Saturday night. The American viewing public was treated to a tape of a boorish Davis in his first interview with NBC.

Davis turned down the standard studio interview with Bob Costas as well as the usual medalist circuit like the ‘Today Show’. But it was NBC's Melissa Stark’s interview with him on Saturday night that had people shaking their heads in disbelief. How could anyone in that position do this to their image?

"You are the first African-American male to win a gold medal at the Winter Games," Stark said. "How proud are you of that?" "I'm pretty happy about it," replied Davis, who looked away from Stark for most of the interview. "That's it?" Stark said. "Yeah," Davis said.

After a question about his mother, Cherie, was met with a similarly abrupt reply, Stark ended the interview asking, "Are you angry, Shani?" Davis replied: "No, I'm happy. I have a loss for words right now." "All right," said Stark, clearly put off. "You sure don’t look happy."

In the studio, Bob Costas and analyst Dan Hicks spoke to Davis' mood. "This is certainly not the kind of interview you're used to hearing from an Olympic gold medallist," Hicks said.

Watching this it is difficult to believe your eyes and ears. I can see millions in easy endorsement money running right down the drain. People must have gotten to him quickly because by the next day he had cleaned up his act tremendously. So much in this world is dependant on your attitude.

02-20 Monday - Somebody won a record $365 million Powerball Jackpot. That always rubs me the wrong way. Would it not be far better to have 365 people each win $1 million than to have one hayseed win all of it and probably kill himself within five years because of such a windfall? Or even better for 3,650 people to each win $100,000. Wouldn’t that spread a lot of manageable joy and financial relief? Or maybe even 7,300 people each winning $50,000.

There is a cute item in the Kitsap Sun today. The Klahowya Secondary School Key Club held their fifth annual ‘Senior’ Prom and crowned as Queen, Louise Nystrom. Ms. Nystrom is age 100. The theme song was Singing in the Rain. “This has been a wonderful day!” said Louise.

Adrienne, yes, send in my application and one year individual dues for the Navy League to Rick Becker, CAOT, MSC, USN - Retired

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02-21-06 Tuesday - Veh#1 - I drove down off Forest Ridge to Charleston at the eastern foot of the West Hills. Just a mile or so west of Bremo’s downtown, you'll find the Charleston neighborhood, Bremo's original downtown and our city's new International District. The area is filled with a mix of antique, collectible, pawn and thrift shops and offers a wide range of diverse eating options. Bremo and Charleston were consolidated on December 15, 1927.

I hit Brewski’s Bar and Grill or Tavern, home of the best barmaids around, and found draft Amber Bock on sale for $1.50. Had my quota and moved on down to the newly opened Paradise Cove, another Filipino eatery. Very friendly people and an all you can eat special buffet of Mexican food. The food was okay. The homemade desert was excellent.

Went on down to the Amy Burnett Gallery on Pacific Avenue. My five framed prints were set out along a wall. All are beautifully framed. Four same-sized matching frames are of Native Americans: Chief Joseph and Chief Yellow Bull, Annie Yellow Wolf and Baby, an Eskimo Belle - Cloud Thread, and a Northern Chief. The fifth is larger and consists of four women. It is titled Fire Watchers. The expression on the woman in the foreground slays me. All were painted form photographs. Annie Yellow Wolf was a wife to Chief Joseph.

Amy also gives me an unframed print that she says goes with this series. It is a woman, Mary Tom, who Amy later learned was a half-sister to Annie. She also gives me another copy of her book Amy’s Bremo Window, to give away. I am quite fortunate to also find the last copy of a book now out of print by a local author entitled Victory Gardens and Barrage Balloons, a collective memoir by Frank Wetzel that centers on Bremo during WW II.

I meet Helen B Louise, Executive Director of the Kitsap County Historical Society Museum. I promise to stop by and see their current exhibit of clocks, and chat about the fabulous clock exhibit in the Forbidden City in Beijing. People talk about how the Chinese are pirating our software. A few centuries ago when Western powers were forcing their way into China, the high tech of the time was clocks. It didn’t take long before the Chinese had reverse engineered these large, ornate, and complex mechanisms and began to produce their own clocks. They have been at this sort of thing for a very long time.

Ms. Burnett wraps and I load up my treasures. Amy advises that I may bring any of them back if they don’t work out, but I know exactly where they are going and they are not going back anywhere.
16:00 OFF

The $365 million Powerball Jackpot was won by about eight employees of a Lincoln, Nebraska outfit. They were all very happy and it was so much better this way than if it all was going to just one person. I think they each get $22 million after taxes in a lump sum. One of them was still reporting for duty on the graveyard shift because he didn’t want to put the company in a bind or inconvenience his coworkers. That is nice but it will change soon enough.

Another news item that I can hardly believe is that the game of tag has been banned from the school playgrounds in Spokane, WA. The TV also states that this is also the case in CA, NJ and elsewhere. The rationale is that tag is too dangerous as it has the potential of victimization, i.e. someone might be tagged who didn’t want to be! There was also something about how they do allow football…but there is no running permitted!

This is enough to make you vomit. And they wonder why boys do not like school. They shorten recess, lengthen the year, and overload them with homework…so that even when they are out of school these kids must remain indoors doing homework.

I still remember one day when I was in the fourth grade in Rhode Island. The schoolyard was divided in half, boys to one side and girls to the other. The yard was surrounded by chain link fencing. What happened that day never happened before or since to my knowledge. Suddenly all the boys, every last one of us, formed into one large group, which then split in two. One half went over to the girls’ side fence and mustered up toward the back of the yard. The girls quickly got out of the way and moved to the front of the schoolyard. The other half of the boys formed by our fence. Somehow I was the general for my half and someone else took charge of the other half.

At a spontaneous common signal, each half charged at the other. We all new it was a war. My glasses were broken in the melee. It didn’t last long. We were as surprised as everyone else. The other fellow and I were hauled into the administrative office. But oh what a glorious event! The saying used to be, “Boys will be boys.” Now it seems that it is becoming, “Boys must be girls.

The difference between the boys and girls was much more apparent in that Mexican School that I was associated with. Generally the girls were well behaved and worked at their studies. The boys played hard and rough and paid as little attention to their schoolwork as possible. My son Tommy was an exception and the teachers loved him for it. Tommy and I were both learning Spanish and we did his homework together each night.

I had the preconception that in third world countries, the boys got educated and the girls did not. The reality was quite different. The school days ran two shifts, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. This was so the youngsters would have time to do their chores and also attend school. Most went to school through the sixth grade, but some dropped out to work full time.

The next level of schooling was the Secondaria, and only some went on to that. The boys mostly knew what they would be doing. San Felipe was and is a fishing town and you don’t need a whole lot of book learning for that dangerous and grueling job.

It was a different story for the girls. They would be raising their children and keeping the home. This included teaching their children. There was a bookshop in town that I frequented in my pursuit of mastery of the language. I had started with comic books like Disneylandia’s Pato Donald, Mickey Raton, and so forth. Then it was soft cover books with text and pictures. They would be on such categories as Romance, Westerns, Police, and the like. Later I went on to the Spanish Classics and eventually South American Classics.

The point is that I don’t think that I ever saw a local man in that store buying a book. The clientele was all female. They had studied well in school and continued to read and learn for the rest of their lives. The oligarchy aside, it is the females and not the males, at least in rural Mexico that are self-educated.

The trend now seems to be to overprotect our boys until they are eighteen and them send them overseas to slaughter and be slaughtered. What’s wrong with that picture?

You can step on a balloon but it will pop up elsewhere. You abuse the nature of these boys and push them up against a wall hard enough and long enough and what happens? They come to school armed to the teeth and begin opening fire. Isn’t that a bit more dangerous then tag?

Very little is worse then overprotecting boys. Girls I am not so sure about but we do know that the sexes in this country are becoming closer in identity and that the girls are getting wilder all the time. Children must be given responsibility in order to develop a healthy and self-disciplined character.

The school that I remember with the fondest memories was the one I attended for most of the second grade. We had moved briefly to Seekonk, Massachusetts and the school was a rural one. We took a school bus to get there. The lunch period was an amazing hour and a half or more. The cooks were local mothers and the food was prepared home-style. You could have all you could eat, seconds and thirds were common.

When you finished eating you bussed your dishes and headed outside. The woods went on for many acres. You could even get out to the highway and cross it to a small store. The policing for all this was handled by designated sixth graders who wore special armbands.

13:30 ON
02-23-06 Thursday - Time for my 14:00 appointment at Affinity Massage with Greta. OMG did I ever need that!
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02-24-06 Friday - Talk about synchronicity, I just now pick up the Kitsap Sun and see that yesterday a fourteen year old freshman in Roseburg, Oregon shot and wounded another student at the school.

The schools curricula have become mostly so irrelevant to our children and what is on point, like computer literacy, the students are far in advance of the teachers and have to show their instructors how to function in this information age.

Abraham Lincoln said that the aggregate of all his schooling was less than one year. Winston Churchill signed on as an officer in the 4t Hussars instead of attending university. Posted to India at age twenty-two in 1896, he had the time on his hands to pursue studies as he wished. We already mentioned some notable school dropouts above such as Bill Gates the richest man in the world. Think these are strange anomalies?

One could certainly make a case that Thomas Edison was the most successful inventor in world history. He had more than one thousand patents to his name. He attended school for a total of three months at the age of four. The teacher sent him home stating that Thomas was too ‘addled’ to be educated. Most of us have heard about how Albert Einstein’s teachers thought so poorly of him.

Not convinced yet? This belongs under the, “No good deed goes unpunished department.” Alan Turing was looked down upon by his teachers and was at the bottom of his class in many of his subjects. He was a brilliant original thinker who wrote on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy and psychology. He had a better understanding of computers and their potential than probably anyone else alive. His Turing Machine was a concept that anticipated many computer standard features like algorithms, compilers/interpreters, input, output, memory, and programs.

The day after WW II began Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School and for the next three years was the key figure in the ongoing battle to decode messages encrypted by the increasingly complex German ‘Enigma’ machines. He took responsibility for the most difficult code-breaking task, the breaking of the German naval codes. His unlocking of those codes greatly reduced losses by our Atlantic convoys that were keeping Britain afloat.

One could argue that Alan Turing was instrumental in saving Britain and therefore Western Civilization from the Nazis in WW II, and also that he was the father of our modern computer architecture and thus our way of life. His reward? He was put on trial in March of 1952 on charges of homosexuality, which was at that time a crime in and of itself. He had never attempted to hide his sexual orientation. To avoid prison he was legally forced to submit to estrogen injections. Fearing that this persecution would never end, Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.

Schools all say that they want their students to learn not by rote but rather that they intend to teach them how to think so that they can study on their own later. Unfortunately, in practice, that is not the case. They are conformity factories. They are paid by the state to produce workers, to stamp out interchangeable units. If the state or institution has enough power, then the kids will even have to dress alike.

Life should be a joy. It is…for most happy healthy kids, at least when they are not in school or doing homework. Learning should be a joy. Learning is a joy if you are learning what you want and need to learn. Having other stuff crammed down your throat is not a joy, far from it. A person wants to first learn something that they are interested in. Once quite full of that subject, at least for a while, you then want to pursue the next area that you are lacking knowledge in and therefore have an interest for. You never really know what will come next until you get there. Your consciousness evolves bit by bit.

I have yet to meet a child that could not find joy in learning what they were interested in at the time. As soon as a school demands that all learn the same things in the same order at the same speed and at the same level, they have already lost it. What schools are excellent at is making students hate school and unfortunately the children confuse this with a distaste of learning.

Sputnik entered the scene in 1957. That spurred a great push in the U.S. towards engineering. When I graduated high school in 1960 I was steered into a very fine engineering school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The problem was that I was more a poet than an engineer. Both of my SATs were in the 700’s but my verbal, right brain, skills were stronger than my mathematical, left brain abilities.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I would be spending six months studying six books that I had no real interest in. I stopped going to classes and began buying and devouring books. Eventually I was detected and called to the Administration. To their credit, when they knew what I was doing, they allowed me to remain and continue my self-education until the semester ended. I doubt that such an outcome would occur today.

Having discovered my great love of learning, I went home to Connecticut and began quenching an insatiable thirst for the Greek and Roman Classics, Russian authors, German authors, French writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment, and many, many others. I also dove into self-help books and anything on psychiatry and psychology. I have been and remain an avid reader and learner from many sources. What a difference between hating school curriculum and loving learning!

All children are artists, but the society does not need that many, so what happens? They start with lots of art in preschool and kindergarten. Less in first grade, very little in second grade, and then that is about it. The kids are weaned from art and then cut off. How many artists do you need in a mill anyway? The problem is that we are or should be decades past producing mostly mill workers.

Art is more of a right-brain function. The curriculum is forcing more and more away from the spatial side and into the left-brain linear processing realm. Following a line of printed words rather than taking in a video. But to be a healthy person you need to be balanced.

Our entire culture is shifting from left to right brain activity. Males are becoming increasingly feminized, not necessarily a bad thing. Baseball is a linear left-brain sport. It has been supplanted, as the most popular national sport, by football. Football provides much more random movement and is right-brained in orientation. Video games have gone from left to right. Watching movies has largely replaced reading books as a form of entertainment by the younger generations.

One thing that amazed me in China was the Chinese writing. Today they teach their children both the traditional characters and also the western alphabet. Think about that for a moment. The characters use the right-brain and the alphabet uses the left-brain! Is there any doubt who will be on top in one hundred years? They also learn English. Our kids won’t even learn a second language.

To me the character language seemed so imprecise and vague and so forth, but that is what they use for virtually everything. I reviewed all manner of technical reports at a factory in Guangzhou. Everything was done in traditional characters. This was the day the famous Guangzhou Trade Fair opened and the rocket was launched that put Liwei Yang in orbit. They had the confidence to openly make that connection and broadcast the launch live. They had Henry Kissinger and Al Haig commenting on TV. The Russian Space program is moribund and the Euro Space Agency never sent up a man. The 21st Century is no question, the Century of China.

It is worth noting that China has a history of many millennia of never being aggressive outside of its own borders, in fact they built the Great Wall to keep all others out. Sure they are menacing Taiwan and took over Tibet but that is because they consider them to be part of historical China and they want all of their parts restored.

When North Vietnam was being nasty some while back, China amassed an army and went into Vietnam to teach them a lesson, but once done, they withdrew. The same thing occurred during the Korean War when Macarthur failed to heed the warnings from China and got too close to the Yalu River.

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters 漢 字 汉 字. Each symbol represents a semanteme, a meaningful unit of language. They are not just pictographs, pictures of their meanings, but are highly stylized and carry much abstract meaning. Only some characters are derived from pictographs. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xushen in the Han Dynasty classified characters into six categories with only 4% listed as pictographs, and 82% as phonetic complexes. The latter consist of both a radical element that indicates meaning and a phonetic element.

Just image putting a man in outer space using such characters! Time and time again I have witnessed two Chinese people coming to a verbal impasse, and what do they do? They resort to the Chinese characters and very quickly arrive at a mutual understanding.

Two personal stories came to mind as I edited this. When I was about four years old, in 1946, I was attending nursery school. One day we were assigned the task of creating a picture using those big fat crayons. I diligently and enthusiastically set about my work. Just before I was quite finished the teacher ordered a cut-off. I continued to hastily finish. The next ting I knew this lady was at my side and physically pulling my paper away and ruining my work.

In frustration I hurled one of the colors in the air. I could not believe that a task would be ordered and then destroyed by the teacher. I was bound hand and foot with rope, dumped in a ‘woody’ and driven home to my mother. I was untied at my house. Yes…I know that this may explain a lot! But the point here is that when push comes to shove, the message is not creativity or work product, what is being inculcated is obedience.

The second situation came about because I switched from a city parochial school in Rhode Island to a rural public school in Massachusetts in the second grade. One thing I can say about those nuns is that I had been taught to write. But in Seekonk they didn’t learn that until the third grade and were still printing. The teacher was a bit shocked to see me writing and made it clear that I was to print only. I had and have no problem with that. I loved that school. But it is a very minor illustration that conformity, not student development, is paramount.

It is certainly not my intention to be knocking teachers here. I could not do what they do, not with the class sizes that are considered normal. That many kids, and I would most definitely go postal on the little monsters.

The maximum span of control is usually about twelve. That is all Jesus Christ could handle and the same goes for any organization. But teachers dealing with our little savages are supposed to manage twenty, thirty, and even forty of them. This is just more built-in systemic failure.

Systemic failure like forcing young children, especially boys to sit still for hours and then forbidding them to run at recess in the playground! What loons come up with that? Is it a matter of liability? If so then pass legislation that deals with it…don’t sacrifice our children who are still close enough to their nature that they know what is good and what is bad. You can’t fool a dog for long…or a child. They are still in tune with the source.

A child has an inner voice. That voice is telling him to be outside with his or her bare feet on the earth, breathing fresh air, running, yelling, and playing with friends. The teacher is the outer voice telling him to wear shoes, come inside, breath dead air, sit at a desk, don’t play, sit still, be quiet, and listen to her. The answer to lack of attention is not drugs. That is criminal. When I was young there was no ADD. You can’t put a child on drugs for no reason so first they had to invent a name like ADD for what is normal; and then they prescribe drugs as a cure for it. Then they make billions.

Mexico doesn’t have ADD. If they did, virtually every boy in school in San Felipe would be so diagnosed. Our medical people who are self-proclaimed experts on ADD have concluded that kids with ADD are more likely to grow up and become drug addicts. In other words if you take a restless five year old, tell him he has a disease whose solution is to take drugs, and you then put him on drugs for the rest of his childhood; then when he becomes an adult and has a problem…he may dose himself with drugs! I’m sorry; I regard this whole ADD fad as a criminal conspiracy.

Society does need to have its educational system produce what it needs. Societal evolution in broad terms has been described as: Nomadic or Hunter/Gatherer, Agrarian, Post Industrial Revolution, Information Age, and perhaps next will be the Age of Creativity.

It is said that the generals are always fighting the last war. The schools are no different. Our schools are still attempting to stamp out cookie cutter workers for the mills. The problem is that the mills meanwhile have long since gone overseas. The kids know its bullshit. Naturally they would rather be playing video games and allowing their brains to follow and absorb the code. That programming is one of the best things for them and will organize their minds in a very logical and highly sophisticated way. A Harvard study just out concluded that video games do not make kids violent.

So the children quite naturally and rightly rebel against wasting their valuable time on this planet, filling their head with garbage…and our response is not to upgrade our methods and make instruction and practices relevant, but to drug them into submission. These are the same folks that gave us shock treatments and lobotomies. These are our children. They are the future hope of our species. These are our children!

In fact the trend is toward ever more national and statewide standardized tests and the Feds now want to start that in higher education as well. Is it true that our kids don’t match some undeveloped foreign countries on these tests? Of course it is! They are where we were fifty to one hundred years ago. The Caucasian prizefighters we produce cannot match those of Blacks or Hispanics these days. Why should they? They could have fifty to one hundred years ago. We have already been there and done that. As long as you are making progress you are moving on. The White boxers of today come from the former Soviet Union.

That’s why so much manufacturing has gone overseas; it is their turn for that. We are supposed to be leading the Information and Creative Ages. That means computers and art, and that means are kids should be playing computer and video games. D’uh!

If each child has a computer that is guiding him or her through the lessons in a fun way and at the child’s speed, then a teacher can move around dealing with problems as they occur. Even the order of subjects can be tailored to fit the child’s needs.

I am not up on current schooling and certainly no expert, but I have been told that in many schools if a student does a report on whatever subject and they put it together by synthesizing the report from info found on the Internet, that they get in trouble for doing that and are charged with lack of personal effort and so forth.

Why? That is the only thing that now makes sense to do. That is exactly what they will do as adults and what many successful adults do now. Think for a moment. Practically all the knowledge and information on the planet is available to them on the Net, and they know that. They also know how to get it. But they are somehow expected to put on blinders and pretend that it is 1920.

Of course no society is all agrarian or all creative or whatever. The U.S. still has some hunter-gatherers out there. Just as an agrarian country has some industry, if only to make farm equipment and the like. But we need for our educational system to be leading our children forward, not dragging them, kicking and screaming back into the pre-computer, pre-digital past.

Some homework is necessary, but it should be given only out of necessity. When it is based on a certain number of hours each day, it represents what? Is it merely a means of attempting to keep the kids off the street? Why isn’t the subject of the homework sometimes left for the child to pick? Maybe one kid would study an anthill, another the stars, another cook or build something, and so on and so forth. Then let each give a brief written or oral report.

That would give variety and relevance. It would also teach public speaking. And best of all, the students could study something that they were actually interested in! That is the purpose of learning. With pride of authorship, all manner of creativity could flow. Plus, each student could learn from all the others, instead of them all having done the same meaningless assignment.

But it wouldn’t show up on the nationwide standards test, you may object. Well you know what they can do with that. Just like the drug war, the situation in the schools is worse every year. Bureaucrats can ruin anything. They always have when they remained unchecked for long enough. Now they are doing their best to ruin the schools.

Bear in mind that most of these kids today get their early learning of the alphabet and reading, numbers and math, animals and whatever from these colorful little handheld computer driven learning devices like those made by Fisher Price and many others. Then when they reach school age and hit the big-time, they are forced to go backward in time.

The key to running a successful and productive workforce is putting the right people in the right jobs. I have found that everyone is good for and at something. If you put the round pegs in the round holes, everything gores smoothly. Forcing square pegs in triangular holes is a fool’s effort. Each child needs to find his or herself, and be developed in the way best for them. We finally now have the technology and the knowledge to actually do this for the first time. We just are not doing it very well at all.

There is a saying in the computer world, GIGO, garbage in results in garbage out. Education is no different. We fill our kids heads with irrelevant garbage and wonder why we get garbage out.

Today’s world is radically different from the past and its needs are different. When Columbus landed in the New World there were hundreds of Native American tribes and many thousands of individual groups. Each group would have had an especially skillful arrow maker. That being an essential product to produce, this arrow maker probably had a protégé or two. That would have meant several thousand arrow makers in North America alone.

How many arrow makers do we need today? A few companies would be more than sufficient, even if we all used arrows. Today they would be a CAD CAM product, in other words designed by computers and aided in their manufacture by computers. Everything is going in that direction. If you are a student and number one or close to that on a national level, then you are indeed valuable and will be highly educated, at least in your specialty area.

But if you are just average, what can you really contribute? The work done by the tops in their fields will have their work or work products replicated a million-fold for the masses. What does that leave for you to do? Individual creativity will become more and more important as machines do more and more of the physical work and a gifted relative few do the heavy thinking.

Another thing that we have upside down is world travel. Instead of our geriatric cases making world tours at an age when they can barely hobble around or more often are too afraid to go at all because of health concerns; it is our young people that need and could most benefit from overseas travel. All of what they learned could be applied to the life that they have in front of them; rather than being experienced at the end of life.

I am often solicited by AARP to donate to this or that cause of the elderly. It is the young people who need the most help. Old people have usually bought their homes when they were dirt-cheap and have long since paid them off. Most young people have low paying futureless service jobs and have little chance at all to buy an exorbitantly priced home.

I didn’t see any mental illness when I lived in Mexico. Basically, the people there were too busy trying to cover their necessities for that luxury, i.e. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Despite what we would call poverty, the quality of life was in many ways far superior to our own. Families and communities were very strong. Joyous celebrations were longer. They celebrated things like Children’s Day, and the Day of the Dead, that we do not. Children played necessary roles in the family’s survival and had a sense of purpose rather than alienation. On Mothers Day there was not a soul to be seen anywhere as everyone had some place to go.

The pharmacist was considered far more knowledgeable about drugs than the doctors and people did not need a prescription. Don’t kid yourself, that is most often true in the U.S. as well. Sure a steady stream of narcotics and marijuana traverse Mexico on the way to the U.S. but they and their children mostly shun them. Those drugs are strictly intended for the stupid gringos.

Then we would come back to the U.S. each month for supplies and family visits and see commercials for such essential medication as that needed to deal with the horrors of things like PMS. And watch ads for such vital products as pre-peeled oranges.

Item: Highland Avenue has long been primo Bremo real estate and the location of the Gates family home. Most homes were built in 1901; all but one was up before the Great depression. Located high up by the Washington Narrows, this allows views of the Manette Bridge and has been rezoned for sixty-foot tall condos. The locals are aflutter over the pending change in character of the neighborhood. They are calling for a forty-foot height limit.

In fact, in 1985 the city passed a comprehensive plan that allows for one-hundred-twenty-foot tall buildings here. The revitalization of downtown Bremo necessitates higher residential density within walking distance of the city center. Bremo will be a great place to live for those who are not looking for the burbs. Last summer Seattle Magazine ranked Manette Greater Seattle’s ninth hottest neighborhood

A motion to revisit the building height limits was made at a recent City Council meeting but failed to find a second to the motion…and so it died as the five fellow councilpersons stood mute. The whole growth strategy is based upon getting many more thousands of people into these areas.

Item: Millions of acres of lush green Canadian forests are turning red and dying. The rapidly warming climate has aided the mountain pine beetle in killing more trees than either fire or logging

The Navy plans to relocate two Seawolf-class fast-attack subs here next summer. That would put all three Seawolfs in Kitsap, the USS Jimmy Carter now at Bangor and the USS Seawolf and USS Connecticut first home-ported to Bremo’s Naval Station. The move is part of a strategic realignment to have sixty percent of the U.S. submarines in the Pacific. Bangor already has had three new subs added in the last few months of 2005.

Bangor is now home to eight Trident Ballistic missile subs, two guided missile subs and the Jimmy Carter. The USS San Francisco, a Los Angeles-class fast attack sub is also here awaiting repairs. This buildup is to counter the fast growth of China’s military and naval forces.

There is an unusual scheme beginning to surface around Bremo, in one form or another. It has only been made possible with the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s very controversial June 2005 5/4 decision to allow eminent domain for economic reasons. Lawmakers in Olympia offered several proposals to clarify Washington State’s constitution’s wording on the issue, but Democrats in the majority left them in committee.

The main outline of the plan being bandied about has numerous evolving variations but it generally goes something like this. Huge amounts of Bremo are condemned through eminent domain for economic reasons. But rather than simply compensating the local owners at the current market value, they would receive shares in a corporate entity that would generously reflect the greatly enhanced value that these properties would represent after major redevelopment occurs on a grand scale.

These shares could later be used to purchase new units of a greater or lesser number of bedrooms in town or sold outright, in whole or in part. The entire area would be transformed and no holdouts would be possible. This has never been done before to our knowledge. It would take tremendous effort and planning but when you consider what the people of Bremo accomplished in WW II, it is certainly not beyond their ability.

And certainly they are most deserving. Look at what the folks in New Orleans did after Hurricane Katrina. First they fail to evacuate as ordered, then they compound that by not putting sufficient water and food supplies on hand. Then they riot and loot, and even shoot at helicopters attempting to help them. Not everyone acted like that but enough did to make it a national disgrace.

On top of that, the government is remarkably corrupt, the same with the Police Department. And Mayor Ray Nagan? My mama taught me that if you can’t say anything good about someone, just say nothing. So much for His Honor. Bremos on the other hand, ask for nothing, work hard, and help each other out. Man, do they ever deserve to finally receive a just reward.

A new Milken Institute ranking puts the 2005 Bremo~Silverdale area as 18^th nationwide, up from 122^nd in 2004, with wealthy migrants driving Kitsap County’s job growth.

Item: The Philippine Army attempts to stop a coup to oust President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. I wonder if that is fallout from her recent statement that had to be the stupidest one I have ever heard coming from a head of state concerning that horrible mudslide that left an unstable 100-acre mud field and swamp enveloping and covering the village of Guinsaugon on Leyte Island.

With widespread poverty that has many citizens eating out of landfills, President Arroyo went on TV to promise that all bodies would be unearthed for the sake of their families. The cost of this dangerous effort would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars…and all so that these victims could be what? Reburied in the very same earth!

09:30 ON
02-25-06 Saturday – I walked to VFW 239 on Dora Street in the West Hills area. Got buzzed in and hit the bar. I left a wind-ripped U.S. flag properly folded, to be forwarded to the American Legion for appropriate ceremonious destruction.
10:30 OFF

Item: 02-28-06 Warning! Financial responsibility can lead to terrorism. An article by Bob Kerr of the Rhode Island Providence Journal concerns one Walter Soehnge a retired Texas schoolteacher who decided to reduce his debt. He and his wife thought that the balance on their J C Penney MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level, so they sent in a check for $6,522.

The credit didn't show up. They were told, as they moved up the ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than the normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. Then the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted. Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and Bob Kerr.

And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act. "The more I read, the scarier it gets," he said. Walter says that he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, but worries now about rights being lost. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to others," he said.

Item: Two Washington D.C. residents have had the tiny VeriChip inserted into their bodies. The RFID chip contains medical info. The device was originally developed to track livestock, and has been implanted in over six million cats and dogs. The units last indefinitely.

My understanding of the privacy promises made when President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, was to the effect that the information would be sacrosanct. It was stated that the Feds would not even use this info to trace a Public Enemy Number One like John Dillinger.

Now we are asked for our social security number for just about anything. All the credit bureaus use it as their file number. I once persisted in questing this until I finally reached a high enough individual who explained to me that the credit bureau does not use the actual social security number but rather it uses another number that is identical to your social security number!

Worse yet, back in the mid 60’s when I was working for local government, I was having lunch with a fellow employee who was running a computer installation for the same department. In response to some problem I was having, he offered to supply me with a computer tape of every Social Security number in Los Angeles County…to run against a tape of my accounts. I was flabbergasted. The offer was genuine.

Today we get bombarded with Privacy Policy Pamphlets from all of our creditors assuring us of the great care being taken to protect our privacy. This is concurrent with the ability of any of us to obtain private information on just about anybody on the Internet. As a licensed Private Investigator, I have long been able to access a great deal of information but now anybody can do the same and more.

This is like the War on Drugs, the longer the war, the worse the drug problem. Today we have all this privacy legislation and no privacy to be had. The damn pamphlets have so much small print that even those with OCD won’t take the time to read it, not that it is understandable anyway. As the old saying goes, “What the big print giveith, the small print taketh away.”

Even worse has been the SPAM situation. It used to be that I got maybe one SPAM a week and everyone would get very upset over SPAM. Then when the complaints reached a certain level, the Feds stepped in to correct the problem. What their anti-SPAM legislation in fact did was to legalize SPAM. Now I get from 20,000-30,000 SPAM each day! Bravo U.S. Congress!

OK Adrienne, about the shampoo subject that was left unfinished last night. Actually it is about more than shampoo. Have you ever noticed that the hair that goes gray first is the hair that you cut? With a man it is the hair on your head and then your beard if you shave. The body hair and eyebrows that are not cut hold their color years longer.

Since they start cutting our hair at age three or so we don’t stand a chance. When hair is cut it grows longer. You pay a price for messing with Mother Nature. Now you may think that if we didn’t cut our hair it would grow impossibly long. Look at a dog or cat or chimp or gorilla or any animal; they don’t cut their hair. It grows to the right length and stops. The same thing happens with our body hair.

But each time you cut your hair your body gets the message that there is a hair problem and so it grows it back plus some extra length. It is the lifetime of this abuse that leads to the loss of color, and probably some longevity. If this is not the message in the story of Sampson and Delilah…what is?

I had my last haircut in 1994. Since then I have never had a bad-hair day. It takes but a few seconds to brush or comb it into a ponytail. The hair is always neatly close to the sides of my head and it stopped getting longer some time back. Each day after showering, about the same amount of hair comes out with brushing.

Shampoo just makes the situation even worse. If you remove the oil from a duck, it will sink and drown. Do we shampoo our body hair and beards? No and we have no dandruff problems there. The more we remove the oil from our hair, the more the body gets the message that more oil is needed and it goes into overproduction.

If you start using stronger, anti-dandruff shampoo, you make the problem even worse and get deeper and deeper into the trap. The way out is to back off and use milder shampoo less frequently until you need very little or none at all.

I recall as a child going through the Breakers, the Vanderbilt’s mansion in Newport Rhode Island. The bathrooms were huge and had small pools in them for bathing but the guide pointed out that they got little use as the family doctor advised bathing no more than twice per year. I guess if you are rich enough you might be told the truth.

Constant showering, bathing, and shampooing doesn’t make you good and clean; it makes you sick, or at the very least upsets your natural body functions, wears you down and makes you vulnerable. Naturally the beauticians are in favor of the above as they charge us to wash our hair, shampoo it, and dye it after we kill the color in it. It is said that Jackie Kennedy died from the black dye that was used on her hair. So nowadays not even wealth can save us from all the commercial forces that will do anything to us for a buck.

Deodorant is the same scam. The more you use it and interfere with nature the more you require and the sicker the area gets and the more it generates an unwanted odor. Worse yet, some companies put aluminum in their deodorant. One thing you never want to put into your body is aluminum. That doesn’t stop firms from making aluminum pots and pans though.

Water is all you need. The same goes with a bath or shower, and antibacterial soap is the worst. Antibacterial soap is great for aiding bacteria to become immune to antibacterial agents…is that what we want? No soap is required or good unless you have grease or something like that to get off. Soap is like clean grease that lifts dirty grease or oil. Otherwise it is unnecessary. Your skin is the largest organ you have. What you put on it is generally absorbed. So if you wouldn’t eat it, don’t put it on your skin. Would you eat your lipstick and other cosmetics?

Another strange deal is toothpaste. Most assume that it has been made with the best possible compound for your teeth in mind. Guess again. The engineering problem to be solved with toothpaste is to find something that you can put into a tube that will stay in there for years without decomposing or turning color and so forth; even when many people will leave the cap off the tube. It must do that and also come easily out of the tube.

Try cleaning an enamel sink or a plate with toothpaste. Impossible, you have to use soap to get that crap off your sink, and then clean the item with the soap. So why would you use toothpaste to clean your teeth? What else could you use? Try using baking soda or salt or soap. Yes soap, it does taste a little strange the first few days but after that it seems quite normal. It does a much better job at a small fraction of the cost. You would want to use pure soap. I have been using soap for about two years now and my oral hygienist keeps remarking about how much my gums are improving. I have yet to tell her why.

A war has raged for decades over the fluoridation of water and toothpaste. The detractors’ case is generally that fluoride is a poison that is a byproduct of manufacturing. Its buildup became a serious problem. The solution arrived at to neutralize and get rid of this poison was to run this stuff through the population’s kidneys via the water supply.

We have been made to fear sunshine like it was nuclear fallout. Well actually that is what it is so just forget that I said that. I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that sunscreen causes cancer. We were not told to avoid sunshine until they began selling sunscreen. Sunshine does an awful lot of good for us. It creates vitamin D that helps prevent bone disease, muscle pain, MS, Types I and II diabetes, high blood pressure, and other maladies. Why do places like Minnesota and London have a higher rate of malignant melanoma than Arizona and Florida?

Once again think of what is natural and what our bodies have been used to for the longest amount of time. We have been exposed to sunshine for billions of years. We have been told to expose our skin to sunscreen, a manmade mixture of chemicals that has been around for only a few decades. I’ll go with the sun. This does not mean overexposing skin that has not been used to sunshine and burning it.

We treat our animals better than ourselves. How often does the average person bath their cat or dog or farm animals? And most do not feed them junk food. Try taking some Mickey D’s to the local zoo and attempt to feed it to a primate. You will be very lucky not to be arrested for endangering the animal’s health. They are considered to be very valuable. But powerful marketing forces are unleashed on us around the clock to entice us to consume that junk.

There is a movie Super Size Me wherein the filmmaker ate only at McDonald’s for thirty days. The medical tests showed that he was ruining his health and body. He became addicted in a very short time. That is to say he would start feeling very bad until he ate more of it. The people who ate there once a week were referred to as Users by the employees; those that ate at McDonald’s more than once a week were dubbed Heavy Users.

McDonald’s are all over the world. I recall walking up the steps out of a train station somewhere in Europe and there was a McDonald’s ad on each and every stair riser. Or being in Paris and seeing the McDonald’s outlets filled with American tourists. Would you not have to be either senseless or addicted, to travel to Paris and eat at McDonald’s?

Is it any wonder that the insurance companies and employers are dropping or limiting coverage whenever they can, when as a nation we are becoming sicker and sicker due to what amounts to slow bad-food poisoning? We need a better accounting and awareness of the power of the various lobbies and a way to keep track of what they are up to. For a case on point read: Don't Drink Your Milk! - The Frightening New Medical Facts About the World's Most Overrated Nutrient by Frank A. Oski

We are told to feed our children artificial and sugared junk that we put in a toaster. Or chocolate this or that for breakfast. The cereal that is pushed on them has artificial dyes and colors, tons of sugar, salt, and some even have candy in them. Why, so they will eat it? No, so they will get addicted to it. Kids will eat good food and like it. Do we really think they will starve rather than eat good food? Does it look like U.S. kids are starving when they waddle down the street?

The best product to sell in order to make money at any cost has always been an addictive one. Tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, dope, you name it. A century ago they had cocaine in Coca Cola and codeine, opium, and the like in all manner of remedies.

I recall decades ago when the major baby food companies were caught putting sugar in the baby food jars. The outcry at that time made them back off. I wonder if it is back in now? Hook them from birth…it doesn’t get any sicker than that. Diet soda is said to be both addictive and that it makes you fat because it causes you to want to eat after drinking it.

Last night the History Channel had a program in the Modern Marvels series about harvesting. Sugar beets make up fifty percent of the sugar in the U.S. It is processed into sugar, molasses, and pulp. The first two unhealthy sugars go to people, while the good part with the fiber…it goes to dairy animals. They must be kept healthy for money to be made from them, whereas the people are for making money off of.

A culturally ingrained tradition is to reward young people for good behavior by giving them sweets. Despite myself I am also sometimes guilty of that. What a terrible signal and reinforcement both ways, of equating good performance with sugar and sugar with good performance.

Now diabetes is skyrocketing through the population. A lot of ads for blood testers and related diabetes products appear on TV. More and more youngsters are and will become diabetic at an accelerated rate. This is more great news for the drug companies.

London: Nearly half the kids in North and South America are expected to be obese by 2010, up from one third now. The European Union is projected to have childhood obesity running at 38% up from 25% at this time. This info is from the International Obesity task force.

Why would this be allowed to happen? Gee wiz, I don’t know, but what I do know is that as these youngsters become diabetic, the drug companies will make billions off of them and their misery. Are human beings now the biggest cash crop on the planet yet…officially?

I was moaning about this over a meal in beautiful Vin Del Mar on the coast west and north of Santiago, Chile last year. My lunch companions were too lovely people from Bogotá, Columbia, Sergio and Claudia. He flew choppers like Blackhawks for the U.S. and she was a pediatrician. She said that this medical drug onslaught is going on everywhere.

None of this is new. Rich old men wanting ever more power and loot have been around for a long time. The Opium Wars had the British fighting to hook the Chinese on dope. Britain built itself by all manner of vile deeds.

For twenty years starting in 1713, England brought 15,000 slaves annually to America. In 1786 the English brought more than 97,000 slaves over and had more than 800 slave ships operating out of Liverpool alone. Altogether British ships transported over three million slaves.

Most of these Africans went to the West Indies to work in the sugarcane fields. There the slave ships would load up with molasses and continue on to New England where that cargo would be exchanged for rum, which by 1750 was New England's chief manufacture. The ships would carry the rum back to the Old World and exchange it for slaves; thus the profitable circle of trade fueled by human misery continued for generations. 

The maritime states of New England soon joined in the slave trade. Boston, Massachusetts started in 1638, followed by Rhode Island where Newport, the chief slave port in the American colonies was located. It actually rivaled Liverpool in England. Slave trading and the export of rum became the basis of New England's economy. Thanksgiving myths aside, even the Pilgrims of Plymouth had consigned Native Americans into slavery and shipped them to the West Indies and elsewhere.

The Southern colonies were not a part of the trade, having neither ships nor molasses. In 1774, the importation of slaves was forbidden by the people of North and South Carolina. But in 1778, the new U.S. Constitution forbade Congress from banning the importation of slaves for another twenty years.

• It is especially virulent
• It is being spread by migratory birds
• It can be transmitted from birds to mammals and in some limited circumstances to humans
• And like other influenza viruses, it continues to evolve.

• The U.S. has nearly two million people incarcerated.
• One out of 150 Americans, are behind bars. This doubled in the past twelve years.
• Daily 1.96 million U.S. children have a parent or close relative incarcerated.
• One out of three young African-American males is under criminal justice supervision.
• For every Black male enrolled in a California college, five are behind bars.
• For every Latino in a four-year college, three are incarcerated.
• The number of women inmates has tripled since 1985.
• 78% of the women in state prisons are mothers.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

The above was delivered by none other than Benito Mussolini, way back in 1925!

The future is unwritten. The one we get is up to us.

Allow me to end with a quote from what else, the Bible - John 8:32.