Who is really to blame for the Healthcare debacle?

Truth!

This makes me Laugh!

 From a major university of higher learning web site! 

"Graduating with student loans? In addition to mandatory online exit counseling, Scholarships & Financial Aid is offering student loan repayment workshops to help you better understand the repayment process." 

The part I laughed about was the "mandatory online exit counseling".  Just strikes me as funny that only the intellectually superior nincompoops that fill the hallowed halls of academia would connect online counseling in the same sentence!  I mean really what could go wrong with that!  

The second part that caused a smile was the, " . . . understanding the repayment process" comment.  Is there really a person who graduates with a four your degree from a major university that doesn't understand you have to repay your student loans?  Well sadly I fear the answer is yes!

Remember these are the folks who shape the thinking of our brilliant American students every day!

You just have to laugh at his stupidity!

What makes me Laugh?

A President who was raised by Communists, who has never held a job that wasn't funded by donations (community organizer) or other people's tax money, who now lives opulently off of the American public, who has become wealthy through the deeds of others on his behalf, going around the country making speeches about how to grow the economy!

GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY

ON JULY 20, 1969, AS COMMANDER OF THE APOLLO 11 LUNAR MODULE, NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO SET FOOT ON THE MOON.

HIS FIRST WORDS AFTER STEPPING ON THE MOON, "THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND," WERE TELEVISED TO EARTH AND HEARD BY MILLIONS.*

BUT JUST BEFORE HE RE-ENTERED THE LANDER, HE MADE THE ENIGMATIC REMARK

"GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY."

MANY PEOPLE AT NASA THOUGHT IT WAS A CASUAL REMARK CONCERNING SOME RIVAL SOVIET COSMONAUT. HOWEVER, UPON CHECKING, THERE WAS NO GORSKY IN EITHER THE RUSSIAN OR AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAMS .

OVER THE YEARS, MANY PEOPLE QUESTIONED ARMSTRONG AS TO WHAT THE - 'GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY' STATEMENT MEANT, BUT ARMSTRONG ALWAYS JUST SMILED. ON JULY 5, 1995, IN TAMPA BAY, FLORIDA , WHILE ANSWERING QUESTIONS FOLLOWING A SPEECH, A REPORTER BROUGHT UP THE 26-YEAR-OLD QUESTION ABOUT MR GORSKY TO ARMSTRONG.

THIS TIME HE FINALLY RESPONDED BECAUSE MR. GORSKY HAD DIED, SO NEIL ARMSTRONG FELT HE COULD NOW ANSWER THE QUESTION. HERE IS THE ANSWER TO "WHO WAS MR GORSKY":

IN 1938, WHEN HE WAS A KID IN A SMALL MID-WESTERN TOWN , HE WAS PLAYING BASEBALL WITH A FRIEND IN THE BACKYARD. HIS FRIEND HIT THE BALL, WHICH LANDED IN HIS NEIGHBOUR'S YARD BY THEIR BEDROOM WINDOW.

HIS NEIGHBOURS WERE MR. AND MRS. GORSKY. AS HE LEANED DOWN TO PICK UP THE BALL, YOUNG ARMSTRONG HEARD MRS. GORSKY SHOUTING AT MR. GORSKY,

"SEX! YOU WANT SEX?! YOU'LL GET SEX WHEN THE KID NEXT DOOR WALKS ON THE MOON!"

It broke the place up.

NEIL ARMSTRONG'S FAMILY CONFIRMED THIS IS A TRUE STORY. Do pass it on, it's too choice not to be shared

Do you live in a Country run by Idiots?

Food For Thought

If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for being in the country illegally ...you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to get your parents’ permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the only school curriculum allowed to explain how we got here is evolution, but the government stops a $15 million construction project to keep a rare spider from evolving to extinction ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to show identification to board an airplane, cash a check, check in at the doctor's office, buy liquor, or check out a library book, but not to vote who runs the government ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government wants to ban stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines with more than ten rounds, but gives 20 F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If, in the largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not a 24-ounce soda because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If an 80-year-old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a woman in a hijab is only subject to having her neck and head searched ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If a seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher’s "cute," but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If children are forcibly removed from parents who discipline them with spankings while children of addicts are left in filth and drug infested “homes”... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government intrusion, while not working is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing and free cell phones ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government's plan for getting people back to work is to incentivize NOT working with 99 weeks of unemployment checks and no requirement to prove they applied but can’t find work ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you more "safe" according to the government ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

Damn, why didn't I think of this?

From The London Times: A Well-Planned Retirement Outside England ’s Bristol Zoo there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 buses. For 25 years, its parking fees were managed by a very pleasant attendant.....The fees for cars ($1.40),for buses (about $7). Then, one day, after 25 solid years of never missing a day of work,he just didn't show up; so the zoo management called the city council and asked it to send them another parking agent. The council did some research and replied that the parking lot was the zoo's own responsibility. The zoo advised the council that the attendant was a city employee. The city council responded that the lot attendant had never been on the city payroll. Meanwhile, sitting in his villa somewhere on the coast of Spain, or France, or Italy, is a man who'd apparently had a ticket booth installed completely on his own and then had simply begun to show up every day, commencing to collect and keep the parking fees, estimated at about $560 per day -- for 25 years. Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over $7 million dollars ......and no one even knows his name.

Gong to Hell in a Hand Basket!

I grew up in the 50’s & 60”s, a child of the Greatest Generation.  I remember my parents telling me how much the world had changed since they were my age.   Things just weren’t the same as when they grew up. . . more crime, the government out of control, too many regulations, the economy was bad, no work for anyone, wars and more wars.    I vividly remember one very hot summer day when I heard the local service station owner saying, “Man it so hot, look at that sun, it just keeps getting closer and closer to the earth, in 20 years the world will be on fire and we will all burn up!” (I do not believe he was related to Al Gore, but I don’t know for certain!)

In the 50’s & 60’s in Somerville, Texas where I grew up, the adults subscribed to the local weekly paper, the Somerville Tribune and some folks had one of the Houston papers delivered by someone in town who had a “paper route”.  If you didn’t subscribe to any of the papers you would pick up a copy every now and then for 5 or 10 cents at the drug store or City Café.  If you didn’t have the money for a paper or you just wanted to get the “real” inside scoop on anything you would go down to Harvey Neutzler’s barber shop and catch up on what you had been missing.  Often you only did that when you went in to get that exorbitantly priced $0.50 haircut.

Folks listened to the AM radio station, the closest station was KWHI in Brenham, which mostly played music and did the farm report but would also have news usually at 8 am, noon and 5 pm, usually a 15 minute or less program that focused on really big world issues, none of which I can remember, and the local news.  

Then in the 1950’s television came on the screen.  The closest TV stations were in Houston and Temple.  Folks installed very tall antennas and pointed them toward the station they wanted to watch.  If you changed the channel you went out and literally twisted the antenna mast to point the antenna toward the City where the station was located that you were trying to watch. 

The Evening News was a 30 minute program at 5:00 PM every night.  You got some local news (Houston or Temple) and national news.  Walter Cronkite is the first person I actually remember as newsman.   There were two networks NBC and CBS, ABC came later.   

So if you were keeping up with all that math the media outlets had less than a hour a day (after commercials) for their news.  They had to pack into that time what they thought were the biggest and most important issues of the day.  And at the time you could not DVR anything to watch later, hell you were lucky if you could watch it when it was on, especially if you lived in Somerville where TV signals were not reliable.

Newspapers were printed once a day or once a week, and magazines were printed once a month.  Their editors had an even bigger job trying to select what they thought were the “really important” stories for you to know about. 

To say a limited amount of data was available from around the world was an understatement!

If you heard about anything happening in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Caribbean, the South Pacific or even California or New York, it was likely history, by at least a day, week or month before you were able to consume or process the data.

Yet even with this limited access to the national and world news all I heard growing up was how the world was “going to hell in a hand basket”. The sun was going to crash into the earth, crime was rampant, life was complicated and the government was out of control. 

And guess what their parents who lived through WWI told my parents the same thing.  And their parents who grew up when Lincoln was assassinated told them the same thing.  

Thanks, in some part, to the business that has been my fascination and business for the last 40 years, electronic communications, the world continues to shrink.  Now we know almost instantly when something happens anywhere is the world.

If you Google (and none of our parents ever heard of Google and only few of us really have clue about how it works) “how many news outlets in the world” Wikipedia will return what they admit is an incomplete list of over 225 news outlets most of which operate 24 X 7 either on the air, the radio, or on electronic blogs and in some cases on all media simultaneously.  Add to that anyone with an opinion and computer and enough skills to set up a blog also provides you with all the news you care to consume.  But let’s just do some math on the 225 + that showed up in Wikipedia’s incomplete list. 

Assuming each of them have 24 hour news shows, that increases the available news time to fill from 1 hour a day in the 1960’s to over 5000 hours a day today.  And when you consider that this 5000 hours has to be filled every day of the week, you soon realize that now anything that happens in the world has a chance of being brought to you, live and in living color, within minutes or live in living color in your living room, on your computer or on your Smartphone while driving.  Combined with the massive number of hours to fill each day, there is a “rush” to beat the competition to the airways.  So you get to hear and see any news, many times within seconds of it happening.  But you can be sure it has not been vetted, checked or verified and often it is gathered and reported on by young reports who have limited life experience and who get rewarded for their “scoops” but not necessarily for their accuracy.  My view and experience is that in the competitive world of news today, breaking the news story is immanently more important to most outlets than accurately reporting the facts of the story.  

So, while we are much more aware of what is going on around the world, we are not necessarily better informed.  In fact Mark Twain once wrote,

“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.”

If that was the feeling in the 1850’s imagine what Mark Twain would say today.

My point in all this is that I personally think the world is a much better place than it was in the 1850’s, the 1950’s, and even at the turn of the Century way back in 2000.  The fact that we are more informed makes the world a less dangerous place, regardless of what you might see in the media. 

But, if you want to maintain some degree of your sanity, you simply cannot get caught up in the minutia of every event. If you do you will go from being informed to being misinformed and extremely frustrated very quickly.   Keep in mind that not everything being reported is accurate!

My experience has been the news outlets usually get the big things right, America was attacked by Islamic fundamentalist nut cases in 2001; the Texas Aggies had a phenomenal season of football in 2012; there was a horrible mass murder in Newton, Connecticut; there is a huge controversy over gun control going on in Washington; Barack Obama won re-election in November of 2012; the American consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012; there is a major uprising in Syria and some nut case wacko's set off bombs in Boston during the Boston marathon.  But if you take any one of those issues, follow ever story, every opinion, and every blog post or Twitter post about it, you will soon be on the verge of thinking, “My God, the world is going to hell in hand basket!” and the cycle for your kids will continue. 

Break the chain, absorb the news with a degree of skepticism and apply common sense to what the “worldly” reporters (sometimes are simplysome kid with a camera phone) feed to the media outlets! 

The One and Only Bob Hope!

BOB HOPE IN HEAVEN For those of you too young to remember Bob Hope, ask your Grandparents.. And thanks for the memories. WHAT A WONDERFUL E-MAIL. I HOPE THIS WILL PUT A SMILE ON YOUR FACE AND IN YOUR HEART. Tribute to a man who DID make a difference. ON TURNING 70'I still chase women, but only downhill'. ON TURNING 80'That's the time of your life when even your birthday suit needs pressing.' ON TURNING 90'You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.' ON TURNING 100'I don't feel old. In fact, I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.' ON GIVING UP HIS EARLY CAREER, BOXING'I ruined my hands in the ring. The referee kept stepping on them.' ON NEVER WINNING AN OSCAR'Welcome to the Academy Awards or, as it's called at my home, 'Passover'.  ON GOLF'Golf is my profession. Show business is just to pay the green fees.' ON PRESIDENTS'I have performed for 12 presidents and entertained only six.' ON WHY HE CHOSE SHOWBIZ FOR HIS CAREER   'When I was born, the doctor said to my mother, Congratulations, you have an eight pound ham.   ON RECEIVING THE CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL'I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.' ON HIS FAMILY'S EARLY POVERTY'Four of us slept in the one bed. When it got cold, mother threw on another brother.' ON HIS SIX BROTHERS'That's how I learned to dance. Waiting for the bathroom.' ON HIS EARLY FAILURES'I would not have had anything to eat if it wasn't for the stuff the audience threw at me.' ON GOING TO HEAVEN'I've done benefits for ALL religions. I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.'  Give me a sense of humour; Lord, give me the grace to see a joke, and to get some humour out of life.

Now this is funny, and scary

Allegedly from a California newspaper!  This could not be real . . . or could it!

Oh, the irony of stupidity!

A Louisiana Ghost Story!

This was passed on to me by a friend from Louisiana who swears it is true.  But you will have to judge for yourself, but I know there are some strange happenings down in that neck of the woods.

This allegedly happened about 6 months ago on Louisiana Hwy 57, just outside of Dulac, a

little town in the bayou country of Louisiana , and while it sounds like an
Alfred Hitchcock tale, I am assured that it is real.

An Ohio businessman, Saul Rubins, abandoned his disabled vehicle on the side of
the road, and attempted to hitchhike. The night was pitch dark in the middle of
a thunderstorm. Time passed slowly and no cars went by. It was raining so hard
he could hardlysee his hand in front of his face.

Suddenly, through the sheets of rain, he saw a car moving slowly, approaching
and appearing ghostlike in the rain. It slowly and silently crept toward him and
stopped. Desperately needing a ride, Saul jumped in the car and closed the door.
Only then did he realize that there was no one behind the wheel and no sound of
an engine to be heard over the rain.

Again the car crept silently forward and Saul was terrified, too scared to think
of jumping out and running.. He saw that the car was approaching a sharp curve
and, still too scared to jump out, he started to pray and beg for his life; he
was sure the ghost car would go off the road and into the bayou and he would
then drown!

But just before the curve, a shadowy hand appeared at the driver's window,
reached in and turned the steering wheel, guiding the car safely around the
bend. Then, just as silently, the hand disappeared through the window and Saul
was alone again.

Paralyzed with fear, Saul watched the hand reappear every time they reached a
curve. Finally, scared nearly to death, Saul had all he could take, jumped out
of the car, and ran to town..

Wet and in shock, he went into Schmoopy's. Voice quavering, he ordered two cups
of coffee, black, and then told everybody about his supernatural experience. The
room became silent and everybody got goose bumps when they realized Saul was
telling the truth and was not just some drunk. About 30 minutes later two
Cajuns, dripping wet, walked into Schmoopy's and one says to the other,

"Look, Boudreaux, ders dat idiot what rode in our car when we wuz pushin' it in
da rain!!!"

Certainly passes my reasonableness test!  

Marc
20 March 2012 posted from London