PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS:

Speaking about the Republican “fear” factor, why don’t they cooperate, et al?  Most people don’t understand (or can imagine) the neocon bottom line because it is so outrageous: they really wish the United States to fail.

Background – I was an administrator for the City of Portland, and Multnomah County, Oregon, speaking and dealing with neocon repubs on a national basis for thirty-two years.  Their GOAL is to preserve, protect and defend special privilege from the democratic rule of law and the American nation.   They are NOT afraid; just arrogant.

Thirty years ago, in the early 1980’s, a CTPPD (a Consensus To Preserve Plausible Deniability), including Texas oil millionaires, automotive manufacturers, bankers, big-ticket real estate developers, insurance and medical care providers, investment firms, and wholesale raw materials providers, began a concerted and integrated campaign to discredit, loot and crush the American government. Call it “Stamping on Franklin Roosevelt’s Grave.”

I was told by Congressman Barbur Conable (R I-forget) back in ’73 that compulsory public education was unconstitutional and undemocratic and vouchers and home schooling would be introduced forthwith – it would be “most helpful in educating children with the right understanding for when they become adults.”  The John Birch Society injunction to its members was, “Join your local PTA, and take it over!”

I stood witness to the shenanigans surrounding local government’s share in the Savings and Loan Scandal (watched the Mormons spirit Jake Gaarn, Mormon hero astronaut-senator who led the S&L thieves on the Senate side, away to Salt Lake City and out of the public eye before the “s” hit the fan – I think this was their rehearsal for the Great American Mortgage Collapse – it has the same modus operandi).

Reagan assaulted government itself – “The ten most dreaded words…’I'm from the government…’“ Reagan went after the Air Traffic Controllers and made the first significant breach in federal protection for unions. The list goes on, as if subject to a consistent and integrated general game plan worthy of the best hostile takeover experts.  Clue.

The people’s government is the one force that is able to withstand and force these self-interested robbers to change. Therefore, the people’s representatives had to be bought, or as many as necessary, depending upon the moment’s tactical need, to shill for and protect corporate interests. The Republican Party (as the easiest – smallest, most uniform, least principled – to corrupt and manipulate had to become ascendant for a short time to gain control of the government and “fix” institutional areas that were most intrusive on the corporatist ability to do pretty much as pleased, including “enslave” people (wage-wise), or “waterboard” them (use any pressure or torture to force compliance and contribution to the corporate will).

They then stole the people’s treasury – carried it out under the glad hand of their born-again rich president Geo. W. Bush.  Dick Cheney is not an accident, but a premier product and instrument of a rapacious piratical, and practically pathological, corporate elite.  These are generationally all pretty much the same guys playing the same ugly way, administration after administration.  They are a scary bunch and they are not American patriots.

The neocon corporatist tactic now is to wave the weak hand – the Republican Party – to obfuscate, delay and confuse, while the real work goes on with the Rubin clones surrounding Obama (it is a real mistake to think that we can continue by reconstructing the past – our environmental jeopardy and social crisis require innovations and new directions that cannot include corporate capitalism – but while we must develop lower economic expectations, we don’t have to give up on a compassionate civilization.

The continued private dismantling, bankrupting and removal of America’s manufacturing capabilities to foreign climes is still in hemorrhage. Leading the list of outsourcers are well-known American companies, including the Xerox Corporation, the Oracle Corporation, The Hewlett-Packard Company, Accenture Limited, International Business Machines Corporation and Perot Systems (Recall old Ross warning against GATT that there would be “a great sucking sound as business went south.”

The neocon corporatists are not trying to fix the broken Republican Party – it is in the game plan to eventually destroy the two-party system and run with one party: cheaper, more efficient, less wasteful (ha!). Steele, Limbaugh, Beck, Cantor, Boehner, all the rest, are handy decoys, making a lot of noise all around the edges so that public attention is diverted from the corruption still proceeding at the center.

The Republican circus masks the real working level where the boodle bags are still being packed. They are not working with us, because the neocon corporatists are still using and stealing from us. They don’t expect any retribution or punishment for it; it is the culture. They are so highly placed that they expect to tiptoe through the tulips while the rest of us fry in the ozone hole. They believe the “highest and best use” of any piece of land is how much money you can make off it, not the future it may provide if unmolested for all life, as we know it.

In 1991, an assistant from President Bush Sr.’s office met National Association of Counties (NACo) President Michael Stewart (R – Salt Lake Co.) at a cocktail party at the Annual Conference in Salt Lake City. I overheard them discussing the “best” form of government, ever. They agreed that it was Medieval England. Its benefits?

• The king is the sole authority, secures obedience, neutralizes all possible challengers; gains the monopoly of force; and, maintains law and order.
• Patriotism is focused on the nation, not on the localities that comprise it, transferring identity from the local to the national level, putting it at the disposal of the king.
• The state dominates or controls the religious life of society, or at least allies itself with the representatives of a single authoritarian religion to more easily manage the mob to the king’s totalitarian advantage.
• The state exerts control over economic life to facilitate circulation and exchange of goods, and to grasp as much as possible of the national wealth for the king and his allies.

In the medieval model stability is created through divine hierarchy. The church prays for the soul, the military fights to save the bodies and property of the “community”, and the peasants work to feed everybody. It’s a simple model, which allowed it to last for several hundred incredibly stultifying and repressive years in which the majority of humankind subsisted on the level of cattle, or swine, and wars were fought at personal whim of a vainglorious, and occasionally religiously demented elite. Does this ring bells, or what?

The important men at the 1991 cocktail party didn’t intend to install a king or a single church in America, but in variation, updated and recycled form, they favored state identification and alliance with a majority religion and a CEO working with a board of directors (perhaps preserving a faint hint of representative government – old habits, even bad ones, die hard). Call king and court president and cabinet, or rose and garden, they envisioned a tyrant working with an oligarchy of the privileged elite that they believe is, of course, best suited to govern.  The Bush-Cheney’s cabinet.

They were deadly serious and not amused when I asked if they had ever heard of Robin Hood or the Magna Carta.

Edward Gibbon wrote an apt description of Augustus Caesar that sounds a lot like George W. Bush, the lately deposed thinly veiled champion of the corporatist New Medievalism.  It reveals the shadowy Republican approach to governance, image over substance.  Gibbon writes:

     “He delights in the image of liberty and is pleased with considering himself as the accountable minister of the laws.

     “He claims a tender respect for a free constitution, which he destroys.

     “A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompt him to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never lays aside.

     “With the same hand, probably with the same temper, he signs death warrants and pardons.

     “According to the various dictates of his interest, he is at first the enemy, and at last the father of the nation.

     “As he frames the artful system of imperial authority, his moderation is inspired by his fears.

     “He wishes to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the army by an image of civil government.

     “Finally, the forms of civil administration are carefully preserved. The ideal restraints of the senate and the laws may serve to display the virtues, but can never correct the vices of  the leader.”

“Americans deserve the government they elect,” my father used to say, but we know we didn’t elect Bush. Is Obama entirely our new free choice? Kings, as I recall, are divinely chosen – in our case, by fat cats and the Supreme Court. Kings represent the elite status quo, which presently resides in Wall Street. Wall Street wants to govern everything by itself, without any interference from the rest of us.  Father knows best.

Our species probably won’t be around long enough to figure out how to change from consumerist overpopulating inattentive polluters into minimalist birth-controlling aware conservationists.  We’ll overgraze our range soon.  One can see our rapidly escalating devastation of the planet.  Bush and his idiot followers accelerated it even more; they “rationalized” their irrational actions with fantastic myths to justify unreasonable behaviors.  There are only a few values in their make-believe world that are any good, and they are, of course, common and obvious to all humankind: love, mercy, truth, honor, and justice – those sorts of universal things, echoed by every other life philosophy ever conceived, that is, invented by man; but hypocritically enshrined by Republican spin meisters.

They have created and are attempting to retain dominance in an amoral, or consciously immoral world of corruption, thievery, and violence, instead of trying to eliminate or improve conditions that would remedy or heal it.  They are in fact, the enemy, and clear-thinking people who treasure compassion and cooperation must vigorously oppose them.  If a thing is contrary to the health and safety of the world, it should be destroyed.

You know what? The world is a dangerous place.  The fact that many choose – even, hysterically – to resist knowledge of its danger, do so at their peril, and endanger the rest of us.  Keeping silent about abuse, perversion, injustice, greed, vandalism, or prejudice is self-defeating, irresponsible, and destructive.  Self-willed ignorance is a socially and spiritually criminal act.  Pericles was right: People who say they have no business with government (democratic Athens, or the U.S.) have no business here at all.

Final words:  Keep on keepin’ on. We, the people, need you, dear reader.  Best regards to all,  j

Att dansbandsklicken överhuvudtaget tar sig själva på alltför stort allvar är knappast något nytt. Men nu har det fan brunnit i röven på det inavlade Malung och Strängnäs.

SVT:s Dansbandskampen anklagas för att inte ersätta deltagarna korrekt. Dansbanden deltar i en tävling och ersätts med vad jag i sammanhanget tycker är generöst, 1500 per band. Veckans clown, Musikerförbundets Jan Granvik, ryter till och menar att banden skall ersättas med 3500 per medlem plus ersättning för resor.

Någonstans läste jag om ett gäng på 50 dansare som minsann skulle ställa in sin resa till Strängnäs som någon markering mot ersättningen. Jättearga var de. Och så satte de sig med sina löständer av trä och spelade banjo…

Det talas om avtalsenliga löner. Men hur i helvete kan ett deltagande i Dansbandskampen förväxlas med arbete?

En sak ska tilläggas. En viktigt detalj som dessutom skänker historien viss komik tillika heder åt utsatta grupp. De som nu påstås få för lite betalt verkar vara de enda som är ok med det. Och det är inte så att de gärna jobbar gratis. De inser att detta är en tävling och att de via programmet erhåller ovärderlig marknadsföring.

Ersättningen för oss handlar om ett reklamvärde för mångmiljonbelopp, säger Jan Lindberg i Date.

Reklamen är värd mycket mer för oss, säger Conrad Bohman i Gamblers.

Det tragikomiska resultatet av svängomen som Granvik och fansen bjuder upp till blir att de som ska låtsas företräda dansbandens intressen och fansen som ska supporta i slutändan stjälper dem. Förra årets tvåa Scotts strutsade omkring som ett hobbyband och har efter tävlingen deltagit i Melodifestivalen, fått släppa sina två första plattor och fakturerar idag enligt uppgift hundra tusen för en spelning.

Nu erbjuder Jan Granvik banden 3500 per medlem i utbyte mot ett avhopp. Han vill köpa loss banden från Dansbandskampen och förneka dessa halvdana musiker en chans att tjäna stora pengar. Låt oss vrida tillbaka tiden och fråga medlemmarna i Scotts vilket de väljer…

Det är värt att upprepa. Dansbandskampen är en tävling och ska fan inte förväxlas med arbete.

I första avsnittet deltog ett gäng tondöva loppiskostymer och orsakade med största sannolikhet ett brutalt tittartapp. I rimlighetens namn borde de få böta. Att de sju överhuvudtaget skulle lyckas kvittera ut ens en sjundedel av 24500 som ersättning för en tvålåtars spelning är så skrattretande att jag skulle behöva valium för samma slant för att lyckas förgöra den hysteriska skrattsalvan.

Cia Hedenström, projektledare på produktionsbolaget Baluba, försvarar ersättningsnivåerna.

Vi anser att det här är en tävling, det handlar inte om regelrätta artistarvoden och det är helt frivilligt att vara med.

Och därmed tycker jag att Cia har avslutat det här tramset. Det är en tävling, ej att förväxla med arbete. Det är frivilligt och banden har tecknat gällande avtal. Och framförallt. Banden inser att de deltar i en tävling och är tacksamma för den ovärderliga reklamen.

Men tvärtom. Det verkar långt ifrån avslutat. Jan Granvik trummar på med ögonbindel.

Och Jan Granvik… När du ändå är igång. Slå en signal till TV4. Skrik skandal och kräv ett arvode på 3500 kronor plus ersättning för resa till varje människa som deltar i Idols audition. Lycka till.

andra bloggar om svt, dansbandskampen, dansband, musikerförbundet, jan granvik, date, gamblers, scotts, cia hedenström, baluba, idol

http://66b56j3jrhxsskr3-ah7705q0q.hop.clickbank.net/

Las Vegas. 40"x30". Acrylic. 2009.

Las Vegas the city of lights. Sin City. This one is for my Las Vegas natives, dice rollers, poker players, gamblers and of course strippers!!!

Preoccupation with gambling

Gamblers who get in love with the excitement and “action” of play may, at first, be quite successful. They score fantasies of advance success and of play decent their personal path to riches and power. Those who are headlike for problems think they are smarter than the total bettor. They pair that gaming is exploit to wreak for them because they, different inferior intelligent people, real understand how to beat the system.

As they beautify statesman implicated in gambling, they derive an progressive allotment of their self-esteem from perception themselves as cagy or lucky. Because of this, digit things happen when they do incur the fateful losses. First, they suffer monetary loss. Second, and ofttimes much important, they get a flat ego.

Financial disaster, legal troubles,

To salve their self-esteem, they organize losses by blaming added people, much as the jockey or the pitcher, or by blaming “bad luck” in cards, two or lotteries. Or they reverberate on their handicapping abilities and archer themselves they will not make the one “mistake” the close time.

The monetary red is added matter, however, and this is dealt with differently. In say to get the loss, some gamblers “chase.” That is, they proceed their betting and growth the amount of their bets in inflict to rag even. Instead of saying, “It’s lost,” the chaser says, “I’ll make steady tomorrow.” Chasing losses leads the venturer to hazard with author than he or she dismiss give to lose, and often to appropriation money in an labor to get even.

Many gamblers haw tag for position periods, until they hear from ale undergo that this is counterproductive. The long-term preoccupancy with chasing losses is the process distinctive of the pathological gambler.

Chasing seems formal to many gamblers, as it implementation gift oneself a adventure to modify even.

If a venturer stops chasing, both money and self-esteem are lost. If the adventurer continues chasing and wins, both tin be regained. There is, therefore, the force to take in prescript to acquire losses. When continued gaming leads to relieve many losses, the ambitious gambler continues to borrow. The solon money borrowed, the greater the cooperation to more vice as the exclusive conceivable implementation of gaining sufficiency money to pay forth the debt.

Unable to stop gambling

This spiraling dedication to inflated gaming oftentimes depletes house resources. some ambitious gamblers cash in joint fund bonds, discharge checking accounts, hock spliff property, and take unsuccessful loans without the spouse’s knowledge. In position to reserve or get honorableness in the eyes of parents, partner and others — and because their paychecks are insufficient — fearless gamblers view more game as the exclusive alternative.

Compulsive gambling is a serious habit

Fearing amount of respectability, the venturer hides loans. When gamblers alternative on the loans, fear that the slope or give companion will recount their mate haw route them to writer recreation as a thinkable hurried pick out. The activity that caused the difficulty is progressively seen by the venturer as the exclusive solution, as there is no remaining portion to seize the required money quickly.

As loans descend cod and pressures to pay get more insistent, sometimes involving threats of danger or of personal hurt from word sharks or bookies, desperate gamblers weigh the risks of “borrowing” (embezzling) money from their employer, making fraudulent loan applications or shelter claims, or concealment the money.

Once they exit to this temptation, the boundary to an modify greater allegiance to diversion has been crossed. This is especially true if they obtain money by give trickery or embezzlement. These kinds of crimes enable gamblers to cogitate that they are not rattling criminals. The money is exclusive “borrowed” so no figure is state hurt. But there is constant somaesthesia to act the money, and investigation on a conspicuous gambling gain is seen as the only trust for doing so. This extends the helix of involvement from solon gambling to solon and solon mislabeled activities — until the adventurer is caught, seeks paid help, or rattling does affect the conspicuous win.

Chasing losses

Falling in fuck with the “action” and then chasing losses is the play portion for most men who become driven gamblers, but umteen women direct a diametric route. piece women also relish the “action” and tail losses, their initial need is often get — discharge from memories of joyless immatureness or maternal abuse, flight from nervous husbands, and flee from loneliness. formerly they became crooked on gambling, however, women canvas the unvaried ornament of increasing wonder as men, ofttimes star to crook activity.

Compulsive gambling is a serious habit. It can lead you to risk your financial security, your personal relationships, and anything else that you value. Very often compulsive gamblers are people who are easily bored and are always looking for action and excitement. It’s not surprising that gambling is such an attractive activity to this person.
You may define symptoms of compulsive gambling as follows:

* Preoccupation with gambling
* Hiding gambling
* Chasing losses (gambling even more to try and recoup what was lost)
* Lying to family and friends about the extent of gambling
* Unable to stop gambling even if it means risking job, relationships or other opportunities
* Committing fraud, theft or using other illegal means to get money to gamble.
* In extreme cases. Financial disaster, legal troubles, loss of family and employment

Well in all of my years, I have had many problems of agility, many of which have been fixed but more that have arisen.  Not a big deal but the consistent problem that has stuck and won’t go away is the lack of gambles.  I have been working on distance for a number of months now.  The amount of  time I have devoted to doing this I figured I would have gotten better.  This is not the case.  Over the weekend I went to a dog show and was hoping to get Amoco her last Leg in gamblers to get the infamous ADCH.  All was going well considering I got stuck on the opposite side of the course as versus where I wanted to be.  I did get to where I needed to be in a decent amount of time so I figured it would be fine.  With this in mind I reverted back to what I had been working at home and before Amocos run.  I had been working sends with turns.  Now to many people this is no big deal but when you have a velcro dog it really becomes a major issue.  Everything that I had done outside at the practice jump seemed to indicate that I would be able to get it.    No to easy.  Amoco came out of the tunnel and I did the send just the way that I practice jump and she stood there looking dumbfounded.  Now this is no different then many other times but I don’t have a clue what I can do to rectify this.

The brash, enterprising Las Vegas legend and casino mogul who brought the Stratosphere to the Strip has sadly died.  Bob Stupak, 67, died Friday afternoon from leukemia at Desert Springs Hospital, with his family by his side. 

Stupak accomplished a lot of things in life and met a lot of people over the years since coming to Vegas in 1971, and on Friday night, friends remembered a man they called a legend. 

“I was surprised and stunned,” said Dr. Lonnie Hammargren. 

As word spread of Stupak’s death, the memories of the casino mogul were still very much alive. 

“Bob had ideas and did things that people wouldn’t do,” Hammargren said. 

Perhaps no one has more memorabilia in one place than former Lt. Gov. Hammargren. His backyard is a lasting legacy to Stupak’s creations, including a model space ship that graced the top of Stupak’s Vegas World in the late ‘70s. 

 “He loved to rock the boat,” said Howard Schwartz. Schwartz met Stupak in the early ‘80s while working at the Gambler’s Book Shop. “He came into the store, and he always had questions about new games or something innovative he wanted to try,” Schwartz said. 

That innovative spirit led Stupak to build what still is the tallest structure in Las Vegas — the 1,149-foot-tall Stratosphere — in 1996. 

The Stratosphere seemed a metaphor for all of Stupak’s life struggles: Its construction was stalled by a dramatic fire high in its pedestal that rained embers onto the street, and three months after its 1996 opening — and a year after he nearly died in a motorcycle crash — he resigned as chairman as the property was falling into bankruptcy. 

It was after that when he pitched his Titanic casino, which Las Vegas city officials promptly rejected. 

Stupak’s bickering with city and county politicians, and his contention that he could do a better job, led to several blustery runs for public office and a stint at publishing his own maverick weekly newspaper, the now defunct Las Vegas Bullet.

In his inaugural run for mayor in 1987, he sent gift fruit baskets to potential voters. Stupak also financed the unsuccessful Las Vegas City Council campaigns of his daughter Nicole in 1991 and his son, Nevada, in 1999. 

Stupak also was credited with helping to get his then nurse-turned-girlfriend, Janet Moncrief, elected to Las Vegas City Council in 2003. She wound up being the only council member ever to be recalled from office. Stupak tossed his hat into the political arena for the last time in 2006, making a run for lieutenant governor of Nevada. He finished third, garnering 17 percent of the statewide vote. 

In the late 1990s Stupak began helping charitable causes through his foundation, including opening a community center in one of the poorest areas of town. 

For his philanthropic efforts, the Las Vegas City Council on Feb. 23, 1996, issued a proclamation citing Stupak for his “valuable pioneering efforts” and “his outstanding generosity … in answering the call of children, the homeless and the underprivileged.” 

In more recent years, a seemingly mellower Stupak kept a much lower profile, content to play in high stakes poker games at the Bellagio and other major Strip resort card rooms and shirking the limelight he once sought with much fervor. He also was seen occasionally on televised poker events, including a final table during the first season of the World Poker Tour. 

Streetwise and poker-savvy, abrasive and ambitious, Bob Stupak was always the ultimate Las Vegas gambler and huckster, always pushing the envelope if it would bring him publicity. 

Always the independent (his nickname was “the Polish Maverick”), he was more aggravating than charming, but always a topic of conversation, which pleased him. 

“He thought of himself as larger than he was and could often come off as gruff and angry, especially if you disagreed with him,” said Howard Schwartz, operator of the Gamblers Book Shop. “Bob Stupak liked being controversial — he swam upstream. It was almost overkill how he tried to earn people’s respect, which he never truly got. People would smile and shake his hand then talk about him behind his back.” 

Stupak was sometimes the survivor — like after a horrific motorcycle crash that crushed every bone in his face and left him in a coma 14 years ago — and sometimes the loser, running unsuccessfully to be the Las Vegas mayor, a Clark County commissioner and the Nevada lieutenant governor. 

What he did win at was poker. A fixture at the old World Series of Poker at what is now Binion’s, in 1989 he won a $139,500 purse in the $5,000 buy-in no-limit deuce-to-7 world championship. He made the final table of that event three more times during his career. 

“Bob was a decathlon gambler — sports bets, propositions, poker — everything at once,” said Las Vegas oddsmaker and gambler Lem Banker, who gave Stupak the advice to take Cincinnati plus 6 1/2 points in the 1989 Super Bowl against San Francisco for Stupak’s legendary $1 million winning bet. “He had a lot of heart and a lot of brains.” 

Besides children Nevada and Nicole, Stupak is survived by another daughter, Summer; two sisters, Linda Phillips and Nancy O’Conner, and two former wives, Sandra Blumen and Annette Hatton. 

Stupak requested that there not be a funeral service.

With more and more people gambling these days, there are more reported cases of gambling Addiction then ever before.

Gambling problems can manifest themselves in many different ways. Some problem gamblers will have all of these signs of their gambling problem and some others may only have one. Gambling addiction affects players of all different forms of gambling like Blackjack, Poker and even Bingo

The most important thing to remember is just because their life is not horrible because of their gambling does not mean there is not a problem, many people can have serious gambling addictions and still hold down a job and make it seem as if everything is fine. This just means that this person has not hit a bottom yet, but eventually it will catch up with them.

Most addicts will stop socializing with anyone not into their addiction, so if suddenly someone you know cuts out all their friends from their life and starts to isolate themselves this can be a sign.

A simple thing to look for is if they are overly interested in the sports scores, and if after reading them to they become ecstatic or depressed. No one likes it when their favorite team loses, but a gambler will have major mood swings depending on if they are winning or losing.

A big sign of gambling addiction is someone who is constantly having money problems and asking to borrow money but never pays it back, but sometimes out of nowhere this person will seem to have large sums of cash.

Lying and stealing is another good clue to a gambling addiction, they will make up all sorts of excuses for their odd behavior, and you may notice small, but expensive items missing from your home.

If when visiting this person if you notice that some of their things are missing, or if they tell you they have had to sell some things, then there is a good chance that what they sold either went to pay of gambling debt or to make new bets.

There are many other signs but these are the most common symptoms of gambling addiction according to addiction professionals. If you see 2 or more of these symptoms in someone you know you should immediately try to get this person to accept their problem and seek professional help.

Without help gambling addiction leads to the same place as drug addiction or alcoholism, eventually they will be overcome by their addiction. At this point they will be fully cut off from friends and family.

Most gamblers with bad addictions usually wind up jobless and in many cases homeless if their addiction is allowed to go unchecked for too long, and studies have shows that people with gambling addictions are more prone to illness because thy allow their health to lapse.

For more information on gambling addiction talk to your family doctor or look on the internet for the gamblers anonymous web site, or from one of the many internet web sites dedicated to helping gambling addicts to locate professional help in their area.