Self Portrait, 2008

the smell of money fills our lungs
our fields are filled with blood
dripping chambers for the death knell
the infidel swings from gallows
erected on our heavy tongues
here, we exile all angels to hell

i have made an aerie for the bodies of the damned
between my skull and womb
nestled in muscle and pulse
the lock is glued
the door is jammed
do not enter this tomb
or heaven will convulse.

1 – There is already a crushing federal debt?

2 – There is a punitive tax of $30-60  Billion on the uninsured, mainly younger people, under the health care bill but none on illegal immigrants?

3 – They will cut Medicare benefits by hundreds of billions of dollars?

5 – The government bought off the AARP on this?

6 – The “death panels” really are death panels?

7 – Mammograms and other common lifesaving diagnostic procedures will be restricted?

8 – The President said there would be no “public option” but it’s there it is in the bill and he said he supports it?

9 – They’re having to bribe Senators and Congressmen with hundreds of billions of our dollars so that they’ll hold their noses and vote yes?

10 – The bill is loaded with so many gimmicks and loopholes that the real cost may be 3-4x what they say it is?

And why are we even having this discussion? How is this a good thing?

     One of the many mis-attributions during the current Health Care Debate is that of Democrats being Elitists.  If anyone is elitist in this current campaign to guarantee health care for as many citizens of the US as possible, it would be the Republicans, who cannot understand the need for health care, when they already have it!  I believe Republicans to be direct descendants of the French aristocracy.  It’s hard not to think of Marie Antoinette when the word “elitist” comes up in the absurd editorials written by the uninformed. 

How could anyone possibly accuse Democrats of elitism?  For over one hundred years, we have been attempting to see that everyone has health care.  Forget insurance!  If the money made by the insurance companies on so-called “Health” insurance were applied to actually providing health Care, we would have no problem creating equity in that field.  Health should not be an “Industry”!  Doctors and nurses and other health care providers should be paid—and paid well—for what they do, but why in the name of sanity should INSURANCE COMPANIES  make huge profits off of people’s health?  Obviously, health care costs are radically affected by the insurance industry, or they would not be selling health insurance at all!  We have all probably paid for health insurance at some time or another.  If it is part of our benefits at work, well…that’s money we are NOT getting paid!  It’s not something offered generously by employers, it’s a benefit, for which we pay, one way or another.

“Oh, but we can’t take that business away from insurance companies!!  What would they do?  They’d have to lay people off, and, oh no!, maybe have to actually think and work and find other ways to make billions of dollars! 

Elitists:  people who think they should not have to work like other people, or pay for things they don’t want or need (to help other people).  Elitists think “Let them eat brioche!”  or bread or pain or cake…whatever the truth in that sentence may have been, if it was said at all.  “Don’t bother us with these unnecessary pieces of legislation.  Provide Health Care for everyone?? How absurd!  “They don’t need it and we already have it, so why carry on so…?”

Teddy Roosevelt was one of the first to really campaign for health care for everyone.  He believed that health and education were essential to a strong country.  What a novel thought!  Republicans believe that warfare and obscene profits make a country strong! 

Figures vary, depending on who is backing what news source.  But 50 million or 30 million…or 10 million people without any health care is untenable!  This country needs to face reality:  National Health Care is inevitable.  Blocking the Democrats’ attempts to pass legislation that will meet the needs of our citizen’s health care is sinful, but any religious standard.   The elitists want to maintain the status quo.  The haves don’t want to pay for the have-nots, even if the haves are the ones who created the problems in this country:

1.  Allowing health care to become an industry rather than a service.

2.  Allowing business to control this country, with no social conscience.

3.  Allowing the media to sway public opinion with malicious lies .

4.  Making little attempt to control greed and graft in politics.

5.  Allowing corruption to go unchecked and accountibility to fall by the wayside.

That was the Republican way.  It’s time to block that road leading to the edge of destruction and start walking tall on the way to Intelligent Government, where words like “Fair” and “Educated” and “Equal” are common in the same sentence as politics. 

Is our progress measured in Pixels?
Is our life made out of stillness?
Were seeking but we find,
nothing of this kind..
im just a living doll
tattered and so smalllllll
ARE WE LIVING FOR TODAY
or just giving ourselves time to play?
Whats behind the mind of minds
I am surely shown suggestions
of backbones never boned
a lonely man wanders
searching for his soul
in a garden of only giving
He leaves it all aside
Dreams the impossible
and just tags on for the ride
that my friends is living
really dying too,
for he knows
the end
is coming oh so softly now, just a peak around the mountain bend, the land where lovers can pretend…
the rustling is just circumstance,
were simply plucked and perched in stance
Nothing transcends like no ends,
the Meaning wants to know its breath
Will be heard and answered
In the world of plastic dancers
Smothered in Smolder
We cant dilute the delusion
further than the shoulder
Im dying for a dream
living for a love
lusting for a lacquered lift
A signal of pure intent
No Harm intended
these are just words in Pixels.
Purveyors of Plastic..

My country isn’t the best.

You have to work hard

to get a pair of pants.

You have to leave your

home and go it alone.

If you get sick or lose your job

no one will give a damn unless

it is an election year.

If you ask for help you’ll get

a bag of canned goods and told

to get a job.

Lots of people want to come here

and live the American dream.

Lots of people who live here

wish they knew what it was.

The military goes out and does things

that most of us never learn about

Until thirty years later or when

someone finds the bodies in the mass grave.

You don’t even want to know

what we’ve done in the name of freedom

and progress.  It’d make your stomach turn

All over the world there are jokes about

us only caring about money.

Its true.  We care about money.

Without it we are homeless

landless creeps starving and driven

to madness and we are incarcerated.

Without a job or some money

we can’t get our cancer treated

or sleep in peace. In my country

citizens kill hobos they catch

sleeping outside.

People all over think we

have it so good but really only

the wealthy and blood thirsty have

it real good here.  Its not for everyone

but it is better to be here than somewhere

that has something that our leaders

want because they’ll bomb your village

or rape your innocence.  They’ll kill

and then say it was an accident of one ours

They’ll tell us you are evil.

Then they will tell

us they’ll give us money if

we do our part for their war of more

and do the worst to you and your evil

And some of us do.

We are tricked by greed

We want a better life

We want to be heroes

We want money

We want to kill the wicked

We see war and death and blood

as a necessary foul.

Its how we feed our babies

My country is not the best

unless you are comfortable

working in the morally grey

Today, President Obama announced a new national science fair for young inventors. He wants to show kids how “cool” science is and give them the same treatment as sports stars when they win a championship. A noble goal, but one that doesn’t get the point. Obama decries the lag in science scores, but ignores the more important reality, a culture of innovation. As a lawyer and politician, he just doesn’t get it.

Someone else who didn’t get it and lost her job because of it is Carly Fiorina, now running for the Senate seat occupied by Barbara Boxer of California. Ms. Fiorina came out of the marketing and sales group at ATT/Lucent. When she began at AT&T, it was one of the country’s crown jewels of technology and included Bell Labs.  Cutting edge innovation in microcircuitry and telecommunications took place there every day. It was exciting and amazing. Over the years since it was started by Thomas Edison, Bell Labs invented radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell,  and the UNIX operating system and 100 other basic technologies. There was no specific brief on where they could go, and a lot of the “pure” research that was done ended up paying huge dividends.

With outsourcing and offshoring, the MBA’s, including Ms. Fiorina, decided that the scientists and engineers and lab techs were too expensive and that emphasis should be placed on applied research. Thus began the downsizing and dismantlement of much of Bell Labs. Today it is a shadow of it’s former self.

Ms. Fiorina led the spinoff of Lucent from AT&T to “enhance shareholder value”. From there she leapt to Hewlett Packard, where she again cut back on the R&D side. Agilent, the scientific instrument business, was spun off in 1999 and she was the center of it. She then proceeded to purchase Compaq Computer, a commodity computer manufacturer to go with what was left of HP. All of these bad decisions have been reflected in the price per share of these companies for years afterwards. HP had effectively lost its soul. From the days of Bill & Dave using Stanford as their minor league system and creating the ultimate engineering culture, it went to Ms. Fiorina’s infamous  “does anybody have a good idea for a new product?” memo.

What neither Mr. Obama nor Ms. Fiorina understand is that invention and science spring from a certain culture. Tinkerers, designers, machinists, basement chemists, slide rule jockeys, and geeks are all a part of this. But management has quite successfully outsourced most of this to a point where even leading technologists no longer have a fundamental understanding of the means of production, which is essential to invention and manufacturing. Today, we have some of the smartest people in the world working in the labs with almost no understanding of how biotech and nanotech and all sorts of other tech translates into the real world.

There is a certain joy in making something faster or watching a chemical reaction or putting things together in new ways. But you have to have the ability to translate those ideas into reality effectively. and this we have lost.

We don’t have the factory floors to prowl or the conference rooms to BS in or the processing lines out back to see “what if”. Even DARPA is a closed loop devoted to “applications” oriented research instead of the blue sky “let’s fund this crazy idea for $1,000,000, Dick” organization it was 20 or 30 years ago.  Management and government thought of maximizing shareholder value and COTS (Commercial, off the shelf) instead of optimizing manufacturing, and the cross-pollination of ideas that creates breakthroughs. The bureaucrats and MBA’s are firmly in charge now.

Now, when a lot of the infrastructure is gone, the President wants to encourage invention once again. It’s a noble cause, but the horse is to a good degree out of the barn. Ms. Fiorina wants to be a Senator well, just because she wants to. Kids can’t even access a proper lab these days because of liability issues and the fact that chemicals and electricity and making things can be “so dangerous”. Gouges and scrapes and burns used to be badges of honor in the manufacturing/engineering class. Now they are causes for lawsuits.

American exceptionalism was defined by the opportunity to fail or make it big. Opportunity of outcome doesn’t work in science and technology. There were over 100,000 people on the Apollo program who were dedicated and failure truly was not an option. With  millions of parts on a Saturn rocket, 99.99% reliability still meant that hundreds could fail, any of which could lead to disaster. The miracle was that we got any rockets off the ground and that we had so few failures. Instead, as a counterpoint, today we are presented with a climate research scandal in which results may have been tainted and data faked. The deterioration of the scientific culture itself is an issue.

MBA’s and lawyers are probably the least qualified to address these issues. Both Ms. Fiorina and Mr. Obama are of the type who think that steaks come from the supermarket rather than cows. This is not getting out there and addressing our country’s desperate need to regain our mojo. The old guys are still out there. Technology has not changed so that we are irrevocably behind, but we must act now. As the government blows trillions of dollars propping up decrepit companies and paying off political allies, our country must once again focus on what made us great. On so many levels, the clock is ticking. We should really be taking those billions and investing in manufacturing and technology rather than things like cash for clunkers and make work highway projects.

“He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity (Eccl 5:10, ESV).”

One of my favorite songs by Shania Twain is “Ka Ching”.

It is very well written, and would make a great sermon just being read aloud.  The video and lyrics follow — enjoy!  Oh, and be careful on Black Friday!

“Ka-Ching”

We live in a greedy little world–
that teaches every little boy and girl
To earn as much as they can possibly–
then turn around and
Spend it foolishly
We’ve created us a credit card mess
We spend the money that we don’t possess
Our religion is to go and blow it all
So it’s shoppin’ every Sunday at the mall

All we ever want is more
A lot more than we had before
So take me to the nearest store

[Chorus:]
Can you hear it ring
It makes you wanna sing
It’s such a beautiful thing–Ka-ching!
Lots of diamond rings
The happiness it brings
You’ll live like a king
With lots of money and things

When you’re broke go and get a loan
Take out another mortgage on your home
Consolidate so you can afford
To go and spend some more when
you get bored

All we ever want is more
A lot more than we had before
So take me to the nearest store

[Repeat Chorus]

Let’s swing
Dig deeper in your pocket
Oh, yeah, ha
Come on I know you’ve got it
Dig deeper in your wallet
Oh

All we ever want is more
A lot more than we had before
So take me to the nearest store

[Repeat Chorus]

Can you hear it ring
It makes you wanna sing
You’ll live like a king
With lots of money and things
Ka-ching!

I heard an amazing message on Greed yesterday. You know, greed — wanting more than you need.

The Bible gives a lot of instruction on ways to combat this sin. Yep, sin.  One of them is in I Thessalonians 5:

¹⁶Be joyful always; ¹⁷pray continually; ¹⁸give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Joy.  It’s a simple word, but the state of being joyful is not always easy to maintain when we face challenges in our daily lives.

But the speaker challenged me:  Jesus first, others second and me…(or you) third.  And when you feel that joy slipping and the greed creeping in, pray!  We have a God who hears every word we utter from our lips and our hearts.   We also are called to be thankful — not just on Thanksgiving, but each moment.  The fact that we exist is a gift.  The fact that we have food, shelter, shoes, water — all gifts. 

My desire is to love others and be concerned more for their needs thatn my own wants.  I know the Lord is in the business of transforming the hearts of people and so let it begin with mine — especially during this season where it is so easy to be consumed with WANT.

I have so much and so many have so very little.  Let me have a spirit of gratitude today and every day.

Too many demands,
clamor in his head,
Desires, fighting
for their pound of flesh,
Trapped in their hands,
a stringed puppet,
he dances
on invisible threads,
they won’t stop
till he’s dead.

Each day arrives
towing unyielding wants,
unseen,
mercilessly tying him
forever to his needs,
chained servitude to commit,
life devours him,
nails driven through his flesh
slowly he bleeds to death.

Blinded by fear
toiling incessantly,
a moment’s peace
now a heavenly dream.
Dragging his body
towards a damned destiny,
born only to fall
into that bottomless pit,
where
his brothers creed rots,
lay in wait for him.

Another soul disappears
helplessly, alone
in the society, vacant eyes
bless the burial service
no one cries, everyone’s busy.

The dead must stay deceased,
their stories, instantly buried.
Civilization moves ahead
in a hurry,
while a million more wait
in line quietly, dreaming
of the good life, in the city.

]]> http://debsdailythoughts.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/the-uselessness-of-chasing-the-wind/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:38:30 +0000 greenlasagna http://debsdailythoughts.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/the-uselessness-of-chasing-the-wind/

I’m not a Christian, but I read four versions of the Bible cover to cover when I was, and there is much wisdom in some of the passages.   Ecclesiastes has long been one of my favorite sections, and I ran across a piece of it today on a quotes page, so I decided instead of writing a post, I would just put it here for all to read.  Whether you are a Christian or not, these words may well ring true for you, remind you of someone you know, or cause you to rethink your own life.

Ecclesiastes 4:1-16

1 Then I looked again at all the injustice that goes on in this world. The oppressed were crying, and no one would help them. No one would help them, because their oppressors had power on their side.  2 I envy those who are dead and gone; they are better off than those who are still alive. 3 But better off than either are those who have never been born, who have never seen the injustice that goes on in this world.

4 I have also learned why people work so hard to succeed: it is because they envy the things their neighbors have. But it is useless. It is like chasing the wind.  5 They say that we would be fools to fold our hands and let ourselves starve to death.  6 Maybe so, but it is better to have only a little, with peace of mind, than be busy all the time with both hands, trying to catch the wind.

7 I have noticed something else in life that is useless.  8 Here is someone who lives alone. He has no son, no brother, yet he is always working, never satisfied with the wealth he has. For whom is he working so hard and denying himself any pleasure?  This is useless, too €”and a miserable way to live.

9 Two are better off than one, because together they can work more effectively.  10 If one of them falls down, the other can help him up. But if someone is alone and falls, it’s just too bad, because there is no one to help him.  11 If it is cold, two can sleep together and stay warm, but how can you keep warm by yourself.  12 Two people can resist an attack that would defeat one person alone.  A rope made of three cords is hard to break.

13-14 Someone may rise from poverty to become king of his country, or go from prison to the throne, but if in his old age he is too foolish to take advice, he is not as well off as a young man who is poor but intelligent.  15 I thought about all the people who live in this world, and I realized that somewhere among them there is a young man who will take the king’s place.  16 There may be no limit to the number of people a king rules; when he is gone, no one will be grateful for what he has done. It is useless. It is like chasing the wind.

Abandoned Barn by Roger H. Goun

Then he spoke a parable to them saying, “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this:  I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.” ‘ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” - The Gospel According to St. Luke 12: 16-21

How strange it is that our best, most rational plans for dealing with the blessings, bounty and possessions of this life can be nothing but foolishness to God.  This parable always seems to be unjust.  The rich man has a problem. His land has produced bountifully and God has blessed him with even more wealth than he already had. His problem needs a solution, and his plan is entirely logical.  Isn’t it good that he build bigger barns in order to store all his goods?  What is wrong with that? Why then is his life taken from him?

It is important to note, however, that Jesus does not say that this man’s life is taken from him because of his wealth or even because he planned to build a bigger place to store his crops.  All Jesus tells us is that God said that night he will die.  This emphasizes what we all know, but easily forget.  That is that none of us know when our life on this earth will end, but God does.  In fact, for all we know our life may end this very night.   When that happens who will all the things we possess belong to?  It is not the plan that is folly, it is the presumption of the man that his wealth is his, and that by storing his goods and holding on to them that he will be able to keep them and enjoy life for many years to come. The foolishness of this rich man is that he has forgotten God.  He has forgotten that nothing that he has is really his.

The message here, once again, is that we must always be on guard against all manner of greed, for life does not consist of the abundance of possessions. To care for possessions, to seek to hold on to what is not really ours, to be concerned with storing up for ourselves without being rich towards God, Jesus tells us, is the height of folly.  For everything I have today will, one day, belong to someone else.  This includes my house, my car, my 401K, my bank account, even my friends and family.  Only richness towards God will last in the end.

“So come on and follow me

But sell your house, sell your suv

Sell your stock, sell your security

And give it to the poor” – Derek Webb

Pax Vobis

From Florida’s West Coast: Among the many financial issues we face, we also have the results of a greedy and shady and a shadow of our strange and disfunctional state government. Republican and the absolute power of money from private and federal dollars, prior to the Economical Bubble burst, has left Florida’s financial future similar to the slash and burn Civil War march thru Georgia…

Building  across our state may have been forever destroyed by both the ancient notions and present reality of elitism and stratification…we may have (6.?%) unemployment until 2019?

The money left for growth and investment may do better by chasing Federal investments in offshore oil exploration and the flow of petro dollars into Florida’s good, evil and its shadow of a doubt.

Great state and a sad example of the greed of destruction…Let us pray that we receive a Left-handed government and Democrats and Socialism, oh my…

Until I moved to Boston, I didn’t watch much TV.  I watched sports, 24 and Lost.  There were plenty of shows that were recommended to me, but I never really had the time to spend in front of a TV.  I used most of my free time to write, hang out with friends, and play IM sports (though not necessarily in that order).

Anyways, fast forward a couple years, and I’m here in Boston with no friends and a job that has me spending copious amounts of time in my own living room, physically in front of my TV.  I’ve also discovered Netflix Instant, which is basically the broadband internet of watching TV (if TV in the old days was pre-Internet, and TV on DVD was dial-up; at this point, it’s hard NOT to watch old TV shows).  One of the first shows I checked out, after years of recommendations, was the US version of The Office.

I watched it chronologically, starting with season one, which was a challenge.  Season one consists of only six episodes, and in this early going, Michael Scott – Dunder-Mifflin, Scranton’s Regional Manager, is at his most idiotic and hurtful.  In later seasons of the show (basically starting in season two – the writers must have made a quick, tactical decision), Michael is far more human than in those first six episodes.  Nevertheless, I stuck with the show, watched seasons 2-5 in (literally) one week, and now am a faithful, dedicated fan.

N0w the show is funny, to be certain.  There are very successful dramatic elements, but if someone asked you “Why is The Office so good?”, I think you’d still have to answer “Because the jokes are good.”  What I think is interesting is why the show is funny – or rather, why it’s so much funnier or better than other shows on TV.  The four main characters are Jim and Dwight, sales clerks; Pam, the receptionist; and Michael, the boss.  Comedically speaking, the former three are straightforward archetypes:  Jim and Pam are “everymen” (though it must be noted that they have the dual role of carrying much of the dramatic weight of the series).  Dwight is the nerdy, socially inept barbarian who is ironically ignorant of his own qualities.  You could even call him an idiot savant, given that he wins sales awards while showing himself somehow incapable of even interacting in a regular way with the other salesmen.  Perhaps “idiot savant” is new ground for a sitcom.

Michael Scott, however, strikes me as the one primary character who is particularly unique and of-the-times.  To the extent that he is an “inept boss,” he is a character that we’ve seen before.  To the extent that he is “the boss that everyone hates,” he is a character that we’ve seen before.  What is unique about him is that his negative qualities all arise from an embellishment of qualities that are all admirable, or at least pitiable.

Michael Scott is a terrible boss because he just wants friends.  Because he’s lonely.

I think you could argue that it’s easier right now to hate your boss than ever before.  Of course, everyone has always hated their boss, and they always will.  No one likes the person who tells them what to do.  Think of the people you’ve always hated.  At different times in your life, that list has probably consisted primarily of your parents, teachers, bosses, and the police.  It’s a thankless job, ordering people around.  But the fact remains that that hatred is really just a kind of knee-jerk, peer-pressure hatred.  50% of the time, it has nothing to do with who that boss actually is.  It’s a personal reaction to what they represent.

Things are different now, though.  In the last ten years or so, The Corporation has become public enemy number one in America.  It’s the most unifying enemy we have right now, in the grand tradition of Taxation Without Representation, Nazis, Communism, et. al.  It crosses class lines because for 99.999% of people, there’s always someone richer than you are, and it crosses party lines because everyone hates a greedy bastard.

The ascension of The Corporation has transformed hating your boss from something purely personal and almost mechanical into something with a tinge of nobility.  It’s rock n’ roll, the 21st Century way to stick it to the man.  You no longer hate your boss just because he tells you what to do; you hate him because he represents the higher-ups that always screw the little guys with their schemes to acquire more, superfluous money.

And that’s the beauty, timeliness, and cultural resonance of Michael Scott (and, of course, the juxtaposition that makes him hilarious):  whereas the hated boss is now synonymous with the greedy suit who doesn’t care about the people below him, Michael Scott is inept BECAUSE he cares about the people below him, both in the sense that he considers them “family,” and in the sense that he truly, madly, deeply just wants them to like him.

All of Michael’s hijinks seem to come from this incredibly lonely place.  He takes his employees on a booze cruise, and constantly interrupts the captain of the ship not because he’s power hungry but because he thinks people will like him more if seems like the biggest, coolest guy aboard.  He makes crass jokes that are very often offensive, but he makes them because in his social calculus, being funny is the most attractive quality one can have.

The challenge of Michael Scott, then, is to make his underlying longings visible under the buffoonery.  As Verne Gay points out in his recent comments on the current season’s premiere, “Michael is a clinically interesting personality type who is profoundly unempathetic, until such times as he is very empathetic. The wonderful creative trick of “The Office” is knowing exactly the right moment to humanize Michael.”  That, I think, is the longer answer about why The Office is so good.

The longest answer, though, is that the writers always make Michael’s internal logic clear, and this logic goes against the grain of what we want to think about him as one of pop culture’s classic bad bosses.  The Office is great for exactly the reasons Gay points out, but it’s perfectly right for right now because Michael is a character that forces us to re-examine reality and question our instincts regarding a current favorite, widely-accepted, tacit platitude.

And really, that’s what good, lasting comedy does (I think).  Jim and Pam are generally regarded to be the characters do all the hard work for The Office’s drama.  I’d bet that Dwight is generally considered to be the most lasting comic character on the show.  But I think Michael does all the “relevancy” heavy lifting.  And for that, Michael Scott, I think you are in a very unique, beautiful position.

That’s what she said.