Mike's Two Cents Worth

There are two soldiers involved in this story, one is the gunner on a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq who shot and killed innocent civilians as if he were playing a game on his X-box; the other is Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, the soldier who leaked the video to the American public.  Private Manning has been charged with a crime and is currently being held by the military at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia.

Before we continue I would ask that you view the video.  At 9:49 in the video, you will see that, after killing a dozen unarmed civilians in a residential neighborhood, the helicopter opens fire on a van that has stopped to pick up a wounded man, killing another four or five men in the van and wounding two small children who miraculously survived.

The jocular tone of the U.S. soldiers as they communicate on the radio in macho military jargon, laughing and “high fiving” about what they have done, is not only sickening but I think revealing.  It shows a pathological detachment from the human suffering they have just visited upon people who posed no threat.  What they claimed was a weapon turned out to be a camera, carried by a young Iraqi journalist.

It is also obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment that these young soldiers were exaggerating the threat in their attempts to obtain permission to open fire, and then again when they saw an opportunity to kill civilians who were obviously rendering aid to the wounded man.

It was referred to as the “Superior orders defense” until the Nuremberg Trials – where ex Nazis were tried for war crimes committed during WWII.  Since then it has been called the Nuremberg Defense – which is to deny responsibility for ones actions as “following orders”.

Under Nuremberg Principle IV, “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

As I see it this condemns the soldiers in the helicopter, and exonerates Private Manning. A moral choice was possible, and in fact the gunner in the Blackhawk helicopter can be heard pleading for orders from his superiors to open fire.

Private Manning was privy to evidence of a war crime and I believe he had a moral obligation, if not a duty, to report it.  Thank God he also had the courage to do it.  Reporting it to the military would have been an obvious waste of time.  As evidenced in the opening statements of the video, the military had already done their best to cover up the incident.

I spent 43 months in Iraq, not very far from where this crime occurred in July 2007 – although by then I was gone.  I left Iraq in May of ‘07.  While I was there I spent all of my time “inside the wire”, but I knew second hand what was going on in Baghdad, and the almost total disregard the soldiers, as well as the thousands of armed mercenaries, had for Iraqi civilians.  I’m glad hard evidence of the fact has begun to “leak out”.

I believe the only legitimate reason for military secrecy is a tactical one – to prevent the endangerment of American soldiers – not to hide their atrocities.

Private Manning personifies the type of individual we admire when we see them portrayed in movies.  The prototypical “American” who stands up to oppressive regimes which operate in secrecy.  When will we wake up and see what our government has become.  At some point in our two hundred year history it has mutated into a totalitarian monstrosity far worse than the one our forefathers fought to free themselves from.

So which soldier is the hero?  I think we both know the answer to that question.  We should all wish there were more like him.

AN INTERNATIONAL convention banning the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster bombs, which was negotiated in Dublin in 2008, entered into force the first of this month.  You didn’t read about it or see it on the news because the American media didn’t tell you about it.

Why not?  Maybe the media considered this “news” too controversial?  Or maybe they were told to “leave it alone”.  After all, Americans might become indignant and demand to know why the country they consider to be the world’s leader in humanitarian issues is actually the world’s largest stockpiler, vendor and user of a weapon most of the world now views as a crime against humanity.

Cluster bombs are very efficient at killing, but they are indiscriminate and years after a conflict the duds that didn’t explode upon impact are killing and maiming civilian populations.  They become land mines and some American bombs are still killing 30 years after they were dropped.

This is what they look like

This is what they do

Here is a list of the countries who have have ratified the treaty banning the use of cluster munitions that went into force recently, on August 1, 2010.

Albania, Austria, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Comoros, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, France, Germany, The Holy See, Ireland, Japan, The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lesotho, Luxembourg, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malawi, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Norway, Samoa, San Marino, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Spain, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Zambia.

Notice anyone missing?

The United States has refused to even sign the treaty, which has been signed by over 100 of the world’s nations, let alone ratify it.  To be fair neither has China, Russia, or Israel.  All of course known for their enlightened stand on human rights.

It is important to note that these are not defensive weapons.  No one would drop cluster bombs inside the boundaries of their own country.  These are offensive weapons in every sense of the word.

American Made

It’s estimated that near the southern border of Lebanon a million unexploded bomblets are still waiting to explode, courtesy of the U.S. and its ally Israel.  They were made in America and delivered by the Israelis during their war four years ago with the Hezbollah.  Removing them is a slow, laborious and dangerous task, as you can see in this video as French soldiers of the UN remove them from a soccer field in Lebanon.

The country that contains the most unexploded ordnance is Laos, which holds the distinction of being the most bombed country in the world.  American bombers dropped more than 2 million tons, in a bombing campaign that lasted nine years from 1964 – 1973 and was kept secret from Congress and the American public.  That is over twice the tonnage of bombs dropped in Germany during all of World War II.

It is estimated that bombing Laos cost 17 million dollars a day, every day, for nine years.   In contrast America has recently been lauded for increasing it’s economic support of the clearing of unexploded bombs in Laos to 5 million dollars per year.  At the current rate of disposal it will take 100 more years to clean up the mess.  In the meantime 6,000 Laotians have been killed and countless others have been been maimed for life.  Just recently seven people were killed when a man hit a bomb while chopping wood.  Two days later two boys were killed while playing with two tennis-ball-size cluster bomblets.

Put this in some kind of meaningful perspective.  Nine years after 9/11 Americans are still enraged that terrorists killed 3,000 of its innocent citizens, and yet in Laos twice that many have died since the bombing stopped over 30 years ago.  Bombs dropped by American warplanes on a citizenry that had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam – a war of dubious value.  They will continue to be maimed and killed for decades to come.  How would we feel if New Yorkers were faced with the same aftermath and could expect to step on an unexploded bomb while working or playing in their city – for the next 100 years!

Ignorance on the part of the American people is the only possible excuse for their incredible dissonance, and the discrimination that has resulted.  But is that an acceptable excuse?  Do we excuse the German people because they didn’t know what Hitler was up to?  Does a citizenry not have an obligation to know what they’re government is doing, and then hold them accountable when it is discovered that they’ve been up to no good?  Does secretly dropping two million tons of bombs on a population of innocent people constitute “up to no good”? (And do not argue that they were not innocent.  It is absurdly impossible to drop two million tons of bombs and accurately hit only the bad guys.  And certainly those who have died and continue to die 30 years later are innocent.)

Lest anyone think I am anti-American, understand that I am 100% American.  It’s the U.S. government that is anti-American.  Don’t become confused and think for a minute that Washington is America.  It is a city filled with criminals who have in every way imaginable subverted the American ideal.

Would the ‘Duke’ have nuked the Japs?

My father was aboard a ship in the Pacific during WWII.  He was young and terrified.  My mother used to mention that he only weighed 95 lbs and had bleeding ulcers when he came home from the war.  I remember as a very young boy, watching him eat soda crackers in milk – good for his stomach.  I also remember the day I realized dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians was an evil thing to do.  I remember it because I shared my views with dad and he became enraged at the very idea.

“What do you know?”, he asked between gritted teeth.  “You weren’t there.  I was.  The Japanese did their best to kill me.”  I knew that, because he’d told me many times about Japanese aircraft attacking his ship.  And I recalled his story about Tokyo Rose threatening his ship by name on her famous radio broadcast, and the Captain, taking the threat seriously enough to change berths.  The ship that took its place was attacked by the Japanese that evening.  It was a fact Dad verified for Mom once when they met another sailor in Oklahoma City who had been on the ship the “Japs” had mistakenly torpedoed.

I can understand the emotional investment my Dad had in justifying the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a cowardly act.

I’ve watched just about every movie John Wayne ever made, and, like most Americans I equate the characters he played with the American ideal of heroism and valor.  What would we think if at the movies we’d watched the “Duke” burst into a home and, with his machine gun spraying bullets, began mowing down the wife and children of even the worst villain?  I don’t think we’d cheer.

The John Wayne I admired would have taken one in the chest himself before he would have killed an innocent person.  He was brave.  And we live in the home of the free… the land of the brave.  Or so we like to believe.

Hiroshima after the bomb

On August 6th, 1945 at a time when the war in the Pacific was nearly over and the Japanese were already prepared to surrender, the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy”, the first of two nuclear bombs to be dropped on a civilian population, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and incinerated 80,000 men women and children – almost entirely civilians.  Within a few days tens of thousands more would die, and over the next several decades tens of thousands more from radiation related diseases.

Were they really ready to surrender?  It depends upon who you ask, so lets ask another one of my heros… someone who ought to know.  Let’s ask “Ike” – five-star general, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII and 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. I’d trust his opinion.

“…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

America only gave the Japanese three days to consider the horror of what had happened before they dropped a second bomb called “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, with the same devastating results.  Why so soon?  Why not give the Japanese a week or ten days to consider surrendering?  Call me cynical but I think – and evidence suggests – that this was an opportunity to test new weapons and time was of the essence.  There could be no justifiable “real world” test of the second bomb after Japan surrendered.

Even Wikipedia, which I consider to be a government friendly source of information, states in its article Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

These cities were largely untouched during the nightly bombing raids and the Army Air Force agreed to leave them off the target list so accurate assessment of the weapon could be made.

These were two bombs of different designs – Little Boy utilized uranium and Fat Man was plutonium based – and both of them had to be “assessed”.

We don’t want to see ourselves as evil, or as complacently looking the other way while our government and its military hit men commit evil in our names, so we readily accept, and use a new term for killing innocent people during war.  It is now called “collateral damage”.  There has been a lot of collateral damage in Iraq.

Tell me again why we’re in Iraq, and why tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died?  WMD’s (weapons of mass destruction)?  No… as our former president once joked from the podium while speaking at a dinner for radio and television correspondents -  “Those weapons of mass destruction have gotta be somewhere… maybe under here.  Nope… no weapons over there.”  And they all laughed.  The official reason had become an official joke.

So why are we there?  I suspect it’s for the oil.

And why are we killing innocent women and children in Afghanistan?  65 years after Hiroshima the American military is still dropping bombs on civilian populations.  Ironically this fact is in a news item today (on the internet, and not likely repeated by the MSM – mainstream media) that the official inquiry has found that a U.S. air attack in Helmand province last month resulted in the deaths of 39 civilians, all women and children.  The U.S. military had previously stated the dead were all militants.

The investigation shows the July US-led raid killed 39 civilians in Helmand

Americans become fighting mad if you try to remove “under God” from their pledge of allegiance.  Polls found that 77% disapproved when a judge ruled that a monument with the ten commandments on it be removed from a state building.  Why?  Because America is a nation of Christians.  Their motto is WWJD – What would Jesus Do?

It’s a good question.  And if you are not a follower of Jesus (and I’m not) then ask yourself another question – WWJWD – What would John Wayne do?

I just can’t see Jesus or John Wayne killing innocent people for any reason.  Certainly not to test a bomb or keep American automobiles supplied with gasoline.

Engineers, Architects and men with Phd’s in Physics have submitted peer reviewed papers that contradict the official conspiracy theory – 19 highjackers with box knives – but some folks are still not convinced.  I think perhaps it’s because their explanations are a bit too scientific for the average person to comprehend.  So let’s KISS it, and see if that helps.

It’s a well established, verifiable fact that the Twin Towers fell at “free fall speed”.  In other words the same amount of time a brick would have fallen an equal distance through air – unobstructed!

Simple physics proves such a collapse would be impossible – given the official explanation.  It won’t take a lengthy scientific discourse to understand why, but first let’s define some terms.

Gravitational Potential Energy: Potential energy is the energy stored in a body or in a system due to its position in a force field. When a mass is lifted up, the force of gravity will act so as to bring it back down.

In other words, if you put a bowling ball on closet shelf seven feet above the floor you have not only stored the bowling ball, you have stored potential gravitational energy equal to the weight of the bowling ball.

Kinetic Energy: The energy an object possesses due to its motion.

If you nudge that bowling ball off the shelf the potential gravitational energy is converted to kinetic energy which accelerates the ball toward the Earth at a rate of 32 feet per second, per second.  In other words, after 2 seconds the ball will be traveling at 64 feet per second, and after 3 seconds at 96 feet per second, and so on.

Place the bowling ball on a shelf 1,350 feet from the ground (the height of the twin towers) and it would take about 10.5 seconds to hit the ground.  In a vacuum it would take only 9 seconds.  Why would it take less time in a vacuum?  Air resistance.

Air resistance: A contact force that opposes the motion of objects moving in air. An object will fall faster in a vacuum than it would falling through the atmosphere because it takes some of the gravitational energy to push the air molecules out of the way.

In fact an object falling through the atmosphere will reach a maximum velocity when the air resistance is equal to the accelerating force.  They balance and the falling object reaches what is called “terminal velocity”.  That is why a ten pound bowling ball will fall faster than a ten pound piece of plywood.  Their mass is equal but the plywood offers more surface area to the friction of air resistance.  That’s how skydivers slow their fall by wearing a bat suit.

This is the Mirabella V.  At 246′ in length, and a displacement of 816 tons, she is the largest single masted sailing yacht ever built.  What does the Mirabella V have in common with the Twin Towers?  Her sail area is equal to the square footage of each of the tower’s 110 floors – 40,000 square feet.  That’s a lot of air resistance.

So, let’s assume that each of the 110 – 40,000 square foot – floors of the Twin Towers were barely supported by chewing gum, or toothpicks, rather than massive steel beams, and just waiting for the slightest nudge from above to begin accelerating toward Earth.  Does it makes sense that they would all have “pancaked” in 10.5 seconds… the same amount of time a bowling ball would have fallen the same distance?  Are we to assume the air resistance made no difference whatsoever?

Lest you think the air between each of those floors would not have made a difference, let me show you one more picture that illustrates the ability of air resistance to absorb kinetic energy – a highfall airbag used by stunt men when they jump from tall buildings.

A highfall airbag creates resistance which decelerates a falling stunt man by absorbing kinetic energy.

Each floor of the WTC towers was not only a large sail, but an enclosed “airbag” as well.

Even if we discount entirely the resistance offered by massive amounts of steel, and we discount the tremendous amount of energy necessary to pulverize the concrete we witnessed in a pyroclastic flow of volcanic proportions, and theorize that all the floors had to do was “pancake” through thin air… that air alone would have resulted in a collapse time much greater than 10.5 seconds.

But we don’t even need a much greater time.  A measly half second per floor would have totaled 55 seconds!  The fact that NO additional time is present means SOME additional energy other than that supplied by gravity was absolutely necessary.  The question is, where did that energy come from?

I’ve accepted the fact that nothing short of a confession signed by George Bush or Rudy Giuliani would convince many skeptics that 9/11 was an inside job… and that would have to be witnessed by Jesus Christ himself.  It’s just too unbelievable for some folks to believe.

Deductive should trump inductive reasoning, but some opinions are not a product of reasoning.  And nobody said humans are reasonable.

Pancake… Schmancake!

I am a conspiracy theorist!!  But so are you!!  As is anyone who has an opinion concerning what happened on 9/11.  I get tired of this phrase being used as a pejorative.  If the media wants to vilify a group it seems that all they have to do is give them a name – any name – and then continually use it with negative connotations and bingo… everyone turns off their brains, quits thinking and just chants the phrase.

Let’s define the words.

Conspiracy – an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.

Theory – a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

By these definitions 19 highjackers armed with box knives is a conspiracy.  And it’s a theory until there is a hell of a lot more evidence to support it than just the retelling of the tale as if it were a proven fact.  Too many of the actual facts show it to be an impossible scenario.

For instance, the theory, within the theory – the “pancake theory”.  This is the official explanation of how the WTC Twin Towers collapsed in approximately 10.5 seconds.

The theory states that the jet fuel weakened the steel beams supporting the building.  They used to say it melted them, until even the dumbest of the dumb were finally convinced that jet fuel (kerosene) does not burn hot enough to melt steel.  I have a kerosene stove on my boat and my steel pan has yet to melt – or even weaken.  The theory is that because the beams were weakened the upper floors collapsed onto the floor below which began a cascading collapse bringing all the floors down on top of one another.  It was officially referred to as “pancaking”.

Now consider this photo taken as the collapse of one of the towers began.

Within just a few seconds tons of pulverized concrete and chopped up steel beams were being ejected.

Ask yourself this question.  Can a pulverized hammer driver a nail?  If your hammer turns to dust with the first blow… how do you strike the second blow?

You surely understand where I’m going but in case you don’t let me try to set up a thought experiment for you.  You have a stack of bricks, each separated by a space of say… ten brick thicknesses.  Let’ assume these bricks are supported by some structure that is just strong enough to hold the bricks above it, and that any acceleration (we can’t say additional weight because there is only the weight of the bricks to bring down the stack) will cause a brick to fall on the next lower brick.

Now assume you were able to accelerate the top brick with enough energy to pulverize the  brick below it into fine dust. ( The first thing that should be obvious is that gravity alone would not be enough, unless the brick were far enough away in height to accelerate to terminal velocity.  But, for the sake of argument let’s assume a drop of a few feet would be enough.)  What would happen at that point?  Would the pulverized brick hit the next brick with enough force to continue a cascading collapse?  If so… would it have enough force to pulverize the next brick?

If you don’t get my point yet, or if you simply buy the idea that the bricks would (all 110 of them) collapse into a pile of pulverized dust (except for the dust that floated away to land elsewhere), then I’ve got a conspiracy theory you’d probably accept.

Once upon a time there were these Muslims who hated us… uh… because we’re free.  And they hated us so much that 19 of them learned to fly small Cessna airplanes, and armed with box knives…

I haven’t posted anything to this blog for several months.  The reason?  Facebook… that inane watering hole where friends and family share drivel about their common ordinary existences.  Its only redeeming feature is shared photographs.  This week I enjoyed seeing a photo of my daughter’s fiance proposing to her.  And just a few months ago another daughter kept her family and friends appraised of her progress as a pregnant mother.

However, it is not a place to share one’s political concerns.  I love them, but they prefer to keep their heads securely buried (in the sand or up their asses… pick a metaphor) rather than share an opinion.

Facebook is not a place where I can vent.  And with every passing day I have a growing need to vent.

So… I’m posting again.

New photos of the 911 “attack” were just released, showing the dust cloud just after the collapse of one of the twin towers.  It prompted me to think again about something I don’t think about much anymore.  I don’t think about it, or discuss it because it frustrates and angers me every time I do.  The majority of Americans, including most of my friends and family, still buy the bullshit story that 911 was a terrorist attack.

Now take a look at these two photos.  The first is one of the newly released photos of New York City on 911.  The second is of the pyroclastic flow of a volcanic eruption.

The dust cloud on 911

You may be wondering “Okay… so what’s the point?”   The point is that this photo absolutely proves there were huge amounts of explosives involved in the collapse of the twin towers on 911.  But like any evidence it is only proof if it can be added to an understanding that leads to a conclusion.  One has to know that a dust cloud is not just a dust cloud.  There are differences.  The dust clouds in both of these photos are of the same kind.  They are pyroclastic flows.

Pyroclastic flow at Mayon Volcano

So what is a pyroclastic flow?

A pyroclastic flow (also known scientifically as a pyroclastic density current) is a common and devastating result of certain explosive volcanic eruptions. The flows are fast-moving currents of hot gas and rock (collectively known as tephra), which travel away from the volcano at speeds generally as great as 700 km/h (450 mi/h). The gas can reach temperatures of about 1,000 C (1,830 F). The flows normally hug the ground and travel downhill, or spread laterally under gravity. Their speed depends upon the density of the current, the volcanic output rate, and the gradient of the slope.

One of the identifying features of a pyroclastic flow is the distinct boundary between the cloud and the surrounding air.  A plain old dust cloud has a “fuzzy boundary” of dust particles and air mixing.  I’ve been in a dust storm in Iraq and seen the approaching wall of dust driven by the wind.  Fuzzy boundary.

The bottom line is that there was an enormous amount of heat energy in both of these dust clouds.  Much much more than could be generated by the relatively tiny amount of jet fuel in one jetliner.

You just can’t bring yourself to believe it… so you don’t.  And I’m tired of talking about it.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t have to vent my frustration when I’m reminded of it.  So I come here to my quiet corner of the web and blow off a bit of the lava that boils within my mind when I think of how the bastards got away with the most evil crime in the history of America so that once again its citizens would rally round the flag and defend their freedoms.

If they were only free to think for themselves.

This morning Tim Geithner helped the White House unveil a $3.8 trillion government budget for the coming fiscal year. If approved, the fiscal year 2011, which starts in October, will ring in a record $1.6 trillion deficit.

Has anyone pointed out that close to half of next year’s Federal budget is freakin’ borrowed?

And then consider this:

The U.S. Senate voted last week to raise the limit on how much the government can borrow to keep itself running, a move that while necessary has become highly political.  Senators voted 60-39 to increase the ceiling on the nation’s debt by $1.9 trillion, boosting the government’s borrowing power to a total $14.3 trillion, the highest in history.

But they really didn’t have a choice:

Speaking in favor of raising the debt limit, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said there was little choice: “The money has been spent and now it must be repaid.  We have gone to the restaurant, we have eaten the meal, and now the only question is whether we will pay the check. It is that simple.”

And billions of what they intend to borrow next year will be to create jobs.  Does it really make sense to borrow money to put the unemployed to work doing jobs that our economy says aren’t worth doing – because if they were worth doing there would be a demand for them and THEY WOULD ALREADY EXIST!  Why don’t we just do what the Soviets did and give everyone a job.  We’d have full employment then.  But wait.  That would be socialism.  And Americans are capitalists.  But capitalism is like… like… survival of the fittest – let the strong survive.  And recessions are really just corrections according to the rules of capitalism.  But what if you don’t let a correction correct?  Don’t you just make the ultimate correction worse?  Like the drunk who drinks more because he’s beginning to sober up and his head feels like it’s about to explode.

We’ve all had personal recessions.  Like when you’ve still got month left over at the end of the money.  It means you’ll spend the next few days in a recession, eating peanut butter and jelly samiches, until you get paid again.  You could borrow some money, but hey guess what… you’re just borrowing from another paycheck.  And if you do it too often you could get behind two paychecks… or three… or if you’re the U.S. Government… a whole freakin’ three year’s worth of paychecks.

Yep… they raised the debt ceiling to 14.3 trillion dollars.  And coincidentally, the projected GDP for 2010 is the same amount – 14.3 trillion!  Which isn’t really like Uncle Sam’s annual “paycheck”, but rather every goddamn dollar’s worth of total goods and services produced in the U.S. in a single year.  The paycheck would be more on the order of… well… the 3.8 trillion dollar budget they announced this morning.

So what that means in terms we can understand is that they’ve borrowed… let me do the math here… 14.3 divided by 3.8 equals… holy crap!  That’s 3.76 years worth of paychecks!  I think that might be financially irresponsible.  Or more like out of control.

Maybe I’m wrong but it seems like America’s problem is debt.  They’ve spent too much time on the midway.  Just look at this chart.  If you turn it upside down you’ll see American’s are falling off a cliff, but guess who lands on the rocks below.  Our children (if you’re my age) and grandchildren. 

So if debt is the problem does it make sense to rack up another trillion dollars worth?  And even if it was the answer, would it make sense to let the morons in Washington decide where to spend it.  For example they’ve budgeted $734 million to install 1,000 new full body scanners at airports.  Why?

Because some nutjob stuffed his panties full of pentaerythritol tetranitrate and got past those geniuses at airport security.  Personally I don’t think he could have brought down an airplane.  I mean seriously… look at the photo.  There is, however, little doubt that he could have done irreparable  damage to his dick.

But hey… thanks to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab they are now hiring at the body scanner factory.

In my experience very few people understand money.  Judging by my bank account you’d have to say I’m one of them… but I’m not talking about how to hang on to it.  I’m talking about what exactly IS money.  They think it’s the Federal Reserve Notes (or their electronic equivalent) in their purse, pocket or bank account.  I’m here to tell you that ain’t money!

I read – and it makes sense to me – that money serves these three functions.

1. A means of exchange.
2. A store of value.
3. A way to measure the relative value of things.

I’ll contend that those “notes” in your pocket only serve purpose number one, and they fail miserably for 2 & 3.  The reason you can’t store value, or measure the value of things with dollars is INFLATION!  I’ll give you a couple of examples and you’ll soon see what I’m talking about.

I bought my first house in 1967 for $11,000.00.  It was an average two bedroom bungalow in Wichita Kansas.  Let’s suppose that on the same day I bought that house I’d put $11,000.00 worth of gold and 11,000 cash dollars in a cigar box and buried it.  Now let’s suppose I dug up that cigar box yesterday.  Which one would still buy that same house today – the gold or the dollars?  The dollars probably wouldn’t be worth enough to replace the kitchen cabinets.  But the relationship between gold and houses would not have changed all that much.

By the way, in 1967 those dollars were called Silver Certificates and were still redeemable for REAL money… steada just another Federal Reserve Note.  Back then you could go to the bank and ask the teller for a real dollar and she’d hand you a coin made out of silver.  Hand her a twenty and you’d get twenty of them.  Hand a teller a twenty nowadays and she’ll ask you if you want fives or tens.

What happened to the “value” that was stored in that cigar box?  Nothing happened to the value of the real money.  The counterfeit money lost about 90% of its value, and it’s not hard to understand how if you know anything about the boogers that created it, controlling the value of it, namely the Federal Reserve Bank.   Inflation is not like gravity.  People have come to believe that there is something immutable in the laws of finance that say prices on the stuff they buy has to go up from year to year, like the laws of nature.  But in nature the weights and measures don’t change.

Suppose I whipped out a tape measure and slapped it down on your dining room table and said “Your table is 48 inches long”.  You’d nod your head and say “Okie doke.”  But what if I came back a year later and re-measured that same table and announced that it had grown and now measured 50 inches long.  You’d probably tell me there was something wrong with my tape measure… that it wasn’t the same one I’d used the year before.  Why?  Because any fool knows that tables don’t get bigger.  They don’t grow.

But you’ll believe that $11,000.00 house I bought in 1967 is now worth $158,000.00.  It’s still the same house, and it’s not located in a particularly hot piece of property, like some sunny beach, or mountain view.  It’s an older house, and 43 years closer to falling apart.  Probably would have fallen apart by now except for the annual upkeep and new paint necessary to keep it livable.

The point is this… functions number 2 and 3 can not be served by anything that is constantly shrinking in it’s value relative to the goods and services of an economy.

In 1913 our illustrious representatives in Washington gave the franchise to create money out of thin air and loan it to the U.S. Treasury at interests to some private bankers.  They turned over a perfectly good dollar, then redeemable in gold and silver, and today that dollar is worth less than three cents.

The bastards, try as they might to control the value of gold for the past thirty years, still could not reach into that cigar box and tamper with the value of the gold.  It didn’t lose it’s value.  That 11 grand would have bought 314 ounces of gold, which at today’s price of just over $1,000 per ounce means you could probably buy two or three of those Wichita bungalows with the gold.

Bankers have pulled the paper money switcheroo many times throughout history, and every time… every single solitary time… they’ve inflated the value of the money to worthlessness.  And every time there has been a return to the only thing that has ever been portable enough, rare enough, and unchanging enough to serve all three functions of money – gold and silver.

Climb aboard a time machine and take a one ounce gold coin with you back in time… say 2,000 years to ancient Rome.  It wouldn’t matter that the Romans couldn’t understand the words U.S. Eagle or Krugerrand on the face of your coin.  They’d know it was gold and they’d be able to weigh it, and they’d give you plenty for it.  And I have to think that if you turned the knob on that time machine toward the future and went 2,000 years in the other direction you’d find the same thing was true.  Your money would have maintained it’s purchasing power.

Take Federal Reserve Notes with you instead and I think you’d go hungry.  And I don’t think you’d have to go that far into the future for those notes to be worthless pieces of paper.  Set that dial for 2015 and you’ll be lucky if a pocket full of twenties will buy you a coke.

Roeder admitted he stalked and shot to death Dr. George Tiller, 67, on May 31 last year as Tiller attended church in Wichita, Kansas. He argued in court his actions were necessary to protect unborn babies.  “Abortions were being done every day,” Roeder testified. “My honest belief was that if I didn’t do something they would continue to die.”

This guy Roeder killed an abortion doctor last May in the town I was raised in – Wichita, Kansas.  That’s where I was thoroughly indoctrinated in one of the more fundamental Christian dogmas while attending the First Church of the Nazarene on East Kellogg Street.  Part of what I was taught was that if a child dies before it reaches the age of accountability it goes to heaven.  Yep.  Straight to paradise, bypassing all the crap the rest of us have had to live through.

Holy shit!  Do you know what that means? Think about it.

It means that this guy Roeder – and I’d bet my free pass through the pearly gates he’s of the Christian persuasion, though I don’t know which flavor – didn’t save any babies at all.  Instead he has condemned them to a life on Earth!  Now instead of being ushered straight into paradise they’ll be born, where more than likely they’ll grow up and suffer through school, dating, marriage, a job they can’t stand, disease, and for the majority of them, die and go to hell.

The majority you ask?  Sure.  Just ask the next Christian you meet what percentage of adult Americans are going to go to heaven.   The last one I asked (though it’s been many years ago) said she thought it would only be 10%.  That means 90% of us had better start packing our asbestos skivvies!

So from an orthodox Christian perspective who was protecting babies, Tiller or his murderer Roeder?  Tiller had a 100% salvation rate.  And I know that’s better than Billy Graham’s or even Jimmy Swaggart’s.

All this kinda makes me wish I’d been aborted.  Cuz if I had been I’d be in heaven now instead of… well I think you all know where I’m headed.