Post Scripts

by Jack Lee

California has the worst credit rating in the US and this is underscored by our own law makers who warn that this Golden State will be flat broke by April. We are looking at a $20 billion shortfall coupled to what Standard and Poors rating service said was, “impending recurrence of a cash deficiency.” Jamie Diamond Chairman of JP Morgan warned that we should be more concerned about California’s looming default than that of Greece, which has recently announced it is bankrupt, because California will have a bigger impact on the world.

It’s all about demographics and reckless spending: In Greece the birth rate is 1.3 and that is so low they are running out of grandchildren to support their generous socialist entitlements and this has contributed to their overall economic decline. 1.3 is a birth rate that is so low that no society has ever recovered from. America Alone, written by Mark Steyn predicted this epidemic problem and warns that irresponsible and corrupt governments that are overly rewarding themselves with higher salaries and entitlements designed to buy votes are running headlong into the reality of birth demographics that say this spending can’t be sustained.

As in Greece and a half dozen or more European nations already on shakey economic ground, they’re running out of wealth producers (tax payers). Our birth demographics are dismal. They show the only segment of the population that is expanding are mostly those in poverty and this includes the many millions of illegals who consume more of our finite tax resources than they contribute.

Our wealth producing segment is shrinking in the USA and in California we are in serious danger of collapse. Many of us could argue we have already collapsed when we are $20 billion short by April! The current rate of government spending compared to income is not sustainable by any measure. It is inevitable that we will have to either seriously raise taxes and drastically cut programs or both and just about everybody knows it, but too few are willing to do it.

Taxpayers have been burned so many times before, they fear giving more to government because government will always take that money and then spend more. They get a buck – they spend a buck fifty! It’s always been that way and finally taxpayers are refusing to play that game. However, it is just as well known that raising taxes will impede our recovery from the great recession and any more bailout money will only add to our monsterous debt and keep us down for many generations to come.

Note: California has the worst schools, highest taxes, worst credit, most business unfriendly regulations, worst crime, but we score first in the highest paid legislature in the nation! Because we reward failure – we are California voters and thats the way we like to do business!

Posted by Tina

I heard the following story many years ago. At the time I didn’t pay attention to the author or source so I can’t tell you much about it’s origins. I may not even recall the details with absolute accuracy but I think I can offer a version that still conveys the message.

A poor peasant man was in the habit of rising every morning before sunrise, gathering up his blanket, and going down to the banks of the river to wash and say his morning prayers. When he was finished he always stood and shook out his blanket just as the sun rose over the mountaintop. During this time threre were three holy men from a nearby village who were in the habit of taking a walk each morning before sunrise. As their discipline dictated they arrived at the river’s edge at the precise moment that the sun was rising over the mountaintop. The rituals of these men continued for years. Every day the men all came to the river’s edge and every day the holy men quietly observed the peasant with his blanket. In time the holy men began to associate the sun rising in the sky with the peasant man shaking his blanket. After much discussion and prayer they determined that the humble man must be a great sage with knowledge of the mystery of the sunrise. The holy men were convinced they had much to learn from this man and vowed to approach him the following day. They packed their blankets, put them near the door so they would remember to take them the next morning. they thought if they could practice with the sage in time they would learn the secret of his powers. But, the next day, as they approached the river’s edge, they could clearly see the man was not there…and the sun came up anyway. The moral of the story is…put down your blanket.

At times we assign too much power or weight to external causes and rituals; we fail to see truth. In doing so we also fail to assume responsibility for our own experience.

by Jack Lee

In one more month, when California goes bankrupt and the feds are forced to bail us out, will they move in and take us over, running this state like they would a bank failure? Will we be another arm of the feds like GM? After all we’re too big too fail, right? RIGHT? Things are getting downright serious, we can’t live on IOU’s, what are we going to do?

I’ve got an idea to put some cash back in Sacramento and keep the feds from dictating to us. . .

How about we sell off some land? We’ve got more than we need obviously (look how much is state property) and I’m not saying we should sell off the really nice parts. But, who cares if we turn loose a few of seedy parts to pay off our big debt, right? How about, we sell everything 2 miles south of Burbank? We could sell it to Mexico! Uh-oh, wait … on second thought that probably wouldn’t go over. See, if Mexico officially owned this area then they would have to start paying the big tab for all the welfare, medical and incarcerations they currently get for free. Nah, they would never go for it. As they saying goes, why buy the cow when the milk is free?

Continue reading “Federal Goverment Takeover of Bankrupt California?” »

New York Times… (see update)

Neil M. Barofsky is not a household name like some special investigators of the past — Kenneth Starr during the Clinton administration or Archibald Cox in the Watergate years.

But increasingly, Mr. Barofsky is setting off fireworks on Capitol Hill as he quietly and methodically pieces together the most complete historical record yet of the financial bailout. His reports are careful but not cautious, showing a willingness to stand up to some of the most powerful people and institutions in Washington or on Wall Street.

Read more, click here

UPDATE: American International Group Inc.’s sale of its Asian life-insurance business to Prudential PLC was well over a year in the making. For the government-controlled insurer, it was worth the wait.

Continue reading “AIG Investigator: Where the Billions Went” »

by Jack Lee

A new book by Lawrence G. McDonald and New York Times bestselling author Patrick Robinson exposes the truths and dispells the myths about one of the greatest financial implosions of our time. This is a black box of secrets. And now Larry McDonald rips the lid off. This is an easy to understand and gripping novel for anyone who has ever held a strong opinion about who caused the housing implosion and who/what set off the great recession.

As Larry says, “America has two distinct groups of people; Wall Street and Main Street – the financial plumbers, and those who have only the most basic notion of the ebb and flow of economics. Wall Street, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, was the epicenter of the worldwide financial crisis that brought the global economy to its knees.

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” was twofold. First, to show Main Street how markets really work. Second, to provide a crystal clear explanation of why the fabled merchant bank, Lehman Brothers, met with such a swift and brutal end. The lessons are important, not just to warn of such disasters in the future. But ultimately to provide a beacon, to help us serve Main Street better.”

Continue reading “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers” »

Anthem Blue Cross is going to raise their rates by 39% despite the 2 billion in profit they made last year. They keep this up and they will empower those calling for universal health insurance. Speaking of. . . did you hear on average that 4 out of every 5 dollars for healthcare are paid by somebody else? That makes it pretty hard to do cost containment when the people making a trip to the doctors have very little incentive to restrain spending for a test or a procedure or even question the need for it.

Last Nov. I went to my doctor with chronic nasal inflammation. This was something that had been dragging on for several months and out of desperation I said, I wonder if an MRI would find anything? (I heard that a polyp can cause inflammation and it’s found by using an MRI) Good idea! she said, I’ll schedule you. The MRI of course came back clear, but it cost me $547 – it didn’t meet my insurance deductible. But, the point is, in most other cases insurance would have covered it and then the costs are passed on eventually in the form of higher premiums. And so often tests are done for that 1 in 10,000 chance that it might be …whatever.

Today’s medical practice is more about docs trying to cover their butts than it is about providing effective and efficient healthcare, and in the process of doing the CYA bit the cost of treatment soars. Guess that’s why we spend roughly twice what Europeans spend for their medical care. In my case I wish I had asked how much it was going to be, because I probably would have declined; as it was the sinus infection finally just went away on its own.

We do have a healthcare problem in this country and we need reform. Doctors should be allowed to practice medicine without fear that if don’t order up tests for every conceivable possibility they will not be sued. We also need to affordable (basic) health insurance for folks in their 50’s up till they can get Medicare. This is when health insurance gets really expensive! I refused to believe that insurance costs could go up 138% (4 X the rate of inflation) in the last 7 years due patients requiring more care! Something is wrong here, somebody is making some money in this deal, you can bet on it.

Unless we can get some cost containment and reform you’re going to get fewer raises, there will be lost jobs and you will wind up paying more and getting less. The rising health insurance costs is like a silent tax on American workers and the companies that hire them and that’s really hard on small businesses! Today the average premium for employer-sponsored health insurance is $13,375 a year for family coverage, with employers paying nearly 75 percent, or $9,860, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Something has to be done, we can’t keep going down this road, it’s a dead end.

by Jack Lee

The accusations, and sometimes the hysteria, from the far left and to a lesser extent even from the far right, have made this “global warming” a politicized issue, even though it should be strictly a scientific issue.

For those who say global warming is mostly due to man-made things, well, I just can’t buy that. Okay, maybe a fraction is due to man, but it just doesn’t seem like its that much. There are so many other things that factor into atmospheric pollution. I have to wonder why we should spend billions on unproven science and damage our economy in the process, when we really don’t have conclusive data to support that we can change a global warming trend or even that we should. Everything I’ve read says we’re in a natural cycle of warming and cooling. That makes me somewhat ambivalent to all the dire warnings that global warming is going to wipe us out in few years.

If scientists can’t reach consensus on this stuff how can you blame a layman like me for being skeptical now? And I am especially skeptical about the motives behind those screaming the loudest (Al Gore) and asking for our tax money to fix “global warming”!

Now, just for fun I have chronicled some of the accusations flying around and I’ve also found a couple of easy to read and understand articles that present a pretty fair balance of what appears to be happening.

The accusations…anything here look familiar?

• There’s a lot of easy money to be made touting green issues, selling carbon credits, etc.
• Half the global warming spokespeople are really just looking for fame and money.
• The United Nations wish to promote a single, global government and the fear of global. warming will help advance their secret agenda.
• Environmentalists wish to halt most large scale industrial development.
• Climate science researchers wish to gain greater financial support.
• Socialists are leveraging off global warming fears to push their own agenda.
• Left-wing political activists wish to halt globalization.
• Right-wing political activists wish to halt globalization.
• Right-wing activists are dupes and pawns for big corporate polluters.
• Right-wing political leaders wish to promote nuclear power because they will get a financial kickback.
• Right-wing activists don’t care about protecting the earth’s environment, they’re short sighted, looking to make a quick buck anyway they can.

Unfortunately for us there is probably an element of truth in most of the above accusations and thats a problem. It really doesn’t help advance one side or the other, in fact people don’t know who to trust thanks to all the claims and counter-claims. These opposing allegations are cancelling each other out and in the process. If there is some truth we really need to know, we’re losing it in the fracus.

Below you will find two short articles that seems to make a lot of sense to lay people like me, although they are writen by egg heads. I hope you will enjoy them and take something away helpful to your understanding.

by Stephanie Stein Standard-Freeholder

The current debate about global warming is “completely irrational,” and people need to start taking a different approach, say two Ottawa scientists.

Carleton University science professor Tim Patterson said global warming will not bring about the downfall of life on the planet.

Patterson said much of the up-to-date research indicates that “changes in the brightness of the sun” are almost certainly the primary cause of the warming trend since the end of the “Little Ice Age” in the late 19th century. Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of concern in most plans to curb climate change, appear to have little effect on global climate, he said.

“I think the proof in the pudding, based on what (media and governments) are saying, (is) we’re about three quarters of the way (to disaster) with the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Patterson. “The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it’s not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles.”

Patterson explained CO2 is not a pollutant, but an essential plant food. (It should be noted that too much CO2 causes plants to become low in nutrients)

Billions of taxpayers’ dollars are spent to control the emissions of this benign gas, in the mistaken belief that they can stop climate change, he said.

“The only constant about climate is change,” said Patterson.

Patterson said money could be better spent on places like Africa.

“All the money wasted on Kyoto in a year could provide clean drinking water for Africa,” said Patterson. “We’re into a new era of science with the discussion of solar forces. Eventually, Kyoto is going to fall by the wayside. In the meantime, I’m worried we’re going to spend millions that could have been spent on something better like air pollution.”

Continue reading “The Great Global Warming Debate” »

For more photos see the Sunday edition of the ER online for details. The museum is located next to the Bidwell Mansion on the CSUC campus.

Notice, this is a free speech blog and we encourage readers to sumit their own original articles. However, out of respect to our friend Mark and others who are in deep agreement with the article below, we allowed this one exception. In the future we would like to read your words on subjects near and dear to you. Feel free to use all the references and quotes you wish, but lets make it your own article!

presented by Mark

Bill McKibben wrote, ” Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. . . . Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet.

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory.

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986. If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence.

If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.”

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting. Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished.

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled.

Excerpted from “How the Mountain of Climate Change Evidence Is Being Used to Undermine the Cause”, Bill McKibbin http://www.alternet.org/environment/145838?page=entire

Posted by Jack Lee

Click on the map and see inter-active video.