Archive for the ‘The Thoughts of Neighbors’ Category
February 15, 2012
There is an op-ed that is flying around the internet lately? It has gone viral as they say. Author Charley Reese, formerly of the Orlando Sentinel, calls it the Frankenstein column. He says he calls it that, because people rewrite and update it with current politicians’ names, but it could also be said that brilliant, common sense pieces such as this one never die.
The title of Reese’s column is 545 versus 300,000,000 people. It was Reese’s final column for the Orlando Sentinel, and it appears as though it unleashed the libertarian frustrations that had built up in him over the years regarding how our beloved country is being run.
It was written back on February 3, 1984, but you’ll swear it was written yesterday. Writing such as this is called beautiful by writers such as myself, because it’s brilliantly simplistic, and beautiful, brilliant, simplistic writing is timeless.
It was written during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president, but it is non-partisan in its condemnation. It was written after a tumultuous year (1983) of spending that led to a mountainous 1.4 trillion dollar debt. That was a leap in the debt of nearly 6.6% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from President Carter’s last days. The final amount of the debt as a percentage of the GDP that enraged Charley Reese enough to write this prescient column in 1983 was 39.9%. The debt that we currently have, as presented by the fine people at skymachines in the link below, is nearly 16 trillion, as of 12/31/2011. The final amount of the debt as a percentage of the GDP for 2011 is currently listed at 99.7, a percentage increase of 15.6% for Barack Obama thus far.
Posted in politics, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: Charley Reese, Government Representatives, Legislation, society, spending
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February 1, 2012
Now that Romney has won Florida, it appears to be what some French would call a fait accompli. A win is a win, as they say, but with the figures we now have rolling in, we may not want to don the FA cap on Romney just yet. I’m not saying that Gingrich or Santorum have a shot at this point, but I’m talking about the celebration that would surely ensue if any other such victory by any other candidate. There is still plenty to fear with Romney.
It took Romney a ton of money to put what many consider a group of lackluster candidates away in Florida. Estimates have that figure to be roughly sixty-five to one in favor of the former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. A win is a win, and Romney did whatever it took in this case to win, but every time the Yankees have won the World Series in the past decade, the sub story has always involved how much money they spent versus their opponent and the rest of the league. The underlying story was, what happens when the Yankees run across a team that is able to spend as much as they are? When the Red Sox reached that point, they beat the Yankees as often as they lost to them. The Yankees lost their mystique. When the Yankees won the Series, however, there was never a next day, a next opponent. If Romney is the Yankees in this scenario, he just won two games, on the road, against the Royals in the Championship Series. (No offense intended to the Gingrich, Santorum and Royals fans, I’m talking money here not quality.) In this money scenario, there are no comparative Red Sox analogies, and there really are no NL analogies, for no team has spent as much as the Yankees or The Sox in the past couple decades, but let’s just say for the purpose of this scenario that the Dodgers were on a scale comparable with the Yankees economically. Let’s just say that Obama is the Dodgers. Romney has just beat the Royals twice on the road. The sub story is Romney has done nothing to connect with voters more than Gingrich or Santorum, and he has done little to nothing to combat his opponents if they were on equal footing.
Posted in politics, Simple Truths, Social Issues, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: barack obama, Elections 2012, Florida, Mitt Romney, money, negative ads, negative campaigns, policits, primaries
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January 27, 2012
Warren Buffet, the oracle of Omaha, and chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway mutual fund, launched his secretary into the limelight by saying that it’s unfair that she pays more in federal income taxes than he does. The first question many have had is if we’re going to reform this nation’s tax code based on how much this particular secretary pays in federal income taxes, shouldn’t we know how much she makes? Both Buffet and Ms. Bosanek have said that that’s private information. Buffet did announce that she’s paying 35.8%, and he’s paying 17.4%. Based upon those numbers, the next logical question is how are each of you declaring your taxes, as total income or dividend or capital gains? Buffet’s response to these questions, thus far, has been to call them personal attacks against Ms. Bosanek. He’s amplified his response by saying these criticisms are ‘ridiculous’.
In an interview with The World-Herald, Buffet said none of the online guesses about Bosanek’s salary are right, and the critics are missing his point. The next logical question to that statement is what is your point? Do you want to raise capital gains taxes and discourage investment in this country? Knowing Mr. Buffet’s position and stature in this country, one would think that that would be anathema to him, as he should understand how vital private investment is to the companies in this nation and the nation as a whole. Buffet has decided not to illustrate his point for us in this manner. He simply wants his complaints about tax rates out there, and he wants the statements he makes about the general unfairness of the tax code to be left as a general statement.
“I’m saying she is being treated unfairly in the tax code, as are tens of millions of others, compared to me,” Buffett said. “They shouldn’t change the rates on all the other people. They should change mine.”
Posted in Nebraska Issues, politics, Simple Truths, Social Issues, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: capital gains, income, taxation, unfairness, Warren Buffett
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January 26, 2012
Omaha is one of the top telemarketing markets in America. I’ve heard that this is due to the fact that we are one of the most plain spoken people in America today. Me thinks it also has something to do with the fact that the cost of living is low in Omaha, and as a result so are the wages.
Restaurants are also huge in Omaha. The marketing line on restarurants in Omaha is: “If you can make it in Omaha, you can probably make it anywhere.” Again, this may be due to the wages and the cost of living, but Omaha has also been said to have some of the most common tastes in America.
I list the traits of Omaha in this manner to lay the foundation for the fact that I know that working in Omaha is the same as working in Duluth, Albuquerque, Monroe, and Pocatello. If something is going right in America, it’s usually going right in Omaha, likewise if times are getting tough. Telemarketing and restaurant jobs are all over America, so I know that my plight in the workforce is no different than any other unqualified worker in any part of America, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to hold back. I know I’m lucky to have a job, but I’m over that. I usually get over it about two weeks in when the reality of what I have to do slides down on me.
Posted in Nebraska Issues, Simple Truths, Social Issues, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: employees, employment, job market, labor market, Omaha, sales, strategies, telemarketing, unqualified
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January 24, 2012
Even in the local, Omaha media outlets one never hears who is funding ads designed to make Republicans look bad. How many Nebraska ads are characterized as those run by George Soros? When it’s a Democrat that looks bad, we get sources and characterization of those funding the ad, and we get attempts to diminish the ad before we even read the article about it.
If you’ve read the stories of Kerry’s mulling, you’d think that the only people against Kerry’s proposed run are Karl Rove and the Koch brothers. From what I hear that’s not the end of the list. People from small town Nebraska and…Omaha are saying that this guy has a long road ahead of him if he hopes to win my vote. Ask Nelson how easy it is to win a Senate seat without Omaha, ask Pete Ricketts.
Everyone knows that the only reason Ben Nelson isn’t running for re-election is his vote for Obamacare. Everyone knows that Tea Party pressure dug at Nelson to such a degree, over the vote, that he couldn’t take it anymore. Why someone who publicly supports the same health care initiative that Ben Nelson wouldn’t even consider mentioning in a pizza parlor would run for the seat Nelson once occupied has many Nebraskans scratching their head. He may as well wear a Longhorn cap to a press conference just to see if he can secure the Longhorn constiuency here. (There are some here, trust me.)
Why would the DNC turn to Kerry in a last ditch effort to secure the seat with someone more prone to vote for the Health Care bill than Nelson? Is it celebrity status? Do the Democrats think that we yokels in the cornfields will get so impressed with him that we’ll fall all over ourselves to get some star-studded representation in the Senate? Do they think that Nebraskans will greet him like Elvis returning home to Memphis?
Kerry’s new tag line is: “I’ve probably paid more income and property taxes than all the Republican candidates combined.” Ok, fair enough, you have made a ton of money in this state, but how many times, while president of the liberal New School, did you espouse conservative, Nebraska views. How many times did you even mention this state in your time in the Big Apple Bob?
Posted in Nebraska Issues, politics, Simple Truths, Social Issues, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: Bob Kerry, carpet bagger, Senate
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December 22, 2011
Amid the kerfuffle of primary politics it seems most of the conservative intelligentsia can agree on one thing, they don’t like former speaker Newt Gingrich. George Will has basically called him a communist; Ann Coulter says he has so many ideas from so many different sides of the aisle that conservatives would do well to read the history of Newt Gingrich better; and Charles Krauthammer has said: “(Gingrich is) too erratic or mercurial… a victim of his own creative intelligence. People wonder if he’ll wake up one morning the way he did in the past with a mandate or global warming… and surprise people by being unconservative.” Even Brit Hume joined the fray calling Gingrich “Undisciplined. You never know what he’s going to say next. He’s a provocative thinker, but a promiscuous talker.” The latter two have also gone on record to say that Gingrich’s May 2011 characterization of Paul Ryan’s plan, as regards Health care, as “Right-wing social engineering” was political suicide on the right.
Enter Thomas Sowell. Sowell differs from Ann Coulter on the credit Gingrich is due for welfare reform, balancing the budget, the 90’s surplus, and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. Coulter believes Gingrich is given too much credit. She says Gingrich did not single-handedly engineer the takeover. Coulter believes that the liberalism of Clinton’s first two years as president is more responsiblefor the takeover than anything Gingrich ever did. (Coulter does not mention the Contract with America that Gingrich engineered.) Coulter does not mention that the 1994 takeover was the first time in forty years that Republicans controlled the house. Instead, Coulter mentions that Boehner’s takeover of Congress, (again, she writes, all glory to Obama for that one) was a greater takeover in pure numbers than Gingrich’s was. Sowell says that Gingrich presided over the party that won Congress for the first time in forty years, and he presided over the Congress that produced the first balanced budget in forty years. “The media called it “the Clinton surplus” but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House,” Sowell furthered. In other words, Gingrich’s seat of power while all this occurred is, at least, more than anything Romney accomplished as governor of Massachusetts.
Posted in politics, Social Issues, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: Mitt Romney, newt gingrich, politics, presidential, primaries, republicans, thomas Sowell
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October 15, 2011
Another friend of mine informed me that our mutual friend (we’ll call him David) was not intelligent, and because of that the two of them did not have substantial or engaging conversations. I informed him that this may be due to the fact that David was considerably younger than us. My friend agreed with that to an extent, but he stated that he thought it had more to do with the fact that David did not have a college degree. He informed me that he considered me intelligent and that I was enjoyable to talk with because of my well-rounded intelligence…even though I didn’t have a college degree. I smiled. I don’t know why I smiled, but that delusional blanket that he wrapped me in was quite warm and comfortable. I felt like an absolute fool later, but I’ve always felt guilty about revealing others aloud. It’s never gained me anything more than the feeling of superiority. It’s usually left the other person feeling bad about their identity, it hurt their feelings, and it’s cost me friendships. That guilt thing would not permit me to lift the blanket from both of us and reveal us for who we are. The laughable thing about that comment was that his greater goal was not to compliment me, or insult David, but to define his feelings of superiority through comparative analysis.
As usual, our best comebacks are those that we come up with after the fact. If I had a time machine to go back to that particular conversation, I would inform my friend that all of us progress through different channels of psychological dominance and subservience in different ways on different days. The search for where we stand in this chasm of dominance verses subservience can be a difficult one to traverse, so we usually attempt to answer them on the backs of others. It’s a shortcut to self-examination and self-reflection. Some feel superior to another, based on that other’s religion, their politics, their race, or in the case of my friend their education level. There are probably even some who gain their feelings of superiority based on whether one brushes their teeth top to bottom as opposed to side to side. There are probably others who base their comparative analyses on how a person shaves their pubic hair. If one person leaves a strip and another person shaves Brazilian who is the superior and who is the subservient, and where does the person who lets it grow wild stand? We all have something, and everything is relative. I met a guy one time who professed a preference for sitting on one cheek. He told me that he didn’t define himself as a one cheek sitter, and he would never call out a two cheek sitter, but he simply preferred sitting on one cheek. I often wonder if he felt dominant to two cheek sitters in anyway?
As for my college graduate friend, I was sure he had a psychological profile built on me. I was sure he had all of his feelings of superiority mentally stacked in a row based upon the characteristics he had witnessed over the years. One thing I would love to ask him is how tenuous that profile of me was. Would it change, for example, if he saw me walk quickly down a hallway? “What if you saw me walk down a hallway quickly without moving my arms at all?” I would love to ask him. “Would I be an inferior or a superior in your eyes? Or,” I would say nearing his face, “would you then consider me an equal?”
Posted in Attempts at Humor, Simple Truths, Social Issues, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: brain, brain dominance, characteristics, patterns, psychology, subservience, traits
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August 20, 2011
We’re only encouraging them to do more solos when we applaud, is something else I would’ve loved to say to the hip dude. In their heads, I’m sure most of these guitar players are saying, they think I’m a guitar god. When, in essence, we’re just trying to show that we understand the complications involved in strumming or picking a guitar string…when we don’t. Some of us don’t think it’s as complicated as rock journalists purport it to be, but most of us don’t care one way or another. We just want to hear the songs, but we’ve been conditioned to clap. If we don’t clap, people will stare, and they’ll know that we don’t know that that guy can pick his guitar strings in a manner no one has since Moses stepped down from Mount Sinai. It’s like when a reference comedian drops a reference joke about how Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination started World War One. Everybody just laughs themselves silly. One percent of the audience probably gets the joke, but no one wants it suggested that they don’t get it, that they’re not intelligent enough to understand culture, history, or a super cool and ridiculously complicated Brian May guitar solo.
Posted in Attempts at Humor, Reviews, Simple Truths, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: guitar solos, music, rock
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July 24, 2011
The NFL owners have agreed, in principle, to end the lockout. The players have yet to sign the Collective Bargaining Agreement. It’s our nature to take the players’ side, because we cheer on the players on any given Sunday. We also think we know the players to some degree. We see the Manning brothers being interviewed, and we see their clean smiles, and they’re soft-spoken nature, and we identify with them in a relative manner. Some have theorized that the owners ended the lockout to put the ball in the players’ court and gain some favorability in their court.
If they were stupid businessmen this would be their play, but they’re not stupid businessmen. Now there may be a little bit of gamesmanship going on here, but owners do not want fans to hold grudges against these players for greedy actions. They know what happened to baseball in 1998. The owners of baseball tried to break the most powerful union in sports, the baseball players union, or the MLBPA, and the owners lost. The result of this is that a great number of fans resented baseball players for going on strike and for the cancellation of games and the World Series. The NFL owners don’t want you to resent the NFL players when Sunday rolls around and they want you to come out to the ballpark again.
Posted in Simple Truths, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
Tags: CBA, labor disputes, money, NFL, NFL lockout, owners, players
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May 10, 2011
Killing Osama: A number of people are climbing all over themselves trying to appear compassionate. We killed life, they say. We shouldn’t celebrate the taking of life. As the British say, rubbish. The guy we killed was a guy whose life’s mission was to kill Americans. Most of the people celebrating on camera were college students. To them, this was like winning a national championship. It was a reason to celebrate. They knew fear when they were roughly twelve years old. They knew defeat. They probably figured the score was 3,000 to zero, until we captured KSM and later killed Osama bin Laden.
Posted in politics, Simple Truths, The Thoughts of Neighbors |
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