I'm beginning to see a pattern here...with EDIT

I've said for a long time, particularly after watching news clips showing rioting mobs in Muslim countries, "Those people just don't think right." A like comment yesterday on my blog from PT Dilloway, referring to the violence in Libya, said, "In what freaking universe does that make any freaking sense?"

This brought to mind an article I once read that pointed out that in the Muslim world marriage between cousins (known as "consanguinity"), and even brothers and sisters, is common.  A little online research found many credible sources confirming this and offering these statistics:  

Thirty-three percent of all marriages in Egypt are consanguine, as are 48 percent in Libya, 60 percent in Iraq, 70 percent in Pakistan, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 40 percent in Syria, 34 percent in Algeria, 63 percent in Sudan, 46 percent in Bahrain, 64 percent in Jordan, 42 percent in Lebanon, 54 percent in Qatar, 45 percent in Yemen, and 54 percent in the UAE.

This has been going on for 1,400 years in the Mideast, and is done in order to keep wealth (?) and power "within the family".   This is why it's so hard for sovereign countries to command the loyalty of their citizens.  People's loyalty goes to their "clan", not their arbitrarily cobbled together "country".

Not surprisingly, research has shown that children of consanguineous marriages have 10-16% lower IQ's.  Can you imagine the consequences of this generation after generation after generation?  Well, they might be able to keep all the camels in the family, but they also have a mighty polluted gene pool!

We (the West) keep trying to lead the Mideast towards our version of how things should be....democratic, governed by rule of law, peaceful, respectful to all, including women, etc.  I'm wondering if their average citizen can even comprehend those concepts?  

Thousands of years of tradition and ignorance and inbreeding are hard to overcome.  IMO we're beating our heads against a brick (or in their case mud) wall.  

S

EDIT:  Oh, the insanity....now they're burning the KFC in Cairo!  Is nothing sacred?

The world's most dysfunctional people!

I'm so sick and tired....have been for years....of opening the paper every morning and reading about one crisis after another in the Middle East.  If they're not killing each other, they're blowing something up.  I swear, those people could fuck up a one car funeral procession!

I understand the hazards of drilling for more oil domestically, and building more wind farms on the prairie, and producing more energy via nuclear plants, etc, but damn, we REALLY need to do whatever it takes to be energy self-sufficient so we can cut ties with the Middle East.  

I know that developing their oil industry a century ago seemed like a good idea at the time, but I don't think we understood what ignorant barbarians we were dealing with.  This has turned out to be yet another example of unintended consequences.  Ours has proven to be a marriage made in hell!

There are many parts of the world that we barely recognize....we send them old reruns of Dallas and The Three Stooges, and they send us produce and flowers.  Honestly, if the Middle East didn't have oil, would we give them the time of day?  We need to make them one of "those parts of the world".

It seems like half our diplomatic corps is engaged one way or another in trying to arrange peace between Israel, the Palestinians, the Shiites, the Sunnis, and all the rest of those obscure rock-chuckin' tribes.  They've been at each other's throats for centuries.  I doubt they're gonna sit down now and happily break bread together just because we ask them to.

I say we need to conserve as much as we can and to rely on ourselves and our dependable allies for our energy needs. Then we can tell the Middle East to go play grenade-toss with each other.  We, and our checkbook, are outta here!

S

Globalization....two thumbs up or a giant disaster?

Depends on where you're sitting.

I recently thought of Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World is Flat that told us, like we didn't already know, that we're living squarely in the Age of Globalization.  And that reminded me of 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot's warning that "that giant sucking sound you hear" will be American jobs being sucked south and eventually overseas if the US passed the North American Free Trade Agreement.  

Perot lost, Clinton and Congress passed NAFTA, and he (Perot) was essentially proven correct.  New industries have since been created to make up for many of the lost jobs, but it's been an ongoing gut-wrenching transition.

International trade has been around for thousands of years, but things really kicked into high gear after WWII when America's revved-up wartime economy had the capacity to produce much more than we could consume at home and the world found itself with an abundance of surplus cargo ships.  

At first lots of our "stuff" went over there (thanks in large part to a Europe rebuilt by the Marshall Plan), and a few early VW Beetles and assorted cheap junk began coming back over here.  By-and-large, though, we were the big international trade winners.  Payback has been hell ever since.  

The irreversible tipping point came in the 1990's when the world's telecommunications companies grossly over-estimated the future demand for new world-wide fiber-optic cables.  Rates charged due to the glut of new capacity fell through the floor.  Now it wasn't just merchandise that was flowing back and forth across oceans, but ideas, aided by the fledgling internet, too.

Supporters of globalization say it's been a good thing because the choice of goods available to us here has multiplied exponentially, while costs have come way down.  Others say prices had to come down in order for us to afford them as the purchasing power of American middle class consumers has been essentially stagnant for the past 20 years.  

I personally don't see globalization as having been particularly kind to the American middle class, all things considered.  Sure, we have more "stuff", but at what price?  (Globalization isn't just about ideas and goods, but the flow of capital and jobs, too.)

I suppose whether globalization has overall been a good or bad thing (for Americans) will ultimately have to be reviewed over a number of decades by future historians, but from where I'm sitting today I see it as a prime example of unintended consequences run amok.

Regardless of what historians determine, all I know is the Globalization Genie isn't going back into the bottle. 

More on this subject tomorrow.  (Another snoozer, right?)

S  

Where do they get this stuff?

Over this past weekend I saw several things that really got my attention.  There are funny, odd things everywhere if we'll just look for them.  This one had me absolutely ROFLMAO:

We were at The Whole Earth Provisioning Company (or as I call it, "The Hippie Store") when the cover of this book, F for Effort, More of the Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers by Richard Benson caught my eye.  It had me rolling in the aisle.

(Everyone knows the correct answers are "Sam" and "Brenda".  Duh!  ;)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then later I saw the message on the rear of this truck, which caused me to do a double-take.  In fact, I caught up with it in order to get this photo:

Look carefully.  It says "Emergency Ice"....for "restaurants, hotels, clubs, special events, and concrete".   What the....CONCRETE?  Huh?  

"I'll have a concrete on the rocks, please."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Finally, on the online edition of USA Today I saw this:

Police bust ends 'free sex after nine car washes'

Thank you Police!  The very idea, my wife making me wash her car 9....NINE!....times before she....  

(I'm all prunie after just 4 washes.  No way I'd make nine!)

S 

Remembering

Please, take some time today to remember what evil people did to us eleven years ago today, and how we pulled together as a nation to console, rebuild, and stand firm.  Never forget....never again.

S

It's the BANKS, stupid!

Dateline NY, Sept, 7, 2012

"...after four years of studies, hearings, and round tables, the Securities and Exchange Commission late last month abandoned efforts to impose new regulations on money market funds intended to prevent another panic like the one that occurred in 2008 and eliminate the need for a taxpayer bailout of the multi-trillion-dollar funds."

It seems three of the five SEC Commissioners, two Republicans and one Democrat, indicated they would NOT support any new reform proposals.  Make that BANKERS, 1; all the rest of us, 0.  Game, set, match.

Here we are in the heat of another election year, our economy is still in the toilet, and the Democrats and the Republicans are both pointing fingers at each other saying, "It's all THEIR fault.  If you elect us WE'LL FIX THIS!"

Truth of the matter is, it's BOTH their faults, and until someone stands up to the bankers, NOTHING is going to get fixed!  Oh sure, they'll let us squabble over things like abortion and gay marriage and whether there should be prayer in public places, but when it comes to anything with a dollar sign attached, they (the bankers / financiers) call the shots.  And the outcome is pre-ordained:  They will win, and the rest of us will....well, they don't give a flip.

From 1999 (essentially the end of any meaningful banking regulations) until 2008, the bankers had things going exactly as they wanted, and they made BILLIONS along the way.  Then when their unrestrained speculation imploded in 2008, they (mostly) kept their winnings, hit the reset button (raided the taxpayer's piggy bank) and started over again.  (It's nice to know own the right people, huh?)

So which political party is most likely to get us out of this vicious financial cycle of boom (for them) and bust (for us)?  Let's review:

Mitt Romney is firmly in the banker's camp (he's actually one of them!) and his veep is their head cheerleader.  Now don't get to feeling too smug, Democrats, because Obama had his chance to stand up to them in March (?), 2009 and wimped out.  And the people he listens to most closely, such as Sec Treasury Geithner, are so far up the banker's asses all you can see are their shoelaces.

So who then?  There are a few brave, knowledgeable people out there such as former Fed Chmn. Paul Volcker and former Citibank CEO Sandy Weill who say publicly that our mega-banks all need to be reigned in and broken up into not-too-big-to-fail pieces.  Problem is they're older, retired, and not in policy-making positions.  They're non-factors.  (The premise is if the bankers know they won't be bailed out again....that they're not "too big to fail".... and know they're being watched over by regulators with teeth, they'll act more responsibly.)

We're gonna have to start from scratch.  I'll volunteer to stand out front, but I'll need about fifty million other uncorrupted citizens to stand up with me.  (Do we even have fifty million uncorrupted citizens?)  And we can't become fractured by other social issues.....we must stay focused on this one issue only.  So who's with me?

*que the music*

As John Belushi so eloquently said in the classic 1978 movie Animal House, "Our forefathers didn't back down when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, and we can't afford to back down now, either!"

Seriously, they're probably too rich / powerful to take on right now.  We'll have to catch them when they come calling again for a handout, and that day WILL happen.  Unfortunately I'm afraid the next crash could be even more devastating than it was in 2008.

S

Too many shoes!

I don't care what the calendar says, I'm declaring this the perfect Autumn day morning.  Overnight it dipped into the upper 50's, and just now I checked and it was only up to 75.  It will be borderline summer again by 5 PM (88 degrees forecast), but, hey, it beats 104!

Oh, the shoes....I was so overwhelmed by the great weather I strapped on my running (OK, who are we kidding....walking) shoes and checked out the neighborhood.  Everybody must either be at church or sleeping in because there wasn't a sound except for the birdies out there this morning.  That's unusual considering we live in a fairly dense urban setting.

As I was settling in to my walking I got to thinking how comfortable these shoes are.  Then I began mentally comparing them to the other shoes in my closet and I realized, dang.....I have a LOT of shoes! Way more than a man is supposed to.  I've seen pictures of celebreties' shoe collections, but those are always women's shoes.  How many pairs of shoes do most men have?

My guess would be a couple of pairs of dress shoes (black and brown), maybe a couple of pairs of sneakers, a pair or two of casual weekend shoes (like Sperry's), and maybe some old worn out ones to mow the yard in.

Not me.  (I'm thinking I might need to go to one of those meetings where you confess what a dork you are for collecting shoes.)  I have dress shoes (to go with my wedding / funeral suit), two pair of sneakers, too many casual weekend shoes to count (my current faves are my Patagonia slip-ons), and two pair of low-top outdoor shoes and a new pair of high-top hiking boots (which I've only worn once because it's too darn HOT here!).  I wear some old Crocs to take the dog for a walk around the block, and even some nicer Crocs that look like Sperry Top Siders, but have that comfy, cushy sole.

I had some really nice ostritch cowboy boots at one time, but couldn't wear them because they were 1. hot, 2.  heavy, and 3. uncomfortable.  I'm convinced guys that wear cowboy boots are just going for the look, because the new wears off fast, like as soon as you leave the store.  I sold 'em in a garage sale for a few bucks, and felt guilty for taking the guys money.  Poor sap.  They're probably like that one fruit cake that keeps getting passed on from one person to another, over and over. Wonder how many garage sales those boots have been through after mine?

OK....enough writing.  Time to go for some coffee and the Sunday newspaper.  Have fun, y'all.  ;)

S