The real scary thing about halloween this year is that unlike Christmas it doesn't seem to be only one day a year.

We may not be wearing scary outfits every day but when one reads the paper every day it is sure scary!

People sailing a 1000 miles from Somalia get kidnapped, a guy walks into a drug store, holds it up, twenty-fours later he is in a shootout with the police, in a neighborhood near an elementary school, and then we have a bus flipping over on the way to a football game.

That was just some of the news today.... I am beginning to think Ann Murray is right. It would be nice to get a newspaper that only had a little good news.
 

Here we have pirates running amuck off the coast of Africa, people being wiped out in Dafor, rape being used as a weapon of war in the Congo, drug lords shooting up Mexico, people blowing themselves up all over the world and what are we doing? Not much. We have turned a blind eye with anything dealing with Africa, we enforce unrealistic laws regarding drugs and we fight wars that have nothing to do with the attack on 9/11!

We already know that Iraq was a huge mistake that has resulted in most of the problems the US is now facing. Afghanistan was originally to go after the Al-quada and drive the taliban out of running the country... Mission accomplished! So why are we still there. The al-quada haven't been using Afghanistan as a base of their operations since we first arrived. If you haven't notice they have being working out of Pakistan and Africa for the past few years. Who do you thing is backing the pirates?

But no we have to spend time tearing down the other half of the country, waste our time enforcing the unenforceable drug laws, be more worried about bubble boy and Kate's divorce and wonder who will be next off the island in one of the many reality shows which are neither real or a show.

The insanity seems to grow every day. It's enough to make a person to want to stop the world so they can get off!
 

As a basketball coach I always tried to use the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) method when introducing a new concept to my players. Looks like Congress is more interested in PYOA (Protect Your Own Ass) than really passing a meaningful health plan.

There are four basic principles needed in bringing health care in America up to world standards.

First is to make insurance transferrable from one job to the next, or from one state to another.
Second get rid of pre-existing conditions.
Third protect doctors from frivolous lawsuits regarding malpractice.
Fourth provide a public option for the poor and where states are served by three or less independent insurance companies

You would think everyone could agree to those principles and you would think the entire proposal could be written with about 50 pages devoted to each area or about 200 pages. Then add another 50 pages for an introduction and appendix for a total of about 250 pages.

At the rate the House is going it will take as much time as it took for America to realize Kennedy's dream of reaching the moon to waddle through 2000 pages and then try and blend it with whatever proposal comes out of the Senate!

Two Thousand PAGES! You got to be kidding!
 

Every since 9/11 the US has declared a war on "terrorism". Is this really a war you can "win"? In the past wars were fought over territory and ideas were usually the motivation for one side or the other. The American Revolution was fought on the high seas and North America, the two world wars were fought, for the most part in Europe and the Pacific, Desert Storm in Iraq. All of these wars everyone could tell when they were pretty much over with. One side had lost either the territory they had captured or lost too much of their own territory to be able to continue fighting.

The war on terror is totally different its a war first on ideas and then it becomes one of territory. We have seen brave men do insane things during war. All we have to do is remember the insanity of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade". Everyday we see where a Mom has put herself between her children and something she considered dangerous. This is not something new. What is new is the use of terrorism being used on a worldwide scale in a battle to convince people that a certain belief is the only belief to be considered as the way to live.

Basically this is a war for the minds of the third world. It will not be won with guns but with ideas. It will be won when the women of the third world begin to stand for their rights. We need to encourage the Susan Anthony's of the third world to mobilize the women of the third world. It will be won when farmers develop crops that will attract major companies instead of the drug cartels of the world. It will be won when these countries build their interstructure, their schools, and medical centers. It will be won when we use our military to protect the citizens from those who would destroy instead running around with our heads cut off chasing the people that want to blown themselves up. If we did this there would be less reasons for the youth to want to strap themselves into a bomb, for they would have something to live for.

Can we wipe them out? yes but not with bombs and troops but with ideas and concrete actions. Just be sure that we have the ability to protect ourselves and the people we are trying to help.
 

I am really beginning to wonder about American values. The more and more I look into the health care debate I keep seeing more and more things that make me wonder if American culture is really on the decline. Here are some of the things that I am really wondering about.

First the slow acceptance of debit cards. Seems like Americans would rather go into debt than use their own money. Little wonder that personal bankruptcies are at an all time high and rising.

Second is how slow Wi-Fi is being introduced to rural America. About ten years ago the Alberta government got together with Bell and wired the entire province with fibre optics. As a result the entire education system has been "online" for the past five years and once the system was in every rural and urban community in the province it has spread to all the homes in the community and is now working its way to all the farmers. Meanwhile the States like Washington now have their state exams on line and when those students are taking the exams the rest of the student population are not able to get on line, and talk about it being frustrating for the students taking the exams when it takes forever for the responses to be recorded!

The third reason is of course the health care debate. One wonders why there is even a debate!

What one comes away with is that Americans have been so brainwashed by corporations that they truly believe that socialism means welfare and capitalism means individual rights. The reality is that capitalism is another way of saying greed and socialism is another way of saying burden sharing.

I am beginning to think that Michael Moore's latest movie hits the mark more often than not. How is it that the richest nation in the world can not provide the same level of health care as one of the poorest nations in the world? Who you say? Try Cuba!

Currently too many Americans still think that they live in the best country in the world. Just because the states has the strongest and best equipped military and has saved the world's bacon twice in the early half of the 20th century does not make America the best place in the world to live and in fact many other countries have raised their standard of living to exceed America's.

America wake UP! The wars have been over for the last SIXTY YEARS, most of you were not even alive when the last one ended. It the past fifty years America has been involved in at least two wars it should NEVER had gotten into! So lets put that myth about being the leader of the free world to bed right now! Half of South America doesn't trust the states, most of Africa is wondering were the hell are you as the "leader of the free world"? Sure not helping any of the struggling democracies and you sit by while Dafur and the pirates of Somilia go about their business without a whimper from the States. Jefferson would be proud! NOT!

There are nearly two hundred countries in the world and America would be lucky to call 25 of them allies and another 25 as friendly to American objectives. That is a sad statement of American foreign policy.

In health care the US ranks 37th. In education 12th. The average age of its citizens ranks in the bottom half of all industrialized countries. The country is in danger of having its currency being replaced as the world's standard. Half of America are holding their breath hoping the other economic shoe wouldn't drop. While the other half are tearing into the one person who is trying to solve major problems that have been ignored for the past forty years.

Well just like New Orleans will never be the same again after Katerina the US is never going to be the same after the mess left by the first president of the 21st century. Both are going to need a hundred years to fully recover.

The US is more than capable of being the leader of the world and regaining its status as the best country in the world, but it will fail as long as it continues to tear its self apart over issues like health care where the rest of the world has already made a decision and moved on to other issues.

 

I am really beginning to wonder about American values. The more and more I look into the health care debate I keep seeing more and more things that make me wonder if American culture is really on the decline. Here are some of the things that I am really wondering about.

First the slow acceptance of debit cards. Seems like Americans would rather got into debt than use their own money. Little wonder that personal bankruptcies are at an all time high and rising.

Second is how slow Wi-Fi is being introduced to rural America. About ten years ago the Alberta government got together with Bell and wired the entire province with fibre optics. As a result the entire education system has been "online" for the past five years and once the system was in every rural and urban community in the province it has spread to all the homes in the community and is now working its way to all the farmers. Meanwhile the States like Washington know has their state exams on line and when those students are taking the exams the rest of the student population are not able to get on line, and talk about it being frustrating for the students taking the exams when it takes forever for the responses to be recorded!

The third reason is of course the health care debate. One wonders why there is even a debate!

What one comes away with is that Americans have been so brainwashed by corporations that they truly believe that socialism means welfare and capitalism means individual rights. The reality is that capitalism is another way of saying greed and socialism is another way of saying burden sharing.

I am beginning to think that Michael Moore's latest movie hits the mark more often than not. Hoe is it that the richest nation in the world can not provide the same level of health care as one of the poorest nations in the world? Who you say? Try Cuba!

Currently too many Americans still think that they live in the best country in the world. Just because the states have the strongest and best equipped military and has saved the world's bacon twice in the early half of the 20th century does not make America the best place in the world to live and in fact many other countries have raised their standard of living to exceed America's.

In health care the US ranks 37th. In education 12th. The average age of its citizens ranks in the bottom half of all industrialized countries. The country is in danger of having its currency being replaced as the world's standard

 

While the US has been wrapped up in a silly debate about health care and while Greenpeace has been bringing the "evils of Alberta's oil sands to the attention of the world, the Chinese have been going about their business of securing their energy supplies and their future economic well being.

Why has the price of oil started to climb while US consumption has remained steady? Simple, the Chinese are paying extra to secure a steady supply. While Greenpeace has been carrying out a campaign about Alberta's "dirty oil" the Chinese have bought into a few of the projects and there is now a proposal of a pipeline that will head for Canada's west coast so it can be shipped east! If the US doesn't want a huge resource because it might not be the cleanest resource around the Chinese have no problem with it and will pay top dollar. Not that Canada hasn't told the US that this could happen. The irony is that it will be American oil companies that will be helping the Chinese to secure the resource.

While the world is in a major economic disaster the Chinese economy is expected to grow only by 7%!!!! This is while the rest of the world is looking to kept their economy from declining never mind growing. The Chinese economy has grown because it had cheap labor and a lot of it, but as the Chinese came off the farms and into the cities they have had a growth of the middle class and today they have almost as many billionaires as the US. What this means is that the Chinese industries are now able to produce not only for the world but for their own population and that is the biggest market in the world! Their middle class is about a third of their population which means it is larger than the entire population of the US and Canada.

China is the other 600 pound gorilla in the room. It has become THE economic power of the world. It has and is still affecting the price of gold as it is encouraging its citizens to buy gold. China is worried about all the US money it has in reserve (2 Trillion and counting). It is well aware that the US dollar is about to hit free fall and is in negotiations with the middle east oil producing countries on establishing another currency as the world's standard.

I can still remember Vice President Nixon's debate with the Kremlin, back in the fifties where he told the Russians that they couldn't compete with America's economic strengths. Seems after 50 years the same truth in now on the other foot when it comes to China and the US. This has nothing to do with the way the two countries are run politically. Fact is the wealthy the Chinese become the more democratic it will become, it's already happening even though they have a ways to go. But the Chinese take the long view and are not interested in short quick easy answers and we could learn from them, for as they say a journey of a thousand miles begins with one single step. I just wonder if that first step is to provide all Americans with health care?
 

Went to a funeral yesterday. It was for the mother of a friend. We became friends while I was principal of a school in which he was chairman of the school board that hired me. About a year after I was hired he left the board but we continued to visit one another's home and I taught and coached two of his children. I also met both his father and mother and liked them both. His dad had died in 2002 while I was still working in New England, but when I heard his Mom had recently died we made the effort to attend the services.

This is the second funeral I have attended in the last month where I have been taken back to places I was either a teacher or a principal and the most shocking thing that has come to my attention is remembering the words I last heard from my favorite high school English teacher. I went to visit her about seven years after I had graduated. I remember going up to her house and knocking on her door and anticipating having a good talk with her. She came to the door and as she opened it I could see a puzzled look on her face. She hadn't recognized me! How could that be? She had gone out of her way to help me get through Senior English, she had to remember! Then she told me that she had taught thousands of students and after a few years of not seeing them on a daily basis she was lucky to remember faces never mind names!

We talked for an hour or so and by the end I knew she had begun to remember for as I was leaving she mentioned something about my family that only the two of us would have known. I was just beginning my career in education and remembered thinking that I would always remember my students....

How wrong was I! In the beginning I could remember everything. As a basketball coach I could tell you. at the end of the season the score of every game we played, by the quarter! As for students I always seemed to remember all of their embarrassing moments as well as their accomplishments. Then I began to move. As an administrator one tends to move during a career and in a career that spanned thirty-eight years there were about ten moves. You tend to forget the people you don't have daily contact with and so as I return to say go bye to individuals and meet some of my old students. Today I find myself in the same spot as my old English teacher. You do remember the special moments. the one's when you see the lights go on in your students, the special accomplishments, the times when a student who is lost finds themselves and never has to look back again to what might have been because where they have gone is far better than where they were. As a coach it's not the wins or loses that matter, its the accomplishments. Its watching a team reach a milestone no other team has made, the comeback win when everyone else has given up, the player doing something they never thought they could do when the team needed them to reach beyond.

As I meet my ex-students I realize my old English teacher is still teaching me. This time it is the lesson of humility as I reach out to my students to let them know that not knowing their names is not to mean I have forgotten them, but it is one of the frailties of life. Give me some time and I will remember, but watch out I may remember more than you wish me too!
 

What nobody is taking about is what is happening to the US dollar and the 600 Pound Gorilla.

Today the US dollar is at record lows and seems to be heading lower. It has gotten bad enough that a number of the middle east oil countries are currently talking with Russia, China, and India about the possibility of using another currency than the American dollar for trading purposes. In addition the Chinese which hold over 2 Trillion US dollars has been advising its citizens to buy gold.

Now Canada benefited from a low Canadian dollar for years. It allowed them to build a very strong economy and it had the US crying unfair trading practices for years. Canadian beef, lumber, oil etc could be sold for 15 to 25 percent less than an American company and still make more than if they sold the same product in Canada. The result was that Canadian products poured over the border. Today with the Canadian dollar almost on par with the US the flow is much slower.

Many Americans do not realize that Canada is still the US's largest trading partner, but with Canada the trade goes both ways unlike the Chinese were there is a 90% flow with products coming in and American greenbacks going out!

Everyone seems to be getting excited about the stock market, but watch out! As the US dollar has dropped in value it makes US products cheaper overseas and like the Canadian dollar this helps increase sales. It also makes travel outside the US much more expensive thus encouraging Americans to do what Dina Shore used to say "Travel the USA" maybe not in your Chevy, but you get the picture. All of this is encouraging news to Wall Street. The bottom line improves and the stocks go up! This happened after the crash of 1929, but what people forgot then and seem to have forgotten today is that after things hit the wall and crashed it left the average Joe with very little cash reserves.

Same thing today. To start with Americans were way down on the savings department to begin with, then for those that had 401s saw them become 201s. On top of that their homes went from a plus to, in many cases, a negative. Then more than 10% of those working lost their job. In many cases jobs that will not be coming back. In 1931 the second shoe dropped and the economy fell and did not recover until WWII came along. The 1931 collapse occurred after the market had recovered 50% from the 1929 set back. Today that would be the 10,300 mark and we are getting close....

They say the recent down fall was a "Prefect Storm" in economic terms. I don't think they have seen the real Perfect Storm. The US needs to stop the down turn in the US dollar to prevent it from being replaced as the world's currency. Why you say? To lose that position would result in the total collapse of the dollar. The only way to save the dollar will be to increase the interest rates. Increase it too fast then inflation raises its ugly head. Too slow and the dollar continues to fall.

Now is not the time to blame whose at fault, but we know who people will blame. The fact is that we are in some of the toughest times America has ever seen! Look for gold to continue to increase in value to unheard of heights. Look for the job situation to get worse as many of the people currently on unemployment insurance begin to run out of their benefits. Watch what happens to companies bottom line as the stimulus money begins to dry up.

On top of this we are looking at the biggest deficits in history. It took us from 1776 to 1990 to get to an 8 Trillion dollar debt and just 20 years to increase it to 12 Trillion and we are heading for 14 Trillion by 2015. No way we are going to get out from under with out lowering expenses and INCREASING, yep you got it, taxes!

The best way to do it is with a VAT(Value Added Tax) type of tax. Nobody likes them but they do hit everyone. In Canada they have a GST (Goods & Services Tax) tax that is on everything except food and children's clothing. Originally it was 7% and the current government dropped it to 5% in two stages, (they wish they hadn't). It is universal tax for everyone spending money in the US. Americans can get a refund from Canada when they spend money in Canada.(Most Americans are not aware of it)

No matter who is the president the fact that America is going to need a VAT tax is the 600 pound gorilla nobody is talking about!
 

Isn't it time we moved on and stop the bashing of the president because he wants change?

Everyone, including the Republicans agree that it is well past time that we change the current health system. It's pretty hard to hear about children that are healthy not getting health coverage because their weight isn't within 95% of the average. Healthcare isn't for just the average it's for EVERYBODY! Isn't it time that health care is provided based on need not a math blueprint?

Isn't it time for the US to join the rest of the planet and provide universal health care? Is the wealthiest country in the world really saying it can't afford it?

Isn't it about time Americans stop throwing around the term "socialism" as if it was a dirty word? Just as the only pure form of democracy can be found in the New England town meetings and everything else is a form of democracy most of the world does not believe in pure socialism but they do accept some of the principals when it comes to meeting basic citizen needs. This includes the United States. America has no trouble accepting social security, public education, unemployment insurance and even health care for the elderly and children so why not for all of its citizens???

Isn't it about time that instead of knocking the President that Americans take up his challenge to tackle the problems facing the country by proposing solid alternatives?

Not only do I think its time I think it's past time that people stop bitching and start making concrete proposals to help America regain its footing both within and outside the country!

As a basketball coach I am well aware of how easy it is to sit in the stands and knock how the coach is handling the team. It is a lot different when you come down out of the stands and join the bench in making decisions. I think it's about time that people either shut up and enjoy the game or get a seat on the bench and have some input. Of course they can also choose to not attend the game at all!