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 |  "Putting on the Game Face" |
  This blog is a doorway into the mind of Percy Goodfellow. Don't be shocked at the lost boys of Namby-Pamby Land and the women they cavort with. Watch as his caricatures blunder about the space between audacious hope and the wake-up calls of tomorrow. Behold their scrawl on the CRT, like graffitti on a subway wall. Examine it through your own lens...Step up my friends, and separate the pepper from the rat poop. Welcome to my abode...the armpit of yesterday, the blinking of an eye and a plank to the edge of Eternity. Note: This blog is my journal. I've no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my views. What I write is whatever happens to interest me when I start pounding the keys. |
| Socialism is the Red Headed Stepchild of Communism. The difference is that in Communism the government owns everything. In Socialism a small pittance is left to the regulation of market forces. Off shore money owns most of the media in the United States and this media is being used to seduce American voters into believing the biggest lie ever foisted on a gullible electorate. The idea that bureaucrats will do a better job distributing wealth than a market economy is totally absurd, yet voters, hoping to get something for nothing think it is the greatest idea in political history. Cuba is still operating on a 1950s economy, evidenced by all the antique cars they drive around. Venezuela had a robust economy until the Socialists ruined it and turned a nation rich in oil into an impoverished backwater of economic despair. But what about those European countries, supposedly living living in Socialist utopian splendor? When was the last time anyone asked them how much they love their county's political form of governing? ... countries which under socialized medicine put their old people out on the ice with rationed healthcare? Look at Canada, for heavens sake. Where do old Canadians, who can still afford it, come to get decent healthcare? We're being fed a bunch a bunch of malarky by the Democrats and our low information electorate is lapping it up like a bunch of morons. |
| I get a little irritated being told that the President is being briefed on his "Options." OPTIONS TO WHAT? screams out in my mind. There are two parts to the problem solving process that leap out before any discussion of options should be undertaken. The first is defining the problem and the second has two parts... facts and assumptions bearing on the problem. Without knowing what these are, a consideration of options is putting the cart before the horse. For example consider the latest crisis on the Cruise Missile/Drone attack on the Saudi Oil fields. The problem could be defined in three ways depending on who the decision-maker is and what his point of view is regarding the scope being considered. Say the decision maker is the Saudi King. His first thought would, no doubt, be a knee jerk inclination to launch a retaliatory strike. As emotions cool he might consider, Against Who? It helps to know that prior to launching a tactical level response. Maybe an airstrike right now against some arbitrary target in Iran is not such a good idea. If the Decision-maker was another leader in the region his point of view would be more Operational (Regional) in nature and his thinking on options might focus on the best way to keep the Iranians from launching a similar attack on his country. For the United States, the President should be looking from a Strategic perspective, on how to keep the oil flowing and preserve the economic world order. Twenty years ago such a disruption would have been a threat to our vital interests but these days, with the US being energy independent, this is no longer the case. So before any meaningful exploration of options, the decision maker needs to consider the scope of their National Interests, be they tactical, operational or strategic. So the Saudi King might reason, the problem is to determine the best way to keep our oil fields safe from drones and cruise missiles. Other Arab Leaders might see the problem as determining the best way to keep the Iranians from attacking them in a similar manner. And the US President should reason, what is the best way to preserve stability in the Middle East? Note: One of the biggest problems with the problem solving process lies in defining the problem. It is often glossed over yet it has a huge influence on what the solution turns out to be. The next step to consider, before skipping over to options, is the one that deals with facts and assumptions. A fact bearing on the problem is exactly that. At a certain time and place, cruise missiles and drones were launched against two Saudi Oil refineries. Fifty percent of the production capacity was impacted. The Saudis were surprised and lacked the defensive means to prevent the attack. Saudi oil is a mainstay of the European economy. Saudi Arabia and Iran are regional competitors for control of the Middle East. An Assumption can be thought of as a fact that hasn't happened or one that has yet to be verified. Sometimes the facts are deliberately concealed or they have an element of futurity... i.e. they haven't happened yet. For example, "Iran launched the attack." While this appears extremely likely, it could be that another country launched the attack hoping Iran would get blamed. Iran claims to have no involvement despite the fact they have a record of abusing the truth... but what if they aren't lying? Anyway, these worrisome assumptions need to be put to rest before serious retribution takes place... One has only to recall the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" assumption, widely believed to exist when the Bush Administration was in power while deciding how to deal with Iraq...to understand how dangerous assumptions can be. Only after the first two steps are clearly in mind should the decision maker allow anybody to start a discussion of options. |
| Sometimes I wonder about a time and place where the designers of life had their workshop. It had to be a very small place, by our standards, because much of the design work was done on the molecular level. Say for example, someone on the design team was the "Ant Guy." Now we all know that ants are small so this guy must have been minute in scale. So there he was figuring out how the DNA had to be arranged to get the body parts to function. If we were attempting such a thing today we would use plastics and wires and power it with electro servos and micro circuitry. The Ant Guy, however would be using biology and chemistry in his work with the same facility that we use nuts and bolts. Pretty cool, don't you think. Here we are a bio-organism and we would try and replicate the ant using electro-mechanical processes. Don't you see the irony? We are made of flesh and blood yet our attempts at creation run along the lines of bent metal, coated with teflon, fiber optic nerves, and muscles made of flexible plastics and servos. Here we are a creator and we aren't even using the same processes and materials that created us. Clearly this is proof that our creator and human kind originated in different dimensions. How about them grits? |
| Some think that to lose weight the answer is eating less, ie smaller portions, perhaps cutting out one meal a day. Others think that a vigorous workout routine, joining a fitness club is the answer. Still other believe that one of these fandango diets is the answer. If the truth be known its a combination of all three that will be necessary to lose weight particularly for those who are getting on in years and have allowed old eating and work habits to continue, long after an aging metabolism has outlived the need for a high energy diet. After I retired I continued my old eating habits while slowing down the tempo of my daily life. Guess what? I started gaining weight, not so much I noticed it right away and not until I got an unpleasant wake up call. I needed three stints for clogged arteries in my heart and some of my smaller blood vessels into parts a man doesn't like to think about got plugged up too. I put on an extra fifty pounds in ten years without hardly noticing. My wife has me on one of those Keto fat burning diets and that is working. I joined Planet Fitness and quit eating breakfast, which I hardly miss anymore. Just a word tot he wise. When you retire you have to make some major life style adjustments and a great place to begin is with your diet and exercise habits. |
| If you take the Muller Report and just open it in the middle, it will soon become apparent that what is being written is a roadmap for impeachment. Everything the reader sees laid out, page after page, is focused on that and nothing more. The problem is that the partisan investigators are unable to make their case. Since they can't prove guilt, they resort to a tactic that throws the presumption of innocence right out the window. They conclude by saying that while the evidence is not sufficient to indite, neither does it exonerate President Trump. In part 1 some effort is made to show that the Russians were involved in trying to destabilize the United States Election process. So what was the scope of this effort...? A measly (In terms of what the two candidates spent) $1.25 million dollars. Maybe a dozen operatives were actively involved setting up email accounts and trying to incite efforts to undermine and destabilize the election. The partisan investigators claim that these efforts were designed to aid Trump without ever bothering to look into the millions Hillary spent on the Steel Dossier which was crafted by the Russians to get political dirt on President Trump. So on one hand you have the Democratic National Committee actively involved with a foreign agent to get dirt on Trump, while it is being claimed that there were Soviet operatives working behind the scenes to get Trump elected. Pause a moment and consider, if you can, in your wildest stretch of the imagination, wonder why the Russians would have preferred Trump over Clinton. Clinton was a liberal Democratic, a known commodity who was committed to continuing the Obama Administration's policies that had literally run the US economy into the ground. Obama told the American people, 1 percent GDP growth is the new norm, get used to it. Contrast that with Trump, an avowed capitalist, a smart businessman, who was an unknown, with the potential for bringing the United States out of the Economic doldrums inherited from the Democrats. As you reflect, do you really think the Russians preferred Trump? Trump had the potential to become a Regan on steroids which is exactly what happened. The Soviets made a dramatic comeback under the Obama administration and became once more a force that exercised influence on the world stage. Decades earlier, under Regan the US economy surged and brought, the then, Union of Soviet Socialist Republic's crashing down on itself. Why in heavens name would the "Rouskies" prefer someone who might turn the US once more into an economic powerhouse? For those who don't understand how dysfunctional the Soviet Union is allow me to inject some background. In Russia, the left hand seldom knows what the right is doing. This is to say that caught up in the corrupt give and take of daily Russian Political life, those with power are constantly competing with each other for the country's limited wealth. Very little of Russian's economic potential ever finds it way down to the people and is instead diffused into the hands of government officials, quasi government officials, wealthy businessmen, and organized crime. At the top of this societal dungheap is Vladimir Putin who rules this buzzing hive of dysfunction in much the same way Stalin did. If you mess with Putin you get sent to the Gulag or murdered. However, Putin can't keep his finger on everything, and the actions taken by the bureaucracy are seldom in the best interest of the populace. Plus, there are limits to what he can actually get away with. No one human being can preside efficiently over this chaotic mess, masquerading as government. Russia is no exception. At the highest levels are government officials who understand the concept of "Real Politic." The idea here is exactly how the Mafia operates. Sure many of the mob bosses hate one another but they often refer to their actions as "business decisions" rather than personal acts. The idea is that a Nation, unlike the social fabric of the governed, lacks even loose concepts of morality, This stands in stark contrast to the idea that a nation state is amoral. Nations are seen as inanimate objects that act in their self interests... as decided by their leaders in power. The idea that a nation acts based upon self interest and not in response to the emotional baggage of their leadership. This is a time tested principle. So on the surface, claims that the personal antagonisms or friendships of leaders belies what is really taking place. So, all this begs the question why on this God's earth..., the Russians, in their wildest hallucinating fantasy would have preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton... IT WAS NOT IN THEIR NATIONAL INTERESTS! The very idea defies all logic. |
| I'm in the process of reading The Mueller Report. I have to report that I see some real problems with it. It is always a good idea to start with the instructions provided by the Appointing Authority. Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General, signed the appointment order. Now, one would think that if the purpose was, "...to insure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian Government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election, that a part of the investigation would focus on Hillary Clinton and not exclusively on President Trump. The New York Times called the Dossier "Russian misinformation." What is not included in the appointment order is as noteworthy as what is. Since the team of lawyers appointed as "Investigators" were all Democrats it is easy to understand why this, one of many oversights, came back to haunt the integrity and fairness of the investigation. (b) The special counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then FBI Director James B Comey in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence on March 20th 2017 including: (Note: The investigation was already well under way prior to President Trump taking office. The Democrats had already decided to on impeachment and wanted an independent counsel to make the case. Knowing they would soon relinquish the levers of power to the Republicans they were determined through a silent coup to regain what they had lost in the election. (i) Any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump and (Note: Why is candidate Hillary R. Clinton and the Democratic National committee not named for their role in commissioning, and paying for the Steele Dossier? This dossier has been described by the Washing Post as Russian "miss information." It was compiled by Christopher Steele , a foreign intelligence agent, with the aid of Russian counter intelligence and political operatives.) (ii) Any matters that arose or may arise from the investigation and (Note: The purpose for this clause is to use the threat of government prosecution to intimidate witnesses via financial, and other means into pleading the case for an outcome the partisan investigators are seeking. (iii)Any matters within the scope of 28 C.R.F. 600.4 (a) So the first question becomes, why Rosenstein ever signed off on this infamous order. If you want to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he was not a part of the Deep State conspiracy to overthrow a duly elected president, try understanding who was trying to get his ear. First the conspirators had to get Sessions out of the picture. Jeff was intimidated by the Deep State and did not believe that Trump would ever survive the onslaught. Realizing he was in way over his head and about to see his reputation tarnished he proceeded to throw Trump under the bus and recused himself. Now Donald had nobody leading the Department of Justice to watch his back. |
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