The television series, set during the Korean War, lasted eleven seasons. The actual Korean War lasted only three years.

Boy has there been some news events as of late.

Farrah Fawcett has died.  I grew up with her poster on my wall.

Michael Jackson has died.   The proclaimed “King of Pop” has succumbed at the age of fifty.

Riots in the streets of Tehran all wrapped around a bogus election.

Cap and Trade to triple your energy bill.

California cannot seem to pass a budget.

Whoa…   Let’s back up a minute…

Farrah Fawcett has died.  Not much that effects us directly, however we are saddened by the loss.

Michael Jackson has died.  Not much that effects us directly, unless you are selling his records on E-bay and we are saddened by the loss.

California cannot pass a budget.  Same story as last year and the year before, and the year before that.  No much here that effects us.

Cap and Trade to triple your energy bill?  Does that effect you and I directly?  Well, let’s see.

According to a study completed by the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cap and Trade program as it is being force fed to us today will cost us…  and cost us dearly.  The Cap and Trade program is the equivalent of a permanent tax increase for the average American household, which was estimated to be $1,100 in 2008 (mine was about three times that amount), would rise to $1,437 by 2015 (1,437 x 3 = 4,311) , to $1,979 in 2030 (1,979 x 3 = 5,937), and $2,979 in 2050 (2,979 x 3 = 8,937).  YIKES!

Estimates of job losses due to Cap and Trade range in the hundreds of thousands. The price for energy paid by you and I, the American consumer, will rise. The studies reviewed showed electricity prices jumping 5-15% by 2015, natural gas prices up 12-50% by 2015, and gasoline prices up 9-145% by 2015. Gasoline would suffer a 16 cent price increase per gallon at the low end of the estimates to a $2.58 penalty at the high end (using the January 2009 reported retail price of $1.78 per gallon – who the hell paid 1.78 per gallon in 2009?).

Cap and Trade is a neat thing because our current politicians can say they are taxing polluters, not workers.  Hmmm…  Once you create a scarce new commodity, in this case, the right to emit carbon, and then mandate that businesses buy it, the cost gets passed onto the consumer in the form of higher prices.  This is elementary business folks.  Think about it.  Ninety-five  percent of working families (that’s you and I) are going to be the hardest hit by this bit of legislation.

Is this the “change” we voted for in 2008?

Note to self; Starting looking for two jobs, not one.  That additional source of income will be needed to keep ones head above water in this climate of “change” as outlined by our current governmental administration.  I will also make sure that my friends and family will also need to seek other means of supporting itself (i.e. sell the following – family mementos, heirlooms, priceless possessions, youngest child) as the cost of living will edge ever higher by exponential amounts.  Hell, cashing in my retirement accounts will probably get me at least a year of living comfortably…  provided that I’m not taxed further.

So, as I purview the news, maybe I should pay a lot more attention to those things that will effect me directly.  I will be sad for those people who have lost loved ones and I will be concerned about the goings on in other countries.  But I will also be looking over my shoulder at this new “politics for change”.  Right now, I am not very impressed with the “change”.

And quietly brewing in the background is an old adversary, North Korea, making saber rattling statements about raining a nuclear firestorm upon the U. S. on July 4th and then rekindle the conflict that they celebrate each June.

I wonder if the actors from the M*A*S*H T.V. show will be back for reruns?

Until next week…

The “Spirit of St. Louis”, a Ryan Airlines built monoplane, was shipped back to the U. S. aboard a Navy cruiser and flew it’s last flight one year later on April 30, 1928.

I just have to share this…  humor…  for the future!

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Your Starship Captain Just Might Be A Redneck If…

• Your shuttle craft has been up on blocks for over a month
• He paints flames and a NRA sticker on the warp nacelles
• You have a shuttle called “Billy Joe Bob”
• He refers to Klingons as “Critters”
• He refers to Photon Torpedoes as “Popguns”
• He has the sensor array repaired with a bent coat hanger and aluminum foil
• He installs a set of bullhorns on the front of the saucer section
• He says “Got your ears on, good buddy” instead of “open hailing frequencies”
• He hangs fuzzy dice over the view screen
• He rewires his communicator into his belt buckle
• He keeps a six-pack under his command chair and a gun rack above it
• He says “Yee-Ha!” instead of “Engage”
• He has a hand-tooled holster for his phaser
• He insists on calling his executive officer “Bubba”
• He sets the forward view screen to reruns of “Bassmaster”
• He programs the food replicator for beer, ribs, and turnip green
• He paints the starship John Deere green
• He refers to a Pulsar as a “Blue Light Special”
• He refers to the Mutara Nebula as a “swamp”
• His moonshine is stronger than Romulan Ale
• He sings “Lucille” instead of “Kathleen”
• His idea of dress uniform is CLEAN bib overalls
• He wears mirrored shades on the Bridge
• His idea of a “gas giant” is that big ol’ XO Bubba after a meal of beans and weenies
• He sets phaser to “Cajun”

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and even more space humor…   in real life…

Navajo Wisdom

About 1966 or so, a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took the astronauts near Tuba City where the terrain of the Navajo Reservation looks very much like the Lunar surface. Along with all the trucks and large vehicles, there were two large figures dressed in full Lunar spacesuits.

Nearby a Navajo sheep herder and his son were watching the strange creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by personnel.  The two Navajo people were noticed and approached by the NASA personnel.  Since the man did not know English, his son asked for him what the strange creatures were and the NASA people told them that they are just men that are getting ready to go to the moon.

The man became very excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. The NASA personnel thought this was a great idea so they rustled up a tape recorder. After the man gave them his message, they asked his son to translate.  His son would not.

Later, they tried a few more people on the reservation to translate and every person they asked would chuckle and then refuse to translate.

Finally, with cash in hand, someone translated the message, “Watch out for these guys, they come to take your land.”

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How about some true stories that beg the question, “Huh???”

True Story

Returning from a trip to Antarctica some years ago, Wernher von Braun, Ernst Stuhlinger, and other space scientists proudly showed pictures of themselves merrily running around a marker in the snow at the exact geographic South Pole. Stuhlinger explained: “We were setting a space speed record – orbiting the Earth every ten seconds”.

True Story

Shuttle project officials were not always candid about their early setbacks. One problem arose with the testing of new booster-rocket parachutes in drops from B-52 over the desert. The chutes failed, shredding as they plunged with a heavy attached test article and crashed to the desert floor. Already knowing the answer, a reporter asked if the test item was destroyed.

“Well,” hedged the project engineer, “let’s just say it is largely unreusable.”

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and some just plain silly stuff…

A blond, a brunette, and a redhead were trying out for a new NASA experiment on sending women to different planets. First they called the brunette in and asked her a question.

“If you could go to any planet, what planet would you want to go to and why?” After pondering the question she answered, “I would like to go to Mars because it seems so interesting with all the recent news about possible extra terrestrial life on the planet.”

They said “Well okay, thank you.” And told her that they would get back to her. Next, the redhead entered the room and the NASA people asked her the same question. In reply, “I would like to go to Saturn to see all of its rings.” Again, “thank you” and they would get back to her.

Finally, the blond entered the room and they asked her the same question they asked the brunette and the redhead. She thought for a while and replied, “I would like to go to the sun.”

The people from NASA replied, “Why, don’t you know that if you went to the sun you would burn to death?”

The blond smirked and put her hands on her hips. “Are you guys dumb? I’d go at night!”

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All of this comes to you as I celebrate another NASA inability to make use of German QD’s (quick disconnects for those reading this in Pacoima, CA).  They fixed the problem…   oh no, wait a minute…   they didn’t fix the problem.  If I remember correctly, they have launched over 100 space shuttles and a leaky hydrogen tank still upsets the apple cart…   go figure.

If you really think about it, would you go up in a space based tin can that acts like your current automobile?
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Not too long ago, a lone man in a single engine airplane flew out over the Atlantic ocean in a three thousand six hundred and twenty four mile journey.

In doing so, he set a record.

In doing so, he fired the imagination.

Until next week…

And yet, there were only two bathtubs in third class.

I have a couple of new buzzwords for you…   get a pen…  ready?   “Reverse Outsourcing”.  Better get familiar with it as the talking heads on T. V. and the vendors of free birdcage liners will be using it a lot in the next few months.

Reverse outsourcing is the return of jobs to the U. S. from countries outside of the U. S., most notably India.

It was a long running joke about U. S. going overseas because of wage concerns and available labor for IT/support positions.  The internet was rife with You-Tube videos of tech support phone calls going to India based concerns where the operator at the other end was also selling Amway products to a man in Virginia, telling a screaming woman that she had just won a free trip to a time-share in the same town that she lived in and was providing marital counseling to a couple from Germany.  All at the same time.

U.S. companies poured billions of dollars into India neighbor hoods in Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore), Mumbai (also known as Bombay), and Delhi…   also known as Delhi. 

What is interesting is that those companies that we outsourced labor to in the late 1990’s and early 2000 are sending jobs back to the U.S. in the form of on-site pre-sales support, situational site assessment and local hands-on technical support.  Companies in India are setting up store fronts in the U. S. and hiring Americans to do the job locally.

Only it’s not just India.  It’s Japan, Germany and China as well.  While one of our closest neighbors, Mexico, is still a ways from making this giant leap, there are rumblings of a few major “south of the border” companies that could be taping the American workforce for development of trade in the financial investment market that benefits Mexican companies while providing employment for U. S. citizens.

Well?  Why not?

It’s painfully obvious that the American way of doing business is crap.  We can’t even keep our auto makers out of bankruptcy trouble.  Of course, maybe the question has to be “Why should we?”

Most of the U. S. investment firms have a whole chapter in their training guides on how to run an elaborate and effective “ponzi” scheme and steer clear of the S.E.C.  The government is making damn sure they have some interest in the running of our banking systems, manufacturing systems, sports franchises and they are more than willing to dish out the ideas of having foreign investors take stake in some our largest Fortune 500 companies.

This begs the following statement;  we are failing as a country in providing for ourselves.  We will have to rely on those good folks who speak funny languages to keep the U. S. workforce from committing hari-kiri over the fact that they have been laid off.

There is no doubt in my mind that very soon, we will see a Ta-Ta motors dealership in the U. S. within a few short years.  For those who don’t know, Ta-Ta motors is the largest car company in India.  Only these cars from India get way better gas mileage than our U. S. gas guzzlers do by running a mixture of fuel oil, turpentine and perfume.  It’s not really smog they send out the tailpipes, but it sure do smell nice.  Oh, and they can fit two Ta-Ta cars in the same parking space that a Ford Lincoln fits in.  (There is a joke about two ta-ta’s jammed together in there somewhere, but I’m not going in that direction…).

So reverse outsourcing will now become the norm for awhile.  We will start hearing a lot about it over the next couple of years.  We will start to see companies take over major metro business complexes and plaster names we can hardly pronounce right up there at the top of the mark.  There’s even talk of renaming Yankee Stadium to Bharat Sanchar Nigham Limited Field.  Hell, Honda’s developmental racing engine, which now provides all of the engines being used in U. S. open wheel racing that’s right, not one American made engine is used in this American Icon of Racing), has petitioned the Indy 500 raceway (the Old Brickyard) to being called Motegi Ring One West.

It’s going to happen.  And maybe that’s a good thing.  If you look on the bright side, those players involved in the business of business in India have a hard and fast rule about executives screwing up and thinking only of themselves.  It usually involves some type of ritual of taking the executive outside behind the barn and shooting his a$$, followed by public humiliation of him AND his family.  There is a good possibility that U. S. Exec’s may start to get a clue about how to handle their American business and not have it just effect their pocket books.  If they don’t, the American people could rise up and adopt a methodology that emulates the ways of those thriving companies overseas.  Sending that clown that blew up Countrywide mortgage (and allowed over 160,000 people to loose their homes) to that Federal Penitentiary Resort and Golf Club in Tallahassee Florida is a down right embarrassment is you ask me.

We are a smart people.  In fact, some of us got so smart that we figured out “how to ruin the U. S. business model” that built the American Economy into a pillar of security and wealth.  But the “Me-Me-Me syndrome… at all costs” that upper level business executives have now ingrained into today’s business plan is killing us as a society and who we are as a people.

I’m telling you, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan have got to be turning over in their graves right about now.  I can foresee a new educational degree coming out of the colleges soon.  Bachelor’s of Ignoring the limits of Risk Taking degree and the new Doctorate of Fleecing the American people degree.

Can it be fixed?  I don’t think there is any way that the American economy will ever recover from all of this.  How can I say that?  Well, if one looks at the broad picture, and I am talking about the whole U. S. economic picture, we, as a people, have lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.6 trillion dollars of our “actual wealth”.  That’s 2,600,000,000,000.  You don’t even want to know the amount of “perceived wealth” that has been lost over the last two years.

All I can say is that it’s a lot a freakin’ zeros…

I guess you could look at it this way.  If the Titanic had a few more bath tubs, and if there had been a way to move those tubs out of third class, there might have been enough life boats and bath tubs so that a few more people could have been saved.  If we could get Taiwan to send us a couple of billion bath tubs (after all, that’s where they are made today), the U. S. could fall off the end of the earth and some of use will still remain afloat.

Sadly, we may be seeing a period of time when history repeats itself and the good ship called the “Mighty U. S. of A.” will slowly slide beneath the waves of business and political idiocy.

Until next week…