The True Facts

I've Moved!

2008-09-07T19:04:00.003-04:00

I have always used this site as a backup in case the official one went down for any length of time. It used to happen frequently when I used Blogdrive as a host.

I continued backing myself up here on Blogspot. However, I have been receiving more HTML errors than I intend to put up with. If you like to continue reading my articles, go to:

http://thetruefacts.blogharbor.com

I post there every Sunday so my print editors can grab it by 2 AM each Monday morning.

Thank you,

Joseph Walther

Facts Schmacks. Stop confusing me!

2008-08-31T14:40:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I swear! Am I missing something, or are huge numbers of people overly captivated by the intellectualization of simplicity? Of course, you are probably more familiar with its technical term: mental masturbation.

Just tune into any of the nationally broadcast cable TV talking heads on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. It’s all they seem to do. Radio talk shows, both nationally syndicated and the local fare do their part, too. And, apparently, we’re tuning in to listen in droves.

Conversely, we also have a flair for oversimplifying complexity. Perpetual, mind-numbing detail is a hallmark of the intellectualization of simplicity. The more of it we get, the more we resent it.

The more the “intellectualizers” drone on with gratuitous detail, the greater the need for the “oversimplifiers” to eliminate it, pertinence notwithstanding. The more some people can replace complexity with simplicity (real or imagined), the easier it becomes to make decisions, stupid or otherwise.

And, in no other endeavors are these activities more prevalent than in our political and community-oriented arenas. Generally, we can invent, and accept as fact, more speculation per factual tidbit than any other society on Earth.

Here are two examples. Both are germane to my home state of Delaware. And, granted, neither of these threaten the foundations of civilization as we know them, but I’ll bet anything you’d like that the same type of nonsense is taking place all over this country.

The first involves a long sitting, United States Senator. The second involves an ongoing war of words over which of two cities, within 30-miles of each other, is more dangerous to live in: Wilmington, DE or Philadelphia, PA.

First, let me explain Delaware’s location on the map because about 90% of the country has no clue. Throughout my extensive travels about the United States, people have proven this by asking if it’s in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

It’s located in neither of these other states. Delaware is that tiny, dangling strip of land hanging down beneath South Eastern Pennsylvania, just west of the Delaware River.

Even though, traditionally, most people have had no idea where Delaware is, now that Senator Joe Biden—our long sitting U. S. Senator—is Barack Obama’s VP candidate, things have changed radically.

Oh, most still have no idea where Delaware is, but EVERYONE now knows Joe Biden. Or, at least they think they do and this applies to the locals in particular.

Right here in good old New Castle County, Delaware, a participant on a popular local forum had typed the words; “Biden’s a draft dodger.” He based this on a small newspaper’s report that Joe Biden had “gone to college” and had “not served in the military.”

This individual took two facts, that Joe Biden went to college and that he had not served in the military, and placed them in tandem, arriving at a highly self-serving conclusion: Joe Biden’s a draft dodger.

He didn’t write; “It seems that Joe Biden’s a draft dodger,” or “Joe Biden may have been a draft dodger.” No! He concluded and wrote that Joe Biden IS, absolutely, a draft dodger.

I’ve known Joe Biden for 54-years. He’s exactly 4-months and 28-days younger than I am. While I disagree with many—most, actually—of his political positions, I’ve always liked him and respected him.

Regardless, the law at the time required all males to register with Selective Service upon reaching the age of 18-years. I complied in June of 1960 and I know, factually, that Joe complied in late November of the same year.

I eventually ended up in Vietnam. However, our draft board—we were under the jurisdiction of the same one—immediately rejected Joe on medical grounds. He was a serious asthmatic, a little factual tidbit that the press had also reported.

But, our intrepid forum participant dismissed this because Joe Biden went on to play sports at Archmere Academy, Joe’s high school alma mater.

Perhaps it was because of his admitted dislike for Liberals or because he’s simply stupid, he inferred that Joe lied about his condition just to avoid the draft and going to Vietnam.

I suspect that this individual’s understanding of how the “draft” worked was non-existent, most probably because he had not yet been born at the time Joe and I registered.

First, it never occurred to him that before a draft board legitimately rejected anyone for medical reasons, at least two independent board-certified physicians had to verify the conditions.

Second, he seems not to have any understanding of the difference between various medical conditions that would disqualify an individual from military service and the ones that would disqualify an individual from participating in high school sports.

Chronic asthma is a serious condition. But with adequate precautions in place, sufferers CAN play high school sports. However, it would be virtually impossible to put those same precautions in place under military conditions.

I tell you this as a combat veteran of numerous night patrols throughout that jungle hellhole. The last thing I would have needed was an asthmatic going into a loud, convulsive, oxygen-deprived wheeze.

We’d have had a better chance of survival had we simply fired a flare into the night sky and yelled, “Yoo-hoo! Here we are… over here behind this tree.”

The bottom line is that Joe’s condition was legitimate and severe enough to rule out military service. He was not the only one rejected and he was not a draft dodger.

Jack Kemp received a medical deferment because of a “bad” knee. If you’ll recall, this did not prevent the former nine-term Republican Congressman and Vice Presidential nominee from playing professional football in the NFL for 8-years.

I never considered Jack Kemp a draft dodger, anymore than I considered the many that applied for and received legitimate college deferments as draft dodgers.

OK, now let’s turn our attention to another local matter, a discussion over which city is more dangerous to live in: Philadelphia, PA or little “ole” Wilmington, DE.

The conversation was between two Wilmingtonians, both avid haters of Philadelphia and its politics. Both insisted that living in Philadelphia was more dangerous than living in Wilmington.

As evidence of this, both tossed out accurate statistics involving the number of murders in both cities for the years 2006, 2007, and to date in 2008. However, I’m going to use only one year to make MY point. The reason will become obvious.

In 2006, there were 406 homicides in Philadelphia but only 23 homicides in Wilmington. If you use only absolute numbers, you’ll run—not walk—away from Philadelphia as fast as you can.

The problem is that absolute numbers do not accurately depict comparative safety because they do not account for varying population sizes. In order to achieve this, we need a common means of comparing. The most common is occurrences per 100,000 inhabitants.

To make sense of it, we need to know the relative population sizes of the cities we want to study. In 2006, Philadelphia, PA was home to about 1,500,000 people. In the same year, Wilmington, DE was home to about 70,000 people.

What, therefore, was the murder rate per 100,000 people in Philadelphia in the year 2006 as compared to that of Wilmington, DE for the same period? Here’s the arithmetic involved.

First, divide the population size by 100,000. Then divide this result into the number of murders for the reporting period.

For Philadelphia, the numbers are 1,500,000 divided by 100,000. You’ll get the number 15. Divide the 406 murders by 15. You’ll arrive at a murder rate of around 27/100,000 (that’s 27 murders for each 100,000-city inhabitants).

Do the same calculations for Wilmington, DE. Divide the city population of 70,000 by 100,000. The answer is 0.70. Then, divide the number of murders (23) by 0.70. You’ll arrive at an answer of about 33.

Wilmington’s murder rate for each 100,000 inhabitants for the year 2006 was 33 (33/100,000). You can now see that Wilmington was approximately 18% more dangerous than Philadelphia was.

This method of calculation is a more realistic comparison in terms of danger; it’s also a better indicator of a city’s propensity for murder.

For example, if Philadelphia had experienced Wilmington’s rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2006, that city would have had 495 murders instead of 406.

From another, equally valid angle, if Wilmington, DE had experienced the city of Philadelphia’s rate for the same period, Wilmington would have had 16 murders instead of 23.

And, it’s looking worse for Wilmington for the year 2008. Projecting based on murders reported through July, Philadelphia’s rate will end up at around 21/100,000 while Wilmington’s will end up around 33/100,000.

So based strictly on murder rates, it seems prudent to stay the hell out of Wilmington, Delaware. Whatever the reasons, the inhabitants there appear to be a crankier lot than those in Philadelphia!

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Humor's supposed to be funny, but sometimes it's only stupid!

2008-08-24T15:23:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I’ve participated in—for over a year, now—a political activist forum called NationalConstitutionalConvention06@yahoogroups.com. It’s a worthwhile group moderated by Eric Reinhardt.

Mr. Reinhardt is an intelligent, sincere American patriot who believes we need another Constitutional Convention to return the country to its proper focus.

I agree with him even though I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime or his.

He works hard at his moderator duties. He’s patient, fair, and empathetic. And, while most of the participants are sincere, intellectually curious people with some great ideas, an occasional moronic gem slips through.

As infrequent as they are, they nevertheless tend to mock, if not seriously undermine, the intended tenor of the group’s purpose.

A piece titled “True American Humor” posted through the group on behalf of Mr. Eric Martin. In fairness to Mr. Martin, I’m not sure if he wrote the piece or simply posted it to be facetious.

Regardless, I present it here in its entire unedited, moronic splendor. But, instead of using quotes to enclose the piece’s words, I’ve put them in 10-point bold italics. My comments follow in regular 12-point Verdana font.

True American Humor

It is time to change from REDNECK humor to TRUE AMERICAN Humor!

Only it isn't seen as HUMOR, but the correct way to LIVE YOUR LIFE! If you feel the same, pass this on to your True American Friends. Y'all know who they are...

It’s presumptuous, not to mention arrogance personified, for you to declare the “correct” way for people to live their lives. What are your qualifications?

I’ve been an American for a very long time. I suspect that my wristwatch is older than you are. I have many friends in this country, all of which are TRUE AMERICANS.

But, I’ll not be passing this on to any of them because, in addition to thinking I’ve lost my mind, they’d ALL be grossly offended by this kind of thoughtless tripe.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: It never occurred to you to be

offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God.'

This has never offended me, but I’ve never put much stock in it, either. The first time I recited the Pledge of Allegiance was in April of 1946. The words, “under God” were not part of it.

While there were many attempts to include them, beginning about 1952, the words, “under God,” were not included until President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill into law on June 14, 1954.

The details will give you a headache, but the rationale behind the movement had more to do with the Joe McCarthy’s “godless commie scare,” than it did with anything involving common sense.

Many, at the time, believed that atheism and communism were synonymous terms. While it was certainly true that most world communists were atheists, it was not so in North America.

Most North American atheists are NOT communists, but why confuse idiots with facts when they’ve already made up their minds.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.

I’d not waste a single second of my life protesting such a thing. It does not bother me one bit if people place the Ten Commandments in public places: courthouses, post offices, or anywhere else for that matter.

But, there’s a catch. Even though not all Americans believe in God, most claim to do so. Of those who do, approximately 75% identify with Christianity.

The remaining 25% identify with various non-Christian religions—all of which are official IRS 990 exempt-qualified. As such, they have the same rights as Christians have relative to displaying their religious tenets in public places.

It seems, however, that Christians who demand the right to share their religious views with the rest of us via public places, have absolutely no interests in reciprocity!

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You still say 'Christmas' instead of 'Winter Festival.'

I’m mid-way through the winter of my life. I’ve been around the world at least 9-times. I’ve been to every state in this glorious country, many of them several times. And, YET, I’ve NEVER had anyone wish me a “Happy Winter Festival.”

Mostly people have said, “Merry Christmas.” Not as frequently, but often, I’ve heard, “Happy Holidays.” But I’ve NEVER heard anyone say, “Happy Winter Festival.”

However, since I believe in respecting others’ beliefs, I find the greeting, “Have a great holiday!” to be quite convenient. But, for the record, I’ve NEVER wished anyone a “Happy Winter Festival.”

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You bow your head when someone prays.

This all depends on the location. During a religious ceremony to which someone has invited me, I respectfully observe all protocols. However, I do not feel compelled to bow my head because someone next to me in the library begins to pray.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.

I’ve always done this. I do it even while surrounded by TRUE AMERICAN REDNECKS who can’t remember to remove their stupid baseball caps. I also know ALL the words, in three languages, even though I can’t sing worth a hoot.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You treat Viet Nam vets with great respect, and always have.

I AM a Viet Nam veteran who served two combat tours in that hellhole. I have extremity scars from the first wound and a nasty chest scar from the second one.

And, while I’m at it, I want whoever wrote “True American Humor” to understand this. Neither my fellow combatants nor I fought in Viet Nam to protect America’s way of life. North Viet Nam was NEVER a threat to America.

America had treaty obligations and my generation was drafted to honor them. This, in itself, was legal justification for our involvement in Viet Nam.

The American people would have understood this and supported it. Instead, our government lied through its collective teeth about our reasons for sending troops there.

I was not proud of my government relative to Viet Nam. I thought lying about the reasons for our involvement was stupid and condescending, not to mention the fact that it caused several future generations to develop a legitimate DISTRUST for government.

And, worse still, our government has never stopped lying about such things, which is why people question motives even under seemingly legitimate circumstances.

Recall, if you will, that even after all of the “wolf-crying,” communism did not overtake the West after we left with our tails between our legs. I think Nixon referred to it as “peace with honor.”

Speaking for myself, I call Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor” pure, second-rate fertilizer and my HONORABLE discharge grants me the right to say so.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You've never burned an American flag.

I’ve burned a few flags. Burning is the proper way to dispose of a tattered and worn American flag. And, while I’ve never burned one in effigy, I have no problems with people who use the action as a means of legitimate political expression.

Again, my father and millions of other fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts fought WWII, to the death for many of them, to make sure we all retained our freedoms of expression, whether we agree with the forms or not.

Even idiots who write stuff like “True American Humor,” continue enjoying the right to do so because of the World War II combatants, along with all who currently stand at the ready to defend such rights—even dying in the effort, if necessary.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.

To this one I say, GROW UP. Compassion has a place even in legitimate criticism. Our believing something does not make it a fact.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You respect your elders and expect your kids to do the same.

“Elder” is not tantamount to “interesting.” People are either interesting or they’re not; age is irrelevant. Regardless of age, people must earn respect; we can’t compel it.

While neither my children nor I would treat elderly people unkindly, we’re not going to hand out respect based on impending transience.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend.

This one is senseless. People who are, themselves, broke, can’t help members of the “down on their luck” crowd. The idea is preposterously stupid!

If you got this email from me, it is because I believe that you, like

me, have just enough TRUE AMERICAN in you to have the same beliefs as those talked about in this email.

The sender of this email notwithstanding, I have nothing in common with whoever wrote “True American Humor.” People, who take the piece as a way in which Americans should live their lives, are the antipathy to what “true Americans” are all about.

God Bless the USA ! Amen.

AND PLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO SING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM IN ENGLISH.

See my comments above under “National Anthem.” I’ll sing it in whichever language I want.

English, while difficult for people to learn, is the most convenient and expressive one on Earth, especially in written form. It contains close to a million words while most others have less than 300-thousand words.

Prudent business people know this. They also know the sales effectiveness in the ability to speak multiple languages.

I have no qualms over voting English as the “official” language of this nation, but I don’t go into a catatonic state when people have difficulty speaking it with the same ease that I do.

Git'er done!!!!!!!! !!!!

This one puts the entire piece into proper perspective. The problem is that the actual catch phrase is, “Git-R-Done.” While a “True American” may know this, rednecks mostly do not.

Dan Whitney (Larry the cable guy) is a genuinely well-adjusted comedian who found a niche speaking and acting like a redneck. He’s made millions thanks to the fact that people like the author of “True American Humor” believe this stuff with the seriousness of a social documentary.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Poor guy! Barely kept his family fed...

2008-08-17T17:24:00.000-04:00

By Joseph Walther

There is no doubt about it. Whenever someone mentions the name George W. Bush, people respond with either disgust or unquestioned admiration. There does not appear to be a middle ground, especially over the past 24-months.

I witnessed a discussion between proponents of these opposing views just three days ago. One man expressed his dislike for Mr. Bush by accusing him of “screwing us in order to pad his banking account.”

His opponent vehemently disagreed by calling the accuser a vulgar name and declaring him full of fecal matter for having “no proof.”

Of course, neither of these gentlemen came close to offering any validation that reasonable people might confuse with those things we call facts.

I am a pragmatist, which is code for skeptic, which is code, at least in the minds of some, for “opinionated old fart.” Whatever! I wear the title proudly.

If one exists, “In God we trust” makes perfect sense to me. But, in ALL other cases, audits would be the order of the day, especially whenever politicians and political pundits are involved.

Political longevity begets prominence. Political prominence begets power. And, political power is precisely what astute politicians learn to use as leverage into the world of immense personal wealth, most often through the subtle, but strategic, misuse of public assets.

George W. Bush didn’t invent this. He’s not been the first to use it, nor will he be the last. He’s merely the most gullible. Look for yourselves.

First, let me get a big point of contention—the Iraqi War—out of the way. It has nothing to do with his personal wealth, but it’s important.

Whether people generally agree or not that the war was a mistake is immaterial. So are all of the disagreements over what motivated it.

There is ample consensus, however, that the execution of the war, until recently, has been a nightmarish disaster for all concerned.

Most people lay blame for this directly at the feet of Mr. Bush—and rightly so, in my opinion. Undeniably, though, things have improved greatly over the past year.

It is only fitting that we also lay the credit for this at the same set of feet: those of Mr. Bush.

I’m not saying that he’s finally come to a cultural understanding of the region, but he deserves the credit for finally surrounding himself with competent people who do understand it and letting them run things.

OK, let’s move on to Mr. Bush’s personal wealth in terms of where it now stands (estimated to be between $8-million and $15-million) and how it got there.

I base what follows on more than mere speculation, including a number of public court records.

George W. Bush was a failed oilman, who, in relative terms, barely kept his family fed. Then, one day, without “shootin’ at some food,” stock options bubbled up through the ground instead of “crude.”

Texas Tea it wasn’t, but his Harken stock options were just as valuable. They were available because Mr. Bush worked for Harken Energy back in the early 1990s.

They accrued so much value because, according to investigators, he had “insider” help.

Investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal and other prominent newspapers besieged him with questions regarding several legal questions. As usual, though, his replies raised more questions than answers.

In short, he earned about $900,000 on a sale made under the same type of circumstances that would, many years later, send Martha Stewart to prison.

The main difference was that Martha’s conviction resulted from far more questionable evidence. The bottom line… George got away with it.

No one’s ever characterized George W as intellectually endowed. Most of his opportunities resulted from family connections and a desire on the part of very wealthy Texas business people to exploit the Bush name.

A man, William (Bill) DeWitt, had earlier bailed George out by buying his failed oil company. He later sold that company to Harken.

Bill then offered George W, along with other Texas investors, most notably Richard Rainwater, a chance to join in a bid to buy the Texas Rangers. The conglomeration bought the team in 1989.

While George W. Bush fell embarrassingly short relative to finances sufficient to play at this level on the big business playground, he was precisely what the group needed in what psychologists call the “affective domain.”

He borrowed $500-thousand from a bank, on whose board he once sat, to purchase a two percent share of the baseball team. He repaid the loan out of the proceeds from cashing in his Harkens stock options.

His official title was “managing partner,” but some thought that it was just a cover for his real title: “political aphrodisiac.” On the surface, all he had to do was attend all home games so the TV cameras could pan in on him.

Below the surface, however, his job was to lure the citizens of Arlington, Texas into a lustfully amorous mindset conducive to having them eagerly submit to the other group partners’ financial gang-bang.

He may not have thought of his actions as active participation in the carnage, though. Perhaps, in his mind’s eye, those folks really wanted it. All he did was provide the intimate dinner, some nice wine, a “place”, and some mental lubricant.

George W. Bush had absolutely no say in the day-to-day operation of the baseball franchise. Edward Rose, another wealthy Texas investor and associate of Richard Rainwater, was in charge of this aspect of the ownership.

However, like most owner-groups, this one wanted a brand new stadium for their baseball team. They did not want to pay for it, though. It was George’s job to get it done.

So, by threat of moving the team, and leaving it to George Bush to convince the city of Arlington to foot the bill, they received a free one.

The city complied by tendering $135-million of the required $190-million. They obtained the rest by applying a ticket surcharge aimed at the “building” fund.

Regardless, taxpayers and baseball fans (71% and 29% respectively) paid for the new stadium.

Even better, the deal permitted the owners to buy back the new stadium for $60-million by having the city of Arlington deduct it from ticket sales at a rate of no more than $5-million a year.

Essentially, billionaire-level private investors substantially increased the value of their holdings by having the tax-paying public pay increased local taxes. In all, they received a $200-million stadium without spending a dime of THEIR own money.

And, George W. Bush carried out his function well. He singlehandedly sold the project to the voters, sans any mention of screwing them, of course.

But, the late Ann Richards (then Democratic Governor of Texas) made the deal even sweeter by signing into law the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority (ASFDA).

This gem of legislation made it legal for government to seize privately owned land as long as they deemed it necessary for stadium construction. Land resale values quadrupled for those members of the “inner” circle.

Whenever the group wanted a particular land parcel, it would make a below market offering to the owner. If the owner refused to sell, in came the ASFGA.

Court records show that the Texas Rangers paid out millions in settlements as the result of such shenanigans.

George Bush announced his intent to run for governor in November 1993 (before the stadium even opened). He became governor in 1994. He placed his assets in a blind trust… well, except for his ownership in the Texas Rangers.

He kept his interests until a man, Tom Hicks, bought the team in 1998. But it seems that a miracle had happened by then. George’s share of the team had risen well beyond the original two percent. No one knows how or why.

However it happened, it resulted in his initial $600-thousand investment blossoming into a $15-million personal fortune, all of it through the misuse of public assets by the politically powerful.

Finally, I’d have to use an additional thousand words to describe the rest of Bush’s dealings in this and several other same theme deals.

I could write an entire chapter on Bush’s relationships with Tom Hicks, the Carlyle investment group, and UTIMCO—the University of Texas Investment Management Company. Ann Richards figured prominently with respect to this last one, too.

As well, the names of other political luminaries like Frank Carlucci, former secretary of defense under Reagan, and James Baker III, former secretary of state under George H. W. Bush come up quite often relative to many of these deals.

This is what our politicians do! They’ve always done it, only they now do it so blatantly. Of course, they’re subtle enough to keep ahead of the laws.

And, we let them get away with it by gullibly and repeatedly sending the same cagy foxes to guard the henhouse.

We’re the ones who have to change. Until we do, the beltway “johns” will continue shoving it up our collective butts without so much as cursory preparatory kiss!

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Of spaceships and little green dudes and dudettes!

2008-08-10T17:27:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I quote directly and unedited. “There’s definitely ‘exterterrestials’ out there. A friend of mine, who’s a science major, saw em last week as he was comin’ home from a night class at Community College in Catonsville.”

I am not making this stuff up. I overheard this as I left a McDonalds. Two men, one in his mid-twenties, the other in his forties… at the youngest, were having this conversation as they sat at an outside table in front of the restaurant.

My ears are especially attuned to this sort of statement. They seem to be able to detect such conversations from miles away. It is virtually impossible for me to ignore them and just walk away!

Before going on, I’m making this disclaimer for the record. First, the community college these two mentioned is part of the Community College of Baltimore County’s multi-campus institution, one of which is located in Catonsville, Maryland.

This is an academically solid, fully accredited college with an outstanding faculty, many members of which hold Doctorates in their respective fields.

Sincerity notwithstanding, whatever the science major may have seen OR said to his friend about this matter had nothing to do with any aspect of the College.

Second, the two men having the conversation I’m referring to were just as sincere. Neither one was boisterous or obnoxious. Other than a tiny hint that both may have, shall we say… partook of a wee bit of the grape prior to stopping at McDonald's, they BOTH seemed quite lucid and gregarious.

As well, both of them were very persistent in their accusations that these sightings “happen every damn (not the word they used) day,” and that the United States Air Force “covers this stuff (not their word) up.”

So, I felt both safe AND comfortable as I sat down next to the older one and asked the younger one to describe what his friend actually saw and whether anyone else had witnessed it.

I also gave them one of my business cards and explained that even though I have nothing to do with the federal government; I like to check these things out.

Well, guess what! You probably already have, I’ll bet. Like Moses’ alleged reciprocal conversation with a burning bush on that mountain top many centuries ago, there were no witnesses.

Besides, you folks would not believe what they told me, anyway. So, I’m not even going into it.

But, since NASA’s report of the Phoenix Explorer sending back evidence of water on Mars, I’ve heard many comments concerning the “likelihood” of life in “outer” space.

While most of them have raised legitimate and intriguing points, others have been so farfetched as to be simultaneously sad and hilarious.

So, I present this in order to posit another perspective, one that accounts for the effects of the sheer, infinite-like scale of the known universe. And, also, to clarify some misused terms: possibility, probability, and likelihood.

That we exist at all is an amazing fact in itself. But, even more amazing is how complex we humans have become, even though we’re made of the same stuff as the stars and the rest of the inanimate universe.

Evolution, a highly distasteful theory for some of the “God” people, nevertheless remains a highly robust theory because it’s been scientifically testable, AND it consistently explains much more than it doesn’t.

Thanks to this and our species’ ability to adapt, we’ve evolved with two unique abilities: self-awareness and proactive thinking as opposed to instinctive reaction.

Indeed, we’re proof that consciousness arose on this pinhead-size rock, third in a line of several other-planets orbiting an average, but not remarkable, star located in the outer tail of a huge galaxy that is only ONE among billions.

We call it the Milky Way Galaxy. And it’s BIG, too, incomprehensively HUGE! Here’s an idea of how big it is. I’ve purposely expressed light years and their MILE equivalencies in order to emphasize just HOW big.

Milky Way’s disk has a diameter of about 120,000 light years. At about 5.8-trillion miles per light year, this comes to 704,346,347,520,000,000—that’s 704-quadrillion, 346-trillion, 347-billion, 520-million miles!

It has an enormous vertical thickness, too: about 1,000-light years. If you’re planning a trip from top to bottom, take a good-sized lunch because you’ll be traveling about 5,869,552,896,000,000 miles.

The distance from planet Earth to Milky Way’s galactic nucleus is about 30,000 light years or around 176-quadrillion, 086-trillion, 586-billion, 880-million miles (176,086,586,880,000,000).

Our indistinguishable, dot-size solar system—the Sun, all its orbiting planets, planetary satellites, and asteroids—circles the Galaxy about once every 225-million years (225,000,000).

And, thanks to our upgraded Hubble Space Telescope, evidence suggests that our star (Sun) is only one of an estimated 300- to 400-billion others within just this galaxy.

So if it(our Sun) flickered and went out RIGHT NOW, the remainder of the Milk Way, let alone the rest of the universe, would neither notice it or miss us.

Cosmological/Astrophysical Science, among others, is backed up by many centuries of scientific observation, testing, more testing, and, still more testing.

This has granted scientists the ability to make sophisticated and testable predictions about the universe. While much of it remains theoretical, many of our theories have become highly robust.

Of course, it’s still all based on an assumption that what WE can see is only a fraction of everything that’s out there. And, things can change, as they have many times in our past. But, so far, so good.

Still, there are more questions than answers. Science doesn’t know it all and may never answer some of the questions. But, so far, we think we know enough answers to place some range of limits on our freedom to believe just any old thing we desire.

Like it or not, science can tell us only what’s there. Sometimes we don’t like it. At others, it’s not thrilling enough for us. So fantasy and gullibility step in and fill the scientific voids to make things more interesting and intriguing.

But, “wishing to believe” does not create facts any more so than martyrdom verifies the veracity of a belief. It does address a martyr’s undaunted commitment TO a belief, but that’s all it does.

For some people—most of them are politicians—science consists of a litany of highly tedious, mind numbing, boring, and unfathomable tenets, all seemingly conspiring to cause us perpetual migraine headaches.

It is so much more alluring to imagine “space folks” on determined, targeted missions to seek us out, snatch us up into their “space buggies,” and whiz us away at warp-10 to conduct biological probes and, perhaps, engage in some kinky, intergalactic sex with us.

Is Earth the only place where life exists? I don’t know. I’ve asked other legitimate scientists about it, too. Each has said the same thing: “I don’t know.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” wrote Carl Sagan. Our science, so far, has NOT found any evidence of life out “there.” This does NOT mean that none exists, only that we’ve yet to find any.

By its sheer scale, though, the universe certainly makes multiple random occurrences possible. This same scale also makes it reasonable to assume probabilities for other life in the universe.

But, this is where communications break down. Possibilities exist by their nature; they’re not the same as probabilities, though. And, probabilities, in the scientific sense, NEVER mean “likely.”

A probability is stronger than a possibility. But, it can be as weak as the smallest fractional measure greater than zero, as strong as the largest fractional measure less than one, or any point in between.

Because of the universe’s infinite-like size, life in the rest of the universe is possible. We can even say, legitimately, that there is a probability of such existence. However, in the absence of scientific evidence to the contrary, we can’t say that it’s “likely.”

In the world of possibilities and probabilities, “likely” has to be supported by scientific, reliably predictive evidence. Empirical thinking, while alluring, doesn’t count much in natural law.

How many grains of sand would you estimate are on a ten-mile stretch of sandy beach? No matter the estimate, the number falls considerably short of the number of stars in the universe.

Yes, space dudes and dudettes might be looking for us. With the sheer size of the matter, it’s certainly a possibility. We could even assign a probability to the prospect.

But, I’d lay some serious money on the proposition that you’d “likely” find a specific, single grain of sand on that beach I described above long before those “space folks” found EARTH.

Besides, if it’s sex they’re seeking, I hear that the Andromeda Galaxy is a virtual hothouse of seething, unbelievably kinky stuff—THE literal Sodom and Gomorrah of the universe. So, they’d probably go there instead. See you next week.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

NEW, BETTER, and SIMPLER are NOT always synonymous terms!

2008-08-03T18:00:00.000-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I come from a working class family. In the early ‘40s, when I was born, every family had a father and a mother, unless either one or both had died, in which case the children lived with a family relative. Social Services had very little to do back in those days.

My mother could go to the corner grocery store—located a block away—and buy 2-loaves of bread, 2-gallons of milk, and 2-dozen eggs... all for a whopping $2.50.

Of course, my father netted about $40 a week in wages. The average annual gross wage was around $2,300. And, just as now, people complained about the rapidly increasing cost of living, too.

You could buy a house for an average of $7,500 and purchase an automobile for about $1,100. But, we couldn’t afford either one until 1948.

The house was a bargain at $6,500 because a residential development had been built for returning WWII veterans. Our automobile was “used,” weighed close to two tons, had “running” boards, and cost $250. It was a gas-guzzler but gas was only $0.199 a gallon.

The news media reported the news: who, what, when, where, and how. Investigative reporters held their subjects’ feet to the fire and demanded verifiable answers.

We trusted people like Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, Huntley/Brinkley, and a number of others. They didn’t report speculation as news. Why, at one point, we even trusted Walter Cronkite.

The news has changed today. Now we have the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Al Franken, and others, reporting speculation as news. Many voters—most of them incapable of original thought—buy into it because they NEED to be entertained.

They believe that if not Democrat or Republican, you’re a troublemaker. If not Conservative or Liberal, you lack all sense of conviction. If not an advocate for Christianity, you’re a Satan worshiper.

And, if you so much as imply that habeas corpus is a basic human right, you’re suddenly a terrorist sympathizer.

It has come to the point where it’s difficult to tell if truly intelligent people are running the world or whether it’s a case of genuine imbeciles spouting off about what they really mean.

On an educational front, the kids of yesteryear had to know how to read and write in complete sentences, as well as do fundamental arithmetic in order to get INTO a high school, let alone graduate from one.

This is NOT the case today. The public school system has become a standing joke. Lowering the hoop so everyone can slam-dunk is a bad policy. It seems that everyone but public school administrators seems to understand this

Even some of the teachers have difficulty with basic arithmetic, not to mention expressing coherent ideas in complete sentences. And, according to the authorities, WE can’t fire them… teachers’ unions, you know.

Another modern day biggie is POVERTY. We like to blame it for everything. It’s become THE default socio-political scapegoat.

The problem is that we’ve always had poverty. We’re always going to HAVE poverty, too. There’s nothing we can do to eliminate ALL poverty. But, we’ll never diminish any amount of it as long as it remains a cash cow for those with vested interests in maintaining it.

Medically, compared to today, we lived in the medical science Dark Ages back then. People died from causes we don’t even talk about today because those causes no longer kill people.

Both kids and adults died regularly from things like polio, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, pneumonia, and even diarrhea. Childhood leukemia was an automatic death sentence.

So was every other brand of cancer, especially breast cancer. If your coronary arteries clogged back then, you died—there was no such thing as “by-pass” surgery.

I contracted scarlet fever—now called strep throat—when I was 4-years-old.

The doctors put me in the hospital for 12-days where I received penicillin shots 4-times a day for seven of those days.

On top of this, the board of health quarantined our residence for 30-days—absolutely no one IN or OUT. And no one gave a hoot about how much it inconvenienced us or the fact that my father lost his job because he couldn’t go to work.

In all respects, today is way different from the thrilling days of yesteryear: economically, politically, medically, socially, and legally.

Today, economically speaking, you can’t buy a single loaf bread for $2.50, let alone the grocery list of items that my mother was able to buy. Every item that she was able to buy for pennies on the dollar now exceeds, by sizeable margins, what she paid for her entire list of items.

Politically, modern day White House Administrations have grown accustomed to doing whatever they feel like doing. Over the past twenty-years, they seem to have grown fond of shredding the Constitution whenever they deemed it convenient.

Over the past 16-years, particularly, politicians have elevated convenience to the status of an imperative while reducing truth to that as a mere option.

Both the Clinton and Bush Administrations lied to us, doggedly and egregiously. Only their lies were about different things.

Trust me on this, one day the real implications of the Patriot Act are going to smack us in our collective nose. Hopefully, it won’t be a fatal blow.

With the exception of periodic elections, the Congress has ceases paying attention to the voters. Why should they?

We permit it, they pander to us in order to get themselves re-elected time after time, by telling us what WE want to hear, but their true constituencies have become the inhabitants of K Street: the lobbyists.

For medicine, on the positive side, medical technology has conquered most of the death-sentence diseases of an era long past. Today, eighty-five percent of the kids diagnosed with childhood leukemia survive it to live productive normal lives.

Many other brands of cancer are no longer automatic death sentences, both, breast and prostate cancers, are prime examples. And, not only have we learned to replace clogged coronary arteries, we can transplant the heart itself. And lungs! And kidneys! And livers!

Even though new diseases pop up all of the time, medical science in the United States is the envy of the world. We reach out to the world, too. Our doctors do more pro bono work for the world’s sick than any nation on the planet.

However, at least on the home front, we still have a thing or two to learn relative to saving lives. Chiefly among them is learning the difference between the “science” of medicine and the “art” of medicine.

The former is clinical—cold and cruel at times. It consists of statistical inferences and group probabilities. They let us predict medical outcomes with amazing accuracy.

But, when symptoms do not abate, we must permit the latter—the “art” of medicine—to take over by ignoring the probabilities and letting, as humanely as possible, nature run its course without people going on moral and litigation feeding frenzies.

Today, at 66-years of age, I am healthier than my parents ever were. Technologically, I have more power in my tiny cell phone than the scientists of my father’s time had with their mainframe computer systems.

I am able to communicate with anyone in the world, anywhere in the world in an instant. All I have to do is use my personal computer to log onto the Internet. I can even use my cell phone to do this.

Yes, it costs me more to live today. I pay more than five times what my mother paid for a dozen eggs, thirteen times more for a stamp, thirty-one times more for a loaf of bread, and twenty times more for a gallon of gasoline.

However, at time I retired, I was earning sixty-four times more than my father did at the height of his earning potential. Even in retirement, I have twenty-nine times more annual income than he did working full-time.

While some things were much simpler then, they were NOT better. Some the things WERE better, but there weren’t enough of them to make me want to go back to the “good” old days.

As a nation, we have some serious problems, ninety-nine percent of which are political in nature. We need to learn that justice—if it means anything at all—cannot prevail until those who have not been injured by injustice become as persistently incensed as those who have been.

All we have to do is rediscover our collective backbone and begin holding our elected officials and the people they appoint accountable to US instead of to the folks on K Street in Washington, DC.

Oh yes, I think the reporting media could do with a good old-fashioned ass kicking, too. Let’s do it! I’ll see you next week.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

MEETINGS: A HORRIFYING glimpse of eternity's downside!

2008-07-27T15:33:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

In the fields of Astrophysics, Astronomy, and Cosmology, TIME is the result of an entropic process: the flow of energy from where there is more of it to where there is less of it. The process began with the Big Bang.

This gets complicated. I don’t want to talk about here because, as it does to me, it will only give you a headache.

However, another term we hear people speak of is ETERNITY. The God people tell us that if we live righteous lives, we’ll spend it in a place called Heaven basking in a state of absolute ecstasy with God.

In this case, eternity is probably a good thing, especially if there is free Internet access and unlimited cell phone minutes.

Those same people also tell us that if we don’t live righteous lives… you know, having too many “dirty” thoughts and such, we’ll spend eternity in a place called Hell, burning, under the supervision of a dude called the “devil,” in fires of unspeakable agony.

In this case, eternity is a BAD thing even with free Internet access and unlimited cell phone minutes.

Look, I’m a scientist. While either or both of these outomes may be true, I can’t find a anything in our legitimate, natural law-oriented scientific data banks to support the existence of either of them.

So, I’m not going to discount them out of hand. I’ll just leave it all for the philosophers to sort out. On the other hand, I think I have some absolute worldly proof that eternity IS real AND that we may NOT want to experience it.

While eternity, in the scientific sense, is a difficult concept to get our frail, human arms around, certain human endeavors bring its meaning into much clearer focus.

Watching Cricket matches, listening to boring speeches, and attending “business” meetings are examples of such endeavors. In addition to their seemingly endless nature, they also demonstrate the very essence of the concept of HELL!

I voluntarily sat through a Cricket match in England. Human society should reserve this kind of punishment for only the vilest of sociopaths. It would render the need for fire moot.

I once found myself trapped in a room with a former colleague. She was in the third hour of a five-minute “talk.” I couldn’t get out of the room—at least not inconspicuously.

She went on and on for another two hours about… something, but I’m not sure what it was. The fires of Hell would have been a welcomed reprieve.

Yes, even though these things, at least in my mind, give us a much more practical glimpse of “eternity” and what Hell must be like, nothing drives the point home like business MEETINGS.

I’ve attended many of them. I’m sure that some of them are still in progress. If it were not for pager and cell phone technology, I’d still be there, too.

In over forty-years of professional experience, I think I attended the absolute worst one two weeks ago in a Superior Court conference room in Maryland. It was horrible. Thoughts of suicide began to permeate my mind.

A young man from the Information Technology department conducted the meeting—let’s call him Satan’s Helper (SH for short). His business card showed a title of Security Supervisor.

He handed out a highly technical 4-page memo that he had written in which he described the IT group’s security concerns over public online access to criminal case disposition.

I’m no technical neophyte—especially when it comes to computer security. I’ve trained police agencies at the federal, state, and local levels in matters of computer security.

In fact, I’ve managed to get out of jury duty on a few occasions simply because some defense attorney thought I was too chummy with the cops. I’ve lost count of the number of courtroom sidebars in which I participated just to convince various presiding judges of my testimonial objectivity.

In addition to SH and me, five other people attended the meeting. I assure you that those five people were completely lost after the introductory paragraph of the memo.

Beginning with the second paragraph, SH used 19-acronyms, half of which I never heard before. I’m still researching some of them. I think he just made them up to impress the non-technical mortals in attendance.

Still, the technical stuff didn’t drain my enthusiasm for the stated purpose of the meeting; even though the others were sound asleep after the first 15-minutes of the meeting’s beginning.

To their credit, though, like all competent meeting attendee pros, their eyes remained open without the slightest hint of glaze-over, an essential survival skill in the business world.

However, the thing that intrigued me the most was how SH managed to remain a department supervisor. Technical savvy notwithstanding, the ability to write in complete, cohesive sentences using proper spelling and at least a modicum of syntactical mastery is also required. At least it used to be.

I counted twenty-three occurrences of the word, “their.” He spelled it incorrectly as “thier” each time. So, it was not a simple typo. I concluded that SH simply did not know how to spell “t-h-e-i-r.”

In the third paragraph, fourth sentence of the memo, SH wrote; “Each time that a computer tech sees unincripted personel information on the web, thier bloodpressure goes off the scale.”

These were SH’s words, exactly as written and in complete contextual perspective. With all due respect to SH’s technical expertise, the memo presented undeniable evidence of a serious affective shortfall.

Anyone having achieved 8^th grade grammatical competency would be able to see that spelling is not SH’s only faux pas. Apparently, he was absent from school the day that a competent teacher covered pronoun/antecedent numerical agreement.

The litany of grammatical felonies made me wonder whether SH, himself, reported to an operational manager. If so, did the manager simply fail to read the memo or did the manager simply fail to recognize SH’s errors as such?

I’m still researching this. If it’s a case of the former, shame on the manager. If it’s a matter of the latter, however, it explains many of the problems with our criminal justice system.

Anyway, the meeting went on for two and a half hours without a single break. This comes to 150-minutes or 9,000 seconds. What did we accomplish after this “eternity-like” interval?

NOTHING! Unless, of course, you consider an agreement to “revisit” the matter in 30-days some sort of a positive outcome.

Here’s my take. On average, in the United States, we live about 78-years. Some live longer life spans and some live shorter ones—much shorter some of the time. But, I’m talking averages here.

If you get to live the entire average of 78-years, it breaks down to about 28,489 days, or 683,729 hours, or 41,023,756 minutes, or close to 2.5 BILLION seconds.

I’ve lived 66-years. If I make it to the average life span, I’m already down to my last 378,680,832 seconds and I am not going to waste a single one of them on any more of this kind of crap.

Have a great week. Stay safe unless, of course, you’d like to find out if “eternity,” good or bad, is all it’s cracked up to be. And, oh yes, God, if you’re out there, please don’t let the readers find too many grammatical screw-ups in this article.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Somtimes we have to be serious.

2008-07-20T10:02:00.002-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I ran into an old friend last week. We talked for several hours. It brought back so many incredible memories for both of us. She had recently lost her adult son to cancer and was afraid that she was about to lose her adult daughter to a serious surgical procedure. The doctors put the daughter’s odds of survival at “7 in 10” chances.

My children are grown and out of the house into successful careers of their own. They’re incredible people and I couldn’t be prouder of them. The mere thought of either of them dying before I do, sends horrible chills down my spine. Both of them dying before me is simply too much for me to think about.

Sometimes, when people we care about are hurting, the only thing we can do is simply help them to cry. There is no consolation for a mother who has lost a son to cancer—even an adult son. And, how horrible and helpless she must feel at the prospect of losing her daughter—even an adult daughter.

When my children reached their teens, there were times when I felt like a second-class citizen. At times, I didn’t even think my children knew I was around for anything other than paying the bills and getting them to their appointed places on time.

I was in a real funk one week-end and a woman friend of mine—she was a nun (Sisters of St. Joseph) at the time, handed me a written piece titled, I’m Invisible.

I don’t know who wrote it, but I’m sharing it with all of you. Here it is in its entirety. Even though it was written for moms, I think it an appropriate piece for loving dads, also!

I’m Invisible

It all began to make sense, the blank stares, the lack of response, the way one of the kids will walk into the room while I'm on the phone and ask to be taken to the store.

Inside I'm thinking, "Can't you see I'm on the phone?" Obviously not. No one can see if I'm on the phone, or cooking, or sweeping the floor, or even standing on my head in the corner, because no one can see me at all. I'm invisible.

Some days I am only a pair of hands, nothing more: Can you fix this? Can you tie this? Can you open this? Some days I'm not a pair of hands; I'm not even a human being. I'm a clock to ask, "What time is it?" I'm a satellite guide to answer, "What number is the Disney Channel?" I'm a car to order, "Right around 5:30, please."

I was certain that these were the hands that once held books and the eyes that studied history and the mind that graduated summa cum laude—but now they had disappeared into the peanut butter, never to be seen again.

She's going ... she's going ... she's gone!

One night, a group of us was having dinner, celebrating the return of a friend from England. Janice had just gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and on about the hotel she stayed in.

I was sitting there, looking around at the others all put together so well. It was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself as I looked down at my out-of-style dress; it was the only thing I could find that was clean. My unwashed hair was pulled up in a banana clip and I was afraid I could actually smell peanut butter in it.

I was feeling pretty pathetic, when Janice turned to me with a beautifully wrapped package, and said, "I brought you this." It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe.

I wasn't exactly sure why she'd given it to me until I read her inscription:"To Charlotte, with admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees."

In the days ahead I would read—no, devour—the book. And I would discover what would become for me, four life-changing truths, after which I could pattern my work:

· No one can say who built the great cathedrals—we have no record of their names.
· These builders gave their whole lives for a work they would never see finished.
· They made great sacrifices and expected no credit.
· The passion of their building was fueled by their faith that the eyes of God saw everything.

A legendary story in the book told of a rich man who came to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw a workman carving a tiny bird on the inside of a beam.

He was puzzled and asked the man, "Why are you spending so much time carving that bird into a beam that will be covered by the roof? No one will ever see it."

And, the workman replied, "Because God sees."

I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into place. It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me, "I see you, Charlotte. I see the sacrifices you make every day, even when no one around you does.

No act of kindness you've done, no sequin you've sewn on, no cupcake you've baked, is too small for me to notice and smile over. You are building a great cathedral, but you can't see right now what it will become."

At times, my invisibility feels like an affliction. But it is not a disease that is erasing my life. It is the cure for the disease of my own self-centeredness. It is the antidote to my strong, stubborn pride.

I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on.

The writer of the book went so far as to say that no cathedrals could ever be built in our lifetime because there are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree.

When I really think about it, I don't want my son to tell the friend he's bringing home from college for Thanksgiving, "My mom gets up at 4 in the morning and bakes homemade pies, and then she hand bastes a turkey for three hours and presses all the linens for the table."

That would mean I'd built a shrine or a monument to myself. I just want him to want to come home. And then, if there is anything more to say to his friend, to add, "You're gonna love it there."

As mothers, we are building great cathedrals. We cannot be seen if we're doing it right. And one day, it is very possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the world by the sacrifices of invisible women.

I am their father, not their mother, but I love my children with every bit of the same fervor…more than my own life. I would spare no amount of effort to make sure they remain healthy and outlive me.

I didn’t build these two cathedrals singlehandedly, but I was a working partner in their construction. They have turned out to be fantastic people. To me they are my emissaries to a time I will not see.

Even though my friend knows that I’m here for her, I know that all I can do is put my arms around her and help her to cry.

But, here’s the REAL tragedy. Whenever children precede their parents in death, it cancels out their emissary mission. And, there is no telling the potential loss to the human race.

Have a great week. I’ll be back next week. If I can remember to do it, I’ll tell you about that meeting I spoke of last week.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Sex in the cafeteria... not to mention some OTHER stuff!

2008-07-13T15:06:00.000-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I use a standard definition for “work.” I define it as anything I’d rather NOT be doing. As such, I’ve always earned my living, NOT by working but rather though the pursuit of my life’s passion. In such pursuits, I’ve never worked a day in my life.

Even though I’ve been long retired, my passion for scientific and legal research has yet to wane. I still do it, only now I do it on a voluntary basis for people who appreciate the effort.

The upside is that I can PICK my research projects, publish my findings and to hell with the nay-saying bureaucrats. And, the downside? I haven’t found one yet. But I have to admit that I have not looked very hard… not at all, actually.

I currently have three big projects going right now. The most interesting one, however, involves the criminal justice system, the courts, and the judges who preside over criminal cases.

It takes me into numerous courtrooms throughout the United States. However, as interesting as this is, I’ve come to realize that some of the most interesting stuff does NOT happen in the courtrooms, but rather in the courthouse cafeterias.

This past week I was in a courthouse in Ocean City, Maryland. The trial I was involved with had recessed for the day due to some legal technicalities. It was close to lunchtime, so I went to the cafeteria to get a bite to eat before leaving for the day.

I was seated at a small table—a two seater—located next to a larger, five seater table. About a minute later two people sat at the larger table. Both were courthouse employees. I could tell this from their conversation. They had brought their own lunches.

They tell us that opposites attract. These two were about as opposite as it gets in terms of physical attributes, but almost identical in terms of their emotional IQs.

One of them, a woman… 50ish or so… worked directly for one of the judges. Her lunch consisted of nothing more than a couple of slices of individually wrapped Kraft American cheese, one slice of whole wheat bread (dry), a pear, and a bottle of water.

The other diner was a man in his early 40s, about five-feet, six-inches tall. He had to weigh 350 pounds—MINIMUM. He pulled HIS lunch out of a full-sized shopping bag.

The first item he pulled from the bag turned out to be a large (VERY LARGE) ham and cheese submarine sandwich wrapped in oil-stained white wrapping paper. It looked large enough to feed two people.

The oil literally dripped from its end each time he picked it up. There were mounds of ham and cheese, enough to provide an average eater with ham and cheese sandwiches for about 5-days.

After removing the sub from the shopping bag and opening it, he then took out a large bag of Herr’s potato chips, popped it open, and poured its entire contents onto the oil-stained paper wrapper next to that huge, oil-oozing submarine sandwich.

Next, he removed TWO chocolate covered éclairs from Dunkin Donuts. But thankfully—and I’m sure it was out of concern for his own health—the last item from the bag was… get this, a 16oz bottle of DIET Pepsi.

I suspected that the woman had some serious physical problems. She was… shall we say petite. Actually, she looked horribly frail. But, the sparseness of her lunch didn’t get my attention nearly as much as her incessant whining over the dishonesty of the human species.

It seems that she had fallen victim to a street scam-artist. She had driven “into” Delaware for some reason. On returning home, she had stopped at a 7-Eleven store. A man approached her as she got out of her car.

Having shown her a Powerball ticket and claiming that it was a $20 winner, he told her that he was about to miss his bus and lose his job. He needed $5 for round trip bus fare but didn’t have time to wait in line to redeem the ticket.

He offered her his 20-dollar “winner” in exchange for 10-dollars from her, further explaining that all she’d have to do was wait a few minutes in line and cash it in. REALLY. She fell for it. You can’t make this stuff up!

She gave him a 10-dollar bill. He gave her the ticket and took off toward the bus stop on the other side of the highway. She went into the store and stood in line for about 5-mnutes to “cash it in.”

Try to guess what happened next. Give up? OK, it was bogus! The ticket was a real Powerball ticket, but it was worthless. NOT A WINNER… not even a free ticket! And, the guy was nowhere to be found. Can you imagine?

Now, I don’t know this woman. I certainly can’t claim any factual knowledge as to the status of her IQ. So I’m not going to write any pointed wise cracks pertaining to her specific intellectual capabilities.

On the other hand, even idiots are capable of devoting a neuron or two to common sense—albeit all too infrequently. Even the truly intellectually gifted in our midst often add to the robustness of a long-standing theory of mine: that greed often short-circuits intellect.

The greed factor can reduce the most intelligent among us to babbling morons. This woman proved that, once again, nothing seems to define humans better than an uncontrollable compulsion to do the irrational hoping for monumentally unlikely payoffs.

Now that I think back on it, perhaps the meagerness of her lunch had nothing to do with the dictates of a physical condition. Maybe it’s all she could afford to buy!

The overweight dude, in the mean time, kept lamenting about how “mad” his doctor was going to be at his next scheduled visit in two days. He really did not appear to see even a slight correlation among his diet, his weight, his blood pressure, and his love life.

His love life entered the conversation when he voiced a serious concern over the likelihood of his girl friend dumping him.

As in the case of his lunch partner, I don’t know this man or the status of a possible uncontrollable physical condition that may be contributing to the largeness of his mass. So I won’t make any pointed wise cracks about him, specifically.

In general though, negative health consequences notwithstanding, once people—males and females—permit food to replace sex in their lives, they should not be shocked when they awake one day to find that they can’t get into their own pants, let alone someone else’s.

I’ve learned that there are incredible stories lurking within the confines of our nation’s courthouse cafeterias. Often, the diners therein relate things about their own lives that make some of the drama in the courtrooms pale in comparison.

Be ever vigilant! There’s danger out there and nothing is more dangerous to our species than the ever-present pitfalls reaped upon us by well-intentioned but extremely determined resourceful idiots.

Speaking of which, I attended a meeting late last week in Harrisburg, PA—in one of the Supreme Court conference rooms. It was a classic! I swear that the attendees—all lower-level judicial support personnel—came right out of a Dilbert cartoon strip!

I won’t be naming names, but I can’t wait to tell you about that one. Maybe in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, let me just tell you that my experience at that meeting intensified, EXPONENTIALLY, my empathy for judges… even the wrist slappers.

Anyway, watch those Powerball tickets, and if needed, lose a few pounds. You might… you know, get lucky! As for me, I’m going to go get a large ham and cheese sub with extra oil! Too much sex isn’t good for you, either… know what I mean?

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Watch the flip-flopping. I own a gun!

2008-07-06T14:23:00.000-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I’ve been out of town—in Washington, DC, actually. Upon my return, I learned that the word on the street is that Obama’s been flip-flopping on some stuff. I’ll get back to this in just a few minutes.

By now everyone, other than those in a coma, knows about the Supreme Court’s two most recent landmark decisions. The first: We can’t execute people who rape children. The second: As citizens, we have a right to own guns, not just as part of a militia but as individual citizens.

Observing the intra-workings of the United States Supreme Court is a process to behold. While I’m not sure that “collegial” is a fitting description, I’m positive that “lovey-dovey” is NOT.

These two issues resulted in an unprecedented inflow of amicus (friend of the court) briefs. You don’t have to be a practicing attorney at law to submit one, either. Anyone with sufficient procedural knowledge may submit an amicus brief.

By the time these rulings came down, each justice had read a 60-page advocacy/petitioner brief, a 60-page respondent brief, a reply brief of between 40- and 50-pages, plus as many amicus briefs (40-pages each… at a minimum) as their nerves and stomachs could stand.

Still, it took several hours to scrape Justice Ginsberg off her chambers ceiling after the gun ownership ruling and she only weighs about 90-pounds… fully clothed and soaking wet.

And, as I write this, parts of Justice Scalia are STILL stuck to his chambers ceiling as the result of the child rape ruling. Of course, that vision is much more compelling because he’s such a porker compared to Justice Ginsberg, not to mention much more scathing and animated.

As always, we’ll all survive these rulings regardless of our respective positions. Just the same, I’m in the process of gathering research data for an article I intend to post in a few weeks.

I’ve written many times that I’m indifferent to the imposition of a death penalty. As long as its use meets Constitutional muster, execute away!

However, as far as I’m concerned, the only LOGICAL reason for executing people convicted of capital murder is to decrease recidivism. Such people, once executed, do not murder again.

On the other hand, while child rape is a crime that is despicable beyond description, I think we need to exercise due caution relative to expanding reasons for executing people. I’ll give more detail on this in that later article I referenced above.

As for our individual right to own guns, I agree wholeheartedly. But I think that we need to have a full understanding of what the Court ruled, though.

Contrary to much of what I’ve heard from most Wyatt Earp wannabes, the Court did NOT rule that we ALL, as U. S. citizens, have a right to own guns. It ruled that government—at ALL levels—does NOT have the authority to ban, outright, gun ownership rights for the general population.

Government still has the authority to restrict gun ownership for those who are no longer legally eligible, such as convicted felons, those legitimately declared to be psychiatric “nut” jobs, and others residing within the realm of similar circumstances.

Again, I think it an extremely dangerous form of naiveté for people to think that outlawing gun ownership will eliminate guns as a major societal danger. The only thing this does is make it impossible for law-abiding people to protect themselves and their families.

OK, now back to the matter of Obama and his flip-flopping ways. First, understand that Obama’s not the only one doing it. McCain’s doing it, too. In fact, ALL politicians do it.

It’s been standard operating procedure since our break with King George for politicians to create massive problems and then campaign against them. In this respect, McCain’s 30-plus years in Congress has given Obama a lot more to campaign against than Obama’s less than 7-years have given McCain to campaign against!

Here are a few items I think we all need to take into account relative to Senators Obama and McCain and their final dash for the Oval Office finish line.

There is no comparison between running a campaign for a PARTY’S nomination and running one for the “GOLD.” We, the electorate, possess the wonderful luxury of pontificating about our moral indignation over what we consider as “flip-flopping” on issues. On the other hand, the candidates must be more discerning.

To quote the late Ronald Reagan, “I can’t do anything for you if I don’t ‘get’ elected.” He was stumping in Harlem at the time he said it, too. I was there and still have the digitized recording.

Unfortunately, in order to “get” elected, the candidates must appeal to the electorate’s lowest common denominator. As such, Obama can no longer afford to be an impractical optimist nor can McCain any longer afford to be, even perceptually, an “in your face” maverick.

For Obama, it’s private campaign funding instead of his promised public campaign financing. Call it flip-flopping all you want, but it shows he’s no fool.

Either can he afford to remain indifferent to Muslim associations—real or otherwise. As it is, he has an uphill battle convincing well over 25% of the electorate that he’s NOT a Muslim.

He’s going to flip-flop on other stuff, too, before it’s all over. So will McCain. It’s going to be very interesting watching things unfold.

For McCain, he has to get the Neo-Conservatives back in his corner and reestablish himself with the God people. As such, he’s NOW in FAVOR of making the Bush tax cuts permanent; he’s NOW in FAVOR of overturning Roe v. Wade, both of which he adamantly opposed back in his good old “up yours“ maverick days.

In an attempt to atone for his prior Conservative blasphemous utterances advocating amnesty for illegal immigrants, he now seems ready to demand their immediate deportation, if not their execution.

And he now thinks offshore drilling for oil—including Alaska—is a “swell” idea. It does not matter that even if we began the drilling in the next 5-minutes, it would be at least 15-years before we’d see any of the oil.

The real flip-flopping has just begun. I look forward to this election year with unprecedented enthusiasm. Even so, I don’t think much will change no matter which of the two wins in November.

The key to both candidates’ successes will be the manner in which they address their particular reassessments (meaning flip-flops). I think Obama’s demonstrated willingness to admit mistakes will help more than hurt him.

However, assuming nothing bombastic happens, I think Obama will win the popular vote—not by a landslide by any means—but he’ll win it nevertheless.

He’ll do it simply because I don’t think the average Conservative (not the Neo-Conservatives) has any idea of how much irreparable damage George W. Bush has done to the Republican Party at the national level.

Although… I keep forgetting the Democrats’ uncanny ability to snatch defeat right out of the sure arms of victory. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, not to mention John Dean, scare the daylights out of me and I doubt that I’m alone in my concerns.

Yes, it’s going to be interesting to say the least. Back at you all next week. I hope your holiday was fun and safe.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Sincerity, no matter its intensity, does NOT confirm intelligence!

2008-06-29T14:07:00.003-04:00

By Joseph Walther

Martyrdom never confirms the factuality OF a cause; it only addresses the martyr’s belief IN a cause. Likewise, there is no inherent relationship between sincerity and intelligence. You can be as sincere as it gets and still be stupid.

Several things make this apparent in our daily lives. Three of the most egregious ones, however, are politically oriented radio call-in shows, the flawed logic that only addicted gamblers seem to demonstrate, and a blind adherence to religious dogma (no matter how seemingly ridiculous).

First, politically oriented call-in radio shows…

I avoid listening to these shows as much as I can. It isn’t that I’m disinterested in politics; it’s just that these shows seem to do nothing but increase our social dysfunction.

I don’t blame the radio hosts, mind you. Without callers, these people wouldn’t even be on the air. The callers, of course, believe with every fiber of their beings that their individual assessments of the “problem” are correct in every detail.

Over the course of many years, tabloid newspapers, magazines, and TV shows have mastered a reporting technique called “baiting.” It works very effectively, too. Here’s how.

Never report the whole story. Real news and the supporting facts—in their proper context—are not necessary. What’s important is reporting only selective elements of the story. Doing it this way boosts TV ratings and reader numbers while leaving people free to fill in their OWN details.

An alarmingly growing number of people in this country have become big fans of “what might have happened.” Nothing satisfies our lust for this like hearing about “potential” facts, “likely scenarios,” and “gut feelings.

TV cable talking heads like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, and Wolf Blitzer—to name a few—and radio call-in gurus like Neo-conservative Rush Limbaugh AND his many Liberal counterparts on Radio America have all mastered the art of reporting “speculation” as news.

This is why many people “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It’s why millions of voters “know” that John McCain is a moderate. It’s why some people, though no longer that many, “know” that George W. Bush is brighter than he seems.

It’s also why, to paraphrase Charlie Reese, we perpetually allow politicians to create so many problems and then campaign against them. It’s why we permit 545 people—100 senators, 435 representatives, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices to create the problems we face in this country.

We ALWAYS fail to hold any of them directly accountable for the mess we’re now facing. It’s just too easy to blame it all on Washington lobbyists.

While we can’t do anything about the Supreme Court justices, we sure as hell can fire the senators (who confirm Supreme Court nominees), the congressional representatives, president (who nominates candidates for the Supreme Court), and the other politicians who fail to represent the country’s best interests in lieu of their own collective ones.

We won’t though, which is precisely why we deserve what we’re getting and will continue to get until it’s too late.

About addictive gambler logic…

At the outset, I have nothing against gambling by responsible, non-addicted gamblers who can afford to do it. For the record, when the Powerball jackpot climbs past the $150-thousand mark, AND I don’t have to wait in some line, I spring for a ticket myself.

A few years ago, I heard a radio advertisement touting the benefits of playing Delaware’s many lottery games. It covered winning amounts and the fact that SOMEONE would win all the while avoiding the laws of probability like the plague.

The last thing the radio announcer said was, “Remember, the less you bet the more you’ll lose when you win!” While I simply chuckled over it, many gambling-addicted listeners may have taken it seriously.

Thirty-five minutes later, I stopped at a convenience store (7-11) for a cup of coffee. As I waited to pay for it, a woman in front of me confirmed my fears.

She had won $79 from a previous purchase of ten dollars worth of those scratch-off lottery tickets. As the clerk counted out her money, she informed him that she’d be buying more tickets.

She proceeded to drop the entire amount on additional tickets. The woman who was with her—I think they were sisters—jumped all over her case for “blowing” ALL of her winnings on more “stupid” lottery tickets.

“I just won $80-bucks. I’m playing with ‘their’ money,” she said. I just shook my head. It simply didn’t register with her that the second she won those 79-dollars, it ceased to be the “their” money and became HER’S.

“Remember, folks, the less you bet the more you lose when you win.” I’m guessing that announcer had this woman in mind when he said this. Yes, it’s true. You can be sincere and still be stupid!

And, about blind adherence to religious dogma…

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most eloquent speeches in the history of this country: the Gettysburg Address. Less than 24-hours later, the Chicago Times expressed its great disdain for it, as well as for Mr. Lincoln, with the following editorial.

“The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dish-watery utterances of the man who has been pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”

A year or so ago, George W. Bush—our current President—said, “The jury is still out on evolution.” The Conservatives didn’t as much as blink over the statement and the Liberals’ response to it was tepid at best.

While science can never prove a theory true, we assign the label, “robust” to those theories that have withstood the test of time and challenge. Solid theories explain things. The more things a theory explains and the more accurately we can use it to predict outcomes, the more robust it becomes.

Evolution is the best theory—based on valid falsifiable hypotheses—that we currently have to explain from whence we came. It does not repudiate Intelligent Design or Creationism. It can’t. These are faith-based as opposed to valid falsifiable hypotheses.

In other words, God may be real. Neither legitimate science, in general, nor evolutionary theory, in particular, attempts to repudiate this possibility. It simply attempts to explain what we know relative to natural law.

George W. Bush, the current leader of the free world, openly chooses to ignore vast stores of human knowledge and scientific experience in such fields as Astronomy, Genetics, Paleontology, Geology, and Physics.

All of these point to some natural process that has gotten us, as one of millions of global species that have existed, from the Big Bang to where we are now. While science may find a better explanatory theory some day, EVOLUTION is the best one we have right now.

Denying it out of hand because the idea of humans evolving from monkeys is too distasteful simply makes the deniers appear silly, not to mention the fact that they have no idea of how the process has worked.

Besides, if we could read the monkeys’ minds, we’d probably find that they aren’t at all enthusiastic over human science blaming the fact of OUR existence on THEM!

Anyway, go figure. The Chicago Times condemned one of the most revered presidents in our nation’s history over one of the most moving, heart-felt speeches in our history.

Yet, not a peep over a current president’s repudiation of one of the most robust theories in human history. Let me repeat it; a person can be sincere and still be stupid!

Tune in same time next week. Have a safe and happy 4^th of July. Don’t drink and drive. If you do and you kill or seriously injure someone, will you be able to live with it? Besides, the cops will be out in force. Do you have any idea what happens to your auto-insurance rates after a DUI conviction?

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

A point or two of clarification!

2008-06-22T13:05:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

Two things came up in conversation over this past week. First, two relatively young political opposites became rather vocal and animated over the state of Social Security in this country.

The other one involved a very close friend of mine relative to her agreement with Michelle Obama’s assessment of most Americans’ diminishing quality of life over the past 40- to 45-years.

Relative to the Social Security issue above, the two men discussing it could not have been older than about twenty-five. One was an “arch” Conservative in favor of doing away with Social Security altogether.

The other one was an unapologetic Liberal who absolutely blamed the Bush Administration for trying to destroy peoples’ lives by privatizing the system.

There were two major problems with their relative positions. One, neither knew what he was talking about. Not a clue! Not even close. And two, both positions raged on in a seemingly mindless state of emotional investment overload.

First, the Conservatives have to stop advocating the privatization of the system. It’s not going to happen nor does it need to happen. Second, the Liberals need to stop demonizing the Conservatives as the ones attempting to destroy lives relative to Social Security retirement benefits.

A Democrat by the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt began Social Security. We have him to thank for that FICA withholding each pay period, which is huge now compared to what it was back then.

Participation in the program was voluntary and included withholding of 1% of the first $1,400 of employees’ annual incomes. Participants were able to deduct the payment amount as an income tax deduction each year.

The government would place the money into a REAL “trust” fund, not the general fund. Washington would use the money to pay Social Security retirement payments and NOTHING else. And, the recipients of retirement benefits would NOT have to pay taxes on what they received.

Today, the program is INVOLUNTARY. The effective Social Security earnings have risen to $102,000 and the tax is now 12.4% of an employee’s income—half paid by the employee and the other half paid by the employer.

While the Bush Administration has advocated privatizing part of the system, neither George W. Bush nor the Republican Party has brought about the changes in the system that have caused the funding problems we face today.

Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats eliminated the Social Security “trust” fund and began placing FICA withholdings into the “general” fund. Guess where a large portion of that “pork” money comes.

You know… the money that sends Congress into its annual spending frenzy each year. And, worse yet, even with the extra money, this crowd still spends more than it takes in.

This same crowd—without Johnson—eliminated the tax deduction for FICA withholding, too.

And, we have Al Gore to thank, as Vice President under Bill Clinton, for the fact that we now pay taxes on our Social Security benefit payments. He’s the one who cast the tie-breaking vote in the United States Senate.

Finally, thanks to Jimmy Carter and his band of merry Liberals, immigrants, many who have never paid a dime into the system, now draw Social Security benefits.

I’m a Conservative. But, I’m not a fan of George W. Bush. Even though I voted for him twice, he’s been one of the biggest regrets in my voting life. Mea culpa! Oh my God, mea MAXIMA culpa.

No matter, though, the man has had nothing to do with our Social Security mess. His proposed solution to the problem, on the other hand, is every bit as knee-jerk as everything else he’s done!

I don’t favor privatizing the system in any way. Just return it to a voluntary status, restore the tax breaks—at both ends—and reinstate the “trust” fund to keep the money out of the hands of the porkers!

FDR and his Congress did not intend for Social Security to become a stand-alone retirement program. However, the government didn’t stop providing pension plans for workers. The private sector did—at least the bulk of the small to medium sized ones did.

If we go back to the original plan of Social Security, including the original rules—modified in terms of the income cap, employees would be able to afford to pay into some sort of “primary” pension savings. The tax breaks would provide the means.

Of course, for those who opt not to participate, they’d be on their own when retirement time comes around. All we’d have to do is enforce it!

Now, about Michelle Obama’s position on the worsening plight of average Americans since 1964...

Her exact words, according to George Will, were; “…most Americans’ lives have gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.” My good friend, Shirley, agrees with Michelle Obama, as she puts it, “150%!”

But, I don’t… not even a teensy weensy bit! I don’t know where she (Michelle Obama) has been, but her assessment is so far off mark, it worries me in terms of her potential as the nation’s “First Lady.”

Since the mid-sixties, when Michelle Obama was growing up, some marvelous things have happened. A few things have gotten worse, but most of it has been great news.

Per capita income has risen close to 150% since then. We’re living longer by almost 8-years. Fewer—a lot fewer… about 76% less—babies are dying during childbirth. Heart disease, while still the number one killer, is only about half the rate that it was back then.

When I was in 4^th-grade, my friend, Roger Coyne died from childhood leukemia within 6-months of his throwing up all over our 4^th-grade classroom floor—the first indication that something may have been wrong.

This does not happen anymore—most kids don’t die from this now. Many other childhood diseases don’t kill kids any longer, either.

The list of good things that have changed for the better most significantly outweighs the list of bad things that are still the same or that have become worse since Michelle Obama was a “little” girl.

I’m not going to list them all here. Suffice it to say, though, that we’ve seen vast improvements across the scale of human endeavors. While we still have a long way to go in terms of racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality, we’ve not been sitting around doing nothing.

The point is that this has occurred despite political windbaggery gone wild. None of the current cable talking heads—O’Reilly, Hannity, Colms, Blitzer, Olbermann, Larry King, or Limbaugh—have had a thing to do with it, either.

Facts supporting the idea that things are better for the majority of us in 2008 as opposed to 1964 abound. So, until Michelle Obama decides to clarify her claims, I’ll remain optimistic.

I don’t hold her husband responsible for what SHE says, though. He seems much more hopeful. If he can actually “unite” this country politically, in a positive way, I’d be a fool to vote for McCain.

McCain’s been around for the last 35-years and hasn’t done a thing that he claims that he’ll do if we put him in the Oval Office. In fact, he’s done the exact opposite close to 80% of the time. The Congressional Record verifies this. Old habits are hard to break!

I’ll be back next week. Stay safe. In the meantime, to the two young men that were arguing about Social Security, people—meaning ME—will think you a lot less foolish if you check facts before blindly supporting or condemning a position.

This is especially important to remember when you are so young that both retirement and natural death are nothing but distant, barely audible rumors in your young lives.

As for my good friend, Shirley, Michelle has either missed a lot since the mid-‘60s, or I’ve been having some unbelievably optimistic dreams.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Listen up! I need a volunteer.

2008-06-15T11:27:00.002-04:00

By Joseph Walther

Sometimes I hang out at the “mall.” In this case, I was hanging out at the Concord Mall in New Castle County, Delaware, just about a mile from the Pennsylvania State Line. It was late Friday afternoon.

There I was, seated at a small table at the North end of the mall, sipping on a glass of iced-tea. Suddenly, like a finely tuned sonar system, my ears detected the sound and my head automatically turned to track its direction and pinpoint its precise source.

The sound’s source was a man’s voice. No more than ten feet to my left, a group of 8-people had pulled three tables together. They were in their 60s or older and were all discussing some steps our government could take to decrease expenses.

Specifically, the sound that earned my immediate attention was one man’s voice as he uttered a term. The term? “Compulsory Volunteerism!”

I immediately turned my digital voice recorder on and moved a bit closer to the group. He used the term, “compulsory volunteerism” three times in under 4-minutes. He was seriously in favor of this, as were at least five of his friends.

The first time I heard this term used was several years ago when retired General Wesley Clark, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination to run against George W. Bush in the 2004 general election, used it to describe his idea of a “civilian reserve force.”

According to the General, folks like you and I could sign on for a period of five years—voluntarily, of course. Once we were “in,” our president could call us up for periods of six months. He could send us anywhere in the world.

I am helpless when it comes to minding my own business whenever I hear this sort of stupidity. And, make no mistake about it. Stupidity IS stupidity whether it comes from Liberals or Conservatives.

He must have seen me looking. My facial expression had to be screaming horrified disbelief! If he missed that, certainly the repeated “no” motion of my head most certainly told him that I disagreed with him.

“So what’s wrong with getting people to volunteer,” he asked, looking straight at me. “Nothing,” I answered. “But first you need to understand how silly the term, ‘compulsory volunteerism’ sounds,” I finished.

I asked him if he volunteers his time for anything. He told me that he regularly volunteers at his church to help collect food to feed the hungry. He told me he also volunteers to do other odd jobs around his church.

“If you decided to stop doing these things for your church, could the church refuse to let you off the hook,” I asked him. “No,” he answered. “That’s why it’s called volunteering,” he continued as though he had me in the throes of a gigantic gotcha.

“Agreed,” I said. “Now, do you see any semblance of a contradiction in the term, “compulsory volunteerism,” I asked. He just stared at me. He must have felt trapped, so I eased up a bit.

I tried to explain that people have a right to “volunteer” for any cause—legal, of course—that they deem worthy. But, for the same reason, they can stop volunteering whenever they wish to do so.

“THIS is TRUE volunteerism,” I told him. “We can’t force people to volunteer. Otherwise it isn’t volunteering.” The rest of the group seemed to get it, but he didn’t—at least it seemed so to me.

Every time I hear people talking about our “volunteer” military force, I have to laugh. I’m not against a volunteer military. I think we have the finest military the world has yet to see, but I think there is a serious misconception about what “volunteer force” means.

The only thing that is “voluntary” about military service in this country is that, now, people voluntarily join instead of our government ordering them to do so as in the use of the military draft of yesteryear.

Once they’ve joined, signed the induction forms, and taken the oath, volunteering is over. From that point on, they are compelled to serve, even to the death, for the period outlined in their service contract.

If, for ANY reason, they decide to “un-volunteer” themselves, they’ll find out in short order just how snotty the military becomes over it. The military deserters housed at Fort Leavenworth Federal Prison can explain the concept in vivid detail.

I am old enough to remember post WW-II film footage of German civilian labor battalions. These consisted of people who “volunteered” to do menial work for the Nazi Regime… you know, keeping the homeland all spiffy for Hitler.

Once they volunteered to “join,” they could not “un-join.” Well, they could, actually, as long as they didn’t mind being shot.

While the General Clark did not mean that our government should execute members of a “volunteer” work force for “un-volunteering,” I have no doubt that there would be some level of “consequences” for doing so, just as there are “consequences” for “un-volunteering” from military service.

I am an American. I love my country. I have served in the military, including two combat tours in Viet Nam. Still, even today at the age of sixty-six, I’d give my life in defense of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

But—I don’t care who is president—we need to end this obsession we have of permitting our elected officials and the media to get away with scamming us by “redefining” definitions, no matter how noble and patriotic they sound.

Our presidents are citizens just as we are. We elect them to administer the government functions outlined in the Constitution. They have to live by the same laws as we do. But, judging by the last 8-years in particular, I’m not so sure anymore.

The notion that an individual aspiring to the Office of President would submit such a ridiculous notion as “compulsory volunteerism” sickens me. That ANY members of an intelligent electorate would buy into it scares the hell out of me.

I most dearly respect the Office of President. However, I have NEVER agreed with everything our Presidents have said or done, no matter who held the office or which party. Not only do I voice my opposition, I feel an obligation to do so.

Voicing legitimate disagreement with our government or NOT volunteering our time just because a U. S. President calls for it does not make us unpatriotic.

On the other hand, blindly agreeing and adhering to whatever our government proclaims has nothing to do with patriotism. It’s plain old nationalism.

Instead of placing love for country above all else, nationalists place their hatred for other countries above all else. Such people seem to think that agreeing with their government—at any cost—is an imperative.

It isn’t, of course. And, during the impending campaign for the Presidency, we need to pay closer attention to all attempts at “redefining” definitions.

Let’s make a special effort at understanding a sometimes-subtle, but nevertheless real, difference between patriotism and nationalism. If we don’t, all of us may one day become compulsory volunteers in a one of those so-called “benevolent” dictator’s “labor battalions.”

Happy Father’s Day! This includes not just the men who are loving dads, but also the loving moms who must also be dads.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

We're the enemy!

2008-06-08T05:28:00.002-04:00

No, I’m not talking about the war on terror or our invasion of Iraq, or any of the usual stuff that people write about whenever they want to discuss how much the world hates us.

I’m talking about US—ourselves! We’re our own worst enemy. Some parts of the world do hate us and would like to destroy us. But, this is not MOST of the world.

But, when it comes to what we, the people, of our own country do internally to solve our problems, we can be abjectly stupid.

I think the problem lies in the apparent fact that we like to view things as we think they should be or, perhaps more to the point, as we wished they were. It’s a dangerous thing to do. And, as a nation, we didn’t always think this way.

Early on in our history, we had to live on what we earned. We had to make do with what we had. Local government authorities, for the most part, took care of local problems and provided local services. The federal government handled the national issues and provided national services.

The system didn’t always work, but that was life. The point is that the system forced us to handle things more democratically. We came together and voted on things. We came to generally acceptable compromises.

Not everyone was happy with the way the vote went, but it kept the national government from running our daily lives. It provided for a much smaller national government.

It also forced the federal government to enact measures in the best interest of the majority. Sadly, this is not so today and has not been the case for the past hundred years of so. In fact, over the past 50-years, it has become downright intolerable.

Here in Delaware, the price of a gallon of gasoline has reached $4 a gallon. In some states it’s higher—lower others, but not by much. We’re outraged over it as though it’s not our own fault.

We’re convinced that it has to be a plot. “The ‘big’ oil companies are ‘screwing’ us,” we claim. “The government needs to do something about this, we scream!”

Well, we have ourselves to blame. Yes, our government could have done something, but it didn’t because we would not have elected national representative who would have advocated such action.

Economics is not all that complicated once we skim off all the technical jargon aimed at making it sound overwhelming.

Seemingly, hundreds of years ago, I had to take a few economics courses at the Wharton School of Finance. I encountered a tough professor there by the name of Dr. Irvin Miller.

Although I thought he was the meanest, most miserable, opinionated old dude whose parents, many of us believed, were never married, I did learn a few basic tenets of economics.

I’m not going into any detail about what I leaned or didn’t learn. I’m not going to discuss Dr. Miller’s teaching techniques other than to say that he’s probably dead now, possibly even in Hell if such a place exists.

No, I’m just going to apply the principles of supply and demand to the price of oil, along with some of the steps that we should have taken to change outcomes or, since we didn’t, what our federal government should have done despite our wishes.

Skim off all the fancy jargon, and we realize that supply and demand are intuitive concepts. The more of something there is, the less it costs to buy it. The less of it there is, the more it costs to buy it.

Oil trades on the world commodity market. The only way to make the price of a commodity drop is to buy less of it. And, since the United States buys more of it than the next 5-consummers combined, the price of oil would come down if we bought even moderately less of it.

Another simple concept in economics is something called an “equilibrium” price. This, in simple terms, is the price at which market consumers are willing to keep paying for something.

Raise a commodity’s price above this level and we’re going to buy less of it. Keep raising the price of it and we’re going to buy even less, still.

I think, at least in the United States, this price hit at around $3.50 a gallon. It got our attention and folks began to cut back. We hit the buying “even less of it” point at $4 a gallon.

Here’s the problem, though. We could have hit this point over a year ago had our federal government had the gumption to do something about it.

When the price of gasoline hit $2.50 a gallon, the feds could have slapped $1 a gallon tax on it. We’d still have had to pay $3.50 a gallon for our gas, but the extra money would have been going to OUR government instead of to far less friendly ones: Iran and Russia jump into my mind!

An added benefit would have been the beginning of our consumption cutbacks. We’d have begun showing our displeasure for the price then and the price wouldn’t be hitting $4 a gallon and threatening to go even higher.

Remember, we consume more oil than the next 5-world consumers combined do. If you were a supplier, could you afford to have your largest customer cut back on purchases by 20- to 25-percent?

I’m a Conservative. I hate taxes the same as others do. But sometimes a tax can be a positive thing in the end.

Even though Conservatives would rather have their hemorrhoids ripped out with needle nose pliers—sans anesthesia—than even mention “taxes,” this one would have been an appropriate one.

People will send me email telling me that this would not have helped because world demand for oil was increasing. I agree; it was. But, the demand would have to increase one hell of a lot to make up for the drop in this country’s demand.

Besides, once we jump on the conservation bandwagon and begin seriously searching for ways to develop alternative energy sources, the rest of the industrialized world will follow suit.

As it stands now, the price we now pay for gasoline has begun to exert its domino effect. Everything else is going up, causing cutbacks in those areas.

The average American citizen is in a difficult situation. We put OURSELVES there because we have a seemingly overwhelming “consume now and worry about it later” mentality.

Even when our government exercises good common sense, it seems to be such a rarity that we don’t trust them. We don’t elect people who raise our taxes.

If we were not so fast on the tax draw to support our pork spending and other nonessential things, we’d be more open to a legitimate tax.

Be back next week. Have a great one.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Whoa! How many zeros did you say?

2008-06-01T13:06:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

Terrorism isn’t the worst danger we face in this country. It isn’t even close, either. And, while the war in Iraq is a serious problem for us, it isn’t the most urgent. Let me explain.

As a nation, we waste money in quantities that most people can’t imagine. We’ve become so desensitized in terms of government spending that the terms "billion" and "trillion" no longer mean anything.

The numbers are so massive that average citizens, having no real concept of just how big they are, simply shrug at the thought of such expenditures. They may even chuckle a bit whenever people issue those “Golden Fleece” awards over stupid spending.

The late Republican Senator Everett Dirksen (he died in 1969 at the age of 73) used to crack his famous joke about the way the United States Congress deals with spending issues.

"You know,” he'd joke, "a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon we're into some serious money."

I remember Johnny Carson’s audience cracking up big time over it. And, that was back in the day when everyone considered a MILLION dollars a lot of money.

So, just how LARGE is a BILLION dollars? Let’s do a little pretending to see if we can get it into perspective. We’ll all pretend that we have a BILLION dollars.

Let's ignore compound interest, too. We’ll simply assume that our $1-billion ($1,000,000,000—yep, that’s 9-zeros) is in cash, and that we have a storage closet that will hold it all in denominations of $5s, $10s, $20s, $50s.

In other words, when we want to buy something, we just open the damn closet and pull out a fist-full of $20s—or whatever—and go buy it.

A billion is equal to a thousand million—1,000 times 1,000,000. So if we have $1-billion, we could spend $1-million a year for one-thousand years. But, the bad news is that we’re not going to live for 1-thousand-years, so we’d better spend it faster.

But, even if we spend $2-million a year for 500-years, or $4-million a year for 250-years, or even $8-million a year for 125-years, we’re probably going to run out of life’s breath before our money runs out.

So, let’s speed it up a bit. If we conserve our finances effectively, we could spend about $12-million a year over an 80-year lifespan without running out of money.

We’d have to make some sacrifices—who doesn’t these days?—but I think we could all still live a pleasant life, all things considered.

Now, let’s add some perspective. We've spent over $466 billion on the Iraq war since "mission accomplished," which breaks down to around $8-billion per month.

But, even though I think our government has squandered this through the inept execution of the war, let's all forgive and forget. We’ll simply chalk it all up to what the private sector calls a sunk cost—lost due to monumental ineptness.

Of course, the private sector also fires its CEOs and Executive Managers for these kinds of screw-ups, but we won’t talk about this here.

Just remember; we have to be careful with this forgiving stuff. If we become too forgiving, our politicians may get the idea that we’re a bunch of damned, wishy-washy, pushover fools.

With this in mind, I want us all to consider that over the same Iraqi war reference period, you know… since “mission accomplished,” we've spent over $85-billion on PORK projects.

Breaking this all down into annual and monthly terms, we’ve PORKED ourselves to the tune of around $17-billion a year, or around $1.5-billion a month.

Understand that I’m not knocking this. While there are a couple of different definitions for PORK spending, here’s the most common one used by those with 3-digit IQs.

PORK is what OTHER U. S. Representatives and Senators spend on THEIR constituent states and representative districts.

Whatever our OWN Congresspersons and Senators spend on OUR state is never considered PORK, and is always a matter of vital security interest to the entire country.

Even so, 99% of PORK is waste no matter how we define it. It's used for nothing more than gaining election year "attaboy" points for each state's respective Representatives and Senators.

Now, let's redo the arithmetic. We have $17 billion dollars. Not only this year, but EVERY year. Over an 80-year life span, it comes to $1.36-TRILLION. Spelled out, that's $1,360,000,000,000.

Just think... If you had just $1-trillion (that's one-thousand billion), you could spend $1-billion a year for 1,000 years, or $2-billion a year for 500 years, or $4-billion a year for 250 years... You finish the arithmetic!

We spend all of this money on all of this PORK… not just during one year, but every year. Yet, we face a national debt of over $9-trillion. It will be even higher when the next President takes office.

It’s one thing to be in hock to the tune of $9-trillion and have the best of everything: infrastructure, energy independence, affordable health care for EVERYONE, etc. But we don’t. We’re light-years from it.

How many of our critical social issues could we resolve if we'd stop letting our elected representatives waste money at the clip they're presently doing it?

Think about it! We're going to have to do something about business as usual on the beltway. If we don't do it soon, it won't be terrorists who do this country in! Ya think?

Say… you don’t think these politicians think we’re a bunch of damned, wishy-washy, pushover fools, do you?

I’ll be back next week with some more dirt. I have not even come close to hammering the lobbyists on K-Street, but stand by.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Memorial Day: A chronical of a perpetually expanding list of names

2008-05-25T12:51:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

For years, America observed Memorial Day on May 30 of each year, initially to honor the soldiers who died in the American Civil War. Following WW-I, however, Congress expanded its observance to honor all U. S. men and women who have died in military service to their country.

Congress changed the day of observance to the last Monday in May. I’m not sure of the significance of the celebration date, but I suspect that it had more to do with a commercial opportunity for retail sales than it did with expanding the nation’s period for honoring its war-dead.

Whatever! This is not about when we observe it. It’s about why and for whom we observe it. I’m going to speak to the matter strictly from my own perspective: that of a combat veteran.

At the outset, I want you to know that in Washington, DC there is a Viet Nam Memorial Wall. It consists of 58,195 names; service people who died fighting for this country’s “security” interests.

I considered twenty-seven of them close friends. We had similar hopes and dreams for our futures. Five of us became like brothers, two of which died while cradled in my arms.

I still—over 40-years later at the age of 66—bolt upright in bed tightly clutching my pillow; their faces are as vivid as they were that awful day.

I see and feel the stickiness of their blood on my hands and combat fatigues. I watch helplessly as they exhale for the last time. I feel them go to dead weight. My heart pounds in my head and sometimes I can’t go back to sleep!

Surviving combat veterans never forget. Don’t believe, even for a moment, that we do.

Personally, I’ve never met any surviving combat veterans who’ve ever expressed the notion of looking forward to dying for their country. I know that I certainly never did.

Neither have these honorable folks ever expressed any signs of exhilaration at the prospect of being wounded, either. Again, I certainly never looked forward to my wounds.

Some military people want to be there, of course, especially young and naïve gung-hoers that can’t wait to get over there and kick enemy asses. But, most would as soon be somewhere else.

Even the young naïve gung-hoers soon change their attitudes after that first taste of real combat causes them to realize that there and Hell are the same place.

It’s amazing how quickly cockiness dissipates in the shadow of genuine fear, frequently accompanied by uncontrollable vomiting and, sometimes, by a loss of both bladder and bowel control.

There is no romanticism about it, though. Strictly speaking, military people die in combat because they’re in the military at the time a war begins and they end up over there.

For many, even though at the time they joined… voluntarily… at some earlier point, it was not necessarily to be sent over there. In Viet Nam, most would rather have been somewhere else but had no choice because they were drafted and sent over there.

There is nothing dishonorable about this. It’s simple human nature. And, military people are just as human as their civilian counterparts are.

The reason that our service men and women deserve our nation’s unyielding respect and eternal gratitude isn’t because they “unselfishly” sacrificed their lives for all of us, but because they honored their commitment to complete assigned missions, to the death if necessary.

Herein lies the honor and dignity of military service, volunteer or otherwise. These are ordinary people, who consistently accomplish extraordinary tasks under unfathomably dangerous circumstances.

It’s why the military ideal; “We’ll ALL come back—though some will be dead—or none of us will come back;” is not just rhetoric. They believe it to very depths of their souls and they prove it every day of their lives.

The other aspect of Memorial Day pertains to the loved ones left behind; the ones who must, somehow, try to piece their lives back together after a good deal of their reason for living has died in combat.

Our concern for those who have died in combat, and their families, is genuine. It is also, for the most part, clinical. But that all changes when it involves one of our own. Then it becomes very personal.

Generally, we do not experience war’s full impact. At best, we’ll see a few flag-draped caskets being carried off of transport planes. It’s all very ceremonial, solemn, and respectful. But, it’s also quite sanitized.

The raw, terrible reality that, many times, the remains inside those caskets are missing critical parts is always born by remaining loved ones. Unless we clinical observers have experience to the contrary, we miss this hideous point entirely.

The Pentagon refers to such cases as “viewing not recommended.” Inside of such caskets are shrouded, unrecognizable remains of what was, not long ago, someone’s loving spouse, child, parent, sibling, or friend.

The remains are shrouded, tucked beneath an immaculately prepared empty dress uniform, complete with medals and ribbons. Oh, there is a body, or what’s left of one, but you’d have to reach down, beneath the dress uniform to feel it inside the shroud.

If the media would let this reality smack us between our eyes, the incessant chest thumping on the part of too many wannabe warriors would stop in a hurry. And, our politicians would learn, first hand, the meaning of direct accountability.

Finally, it’s time all of us come to understand that this nation is not free because some version of a benevolent deity is on “our side.”

While it is nice, snuggly and acceptable to think such thoughts as a matter of religious faith, it is folly of the worst sort to rely too heavily on such beliefs as a matter of military tactics.

As a nation, in uniform or not, beginning on day we declared ourselves independent from King George, right up to the present, we’ve always been willing AND able to do whatever we had to do in order to keep ourselves free.

If we ever lose either the will or the ability to defend ourselves—to the death if necessary—against all foes, we’ll forfeit our freedoms and render our Constitution worth less than the paper it’s written on.

Our military personnel have always held true to their commitment of service, even to the fullest measure, to keep us free. Our civilian population, overwhelmingly, has always been willing to make the sacrifices to support our troops, the perceived righteousness of the war notwithstanding.

Before we send our best and brightest into harm’s way, we’d better have a righteous reason for doing so. We’d better fully understand precisely what we’re asking our youngsters to do. And, we’d better possess a national resolve to complete the mission successfully and bring them home.

A President’s clueless hankering to kick some ass does not qualify and a Congress inept at driving that point home is useless to us as a nation.

And, once we have our war veterans back home again, particularly the wounded, we’d better be prepared to take care of them with the same level of commitment that they had when they fulfilled theirs.

Have a safe and meaningful Memorial Day. Back at you next week.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Oh my GOD! Our next president's ALREADY in trouble.

2008-05-18T14:00:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

We all—at least I know I do—feel like we’ve been marinating in the endless hyperbole of a long worn out primary season. But, just you wait.

The feverish pitch of discontent is going to get a lot worse as the campaign windbaggery increases over the next 6-months.

Here is some of the less glamorous stuff. The press won’t talk about it because to do so would bore most of us to death.

Or, maybe most of the media is clueless! It’s probably a little of both, I fear.

Be aware. Even though this stuff can cure insomnia, it all came straight from the Congressional Record, some of it going back to 1938.

Like it or not, the Piper awaits payment. So, read on and get your wallets out! It’s about to get expensive. Rising gas prices don’t even scratch the surface, either.

Taxes! Nothing induces catatonia in Conservatives like the mention of the word, “taxes.” They just seem to drop right down into a thumb-sucking fetal position.

Liberals, on the other hand, don’t seem to be anywhere near as terrified of these terms. Well, at least they don’t if we don’t count both Congressional reelection and Presidential election years.

I thought NOW would be a good time to bring up the fact that ALL of our respective candidates have been less than forthright about the nation’s tax situation. Hillary? Barack? John? ANYONE?

Guess what? The Iraq war will NOT be at the top of our next president’s list of things that have to be addressed NOW. And, all three of our candidates know it, too.

No matter which candidate we elect—Democrat or Republican—the number one concern will HAVE to be the economy. If not, the present will look like GREAT times compared to what’s coming. Barack? John? Hillary? ANYONE!

First, two years from now, $300 billion in tax cuts will expire. And, because we are facing a monumental budget deficit, the next president will have to DO something.

And, it will cause whichever candidate it is to come to a complete understanding of the phrase, "between a rock and hard place."

If Congress—the president can't do a thing, really—lets the tax cuts expire, we'll be in for a humongous tax increase. If the Congress extends the cuts, the shortfall in federal revenue will become even worse than it is now. Senator Reed? Representative Pelosi? ANYONE!

Remember, we're looking at a projected budget deficit of about $500 billion. And, our national debt is around $10 trillion as I type this. Wait and see what happens to it, given the status-quo—in two years!

The three main areas of concern are first, $174 billion in individual and business tax cuts, plus tax credits for expanded child and education initiatives. These, alone, reduced the average tax bite for a family of four by about $1,700 a year—from $4,000 down to around $2,300.

Second, there is the matter of that annoying alternative minimum tax that the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted about 40-years ago as a knee-jerk reaction to trap a handful of millionaires in the process of exploiting the system.

An unintended consequence, thanks to inflation, has been the entrapment of over 25-million honest taxpayers (middle-class) getting their pants ripped off. This little mistake will cost around $82 billion to fix AND it will have to be fixed. Why is the subject of a near-future column.

Finally, something will have to be done about the inheritance tax (the "death" tax). It will expire at midnight on 12/31/2010. One lousy second later, as the calendar switches over to 01/01/2011, all inheritances over $1 million will be taxed at a 55% rate.

This will result in additional tax revenue of about $50 billion for the federal government, but it will sure piss off the natives! Remember the battle cry of "read my lips; no new taxes?" It made George H. W. Bush a one-termer.

OK, now let’s explode some fiscal myths concerning Liberal and Conservative spending...

From 1938 through the year 2007—69-years—we’ve had 35-years worth of Democratic presidents and 34-years of Republican presidents. Over that period, our national debt has increased at an annual rate of around 8.7%.

According to the Congressional Record, the breakdown is an average annual increase of 8.3% during Democrat years and 9.7% during Republican years.

This is no big deal. The difference is not worth discussing. However, when we look closer at the Congressional Record, we see something else. Let's start with Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, and go forward to 2007.

We elected 12-presidents during this period: six Democrats and six Republicans. But, the debt scenario looks a bit different under this microscope.

Democratic Presidents increased the debt an average of 3.2% annually, while the Republican presidents increased it 9.7% annually. This looks a tad bad for the Republicans, but maybe not too bad.

However, here's something interesting. The Neo-Conservative movement started in earnest in 1981—certainly, we all remember Newt Gingrich.

The Neo-Conservative presidents since then have been Reagan, Bush-I, not a true Neo by any stretch but he let the Neo's run his presidency, and Bush-II.

Of course, in between Bush-I and -II came Bill Clinton. And, Conservatives, keep holding your noses! The reason that the country elected Bush-II in his first term was NOT because he ran against Al Gore, or because of the Florida ballot fiasco, or even because of the United States Supreme Court.

It was because Bill Clinton could not run for a third term. At the time, he would have won reelection in a landslide—justifiably or not.

Clinton—I know you Bush folks won't like this—sexual indiscretions notwithstanding, raised the debt only around 4% a year, while Reagan, Bush-I, and Bush-II raised it an average of about 11% a year.

Conservatives, keep inhaling and exhaling into the paper bag! Relative to the debt’s RATE of increase, Bill Clinton has been the only exception over the past 25-years, bringing the debt growth RATE down.

By the end of his last term, he had brought it down to just about ZERO.

Looking at the entire national debt over the past 25-years, Reagan, Bush-I, and Bush-II have been responsible for around 71% of it. Neo-Conservatives, it seems, either don’t know how or don’t have the will to control government spending.

Oh, and don’t blame it on wars, either. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have taken us to war. The Neo-Conservatives just seem more inept at efficiently ending them.

I have no ax to grind here, folks. For the record, I’m a Conservative, a registered Republican since 1963—the first year I was eligible to vote.

More importantly, though, I'm just a scientific and legal researcher who knows how to find the REAL numbers and crunch them.

I've said this numerous times. If we don't get the extremists out of our government (Neo-Conservatives on the Right and their equally dumb-assed cousins on the Left), we're ALL screwed.

If you notice, none of the three candidates has brought any of this up. They have not brought it up because the media hasn’t asked the right questions: too busy spending all if its time endlessly plotting meaningless gotchas.

Until we voters take the extremists out of the political equation, Congress cannot work the way we need it to work.

While the system wasn’t perfect back in the days of Tip O'Neil (’51-’69), Everett Dirksen (’77-’87), Barry Goldwater (’69-’87), and others, we didn't have the crescendo of deal-breaking ideological stalemates as we do now.

These people would solve myriad problems over a simple round of golf or afternoon lunch sessions. They were on opposing political sides, but they knew the art of reasonable, accommodating compromise.

Both sides of the political isle talked to one and other. They also understood that the security and prosperity of this country depended on it. They still DO depend on it—desperately!

We need to get back to that way of governing. We should be looking for a candidate who can get us closer to talking to each other. I'm not sure that any of the current candidates can do this... at least not right now.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Ah, YES! Let's hang the little darlings.

2008-05-11T12:54:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

Have you ever noticed how, every time some teenager does something “stupid,” a hue and cry goes up to pass some law aimed at “preventing” future occurrences? Oh yes, and the loudest cries usually come from knee jerk state lawmakers.

In Delaware, there is a bill in the early stages of sponsorship that would, if passed, result in teens losing their driving privileges if caught in the act of underage drinking.

The mere presence of a blood-alcohol level, however slight, would constitute legal grounds—whether they were driving at the time or NOT!

Well, it all sounds good and tough, but it’s no more than just another one of those convenient cure-alls that will wind up on the junk heap of stuff that never actually worked.

Adolescent problems abound throughout society: teenage drinking, adolescent drug use, and teen crime—to name but a few.

We’ve increased the legal drinking age and installed zero-tolerance policies in our schools and criminal justice systems.

We’ve established curfews, tried teenagers as adults, and sent them to adult prisons. And, I’ve even heard cries for adolescent executions.

It’s amazing, really. For all of our chest-thumping, get tough on crime proclamations, we still have one-percent of our adult population in jail, the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Obviously, something’s eschew, as comedian Lewis Black would say. But, this never stops us from attempting to get even tougher.

Oh, we try other methods for a few months, but when they don’t seem to work right away, we go back to “getting tough,” which has NEVER worked.

If these techniques fail to work on adults, why do we keep trying to make them work on our adolescent population?

Politicians love cure-all solutions, commonly referred to as panaceas. The things are so convenient in terms of almost no relative costs AND they NEVER apply to the adults who propose them.

But, every bit as important as these two characteristics, cure-alls NEVER address the need to change adult values and conditions that have a much more powerful affect on adolescent behavior.

Adolescent curfews, adolescent drug testing, zero tolerance policies, and myriad other social cure-alls are wildly popular with local and national lawmakers for three reasons.

First, they NEVER interfere with our adult freedoms. Second, they make we adults feel better about ourselves because we’re so accomplished at conning ourselves into believing that we’re “doing” something. And third, they get politicians reelected with a minimum of intellectual effort.

I am, by no means, a social “do-gooder.” I fully recognize that we have serious adolescent-generated problems; and that we must address them for the greater good. I just don’t think that cure-alls work.

Neither time nor space permits me to address all of the ones I’ve mentioned so far. So, I’m going to pick on just one: our current favorite, underage drinking.

This past week I came across some data that sheds some sensible light on the problems that occur whenever we erroneously analyze underage drinking—translated as drinking alcoholic beverages prior to the age of 21-years.

It involved an old report—around the year 2000—put out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The report claimed that our ban on under-21 alcohol drinking in 1975 has saved 19,120 lives to date.

I couldn’t find any documentation on that number: 19,120. I’m a skeptic by nature, as are most of us that live in the world of legitimate science. Frankly, I wanted to see where the NHTSA got 19,120.

So, I began to dig around. I found a 1984 report published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety regarding teenaged traffic fatalities. The report cited 7,648 teenage lives saved by increasing the minimum drinking age.

The study claimed that in states that raised the drinking age to 21-years, traffic fatalities fell around 10% more for ages 18 to 20 than they did for 21- to 24-year-olds.

Fine! Does it prove cause and effect, though? I seriously doubt it. But guess what number you come up with if you multiply 7,648 by 2.5?

Do the arithmetic. If all the NHTSA did was fudge the numbers—and it seems as though they did—their report was not worth the paper they used to print it.

I did some more digging. I found another report authored by Peter Asch and David Levy, professors from Rutgers and Baltimore University respectively.

They found that raising the drinking age to 21 resulted in a reduction in deaths in the 18-20-year-old group but raised them in the 21-24-year-old group.

They concluded that a “minimum legal drinking age has no perceptible control on driving fatalities.” They concluded even further, “Inexperience in drinking is a much more applicable risk factor… AND it’s independent of age.”

In 2001, Tom Dee and Bill Evans, from Swarthmore and the University of Maryland respectively, confirmed the earlier study. Only the latter study looked at multiple factors.

They concluded that raising the legal drinking age shifted some fatality risks from teenagers to young adults.

Specifically, raising the drinking age from 19 to 21 cut traffic fatalities for the 18- and 19-year-old set by 5% but increased it for the 22- and 23-year-old set by 8%.

In other words, it did nothing other than to increase (significantly) the “magnitude of mortality redistribution.”

We need to learn that there is a difference between saving lives and postponing death, particularly as it applies to the skill sets of both driving AND responsible drinking.

All of us who do both of these responsibly, learned how to do so by DOING, not by reading a manual of some kind. And, DOING is a critical component to adolescent leaning. We need to make sure we don’t forget this.

In order to master responsible adult behaviors, adolescents must practice them, whether it’s drinking, driving, or any other responsible adult activity.

I’m not advocating letting 16-year-olds drink or letting 12-year-olds drive. I’m simply saying that raising the legal drinking age from… say 18 or 19 to 21 does NOT prevent drinking related fatalities.

Nor, will raising the minimum driving age to 18 or even 20 prevent youthful driving deaths. It will simply shift the age at which they occur.

However, limiting the number of young people who can be in a young driver’s car will prevent multiple simultaneous deaths. This is good.

And, here’s another “sobering” statistic from the same report. In 40% of the drinking-related teen driving fatalities and almost 90% of those involving even younger children, the drunk driver was OVER the age of 21-years.

Throughout the United States, objective statistics prove that the majority of these so-called tough solutions fail to work, but we keep applying them.

In controlled city studies, for example, curfews were either not effective or increased the incidence of crime. The same is true of “zero tolerance” policies. They do virtually nothing to curb drug use.

Adolescents need time to practice responsible adult skills. Postponing the learning process does not help. Like it or not, we’re going to lose some adolescents to driving accidents, drinking notwithstanding. It’s a function of inexperience.

Here’s an idea. While it will take a greater degree of intellectual aptitude and time, perhaps teaching teenagers by example would prove more beneficial in the end than draconian measures aimed at getting tough, for the mere sake of it, have been so far.

God knows that our seemingly perpetual quest to abolish adolescence has not worked out too well.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

You MIGHT be rich and NOT know it!

2008-05-04T15:56:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

If you work for a living, you know all about the Social Security tax your employer withholds from your paycheck each pay cycle.

The total is 12.4%; of which you, as the employee, pay half and your employer pays the other half.

And, God help you if you’re self-employed and have employees of your own. Not only will you have to pay half of your employees’ Social Security tax, you’ll have to pay ALL of your own—the entire 12.4%.

There is a cap, however, on the amount of earnings that are subject to the tax. Currently that cap is $102,000 per year. So, if you earn in excess of this amount, the excess is not subject to Social Security tax.

This drives the dyed-in-the-wool Liberals right up the proverbial wall. They immediately point out how this is a Conservative attempt to protect those filthy rich people.

The political hot air blows profusely—especially around reelection time—hinting at raising the cap or eliminating it altogether.

The proponents of the move claim that it’ll kill two birds with one stone. First it will end the tax-free frenzy for those wanton rich people.

Second, it will help solve an impending shortfall in Social Security benefits to those who retire.

In fact, Barack Obama has already stated that he favors removing the cap… not raising it, but REMOVING it completely.

When I read about this—quite by accident—I called my friends of ten years, Jack and Martha (No last names. They really are friends and I don’t want to embarrass them).

“Barack Obama thinks you guys are rich,” I told Martha over the phone. “Wow,” she replied, “Wait til I tell Jack!”

Jack came on the line and asked me how the hell Barack Obama knows how much he and Martha make.

“He has no idea,” I replied. “He wants to remove the current $102,000 cap on Social Security earnings in order to strengthen the fund and make the rich pay their fair share.”

I further explained that, “by implication, he thinks you two must be rich and he’s promising all the poor folks that he’s going to make you pay up.”

Jack and Martha have been married for ten years. They have three children, ages eight, six, and three.

He has worked for a software developer company for the last eight years, currently earning $65,000 a year plus major medical benefits for which he pays group rates each pay cycle.

Martha works a full-time job outside the home also. I’m not sure of her title, but it calls for a college degree and she earns $46,509.00 a year without major medical because she’s under Jack’s program.

These folks do not live an extravagant life style. She drives a newer model compact car—still making payments. He drives a debt-free old clunker.

Their cost of living has gone through the ceiling like everyone else’s has. Plus, their third child has special medical needs for which their insurance co-pays have skyrocketed over the last year and a half.

In order to meet all of their financial obligations, and to satiate the chronic addictions of eating regularly and living indoors, Jack took a second job writing non-competing code for another software company.

He averages about 30-hours a week, earning an additional $31,000 a year. So their combined family gross income, for the past two years, at least, is $142,500.

And, the way things are going economically right now, this is not going to change anytime soon—at least not voluntarily.

Senator Obama needs to explain how taxing this family an additional $5,022 a year will ensure that those rich people pay their fair share.

Families like Jack and Martha’s outnumber those earning a great deal more… you know, the ones he’s REALLY out to get, by a ratio of 500 to 1.

I think the impact, if any at all, won’t be worth the effort to figure it out. But, hell, this has never stopped an inept Congress before.

There is no denying that Social Security is in trouble. There is also no denying that we have to fix the problem. And QUICKLY!

However, we can do it WITHOUT privatizing it, increasing the cap, or eliminating it altogether.

The problem is that YOU guys down there on the beltway won’t do it if it means cutting into your mad money.

Try this. Leave the rate alone. Leave the cap alone. Just take Social Security tax revenue OUT of the general fund.

Put it into an interest-bearing fund and make it untouchable for any reason other than retirement and SSI needs.

This will mean, of course, that people like Senator Babbling Byrd won’t be able to deliver the same amount of annual pork to their home states.

It will also mean some serious cuts into the rest of the Congress’ spending habits.

We face many problems today that YOU people can solve a lot easier than you want to admit. After all, you people DID create most of them with your knee-jerk reactions to insure reelection.

Everyone in the United States Congress agrees on what they are. So, why don’t you get together and solve them?

I mentioned that I heard of Senator Obama’s desire to eliminate the Social Security cap by accident. There’s a reason for this, too.

It’s due to an alarming increase in the ineptness factor on the part of the reporting media. The 24-hour cable talking heads have too much time to fill.

They devote incredible amounts of energy to meaningless “gotcha” scenarios. The Reverend Wright/Barack Obama saga takes on a surreal precedence over a protracted, failing war effort.

Hillary Clinton swigging a shot of whiskey and a beer chaser hilariously trumps a crumbling economy and the fact that clueless George still thinks we’re doing OK.

The next United States President—regardless of party affiliation—will be facing a national debt topping the $10-trillion mark. It’s already at $9.3-trillion and growing at a pace of $1.45-billion a day!

On top of this, there are tax-cut issues that the next one must address immediately. The luxury of postponing action the way the last one did will no longer be an option.

With the exception of a few objective investigative reporters, we don’t hear much about the things that really matter.

I fear that the reporting media has become a Pavlovian dog. The politicians have trained them to ask the wrong questions—on cue—thereby rendering the answers moot.

Edward R. Murrow and others like him—all long dead—must be turning over in their graves!

One of three sitting United States Senators is going to be our next President. For the first time in our history, both a woman and a black man have a realistic chance of winning.

While I think this is both significant and wonderful, I resent the fact that the press has reduced the contest to nothing more than gender, race, and age, as well as a contest to see which news outlet can acquire the greatest number of meaningless gotchas!

There are millions of other people in this country working two, three, and sometimes four jobs to support their families. On top, most of them fall way short of that $102,000 combined joint gross amount.

I’m not trying to diminish their efforts or plights in life. However, placing everyone in the same situation and reducing society to the classes of the insanely rich and the working poor solves nothing.

Monetary benevolence is a function of monetary affluence. It always has been. While the availability of the latter does not guarantee the former, eliminating the affluence will absolutely guarantee the elimination of ALL benevolence.

I’ll be back next week. I have a lot more questions to ask these candidates irrespective of gender, race, age, or ability to swig whiskey and beer.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Enough already!

2008-04-27T16:21:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I wasn’t going to write any more about it; but I changed my mind after listening to Bill Maher’s latest tirade against religion in general and the Pope specifically. But, Maher’s pontification wasn’t the only one that set me off.

Every national talking head pundit and comedian, including two-bit local wannabes, had to chime in with the same flavor of vocal tripe. All of it demonstrated, at least to me, the depths to which political, anti-religious, and comedic zealots would stoop to make a misinformed point or garner a cheap laugh.

Benedict XVI is the leader of approximately 1.2-billion Roman Catholics, of whom about 60-million reside in the United States. If people are going to level accusations against him, they should at least attempt to find out what they’re talking about.

While the current Pope did not instigate the sexual abuse problem in this country, the fact does not diminish his responsibility in attempting to resolve the matter. But this responsibility and his alleged Nazism are two separate issues.

So, we should deal with them separately, which is what I am going to do with this particular column. The difference is, that relative to the sex abuse scandal, I’m going to go further than Maher did by applying liberal coatings of blame over ALL of the participating parties, not just the Church, Her leadership and ordained priests.

First, those screaming for Maher’s firing need to get a grip. This is not a 1^st Amendment issue nor did Mr. Maher break any laws. HBO is a private TV service. If you don’t like their programming, don’t tune in. And, if you’re already tuned in and hear something offensive, tune out! But, let HBO know your reasons.

In my opinion, Bill Maher’s superior writing ability, issue perspectives, along with an impeccable timing of voice inflection and facial expression, combine to make him one of the funniest people on television. Even so, I do not agree with everything he says on his HBO program, Real Time with Bill Maher.

He missed the mark with his Nazi slam by intentionally omitting exonerating facts; and, he failed to go far enough in spreading the blame for one of the most horrendous sex scandals in modern Catholic Church history to ALL culpable parties.

While young Master Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) joined the Hitler Youth Group when he reached the age of 14-years, so did EVERY German boy of that era. They were COMPELLED to join upon reaching that young age. Mr. Maher obviously forgot to include this fact.

He left out two other facts, too, both verifiable. The first one, on the record, showed that young Master Ratzinger hated the group, refused to participate, and NEVER attended any meetings.

The second one verified that the entire Ratzinger family detested the Nazis and refused to participate in Nazi programs—at significant risk to their safety—because Nazism violated their religious beliefs.

Such factual omissions were disingenuous at best. There was no legitimate reason to attempt to link Benedict XVI to Nazism. In attempting to do so, Maher offended millions of decent, faith-living Catholics who were every bit as horrified over the sex scandal as he was.

In fact, it seemed to me that his intent was nothing more than a juvenile-style hissy fitter’s attempt to get attention and a cheap laugh. Shame on him! I know a number of 4-year-olds who demonstrate, routinely, infinitely greater skills in controlling their emotions.

He later issued an apology for this aspect of his rant. I’m not going to express gratitude for his doing so because it was the only decent thing for him to do.

On the matter of his criticism regarding the Church’s cover-ups over years of sexual abuses of prepubescent and pubescent boys by Roman Catholic Priests, he was on the mark—except he didn’t go far enough. So, I’m going to do it for him.

I will be 66-years-old in a month and a half. I was raised, from birth, as a Roman Catholic. My parents were staunch in their faith. As such, my siblings and I adhered to ALL of the rules.

In addition, I eagerly embraced one of my late mother’s rules—that I become an altar boy and serve mass on a regular basis at St. Helena’s Parish where I and my siblings attended elementary school.

Not only did I obey HER rule, I achieved the lofty goal, the highest status for altar boys of that era, Master of Ceremonies at solemn high masses, weddings, and funerals.

In fact, the last ceremony that I officiated as a senior altar boy Master of Ceremonies at St. Helena’s was my dad’s funeral mass. He died, along with my 3-year-old brother, as the result of an automobile accident. I was 14-years old.

Three weeks prior to this, however, I found myself on the receiving end of a priest’s sexual advances.

At the conclusion of my serving his 11:30 AM Sunday mass, the late Father Walter Powers decided to show me how much he cared for me. He came up behind me (fully clothed), gripped my hips with his hands, and rubbed himself against my buttocks.

Mostly, his action surprised and scared me. But, it also ANGERED me. I reacted the way my dad had taught me to react to anyone who approached me in such a manner: BY NOT GOING INTO A PANIC.

With a swift body turn and a clenched fist, I delivered a decisive uppercut to his scrotum sac. He went down like an anvil, with a resounding thud. I left the sacristy immediately and rode my bike home.

There were no repercussions. He never spoke to me again, nor I him. I did NOT feel traumatized THEN nor have I ever felt compelled to seek monetary compensation from the Church.

In fact, I’ve often looked back on it with a fond sense of having been an instrument of specific justice, especially as I recall that contorted look of sheer agony on his face.

I did not tell my father about it because he would have ended up in prison as the result of beating the good father to within an inch of his life or, perhaps, going all the way and killing him.

I did not tell my mother because, sadly, she would not have believed me. To her a Catholic Priest was, in fact, another Christ—incapable of such despicable acts.

Here’s my point. Father Powers was only ONE of twenty other priests in the Diocese of Wilmington abusing children. Simultaneously, thousands of others, all of them sexually perverted, were doing the same from coast to coast across the United States.

Many of them got away with it for YEARS before their names came to light. Some, like Walter Powers, died long before that. But, when it comes to tossing blame around, society simply fails to include everyone.

In Catholic dioceses like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, and myriad parishes across Middle America, police departments had standing orders NOT to arrest these priests.

Of course, this was NEVER an OFFICIAL policy. But, It was definitely one of those “wink-wink” policies that came to be “understood” by every street cop, desk sergeant, and precinct commander.

Like it or not, it was a fact back then. Whenever they caught a sexually wayward priest breaking the law, they returned him to his pastor or diocesan bishop and let THEM deal with the issue.

In my opinion, this renders the very police department officials sworn to protect innocent people as inferentially complicit in the scandal. But we never hear this crowd mentioned pursuant to blame delegation, even as passive participants.

At St. Helena’s, a few intrepid folks complained, but EVERYONE knew about Father Powers: The pastor, the nuns who taught in the school, and many, if not most, of the parents of altar boys.

As with the police authorities, the nuns and lay-people are generally absent from mention during the blame game. For whatever, reason they chose NOT to raise too much hell. Nevertheless, they must share in at least partial blame for the scandal.

In my mind, they were just as inferentially complicit in the scandal as the priests who did the abusing and the Church authorities who successfully covered it up for years.

Finally, Benedict XVI did NOT transfer Cardinal Bernard Law to permanent duty in the Vatican just before the State of Massachusetts was to indict him. It was John Paul II. And, I would not bet against the notion that some state-level authority warned him ahead of time, either.

Of all of the people involved, the Popes, as insulated as they are from day-to-day operations, are the least indictable pursuant to this scandal.

I do not doubt Pope Benedict’s remorse and embarrassment at the way the Church leadership performed in this matter. On the other hand, he’d be a lot more convincing to me if he’d do just three things.

First, order Cardinal Bernard Law back to the United States to face his accusers. The second is to toss Cardinal Maloney of Los Angeles out of the priesthood. And third, permit the United States criminal justice system run its course.

This is the last I will write on the topic. I’ll get back to other things next Sunday. Have a great week.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment ohis column by clicking here.

Um, the Pope's here.

2008-04-20T12:28:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

Speaking of religion—and I don’t advise doing so—hordes of incessant TV and radio talking heads have analyzed the Holy Father’s visit to death, whether any of them knew what they were talking about or not. So, I’m not going to perpetuate it here.

Instead, I’m going to use the occasion to examine why religion, in general, tends to be such a potentially lethal subject—both physically and culturally.

In the United States, from the moment they become self-aware until the moment of their death, people express a blind belief in God. In fact, it takes a fair amount of guts to express otherwise.

The polls all agree; we are a religious lot. About 72% of the world’s population—around 84% in the United States—believes in a Deity, including a belief in Heaven and Hell. Here’s a breakdown of world religions.

As religious as we claim to be, though, we know little about our religion, and virtually nothing about most of the world’s other religions.

It’s a sad commentary that, in America, ample numbers of Protestants can’t differentiate between the Old and New Testaments, correctly recite the Protestant Version of the Ten Commandments, or name all four Gospels.

Equal numbers of Roman Catholics don’t know the Stations of the Cross, can’t name all the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, name all of the Sacraments, or the Ten Commandments. And, as many Catholics as Protestants can’t name the four Gospels, either.

The Jews don’t score any better. Many can’t adequately define the difference between Orthodoxy and Reform Movements or adequately define their own precepts. Neither can many of them name the five books of Moses.

Not so in European countries! Even though average Europeans would as soon have their hemorrhoids ripped out with needle-nose pliers… WITHOUT anesthesia, than attend church services, they know plenty about religion.

They know all about the things that we Americans don’t. More importantly, they also know many things about most of the world’s religions: the 4-Noble Truths of Buddhism, the 5-Pillars of Islam, the 8-Fold Path of Buddhism, the Ten Commandments (Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant Versions), to name just a few of them.

In this country, we don’t teach people about religion. In fact, the ACLU bounds out from the public school corridor shadows at the mere mention of the word religion. Public school officials assume a fetal position as the pros and cons take to microphones condemning each other.

In European countries, comparative religion courses are part of public school curricula from the beginning. They are also part of all university programs.

This is a dangerous situation in this country. Not only do we appear blindly dogmatic, it makes us look a bit silly to the rest of the world: not our blind belief in God, but rather our obvious cluelessness about religion.

It is more than a simple question of cultural diversity. Even before, but especially since 9/11, ignorance of various religions has proven, in some cases, to be physically lethal.

I wonder what would have happened in Waco, Texas if the FBI had assigned a religion expert to the case, especially regarding apocalyptic Christianity. Such and individual could have done a profile on David Koresh’s crackpot interpretation of the book of Revelation.

I’m not saying that it would have turned out differently. I’m merely saying that it could have had the FBI understood that Koresh believed with every fiber of his being that it was his God-destined duty to bring about the kind of apocalyptic end that ultimately occurred.

I read about a man from India who lived in Arizona. Right after 9/11, he was at a gas station, putting gas in his car, when some loony-assed, self-professed patriot zealot shot and killed him.

Because the man was wearing a turban, the assassin thought he was another one of those “towel-heads” gassing up to go and kill other Americans.

Muslim or not, it was not justification for murder. But, the victim was not a Muslim; he was a Sikh. But, what the hell, they all looked alike to this idiot. And, I’m afraid; they all look alike to many Americans.

I wonder how things would have turned out had George Bush attempted to learn, just a little bit, about the religious tenets of the multiple religious factions residing in pre-invasion Iraq.

The religious strife in the region, especially between Iran and Iraq, had been going on for centuries. The real fundamentalists are in Iran. Iraq was a secular country under Saddam Hussein, who wanted no part of radical Islam.

Iran tried numerous times to get rid of Saddam so that they could move into the country and install an Islamic Government. But, religious ignorance and all, George and his band of Neo-Cons took care of it for them. We’ll be living with that mess for decades.

All we ever seem to hear about in this country is the multiplicity of legal cases involving separation issues over “church and state.” While some of them are legitimate, many are not.

Regardless, however, teaching about religion has nothing to do with the theology of religion and our Constitution does not prohibit our public schools from teaching the former.

In addition to teaching Americans about religion—starting in grade school--perhaps we should also begin teaching our schoolchildren the difference between a scientific theory and a theological belief.

Of course, this must include the fact that believing in God is not grounds for non-believers to declare believers stupid. It’s just that such a belief isn’t a scientific theory because there’s no way—at least not yet—to develop a falsifiable a hypothesis.

Maybe… if we do this, we can vastly improve our religion literacy quotient and possibly avoid going to war so quickly and stupidly. And, let’s not discount improving our ability to compete with the rest of the world in science and math.

Back next week. I’m sure that something Earth-shattering will happen before then, especially with Barack and Hillary at each other’s throats. If not, I’ll come up with something.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

At times, some people should just SHUT UP!

2008-04-13T00:06:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

This past Monday, I received word that the 78-year-old mother of a friend of mine had died. It wasn’t a surprise; she had been terminally ill for some time. I stopped by their house to see if I could help out and to offer my condolences first hand.

While I was there, my friend let me read some of the letters, cards, and best wishes she and her mother had received from people—some of them from perfect strangers.

There were the usual get-well wishes, “we’re praying for you” wishes, etc. All of these were nice and certainly most welcomed.

However, I read six letters, two from acquaintances of the mother and four from perfect strangers. My friend has no idea how they found out about her mother’s illness in the first place.

Regardless, the themes of those letters were not only rude, but personally invasive. Here’s a bit of context for clarity.

Her mother had discovered a lump on her breast. She went to her doctor to have it checked. Between the time that she discovered it and the time she had a doctor examine it, fifteen days had passed.

This wasn’t a serious time lag, but, just the same, her doctor had offered to approve a referral had she wanted to have it checked out sooner. She declined.

Unfortunately, this lump, though small, turned out to have been a nasty, very aggressive, and rapid growth malignancy—I have the clinical name somewhere around here.

But, it’s not important. It would not have made a bit of difference how soon a doctor could have checked the lump.

By the time they were able to do a biopsy, it had already spread; involving one of her lungs and throat.

They gave her two options. She could do nothing and die—I’m paraphrasing, of course. They were much kinder, professionally clinical, and empathetic.

If she chose this option, they assured her that they could administer routine maintenance treatments to maximize her life-quality over the time she had left.

The second option was a procedure called a hemiquadrantectomy. The detail behind this procedure is extensive and very technical. So, let me describe what they do.

The surgeon begins the incision approximately an inch and a half below the ear. It follows a winding path down the side of the neck, across the chest to the other side of the torso. It then reverses direction, coming back to end just below the armpit.

The surgical team then removes everything outside the cut boundary. And, I mean EVERYTHING—arm, ribs, lung.

Would she have better odds of survival under such conditions? “Yes,” they told her. They would improve—again, I’m paraphrasing—from zilch to slightly better than slim.

This hinged, of course, on the assumption that the procedure itself or an unforeseen circumstance during a long and painful recovery period didn’t kill her first.

She chose the former option. Her family—daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—accepted her decision and supported her every step along the way.

She lived the rest of her life on her terms, enjoying shopping sprees, particularly with her great-grandchildren, putting her affairs in order, and enjoying her family as much as she could for the time she had left.

When she died, she did so peacefully, with dignity, and surrounded by people who loved her dearly.

So, what happened to upset her daughter, not to mention me? Strangers sticking their “religious” noses into other people’s business, THAT’S what.

We have no clue how six unrelated strangers found out about the decision to let nature take its course. But, somehow, six people took it upon themselves to write letters to a dying woman, expressing their concerns that she failed to put her trust in God.

The letters had a common theme. The wording of the comments, while different from letter-to-letter, carried the same messages.

”Choosing to die without a fight is not your right,” was one of the comments. “Only God can give life and only God can take it,” was another one.

I’m not even going into the rest of the garbage this woman had to put up with from these… so-called “Christians.”

I respect people of ALL religious faiths. Most of the ones I know are very kind, considerate, and intelligent. They both talk the talk and walk the walk. They manifest the very epitome of religious conviction and sincerity.

Unfortunately, though, there are those who do no such thing. They do nothing more than meddle in the personal affairs of others, using the guise of religious conviction as a convenient justification for their insipid moralizing and self-righteousness.

Dying is ALWAYS the last thing that can happen to people. Many times, however, it is not the WORST thing that can happen.

While it was difficult for her loved ones, they took great solace and much satisfaction in helping her die surrounded with love. They’ll never forget her, but time will help them learn to live without her, as it does all of us when people we love die.

We have reached a point in medical science where we can keep people alive almost indefinitely. But, sometimes we have to ask why? For what purpose and for who’s edification do we do it?

God notwithstanding, it’s time that we all learn that state of the art medical care and love are sometimes NOT the same thing.

If you are one of those who simply must preach the will of God under these circumstances, DON’T! Just send a nice religious get well or, ultimately, a religious sympathy card.

I’ll leave you now. I’ll be back next week. I have a memorial service to attend in honor of a life well lived.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

So, what's all this stuff about the "good ole" days!?

2008-04-06T01:58:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

“Look, I’m old enough to remember when gas was seventy-five cents a gallon, dude.” Yes, that’s what the man said. I don’t know how the subject of gas prices came up; it just did. Someone else blurted out, “But, those were the good old days.”

As I gazed around the room, I realized to myself that I probably have socks older than most of the others in the room. But, try as I did to stifle it, I laughed aloud. I swear; I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to sound as condescending as it must have appeared to most of them.

The silence in the room was deafening. The crowd, about fifty-five people ranging in age from early 20s to mid-40s—the speaker was only 30, for God’s sake—appeared to be waiting for this old sage to impart some ageless wisdom. And I feared that it had better be good, too!

The speaker asked me if I’d like to come to the podium. I accepted, but only because the podium was closer to an exit than where I had been.

I began by telling them that I would not give my age until the end of my comments. I challenged them to guess my age by the things I was going to tell them.

With that, I pulled my jacket sleeve up above my wristwatch, pointed to it, and explained that it’s a Bulova, a watch that my late mother gave to me the day I graduated from high school. “I still wear it, and I suspect that it is older than most of you.”

The room was deadly silent as I began to explain. Starting with my junior year in high school, I worked a part-time job at a local ACME food store. It was a Saturday in mid-June. My mother had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and two-dozen eggs on my way home late that afternoon.

In appreciation—provided I would stop and put some gas in it—she let me drive her brand new, less than two-months-old Chevy Bel Air ($2,500 loaded) to work that morning.

My hourly rate at ACME (the part-time rate) was $1.335 per hour. In case you think that was cheap, the minimum wage was only $1.00 an hour. I worked an average of 25-hours a week—sixteen-hours during the week after school and nine-hours on Saturday.

My weekly gross pay was about $33. Subtracting the standard wage taxes and a once a month deduction of $5 for union dues, I walked out of the store each payday with about $28. Employers didn’t give employee discounts, either.

And, YES, my mother expected ME to pay for the bread, eggs, and milk on those rare occasions when she asked me to pick them up. It was also a foregone conclusion that, EVERY TIME I drove her car, I would “gas” is up. Failing to do so, Hell would freeze over before I’d get to go near her car again… EVER!

It wasn’t too bad, though. A loaf of bread was 19-cents—and it was FRESH, too. Milk went for $1.01 a gallon; the containers were GLASS and had about 2-inches of cream at the top—no one gave a crap about cholesterol back then. The price of a dozen eggs was 85-cents.

Best of all, from fumes to a full tank at 30-cents a gallon, it only cost $5.10 to “gas” up her car. But, I don’t remember it ever costing ME more than $2.00 to do it.

My mother was a widow at the time. My father died in 1956. He was a good provider, though. His life insurance paid off the mortgage on our home, which he bought for a whopping $6,000 in 1947 based on a twenty-year mortgage.

My mother had a formal education sufficient to earn at least the average weekly wages at the time, about $108 a week. With what she netted, she raised my siblings, including the cost of sending me to a Catholic high school at a tuition rate of $90 a YEAR.

You know what else I remember about those times? ALL of the adults in my life; including my mother, aunts/uncles, teachers, neighbors, and virtually everyone I overheard speaking in general, seemed to be seriously obsessed with the impending demise of civilization as they knew it.

You want to know why? It was because of the way that we youngsters—the “younger” generation of THEIR time—were turning out: disrespectful, slothful, academically lazy, beer-drinking, cigarette smoking, sex-obsessed, and self-centered whiners.

Oh, yes, about those “good” ole days… as I look back on them, they weren’t all that good. Some things were. For example, it cost less to live in those days and the real value of the dollar (what it could buy) was much greater than now. But, so many other things were not good at all.

Kids were dying on a regular basis from things like polio and childhood leukemia. Scarlett fever was dangerous and still required penicillin shots every 6- to 8-hours.

Breast cancer was an automatic death sentence. In fact, many of the things that we can cure now, killed with speed and certainty then. We didn’t even have the means for early detection for most to them.

In 1951, my best friend in the whole school, Roger Coyne, died from leukemia. One fall-morning he threw up on the classroom floor and his mother came and took him home. He was dead before Christmas.

In 1952, sixty-thousand kids contracted polio in this country. Three-thousand of them died. Shirley Trotter, another beloved classmate of mine was among them. I still think about her.

No, I don’t think of those as better days. They were simpler. But just because ignorance is so blissful, doesn’t make it desirable.

The world was smaller then. Not geographically, but in the sense that it wasn’t as crowded. It took much longer for news to travel from one continent to another—no Internet! No Email! No cell phones!

It isn’t that these things are bad for us. It’s just that we fail to realize that the more crowded the world becomes, the crankier PEOPLE become. Crime rates in most categories were about as high then (as a percentage of the population) as they are now.

It’s just that there were no 24-hour cable news outlets to bombard us, CONSTANTLY, with the same negative stories for weeks on end. The world seems to be on fire and we’re all seemingly doomed to go to hell in a hand-basket because that’s what we hear… day in and day out!

We face serious problems today. We faced serious problems back in the good “ole” days, too. We found ways to solve them, though. Today, we have unprecedented technological capabilities. We will solve today’s problems, also.

As for the younger generation of OUR era, it will do just fine. They’ll grow up and worry about THEIR “younger” generation just as we did about ours.

Just as we were, they’ll be convinced that their “younger” generation, with all of its drugs, slothfulness, disrespectfulness, academic laziness, sexual depravity, and self-centered whiners, will destroy civilization.

They won’t, though. And, ha ha, what the hell, even if they do, it won’t matter to me, being as how I will have taken the off-ramp to life’s interstate long beforehand.

So, yes, maybe you guys have some problems. I’d stop worrying about them, though, and do something about them. A good start is to stop assuming that everything you hear coming out of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC is biblically veracious.

It would also pay all of you to remember that Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Al Franken, and all the folks at Air America Radio are 99% wind and water—intrepid windbags as it were.

Oh my God! WAIT a minute. I just realized something. My parents, as well as we youngsters of that era, didn’t have these morons telling us what to think the way that you people do today.

So, yes, I guess you folks DO have something to worry about. Let me just slip out this here side door. Where is Jack Kevorkian when I need him? Anyway, I’ll be back next week. Well, maybe, if you young people don’t destroy all of us before then!.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.

Please! Our kids are not THAT stoopid, man.

2008-03-30T16:12:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I stopped at a Wendy’s^® restaurant last night. I was third in a line of 5-customers. The customer being waited on was a woman in her mid-to-late-40s. She had just ordered a “TRIPLE” classic hamburger with cheese and a baked potato with butter.

That’s a hamburger with three meat patties, two slices of cheese, tomato, lettuce, onions, pickles, and a gookie-looking, dripping mixture of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. Yuck! The baked potato, of course, needs no explanation.

To make a long story short, the young man at the cash register had already entered the order when the customer dropped a bombshell. I swear I’m not making this up—“NO meat on that burger and NO skin on the baked potato”—she demanded.

The employee looked simultaneously confused and terrified. He seemed speechless for a few moments before he started to explain that he wasn’t entirely sure how to handle the transaction.

The customer became indignant, calling him a “hopeless moron,” and demanded to speak to the manager.

Though the customer hadn’t realized it, the manager had been standing back observing the entire transaction. So, when he—a 50ish-looking man—stepped forward with, “I’m right here, ma’am,” she looked a bit stunned but immediately began to berate him, also.

He cut her off in mid-sentence. “Lyle is NOT a hopeless moron. He’s a straight “A” high school student and a valued employee”, he told her. “We’re not going to fill your order, either,” he continued.

“This is a hamburger joint. If you don’t want the meat on your sandwich, take it off and throw it away. If you don’t want the skin on your baked potato, don’t eat it, but we’re not going to take it off for you,” he explained. “If this does not suit you, kindly leave and don’t come back,” he finished.

She threatened to sue him and stomped out of the restaurant. As she left, though, I’m sure she heard the rousing applause that all five of us customers gave the manager. In fact, all of us gave him our names and phone numbers, just in case. Two of us, me included, gave him our email addresses.

Just the day before this, at a Concord Mall concession stand, I observed two old men—75-years old, at least—discussing why they thought Congress should vote to make certain provisions of the Patriot Act permanent.

The “kid” waiting on them was—I found out after they left—a 16-year-old second trimester high school sophomore. However, she spoke with the wisdom of someone much older and wiser.

Anyway, these two old codgers felt that the only people who had anything to fear from the Patriot Act were potential evil-doers and that such people deserved whatever the government could heap upon them.

I was about to reach down their throats and yank them inside out for being such wussies. But, as it turned out, the young lady waiting on them did it for me, only she did so with the grace and intellectual acumen of a seasoned diplomat.

“I don’t see it that way,” she explained to them. Our Constitution already provides a president with the authority to take such action. My Government Studies teacher has explained that our government has the power to suspend some of the provisions of the Constitution during declared wars.”

Continuing, she elaborated that, “I do not favor letting any branch of the government, let alone the dummies in Homeland Security, decide that whatever I may be doing is illegal without me and my lawyer being involved in the conversation.”

She further explained, “We shouldn’t prevent the President from fighting terrorists in this country. Making certain provisions of the Patriot Act permanent, though, simply deprives us of some basic rights and freedoms by permitting police authorities to be the sole determinants of what is a crime, based purely on their selective definitions and without our having any input whatsoever.”

How refreshing! This young woman displayed wisdom beyond her years. At the young age of sixteen, she already understands that some people, by virtue of their positions, have the absolute authority to define reality anyway they see fit. Baseball umpires and the members of the United States Supreme Court are two primary examples.

In baseball, a pitch is a ball or strike, NOT because it actually IS, but because the home plate umpire calls it as such. There’s no appeal, either. In fact, a player can be thrown out of the game just for questioning the call. The player has no defense whatsoever!

In the matter of our Constitution, it is whatever five of nine Justices say that it is. And, the makeup of the Supreme Court falls to the Presidents in power at the time they fill various vacancies, unless the United States Senate refuses to go along, which happens so seldom that it’s not worth discussing.

We, the people, don’t get to debate the appointments or the Court’s decisions. They become the laws of the land. Violate them and go to jail or suffer serious financial loss.

She asked them: “Are you sure you want to give this kind of power to the crowd in Homeland Security based on some misguided illusion of feeling safe? You want to be declared guilty simply because THEY say so?”

“Neither your presence nor your defense will be necessary. No lawyer for you! No limits on your detention and/or ultimate prison time, either.” As they walked away from the counter, she explained with emphatic finality, “Count me out!”

I suspect that there are more young folks of this caliber than there are of the stupid variety. It’s just that we don’t get to hear about the former because it doesn’t sell as many newspapers or increase TV news ratings as much as the latter.

Besides, assuming the youth of the land are stupid is the best way we have of boosting our own feeling of intellectual superiority. It gives us a continual scapegoat for blaming our own stupidity on the “younger” generation.

I don’t know whether she had any impact on the two old guys, but she has my vote. I won’t be alive, but she’ll make a great senator or president someday unless we self-destruct beforehand.

Have a great week and don’t fall for any April Fools tricks. Talk to you next week, same time and channel.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Fahst, let's all just simah down!

2008-03-23T00:12:00.000-04:00

By Joseph Walther

In case you have not noticed, it has become rather testy nowadays just trying to have an intelligent conversation, especially if it involves politics in the presence of one or two visceral-minded Neanderthals.

I have stopped watching ALL cable news/pundit channels as of this past Saturday. If I hear one more “learned” analysis concerning the words of Barack Obama’s pastor, another hint of a Bill Clinton/Joe McCarthy comparison, so much as a whisper of comparing Hillary Clinton to the Wicked Witch of the West, or another word about John McCain seeking right-wing televangelists’ endorsements, I’m going to go stark raving nuts!

A friend of mine sent me an email containing a YouTube video clip this past Friday evening. It was a fantastic clip and it brought back memories of those saner days of yesteryear. I’ve put a link below, but first, let me give you some background.

In 1951, a comedian by the name of Red Skelton hit the TV airwaves. His show started out on Sunday nights but switched to Tuesday nights beginning in 1953. I was only 9-years-old when I watched my first episode. I thought Red Skelton was not only the funniest man who ever lived, but one of the smartest.

Fast forward several years. I was visiting my mother’s house one Tuesday night in 1969—a couple of years before the end of Mr. Skelton’s show. In her house, on Tuesday night, you watched Red Skelton or ELSE!

He did a skit on the Pledge of Allegiance. It was, and remains so to this day—and I’m now 65-years-old—the most meaningful and moving tribute to our flag that I’ve ever heard. Click here to listen to it. Compare his words to what is happening today. It’ll make you cry.

We can’t even have a decent conversation about the flag or patriotism today. Somehow, in today’s warped society, we’ve come to accept the implication that if people are not Democrats or Republicans, they’re troublemakers. If we fail to identify with EITHER Liberals or Conservatives, the moron segment of society will accuse us of lacking any sense of conviction.

If we don’t hop on the God wagon and espouse an absolute advocacy for Christianity, we’re Satan worshipers. If we criticize the Bush Administration’s shredding of the Constitution by demanding the reinstatement of Habeas Corpus, the Geneva Conventions, and a return to a meaningful form of Democracy, we’re siding with terrorists.

Like it or not, folks, the terms, Liberal and Conservative are NOT mutually exclusive. They never have been.

People seem to have lost the distinction between patriotism and nationalism. The former emphasizes LOVE for our OWN nation and national causes above all else. It’s mostly positive. The latter emphasizes HATRED for all OTHER nations and national causes above all else. It’s mostly negative.

If you get your opinions strictly from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, or Al Franken, to name just a handful of blind zealots, you’re part of the problem, not the solution. Try to remember that rearranging prejudices is not the same as thinking.

The more I listen to TV political analysts and pundits—both sides—I get the feeling that we’ve come to settle for convenience as an overriding political imperative. Certainly, when we do this, the rest of the world can rightly infer our automatic willingness to demote truth to a mere secondary option.

The Pledge of Allegiance is big on the term, liberty. In part it reads, “…indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” However, it’s interesting to listen to all the “nationalists,” masquerading as “patriots,” as they run around spouting off about our Constitution and how it guarantees our liberties/freedoms.

Well, it guarantees no such thing. Freedom exists in the minds and hearts of those who are willing and able (at all costs) to take it and keep it. If it ceases to exist there, it’s gone and words on a faded sheet of parchment paper will be useless.

This nation wanted freedom bad enough at the beginning that our founding fathers—patriots ALL—laid their lives and fortunes on the line to obtain it. Since then, we’ve always demonstrated, to the entire world, our willingness and ability to secure it, even to the death.

But, we must be willing and able to take and hold onto our freedom—we need BOTH. If either our willingness OR our ability ever cease to be, freedom will become nothing but an empty word, as it is in so many other parts of the world.

Folks, we need to grow up pretty soon if we expect to be around as a sovereign nation for another two hundred plus years. It’s a small world and it’s getting smaller by the hour. As large and as powerful as the United States is, we’re just bullies if we fail to convince the rest of the world that we’re NOT.

Finally, since this is Easter Sunday in the Christian world, I’m going to try and clarify a couple of terms we’ve heard bantered about many times over the past few years. And, never forget that most labels used to describe people tend not only to be relative but also grossly misused.

“Infidel” is one such term. In the United States, for example, it is one of the terms misused to describe people who do not believe in the Christian Religion. In Iran and other hot spots in the Middle East, it is a term used to describe those who DO!

I’m not trying to defend extreme Islamic fundamentalism; I’m just stating a reality. As frightening as terrorism is, learning to live without certainty is infinitely more useful to us than letting ourselves be paralyzed by fear, intimidation, and hesitation.

The term “scriptures” is another relative term. Whenever we’re discussing OUR holy religion, scriptures are the holy books that define it. Of course, by implication and inference, we always distinguish OUR holy scriptures from all of those false and profane writings that define those “other” religions.

For those of the Christian faith, have a holy and happy Easter Sunday. No matter, though, I’ll be back next Sunday.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Um... like let me clarificate something, dood!

2008-03-16T17:45:00.003-04:00

By Joseph Walther

I have not heard people comparing the Iraq War to the Viet Nam “War” for almost two years, now. I’ve used quotes relative to Viet Nam because Congress never declared Viet Nam a war.

Nevertheless, when the body counts began their inevitable climb with breath-taking rapidity shortly after Mr. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” declaration, it seemed like every call-in radio show wanted to make such comparisons.

Low and behold, on one of our beloved local shows here in my part of the world, a caller (a Viet Nam veteran), recently alluded to similarities between the two “conflicts.” But, his main concern was with our erroneous use of the phrase, “our freedom,” when describing what our military folks were defending in Viet Nam and are now defending in Iraq.

Listening to the conversation between the show’s host and the caller was like listening to a conversation between two not very bright drunks!

Anyway, I took exception to this. I, too, am a Viet Nam combat veteran. So, I’d like to set them straight with a few facts, even though facts tend to be confusing to minds that have already been made up.

First… relative to Viet Nam…

On Saturday, April 3, 1954, then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford met with some members of President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. The topic was Viet Nam and an impending French defeat at Dienbeinphu, complements of the communist-led Viet Minh independence movement—several years later they became the Viet Cong.

While precious few Americans had ever heard of Viet Nam in 1954, the entire country was terrified of a boogie man called Communism. The Eisenhower administration, as well as most military experts of the time, was convinced that if Dienbeinphu fell, Indochina and ALL of Southeast Asia would become communist, bringing those Godless heathens a little too close to our homeland for comfort.

The point of the meeting was to obtain congressional support. Dulles failed to convince the congressional leadership. The most vocal and demanding of that leadership was a young, United States Senate minority leader by the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson. It seems he was vehemently against getting us involved in what would possibly become a long and costly war in terms of money and lost lives.

Fast-forward the scenario to 1963, just prior to John Kennedy’s assassination. President Kennedy saw how entrenched we’d become and with no end in sight. He wanted a strategy in place to make the South Vietnamese government and fighters self-sufficient enough so that we could transfer the bulk of the load to them. He wanted to begin withdrawing our advisers and other military personnel.

Kennedy and HIS military advisers were also convinced that South Viet Nam was one of our vital security concerns. Even so, General Maxwell Taylor, via a memo dated October 1963, outlined the withdrawal of ALL United States advisers and other military personnel by the end of 1965.

Of course, Kennedy was assassinated and the rest is history. We had a mere 16,300 military advisory and other personnel in South Viet Nam in 1963. By the end of 1965 we had over 500,000 combatants there! And the body counts were soaring.

Lyndon Johnson—how attitudes seem to change when you go from being the Senate Minority Leader to being the President of the United States—made it worse because, as he said, “I’m not going to be the first president to lose a god-damned war!” He then proceeded to escalate the matter.

In his defense, though, he was acting on advice from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland, Commander of Military Operations in South Viet Nam.

These people believed in the total defense of South Viet Nam. They believed, at the very core of their hearts, that what they were doing was protecting THIS country. If they had to lie here and there to get it done—and they did, especially Westmoreland—so be it.

No matter! In the end the insurgency was all but dead. However, because of the continual governmental lies and cover-ups, the people of this country were fed up. The national will to WIN was gone. Any politician, who would have advocated a continuation of that war, would have been committing political suicide.

Regardless of any of this, I was a 23-year-old kid in 1965, well-educated, but naive and idealistic nonetheless. I believed with every fiber of my being that America’s cause was both justifiable and honorable.

Relative to Iraq…

Everything that applied to Viet Nam applies to Iraq, with one exception: Bush’s ineptitude at conducting a war. Even this would be forgivable had he been willing to surround himself with competence and heed good counsel.

It isn’t that he has never had any; he most certainly has, including that of his own father, former President George H. W. Bush. Unfortunately, George (the son) has persistently refused to listen, all the while standing by as his neo-conservative cronies publicly vilified those who tried to render effective tactical counsel.

I’ve lost count of the number of previously competent and dedicated generals who found the Iraq War to be a convenient time to “retire.”

We’re going to get out of Iraq and it’s going to be sooner rather than later. George Bush will manage to sliver off the hook some way. The process has already started. If we begin a withdrawal while he’s still in office, miraculously, it will have become the Iraqi Government’s idea.

But, just as in Viet Nam, the troops believe with every fiber of their beings that our country’s cause is honorable and just. While some of them may silently question their civilian leadership’s tactical wisdom, they don’t do so publicly.

They simply do their duty, consistently, methodically, effectively, always in the highest traditions of honor and integrity.

This, and the fact that I’ve never forgotten my days in Viet Nam, is the reason why I support the troops. On the other hand, George Bush and the rest of his cronies can go to hell.

Finally, while this may upset some of the idealistic romanticists who read this, I’m going to explode another myth about military combatants: that the honor of dying for freedom is uppermost in their minds.

While “freedom” is an honorable cause for going to war, never confuse IT with combatants’ reasons for fighting and dying during combat missions. Trust me; they’re not the same things.

Five of the names on the National Memorial to Viet Nam veterans were friends of mine. I was with each of them when they died: three of them cradled in my arms. Not a single one of them ever mentioned how honored they felt for the privilege of dying for our Nation’s freedom.

I found myself engaged in numerous fire fights, many times involving hand-to-hand combat. Whenever I was so occupied, never once did I consider that I was fighting to preserve anyone’s way of life. And, I assure you that I was NOT looking forward to the honor of dying on such a behalf.

Front liners fight wars because war—righteous or unrighteous—breaks out at the wrong time in their lives. They happen to be there because fate put them there. Those who die, do so because they are unlucky. The “nobility” of it all never crosses their minds!

General George Patton was correct when he said, “Now, I want you to remember that no son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor son of a bitch die for HIS country."

The idea that our young people consider it an honor to die on the field of battle is quite the comfort for the war hawks who’s closest encounters with military service, let alone combat, have been John Wayne war movies, having been viewed, of course, within the confines and safety of their living rooms.

Have a safe and happy holiday—Easter for those of the Christian persuasion. I’ll be back next week.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

George W. Bush NEVER disappoints!

2008-03-09T15:03:00.001-04:00

By Joseph Walther

In case you haven’t heard, about forty-percent of this year’s flu shots have not worked. We’ve simply failed to revamp the vaccines to keep pace with the ever-changing, never-ceasing onslaught of flu strains. Anyway, I received a flu shot and I now have the flu. So this week’s article will be brief.

Life goes on whether we get sick or not. And, when a country has George W. Bush as its President, there is absolutely no way that we can permit trivialities, such as severe flu symptoms with their accompanying feelings of impending death, to interfere with writing about the man.

Over the past couple of weeks, he’s done two things that have to make people wonder if his advisors have any impact on his words and actions at all. The first dealt with whether we’re going into a recession or not. The second, just yesterday, dealt with a hot-button torture technique called water boarding.

Three months ago, about fifteen-percent of the nation’s economists believed that we were going into a recession. As recently as 30-days ago, that number had jumped to sixty-percent. Even Warren Buffett and Bill Gates weighed in on the topic; acknowledging that the country’s on the verge of a recession that will probably be severe.

Many of these experts have PhDs in Economics. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates don’t, but their successes speak volumes on their behalf. George W. Bush, with his, um… limited knowledge, stood before the nation’s cameras three-weeks ago and stated that he didn’t think we’re going into a recession.

As recently as this past Thursday, he still refused to use the “R” word, simply stating that he now believed that our economy was “slowing down.”

You know, if I were one of his advisers and I really cared about him, I’d have to call him aside and say, “Mr. President, you have to stop saying this silly shit! It makes you sound excruciatingly stupid, sir.”

Then, yesterday, March 8, 2008, he vetoed anti-water boarding legislation passed by the Congress of the United States. But, before I go into that detail, I’m going to give you a bit of my background regarding the use of torture.

I’m old enough to remember two combat duty-tours in Viet Nam. They were for twelve-months each. The fighting was jungle warfare at its finest, inevitably hand-to-hand before it was over.

The Americans knew that the Viet Cong NEVER took wounded prisoners, no matter how slight their wounds, unless they believed them to be officers. They did torture them, though… to death.

The Cong would mutilate and set afire those who were severely wounded. The less severely wounded suffered the same fate, but it took longer to die while increasing the enemy’s “entertainment” value.

No matter what, the American troops made sure that whatever information they gave, under torture, was bogus. We also assumed that, even if we tortured in return, the information would be unreliable.

I cannot recall the name of a single General or Admiral who ever put a premium on information derived from torture. This has not changed. Not one General advised George W. Bush to endorsed water boarding.

I want to make this point abundantly clear. I don’t take a moral stand on torture during war time. When your way of life is ultimately on the line, you do whatever you need to do to win. Otherwise, there is NO tomorrow to worry about.

My problem with this matter is the conflicted stand that this White House Administration has taken. It has consistently claimed the moral high ground while just as consistently doing the exact opposite.

This White House gang, in particular, does not seem to understand that if you’re going to claim the moral high ground and actually follow it, you don’t torture you enemies, EVEN if they torture YOU!

If we’re going to advocate torture as a means of securing information, then let’s repudiate the Geneva Conventions altogether and get on with it. Of course, this would mean that we, as a nation, are no better than the world-class thugs we routinely condemn.

It has finally happened. Even though I voted for George W. Bush twice, I can no longer stand the sound of his voice or the sight of his smirk-laden face. He has come to represent everything that a nation does NOT want its president to be.

OK, that’s it for this week. I really am sick. I have to lie down or I’m going to fall down. With any luck at all, I’ll die in my sleep, preferably right after the climatic point of an intense wet dream!

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Oh, the GUILT of it all!

2008-03-02T16:33:00.006-05:00

By Joseph Walther

A few years ago, I wrote a column about competitive guilt. It concerned the seemingly perpetual competition between Catholics and Jews for the ever-coveted “Most Adept at Dispensing Guilt” award.

While I intended it as a tongue-in-cheek parody on the standard, comedic stereotypical reputation of Jewish mothers specifically, and Roman Catholics in general, there was more than a smidgen of truth involved.

It seems that nothing’s changed. I had to be in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this past Thursday to testify on behalf of the State on a technical matter.

During a lunch recess, as I approached my table in the courthouse cafeteria, I overheard a man at the adjacent table say, “I’m Jewish. Trust me when I tell you that no mother can heap on the guilt like a Jewish mother.”

There were six people at his table: two men and four women. As I was sitting down at my table, one of the women at his table blurted out, “Oh, REALLY! Well, I’m a 40-year-old married Catholic woman and I STILL feel like I’m committing a sin whenever I have an orgasm. How’s THAT for guilt?”

She didn’t mean to, but she said it loudly enough that silence descended upon the entire cafeteria. All eyes, it seemed, focused on HER. I have no doubt that, had she been able, she would have climbed under one of the floor tiles.

No one’s ever accused me of being at a loss for words. As she and I made unintentional eye contact, I gave her a bit of a smile, a thumbs up sign, and told her, “Guilt or not, it’s not YOUR fault that nature makes it feel so good. So, my child, go and find thee a more substantial reason for feeling guilty.”

The place erupted in laughter, including her, and everyone seemed to get back to their respective conversations.

I’m not going to the trouble of rummaging through the archives to repeat what I wrote in that past article. However, I think it worth a brief overview just to clear things up once and for all.

For centuries now, comedians by the millions have done a job on Jewish mothers and the guilt they’re capable of heaping on their children.

I’ve also known my share of loving Jewish mothers. While a few were a bit heavy handed with the guilt trips, the majority wouldn’t have been able to hold a candle to my own mother’s ability to delegate extreme guilt, and SHE was a devout Roman Catholic.

First of all, Jewish guilt tends to be cultural in nature, centering around an interpersonal theme. When a Jewish mother, for example, lays a guilt trip on a son, it might go something like this.

Son: Mom, hi! How are you” How’s everything in Florida?

Mom: Not too good; I’ve been very weak.

Son: My God, WHAT’S wrong?

Mom: Never mind.

Son: What’s wrong, mom?

Mom: Never mind; it’s OK.

Son: WHY are you weak, mom?

Mom: OK! OK! I haven’t eaten in 41-days.

Son: That’s TERRIBLE! Why?

Mom: Because I didn’t want my mouth to be filled with food in case you should call.

The guilt is interpersonal. It’s main premise is that the behavior in question constitutes a terrible thing to do to someone. You know… like when a Jewish daughter marries a male nurse instead of a doctor.

Roman Catholic guilt, on the other hand, is an altogether different matter. It’s neither cultural nor interpersonal. It’s endemic, going to the very essence of humanity itself.

It’s not a matter of Catholic parents dropping a guilt trip on their children. This guilt comes directly from Catholic Theology! Catholic parents and Church teachers are merely the conduits through which the guilt is passed on to ensuing generations. Here’s how it works.

Christians, in general, believe that Jesus Christ became man by being born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered an unimaginable degree of physical and emotional pain while being crucified for OUR sins.

God sent His son to suffer and die like this as retribution for humanity’s sinful fall from HIS favor after that terrible “apple-eating” scandal back in the Garden of Eden, thanks in no small part to that temptress she-devil, Eve.

Remember! God was a prick back in those days. This was the OLD TESTAMENT God, a nasty-tempered dude who would toss fireballs, raging floods, and hideous, disease-ridden plagues at people who pissed him off, even small children.

I mean, after all those years of leading the Jews through the desert, He wouldn’t even let his favorite buddy, Abraham, into the Promised Land and, from all the reports at the time, Abraham didn’t even do anything. Now, THAT’S a prick.

Then, somewhere along the line, God found some PR (Public Relations) people and they did a complete makeover. Suddenly there was a new God, a kinder, gentler, less edgy and far more personable God. He sent his son to get us off the eternal damnation trail.

In other words, Jesus died for US! All of US! EVERYONE who’s ever been born! EVERYONE who is alive today! EVERYONE who will ever BE born, right up to the end of the world.

Here was the nicest, most loving, most helpful, sinless person ever to grace humanity. A living personification of goodness and mercy!

He healed the sick, raised people from the dead, forgave hookers, walked on water, even fed thousands of people during a single afternoon using just a few fishes and containers of wine.

And how did WE repay Jesus? We KILLED him. That’s right! After all he did for us, we caused him to be scourged, crowned with thorns, nailed to a cross, stabbed with a spear, and left to die between two common, sinning scumbags.

Now THIS is guilt. It makes Jewish guilt seem like child’s play in comparison. All Christians are subjected to it and must live with it. Catholics, however, have raised the bar to even greater heights, though.

Not only are we guilty for every “sinful” ACTION we’ve ever taken, we’re also JUST as guilty for even thinking about such things. In other words, thinking about doing it is the same as doing it.

Why, just a second ago, I had some fleeting thoughts about a woman I saw at the mall last week. Now I’m going to go to hell if I die before finding a priest for confession.

You see, thoughts are no problem for you Jews and other Christians. All it takes for eternal damnation for us Catholics, though, is a single thought.

Let me tell you. Speaking for myself, I’m not about to go to let myself be sent to hell over a damn thought, if you get my drift.

You Jewish folks out there just have to accept the fact that when it comes to guilt, there’s no contest. We Catholics trounce the daylights out of you when it comes to some of the best guilt trips known to humanity.

And, let me clear up something else while I’m at it. Catholic women are INDEED permitted to have orgasms, but the permission is subject to certain conditions.

First, an orgasm must be the result of sexual intercourse in the standard missionary position—man on top. Absolutely NO MASTURBATION.

According to every Nun I’ve ever spoken with, not only will God send you to hell for this, you’ll be blind when you get there.

Second, she may NOT, no matter what else happens, enjoy it. She is even prohibited from expressing any pleasure whatsoever, especially to the man on top of her. She is permitted to express non-sexual thoughts only, such as, “Are you done yet?”

The man, however, has no such restrictions. He is perfectly free to climb Mt. Ecstasy to its summit, all the while breathing heavily and snorting all sorts of stuff as he lets it rip. However—this is critically important—he MUST pull out immediately after HE ejaculates. Otherwise, according to the rules, God’s going to be pissed.

Furthermore, the Catholic rules of sexual engagement require that he immediately roll over, fall into a coma-like sleep, and snore the rest of the night—loudly enough to keep people awake for miles around.

So, rest easy all of you Catholic women. You are free to orgasm all you want. Just don’t even think about enjoying it. And, STOP blaming us MEN for the fact that WE don’t want to talk AFTERWARDS.

We can’t. GOD, not us, forbids it. It’s right there in the annals of Catholic Theology. Google it if you don’t believe me. What are you trying to do: instigate another one of those “apple-eating” scandals? Didn’t you cause enough trouble the first time?

Hopefully everyone will better understand this matter now. I’ll be back next week… unless I die and go to hell first.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

I'm educated and can't get know job!

2008-02-24T16:04:00.003-05:00

By Joseph Walther

During an average week following the publication of this column, I receive around 360-emails plus another 10- to 15-letters or post cards through the United States Postal Service. These numbers jump considerably, to about 1,100 emails and 100-letters if I hit on the hot button topics: religion, homosexuality, or politics.

The greatest single week’s response, since beginning the electronic version over four years ago, has been 6,345-emails and 345-letters. While I can’t possibly respond to such large volumes of correspondence, I do read most of it. While the bulk of it has been thoughtful, some has not been. And, a few have been nothing more than sorry attempts at veiled threats.

About three weeks ago, I received a letter from a recent—two-years ago—college graduate asking me to write something concerning the plight of people with degrees who can’t seem to be able to land jobs.

Well, since our economy seems to be spiraling the drain of economic horror with ever-increasing orbital velocity, I thought it would be an opportune time to share the young man’s plight with you readers. Maybe some of you could give him some advice.

Here is his letter, verbatim. I’ve removed his name—the lawyers were quite animated about it, too! It’s a genuine letter, though. I have his real address. If any readers out there would like to send him some advice, send it to me via email or USPS mail and I’ll see that he gets it.

Feberary 3, 2008

True Facts Editor

1812 Marsh Rd.

Suite 6, B184

Wilmington, DE 19810

Dear Mr Editer,

2 yeers ago I got a BS degree in Socialalogy at the age of 30. I sent out hundreds of resumes all over the country. I still don’t have no job. Its as thoug employer’s don’t even read them. Some have said to me that I don’t have experience.

No matter how hard I try or how much resumes I send out I just cant get a job. Well, I can’t get experience if people won’t higher me. I even changed my cover letter, droping my salary requirements from $60,000 a year down to $50,000 a year.

I am at my wits end. I’m even thinking about checking with a lawyer about some employers discriminating at me because of my age. My neibor two doors down just won her case. She was fired after 26 years at the age of 50.

Rite now I have been working two part time jobs. I work 22 hrs a week at a local Family Dollar Store at minimum wage and no benifits. I work another 20 hrs a week at Taco Bell. It pays a little more than minimum but still know benifits.

It is so discurageing to be a college graduate working for minimum wage stocking shelves and serving food. If its realy this hard for college graduates to get job it must be inpossible for less educated people to fine work. No wonder people are gone broke.

What really upsets me is that within six weeks after I don’t here nothing about a job I applied for, I see it in the news paper again. This makes me fell like there is something awrong with me.

I have been using a goverment job service even. It don’t do no good thoug because the same people keep posting to it and most of them cant get jops. It makes me wonder why George Bush keeps saying the econimy is doing so good! Maybe he should try to fine a job.

I’m thinkin about gone back to get my masters. They told me that Socialalogy was a hard field to get into with out at least a master’s degree. I guess they were rite. I already took the GRE, but I was not felling well that day. I may have to take it again.

Well, any help you can give me will be fine. I’ve inclosed by phone number (cell). I’ll anser any questions you have.

Sinserely,

Name Withheld

This young man included a real telephone number. I called the number for obvious reasons, never expecting a legitimate response. I actually spoke to him. He verified that he sent the letter.

He’s as sincere as it gets and truly believes that he’s typical of struggling, unemployed, recent college graduates. I assure you that his verbal skills are much better than his written ones. While I discussed this with him, it did not seem to register.

I agreed to publish his letter but not his real name or phone number. People wishing to advise this young man can send it to me, via email or letter. I’ll be delighted to pass it on to him.

I don’t know what else to tell him that I didn’t cover during our phone conversation. Maybe some of you could give him some pointers. Since I’ve not met the man face to face, I certainly can’t rule out the way he dresses as part of his problem.

Next week… same time and channel and, oh yes, before I forget, what in the hell is “Socialalogy?” Admittedly, it’s been decades since I’ve taken college courses. I just assumed it was a misspelling. But… ya never know.

Saaay! It’s not one of those socially oriented, feel good degree programs aimed at “academic-hoop-lowering-so-everyone-can-slam-dunk,” is it? You know the kind… there’s no wrong answers; everyone in the program gets a college degree; and the institution gets tons of tuition income.

Curious minds want to know!

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

But, MAN, he don't say nothin' specific!

2008-02-17T16:35:00.001-05:00

By Joseph Walther

I’ve listened to many speakers throughout my life; a few were absolutely terrible; most have been OK; a few more have been downright good; and two have been positively inspiring. This column is about one of the two in the latter category.

All good writers do a lot of listening. While all listeners are not good writers, I do the best I can with what I hear.

For well over three-years, I’ve participated in a couple of well-moderated forums where the topics vary considerably depending on what’s hot at the time.

For the past three weeks, the hot topic has been speeches, Barack Obama’s speeches in particular.

Those who have heard him speak—at least the ones who have emailed or called me—tend to classify his speeches as either highly inspirational or inspirational but devoid of specifics.

One emailer, Mark Gingrich, wrote; “Obama is an outstanding speaker but he doesn’t go into any specifics.” Another emailer, Jack Nubenski, wrote; “This man (Barack Obama) could motivate the devil to turn good! He’s got my vote.”

So far, the emails I’ve received fall into a variation of two basic themes that share a common agreement, but with a major qualification. A big time qualification, indeed.

The common agreement is his unquestioned inspirational ability and the fact that the Senator comes off as politically atypical; a person who does NOT sound like a politician.

The major qualification is that some people knock him for his lack of specifics while others do not seem to care at all about the lack of specifics.

Here’s the interesting part, though. The universal theme of those emails from people identifying themselves as Conservative is, “fabulous speaker but non-specific.”And, to this group, they see his lack of specifics as a serious flaw.

Those identifying themselves as Liberals, on the other hand, also think he’s unbelievably inspirational but don’t seem to care about his lack of specific remedies.

I’ve heard him speak on television and in person. If you’ve heard him speak on TV and think he’ inspirational, you’d be absolutely mesmerized if you heard in person.

Terms like captivating, motivating, and inspiring don’t begin to capture the mood in his audiences. It’s a truly amazing experience to watch his audiences as they literally fixate themselves on both his presence and his every word.

Personally, I think Senator Obama IS a motivating speaker of the highest caliber. I also acknowledge the charges that he does not get into specifics and that that he lacks some experience. But, there’s no question that he’s an atypical politician.

On the other hand, he seems well informed about most issues and he demonstrates a remarkable degree of intellectual curiosity.

Combined with a knack for surrounding himself with highly qualified advisors—both PRO and CON issue wise—his positive qualifications seem to outweigh his shortcomings and elevate his status to that of a serious contender.

I think he purposely fails to mention specifics and relishes in being politically atypical. Furthermore, I think he has surrounded himself with a superb campaign management team.

His campaign manger knows how to run a campaign effectively, but even more important, Senator Obama knows EXACTLY what he’s doing as a viable candidate.

The best presidents we’ve had as a nation have been those who have been non-specific relative what they’re going to “fix.” They were not specific because they knew that, alone, they couldn’t fix ANYTHING, let alone micro-manage specifics.

They’ve always seemed to know that our real underlying problems have had more to do with poor coalition-building on the part of its presidents, than a mere lacking in the ability to “fix” things at the micro level.

The main theme of Obama’s campaign is CHANGE. He’s said so from the beginning of the primaries. And, so far, he’s shown a potential to create this change through a means not seen in Washington, DC for the past twenty-years: UNITY.

He certainly has the oratory wherewithal. Combining it with his intellectual curiosity and general knowledge on most issues gives him a better shot than all of the others at creating the changes that WE, the people, mean by change.

This country has been in the throes of gridlock for many years. It began to increase in intensity with George H. W. Bush’s Administration. It increased significantly with the beginning of the first Clinton Administration.

By the end of Clinton’s second term, it was rapidly headed toward critical mass. Throughout George W. Bush’s two Administrations it’s reached absolute critical mass.

Blaming gridlock on the Executive Branch is easy to do, especially if you dislike the President. It might feel good, but it’s stupid. All it does in is throw the country into a state of political paralysis.

The Executive Branch, by Constitutional mandate, is only ONE of the three SEPARATE branches in our system of government. And, while important, it’s not the MOST important.

The Legislative Branch, not the Executive, runs the country. Our legislators enact the laws of the land and set the rules by which the country functions and the manner in which the Executive Branch operates. No matter WHAT the Executive Branch may want to do, Legislators have the power to legislatively hold them accountable.

The Judicial Branch, though a seemingly endless maze of federal and state courts, is supposed to ensure the legality and ultimate constitutionality of what the other two branches do.

However, replacing interpretation with activism relative to our Constitution only throws more sand into the gears of government.

Even though all three branches of government are independent, the entire system falls apart when any single branch fails in its constitutional responsibilities. And, RIGHT NOW, all three branches are failing miserably.

The current Executive Branch seems to believe that it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants and has proceeded to act exclusively in accordance with its OWN interpretation of the Constitution.

They’ve truly made convenience the imperative while effectively relegating truth to the status of a mere option. They’ve raised obfuscation to an art form of unprecedented proportions, while the Legislative gang has done nothing to interfere.

Meanwhile, all out pure partisan warfare has rendered the entire Legislative Branch politically impotent to a point that NOTHING of any real meaning gets done.

The gang on Capitol Hill has permitted the partisan extremes to hijack the entire process; replacing viable non-partisan issue-oriented dialog with partisan positional agreement at all costs. Positional veracity, or lack thereof, no longer means anything.

In other words, unanimous party agreement is now far more important than it is for both parties to test the effectiveness of various party proposals and work together to reach workable compromises.

The reason that little—much of the time NOTHING—gets done in Washington is unprecedented GRIDLOCK caused mostly by the United States Senate filibuster rules.

Under these rules, as few as forty senators, representing as little as 11% of the population, can bring the entire legislative process to a screeching halt for months on end.

Both sides are guilty of it, too. When the Republicans were in control, the Democrats had a filibuster orgy. The Democrats are in control now and the Republicans, having stocked up on plenty of lubrication, are making up for lost time in a monumental way.

Continuing at the present rate, this current gang of “Rs” will have broken all filibuster records by doing so a total of 140 times. And, this is ONLY during THIS term!

Presidential candidates can give all of the rousing, inspirational speeches they want. They can lay out their agendas with details galore as to how they’ll solve specific problems. But, none of it means a damn thing.

Write this down! A United States President cannot solve a single problem if our nationally elected legislators refuse of do their jobs. The United States Congress has to be willing to forego partisan bickering and LEGISLATE. Get it?

TV talk-show sages of either political persuasion, Conservative or Liberal, can call it whatever they wish and continue to blame the other side until pigs fly.

As well, political analysts representing ALL forms of media outlets, can pontificate, prognosticate, and predict outcomes until the end of time. It won’t solve a thing until everyone starts calling this crap what it is: OBSTRUCTIONISM.

Until then, none of the candidate-defined proposals—including the minutest of specifics—have a snowball’s chances in hell of succeeding.

I will vote—even to the point of self-herniation while racing to the polls—for the first candidate who demonstrates an ability to replace obstructionism with meaningful political dialog among our national legislators.

Neither will I care a hoot about the gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation—or NONE—age, race, nor political party affiliation of such a candidate!

If a President can accomplish this, delving into specifics won’t be necessary. The Legislative Branch will effectively deal with the specifics. And, once they begin doing this, the Executive and Judicial Branches will fall right into line, just as the Constitution intended.

At present, the only candidate showing any potential for doing this is Barack Obama. Additionally, he’s the ONLY candidate who has not claimed to have any secret solutions relative to any specific issues. And, he most certainly possesses the ability to inspire throngs of people.

IF he receives his party’s nomination, and IF the country elects him, and IF he can continue to inspire the people of this nation to move off of their collective butts with the same fervor he’s inspiring people to come out and support his candidacy, he may just be the ticket we need to get ourselves, as a nation, back on tract.

We shall see. Have a great week.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Let me take away some of your rights and I'll keep you safe!

2008-02-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

About two weeks ago, I found myself on the receiving end of a bit of a lecture involving the Patriot Act. The speaker, Mr. Harold Gerson, was extolling the virtues of the Act and how “patriotic” Americans need to rally around our President and support his bid to make it permanent in order to help assure our Nation’s continuity.

I have no real idea who Mr. Gerson is. He introduced himself as a member of some right-wing freedom organization. I’m not going to give it any free advertising here. The point is that I took significant offense at his little talk.

Like most of the blindfolded Bush diehards, he seemed to imply that those who disagree with making the provisions of the Patriot Act permanent are, at best, not patriotic and at worst, outright traitors.

What scared me even more than Gerson was the fact that several members of the audience seemed ready to run out and write letters to their congressional representatives in absolute favor of the matter.

I understand the Patriot Act—intimately… like, verbatim, dude! I have a copy in front of me as I write this. It has brought out the activist in me like nothing else ever has. I’ve written letters opposing it. I’ve given testimony about it.

In the interests of insight, I’m going to summarize my points relative to their Constitutional impact. Also, for our collective good, we need to start understanding that everything the government does, allegedly on our behalf, is not in our best interests.

Also, many of the things proposed by George W. Bush relative to his execution of the war on “terror” have been outright stupid. Expanding the provisions of the Patriot Act and making them permanent are just two more acts of sheer stupidity.

At the outset, understand that the probability of any one citizen of this country falling prey to the provisions of the Patriot Act is not worth the effort to calculate it. Collectively, however, it’s am absolute certainty that some folks are going to be screwed royally.

First, everyone needs to understand that ALL United States Presidents have ALWAYS had broad powers in matters of national security during times of war. As shocking as it may be for, I’m sure, many to find out, the provisions in our Constitution can be, and HAVE BEEN, suspended in times of declared wars.

This fact, alone, renders most of the Patriot Act as superfluous to begin with. Presidents already had very broad powers. So the point of the Patriot Act had nothing to do with “protecting” us citizens from the “bad” guys.

On the other hand, it had EVERYTHING to do with creating the illusion of doing something to guarantee our safety through the EXPANSION of certain PROVISIONS of those PRE-EXISTING powers. To wit:

The Patriot Act EXPANDS terrorism laws to include "domestic terrorism." I'm using quotes here for a reason. It isn't that domestic terrorism does not exist. It does. But then, it has always existed. I’m not trying to diminish its danger, either.

However, under the Patriot Act's EXPANSION, "domestic terrorism" is determined to be whatever the White House says that it is. Those involved, no matter how innocent the intentions, will have no say in the matter. All the White House will have to do is say the MAGIC words: "for intelligence purposes."

It exposes mere politically organized opposition to non-warrant surveillance. There'd no longer be a need for one of those pesky old warrants. It would open us up to virtually unlimited wiretapping, harassment, and criminal proceedings for nothing more than political opposition. And, all the Administration would have to say is... "for intelligence purposes."

Second, it EXPANDS law enforcement's right to conduct secret searches through the acquisition of phone records, Internet surveillance, medical records, financial records, mental health records, and student records, all WITHOUT an ounce of judicial oversight.

Again, all they'll need to say in defense of their actions are those wonderfully magical words: “for intelligence purposes.”

Third, it specifically EXPANDS the FBI's power to investigate, AT WILL, every American citizen over virtually any criminal matter—based on nothing more than someone's hunch. We might just as well remove “probable cause” from the Bill of Rights. Again, they'll only need to say the magic words... "for security purposes."

Fourth, it EXPANDS the ability of the Feds to go after non-citizens; putting them in jail for indefinite periods on nothing more than suspicions and denying them any type of judicial review.

And, before some of you "law and order" types tell me that such people have no rights, let me just say... um... well, BULLSHIT!

There are millions of non-citizens living and working is this country LEGALLY. Illegals—between 9-million and 14-million, depending on which set of data estimates you believe—comprise a small percentage of the total.

Even so, at a minimum, all non-citizens, once apprehended for whatever reasons, have the RIGHT to embassy personnel in their country of origin unless diplomatic relations do not exist.

Like it or not, the four expansionary areas I listed above jeopardize our rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

As I wrote above, the likelihood of any one U. S. citizen falling victim to these expansions is not high. Collectively, though, it's a guarantee.

If you’re thinking that they will NOT read YOUR emails, or listen to YOUR phone calls because you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re probably correct. The point is that they COULD do so.

While they are not likely to read or listen to YOUR stuff, it's a cinch that they'll be reading and listening to other people's stuff, though.

And, if they do hit YOURS, even if you've done something inadvertently, most likely with no idea that you've done anything wrong, your potential exposure to a sustained period of emotional and physical hell is assured.

It's assured because, by making these four expansions permanent, we will have granted the government carte blanche to decide, UNILATERALLY, that YOU have committed a crime. And again, they’d need only to have said those magic words: "for intelligence purposes."

A guarantee of security and safety is an impossibility. People who claim to have the powers to keep us safe are delusional. All they really accomplish is the illusion of being safe.

Whenever such people—no matter how seemingly sincere their intentions—include a few “minor” changes to our Constitution, we can be sure that Mr. Murphy, of Murphy’s Law fame, is lurking close by.

Interesting fellow, that Mr. Murphy. He’s roamed this planet since the advent of the human race. He's been present and taken an active hand in every catastrophe we humans have ever endured.

He was present in the World Trade Towers on 9/11. He was aboard the Hindenburg, Titanic, and Apollo-13. He was lurking in the early morning shadows at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. He’s played a significant role in every commercial and private airline crash we’ve ever heard of.

He was everywhere in Viet Nam, Korea, WW-I and II. And, if it occurs, he'll have played a significant role in starting WW-III.

What's more important to remember is that he's always left the scene, completely unscathed, with the snug satisfaction that he's completed his mission while eagerly awaiting the next one.

As usual, we’ll be left in an emotional daze, trying to legislate a way to inoculate ourselves against his future rages, which most assuredly will find us at the usual inopportune of times.

I have no problems granting our government leaders extraordinary powers during extraordinarily perilous times. I just don't want to make them permanent.

We can always grant them anew as conditions warrant. However, history has shown, repeatedly, that once we give up a freedom, we do NOT get it back. As for making these expansions permanent, I can literally smell Mr. Murphy!

Back at you next week. Stay safe, but don’t forfeit your rights to guarantee it, though.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Ya know what this country needs?

2008-02-03T12:55:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

Last week’s article had a definite political theme. Judging by the large number of responses—5,419 emails over a 6-day period—it hit some sensitive nerves. While I try to keep political writings to a minimum, I’m going to stay with a political theme for this week, also.

This general election year, for reasons I can’t quite figure out—other than the obvious ones of discontent over the same old crap coming out of Washington, DC, including the White House, has piqued my interests. It’s piqued the interests of many others, too, especially the younger set.

All of the candidates, as always, are long on what’s wrong with the country, as well as who’s to blame—the other party, naturally—but woefully short on specific solutions. Well… other than being absolutely certain that the other side’s solutions won’t work, that is.

The news media is supposed to be neutral on all of it and help us citizens to differentiate among political spin, outright lies, and pure bullshit. As has been the case over the past thirty-years, though, they’re not doing it.

They’re too busy replacing lucid discussion with heated provocation and playing “gotcha” with various candidates over unimportant issues.

Of course, we citizens are not blameless, either. We continually fail to realize that democracy is a perpetually evolving experimental process that needs meaningful debate in order to survive.

But, meaningful debate is impossible if we’re not reasonably informed on problematic issues, willing to overcome mutually exclusive positions, and prepared to engage in rational conversations based on facts instead of purely emotional adrenalin.

Since 9/11/2001, the Republican Party, having detected the presence of reasonable amounts of fear throughout the country, has assumed exclusive rights to monger it. Conversely, at least at this point, I have no idea what the Democrats have been trying to do or what they stand for. I don’t think they do, either.

We’ve spent the last eight years at the mercy of a President who seemed bent on proving his monumental lack of intellectual curiosity. Furthermore, his ship-of-state guidance system appears to have been based on nothing more than a guessing game of instinct and faith. So far, the inherent value of fact-based open dialog has soared well above his head.

While these circumstances have given the Democrats a golden opportunity to regain the White House, as well as a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress, they seem more intent than usual on screwing it up big time.

When will we realize that there is not a person in this country capable of single handedly solving the myriad problems we face? Since our present political imperative has been reduced to all members of a given side agreeing on some action as opposed to any merits of the action itself, we can’t solve most of our problems… PERIOD!

This is what happens when the citizens of a democracy permit the proponents of invective and divisiveness to hijack both sides of the political realm: conservatism AND liberalism. Honest dialogs disintegrate to nothing, thus reducing political debate to mere multiple monologues with witnesses.

We don’t need candidates who promise to solve specific problems. They can’t deliver on such promises. We desperately need to send someone—male or female—to the Oval Office who is willing to abandon the old attack-and-defend model of debate and replace it with the conflict resolution model. Why? Because it’s so much better!

It places rationality above reactivity, sincerity above disingenuousness, authentic representation above dissembling, meaning above absurdity, and recognition above cynical suspicion.

As big and populated as this country is, such a person MUST exist. Please! Come forward. I’d vote to elect such a person in a heartbeat regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or religious/non-religious position: Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Other, Atheist, or Agnostic.

Now, moving on, I’d like to air two other pet peeves I have harbored for many years: moral absolutism and the way we treat our Constitution.

I recently heard a discussion between former Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, Bill Bennett, and some callers to his radio talk show. The topic was the ever-increasing threat to the “sanctity” of marriage by gays seeking the right to marry their partners.

Admittedly, I don’t like Bill Bennett… AT ALL. I think he’s a pontificating, self-absorbed, self-appointed moral windbag. So, I’m not the most even-keeled voice of reason when it comes to his views. Keep this in mind as you read some of what follows.

Mr. Bennett, like all loyal partisan absolutists, likes to define this issue as a mere definition of marriage and whether we need to place—on God’s behalf, of course—a “between men and women only” restriction on its participants. I disagree with such a position.

I don’t believe that homosexuality is a random fetish, something that people choose to do. I think the issue is more about who counts as human and about understanding sexuality as it applies to the human condition.

If people wish to object to gay marriage on religious grounds, fine. It’s their right to do so as it is religion’s right to set such rules for its members wishing to marry via religious ceremonies. They do not have the right, however, to set the rules for civil ceremonies. And, we don’t need to waste millions of dollars and years of time changing the Constitution to protect the sanctity of marriage.

Finally, the above reference to our Constitution leads me to my other peeve: our obsession with an unconditional interpretation of what our founders intended concerning the text they gave us.

We are too preoccupied with our attempts at perpetuating the long-lived myth that our forefathers were infallible. We continually worship at the altar of the forefathers, even though doing so does not solve many of our problems.

For the most part, I think we do it unconsciously. Regardless, we have to stop it. We live in today’s world with its own problems and conditions. It’s about time we develop the intellectual capacity to think for ourselves relative to our own time.

The thing about our founders is that they KNEW they didn’t know everything. This fact is what makes our Constitution a stroke of genius. It comes to us with a built-in method for making changes to it.

Some of the things they wanted to cover under the Constitution no longer apply to us, at least not in the same way it did to them. Conversely, they could not have conceived—in their wildest collective imagination—many of the problems we face today.

So, they gave us a neat little way to address the situation. Amendments! By God they gave us the right to amend stuff. With them we can cover things they never thought about. We can remedy mistakes that we’ve made by adding or subtracting stuff. We can even change existing Constitutional Amendments if so warranted.

They made it tough to do and that’s fine. We should be positively sure that we want to change Constitutional provisions, especially where personal freedoms are concerned.

I think it boils down to us ceasing to blame our own collective inflexibility on men who have been dead for centuries. The sooner we stop doing it, the better off we’re going to be.

OK, this is it for the political stuff for a while. Next week I’m going back to my wise-assed old self. See you then.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Damn! Ya gotta love them Libs. Know what I mean?

2008-01-27T17:44:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

Getting into matters economic for this week’s topic was not even a blip on my radar. Then something happened and that all changed. Let me explain.

Each Sunday morning at 11 AM I sit in front of my computer, bring up MSWord, and begin to write the week’s article. Most of the time, I will have settled on a topic by the previous Wednesday. Sometimes, though, things happen between Thursday and Saturday that will cause me to change my mind.

In fact, on more than a mere few Sundays, I had NOT settled on a topic until roughly 20-minutes prior to sitting down to write about it. This drives my editors batty—though I’ve never missed a deadline.

However, it does not bother me. While I’ve been accused of many things in my life, being short on words has never been one of them.

Unless you’ve been in a recent DEEP coma or have devoted your entire attention span to watching the Entertainment Channel, two things have become apparent.

First, our economy is in deep trouble and second, there must be an election looming on the national horizon because you can’t change the TV channel without seeing a “debate” being moderated by self-aggrandizing, talking-head twits.

Between this past Tuesday and just about 3-hours ago, I had received 1,300 emails about an “impending” economic collapse. Nine-hundred of those emails came from staunch Conservatives soundly blaming the “damn” Liberals; implying that we should deport ALL Liberals immediately.

Two-hundred and seven of the emails came from Liberals blaming everything on George Bush; implying that we should castrate him… without anesthesia… using a dull-bladed, rusty serrated knife.

The remaining ninety-three emails were from people that seemed quite confused about things. In fact, I’m not sure that most of them have any awareness of what’s going on around them at all.

I’m a Conservative, a registered Republican since the day I became eligible to vote, about 45-years ago. For the record, though, there is nothing “Neo” about my conservative slant.

In fact, on social issues I tend to fall slightly left of center. On fiscal issues, I fall a bit more to the right of center. On balance, though, I wobble about the middle of the political spectrum the same as the majority of American voters.

In this article, I’m going to address the Conservatives’ attack on the Liberals and challenge their absolute praise for such political luminaries as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Oh, ye clueless ones, prepare to be shocked.

Since our country’s beginning in 1776, we have amassed a national debt of about $9.2 TRILLION! If you click here, you can see a perpetually running tally. All you have to do is click the reload button on your browser to see a current total.

The point is that over half of the total came about during a Bush’s term in the Oval Office. Add in Ronald Reagan, and you’ll come to the realization that over 70% of our national debt was created by just three Republican Presidents: George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.

To add insult to injury, the Republicans in the United States Congress under all three of these men—but particularly under George W. Bush, did NOTHING to stem excessive spending.

In fact, they have not even tried doing anything during George W. Bush’s terms, in spite of the fact that they’ve held veto-proof control about 75% of the time. These three Presidents submitted a total of 19 budgets of which only two were balanced.

Extremists on both sides of the political isle are dangerous. Whenever either of these is in the national preponderance, we’re in for some dangerous periods of collective fiscal and social hell.

This country needs a healthy balance of liberal and conservative voices to remain in a state of relative productive balance. Otherwise, we could either lose most of our personal freedoms to the whims of the fanatical lefties or end up in a state of brutal indifference, an unavoidable by-product of laissez-faire economics.

I don’t think that any of the three men I’ve spoken of here are indecent, uncaring, or intentionally detrimental to the best interests of America. I knew Ronald Reagan on a personal level and I met George W. Bush in 1975, long before he became a viable political force.

I lived in California for a number of years. I met Ronald Reagan through his daughter, Maureen, with whom I was friends. When Mr. Reagan announced his candidacy for Governor of California, I was there. He made the announcement in 1966 from the second floor balcony of the U. S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego.

Maureen had invited me to attend. Standing with him was Nancy, his wife, 25-year-old Maureen, 21-year-old Michael (the adopted one), 14-year-old Patti, and 8-year-old Ron. I stood deep in the background as we all listened to his speech.

I respected him both personally and politically, although I did not totally agree with some of his political stances. He was a decent, principled, and honorable man who held the best interests of this country above everything else in his life.

I voted for him in his bid for California’s Governor and later for his initial run for the presidency and his reelection. I’d do so again if he were alive and viable.

I met George W. Bush during a seminar in 1975. I spent close to three hours in a group conversation with him covering a multitude of business and scientific topics.

He struck me as affable, topically literate on a conversational level, witty, and quite likeable. However, his holding capacity for voluminous amounts of Kickapoo Joy Juice was legendary.

But he held it well and most folks considered him a typical, happy-go-lucky imbiber. Not many people considered him anywhere near a potential candidate for ANY national office, let alone the United States Presidency.

As the President of the United States, though, he’s been an unabashed personification of the Peter Principle. In my opinion, he’s been a monumental embarrassment for the United States and a devastatingly lethal destructive force relative to the near-future viability of the Republican Party.

The sooner he’s out of office, the better off this nation will be. He’s proven—at least to me—that just because a person’s voice can be heard throughout the world instead of just to end of the bar, does not mean its owner is any wiser.

I have no idea who I will vote for in November. I mean this in the party sense. At this point I could go either way: Republican or Democrat.

For the sake of the Democrats, I sincerely hope that Hillary Clinton does not represent that party’s best. If she’s the nominee, I will NOT vote for her. John Edwards just cannot seem to get away from first base.

I’m not sure about Barack Obama; he’s an atypical candidate… bright, energetic, and a rousingly impactful and articulate motivator. He’s also relatively inexperienced.

On the other hand, if he surrounds himself with capable, advisers—NOT of the “yes-men” caliber—I think he could take us in a positive and productive new direction by stimulating a well-balanced Liberal/Conservative agenda. I’ve not ruled him out.

On the Republican side, it’s even worse. John McCain is a temper time-bomb looking for a place to go off. As for his current run for President, I’ll defer to a quote from the late Illinois Republican Senator, Everett Dirksen.

Many years ago, Johnny Carson asked him about the possibility of his running for President. He was 70-years old and not well. He replied in part, “…In my case, I think the vessel has already gone away from the pier.”

Mike Huckabee is painfully honest with voters. He’s quite likeable, politically moderate, and capable. He scares the daylights out of me, though.

He strikes me as being just a tad too chummy with Jesus; a bit prone to permitting the Bible and Ten Commandments to trump the Bill of Rights and Constitution.

The rest of them are not worth talking about—again, in my opinion. Although, I have direct experience with Giuliani and I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.

So, with the possible exception of Barack Obama, I fear the upcoming election may well boil down to a section process aimed at choosing the lesser of several bad choices. But who knows… geez, where the hell is Pat Paulsen when we need him?

Oh, wait… people are talking into my earpiece. They’re telling me he’s dead! So, what does this have to do with running for President? Given our national propensity for not voting, who would know?

I mean, even dead, Pat Paulsen can’t be any more of threat to this country as has been the 30-year-old myth that the GOP is absolutely fiscally responsible. Think about it. I’ll see you next week.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Whoa! You've grossly misunderstood us, Mr. and Mrs. America

2008-01-20T18:59:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

In the true spirit of an election year, I thought I’d try to clear up some of the terms that politicians like to throw around. Keep in mind, though, that it isn’t just the politicians who do this. The media, depending on its particular stance on a given issue, will either downplay these things or give them a life all their own.

But, always remember that without a gullible public, none of this nonsense would be possible. People hear what they want to hear no matter how much—or little—surface sense it makes. The key term here is “surface sense.” Here’s what I mean.

Way back in the dark ages of the ’80s—1980 to be precise—Ronald Reagan was in the midst of his campaign that led to his first term as President of the United States.

Whether you voted for the man or not is irrelevant now. Some of his campaign promises are relevant, though.

Virtually everywhere he went on the campaign stump, he said that he was going to do three things: reduce taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the federal budget. Millions of people heard these promises and took them literally.

Think about these things for a second. On the surface, he said that he was going to take in less money, spend more of it, and STILL balance the budget! People with 3-digit IQs knew that this was impossible.

Of course, there were many sub-surface conditions that had to occur first. Mr. Reagan knew this. However, as in the case of most elections, getting elected was—and still is—THE operational imperative; complete truth was—and still is—an option.

And, since gullibility was—and still is—such a strong force among the electorate, he chose the former, the same as any other politician. Ronald Reagan was not a liar; but he was both a great story-teller and THE consummate communicator.

We elected Mr. Reagan as our 40^th President. The rest is history. Love him or hate him as you see fit. The fact remains, however; in memoriam, he’s an icon to his supporters and a symbol of the devil incarnate to his enemies.

All politicians love buzzwords and power terms. One of the most popular, especially over the past fifteen- to twenty-years, has been “accountability.” They all promise this, as though they invented it.

It’s a vague term that’s implicative of the speaker’s higher virtues of honesty, as opposed to the status-quo of an opponent’s implied lack of virtues through some sort of terminal non-accountability.

The fact is, however, politicians—on average—do exceedingly well at “talking the talk,” but fail miserably at “walking the walk.” But, the successful ones are even better at something else: hiring spin masters.

Since they don’t seem to show a propensity for “accountability,” even when there are legitimate reasons to demonstrate it, they opt to pay good spin masters to “explain” things to the voters in ways that normal people never could, at least not with a straight face.

If you listen, even casually, to the political rhetoric that’s been going on for the past year or so, you will hear the incessant use of the term, “change.” Don’t take this stuff too seriously.

There is a big difference between what WE, the “people,” mean by change and what THEY, the “candidates,” mean by change. They’re as confident as ever that we, the “people,” can’t tell the difference.

We, the “people,” mean that we want a change in the beltway culture that has this country circling the drain of oblivion. We, the “people,” want “our” United States Congress to change, also, and begin to represent our, the “people’s” best interests, instead of those of the lobbyists on K-Street.

By “change,” they, the “candidates,” mean simple personnel changes. It will be business as usual but conducted by a different crowd of politicians, all of which have dubbed themselves, as being absolutely accountable to us, the “people.”

Here’s another thing. Lies have always existed in politics. The difference now is that there are more of them simply because we’ve permitted the definition of “is” to become relative.

Plus, today’s politicians are more adept at disguising lies as mere episodes of causal, but innocent, “misunderstandings” or at worst, “misstatements.”

Just in case we, the “people,” happen to understand what was said perfectly well, plan-B kicks in, changing “misunderstandings” to “misstatements.” Yes, both are powerful terms and all astute politicians must understand the difference between them.

The former are always the fault of us stupid-assed, misunderstanding voters. The latter are vague attempts at quasi-apologies from politicians. Under NO circumstances, though, should we ever interpret them as admissions of guilt.

As powerful as these terms are at covering a political liar’s butt, especially in the hands of competent spin masters, they pale in the mysterious glow of this one: “out of context.” This one is a truly versatile phrase that covers multiple, simultaneous sins.

For example, in addition to flat out lies, politicians say stupid, offensive things that not only defy constituent positions, but also violate every known tenet of human compassion, empathy, and common sense.

Here’s a gem from George H. W. Bush: “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is a nation under God.”

His press secretary didn’t claim a “misstatement,” but rather that Mr. Bush had been, “quoted out of context.” He knew that the general electorate wouldn’t bother to check it.

The opposition media checked the context, though. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter because we don’t trust the media, especially those outlets that “pick” on OUR favorite politicians!

Honesty, charity, and empathy have never been contingent upon a belief in God. Even so, today’s political office seekers have elevated the term, “religious faith,” to the status of Divine Commandments.

Politicians who want to be elected, must find a way to include these buzz words as inherent in their political footprints.

And, it can’t be just any old faith, either. It has to be the “right” faith. It’s tolerable—at least here in America—for people to believe in those “other” gods, but OUR God, the Christian one, is the only one that counts.

At the national level, it used to be that Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Mormons, Zoroastrians, and, MOST CERTAINLY, Atheists need not apply. But, since Kennedy’s election, Catholics seem to have been removed from the “dangerous” list.

Likewise, Jews, thanks to Joe Lieberman, also seem well on their way to a national upgrade from absolutely NEVER to “OK” under some circumstances. Mormons, via Mitt Romney, may also become eligible for a future upgrade. We’ll see.

As for members of those other faiths, they have two chances of being elected to a national office over the next couple of decades: slim and none.

Many politicians are lawyers. Please note, here. I used “lawyers,” not “attorneys at law.” Graduation from a legitimate law school earns the title: Lawyer. An attorney at law is a lawyer who has passed one or more state bar exams and is licensed to practice law.

So, why do I bring up the difference? It’s simple. Both are master obfuscators. And, for politicians, obfuscation is as vital to a success as oxygen is to the life-sustenance of every living being.

Even the most skilled obfuscators, screw up on occasion, though. This can be a death knoll for a politician. Substandard obfuscation could actually permit voters to understand just enough of what’s been said to know that it’s pure crap. Such screw-ups are tantamount to political felonies.

If this happens, the affected politicians have to make themselves “perfectly clear,” relative to their positions, at which point they raise the bar to formerly unheard of levels of obfuscation, or, if you prefer the more common term, bullshit.

Let me close this by stating MY firm stances on other well established positions and a realistic potential of ME changing my mind. Never let it be said that I am NOT perfectly clear on these matter.

When it comes to positions, missionary, in my estimation, is still the best. Also, I am a man of faith in that I firmly believe in prayerful thanksgiving. To me, this is what the doggy-style position is all about. And, screw any changes, too! My back just won’t permit them anymore.

But, as for the politicians in the upcoming general election, nothing will get our real desire for change across to them like unprecedented voter turn-out; throwing long-standing incumbents out of office; and electing who WE want to elect instead of who the media tells us that we want to elect. Let’s DO it.

See you all next week unless my back goes out.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Yo, God! Gotta minute?

2008-01-13T18:20:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

Let me cut right to the chase here, God. Running THE universe—and for all we know, any number of parallel universes—has to be a tiring job of monumental proportions. Although… I have to say that the folks who claim to know you personally (about 75% worldwide, about 83% in the United States) swear that you’re up to the task.

Yes, I’ve heard that you’re omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Still, with all the crap that’s going on in this world, I have to wonder about your qualifications, and ever more often, whether you exist at all.

I know! You’re going to tell me that there is far more good in the world than bad. I concede this, but certainly you have to admit that the range between these two forces is closing, and pretty fast, too. I tell you; it’s downright scary.

Let me pick just one teensy theory that has become a perpetual pissing contest between regressive religion and reductionist science.

Oh stop rolling your eyes like that. You’re the one who allegedly gave me a brain with its reasoning capabilities. So, don’t go getting all pissy because I’ve opted to use it.

Evolution! Nothing raises the neck hackles between the “we came from monkeys” and the “no we didn’t” gangs. When you stand back and listen to these two extreme factions rag on each other, it’s reminiscent of a not too intelligent debate between the naively trustful and the pathologically paranoid.

What blows ME away about all of this bickering is the fact that only a virtual handful of people doubt the scientific evidence of planet Earth’s evolutionary history or our place in an unimaginably vast universe over an incomprehensibly immense timeframe.

No! Surprisingly, the real fight doesn’t begin until we get to the HUMAN part of the theory, especially the part about the monkeys. It seems that we just can’t have this.

“We came from MONKEYS!? Eweeeeeeeee!” Multitudes—measured in billions, worldwide—don’t believe their distant ancestors were monkeys. And, you know what, God? I don’t care one way or the other. If my distant ancestors were monkeys, I can’t do a thing about it at this point.

All I know is that I’m not a monkey NOW. None of us are; nor have we been for a very long time. Yes, some of us have monkey-like intellects—politicians, for example. But this is irrelevant to the issue.

About a hundred and fifty-years ago, Charles Darwin published his evolution theory in a book called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. It was 1859 to be exact.

Since then, even though the general public is unaware of them, countless refinements and qualifications have redefined the theory, making it one of the most robust theories ever published, albeit a most controversial one.

Regardless, whether we like it or not, by now it ranks right up there with Einstein’s theories of Relativity, both General and Special.

Then, in 1871, he published another book titled, The Descent of Man. You can check it out here. While his original theory consisted of pure biology and paleontology, the nuts and bolts of where we came from and how and why, so to speak, this one was different.

His second book addressed the purely human level of evolution. While it did not deny the tenets he established in his initial theory, it did reveal another side of Darwin’s theory: the human side. It also revealed a very human side of Darwin, himself.

However, thanks to the age-old, black and white competition between regressive religion and reductionist science, Darwin’s true feelings relative to the human aspect of evolution have been distorted beyond recognition.

For close to 150-years we’ve used the biology and paleontology of our origins as excuses for being complete assholes. Scientific reductionists have a huge infatuation with snotty-sounding, sophisticated terms.

“Evolutionary imperative” is one of their favorites. You’re probably more familiar with the term, “genetic hardwiring.” Don’t worry about it, though; they’re just different words that express the same idea.

They both imply that we humans are powerless to control our impulses. They’ve been the fuel that has powered the drive behind rationalizing our lack of shame in publically fondling ourselves while flinging our feces all over the planet. After all, monkeys will be monkeys.

I am a man. My background is science. As such, I understand the worlds of atoms, quarks, strong and weak forces, and dark matter.

As a man of science, I also understand how imbibing in too much Kickapoo Joy Juice can, sometimes, cause female monkeys to look pretty good. So, it’s conceivable, at least to me, that we may have come from monkeys. But, this is immaterial to my point.

That point being, we have to get past this monkey business and the associated pissing contest between the regressive religious fanatics who deny ALL scientific tenets and their reductionist science counterparts who have persistently wallowed in a ritual of mental masturbatory conduct over evolution’s biology component.

Accept or reject that we came from monkeys, whatever floats your boat. But, accept the reality that we are NOT monkeys NOW. We are humans, capable of self-awareness. We can reason. We can DECIDE what’s trivial and what’s important. We can love and display empathy for other humans and, for that matter, every species on this planet.

This is what makes humans special, whether there is a God or not. Natural, catastrophic events notwithstanding, this is also what will determine how long we survive as a species. It’s not just about biology and paleontology. It really isn’t! It never has been.

Darwin’s OTHER book, The Descent of Man, explains this idea. It defines the human side of evolution. It shows us that we can choose one of two courses for our species.

We can continue permitting regressive religion and reductionist science, as we have for the past 150-years, to set our agenda, one based on a media driven orgy of fear. We can continue believing that we are victims of our own selfish, killer-genes, all of which are beyond our control, thanks to “evolutionary imperatives.”

Or, we can choose to supplement the biology part of evolution with a human element that permits love and kindness to balance the violence of “genetic hardwiring” and instills genuine hope to balance the despair born out of illogical fear.

We can do this, but we have to get past the monkey stuff first. In the end it does not matter whether there is a God or not, whether we came from monkeys or not. There either is a God or there isn’t. We either came from monkeys or we didn’t. In the absence of verifiable proof either way, we can’t do anything about it.

Finally, here is some advice for you men. Whenever you are horny, stay off the Kickapoo Joy Juice. If it is impossible for you to do this, for God’s sake stay the hell out of the monkey house! And, on that note, assuming that we don’t extinct ourselves beforehand, I’ll be back next week.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Praise the Lord and vote for ME!

2008-01-06T16:38:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

God-believing candidates are seemingly multiplying like rabbits, nowadays. Most of them have been locked in a virtual over-drive to let us know that they are believers. We voters demand it is what the media reporters and pundits tell us. Personally, I think it’s a lot of baloney. Here’s why.

First, the folks I’ve spoken to and heard from tell me that they don’t care about a candidate’s religious beliefs unless the CANDIDATE makes them a major hallmark of the campaign. It seems that religion is fine unless… there is too much it.

Second, mixing religion and politics can’t succeed in any positive way. This has always been the case because the two are utterly opposed in every respect.

By its definition, fundamentalist religion is a belief in the infallibility, and literal interpretation, of a particular religion’s doctrine or holy books. It has NEVER been about finding any acceptable middle ground. Nor, will it ever be.

It’s dogmatic. Absolute! No compromises. No wiggle room for discussion. You’ve either accepted Jesus as your personal Savior or you haven’t. If not, you’re NOT saved. You are not suitable to hold a public office, PERIOD! End of conversation.

For true religious fundamentalists, the Constitution is subservient to the Bible. The Ten Commandments supersede the Bill of Rights as a matter of dogmatic imperative.

Issues such as gay marriage and abortion are not debatable. They are not open to ideological compromise because they are forbidden by God. And those who deny it are sinners to be shunned, pure and simple.

On the other hand, the field of secular politics, by its nature, is one of consensus through compromise. It depends on non-boundary coalition building in order to forge solutions that the majority of citizens can live with.

Conservative politicians, particularly over the past fifteen or so years, have tried to forge this ideological abyss by promising things they can’t deliver. It will ultimately destroy them. Religious fundamentalists are neither ideologically flexible nor open to consensus building.

To such voting blocs, if “their” politicians can’t deliver the goods they promised, they will move on to others who will. Given no alternative, they’ll vote the “perceived” phonies out of office just to prove a point!

Liberal politicians—for well over multiple decades—have come off as distaining most religious ideology, particularly that of the fundamentalist movement. It is immaterial whether this is reality or perception.

It’s a matter of fundamental human nature to believe our preconceived notions. “When the myth becomes fact; print the myth.” So, too, when a perception becomes widespread enough, it BECOMES reality.

Governor Huckabee is an unapologetic religious fundamentalist and Barack Obama, while a Christian, does not share the moral absolutes of his fundamentalist opponent. Just the same, their respective wins in Iowa got my attention, albeit it for different reasons.

Their religious contrasts had nothing to do with it, either. It was their striking similarities as political candidates.

Neither comes off like a stereotypical candidate. Both unapologetically state their beliefs in straightforward terms, projecting a refreshing degree of sincerity and willingness to say what they believe, come what may. I haven’t seen this in decades.

And, even though I count myself among the multitudes of people who can be fooled some to the time, I believe the sincerity of both candidates is both real and refreshing. However, time will tell.

Both candidates have hit the big radar scope. Unlike campaigns of years ago, the press nowadays has anointed itself as the purveyors of “gotchas.” Reporters and political pundits alike, revel in catching politicians in a faux pas, regardless of how minor it may have been.

In turn, every news media outlet, every cable-channel talking head, every radio talk-show host, and every political analyst will regurgitate it for weeks, maybe even months, thus obliterating many substantive issues.

Additionally, every enemy either of these men has ever made, even remotely, will begin to come forward, placing themselves at the disposal of political opponents.

And, the blogosphere—right and left—will spring vigorously alive, solidly intent on either candidate’s total annihilation or ultimate victory.

The essence of politics has not changed for centuries. They still kiss babies when it’s feasible. And, they are still not opposed to stealing their lollipops if they have to. I suspect that this will never change as long as there is an American form of politics.

What has changed, though, is the depths to which many politicians will stoop to get themselves elected. It’s a no holds barred situation where negative—often absolute defamation and/or slander—has become the rule.

While we voters vehemently deny a preference for negative campaigning, it works. It if didn’t the politicians would abandon it.

So, either we’re lying about our distain for it or we simply can’t tell the difference between outright character assassination and honest, sincere issue disputes.

Either way, it behooves both of these men to remember that, even if familiarity does not breed absolute contempt, it most certainly will take much of the edge off of admiration.

What happened in Iowa has raised my interest level substantially. It’s far too early to draw any meaningful conclusions at this point, though.

But, it looks as though people in this country—at least those in Iowa—are beginning to see what we need in terms of political leadership.

We don’t need the same old political rhetoric promising change and unworkable solutions to age-old problems. This has grown as stale three-day-old bread.

We NEED a President who is capable of challenging and inspiring Americans of all persuasions to abandon their petty differences and concentrate on the finding solutions to those critical problems that divide us.

At least for now, Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama are refreshing in this respect. Maybe one of them can pull it off. Dear Lord, if you’re out there, please deliver us from evil… We can only hope. Time will tell.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

So! How about them good old days?

2007-12-30T11:25:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

Here’s some good news and some bad news. Americans’ average life expectancy is currently around 78.0 years. It’s higher for women but lower for men. The bad news is that, according to www.NationMaster.com, we’re 44^th on a list of 220 covered countries.

Medical Science has come a long way over the past 100-years. In 1907 over ninety percent of all United States physicians had no college education and some had never attended a medical school. Medical schools were thought to be substandard.

The five leading causes of death were (in order from first to last): Pneumonia and influenza, Tuberculosis, Diarrhea, Heart Disease, and Stroke. The five leading causes of death today are (same order as above): Heart disease, Cancer, Stroke, Pneumonia, and Accident/Suicide.

Diarrhea is no longer on the list. Thank God for Imodium AD! When ya gotta go, ya gotta go. As life-saving as this stuff is, the last cause of death on the list indicates that more and more people don’t care and just want to check the hell out of here.

Here’s a complete list of how it was in 1907. I don’t know who compiled it, though. Have a look, anyway. I have verified it against other legitimate list and it seems consistent with them.

The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
The average wage in the U.S. was twenty-two cents an hour. The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the United States took place at home.
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants.
The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
Drive-by-shootings, in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages, or anything else that caught their fancy, were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.
Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
One in ten U.S. adults couldn't read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Some medical authorities warned that professional seamstresses were apt to become sexually aroused by the steady rhythm, hour after hour, of the sewing machine's foot pedals. They recommended slipping bromide, which was thought to diminish sexual desire,into the woman's drinking water.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.
Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine.
Punch card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile the 1900 census.
Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the NEXT one hundred years assuming, of course, that we don’t extinguish our species with some of the stupidity we are currently involved with.

Another point worth noting is this. Progress, from generation to generation, usually occurs at an ever-increasing rate because of technological advances. It took humans about 200-years to go from horse speed to Voyager-1 space probe speed (about 38,000 miles per hour).

I wonder how long it will take us to get to some meaningful percentage of light-speed (around 50%). I won’t be around to see it, but some of you might be provided you tame some of your excesses and always make you to have some Imodium AD on hand!

Next week… same time, same channel.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Of Doctors and other matters of IQ

2007-12-23T17:25:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

A few months ago, I was channel surfing during the late night—defined by ME as after mid-night but before 4 AM. I came across Larry King Live. His guest was Dr. Jack Kevorkian, recently released after serving 8-years of a 10 to 25-year prison term stemming from his conviction on a multitude of assisted suicides.

This is not about Larry King or Jack Kevorkian, at least not specifically. It’s about something that Larry King said to the infamous Dr. Death! However, in the interest of fairness, I must clarify something first.

Relative to Larry King, I have never been one of his fans. Personally, I think he’s highly overrated and a perfect example of how someone has managed to fool an inordinately large number of people over an interminably long period of time.

But, given his long and successful career, I stand as a member of a relatively small group of critics. Regardless, in my opinion, there is something about Larry King that seems to scream out; “Look at me, everybody; I’m a dumb-ass!”

Relative to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, I ALWAYS agreed with him in principle. I think his intentions were always honorable and sincere in that he believed he was helping people.

Since we seem to abhor letting animals suffer under such horrible conditions, why do we expect humans to suffer so? If their medical conditions are terminal and they are mentally and emotionally competent, why not permit medical doctors to help them die painlessly and with dignity?

All of this aside, though, I think Kevorkian did his cause more harm than good. His methodology appeared callus and dangerous. Taunting law enforcement personnel to “Stop me if you can” by sending audio/video recordings of his actions was both arrogant and stupid.

Okay… Now, back to the interview. In answer to King’s question concerning the outcome of his (Kevorkian’s) efforts, Dr. Jack explained to Mr. King that his “doctor-assisted” suicide mission was over.

“Someone younger will have to take up the cause,” he told King. “Besides,” he added, “the state of Michigan revoked my medical license as a result of my conviction. So I couldn’t continue actively, even if I wanted to.”

Larry King then asked, “So, how do you feel now that you can’t call yourself ‘Doctor’ anymore?” Dr. Kevorkian looked at him and said, “I’m still a doctor because I have a medical degree from an accredited medical school. They can’t take that away. I just can no longer practice medicine.”

This went over Mr. King’s head by at least 5-vertical feet. He was sincerely clueless. Viewers could tell this because of the way he continued to press the point. He seemed determined to spring some sort of “gotcha” on Kevorkian.

It always seems that whenever dumb-asses try explaining what intelligent people have said, they (the dumb-asses), due to sheer cognitive deficiency, subconsciously translate it into something THEY can understand. Larry King seems to substantiate this with alarming frequency.

Actually, it lends much credence to what I said about him a few paragraphs above: that, in my opinion, there seems to be something about Larry King that just SCREAMS, “Look at me, everybody; I’m a dumb-ass!”

Now, if you happen to be a Larry King fan, fine! Don’t be sending me hate email because I’ve picked on him. It’s not personal. And, besides, I’m not alone in this respect. Take consolation in the fact that many other TV/Radio talking heads are just as bad, only a lot younger.

Look, I have to begin my Christmas shopping—I’m not about to let people classify me as a “last minute shopper”—so I’d like to keep this week’s article short. However, I do believe that I’ve stumbled onto a possible reason for Larry King’s long-term celebrity success.

I’m a Comcast broadband ISP subscriber. I found the below headline on Comcast.net Entertainment. Since they tend to remove stuff faster than people can read it, I’ve decided to include the entire article here.

“Cops: 'Mr. Bean' Dings a Car in Aspen”

ASPEN, Colo. — British comedian Rowan Atkinson, known for playing the bumbling television and movie character Mr. Bean, made a mistake of his own when he backed an SUV into an Aspen woman's car.

Atkinson was moving from a metered spot Thursday when he struck the Volkswagen Jetta, police said. "He was backing out of a parking spot and didn't see the car behind him," said police Sgt. Dan Davis. "There was a little bit of damage to the car. He put a ding in it."

Davis said the accident was minor, and no citations were issued.

A phone message left for Atkinson's management in London late Saturday was not immediately returned.

Why is this newsworthy, even though I think Rowan Atkinson is a fine comedic entertainer? The fact is that it isn’t. However, some reporter thought it important enough to call Atkinson and tell us that he did not IMMEDIATELY return the call.

These entertainment reporters must have the IQs of carrots. And, based on some of the stuff I’ve seen on television over the past several years, we readers and viewers may be suffering similarly.

The fact that I’ve actually enjoyed some of this stuff scares the daylights out of me, though. I’ve always thought my own IQ to be in the range of high-grade tree bark.

Even though I told you last week, again, have a great holiday, whatever name you assign to it. I call it Christmas. So Merry Christmas! If this offends some you, I’m sorry, not for offending you, but because you have a carrot-level IQ.

We’ll do it again next Sunday. Stay safe. Don’t drive and drink. Carrots certainly don’t.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

OK! But ONLY because it's Christmas

2007-12-16T18:19:00.001-05:00

By Joseph Walther

For many people, most applicably this writer, using the newest, faddist, and most recently declared GREATEST electronic gadget is the SECOND most incredible feeling male humans can experience. I subscribe to at least 30-electronic product newsletters; each arriving in my inbox chocked full of “gotta haves.” Trust me; I know what I’m talking about.

People flock around me for advice on the newest and greatest stuff to buy. Computers! Digital Cameras! Cell Phones! MP3 Players! Digital Voice Recorders! Vibrators! You name it and people have asked me about it.

I was in Best Buys^® last Tuesday afternoon. A sales associate had approached a potential customer and had just popped the magic question: “May I help you?” Yes, rare as it is, it still happens occasionally.

The customer, probably in shock, gushed, “Oh, God, I hope so. I’m looking for a digital camera with a lot of megapixels for my wife for Christmas and I’m clueless.”

The sales associate then asked the ultimate sucker question, “How much did you want to spend?” The customer, in the tradition of the truly clueless, responded with, “Not too much. I’d like to keep it under $500.”

With that, the “associate” stepped back a pace or two and picked up an Olympus SP-560-UZ. “This is one of the best cameras on the market,” he said; “and, it’s on sale for only $459.99!”

The man appeared to be in his mid- to late 50s. But, as nice and sincere as he appeared, the only thing missing was a lollipop wrapper covering his head and tightly twist-wrapped around his neck.

My spoiler instinct kicked in immediately. “NOT ON MY WATCH,” I whispered under my breath. “I own this model,” I said to the man. “What would you like to know about it?”

At this point, the store “associate” excused himself to wait on another customer, a much younger customer, female with perky breasts and firm… SORRY, I digress too much sometimes.

Though I cursed myself for intervening too soon, I continued my resolve to help this man just the same.

As the sales associate schmoozed with his younger, perky-breasted, bubbly-voiced customer, I tore my eyes away and pulled the older guy aside; describing the two most egregious consumer felonies customers could possibly commit: telling salespeople how much they’re willing to spend and admitting their cluelessness.

In less than 2-minutes of conversation, I learned that his wife’s total camera experience was restricted to those disposable 35mm cameras sold at drug stores and department stores such as Target, and K-mart. His experience, I also learned, was not quite as extensive as hers.

I asked him if he had a home computer with email and an Internet connection. He said that he did and that both he and his wife were more familiar with the Internet than with digital cameras.

I’m not going into the entire lesson on digital cameras that I shared with him. But, in summary, here are the features that people should look for in a FIRST digital camera purchase.

Sadly, sales people tend to overlook most of the absolute, practical features, while overemphasizing much of the relative and/or useless stuff.

Take megapixels for example. We’ve been brain washed when it comes to megapixels. We’re convinced that the more megapixels there are the better the camera. This is a myth that all camera manufactures love to perpetuate because more megapixels mean higher purchase prices.

However, once people learn the role that megapixels play in the total quality aspects of digital cameras, they discover that the importance of large megapixel counts is relative to what you want from the camera.

The most popular print size for digital prints is 4x6 with an occasional 8x10. While it’s true that megapixels determine image quality, it’s also true that they are more relevant to print quality. The higher the number of megapixels, the more you can enlarge the image for printing without distortion.

For prints of 4x6 and those occasional 8x10s, between 4- and 6-megapixels is more than sufficient. It also lowers the price of the camera. Four to six megapixels will provide great screen image quality as well as provide for image enlargements without quality distortion when printing your pictures.

Also, forget DIGITAL zoom. It’s a software matter that comes into play during the cropping of images or their screen resizing. What IS critical to camera users is OPTICAL zoom. Standard optical zoom for point and shoot digitals is 3x or, more rarely, 5x.

Again, manufacturers do a lousy job of explaining optical zoom. Most people understand that a zoom feature brings a subject closer to the camera. I heard one sales associate at CompUSA explain that 3x brings the subject three times closer.

Wow, that’s clear, but um… three times closer than what AND from where? Here’s a down and dirty explanation. Divide the distance to the subject by the optical zoom number.

In other words, if your subject is 100-yards away, a 3x optical zoom will make it seem like it is only 33 yards away. If the optical zoom is 5x, the subject will seem to be only 20-yards away. A 10x optical zoom will make it seem like your subject is only 10-yards away.

Most point and shoot digitals do not have viewfinders. You just look through the LCD monitor; focus in on the subject; and take the picture. A viewfinder is only important if you take many pictures in very bright light, such as sun glare-like brightness at the beach.

The last technical features that you should look at are shutter lag and optical image stabilization. These are important.

Blurring, especially in low light conditions, is caused by natural handshake. I don’t mean overt handshaking, as in suffering from a hangover, but rather a natural, subtly undetectable handshake that comes from the simple act of trying to hold a camera still. It happens and it blurs the image.

It’s enough to drive you crazy, to maybe start drinking; resulting in some of that overt, hung-over handshaking I referred to above!

Built-in optical image stabilization overcomes this, for the most part, using gyroscopic sensors and floating elements in the lens. So always look for a digital camera that has this feature.

BUT NOTE! It does NOT overcome handshake from hangovers. You’ll need cocaine for this, or, at the very least, some high-quality pot that ONLY Leroy sells… outside the police station… downtown.

If shutter lag is too long, you’ll end up missing some great shots, especially those evidence shots involving small children putting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into the VCR slot.

So, whatever you do, be sure to buy a digital camera with a shutter speed less than one half a second. You won’t regret it.

Finally, find a digital camera that is easy to use. It does not matter how technically GREAT a camera is. If it’s too difficult to learn, you’ll not use it. Conversely, no matter how easy a camera is to use, if it takes crappy pictures, you’re not going to use it, either. So look for balance.

That Olympus SP-560-UZ, you know… the one the sales associate mentioned above… has all of these features and tons more. It’s optical zoom is 18x, to boot. On sale notwithstanding, $460 is a lot of money for something with this kind of power, most of which you’ll not be using.

You can buy a compact Olympus Stylus-740 with just the right number of features (no viewfinder) with a 5x optical zoom, the proper shutter speed, and optical image stabilization for MUCH less. And, it will fit inside one of your wife’s smaller purses—I think they call them clutches.

You can buy one at www.amazon.com for $237.87, with free delivery before Christmas. Your wife will LOVE it because it’s so easy to use, especially the self-portrait/timing features. And, if you apply the savings in some Christmas Eve champagne, she may even let you experience the FIRST most incredible feeling that male humans can experience!

I mean, with the new camera, you might even decide to take pictures. Personally, I wouldn’t, but if you do, you should know that proper use of the auto-timer feature is critical, unless you invite a “friend.”

You’ll also need an optional tripod (absolutely eliminates camera shake) and lots of dooby vapor (eliminates ALL semblance of fear, embarrassment, and common sense). BOTH are sold separately, of course—just call Leroy.

He can probably get you a good deal on the tripod if you buy the doobies from him. In fact, he might provide the stuff for free if you let HIM be the “friend.”

In any event, have a great holiday, no matter what you call yours. Be safe and I’ll be back next week.

Oh, by the way, if too much dooby vapor and champagne cause you to take pictures ANYWAY, don’t post them on YouTube. It might prove quite costly. I’ll try to cover the procedure in a later column, including some helpful hints on how to keep both the police and the lawyers out of it, especially your wife’s divorce lawyer.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Could it BE!?

2007-12-09T17:51:00.001-05:00

By Joseph Walther

A friend of mine owns a jewelry store. I stopped in to see him the other day. While we were talking, we noticed one of his younger sales associates waiting on an older man—looked to be in his late ‘60s. The customer was nicely-dressed and well spoken. He was interested in a diamond necklace that was on sale for a mere $6,899.96.

The clerk, anticipating an imminent sale, dutifully explained the investment qualities of diamonds and his store’s quality guarantee. Almost as an after-thought, he mentioned the inevitable thrill his wife would feel when she found it under the Christmas tree.

“Oh, I’ve been a widower for the past fifteen years, but I’ve finally met someone. I feel like a teenager in love for the first time,” he explained.

At this, my friend (the owner) excused himself for a “minute” and went behind the counter to “help” the clerk close the sale. He’d spent his life in the jewelry business and he knew something about the product that young, inexperienced clerks have yet to learn.

He introduced himself to the customer, complementing him on his taste. He also asked if he’d like to see a matching set of earrings that he might want to consider for a later purchase. The customer seemed thrilled to look at them.

With that, my friend reached for the earrings that were next to where the necklace had been. They, too, were on sale. The price was $8,996.99. His eyes widened and he exhibited the biggest smile I’ve ever seen.

“I’ll take them AND the necklace,” he exclaimed. Harry (the owner) asked if he’d like to include a card and have them gift-wrapped. The customer said that he would like that very much.

Harry handed him the small white, blank card. The gentleman took out a FOUNTAIN pen and wrote in a near-perfect Palmer Method—cursive to you non-Catholics—“I love you, Ann” and signed it, “Tommy.”

He pulled his check book from inside his overcoat and wrote a check in the amount of $15,996.95, explaining that the extra $100 was a tip for being so helpful. Harry concluded the transaction with a warm handshake and a wish for a very warm and happy holiday.

By now, the young clerk had moved toward me. He told me that he would not have believed what just happened had he not seen it with his own eyes. “My boss just talked that customer into buying $16,000 worth of jewelry,” he told me. “I could never have done that,” he finished.

Clearly, this young clerk had no idea what had happened. The customer was there and already committed to buying. The boss knew this because he had a clear understanding about what the customer was trying to buy. All the boss had to do was show the customer what he was looking for.

I tried to explain that while he (the clerk) was trying to sell the customer quality diamonds, the customer was looking to buy a fantastically positive reaction. His boss knew this almost instinctively.

“There must be five or so other jewelry stores within a 5-mile radius of this one,” I told him. “Each sells high-quality diamonds,” I continued. “This customer came into YOUR store. All you had to do was convince him that he’d come to the right store. You had the necklace sale in the bag,” I concluded.

Harry knew that this customer was not buying diamonds for his newfound love because they’re good financial investments. If this were the case, a nice cache of blue chip stocks would have sufficed quite nicely!

No, men who purchase diamonds for the women in their lives do so to experience an exhilarating, sincere, tearful, loving reaction. It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world. In my life, the only joy that ever topped it was that of my children wrapping their little arms around my neck and saying, “I love you, daddy!”

Anyway, this is why Harry has been so successful for so many years. He knows what he’s actually selling. Hopefully, this young clerk has begun to see the point, too. The same lesson is applicable to virtually every other retail sales endeavor.

On another matter, unrelated to diamonds, I volunteer some of my time to one of those homework help facilities. You know… the kind where kids can phone in their questions or pose them via internet forums. This one is unique, though. It’s private.

First, those who provide the help must submit their qualifications to do so. Participating schools verify the credentials, including background criminal checks.

Second, the students who use it must register with their school’s principal who provides each student with an approval code. Whenever a student either phones in or places a question in the online forum, they must provide the code.

Third, the service is restricted to junior and senior high school students. The phone system records student codes, questions, and responder solutions. The same is true of online forum use.

Last the service is free. Responders are all volunteers. The only technology that a student needs to use the service is access to an online-capable computer or a standard landline phone.

Responders are not permitted to divulge student identification in any way. However, I recently received a help request that blew me away. It wasn’t the question, though. It was the fact that it came from a 13-year-old.

I contacted the school and they gave me permission to write about it here as long as I do not divulge the student’s identity, including the name of the school. I agreed and, for the record, the school is not in my home state of Delaware.

The question…FROM A 13-YEAR OLD was as follows. “Is there a way, using simple algebra, to calculate the effects of relativistic time dilation? I’ve tried everywhere to find an answer, but the only thing I found involves Lorenz transformation equations and I can’t understand them.”

The question continued, “I want to figure out how old I would be if my father left on an outer space trip that took him ten years traveling at 80% of the speed of light.”

My response… “WOW, you’re only thirteen?” To answer the question directly, yes, you can use simple linear algebra to calculate a correct answer. The key is to concentrate on relative time lapses instead of worrying about figuring out dilation factors.

Since it took dad ten years to make the trip, I assumed the ten years to be his time inside his space ship. As such, calculate the square-root of (1-0.8²—the 0.8² represents 80% the velocity of light). The square-root of it all is 0.60.

Then, divide this into 10 (representing the ten years of dad’s reference trip time. This will put your reference time, upon his arrival back on Earth, at about 16.7-years.

The answer makes sense because, in terms of relativity, clocks run slower the closer you get to the speed of light. This isn’t speculation, we’ve already proved it.

In other words, relative to the clocks on dad’s space ship, a total of ten years went by, while 16.7 years went by on your Earth-bound clock. The formulation works in the other way, also.

Assume the same speed of travel. Then, say dad leaves on a space trip and you wait 16.7-years (by your Earth clock) for his return. How many years will have transpired on HIS space ship clock?

Again, calculate the square-root of (1-0.8²), which still equals 0.60. But instead of dividing this into 10-years, multiply it by 10-years. Dad’s space ship clock will show that it took only ten years to make the trip.

While relativistic time dilation is verifiable—it’s done, almost daily, in virtually every undergraduate physics lab in the country—we’re nowhere near actual human age effect verification.

Besides, no massive body can achieve the speed of light. By massive, I do not mean big. I simply mean a body that contains mass. And, we’re not likely to achieve even 50-percent the velocity of light in terms of travel speeds anytime soon.

It took the human race 200-years to go from horse speed to Voyager speed, the fastest space vehicle we’ve thus far developed. Going full-throttle, its speed is about 40,000 MPH.

Don’t fret, though. When Albert Einstein was 8-years old, he wondered what it would be like to ride on a light-beam. You’re a little older than he was when he began thinking about such things, but you seem to think far in advance of your years, the same as he did. Could a Nobel be in your future? Maybe! We humans could use some good news. Keep it up.

Next week… same time and place.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Double-speak 101

2007-12-02T17:03:00.001-05:00

By Joseph Walther

I sat through a 30-minute political tirade last Wednesday afternoon. The tirader, a “potential” candidate for one of Delaware’s numerous school boards, seemed oblivious to the fact that we tiradees were more embarrassed than interested. I’m not going to name the dude because I refuse to give him any press at all, even negative press.

Astute politicians—and ONLY the astute ones--seem to have one thing in common. They have huge egos that they’ve learned to camouflage by using generous coats of modesty and affability. This produces a rather pleasant, veneer-like appearance to their celebrity.

However, Sherwin Williams must have been closed the day this guy showed up to pick up his painting supplies.

School board candidates are politicians, no different from those seeking other elective offices. But, unlike other elective offices, school board seekers don’t have to campaign as rigorously.

First, school board elections are held at the most innocuous times with voter turnout closer to two-percent than five-percent. Second, the candidates are practically anointed by the “power” structure within the sitting boards. So, “politicking” is not something board position seekers need to do.

Educational administrators, particularly school board members, are notorious perpetrators of munificent amounts of double-speak, passionately expressed in their favorite mode of communication: passive voice. Thanks to this man’s efforts, the stereotype remains firmly intact.

“It’s imperative to get a handle on wasteful spending,” he bellowed. “The need is critical for allocating more money to classrooms rather than to administrators,” he continued. “The need to reduce the number of school districts in this state has become evident,” he admonished. “We MUST get more parents involved with their children’s education,” he declared. “Discipline is all but dead in public schools,” he sputtered.

He was long on stating the obvious problems that everyone, including my 15-year-old cat, already knows about. He was alarmingly short on stated solutions, though.

I was one of several people present. While I observed about twenty people walk off shaking their heads in disgust, I remained put, out of, um… respect. Besides, this occasion had “COLUMN” written all over it.

What amazed me beyond belief was the rapture-like attention most of those remaining were paying to this individual. It was as though he was Jesus, giving the famous Sermon on the Mount. I expected a lunch of loaves and fishes to appear at any moment.

There is a saying in politics and post-secondary education: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” He had this down to a science and, trust me, he was light-years from brilliant.

The man used turns of phrases and descriptors that people rarely hear at a local level. How about some of these—I’m not making this stuff up, either.

Have you ever heard of “subdued flamboyance?” He used “courteously unfriendly” four times over a 15-minute span. Also, I’ve met thousands of people during my life to date, and none have been “compassionately quarrelsome” or “spuriously real” or “harshly tender? In fact, I have no idea what these terms even mean.

He referred to a speech that he claimed our Governor, Ruth Ann Minner, gave several months ago, wherein she, he stated, “inferred that some educational programs should be cut. My implication from this,” he told us, “was that she has no idea of the problems we face.”

I’ve searched everywhere, including the State of Delaware web site and a call to her office. I can’t find it. And, neither can members of her speech-writing staff find it.

As a governor, people either love Ruth Ann Minner or they despise her. From the average poll in this state, more fall into the latter category than the former. But, if this man wants to be on a school board, he should know that speakers imply and listeners infer.

No matter what you think of Ruth Ann Minner, she knows the difference between “infer” and “imply,” and HER formal education ended with a GED, albeit a respectable achievement for her in light of several personal adversities she faced in her early years, over which she had no control.

It’s probably best NOT to elect this man to a position as a school board member. The problem is, though, that others, who’d consider a run, especially if they are competent, will not receive the anointment of the present board’s power brokers.

This is because incompetence will NEVER willingly surround itself with competence. Otherwise the incompetence would stand out like zit in the middle of your forehead. So, much of the time, we’re stuck with the “baffle them with bullshit” candidates for whom a sufficient number of clueless voters will vote.

This has given ME pause to consider a run for some office. I’ve already begun my search for rousing bullshit comebacks to campaign questions. I dug into my files and found this one that a former colleague of mine sent me years ago. I’m thinking about asking her to be my campaign manager. Anyway, here it is.

“I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions… Indeed, I feel that I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems.

To sum it all up… In some ways I feel we are as confused as ever, but I sincerely believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things!”

This gem, alone, could propel me to the top. Eat your hearts out Barrack, Hillary, Rudy, and Mitt. Just consider yourselves lucky that I didn’t think of this in ’06!

A candidate has to be prepared out there on the campaign trail. After all, what happens when it’s impossible to seed the audience with friends that will ask light-weight questions? You’re screwed. That’s what happens.

As the recent ’07 primary debates have proven, the other party may try to sabotage the proceedings by planting subversives without the debate moderators knowing about it. What does a candidate do then, hmmmm?

Believe me. It’s prudent to have an ample supply of “baffle them with bullshit” material at your disposal, especially if the stuff seems perceptively brilliant.

For example, suppose, hypothetically, a member of the audience were to ask, “Do you believe in UFOs?” Or, “What is your stance on the Supreme Court’s ruling relative to “Brown v. The Board of Education?” Or, even, “Yes or no, do you believe in evolution?”

Candidates shouldn’t pussy-foot around such issues. They need to take a firm position… stand up and be counted as it were. Since my motto is “BE PREPARED,” I’d snap back, instantly, with something both “surreptitiously direct” and “non-definitively committal”.

“Well,” I’d begin, “I kind of sort of think I might be leaning, at least a little, toward possibly agreeing in principle. However, if you MUST have a definitive answer IMMEDIATELY, than I must tell you that I am decidedly and definitely more positive than ‘maybe,’ but probably not quite as strong as ‘perhaps,’ so you can put me down as respecting the rights of those who differ with me but as holding whichever opinion most people hold and sympathizing with those who are undecided. And, I MEAN it!”

I should win in a landslide! Wolf Blitzer would eat this up. And, if I added something like; “There are no gays in this country, only straights living in sin,” I’d have Sean Hannity campaigning for me night and day.

See you next week. By the way, it has come to my attention that traffic is becoming more and more congested out there due to the looming holidays. Watch out for drivers who are “drunkenly sober,” not to mention those shoppers who are “sanely crazy.” So, watch yourselves.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Who!?

2007-11-25T13:29:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

About a year ago—perhaps less—a reader sent me an email asking about a fellow named Steven Milloy. At the time, and even before that, Mr. Milloy had been a designated global warming darling of conservative TV and radio, particularly “fair and balanced” FOX Broadcasting.

I replied to her explaining his identity and his theory that global warming was NOT a real threat to our environment, but rather an exaggerated position on the part of various tree-hugging alarmists.

Since then, I’ve not given the man much thought because I haven’t heard from him. Some silly old scientific stuff has come up that tends to make his thoughts on the matter seem a bit… well, stupid.

I’m puzzled, though. Over this past week, for some reason, I’ve received several emails involving Mr. Milloy’s scientific credibility pertaining to global warming. So, I’m going to repeat my position on him.

Understand at the outset that Steven Milloy is not stupid. He has a legitimate scientific background. It’s nothing at the post-graduate level, mind you, but he does hold a Master of Health Science in Biostatics from Johns Hopkins University.

Johns Hopkins is an outstanding university with some of the best Health Science programs in the world. It is not the type of academic institution that bestows a degree based solely on a student’s payment of tuition.

While his academic credentials quality him to discuss a relationship between global warming and health science, they do not qualify him to discuss the matter in terms of its existence, real or imagined, at any purely scientific level.

His doing so is tantamount to seventeenth-century Bishop James Ussher concluding that God created the world around 7,000 years ago by back-tracking all of the “begats” in the Bible. He even set a date, Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC.

Practically no one in the objective scientific community pays Milloy any mind at all. I think it’s a mistake to do this. Here’s why.

In general, the American public tends to be, shall we say, a bit lethargic when it comes to the hard sciences. Perhaps it’s the somewhat daunting mathematics. Regardless, dudes like Milloy, seeming personifications of technical competence and authentication, always rush to the rescue.

In addition, their command of the proper “buzz” words makes them appear perceptibly articulate. When they also project pleasant on-air personalities—and Milloy is a master at it—listeners tend to like and trust them in a deceptively comfortable, Walter Cronkitish sort of way.

That their academic backgrounds have nothing to do with the scientific theories they routinely condemn AND that the listening public tends to be scientifically clueless, hide most of the hints that they’re a scientific panderers.

Milloy should print business cards that read; “Have theory, will travel. Wire Milloy.” It worked for Paladin, but he was a real gun fighter!

I mentioned earlier that Milloy was—he may still be—the darling of the Conservative point of view relative to global warming. In addition to this, FOX Broadcasting IS synonymous with the label, Conservative.

So, it’s important to differentiate between FOX News and the various show-time FOX talking heads: Hannity, O’Reilly, and a few others.

Both groups put Milloy on the air, the news group for the purpose of convincing the listening public of their “fair and balanced” philosophy. The other group used him because he told them precisely what they wanted to hear: global warming is liberal hype.

It’s also important to understand the personality make-up of those who listen to FOX. I think there are three types. There are those who (1)…truly believe that FOX News IS, in fact, “fair and balanced,” (2)…those who are dyed in the wool, dogmatic Republican absolutists, and (3)…those who are looking for simple entertainment.

The first type comprises intelligent people who are sick to their eyeballs with a mainstream media that’s become increasingly subtle in its liberal bias. I don’t blame them. The bias is real, though I don’t think that FOX is the definitive solution to reversing the fact.

Perhaps this type of viewer doesn’t understand that the news coming out of FOX is just as slanted, only to a conservative bend. After all, FOX only presents the conservative view, what it calls the “other perspective.” It’s this singular fact that gives rise to FOX’s “fair and balanced” claim.

The second type of listener comprises the “vote Republican at ANY cost” crowd. Regardless of the facts, these people will vote the Republican ticket with an unabashedly Newt Gingrich-like fervor in every aspect: social, fiscal, political, and dogmatic.

They, as well as others, call themselves arch-Conservatives. I call them stupid. Of course, the arch-Liberals are just as bad. I think they’re just as stupid!

The third type watches FOX because they think it is “cool” TV programming. They prefer the color red over blue but don’t know why. What else can they do? Girls Gone Wild is no longer on the air.

These people derive very little from the news—regardless of the channel—because they fall asleep almost as soon as it comes on. It gives them a headache. As such, there is no need to fret over this group. They’re inconsequential and, hopefully, they won’t bother to vote.

As well, the first type, (genuine 3-digit IQs), is in a perpetual search for those who can appeal to their sense of “logic.” They’re in a quandary to begin with because global warming is a complex matter involving more than a single scientific truth.

Milloy fits their bill to a tee. He’s affable, seemingly authentic, and entertaining. The fact that his logic is flawed is of no consequence. He sounds intellectually impressive; so, he must have a valid point. Besides, it beats the hell out of the mainstream news channels!

The other type likes Steven Milloy because he speaks their language. He tells them what they want to hear. They comprise most of George Bush’s 26% approval rating. They still fervently believe that we’ll find all of those WMDs.

Finally, many people have expressed a belief that hurricane Katrina provided an example of the unintended consequences of global warming. I don’t believe that it did. We have yet to see that level of devastation.

Yes, it was tragically devastating, but most of it resulted from human incompetence on an unprecedented scale, and not just among the Bush people, either. The locals, Liberals and Conservatives, were just as much to blame.

The entire country knew, well in advance, what was coming: a category-2 hurricane that would strengthen to a category-3 before landfall. People didn’t pay attention. It amounted to a colossal human screw-up!

When ocean temperatures warm, hurricanes become stronger. This isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t take much of a warm-up, either—as little as a half to one-degree will shift hurricanes’ numerical category designations by a half to three quarters of a point.

Essentially, a category one becomes a category two. Two’s become three’s; three’s become four’s, etc. The world’s getting warmer, so get ready for it.

In matters of science, many humans choose the path of least resistance because they’re in a perpetual search for facts that fit their preconceived notions. When the facts fail this task, it’s easier to ignore them than it is to reexamine the preconceived notions.

People like Steven Milloy, whether they are Conservatives OR Liberals, will always find a place in our hearts because of this. And, broadcasting companies like FOX, MSNBC, and CNN will always provide a forum. Ratings, you know!

Well, another week has come and gone. I hope all of you enjoyed your holiday. If not, keep the faith. There’s another one close on its heels. If you’re claustrophobic, though, it’s best to stay out of the shopping malls. See you next week. Stay safe.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Common sense is SOOOO overrated!

2007-11-18T17:02:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

Whenever I hear the term, “common” sense, I become nervous. It is one of the most overused terms in the history of the human race. Still, people who use it are very sincere about it. While it’s a relatively harmless term much of the time, we still should use some degree of caution before we call something “common sense.”

First, “common” sense, if the term applies at all, can only exist when we’re all on the same page. So defining terms is critical prior to calling something “common” sense. Second, we should never forget that the term is time-relevant.

If we violate the former condition, we may end up arguing for hours over unrelated matters and end up looking foolish. If we violate the latter condition, we show a serious lack of historical perceptive.

Writers do a lot of watching and listening. I know that I do, anyway. I never leave my residence without two things: my digital voice recorder and my 2-megapixil camera/cell-phone.

I rarely have to drive more than two miles before potential column fodder begins to smash into the windshield of my two-seater sports car! Shopping malls and courtrooms, on the other hand, provide a literally inexhaustible supply of story-line ammunition.

Last Tuesday, after concluding a meeting in one of the Superior Court conference rooms, I walked down the five flights of stairs to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. As I sat at a table drinking it, I could not help but overhear a heated discussion among five people seated at the table to my right.

From what I was hearing, it became obvious that two of the men at that table had tested positive to a drug test administered by their employer—the State of Delaware. State agencies can do this for cause and fire those testing positive.

Apparently, they were awaiting a preliminary hearing to determine if a wrongful termination lawsuit would go forward. This confused me because, where the State of Delaware is concerned, such matters do not go to court.

These matters go to arbitration. The arbiter’s ruling is final! What surprised me was that, apparently, a Delaware attorney agreed to take such a case. Poor guy! He’ll likely be experiencing severe rectal bleeding when the judge is though with him.

Anyway, the crux of their argument was that drug testing constituted a privacy invasion and that it never constitutes proof of diminished job performance. In their minds, “common” sense dictated an impending victory against the state.

The other three, a man and two women voiced differing opinions. Lyle defended employers’ rights to test for illegal drug use. He based his position on the legal principle of Joint and Several Liability.

He argued that employers have an obligation to provide drug-free work environments in the interests of employee safety, as well as that of the general public while engaged in business with various state entities.

Then, the old “common” sense thingy reared its often irrelevant head, AGAIN. Pat, one of the women, said, “Drug testing proves nothing in terms of job performance.”

The other woman, Nora, rolling her eyes and oozing condescension all the table, chimed in with, “It’s simple common sense that random drug tests do NOT test for diminished mental capacity or diminished physical dexterity.”

“Walther,” I said to myself, “stay out of this!” I did and I’m proud of myself. Just the same, I’m going to let you folks in on something here.

These two men were not fired for diminished job performance. The State fired them for testing positive to using illegal drugs. Illegal drug use is a CRIME, whether it causes diminished job performance or not.

The sole purpose of drug testing, random or specifically directed for cause, is to detect illegal drug use. As long as it’s done properly, it accomplishes its goal and enjoys the support of the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals.

On Saturday afternoon, another hot button topic reared its ugly head: government-sponsored needle exchange programs for intravenous drug addicts. A poster broached the subject in a discussion forum at www.talkdelaware.com.

I enjoy Talk Delaware because the moderators keep the discussions civil and devoid of personal attacks. This topic was no different.

The views were varied. Some posters agreed with needle exchange programs but felt that public money should not fund them. Others disagreed with the programs on moral principles.

We can debate whether or not needle exchange programs work. However, everyone involved must first understand the purpose of the programs.

People can’t use a “common” sense argument to declare programmatic failure without first understanding a program’s success criteria.

Those who argue that such programs should be discontinued because “common” sense dictates that they do nothing to instill a sense of responsibility in addicts; enable even more illegal drug activity; and are ineffective at getting people off of drugs, can never win the point based on “common” sense.

Needle exchange programs have a single and directly stated goal: prevent the spread of disease. These programs have never claimed any impact on addiction reversal or accepting personal responsibility. So we can’t use such arguments in efficacy evaluations.

On the other hand, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and the World Health Organization enthusiastically endorse such programs and they have ample data to show that they have been effective in their stated purpose: preventing the spread of disease.

I also disagree with the argument against using tax dollars to fund the program. One of the primary responsibilities of a central government is to stem the spread of disease, regardless of source.

Needle exchange programs have proved themselves as relatively inexpensive and highly effective at doing this. I think that such programs exemplify tax dollars wisely spent.

The argument that such programs fail to instill a sense of personal responsibility in addicts is also nonsense. Drug addicts do not have any such sense; otherwise they wouldn’t be drug addicts.

I certainly agree that a society can neither condone nor overlook addiction-oriented crimes. At some point, some addicts prove that they’re not likely to succeed at rehabilitative efforts and we need to draw the line at some point. But this has nothing to do with needle exchange efforts.

People, drug addicts or otherwise, are going to survive using whichever means they perceive that they need. Addicts run the gamut from teenagers to well-dressed articulate professionals to obvious rotten toothed, dirty, smelly washouts who inhabit skid row.

They all have some things in common, though. They’re going to get their fix with or without clean needles. They’re as likely as the rest of us to engage in sexual activity if an opportunity presents itself.

Since many are married, living in monogamous relationships, needle sharing plays a dominate role in spreading disease to innocent third parties, especially the unborn. Needle exchange programs reduce this and they do so very effectively.

I stated above that common sense is time relevant. At various points during human evolutionary history, everyone “knew” that the Earth was flat. It was “common” sense. The human race “knew” that our planet was the center of the universe. It was “common” sense.

The best minds of our species “knew” that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. It was, after all, the only “common” sense explanation for planetary movement, both daily and over longer periods of time.

These people were not “off the wall kooks. They were well-respected, highly educated people. They based their “common” sense on the existing state of scientific discovery.

The point is that the list of what people “knew” has always seemed endless. This tradition continues today, still under the guise of “common” sense.

We’d do well to remember that it does not require an inordinate amount of intellectual capacity to “know.” However, it takes a great amount of effort to “understand.”

Likewise, the greater our understanding becomes, the MORE we come to realize that we no longer “know” what “common” sense always assured us that we “knew.” So, take “common” sense with a grain of salt.

Let me leave you with this thought. I’ve been wearing eye glasses since I was twelve-years-old. I’m sixty-five years old now and my eyesight has gradually diminished to being one step removed from requiring a dog and a cane.

Is this age related? Or is it, as well-established Catholic “common” sense has always dictated, irrefutable evidence of masturbatory abuse? If it’s the latter, there are far worse ways to go blind, “common” sense notwithstanding.

Next week… see you then.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Irrefutable logic MY butt!

2007-11-11T14:26:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Walther

I won’t bore you with subject-matter detail, but I was privy to two people engrossed in a heated debate last Friday. Between the two of them, they dropped the label, “irrefutable logic” seven times. As I listened—they knew that I was listening, too—both debaters appeared intellectually adept in matters logical.

“Logic” is a term used loosely by many people from myriad educational backgrounds. I’ve heard the phrase, “I AGREE with your logic,” used hundreds of times by many people over the course of my life. However, I’ve heard, “I DISAGREE with your logic,” even more.

We tend to have no problems with those who agree with us. It’s those who disagree that tend to drive us batty. In fact, this idea formed one of the fundamental motivations behind this BLOG’s title: The True Facts!

At best, whether you agree or disagree with people’s logic, you need to be careful when stating your own positions. As is often the case, many statements may be devoid of logic to begin with.

Consequently, agreeing or disagreeing has no meaning other than to point out that the one in agreement, or disagreement, is just as confused as the one who made the original statement. In other words, it often tends to boil down to the blind attempting to lead the blind.

Formal, legitimate logic is nothing more than an argument consisting of a list of statements called premises. Following the premises is a final statement called a conclusion.

However, the process is based on well established rules of formal logic, not to mention at least one, mostly overlooked, MAJOR assumption, the absolute truth of the stated premises.

We have to examine the conjunction of an argument’s premises. If the premises imply an argument’s conclusion, we deem the argument as valid. Of course, this is the way some stodgy old philosophy professor would say it.

A normal person, with a 3-digit IQ, would simply tell you that if all the premises are true, then the conclusion is true!

Most of the time, it isn’t the logic behind the premises that causes people to suspect the absolute validity of an argument’s conclusion. It’s a failure to acknowledge that MAJOR assumption… the one I mentioned above.

An argument’s conclusion may be perfectly valid. However, its validity does NOT guarantee the TRUTH of its premises. As such, neither can it guarantee the TRUTH of its conclusion.

Stated another way, it may be a perfectly logical true conclusion that is based on a huge pile of untrue bovine excrement.

Be careful! There are inherent flaws in declaring statements as “logical/illogical.” The most common one is the degree of emotional investment on the part of those doing the arguing.

The higher the degree of emotional investment, the more susceptible such people are to the unintended consequences of self-delusion.

At one point in our evolutionary history, people “knew” that the Earth was flat. They all “knew” that Earth was the center of the Universe. At various other points people “knew” other things that, thanks to today’s facts, WE know to have been “just plain stupid.”

Note, however, that this does not mean that our ancestors were stupid. It simply means that, based on the “scientific” premises of the times, they believed their conclusions to have been true.

Humans are highly susceptible to self-delusion. Pre-conceived notions often trump disproving facts. When people believe something to be true, unless contrary evidence is overwhelming, they will adjust the facts to fit their pre-conceived notions rather than revise them to fit the facts.

This applies to ALL humans without exception, scientists in particular. In fact, when scientists fall prey to this kind of behavior, the consequences can be devastating; which is why scientists should NOT guess.

Scientists who theorize BEFORE they have facts to back up their theories inevitably begin to revise the FACTS to fit their theories rather than revise their theories to fit the facts.

The one consolation, whenever scientists do this, is that scientific critical thinking eventually lays waste to the scientifically ridiculous. The problem, though, is that most non-scientists, at least the ones in this country, don’t DO science.

After all, there is math involved in this stuff! Right? At any rate, the sad fact that most non-scientists do NOT do science gives rise to an ever-increasing onslaught of episodes of scientific prostitution.

So, the next time you hear people talk about what is logical and what is not logical, ask them which assumptions, if any, they have made and whether they have independently validated the truth of their premises.

No matter which subject they’re speaking of, I’m betting two things. The first is that they have no idea what you’re talking about. The second is that their minds have already been made up and they’ll be in no mood to be confused with facts.

Tune in again next Sunday. I’ll be revealing more truths just as soon as I find out what they are.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

I'm NOT apathetic; I just don't give a hoot!

2007-11-04T15:42:00.001-05:00

By Joseph Walther

It’s only early November, 2007. Elections are over a year away. It’s not so much that the politicking has already started; it’s that it’s been going on for close to 7-months, now! And, THIS is local politicking.

Nationally, it’s been going on, in earnest, for over a year. The Media—electronic, print, and blogosphere—have been inundating all of us to freaking DEATH with this stuff! Mediocrity at its finest.

A major problem for me is that most, at least 99.9%, of the local political windbaggery pertains to stuff outside of my home state. It involves mostly issues in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Yes! Local stuff that is meaningless to ME.

I can’t turn the TV on without seeing one or more political wannabes personally trashing their political wannabe opponents. And, seldom do such ads pertain to Delaware politicians.

The reason for it is the fact that Delaware is part of the Philadelphia metropolitan broadcast market, which includes Central/South New Jersey, all of Delaware, and Eastern Pennsylvania.

I live in a thriving republic called Delaware. It consists of 2,489 square miles—1,955 in land and 535 in water. Whenever I’m in other states and tell people that I live in Delaware, they want to know if it’s in Pennsylvania.

The point is that Delaware would amount to no more than a nice-sized county in upper Pennsylvania. Yet, we Delawareans, per-capita, have to listen to an endless stream of stupid, nonsensical, and worthless political TV ads that perpetually depict the sorry-assed state of political nonsense in other states.

It’s just not fair, I tell you. We have our OWN crop of sorry-assed political nonsense to deal with, along with our share of political morons who perpetuate the stuff.

Politicians are politicians. They transcend state boundaries. As in the rest of the fifty United States, most of them don’t care a hoot about the people they represent. They’re way too busy catering to “special interests.”

As well, we Delawareans can’t get enough voters to the polls at election time to “throw the bums out.” Perhaps if we did this a couple of times every fifteen or so years, they’d start paying more attention to us. But, don’t hold your breath. And, it’s getting worse, not better.

On the national level, the process has reached a point where there isn’t even the slightest attempt at political sincerity and seriousness. Note the primary debates. They’re no longer debates at all. They’ve come to be nothing more than multiple monologues with witnesses.

I look in on the debates, both sides, from time to time. I don’t do it to hear what the candidates have to say. They never say anything beyond their party’s line, while trying to fool all of us into thinking that THEY’LL be different.

I tune in just to watch the moderators. They ask positively stupid questions that have no bearing on reality. They spare no effort in trying to outdo each other in ineptness and foolishness.

They seldom attempt to hold a candidate’s feet to the fire with meaningful questions with follow-ups to confirm meaning. And, even when they do, they permit the candidates to spew out the same old stale party-line rhetoric, which, most of the time, has nothing to do with the original question.

The real entertainment value is in watching the moderators trying to project more intellect than they actually possess. While I’ve always respected Tim Russert of Meet the Press fame, even he has begun to sound like a moron.

At the last Democratic primary debate he asked the candidates if they’d “PLEDGE” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Every candidate replied that they’d do their best to prevent this from happening.

Unfortunately, this was not good enough for Russert, because they wouldn’t use the term “PLEDGE.” He seemed to have had his heart set on hearing the word “pledge.” He wasted a good 15-minutes trying to get someone to use it!

At one of the prior Republican primary debates, the moderator (Wolf Blitzer) asked the candidates, “Do you believe in evolution?” The answer choices were “YES” or “NO.” I certainly didn’t find the question offensive, but I think the required black and white response was stupidity personified.

We face real dangers in today’s world. Terrorism is serious business. Nuclear proliferation is serious business. Securing our borders is serious business. War, at all levels, is serious business. Finding ways to obtain affordable health care coverage is serious business. Solvent Social Security and Medicare systems are serious issues.

But, turning our lives and future over to a central government that has divided itself into hostile parties, both of which cannot agree on anything other than the notion that the other side sucks, is far more dangerous.

The Republican leadership spends way too much time hoping that we voters have NOT noticed how they have become the party of humongous government on a spending spree. Or, that a large degree of moral corruptness seems to have penetrated the party.

And, they most certainly want us to forget how they’ve managed, along with the Democrats, to screw up the execution of the Iraq war… beyond salvation, or that they seem to now be looking at repeating it in Iran.

The Democrats, on the other hand, lost their identity a few decades ago. Their leadership is still slinking around hoping that we have not noticed that they still have no idea what they stand for.

The voters don’t give a damn anymore. It isn’t because we’re clueless about things. We know, generally speaking, what we have to do to solve our problems.

Unfortunately, the media has gone above and beyond in its attempt to bring mediocrity to a new level. They not only permit political candidates to keep telling us things we already know, they encourage them to keep doing it.

The media will spend months over whether Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO, or whether Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith will permit him to govern without prejudice, or how many times Giuliani has been married, or whether a candidate thinks it’s OK for boys to kiss. It goes on and on and on… ridiculousness ad infinitum!

Unfortunately, critical issues remain unaddressed, not to mention the fact that specifics are not permitted into discussions. God forbid that they ever force candidates to spell out what has to be done, how to go about it, and how much it will cost.

I’ll “pledge” my support to the first candidate of either party who will look the American people straight in their eyes without giving us the impression that we’re a bunch of non-thinking morons, lay out what WE, ALL of us, have to do to get ourselves back on track, and challenge us to DO it.

We Americans can do the seemingly impossible when competent leadership challenges us to do so. We proved our mettle in two world wars. We were the world leader in science, medicine, and technological innovation for decades. But, I’m not so sure anymore.

As a nation, we’d better locate some substantive leadership and get back to minding the store… quickly. If we don’t, coping with the problems generated by global warming will be child’s play compared to getting used to the unpleasantness of losing our way of life.

See you next week. Hopefully George Bush and his band of merry men and women will not have started another war by then. I know well-meaning advisors have tried to dissuade him from this. Unfortunately, in their attempts to explain it to him, they keep forgetting to bring the sock puppets to the oval office.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.