Let's hear it for Pension Abuse

The Los Angeles Times had the following to say, "Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has grown increasingly bold — some say too aggressive — in his attempts to influence panels that guide the city's huge retirement funds."

Los Angeles Times - Villaraigosa puts teeth into his stand on pension funds

You should read the article, as always; but, here is the short. The Mayor appoints the majority of the people to the Pension Board, now mind you this is not City money, it is a trust fund. In the past the Mayor has appointed all sort of people to the Boards including the since convicted Elliot Broidy. Thes same Boards have lost millions and millions in "alternative investments".

The Los Angeles Times article said that a couple of Board members were removed for voting against the Mayor. This is an easy, if the Mayor's members vote on bad ideas, lose additional millions and are found guilty of anything then he has violated the trust and should be charged with such.

This is exactly the type of thing that is bothering both the Tea Party and the people of the Occupy movement. I hope everyone on the City Hall lawn reads about it.

A Slight Fever

I went to church yesterday and was find; but, by the time I got home I couldn't eat and developed a fever. Darn thing kept me up all night with the chills and the sweats. I still haven't slept and I trying to stay awake so I can sleep tonight. I say this by way of explaining if my writing isn't very good.

I was reading the news and came across more stupidity from the media. Occupy Wall Street and the others are not about seeking an answer, it is about identifying the unifying truth for most of us, we are not treated fairly and insiders run the show. It is not anti-capitalist (though some may be), it is not anti-government (though many are against our current form of government) and it is better to consider what it is about, what it is in favor of.

These protesters and most people in the country feel they have been cheated. They want to be treated fairly. They don't like privileged classes. I read an article today that talked about the 1% of income earners not be mostly in the financial industry. It completely misses the point, this is not about the 1% of people getting salaries more than others, it is about the 1% that own 90% of this country, the ones who control the government and the media, not the well paid CEO's that work for them.

Now here is the answer to why they will not listen, they know what this is all about, they understand it is about changing the system to be fair and open. If you have an oligarchy there is no reason they are going to like that, it means giving up unfair control. It is about making sure that people can have a reasonable lifestyle, with reasonable freedoms and a reasonable chance to get ahead and we don't have that.

There are two kinds of special treatment, one is earned and the other is inherited. Most people would agree that the war vet who lost a leg and stole some food should be treated better than Linsey Lohan for stealing jewelry. If Steve Jobs changed the world then maybe he deserves to be treated a little better at a restaurant. Still, if he had killed his wife then we probably wouldn't support him as much. What we see are people who are given special treatment and immunity from prosecution and conviction because they have the money.

I have never liked mobs. I don't like large groups of people who are not organized in a manner that they can be reasoned with. But I know history and I know what can happen when your citizenry becomes a mob. It means that they lack confidence in the basic system. There is a need to go back to fundamentals, to fundamental justice. There is a need to stop rewarding people for bad behaviour.

The issue is not the thousands in the occupy movement, it is the 37% that support them. The percentage of people that support the current system is about 30% and that is getting lower. Stop the next ten people you meet and ask them if they think the system treats them fairly. Ask them if they think the rich get special privledges.

Moammar Gadhafi

This post may upset some people. The United States has openly admitted to torturing it's enemies. How are Bush and Obama any different that Gadhafi? He tortured people and lived extravagently while the people of Libya were highly controlled.

Gadhafi was a horrible person who believed his own lies and he did terrible things to innocent people. We do not know how many people he had tortured or killed and never will. We will know how bad he was because whatever we discover, it will be worse. He was still human, he was still an emotional, self aware being. He was still human.

I saw the video of him in his last minutes, he was bloodied, confused and being driven around on the hood of a truck for all to see. They did not rip his eyes out, cut off his nose, tongue, eyes of more delicate parts. They shot him in the head. He was not tortured as he had done to so many others, beaten; but, not truly tortured, not the really bad stuff that takes days.

As I saw him being manhandled and carried away from the truck, as he wiped the blood from his face and you could tell he was alive, he looked confused. I bet he was. He did not hate Libya and he loved Libyans, he just believed his was the only way. As sick as it is he believed he was doing what was best for Libya. He was willing to die for it, he had hundred of millions and could have left the country; but, he didn't because he believed he was supposed to be in charge to protect the country from westerners.

I never liked the man, he was a horrible person and I don't seek to justify anything he did, I am pacifist and cannot justify anything he did nor would I even try. Yet, he was still a person, he was still a bundle of emotions and urges. He still felt pain and greed and loss and emptiness and fear and joy and love and anger. All the emotions you feel, he felt. The problem was that he either did not care what others felt or thought they did not feel the same emotions as he did. God made us all in his image, we are all as complex and complete as each other.

As I watched him being walked down the street, I wondered if he understood what he had done to others. I wondered if he understood that they felt even greater pain than he was feeling. I wondered if he finally understood and felt regret for having treated others so poorly and having forgot their humanity and pain. If he did then he would felt regret and guilt and we cannot find grace, we cannot find forgiveness in our own hearts until we feel guilt and regret and are then capable of knowing forgiveness. The innocent cannot understand grace, the guilty cannot understand it, only those who are saved can be guilty and understand innocence because they know they are not. That is salvation.

Did Gadhafi finally know his guilt, if so then we should pray for his soul. We all sin; but, it is through guilt that we find salvation and it is only found in grace. I wish him grace for he will need a lot of it, I cannot imagine living with such guilt for eternity, I could not wish that on any self-aware being. I cannot only wish salvation for all, for we are all human and flawed, imperfect.

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

The people that run the world, the people that set the direction for societies are scared. Unfortunately for them, they are making the same mistakes that have been made in the past when confronted by a population that is fed up and has nothing to hope for. The lies have been too many for too long and all legitimacy is being lost.

We have 30 million people without jobs in the United States, most houses are upside down, the people's retirements and pensions have been raided in order to give money to thieves on Wall Street and the government and internet are destroying and idea of privacy. All the spin in the world cannot keep people from seeing this and that is the problem for the media and those who support the status quo.

In Boston and Denver police have used force to break up peaceful demonstrations. This type of response will only have one effect and that is to further separate the police from the people and that is when things get worse for a society. People really need to learn from history.

We no longer live in the 1930's and people will not willingly go into permanent poverty, we have learned how to work together to protest, we learned that in the 60's and the kids of today are even better at it. People today are also much more willing to use violence.

When both the "Occupy Wall Street" and "Tea Party" began the media's first effort was to ridicule them. That is an indication of just how much the media is controlled by the status quo, by the powers that be. Next the media attempted to limit the change being sought, they spouted off about how these movements are vague and don't have clear points. They said that the movements needed to focus on a couple of specifics in order to be effective. They still don't get it, these movements are not about a couple of things, these are about people who no longer have any faith in how our society is run.

You can attempt to pit people against one another, divide and conquer; but, that doesn't work when all sides are against the system. This is not about left or right or conservative or liberal, this is a lack of confidence in all of them. While the wealthy complain that this is about class warfare they are correct, that is exactly what it is and it doesn't get better.

The issues are really simple in the end. The Tea Party movement wants what we had back again. The Tea Party wants this country to play by the rules; but, they see how the rules only apply to us and not to the wealthy or well connected. Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated this the most clearly when he paroled a murderer because he was the son of a political ally, Arnold said that is what you do for friends. That shows a complete contempt for the rules that apply to the rest of us. The Tea Party knows that it us against them.

The problem is that there are now two distinct societies, that is what happens when you destroy the middle class. There are the rich and the poor. The currently popular attempt by the media is to say that the protestors should really blame the baby boomers for their problems. Anything other than what it is really about, it is about the distribution or wealth and the distribution of rights.

When all else fails the media attempts to make people see things in terms of religion (think about the needless argument over whether or not Mormons are Christians, why would any politician even bother bringing it up) or race or age, they question the motives of people, they question their logic, they eventually promote the use of force and when that happens the government loses any ability to communicate with the protestors because they will no longer believe anything they are told and we are just about there.

Revolutions happen in stages, they grow into revolution when the government fails to give in to the population. 1% of the population owns 99% of everything, how could this possibly be fair? Is it fair that the rules don't apply to some of us? Is it fair that the educational system ensures that most people will never even get a chance to compete? The game is rigged and everybody knows it, the response to the protestors only exposes it more. If the police begin really being abusive to our children then they will no longer be respected.

I do not promote revolution, I remember history. It was so obvious to everyone when the protests in Egypt occurred or when they occurred in Libya, it is no different here except there haven't been any deaths yet. The protests are not going away, they are only growing and they are growing internationally. Some of the wealthy and powerful get this, Warren Buffet gets it and always has. Bloomberg does not get it, Cain does not get it. This will be a seminal moment in history, this decade will. The internet has allowed people to see just how rigged the game is and more importantly that the people in power don't care about them or fairness.

Societies need a strong middle class to survive and thrive, to grow. When you eliminate the middle class, you eliminate incentives and condone corruption at all levels. When the people in power do not follow the rules, their rules have no power.

We now have the forum for a real leader to emerge, he will be the one who is able to take the aspirations of both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street crowds and combine them into a new vision of government and how we distribute wealth. People do not have a problem with people becoming successful because of hard work or being smarter, they have a problem with people becoming wealthy because the government gave them different rules than the rest of us. People have a problem with you stealing their pensions and then blaming them for your theft. The police in New York would be well advised to remember that a man who had lost tens of millions of their pension funds and then said that their pensions were too generous.

"Things fall apart, the center will not hold". Without a middle class, there is no center, there is nothing holding people together other than shared outrage. There is nobody to support because it is all just a show and the audience knows it. Let us say that we manage to avoid a revolution, what will these people teach their children? They will teach them that the system is rigged, they don't have a chance and to not trust the police. They will teach them to hate the wealthy and ignore the laws. That would be a slow death for the country.

Is there a way to correct this situation? Yes, there is; but, it requires fairness and it requires justice. One of the protestors thought that college should be free. People in the media accused him of being a socialist and crazy. Well, this country became strong because of the public education system. There is no reason for a kid to spend $150,000 to get a degree just so he can be poor. There is no incentive.

The protesters believe in private property, they believe in consumerism, they like the cookies of this world. They are mad because they no longer believe they can share in having them and that is what they are being told by the media and the government. They are being told that they will have to work till they die, not have a pension, not have adequate medical care, never own a home, go for long periods without any work and that their lot in life will not get any better. At the same time they are being told that the connected ones will have whatever they like and not have to live by the same rules.

This is not a political post, this is a post on societies and how they collapse. This is a social post. What is amusing is that the powers in the United States don't even understand why Saudi Arabia escaped a revolution, the rich began giving people more, they started sharing more of the wealth. This is not about wealth, this is about the fair distribution of wealth, this is about putting an end to rewarding people for stealing your money. This is about not wanting to reward people for bad behaviour anymore.

In some cities they have attempted to remove the protesters, as if that would somehow cause the protests to end. Activity just goes underground and our institutions get compromised and weakened. The media hopes to pit the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street crowds against each other, to misdirect them; but, the reasons are all too obvious and it will not work except in the theater of the absurd that we call politics and this goes beyond politics because both groups know that the middle class has been destroyed and they don't have a chance for a decent life.

Who could honestly look their child in the eye and tell them that if they work hard, educate themselves and act with integrity that they will have a decent life? That is the problem, no honest parent would say that anymore. Worse yet, who would believe them if they did tell them such a thing?

In all things act in love and in all things be peaceful.

Sometimes it is nice to know there is always hope

The world is in pretty bad shape right now and it will get worse before it gets better. I read so many news sources just to keep up with what is going on that sometimes I feel bad that times are so hard for so many. Those who have followed this blog for sometime know that I do not think things are as they should be and that I am very unhappy with somethings that are coming in the future.

Having said what I have, sometimes I come across things that remind me of how it could be and why it should be. I came across this article and video on the Huffington Post, I will link to it at the end. It is of a little girl and her birthday present. In the video the little girl is very innocent and obviously raised well. There are still families that have their priorities straight, there are still people that want to raise healthy families in love. A child who grows up in such a family remains innocent longer, you don't want them to grow up too quick.

Disneyland Birthday Surprise: Adorable 6-Year-Old Little Girl's Reaction

When life is hard, put a smile on someone else's face and you will smile too. Share joy.

We Have Finally Become "A Brave New World"

"Brave New World" is a book by Aldous Huxley. The novel is set in the future when people can clone copies of themselves to harvest them for body parts as needed. People could never imagine a society so corrupt that they would be capable of making copies of themselves just to take parts from them, they could not imagine such a think when he wrote the book.

Well ladies and gentlemen, the technology is now here. This article entitled, "Report: Stem cells created from cloned human embryos" from MSNBC is about how science can now clone you from a cell and then get stem cells from your identical embryonic self to heal you. Morally it is even more corrupt then to take the stem cells from an unknown source.

This type of thing will initially be considered the same as saving up your own blood when you are about to get surgery; but, it is more than blood, it is your biologically identical self, it is you. People will justify that it is their body and they can do with it what they want including cloning it. Truth is, it is not you, even if fully grown it will be it's own self, you do not share the same carbon molecules and are unique, you matter and so does everyone else. The corruption is in thinking that anybody doesn't matter or worse yet, thinking you are all that matters.

Women who had agreed to donate their eggs for research were paid $8,000. When the scientists for this project needed eggs the women were asked if it was okay to use it for either project, they were paid the same either way and didn't care what happened to them. This is a morality question and we need to consider it very carefully. The women basically agreed to be cloned and have their clone killed in exchange for $8,000. They agreed to be paid for murder and the cost was only $8,000. I am pretty sure they didn't look at it that way; but, that is what happened.

I do not believe in stem cell research, I do not believe in cloning, I do not believe in "upgrading" our bodies through technology. I do believe we can use technology to replace missing parts; but, not stem cell or cloning technologies. I do not believe in integrating technology with our minds. I think humans should be humans and not hybrids.

People seem to really like the vampire movies and shows these days. If you could live forever; but, it meant continually living off of new life, would you do it? That is what is so morally bankrupt about this, many will choose to be vampires.

I will give my ex-wife credit for something. She always told me that when she died she wanted to donate her body to science. She believed that the parts might be useful for others. I personally couldn't do it, I don't feel comfortable doing it and I am not sure that I would accept a body part from another person. A personal decision and I respect those who differ with me on the matter. There is a difference between giving up body parts to be incorporated into another and creating a new life. That is my moral line in the sand. Donating body parts to science is admirable; but, not to donate them so that a new life can be created just to be killed. It is not the same.

By the way, just because I don't post as often doesn't mean that I have stopped reading the news or having an opinion. I just don't have the time to post everyday, I will only post when I see something that deserves being discussed.

Sorry the last post was so short

I am finding less and less time to post. There is however no shortage of things going on. Keep your eyes on the news and watch as nothing gets fixed. Have a great week.