Our long-time friends around the world are becoming more and more troubled by what is happening in the United States. Australian Karen Pickering wrote a fascinating article in The Guardian titled “Something Is Really Wrong With The USA.”  She admits she is an “incurable Americophile” who loves the pop culture, the literature of Walt Whitman, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg,the music of Bruce Springsteen, the TV shows. She has studied and taught our culture at our universities.
But in the last few years she has seen things change and become dysfunctional, and points out the differences in the two countries. She projects absolute horror at the U.S. gun culture. She writes: “In Australia, if you’re not a police officer, soldier, or farmer, then it’s very unlikely you’ve ever seen a gun up close, much less held or fired one. I despair at the recent mass murders, the murders of Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride (The Detroit 19-year-old girl who had her head blown off by a shotgun blast when she knocked on a suburban door for help after a car accident).”
  Karen thinks our recent “justice” system does not have much justice in it because we incarcerate more people per capita than any other “civilized” country in the world. Aussies think the “Stand Your Ground” laws in the racist gun states is a ready excuse for murder.

Australian Universal Health Care And American Personal Bankruptcies

She says the average Australian would be absolutely amazed to have a government shutdown over health care policy because every Aussie has universal access to health care. They are shocked by the fact that even persons with American health “insurance” go bankrupt with medical bills and that over half of our personal bankruptcies are because of medical bills. Karen relates the story of helping an American girl after a terrible accident in Melbourne that left broken leg bones protruding from skin. When Karen attempted to call an ambulance, the girl yelled in pain: “Don’t call! How will I pay for it?!” She had no health insurance. She was treated without cost.
Karen writes that tourists are often surprised about how expensive it is to travel in Australia. She politely tells visitors that the Australian minimum wage is almost $20 an hour and that almost all workers belong to strong unions. There’s hardly any poverty in Australia because it is on the right side of capitalism. American full-time workers at $7.25 minimum wages are on  on the wrong side of the safety net. They stay in poverty.
   She finishes her article with “So why do I still love America? It’s given me so much. I’ve been utterly transformed by its artists, thinkers, and visionaries...America, it’s time to be brave and redirect your immense power inwards. Imagine if just a fraction of military spending were channeled into education, health and a slew of social and economic programs...”

We Need To Expose The Brains Of Our Current Politicians

Perhaps in the very near future we will be able to study the exposed brains of politicians to see what makes them tick–that is, if they can tick-and-tock at all. With pin-point lasers, scientists can now study how fruit flies make decisions by directly examining their brains. Using lasers, the scientists make holes 12 to 350 microns wide in the flies heads (the human hair is about 100 microns wide) and use a saline solution to preserve the brain’s tissue. Then the scientists analyze the neural activity.
The scientists have also successfully tested the brains of worms, ants, and mice with this procedure. With the brains of mice covered with tiny glass windows, researchers have been able to study the development of cancer and the effect of medicines on those cancers. Perhaps analyzing political brains would be much more difficult, but it would certainly be useful to discover the synapses swirling around in the brains of politicians. If we have been successful with mice, I would expect that soon we could peer into the brains of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Texas Senator Ted Cruz to see if there is any synapses snapping in those wastelands.

Will The Very Painful Scrotum Protest Spread To Our Culture?

When Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated the breakup of the Soviet Union many Russians hoped that Russia might move directly from a Communist dictatorship to some form of democracy. It was progressing well until Vladimir Putin used his KGB background to turn Russia into a corporatocracy, making he and his friends very rich. Putin and his Russian elite continue to pick the fat off the huge natural resource carcass of Russia. This is close to what Wall Street and the One Percent are pulling off in the U.S. by destroying the middle-class.
Russians are beginning to catch on to what is happening to a once great but always troubled Euro-Asian culture. Last week in historic Red Square artist Pyotr Pavlensky tore off his clothes, sat down , and nailed his scrotum to those fabled cobblestones in protest. His
statement: “The performance can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference, and fatalism of contemporary Russian society. As the government turns the country into one big prison (Actually we imprison more citizens per capita than Russia does!), stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures...” He was arrested.
Talk About Stealing From The Russian People...Take A Look At America

There’s the joke about banksters that involves a customer who seeks to borrow money for an addition to his business. The bankster challenges the prospective borrower: “I have a glass eye and a good eye. If you can pick out which one is glass I’ll give you the loan.” The customer picks out the glass eye. The bankster asks, “How could you tell?” The customer replied: “That’s the one that expresses some feeling and emotion.”
It’s a sad day in America when you cannot trust anyone.  On November 12th the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology issued new guidelines for the use of statin pills to lower cholesterol. The guidelines would double the number of people taking statins in the U.S., an absolute bonanza for blood-sucking drug companies. I admit I’m an old cynical bastard. My first reaction? Doctors and drug companies have joined to make each richer. Well, who’d a thunk it? Half of the doctors on these two boards are paid consultants to big Pharma.  
A day later an expert at Harvard Medical School John D. Abramson, author of “Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine,” and cardiologist Rita Redberg of the University of California Medical Center, immediately threw buckets of cold water laced with  truth serum on the whole idea. A combined statement: “The American people deserve to have important medical guidelines developed by doctors and scientists whom they can confidently rely to make judgments free from influence, conscious or unconscious, by the industries that stand to gain or lose.”  That says it all, folks. Let’s see some real research first before adding billions to our medical bills. Pure greed may be the motivator.

Maybe This Banker Has Two Good Eyes And A Moral Compass

Here’s a Wall Street banker who may have two good eyes. William Dudley, president of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, supervises all of the big banks in the city and is the second most powerful administrator at the Federal Reserve.  He doesn’t think much of the greedy culture pervading Wall Street banks said to be “too big to fail.” The CEO and members of the boards of the banks are psychopaths without morals or ethics. Here is Dudley’s evaluation: “They have an apparent lack of respect for law. They commit major violations of laws against fraud and theft.  There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions. Whether this is due to size and complexity, bad incentives or some other issues is difficult to judge. There is a criminal mentality present.” These are the people who brought us two big economic bubbles and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. These are the people who have cleaned out the middle-class for thirty years–and not a single one has occupied a jail cell yet.
Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs also has examined the same banks with much the same result: “I regard the moral environment on Wall Street as pathological, and I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that.’ Dudley says the only possibility in restoring moral leadership to the banks is to fire all present leaders and replace them with people who have a moral compass–and at least one friendly eye.

Just What Should Be Our Role In The World?

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to fight political extremism. We have not paid our dues of $80 million per year for over two years, so we are about to lose our voting rights. We co-founded UNESCO in 1946 with the specific goals of an anti-extremist agency that would help countries have access to clean water, educate females, eliminate poverty, promote freedom of expression and creative thinking skills, teach non-violence and non-discrimination, and support ethnic tolerance.
   George W. Bush helped negotiate a treaty at the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities while he was president. President Barack Obama signed it in 2009. It is still sitting in the Senate for approval. The last time it was voted on it lost by six votes, defeated mainly by Republican and “Cruzservative” senators in the pocket of religious conservatives who hate what the UN stands for.
I received an e-mail from the American Legion supporting the approval of the treaty because: (1) Millions of disabled veterans work, serve, travel, and live abroad in countries where there is no respect for persons with disabilities, (2) Treaty signers agree to provide reasonable accommodations for the disabled, and (3) The treaty would ensure that persons with disabilities would have the same rights as everyone else to live full, satisfying and productive lives. We currently have 5.8 million disabled veterans among the 58 million Americans who live with a certified disability.

The Immortal Words Of Former Texas Republican Senator Phil Gramm:
“Republicans don’t do Special Education”

This quote was his response when he voted against funding a number of special education programs. I suggest his response indicated Republicans live in the country of Lake Wobegon, all adults beautiful without disabilities, where all children are above average without any disabilities. Some “Cruzservative” and religious “Christian” responses to the treaty: (1) “My kids wear glasses, now they’re disabled, now the UN gains control over them,” (2) “The global community could force America to sanction sterilization or abortion for the disabled at taxpayer expense,” (3) “America is signing up to be an official socialist nation,” (4) “Home-schooled children under the treaty could be removed from the jurisdiction of their parents and forced to be educated in the public schools.”  
This treaty on disabilities does not force the surrender of a nation’s sovereignty. No international law overrides U.S. law. Fear is conquering faith. It will be hard to understand until we can use a laser on political heads and examine the circuits. A New Yorker cartoon explains it as well as anything. God is in the clouds peering down on earth in a dejected fashion.  He had had an eighth day in mind. The caption reads: “Then on the eighth day God gets creator’s block.”  That could be the problem with the human race.\