The Weekly Notes 2007

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Weekly Notes:

February 12, 2007:

All Guilty:

In Boston, a couple of punk thugs put several electronic devices on public property around the city. Someone thought they might be terrorist devices and the police shut down major parts of the city while they removed the devices. It turned out, the punk thugs were employed by an advertising agency, which was employed by Turner. When the punks were arrested, they acted like they thought they were oh so clever and cute. It was clear they were emotionally and intellectually challenged. The agency tried to glamorize the criminal activity by calling it guerrilla marketing.

I call it vandalism and I find all those involved guilty. The punks should get a couple of years in the slammer. The agency and Turner should have been heavily fined. They should have had to pay the entire cost of the police response plus compensation for the citizens who were inconvenienced by this stupidity. The purpose of this vandalism was to save money in advertising. It ended up not saving very much. Turner and the agency settled with Boston for about 2 million bucks. I don’t think that is nearly enough, but it does get the message home.

McCain:

He was on the hot set for This Week. I have noticed it takes a lot more words to pretend you are saying something than it would if you just answered the question. McCain is verbosity personified. He is still talking about failure and success in Iraq. I have no idea what he means by that. It is clear that we have failed and it can only get worse as we increase the troop levels. Instead of civil war, he babbles about a high level of sectarian violence. He also uses the timeworn administration bologna. If you disagree with me, you are undermining the troops. Such dishonesty! Such silliness!

Hagel:

This is another Foreign Relations Committee guy. He is against the troop surge. He says we cannot change the outcome in Iraq by putting American troops in the middle of a civil war. This is the first person I have seen in government who has called a spade a spade. He says civil war out loud on national TV. He talks about America brokering a political agreement in the whole region over there. I believe there will be an agreement, but we don’t have to broker it. In fact, it won’t happen until we get out. We must take things in order. Get out, let the inevitable bloodbath happen, then someone will come to power and the region will be stable. The point is, so long as they are killing each other, they will not be bothering us.

Texas:

Merck has developed a shot to deal with the human papilloma virus, which can cause cervical cancer in women. Now, the governor of Texas has order that all female children must be vaccinated. I have two problems with that. First, I am not convinced this vaccine has been tested well enough to inflict it wholesale on an entire demographic group. Second, everyone should know that the former chief of staff for the governor of Texas is a lobbyist for Merck. Well, now! Should we be suspicious?

In addition, we have the classic, shifting the burden, dishonest maneuver of government and big business. Instead of making the vaccine available for people who want it, they put the burden on the people. The ones who want to be excepted must object in writing, stating the grounds for refusal. This is the way many big businesses, including CitiBank, operate. It is also the way dictators operate.

Children:

There seems to be a debate about how to treat the epidemic of depression that is happening among our children. Many doctors have stopped prescribing antidepressant drugs after it was shown that some kids on those drugs were committing suicide. Now, it turns out the incidents of suicide rose when they stopped the drugs. I see two things wrong with this debate. First, I don’t find any evidence that anyone is trying to figure out why the kids are depressed. Second, we have doctors, untrained in psychology treating what is obviously a psychological problem.

It’s another case of ignoring the cause and prescribing some kind of pill to mask the symptoms. When the hell are we going to take a hard look at the pressures we are putting on these kids? The real cause of the depression and the suicides is us. No human being should have to undergo the stress caused by this incessant demand for academic performance. Unless we get away from this curricula driven must-learn-these-things mode, we are going to raise a whole generation of psychotics. Why can’t we just let the kids learn what is interesting to them? Isn’t it obvious what we are doing does not work?

NASA:

Perhaps they need to rethink their astronaut checkup procedures. What happened is an astronaut, Lisa Mowak, tried to kill a rival in a love triangle. All three of the principals were NASA astronauts. It is difficult for me to see how this woman could have become this crazy overnight. There had to be some indicators before hand. Those indicators should have been revealed in a psychological profile. To be fair, I must note that Mrs. Gaffer has a different theory. She thinks something happened to that woman’s head while she was in space. We really don’t know enough about how being in space can affect people psychologically. We lack experience there.

Duh:

Ford decided to retire the Taurus. Wait a minute. Now they have decided to put the Taurus name on the Ford 500. What will that accomplish? Dinking around with names is not going to solve the Ford problem. If they just make it a first class automobile with reliable performance, the name won’t matter. How do you do that? Two words. Quality control! Not a slogan like quality is number one. Real quality control with inspectors who will not let a vehicle leave the plant until it really passes. Right now, if an inspector stops production, he is more likely to get fired than commended. That management bully crap has to stop if they really want to succeed. So long as a manager can overrule an inspector, the returns to dealer will remain high and the customers will know that.

Iraq:

What do you know? 12 billion American dollars in cash were shipped to Iraq and the whole pile disappeared. There was no accounting. I suspect there are some very wealthy pretended contractors living large somewhere. I think what that money could have done in New Orleans. Crap, I wonder what I could have done with it. I think I could have got a great start on building Camelot II. Maybe a real police academy, maybe a research center to make emission free automobiles, maybe an interest driven K-12 school, who knows what else. Instead, George’s cronies gave it to crooks.

Healthcare:

If the Dumbocrats do not do a single other thing, if they fix this healthcare debacle in America they will remain in power for a couple of decades. What we need is a government-controlled system of healthcare that is simple and effective. A senior citizen should not have to be a language analyst to get the care he or she needs. It should be easy. When the Republicrumbs used the prescription drug plan to reward their big drug company supporters, they made it so confusing that no one can understand it. That, after all was the intent.

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