From outside the box

I just spent about 45 minutes reading everything I could google about the health care bill that is about to be passed. The two areas I am most concerned about have very little to no mention in any of the articles I have read. First of all, I am trying to find out if this bill does anything to keep premium cost's from rising much faster than the rate of inflation, like they have been for years. Second, is there anything in the bill to keep insurance companies from denying coverage for certain procedures without putting the patient in an endless maze of "prove to me I have to cover that procedure before I do".

Without these two guarantees, it would seem to me that the whole bill is just another gift to insurance companies, giving them tens of millions of new customers and possibly tens of billions of new profits. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? If so, please enlighten me.

Recently I asked a friend to give me an idea for a blog. The idea, as written below by my friend, is good enough to BE the blog....

blog: maybe talk about how each side needs to stop being knee-jerk and exercise the intellectual discipline to analyze the opposing arguments? I periodically read or listen to conservative rhetoric just to hear what they're talking about--and I don't disagree with everything they are saying. Some people I know (whose name will go unmentioned) are just knee-jerk progressive--whatever the progressive "stance" is, they just automatically embrace it. Automatically! Just as the knee-jerk conservatives will automatically embrace the conservative stance on an issue. When do people stop the polarization and start looking for the common ground? There is a Sufi prayer, a line of which is "...raise us above the distinctions and differences that divide us..." Oh, what a concept. Right now we have Republicans who will be oppositional to ANYthing Obama and/or the Demos bring up, as they want to "win" at all costs. But who "wins" in the long run with that kind of approach? I don't like it when people call me a liberal--I don't like to be pigeon-holed that way. With some things, I am more and more conservative! Although I would never want anyone to call me a conservative either.

Well said. I hope my friend doesn't think that I tricked him/her into writing a blog for me. Just to make it fair, I will ad my two cents to what he/she has written....

The fact of the matter is that most (rational) people are 60% liberal and 40% conservative or vice versa. There was a time I would have said that it is the outer fringes from each party that dictates policy. Oh if that were only true today. These days policy is dictated by monetary influence more than ever before. I long for the days when Washington politicians were actually passionate about issues like abortion, euthanasia, nuclear weapons, gay rights, welfare, and anything else that had to do with issues that people really care about. Now they just use those issues to pit us against each other and distract us while they go about pandering to the big money interests. Maybe one day, after we have been through bankruptcy and a long depression, we can start all over and get back to legislating and debating things that really matter to us, the people, the ones these whore's are supposed to be working for.

Getting back to what my friend was taking about. I agree whole heartedly that too many people blindly align themselves with their political party and whatever the fashionable beef of the day is that their party is taking on. That's why I have blogged so often about the importance of critical thinking. Did every conservative really think the Iraq war was just and worth the cost in dollars and lives? Does every conservative really believe global warming is a hoax? Does every conservative really believe that to have a government sponsored option for health care is a bad idea? And on the other hand does every liberal think the way we have structured welfare in this country is a good thing? Does every liberal blindly support unions and not see the role they have played in jobs going overseas? Does every liberal think corporations are evil and not realize the role they play in allowing us a better lifestyle than we've ever had before?

The answer is....of course not. Yet there are many from each political party who would passionately defend the stance their party has taken on each of these issues. We need more critical thinkers and less followers.

Time to change the clocks again already? Didn't we just do that like last month? It's a real pain, especially when all of your clocks are attached to a nail in the wall, which, when originally pounded into the wall, missed the stud and therefore is 'free flowing'. It's easy to get the clock off the wall but when you try to re hang it, the nail keeps flattening against the wall. It's like trying to thread a needle in the dark or play the guitar with gloves on, but eventually I win.

But here's the part that I hate. About a week after I go through this battle with six wall clocks, the batteries start dying one by one and I have to do it all over again! Oh sure, the responsible thing to do would be to change the battery when you take the clock off the wall to change the time. But batteries are like nose spray, garden tools, brown sugar, and money in the bank....never there when you need them!

So let the games begin. I should probably start out by making a quick run to Costco and getting a pack of double "a's", you know, those four foot long packages with like 600 batteries in them. It would save me a lot of headaches as I wouldn't have to spend hundreds of hours taking my clocks off the walls throughout the spring to change dead batteries and curse those damn stud finders that never work right which is why I am scrunching my face against the wall and trying to thread this small hole on the back of the clock onto a nail which isn't there.

Yes, that would be the logical thing to do. But considering that I thread needles in the dark and play guitar with gloves on, why let a little thing like logic get in my way now?

This is part of a piece written by Connie Shultz, columnist for The Plain Dealer.

The fantastical adventures in Palin World are seemingly endless. The night before her speech in Canada, Palin told a Right-to-Life audience in Columbus that her critics got it all wrong, wrong, wrong when they accused her of a double standard after she ridiculed Obama for using a teleprompter but then was photographed with crib notes scribbled on her palm for a speech at last month's Tea Party convention.

She assured the Ohio audience that she was just emulating God -- and that she had the Bible verse to prove it.

"I didn't have a good answer to that criticism because I thought it was so ridiculous," she told the audience. "But then somebody sent me the other day Isaiah 49:16. . . ."

The crowd was eating it up, so she kept shoveling.

"Hey," she said, "if it was good enough for God -- scribbling on the palm of his hand -- it's good enough for me, for us. In that passage, he says, 'I wrote your name on the palm of my hand to remember you.' And I'm like, 'OK, I'm in good company.' "

I am so tired of Sarah Palin's version of America.

I don't think she's stupid. I don't think she's evil, either. But I do think she's as cynical as they come, winking and cha-chinging her way through one gig after another by spinning a narrative that gets progressively loonier with every misstep.

Palin is making a fortune on the backs of those who think she represents deliverance from everything they hate about today's America. This includes but is not limited to women's reproductive freedom, affordable health care for all and Barack Obama's U.S. birth certificate.

Ah, well. I'll give Sarah Palin this: She's not one to let facts get in the way of a good story.

One humdinger at a time, she's writing herself out of politics for good.

I've always loved a happy ending.

Most people who have a passion for anything in life have an early influence, maybe even a childhood hero, who planted the seeds for their inspiration. I have three. As a very young boy I was mesmerized by anything cowboy. My favorite cowboys were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers because they were the singing cowboys. I spent my whole childhood dreaming of horses, six guns, and guitars.

By the late fifties I had a new idol. He didn't shoot a gun or ride a horse, but he played a guitar and sang, and he did it oh soooo well. I used to watch The Adventure's of Ozzie and Harriet every Wednesday evening just to see Ricky Nelson play guitar and sing at the end of each episode. He always played to a small audience in the malt shop of swooning girls and jealous guys. Girls wanted to date him and guys wanted to be him. Later on, almost every guy I would ever play with on bands said that Ricky Nelson was their first inspiration to become a musician.

In the mid seventies I actually met Rick Nelson back stage after a concert in Sacramento and had about a ten minute one on one conversation with him (Lynn Brown, if your reading this, you'll remember because you were with me!). If I had been dying at that time and the "Make A Wish Foundation" said they could grant me any wish I wanted, I would have asked to meet Ricky Nelson. And here it was happening and I didn't even have to die!

Yesterday evening I was out walking with a friend and we we're talking about....actually, I don't remember what we we're talking about, but I mentioned to her how funny it was that back in the sixties girls were attracted to guys who played the guitar, and as I've aged I have found just the opposite to be true....that when women see older guys playing the guitar in a club or coffee shop, they see a bum who probably failed at everything else in life. She said that I should write a blog about that. I said that she should leave her boyfriend and run away with me....or maybe that's what I was thinking, don't remember if I said it out loud or not.

Anyway, my blogs seem to start out with a certain idea and then they always end up going somewhere else. That's because I don't know how to write. I keep telling people that. I just hate it when they respond with, "I know." But the whole point is that many of us baby boomer guitar players started out wanting to be Ricky Nelson. Sure we wanted to express ourselves musically and to be recognized as artist's. But mostly we just wanted to get layed. And often we did! The funny thing about it is that we used to use music to enhanced our reality, but now days when we play, it's usually to escape from reality.

The whole musical journey has been quite fascinating. On the one hand, you do get better at your instrument over the years. On the other hand, if your in it for the ladies, it's not going to work for long because physically speaking, you go from Ricky Nelson to Carl Maldon in like forty short years. OK, so I was never as good looking as Ricky Nelson, and I'm not now as bad looking as Carl Maldon, but you get my point. What was my point? Crap....where's my guitar.

As the Perry v. Schwarzenegger Proposition 8 trial drags on, it is becoming more obvious by the day that the homosexuals who are trying to strike down Proposition 8, clearly have a broader agenda in mind. On the surface it appears that they are simply seeking out the right to marry a person of the same sex. However, lawyers representing the state of California contend that the ultimate agenda of this group is to eventually be able to marry family members, barnyard pets, and of course, whole groups of people, like the Los Angeles Clippers for instance.

What these lawyers, along with most right wing groups and organizations do not realize is that this is what the gays want them to think. Their true agenda actually goes much further than this. Through countless hours of researching grocery store tabloids, hanging out at fashion shows, and once talking to a male hairstylist for several minutes, I have uncovered the true homosexual agenda. What they hope to eventually achieve is, are you ready for this?....the right to marry cartoon characters!

Dante Phillippe Marcus (the hairstylist) accidentally let this slip out a few weeks ago while trying to straighten out a cow-lick on the back of my head which Dante Phillippe Marcus called "just one of those hair travesties, no big whoop" and we started talking about our favorite cartoon shows. And then out of nowhere he mentions, "I just don't get this whole hang up people have about cartoon characters. So what if your operating in two dimensions instead of three. I mean Jesus H. Christ, so I don't have that third dimension hang up like those right wing retards. Ink blots, living tissue, what's the big diff? If you really love somebody, why should we get all hung up on a little thing like existence?"

That's when it hit me. Gay people don't want to be limited to just marrying each other, or animals, or children, or sports teams, they want the freedom to marry Sponge Bob Square Pants, Marge Simpson, or Eric Cartman. All of a sudden it all became so clear. Why hadn't I seen this one coming? It's like the old NRA tactic....make it appear that you are fighting for the right of law abiding citizens to own and carry a gun, when in reality, your real goal is to arm every house hold with tactical nuclear weapons!

Recently I contacted Peter Griffin of Family Guy fame to get his take on all of this. "Look" Peter said while downing a cold one at the local pub with friend Quagmire and next door neighbor Joe, "You can spare the rod and spoil the child but then again....oh wow, I just said rod....eheheheh. That reminds me of the time I got fired from a job of being the fishing hook for O, J. Simpson." I then had to sit through five minutes of watching this flashback where O. J. Simpson was fishing from a small boat with Peter Griffin tied on to the end of his fishing line. He'd put a worm in Peters mouth, cast him out into the lake, and you'd see Peter under the water smiling as a fish approached to get the worm, at which point Peter would grab the fish into his mouth and quickly eat it. Finally O. J. gets tired of constantly pulling Peter out of the water with no fish in his teeth and says, "Peter, your fired!"

OK, so I didn't get any help from any toons, but what do you expect, their all crazy! But I do know one thing....if homosexuals are successful in overturning proposition 8, the flood gates will be opened. And then it will only be a matter of time until you see gay rallies and parades with angry flamer's carrying signs along side the likes of Popeye and Homer Simpson chanting, "Were here, we're either queer or we're a two dimensional drawing, get used to it, get used to it!" I swear, give them an inch and they take....oh never mind!

I found this article stumbling around AOL. Thought it was worth sharing.....

Harrison Ford hates being a celebrity because he's lost his "privacy". But that tub of money he drowns his sorrows in? That's not too bad.

"There's nothing good about being famous. You always think, 'If I'm successful, then I'll have opportunities.' You never figure the cost of fame will be a total loss of privacy. That's incalculable. What a burden that is for anybody. It was unanticipated and I've never enjoyed it. You can get the table you want in a restaurant. It gets you doctor's appointments. But what's that worth? Nothing."

However, Ford admits there are some benefits to finding fame in the movie industry: "I'm in it for the money. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. This is my job."

To recap: Fame - can get a seat at any restaurant, doctor's appointments every time, bags of money, maids, people worship you, big house, girls love you, travel anywhere, no privacy. Worth: nothing. No fame - have to wait an hour to be seated, doctor goes on vacation, bags of bills, no maids, people forgetting your name, one bedroom apartment, girls already have 9-1-1 pre-dialed on their phones, travel to the laundromat, total privacy because who the hell wants to know what you're up to? Worth: priceless.

Yea, I'd totally "loathe" fame too if I was Harrison Ford. This guy has it rough. How does he do it? He's like those people in concentration camps. Trying to survive one day at a time. An inspiration to us all.

"Almost always, you have a choice as to what attitude to adopt. There is nothing in any normal work situation that dictates you must react one way or another. If you feel angry about something that happens, for instance, that's how you choose to feel. Nothing in the event itself makes it absolutely necessary for you to feel that way. It is your choice. And since you do have a choice, most of the time you'll be better off if you choose to react in a positive rather than a negative way."....from "The power of Attitude"

It seems that every time I face a challenging situation in my life, I have to struggle with all the negative feelings and emotions that attache themselves to it.....fear, anxiety, worry, stress, doubt, and sometimes anger. Then when I get through the situation, I look back and ask myself, "how would that situation have been any different if I had just allowed myself to go through it without any of those negative feelings?" Well for one thing, I can't imagine that it would have been any worse. And I always wonder if it would have actually been easier or resolved itself quicker if I faced it with a positive attitude.

Through out most of my life I have always thought that positive people either don't have the same problems as everybody else, or they suffer from what I have always called "The happy idiot syndrome". Happy idiots being people who lack awareness of the gravity of their situation. I'm sure there are plenty of these kinds of happy idiots around, I often wish I was one of them.

But then again, perhaps many, even most of these happy idiots are not idiots at all. Maybe they are people who have discovered something that I lacked the awareness to understand, that being positive is a choice that some make because it serves them better than being negative. So then I have to ask myself, "Why don't I make that choice the next time I'm dealing with a negative or depressing situation?"

When I think about it, if I am being completely honest with myself, I feel like most of my life is a negative or depressing situation. That's not to say there isn't more good than bad because there usually is, it's just that the bad always feels worse than the good feels good, therefore it gets most of my attention. So why don't I change that?

I remember a slogan that was popular back in the seventies...."Descend with conviction". What would happen if I took that a step further? What if I decided to...."Descend with joy?" But how do you do that when you feel like your world is crumbling around you? Well, if I had the answer, I could be one of those new age motivational speakers. But my instinct tells me it has something to do with "mindfulness", or being conscious of your thoughts and feelings, your state of mind. And for anything positive to happen, awareness must be followed by action. It takes a lot of energy to tackle a problem or any kind of emotional pain, but I think it takes even more energy to spend time worrying about it and stressing over it.

I like that Christian slogan that says "Let go and let God". You can interpret these words many ways. For me, I have always had this magic formula that seems to produce miracles in my life when I have the presence of consciousness to remember it and apply it....Be aware of what I'm feeling, let go of all of my attachments to that feeling (sometimes the best you can do is try to ignore them), and then roll my sleeves up and do something about it. Problem is, I usually forget about this until I have exhausted myself with worry and stress.

As the recession drags on and I see everything I have struggled my whole life to accumulate begin to disintegrate, I think it might be time to become the happy idiot. I'll keep you posted on how it's working.

The culture war probably started over one hundred years ago but it was during the sixties when it really picked up some steam. I'm pretty sure that before the sixties, everybody was conservative. Radical conservatives called themselves republicans and middle of the road conservatives called themselves democrats. I think my parents got their first real taste of liberalism when I grew my hair past my shoulders, took up smoking pot, and burned my draft card. We were all protesting. Their generation was protesting the social changes taking place all around them at lightning speed and my generation was protesting, well, the fact that their generation protested against us wanting to change! In other words, (think stoned hippie accent here) "We just wanted to be free to do our thing man."

A lot of the sixties was as much about youth breaking away from social constraints as it was about major social change, something young folks always find a way to do. On the other hand, a lot of seeds were planted during that era. Some took root and grew into trees while others are still germinating in the ground. At any rate, the culture war was on. The progressive side had decided that the values they grew up with in the fifties really only worked for straight white males and therefore, change was necessary. The conservative side was fighting to keep the status quo. The problem is, we are all loosing the battle.

Somewhere along the way corporate America saw an opportunity. They found a way to exploit our differences to their advantage. First of all let me say that big businesses know the importance of hedging their bets. It's like when you double down on black jack or buy insurance, your betting for yourself as well as against yourself. They know the importance of getting everybody from one side on board, and as many as they can from the other side, which is what their lobbyist do. What big business saw in the republican party, and completely took advantage of, was the "reactionary factor". Progressives were out to change things (actionaries'). Conservatives were fighting the changes (reactionaries).

By aligning themselves with the conservative party, they knew they could sell their agenda because when you are in a reactive mode, you are more prone to slogans, feel good quick fixes, and following a strong personality than you are to understanding what is really going on. This is how they got lower taxes, less regulation, and greater freedom to influence politicians. Their agenda is really a simple one. Complete freedom to operate in any manner that best serves their profits. Their goal is almost complete. Soon they will own and control everything.

Big money interest's have always been at the heart of the cultural war. They stand back and laugh as we fight over gay rights, medical marijuana, abortion, and argue about evolution versus creationism. We think we are fighting for real change while it is they who have gotten the real changes. They feast from our national wealth while the rest of us share scraps and leftovers. We thought we were being patriotic by supporting unprovoked wars. We thought that getting government out of our lives applied to us, when all along it was about getting government out of their lives. We thought that if we lowered their taxes they would in return give us more jobs, but they sent them over seas to get done at a fraction of the cost. We thought that lower taxes would mean more money in our pockets because after all, (slogan alert!!!) we know how to spend our money better than the government does. But lower taxes meant more borrowing from other countries, and we borrowed trillions, most of which went to Wall St., not Main St. We thought that keeping our guns would mean that we would have protection from ever being taken over by an outside force while not realizing that the true enemy was right here among us, invisible and immune to any kind of bullets. We thought that health insurance would be better run by private industry rather than a socialized system, because after all, capitalism is what we are all about. But we never stopped to think that capitalism only works when there is competition and competition has been dying a slow death. Every time corporations merge or buy up another company, there is another nail driven into the coffin of competition. We were placated all along. We gave it all away to the music of happy feel good slogans as we waved our flags and danced like idiots.

So the phony culture war drags on. We fight for animals, we fight for babies, we fight for the sanctity of marriage, we fight for family values, we fight for guns, we fight for freedom of speech, we fight for everything under the sun except the for the one thing that should matter the most to all of us....to keep and maintain a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

During the last couple of weeks it seems like I have been hearing the word "judgment" everywhere I go. I don't know if the universe is trying to tell me something, but whenever a word starts knocking me upside the head, I always feel a need to explore it's deeper context, to find out and to feel the meaning of that word from every possible level my mind can grasp.

The first thing I have to do is to ask myself if I am a judgmental person. I want to say no, but when I think about it, I realize I'm very judgmental, we all are! So the question becomes, is that really a bad thing? Don't we have to make judgments everyday just to survive? Don't I have the right to judge a person on the street as possibly dangerous if he is acting crazy? Don't we all judge art, sports, music, movies, and basically everything that catches our attention? Can we even get through a day without judging? I don't think so. It appears that judging is a part of our thinking process. If we didn't constantly judge, we would go around bumping into each other and we wouldn't have an opinion about anything. Judging seems to be a necessary part of our survival and it also establishes a foundation for how we feel about things.

So I have to ask myself, when is judging bad? Maybe 'bad' is not the best word. I think 'unnecessary' is a better word. To me something is unnecessary when it does not serve our best interest. I know from my own experience that every time I judge something about another person that gives my ego a boost, it's usually an unnecessary judgment. The ego seems to thrive on comparing, measuring, evaluating, analyzing, scrutinizing, and anything else that it can use to define itself as superior.

I guess that the trick is to be conscious enough to know when we are judging in a way that serves our best interest and when we are judging in a way that gives us a false sense of superiority. Maybe I'm wrong, you be the judge.