"The buying and selling of everything diminishes its real value."
Click on Title to read the post
Featured Post: The Role of a Woman Posted: Feb 26, 2012
The Role of a Woman
There are two categories of women in the US. One category believes women are only vessels to produce an heir. The others know that they are much more than that. How each type of woman reaches her conclusion is mostly a mystery, but there is a high correlation to biology and adherence to paternal social norms. Equally mysterious is how it is that a woman can support a position that is so detrimental to herself in particular and to her gender in general. Read more
Debt and Tax Breaks Posted: August 13, 2011
Debt and Tax Breaks
Repeat after me, "Every formula and equation has an Equals Sign in it." Irrespective of ones politics, religion, economic posture or ethical persuasion, it is a hard and fast fact that cannot be denied or discounted.
As a nation presided over alternately by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, Houses of Representatives and Senates we have swayed our allegiances back and forth between extremes. The pendulum swings between raising taxes and cutting taxes, providing financial support to people who cannot support themselves and taking that support away, funding education and pulling that funding, investing in our infrastructure and neglecting it, fighting wars and ending them, building a great nation and watching it decay. Always, always the tax revenue to pay for such positive things falls short of the actual costs and we issue debt paper to make up the difference.
In July-August 2011 the nation teetered on the brink in default because... Read more
Featured Post: Government Shutdown Tuna! Posted: April 9, 2011
Government Shutdown Tuna!
Congress has gone fishin’. Fishing for Tuna that is. Both parties hold fast to their ideologies while neither has a firm grip on the big picture or the realities of what needs to be done to resolve the imbalance of the budget. One party says cut the spending!! They are bolstered by the Tea Party faction yelling “Cut it! Or shut it!” The GOP legislators want about $61 billion in cuts while their fanatic backers want $100 Billion. The reality is that cutting the entire $100 Billion would do nothing to either balance the budget or curtail the necessity to raise the debt ceiling. Calls for shutting down the government elicit visceral responses from all factions in the grand debate. Read more
Job Creation Fact or Myth Posted March 28, 2011
I Have an Idea!
In defense of low taxes for the very wealthy the economic theory is that if they have low taxes they will create jobs with their invested wealth. These jobs will benefit the middle class and in turn generate tax revenues at higher rates on the income of those workers.
This may be a FACT or it may be a MYTH. The conservative school of thinking say it is a fact and the progressive school of thinking says that in all the years that taxes have been held low on wealthy persons, the jobs have just not been there.
Part of the problem is that there is no accountability for whether a job was created (or maintained), whether it was created inside the US or on foreign shores, or if it was a job that paid a livable wage to the worker.
Part of the Myth of Job Creation is that low tax rates are not a primary factor in jobs at all. If a wealthy investor creates a business and hires workers, he is afforded the opportunity to deduct from taxation all of the compensation that the employee is paid. However, if those employees are paid minimum wage and no fringe benefits, other tax payers must make up the shortfall. Everyone else who actually pays taxes must make sure that the worker can eat, feed his family, put a roof over their heads and take them to a doctor when injury or illness enters their lives.
So if jobs are the justification for low taxes of wealthy people in the US, then we should ask them to demonstrate the benefits they claim. Therefore, the idea is double the tax rate on those wealthy incomes. Allow them a full tax credit for all wages paid over and above the minimum wage if the job is located in the US.
This plan would be similar to the Carbon Credits that were proposed for the buying and selling of pollution rights by businesses operating in the US. The investor would derive a portion of the tax credits equivalent to the percentage of ownership of the business or as a portion of the invested money that supports the business. Funds that were borrowed in order to invest would not be allowable.
By this performance measurement, if the wealth is used to create or maintain jobs, then the net tax rate would be much lower. With a sufficient investment a wealthy person may not pay taxes at all, but at least many people in the US would be able to work and pay the taxes instead. AND we would be able to see that the jobs were a FACT not a MYTH.
A Longbeach Photo Posted Today
A Union With Too Much Power Posted March 6, 2011
In Wisconsin there is a group of men and women who bargain as a unit and hold all monitory decisions in the palm of their hands. This union has two Locals. Each has its elite membership that demands undivided loyalty to the union. They are the Wisconsin Legislative Assembly Republicans Union and the Wisconsin Legislative Senate Republicans Union. They want to control who gets paid how much and all other working conditions. Their Union Boss is Scott Walker. Their affiliation is with the Union of Corporate CEOs. They are truly a powerful and corrupt union.
Governor Walker Von Munchhausen Posted: March 6, 2011
Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin seems to be suffering with Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy. A strange malady indeed. Traditionally it refers to a person, a parent, who creates medical infirmities in their child in order to get sympathy and attention from the medical profession. The child is made sick so that he can be rushed to the hospital to receive intensive treatment to save his life. In the process the parent gets sympathy and lots of attention because of the emotional turmoil he/she is suffering.
Governor Walker has done this with the state of Wisconsin. First he made the state sick by starving the budget of needed tax revenues. Now he is demanding intensive treatment to save its life. He passed legislation to cut taxes. Now even when the public employee unions have agreed to pay for the live-saving treatment, he still demands that they cannot have a voice in future treatment. He seeks to curtail their collective bargaining rights.
Gov. Walker is receiving massive amounts of sympathy and support from a multitude of sources because he is so embattled trying to save his 'sick child." This sounds remarkably like Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy to me.
Tuna! 451 posted: July 24, 2010
Many times science fiction writers look into the future and see a clear vision of the future. While most science fiction is really science fantasy where flying cars navigate in close formation with oncoming traffic and the vision is one of zoning regulations gone absent and every corporation doing just as it wishes, the real science fiction writer sees society as it is today and extrapolates the possibilities into a dystopian world that is possible although not to be desired.
Ray Bradbury's Farahenheit 451 is one of those books and films that is in the process of becoming fact. In that world books and the written work are illegal. The specified reason is that books make people sad and sad people are not productive consumers and obedient citizens. The world evolves that way with the introduction of television that is able to present the conflict and the resolution within hours. Montague, the rogue fireman who hordes illegal books and becomes a fugitive is cornered and killed while he watches the whole process on the telly. It is explained to him that the public would lose interest if there was not a speedy resolution to his flight from justice. The victim on the telly is just any hapless person who strayed into the line of fire and became the fleeing quarry of the helicopter police squad who shoots down the anti-social perpetrator and brings closure for the eager public who wants to see the situation ended with a patriotic cheer.
When the Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster was only a few weeks old, I asserted that whatever they do to eventually stop the oil from spewing into the Gulf, they could have done on Day 3. I question why it was that they didn't seem to have any spare parts to replace any that were damaged. In particular, couldn't they go pickup a replacement 'marine riser' pipe and simply bolt it on to the flange after unbolting the bent riser stub that was left after they pinched it off? My assertion was that they would not have to invent anything new to stop the leak.
So now these three months later, what have they done? They unbolted the flange and are placing a new set of valves on the hemorrhaging wellhead. The video that BP is streaming across the Internet clearly show us that the parts that they are NOW installing are not new. These are parts that have been sitting around somewhere waiting for this day to be installed and the oil stopped.
Billboard Tuna: Lessons in Private Property Rights posted:
Billboard Tuna: Lessons in Private Property Rights
"I think that I shall never see, a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all." -- Ogden
Nash, Song of the Open Road, 1933
"A tree is a tree - how many more do you need to look at." -- Ronald
Reagan, California Governor
After the close of WWII the nation went wild in celebration and with a
free wheeling spirit that made everyone want to break out of their former lives
for the open road. Read more
Taxable Tuna posted: July 6, 2010
When I undertook to write about the varieties of Tuna that men make out of everything they touch, I needed to see and hear the points of view of visionary people of many different cultures. Short of personal travel to places where that culture exists the best way to see and hear the stories of those people is through the cinema. There is no better way to understand the minds and souls of a culture than through seeing the faces and the homes and the lives of people living out their time in their land. Short of inventing a time machine and actually visiting 1970 Venezuela, or 1960s Algiers or bombed-out cities of WWII there is no way to gain even a slice of how it was.
The imagery is best captured by writers and directors who are part of the culture and are depicting the emotions that are born in themselves. With all due respect to Hollywood productions that entertain and occasionally evoke a wide range of emotions, the $20 to $200 million blockbusters just cannot match the acute eye of the Latin American films when it comes to Adrián Caetano and a film such as Bolivia. Actors do not receive multi-million dollar fees and crews are lean. The story is told and the portrayals are accurate. Or there is Central Station, directed by Walter Salles.
People who know me and the topics of my writing might be shocked and dismayed at what I am about to say. I don't like having the Federal Government intruding in my life. I don't like have a bunch of bureaucrats telling me what to and not to do. I think that businesses flourish best when left alone in a Liaise Faire atmosphere.
I want to be able to order and eat a cheesy-eggy-bacony muffin or biscuit, some fat fries and a sweet-fizzy-caramel -colored water without some government wonk telling me it is not good for me to eat this stuff. I can make that informed decision and have this meal one a month or twice. The problem is that there are other adults who do not understand the connection between that meal three to five times a week on a human body that is only fifty pounds and still growing. When we let a corporation mascot have the freedom of speech to encourage naive children and adults to maintain brand loyalty and over eat too much of the calorie-laden, fat-laden, sugar-laden, salt-laden foods, we the people will pick up the medical tab several decades later.
Jenny Beth Martin, who's the national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, has said the conservative grassroots movement is dedicated to furthering three core values: fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.
The founding fathers of America, the very ones who wrote the Constitution, would be the first to say that their perspective on how the country has developed was significantly limited. In the many decades since that founding 111 Congresses have struggled with balancing those three core values with varying degrees of success. On one extreme you would have a constitutionally limited government that would spend only what it was able to raise through taxation and there would be no limits on what a business could do. The limits on taxes would predicate a small government and without a governing body, businesses could do whatever they want to do.
The problem is this is exactly what was the founding conditions of this nation. There were no controls, no regulations, no unified oversight and terrible things used to take place. The government we have today was built up in response to the irresponsibility of people, communities and businesses.
You can't blame the current recession on the banking sector due to issuing a bunch of bad mortgages. The big picture is a lot bigger than just that. It was not the just mortgage bubble that burst, it was a whole lot of bubbles that all went down when the shock wave of the first big pop took place.
We were all living on borrowed money. Car dealers gave us a car just for signing the papers and driving the vehicle off the lot.
Read more
Mortgage Hoopla! posted: Feb 13, 2010
Let's face the facts, folks: both political parties are responsible for the incredible size of our current and future national debt. They are both complicit in failure to address the imminent collapse of our debt-based economy. If Congress was Bernie Madoff, they all would be sentenced to life in prison.
Let's face an additional truth: We all loved living on credit and the benefits that a credit-based economy provided for us. In order for me to substantiate my assertions, the following list of premises must be stated:
If everyone who started investing in their houses when they first got married kept them any paid off the mortgage, they could fund their own retirement and not rely on SSI for their primary retirement income. Resistant Legislators wanted this mechanism to prevail so they would not have to raise taxes to fund the social systems.
As long as there is an interested investor the logical limit to deficit spending is when 100% of the Federal budget is consumed paying the interest on the debt. As long as the "economy keeps expanding" so does the ability to pay interest on more debt. You always repay loans with devalued money, so borrow now and pay later when your income is higher.
The Art of Outrage and Amplification posted: July 25, 2009
I don't like what you said about me! Your comments are hurtful not only to me but every other me in the world! We are all shocked and dismayed that you are so insensitive as to say what it was that you said! Furthermore, your apology is not welcome. It is too late for that! There is nothing you can say or do that will appease the outrage we all feel about your words.
I make no apology for what I did that you didn't like. I was and always will be absolutely blameless in what I do. I have Right on my side. I did what I was trained to do and I did it. If someone else did not understand the situation, that is not my fault.
These and other scenarios play out every day on the world stage.
Read more
Once Again, The Tuna!! posted: May 17, 2009
When faced with an imminent loss of thousands of dollars of investment capital, the day-trader hurries to his computer and sells his stock before the price hits bottom or appears to do so. If he has sufficient margin, he will also sell short the stocks and derive a profit as the price tanks. His only concern is to buy back the stock at the reduced price and rebalance the ledger sheet. His profits come at the expense of other investors who did not move quickly to liquidate their holdings in that equity position.
Banks and other lending institutions grew a crop of mortgages for sale...
Read more
Easy Rider Tuna! posted: April 19, 2009
"Billy, we blew it."
Captain America to Billy, Easy Rider, 1969
It is the lure of easy money that drives the downfall of many good people, companies and economies. The lure is akin to the fascination with narcotics that are pushed at us by cold-blooded dealers that can sit back and reap the rewards of well placed marketing, supply-chain operations and a willing clientele.
Millions of Americans and other people around the world sampled the goods offered by credit pushers at low rates and easy terms.
Read more
Tuna Marketing Board posted: Mar 3, 2009
"You really shouldn't smoke those things," Woody Allen in Sleeper.
"You have been out of it for a really long time. They discovered that tobacco is good for you and everyone is encouraged to smoke at least one a day," Diane Keaton.
Yes, everything old is new again. We ate chicken eggs by the millions until the cholesterol lobby nixed them as silent killers. Then the Egg Research Board found that eggs were a great source of protein and we should eat them. The benefits outweighed the faults.
High Fructose Corn Syrup replaced sucrose in just about every processed food product and every caramel-colored sweet bubbly water. Then we learned that it was the calories in the molecules that were the culprits. Americans grew heavier by the day with the daily consumption of tons of sweet-stuff.
Read more
Pumping Tuna! posted: Feb 7, 2009
The eight conspirators engaged in financial activities that while intended to generate wealth for themselves, ultimately resulted in dispositions of guilty in US Federal Court. Their plan was patently wrong due to the fact that unwary investors would have to contribute a portion of their wealth hoping to increase it, only to have that investment evaporate in a scheme commonly referred to as "pump and dump."
The scheme in a nutshell consists of a group of people and businesses purchasing or creating a large block of stock in a company at a low price, then pump it relentlessly until the price goes up to some trigger price where they dump the stocks on people who have seem the price going up and believe that there is good reason to expect the trend to continue. Ultimately the stock price crashes and the schemers walk away with everyone else&qt;s money. The hopeful investors end up holding worthless stocks that will never grow in price again.
Read more
When Did It All Change? posted: Dec 14, 2008
This question is posted across several blogs because it applies to all the subjects of those blogs. It&qt;s All Tuna begs the answer to when did everything become Tuna and why? The Principle of Imminent Collapse has presented many examples of the principle in action, but why is it that we repeatedly fail to do anything about it? Is THAT another of the characteristics of the PIC? And the Vulnerable Geometry is only vulnerable because we construct it that way. Why?
This post seeks to elicit examples of when it all began and what evidence, albeit in retrospect, can be seen that has led us from the Before to the Now. An example of this question and answer is thus: People driving on the road today are so rude, ignorant and aggressive that they endanger everyone around them and sometimes commit murder over simple things. When did this start and what caused it to happen?
With that in mind, what is the answer to these:
When and why did it become more important to make a profit than to make a product or service that made life better for people?
When and why has sex replaced love? Songs in the 1950s and earlier were all about love and relationships. The 1960s saw some transition. The 1970s and on it is sheer sex and show.
We used to see starving children and mobilize efforts to save Biafrans. Rock stars sang and did benefit concerts. We had Farm Aid. We had Feed the Children. Now we hardly even know the place called Darfur. What has happened?
If the answers were simple, we would have solved our problems already. But identifying the causes and the time line is an essential step in getting to that goal.
It&qt;s a form of Tuna, too. After the fall of Saddam Hussein&qt;s government in Iraq, people went wild. They broke into every government building and the numerous Presidential Palaces and ransacked each one of them. The 24-hour News Stations aired footage of men carrying away filing cabinets and swivel office chairs and desks. Framed pictures, computers and copy machines were prized loot while the Capitol burned and the frenzy of liberation from one despotic regime to another took hold and the light of reason failed to illuminate the minds and hearts of men. No one was around to stop them or protect the assets of the once powerful totalitarian government. Somewhere around $600 billion in US currency likewise disappeared in the looting that went on for days until the elation ran out of steam and an uneasy quietness enveloped the country.
Years later the American financial architecture suffered a catastrophic failure that resembled the aftermath of carpet bombing Read more
Now What? posted: Nov 14, 2008
The global economy has been sinking into a quagmire allegedly created by the magnitude of crappy mortgages that turned into foreclosures in the seminal year of 2008. Everything seemed to be going along reasonably well until something happened. People went to work and earned their paychecks. Mothers shopped for groceries and toted the children from one after school activity to another. Consumers bought new cars, flatscreen TVs, cell-phones and iPods. Cable and satellite content delivery utilities put every conceivable sports event on screens in millions of American homes. Beer and a multitude of fried potato and corn products ran aplenty. Tens of millions of Americans earned a paycheck, received a pension payment, got a public assistance check of one kind or another, and dutifully spent all of it on the consumables, commodities and utilities and medical bills. All seemed right with the world.
Read more
Buying Rotten Tuna posted: Sept 29, 2008
The idea of engaging in buying and selling is to invest some capital and end up with more when you are done. You buy low and sell high. Or as in the hedge funds, sell high and buy it back low. Both ways make money for the investor.
This nation undertook to make it possible for low-income people to purchase homes and begin to build wealth through ownership of that property. Owning ones dwelling afford the owner several things that renting a property does not. First, the interest on the mortgage is a tax deductible expense as is the real estate tax. When the occupant is a renter, they end up paying those expenses as part of the rent, but cannot gain the advantage of the deduction. The property owner gets that advantage.
Read more
Tuna to the Rescue! posted: Oct 3, 2008, 2008
Several screenplays have been written where the arch-villain conspires to use all his resources to manipulate the global financial markets to either hold the world hostage or to walk away with unimaginable wealth.
Ian Fleming&qt;s, Goldfinger is one of the most comical films where the diabolical plot is planned to perfection only to be spoiled by James Bond. The comedy was not part of the script, nor is it funny when viewed in the context of 1962. In 1962 it was indeed diabolical. To conceive of irradiating the US national gold reserve to render it useless with what today would be called a 'dirty bomb' was the work of a masterly criminal mind. But the time and reality has a way of rendering the most ingenious ploys trivial and indeed laughable. Let&qt;s review the essential facts.
Munchausen’s syndrome by Tuna posted: Sept 23, 2008
Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy is a strange malady indeed. In the strict sense of what it is, a person creates illness in him/herself in order to illicit attention from the medical profession. In contrast to hypochondria, Munchausen’s illnesses are real. The person actively seeks out an illness in order to get the ‘benefits’ of treatment.
In a more perverse form of the disorder, the person actively makes someone else sick in order to help them, or get treatment for the victim. In a number of cases, mothers make their child sick so that they can take the child to the doctor and derive social comfort from being the stoic and selfless parent of a sick child.
The psychological term stems from the fictitious Read more
The Shocking Secret of Tuna! posted: Sept 13, 2008
Food from the sea - it is something mankind has taken for granted for thousands of years. He has set out in small boats to cast nets into the cold deep waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans; into the Caspian, Black and Red Seas and countless other named bodies of salt water. Men have stood on sandy shores spreading nets in tidal surf hoping to drag protein out into the atmosphere where it could be dried in the sun&qt;s rays and sold or eaten directly to sustain human civilization. Read more
Black Market Sales posted: Sept 6, 2008
That nebulous place called the Black Market where illegal commerce takes place trading "black market goods and services" also accrues value to the bright white economy. As the master detective says to solve the crime, "follow the money." In many Third World countries, the poppy generates the lion’s share of the national or regional income. Without the cash that addictive drug crops bring, how else could they afford the Reeboks, Nike and Tommy Hilfiger products that cost hundreds of dollars? How could Motorola and Sony sell them cell-phones and pay for the service? When the natural flow of economic activity is such that a household lives on the equivalent of $300 per year, they need an infusion of cash in order to become part of the global economy that cycles $30,000 to $100,000 per household per year.
Arms dealers also realize incredible profits
Read more
Company Tuna: Reagan Era Buying and Selling posted: Aug 20, 2008
The Ronald Reagan Presidency era was a great season for tuna. While there are those politicians and business owners who sing the praises of the policies that were invented or finely tuned during his office, the economists without political agendas to promote see it another way entirely. Most Americans like many thousands of spectators at a football game, can’t sing the National Anthem unless someone else is leading them with a louder voice. Similarly, most Americans cannot understand the intricacies of economic policy unless someone repeatedly tells them that they believe. They follow the crowd and stand with their hats in hand and mouth the words. Nevertheless, the policies were promulgated and those policies did have an impact. But as with the selling and buying of tuna, the primary emphasis of those policies was to free up the business community to concentrate wealth in the wealthy few.
One only need look at who benefits from the government expenditures to see where the allegiances were.
Read more
Securitized Tuna! Posted: Aug 5, 2008
When I was asked what I thought about the sub-prime mortgage debacle and how we arrived at that place (once again), I only thought about the S&L Crises of the 1980&qt;s and said, "What did you expect?" Here we were facing the same frenetic bidding up of the prices, the over building of the supply and the free-wheeling financial conditions more suited to wildcatting in the oil fields of Texas, Oklahoma and originally, Pennsylvania.
William Greider, the author of Secrets of the Temple, about the Federal Reserve, had written several other excellent accounts of how we get ourselves into these fubars and why we can't seem to see clearly enough to not step into the deep stuff.
Read more
Medical Tuna
Any one who has had the misfortune to require hospitalization in America will recognize and commiserate with this description. Let us hope that you checked yourself in for a voluntary stay for some less than critical reason. Now I have checked into hotels where I was going to pay around $150 per day and received royal treatment at the registration desk and by everyone else from my initial arrival under the portico to my room where I could flop on the bed after a protracted flight and taxi ride. The desk agent asked me if I needed someone to take my bags to the room. The man in uniform efficiently conveyed me and my bags to the correct room, explained the amenities and offered to attend to anything I needed at the time or any time later on. He was available by dialing 65 on the telephone, day or night. For this service he got a $3 tip.
During my stay, I was able to leave and return at my leisure and engage in most anything I cared to do. I logged in my laptop and checked email, I used my cellphone to call home and say that I was well situated and the trip had been uneventful. There were two double beds in the room, a TV and desk with lamp and stationery. Everything was included in my $150 per day rate, except the first run movies on the cable. The best part was that I did not have to share my room with a stranger who was also assigned to my room.
Read More
The supporters of the Right to Life doctrine have a very valid principle to guide them. The supporters of the Pro-Choice doctrine also have a valid platform on which to stand to defend their point of view.
Terminating a life under any circumstances in our society is a painful and difficult decision to make, whether it be the developing body of a human being in the womb, a criminal suspect by a police officer, the removal of life support by a relative or of a convicted heinous criminal by a judge. Each of us has varying degrees of compunction, or the lack of it, in each example cited. Our pureness of heart and greatest of intentions to protect one or other&qt;s rights is soon co-opted by factions that have an agenda to promote and not to fully and singly support the original goals.
Read More
Coke or Pepsi? 4-23-2008
21:51
The long standing battle over which sweet carbonated cola beverage is the better is fought over a completely useless set of opinions. Indeed, which cola drink tastes better should not be the criterion for selection but which costs less. The simple fact is that whether by coincidence or by design, the price difference is negligible. The calorie content and the amount of caramel colorant differences are negligible also. The only difference that I have been able to discern is that I prefer one over the other. Maybe it’s the color of the can, or the celebrity endorser who makes the difference. At the end of the day, the only positive advantage of the media campaigns is that they both companies spend billions of dollars to edge ahead of each other. Now there is the real thing, a choice of any generation: spend lots of money to get people to spend a lot more. Force that dollar around another loop in the network of commerce.
Read More
Clean Air Tuna! 4-10-2008
20:49
Clean air is for breathing, right? It is, but we can breath polluted air too. We can usually see through the haze far enough to complete our essential daily tasks. Clean air is available to buy and sell as well.
When the USDOT started its clean fuels program to help make the air we breath cleaner, they also created a market opportunity to buy and sell.
Read More
Wheaty Oatey Ricey Tuna! 4-9-2008
21:43
Although food and beverage manufacturers all try to keep the cost of their products low, they never endeavor to get them to the lowest level possible. What&qt;s the use of going too far below the competition? As long as the dominant companies have their comfortable market share, there is little need to go to extra ordinary lengths to make the product less expensive.
Actually in many instances, the cost of the product is small compared to the cost of putting that product in a six color pressboard box or in 16oz plastic bottles. Often the packaging cost is greater than the value of the food it contains. In short, the consumer is paying the manufacturers for colorful enticements to buy the brand named item rather than for the nourishment that product provides. And when one considers the prolific numbers of snack food items on the shelves at $2.49 to $3.99 per bag, one can see that the heavy emphasis is on the impulse and mindless consumption part of our diet.
Read More
Pharmacuticals
April 3, 2008 14:32
I have a difficult time distinguishing honorable
intentions to help humanity and the profit motive to make a big score doing
something that just looks like helping humanity. You can see it in the books that tell you that every illness is treatable with the right combinations of foods and herbs, that you can only learn about if you buy my book and read it.
You can’t borrow the book or listen to someone tell you the truth. You can only reap the benefits if you buy the book. What else don’t I know? That is what will hurt me.
Every drug on the market, no matter how beneficial it is, generated huge profits for the pharmaceutical company that developed it. And, yes, there are side effects that can be worse than the illness it treats. But if you really want relief from your tri-literal malady, you’ll be willing to ask your doctor about this new wonder drug.
Every day researchers and marketers discover a new ailment with three or four letters that, only coincidently, has a recently discovered treatment. It’s never a cure. There’s no future in cures. The book lists the cures, though. What might have been a great intention at the start has become perverted into a profit center and a way for investors to get a piece of the action for nothing more than lodging some money in a brokerage account.
Incoming Comments:
Name: Your Mother Posted: 4-13-2008 6:35 Location: Home, you DO know where that is, dont you? Comment: It&qt;s your mother...
Why don't you ever call? I see that you have time to blog to the world and explain to them about TUNA! Me? I have to buy this computer thingee and learn all about the internets just to talk with my son, the person whom I gave birth to in an agonizing seven hours of my life.
Maybe I should just write to you here and you will get my messages.
I realized that Tuna was a great metaphor for how we treat everything and everyone in this great country of ours. And since we treat everything locally that way, and we have influence all over the world, the rest of the world has caught on and treats everything and everyone like Tuna.
The reference comes from a cocktail party I was at while visiting on Nahant, MA back in 1978. A businessman there was having trouble with a business deal that
literally was ‘going sour.’ His orders to an associate would free him of the losses he faced if he didn’t sell a boatload of tuna ASAP. The story exemplifies the importance of strategic buying and selling over the importance of actually using that is being sold.
Why you won’t find ads flashing in your face while you are trying to read this Blog.
Because this Blog is NOT Tuna and cannot be bought and
sold for incremental profits at the expense of intelligent discourse. But then
make me an offer!
Here are a few links that relate to this site's content www.SeaWeb.org
Bernie Sanders Speech on April 12, 2011 Cute AND disturbing at the same time
