None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its' conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its' lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. There is no shortage of filament. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?

Listening to Republicans speak of themselves, you get the felling that the party is one big love-fest when they refer to themselves as "freedom loving." But since "freedom is not free" then where, I ask, is the love or the freedom?

Freedom loving. What a joke. Oh they love freedom alright. Let me explain.

They love freedom so much that senior citizens are not free to purchase cheaper drugs from Canada. When asked why, the representatives of the "freedom-lovers" say that imported drugs are not safe, but fail to mention that many of the drugs drug companies sell are imported from Canada. So you can only import drugs if you are a corporate Drug company.

Ah, ha. Freedom for corporations and wealthy investors only.

Oh and freedom is so loved that they bribed Republicans on the floor of the House to get the Medicare rape bill passed. Republican legislators were not free to vote as the wanted, and had to have their arms twisted by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay for 3 hours.

So Republicans in Congress are only free to do as the leadership tells them, or they get the cold shoulder and are ostracized.

And then the Bush administration was free to lie about the real costs of the medicare rape bill. The head administrator who audits medicare was threatened with his job if he revealed the true costs. Tax payer money was used to make news videos with fake news reporters speaking gloriously of the great new medicare bill. This is apparently called freedom of speech, but all of it is a grand hoax to bilk the tax-payers and sell our nation to the front corporations controlled by wealthy investors.

And don't give me that "everyone can buy stock and invest in corporations" nonsense, because although true, you can't compare a small $500,000 investment to a trust fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There are millions of small investors vulnerable to the big players, no different than the millions of consumers vulnerable to the big corporations.

And because "freedom is not free" we have to have military excursions into choosen middle eastern nations that have lots of oil. We have to lie about the reasons and promote forged documents about non-existent yellowcake Uranium sales from Nigeria, because freedom also included the freedom to lie. And freedom is no doubt being installed now by the massive fire-sale of Iraq to corporations and administration cronys who hired imported cheap labor and export profits without reinvestment. Corporations who provided supplies to our freedom-fighters were not able to provide adequate supplies, but were free to skim off their profits -- since freedom is not free you see.

And elections are free when we call them free, ignoring all of the polling booths that are bombed and all of the trade union leaders that are getting assassinated by "operatives." Because the people are free only when they accept their corporate masters, and when they pull the levers to choose for one of the acceptable government candidates. Is it important that only 50% of the population will vote? Is it important that Iraqi's had to register to vote before they got their food rations? Not according to the Republican ink- fingers who blame our bad foreign policy on the "insurgents","terrorists", and "dead-enders" who hate freedom -- or at least the current version. The people are free to drink untreated water, to breathe the radiation and the toxic waste created by the military bombs dropped from the freedom-loving Americans. We killed more people in Iraq because of the war and the 10 year economic boycott than Saddam did as the freedom-hating dictator. But freedom is worth the cost I'm sure. And after all, freedom is not free, right?

This is the freedom to exploit and profit at the expense of the localities being exploited, who get to watch the profits made from their resources leave the nation to freely find other investments and make more profit.

These freedom-lovers are oxymorons. They blind themselves and sing hymnals of praise about a glorious cause, using words that have no underlying contextual validity. There are plenty of killers who justified their murdering with convoluted self-serving reasoning.

Which freedom are they talking about? The freedom to lie, cheat, murder, and steal.

It's a very small world, very small, smaller than the cubicle into which we place ourselves day after day, rotating from one function to another, looking at the world as if through a microscope, with one eye closed, and the other focused on a tiny pinprick.

Across this world, we carve tiny traces of ourselves that disappear and become non-existent almost as soon as they occur, and everything seems to fall upon us at once, so that we only remember but one little dot on the map, one little morsel in the vast ocean of existence. It is only the mind, and the reinforced sycophancy of fawning others which might convince us otherwise, but nevertheless we are still as relatively insignifigant as hapless dust in the workings of the universe. Would that we led a nation to war and back, we are still merely a mortality of flesh with a soul. Nothing more, nothing less.

And thus we seek stability, ritual, and routine, because we cannot often bare ourselves to such existential nihilism. The nestling of absolute nothingness, an abyss without anything we might care to recognize, is not comforting insofar as is the white noise which appears on the television when there is no signal.

Ladies ... and .... gentlemen .... do not miss tonight's world premiere showing of The Spice is Life, that great all American TV show where you get to waste your life sitting on your bottom staring at the oncoming sounds and changes in light patterns, all of it falling into and across your mind, giving you the freedom to see and hear, rather than perceive and listen.

The spice of life is somewhere on the hundreds of stations out there, cheap laughs and morality plays dancing before you with nary an effort on your part. All you have to do is have a pair of eyes and ears, but you don't need to use them, because your brain automatically takes over once the mind is inundated with sound and light, that comes so rapid and swift that you don't have time to decide what to filter out. But relax, your subconscious id takes over and does that for you.

Train yourself to become accustomed to being entertained, rather than entertaining yourself. Sit there and watch, instead of developing skills and knowledge. Then, convince yourself that you are becoming wise and intelligent by whatever the TV brings to your palette. Learning, you see, occurs when you pay attention to the filtered presentation of light and sound. We learn to glean knowledge from these external imprints of light and sound, rather than pull from our own internal resources an image or mental association. When you read, your mind produces an image; when you watch your mind only stores a replica or a reminder that the image existed. When you hear, your mind interprets, but you don't get to ask questions or reinterpret from a medium that allows no interaction. There is no feedback or interaction possible from the Television.

And when we get used to the habits of storing incoming lights and sounds, when we get used to non-interactive learning, we become non-responsive automatons.

You know, I was reading a book review in the New Yorker earlier this week. The author, Jared Diamond, has written another anthropological treatise that will probably rival his prior masterpiece, Guns, Germs, and Steel. According to the review, Mr. Diamond has taken up the theme of society's collapse as the result of environmental exhaustion. He uses the two examples: one of the Nordic Vikings who inhabited Greenland in the early part of the 2nd millennium, and the Easter Islanders who chopped all of their trees down and thus extincted themselves. The Nordic immigrants could not culturally adjust to the Greenland environment. Proud Nords insisted on raising crops and raising livestock, refusing to eat fish, which were endlessly abundant, thereby exhausting the land and resulting in the elimination of the Nordic settlement by the middle of the millennium.

Man is an inbred creature, intra-mentally associated with the taboos, blindnesses, and impressions of those with whom one has shared a common existence. Man also tends to derive his self-esteem and his sense of peace from that amorphous ambiguity of the fellow man and the community. A shared language relates the everyday existence within sub-groups of the species.

In the modern world, we exist as parts of a worldwide human machine, but we still understand ourselves and our roles in that machine within and not removed from the context of our experience with the machine. And since we live in such an anonymous world, the idea of the human community as something as alien and unknown as a machine indicates our detachment, our feelings of dependence, and a fear of helplessness because each of us has to perform some role within the huge division of labor on the planet. We are not self-reliant farmers or tribal groups who can feed, clothe, and shelter themselves without the need for grocery stores, without the need of gasoline for the automotive commutes, and not spending 3 or 4 hours a day shopping and accumulating stuff at various stores and malls. And whereas tribal groups were on intimate life-long terms with the members of their community upon whom they depended, modern man has only an icon of an anonymous someone to thank for all the conveniences of modern living. In more simpler times about 100 years ago, before the rise of the financial giants called corporations, this was much less so than it is now. We live within an inbred philosophical reality.

Another book I picked up (or rather found in a box by the door to the faculty room) concerned how to make money on the stock market. On the cover poised two confident looking men with arms folded across their chest, and a slightly smirking, self-assured grin. Ah, yes, making money on the stock market, or rather, reducing our role as members of the community into a small cell wherein we join mutual societies called mutual funds for the promise of mutually making money. Adduced with a simple notion of cause and effect, profit becomes the sole importance of the social network. The human machine thus charts and statistically analyzes itself, hoping to manipulate the rhythms of up and down, the gyrations of buying, selling and supplies that is at the very utmost central root is just a representation of all that is grown, mined, and built on and-or from the earth. The planet earth is the medium used by which man manipulates other men and profits so as to hope to obtain the lavish fruits of the great extraction system that mankind has created. Earth has been rather passive so far, but this will not last. The society of modern man will also collapse because of the pressures of a decimated environment.

This alone is, to me, what is so damn annoying about those who espouse the "business friendly" argument which excoriates tree-hugging environmentalists and impish weak libr'uls who live off of government salaries and grants because they can't hack it in the "real world."

Like, grow up. Don't equate anti-business with being smart about the environment. Some people might want to ride the hog and burn the house down, but then you give a 14 year-old one million dollars and no responsibility and see what happens. And that thing called "the real world" is ambiguous and ephemeral, and probably is just a mirror image of the self's illusion.

Sorry Y'all. I've been mentally and spiritually on vacation. I will reappear again in a couple of days.

Promise.

Okay, so now we have a plan to offer younger workers a small portion of their paycheck towards private wall street accounts, as if this is a solution to the problem of the system running out of money by 2052 (according to the Congressional Budget Office.) That's 48 years from now.

Its what the letter of the law states which our congresspersons never read that is important. All this hype is just the perfunctory ritual excuse that is supposed to justify what they intend to write insidiously and esoterically into the thousand page booklets that are called Congressional legislation. Most Congresspersons (probably almost all) do not read the legislation over which they vote. Some read what they need to and depend heavily on their staff to cull and filter the enormous body of correspondence and legislation which really is too much for anyone person to handle. Some persons know how to create a staff, some persons accept the suggestions on whom to hire on their staff to the extent that the staff sets the agenda.

So these fools have a great idea that is meant to be a show of decisive action. You see, we have a "crisis." At least the corporate media outlets all say so, blaring dramatic sounds and colorful, prominent banners. Follow the parade. Borrowing one trillion dollars called "transition costs," the idea is meant to offer younger workers the right to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into private wall street accounts. But no one can explain how this diversion of funds from the general insurance fund is supposed to help the long term stability of the Social Security System.

Oh, but in 10 years the "efficiency" will more than pay for the initial cost in "savings." Huhn? Where are these savings going to come from? The only problem with social security is the need to secure a large stable source of funds. The costs of having social security are only 2 percent. What the hell do efficiency and savings have to do with this defunct, inert notion of privatization? They mean profitization. Someone wants to make some more money off you, and promise that you will make more money too.

People confuse insurance with profitable investments. The idea behind the Social Security Insurance is to spread the costs of society over the entire population. Unfortunately, political reality necessitated certain modifications. All persons are taxed at the same rate of 7.5%. But this percentage does not apply to the entire amount of income. Only the first $87,500 is taxed. So if you have a collective income of 2 million dollars, you only pay 7.5% on the $87,500 ($6562.50.) The rest of that income ( 2 million minus 87,500) is not taxed!!! That is a difference of $143,437.50 in taxes !!!!!

Now you might say that is great. A tax savings of $143,437.50. But the choice before us is not as simple as applying the same tax percentage. If the cap on the percentage was raised, the percentage could be reduced. The tax on those with more than $87,500 would increase but not by nearly as much, because the tax percentage could also be reduced to say 4 percent. The vast majority of tax payers would get a 3.5% tax break.

The idea of insurance is simple. If a large group of people each pay a small amount of money into a general fund, all of the needs of the group can be met because the averages will spread out over time. Thus if 140 million people each pay 5 percent of their income into a general fund, we as a society can pay for all of the needs we need. Despite the Neo-Hobbesian social-darwinists belief in a society free of government meddling, mandkind has always taxed the citizens to perform functions necessary for the whole. In primitive tribal society, members had understood responsibilities and duties to the group. In our polyglot, anonymous social order, we form a government to perform and coordinate these necessary tasks.

Diverting funds to some other fee-based system removes from the pool those citizens who feel economically secure. This defeats the ability to spread the costs because since the numbers involved are reduced, the burden per person goes up.

What's more, because social insurance is not run for a profit, the overhead (the expenses above the deposited funds) is only 2 percent of the total funds. In private accounts, the fees and the services can run as high as 35% of total funds. But you didn't think their is any altruism in private-minded investment brokers. Greed can pretend to be mutually beneficial, but then, it is you who provide the funds. The reality is that greed means little when beset by those who have the upper-hand. You are just depositing money in an account and trusting that the movers and shakers are gonna send you a fat check every month. As history shows, there really is no guarantee. Through no fault of your own, you could be the poor fool who suffers losses on his investments, then goes bankrupt and winds up homeless at age 62. Or the sad one who loses an arm in an accident, and can't work. Or the man who suddenly becomes blind at age 31. Or the woman (man) with children whose husband (wife) suddenly dies.

We don't want to leave the care of our children, the injury to our workers, and the retirement of our older persons to chance. As a society we tax ourselves to provide the funds for these services. We must get the debate away from one that is either for or against the system as a whole, and start focusing on the best way to spread out the financial burden on our taxpayers.

Don't be misled by the subtle propaganda of the profiteers who wish to dismantle the system for their own gain, nothing else. What a shame that such small minded fools even offer such a hoax and actually call it reform.

It has been some weeks now since I last wrote a letter to the editor. I did not bother to respond to the four or five letters of criticism that followed that last letter. There was no need to defend myself to persons who would never listen, given that how they responded was indicative of their ignorance. You cannot reason with people who like to believe they've made up their mind about something and cannot admit that they might not be accurate or correct in their assessment.

They believe differently, and they can't explain how or why, but you who have a valid disagreement are still wrong, simply because you don't believe the same thing. It is really that simple.

One thing I have learned in the last 10 years : you do not have to respond to criticism. The truth, wherever it may be, cannot be proven. That might be hard to accept, but in the realm of ideology, proof is whatever you cling to that justifies what you want to believe. Occassionally, the weight of evidence causes the roof to cave in, but when the capacity to believe what you want still exists, people will take the evidence that points in the chosen direction. Some of us don't like the shit to stack too high before we start cleaning house; the rest of us are just full of shit. Accept this, without emotional reaction, and move on.

That being said, I am still amazed at the silly audacity of what suffices for a rebuttal. One man, named Steve Smith lambasted me because I attached my public title. He commented that he stopped writing letters but decided he'd make an exception for me. Funny that Mr. Smith is actually a regular letter writer, who only 2 weeks ago published another, in what was probably his tenth this year (out of 52 issues, 20 percent.) Me, I've sent 2 all year, and both were published.

One fellow said I was a perfect example of why public schools are destroying education, and then said that he would vote no the next time a public vote on school bonds was held. I thought that was funny.

I was told how off base I was. One of the writers mentioned the Buffalo 6 in rebuttal to my statement that "not one conviction" has occurred against any terrorist despite being held in Guantanamo for 2 years. If only this writer had done a google on the "Buffalo 6" and he would have found that the conviction was thrown out. This writer no doubt watched the puffery on corporate television and thought he got the real scoop. When the television that brought him his reality stopped telling him the story, he kept that initial vision of reality in his mind, frozen like a 2 year old steak in the freezer. And still he wants to cook me that steak and call it substance.

The criticism I have concerns the way the Bush Administration is handling these terrorists. Why do real terrorists like Saudi's get to leave the country without inspection, but we quickly arrest 6 fools in Buffalo who happen to be in a mosque that was used by a terrorist agent as a recruiting ground. Why does the Bush administration blow the cover of 2 (yes, not one but 2) undercover agents who are involved in rooting out terrorists? Why does the Bush administration spend 200 billions on the Iraq debacle, but nothing, not one cent, on beefing up protection in the United States? Why aren't the ships and plane cargo inspected? Why aren't the nuclear plants guarded?

If indeed, this truly is war on "terror," how come the homefront is not protected? Why are the FBI and homeland security using the Patriot Act to investigate peaceful groups that have nothing to do with "terrorism" when that was the reason why the Act was passed in the first place?

Remember those Anthrax letters addressed from Iraq. The entire Congress had to vacate because of those letters.

Another man accused me of being mean and out of my mind. He couldn't believe that what I said might be true, like it is somehow my fault that he is not paying attention. All you have to do is watch the TV and believe your armchair philosophy is applicable despite historical fact. But then facts are just concoctions of the vast liberal conspiracy that owns 95 percent of all media.

This other man called me a mean spiteful person, and then said I called him names when I said "this is stupidity and arrogance" while referring to the Bush administration policy. The Bush con is that Iraq is due to a "failure of intelligence" which is a pile of shit higher than a Haight-Ashbury hippie. The Bush gang did what they wanted to do because they have a vast hubris of infallibility, aka stupid arrogance. I was not referring to people in the audience of readers as "stupid and arrogant." Anyone with a fair mind could understand this, but this is just the ole subconscious ploy of moral distraction. You can't handle the argument, so you castigate the appearance.

Or as I've heard on the Bill James show, "If you have the facts on your side, you bang on the facts. If you don't have the facts on your side, you bang on the table."

These days we live in a world of an arrogant and powerful aristocracy. There are plenty of fawning followers who collectively make cconsiderably less money than any ten of the dominant families. There are plenty of the less than powerful who still hope for fame, wealth, or power but are content to merely get by day after day. Sometimes power is obtained through psychological means, whereby one person guilt-trips another, knowing there is line of control in that small special domain. Wealth by itself is not necessarily the creator of a baneful mentality, much as fame does not necessarily accrue to those who are truly talented nor to those who strive -- although the loudspeakers of corporate media do tend to fawn over those who are willing to inflate themselves like bouncing balloons for the national cameras.

No it seems that mentalities are randomly dispersed among the panorama of wealth and power. There are massive accumulations of interacting members of the rich and powerful, but this is merely because those who are willing to strive and sacrifice their integrity will tend to fill the ranks of the rich and powerful, unless they are there by birth. Of course there are countless exceptions, but the exceptions do not defy the averages. This is the inherent state of mankind at this stage of population growth. This is the result of a world in which anonymous people perform tasks and control aspects of life and society in total ignorance of the lives of those whom they affect. A certain perspective of one's rank and position becomes more relevant than the actual reality of that rank and position, which is the breeding ground for hubris and vouchsafed arrogance.

Sometime in the future you should try this. Don't bother to think about what words flow out of your stream of consciousness, and just allow yourself to ramble. The point is to not care what words you say, and just let yourself grab whatever words float to your mind.

The amazing thing is that your sub-conscious will innately create something. Try it. Write down what words come to mind if you care to do so. Once the mind is allowed to flow like an opened faucet, the mind is automatically spilling what is quite natural to its existence. This is the idea behind meditation. Your mind produces thoughts automatically. You don't have to try to have a thought, because the mere process is itself a thought. What you call yourself is nothing but a long history of compiled thoughts by which you have come to understand both yourself and the world in which you exist, albeit affected by the other phenomenom and people in your immediate environment.

So when you let it rip, the results can be rather interesting, and often revealing.

The blue coat was next to a bird which had nothing but songs to sway the abuse of a hot sun that was the afterthought of some long extravagent winter when everyone was next to impoverishment in their relationship with the ethos of wonder.

-- you see what I mean.