This internet company claims to provide a credit report for one dollar.

In fact, the fine print in the purchase agreements signs you up for a continual credit reporting system. You have 7 days to disconnect from something you never signed up for. Then they charge you $30 and a few days later another $20.

You go “what the hell?” and try to uncouple from these thieves.

You finally track down a contact number. It rings in India or Pakistan from the accent of “Ron” or “Mary” who really do their darndest. But the system is set up not to work at all. These strangers 10,000 miles away ask – not for the transaction number – but your social security number! They won’t talk to you until they get it. “The system.” They refuse to connect you with a supervisor. They refuse to tell you how to reach the company directly. They do nothing.

You go to your credit card company to dispute it and find out that there is little they can do except help you disconnect from these folks.

These folks need a visit from the FTC in the worst way.

September 23, 2011

Salisbury, North Carolina   So I’m visiting my sister.  Her city got some “stimulus money.”  They weren’t used to anyone giving them anything since Reconstruction after the civil war, so they didn’t have an elaborate plan already in place to spend the ill-gotten gains.  They decided to put the money to work on sidewalks.  Not a grand plan, but who knew it was coming, huh?  The city being old and well-kempt had sidewalks but the spreading suburbs did not.  So they extended sidewalks that were already in place into the suburbs toward the rural areas that surround the city.  The sidewalks look good, but they’re on their way to farms.  No one much walks there is my point.  And worse?  They go to nowhere.

They let out bids and a company in SouthCarolina got the bid.  So far no jobs in Salisbury.  The South Carolina company offered jobs to local pretty-much legal Mexicans.  Now Mexicans are respected workers in stone and cement and they tend to work hard and cheap, so it was a good call by the South Carolina company.

One of the locals who got a new sidewalk watched as it started a half-a-block away where it connected to an existing sidewalk and continued a hundred yards past his house and there stopped on its way to oblivion.  He went out to talk to the workers.  Turns out the Mexicans send most of their money to their families in Mexico.  Now this isn’t bad – people in Mexico need money, too.

So the stimulus to the local economy largely went to another state and thence to another country.  It created not one lasting job and was gone in a wink.

We wonder why the stimulus didn’t get us anywhere?

By idiots for idiots.

Or was that Abraham Lincoln?

Keywords:  Legitimacy, health care, medical doctors, homeopaths, osteopaths, chiropractors, doctors of oriental medicine, acupuncturists, Great Influenza Pandemic of 1917 – 1918, aspirin, theories of wellness, theories of illness, how unfounded “legitimacy” can kill us.

The word “legitimate” carries a lot of implications.  But the basic one is that ‘it works.’  Whether it’s a new technology or a new type of medical intervention, it has to struggle against the established legitimacy.  This is not a bad thing if the struggle is “fair” – that is that the most legitimate does not use its position to suppress the challengers.  In another words that the meaning of “legitimate” is dynamic – it is always in flux.  The moment it solidifies its position by force, it technically has lost its legitimacy and has now just become another thug.

Legitimacy cannot be truly made “by fiat” – neither by a directive from “on high” or by a legislative act.  Legitimacy, if it is real, cannot be “bestowed” – it must be earned.

For example, in the world of health care we have a lot of players: physicians, drug companies, hospitals, insurance companies.  We take it for granted that they are all “legitimate.”  Why, because they are “licensed”?  They have the blessing of government?  It does not mean that any of the players, be they corporate or individual, have earned “legitimacy”.  It is not as if hospitals don’t have to meet “standards” or physicians don’t have to get diplomas and licensing.  They do.  But all these “steps” are to give the impression that “they work” – that they are legitimate.  Supremely legitimate.  But, in truth, a young medical doctor who has worked herself to death getting her diploma does not mean that what she was taught or what she think she knows anything about  has anything to do with “what works.”  Granted everyone believes it but that doesn’t make it so.  You can think for yourself of many legitimate beliefs that were so wrong.  The earth as the center of the universe.  The earth being round and not flat.  Of what matter is or is not.  Or, to get to the matter at hand, what drugs truly work and why.

The sad fact is that all too often they do not work.  And as a general rule, the “legitimacy” that someone works hard to get, sometimes doesn’t deliver the goods, but by that time, it’s “common knowledge.”

M.D.s are at the top of the food chain as “legitimate” physicians and surgeons.  There are “lesser” physicians: osteopaths, homeopaths, naturopaths, chiropractors, doctors of oriental medicine, acupuncture.  Then start the questionable: herbalists, shamans, medicine men, and healers without names or addresses.

This is your life we’re talking about.  Our bodies are suppose to keep us healthy but our lives and our behaviors and our environment, as well as inherent genetic problems, can overwhelm our natural ability to keep us well.  Or an accident.  It’s then that we seek medical help.  And we turn to legitimacy.

Very few of us ever challenge or even understand the theory behind healing arts.  We may assume that all physician are playing with the same deck.  May I assure that they are not.  Each healing art has a theory of disease and wellness and a tool kit of interventions to get us back on track when we get off track.  And they are not at all compatible.  For the most part they don’t even speak the same language.  And they certainly don’t have a commonality of explanations for how the body functions.   Imagine an Amazonian shaman talking to an M.D. and looking for common ground.  There is none.  A doctor of oriental medicine and an M.D. can agree that a particular “organ” is a liver.  But what it ultimately does?   And what forces keep it working well?  They have little if anything in common to say to one another.

Few people know that the worst record of deaths (while undergoing treatment) in the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 that killed 500,000 Americans and untold millions around the globe was had by M.D.s – who lost upwards of 30% – 50% of their patients.  Whereas chiropractic and homeopaths lost less than 1%.  Hugh epidemiological studies.  Real facts.  Why?  Because M.D.s have a belief that suppressing things like fever is important whereas the others believe in letting the disease express itself “out” is essential.

Can you see that from this one simple example that two types of physicians look at disease differently and one type, with none of the tools of the modern age, had cure rates thousands of times better than medical doctors? Do you know what the single most miracle drug that was prescribed by medical doctors?  Do you know what same drug is thought by the other groups of physicians to have caused the death of hundreds of thousands?  Aspirin.  A drug that suppressed the fever of the inflicted, where as the other group allowed the fever to kill the pathogens and their patients recovered.

Today, antibiotics are the miracle drug of choice.  In various strengths.  They are for bacterial infections though they are often used as a palliative for patients with viral issues – which have no easy fixes yet in M.D. medicine.  Yet chiropractic, homeopaths, naturopaths, osteopaths can still treat disease without them.

What this means is that the “health care system” that is designed around M.D.s (with lesser physicians tolerated like a red-hair step-child) just doesn’t cure as much stuff as they’d like us to believe.  They have “science” and the massive pharmaceutical industry  on their side and peer reviewed studies.  What they don’t have is an explanation for why other healing modalities work – sometimes better than theirs.  And since they have the most legitimacy, due to legislative acts and a grand strangle-hold on healthcare, no one really cares.  It’s presumed that they know best.

What is at the origin of the divergence between wellness theories is a differing opinion as to what are the basic building blocks of wellness and how the body basically works.  New modalities are almost all leaning toward an electrical explanation.  After all, physics says that all of “what is” (including us and rocks) is a combination of energy and an organizational principle.  At the heart of matter, there is nothing.  As small as we can cut it up, it disappears and there is nothing except energy.  When the well-patterns of energy are disrupted and become sick-patterns of energy, then a healing intervention should be something that causes the well-patterns to return.  That is the direction of medicine.  It has nothing to do with M.D.s but it has everything to do with other healing modalities.  Most non-M.D. physicians try to use medicine to influence energy believing that if they push it into alignment, the body will do the rest.

As an adult, we are in charge of our own healthcare decisions.  We are not limited to what is forced upon us by legitimacy.  Go back in history.  Do you know why some religions have massive churches and others don’t?  Because big and organized and pageantry always reek of legitimacy – whether of church or government.  You need the trappings of legitimacy to cause people to easily believe you have it.  Can you see that courtrooms and courthouses reek of legitimacy even if the law is corrupt?  How the pomp and décor of palace cloaks it in ostensible legitimacy?

So too are modern hospitals and massively impressive diagnostic equipment all designed to overwhelm the individual’s sense of his own self-worth and surrender to the legitimacy.

If you add media (TV/cable) into the mix, to be on the winning side, media must back legitimacy and avoid the illegitimate that might come under fire from government (or even media) at any moment as a challenge to and effrontery toward the legitimate.

However, what is legitimate is always in the past.  The new must strive to assume the cloak of legitimacy or else it will always be a backroom or home-based healthcare system or religion.  As soon as the new becomes legitimate, it is destined to become the enemy.

Only YOU can give something legitimacy no matter how many trapping it puts on itself to trap you into believing it is “legitimate.”

The “take-away” from this monologue is that as soon as something becomes legitimate, is has, more likely than not, already abused power and assumed the throne and all you hear and see is designed to make you kow-tow to the throne.  Whereas, you should, as soon as something takes on the mantle of legitimacy, know its true legitimacy is suspect.  Use it while it still has efficacy.  Its legitimacy will long outlive its efficacy.  Lord knows it’s earned it.  But also look for signs of abuse of its position.  Once enthroned, if the legitimate becomes closed-minded, close-door-ed, monopolistic, unavailable to new thought, then it has signed its death warrant.  You job is to find out who or what will succeed it and form new alliances.

But know that the legitimate media is always in bed with the legitimate anything else.  Finding the “new” is always going to be difficult.  It never hurts to learn how to learn, how to question, how to ask questions.  And how to successfully maneuver the politics of legitimacy.  And “new” is not always good.  The difference between cutting edge and crackpot is a very narrow margin.  And most of us are not equipped to know the difference.

In an article that came at this legitimacy issue from less philosophical direction, Michal Glueck, MD in an article called “Peer Review vs Timeliness: A Delicate Balancing Act,” said, “As a resident and instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital in the early ’70s and a part of the patina of the old Boston medical scene, I soon learned their motto regarding innovation: “Be neither the first to adapt the new nor the last to cast the old aside.”

Dr. Glueck goes on “That battle is crucial today, since more patients watch, listen to, and read the latest in medical advances, hoping to find some miracle cure. In my opinion, the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of information delay, not because of peer review itself, but because the review process is too long, cumbersome, and obstinately resistant to modern advances. Tradition and the methods of the good old days seem to outweigh the benefits of recent technology. I, too, wax poetically for the good old days but now must accept that being up-to-date means communicating as well as other skilled professions in the new millennium.”

He argues that peer-review that takes years to bring crucial information available to healthcare patients is of little use in an electronic age.  Put in my words, innovation is at an ever-accelerating pace.  New theories are promulgated daily it seems on the human body and how best to keep it well.  It takes time to discover the nuggets in the morass of soggy thinking.  Unfortunately, this is the human condition.  It takes lifetimes to know what really works.   And we have only this lifetime.  We need a vetting system that works as fast as information comes of age.  This would be an honorable mission for the FDA but instead it acts as a thug to repress all new thought and imprison its promulgators and outlaw treatment that could form the basis of studies that could honestly help discover “what works” – the meaning behind “legitimacy.”

There are no easy answers.  But the bottom line is that we should always question what is most legitimate.  The U.S. FDA and its associated monopolies are raging a ceaseless battle to suppress innovated health care information and treatment.  It has always been so in its inglorious history.  What the real battle is about, make no mistake, is the right of the individual to decide his own modality of wellness and to select whatever person he chooses to deliver that – irrespective of their licensure.

That headline alone should give you pause for thought.

The Associated Press, as well as many other papers, are reporting this date that a reporter has fled Ecuador to Miami after the was sentenced to three years in prison for calling the president “a dictator.”   Three other executives of the newspaper El Universo – the largest in the country – were also convicted and fined $42-million.  It is a slippery slope from socialist reformer to fascist dictator as President Correa and the people of Ecuador are discovering.  The problem is, and the problem always has been, that a poor electorate are quite susceptible to being enticed to vote for someone who promises that their lives will be better – that the new president will take from the rich and give to the poor.  Correa’s problem is that his promises are many and his cash limited and no one’s lending.  Ecuador’s currency is the U.S. dollar and Correa doesn’t have a printing press like Obama does.  Me thinks this could come to a bad end.  The only way Correa can keep the promises is to go off the dollar and if he does that, there will likely be a coup d’etat and if there’s not?  Inflation will start to run at 20% a month until there is.

I have written a complete “boots on the ground” booklet on my experiences in Ecuador and why I wouldn’t wish them on ANYONE.

Go to http://www.ascolibooks.com/

It’s right there bottom right “The Ugly Truth about Ecuador”

If you are even THINKING about relocating to Ecuador PLEASE PLEASE do yourself a favor and read this first!!

The truth about Ecuador is that it really is NOT a great place to live.

NATURALIST HEALER GREG CATON OUT OF PRISON — U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT DELAYS ISSUING PASSPORT BUT FINALLY GRANTS ONE – GREG ARRIVES SAFELY IN ECUADOR TO JOIN HIS WIFE AND FAMILY IN AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

Précis: Greg Caton, prison, U.S. State Department, Ecuador, healthcare, Osama bin Laden, Brian O’Leary, astronaut, Obama healthcare, Obamacare,

After a failed kidnap attempt a few years ago by the FDA and FBI, Greg Caton was listed on Interpol as one of the most wanted criminals in the world – along with Osama bin Laden.  His offense was jumping his parole.  When he was eventually captured in Ecuador in a manner that maybe got a few embassy personnel deported, and embarrassed the country, he was forced to complete his parole in prison.  That was two years ago.

Greg has now done five years in prison for selling a low cost cancer treatment product that actually works.  (See astronaut Brian O’Leary’s testimonial at www.altcancer.com) His marketing methods certainly upset the FDA who eventually used a bunch of all-too-common prosecutorial tricks to take him down.  Greg did his time and spent a year on probation in the U.S. while moving his family and his business to Ecuador.  He eventually asked to have his parole, called “supervised release” reduced since he was essentially living abroad most of the time with the court’s permission.  Simultaneously, an ever-rabid FDA agent, was trying to bring new charges that never amounted to anything but caused the court to reject his request for parole reduction.  Greg, fearing for his freedom from antics of a rogue FDA agent, refused to return from Ecuador.

Greg is a nice guy and so is his family.  He’s smart and knows his stuff.  But he is the poster-child for an FDA gone insane.  It’s just the wave of the future as government prevents adults from making their own healthcare decisions.  And, even tries to enforce compulsory healthcare insurance, which obviously controls healthcare, via Obama Care.

There are a tremendous number of things we can use to maintain our health and well-being.  M.D.’s and Big Pharma and government do NOT have a lock on wellness.  They are undoubted useful and should be part of our “kit” in an emergency or for diagnosis.  But they are far from the ultimate solution to wellness.  Most folks don’t know that M.D.’s had a terrible living/dying ratio in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918.  Almost every alternative health care modality did better than them.  While M.D.s lost 50% or more of their patients, other practitioners lost no more than 10%.

While Big Pharma says that they’re circling in on a cancer cure, there are two things to keep in mind.  One, a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine saying that 70% of M.D.s would NOT take chemo therapy for cancer!  That is not some whacko minority.  That is a roaring majority of physicians who believe it doesn’t work or isn’t worth it.  And yet, they lose their license if they suggest anything else to their patients.  Or even encourage someone to forego chemo.  Two, in the diagnosis of cancer, the “needle biopsy” which seems to be un-intrusive and “safe” actually results in metastasis of cancer in 50% of biopsies!  That means you have a 50/50 chance of the cancer spreading if the physician even touches the mass with a needle!  [Study: John Wayne Cancer Institute, Orange County, California]  And yet thousands of these tests are done each day with M.D.s leading the charge!

Almost all men die with cancer cells in their prostate gland.  But most men do NOT die from prostate cancer.  The needle biopsy to check it out has a 50% chance of spreading it outside the walls of the prostate gland.  Just as a needle biopsy has a 50% chance of spreading it outside the mass in breast tissue of women.  A needle biopsy that almost any M.D. will recommend without a second thought is nearly a death sentence.  I mean, readers, who many of you would get on a plane that had a 50% chance of crashing.  None of you!  And THIS is the state of our “approved” healthcare?

All of this is with FDA approval.

No one is ever going to held accountable for the crimes of the FDA that will emerge as primitive in 50 years.  But one man who stood up to them has given five years of his life for having the temerity to challenge them.  The FDA won.  We all lost.

I for one thank him for his courage.

At least they didn’t just kill him.

We’re making progress.   Keep up your fight to take charge of your own healthcare and don’t accept what every M.D. says without doing your own homework.   The FDA can make it illegal for someone to SELL you what will make you well, but it doesn’t keep you from finding it, buying it or making it for yourself.

It is YOUR life, no matter what anyone else says.

Having grown up in the hippie era without having been one, having lived through the Vietnam war without fighting there, it is hard to imagine that these are not times that call for anti-establishment protests.

I’m not talking about the disgraceful and embarrassing union protests in Wisconsin’s state capitol.  I’m talking about “government is not working” protests.

And then I got to thinking.  Did the hippies actually come to maturity and power and vote in this nightmare of social experiments we can’t pay for?  Well, that’s not entirely true.  We could pay for them if we, say, gave up our military but watching the news, I’d say it’s not the right month to do that.  And maybe it’s not so much that the “hippies” social consciousness is responsible for this mess as it is that few of us, including myself, have learned the lessons of fiscal restraint and “conserve”atism.   Of course, history shows us that as soon as someone saves something, someone, as in government, comes along and steals it. Or whatever taxation is called by another name.

Was it the yuppies fault?  How did we learn to live on what we didn’t have?  Did our parents not teach us about saving?  Can we lay this off on TV stimulating our “must have it now” glands?  How did it come to pass that we as individuals (and now our nation) came to live ahead of our earning curve?  I mean how did we even have that thought?  Was it some positive thinking guru who told us to envision our future and we could cause it to manifest?  And then the credit card showed up in the mail?

The ease of “credit” – alas gone forever for many of us – stimulated entire markets, like real estate, and caused demand to soar beyond what a cash economy could support.  That raised prices and real estate values that had no meaning if someone would give you credit to buy – regardless of true value or the price.  We all knew it didn’t matter.  It would go up faster than our interest rate, so even a Nobel laureate economist could figure out you’ve got to buy today on credit to lock in the price on a rising tide.

It seemed so plausible.

And now the disaster seems so predictable and obvious.

So today even banks know you can’t have sound lending policies until jobs become stable and predictable.  The stuff of actuarial tables.  I mean if you ran a lending department of a bank, just exactly who would you lend to in this economy?  Certainly not me.  Some who works for GM?  Ah, no.  At the Detroit Burger King?  Ah, no.  At a mini-mall?  I don’t think so.  Your own grandmother?  Your kids without jobs or prospects?  To anyone whose job is hanging by a thread – which is almost everyone?

The answer is in our own minds.  If you had $1-million of your own money that was all you would ever get in life, and you wanted to “work” your money – where would you place it to get a 95% chance of a 10% return?  I’m old and “experienced” and I would tell you I have not one idea of what I’d do that gave me a fair return without much risk.

Imagine how banks and even government feels?

I don’t get the feeling that President Obama is a crook.  At least THOSE days are gone.  But a good-looking under-experienced academic who is forced to rely on “experts” who are not really experts?  Yeah.  At best, he’s that.  I am not an Obama fan, but I told friends before the election that whoever got elected was taking over the White House with a nuclear bomb in the basement – the Bush era overspending – that was just ticking away.  Obama thought he could roll back the timer by spending even more money we didn’t have.  He had experts telling him it was the only thing to be done or it would explode.  They didn’t lie.  It would have.

The only question for any of us is do we want a controlled demolition or just let it blow to hell.  I suppose the follow on question is, can we really control this or will we just spend a lot of money and it’s going to blow anyway?  History says it’s going to blow anyway.  It always has.  What government is doing, without telling us straight out, is giving us time to prepare as best we can.

But . . . if Obama can keep it together with bailing wire for another year and some, he can get “defeated” in the election and the ticking time bomb will pass to the control of Republicans who will accuse Obama of all evils and they, too, will be unable to stop the bomb.  Better it blows on their watch, I say.  They made the mess.  It’s hypocritical for them to get religion this late in the game.  We can’t forget that.

The Tea Party’s “just say no” approach seems responsible at first blush.  But their rallying cry seems to be “Let ‘er blow!” and I think that’s not as good as we can do.

In the end, chances are good that the economic time bomb will explode and scatter debris everywhere.  Each of us needs something paid off that’s big enough for three generations and someplace that limits property tax increases.  Anyone who buys property someplace without constitutional prohibitions against unlimited property tax increases is an idiot.  How do you think government is going to feed itself?  If it can’t tax paychecks, the only thing left is property.

That’s a long ways from “hippies” but their time has come and gone.  Hippies age.  Young hippies need very little.  Old hippies need everything.  They’ve avoided “the system” and now would like the establishment to take care of them in their agedness.  If they paid for their commune and are now organic farmers, they’ll own the world.  If they took the cash when property values soared?

They’re broke.  Like the rest of us.

The good thing about economics (and budgets) is that the market will correct itself in time.  It’s doing it now.  What legislators do may make a difference one way or the other but the correction is afoot.  Corrections that are not planned properly and executed perfectly usually are hurtful to watch and certainly terrible to live through.  But the ship will right itself though it’s hard to say who will still be onboard.

In all the budget discussions we’ve heard ad nauseum, I have not heard one proposal to cut government itself.  Lay off 20% of the workforce tomorrow.  Or keep the work force and cut wages by 20%.  But I’m going to leave that aside, too.  The market will act.  Many a big, fat, mighty, all powerful government has been taken down by the same forces that are at work in our own: stupidity.

But the discussions we’re not having are about our laws.  Our tens of thousands of laws.  Laws no one, and I mean no one, can understand or put together coherently.  If someone does not leave high school with an understanding of the law of the land, then they can’t be expected to keep laws they’ve never heard of or don’t understand.

If to the uncountable laws you add attendant regulations and heaped upon that you add legal decisions about those laws and regulations that are too massive to even house, then you have a legal system that lends itself to being “capricious and arbitrary.”  That means that whoever has a grudge against you can use the laws anyway they want to send you to prison or take your property.  Law schools usually teach a course about how laws get their right to exist and what is a moral and immoral law.  One of the measures that must be met is that a law must be promulgated – that means it must be noticed to everyone so that everyone understands it.  Since no one can do that, most laws are inherently immoral.

This is not a legal defense.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid point.

The U.S. retains, as it has for years, the distinction of having a greater percentage of its population in prison than any country on earth.  Including China.  Syria.  Russia.  We’ve created private prisons that demand new inmates!  Prison guards have unions that need prisoners.  Besides our foreign wars or non-wars, we have created wars on drugs, terrorism, pornography – that have bloated our federal payroll and justice department that like their cushy paychecks and don’t want to stop.  After all, they’re helping America.

Our current “scandal” involves an ATF operation that was conceived in hell and run by idiots.  (These are the same idiots who burned down the compound in Waco, Texas that killed women and children.)  There’s the woman who runs a Veteran cemetery in Texas that won’t let the word God be used when burying our fallen.  Who ARE these people?   Can’t you smell the arrogance of government?

Here’s the next law I’d like to see passed by Congress and signed by the president: for every new law that is passed, ten laws must be repealed.  That will be a sobering moment for the boys and girls in Washington.  But it needs to happen.

Do you know that more than one half of all our laws have no counterpart in other first world countries?  That’s right.  Guys are doing time for offenses that no one else on earth even considers a crime.

This is what America has become and there is not one word in the budget talks about the cost of laws.  The cost of enforcement.  The cost of prosecution.  The cost of prisons.  The cost of taking non-violent people out of the productive system and locking them up and paying for it.  Here’s a small reason why?  Do you know that there is actually a department in the Department of Justice that decides whether to prosecute or not based on how much the government can seize or the fines they can extract? 

The beast that is government is facing going on a diet.  It will not be happy.  You are food.  If you don’t feed it, they will just go get the food.

The faster we can cut the beast down to a manageable size, the safer we will all be.

According to a post on “Denis Campbell’s UK Progressive,” author Theodora Filis claims that on July 15, 2011, the Ministry of Industry and Trade (METI) Agency for Natural Resources and Energy put out a request for bids for a contractor to monitor websites, tweets, youtubes, blogs about nuclear power and radiation.

They are looking for “incorrect” information – which is Japan-speak for all information, true or not, that “they” don’t like.

There has been no discussion about what Japan wants to do with all this information or what they want to do to the people and organizations who publish it.

This has been business as usual for Japan and its troubles up north.

The U.S., of course, monitors “everything” with key word searches etc. – emails, phone calls, etc.   The U.S. mostly just saves everything and doesn’t use it unless content rises to the top of the pile.  Which it won’t since most real trouble makers use encryption – which in itself puts a flag on communications.  Of course, all financial and legal transactions are suppose to use encryption, too, to protect our privacy, so the government has a lot of “stuff” piled up to crack.

In reality, the U.S. doesn’t usually use the sniffer technology to find targets, it uses it to track targets once they are identified.  What happens in seconds on TV in “Criminal Minds” and “NCIS” and “CSIs,” in reality gets sent to a “department” where it’s prioritized and then hammered until it cracks, if it cracks.

That is not to say that just as there are “No Fly” lists, there are undoubtedly lists of folks who publish anti-government polemic – true or not – and that those lists are loosely monitored.

Whether it’s Japan, the U.S., the UK, Libya, Syria, or Israel, all persons in positions of power like to stay there and don’t like their roosts rattled.  So it has always been.  Go too far and it’s treason and Henry the VIII will off your head.

What’s funny about Japan is that the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been proven to have consistently under-reported nuclear events.  And the government has more or less supported them under the heading of forestalling panic.  In other words, Japanese authorities, instead of demanding and disseminating truth, have now taken another step to suppress truth and thus support lies that affect people’s lives.

This conduct is reprehensible by any standards and it is a continuing weakness of Japan’s ruling structure.  The Japanese people are some of the most incredible people on earth and they deserve better.

A lot better.

But it’s not too early to ask how a civilized society is suppose to deal with deliberate acts of mass killing and mayhem.  Whether they are from a whacko or a terrorist organization.

People, youth, on an island for peace and tranquility become the target of a killer.  It’s a bad movie.  And yet it happened  To prevent it in the future we do what?

Strip everyone of guns.  No.  Then only the criminals and terrorists will have guns.

Surround all “events” with “Gestapo” security?  That will surely bring a sense of peace and tranquility.

The killer seemed to be making a political statement about allowing Muslims to immigrate to Norway or the EU – by killing people who had nothing to do with the policy.

I’m one of those people who think that immigration opportunities for Muslims needs to be slowed to a crawl until we understand why and how second generation Muslims are radicalized and turned into terrorists.  Just as there are Christians who are prepared to kill to support their beliefs (such as bombing abortion clinics) there are Muslims who have been taught to believe all evil starts in America.  There are even Jewish extremists who will kill for their beliefs.

The belief that “my religion says I can kill you if you don’t believe what I believe” is not what freedom of religion is supposed to mean.   It’s not even what the religion says.  The problem with “Holy Books” is that they can be interpreted just about any way one wants to.  Further, few religious fervent believers are willing to admit that neither God, nor Moses, nor Jesus, nor Muhammad actually wrote one word of the “Holy Books”.  Instead these religious icons inspired others to write the sacred words. And sometimes these words are attempts of early theologians to grapple with man’s relationship with God, while other words are thinly disguised political rhetoric to give the religion glue to make sure it had the necessary “us versus them” psychological point of view that all politics, religious or not, seem to prosper on.

In the end, the mass murders in peaceful Norway, should be mourned and then not become the basis for reactive politics or legislature or hate mongering.  That is what 9/11 did to America.  And that’s not worked out all that well for us as a people.  In an instant we abandoned all we stood for as a people in our hunt to rid ourselves of something we can’t even find.  We reacted precisely as Osama bin Laden predicted we would.

A fundamental irony with ridding ourselves of terrorism – politics using guns against innocent people – is that we have to become terrorists ourselves to do it.   You can condemn it or condone it, but something like water-boarding/torture makes us lesser humans for using it.  When intelligence officials say it doesn’t work, and they’re the ones you’d expect to support it, then the only conclusion is that we like to be terrorists, too.

While Norway may need to re-think some of its policies, it is far and away one of the societies and cultures that works.  It had a terrible incident.  But nothing that Nazis didn’t do in World War II.

It appears that no country is exempt from the new God-given right of terrorism that some citizens hear the voice of.  But random acts of violence make big news.  Random acts of kindness are rarely seen or acknowledged.  Norway, largely a Lutheran country, practices its Christianity on a day-to-day basis as early Christians would have.

I hope they will grieve and pray and not change their culture or laws in reaction to something that is akin to an asteroid hitting the small island.

The beginnings.  The first immigrants, largely émigrés from England and Scotland, carved tenuous beachheads in various areas of what was later to be called America.  These “pilgrims” were or had been prosecuted for this or that and they were as happy to go as the country was to be rid of them.  They were strange folk by anyone’s definition and they wanted religious freedom.  Which they got.  The other type of immigrant were “companies” – capitalist endeavors whose goals were to find easy pickin’s in the new world – large tracts of land full of commodities to be sold back to the civilized world.

A lot of these endeavors failed.  And as a rule they took little notice of the indigenous populations that had been in America for thousands of years.  And what notice they did take was not politically correct as we’d say these days.

Follow-on immigrants tended to come in waves coinciding with pre- or post-wars in Europe.  Orientals wanted in on America, too, but ended up largely as indentured workers and perished by the thousands.  Those that survived became moderately prosperous.  They were “tolerated,” but barely.  None rose to the level of the early anglo-saxon capitalist giants.  Not for lack of trying.  But for prejudice pure and simple.

Long and short, immigrants used to come to America for opportunity and freedom.  Each new wave that got off the boat was often fleeced by those just landed before them and the “just off the boat” took their place at the bottom of the social ladder to start their assimilation.  Immigrants tended to stay in neighborhoods with the same ethnicity.  So some areas were predominately Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Hungarian, and even Japanese or Chinese.  But for the most part they almost immediately considered themselves Americans.  They were proud that they were.  They looked forward to full citizenship.  Second and third generations slipped the bounds of ethnic neighborhoods and assimilated themselves into more commonplace homogenized neighborhoods and jobs.  Life was good in America.

These immigrants expected nothing from government.  And all they hoped for was a fair chance at a decent life.

As government expanded, the early immigrants headed West.  Always one step ahead of government – always looking for freedom in the plains, in the mountains, finally at the Pacific.  They took their largely protestant/Christian/Jewish religions with them.  Full of ethics and values that built a nation.  They were not all good.  But most were.  They knew they could only count on themselves and perhaps their close neighbors.  Someone in the Rockies did not look to Washington D.C. to do anything for them.  They moved West to rid themselves of such nonsense.

Times have changed.  We know a lot more big words about how new cultures assimilate with older cultures.  We have a government the size of a medium large state that has its fingers in everything.  And immigration has changed.  Few want to come to be Americans.  They want to come here for jobs.  Not necessarily freedom and opportunity.  But because it’s better in America than where they’re coming from and they can get work.  And they are increasingly wanting to retain the live with the culture they came with — not an American culture.  I’m not saying this is good or bad, but something has changed.  And the results are often not pretty.

The Eastern European cultures from former communist states have a lot of misconceptions and bad habits they’re bringing with them.  They, for the most part, do not have a solid religious (of whatever kind) sense of good, bad, evil, and ethics.  Their “ethics” were about survival and they oft bring a dog eat dog attitude to the locales they inhabit.  Some of these folks are artists and technicians and are gracious and lovely people.  Others make the old Italian mafia look like boy scouts.

These latter day immigrants are even more hell-bent on keeping and defending the culture they came with.  They do not usually come for the dream of America.  They no longer come for freedom and the ability to make their own life.  They quickly fall into the various slots of benefits and entitlements that a socialist safety net provides.  All provided by big government.  And they look at this as a sign of weakness.  They spit on it while their hand is out.  They know you take what you can; what someone is stupid enough to give.

Then we have those who immigrate under false flags.  They come to undermine America; to kill us.  They come shrouded in veils whose metaphor is to keep hidden.  These are mistakes made from too liberal entry requirements and, worse, corruption of otherwise good people from radicals of their ethnicity already here.  This is clearly the root of evil and terribly difficult to deal with.  The Arab expression is “the camels nose is already under the tent.”

America itself we know is going through the pains of confusion of purpose.  Of unresponsive and irresponsible legislators.  Of what feels like a powerless electorate.  Of impressive greed imposed on increasing poverty.  Not a good time to be bringing new arrivals onboard.

But . . . the landscape of immigration has changed.  It has not changed for the good.  We, by virtue of a government we little control, have let this happen.

In the New Testament the early writers talk of Christ being cautious of allowing too many new folks into the religion for fear it would corrupt.  That the dough, metaphorically, could only absorb so much so fast without going bad.  This is true of almost anything and it is certainly true of immigration and it is a fundamental fact that has been forgotten.

Some cultures flow easily into America because their values and beliefs are our values and beliefs.  But other cultures have no common denominator.  They have beliefs adverse to ours.  This doesn’t make them “bad” but it should make “us” cautious.  A few at time, until they have been successfully incorporated into the dough that is what is fundamental to America.  And if they don’t incorporate, then they have to go.  Not all ingredients are useful or good.

It is not unkind or Un-American to recognize that the good old days are gone.  Mexicans are not, for the most part, coming to America for freedom.  They want jobs and money.  Some want to engage in drug trafficking.  They’ll do what they have to.  This is not the dream of America and not what “bring me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” was about. That was 250 years ago.  We are a country now with edges, with boundaries, with troubles.  We need to recognize that.  It doesn’t seem right that we kill people trying to cross the borders without a visa.  Seems sort of not the kind of people we are.  But it also doesn’t seem right that we spend a billion dollars on fences that don’t work and perhaps the diversion of 30,000 troops to guard our southern border.  We’re not that rich anymore.

In my travels around the world, I find very few folks who are ready for America.  People, who you want to pick up and say, “Yes.  You!  Come with me.  You have honesty, integrity, work ethic, and education.  I’ll give you work the minute you get here.  I want you as a neighbor.”  (And, frankly, most Americans have forgotten what it means to be American.)

America in these last years should have learned a few lessons.  We cannot fix everyone’s problems in the world.  We can’t even fix our own.  It is sad.  There is real suffering in the world that we watch on TV or YouTube.  And to make it sadder, we have our own problems.  We have an America in turmoil; a government that is largely unresponsive and increasingly arrogant.  We are on the verge of becoming one of those countries that people flee from – as many of the best and brightest are fleeing now.  The wise ones do it quietly.  But very few are the wealthy that don’t have businesses on foreign soil.  Residency permits in place other places.  Bank accounts in other places.  They’ve done it quietly so as not to endanger their public images in America.  Just as billionaire and millionaire Mexicans have businesses and residences in the United States as a hedge, so do thoughtful and prepared Americans have their chosen places as a safe haven just in case.

Many feel that America is off-course.   And it’s not time to bring new people until we have fixed what is ailing in the land of the free, to quote Buffett.  Jimmy, not Warren.

I’m sure some of you have made bread.  Once you have the beginnings – the yeast, sugar, and small amount of flour called the sponge (as in what soaks things up), you let it germinate for a bit and then slowly add flour, a bit at a time, letting the sponge slowly absorb and incorporate the new flour until you get the right consistency.  If you dump the flour in too fast, the sponge is overwhelmed and the batch is ruined.

It’s a metaphor, but there are many more just like it in our daily life.  Too much of anything that overwhelms our ability to soak it up and incorporate it into the sponge that is our culture, leaves a mess.  And that’s where we are.   If we add the “Muslim” element into the mixture, it is too much.  Someone did a study of the critical mass of Muslims it takes to start causing serious problems.  We’re not quite there yet.  But a lot of countries are.  Not all Muslims want to kill us and destroy our way of life.  But a certain percentage do.  And if they don’t, radical imams, clerics, have done a good job of radicalizing second generation children.  This is sad, because a lot of Muslims just want to escape the tyranny of Islamic theocratic fascism and find freedom in America.  Unfortunately, they bring the seeds of trouble with them.  If not in their hearts, perhaps in their children, some of whom, as they reach the teenage years of discovery and rebellion, are ripe for conversion to radicalism.

The Koran, like the Old Testament, and even Hindi texts, is full of jihad-type rhetoric.  Just like Moses didn’t actually write the Old Testament, nor Jesus the New Testament, nor the god Shiva Hindi texts, neither did Mohammed write the Koran.  All of these texts, sacred to their followers, were written by men with an agenda.  The wanted to enforce dogma and legitimize their religions and make other religions, and peoples despised by God and ready for killing.  Scholars can explain this as metaphor or diatribe, but it’s not construed by civilized persons as carte blanche for mass murder.

As we can see from concerns about the true background of the freedom fighters and demonstrators of the Arab Spring, radical Islam is quite good at insinuating itself into the sinew of a culture before its cancer is detected.  The Spanish didn’t throw the Moors out for the hell of it.

So . . . until we’ve solved a LOT of other problems, including rooting out radical Islam that already exists here, it’s probably not the right time to bring in any more.

And rooting out radical Islam is almost anathema to what America stands for.  We don’t like to mess with someone’s religion.  And it’s hard to tell which religions want to kill you any more than it’s easy to tell which radical political American organizations are training to resort to violence if they don’t get their way.  The freedoms of speech and religion guaranteed in our Constitution were never meant to shield rhetoric designed to destroy us.  But it sure films poorly to show police ferreting out persons or organizations that have crossed the line.  It looks like Nazi Germany and we don’t want that image of ourselves.  And yet . . . what do you do?   Pinochet, who lead a coup that killed President Allende in Chile, “said coup sponsored by the CIA”, killed a lot of folks who were socialists/communists which Pinochet and others felt were eating away at the heart of Chile.  Years later, Chile is a thriving capitalist country and most folks are very happy that they are rid of socialist/communism and they are rabid about nipping anything in the bud that seems like it.  Not true democracy.  But, to them, you rid your country of cancer anyway you have to.  Boy, that’s a tough call.

We have no easy answers to immigration but we have enough problems that if we want to continue to allow immigration, that we MUST do some things that are NOT-equal.  All cultures are not equal when it comes to becoming American.  We’re almost apologizing that we expect immigrants to become American.  But that’s the bargain:  To accept our values and laws or to find some other country.  It is terrible to lump all of anything together and stereotype them as undesirable but we have to do it, perhaps, for a while until we get a handle on things.

I’ve done immigration lawyering and I’ve got to tell you that the INS or whatever the hell it’s called this week can be the least caring and stupidest bunch of bastards on the planet.  Maybe they just get that way from thousands of folks trying to scam them.  I don’t know.  But we are not talking a pleasant bureaucracy to deal with.  “Arbitrary and capricious” should be their motto.  For the most part they try to follow rules that they are made to follow by someone upstairs.  And often those rules are stupid and reactive to political manipulation rather than common sense or long term planning by common sense persons without either a liberal or conservative bias: ethical pragmatists.

It’s hard to live in times with no easy answers.  Mexicans do take American jobs.  Mostly the jobs no one wants to do.  A Mexican executive vice president of marketing is not climbing the fence with the help of coyotes to steal an American executive’s job.  Folks who are to be maids, dishwashers, cleaning persons, gardeners – the unseen who make all possible – are coming for survival and even safety.  Yes, and some are drug dealers.  The real answer to stopping the supply of drugs is to stop demand.  That means locking up even more people (which is stupid and expensive) or it means two generations of practically brain washing education against drugs.  In the churches, the media, the schools.  You’re adults.  You know by now that if there is demand for anything, someone will supply it.  I’m not saying that taking steps to limit supply is not good.  But it won’t do the job.  And it’s damnably expensive.  And drugs are way too lucrative not to inspire corruption at all levels.  If we truly need a war on drugs, then maybe we need to get the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq and tell Mexico we’re coming in.  Clean it up or we will.  Drug dealers can be very tough thugs but they are not a match to the U.S. military.

There seems to be some legislation in the works to allow marijuana and other natural drugs, and that might slow demand.  But street drugs are almost a cultural right of passage.  “As seen on TV.”  We’re doing it to ourselves.  The point is that the porosity of our borders on the South and our immigration policy for Muslims is hurting the country.

Taking “judicial notice” of it and taking severe and drastic steps to stop it seem warranted.  As I’ve written before, for Mexicans, let’s get an easy visa program started that’s cheaper that coyotes.  God knows we need these folks.  We don’t need them on welfare and in our hospitals (unless they are here legally on a work visa).  I don’t know how Amsterdam deals with all manner of drugs and still has one of the most productive economies per capita in the world.  I’m not saying they’re a model, but it does seem to work and ours doesn’t.

I am concerned about “Mexican nationalism” being promoted in America.  Neither Mexico or the U.S. gain anything by early Mexican land in California, Arizona and Texas becoming Mexico again.  That’s a non-starter.  More rabble rousing for us to deal with.

No one wants Pinochet-type death squads roaming the cities and countryside “taking care of these problems.”  But, truly, what is the answer?

Every family either has children who’ve “gone bad” or they know of families that have such children.  After they’ve bled your life dry on treatment programs and then stolen your TV and cleaned out your bank accounts, families universally, to survive, must draw a line in the sand and throw their own child to the wolves.  It happens every day in every strata of society.

What do you do when a certain portion of society has “gone bad” and is threatening your life and livelihood – your survival and your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

I dare say it is not a pretty answer.  We do not have enough judges and due process to deal with it.  It’s way past that.  I’m not a fan of Dirty Harry justice.  But Dirty Harry took over when common sense had left those in office and liberals had taken on too much power and prevented common sense justice.  Dirty Harry’s city, San Francisco, wants to ban circumcision now.  That’s the kind of arrogant power the, “we know better,” neighbors we have.

I have always detested the Patriot Acts as un-American.  But . . . the ONLY thing I really think is missing is a couple of provisos: one, anything found pursuant to the Act and not by due process that is other than terrorist related cannot be used as evidence and becomes fruits of a poisonous tree.  Meaning you can’t convict a money launderer of money laundering if you violated his rights all to hell claiming he was a terrorist.  If he’s NOT a terrorist, then he walks.  The second provision it needs is one that says any law enforcement official who deliberately and knowingly uses the power of the Act for other than terror fighting purposes, is subject to prosecution with a prison term of no less than 10 years.  That last provision creates a sobering moment for someone wanting to play cowboy under the aegis of the Patriot Act.  Those “common sense” provisions that would protect us all are missing.  Probably for a reason.  I hate to think what the reason it.  I already don’t trust government too much.

So, as far as immigration, how would you deal with it if you were appointed “czar” for a day?