Reinke Faces Life

A friend may have had a TIA. Her husband called me on the way home from the hospital. It wasn’t until we were deep into conversation that I realized he was talking and driving. I rudely rushed him off the phone so he could get home safe with a promise to call in a few minutes. I hope he understood that I didn’t want more trouble. Cell phones and cars don’t mix. I think that OnStar is some how different. At a lotta cents per minute, your conversation will be short. No free minutes there. And, it’s truly handsfree with a good quality. No “can you hear me now” with it. Good thing, at those prices. Any way, I’m anxiously whiling away the minutes until he send me an email and I can call. What else can one do. SO far away. Any way, when he reads this, I hope he knows it was his best interest in my heart. Hope it came across that way. Injineers are not known for delivering good messages. Tapping the keyboard aot twiddling my thumbs. Say my grandmother’s prayer “In your hands Lord, here’s my trouble”. Let’s hope that it’s just the “Littlest” of a little TIA. I don’t make new friends easily. So I can’t to afford to lose any. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re amazed I have any with my wise-backside tongue. Nah, nah, some people like a “spicy fellow” like me. Gottago there’s his email.

http://www.earlytorise.com/

This sometimes feels like a nag, but it has been able to keep my interest for 2006. So, hence, in 2007, I recommend it to you. Take their daily email, and let me know what you think next January.

Did someone forget that Sunday night was New Years? Maybe Katie was too busy with the Ford funeral to do “it”? In these days of look a like media (i.e., the media mimics each other), it was a glaring flaw. It’s pretty sad when the Game Show Network has more New Year’s hoopla than a major NYC TV station. Even more pathetic is that I noticed. Doesn’t Dick Clark look terrible? It’s noble that he tries to carry on the tradition, but it’s very flawed. It makes me think of my eventual end. Doesn’t make for good escapist “everyone’s happy in times square” tv.

Happy new year to anyone who reads this.

Well it’s been a year of blogging. I have to tot up the pluses and minuses. Despite the hype on blogging, the question is “was it worthwhile?”

Your opinion?

Snl Tv Funhouse Conspiracy Theory Rock Censored By Nbc Only Aired Once
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=965683749801668899&q=snl&pr=goog-sl>
2 min 26 sec – Oct 15, 2006
Description: priceless.

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2006/12/25/495255-boy-15-charged-with-driving-stolen-bus?threadId=63496

http://tinyurl.com/yfob4d

Boy, 15, Charged With Driving Stolen Bus
Mon Dec 25, 2006 9:21 AM EST
Associated Press

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FERN PARK, FLA. — A 15-year-old boy has been sentenced to four years in a juvenile treatment program after deputies stopped him driving a stolen bus along a public transit route, picking up passengers and collecting fares.

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Let’s get this right. He drove the bus safely. Safer than some cops, politicians, and driving instructors. But society will jail. And, the reason is? Wouldn’t a better “punishment” be to give him a job?

This is passing along the “gun nut” groups:

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The Surfing The Apocalypse Network
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE
Posted By: pjbuk
Date: Saturday, 23 December 2006, 4:49 p.m.

The Christmas Truce – 1914

On Christmas Day, 1914, in the first year of World
War I, German, British, and French soldiers
disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with “the
enemy” along two-thirds of the Western Front. German
troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches
with signs, “Merry Christmas.” “You no shoot, we no
shoot.”

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Which is most interesting. Do you suppose we can have peace among men of good will by just doing it?

I also liked this snip:

<begin snip>

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same

<end snip>

Ain’t that the truth? The politicians that decide our fates live high on the hog for selling us down the river.

Where are the George Washingtons, the Jeffersons, and the dollar a year men?

This week I formulated a theory about gambling. Gamblers lose for three reasons:

• They don’t understand the game.
• They have no limits.
• They have no money management scheme.

Regardless if it is slots, table games, or something else, gamblers lose because they really don’t understand the “rules”. Both the published rules, the implied rules, and the common sense ones. For example, on slot machines, do you even know what the bonus that you (me) are chasing will pay. Dropping big bucks chasing what turns out to be a small bonus is a losing gamble. You have to understand what you can take away. I see hunch players at the Let It Ride game chasing everything, even low hands with no reasonable expectation. Pumping bills into a slot machine where the expectation is low is also demonstrating not understanding what you are doing.

People often have no limits other than when they are “tapped out”. Very early in my gambling career, I learned about limits. Lots of limits. I divide my trip limit stake into day, session, and game limits. We used to use envelopes, but they are NOT needed now. With the envelopes, I used to actually put all the change back into the envelope and total up at the end of the trip. Using that system, I was surprised at how it averaged out well.

Gamblers lose becasue they have no money management scheme. For example, yesterday, I met a lady who hit a straight flush earlier in the day with one five dollar bet (An example of flaw number one!) who won $1,000. She had played it ALL back. Did she think she was going to get another one? You have to play with a way to get YOUR money out of the game, off the table, back to your pocket, wallet, or envelope. I use a money management schme with Let It Ride that sets a game stake that will allow me to pay for six losing hands in a row. When my “front row” is full, any winnings go to my “back row”. Once in the back row, they are never risked again. Frau plays roulette with her game stake on the table. When she wins, she carves out her original stake. If she’s doing really well and they pay here in “real chips”, those go right into her pocket never to be seen again.

Comments?

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Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, And our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What happened?

*** end quote ***

In yesterday’s post from my Luddite friend, his forward posed the question “what happened”.

Easy, the people stopped watching the politicians. They thought they could get something for nothing. Beginning with FDR and the Great Depression, which was caused by the Smoot Hawley Tariffs, the country adopted socialism. And, like the Pilgrim story, socialism leads to death by starvation. The Communists demonstrated in a 70 years “lab experiment” that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is a recipe for disaster! We even had side by side comparison in East and West Germany. And, we demonstrated in Katrina that anyone, who depends on government, dies. And, we demonstrate in Waco, that the government kills people.

So we need honest money, an end to making the nation stupid with “public education”, and an end to the dole (welfare in all its forms).

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/
oped/articles/2006/12/08/the_abiding_legacy_of_my_
mother____the_listener/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+–+
Op-ed+columns

http://tinyurl.com/y42gdk

The abiding legacy of my mother — the listener
By Ellen Goodman | December 8, 2006

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Old age is not for sissies. My mother’s long slow terrible decline lasted over a decade. There was the television she could no longer work and then the telephone. There were the small spiral notebooks whose pages were covered with names from a past she struggled to retain. One page listed her favorite movie star: Cary Grant. Another listed my father’s best friend: Lou Novins.

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This really rang true as I am traveling down that road with my Mom. Dementia is a terrible thing. Slowly turning her from a “mom” into a shell of her former self. It saddens me. And, I’m not kidding when I tell people “when I get old, just shoot me!”

http://www.violentacres.com/archives/54/the-deadbeat-dad-myth

The Deadbeat Dad Myth
December 6th, 2006

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In the end, it’s all about money. Over two thirds of the divorces are initiated by women who were promised that they can have it all: The kids, the house, and a nice paycheck every week to ease the agony of their oftentimes flippant decision to destroy their families. What they don’t know is the only reason they are so often encouraged down this path has nothing to do with what’s ‘best for her family.’ The family concept could be repaired if more people were willing to work on it instead of cutting and running the second things got a little rough. Divorce, on the other hand, is a business that is keeping thousands of people in a new Lexus every year.

Let me say that again in case anyone missed it: Women are encouraged towards divorce because the system profits when their families implode.

Your divorce keeps the judges, the lawyers, the file clerks and the security guards all in jobs. Court appointed therapists and counselors benefit financially when you’re forced into programs with little substance designed to make you feel better about being in a broken home. The main benefactor is the child support agency who takes a 2% cut out of every child support check for as long as the child is in the system.

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Now that’s an interesting assertion. I think it’s interesting that the State doesn’t “insure” the judgment. I know for a fact that in New Jersey, that you may have a judgment, but if the State collects zero, you get zero. No skin off their nose. No stats on how they help or hurt the process. Now you can be sure if it was their money from taxes, they’d move heaven and earth to get it. If they were concerned about the children, they’d cut the family a check and assume the role of guarantor. So I tend to suspect that this fellow has it pegged — fees, employment, and contracts are probably the prime mover.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003614.shtml

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A German friend this afternoon was recounting this story to me — he too is obsessed with how to reduce Iraqi anger. But the part he emphasized that I had missed originally was how significant it was to Germans to know that these packages were sent by ordinary Americans. It wasn’t the government sending government aid; it was American volunteers taking time to personalize an act of giving.

CARE has given up the CARE Package. So too has it moved far from the individual-driven model of giving that marked its birth. But I wonder how current victims of war would react to a repeat of 1945-giving. A related idea has been taken up by a 10-year old from New Jersey. But what if every city in America selected sister cities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, and individual volunteers from the US repeated what our parents and grandparents did 60 years ago?

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I found this interesting in that it echos that there HAS to be a personal element of charity for that charity to be effective.

So, what does it make one do?

The Capitalist Manifesto: Managing the Rise of Citizen Investors
28.01
07-November-2006
Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

http://changethis.com/pdf/28.01.CapitalistManifesto.pdf

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The citizen investor is you.

***End Quote***

I’m so not sure I believe this. The mutual fund managers have the big stick! I’d suggest that they are not immune to pressure. CEOs that tick of the general public and / or the investing public, like the Home Depot example, are doing so at their own peril. But, a underlying change in the corporate structure, nah! AND, certainly government regulation is probably the proverbial thumb on the butcher’s scale. Businesses disciplined by markets appeal to the government to save them from themselves, the stockholders, and consumers. With out of control government, businesses have little power. We need a different paradigm. True, but this isn’t it. imho

http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9410

New Breed of ‘Mom’ Alarms
Posted on Monday, October 02 @ 23:43:28 CDT

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The recorded sound of a parent’s voice urging their child to wake up and get out of bed is a better smoke alarm than conventional tone alarms, a study shows.

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Hmmm, sounds like a great idea. I could have my Mom record a wake up message to get me out of bed and off to work. Instead of my daily “fire drill”?