The Emerald Rose

       From the old lyrics of a Simon & Garfunkel song of course, but a great analogy for where our liberties and rights, and what we have been as a country, and stood for since 1773 are doing,….”slip sliding away”.
            I subscriber to a really good magazine called “The Week” and it fairly summarizes the news and actions of the week on a world-wide basis, and presents both sides of the situation, succinctly and briefly in a language we can all understand. Unlike the convoluted and non-sensical testimony like I tried to understand to on Goldman Sacks Senate hearings the other day.
          Many years ago, in fact back in the 1960’s when computers were first appearing, one of my friends who was a “programmer” as they were called back then, shared an inside “thing” they had. It was called a “Buzz word generator”. Since they were the original “geeks” and they had to deal with parochial business people who had a knowledge base of zero on computing, they needed “power” to prevail.  

         And here’s how you can make your own buzz word generator, and be the next “brilliant”, “highly educated”, and deemed a “true expert” in any field you want to appear to be. Take a piece of plain paper, draw two lines down, so you create three columns. Fill each column with a single word per line, either relative, or apparently relative to the subject in question. Then armed with your new “Expert “PhD  Notes”, go forth to a cocktail party. When a subject comes up upon which you predicated your list, voice your opinion on any part or all of it using one word from each of the three columns together as a phrase. For example if we are talking about a “financial meltdown in the stock market” ,….well using your new buzzword generator you could cobble together the following answer. (I will make the “buzzword” bold so you can see it’s impact.)
       “So what do you think of this mess in the Market?”
       (YOU): “Well based on the underlying-derivative-stopgaps it was obviously going to happen, right?”
There you go,…sounds like you are a native to “the Street”, and not only that but one of the elite “savvy” investors that everyone else wished they could have been before this mess happened.  Try it, you’ll like it, until your new found friends/followers/”savvy investor wannabe’s,  start to ask for “inside advise” and the like. The you have to use the Almighty Humility Bomb on them. (YOU): “You know, my Daddy told me when I was studying the market,…’ Son, don’t ever give anyone advise, it’s far worse to lose a friends money than your own, even with the best of intentions and advice, because you will lose a friend as well.”
      As Albert Einstein said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it enough .”

        Back to business, in my Week magazine this past week there was a tidbit about the efforts in Great Britain to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 years old. A comment by one of the local pundits states, “Leftist ideology is deeply appealing to ‘adolescent minds’. After all, when your parents pay for everything, and you personally pay no taxes, why not support a massive welfare state? Only when we start earning our own incomes do we realize that handing most of it over to the government is a bad idea!”
         Could not have said it better myself.
Then there was a big “blurb” on Google pulling out of China. The take on that from the United States government was , The truth is, the Chinese government, “like any other independent government in this world, has the right to censor information which it considers to be “harmful to the well being of it’s citizens.
First time the use of “censor” has appeared as being a broad “right” of the government. So what else shouldn’t we know in this “transparent” philosophy of Obamaism.
         Further on it was presenting the case where His Presidentness has issued a Presidential directive to sanction the assassination of an American Citizen, who obviously was a bad guy and was allegedly counselling the whacko who cut loose on US soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas, and the other whacko who tried to set off a bomb in his underwear. True, a very, very bad dude who has committed treason, BUT that does not allow him to be assassinated at the whim of His Presidentness or his National Security Advisors. (Surely if we substitute the word “Der Fuehrer” for” His Presidentness”, and ” Himmler, Goehrhing, and Eichmann” and  that crew for” National Security Advisors”,….well what’s the difference?

          To harsh an indictment,…perhaps, but I welcome your comments, for that’s what made America a great Nation,…..oh yeah, and “Under God”

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