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Obama makes a cameo...
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Public breastfeeding...
In memory of Halloween...
If you ever wanted to know more about iPhones...
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Oh by the way...the dollar is doomed...
Top 100 villains in comics...
Big Brother is watching soon...
A cool animated music video...
Why you should be upset...
God is watching...
Top 10 MLB offensive seasons...
The dollar is doomed part II...
Bloody charades...
Bailout lies threaten you savings...
5 year old gymnast...
Reclaiming our Central Bank and monetary policy...
30 little known facts about the United States...
Keep drinking that Kool-aid...or maybe not...
Brace yourself for higher for grocery inflation...
Flu vaccine exposed...
FAT kids falling...
Top 25 hardest video games of all time...
GTA vs Frogger...
Flu vaccine exposed part II...
We don't need no stinkin' fingerprints!
Circle the cat...if you can...
"What is Money?"
"FEELING GREAT"
John is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, "If I were any better, I would be twins!" He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, John was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.
Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up and asked him, "I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?"
He replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or...I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or... I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”
"Yeah, right, it's not that easy," I protested.
"Yes, it is," he said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's your choice how you live your life."
I reflected on what he said. Soon thereafter I left to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it. Several years later, I heard that he was involved in a serious accident, falling some 60 feet from a communications tower. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, he was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back. I saw him about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, "If I were any better, I'd be twins...Wanna see my scars?"
I declined to see his wounds, but I did ask him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place. "The first thing that went through my mind was the well-being of my soon-to-be born daughter," he replied. "Then, as I lay on the ground, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or...I could choose to die. I chose to live."
"Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness?" I asked. He continued, "..the paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses I got really scared. In their eyes, I read he's a dead man. I knew I needed to take action."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Well, there was a big burly nurse shouting questions at me," said John. “She asked if I was allergic to anything ' Yes, I replied.' The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, Gravity." Over their laughter, I told them, "I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead."
He lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude... I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
This is Kristos, reminding you that to a large degree, happiness depends on your own perspective.
DRX9000 Spinal Decompression System
The DRX9000 True Non-Surgical Spinal Decompression System is designed to provide pain relief for compressive and degenerative injuries of the spine. As it relates to Axiom Worldwide's DRX technology, the theory behind non-surgical spinal decompression is a process whereby forces are applied to the spine in a manner that maximizes spinal elongation. Since its inception, the DRX9000 has shown promising anecdotal results in treating back pain caused by herniated discs, degenerative disc disease, sciatica, and facet syndrome
MegaConverter2
Today's feature is a site that will convert just about anything from one unit to a different unit, from angles, area to wire density and wire resistance with lots of units in between. There are links listed in the 'Other Sites' on the conversion 'that have applicability to the category chosen.' Ladies, don't despair. There's a kitchen measure converter that goes beyond the ordinary cookbook - how about 16 dashes equivalent to one teaspoon. MegaCinverter2 is a site to bookmark. You never know when you might need this type of tool!
NWUAV MEMS Fuel Injection System
| The NWUAV MEMS Fuel Injection System uses Hewlett Packard Ink Jet technology to atomize a variety of fuels including JP5, JP8 and logistical fuels used in internal combustion engines. The system will allow longer duration flight times and reduced (green house gas) emissions as a result of the ability to digitally control the fuel delivery and droplet size to a level much smaller than is conventionally possible using carburetors and COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) fuel injectors. |
Today's Quotes
OVERCOMING THE NEGATIVE
“Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.” -- Victor Hugo
"People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them." -- George Bernard Shaw
"We were not created to be eaten by anxiety, but to walk erect, free, unafraid in a world where there is work to do, truth to seek, love to give and win." -- Joseph Ford Newton
"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself." -- Lucille Ball
In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
- Henry David Thoreau
- Lawrence J. Peter
Imagination was given to us to compensate for what we are not; a sense of humor was given to us to console us for what we are.
- Mark McGinnis
Insight
STAY GROUNDEDThe best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Albert Ellis
Don't get too big for your britches. It's easy to get all caught up in the hype and start believing it.
Maxie Baughan
A Summer Skirt Situation...
As the bus stopped and it was her turn to get on, a lovely looking woman became aware that her skirt was too tight to allow her leg to come up to the height of the first step of the bus.
Slightly embarrassed and with a quick smile to the bus driver, she reached behind her to unzip her skirt a little, thinking that this would give her enough slack to raise her leg. She tried to take the step, only to discover that she couldn't.
So, a little more embarrassed, she once again reached behind her to unzip her skirt a little more, and for the second time attempted the step
Once again, much to her chagrin, she could not raise her leg.
With a little smile to the driver, she again reached behind to unzip a little more and again was unable to take the step.
About this time, a large Texan who was standing behind her picked her up easily by the waist and placed her gently on the step of the bus.
She went ballistic and turned to the would-be Samaritan and yelled, "How dare you touch my body! I don't even know who you are!"
The Texan smiled and drawled, "Well, ma'am, normally I would agree with you, but after you unzipped my fly three times, I kinda figured we was friends."
Whiskey & Gunpowder
By David Calderwood
October 29, 2009
Revolutionary Language
Will You Be Middle Class Much Longer?
Many people write of the imminent destruction of the U.S. middle class (of which I consider myself a member) but few have explained specifically how this occurs. Understanding the mechanism seems important if I hope to avoid the fate of most of my peers.
An insight on this question came from an unexpected quarter.
A gentleman by the name of Fernando Aguirre, who posts on Internet forums and his blog as FerFAL, has written voluminously about his experiences as an Argentine citizen during and after the economic cataclysm that wracked his country in 2001. I first found a long forum post, and then a Google search of “FerFAL” revealed a larger web presence, including a recently published book.
Mr. Aguierre shares his thoughts on all sorts of related subjects, from food storage to guns to politics (he appears to really like Rep. Ron Paul). I personally found a great deal of value among what I’ve seen so far.
One brief passage struck me, however, because it related to the mechanism by which middle-class people become poor during an economic meltdown. The mechanism may be obvious, but it is important to see how theory actually worked in the real world.
Mr. Aguierre shares (in “Part IV”) how, while studying architecture following the 2001 crisis, a social studies teacher illustrated Argentina’s middle class’ slide into poverty. Quoting the teacher from memory, Mr. Aguierre writes,
“[Those in the] middle class suddenly discover that they are overqualified for the jobs they can find and have to settle for anything they can obtain, therefore unemployment sky rockets: too much to offer, too little demand. You see they prepare, study for a job they are not going to get. You kids, you are studying Architecture because you simply wish to do so. Only 3 or 4 percent of you will actually find a job related to architecture.”
We all sat there, letting it all sink in. After a few months, it all proved to be true. Even the amount of students that dropped out of college increased to at least 50%. They either [saw] no point in studying something that would not make much of a difference in their future salaries, had no money to keep themselves in college, or simply had to drop college to work and support their families.
This reads like a premonition.
The USA’s middle-class includes lots of people whose careers rest on higher education and specialized certification. While plumbers, electricians, factory employees and truck drivers typically are among the middle-class, most of those populating suburbia are accountants, middle managers, sales people, financial consultants, teachers, nurses, writers, etc. In other words, as manufacturing and now building activity contract, more of the middle class is made up of the college-educated in white-collar careers.
Factor in our current economic pickle and it’s easy to see the most likely path ahead.
With the economic expansion built on mass optimism and debt rolling over, conditions are now fertile for questioning the college degree system as jobs for the college-educated evaporate en masse. The ability of technology to replace white-collar jobs is widespread, and an increasing need to cut costs is finally driving its use, just as changing economic (and regulatory) conditions also drive the replacement of manpower with robotics in the factory.
Across the economy, the need to cut employment costs (not just payroll, but payroll taxes and benefits) is resulting in mass layoffs of sales people and white-collar office staff. When one considers how much work can be replaced now by accounting software, electronic sales presentations, flatter organizational structures, and “news persons” filing reports for free on the Internet via blogs, it is obvious that vast numbers of middle-class Americans teeter on the precipice of unemployability, not just unemployment.
When the “unique” skill sets that commanded $50,000 to $100,000 (or more) annual salaries turn out to be in vast oversupply, the only course left is to compete with those with neither a college degree nor technical education for jobs that can’t support a middle-class lifestyle.
Hands-on service occupations like nursing and medicine are also far from safe. At the end of the day, it is productivity that pays for such work to be done, and when vast numbers of people cannot find economically productive work, economic reality will land on these occupations, too.
When the economic tide goes out, all boats sink into the mud.
Too many people were goaded into illusory occupations by tax subsidies for higher education, government (rather than market) demand, and other distortions like the credit-without-prior-production of the central bank. Political pandering and central planning replaced the natural balance of an economy growing organically through the honest signals of the price system.
As long as there was enough optimism and ignorance to sustain the illusion, the distortions only grew larger.
Though the ignorance largely remains, there’s no more blind denial left to sustain the burden of all that wasted effort. If your job disappears, it may not come back.
This time it really is different. The final stages of that blind denial included fiscal imprudence that bordered on insanity. The mirage economy can’t return until after the pendulum has swung its full travel to the other side of the arc. That path leads through the valley of a crushing economic depression, one that will radically and permanently alter the lives of middle-class Americans who are almost universally unaccustomed to hardship.
Regards,
David Calderwood
I’m sure it was an honest mistake.
Seems the effects of the stimulus have been overstated.
“My bad,” says the White House…
“An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.”
In a couple of cases a lot of very temporary call center jobs were created, sometimes counted twice, and then almost immediately destroyed. Other times workers merely got raises, which were counted as newly created jobs.
But honestly, why would we expect anything different? This is what happens when easy money flows out of from the feds. Misallocations, theft and lies…surprise!
Peace, love and happiness...until next time...
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