Keep the One Percent!

I watch these protesters from the comfort of my easy chair.  I certainly don't venture forth into the cold to join them and it has been over 20 years since I have slept in a tent.  I don't disagree with all they say but I wish they could find leaders, someone to vocalize their anger, refocus their efforts and be a little more rational in what they want.  I see so much anger there when in most cases they are the cause of their own problems.
It is really easy to get back at the 1% if that is what you want to do.  Quit supporting them.  Don't go to Sam Walton's stores.  Throw away your Ipod! and, only if you are pretty enough, take off your foreign clothes!
   I like the 1%.  Walmart has done some good things and I am sure they are listening now.  That is how they got to be the 1%, by listening and filling a need.  Walmart offered us the $4 dollar prescriptions, cheap eye glasses, and they are beginning to provide local produce and an organic section to their food departments!
Steve Jobs was a multi gazillionaire, selling telephones basically!  How cool is that?  I like Bill Gates and the whole group that make up this 1%
   I don't even want their money, not much of it anyway, not enough that they would notice much.  I think the Democrats are after just 3% on money made after the first million dollars!  Do you really think this would cripple Microsoft?  I doubt it.  It certainly won't equal the playing field and that is probably a good idea.
   I wish Politicians were forced to study Economics.  I wish they knew our own History and I wish they could find countries on a map, at least, say ten of them.  It would be nice if they knew that Africa was not a country.  There are "laws of economics" and I wish they understood these.  Sometimes opinions and emotions can be destructive of what we are after.
   There is a food chain and as killing the sharks disturbs the ecosystem in the oceans, destroying the 1% would probably have disastrous effects all down the line.  Someone else would just replace them.  There will always be 1%.
   Our Congress can't even agree on vegetables for school lunches!  That is right, that measure failed.  It was an Obama backed measure and, god forbid, passing it might have made him look good!  So we will continue with pizza and french fries and cold corn dogs because we can't agree on anything!
   20% of our population is taking mood altering prescription drugs!  25% of women do this!  Probably 50%
are on non-prescriptive drugs, alcohol and marijuana!  It is a ship going down and unlike the Titanic we are not even dancing!  Like rats caught in a maze we are reduced to eating each other!
   Our National Debt is about 62% of GNP.  Italy's is 118% and Japan's is over 200%. I do not know what is acceptable, reasonable and ordinary.  I do know the fear, the anger,the finger pointing, the emotions of it all are preventing any kind of reasonable solution.  I know that we shouldn't implement reforms and see what will happen.  It is not necessary.  We know what will happen.  You can look to recent history and see what will happen, look to Greece, to England and Ireland, look to what will happen soon in Spain.  Look to what happened in Germany when their money was so devalued that a worker was paid three times a day, devaluing a hundred times in a matter of hours.
   There is a science to this and an historical precedent. It would be nice to have leaders who actually read books.

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A single bullet and photo-recognition software...

The key tool of terrorists is terror, controlling thought and behavior through fear.  It is interesting in our modern age how terrorist governments have made use of technology.  Today I am thinking of Lybia, Syria and Iran but any country can do this and the list keeps growing.  Without technology and terror crowd control has always been achieved through by more crowds, well armed and armored police and military.  In civil societies they might use water cannons, rubber bullets or maybe teargas with the objective of sending the crowd home and dealing with the issue another way.
     Now they are using real bullets, armored vehicles and tanks and the objective is to squash the rebellion, kill the opponents and rule through fear.  Iran has mastered this ability and exports its technology throughout the Middle East.  At a sign of initial protest the police might only show up with cameras in hand or a single sniper perched on top of a building safely a half mile away.  Suddenly and without a sound a single well place bullet can penetrate a speaker's head!  No one knows where the bullet came from, where the enemy is or who is next in his sites.
    Meanwhile the photos are being examined not even by humans in a back room of a government building
but by computers and through photo-recognition software, they are supplying a name and address to the photograph.  In the middle of the night an armed security detail will knock the door down and remove the subject in the photograph eliminating that protester.
   This is the modern era and every civilized society should have fear of it.   Our own "Patriot Act" allows almost unlimited government access to our every keystroke, our every telephone conversation, our personal mail and entry to our homes without court order.  This sounds better than it is when we can agree on who the
"bad guys" are but it is always a bit frightening to relinquish hard won freedoms in the name of security.
    It took us hundreds of years to develop a government of laws, rights and responsibilities to replace tribal
supremacy and the power of the majority.  I don't want to see us lose a single step that we have gained and I will have no belief  in the uprisings around the world until I hear a cry for the rule of law and a protection for those who disagree.
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