Earth Day and unearthly warnings…

Are we nearing the “End of Times”  as described in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation? I know what you are thinking. You are going to look over on a street corner and find me holding a cardboard sign that says “REPENT! The end is near!” Well, I am almost doing the same thing in this blog.

I look around at our world and see disasters everywhere, both natural and unnatural. One might surmise that nothing is abnormal, we just know more because of our 24 hour news network world. Maybe that is so, but you cannot overlook some of the things happening lately.

In the natural realm, the world is undergoing some major changes. The number of major earthquakes lately is bothersome but maybe not unnatural. Volcanoes have been erupting regularly but since I am not a geologist or geophysicist, maybe things are just shifting the way they should.

In the unnatural realm, however there are lots of things that bother me in a very large way. Let me give you two examples of what I think are indicative of our state of affairs. One example is international in scope and the other is very local but very troublesome.

The international crisis is with a Church that will not… wait, refuses to come to grips with a problem that is so widespread, it touches the countries of India, Nigeria, Columbia and all points in between. It is so wide spread because the Catholic Church is the largest church in the world. Of the six billion inhabitants of our planet, over half are Catholic. They belong to different rites of the Catholic Church but they fall under the umbrella of the Papacy. Sitting in that chair is a man (yes, he is just a man appointed by his peers, not God) who refuses to deal with the insidious nature of pedophilia and child molestation within the Catholic Church. As a Cardinal, he brushed under the carpet allegations of child abuse, ignored the pleading  of bishops to do something and then he allowed the transfer of criminals (yes, they are criminals… just because they are priests doesn’t lessen the fact that pedophilia is a crime) to unsuspecting and uninformed congregations where more children were allowed to be abused. There is even video tape of Cardinal Ratzinger brushing away the hand of Brian Williams when being questioned a few years ago about his findings on molestations. Maybe touching His Eminence was inappropriate but look at the ferocity of the Cardinal’s reaction. It was one of guilt.  And because of Church law, a local bishop can protect these pedophiles from being returned to the jurisdiction  of their crimes to be made to stand trial and be judged for their actions. This Pope, even now, refuses to do anything and claims that the media is out to “persecute the Church”. He will not say so himself… he has his press secretary do it. Why doesn’t he come out and admit the wrong, apologize and promise to put an end to it? He should do so or he should step aside in favor of a real reformer who will not let one more child be abused. The Pope would do well to remember the words of Jesus Christ in Luke 17:2 “It were better for him that a millstone be hanged around his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should harm one of these little ones…” Your Holiness, you are an accessory after the fact as you have kept criminals and pedophiles in positions to continue to commit crimes. For the sake of those cherished little ones, step aside and let someone else sort this out. You obviously cannot be open-minded.

Now to the local crisis that has me concerned. I live near Bakersfield, California, which is just north of Los Angeles. Last week, three teenagers, a 17-year-old male and two female sisters aged 17 and 15, went through a neighborhood knocking on doors until they found someone home. That someone was a 91-year-old woman. She answered that door knock with her life as the three teenagers then beat her to death without provocation. She did nothing to them. They offered no explanation either at the time of the assault or at the time of their arrest or at the time of their arraignment for their actions. It wasn’t a gang intitiation… it wasn’t a robbery… it was a lark apparently for kids who should have been in school.  No one quite understands it and the mother of the two girls said “they were with the wrong person” and that she “knew my little girls could not do such a thing.” Maybe they didn’t do the killing but they sure as hell didn’t stop it. They witnessed it at the very least and did nothing to stop it which puts them in the same boat as Pope Benedict XVI… they are accessories after the fact and are guilty because they didn’t lift a hand to save someone from pain and suffering. No difference between the two sets of criminals… one just happens to have a higher profile.

I worry that these types of acts are indicative of the loss of our moral compass. Are we in the same place as the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah? We have political leaders holding fund-raisers in “erotic clubs”, sports figures raping and molesting their way through the world, civic leaders in high government office selling contracts for favors, bankers who steal entire pension funds and then get rewarded, the Supreme Court opinion that videos of animals being crushed to death by bare feet for fun  (that can then be sold in the open market) falls under the protection of free speech… oh the list goes on and on… just watch the news. There is so little to be positive about these days. Air pollution, mind pollution, pollution of our hearts and souls, shouts of anarchy and little caring about our fellow human beings… all this scares me.

So maybe on this Earth Day, we should focus not just on the Earth but those who inhabit it. We should be worried that we are worthy of drawing the air that is left… if our souls are as polluted as we are making the air, there is not much point in it, is there? It is time to clean up ALL of our acts and not just the litter by the highway or at the coal plant. God isn’t going to tolerate this much longer. He said so… just read for yourselves. But then I wonder… how many households even have a Bible any longer? Oh well…

When will the first shot ring out?

I am afraid. People like Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck scare me.

Not because of the fact that they exercise free speech and espouse a certain political point of view… I have no fear of that. But they scare me in the same way that Eldridge Cleaver, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn scared me. They all have followers. And some of those followers don’t have their heads on very straight. Some of them might even think that one of these “talking heads” might actually have a good idea about inciting violence and then translate that into taking action by opening fire.

Think it hasn’t already happened? Have you forgotten David Koresh? Or how about Timothy McVeigh? Neither one of these upstanding individuals thought twice about killing children as part of expressing their displeasure at the “government”. And while both of them paid the ultimate price with their lives (I doubt either one gave it up voluntarily), tell that to the dead children. Even the Geneva Convention, let along human convention, frowns on killing kids regardless of their parents jobs or political beliefs. In both cases, kids died. What has that got to do with displeasure with the government?

There are so many things wrong with what is going on in this country. We need to really admit what is behind all this hysteria. It is racism pure and simple. The white candidate lost to the black candidate. What we feared since the end of the Civil War has come to pass. The field hands have taken over the big house. Why else would all this talk of “States Rights” resurface now? Where was all this outrage about Social Security and Medicare when it involved the parents of white people? Now that we want to serve ALL the people, franchising even the poorest, that it is “SOCIALISM”. Well, are you willing to give back all that money for roads and bridges? Are you willing to pay top dollar for your medicines? Are you willing to let people die because they “just aren’t willing to pay their share and I’m not paying for it?”

Let me pose one more question? Any of you that listen to the right-wing heads listed above happen to know their incomes? They are no more indicative of the “working middle class” than a biplane is indicative of the jet age of airline travel. They all have annual six figure incomes, fly on personal jets (Rush says he won’t fly commercial and “$1400 wouldn’t buy a bottle of wine on my plane”…), demand outrageous hotel rooms and speaking fees (google Sarah Palin and the California Foundation flap). These same folks will be sitting in the back throwing around words like “revolt” and “citizens, not subjects” while someone else gets killed or does the jail time.

And if you don’t think I am serious about how these idiots view themselves, snickering behind their followers back, check out this quote by Glenn Beck who said it himself (New York Times, March 29, 2009 on-line edition):

“If you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot.”

There you have it, straight from Glenn Beck’s mouth. He admits he is nothing but a charlatan selling snake oil the same way we used to do the Native Americans while we gave them diseased ridden blankets and cattle. And this is also a guy who has espoused elimination of not just health care reform, but Social Security and Medicare.

So there is your call to arms, America. Are you willing to let go with the first shot in the “new” American Revolution watching your parents eat cat food instead of tuna and dying because they can’t afford their medicine because pharmaceutical companies have priced your love one right out of the market with “free market” capitalism? Are you willing to shed your blood while the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin are sipping $1400 bottles of wine in their private jets and hotel rooms? Are you willing to be led by these self-proclaimed “idiots” and “rodeo clowns” (Beck called himself that as well at one time) who shout down all manner of discourse and claim that “white people” are getting the shaft when what they really are saying is “that uppity N@@#er in the White House ain’t telling me what to do?”

Do you want to be the first? That is what they want… and then they will disavow you and call you a “radical who took it too far.” Sorry folks… you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater, then claim it is free speech when others get killed. That isn’t how it works… not in my country anyway.

Shame on you, Pope Benedict!

I told you I was going to say it… here it is. Shame on you, Pope Benedict. Shame on you for hiding behind the cry of media bias. Shame on you for equating your plight with that of the Jews. Shame on you for not bringing the Roman Catholic Church into the 21^st century.

Let me be upfront from the start. I was an altar boy in a Roman Catholic Church. I was NOT abused by anyone including nuns, priests or lay persons. I attended parochial school for 8 years. I did feel the rush of wind as the razor edge of a metal ruler passed within nanoinches of my knuckles that magically appeared from the sleeve of my habited teacher. (She never had to hit me… that warning shot was just enough to remind me that real pain was only a fraction of an inch away! It kept me in line!)

I fell away from the Church in my late teens because I could not tolerate a religion that would tolerate the war in Viet Nam. I didn’t know about the feigned ignorance of the Catholic Church to the plight of Nazi Germany’s Jews. I didn’t know that the Church refused to condemn the assassination of the leader of a Catholic who happened to be President of Viet Nam. I didn’t know and it didn’t’ seem to matter.

But I do know about the abuse now. And I am ashamed to call myself a Catholic.

 I know about how priests were moved after allegations of abuse surfaced to unsuspecting congregations without the abuser’s history being told to the new pool of potential victims. I do know now about the pay-offs and the shell game the Church played to keep the abusers out of the laws reach. I know that local bishops are under no obligation to repatriate abusers to the countries where they committed their crimes. I know that Archbishops hid the sins by hiding the priests. I do know that the College of Cardinals, in the person of the current Pope, investigated specific allegations, did nothing but move those abusers and then kept silent. And I do know wrong when I see it.

I do not need to do anything more than quote the very person that we base our faith upon… Our Lord, Jesus Christ himself who said in the Gospel of Luke 17:2 “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he cast into the sea, than he should offend one of these little ones.”

So to the Pope, I ask: Your Holiness, are you a Christian man? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? Are you willing to abide by the words of Our Lord? If your answer is “Yes” to any of these questions, it is time for you to institute a blue ribbon commission of lay and clergy alike that will leave no stone unturned to root out this insidious practice of child abuse perpetrated by members of the Catholic clergy. This should be your gift to the practicing faithful as you make your exit and resign. Make this your legacy. You didn’t start it, but you can end it. That is your duty as a “man of God”. Are you ready to do your duty?

CEO compensation for 2009… how is this possible?

I want to quote to you some figures I found in the Tuesday, March 30, 2010 issue of USA Today (you can’t make this stuff up).

I quote: “Boston Scientific welcomed new CEO J. Raymond Elliott last year with a $1.5 million signing bonus and stock and option awards of more than $29 million. His total compensation was $33.4 million for 2009… The total compensation for Goggle CEO Eric Schmidt fell 52% last year to $245, 322… Anadarko Petroleum CEO James Hackett’s compensation rose 6% in 2009 to $23.5 million.”

Let us look at little closer at this piece of news.

Boston Scientific… what do they do? They make medical equipment like the two stents I have in my heart; they pioneered the balloon pump for angioplasty and they have a corporation mission statement that is vague as all mission statements are (so that if you fall short, you can say “Where does our mission statement say that?” Most mission statements could be written by the average fifth grader.)  The mission statement reads “to help clinicians improve patients’ lives through medical innovation, Boston Scientific is committed to making more possible in the communities where we live and work.”

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Boston Scientific is also laying off 1,000 to 1,300 employees in April due to “global restructuring”? This follows a lay off during 2007. Maybe they should lay off the CEO and keep some of the ideas of “restructuring” in the corporate boardroom. $33.4 million to a CEO of a corporation that is laying off employees? Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit… well… stupid.

At Google, CEO Eric Schmidt is keeping his salary in line with the world economic times. While Google made a 17% increase in revenue during 2009, Schmidt kept his head and led his company in reinvesting in the country while rebuffing China’s attempt at censorship. A company with morals and a view of a duty to act? Unheard, I say… too bad there aren’t more.

Finally, Anadarko Petroleum.  First, the ubiquitous mission statement: “Anadarko’s mission is to deliver a competitive and sustainable rate of return to shareholders by developing, acquiring and exploring for oil
and gas resources vital to the world’s health and welfare.” Notice the emphasis on sustainable rate of return to shareholders? No mention of making oil cheaper for the consumers, is there? Without making your head spin, a quick summary says that Anadarko added to its reserve of oil and natural gas and gave stockholders a profit of .48 cents per share. In addition to his hefty salary, James T. Hackett, CEO of Anadarko sold over 500,000 shares of Anadarko on 3/31/10 for over $42 MILLION dollars. That makes his income for the past two years at somewhere around $65 million dollars. What on earth can you do with that much money? Buy your own country?

It wouldn’t be fair to paint Mr. Hackett with a broad brush but according to muckety.com, Mr. Hackett sits on the following boards of directors: The Fed, Halliburton, The National Petroleum Council, The National Center for Humanities and the following energy concerns: Ocean Energy, Devon Energy, Seagull Energy, Temple-Inland and Flour. In other words, while we are paying record prices at the pump, Mr. Hackett is making record amounts of money. Could this be co-incidental? Do I need to list how many buddies in the GOP Mr. Hackett has? Well, let’s just say the list includes the names Bush, Cheney, Cornyn, the RNC, John McCain, Ted Stevens, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Mary Landrieu, Mitt Romney, the Americans for Sound Energy Policy along with three oil PACs and numerous other recipients.

But wait, Patrick! Doesn’t he have the right to support whomever he pleases? Of course he does, but money follows money. An association with anything that addresses social injustice seems to be taboo. Mr. Hackett is rich and intends on staying that way. Imagine the good he could do with just $10M of that stock sale. Imagine if all that money he spent on making sure that the GOP stays in power with all of its objections to healthcare reform, banking reform and energy reform had gone to something other than making sure his pockets remained lined with money… just imagine.

I have an idea. Why don’t we get these guys like Hackett and Elliott to sponsor schools  and pay for everything for a year including salaries, books, supplies… the whole ball of wax. They could put their name on the school, write it off for tax purposes, our kids would get the education they receive, teachers would get the compensation they deserve and they could all feel like Bill Gates. Oh wait… that sounds like socialism. GASP! What an idea! Reinvesting in the country you seem to be taking everything out of in the form of oil that should belong to all of us (Who gave you the rights? You bought them? From whom?)

I asked you in the beginning how is this possible? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The answer is easy… just look at what two of these three guys are taking out of America and what they are putting back. Folks, this isn’t brain science.

Only four Missions left… Space is about the disappear from our radar screens

I just read a story about the town of Titusville, Florida and the next round of upheaval that is about the engulf this city on the Florida Coast.

Titusville is known to many as “Space City, USA”. The residents there have long been employees at Cape Kennedy and supported such programs as Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the Shuttle Transportation System (that is the STS part of every mission name). Children have been born there in the shadows cast by such luminaries as Armstrong, Grissom, Young, Ride and McAuliffe. The town has endured the ups and downs of the rising and ebbing fortunes of NASA. It is now headed for another ebb as the Orbiter program winds down into the last four flights. With the cuts announced by President Obama to the Orion program recently, Titusville knows that its high school (Apollo High) and its entire education system will melt back into nothingness. Already, the high school is beginning to look like the empty stores on Main Street. From afar, I watch and shake my head at the thought that we have no goal currently to continue manned space flight supported by our government. It is to be turned over to the private sector where Virgin Space Airlines is already treating space flight like a thrill ride at Six Flags but only for the very rich. Oh yeah, you can go into space but have you got an extra $300,000.00 to throw down?

All we have left is the International Space Station. One has to wonder how long it will be before expedience has us abandon this fort on the edge of the frontier of space. Getting the ISS built has been nothing short of a monumental struggle between those who see what real science (not like Mythbusters) and real ingenuity can do and those who see nothing but dollars… a struggle between dreams and as Glenn Beck would put it “the harsh realities of living here on earth and paying for it…” We, as a country, have had no direction for years. When President Kennedy announced the goal of putting a “man on the moon and returning him safely to earth”, it was a military as well as political goal. I know… I grew up in that era. It was unthinkable that we all might be living under the glow of a “red” moon if the Soviets got their first. Who knows? They might have been planning on missile bases on the Moon, or so the thinking went.  The government not only scared us all but put the money out their to improve schools, increase science budgets and with the help of television, we could all be there to share in the achievements. It gave our children incentives to learn math and sciences.

Since then, what have been our national goals? A War on Poverty brought to you by LBJ, a War on the Constitution and Viet Nam by the Nixon administration, a War on Drugs brought to you by Ronny Rayguns followed by the “Star Wars” initiative… And now we have the “War on Terror”which is just the latest in unseen, intangible “wars” with no definitive goals and no end in sight. Have we won just one of these “wars”?

I was so hoping that President Clinton, in the spirit of President Kennedy, whom he so admired, would set a new goal of landing on Mars by the year 2020. But like most other politicians, he was distracted by his own delusions of grandeur and hamstrung himself right into an impeachment trial. And now, my next newest hope is turning to the private sector to save our National Heritage as the most innovative, most progressive and most outward thinking race on our planet. Why? Well it very simple… the previous administration left our economy in a shambles.

After rebuilding the economy so there was a surplus at the end of Clinton’s term, Bush spent all that real money and political clout in a war triggered by an attempt on his father’s life in Kuwait. It was “blood vengeance”. While our country went to hell, Congress authorized time and again at the President’s request, a BILLION dollars a day for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So now we are broke and the cuts have to come somewhere. Unfortunately, when people are dying on earth from disease and an outmoded health care system and unemployment is at an all time high, we are once again cutting jobs instead of creating them. Somehow that doesn’t make sense.

If this sounds like disillusionment with the President I voted into office, then I guess the answer is that I AM disappointed in President Obama. This could be the incentive to get our children excited and learning again… appeal to their sense of exploration and wonder. Teach them as Thomas Jefferson did Lewis and Clark 200 years ago to be scientists and not to fear the unknown. Send them off as the Spanish did Columbus to discover a “New World”. Give our youth purpose and direction and they will follow.

Do you want to see what real science has brought to us from the space program? Go to the NASA website (www.nasa.gov) and search for the list of earthly benefits we have gleaned from the program. Want to see REAL science in action? Turn off the video game and fire up the NASA channel while any of the last four orbiter flights are in progress. Let your kids see our world from space, with all its fragility and beauty. (Funny thing is, there are no border lines on the ISS and from space, you don’t see those division lines either). It is a planet full of us…. those of us who remember the glory and sense of national pride when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and those of us who also remember the sorrow as we lost 14 during the orbiter programs alone of those explorers but knew that, like the Phoenix, the space program would endure these setbacks and rise again.

Dare to dream, Mr. President. Dare to dream that one of your girls could be among the first colonists of Mars. Dare to dream, America. Dare to dream that our country can again ascend to that lofty perch of ingenuity and creativity. Dare to dream, youth of today. Dare to dream that an international effort to explore the heavens with only the title “earthlings” to unite you could ultimately be the savior of our planet. God knows, we need a direction. Let us find our compass, both literally and figuratively,  explore what’s out there and once more confront the unknown again. We could all use the challenge.

Civility and our loss of manners

When did this happen? How did this happen? How can we stop it?

I know that it seems these three questions could apply to so many topics, but for me, right now, it is about civility… or rather our lack thereof as a nation.

For years, I have heard countless rants about how the French are rude or New Yorkers are rude or some other nonsense. But I am here to tell you, this entire country needs to rethink the direction we are taking as a society and the lessons we are teaching our children.

For me, it started with hats. In Texas, it is common to wear your hat anywhere… indoors, whether in a movie theater, a restaurant or even at a funeral service. Outdoors is no better.At a NASCAR race at TMS, once I had to ask someone to remove their hat during the convocation and the national anthem. They stared at me like I was a two-headed goat, and it almost got me a punch in the nose. My dad served in the USN and had a ship sunk from underneath him to defend that flag. The least you could do is be respectful. And the issue of hats indoors at dinner? I wouldn’t have any teeth left if I had tried to pursue that issue. But as my ranch foreman, Pete, once said when I sat down at his dinner table and didn’t remove my hat (the whole room fell silent… I didn’t get it), “I don’t recall the last time it rained indoors…” That was all it took. No one could eat until I corrected this faux pas. Someone try to tell me that wasn’t a real man or a real cowboy. I dare you…

But let me tell about this latest outrage… and if you are not outraged then there is something seriously wrong with your moral compass. You might want to send it in for repair.

The two affronts are called “internet trolling” and “homewrecking”. The latter involves finding out about an empty home, throwing a party advertised through FaceBook (unknown to the residents or owners of said home) and then destroying someones dreams. You, as a homewrecker, show up, get drunk or high, destroy the home through vandalism, clog the toilets and urinate anywhere you feel appropriate. Then you brag about it on your FaceBook page. The homeowner returns home to find the handiwork of this wrecking crew and are left to wonder “why and how did this happen…” For this, I don’t have an answer except there is a message coming through loud and clear. Rudeness and anarchy rules.

The former practice of “internet trolling” however, troubles me a great deal. This practice was revealed to me on the Today show this morning. Apparently, trollers find a human tragedy such as the loss of life by a rich young girl who took her dad’s car for a joyride and augered into a tool booth. Within hours, pictures of her and the subsequent autopsy were circulating on the web, including FaceBook. The “trollers” felt it very funny to send the photos to her parents. In another case, when a young woman took her own life, these heartless bastards (and that is the least offensive terms I can think of) took over a FaceBook site devoted to the young woman and left heartlessly cold messages such as “Hey guys… how’s it hangin’?” The young lady had committed suicide by hanging herself. The same behavior is taking place in the case of the Massachusetts student who committed suicide after relentless bullying by some at her school. The bullying has continued, in the nether and nefarious world of the internet, where her memorial site has been the target of those same bullies.

Do you happen to notice one word popping up in the preceding instances? That word is FaceBook… and that will a subject for another day. I want to get back to this rudeness and where is it coming from?

Well, as is often the case, when we point a finger, there are three pointing back at us. Our kids are getting the message that anything goes from… you guessed, us… the “adults” in the room. Congressmen interrupt the President of the United States in mid sentence while delivering message to Congress with shouting, news correspondents no longer think ti necessary to wait for an answer to question but interrupt to rephrase or restate their point of view and we no longer think it necessary to even say “please” or “thank you”. That doesn’t even address our problems with convicted criminals becoming celebrities (Michael Vick to name one… other Michaels may not have been convicted but we were willing to over look the obvious because of his status as a “star”. Mike Tyson is another example that jumps to mind. And just to show I am not being racist in this, Woody Allen certainly wasn’t convicted of a crime but he should be forgotten, as should Jesse James, Tiger Woods and a few other dirt bags in our midst.)

We have made rudeness and incivility a badge of honor. Beat up your wife or girlfriend… no problem. Cheat on your spouse… we will forgive you. Kill a few animals or people for that matter and … voila, you are okay with us. In other words, our society has become one of “anything goes”. That includes threatening members of Congress who disagree with you, spitting on others and hurling racial and sexual epithets… oh the list goes on and on. But let me end this rant by telling what a “anything goes” society means… it means a total disregard for the rules of society and a totally “me first always” attitude. Know another word for that? It is called “ANARCHY”.

Yup, that is where we are headed… anarchy. And we are to blame. We sit back and refuse to say those words my grandmother used “SHAME ON YOU…” . In our rush to politically correctness, we all drank the Kool-Aid that said, “You can’t shame children… it will hurt their self-esteem.” I am not talking about beating your child. That is not the point… but we have gone the complete opposite direction where our kid make the rules and we obey for fear that they will not love us any longer or (and this has happened) call the authorities with tales of abuse because of punishment. We are to blame for sparing the rod completely and spoiling our children to the point of obnoxiousness.

In closing, I have wanted to say this on so many occasions but haven’t. So to all of you who have forgotten simple manners or to those of you who insist on inflicting pain on people who don’t deserve (that means those of you who are “wreckers” or “trolls), I say…

“SHAME ON YOU” and shame on me for holding my tongue. I refuse to go along with this boorish behavior another day. If someone says “shame on you” when you let a door slam in my face or when you cut me off in a shopping line or when your children act up in ways unimagined by us in our days, it will probably be me. And I’m not apologizing… or else it is “shame on me”.