12/29/08

Will 2009 Really Suck?
    With the dollar nose diving, unemployment surging, and the pundits forecasting a serious depression. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in lousy shape and horrendously expensive, half of Americans getting cancer, so-called health care costs exploding, our kids coming in at the bottom in international tests, millions of illegals pouring across our wide open borders, our car companies going broke, most of our major industries moved to Asia, our kids slowly burning out their brains with cell phones, many of our high school graduates barely able to read, our federal government doubled in size in the last few years, our prisons bulging, our war on drugs a total flop, record winter snowfalls, oil prices all over the place, the stock market plunging, Congress doling out thousands of earmarks for their larger doners, foreign countries buying American assets on the cheap, college tuitions rising far faster than inflation, obesity and diabetes soaring, Iran building a bomb, fluorides poisoning our drinking water, vaccinations causing autism and Alzheimer's, our largest military in the world spread out in 144 countries, we're either going to get off our duffs and start making major changes or we're going to be in for what could be the end of the American empire.
    While I've been researching our problems and proposing practical solutions, the American public, with far too few exceptions, has been busy entertaining itself, mindless of what looks like is coming.

12/28/08

Corruption
    It’s understandable if there are no newsletters dedicated to reporting on corruption, but I’ll bet there are some web sites. Check it out for me.
    In the meanwhile I cut out articles I find on the subject, plus I enjoy the exposés on 60 Minutes.
    D’ja read in Time about the Choctaw Indians and their casino in Mississippi? They’re raking in about $100 million in profits every year…at a 41% return on revenue they even outclass Microsoft with its 29% return. They’ve also gotten another $245 million in aid from the feds in the last five years.
    Yes, of course they’re investing millions in Congressional graft…er, I mean re-election campaigns.
    But this is also a story of federal bureaucracies in confusion. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is a total mess, as is the Bureau of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR).
    And Congress is just letting the hundreds of alphabet agencies waste our tax dollars and we don’t even say boo. Your taxes have gone from 2% to almost 50%…what does it take to shake you awake? Now it takes two wage earners in a family to earn what one did a few years ago. Zzzzzzz.
    Is there something you can do about all this? You bet your sweet bippy there is. Start a Never Re-elect Anyone (NRA) group with your friends and neighbors so we can start flushing that Washington toilet. Let's get busy making being a politician no longer a viable career path.

12/27/08

Pumpheads
    That’s the term used by doctors for the after effects of being hooked up to a pump oxygenator or heart-lung machine for open heart or by-pass surgery. It’s a state of dimwittedness that the 900,000 annual by-pass operations have been causing. At first the memory losses, personality changes, and inability to think improve, but then the condition often worsens and persists for years. Scientific American had an article on it in their July 2003 issue.
    Such a post-operative prospect might, if the word gets around, almost be enough to encourage people to change their lifestyles so they won’t need any operations. I know it had me cutting down on my already restricted input of cooked food and adding a little extra cayenne to my daily heaping tablespoon.

12/26/08

Talk Radio and Television May Be Doing Your Thinking
    Listening to talk radio and watching television are great ways to relax. Most of us like to think these activities have absolutely no effect on how we think or what we do. Many of us may be surprised to know that these are controlling mediums, relaxing us enough to switch off our analytical brain (the left side of the brain) so that we uncritically process the information beaming at us. This means we are less able to make decisions or judgments about what we hear.
    Our brains undergo a similar process under hypnosis. The similarity between hypnosis and the effects of radio and television are unveiled in Dr. Aric Sigman's, Remotely Controlled. Sigman describes hypnosis as "an altered state of consciousness," a form of sleepwalking where our mind is influenced by another (the hypnotist or practitioner).
    Under hypnosis we become more open to the suggestions of the practitioner and this happens as we are asked to refrain from being critical. As we do this, the frontal lobe in our brain alters, becoming less connected with the brain so that we switch off. Hypnosis effectively causes a change in the brain so that we use the right side of our brain. What we switch off is the left side, used for critical thinking.
    While hypnosis may be considered an extreme or unusual solution to certain conditions, it only takes 30 seconds for us to be in a similar state when we switch on the television or radio. Such were the findings from Professor Herbert Krugman in a study conducted in 1971. His conclusion was that we do not think about the information transmitted. In other words the way radio and television communicate are a form of brainwashing.
    Left in this state for some time can mean that we become less inventive in problem-solving and less able to concentrate. This suits some environments. In the UK, television is used to keep prisoners quiet. It is regarded as one of the best types of control mechanisms by the General Secretary of the Prison Governors' Association. Prisoners are subjected to the tranquillising effects of television which subdues behaviour, and the other benefit is that it is a cheap and effective way to do that.
    The frontal lobe also alters in the brain when watching television. The frontal lobe is an important part of the brain as it is a management type system ensuring that our self-control, moral judgment and attention is planned, organised and sequenced. The concern is that the frontal lobe may be damaged by watching television and this may happen in childhood because the frontal lobe is in a continual stage of development until around 20 years of age.
    When children watch television, the frontal lobe is not doing anything, with the result that over a period of time this part of the brain doesn't develop, which can then stunt development. A study in The World Federation of Neurology outlined concerns about the impact of visual electronic media (including television) on children because of stunted frontal lobe development which also impacts on their ability to control antisocial behaviour. Playing and interacting with others is recommended to encourage the fibres in the frontal lobe to develop and thicken, and to make stronger connections to neurons.
    It is not the information itself that causes the problem, but rather the medium. Somehow we are electrically wired to the television, enabling information to be absorbed – any information. The medium induces within us a passive state for communication. If we are unconsciously absorbing information, then what is this information doing to the way we think and act? Of course, the medium is a perfect match for advertisers.
    How much are we influenced by the opinions of others presented on TV? Ask how you came by that opinion – was it someone else's opinion that you've unconsciously accepted. Is your view of the latest international news event – consider the Russia vs Georgia crisis – shaped by what you hear? For example, I started to believe what I was hearing regarding this 'crisis' (ie that one country was the problem), until I was reminded of the history and other related events. Do you find yourself arguing forcefully about an issue then wondered how, or even why, you had that point of view?
    The other aspect of television to consider is the amount of negative information that is transmitted. There are a few stories that are uplifting and empowering. Some groups recommend staying away from television particularly the news because of what they see as it's potential to negatively impact on enthusiasm, positive thinking, and self esteem. Do an experiment and stop watching television for a few days or a week, then assess how you feel in general. Once you start watching television again, reassess.
    While we may look after our physical body, eating well and exercising, we also have a duty to look after our mental body, feeding it with positive stimulation. In a positive environment we become positive, influencing others to be positive.
    Source: 'Weapons of Mass Induction," an article in Kindred based on an excerpt of a book by Dr Aric Sigman called Remotely Controlled. (See www.kindredmagazine.com.au)

12/24/08

God
    Now there’s a subject!
    Well, humans have been ascribing things they haven’t understood to gods ever since they figured out how to talk. Despite considerable progress in some fields, there are still a bunch where we’re fairly clueless. And this provides a ripe opportunity for people to proclaim they have answers and build religions. Indeed, this has been going on as far back as any records have been found. And way before that. Today, religions are the largest industry in the world…a source of money and power for the religious leaders.
    Sherry took some film courses at Keene State College in Keene (NH) taught by Kate Phillips, who was an actress way back in the 1930s. She also was in all of the Charlie Chan movies. Anyway, she died back in April and her friends and fans held a special 95th birthday commemoration gathering at an Episcopal church in Keene recently. So, there I was, in a church pew, complete with a kneeling pad, a hymnal and a bible. That took me back to when I was a boy soprano and sang three times a week in the St. Paul’s Episcopal church in Brooklyn (High Episcopal). Well, it was fun, and I got paid. Plus I got a free month of summer camp out in Center Moriches, Long Island. Then my voice changed to baritone.
    During the Kate Phillips commemoration ceremony there was the singing of a couple hymns, the recitation of the 23rd Psalm and The Lord’s Prayer. Just like seventy years ago. And eighty. For some reason my mother sent me to the nearby Dutch Reform church for Sunday-school when we lived in Brooklyn and I was four years old. I continued in Sunday-school until I got the boy soprano job when I was about fourteen.
    For some reason I have zero recall of all those bible stories I was told. It did seem odd to me that there was such a fuss over stuff that supposedly happened a couple thousand years ago. I was more interested in what was happening now and what might be coming up.
    There are so many things we don’t yet understand that there’s plenty of opportunity to ascribe some of them to gods or a God. I enjoy talking, reading, and thinking about mysteries such as ghosts, poltergeists, reincarnation, plants able to read our thoughts, our cells being in communication with each other, even over vast distances, our ability to communicate with many living thing, dogs that know when their masters are coming home, animals who sense tsunamis and head for the high ground, morphemic resonance, psychics able to communicate with the dead, psychokenisis, mind-reading, foreseeing the future, the power of intention, etc. Why not throw in UFOs and ETs?
    The idea of a judgmental God, in a long  white robe, watching what I’m doing and chalking up my sins, has never seemed reasonable. I like the concept of the sum of the consciousnesses of all living things, which I call sigma (∑), having a god-like power. Well, we have a lot to learn.
    Ah, the power of belief. And, as I keep explaining, belief is a prison for the mind. Doctors truly believe in prescriptions and surgery as the way to treat illnesses. The whole idea of why a person has gotten sick…well, maybe God or something explains that. It never crosses their mind that maybe something the person has been doing has caused the problem.
    Priests totally believe in the religion they are teaching. They live totally within the confines of their belief system. Beliefs are like locking the mind in a cell.
    So we have thousands of religious groups, each with their own version of the Truth, and with their flock of believers supporting them. And we have an array of religious they turn to for inspiration…the Bible, Koran, Torah, Upanishads, etc. I'd like to see a list of the Christian sects here in America…Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Baptist, Luthern, Congregational, Mormon, Unitarian, Dutch Reform, Presbyterian, 7th Day Adventist, Methodist, Greek Orthodox, Jehovah's Witness, Pentecostal, Christian Science, etc. It's the world's biggest industry, and all dependent on people believing what they are told.
    What do I believe? I believe we have a whole lot more to learn and we shouldn't deny new data because it conflicts with things that've been taught for a thousand or so years.

12/23/08

Transition
    That's what Newsweek called it when they covered 36 well known people who died in 2008. As I read the brief obits, I kept wondering why no friend told any of these people that they didn't have to die. That they could cure themselves of any illness if they'd just change to a raw food organic diet and stop putting poisons into their bodies.
    The only excuse today for dying is ignorance or suffering an accident. Our total belief in allopathic doctors is killing over two million Americans a year. Oh, a few doctors are starting to wise up, but it's slow progress, with the Pharmaceutical industry, around 99% of the food industry, the AMA, FDA, and down the list, doing their best to milk Americans of an average of $7,350 a year each for so-called health care.
    Our media is not about to help spread the word. The current U.S. News & World Report has 14-2/3 pages of pharmaceutical ads and only 15 pages of other ads. Without Big Pharma ads they'd be out of business, not just going from a weekly to a monthly publication. And you see the Pharma ads going by on your TV. Endlessly.

12/20/08

Vaccinations
    It isn't bad enough that allopathic doctors, which are most of ’em, are treating disease symptoms, and ignoring the causes, they're pushing vaccinations by the gazillions.
    Children are getting 24 vaccines by their first birthday, and almost 40 by the time they start going to school. And few parents have a clue that these are not just a waste of money, but do no good and can do a lot of bad. They are one more medical industry scam to milk the unwary…shear the sheep.
    The May 2008 Dr. Blaylock Wellness Report goes on for pages on the harm vaccinations are causing, and their lack of any validity for health.
    If you have children, please don't let them get any vaccinations, And, please, warn your friends. Avoid those phony flu shots like the plague they are.


12/19/08

Lights Out!
    When I got up for a midnight trip to the bathroom everything was fine. But, when I woke up at 2:30 AM the LED clock was dark. Uh oh, the power was out! No lights, no water, no heat. An ice storm had put the whole area out of power, but at least the phones were still working.
    After a day in the dark and cold, and with news that almost half a million New Hampshire homes were without power, we drove to Keene, some twenty miles away, which the ice storm had completely missed, and bought a couple kerosene heaters at Home Depot. A shipment had just come in, so we were lucky. Well, two was all we could fit in our little Mercedes 380. With kerosene from a local gas station where, though they were out of power and couldn’t sell gas, they had a little emergency generator powering their kerosene pump. Pretty soon our kitchen and upstairs were warming up.
    The next morning we checked and the Keene Home Depot had sold out their heaters. We found a Home Depot in Concord that had just gotten some and were on our way to a much warmer house. And daily trips with three kerosene cans to the gas station.
    By the second day we got the gas-powered generator in the pump house going, so we had water again. Cold water. I dug out my long power cables and ran them from the pump house, about sixty feet away, to the house and got the freezers and fridge working again. Next, a cable up the back stairs to my office for the computers. Whew, back on the Internet!
    The Public Service crews managed to get power up to the nearest house, about a mile down the hill. It’s now been nine days of cold living. I’m only eating raw food, so I have no problem fixing meals. But I’m sleeping fully dressed and under four blankets to keep warm. That’s dressed with thermal underwear, Haband Ice-House pants and shirt, which are flannel-lined.
    The scene was spectacular, with the sun sparkling through millions of heavily iced tree branches and twigs, all draped over. Thousands of downed trees caused many of the main roads and most of the back roads to be closed for a few days, making travel anywhere tricky. A few days later it warmed up and the ice all melted.
    Okay, that was a warning. I got out my mail order catalogs and ordered two more gas generators so we’ll be in better shape next time something happens, with the oil furnace and propane heaters operating.
   
12/18/08

Ice Cream
    I’m having so nuch fun with my raw food diet, learning new things every day. I keep my blender and Ultimate Chopper busy. Like making my own ice cream. Delicious, healthy ice cream.
    I put four bananas and four eggs (organic, free range) into the blender, add a cup and a half of raw milk, two tablespoons of cocoa powder and blend. Then into the freezer. A few hours before a meal I move the solid-frozen ice cream to the fridge to soften, so it’s easy to eat.
    My coleslaw sauce gets used every day. I put carrots, broccoli, or cauliflour into the chopper and then add some sauce. It’s sweet, sour, creamy and crunchy. The chopper almost liquidifies my raw buffalo liver. I put lots of organic tomatoes into the blender with a generous abount of sauce and the result is raw tomato soup. Mmm.
    And I’ve told you about the dark green smoothies. They’re made in the blender with bananas, kale, and pure  water. Alternatives are Swiss chard, broccoli greens, and anything else dark green. If the bananas don’t make it sweet enough I add a tablespoon or two of good old New Hampshire maple syrup.
    The cole slaw sauce recipe is simple. 2 qts organic plain yogurt, 2 cups of extra virgin live oil, 2 cups organic apple cider vinegar, 1 cup unheated honey, sea salt, cracked pepper and celery seeds to taste. Blend. It’s even great with chopped cabbage.
    Let me know what you’ve come up with that’s delicious and raw.

12/17/08

Aliens
    No, not the grays, the browns. They’re swarming over the Mexican border every night. By the thousands.
    Hey, we’ve got a pretty good thing going here in America. Sure, we could make our country a whole lot better if we’d get our ass off the couch and take a serious interest in ending the corruption that our bonanza (compared to other countries) has made possible, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen. We’re too busy to waste time worrying about who’s actually running the country or to try and stem our gradual loss of liberties.
    How many illegal aliens have walked past our moribund border authorities? Somewhere on the order of eight to twelve million. So far. But that’s going up every night, and they’re coming in from China, Pakistan, Yemen, all of the Central American countries, and you name it.
    Of those it’s estimated that about 80,000 of ’em are from terror-supporting countries and could easily be living here with an eye to doing us harm.
    We have the laws, but we also have federal immigration authorities who have failed at every level to protect our borders. No, I haven’t thought of anything to do about it except gripe.
    Just in one small border area…Organ Pipe National Monument in Arizona…up to a thousand illegal aliens a day come across. Some 200,000 illegal border-crossers and 700,000 pounds of drugs were intercepted there last year.
    Got any ideas?
    Maybe you’ve noticed the Spanish TV channels and radio stations, aimed at the immigrants, legal and illegal, who don’t want to bother to learn English.

12/16/08

Silverized Products
    Agionize over this one you couch potatoes.
    I’ve been making a big deal out of silver colloid as one of the finest microbial detergents…the only antibiotic that germs can’t adapt to. Most of you said ho hum, but a few have sent for one of my $40 silver colloid making kits…and a bunch of those customers have been writing and calling to tell me about the great things they’ve been doing with the stuff. With my kit it costs about a penny a gallon to make the stuff. Or you can buy it at health food stores for $20 a thimble.
    It’s great for any cuts, warts, rash or fungus…and to drink (in moderate amounts) to ward off colds and flu. And SARS, I’ll bet.
    An article in Red Herring reported on Roger Freeman, who just got a bunch of millions of venture capital for his AgION Technologies. What he’s done is produce a silver-ion powder that fights bacteria for hospital equipment, and can be infused into fabrics and fibers for air conditioners, tooth brushes, hunting boots and so on to prevent mildew and mold. He’s looking for some of the homeland security $60 billion action too.
    How come I didn’t think of this? Two reasons…first, I have no big interest in making money. Done that. Second, I’ve been too busy trying to get people to stop making themselves sick. How come you didn’t think of it? You’ve been watching too many ball games on TV.
    It’s a perfectly logical development of the silver colloid genre.

12/15/08

Meat
    Yes, eating meat can be harmful to your health. But so can eating most vegetables and fruit. So much for vegetarianism.
    So, what’s wrong with eating veggies? Two things. First, most American crops are grown on land from which the minerals were sucked out by crops decades ago. Thus, to get plants to grow they have to be fertilized, so we dump chemical fertilizers on them. Thank you, ADM and Monsanto. This results in the fertilizer being incorporated in the plants as they grow. It also results in sick plants, which attract scavengers…pests. So the crops have to be sprayed with pesticides. Yep, you guessed it, these too are absorbed by the plants. Pesticides are not healthy to eat.
    Okay, a few of you go over to the more expensive part of the supermarket where they have the organic stuff where you can buy veggies and fruits that have not been sprayed with poisons.
    Until our farmers wise up about remineralizing their land…a simple process of spreading some ground rock on the farm land every few years…we’ll still have to use mineral supplements if we want to be healthy.  Our bodies don’t do well when deprived of the missing trace minerals they’re designed to use. My hope is to get the word out to organic farmers about remineralizing their land. The resulting crops I call super-organic food.
    In the meanwhile, even though we’re buying organic food and taking mineral supplements, we’re still poisoning ourselves when we cook the vegetables or fruits. Cooking quickly destroys the enzymes and vitamins, and our immune systems react to it as toxic (poison). The white cells are rushed out to fight the poisonous intruders, and down goes the immune system’s ability to fight other battles. Like? Like cancer, colds, flu, and so on.
    Worse, the attacked food slows down on its trip through the digestive system and we get less good out of it.
    Okay, you want to know about meat.
    Just as with fruits and vegetables, if we eat our meat in its natural form, we will get the maximum benefit from it. But, no, our farm conglomerates, in order to have faster-growing, bigger animals, and more milk, use hormone injections. The hormone shots make the animals sick, so they have to be injected with antibiotics. And we get both the growth hormones and the antibiotics in our meat, milk, cheese, etc. No, these are not healthy for us.
    Oh, I forgot to mention, almost all of today’s beef has been fattened in feed lots, which cuts the growing time to about a third. There they are crammed with high calory genetically modified (GM) grains instead of being allowed to eat pasture grass. They’re also fed ground up waste poultry, beef and pig parts left over from the processing of those meats.
    European countries do not permit our hormone-injected beef to be imported.
    If you can get your butcher to get meat for you from a local farmer who raises the animals on organically grown grass, with no hormones or antibiotics…and you eat your meat either raw or damned near raw, your body will respond with health. I eat all mine raw…and love it! Yum!
    Unpoisoned raw meat zips right through your digestive system. Well, this is what your ancestors ate for thousands of generations. We’ve just recently started poisoning our food with pesticides, hormones and antibiotics. And it’s only been a few thousand years that we’ve been cooking our food…not nearly long enough for our digestive systems to adapt to this change.
    I’ve found two healthy meat sources locally for unpoisoned grass-fed beef and buffalo. I buy whole buffalo livers, slice ’em up and freeze the half-inch thick slices. I mince it in my Ultimate Chopper for about two seconds, add sea salt and cracked pepper. I love it. And I was a kid who really hated the taste of cooked liver.
    Years ago I discovered how good it was uncooked, so when I went deer hunting I ate my deer livers just barely singed, much to the horror of my hunting buddies…all of whom, though younger than me, have passed on by now.
    Oh, two more items. Meat has vitamins and enzymes which your body needs. A few babies raised on vegetarian diets have died of a lack of the B-12 they would have gotten from meat. Our ancestors were not vegetarians. They hunted. Then there’s the matter of acutally chewing your food before swallowing. Everything should be chewed until liquid, and that sure includes meat. Well, that’s only if your health is of any serious interest.

12/14/08

War 2009?
    Back a few decades we tended to be more forthright in calling a spade a spade (no offense intended to any overly-sensitive people of color). We had prisons, not correctional institutions. Janitors, not maintenance personnel. And we had a War Department, now known as the Department of Defense, and soon no doubt to be renamed the Peace Department.
    Well, we’ve “defended” our country in Eritrea, Haiti, Kosovo, East Timor and so on. Also against Saddam Hussein’s vicious attack on our oil fields some place there in the Gulf area. Some Kuwaiti Emir, I think, was managing them for us.
     In a recent talk Dan Quayle (remember him?) was hand-wringing about how seriously our military forces have been cut back. In the last ten years our army divisions have been cut from 18 to 9, our navy from 600 ships to 300, and the number of air wings from 36 to 18.
    Back when the USSR was doing its best to expand communism around the globe it made sense to carry a big stick. Do we really need 600 ships to deal with North Korea? With easily portable biological or nuclear weapons, any rogue state can wipe out gobs of Americans without any ships, planes, or armored divisions. Technology has changed warfare. What good are battleships, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and even intercontinental missiles against a couple of hundred infiltrated agents with anthrax or botulism to spread? Our borders are wide open, with around 20,000 sneaking in from Mexico every day, and anyone who wants to coming down from Canada. In droves.
    A 600-ship navy isn’t going to give us any security from attack. Nor are 18 army divisions.
    Instead of budgeting billions to support a cold-war-sized military, how about going about it a different way? What would happen to rogue states like Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea, if we made a business offensive? Just look at what’s happened in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia…the Asian Tigers. These were serious poverty areas when I first visited them 50 years ago.
    The island of Singapore was such a mess when Malaysia broke free from British rule that Malaysia refused to include it. So Singapore called in a UN team for advice. The team surveyed potential markets and raw material sources within easy shipping distance. Then they went to Europe for financing. Within a few years the tin shack slums were replaced by high-rise apartment complexes and industrial parks. If you’ve visited Singapore in the last twenty years or so you’ve seen cranes all around the city busy erecting more high rise buildings. Unless you spit on the street, pee in an elevator, or spray paint cars, it’s a great place to live.
    So how can we help Syria or Iran get out of poverty? We can help them build an educated citizenry, a resource that will attract business.
    The main reason that Jordan is by far the most technologically advanced of any Arab country lies in the setting up of amateur radio stations in almost every school in Jordan thirty-eight years ago. That got the kids interested in learning about radio and electronics where, before that, even something as simple as stringing telephone lines meant bringing in $300 a day technicians from Europe.
    The Sudbury Valley School and its many clones have proven that, left to their own devices, kids love to learn. These kids are leaving the public-school kids in the educational dust. Children do far better when self-motivated than when forced to study things. So all we’d have to do is make study materials available to the kids in Iran and Syria. If we could round up a few million ancient computers, refurbish them, gear them to access the Internet, and then set them up in third world country schools, what a difference that would make in a few years. Plus it would save millions of old computers from being land fill.
    And, since the Web is largely English language oriented, the kids would learn English, which would help them cope with today’s international business world, which runs on English.
    We don’t need a 600-ship navy, we need creative ideas on how to stop making enemies and make more friends around the world.
    How do you get people to stop fighting small wars? The French came up with a great solution to that when they took over New Caledonia. That’s an island about half way between Australia and Fiji. I spent a fabulous week there a few years back, giving hams all around the world a contact with this rare country. Before the French took over, the natives had been fighting each other for centuries. Constant warfare. So the French put in a TV station and made inexpensive TV sets available. The natives stopped fighting and went to work to make enough money to buy their families a TV set. Then, they had to keep on working because their families want to buy the stuff they saw advertised on TV. And that was the end of the wars.
    The Peugeot Deux Chevaux car got the French off bicycles after WWII, just as the VW beetle got the Germans off their bicycles. Maybe it’s about time to slow down on developing luxury cars and start making the lowest possible cost cars we can to sell in Iran, Syria, and so on. That would get their people interested in making money, not war. Something like the old Deux Cheveaux (two horses), with a go-cart engine. A $1,000 car? Why not?
    That was a great little car, though it looked like hell. The seats were canvas, slung from pipes. Every part was easily replaced, including the doors and fenders, and it carried four people. Any society that can make a profit selling a color printer for under $100 should be able to provide a $1,000 car.

12/13/-8

Declaration of Dependence
    I will depend on the government to school my children.
    I will depend on the health care system for my health.
    I will depend on the media to inform me honestly and accurately.
    I will depend on my church to guide me in spiritual matters.
    I will depend on the government to protect me from my own follies.
    I will depend on my employer for my paycheck.
    I will depend on supermarkets to provide me with healthy food.
    I will depend on the FDA to protect me from harmful food and drugs.
    I will depend on my town or city to provide me with safe drinking water.
    I will depend on the governmment to spend my tax money wisely.

12/11/08

Glacier News
    Bore sure has a lot of C. Littles in an uproar over global warming. Cooler heads (heh) are snickering over the just plain political foofarah. The real experts, not those who cobbled up a now discredited computer simulation which unleashed the politicians, are telling us that the real skinny is that a new ice age seems to be under way.
    For instance, in addition to the growing ice pack in Greenland and Antarctica, the glacier on Mt. Rainier at the 8,500 foot level increased by 50 feet between 1994 and 1997.
    Ice age? Yep. Deep sea core samples show that over the last 800,000 ytears there have been ice ages about every 100,000 years, triggered be the Milankovitch eccentricity cycle of the Earth’s orbit.
    The ice ages last about 100,000 years, with a brief interglacial warming period between, lasting about 10,000 years. We’re now 10,800 years into the current warm spell, so the next ice aged is overdue.
    One sign of the changes will be an increase in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms and coastal flooding.
Maybe it’s time for you to break down and read Not By Fire, But By Ice, by Robert Felix. See page 24 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom.
    Geologist Jack Sauers, one of my readers, had an article published in 21st Century magazine proposing that the continuing uplift (about a half inch every ten years) of the Cascade Mountains may be helping bring on the next ice age. Well, they had a Nova program about a young woman geologist made a very good case for the uplift of the Himalayas being responsible for the Sahara desert being formed, so he may well be right.

12/10/08

Another revolution!
    First, we had the agricultural revolution…  with large scale farming
    Then, the industrial revolution…  with large scale manufacturing
    Then, the information revolution…  with large scale cellphones and computers
    Now, the small business revolution… 
    The information age has made it possible to outsource large scale manufacturing to lower wage countries. This has the benefit of helping improve the welfare of other countries, while at the same time making it possible to improve the welfare of the more advanced countries.
    Yes, in America we’re losing blue-collar jobs to Asia. But these were, for the most part, low-paying jobs which kept millions of Americans from moving up the ladder. Dead end jobs. Forty years, a retirement party with a gold watch, and then a few years in an RV or on the golf course.
    This change is putting a premium on education…a premium that our school system has not yet understood, much less even begun to adapt to.
    Not only are low-wage blue collar jobs being exported, the lower-wage white collar jobs are either being replaced by information systems or being exported.
    But, all this has to do primarily with large businesses. Few small businesses are able to take advantage of the economies afforded by exporting work to lower wage countries.
    So, as large businesses are shrinking, we see small businesses flourishing…more than taking up the employment slack. But, our school system is still designed to provide workers for large businesses. Thus, our school curriculums are woefully out of date, geared for the employment needs of a hundred years ago, much less looking ahead to the needs of workers in 2010, 2020 and beyond.
    More and more, small businesses are outsourcing work from larger companies…accounting, maintenance, information systems, food service, specialized electronic systems, prototyping, drafting, etc.
    Small businesses are also in need of outsourced supporting functions such as legal, accounting, computer systems, advertising, promotion, warehousing, shipping, web sites, printing, photography, travel, and purchasing. And these are the fields that our schools should be covering.
    Fifty years ago, as a management major, I had to take courses in chemistry, bridge design (mechanics), statistical analysis, calculus, psychology, economics, and so on…none of which have ever been of the slightest value to me in any of the many businesses I’ve been in.
    The time is ripe for an educational revolution…one that will prepare youngsters for the real world as it is today and as we see it evolving tomorrow. It’s a matter of either working with one’s hands in competition with workers in China, India, Mexico, and dozens of other low-wage countries, or working with our minds. Unless we radically change our educational system, our kids are going to continue to be ill-equipped to do mind work.
    They’re going to have to know how to read and write, just for starters. And not at the fourth grade level.
    But how, considering our thoroughly intrenched school system, can we make the needed changes?
    Fortunately, as with the previous revolutions, new technologies will come to our rescue. Like? The beginnings of the educational revolution are here with distance teaching programs via books, audio cassettes, video tapes, CDs, DVDs, and via the Internet. It’s starting and nothing the NEA, the ed schools, or the Department of Health, Education and Welfare can do is going to stop it.
    Okay, it’s started. What can we do to speed it up?
    Well, I sped up the acceptance of compact discs with a magazine devoted to reviewing the new releases. This helped the good ones sell and the poor releases blow away.
    It was my publications that took a hobby enjoyed by a few hundred ham radio operators, who wanted to extend the range of the mobile and hand-held stations, into today’s cellphone industry.
    It was my publications which took the interest of a few hundred computer hobbyists and built it into a multi-trillion dollar industry which has changed the world.
    I think the same approach will speed the transition from schools as we know them today…not much changed from the 19th century…to a 21st century revolution in learning.
    I know what needs to be accomplished. I know how to do it. But I can’t help make it happen without some help.

12/09/08

David Booth
    Dave, who moved from the next town (Antrim) to Tennessee a couple years ago, asked me to do a piece for his web site. You can check it out at:  http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1176.htm
    His site draws a lot of visitors, so it’ll help get the word around about how to cure any illness and start living a really healthy life. It might even sell some of my health guide books.
    Alas, most people are so busy watching ball games and TV that their health isn’t an issue...until their doctor one day looks up and tells ’em they’ve got cancer.

12/8/08

Blending Bliss
    Between a chopper and  blender, I’m having a ball with my raw food diet. It’s not only delicious, it’s fun.
    For instance, our bodies are designed to work well on fruit, and I love most fruits. But I love ’em even more when I blend ’em. Wait’ll you see how fabulous grapes are when you wash ’em off, put ’em in the blender, and purée them.
    Oranges and grapefruit are wonderful, but you get more fiber when you peel ’em and purée ’em.
    I check the stores for over-ripe bananas and other fruit. That means they’re sweeter, and a lot cheaper. The bananas I peel, cut into chunks and freeze for later use in smoothies. Bananas with kale, spinach, Swiss chard, and other dark greens make great smoothies. Even a dollar bunch of kale makes two or three quarts of green smoothies, so I put one quart in the fridge for current use and freeze the rest. Unlike whole fruits, purées and smoothies lose nothing when frozen.
    If the bananas don’t sweeten the dark green smoothies enough I add a few spoons of New Hampshire maple syrup. The same with grapefruit. 
    My chopper gets the broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, potatoes, yams, turnip, and so on. Then I add some cole slaw sauce to give that sweet-sour-creamy boost to the veggie. I also chop the raw buffalo meat and add some sea salt and cracked pepper. Mmm.

12/7/08

Pearl Harbor!
    I was talking with a ham friend on 160m in Stacey Basin (NY) from my fraternity house in Troy (NY) that Sunday morning in 1941. Suddenly he said he’d just heard that Japan had attacked us in Hawaii, so I turned on the broadcast band to get the details. At 19, I was just three months into my sophomore year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, so I knew I was prime Army meat. Uh oh.
    Roosevelt came on the radio, denouncing the dastardly attack. We were at war. Worse, Germany and Italy joined in, so we’d have to fight two wars at the same time. The war in Europe, which started on my 17th birthday (1939(, was going very well for the Germans. They’d blitzed through the Benelux countries, France, much of the rest of Europe, except Switzerland. Well, the people making money from the war needed a safe place for their money. And Britain was in bad shape, mostly held together by supply convoys from America. Hundreds of German submarines were having a ball littering the bottom of the Atlantic with convoy ships.
    A few hours after the Japanese attack the government shut down all ham radio operation. It was going to be four years before I could get back on the ham bands.
    There were the usual conspiracy theorist rantings that Roosevelt had known ahead of time that the attack was coming. There are always nut cases like that.
   Then books such as At Dawn We Slept and Infamy, began to uncover what had really happened. The 700-page 1986 Pearl Harbor, The Verdict of History, by Gordon Prange soft-pedaled Roosevelt’s involvement. The 485-page 1992 book by Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor Final Judgement covered many of the shortcomings which allowed the disaster, but was shy about crucifying Roosevelt, who had promised at his 1940 re-election to keep America out of foreign wars. After the massive loss of American lives twenty years before, during WWI, the American people wanted no part of any more wars.
    The bombshell that really nailed Roosevelt was Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit, The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. Stinnett proved that Roosevelt intentionally pushed Japan to attack us as a way to get us into the European war and save Britain’s butt. We’d broken the Japanese codes, so Roosevelt knew exactly when and where we would be attacked. Further, he intentionally replaced the Oahu Army and Navy commanders with incompetents, and made sure that the only ships in Pearl were no longer important old battleships instead of carriers.
    I’ll bet our schools aren’t teaching the truth.
 

12/6/08

Helping Kids
    There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the sad state of our youngsters. They’re not getting interested in science and math—they’re not reading—heck they can’t even talk very well, like, ya-no. Yes, I agree that our educational system is at fault. It’s been shown to be one of the worst in the developed countries. And yes, I have a bunch of ideas on ways to get it turned around.
    My proposals for change are radical. They have to be, because all of the efforts to just improve education have failed. In the almost ten years since the A Nation At Risk report billions have been spent trying to improve the system. What they’ve found is that the system doesn’t need fixing, it needs re-inventing.
    Now, my question is this. How interested are you in helping to do something about this mess? I’ve done a lot of homework and have come up with some proposals for a completely new educational system—one I think you’re going to like. But just proposing the changes means little—the tough part is getting them implemented. That’s going to take some work and clout. Are you into work? Have you any clout? Connections?
Indeed, good news for entrepreneurs. Frankly, I hope they raise the minimum wage to at least $7.50 per hour, which is around $15,000 a year. How can a family live for much less than that these days, right?
    Of course this will increase the costs for manufacturers to make products, forcing them to either increase their prices or get rid of workers by replacing them with automation and computers. And this is where you come in.
    A good rule of thumb is to multiply the cost of manufacturing a product by about six to cover the costs of distribution and marketing. Thus any increase in worker’s pay will be multiplied by six when it reaches the sales price for the product. And that will make many manufacturers no longer competitive with foreign factories, so they will either have to move their jobs to Mexico or some other lower wage country, or automate more to cut payroll.
    If you spend much time on the telephone you know that more and more companies have replaced telephone operators with maddeningly automated message handling systems. There are fewer and fewer jobs for  low-skilled workers. And there are going to be even less.
    The next time you visit a factory, take a good look at what the workers are doing. How many of them could be replaced by a computer or a computer-driven machine? Every time you can replace a worker by a machine of some kind you are going to save the company money. You’ll also probably improve the quality of the product.
    A worker making $15,000 a year also costs the company around $5,000 more for health care insurance, unemployment insurance, and so on. A machine doesn’t come in late and leave early. It doesn’t have children that get sick. It doesn’t even take long weekends or have to observe holidays. No ten-minute smoking breaks every hour, either.
    Companies are going to be looking for consultants who can cut their payroll, either by streamlining the work or replacing un- or semi-skilled workers with machines and computers.
    This is going to come as a big surprise to the kids who are dropping out of school. McDonalds is experimenting with automated burger flippers. It won’t be long before most fast food chains can be run by half as many workers or less.
    For instance, suppose you could punch in your order on a keyboard by your parking place as you get out of your car? You’d put your credit card in to pay and get a card to put into a slot once inside. Your tray would come out almost immediately with your order. A similar system would work for the drive-through service. If you don’t have a credit card you can pay with cash inside. But you can bet that McDonald’s credit cards would be plentiful. They might even work at Wendy’s, earning you prizes or future Big Macs.
    Increases in the minimum wage have always hurt those the most that they were intended to benefit. Gee, what a surprise! Just as I replaced the teenagers who were helping me in their spare time (and learning) with automation.
    And what low end jobs aren’t replaced by automation will be filled by illegal aliens.
    Starting from the concept that there are very few poorly educated successful people and very few well educated poor people, it’s about damned time we made some major changes in the American mandatory socialist school system. Socialism, where the government runs businesses, has failed in every country where it’s been tried. Bureaucrats just aren’t able to run profitable businesses.
    Our socialist school system is both the most expensive in the developed world and the least effective. Our socialist health care system is also by far the most expensive and about 37th in health results.
    So, in education, let’s see if there are some successes. The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham (MA) is a fine example of what can be done. It’s a private school that costs less than half as much to run as nearby public schools. It has no curriculum, no tests, no grades, and the students aren’t separated by age. The kids, from four to twenty, learn what they want because the want, when they want. The results are spectacular. I’ve got eight books written about it and I’ve visited it.
    The teacher unions would have a hysterectomy if any state proposed to try that with a public school. Sure, Sudbury has teachers, but nowhere near as many per pupil, since the kids teach each other a good deal of the time. But the concept suggests that kids, if provided the material,  could self-educate themselves.
    Babies are a good lesson for us. They are inquisitive about everything around them. Kids, unless prevented, can be just as avid learners. So let’s start making learning materials available for them in a form they’ll enjoy. Like DVD-based programs that are like computer games. Today we can even have interactive laboratories on DVD for experimentation.
    During WWII the Navy was able to take kids who didn’t know an ohm from a volt and, in nine months, have them able to easily fix anything electronic, including radio receivers, transmitters, sonar, radar, and test equipment. They did it with lectures, followed by hands-on lab work. They’d explain how a receiver works and then we’d go into the lab and we’d be faced with fiendishly disabled radios and the test equipment we’d need to discover the problems. It was great fun, but we had to think.
    Our schools have hardly changed in the last hundred years. It’s time for major changes.
   
12/5/08

Jobs
    November, with over half a million more people reported out of work, brought the unemployment to over 6% of the workforce.
    Just as with health, where my approach is to cure illnesses by getting people to stop doing what’s caused the illness, apparently  startling and controversial concept, let’s look into why those half million workers were canned, while others weren’t.
    I wonder how many of those laid off had tried to be the very best at what they were doing? Read relevant books and magazines, done online searches, attended talks by experts, and so on. Self-education toward being a more productive worker? I wonder how many of them did more than report for work, do their assigned job, and after work entertain themselves?
    As the unemployment ranks grow I’ll bet we’ll see the stands at ball games thinning out. Movie attendance, already suffering from an unending string of crummy movies, will drop more sharply.
    Were there over a hundred of the self-employed in that half million jobless? I doubt it. Have more than a dozen of the laid off read Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad? Or more than one my Secret Guide to Wealth? Unlikely. I wouldn’t be surprised of around 90% of them dropped out of high school and that maybe 25% can’t read at the fourth grade level.
    The real strength of our country lies in small businesses. Our schools should be teaching things and skills that entrepreneurs need to know to be successful. Our states should be establishing Business Incubator Groups in every town and helping fund startups. We don’t need more giants like U.S. Steel and General Motors, we need million of smaller businesses, and with many of them doing business world wide.
    When I was publishing 73 Amateur Radio Today I had subscribers in over 200 countries. And almost as many for several of my computer magazines. When I stopped off at Guam for a couple days a group of over 40 of the subscribers to my magazines put on a dinner for me. Orders for my $40 silver colloid-making kit are coming in from all around the world.
    Meanwhile we’re seeing more and more bigger industries moving their factories to Asia, where there is both a better educated workforce, and a less expensive one. Even illegal aliens are starting to go back to Mexico. Gee. So we’re seeing the middle classes in China and India growing rapidly, while ours is shrinking. If some of the half million who got canned in November would stay out of the local bar for a night and invest $5 (plus $3 s/h) in my Secret Guide to Wealth, they’d soon be back to work and getting busy educating themselves so they will be able to join the middle class.

12/4/08

Dear Occupant:
    Your body is designed with truly remarkable restorative powers. It’s enormously over-designed for survival. It’s able to keep going and repairing itself for years despite constant high stress, an input of coffee, Danish, Whoppers, fries, malts and other poisons that weren’t a factor when the original design was firmed. Despite a lack of exercise, tons of beer and pretzels, a lack of sleep, an ungodly intake of chemicals via food preservatives, your water supply (which brings you fluoride, chlorine, lead, etc.) and pharmaceuticals. It even keeps going though we shovel in highly addictive and destructive drugs such as sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, and so on. It keeps going even when deprived of the ultra-violet light it was designed to need, and in the presence of electromagnetic fields which interfere with the ability of its cells to communicate. It does its best to keep going despite steady infusions of deadly poisons such as mercury, nickel, aluminum and formaldehyde via dental fillings and vaccinations. Even with all these destructive things most bodies are able to keep going for 50-60 years, a demonstration of the incredible repair system which is built in.
    Sure, there can be some genetically influenced repair problems which result in lowered performance. But most of these can be avoided if the occupant observes known, but not well known, health rules.
    Oh, we know we’ll live longer and healthier if we eat right, avoid drugs, get exercise, get enough sleep, and keep our stress to a minimum. We know it, but we keep putting all that off until next week…the next week that never quite comes.
    We know now that we can have healthier, more intelligent, and better kids if we give them a good healthy start. And that means not screwing up our sperm and ova with drugs and magnetic fields before conception. It means being careful during pregnancy of magnetic fields, eating right, avoiding drugs and other chemicals, and avoiding stress or physical pain to the baby.
    We know we’ve really screwed up the first year of life by separating the baby from the mother. We know that few of our child-care facilities are worth the powder to blow them to hell. We know that our schools are a major disaster. And we know what damage most fast food does to bodies, yet there we are, at McDonald’s, queuing up at the counter, and not for their crappy salads, either.
    If we were to apply the things that have been discovered about keeping our immune system strong, most of us would be living over 100 years and in good health. Instead, we are constantly knocking our immune systems for a loop.

12/3/08

Raw Food
    When we cook food we’re producing a myriad of new molecules, called Maillard molecules, that are relatively new to our bodies, at least in evolutionary terms. And then, not satisfied with dumping all these new molecules into our bodies, we added dairy products and grains, also new chemicals to bollix the works.
    When food is cooked it plays hob with its life force, which is easily demonstrated via Kirlian photography. Our bodies were designed, like those of most animals, to eat live food. When we cook plants it breaks down the fiber, eliminating it’s ability to help keep things moving through the colon.
    Cooking alters or destroys the vitamins, phytonutrients, minerals, and amino acids so important for the health of our bodies. The longer and/or hotter food is cooked, the less nutrition it can provide and the more the immune system has to send out the white cell troops to fight it, leaving the body less protected against disease. It coagulates protein, making it unusable, creating cross-linked proteins, which cause a bunch of problems and speed up aging.
    Cooking meat generates atherogenic free-radical-initiating homocysteine, a major factor in heart disease.
    It also cuts down the food’s water content and changes the structure of the water, causing more problems. Maybe you’ve read some of the books on the weird properties of water. Heat changes it, as do magnets and vortexing.
    The higher the cooking temperature, the more toxic the result. Like mutagenic, carcinogenic substances and lots of free radicals. The heating creates new chemical composites, all toxic.
    The more live food that’s been killed by cooking, the more waste products to clog the digestive track, keeping it from getting good from what little usable food manages to get there.
    Anything over 118°F and the enzymes in raw food, which are so important for digestion, are gone. This overworks the pancreas and other organs, robbing enzymes, and eventually exhausts them. No, that is not good. Raw food is thus far easier to digest, providing the body with the nutrients it’s been designed to need, and it goes through the system in a third to a half the time of cooked food. And with no constipation.
    The more you cook meat (make that well done, please), the more it can slow down to a stop in the intestines, putrefying…making farts that can clear a room. And it can stay there for years, another toxin source (called lipofuscin) to help shorten your life.
    One of the major causes of obesity is the body not getting enough usable food and thus demanding more and more, blimping you out. Those protruding stomachs (bay windows) are largely filled with colons packed with putrefying old meat.
    This toxic assault on the immune system prevents it from handling it’s routine activities such as fighting off any invading germs, viruses, parasites or fungi. It also keeps it too busy to check on new cells as they’re made, trashing any cancerous cells before they can get started. It’s no wonder that half of Ameicans are coming down with cancer and a good proportion of them dying after a very expensive series of awful treatments. And aging much faster.
    Swiss researchers in 1930 found that the more food was cooked or processed, the more toxic it was to the body. Word of this has not yet reached our doctors, who are only concerned with treating the symptoms. Dr. Mercola, if you get his emails, is aware of this and, at last report, was running 90% raw.

12/3/08

Collectivitis
    I’ve been thinking. about my past, present and future. The things I’ve done. The things I’m doing. The things I’d like to do. Hey, I need to get rid of a lot of the baggage I’ve collected.
    Yeah, I collect things. Things I love. Books and records mostly. But there’s no way I can take my beloved books and records to the dump. Maybe there’s some way to find a loving home for them. Any ideas?
    There’s the thousand or so old 78 records, mostly classical and old country…Roy Acuff, Ernie Tubbs. I started my collection over seventy years ago. LPs? Ten or twenty thousand. All flavors. CDs? Thousands, again heavily oriented to classical.
    Back when LPs were putting 78s into antique shops, an old computer friend of mine, George Morrow, collected thousands of 78s. His plan was to take three copies of any title and digitize them. Then he’d have the computer sort through, keeping the sounds that were duplicated on two of the three records. This would get rid of random clicks and other noises. It was a great idea, but I never heard more of it. Now, that’s a good idea for preserving old performances on LPs as well as the old 78s. It’s a shame to lose all those old performances forever.
    How about my books? Maybe donate them to a library? I tried that with a big bunch of computer bvooks a while back. But libraries have limited shelf space so they have book sales or just throw out books no one asks to read. I found several of the books I’d donated being thrown out a couple years later.
    Other than my Secret Guide to Wisdom, I’m not aware of any reviews of books that are proven of value. My Guide covers a hundred or so key books. A better guide should review (not just list) at least a thousand.
    My book collection would make a wonderful library for a school that actually encourages the kids to read. How about a section on the school’s web site where the kids could post reviews of the books they’ve read, complete with references for the subjects it touches on to add to the index by subjects of all reviewed books?
    For instance, I have nine books in my collection that go into reincarnation, even though it may not be in the title. And they’re all interesting.
    I check the book sections of the Hancock and Peterborough dumps, finding some great gems at times. But, the most painful part is when the books that haven’t been taken are torn up and trashed.

12/2/08

419 Scams
    For some reason my w2nsd email address suddenly began being bombarded with Nigerian-type scams. Someone with my last name died in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, or Hong Kong, leaving no next of kin to collect the millions of dollars he left in a bank account. And unless someone steps up soon to collect it, all that money will go to the government. This bank official can arrange everything for a share in the money.
    Of course, if you are naive enough to give them your bank account information your account will quickly be not just cleaned out, but overdrawn, so you owe the bank money. Some of the scammers send you the money via a courier service, for which you have to prepay $250 or more.
    Wow, I’m rich!
    Then I began winning email lotteries, again with millions in prizes. For a while I was winning one or two a day. Toyota, Ford, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so on lotteries in Ireland, Nigeria, South Africa, England, etc. My luck was fantastic.
    But I was noticing many similarities to these messages. Like in the list I was to send back it asked for my names. Plural. Hmm. And several had misspelled words, the lower case “i” which should have been capitalized, some words capitalized that shouldn’t be, no space between sentences, and stuff like that. The same style from different countries with different names.
    I answered many of them as Alfred E. Neuman, and none caught on. I’ve saved all of ’em. Maybe I should open a space on my site for them as interesting reading. You’ll have to talk me into it.
    The latest approach is with 3% loan offers. I’ve gotten three of those in the last couple days. All asking for my names, bank accounts, driver’s license, passport, and so on. Yes, names....plural.
    Golly, I almost forgot the old women dying of cancer who want me to put their money to use helping charities.

12/1/08

Being One’s Best
    While watching one of Ross Perot’s commercials, when he was running for President, I took particular note of a comment made by both his family and friends…that he urged them to not just be good or better, but to be the very best they could be in life. This is a philosophy worthy of consideration. It got me to thinking…have I done my best to be the best that I possibly can? How about you?
    There’s being your best at your work. What a shame it is when parents don’t teach their children the importance of doing their very best. To me that means knowing more about my work than my competitors. It means endlessly doing my homework…which isn’t actually work because it’s fun. It means attending conferences, taking classes, reading books, subscribing to magazines. I just bought a new stack of books and am working my way through them. Some are tedious to read because they’re poorly written, but most are wonderful and give me lots of ideas.
    When I took on my responsibility as a member of the New Hampshire Economic Development Commission I refused to let the politicians and their efforts to block the Commission from doing anything of significance hold me back. Ross’ idea resonated with me.
    Whenever I take up a new interest I tend to go at it whole hog. When I got interested in horseback riding I took lessons…and more lessons. I found better and better experts and soon I was teaching riding myself. And then I was teaching instructors! I have a professor certificate from the Beery School of Horsemanship. When I got into sports car rallying I first learned to navigate and then to drive. I developed a new navigation system which filled my shelves with trophies. I needed special watches which would keep time accurately all day so I found a factory in Germany to make them for me and I imported them. I discovered a special pepper-grinder-like calculator used in Europe for currency conversions, but which was ideal for rallying. I went to the Curta factory in Liechtenstein and made a deal to import them for rallyists. I developed and printed my own rally tables, which were incredibly simple compared to those made by others. I buit little radios for cars to pick up the time signals from the National Bureau of Standards for precise timing. My customers were soon winning all the rallies.
     When I got interested in photography I read books, took lessons and spent endless hours in the school darkroom building my skills. I armed myself with everything from 35mm to 5x7 cameras. This helped be greatly when I became a TV cameraman at WPIX in New York and knew how to compose pictures. As a result I was made Chief Cameraman. Later, when I was a TV director in Dallas and Cleveland, I helped my cameramen get great pictures. In my early publishing days I took most of my own pictures.
    I didn’t take up skiing until I was 44, but then I went at it furiously. I took lessons and more lessons. In a few weeks I was skiing better than I ever thought I’d be able to in my life. So I took even more lessons. Now, in my 80s, I’m brittler and thus a bit more cautious in the trails I ski, since breaking something would be extremely inconvenient, but I still tear down the mountains, having more fun than should be legal.
    Somehow my parents got across to me the concept of trying to be the best I could at whatever I got interested in. I’ve been preaching this idea in my magazine editorials, hoping others would see the value of this approach to life and adopt it. So, how about you? Do you settle for less than your very best in what you do? Are you the best at work? Are you learning all you can or are you cheating yourself? When you gold brick through life you’re only cheating yourself.
    What challenge is there for you? What haven’t you done yet? Why not? What are your excuses?
    When I had sales teams for my computer magazines I’d hold a meeting and offer to let them read any of the books on selling I had in my book collection, and to listen to tapes I’d made of top salesmen. They were making good money selling ads, so I was unable to get them to try and get even better at it, They weren’t interested in the books or my tapes.
    Selling is a wonderful skill to develop, and not just for selling ads or products, but salesmanship is important in many of one’s dealing with others. You want a raise? You’d better be a good salesman when selling yourself. A skilled salesman will never go hungry. Indeed, the closer one gets to where the money comes in, the more one generally can make.
    The top sales people have all written books giving away their secrets. How many have you read?

11/30/08

Prisoners
    A recent survey showed that 25% of Americans believe the Sun revolves around the Earth. No wonder around 99% of us are still drinking diet colas, eating Big Macs and fries, and feeding our children pasteurized milk and sugar frosted cereals.
    We are prisoners of our almost totally bribed and controlled media, backed by a mandatory government public school system which was intentionally designed to discourage thinking and creativity. I wish I was exaggerating. We American sheep are being shorn to the tune of over $7,000 a year per man, woman and child, but the medical industry…unaware that there are NO incurable illnesses (www.drday.com) and that any illness can be cure easily and quickly when one stops putting poisons into and on their bodies (www.comby.org). So, rather than change to a raw food diet, cancer victims suffer the agonies of chemotherapy “fighting cancer” and then, usually die. If they go into remission, some $345,000 (average) later, since they continue doing what cause the cancer, it soon reappears.
    Putting sugar, caffeine, alcohol and nicotine into our bodies would be really stupid…if we knew better. We’re not so much stupid as ignorant, protected from the truth by our shepherds, who are milking and shearing us. Well, we sure don’t want to threaten our tobacco, coffee, beer, wine and booze industries. Or the most profitable industry in America, by a wide margin, our pharmaceutical industry.
   A recent Dr. Blaylock newsletter pointed out that the government declared war of cancer in the 1960s, throwing tens of billions of our money at the problem. So, here we are forty years later and death rates from most common cancers haven’t changed. Gee, that war has gone about as well as the war on drugs, in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe encouraging Congress to declare wars isn’t wise for us to keep doing, as we keep re-electing 95% of the incumbents who are spending our money.
    Blaylock even goes so far as to mention cancer prevention and treatment via diet! Damned trouble maker. He suggests the best way to eat vegetables is to blenderize them. I did that yesterday, making three quarts of kale and three quarts of spinach smoothies. I minced a pint each of carrots and broccoli, adding some of my sweet-sour-creamy cole slaw sauce. So I have several delicious raw meals ahead.

11/28/08

The Greatest Christmas Present Ever
    It is, of course, my $20 Secret Guide to Health. What greater present can you give a friend than health? Without that nothing else matters much. Yes, we’re throwing away half of our potential lives with the junk we’re eating. We’re giving ourselves cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and so on. We can’t blame God or bad luck. We can only blame the poisons, probably mostly unknowing, we’ve put into our bodies.
    “There are NO incurable diseases,” say both Dr. Lorraine day and Dr. Bruno Comby. You see, when we stop poisoning our bodies they are able to repair any problem we’ve created. Dare I used the word “cure” without having the government rush me to Guantanamo as a terrorist?
    That’s a $20 present. For $20 more you can also give a blender, which is a key tool for raw food preparation. It does fantastic things for oranges, grapefruit, and grapes. It makes fantastic smoothies with dark green leafy vegetables. I’ve found several stores around here selling name brand blenders for $20.
    If you order for mailing to a U.S. address, just send a $20 bill and I’ll mail you my book. Or a bundle of $20 bills for a box of books, postpaid. No, I’m not selling blenders.
    If there are any teenagers on your list, consider my $5 Secret Guide to Wealth, which explains what a huge ripoff a so-called “college education” is. It’s a waste of four to six very important years and tens of thousands of dollars to get them ready for a job in a large corporation. What a fantastic con job! Not one of the courses I took in my four years of college have ever been of any value to me in the many businesses I’ve been in or started.
    When Inc. magazine surveyed the top hundred American entrepreneurs, only a couple had completed college. The rest either didn’t waste their time and money, or dropped out, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ted Turner, and so on. The alternative is to own your own business. My book explains how to get someone else to teach you everything you need to know to start and run your own business, and to pay you to learn.
    If you want both books, put $25 in the envelope.

11/27/08

Outsourcing
    It costs less to have most products made in Asia, so that’s where jobs have been moving. American’s aren’t about to pay more for something just because it was made here, so imported products quickly put American-made products out of business. In the last ten years the number of American manufacturing jobs has gone from 17 million to under 13 million. Heck, we have more people working for the government, jobs that bring in no revenues and have to be supported by taxes.
    There have been proposals for stimulus programs to give the public money to spend, but when they do spend, a big part of the money will be spent on imported products. Imports, over the last 25 years, have gone from 9% of the gross domestic products to 19%.
    We need to get American back to manufacturing so we can export more and at least break even on what we’re spending on imports. Otherwise we’re going to go broke, like every past empire has. There’s just so long we can print money to make up the difference. Britain used to be Great when they included big parts of Africa, India, the Middle East, and Indonesia. They sure blew that one.
   Yes, if anyone cares, I have three new technology industries that could turn things around. But who’s going to listen to an old guy up on a hill in New Hampshire? Each could be world-changing trillion-dollar industries.

11/26/08

GM
    You know all the trouble GM is in and why. That’s easy, massively lousy management has been producing lousy, expensive cars. Taking off my fake modesty hat for a moment, more than any other person in the world, I could save their bacon. Even better, As a result we could have America again start making products the world wants. We need to end Americans having to buy products the world makes instead of American-made.
    Instead of losing $2 billion a month, GM could be raking it in by the hundreds of billions. But, far’s I know, there’s no way these guys, all with their own corporate jets, are going to listen to an old geezer from Hancock NH, even if he has a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurial Engineering.
    My first car was a 1932 Ford, which I bought for $20 in 1940, when I was 18. Then after WWII (1946) I bought a 1940 Ford, which I used until I bought a 1954 Ford Country Squire station wagon. Well, I’d started my first company in 1952 and was making big bucks by 1954. In 1957 I bought my first Porsche, and that was the end of my American car buying. Then it was a Volvo, which I picked up in Sweden, then a VW, which I picked up in Germany, more Porsches, also picked up at the Stuttgart factory, and so on. When Japan got into the act it was Datsuns, Toyotas, Mazda, and Hondas. My British Jaguar was nothing but headaches. 
    So, what could I do to help get GM back into the black? Well, how about an engine that will only need water for fuel as it generates electricity to power the car? And a new, enormously advanced battery (made in New Hampshire) which will more than substantially reduce the car weight? Then I can show them how to cut their healthcare costs drastically.
    Maybe I can interest them in setting up a New Hampshire factory to make units like their car engines for home heating and electricity generation. They should be able to sell hundreds of millions of those.
    Now, about those unions…


11/24/08

Abortion
   Aha, a hot button! Hey, don’t bother me about our healthcare industry killing two million Americans a year in order to shake us down for 16% of our earnings a year. That’s about $7,334 for every man, woman, and child. Or the hundreds of millions being killed by AIDS and malaria in Africa…which could be easily and quickly cured by a little blood purifier gadget that can be made for about $5 in quantity. Never mind about the massacres in Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Uganda, Congo, and other African countries. I almost forgot the Nigerian massacre of the Ibos. But then, so have you, I’ll bet.
    Some do-good idiots banned slavery, thus condemning millions of Africans to death. So the tribes went back to killing their neighbors instead of capturing and selling them.
    Our Native Americans spent their lives for thousands of years killing each other. The men were called warriors and braves. So we came over from civilized Europe and stopped all that. Well, maybe not stopped, just changed it. When I was 19 my government decided I was a warrior and had me spend four years killing as many Japanese as I could. And I helped kill a bunch. I was one of the lucky survivors. Twenty-four years earlier we sent millions of American youngsters over to Europe to kill Germans. And to be killed.
    It’s difficult for me to remember, as I consider human history, that life is precious. And that we’ve people making a huge deal out of pregnant unwed teens who have screwed up (or down) and don’t want to be forced to have unwanted children.
    I remember the sorry story of a woman whose mother, a bleeding heart Catholic liberal, who got knocked up by a Jewish man she was dating out of pity, and had to marry him. She let her daughter know whenever she got angry, that it was her fault her mother was married to this terrible man, who was making her life a living hell. She convinced her daughter that she was ugly. That she had an ugly face. An ugly body. Ugly hair. Ugly teeth.
    The poor girl, frantic to get away from an abusive father and a horrible mother, grabbed onto the first man she could, and this poor guy suddenly found himself trying to care for a wife who would go to bed for days crying in depression. Thousands of dollars and several years spent on psychiatrists didn’t help. Then, after a couple of suicide attempts, her psychiatrist had her put in a mental hospital/prison. They used to call them insane asylums. He gave up and divorced her.
    Life is easy (and fun) to start. So, other than from some religious conviction, against which common sense is powerless, what’s wrong with terminating unwanted pregnancies? It’s erasing a mistake. But how can the religious zealots square their forcing women to have unwanted babies while they sit watching The View, Oprah, and Maury from their couch while millions are dying because of their indifference over in Africa? Is it because they’re black, so who cares? I don’t recall any color lines in the Bible they thump.
    Forget Africa, how about getting upset over our healthcare industry helping to kill America by the millions. As I’ve mentioned before, scientists tell us that if we would give our bodies the nutrition, water, exercise, sunlight and sleep they’re designed to need, they should be good for 150 years. We’re getting half that. With 300 million America and living 150 years we’d have two million deaths a year. So we have four million dying a year, two million because we’re really screwing up on our nutrition, water, sunlight, exercise and sleep.
   
11/23/08

Safari I
    I just ran across the notes I took on my African hunting safari, back in 1966. In case you are hard up for reading I’ll post the story here for you. Please remember that any prices are in 1966 dollars, so make a mental twenty-times calculation for the Federal Reserve’s inflation of the dollar since then.
    My trip got started innocently enough. I’d been talking with a good amateur radio friend of mine, “Robbie” Robinson, a pharmacist in Nairobi, Kenya. His call was 5Z4ERR and I’d been talking with him over the air for years. Robbie kept asking when I was going to come over and go on a safari. Well, that was something for the rich, so I didn’t give it a lot of thought.
    Then a good friend sent me a book by George Herter, How To Go On A Safari  For $690. Now that was more suitable to my pocketbook. You’ve probably missed reading the Herter cook books. Pity. The safari book explained in detail how George had gone on safari in Kenya for $690. It sounded like fun. Instead of a big operation with tents and an army of attendants, you went up to Nanyuki and lived in an inexpensive hotel. Instead of hunting in the jungle, you hunted on farms.
    What had happened is that most of Kenya had been divided up into farms, complete with barbed wire fences. A good deal of wild life was now living in and around these farms. The government had made it illegal for the farmers to shoot the wild animals, but the farmers wanted them off their farms so their cattle would be able to graze. This left thousands of impala, zebras, Grant’s gazelles, Thompkin’s gazelles, plus a few elands, oryxes, waterbucks, and so on to eventually be eliminated. The government made money selling hunting licenses to visiting hunters to shoot these animals. This served the government, the farmers, and the hunters.
    So I decided to go on safari.
    When I priced the air fare to Kenya I noticed that it didn’t cost a lot more to just go on and fly around the world instead of going straight back. My trip thus expanded from three weeks in Kenya to more like three months going around the world.
    I needed something like that at this time in my life. I’d been through my first divorce the year before and was still in despair over it. I’d been deeply in love with my wife, but she suffered from what seemed like manic depression and, despite extensive psychiatric care, had to be put in a mental hospital to keep her from suicide. It was more than I could deal with, so we got divorced.
    It would be a lot more fun on a trip like that if I had some company, so I asked in my ham magazine editorial if there was anyone with the time to take such a trip. I got two replies, one from Jim Cotton, down in Texas, and the other from Larry Frank, from Los Angeles.
    Larry went with us on the hunting safari, but then had to return home for business instead of going on around the world. Jim went on around, but didn’t want to do any hunting. he just wanted to take pictures, so Larry and I did the hunting.

Safari II — July 15, 1966
    Perhaps this minor travelogue should be subtitled Gullibles’ Travels, for I naively have been believing a lot of things that have disillusioned me. For instance I believed the airline people when they confirmed and reconfirmed my flight from Boston to Rome to Nairobi. Know where I am as I file this report? Flying from Athens to Cairo. The last two days have been fascinating.
    Three of us started out from Peterborough on Tuesday afternoon on our way to Kenya for a big game hunting safari. We drove to Boston and boarded an Alitalia jet bound for Rome. All was going well as we fastened our seatbelts and started munching on the candy the stewardess passed around as we took off at 9 pm. Almost every flight to Europe starts at night and pulls in the next morning. This is bad news for the traveler because it results in miserable fatigue all the next day.  What happens is this. Most of us get up fairly early on the day of departure and spend a very full day in packing, weighing the bags, wondering how much we can sneak by over that 44 pound weight limit, saying good bye to friends, and trying to attend to all the hundreds of details that should be taken care of before we go. By evening we are bushed and we stagger into the airline terminal with our bags while the police outside do everything in their power to make life miserable for us and try their darndest to force us to park our car a half mile away and bring the bags from there.
    The seasoned traveler hides his hand luggage and appears at the check-in desk with one or two bags which will pass the weight limit. Overweight on our trip was $7.50 per pound...in other words forget it! If the girl at the desk asks if you have anything else you just wave vaguely and admit to a camera and a book. I always feel just a bit guilty as I struggle past the desk later with my suitcase full of cameras, a portable typewriter, binoculars, attaché case and bulging flight bag. At $7.50 a pound I have no shame.
    Once the flight begins the pattern is standard. For the first half hour the seat belt sign is on and you are strapped in place and immobile. Then the stewardesses jump out of their seats and fill the aisle with a giant cart full of bottles and for the next hour they serve hooch. The lights are on, the glasses clinking and the voices are loud...there is no possibility of snoozing. then, when the alcoholics are well oiled, new carts are pressed into service and the food comes pouring out. The first class passengers get a six or eight course dinner...tourist class gets a tray.
    Dinner finishes up around 1 am and about 1:30 or so the lights are turned out and everyone settles back to sleep. You know what time it is in Europe at 1:30 Boston time? It’s 6:30 am. You get a couple hours rest and suddenly the lights go on and you find yourself gulping some orange juice followed by a breakfast tray. Before long you are there, you’ve struggled yourself into your hotel and you are good for another hour or so before dropping in your tracks. Few tourists make it past 4 in the afternoon. About that time they decide to take a short nap. From which they awake at ten that night. Or maybe midnight.
    And there you are, completely slept out, hungry, and no place to eat, no place to go and little to do, with the whole night still ahead of you.
    I checked all the airline schedules trying to find one that left in the morning and arrived at night so I could beat the rap. Not a chance. We left at night, as usual. Just to set my mind at ease, we took off an hour late...leaving me with some nervousness about my connection in Rome with the Alitalia flight to Nairobi. We only had about an hour and a half between the flights and it wouldn’t be the first time I had managed to miss a connection. I needn’t have worried.
    By some gift of the gods all three of us were put in the first class compartment. Seems they had too many tourist class seats sold and didn’t have room for us there. Pity. We did not complain even once during the beautiful meal or when we settled back in the oversized seats while the tourist class passengers squirmed in their crammed quarters.
    Rome was clear and hot...about 90 degrees. We sleepily stumbled into the big new terminal building and headed for the Alitalia counter to find out about our Nairobi flight. The place was quite crowded and the air conditioning had obviously been overwhelmed. It took me a while to find out what was going on. I heard quite a bit of excited Italian and much shaking of heads Something was wrong. The word Nairobi kept being repeated...our flight!
    Finally it came in English. The flight to Nairobi had been canceled and they thought they might be able to get us there on another flight on Saturday. If that one failed then we would surely make it the following Tuesday. Good grief.
    My first reaction was that they couldn’t do that to me. The flight was confirmed. How could they just cancel it. Why couldn’t they get us on some other plane to Nairobi...etc. Their answer was that nothing could be done, there was no other way to get to Nairobi, and Alitalia would put us up in a hotel in Rome and buy us three meals a day as long as we were stranded. If we hadn’t been due to go on safari (at $100 a day) starting Friday we might have been enthusiastic about the free vacation in Rome.
    After several hours of checking airline schedules we found that there were two possible ways of getting to Nairobi by Friday noon, one via Athens and the other by way of Tel Aviv. Aha, but which way could we get seats? Reservations came through for both paths, so we chose the Athens route.
    By nine that night (Wednesday) we had made the two hour flight to Athens and were sitting in the Hotel Elektra, the guests of Alitalia, eating dinner. We were irritated. In the process of haunting the Alitalia people at the Rome airport, an activity that separated us from all the other Nairobi bound travelers who succumbed and stayed in Rome in hopes that they might get through on Saturday, we had wormed out of them that the reason the flight had been canceled was that we were having an air strike in the U.S. and Alitalia could get more revenue by using the plane to replace the struck U.S. planes than running it partly filled to Nairobi. Further, they admitted that the Nairobi flight had been canceled well before we had left Boston.
    Our disposition wasn’t helped any when the taxi driver taking us from the Alitalia office to the hotel stole several cartons of cigarettes that we had been bringing for the safari boys. Insult to injury. (Note to incipient travelers: watch every bag every minute.)
    The hotel claimed not to have the three single rooms Alitalia had paid for, doubling us up. The day and a half with little sleep soon caught up with us and we sacked out for the night, the air conditioning turned up full blast.
    The next morning, considerably refreshed, we had a continental breakfast courtesy Alitalia and a glass of orange juice (50 cents) at our own expense. Then we crossed the street and bought some drachmas at American Express. Boy, do they make a big deal out of that compared to the fast change I made at the airport when we arrived. The drachma is worth about 3 cents.
    We window shopped a little, but got frightened off by the fantastic prices. We tried different methods of shaking the men that sidled up to us and tried to con us into going to nightclubs, renting girls, selling us pistachio nuts, etc. Cameras in hand, we took a taxi to the Acropolis, a 30 cent ride from downtown.
    The Acropolis, Parthenon, et al, are high on a hill in the center of Athens. It is a bit of a climb and hard work in the fierce sun and 90 degree heat. We clicked off film, shooting everything in sight for an hour or so and then took a taxi back downtown for lunch.
    Our flight to Nairobi was scheduled to leave that night about midnight. Suddenly it occurred to us that Alitalia might have only paid for our rooms for one night and that if we stayed until flight time we might have to pay for a day ourselves. It didn’t seem reasonable, but we decided to check and make sure. Righto, we were heading into a $28 room bill with no warning. Boy, you have to think of everything and ask. We could have one room for $8, if we wanted.
    We thought this all over and brought up the matter of the three rooms that had been paid for with only two rooms used and the hotel decided to let us move into the one room as long as we got out by 8 pm. Deal.
    In moving from the one room to the other I managed to leave a bag of flashbulbs behind. Later, when I remembered, they “couldn’t find” them. First the three cartons of cigarettes and then the flashbulbs. Athens was cutting our baggage down for us at a good clip.
    We had several hours to walk around town between hotel check out and bus to airport time. I’m a fooder, so I tried out some ice cream and found it to be fabulous. The second cone was a disappointment, being like frozen custard everywhere. I tried what looked like a glass of grapefruit-ade, squeezed and mixed as I watched, but found that the grapefruits were lemons. Lemonade, and great. Biggest damned lemons I’ve ever seen.
    Almost every street-corner has a fellow with a little brazier roasting corn. Smelled good, but with the ice cream and lemonade plus the big dinner (on Alitalia) our appetites were a little off. I think this corn bit is a new gimmick, I don’t remember it when I first visited Athens several years ago.
    About 2 am we lifted off for Cairo aboard an Ethiopian Airlines 720 jet. Note: orange drink downtown runs 9 cents, at the airport it costs 27 cents. Hoot mon. On board the plane we were served ice cold lambergers with cold fried onions and a piece of cake. The cake was fine.
    At Cairo we found postcards selling for 25 cents each and, being dedicated cheapskates, passed this opportunity by. Everything else available was similarly priced.
    From Cairo we whooshed on down to Asmara (Ethiopia), then on to Addis Ababa. As this is being written we are arriving in Nairobi, a day and a half late. We’ve missed another night of sleep and are groggy, just to help matters.
    For some years I have been talking over my amateur radio station with a chap in Nairobi and he has been persistently suggesting that I come over and pay him a visit. Just recently I managed to get my little publishing business (an amateur radio magazine) well enough organized so that I could consider such a formidable jaunt. I mentioned the trip in my magazine and soon found myself with two other amateurs as traveling partners. As I read more about Africa I got more enthused about including a bit of a safari in my visit. My traveling companions were agreeable so we made arrangements for a three week hunting safari followed by a two week drive through the wilds of East Africa.
    When I went to price the air fare for the flight I found that for about $200 extra we could return by way of the Pacific. So we added a few more weeks and 23 more countries to the trip. One of my companions, a manufacturer from Los Angeles, Larry Frank, couldn’t spare that much time from his business, so he decided to return after the Africa section. The other, Jim Cotten, a lawyer from Texas, said what the hell you only live once and bought the package.
    None of us have ever hunted anything more dangerous than woodchucks or hedgehogs before. We haven’t even shot anything much more lethal than a .22. Rank amateurs. Our safari outfit has guaranteed us a whole list of game, including one of the most dangerous of the lot, the cape buffalo. I wonder if they haven’t bit off a lot for us to chew.

11/22/08

Ham History
    Most of us are so busy messing with the trees that we’re unaware of the forest.
    The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national amateur organization, paid an independent survey company in 1960 to do a study of amateur radio. The report showed that 80% of all ham newcomers were teenagers, with 50% being either 14 or 15 years old (just like me). Further, they found that 80% of these newcomers ended up pursuing high-tech careers as a result of their interest in amateur radio.
    Mort Kahn K2CR, a multimillionaire WWII war profiteer, bought the ARRL Hudson Division Director’s job and quickly forced the ARRL General Manager “Bud” Budlong W1BUD to retire, replacing him with Bud’s gofer, John Huntoon, who then became Kahn’s puppet.
    In 1962, despite the strong growth of the hobby, the ARRL membership had dropped, so Kahn held an emergency meeting of a few trusted League directors aboard his $2 million yacht on Long Island in December 1962. He also invited a few of his 3999 kHz cronies to the meeting. The goal was to turn things around and get the membership to grow again.
    In order to focus attention on the League, and therefore attract new members, Kahn proposed that they come up with something controversial for the League to do. Several ideas were discussed, but the winner was from Tom McAnn K2CM, who suggested going back to the pre-WWII system where there were just Class A and Class B licenses, with Class A having phone privileges on the major HF bands and Class B phone again restricted to the ham 10 and 160 meter bands.
    Huntoon, in the next QST editorial, obediently wrote that the League directors felt that there were some serious problems with amateur radio and that these might be solved by restructuring the rules to encourage amateurs to upgrade their licenses. He called it “Incentive Licensing.”
    Kahn’s group proposed making the General Class licensees have to upgrade to Advanced Class in order to continue to use phone on the HF bands between 10 and 160m. This would, in effect, force about 90% of the active amateurs to have to be relicensed to continue to use phone on the bands they’d been using.
    Well, it was controversial, that’s for sure. All hell broke loose. No other group had ever been forced by the government to be relicensed to continue their practice—doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, and so on. It was so controversial that the directors at their spring meeting handed the hot potato to the Executive Committee to deal with. Yes, of course Kahn had tight control of that group. The next step came in October 1963 when the Executive Committee submitted the Incentive Licensing proposal to the FCC. The other directors were furious because they never had a chance to see it before it was submitted.
    In addition to the loss of phone frequencies, the proposal also called for new hams to use only Morse Code (CW) for two years before being allowed to upgrade to general, as before WWII.
    The immediate ham reaction was fury and frustration. They weren’t about to have to take their license exams again. That meant re-learning the code, which 90% had long forgotten, and memorizing hundreds of Q&As for the written exam. No f…… way! So tens of thousands of hams put their stations up for sale, often for dimes on the dollar. This avalanche of used ham gear almost totally destroyed the ham industry within two years.
    Virtually all of the major ham manufacturers went out of business, as did almost 90% of the ham stores. I’d just started 73 magazine in 1960, and by 1963 I had 850 ham stores selling my magazine over their counters. By 1965 this was down to under a hundred survivors. By 1965 Hallicrafters, Hammarlund, National Radio, Multi-Elmac, Thordarson, Stancor, Gonset, Barker & Williamson, Lakeshore Industries, Central Electronics, Sideband Engineers, and so on were gone.
    Worse, also blown away were almost 100% of the school radio clubs, and over 90% of the other ham clubs. Gone was the infrastructure which had been bringing us new hams.
    When I got interested in electronics the first thing I did was join my high school radio club (W2ANU). They encouraged me to get my license. And this was the route over 80% of all new hams had taken.
    By 1964 the steady growth of amateur radio had stopped and, for the first time since WWII, we had a drop in new hams. I did a study of the FCC licensing figures and found that the hobby had been growing steadily at a rate of 11% per year for the previous 16 years, growing from 50,000 hams at the end of WWII to 240,000 by 1963.
    I found, when I attended IEEE shows, that virtually all of the top people in the electronics industry were hams. Well, with the hobby providing about 200,000 high-tech career youngsters to the industry, this wasn’t any surprise.
    At about the same time that Kahn quietly railroaded Incentive Licensing into the FCC’s hopper, the Japanese went the other direction, introducing a no-code all band low power ham license. So, while our growth went into a decline, theirs went crazy, with ham clubs opening in every school in Japan.
    And, boy, were they active! When I got on the air from countries around the Pacific area such as Sarawak, Sabah, Korea, New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tahiti I found massive pileups of Japanese low-powered stations calling me.
    It wasn’t until 2 meter FM and repeaters caught on in 1970 that we started to see growth again, but since then our growth has been in the 1% and 2% range most of the time. If Kahn hadn’t come along with Incentive Licensing we would likely have about 11.5 million hams today, with 9.5 million in high-tech careers.
    Also, with kids today largely unaware of the hobby, and with few schools having radio clubs any more, there has been a secondary, and also very destructive result.
    Right after WWII, there was a young ham (26) who lived a few blocks from me in Brooklyn, Jack Babkes W2GDG (two gallons of dry gin), and he was all excited over his idea of narrow band FM (NBFM). He’d gotten the FCC to permit it to be tested on parts of our phone bands, so naturally I quickly installed a phase modulator on my Command Set exciter and was in business on 20m with NBFM. Wow, no 500-watt modulator for my KW rig. Today virtually all VHF rigs are using NBFM.
    Single sideband was invented by a young ham, as was slow scan TV (Copthorn McDonald). Nicola Tesla was in his 20s when he invented alternating current, transformers, ac motors, the loud speaker, fluorescent lights, and so on. Edison, by the way, fought ac until his dying day.
    By inadvertently killing our school radio club infrastructure, the League cut off our source of young hams, which is around 8% today, instead of 80%. And by killing off all of the American radio giants of the 50s, they opened the market up for Japanese companies to take over the world market for radios, then TVs, recorders, and everything else in consumer electronics.
    In the 1980s, when I was visiting Japan once or twice a year, hosting two to three hundred Americans looking for consumer electronic products to import, every electronics company I visited was packed with young  Japanese hams. When I visited the sole remaining American manufacturer of HF ham gear I found one old timer sitting there doing the development work. When I visited Kenwood, Icom, Yaesu, and so on, I was amazed at the huge labs, with dozens of engineers and technicians, almost all young hams, developing their new rigs.
    If we had 9.5 million engineers and technicians in America today, would we have totally lost our entire consumer electronics industry to Japan? I doubt it. And the same goes for all the other high-tech industries we’ve lost and are paying for with enormous balance of payment penalties as we are forced to buy imported equipment.
    I think I can make a good case for the ARRL to have cost America over $20 trillion so far, and probably a billion dollars a day from now on—not to mention where our military technology might be today if we’d had bright high-tech youngsters to help develop new systems.
    But, the nay-sayers will counter, if the League hadn’t stopped our growth in 1964, where would we ever have the spectrum to handle 11.5 million hams? Heck, there are any number of technologies which the pressure for innovation would have encouraged. Just changing from single sideband to double sideband and using synchronous detectors in our receivers would have allowed us to have at least ten to twenty times as many stations using the same spectrum. We’re seeing data compacting systems being developed to cram more information through the bandwidth supported by phone wires. With data burst transmissions and spread spectrum we could probably handle a hundred times more contacts in the same spectrum.
    Then there are our microwave bands, which are virtually empty. With more hams and system developments we could have had a world ham communications system via satellites 20 years ago. I talked with the top people in the corporations which had satellites in operation and they all said they had no problem with allowing hams to use some of their unused channels. I wrote about this at the time, but nothing ever happened. That was while I was a member of the FCC’s Long Range Planning Commission (LRPC).

11/21/08

Me and Ham Radio
    My involvement with ham radio started in 1931, when my grandfather, Tully (Pop), took me to visit the ham shack (wherever a ham operator keeps his station is called his ham shack) of Harry Stevenson W1CUN, in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. It was an awe inspiring sight, with Harry sitting there, his long legs entwined in his chair, talking to someone on the radio, with his final tubes glowing red to white when he spoke and his 866 rectifiers flashing bright blue. How could I even imagine that I’d have my ham shack in the same building 15 years later, sitting there for a summer, talking to the world?
    Okay, a little background. My grandmother, Netta (short for Anetta), had serious asthma problems during the summers in Brooklyn (NY), where they’d moved in 1909, when my mother was nine years old. They’d moved there from Denver when Pop’s old school chum Henry L. Dougherty, got an inheritance and talked Pop into moving to Brooklyn to start the Improved Appliance Corporation. Pop was an inventor and the company made and sold his inventions.
    The business did well enough so Dougherty looked around for ways to invest the profits. He decided that the recently invented automobiles were going to be a big thing, so he started investing in oil wells. The company today is known as Citco. It started out as Cities Service Company.
    By 1919 Pop was doing well enough so they spent the summer in Vermont, to help Netta with her asthma. That’s where my mother got to know Osa, later to marry Martin Johnson, the African explorer. Their films were sensations in the 20s. The next year Pop and the family tried Bethlehem, which was high on the side of Mt. Agassiz, and a famous hay fever refuge. They stayed at the Valley View Inn, where Johnny MacCauley was the major domo and chef, and the pastry cook was Mamie Stevenson. Her son, Harry, had his ham shack in a shed in back of the hotel.
    They liked Bethlehem so much that they bought an old farm. Johnny organized the renovation of the farm house into a nice summer cottage.
    Word quickly spread to my dad (to be) in Littleton, the next town, that an attractive young girl had arrived. By August he had married my mother. He was a dashing Army pilot and my mother was a commercial artist, painting magazine cover art. I was born a year later in the Littleton hospital.
    Now, with that background, back to the radio saga. My father’s dad, F.E., by the time I knew him, was the Littleton water and light commissioner. But, best of all, he had an all-wave radio in his living room, so whenever we’d visit, I was soon glued to the radio, listening to the hams on 20m from all around the world. Brazil, the Canary Islands, Morocco, India, Wow!
    It didn’t take long for me to get some short wave listener (SWL) cards printed and I started collecting QSL cards from the ham stations I was hearing.
    When I was ten (1933) we moved from Washington DC when Luddington Airlines (my dad was the passenger and cargo manager) was sold to Eastern Air Transport. So dad quickly got busy starting a seaplane-based airline (Marine Airlines) to fly between lower Manhattan and downtown Boston. We moved, temporarily, in with Netta and Pop in Brooklyn. Pop died a couple years later of pneumonia—he was a heavy cigar smoker, so his lungs had little stamina.
    About a year after that, in 1936, an angel appeared one Sunday in Sunday school with a box of old radio parts and gave them to my best friend Alfie. He took one look in the box and said, “Here, d’ya want this stuff?” You bet I did! And that was a major turning point in my life.
    The second turning point was when I used the parts to build a cigar-box radio from an article in Popular Mechanics and…it worked! I was hooked. I joined the Erasmus Hall High School radio club (W2ANU), built bigger and better radios, and started visiting every local ham I heard. I marked a map with the location of every Brooklyn ham and went to see them on my roller skates. By my senior year I was president of the school radio club.

11/20/08

High Blood Pressure
    See if your library can get you a copy of Sam Biser’s Curing with Cayenne. In a nation with millions of people slowly killing themselves with high blood pressure, according to Sam’s book all it takes is a teaspoon of cayenne three times a day in some hot water to get one’s blood pressure down.
    Doctors, and people in the know about cayenne, are saving lives. When someone keels over with a heart attack they quickly warm a cup of water, stir in a tablespoon of cayenne, pour it down the person’s throat, and it’ll save their lives. Cayenne is good, too, for open cuts. bullet holes, and even frozen feet or fingers. The Biser book is worth a lot more than the $36 it costs from Box 8122, Van Buys, CA 91499.
    Well, that ties right in with Dick Quinn’s Left For Dead, which explains how he avoided having a second heart attack with cayenne. It helps roto-root the arteries. That’s reviewed on page 7 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom, and is available from the American Society of Dowsers book shop.

11/19/08

Peterborough
    In 1960, when I started my first magazine, I’d been living in New York City, on and off, for quite a while. I wanted to get the heck out of there. Well, having been born in New Hampshire, and spent many of my summers at my grandparents cottage just outside of Bethlehem, I got in my little Porsche Speedster and headed north.
    Just over the border, not far from Boston’s Logan airport for air travel, I stopped in Peterborough to look around. John Peterson, the local real estate agent had a Speedster in front of his office. Wow, a fellow Porsche fan! And I was the president of the Porsche Club of America.
    I explained to John that I needed a house. A big one, since I would be publishing my magazine there. And, being a ham radio hobbyist the house should be on high ground for good coverage with my ham station. Oh, and one more thing. I haven’t any money, so it’ll have to be low rent or no down payment—what’ve you got?
    John checked his files and took me to a huge house, overlooking Peterborough. Forty rooms and a four car garage. Great location. Plenty big enough. Beautiful old place, over 250 years old. But, how much is it? He said it was free. Wow! I’ll take it!
    It turned out the house was owned by the New Hampshire Historical Society and they needed someone to live in it, keep it up, and pay the taxes. Eventually I bought the place from them. And, as I got to publishing more and more magazines and books, I expanded, buying the house next door, another in North Peterborough, one in West Peterborough, and the Motel.
    John and I got to be good friends. He was an avid hunter, so we had a great time hunting around Peterborough, Maine, and up in Canada.

11/18/08

Free Staters
    New Hampshire is slowly being invaded by Americans who believe in liberty and freedom, and who would like to escape from the socialist nightmare Congress has created. They picked New Hampshire because we have the lowest state and local tax burden in the country, the second lowest dependence of federal spending, and the lowest crime level.
    Well, we’ve got lots of room for them, and we sure can use their help to make New Hampshire even better. I’d sure like to see us the healthiest, best educated, most prosperous state. We’ve always been a pioneer state, so let’s get busy cutting the ways the federal government is binding us to their socialist programs.
    Once we get our people to stop making themselves sick with their diets and lifestyles, there’ll be little need for Medicare and Medicade, and we’ll be living twice as long in robust health. Once we break free from the 19th century compulsory public school system, we’ll be able to raise a generation of creative geniuses. With business incubator groups in every sizable town, we’ll grow thousands of new businesses, eliminating unemployment problems.
    Until the midwestern farmlands can be cleaned up so they can grow organic crops we’re going to need to get our kids busy planting thousands of gardens. We’ve no shortage of granite to remineralize the gardens, so we won’t need to take supplements any longer to be healthy.
    It would be great if the Legislature could be infiltrated so we can get rid of the laws against selling raw milk. Better yet, make it illegal to sell pasteurized milk, except from the pasteurizing plant door.

11/17/08

Bah, Humbug!
    I hate Christmas, and you would too, if you’d had my experience.
    It all started when I was eleven. That’s the first time I was old enough to go downtown to shop by myself. Up until then Christmas had been a wonderful time. School was out for a week. And Christmas day meant piles of presents. What’s not to be excited about?
    We were living in Washington, D.C. at the time and a taxi anywhere in the city was 25¢. That’s about $5.00 in today’s dollarettes. So I went downtown to the department stores and bought presents for my mom and dad. My trip was more than rewarded Christmas morning when my mother just couldn’t get over how creative I’d been in my choice of presents for them. I felt great about it. Cloud nine.
    The next Christmas season I was at it again, searching the department stores for unusual presents. And I found them, but I was already beginning to feel the pressure. Mom was again surprised and delighted at the creativity of my presents.
    By the third Christmas the pressure was enormous to outdo myself. I found that just going into a department store was making me sick. I hadn’t a clue as to what to look for. In show business they call it flop sweat. Boy, could I identify with Scrooge. Christmas? Bah! Humbug!
    Now, at 86, I assure you that my childhood trauma permanently marked me.
    My mother was surprised at the creativity of my gifts and anxious to reward me for my thoughtfulness. She had no clue that she was going to ruin the holiday for me for the rest of my life.
    There’s no way I can give socks or a necktie for a present. A present has to be something the recipient would never have thought of and be delighted to get. It’s a curse. Here’s some money, go find something incredibly creative for yourself.

11/16/08

Editorial
    Here’s the editorial for the January 2009 issue of NH ToDo that I submitted to the editor.

Change
    Many of us start out the new year by listing changes we’d like to make in our lives. So it’s fitting that President-elect Obama’s largest plank in his campaign platform was for change. Considering the boggling messes we’ve gotten ourselves into, our country desperately needs change…and not a small change. Say, have you watched the Small Change DVD exposing the almost unlimited number of questions the government has refused to answer or even investigate about the 911 attack? Let’s add that to the list of needed changes.
    So here we are, up to here in messes we (mostly congress and the administration) have made for ourselves, and with no simple credible solutions. Like those two wars (1). Like America having one of the worst health records of the developed countries, and at enormously higher expense (2). Like our students coming in at the bottom in international surveys…graduating kids from high school who have to take remedial reading courses when they go to college (3). Like a million or three illegal immigrants swarming over the southern border every year (4). Like the loss of one major industry after another to Asia (5). I almost forgot our super-bloated government, which has doubled in size in the last few years, with more government workers than in our factories (6).
    On www.waynegreen.com I’ve proposed some creative solutions I think you’ll like. Some of them will have to be implemented by that bungling, corrupt congress we don’t seem to be able to stop ourselves from re-electing (we re-elect 95% of the incumbents). But there are some solutions to major problems we could spearhead here in New Hampshire. Hey, we’re Yankees, and we’re one of the states that got this country started when we got fed up with being screwed by England.
    This time, instead of revolting with guns and cheating, the way our ancestors did, by hiding behind trees and shooting the ranks of British soldiers lined up in the fields, the way wars were supposed to be fought, let’s start a new kind of revolution and start upsetting the powerful interests resisting change.
    Education? Let’s show ’em we can be number one. How about tuition-free colleges, with no government support needed, that run fifty weeks of the year to graduate students in three years instead of four to six? Students that are vastly better educated than we’re graduating today? Hey, today, in our high-tech age, we’re only graduating about 70,000 scientists and math students a year, while India is graduating 400,000, and China 600,000. We’re being left behind in the educational dust. I’d sure like to see New Hampshire pioneer changing that, showing our country how it can be done.
    The old factory buildings in Manchester are a monument to losing our industries to foreign countries. So let’s start some new industries and bring money back into our state. One that I’ve proposed, would require our planting a legal crop which would cost nothing to plant and would net at least $100,000 a year per acre. Maybe as much as $250,000. And it could kick off a new industry.
    As an Associate Professor of Energy, Institute of Basic Research, I’ve got a proven new source of energy the oil industry has done it’s best to bury, one that can supply unlimited non-polluting energy at less than a tenth the cost of oil. Think no more gas stations, no more electrical power grid, with nuclear power plants no longer needed.
    Why does a Machiavelli quote come to mind? “It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, so that between them he is in great danger.”
    And, as Schaupenhauer put it: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
    How about a show of hands? How many of you are interested in helping get some desperately needed changes started here in New Hampshire? How many would rather watch a Red Sox game with six-pack of beer and pretzels at hand?
    So, let’s get behind those trees again and mow down our oppressors who’ve been taking us to the cleaners…shearing us like obedient sheep. I think you’ll like my proposals for health, education, easily winning the two wars, and unbloating the government. Let’s make New Hampshire a starter of change for America that’ll give us a whole new country by 2020.
    Now, if your reaction is to suspect I’ve been smoking too much weed, check www.computerworld.com, search for Wayne Green, and read about me.
    Now, just for example, how about a creative solution to the government bloat? A way to cut any bureau or department in half in three years with everyone involved enthusiastically cooperating? Impossible? Nah, easy, and you can help prove it by getting your member of the legislature to get it going.
    As George Santayana wrote, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” Next, if you haven’t read Parkinson’s Law (1957) you missed a history lesson. His Law #1, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” This results, Parkinson found, in government bureaus historically growing steadily at about 7% per year.
    How can we not just stop, but reverse this? My solution is to use human nature. The present system encourages the people in a department to make sure their budget is totally spent by the end of the fiscal year so they can ask for more next year. Instead, let’s make it so that if there is any unspent money in the budget at the end of the fiscal year it is split among the department’s staff. You can bet there’s going to be an awful lot of unspent money. The next year they start with what the actually spent the year before and repeat the process. In three years the department will be cut in half or more, and will be functioning far better.
    Let’s get that going in New Hampshire and save a bundle. Get busy nagging your legislator.
    You’re going to love my human nature rather than a military quick solution to our two wars.

11/15/08

Fluoride
    It’s still difficult for me to accept that the people of Manchester, on referendum, okayed having fluoride added to their water. Ahh, the triumph of money over health. The triumph of propaganda and advertising, promoting ignorance.
    So, I was glad to see Dr. Blaylock pointing out in his newsletter that fluoridated water lowers IQs and one’s ability to think. Well, this is a big plus for the government and the corporations in control of the government, where an educated, thinking consumer is a serious danger.
    There has never been any reliable proof that fluoride helps children’s teeth, which is supposedly the reason for adding this deadly poison to town water supplies. Indeed, in California, towns are forced by the state to add fluoride to their water.
    It’s lowering the IQ of babies and is causing birth defects, as witness the large increase in Down’s syndrome in fluoridated towns. With every drink of water it accumulates in the brain…d’uh?
    Until you can get your town to stop adding this waste product of fertilizer and aluminum production, I suggest you invest $120 in a still. See www.steamdistiller.com. I use mine every day.
    Many New Hampshire schools (and probably those in many states) are forcing their students to get fluoride rinses. If your child has had this happen, keep a close eye on your child’s teeth for signs of mottling. At the first sign find a good lawyer and sue the hell out of the school board for permanently disfiguring your child. Do the same if your child swallows the rinse and dies.
    For more info on fluorides check www.mercola.com. Dr. Mercola has plenty to say on the matter.

11/14/08

Cancer
    Dr. Blaylock is usually right on. His Excitoxins, The Taste That Kills (page 49 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom) explains how toxic to our bodies food additives like MSG and aspartame are…contributing to strokes, brain tumors, and dementia.
    His October newsletter points out it was almost fifty years ago the government declared war on cancer. That’s gone about as well as the government’s wars on poverty, drugs, and terrorism. After spending tens of billions in the “war” on cancer the death rates for common cancers haven’t changed. Most cancers, by the time they’re discovered, have spread through the body and are usually a death sentence.
    Well, up until recently. Though somewhere between 99.9% and 99.9994% of all doctors (which unfortunately includes Dr. Blaylock) are totally unaware that  a simple, cost-free, quick, fail-proof, cancer cure has been found. Alas, with billions of dollars dependent upon doctors not hearing about the simple cure, and almost no dollars if they find out, the secrecy is understandable and pretty well guaranteed.
    So, the next time you’ve got a couple minutes to spare, email askblaylock@newsmax.com and ask him to look into www.drday.com, www.comby.org and www.waynegreen.com and wise up to the power of a raw food diet to cure any illness. Any.
    If enough of us rattle his chain, maybe we can get him to think outside the medical industry box.

 11/13/08

Tara Singh
    While putting my summer clothes away in the attic I came across a brand new denim shirt that brought back memories. I bought it to send to my friend Tara Singh in Burma (now Myanmar).
    It was back in 1966 and it all started when two events meshed. One was the repeated invitations from a ham radio friend in Nairobi to come over and visit Kenya and the other was a present from old friend Jim Morrisett of George Christian Herter’s book How to Go on an African Safari for $695. Hey, that I can afford.
    Since the round trip air fare to Nairobi wasn’t much different from going on around the world, why not? In a 73 Magazine editorial I asked if any of the readers would be interested in a going on a bargain-priced African hunting safari with me. Two were, one from California and the other from Texas.
    It was a great safari, with me sending home a crate of skins and a mounted water buck head. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It was a fantastic adventure, complete with the three of us coming tha-a-at close to getting killed by some Somalian Shifta tribesmen in the Great Rift Valley, near Ndoldol.
    After the safari we visited the Serengetti game park in Tanzania and the headwaters of the Nile in Uganda for more pictures. Then I went on to visit hams in Ethiopia, the Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji, Western Samoa, American Samoa, Tahiti, and back to America. Each country visit was an adventure.
    For instance, Burma. It was difficult to get a visa to visit Burma. You were allowed to stay just one day and had to have confirmed flight reservations to leave in order to be admitted. After a few days in Nepal, staying at the school run by Father Moran (9M1MM) in Katmandu, I flew to Calcutta for a day, on my way to Rangoon. Bad news, my flight to Rangoon the next morning had been canceled. I could fly the following day except there were no flights leaving within 24 hours of its arrival, so they wouldn’t let me go. Rats!
    Then, that night, the airline called. My original flight was back on, so I was off to the airport at dawn. I was surprised at how many men were sleeping on the sidewalks. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. At Rangoon I changed dollars for the local currency, took a taxi to the hotel, unpacked and got a pedicab to take me to the house of a ham I’d talked to a couple of times.
    When I got there I knocked on the door. No answer. So I slipped my QSL card under the door. That’s the card I send to the hams around the world I’ve contacted to confirm our radio contact. Moments later Tara Singh opened the door and welcomed me. He’d been worried that it might be the police knocking. He was a Bengali from India and the military government was trying to get all non-Burmese to leave the country.
    He explained that he and his family were now living in what had been his metal-working shop. That before the military coup he had been the golf champion of Southeast Asia, but the military had closed all clubs, taken over almost all of the businesses, confiscated people’s cars, banned tourists and any media, and brought the country to a halt. He was staying alive by selling the scraps of metal left over under the floor of his old shop at flea markets. And amateur radio had been outlawed by the military.
    When his car stopped running they gave it back to him. He kept it just barely able to run, but usable, so he drove me around Rangoon to show me what had happened. Stores by the hundreds were boarded up. Hardly anyone walking around. There was little money so on the weekend flea markets it was mostly trading things.
    My flight out of Rangoon was canceled, so I was able to spend a second day there and visit the famed Schwe Dagon temple. As I was leaving Tara asked if I would send a couple badminton racquets for his son. You bet!
    My next stop was Singapore, where the local hams met me and took me to a restaurant for dinner. The next day I visited my ham friend Dr. Singh (the Bengalis seem to all be named Singh and wear turbans. He said he’d send the badminton racquets to Tara for me. And then I was on to Perth in Western Australia.
    When I got home I sent regular boxes of clothes for Tara and his family, and perhaps to trade for necessities. I still have denim shirt that I was ready to mail him when I go word that he’d been killed. So I’ve kept it in memoriam.
    A few years later I learned that shortly before Tara was killed the government had given his son twenty-four hours to either leave the country or be put in prison. The only place he could figure to go was to Singapore to Dr. Singh, whose address was on the badminton racquet package, so he flew there.
    I got a wedding announcement when he married Dr. Singh’s daughter. They then moved to America and settled in Ohio.

11/12/08

Michael Crichton
    Having so enjoyed his many novels, I was really sorry to read about him dying of cancer at 60. Well, no surprise, I suppose, since he went through Harvard Medical School and served his internship before he started writing. Since doctors are taught virtually nothing about what causes illness, only how to treat the symptoms, it may not have occurred to him to do any investigation on alternative cures for his cancer.
    Not that he would have found it all that surprising. In his non-fiction book, Travels, he described his experiences with telepathy, auras, and spoon bending. Yes, he was able to bend spoons. Easily.
    Since there is so much money being made from sickness and so little from health, getting the word out about how easy it is to cure cancer, or anything else, is very difficult. With Big Pharma spending over $20 billion a year on advertising, the media stands to lose big time if they in any way help get the word out. And the four million American deaths a year resulting from this secrecy is a small loss.
    But, I wish some friend of Crichton’s had told him about my book, Dr. Comby’s book, or about www.drday.com. Sigh.
    My good friend Jim Morrissett, a fellow ham operator, who I first met at the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in 1950, has been teaching people how to bend spoons. When he and Daron Libby, the editor of New Hampshire ToDo, were here a couple years ago, Jim tried to show us how the mind could soften the spoon, making it very easy to bend. It didn’t work for us, but Daron kept the spoon he’d been trying to bend, testing it every now and then. He called a few weeks ago, triumphantly explaining that at last one night the spoon had suddenly softened and he had no trouble bending it double.
    We have so much to learn about the power of the mind.
   
11/11/08

Second Edition
    With supplies of my Secret Guide to Health running out, I’ve got to get to work on a second edition. But, I need your help. If you have my book please look through it and let me know where you suggest I add more information, and where I might cut things.
    I certainly want to add more about raw food meals and the things I’ve found the most fun to eat. And let me know about any raw food books you’ve found particularly valuable.
    It would be helpful to know of any health successes resulting from changing to the raw food diet.
    Have you any suggestions for a better title and/or a better cover design? Or even the title.
    Let me know if you’ve found any other books that cover the subject of how to stop making yourself sick and start reversing whatever has gone wrong. Far’s I know I have the only book that really does the job.
    This time, instead of just selling it myself, I’ll be sending review copies to book reviewers and getting it into Amazon, B&N, and other book store chains. Hey, keep your eyes open for book reviewers and let me know their names and the address of the publication. Any hints on how to get it high on browsers will help. And let me know of any web sites that might be interested in working with me. Oh, and any I should consider referencing in the next edition.
    If you don’t have my book and haven’t changed your diet, you have a 50-50 chance of getting cancer, and then a 90+% chance of painfully dying…at great expense. Your choice.

11/10/08

Green Gang
    It’s time we started getting the word around about how any illness can be quickly cured with no drugs…and here’s how you can help.
    What you do is make copies of the following letter and send it to the author of any article on health in any magazine or newspaper you read. Tell ’em Wayne asked you to get them the word.
= = = = = = = = = = = =

Dear.........
    Though you don’t dare write about it, some doctors have discovered how any illness can be cured with no drugs. Yes, I said any! It’s simple. It’s even common sense. That’s right, there are NO incurable diseases.
    Please, if you can, try to suspend your well-inculcated belief in the miracles of modern medicine, upon which the enormous profits of the pharmaceutical industry, the livelihood of 788,000 doctors and over 5,000 hospitals rely.
    Before I explain how easy it is for anyone to cure any illness, you’ll want to know who I am. I’m a writer, publisher, scientist, and lecturer. My publications pioneered cell phones, personal computers, and compact discs. See www.computerworld.com and search for Wayne Green. Also, I founded American Mensa.
    Each of us has the finest doctor in the world built into our bodies. Our immune system knows what every cell in our body is doing and is tasked with fighting any attack by germs, viruses, parasites, fungi, other pathogens and any poisons introduced in or on our bodies. Our cells are constantly replicating and the immune system’s responsibility is to check each new cell to make sure it’s right.
    We get in trouble when we keep the immune system so busy fighting poisons that it can’t do its other work. And what are the more popular poisons? Some are obvious, like alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and drugs. Yes, caffeine is so powerful a poison that one drop of pure caffeine injected into your body will kill you. Refined sugar should not be a big surprise. The big one, I held it for last, is cooked food. Yes, it’s toxic and it, along with the other poisons, are keeping our immune systems from protecting us from cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on.
    I wised up when one of my readers asked if I’d read Dr. Bruno Comby’s Maximize Immunity. It explained that in every research project with dogs and cats, those fed the standard American diet only lived about half as long as those fed raw food. And they were getting cancer and other human diseases. So, not being stupid, Dr. Comby started putting his patients on raw food diets…and curing them of cancer, AIDS, and so on. I called him in Paris and asked what failures he’d had. He said his only failures were patients that went back to cooked food diets. See www.comby.org.
    Next, I heard Dr. Lorraine day on a radio talk show as she explained about developing a huge breast cancer. As a trauma and teaching surgeon in San Francisco, she knew that chemo therapy didn’t extend lives, so she didn’t do that. When the cancer went all through her body and she was given days to live, she changed to a raw food diet, with plenty of juicing and lots of pure water. Total cure. She now claims, “There are NO incurable illnesses.” See www.drday.com and get her video, “Cancer Doesn’t Scare Me Any More.”
    On the strength of that I did some more research and wrote Wayne Green’s Secret Guide to Health. I covered not only diet, but other poisons such as mercury in dental amalgam, mercury in vaccinations, and root canal teeth. I got a phone call from Dr. Day saying my book was, “Right on the money.”
    Scientists tell us that if we give our bodies the nutrition, water, exercise, sunlight and sleep they’re designed for, they should last in good health 150 years. We’re only getting half that with our diets.
    In Cook and Yasui’s Goldot I learned about the experiments with rats that was similar to those done with dogs and cats, and with the same results.
    A group of rats were fed raw vegetables, whole grains, fruits and nuts from birth. They grew into healthy adults, completely healthy, never fat, and produced healthy offspring. They lived together in peace with no fighting, and were friendly to handle. When they got to the equivalent of 80 human years they were killed and autopsied. Their organs and teeth were all in perfect condition, with no signs of aging or deterioration.
    A second group were fed the standard American diet, with cooked food, including meat, soda, milk, candy, vitamins, and supplements. This group got fat, and came down with all the human diseases such as colds, flu, cancer, arthritis, heart disease, cataracts, and so on. They had to be kept apart because they were killing each other. They were nervous, fighting and vicious. As they died of diseases autopsies showed them to be physical wrecks. Only a few survived to the equivalent of 80 human years.
    A third group was fed the same diet as the second group for the equivalent of 40 human years. They, too, had to be kept separated to keep them from killing each other. Then they were first put on a water fast for a few days and then fed the diet of the first group. A month later they were tame, loving, playful rats, had gotten over all their illnesses and didn’t ever get sick from then on. They all lived the equivalent of 80 human years and when autopsied at that time their organs, skin, and hair were in perfect condition. The deterioration of these during the first half of the experiment had all been totally reversed.
    These are the same changes that humans undergo when they change their diets.
    You can read the story at: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/12/20/18339027.php
    With Newsweek having eight pages of drug and health ads right up front in this issue, you don’t dare tell the truth about health, no matter how many lives you might help save.
                                                                                                                                            Wayne Green, Ph.D

11/9/08

Mercola
    Dr. Joseph Mercola’s organization dumps a pile of interesting information into my email every few days, and much of it I copy to my “health” file so I won’t lose it. Unlike other health blogs and a welter of health newsletters and ads arriving by mail, Dr. Mercola is into the prevention of disease and the curing of it mainly by a diet change rather than peddling bottles of pills and capsules.
    My copy of his 2007 book, Taking Control of Your Life, is heavily hi-lighted. It starts out, on page 2, with the heading, “Achieving Health and Wellness Rather Than Treating Illness.” Gee, what a novel concept! He points out that in 2006 over $2 trillion in America was spent on so-called health care, and little of that was spent on health or even health promotion. It went for drugs and surgery to counter the symptoms of illnesses. Do the math and you come out with our shelling out about $7,000 each for every man, woman, bi-sexual, and child per year on the average.
    And how well spent is this huge investment? Compared with two dozen other industrialized countries, we have the highest infant mortality rate, plus the highest mortality rate for people who have survived to age 60. And what is the number one cause of death in America is complications from drugs and surgery…our medical system. It beats out cancer, heart disease and accidents.
    How’s all this happen? It’s the money, of course. The multinational drug industry is the most profitable in the world, and they control most of the medical education of doctors…so few doctors know any better. They’re spending over $4 billion a year on consumer advertising. This not only helps sell the product, it keeps the media quiet about any alternatives. Ad bucks beat truth any time, no matter how many lives are involved. Ads like these are only allowed in the U.S. and New Zealand.
    It’s valuable to have clout right from the top, so the largest lobbying groups in Washington are the drug companies, with more well-heeled lobbyists than congressmen. And they’re swarming over our state legislators too.
    Oh, let’s not forget the $16 billion the drug companies spend to influence physicians to write prescriptions. That’s over $10,000 a year per physician in America. And it’s paid off handsomely, with over five billion prescriptions in 2006. That’s more than one a month for every American. And that includes the 20 million the illegals, too.
    Dr. Mercola came to the same conclusion I have, particularly after I read Dr. Bruno Comby’s Maximize Immunity (www.comby.org), Dr. Henry Bieler’s Food Is Your Best Medicine, and watched Dr. Lorraine Day’s Cancer Doesn’t Scare Me Any More video and web site (www.drday.com). They all found that the body has an enormous ability for self-healing once you stop putting poisons in and on it. Gee, that almost makes good common sense. Alas, common sense seldom manages to survive the closing of minds by indoctrination.
    He prescribes a diet of raw organic fruits, vegetables, milk, meats, and fish. Check Mercola.com and get a copy of his book. He goes into details on the dangers of pasteurized milk (or pasteurized anything else), fluorides, and so on. Unlike many other raw fooders, he admits that we’re meat eaters and have always been, but we, like all the other meat-eating animals, ate it raw. I love it raw. The book is only $20 from his web site, and other than getting my Secret Guide to Health, it’s one of the best $20 you’ll ever spend.
   
11/8/08

Acrobats
    When I read in the paper that the Chinese Shangri-La Acrobats would be performing at the Colonial theater in Keene on November 7th, I called to see about ticket prices. Uh oh, $30 and up. Each. And no senior discount. Ugh. Then they mentioned there would be a matinee at 10:30 that morning which would only be $9. That I could live with, so Sherry and I got there a bit early to get good seats.
    Which we did. What we didn’t know was the kids from every school in the area were going to be bussed in for the show. Soon the theater was packed with boisterous, excited kids. By the bazillions. I don’t think they had to pay anything. Well, this was pretty much a dress rehearsal for the evening’s performance, so why not invite the kids?
    The show, which they said was a somewhat truncated of the evening show, lasted an hour, and it was fantastic! Amazing! We sure got our $9 worth. Not a moment of boredom. I suspect the contortionists gave our kids ideas of what can be done with the body when one works at it. One girl was so limber she was able to bend backwards so far her head was looking out between her legs.
    If they do their show on TV or make it available on a DVD, it’ll sure be worth watching. I’d buy the DVD in a minute.

11/7/08

No Grains?
    Having been fed hot cereal with cream and no sweetening for breakfast by my mother from my earliest memories as a child, I loved eating grains. And whole wheat toast. No, no white bread, no jam or jelly, and very rarely, corn muffins. On Sunday we’d have pancakes or waffles with good old New Hampshire maple syrup, even when we were living in New York or New Jersey.
    Since breads and hot cereals are cooked, as are most packaged cold cereals, I’ve gotten off them. My only remaining poison was toasted bialys, Mmmm, my, they’re good! And one lasts me four days. If you’re not familiar with bialys, they are about the size and shape of a bagel, except the center is still there, though very thin, and usually hiding some onion bits.
    I cut ’em in half the long way and toast ’em. Then I cut each of the halves in half and eat a quarter bialy with a generous quantity of orange slush. I take the outer peel off four oranges, remove any seeds, put ’em in my blender and bzzzzt, I’ve got orange slush, which has all the fiber along with the juice. It’s a great way to eat oranges. And don’t forget to chew each mouthful before swallowing, as you should do with everything you eat or drink.
    My good friend Dick Hussey sent me a copy of Grain Damage by Dr. Douglas Graham. It’s more like a pamphlet at 52 pages, but it’s packed with good information that we’re not hearing very often. My copy is heavily hi-lighted. Like on page 1, in the Foreword, discussing gluten grains like wheat, “When these grains were removed from the diets of autistic children, the majority of them became symptom-free. Wow!” And I like the next quote I hi-lighted, “If you find yourself in a hole and want to get out, first you have to stop digging.”
    That’s sure basic about health. Every illness we have or get we’ve paved the way for it with our diet, shoveled in with our forks and spoons.
    Dr. Graham, by page 12, says, “There is no scientific basis for eating cooked food.” He explains that vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, enzymes, coenzymes, antioxidants, and phytonutrients are damaged or destroyed by cooking. This is not news to scientists, only to the public. He goes further to say that heated proteins are unfit for human consumption.
    I liked what he had to say about aspartame, “a known neurotoxin that causes cancer, brain damage, neurodegenerative diseases, and birth defects.” Yes, birth defects, permanently disabling your child from before birth for it’s whole life. Gee, thanks, mom.
    Our dependence on grains, for cooked food, and to feed animals, has changed America enormously. “Just four hundred years go, the United States was one large forest from Maine to Texas.” Fruit trees produce the highest pound yield per acre of all food crops. We could be well fed and a whole lot healthier if we changed to a diet of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and we’d need only a quarter as much land.
    Dr. Mercola, who dumps several papers into my email every week, and with whom I agree almost all the time, has a 2003 book, The No-Grain Diet. It’s a 312-pager, and he covers subjects I’ve written about such as thoroughly chewing your food before swallowing it. And to avoid talking  or drinking fluids, which interfere with digestion. Oh, and NO microwaved food.
    He does approve of mean. But only if it is organic and raised on pastures and not grain-fed. His number one choice for meat is buffalo, which is mine, too. I love minced buffalo liver from a neighboring buffalo farm. Grass-fed beef, free range chickens and turkeys, venison and lamb are on his approved list. And mine.
    Raw chicken? When I had dinner at a chicken restaurant in Tokyo, the first course was raw chicken. Chicken sashimi, and it was delicious.
    Now, if there was some way to get both the public and the government to start thinking in terms of the prevention of sickness instead of treating the symptoms it causes, we could cut the hell out of our so-called health care costs, which are running over $7,000 per person in America per year. That’s flat out stupid. Of course our good health would put the pharmaceutical industry, our most profitable industry, out of business. It would put about 90% or more of today’s food industry out of business and raise hell with supermarkets. No more row after row of boxed food.
    We’ll need to remineralize our farmlands, start planting zillions of fruit trees and plant a hundred or more times as many vegetables. And with us living twice as long, there’ll be a whole lot more changes. But, at least we’ll stop seeing those mountains of flesh going around in carts because they’re too fat to walk.

11/3/98

Teaching Entrepreneurship
    "Entrepreneurship is like psychiatry was 100 years ago. People thought it was foolishness or quackery," says Emery Turner, a dean at St. Louis University. Entrepreneurship as an academic discipline is still in limbo.
    Professor Sahlman of Harvard says, "It’s like an intellectual onion. The deeper you go the more you cry, and you don’t ever find anything substantive."
There are few endowed chairs, and fewer qualified candidates to fill them. Many are going unfilled…and that’s probably just as well. As a certified entrepreneur, complete with a doctorate in Entrepreneurial Science from Central New England College, I’d like to let some gas out of the bag. We don’t need professors of entrepreneurialism; what we need are more courses in the nitty-gritty that entrepreneurs need to know.
    Entrepreneurialism is a frame of mind. But it can’t do much for you unless you have a wide variety of backgrounds. There’s no such thing as a course in entrepreneurialism. That’s like trying to teach an artist with a course on the color red.
    Yes, of course I’ve made up a list of some of the more important things an entrepreneur should know. My goal is to get schools to offer courses in these…not to just entrepreneurial and business students, but also as adult classes to help local business people do better…and perhaps (why not?) to engineering students as well.
    Here are some courses I would have found of enormous value if they’d been available when I was frittering away my school years with junk like Strength of Materials, Mechanics (bridge design), Economics, Advanced Calculus and so on.
Speaking. This is a critically important skill for entrepreneurs. We have to be comfortable and persuasive addressing trade, engineering and public groups. We have to be able to do radio and TV interviews, and chair symposiums. Being able to speak well also helps in committee and corporate board meetings.
Writing. Having evaluated and edited thousands of articles submitted to my magazines over the last 57 years, I assure you that the ability to write clearly and simply is pathetically rare.
Speed Reading. To keep up with today’s world you have to be able to speed read. With political events and technologies moving rapidly, we need to read at least a couple of books a month, plus a stack of magazines.
Personnel Management. How do you convince people to do what you want them to and like it? This skill does not come naturally, it has to be learned. It’s a very necessary skill because without it a company can flounder. Few committee-managed companies last long. It takes the driving passion of an entrepreneur to keep small companies strong while technology and public demands constantly change. I’ve watched many large companies lose billions through poor management. I’ve watched thousands of smaller ones fail.
Quality Control. Shades of Ed Demming, who convinced the Japanese that quality could turn their weak economy around. He tried to sell quality to American business, but we wanted no part of it. "Americans will always buy American cars, no matter how we make them." Sure. Then came the Volkswagen beetle. And Toyota, Nissan, and Honda. We’re in competition with the whole world now, so we have to understand that quality control is no longer just in manufacturing, it’s also critically important in research, design, customer service, advertising, promotion, supplier dealings and so on. Youngsters need to understand the concept that "quality is free." The costs of providing quality will always more than repay themselves.
Statistical Analysis. Modern scientific calculators can help us sort through a maze of statistics, once we know how to use them. For instance, about the only way to accurately determine the best retail price for a product is to test it statistically. How many people know how to handle that?
Advertising. Businesses waste tons of money because they have no one with an education in advertising around. One of the best business moves I ever made was taking a night course at the New York Advertising Club. I’ve run into a few ad agencies that know what they’re doing, but most are shams and make up for their ignorance with outrageous prices.
Promotion. I got so fed up with trying to deal with inept PR firms that in frustration I put together a video explaining the inside secrets on how to generate an extra million dollars in sales just with PR. Small businesses should learn how to use new product releases and reviews to increase their visibility. If prospective customers are unaware of the company and their products, they sure aren’t going to buy them. Advertising, when done right, works fine, but well done PR can save a fortune.
Business Planning. Entrepreneurs need to know how to put together business plans. They need them to attract venture capital and as guides for running their businesses. They need to know how to build action, cash-flow, P&L, and net worth plans.
Accounting. With hundreds of computer accounting programs, which are going to be best suited for your business? You don’t want to have to contort your business to make it work with the wrong accounting program. Worse, complex businesses may call for several accounting systems. You may need one to generate IRS required reports, and another to manage cash flow.
Desktop Publishing. Entrepreneurs need to know about the latest systems. They need desktop publishing for newsletters, catalogs, advertising, spec sheets, instructions, booklets, or perhaps to present a report such as this. My wife uses a Macintosh system to design her video boxes, produce catalogs, a newsletter and so on. My own firm totally replaced a $500,000 Bedford typesetting system with a Macintosh costing less than one-hundredth that. One man, a Mac and Quark Express produce New Hampshire ToDo, a 64-page full color magazine every month, in about ten days and then send it to the printer over the Internet.
Financing. Enterpreneurs need to know where and how to get money for startups and growth. Banks? Venture capital firms? How about going public? ESOPs? Limited partnerships?
Selling. Selling is not a natural talent, it has to be learned. It’s a marvelous skill and no entrepreneur should be without it. Nor should any salesperson. Once you know how to sell, you’ll never go hungry.
Direct Mail. Entrepreneurs need to learn how to design and write direct mail packages. They need to find out what has worked for others and what hasn’t. Billions of dollars have been spent on direct mail research, yet most entrepreneurs dive into this business blind — and waste enormous amounts of money.
Numerical Control. Most manufacturing these days is automated and that means computer control of machines. This is a specialized business, but it still needs to be learned.
New Product Introduction. This calls for a combination of advertising, PR, new products releases, catalog sheets, packaging, pricing decisions, distribution alternatives, and so on. Packaging. How would you go about getting a special box made for your product? How about a molded box? Or a foam-lined shipping container? What works best in advertising on the package?
    And today, learning all the ways you can use the Internet is critical.
    That’s just a few courses which would help small businesses operate more efficiently. I’d also recommend courses in graphic arts, product photography, purchasing, ergonomics, building and site selection, production planning, office planning, dressing for success, print buying, bill collecting, taxes, business law, word processing systems, communications systems — including paging, fax, bulletin boards, intercoms, data services, etc.
    Entrepreneurs need to be able to learn about computers, data base management, inventory handling, and payroll systems. They need education in office equipment buying and leasing. What are the best copiers, telephone switches, and data storage systems?
    If New Hampshire can organize adult educational courses such as these, we’ll start attracting new businesses from all over the country. Just think of the promotional piece the state could send out to entrepreneurs promoting New Hampshire as the entrepreneur’s paradise!
    New Hampshire businesses, by being able to operate more efficiently, would soon be big winners. Wasting less money on poor ads, PR, packaging, inefficient distribution and so on will enrich us all and contribute positively to our New Hampshire quality of life.
    And since every one of these educational courses will make money for the school offering it, there’s no expense to the state. Everybody wins.
     If the courses are good, businesses will be sending their people in for them, paying their way. I’ll bet a good course in how to sell would be sold out in an hour.
    Where can we get the expert teachers we’ll need? I suggest we call on local entrepreneurs. I love to teach and have lectured at colleges all around the country and on every continent. You’ll find plenty of volunteers who will be delighted to teach the things they’ve learned.
     The courses I’ve outlined are the same ones business schools should be teaching, but aren’t. If you’ve been reading your business magazines you know that business schools have been losing their charm because they aren’t teaching the right things. This opens an opportunity for New Hampshire to become the business school capital of the country. We could have businesses sending customers from all over the country.
    We could organize two-week intensive management packages, charge $4,995 or so (plus room), and get it. We’d work ’em night and day, seven days a week, giving them more than their money’s worth. Oops, there’s my entrepreneurial spirit showing again.

11/2/08

McCain
    When I discovered McCain was scheduled to give a talk in the next town, Peterborough, and just two days before election, it was worth a try to say hello and maybe slip him a little note that would only take a minute to read, but might give him some ideas.
    My note was headed: “McCain - the President who:” and then I had a list.
• Cut health care costs 80%
• Cut energy costs 90%
• Created the world’s best educational system
• Ended Bush’s wars successfully
• Cut the federal government in half
• Gave us free college tuition
• Ended inflation
• Doubled Social Security payments
• Drastically cut pollution
• Ended the world’s AIDS epidemic
• Created a new generation of geniuses
• Created millions of new small businesses
• Ended unemployment problems
• Created two new trillion-dollar industries
• Eliminated the electric power grid
• Eliminated nuclear power plants
• Put all that nuclear waste to good use
• Ended fluoridation of our water
• Cut prison costs by 50%
(As advised by Wayne Green)
    Well, I have plans for each of the items on the list, many of which I’ve covered in my editorials (a.k.a. blogs).
    The notice said that the doors of the meeting hall would open at 4:30 pm, so Sherry and I got to Peterborough by 3:45, in case there was a line. When we got to town the main streets were blocked off and cars were parked solid along the highway out to about a half mile from downtown.
    I drive round until I found a little spot to park they’d missed. It was a cold day, in the 40°s, and we were dressed for the 50s. The town was packed with people…biggest crowd I’ve ever seen there. We found the end of the line, which I’d estimate was maybe four hundred feet long, and two to four abreast. The town hall couldn’t hold but a small fraction of this mob. Sigh.
    There were hundreds of people with McCain signs, and a big bunch more with Obama signs, yelling and screaming at each other. The chap next to me in line turned out to be a submarine veteran, but more recent than WWII, so we had a lot to talk about. I gave him a copy of my little 2.5 x 3.5 inch paper to give to McCain, if he got the opportunity. The line was moving so slowly we gave up and drove back home.
    With my list, if he’d been elected, he could have been the greatest president in history.

10/30/08

Ramifications
    If a raw organic food diet can help cure any disease and keep people from ever getting sick, how come there are so few doctors telling us about it?
    This is an ages old phenomenon. As Niccolo Machiavelli put it in chapter six of The Prince, “It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, so that between them he is in great danger.”
    And as Schaupenhauer put it: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
    Okay, who stands to lose by the public learning how simple it is to cure any illness? Well, it would decimate the $2.3 trillion so-called health care industry, which only makes money when we get sick. Oh, we’ll need some doctors and hospitals to handle accidents, but that isn’t going to take the 788,000 physicians we now have, and that’s just here in America. Or our 164,000 dentists, since tooth decay would virtually disappear.
    The American food industry as we know it today would be virtually destroyed, No more aisle after aisle in the supermarkets of packaged or canned food. No more pasteurized milk or anything else. No factory-raised meat.
    Then there are almost 100% of our farmlands, which have been poisoned by decades of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. With people avoiding grains, what’ll happen to the millions of acres of wheat being grown today? And, with high fructose corn syrup avoided like arsenic, the need for corn, other than for silage to help feed cows over the winter, will be scant. I’m presuming that the lid can be taken off cold fusion, so the use of oil will be just historical.
    We can remineralize farmland so fertilizers and pesticides will no longer be needed to get crops to grow, but I haven’t seen any data yet on how long it’s going to take to return poisoned land to organic use.
    The pharmaceutical giants, our most profitable industry by far, will be gutted. No more pills or shots. No more “detail men” bribing doctors to use their company’s products. No more billions to influence state and federal legislatures.
    The media will be severely hit. Without Big Pharma ads quite a few magazines would go out of business. Could radio and TV stations even survive without Pharma and food company ads?
    Most nursing homes would fold.
    With people living 150 years instead of 75 our Social Security system would blow away. And, with some four million people not being killed by the present system per year in America, we’d have a runaway population growth. We’d need more homes and lots more jobs. Instead of retiring at 65 we’d get into our RVs or head for the golf courses at a 130. And, I expect that those retirees will be a whole lot healthier than today’s.
    Now, who stands to win? With cold-fusion-powered cars that never require any fuel besides water, the vacation industry could explode. And with grandma and grandpa preferring to have their own home, as will great grandma and great grandpa, we could see a building boom.
    The demand for organic food is going to raise the prices substantially, getting more and more farmers to rush to fill the need. We may see a huge increase in imported organic food, from countries that haven’t poisoned their farmlands…like in Africa and South America. Maybe we’ll see the Afghan farmers shifting from poppies to kale and spinach.
    Basically, there are trillions upon trillions of dollars invested in the status quo and few short-term benefits to a change to organic raw food…other than we’d stop killing ourselves at half time. Wendy’s with a choice of kale, Swiss chard, broccoli greens or dandelion greens smoothies? And most restaurants with a raw food salad bar.

10/29/08

Cancer
    With half of Americans coming down with one kind of cancer or another…that’s either you or me…those are really lousy odds. So, we have a choice…we can either learn how best to avoid cancer, or get ready to battle it when we get the terrifying news.
    It was almost fifty years ago the government declared war on cancer. Like most of our wars, even though the government threw tens of billions into it, the death rates from most cancers haven’t changed. Dr. Douglass noted that over 80% of oncologists have said that if they were to get cancer they would not go the chemotherapy route which they recommend to their patients.
    In a recent blog he started gently suggesting raw food, and was very emphatic about the value of raw milk vs. pasteurized. Yes, raw food is one of the most basic answers to health, but doctors who understand this are very reasonably afraid to speak out. Cancer is the bread and butter for a large part of the medical/pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Mercola is strong on raw food, but hasn’t yet, that I’ve seen, equated our cooked food diet as the triggering cause of so many illnesses, or raw food’s value in curing them.
    We sure haven’t been doing well with our wars. The war on drugs has cost hundreds of billions, yet drugs are cheaper and more available than ever. Then there’s our war on poverty. Har de har. Our wars in Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

10/22/08

Scientific American ?
    Semi-Scientific would be more accurate. The current (November 2008) issue has 14 pages devoted to the failure of the drug industry to develop a cure (a.k.a. vaccine) for AIDS (HIV). Hey, guys, wake up! I’ve reported rather extensively on two easy ways to cure AIDS.
    Back in 1995 in a 73 magazine editorial I explained about Drs. Lyman and Kaali at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City serendipitously discovering that when a tiny electrical current was passed through the blood it prevented any virus, germs, or parasites trying to live in the blood from replicating, thus killing them. They then patented the process (patents #5,091,152 - 5,188,738 - 5,328,451), but were never able to get published in a medical journal. In fact, the pressure was so great that later they had no recollection of doing any such work.
    In my 5/15/08 essay I explained about all that, and how an old friend of mine, Bob Beck, ran across the discovery but, instead of taking the blood out of the body to pass the electric current through it and then returning it, he put a couple electrodes on the patient’s arteries and passed the current through it that way. He got a local clinic to test it and they were curing AIDS in a few days. Bob showed me their reports.
    I published the circuit, which took under $20 in parts, in the May 1996 issue of 73 and made reprints available. When the Post Office sued me because the process was not FDA approved, I had to stop. But, by then, Dr. Bruno Comby had proven that a raw food diet would do the same job, so no big deal. Read his Maximize Immunity for the details.
    So, for over 13 years we’ve known two ways to quickly and inexpensively cure AIDS and Scientific American hasn’t a clue. Well, they’re just as blind when it comes to cold fusion and global warming.

10/21/08

Jobs
    The current financial panic has the public cutting back on major purchases, so larger industries are cutting jobs by the thousands. We’re fortunate here in New Hampshire, where we haven’t many big industries to make long lines at the unemployment offices. Even so, it’s time for you to go to my letters to the governor, look up my Business Incubator Group proposal and lay it on your governor.
    This is a neat way to generate new small businesses by the thousands, which would go to help take care of unemployment.
    Now, for individuals suddenly out of work, here’s a way you may be able to generate some income while you are looking for that dream job. You go to small businesses in your area and talk to the owners. Put it like this, “You’ve got a whole lot of things that need to be done around here and no one to do them. I’ll do them and, if I don’t know how, I’ll learn.” Further, offer to work half time so there won’t be any unemployment or health insurance payments. You can hold down two jobs like that.
    I’ve talked with dozens of business owners and they all agree they’d give anything to hear someone come in with a proposition like that.
    Such a job gives you a golden opportunity to learn every aspect of the business. Offer to help the bookkeeper in your “spare time.” Then the purchasing agent. Then advertising. In each part of the business read the magazines in that field and ask about any good books. Very few businesses have anyone who knows anything about advertising and promotion, yet this is a key element in the success of the business. For that matter, as a publisher of a bunch of magazines and having dealt with an awful lot of advertising agencies, I found very few of them had anyone on their staffs that really knew much about advertising or promotion.
    The more you know about all aspects of a business the more valuable you’re going to be. And what a résumé you’ll build! If you have any entrepreneurial blood in your veins you’ll know how to start a business and have a good idea for the products or services you want to handle. 95% of small businesses fail because the entrepreneurs haven’t done their homework in sales, advertising, promotion, and so on.
    Selling is a wonderful skill to build. And there are plenty of excellent books available to help you.
   
10/20/08

Let’s see how many of these pairs you can finish naming

Stoopnagle and ______
Gallagher and _______
Ma and Pa __________
Groucho, Chico, Harpo and ________
Betty and Barney ______
Myrt and _________
Batman and ________
George and Gracie ________
Fibber McGee and ________
Clark ______ and Lois _______
Frederick Chopin and _____________
Popeye and _________________
Dagwood and ______________
Maggie and ________________
Molly and Uncle David _______
Nelson Eddy and ___________
Edgar Bergen and ________________
Penrod and ________
Tom Sawyer and __________________
Click and __________

The answers can be found at 9/20/08

10/19/08

The Green Team
    With our country going to hell in a handbasket, our presidential candidates have promised change. We are in desperate need of change, but I haven’t seen any sign that the candidates have a clue on how to change things.
    So, I’m calling on you to join my Green Team to get some real change started. Change? Our health is the pits compared to most developed countries, and we’re spending more than twice as much as any other country on it. The same goes for our school system. And we’re fast losing our middle class as more and more of our industries are exported to lower-wage, better educated countries.
    With what I’ve learned we can be healthy, wealthy, and wise. We need to work together so we personally, our family, our community, our state, our country, and even the whole world can be healthier, wealthier, and wiser. I think you’ll like my plan.
    Health? My Secret Guide to Health explains how easy it is to cure any illness with no drugs…and never get sick again. It’s pathetically simple and common sense. Once you stop putting toxic stuff into and on your body, your immune system will recover from fighting the poisons and get busy curing any and every illness you have. And that includes tooth decay. The basics of health are simple: Give the body the food it is designed to use, including suplements for any missing minerals. Give it plenty of pure water, exercise and rest.
    Wealth? My Secret Guide to Wealth explains how anyone can make all the money they want and have the freedom to enjoy it. It also explains what a waste of time and money colleges are. It promotes the starting of small businesses. Entrepreneurialism.
    Wisdom? How about a new generation of kids with 150 average IQs, who can read, speak and even think in a dozen languages? Who are able to read books at a few seconds a page with good comprehension, and who have read hundreds, or even thousands, of interesting and valuable books? Who have built a wide array of skills, and who know how to think?
    Since there are very few poorly educated wealthy people and very few well educated poor people, our goal is promote self-education. Our schools and colleges have failed us, so it’s time for a major change.
    Our current system has failed us, so let’s get started on bringing about some massive changes. Step one is to understand all the changes I’m proposing so you’ll be able to teach them to others…via the Web and by giving talks to groups such as Chambers of Commerce, Rotary, Lions, Elks, Odd Fellows, American Legion, VFW, Grange, 4H and other groups.
    We’ll be encourage the forming of new farms to supply mineral-rich organic food, unpasteurized milk and organic meat. And the forming of new small businesses via business incubator groups in every town. And encouraging the forming of new independant schools based on the Sudbury Valley School system, where there is no curriculum, no tests, no grades, and children are not separated by age or abilities. Where they are taught to speak, play instruments, and an array of skills. Where they are exposed to the cultures of several countries via class trips abroad. Where they learn about industries via class trips to factories and businesses. Where they are encouraged to start their own small businesses.
    I still have the meat slicer we used to make sandwiches when I was in college. A team of my guys went through the freshman and upper class dorms every night selling sandwiches, hundreds of them.
    So let’s get busy changing ourselves, our family, our friends, our community, our state, our country and the world. The need is desperate and we have the answers which will benefit everyone.
    We should encourage the forming of new day-care centers where babies can be taught several languages and other basics. Where they are there to learn, not just to be baby-sat. Where they are taught to think instead of sitting there for hours watching Big Bird and Teletubies.


10/18/08

Alaska
    Governor Sarah Palin gave a speech at Hillsdale College in August about the oil and natural gas available in Alaska and the need to build a $30 to $40 billion pipeline and infrastructure to bring out the natural gas. Plus the need to drill oil wells in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore. Well, that should help bring down oil and natural gas prices. But they better get going on the project pretty soon, before someone finds out about cold fusion.
    Cold fusion, which as I’ve explained a few hundred times, has been proven, even by a NASA lab, will bring us a total freedom from a need for oil or natural gas, or even the electric power grid. No more gas stations, no more hydroelectric or nuclear power plants. No more middle-east wars.
    Now, is there any way to get through to Governor Palin with the news so Alaska can avoid sinking billions into a soon to die technology? Probably not. Maybe, if I’d run for vice president in New Hampshire in 2004, as I did in 1964 and 1984, I could have gotten some media attention on this.

10/17/08

New Hampshire #1
    Four years ago, when John Lynch first ran for governor, I sent him a series of letters proposing ways our state could be improved. When I got no response, I sent them again, one day at a time, blown up to 11x17 inches. Nada.
    Many of my proposals would work for any state, so I’ll add them to my editorials-essays-blogs. Here’s my first seven.

10/17/08 (NH#1)

Customer Service
    Every business has to have a customer service department. So how about New Hampshire, Ltd.? Where can our people go when they have a problem with a state department or bureau?
    The cost of a Citizen Ombudsman Commissioner should repay itself many times over. One person, I hope, should do. The idea is to have someone for people to confidentially go to when they’re having a problem with the state. That person would decide if the complaint is legitimate and if so, figure out a solution…even if it takes some action by the Legislature or the Governor to solve the problem. Just like any business would do.
    This service will help keep state government workers thinking in terms of serving the people who are paying their salaries. And that’s supposedly the reason to have a state government. The people need certain services and will be willing to pay for them as long as they are convinced they are getting their money’s worth. A responsive complaint department will help keep them convinced.
    The complaint chief needs to report only to the Governor. This will help prevent cover-ups and bureaucratic red tape. Successful solutions, if not too embarrassing, can be fed to the media as a way to (a) bolster confidence in the administration and (b) to help get the word out about the service.
    The administration should also have an experienced spin-meister to interface with the media. This would help build citizen confidence in our state. There are many positive things going on that few people hear about. The constant messes in Washington do not tend to give us confidence in government. The IRS, FDA, DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, BATF, and so on through the Beltway alphabet endlessly come across as the bad guys. Surveys do not show a citizen trust of the government. Well, we want to have all that crap stop at our borders. We want to be able to feel that we are being protected against the out-of-control monsters Washington has spawned.
    No, I’m not looking for work…I’ve got my hands full trying to convince people to stop making themselves sick by eating cooked food and other toxic stuff.
    This is an innovation that could make national news, keeping people aware of New Hampshire and it’s Governor.  
                                                  
10/17/08  (NH#1)

Thinking BIG
    To keep New Hampshire’s economy healthy we need to do everything we can to encourage small business growth and the formation of new businesses. The more you and the Legislature can do along this line, the stronger will be our New Hampshire economy. Big business has gone global.™
    For instance, we have at least a hundred towns in New Hampshire that are large enough to benefit from the formation of Business Incubator Groups (BIGs).
    The concept is simple…in each town organize a group of business leaders who would normally benefit from new businesses being formed…such as a lawyer, accountant, printer, mailing company, computer service company, Realtor, insurance company, and so on. Have them form a Business Incubator Group to help entrepreneurs put together and fund business proposals. They would also act as a board of directors for the new firms as well as get more business for themselves providing their services.
    The actual funding would come from the state, but would be guaranteed by the BIGs, thus insuring the state against any possible loss. Indeed, the state would collect interest on the BIG loans. It’s a proverbial win-win situation.
    Small businesses are the real backbone of America, not huge industries. In my Secret Guide to Wealth I advise youngsters to think in terms of owning their own businesses, not in working at a job for someone else. I explain that there are no schools or colleges I know of today that teach the things an entrepreneur needs to know to be successful…which is why nine out of ten new businesses fail within five years. I explain how they can learn everything they need to know to be successful, with someone else happily paying them to learn.
    It is only when you own your own business that you can have the freedom and the money to do things. I was 30 before I learned that. That’s when I borrowed $1,000 on my car to start my first business. Within three years I was going the usual successful person route buying a yacht, an airplane, an Arab horse, and new Porsches every year. Johnny Carson joked on his show that I had front and back Porsches.
    A few years ago, when I was working with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Board of Overseers, RPI Council, and First Executive On Campus), their business incubator heads consulted me on how they might improve their operation. I proposed a similar approach to the above, which they implemented. They recently won a prize as the best business incubator in the country.
    If a hundred towns help develop just four new businesses a year, in five years we’ll have two thousand new businesses. With an average of ten employees, that’s 20,000 new jobs. We’ll see entrepreneurs rushing to New Hampshire from all over the country. Make that ten new businesses a year per BIG and do the math. Watch out Silicon Valley, here comes the Granite Mountains!
    One more thing. Will I be invited to say a few words at your press conferences announcing the formation of each of these hundreds of new businesses?
                                                                                                      

10/17/08 (NH#1)

Whistle Blowers
    You’ll agree, I hope, that lowering our taxes will tend to improve our quality of life. I hope you’ll further agree that one very good way to make it possible to lower taxes is to cut wasteful state spending. Another, of course, is to tap the federal government for every penny we can get. That’s presumably one of the more significant responsibilities of our senators and congressmen in D.C..
    Governor Judd Gregg (now Senator) was quite clear in a Chamber of Commerce address that he was opposed to a broad-based tax. He pointed out that New Hampshire already has the lowest tax burden on its people as a percentage of income in the country with a total tax of less than 10%.
    He went on to point out that you can’t manage government from the spending side of the ledger. “If you turn revenues over to the legislative body, whether at the local level, the county level, the state level or especially the federal level, it will be spent. Unless you can lower revenue sources, you will never lower or control the rate of growth of government.” Bravo!
    As we sort through what our state is doing, has done and plans to do, I suspect we’ll find some areas where we will recommend that more money be spent. These will undoubtedly be popular with our legislators. We’ll also find some areas where we believe economies can be observed. I doubt these will be popular with anyone. Indeed, I expect we’ll be faced with a good deal of obfuscation and spin when we get into these areas.
    There are a couple of possible approaches to tackling this problem. Let’s first look at finding areas of fairly obvious waste. As parsimonious as we are up here in N’hamsha, you know as well as I that we’re going to be able to uncover some really upsetting waste. It’s a given with any bureaucracy, private or public.
    One more thing we know…where there’s wasted money there are some people who know it’s happening and are not happy about it. We also know that the system martyrs the hell out of anyone who dares blow the whistle. We fire them. We black-ball them. We even kill them. They are hated and scourged. We call them rats or finks.
    Even so, when the waste gets really bad there are a few public-spirited people who are willing to brave the consequences. They complain first to their supervisors.  Nothing, of course happens other than a warning to shut the hell up. It isn’t until we see a segment on 60 Minutes that the fat finally hits the fire. Then, extremely reluctantly, something occasionally gets done to fix the problem.
    Did you see the exposé showing how the Rural Electrification Authority (REA) is giving about $600 million in low interest loans to huge corporations? No amount of whistle blowing has managed to counter the lobbyist pressures which control Congress. Even the REA president hasn’t been able to stop the give-away.
    Let’s look at this creatively. We know we have waste in our state government. We know also we’d like to cut as much as we can. At least I hope that’s what we want. Yes, it might mean putting an uncle or cousin out of work. Ouch!
    We also agree, I hope, that we may be able to find some state employees who are well aware of the waste and are not happy about it…but may be justifiably afraid to say anything. How can we make it safe for whistle-blowers? How can we protect them from the normal vicious bureaucratic backlash?
    One approach might be to establish a third party, pledged to total secrecy as to any sources, to get the information, investigate, and report directly to the governor. This should be able to insulate whistle-blowers from the usual retribution. Then it’ll be up to the governor to take corrective measures. The governor is our CEO, so that’s part of his job in managing NH, Inc.
    I’d be surprised if a one-person Collaborative Data Department couldn’t help cut state waste by at least 10% of the state budget. Let’s try it and see!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
10/17/08  (NH#1)

Business Careers
    Since the quality of life in New Hampshire depends on the education, skills and motivation of its workforce, the more the state (i.e. the Legislature and Governor) can do to improve work-oriented education and skills the better. It just so happens that our New Hampshire schools could be doing a lot more than they are toward educating and motivating our youngsters. Our schools should be educating our children so they will be able to cope with the two main aspects of their lives…their work and their families.
    When I went to high school we made class trips to visit various types of businesses so we could see how they worked first hand. We visited a large newspaper, an auto assembly plant, and businesses like that.
    It would be beneficial if the schools would include some sort of business orientation for the students. This is something that could be organized by the state, even though the plan could be implemented locally. This might require a manager and a clerk at the state level.
    School groups could visit local businesses and see how they work. A visit to a large mail order firm where an army of data input people come in each morning and enter all the orders received in the mail and email that day…where the orders are picked, packed and shipped the same day…will give many kids an understanding of how the world of 2009 is geared.
    Another way to help kids get a better understanding of business is for schools to invite business people to give talks…to explain how their business works…to tell the kids what kind of education, skills and experience they’re going to need to succeed with their company. They should also explain what career paths are possible through working for their company.
    Schools can also be encouraged to work with local businesses to find part time employment for the upper grade youngsters…perhaps with apprenticeship arrangements. Most businesses need entry-level work done and would welcome an organized school effort to help. It sure beats beer, drugs, mall-wandering, and hanging out as after school activities.
    Schools can survey local businesses to see what kind of evening classes might help their employees in their careers. Courses in advertising, promotion, writing, selling, telemarketing, computer literacy, speaking, marketing, distribution, shipping, desktop publishing, video production, purchasing, packaging, inventory management, speed reading, website development and promotion, and so on would not only help local businesses, but would be of interest to the more motivated youngsters too. By charging adults for these business courses the schools would have a revenue source, get additional use from their buildings, and be contributing to the knowledge and skills of the local work force.
    Who would teach such classes? Ask the local business people. It’s in their interest to help.
    Kids need help in learning about business. They need to develop communication skills such as public speaking and writing. They need to understand about the importance of work habits, discipline, and responsibility. They need to know about how to get along with those above, below and on a parallel with them. They need to learn about problem solving.
    If the schools provide a place to meet to discuss a program such as I’ve outlined, the local business people will come. The initiative has to start somewhere (ahem…like Concord), from then on the project will probably take on a life of its own.
    The evening courses I’ve suggested would not only benefit the local work force and interested students, it would be able to help unemployed people build skills and make the contacts needed to get work.
    The educationally oriented tend to think in terms of a socialistic approach wherein education should be free. Baloney. Education is money. The more education people have, the more opportunity they have to make higher salaries and commissions, and to be able to start their own businesses. Don’t debase the product by giving it away. People little value anything they get for free. Charge for the evening courses.
    One of the reasons kids drop out of school is that school is free. If they had to pay for it…if they had to work for their education…it would have more value for them. This is why I propose a completely new approach to education…with no compulsory education, school 50 weeks a year, no grades, no tests, no compulsory homework, and so on. Regimented (socialist-type) thinkers are going to hate the whole idea…at least until they find out the thinking behind each aspect of this new approach and see how well it has worked where it has been tested.
    Of course, if we’re satisfied with the educational product our schools are turning out now…if we don’t mind that our kids and grandchildren are ignorant and are going to pay the price as foreign competition clobbers us in one industry after another (as it has been doing)…we can settle back and watch Monday Night Football, a six-pack and pretzels at our elbow and forget about our kids for still another night. Things are changing and we have to change with them or lose out. Our shoe manufacturing has moved to Portugal, China and Pakistan, leaving our huge empty factory buildings as reminders. Our mills moved down south, and then to China and third world countries.
    My summer shirts were made in Mongolia, my winter shirts are from Swaziland, my jacket in Bangladesh, my pants in United Arab Emirates, my parka in Macau, my socks in Malasia and my shoes in China.
    A Concord-based Biz-Ed Liaison Manager could get this project started and monitor it for a minimum cost and a large future return. As an entrepreneur I recommend publishing reports on the plan and its progress and selling them to the educational secretaries of other states, which could turn the office into a profit center.
    This could lead to area Business Expos where youngsters could get to meet local business people. There have been some of those, but there should be more and not just once a year.
    Perhaps the youngsters could be encouraged to form small businesses to provide services on contract…such as cleaning offices, baby sitting, lawn mowing, and helping local businesses with mailings. This would help teach the kids responsibility, punctuality, and the work ethic. It might help them buy even more expensive sneakers (from Taiwan).
    Of particular importance would be the cooperation of our New Hampshire high-tech businesses. This is the greatest area of business growth and it’s going to stay that way, so the more we can interest youngsters in high-tech careers, the better work force New Hampshire will provide, and the higher the wages paid.
    Our universities are graduating 40,000 electrical engineers and computer scientists a year, about the same as we did 30 years ago, when we had about 5% as many high-tech businesses. About half of these graduates are foreign students, many of whom will stay here after graduation. But our high-tech industry needs double that amount of talent, so they’re bringing in about 5,000 engineers and scientists a month. A month! More and more or our software companies are holding their engineering meetings in Chinese!
    This is why I’ve been pushing our school system to help interest kids in high-tech hobbies such as amateur radio, astronomy, computers, and electronic experimenting. I’d like to see an eight-year voluntary course in the fundamentals of electronics…taught by a bi-weekly magazine instead of text books, which are out of date by the time they’re published. Yes, I can organize such a publication. I’ve been publishing stuff like that for over 50 years.
    Let’s stop just reacting to change and be out front, helping to make change happen.                                                                               

10/17/08 (NH#1)

Improving Schools
    Anything we can do to improve our school system and reduce its cost will improve our quality of life, cut our taxes, and provide a better educated work force for NH businesses. This would, in turn, tend to attract more businesses to the state and help new ones get started.
    I believe we can cut our public school cost at least in half, and at the same time enormously improve the quality of education offered. I have written at length about this, but here I’ll be brief and not go into the details and furnish all of the references. But this is a subject I have studied in depth. Having been invited to give the keynote address at a national educational conference, perhaps I can claim to be an expert.
    To better equalize the funding per student in the state I propose that all schools be funded by the state instead of the towns. Further, I’d like to see the administration of the schools in the hands of elected state officials instead of local school boards. Yes, I’m aware of the pros and cons. Ask Daron Libby, the editor of New Hampshire ToDo, who served on the Londonderry school board for several years, for an inside view.
    The school model which is the very best I’ve found is the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Mass. This school costs less than half as much to run as the nearby public schools. The school takes students from 4 to 20 and has no curriculum, no tests, no grades, no homework, and no separation of the students by age. The kids study what they want, when they want. And if a group decides they want to learn some subject they get a teacher to help them. The Sudbury graduates are outstanding and are welcome in any college. There are eight books written about the school. Yes, I’ve visited it.
    We need to be able to weed out poor teachers and should end tenure, no matter how much of a fight the NEA puts up, or how well-healed their lobbyists.
    Further, I propose that any interested school be commissioned to have its students build a mobile workshop or laboratory in a trailer which can then be moved from school to school, staying at each for a few weeks, making it possible for every NH student to have an opportunity to build skills which require equipment. Skills such as woodworking, metalworking, electronic repairs, foundry, surveying, astronomy, typing, video and audio recording and editing, etc. These trailers would be returned to their home schools several times a year for maintenance and upgrading. The students would love projects like that to work on.
    I’d also like to see students given the opportunity to learn skills such as speaking, juggling, swimming, skiing, snowboarding, scuba diving, horseback riding, skateboarding, roller skating, driving, flying, golf, bowling, sailing, kayaking, bicycle riding, playing the piano (or any other instrument), typing, speed reading, flying kites, spelunking, and so on. Any extra costs of the activities would be paid by the parents, not the state. The idea is to make the learning of these skills available, not mandatory.
    The Sudbury school students make all of the school’s rules. Every student and teacher has one vote and they have regular meetings where changes in the rules are discussed and voted on. The school is run by the students. They handle most of the maintenance and keep it clean, thus keeping costs down and providing an incentive to keep the school clean. There’s never any graffiti…anywhere. Almost no administration is needed. And administration accounts for a hefty chunk of our New Hampshire school costs.
    I also have a sneaky plan which would provide our schools with the latest in computers and software, all at no cost to the state.
    As John Taylor Gatto, the New York prize-winning teacher said, anyone can learn to read in 100 hours, if they’re allowed to. That’s in just one month. Yet we’re turning out college graduates who can barely read. I’ve taken musicians who came to record their CDs in my studio out to dinner and found they were unable to read a restaurant menu.
    I’m working on a complete book on improving our schools, so these are just a few ideas.
If we cut school costs by 50%, will that reduce our property taxes or will the Legislature find something else to spend the bonanza on? I know what the answer will be unless you find some way to rein them in. That’s going to be important if you implement some of the other proposals I have for cutting state expenses.
                                                                                                                                                                                             
10/17/08 (NH#1)

New Business Development
    Since the quality of life in New Hampshire is dependent, among other things, on the number and quality of businesses in the state…what can we do to attract and grow quality businesses?
    Businesses looking for cheap labor are moving operations to Mexico, China, India, and other low wage countries. But what most companies need are reasonably priced workers who are skilled and trainable. The reasonably priced part will depend on New Hampshire’s cost of living. The skilled and trainable parts have to do with how good our educational system is. If we turn out barely literate youngsters with few math or science skills, as we’re doing today, we’re sure not going to attract high-tech businesses. But, I’ll cover this later, so let’s say that we do have a well educated workforce available.
    A state Business Development Department (BDD) should be looking for high-tech businesses to attract. This means talking with prospects to find out their needs…and then trying to fill them. We have low taxes, a high quality of life, endless activities for the whole family, reasonably priced housing, four fabulous seasons, and beauty that won’t quit. Now all we need is to be able to provide the educated work force they need.
    The BDD should have a DVD available showing available commercial buildings and building sites. It would show the buildings, inside and out, including aerial photos. A map would show its location in relation to the nearby towns, transportation, recreational facilities and attractions, schools, shopping and the nearest hospital.
    It should also give an idea of the type and cost of housing available in the area, with pictures of some typical homes.
    The cost of the equipment needed to make digital video tapes and burn DVDs is very modest. I bought an iMac and an excellent Sony camera, complete with the editing program for well under $2,500…and that was eight years ago. Prices are continuing to drop and performance improve.
    Let’s start gutting what’s left of Silicon Valley and transplant the good stuff to the Granite Mountains. Where would you prefer our new high-tech industrial center? Over around Lebanon? Down near Greenville? Laconia? Or maybe Conway…not far from what can become Aspen East, in our almost vacant North Country?    
     Why think small?                                                                                                                        

10/17/08  (NH#1)

Health
    What would be the impact on New Hampshire’s state budget if health care costs could be lowered by 10%? I see that health insurance is up $500 over last year on the average per employee for businesses. Okay, how would you go about achieving a 10% reduction in health care costs for state employees? Any clues? Having researched this field carefully, I have.
    What I discovered is one of the biggest cover-ups in the world…one responsible for the unnecessary deaths every year of hundreds of millions of people world-wide. I’ve discovered some doctors who have proven that any disease can be cured without drugs and not even a need for a doctor. This has been intentionally covered up to protect the pharmaceutical industry’s enormous profits. For proof I’m not a wacko read Dr. Bruno Comby’s Maximize Immunity or check out www.drday.com and see what well-known San Francisco trauma surgeon Dr. Lorraine Day has to say.
    My Secret Guide to Health explains how anyone can cure themselves of any illness, mainly by changing their lifestyle. If copies were given to all state employees at least 10% of them would be motivated enough to make the lifestyle changes needed to regain and maintain robust health. And, a year later, when their fellow employees see how healthy and slim that 10% have become (and are bragging about), they’ll re-read the book and more will change.
     Imagine the consequences if every major employer in New Hampshire followed this route! It could put our drug store prescription counters (they’re in the back, past the candy and snack-food racks) out of business. Talk about a drug-free New Hampshire!
    The “secret” is simple. By getting people to stop putting poisons into their bodies, their immune systems can recover from fighting the poisons and get busy repairing the damage that’s been done…such as diabetes, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, tooth decay, obesity, and so on. From there on it’s illness prevention instead of sickness care.
    Give me a call so I can go over the details with you and bring you a copy of my book. It can change your life. Once you’ve slashed the cost of health care for state employees, we can get busy encouraging New Hampshire employers to do the same for their employees. And, money saved goes right to their bottom line.
    The biggest obstacle is getting people to believe how easy it is to cure any illness and never get sick again. As Dr. Day says, “There are no incurable illnesses.” She called to say she’d read my book and “it’s right on the money.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

10/16/08

American Legion
    For some reason, which I don’t recall, I joined the American Legion a few years ago. Big mistake.
    The local post monthly meetings are a total bore. Of the post’s 43 members, four or five show up for meetings. I can’t imagine why. The post commander calls the meeting to order, we pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Legion, the minutes of the last meeting are read, the treasurer gives his report, no old business, no new business, meeting adjourned and everyone goes home.
    There are two newspapers, a national Legionnaire, and a New Hampshire Legionnaire, are mostly filled with pictures of overweight Legion members standing there smiling. Both ask for articles. I’ve submitted some, but none have been published, or, for that matter, even acknowledged.
    The membership, understandably, is plummeting. From a high of 27,000 in NH, they’re down to 11,800, and all but one of the 84 NH posts failed to reach this year’s goal. The one winner was Dunbarton, with a goal of 25 and managed 26. Wilton had a goal of 148 and ended with 3. How about Sunapee, with a goal of 15 and only managed one. But, it was disappointment all across the board.
    The American Legion management sure needs a deep enema. Hells bells, it’s easy to get new members. Just put on interesting meetings and they’ll come. And that means attracting speakers with information that is of value to the audience. It means getting word of the meetings and the speaker into the local media and inviting new prospective members.
    The bi-monthly New Hampshire Legionnaire reported 105 member deaths in the latest issue. At that rate, if the posts don’t start having me for a speaker and the Legion newspapers don’t start publishing articles I’ll be glad to write, they’re going to run out of live members.
    I wonder if the VFW is any better?

10/15/08

Specie
    Wouldn’t it be nice to have some alternative that would hold its value should the dollar tank? No, not the amero, which the New World Order alarmists have been threatening. How about a New Hampshire dollar, backed by the state? We could keep it stable, no matter what the Federal Reserve Banks do to the American dollar. With banks folding by the thousands and the rumors of hyper-inflation, we sure could use something we can depend on.
    In the meantime, just in case, I’m going to take my money out of the bank, and change it to Canadian dollars.
    Have you any suggestions for a name for the New Hampshire currency? Let’s not call ’em dollars. Too confusing. Something short and catchy.

10/14/08

300 Million
    With over 300 million people to pick from to run for president, the best we could come up with were McCain and Obama? Lordy! Neither has ever run a successful business. Neither has written anything outstanding. Nor done anything as senators worthy of note. Even with their brain trusts to help them in the campaign, neither has come up with any outstanding ideas.
    And last time the system gave us a choice of W or Gore. Aargh!
    Folks, we’re being suckered big time. We’re being kept fat, dumb, and worried. As a country we are losing it. We need someone in charge with some ideas on how to save our country from blowing it the way Greece, Rome, Spain, France, and Britain blew their empires.
    America used to be great. A world leader. We produced great literature, great movies, great music, great new technologies. So here we are today, the most bankrupt of the developed countries, with a massively bloated government, by far the highest cost health system and one of the sickest people, the highest cost school system and students who come in at the bottom in international tests, truly lousy movies, no great recent literature or music, and the only two new technologies we’ve come up with in decades, cell phones and personal computers, I got started.
    We don’t need Obama or McCain, we need someone who can save our country from following what used to be Great Britain, an empire upon which the sun never set, into the roster of lost empires.
    With a strong leader we could have the healthiest people in the world, and at the lowest cost. We could have the best educated kids in the world, and at a fraction of today’s cost. We could unbloat the government, saving hundreds of billions. We could start millions of new small businesses to provide employment. We could develop cold fusion energy to provide non-polluting energy at a hundredth the cost of oil, allowing us to close down our nuclear power plants and get rid of the power grid…and sell it to the world, made in America, to generate trillions of dollars. Oh, and get rid of that damned Federal Reserve system to put an end inflation.
    What’s that rumble I’m hearing? Oh, it’s only you, snoring.

Governor Lynch: Thinking BIG
    To keep New Hampshire’s economy healthy we need to do everything we can to encourage small business growth and the formation of new businesses. The more you and the Legislature can do along this line, the stronger will be our New Hampshire economy. Big business has gone global.™
    For instance, we have at least a hundred towns in New Hampshire that are large enough to benefit from the formation of Business Incubator Groups (BIGs).
    The concept is simple…in each town organize a group of business leaders who would normally benefit from new businesses being formed…such as a lawyer, accountant, printer, mailing company, computer service company, Realtor, insurance company, and so on. Have them form a Business Incubator Group to help entrepreneurs put together and fund business proposals. They would also act as a board of directors for the new firms as well as get more business for themselves providing their services.
    The actual funding would come from the state, but would be guaranteed by the BIGs, thus insuring the state against any possible loss. Indeed, the state would collect interest on the BIG loans. It’s a proverbial win-win situation.
    Small businesses are the real backbone of America, not huge industries. In my Secret Guide to Wealth I advise youngsters to think in terms of owning their own businesses, not in working at a job for someone else. I explain that there are no schools or colleges I know of today that teach the things an entrepreneur needs to know to be successful…which is why nine out of ten new businesses fail within five years. I explain how they can learn everything they need to know to be successful, with someone else happily paying them to learn.
    It is only when you own your own business that you can have the freedom and the money to do things. I was 30 before I learned that. That’s when I borrowed $1,000 on my car to start my first business. Within three years I was going the usual successful person route buying a yacht, an airplane, an Arab horse, and new Porsches every year. Johnny Carson joked on his show that I had front and back Porsches.
    A few years ago, when I was working with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Board of Overseers, RPI Council, and First Executive On Campus), their business incubator heads consulted me on how they might improve their operation. I proposed a similar approach to the above, which they implemented. They recently won a prize as the best business incubator in the country.
    If a hundred towns help develop just four new businesses a year, in five years we’ll have two thousand new businesses. With an average of ten employees, that’s 20,000 new jobs. We’ll see entrepreneurs rushing to New Hampshire from all over the country. Make that ten new businesses a year per BIG and do the math. Watch out Silicon Valley, here comes the Granite Mountains!
    One more thing. Will I be invited to say a few words at your press conferences announcing the formation of each of these hundreds of new businesses?
                                                                                                                                                                                                    ……Wayne Green


10/13/08

My Winter Prediction
    Last winter, here in New Hampshire, we had the most snow in a hundred years. It was at times over five feet deep in my front yard. So, what’s it going to do this coming winter? Was last winter an anomaly? I don’t think so.
    Chalk it up to global warming. You see, the earth, like all the other planets, is heating up…in response to the sun’s increased activity. Scientists are telling us that there are thousands of volcanoes erupting under the oceans, heating them up. This, naturally, is causing more water to evaporate from the oceans into the atmosphere…which helps explain the abnormal rainfall this last summer. It also explains why we got so much snow last winter and why we can expect even more this winter. And why the pack ice at the poles is melting, even though the poles are getting a deeper snow cover.
    It also explains why winter started so late last year and ended early. Our first good snow didn’t arrive until Valentine’s Day, February 14th! In past winters I remember being out there skiing on Thanksgiving Day. And this year, by mid-April, it was 83° and I was out getting vitamin D and starting my summer tan. This winter I expect we’ll have a corking good ski season…though short.
    I’m out there every day, walking in a crouched position to help strengthen my leg muscles for skiing. By February they should be in good skiing shape.

10/12/08

120 Pounds!
    An article in a March 2002 issue of Woman’s World on Victoria Boutenko losing 120 pounds when she changed to a raw food diet caught my eye…particularly since I reviewed her book Green For Life in my 2/15/08 essay. Oh, hell, essay or blog, I’ve been writing editorials for my publications for over fifty years, so these are editorials, but in the modern web publishing format.
    Victoria started out at 280 pounds and, not bothering to count calories, on a raw food diet, eating all she wanted, she lost 30 pounds in the first month and ended up weighing 160 pounds. I suspect the reason the article didn’t mention anything about the fantastic health benefits of a raw diet was so as to not upset their Big Pharma advertisers. So it was all about losing excess weight, and with many excellent examples.
    It points out that it takes only 1.6 pounds of cooked food to provide 1,500 calories and five pounds of raw food. No wonder you can eat all you want. It also explains that you have a lot more energy and need less sleep. The body just does better all the way around when it gets the raw food enzymes that are destroyed by cooking anything above 118°.
    For lunch today I started with some watermelon, then I minced some buffalo liver in my chopper and had that with one of Victoria’s green smoothies of banana and kale, plus minced broccoli, minced cauliflower and tomatoes. The last three slushed with my cole slaw sauce.
    The sauce recipe is in my health guide, but it’s simple. Two quarts of organic (Stonyfield) plain yogurt, two cups of organic apple cider vinegar, two cups of extra virgin olive oil, one cup of organic non-heated honey, sea salt, cracked pepper and some celery seeds for seasoning. Sweet, sour, creamy, healthy, and you’ll love it. It’s great on any kind of minced veggies. I keep my little chopper and a blender going almost every day.

10/11/08

The Deerfield Hamfest
    We amateur radio hobbyists (hams) get together at hamfests, and the big one in New Hampshire is in October at the Deerfield fair grounds. The main feature of this hamfest is the flea market, with a hundred or so hams selling their unneeded equipment and parts from the backs of cars, tables, and even some tents. It’s a great place to find bargains, so hundreds of hams gather from all around New England.
    Having published a ham radio magazine for 43 years, just about everyone there knew me. Several stopped me to say they had a complete collection of my magazines. And dozens told me how much they enjoyed my editorials down through the years. Well, they were pretty much like these little essays…about anything I thought would interest the readers, and not just about the hobby.
    Come to think of it, this year marks my 70th year in the hobby.
    My old ham skiing buddies Chuck and Eric were there. We spent many years together in early Januarys skiing for a week at Aspen. What fun we had. I stopped going to Aspen when they started charging seniors to ski. It costs a lot less to ski here in New Hampshire, even though we don’t have the variety or length of trails. Or the variety of restaurants right near the ski areas.
    Before global warming set in I wanted to see the North Country of New Hampshire developed into an Aspen-East, with ski areas on a few more of the White Mountains. This would attract hotels, restaurants and other businesses to the area. On the other hand, with the ski seasons shortening the way they are, it probably would not pay off.

10/09/08

Modesty
    In the words of Bill Gilbert, (Ruddigore) “If you wish in the world to advance, your merits you’re bound to enhance, you must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet, or trust me you haven’t a chance.”
    Somehow, my love of reading, learning, and thinking was not totally beaten out of me by our mandatory government public school system, which was designed to minimize such character deviations and turn out as uniform and manageable a product as possible.
    Fortunately, there have been a few system failures like me, so I research things that “everybody” believes, and have been finding one thing after another where we’ve been suckered.
    Though not an MD…indeed, because I am not an MD…I’ve been able to learn more about health than 99% of the MDs. Maybe 99.9%. Nor am I a psychiatrist, yet I know how to fix most people’s mental problems in hours instead of years or using pills.
    It is very frustrating to see the U.S. coming in around 37th in health and dead last in education, all because of firmly inculcated beliefs in the present systems. And being suckered by stuff like global warming, 911, fluorides, vaccinations, mad cows, and so on.
    So I write and get on talk shows to share what I’ve discovered. Alas, most people are so deeply indoctrinated they don’t even want to hear anything different, much less think about it. Like a year ago when Prof. Randy Pausch was given a few months to live I sent him a letter explaining how easy any cancer is to cure, mainly with a diet change. I got no answer and he died, as his doctors predicted.
   
10/7/08

Multi-tasking
    Several state legislatures have passed laws against using a cell phone while driving because it’s been causing so many accidents.  How come? That’s easy, our brain can only do one thing at a time, and it can’t switch between tasks very quickly. The brain can’t successfully multi-task.
    Kids in particular are having accidents. Because they haven’t the years of driving experience to have developed driving habits to protect them when their mind wanders. But even decades of good driving habits doesn’t protect us when we take our eyes off the road to make a cell phone call.
    Many kids tell their parents that they can do their homework better when they have their radio blasting out music. These are not going to be A, or even B students. Some offices have music playing softly. Not only will the work slow down, but it’ll be sub-par and the workers will start having trouble with their memories.
    The people who are having major problems with their memories are often those who go to sleep with the radio on. With this, music is bad enough, but the real brain scrambler is talk radio. While you are sleeping and dreaming your brain is normally busy sorting out the events of the day and filing memories away.
    We are designed to sleep in total darkness and total silence so all the brain has to do is help your memories be firmed up and keep you entertained with dreams. I do that and I haven’t had an unpleasant dream in years. And my memory is pretty good, too.

10/6/08

Germs
    There’s little argument that germs are to be avoided and can make us sick. Actually, it isn’t quite that simple.
    You’re aware, I hope, that even in the worst plagues there have always been a few people who haven’t gotten sick. Gee, how come? They’ve been the people with strong immune systems, people who have not compromised their system with poisons. Well, that used to be a lot easier than it is today.
    Germs, viruses, parasites, and fungi are easily eliminated by a strong immune system. Your immune system knows what every cell in your body is supposed to do and it checks ’em to make sure they’re healthy, doing their job, and replicating without errors. Any cancer cells are quickly disposed of. Well, it does that if it’s not tied up dealing with barrages of burgers, fries, and most of the other stuff we’re eating these days.

10/5/08

Mercury
    This stuff is an insidious poison. Some years ago, when I was invited to give a talk at a Tesla Society conference in Colorado Springs, dentist Hal Huggins was another speaker. He explained how amalgam fillings, which had half mercury, were causing multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s, birth defects, and other serious illnesses. He showed a film of a woman so crippled by multiple sclerosis she was confined to a wheel chair. A few weeks later, after he had removed her amalgam fillings and replaced them with plastic, she was out playing tennis.
    Hal’s first book, It’s All In Your Head, was reviewed in my Secret Guide to Wisdom (p.8). The subject was of particular interest to me because I’d watched one of my grandmothers slowly die of MS. Now Hal has a new book, Uninformed Consent, and it’s well worth getting. My copy is heavily highlighted.
    Mercury plays hell with one’s immune system, so it is to be avoided. The main sources are dental amalgam, vaccinations (which have thimerosal, which is mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde as a preservative), and fish. Doctors, who have dared to level with us say that if you get flu shots three years in a row you’ll have ten times the chance of getting Alzheimer’s.
    It isn’t only with amalgam that dentists are poisoning us, complete with the backing of the American Dental Association. Hal’s book also goes into the way root canals are making us sick. I’ve reported on this with a review of Dr. George Meinig’s The Root Canal Coverup (p.12 of my Wisdom Guide). When I saw my old dentist the other day I should have thanked him for capping all my teeth. He said that would stop me needing any more fillings. Well, he was right. The teeth he capped all rotted under the caps, so I had to have them all removed and get false teeth. That got rid of my many amalgam fillings and root canals.
    If you have any amalgam fillings or root canals, get ’em out! Get Hal’s book for all the details. It’s 278 pages and only $15. ISBN 1-57174-117-A. If you can’t find it locally, call the publisher at 800-766-8009.

9/30/08

Radio Bookshop
    When I took the editor’s job at CQ magazine, back in 1955, the magazine had been losing money…a lot of money. So I signed on for $10,000 a year, with the understanding that I’d get a raise when I had the magazine in the black. Well, within nine months I had the magazine solidly in the black, but Sandy Cowan, the publisher, had excuses for delaying my raise.
    And more excuses. So, in 1958, I said, okay, how about a half page for me to advertise books the readers might want to read? That’s how Radio Bookshop got started. I picked a couple likely books and ran an ad. It was a huge flop. All I got was four lousy orders. Bum idea.
    Since magazine had to go to press about a month before the cover date, by the time the flop was obvious the ad was running again. It did better, so I kept the ad running. Six months later I was getting about four hundred orders a month from the same ad that pulled just four orders at first. That’s an advertising lesson I’ve never forgotten.
    So I found more and more books for the readers and the business grew. The profits paid for a nice European trip for my mother and dad. The business is still going, though today, fifty years later, I mostly sell books I’ve written.

9/27/08

Missed Out
    When I graduated high school, back in 1940, only one of my classmates even claimed to ever have had sex with a girl, and I’m still skeptical about his claim. Today, 60% of high school senior girls are sexually active, and 7% are getting pregnant every year.
    I continued to miss out during the first two years of college, as did most of my fraternity brothers, with the exception of a few who went downtown on Saturday nights to one of the whore houses, for which Troy (NY) was famous.
    Then WWII kept me busy and away from temptation for four more years. It wasn’t until 1946, when I got out of the Navy and went back to college, that my virginity was finally demolished. I didn’t lose it, I eagerly gave it away. From a sexual point of view those were not the good old days.

9/26/08

Cancer
    Any cancer can be easily and quickly cured…unless you let a doctor treat you. As Dr. Atkins put it, “There is not one, but many cures for cancer. But they all are systematically suppressed by the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the AMA, the FDA, and the major oncology centers.. They have too much of a vested interest in the status quo.”
    The AMA? When Dr. Richard Eby, an obstretician, professor and author approached the AMA and asked why they had never studied primitive societies where there was no cancer, the AMA’s chief counsel pointed out that the purpose of the AMA, if he’d read the by-laws, was to protect the income of its members. And since cancer was the main income of the members, if ever a cancer cure was found it would not be recognized by the AMA, period!
    According to Dr. Hardin Jones, a University of California professor, “Patients are as well, or better off, untreated. My studies have proven conclusively that cancer patients who refuse chemotherapy and radiation actually live up to four time longer than treated cases, including breast cancer cases.”
    The only cure for cancer is one’s built-in body repair and maintenance department, the immune system. A strong immune system can handle any germ, virus, parasite, or invading fungus. The system checks every new cell and trashes any defective or cancerous cells. But, when we weaken our immune system by overloading it with toxins, all hell, including cancer, can break loose. This is the root of every illness.
    If we continue the toxin barrage, there’s nothing to stop a cancer growth. The toxins? There’s a bunch, but the most popular is cooked food. Then there’s sugar, alcohol, nicotine, drugs, mercury, fluorides, MSG, root canals, and so on. I go into all the details in my Secret Guide to Health.

9/25/08

Winning The War!
    If, instead of shipping more weapons and men to Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d invest a few billions in outsmarting our enemies instead of trying to outfight them, we might quickly wind up our two seemingly unwinnable wars. And, as winners. We don’t need smarter weapons, we need smarter top brass. Unfortunately, our military promotional system, as with our large corporations, assures this will never happen.
    It’s a religious war. An ideological war, complete with suicide bombing terrorists. So how can we fight an enemy that teaches its people from earliest babyhood that killing non-believers is a sure path to paradise? My approach is to use their belief, as well as bullets, to fight them.
    The next time a suicide bomber blows himself up, gather his body parts and bury them in pig shit. That’ll cancel his passport to paradise, free up 72 virgins, and send his soul straight to hell. Be sure to take a video of the procedure for airing on local TV.
    And do the same with every enemy we kill. Leave no martyrs behind. Let’s start filling the Muslim express trains to hell with passengers and save an awful lot of virgins from what could be a very unpleasant eternity.
    Here’s a weapon that will put an otherwise waste product to good use. We have a huge supply on hand, with nothing nearly as good to do with it.
    Why stop there? When one of the enemy shoots at us from a house, not only bury him in pig shit, but spread a generous supply in and around the house, making it uninhabitable for Muslims from then on.
    If a village is giving us serious trouble, let’s borrow one of those chem-trail planes and carpet bomb the village with pig shit.
    How about our having our bullets specially made with a tiny scrap of pork inside the hollow-noses?
    Instead of water-boarding prisoners for interrogation, threaten them with a pig shit bath.
    We have a super-powerful and very inexpensive weapon sitting in pig farm pools around the South. Let’s put it to good use and wind up this whole terrorist and war thing.
    Oh, damn, I forgot, this idea will never fly as it could raise holy hell with our military-industrial complex which has to have wars using planes, ships, guns and other weapons, and the more the better. Sigh, back to the drawing board.

9/24/89

Bananas
    After reading this, you'll never look at a banana in the same way again.
    Bananas contain three natural sugars - sucrose, fructose and glucose combined with fiber. A banana gives an instant, sustained and substantial boost of energy.
    Research has proven that just two bananas provide enough energy for a strenuous 90-minute workout. No wonder the banana is the number one fruit with the world's leading athletes.
    But energy isn't the only way a banana can help us keep fit. It can also help overcome or prevent a substantial number of illnesses and conditions, making it a must to add to our daily diet.
    Depression: According to a recent survey undertaken by Mind amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. This is because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin, known to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel happier.
    PMS: Forget the pills - eat a banana. The vitamin B6 it contains regulates blood glucose levels, which can affect your mood.
    Anemia: High in iron, bananas can stimulate the production of hemoglobin in the blood and so helps
in cases of anemia.
    Blood Pressure: This unique tropical fruit is extremely high in potassium yet low in salt, making it perfect to beat blood pressure. So much so, the US Food and Drug Administration has just allowed the banana industry to make official claims for the fruit's ability to reduce the risk of blood pressure and stroke.
    Brain Power: 200 students at a Twickenham (Middlesex) school were helped through their exams by eating bananas at breakfast, break, and lunch in a bid to boost their brain power. Research has shown that the potassium-packed fruit can assist learning by making pupils more alert.
    Constipation: High in fiber, including bananas in the diet can help restore normal bowel action, helping to overcome the problem without resorting to laxatives.
    Hangovers: One of the quickest ways of curing a hangover is to make a banana milkshake, sweetened with honey. The banana calms the stomach and, with the help of the honey, builds up depleted blood sugar levels, while the milk soothes and re-hydrates your system.
    Heartburn: Bananas have a natural antacid effect in the body, so if you suffer from heartburn, try eating a banana for soothing relief.
    Morning Sickness: Snacking on bananas between meals helps to keep blood sugar levels up and avoid morning sickness.
    Mosquito bites: Before reaching for the insect bite cream, try rubbing the affected area with the inside of a banana skin. Many people find it amazingly successful at reducing swelling and irritation.
    Nerves: Bananas are high in B vitamins that help calm the nervous system.
    Overweight and at work? Studies at the Institute of Psychology in Austria found pressure at work leads to gorging on comfort food like chocolate and crisps. Looking at 5,000 hospital patients, researchers found the most obese were more likely to be in high-pressure jobs. The report concluded that, to avoid panic-induced food cravings, we need to control our blood sugar levels by snacking on high carbohydrate foods every two hours to keep levels steady.
    Ulcers: The banana is used as the dietary food against intestinal disorders because of its soft texture and smoothness. It is the only raw fruit that can be eaten without distress in over-chronicler cases. It also neutralizes over-acidity and reduces irritation by coating the lining of the stomach.
    Temperature control: Many other cultures see bananas as a "cooling" fruit that can lower both the physical and emotional temperature of expectant mothers. In Thailand , for example, pregnant women eat bananas to ensure their baby is born with a cool temperature.
    Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): Bananas can help SAD sufferers because they contain the natural mood enhancer tryptophan.
    Smoking & Tobacco Use: Bananas can also help people trying to give up smoking. The B6, B12 they contain, as well as the potassium and magnesium found in them, help the body recover from the effects of nicotine withdrawal.
    Stress: Potassium is a vital mineral, which helps normalize the heartbeat, sends oxygen to the brain and regulates your body's water balance. When we are stressed, our metabolic rate rises, thereby reducing our potassium levels. These can be rebalanced with the help of a high-potassium banana snack.
    Strokes: According to research in The New England Journal of Medicine, eating bananas as part of a regular diet can cut the risk of death by strokes by as much as 40%!
    Warts: Those keen on natural alternatives swear that if you want to kill off a wart, take a piece of banana skin and place it on the wart, with the yellow side out. Carefully hold the skin in place with a plaster or surgical tape!
    So, a banana really is a natural remedy for many ills. When you compare it to an apple, it has four times the protein, twice the carbohydrate, three times the phosphorus, five times the vitamin A and iron, and twice the other vitamins and minerals. It is also rich in potassium and is one of the best value foods around So maybe its time to
change that well-known phrase so that we say, "A banana a day keeps the doctor away!"
    PS: Bananas must be the reason monkeys are so happy all the time! I will add one here; want a quick shine on our shoes?? Take the INSIDE of the banana skin, and rub directly on the shoe...polish with dry cloth. Amazing fruit!

9/22/08
 
  Sex
     According to the cover story in a recent U.S. News & World Report, staying sexually active has some major benefits, in addition to being one of the most fun things there is to do. Joy, excitement, connectedness, and a whole bunch of health benefits.
     Scientists tell us that regular sex boosts the immune system, lowers stress, improves sleep, improves memory, and can hold off wrinkles. A Scottish study reported that people having sex every other day look from seven to twelve years younger than their peers.
     Since the most basic key to health is a strong immune system, regular sex can help prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s and other illnesses. I’ll have to add this when I publish the second edition of my Secret Guide to Health.
 
9/22/08
 
  It’s Your Diet!
     The BBC produced a ten-minute segment you can watch at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/uk_news/magazine/6248975.stm. It’s about nine men and women, all with dangerously high blood pressure, who camped out in a British zoo for twelve days, and ate about eleven pounds daily of an ape-like diet of high-fiber fruit and vegetables, some nuts and seafood.
     In less than two weeks on this diet everyone’s blood pressure was down to normal and they lost an average of about ten pounds! Constipation problems vanished and their energy levels soared.
     Our digestive systems evolved on foods that are nothing like our diets today, and this is creating our health problems, as I’ve explained in my Secret Guide to Health. The researchers you won’t hear about from the major media or most medical publications, have made it clear that there are no incurable illnesses…if you change your diet. Anything our digestive systems aren’t able to handle is classified by our bodies as toxic, so our immune systems rush to deal with the invaders…like cooked food, sugar, white flour products, pasteurized anything, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and drugs.
     How many of the nine people in the film do you think have gone back to their old diets? You won’t either, if you give a raw food diet a two week test hop.
    
9/22/08
 
  College
     Today college is one of the bigger frauds on families. Yes, FRAUD!
     Well, gee, everyone knows you have to have a college education to get anywhere. Yeah, well everyone, as usual, is full of fecal berries. Let’s see you convince Bill Gates, who dropped out of college. Or Steve Jobs? Or Ted Turner, and so on. An INC magazine poll of the top hundred entrepreneurs found that most either didn’t go to college, or dropped out.
     As I point out in my Secret Guide to Wealth, the best path to wealth and freedom is to own your own business, and that colleges are not teaching the things an entrepreneur needs to know to succeed. So I explain how to get someone to teach you everything you need to know, and pay you to learn.
     You see, college educations, and I’m using that word very loosely, are geared toward getting grads jobs with large companies. That was yesterday, when we had lots of big corporations and they were busy growing. These days few are growing, and much of their operations have been moved offshore.
     But even if a grad gets a job in a large corporation, what are the long range prospects? They’re the same as my uncle, who worked for General Electric for forty years got…a modest pension. Fortunately, like many retirees, he didn’t live very long after retiring.
     One of my step-sons is starting his daughter in college where the tab is $33,000 per year! Since he’s a Mormon, he’s going to send a couple other of his kids to Utah for college for a third that.
     Unless colleges have changed recently, which I seriously doubt, they’re “teaching” by having their students, as homework, read several pages of the text book and then be tested on their memory. This tests short term memory, not understanding, and certainly not thinking.
     Our mandatory K-12 public schools teach us conformity and to obey orders. There is no effort to teach thinking. Today they are barely teaching kids how to read, write and do arithmetic. Read some of John Taylor Gatto’s books. He’s the prize-winning teacher who has written brutal exposés of the system.
     When I was 17 I was as brainwashed as my folks on the critical importance of a college education, so I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy (NY) to get an EE. Well, I’d been an avid ham for several years, so that was a natural for me. After two years we had a war, so I joined the Navy for four years. I served as an ET on a submarine from 1943 until the end of the war. The, back to college, courtesy of the government.
     When I got out, instead of a big company, I went into radio broadcasting and then television. Then I wised up, borrowed $1,000 on my car and started my first business. Two years later I had seven factories busy and was buying toys like a yacht, an airplane, an Arab horse, and a couple Porsches.
     The top economists are telling us that our middle class is shrinking, now that manufacturing jobs are moving and have moved out of the country. And, the companies have found better educated, less costly employees in Asia.
     So, here we are today, with a fast-shrinking market for college grads, and no effort to teach them anything about starting or running their own businesses. Worse, we’re well into a huge financial crash that’s going to have companies more interested in shedding employees than hiring new ones. It’s a bare market.
 
9/21/08
 
  The AMA Sucks!
   When I read about one therapy after another which has been proven in practice, but of which the AMA “doesn’t approve,” I almost get upset. It seems like almost every branch of science has the same problem.
     I’ve learned a bunch about the problems that dental amalgam and nickel inlays can cause. If you have any amalgam fillings, I guarantee you’ll be healthier if you get ’em replaced. You want to read It’s All In Your Head by Dr. Hal Huggins. Those fillings, which the ADA still supports, are dumping poisonous mercury into your body.
     Then there’s the way we’re doing a job on ourselves by preventing ultra-violet light from getting into our eyeballs. Read Health And Light by John Ott, Light, Medicine of the Future, by Jacob Liberman, and Into The Light by W.C. Douglass. It’s amazing what even just a little ultra-violet light can do for your health.
     There also is a long history of curing a wide variety of illnesses by exposing a small amount of a person’s blood to ultra-violet light and then putting it back. Illnesses like cancer.
     Are low powered magnetic fields helping to make you and your family sick? You bet they are. You can read more about this in The Body Electric by Robert Becker, Cross Currents, also by Becker, The Electricity Around You May Be Hazardous To Your Health by Ellen Sugarman, Currents of Death by Paul Brodeur, and The Great Power-Line Cover-Up, also by Brodeur.
     You’ll also want to read Magnetism and It’s Effects on the Living System by Davis & Rawls.
     And if that isn’t enough, you’re going to love Hydrogen Peroxide Medical Miracle by William Douglass. If you know anyone with cancer, colds, flu, artery plaque, heart disease, shingles, gum disease, etc., you should get them to read it.
     A friend sent me a brochure from the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS) about a snake bite zapper. It does about the same as zapping a snake bite with a wire from the spark plug of a car or boat motor, the way the Peruvian Indians do. JAARS makes small hand-operated generators for jungle use (no batteries to die). They claim that the treatment also works on scorpion stings. I’d say we need more research. I’ll bet a similar approach would work on jelly fish, sting ray, scorpion fish, and fire coral stings. It might work fine for bee and wasp stings, and even mosquitoes and other insect bites. Imagine what a business you could have with a little gadget which instantly stopped the itching of bug bites. It would have a small ring you’d put around the bite and an electrode to touch the middle of the bite. Zap, and no more pain.
     There are more than a few reasons to suspect that something like this might also help with some skin or breast cancers. I’ve a letter from a   reader citing the Swedish use of 12 volts to get rid of breast cancers,.
     Alas, there is almost zero funding available for research into non-pharmaceutical approaches to sickness repair, and it has been claimed by many people in the field that the FDA is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. Tough combo to fight, no matter how good the therapy.
     Now we read that in the last 50 years male sperm counts have been cut in half. What we haven’t yet read is what whatever is doing this is also doing to the surviving half of our sperm. If something is killing half, imagine how sick or damaged the other half must be! Pesticides are suspected. They’ve been used so extravagantly that now they’re into just about everything we eat and much of what we drink. They’re into our farm soils and our water supplies. We eat them, drink them, and breathe them. Say, are you distilling your tap water before drinking it yet?
     So what can we do about this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into? You can do the same thing I’m doing. You can do some research and get the facts. You can give talks at your local Chambers of Commerce, Rotary,  and Lions clubs. You can get on talk radio and pass the word.     You can raise hell and put a brick under it.
     I’m not talking ecoscams with little or no scientific basis like the ridiculous Alar scare, those owls, nuclear winter, acid rain, greenhouse summer, the snail darter, and the blessed ozone hole. And by the way, there are some fine books on all these media-hyped scares. The two I recommend as the best are Environmental Overkill by Dixie Lee Ray, and Ecoscam by Ronald Bailey.
     Your alternative is to keep quiet and shrug off your responsibility to do your best to fight for a healthier life for your children—and theirs. And, as you are shrugging, try to remember that the main reason democracy has failed so badly in America is the refusal of most people to assume any responsibility, thus leaving much of the change in the hands of nut cases who do go out and scream and carry on.
     The bottom line: do your homework and then make yourself heard.


9/20/08

Bud; Sheen; Kettle; Zeppo Marx; Hill; Marge; Robin; Allen; Molly; Kent & Lane; George Sands; Olive Oyl; Blondie; Jeff; Also; Jeanette McDonald; Charlie McCarthy; Sam; Huckleberry Finn; Clack.

9/08/08
 
  Defense?
  Fifteen years ago we’d built up a military system as part of our cold war strategy. Considering that the main threat from Russia wasn’t a war played with ships, planes and tanks, but of nuclear annihilation from missiles, perhaps Congress let those old generals and admirals keep to their old habits too long.
  History has shown us endlessly that our military leaders have never accepted new technologies without a long, bitter battle. Just like our school teachers. And our scientific establishment. And our medical establishment.
  How many ships, planes, and tanks did we need to put Sadam out of business? And our invasions of Haiti, Panama, Somalia and Grenada? Or our adventure into Yugoslavia?
  We’re worried about North Korea and Iran. But these pip-squeaks are more likely to play the terrorist game with suitcase nukes and biologicals, from which no amount of army divisions or navy ships are going to help us.
  Then there’s China. The communist Chinese leaders are a proven royal pain in the butt. How much the rising tide of capitalism will rock their boat is yet to be seen. And, like our standoff with the USSR, this is most likely going to be another nuke problem, not the number of army divisions we’re keeping out of our workforce at public expense.
  Nukes are a problem. A big problem. We can spend billions or even trillions developing anti-missile defenses, but that isn’t going to keep even a small country from smuggling dozens or even hundreds of nukes into America over our almost wide-open borders and coasts. Plus the makings for tons of biologicals. That’s a lot cheaper way to deliver the goods than via multi-million-dollar guided missiles (which leave a clear signature telling us exactly where they came from).
  Well, what does that leave us? Diplomacy? Har-de-har.
  One thing we’ve sure learned in the west is that money talks. Money from our big industries has total control of Congress and the White House. It was a slow, sneaky shadow win, covered carefully with propaganda (a.k.a. advertising and PR).
  We suckers dutifully roar, running after the waving red flags like bulls, unaware that we’re puppets being strung along. We’re, and this includes most of Europe too, being manipulated. We’re being entertained with baseball, football, soccer, basketball—with a media totally owned by the same group that’s pulling Congress’ strings, chasing after more  entertainment for us. Like political campaigns or the latest Simpson or Lewinski scandal.
  Is the situation hopeless? Not at all. I see a revolution coming which can change everything! It can take the big foot of government (currently America’s fastest growing industry) off our necks. It can cut our government back to that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, where taxes are more on the order of 2% instead of 50.4%. And it can do the same for the people of China, North Korea, and so on.
  So what’s this big revolution?
  It will start here in America. And, like the computer and compact disc revolutions, I hope I can be up front helping to lead the way.
  With the development of the digital video disc (DVD) we have a way to provide hours of high quality video on a small (and getting smaller) disc. The revolution will start out, I suspect, with a few companies providing alternative ways for kids to learn to read and write, then arithmetic and the other stuff kids are being exposed to in public schools. Parents will get these courses at first as a way to help their children do better in school. But soon these DVD courses (or programs) will have a life of their own.
  The programs will have professional actors instead of the grade school teachers we’re used to. The programs will be written by top notch writers, aided by state-of-the-art graphics. Have you seen Shreck or Dinosaurs? The programs will be so much fun that kids will gobble them up and be looking for more.
  PBS has been showing the way with some marvelous history programs—about our wars, our presidents.
  We’ll be seeing ads for these DVD programs on TV. I was roundly ridiculed when I predicted back in 1975 that one day we’d see ads for computers on TV. Yeah, sure.
  The programs will expand to cover all school subjects, and then on to programs on anything else youngsters will want to learn about. We’ll see adult learning programs, plus programs to help us learn skills. Thousands of programs. And all available dubbed in any language. Including Chinese, Russian, Persian, Pashtu, Turkic, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Punjabi, Urdu, Turkmen, Tajik, Bantu and Swahili.
  Here’s learning at a fraction of the cost of today’s school system, and easily a hundred times better.
  No government can keep down an educated and motivated citizenry for long. I just hope that the educational revolution comes along in time to bring so much prosperity to China that they’ll be able to throw out the Communist leaders before a war.
  Cheap education, brought to Africa, will help those countries get rid of their dictators and despotic governments.
  Now, being practical, I believe this revolution can be triggered by a publication, just as my publications sped up our having cell phones, personal computers and CDs. It’ll take about a half of a million dollars to get such a publication nationally distributed. Know anyone with a half mil and an interest in totally changing the whole world? In making wars history?
     Cell phones helped change everything, by providing the people with easy communications. Then personal computers made the Internet possible, providing even more communications not controlled by the government or the international bankers. The next step is to bypass schools and learn about anything we want in any depth we want, with none of the old memorization and tests system. No grades, just education in its pure form.
     The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham (MA), where there is no curriculum and kids learn what they want, when they want. They are not separated by age, there are no tests, no grades, and the results are spectacular. Kids, unless they are imprisoned in our government-run public school system, love to learn.
     As I’ve often pointed out, there are very few well educated poor people, and few poorly educated wealthy people. It’s time to make self-education inexpensive and fun. Perhaps we can finally end poverty. And maybe war, too.
  Dan Quayle (anybody remember him?) has been wringing his hands over the shrinking of our military might. He frets that in the last decade we’ve cut the number of army divisions from 18 to 9. The navy has shrunk from 600 ships to 300. The number of air wings from 36 to 18. Do we really need to have our troops in 144 countries? As I mentioned back in January, we have 1,400,000 in 144 countries and territories. 40,000 still in Japan, 38,000 still in South Korea, 71,000 still in Germany after sixty years! And our military are costing us $400 billion, which is more than the next twenty countries combined. Thanks, Congress.
  I’m in hopes that with uncontrolled education we’ll stop being sheeple, stop re-electing 95% of the incumbents to Congress, and recognize that in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world business is war, not the military. We have far more to fear from ignorance than nukes or biological attacks. We need to have those container ships fully loaded both ways.
 
 
9/7/08
 
Africa
     Dunno if you’ve been too busy keeping up with the Obama-McCain events to notice what’s been going on in Zimbabwe. Well, it’s a mess…like most other black-run African countries.
  Africa
     Up until around 1850 the black-African countries had about 900 languages, no technology, no education, no civilization, no agriculture, no cities. There were thousands of tribes, mostly busy killing each other, controlled by local witch doctors.
  Africa
     While the Europeans were busy inventing symphony orchestras the blacks were beating on logs for drums.
  Africa. Once the slave business got started the losers in the tribal wars suddenly had value, so instead of killing them, the victors sold them to slave traders, who mostly exported them to America. The slave trade was the best thing that ever happened to hundreds of thousands of blacks.
  Africa
     Then, in 1850, the Europeans moved in, setting up countries, with farms, roads, cities, railroads, businesses, and government. In East Africa, unable to get the blacks to work, they imported Indians to build the railroads and roads.
  All went well for the blacks in the European-run countries until after WWII, when the UN was formed. Under pressure from do-gooders the Europeans were forced out and the countries turned over to the blacks to run. And run them, they did. Mostly back to the tribal bush days.
  Africa
     The white farmers were forced out and their farms went back to the bush. Exports stopped. Poverty and massive inflation were the rule. Black dictators did well, while their people starved. Mass murders in one country after another. Cities disappeared. Towns were replaced by tribal villages.
  Africa
     South Africa, one of the most developed countries, maintained British rule until the 1980s and was a model of what could be done. Little crime. No starvation. Prosperous. Then, led by Mandela, the blacks took over. Today the country is a terrible mess. It is unsafe to visit.
  Africa
     If you’ve read The Bell Curve, or other books on IQ, you know blacks have an average 85 IQ, whites 100, and Asians 110. Which may help explain a lot of what’s happened and is happening today.
  Africa
     Uh, oh, so what about Obama? He’s African-American, right? Well, he’s on the high end of the bell curve, I guess. Unless he isn’t. I got an email explaining that Obama’s mother was white. That’s 50%. His dad, it said, was one eighth black and seven-eighths Arab. That would make Obama only one-sixteenth black, helping explain his high IQ. But in today’s world in America few people are admitting to being Arab-Americans. Politically, it’s far better to be black. Well, we’ll see how all that shakes out.
  Africa
     Meanwhile most of Africa is a mess and not getting better. I’m glad I managed to visit Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland while most of them were still under European management.
  Africa
     If Americans ever get serious about their health there may be enough commercial pressure to redevelop former African farms in order to grow organic crops to bring about positive changes in their governments. With most American farm lands poisoned by a hundred years of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, we may have to look elsewhere in the world for food that’s healthy to eat.
 
8/6/08
 
CPR
     A while back Sherry and I took a CPR course…just in case. Just as we’d finished it my cousin Sanger and his wife Carole came to visit. So we told them about our taking the course, explaining that a high percentage of heart attacks are fatal because no one was around to do CPR.
     When we explained that the procedure was to blow into the victim’s mouth and push on the chest, Carole said, “Oh, I could never do that!” And Sanger said, “But what about me?”
     A few months later he was sitting there at home, eating breakfast, when he keeled over with a heart attack. And died because Carole didn’t know what to do except call 911 and wait.
 
9/5/08
 
Light Bulbs
     In a frenzy to save energy, our beloved and trusted Congress has mandated that by 2014 energy-saving light bulbs will be required as a replacement for all light bulbs. It’s interesting that all of these mercury-laden super-toxic bulbs are made in China.
     When one of these gets broken in the home you’ve got a problem. A big problem. Mercury is super-toxic, so you sure don’t want to breathe it or touch it. Okay, how do you clean up the mess? And be super-sure you or your children don’t get cut on the glass shards.
     Town dumps are trying to work out ways to dispose of ’em, telling us to be sure not to throw them in with our regular trash. And I understand that one broken bulb thrown into a small lake could make the fish toxic to eat. For years.
     Yes, they save a lot of energy, which is fine with our current system of making and distributing electricity. But what will happen when the oil industry is no longer able to prevent the development of cold fusion power, making it so every home will be able to generate all the heat and electricity needed virtually for nothing? No more power grid or nuclear power plants. So why save energy with toxic light bulbs.
     Not that I’m a fan of the old Edison bulbs. We need full-spectrum light in our homes, not yellow tungsten or bluish fluorescent light. Schools that have replaced their regular fluorescent bulbs with full spectrum lights have shown a substantial improvement in student grades and less distraction. People work much better in offices with full spectrum bulbs.
     Well let’s see what we can come up with that’s better and get the Chinese to make them for us instead.
     Meanwhile, let’s see if we can get Congress to advise us instead of making nanny laws, forcing us to do what they want…either for our own good or for the good of the industries who paid for the legislation.
 
9/4/08
 
Our Children
     As a result of childhood obesity, it looks as if American children, for the first time in 200 years, may have shorter life expectancies than their parents. Yes, it’s what they’re eating. And it’s what we’re eating, too.
     In the last thirty years childhood obesity is up 400%, asthma is up over 200%, with autism and ADHD going through the roof. And chronic illnesses are up almost 500%.
      We’re feeding our kids canned soups, chips, frozen dinners and other dead foods, many with coloring, flavor enhancing, and freshness preserving chemicals, and we’re robbing ourselves and our kids of health. Oh, and the emotional damage of being obese. How about the labels o the boxes? Har-de-har, MSG can be listed under any of a wide variety of names. And children are four times as sensitive to this toxin as adults.
     MSG in particular, but poisons in general, can serious affect a baby’s brain during pregnancy, leading to a host of later problems. Like learning, emotional, and sleep problems. It can even make the child shorter, contribute to autism and ADHD. Alas, these are not reversible.
     Over 65% of Americans are overweight. 18% of our children are grossly obese. In animal tests all of the animals fed MSG as babies became grossly obese. Maybe we can get Congress to pass a law making it a prison offense for a pregnant woman to eat in a Chinese restaurant. They seem to enjoy passing nanny legislation. And let’s ass aspartame and Splenda to the forbidden list.
     Until mothers pay more attention to their diets during pregnancy we can expect to see a growing epidemic of twenty and thirty year olds having heart attacks and strokes.
     Just look into the problems soy is causing. Like brain shrinkage. Never, ever, feed a baby soy milk. The best food source for a bay is mother’s milk, but if that’s not available use raw cow’s milk in a glass bottle. Never use any plastic baby bottles.
     Jeez, so many things to keep in mind when having and raising a child! I sure need to write a book. If we do it right we’ll have babies with 150 average IQs that are healthy through life. I haven’t seen an honest instruction book yet on the subject. Have you?
 
9/2/08
 
Cell phones
         Wow, even Newsweek ran an article on them causing brain cancer! But if you’re interested in all the ways they are causing health and mental problems check www.mercola.com. I’ve downloaded forty pages of references to the damage they’re doing to us.
     Hey, told ya so. I’ve been warning for over thirty years in my editorials and essays to never use a cell phone without a headset so you can keep it away from your head. I never have, and I’m the one who turned the technology from a ham radio hobby into an industry with my publications. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask any old time ham or check www.computerworld.com and search for Wayne Green.
     Cell phones were first introduced in 1984. In 2004 there were one billion users. It only took 18 months to reach a second billion, 9 months for a third billion., and only six months to four billion! Look what I’ve done!
     In addition to brain tumors and memory loss, they’re also contributing to a serious increase in car accidents. The brain can only process one thing at a time, so people busy talking on their cell phone can’t quickly react to driving emergencies. Surveys have shown that there’s a four times more risk of an accident when using a cell phone. And this danger continues for up to a half hour after making a call. It’s comparable to driving a car dead drunk.
     Considering the hundreds of billions of dollars involved, is it any wonder the cell phone dangers aren’t being as covered up by the industry as we saw with cigarettes? And this despite over 15,000 scientific studies documenting health hazards.
     Men carrying their cell phone on their belts are experiencing a substantial loss of sperm, and those they still did produce swam erratically, making fertilization less likely.
     Their use can cause forgetfulness, confusion, and an ability to calculate, concentrate or coordinate. Kids who use them heavily can expect a lifetime of learning disabilities, high risk of driving accidents, hyperactivity, sleep disorders, hearing and vision loss, and cancers. Even short-term use can have long lasting effects.
     Scientists are finding the cell-phone users are often becoming senile in their thirties instead of it starting in their sixties. It’s definitely contributing to the onset of Alzheimer’s at younger ages. And if that isn’t enough to have you grabbing the phones from kids ears, they’re also affecting the kid’s DNA, so they’ll be passing the changes along to their children. When Dr. Ross Adey (a good friend of mine) discovered this back in 1991 Motorola asked him not to mention it. Adey was the pioneer researcher in the field and he sent me copies of all his papers as they were published. Which is why I’ve been such a nuisance on the subject for over thirty years.
 
9/1/08
 
Midwives
     With America rating 42nd in the world in live births, even though we spend far more money than anyone else, it’s almost enough to make a prospective mother think. But probably not enough to overcome their solidly ingrained belief in doctors and hospitals.
     Our better educated mothers are having their births at home, helped with an experienced midwife instead of an obstetrician, and a warm bath instead of epidurals. No medications or C-sections, which are the fate of a third of the mothers birthing in hospitals. And at $1,000 or so for a midwife, it’s a tiny fraction of a hospital delivery cost.
     Our beloved AMA is, of course, pressuring Congress to have midwives licensed by state medical practitioner boards.
     The inculcation is so strong that only about one percent of births are at home.
     As a psychotherapist who has had to regress many people through their births in order to resolve present life problems, I know from experience that total quiet is important for the baby, not the hurly-burly of a hospital delivery room, with many people talking.
     It’s almost forty years since my daughter Sage was born, but my then wife and I used a plastic dome that went over her stomach so that a vacuum could reduce the pressure on the baby during the pregnancy during the last months in order to provide more blood so the baby’s brain could grow faster. It was also used during the birth, helping to make the birth easier on both the mother and baby. I haven’t seen any mention of this since then.
 
8/31/08
 
Schools
     Yes, our schools suck, and apparently no one in government has a clue as to what to do about it. Including the candidates, so we have no reason to hope for any significant improvement in the near future.
     There’s the Locke High School in L.A., for example, where 2% of the ninth graders are proficient in algebra and 11% can read at grade level. Many can’t read at all. In 2001 1,000 ninth graders were enrolled. Of the 240 who graduated four years later only 30 were eligible to apply to a California state campus. Three percent!
     If the U.S. has any hope of competing internationally, we’ve got to make some major changes.
     Yes, under the present system teachers have low pay, low status, and low job satisfaction. So only the lowest of our college grads go for teaching, and half of them drop out within five years.
     The teacher unions claim that higher teacher pay is the answer. Yet, some of the cities with the highest paid teachers are turning in the lowest results. That’s not the answer. The usual government practice of throwing money at problems isn’t going to help. I’ve already written about why our school system sucks (7/26/08), so I won’t go over that again. Unfortunately, it was designed purposely to be that way, so we’re going to need some major basic changes, not improvements. Yes, I’ve proposed a whole new approach as pioneered by the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham (MA).
 
8/30/08
 
MonaVie
     It’s a purple drink made of the Brazilian açai berry and 18 other fruits, which is touted to perform health miracles and costs $40 a bottle. It’s also a very fast growing business.
     I’m not complaining. I got a free $5 Chinese buffet lunch and a sample bottle from a local chap who signed on with MonaVie as an unsalaried sales person. He makes his money on commissions when he recruits new customers. With over a million such sales reps, the company is growing fast.
     For $39 and an agreement to sell at least eight bottles a month one can become a sales rep. The rep who recruits the new rep gets a percentage of the sale, of course.
     Well, I read through the literature he gave me and drank my sample bottle. It tasted good, but I didn’t notice anything changing with my health. Of course, with my extra-healthy raw food diet I’m not sure how I could feel any healthier, so I was not an ideal test subject.
     Both the company and the reps have to be careful about making health claims, elst they stir the FDA into action to protect the pharmaceutical industry.
 
8/29/08
 
Assimilation
     In the past, immigrants arrived here, mostly from Europe, and within a generation—two at the most—they became Americans. They adopted American customs and language.
     A recent Duke University study, which considered intermarriage, English ability, military service, citizenship, and earnings, showed that most immigrants are integrating at a remarkable rate. The main exception are the Mexicans. They’re arriving here poorer and less educated, and with most of them illegal immigrants, their job opportunities offer little opportunity for advancement.
     And there are so many of them that they’ve continued the Mexican culture instead of assimilating ours. They are encouraged in this by our helping them live separate lives with Spanish radio and TV stations, newspapers, and magazines. We even, at government expense, teach their children with Spanish language classes.
     The result is exactly what one would expect. When Mexican immigrants were surveyed for the Tufts study, most of them identified themselves as “Mexican” or “Mexican-American” even into the fourth generation. They are making little effort to assimilate. Or, for that matter, to become Americans. They are Mexicans, waving their flag at public gatherings, and they’re here to make money to send back to Mexico, to the tune of billions every year. Please let me know if you can figure some way this is helping America be stronger.
     When a bill to make English our language was proposed, Congress voted it down. Including Obama.
     I’d like to see it passed, and enforced to close down any foreign language media—even store signs. No more, “Press one for English,” crap.
 
8/26/08
 
Bread
     The staff of life, right? No, make that the shaft of life.
     Grains make healthy food—when we sprout them, but when we grind them into flour, a process we invented around 10,000 years ago, and which had not existed for 99.999+% of mankind’s history, we did not do ourselves any favors.
     Robert Crayhon, in his Paleolithic Diet, says that the combination of low physical activity, hypercaloric intake, and over consumption of these neocarbs (new carbohydrates) is at the root of our obesity crisis, plus a long list of other health miseries. His cure is simple—just return to our historical diet of raw meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and moderate physical activity.
     Our guts over millennia adapted to our eating raw food. Thus, the more you go raw, the healthier you’re going to be and the better you’re going to feel. You’ll lose unwanted weight, have more energy, and even your brain will respond once you stop sandbagging your body with sugar, flour products, and cooked food.
     That’s right—no pasta, no pizza, no hot dogs, no Big Macs. That is, unless you don’t mind being grossly fat, tired all the time, constipaturd, and difficult to live with. Plus short-lived.
     I just love the letters and emails I’m getting from people who have changed to raw food. They’ve lost their unwanted weight, and say they’re looking and feeling years younger.
     Is it really surprising that when you put the wrong fuel into a machine that it’s going to work poorly and not last long?
     In looking through The Concise Medical Encyclopedia, a 500-page 1998 book describing thousands of illnesses, I could see that around 99% of these illnesses are caused by a poor diet. And most can be cured by a diet change. It’s your health, your body, and your choice.
 
8/25/08
 
The Singapore Lesson
     When Malaysia broke away from the British Empire in the 1960s it didn’t want Singapore, which was a small island with no resources and a mainly Chinese population living in terrible poverty. So Singapore formed its own little country, went to the United Nations and asked for a task force to come and help.
     The UN team surveyed the resources and the markets within easy shipping distance. Then they went to the European investment market and got the money to build factories to make the needed products using the nearby resources. Within four years Singapore’s 50% unemployment was down to 5% and the poor had been moved to beautiful new high-rise apartment complexes, complete with movie theaters, bowling alleys, and other entertainment services.
     With modern air transportation and satellite communications, Singapore today is in competition with the entire world…and doing very well. New Hampshire is in competition with Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, India, China, and all of both Eastern and Western Europe…as well as our other 49 states. That’s today’s world, and isolationists had better understand this fairly recent paradigm shift.
     To succeed, we need to be smarter, better educated, and entrepreneurially savvy…and we are presently none of those. Or we can continue to center our interest on ball teams, TV, and other entertainment while the most powerful country in the world goes down the tubes. Already, the for sale signs are out there for our assets. Many of our largest companies have quietly moved away. Maybe you saw how few have to pay taxes any more.
     What to do? Congress and the administration are bought and paid for by the big companies. So, are you going to re-elect the same people again this November? As far as the administration goes, the only ray of hope I see is Ron Paul. Yes, he’s still running. Or maybe creeping is more apt.
     If we could start developing cold-fusion powered cars and home units, and make sure they’re made in America, we could turn things around in a hurry. If we re-invent education, there’s another huge world market.
 

8/24/08
 
Bedbugs
     A little item on the morning news about a hotel having bedbugs had me remembering a night in Sydney, in the Hotel Australia. I’ve been all around the world, and that’s the only time Ive ever run across bedbugs. And now, forty years later, I still remember it.
     I guess bedbugs were once more of a nuisance. “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” was something my mother used to say when I was a kid. Now they are so rare they make the morning news.
     Ask me what I was doing in Sydney in 1966. Glad you asked. The seed that grew into a 1966 trip around the world was planted in 1936 when my good friend Alfie and I went, as usual, to Sunday school at the Dutch Reform church in Brooklyn (NY).
     This Sunday a man put a carton of radio parts on a table, and asked Alfie if he was interested in ’em. Alfie took a look, then asked if I was interested. You bet! Wow! And most of ’em were still in their boxes.
     As luck (a.k.a. serendipity) would have it, a recent issue of Popular Mechanics had an article on building a cigar-box radio which used many of my parts. My future was cemented when I put it together and…it worked!
     My folks friends, hearing I was interested in radio, brought over the old radios out of their attics. I used the parts to build more stuff from Popular Mechanics. Soon I was haunting the radio parts stores on Radio Row on Cortlandt Street in Manhattan. Tubes were 10¢, “guranteed to light and play.” Radio-Wire Wholesale, down by Canal Street…later to become Lafayette Radio…was a treasure trove of inexpensive parts.
     Where’d I get the money for parts? I was raking it in with my Elm Stamp Company. I bought fifty-pound sacks of “unpicked” stamps salvaged from New York City businesses and sold ’em via newspaper ads in five-pound boxes to collectors. Not bad for a twelve-year old kid. My first entrepreneurial adventure.
     The next year I started high school, opting for Erasmus Hall, even though it was a half hour trolly ride from home. Well, my mother had gone there twenty years earlier, and the trolly was only 2¢, including the free transfer to the Church Avenue trolly. That’s about 40¢ in today’s dollarettes.
     Erasmus, with 10,000 students, had about 120 after-school clubs. I joined the radio club and was quickly initiated into the world of amateur radio with the club station, W2ANU. I also joined the camera club, the book club, the choral club and the Savoyards, the Gilbert and Sullivan club.
     All new students were given a voice test and the top 100 voices were allowed to join the choral club, where we practiced daily during the second period. We performed in assembly and gave radio and guest performances at other schools.
     The Savoyards, named after the Savoy Theater in London, where the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were performed, met daily after school. We put on The Mikado in assembly, before audiences of several thousand students. I played the part of Koko, the Lord High Executioner. The lead. I still remember my stage fright the first time we performed.
     In the camera club we marveled over the first issue of Life magazine.
     The major stumbling block for me in getting my ham radio license was the damned Morse Code. I’d learned the alphabet and numbers one evening while getting into my Boy Scout uniform, but knowing the code and being able to copy it at 13 words per minute were not the same. The Scouts used Morse Code with flags, so I quickly learned the characters and passed the test that night at the Scout meeting.
     Let’s see. Bedbugs. Australia. My trip around the world. Remind me to tell you more about that.
 
8/23/08
 
Second Homes
     According to the National Association of Realtors, 7% of boomers own vacation homes. They’re predicting it’ll be 20% within the decade. Considering how many millions of boomers there are, that’s a huge market.
     And that’s a fantastic business opportunity, particularly for New Hampshire. We’re a vacation state all four seasons of the year, and we’re not a far drive from southern New England, New York, and even from Philadelphia.
     I started my ham radio magazine from Brooklyn, NY. A couple years later, fed up with New York, I looked around for some place better to live. New Jersey, New York State and Connecticut were already well populated, and expensive. The Massachusetts tax situation eliminated that option. Vermont was great, but too far from a major international airport. So I opted for southern New Hampshire, only a couple hours drive from Boston’s Logan airport.
     While there’s still plenty of room for growth in the southern part of the state, the North Country is wide open for development. It promises a field day for Realtors, contractors, building suppliers, and so on.
     Let’s say you buy an old 100-acre farm and build twenty-five two-acre vacation homes, with room for a garden and some fruit trees. I’d build the homes underground. It’s a lot cheaper to build that way, plus extremely cheaper to heat and cool. Cap it with a sprayed concrete dome, with a picture window facing the nearby mountains. Solar power. Plant some apple, pear, plum, black walnut, and cherry trees, plus raspberry, gooseberry, and blueberry patches. Betcha you could have these all set to go for under $75,000 and sell ’em for three times that for a quick $5.5 million profit.
      My mother’s folks, who lived in Brooklyn, spent a summer vacationing at the Valley View Inn in Bethlehem in 1920, and the next summer they bought an old 100-acre farm out Cherry Valley Road. Though in those days it was a twelve-hour drive from New York City, my grandfather made the trip every weekend during the summer. Now, with turnpikes, it takes less than half that.
     An underground home with a domed roof could come in handy if the worry-warts who are predicting a pole change, which could trigger winds of 200 to 600 mph, are right. Stick houses would be blown away, leaving some stone houses and the domed underground homes.
 
8/22/08
 
Farm For Sale
     The chap with the Buffalo farm in Hillsborough wants to move to North Dakota, where there’s a lot more room, to raise buffalo. He’s got 42 acres, and a house with a well and a septic system.
     If I am ever able to get the word out about how important it is to eat meat from animals raised on grass, without any hormones or antibiotics, and crops raised without chemical fertilizer or pesticides, we’re going to need millions of new farms. And I’d sure like to see the move get started here in New Hampshire.
     A hundred years ago the state was mainly farms, as anyone can verify by walking through the forests and see the old stone fences everywhere. Then, when the midwest and the west opened up, making much larger farms possible, the farmers moved west.
     Not knowing any better, when the minerals in their farmland got used up by the crops, they used chemical fertilizer to get their crops to keep growing. But this made sick plants, which attracted pests, so they had to spray pesticides on the crops to save them. They didn’t know anything then about using rock dust to rebuild the minerals in their farmlands. Using rock dust, the land is again healthy, and the crops don’t attract pests. Organic.
     We need organic crops. We need organic raw milk. We need organic meat if we’re going to stop making ourselves sick. And we are not finding many of these needed foods in our supermarkets, so I’d like to see some of the retiring boomers buy the old farms. And, with the sub-prime mess, property values everywhere have tanked, at least for a while, so this is an opportune time to look for New Hampshire property.
     Justin (Red Bear), who owns the buffalo farm, is an American Indian, so he’s always been deeply into raw food. He loves the raw liver and has promised me a buffalo heart, which he says is even better than liver. I’ll hate to see him leave, but I hope whoever buys his farm will continue the buffalo. He’s only asking $160,000, so I expect someone will snap it up soon. His phone is 603-345-5040, if you’d like to know more.
     I got a quick look at his spread from the air a couple years ago when I was on a balloon ride during the Hillsborough Balloon Festival, and we came down right next to Justin’s farm. Hmm, I wonder if he’s considered putting in an Indian casino for New Hampshire so our people wouldn’t have to drive all the way down to Foxwood in Massachusetts?
 
8/21/08
 
Pigs Is Pigs
     When I went to Erasmus High in Brooklyn (NY) they had a booklet of recommended books to read. I naturally turned to the humor books, and listed there was Pigs Is Pigs. Yes, of course I read it. It had to do with a Railway Express agent who received a freight collect shipment of two guinea pigs. The agent looked in the manual to see how much to charge, but could only find pigs listed, so he used that price. The addressee looked at the bill and said hey no way I’m going to pay that much for two little guinea pigs. The agent argued that, “Pigs is pigs.” He sent word back to the home office asking for clarification.
      Weeks went by with no response. The two guinea pigs turned in eight, then twenty. More weeks and a second generation was propagating, with the agent now dealing with hundreds of guinea pigs. Soon it was thousands.
      I was reminded of this story when I read about scientists using pig organs for transplants. The problem was that the body’s immune system immediately rejects the implant. That was only a small problem for good doctors, who solved it by destroying the patient’s immune system with very toxic drugs.
      Their next approach, they decided, would be to take some of your bone marrow and inject it into a pig fetus before birth. Then, after they’re born, some of your bone marrow cells could be removed and injected into you, making you like brother and sister, making the pig part human and you part pig. Theoretically it should work and genetic engineering will have done it again. Of course it could have a side effect of giving you a strong desire to roll around in shit.
      Hey, why bother to live a healthy life so you won’t destroy your organs when genetic engineering will soon be solving the organ transplant problem? There are, by the way, 65,000 dying Americans who are desperately waiting for human organ transplants, but only a third of them will get one in time.
      On the bright side, the Mayo Clinic, the best hospital in America, claims that 95% of their organ transplant patients live normal healthy lives for at least one year. What a fabulous success!
 
8/20/08
 
A Life Decision
      There are three fundamentally different career paths for youngsters to pursue in life, and the education for each of these is quite different. Thus, students should decide what career path looks best to them and choose their schools and, in particular, their college, on this basis.
      Having been consulted by several college presidents, having interviewed a few more as part of my work with the Educational Subcommittee of the New Hampshire Economic Development Commission, and having read several shelves of books on education, I’m convinced that neither the public nor educators have considered this concept. And that’s resulted in a massive waste of time and money for students (and families), faculty and schools.
      The three career paths? One path is in preparing for a job. The second is preparing to own one’s own business. And the third is in the arts, as a creator or a performer—like actors, playwrights, artists, musicians, composers, the clergy, and so on.
      There are many things all three career paths have in common, such as a need to be able to read and write, a knowledge of history, and basic math skills.
      Business owners in high-tech fields will need to have a good background in math and physics. But from there it should be their personal interest which dictates whether they are going to specialize in electronics, computers, radio, chemistry, biology, and so on.
      This is a particularly difficult time for school administrators who have the responsibility for planning ahead. The world changed enormously when the agricultural revolution hit, and then again with the industrial revolution, which changed populations from being largely farmers to production line workers, and moved millions of people to cities.
      The recent high-tech explosion in computers, communications and transportation, with the incredible ballooning of the Internet, is changing the world again.
      Just as shopping malls and strips killed downtown shopping, Internet shopping is starting to change the whole product marketing and distribution system.
      When personal computers first started in 1975, it was only a year until we started seeing computer stores opening. Indeed, I started with five stores I opened in the greater Boston and Southern New Hampshire area. This grew to a national chain of 58 software centers. But I saw the handwriting on the wall, with the entry of mail order stores offering a wider variety of products and overnight delivery—so I sold the chain. Today, in place of thousands of computer stores we have a few mail order giants. No more distributors. Still a few retail stores. And this is still before anywhere near the full impact of the Internet has hit.
      The Internet is going to put more and more of a squeeze on prices, pushing out smaller and less efficiently managed retailers, and making it almost impossible for small stores to survive. Even entertainment complex super malls such as the one in Edmonton will not be able to survive the loss of their retail stores.
      With groceries, clothes, and just about everything else being sold via the Internet, the business world of 2020 is likely to be vastly different from today, just as our world today is totally different from that of 1908, it’s just that changes are happening faster and faster.
      Education, too, will be sold and delivered via the Internet, with bricks and mortar schools only needed to provide the hardware needed for people to build skills and provide a baby-sitting function. Of course, with virtual laboratories, even the need for electronic and chem labs can be covered via interactive software.
      This is the world of 2020 for which school administrators should plan, but probably won’t.
      Most of the courses people need to pursue the three major career paths will be available via the Internet. However, once the word starts getting out about the advantages of pursuing an entrepreneurial path, one aimed at eventually starting and running one’s own business (and I don’t mean a mom and pop store or restaurant), the interest in job oriented careers will inevitably diminish.
      What benefits can the college of 2020 provide that students will feel is worth a $100,000 (or more) and a four year investment?
      The jobs of the future will be in high-tech research and development, manufacturing (done mostly in some other lower-cost, with a much better educated work force country), in marketing, sales, and service (installation and repairs). Products will mostly be sold via video demonstrations on the Internet and by price.
      Print media looks as if it will eventually be replaced by webpapers and webzines, and books will be automatically printed on demand by two or three Internet megabook companies. Retail book stores could be blown away.
      We already have recording systems which automatically record any TV program that fits our interest profile. The next step, which Amazon has already taken, is to alert potential customers when a new book is being published which their interest profile suggests they might want. And, with the sale of 100% of all printed books, or even a download of the text, book costs will be reduced, so authors will do better.
      The babies being born today will be of college age by 2025. Why would they want to run up big debts in order to sit in a class, listening to a grad student subbing for a professor, when they can get far better information via the internet, taught by a star performer, complete with a million bucks worth of graphics and enough interactivity to answer just about any questions?
      Sherry has almost a hundred how-to-dance videos she sells. Her star is Kathy Blake, who’s taught thousands of students, so she knows where people are going to have problems and what their questions are going to be. She answers those questions in her videos. The result is that her video dance lessons are so much better than anything else out there that once people discover them, they buy one video after another and are devoted fans. Her dance instruction thus is far better than 99% of the studio instructors provide.
      In all of my high school years I had only one exciting teacher. Ditto college. With video teaching, good teachers will be in high demand. These will be the exciting performers.
      The picture for the survival of universities twenty years from now looks grim. I know, if I were to be consulted by a college president today, I’d recommend, as a first measure, that the university’s business school start polling the alumni every year, asking them which of the courses they took have benefited them in their careers. And I’d have them also ask which courses they wish they’d had an opportunity to take. That would give the university feedback to help it adapt to the real needs of its students.
      For the longer run, I’d get busy and start teaching the things a small business person needs to know. And I’d have the students produce video teaching courses. These would not only give the students a wide variety of business experience, but would pay off for both them and the school.
      Video business courses would be of interest to both youngsters and business people. Courses such as advertising fundamentals, accounting, business law, printing, speed reading, purchasing, warehousing, shipping alternatives, packaging, and promotion would be very popular.
      Well, there’s the future as I see it. Colleges that pioneer the way to 2020 will be in the best situation to stay in business. The future is going to present unlimited opportunities for entrepreneurs, as smaller businesses gradually replace today’s giants.
 
8/19/08
 
Water
     Our bodies are 70% water and our brains 85% water. So make a quick wild guess as to what part of the body will be the most effected when you dehydrate your cells.
     For the average person anything less than a half gallon of water a day means cells are being dehydrated. That’s why experts in the field are recommending that we drink at least eight glasses of water a day. But, if you’ve dehydrated your cells for years, the way I have, then the smart thing to do is to rehydrate. So I’m drinking at least ten glasses a day. Dr. Lorraine Day, when she was totally curing herself of a huge breast cancer, drank twenty glasses a day.
     And that’s pure water, not that sewage coming out of your tap. Distilling your water is the only way to be sure your water is pure. That gets rid of the chlorine, fluorides, lead, and anything else that can cause you problems. I got my still from www.steamdistiller.com, and I love it. It’s only $120, too. No, I don’t get a commission.
     Is there any connection between our dehydrating ourselves and brain problems such as memory loss, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s? I’d sure be surprised if there wasn’t.
     No, drinking coffee and tea does not count as water. Nor does beer or wine. Nor milk. Water means water. Cool, clear, water.
 
8/18/08
 
The Staph of Death
     D’ja see the five-page article in Fortune on the latest Staphylococcus mutation? Infections by this mutant staph are now routine in hospitals. This is a nightmare that doctors have been dreading (and expecting) for years.
     Several years ago I reviewed the wonderfully documented 750-page book by Eileen Garrett, The Coming Plague.
     According to the CDC, of the ten million patients who entered hospitals in 1999, two million caught bacterial or viral infections, and over 90,000 died of them. This makes hospital infections the number 5 killer in the U.S.
     The research looking for a cure for staph is being done by the pharmaceutical companies. Are they checking out silver colloid? Of course not. That’s not an option since it can’t be patented and sold in $20 a day doses.
     In the meanwhile, perhaps you’d do well to do everything in your power to stay the hell out of hospitals…where, if the staph of death doesn’t get you, a surgeon’s oops, prescription error or some other hospital-gained infection may. The Archives of Internal Medicine published a study tracking drug use in 36 hospitals and nursing homes in Colorado and Georgia. The report showed that in the average 300-patient institution an error was involved in one out of five cases. Seven percent of the errors were “really, really bad.” That’s more than 40 really bad errors per day.
 
8/16/08
 
Gore Gored
     If you are one of the millions of Americans who got caught up in the global warming excitement, you can cool off. The scientists, those few who didn’t run with the herd—those very few—now tell us that in the last year the ice pack in Antarctica has grown by over a million square kilometers. And the north pole ice has grown by 30%. So much for a new Northwest Passage.
     Gee, we need more greenhouse activists. But, will they take some of those awards away from Al Gore?
     Hey, told ya so. When Gore came out with his Inconvenient Truth movie, I wrote my A Convenient Lie booklet.
     If you haven’t read Robert Felix’s Not By Fire, But By Ice, get down to the library. His predictions that what was going to happen just before a new ice age are happening. I’m sure not going to throw out my fur parkas.
 
8/15/08
 
  Black & White
     We seem to be faced with a choice of black or white presidential candidates come November. As with conspiracies, I prefer to look at the facts.
     As I wrote a couple months ago (6/25/08), if it hadn’t been for slavery, today’s American blacks wouldn’t just not be here, their ancestors, who were imported for their value as slaves, would have been killed by a neighboring tribe. Up until the slave business came along, the native black tribes were busy slaughtering their neighboring tribes, as we’ve seen them doing since slavery was ended. Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, and so on.
     When a price was put on human lives it made sense to sell the losers rather than kill them. So those rotten despicable slave traders actually helped save millions of lives.
     Africa was a terrible mess until the 19th century, when the European countries divided the continent up. England did well, with Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, South Africa, and a few other countries. Belgium got the Congo. France grabbed much of northwest Africa. The Italians, Dutch, Portugese, and Spanish did well too. The next time you’re in Sudan visit the fascinating museum in Omdurman and bone up on the Battle of Omdurman.
     The British, when they wanted to start civilizing Kenya, had a serious problem, as I discussed in my 12.25.07 posting. Since women did all the work, it was almost impossible to recruit blacks to build roads and railroads. So they imported Indians. It didn’t take long for the Indians to start businesses. Then, if a black tried to start a business, the Indian community cooperated to make sure the black business failed.
     So when the English left, it didn’t take long for the blacks to throw out the Indians, with the result that Kenya and Uganda soon were back where they’d been before the English had arrived. Back to the bush, with raids on neighboring villages—killing and raping the girls and women. No more farms. No more coffee exporting. No manufacturing. No industries. Instead of pianos and orchestras they were back to banging on hollow logs and dancing around the village fires.
     A while back the blacks in Nigeria were ethnic cleansing the Ebos. Maybe you’ve read about the horrible situation in Zambia, with run-away inflation and endless corruption. A friend in South Africa has been keeping me up on the awful mess there since the blacks threw out the whites. When I visited in 1982, under British rule, it was safe to go anywhere in the country. Now, you’ve got to be nuts to visit there.
     We set up Liberia as a black-run country. The result has been wars. Maybe you remember the mess in Somalia. In one African country after another, when the whites move out a black dictator steps in and the country goes to hell. And not only in Africa, when the blacks took over Haiti, it soon was a lawless mess with terrible poverty. Yeah, I’ve been there, and Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho. I visited white ham operators in those countries and, for a while kept in touch, until they had to leave.
     When some researchers dared to check the IQs of whites and blacks, their report was deplored as racist. They found the blacks to average about 85 vs. whites at 100. Even quieter was the news that Asians had an average of 110 IQ. Oops, they’re smarter.
     Perhaps this helps explain the black ghettos in our cities, the high percentage of blacks in prison, the high percentage of blacks on welfare, the number of black unwed mothers, and black fatherless families. And why, with the most expensive school system in the country in Washington DC, which is largely black, the SAT scores are the pits and the drop-out rate soaring.
     Sure, we have some highly intelligent blacks, like Thomas Sowell, but it’s the average that we see, and make walking around so many of our cities dangerous. When there are riots, it’s black kids rioting. This helps explain why Mississippi, which has such a high percentage of blacks, comes in at the bottom in so many categories.
     Was it the white families who were the problem in New Orleans? It was the blacks, who had made no plans, and just sat there, waiting for help. The black mayor made things worse.
     Black kids make education even more difficult than their lower IQs by making life miserable for any black kid that tries to learn. That’s “acting white.” So many never learn to speak “white” English. Or to read well. Unfortunately, like the recent Hispanic invasion, the blacks have made little effort to integrate into the white society as most immigrants have in the past. People came here from all over Europe, learned our language, and adopted our customs. Within a generation they were Americans. The blacks are African-Americans to this day, Not Americans.
     That’s odd, too. We have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans and German Americans, but no Euro-Americans. We have African-Americans, but I haven’t heard of any Nigerian-Americans, Gold-Coast-Americans, or Ugandan-Americans. I suspect most blacks haven’t any clue where their people came from, but since their skin is black, it must have been from Africa somewhere.    
     My usual approach to problems is to research them and then try to come up with a practical solution. The black-white split in America has me stymied. Well, so has the Hispanic invasion, plus the recent quieter Chinese and Moslem infiltration, neither of which show any signs of being willing to adopt our language or customs. The Moslems are largely being funded by the Saudis, who have built over a thousand mosques here and staffed them with Wahabbi clerics, preaching death to Christians. And the Chinese are putting in restaurants everywhere, funded by the Chinese government. Three in nearby Hillsborough, and even one in tiny Antrim! The people working in these restaurants are busy watching Chinese TV shows and not bothering to learn English, except for the waiters.
     The original American plan to attract immigrants and get them to adopt our language and customs was a good one. It built one of the fastest-growing and most prosperous countries in the world. We dominated in the arts, literature, and technology. We worked hard to do it and it paid off.
     Our leaders, including Congress, have made a miserable mess of our country. We’re in serious trouble with so-called healthcare, oil prices, education, a super-bloated government, a Congress bought and paid for my major industries, a couple of ridiculous wars (whoops, there went another trillion dollars), a sinking dollar, inflation, endless government waste—heck, you make a list. Oh, and the soaring deficit with no possible way any longer to pay it off.
     So, are we going to elect Obama? And if we do, will he turn out to be the first black leader not to trash his country? Oops, that might be considered racist. His voting record, during his short time as a senator, has marked him as an ultra-liberal. Are more government spending and higher taxes a route out of our problems? Well, we’ll see.   
 
8/14/08
 
Serendipity
     Every month or so Sherry and I both get a hankering for seafood, and that means a dinner at High Tide Takeout in Hillsborough. Yes, I do eat cooked food now and then, although I order my scallops very, very lightly fried so they’re mostly raw. I go whole hog and eat a few of the french fries that come with the dinner. I also take along a copy of the ad they ran in New Hampshire ToDo last year offering a free order of fried onion rings, so I eat a couple of those, too. Mmm, they sure are good! And there are so many scallops that I eat what I can and bring home enough to last me a couple weeks, savoring one a day as a dinner appetizer.
     So today we got in Sherry’s Mercedes 380 and drove to Hillsborough. As we entered the restaurant’s parking lot, though it was only five o’clock on a Wednesday, the lot was packed with cars. We’d gone early to avoid the usual crowds, so this was a surprise. As we drove in there was a man handing out tickets to the cars ahead of us. When we got up to him I asked what was doing. He said it was an antique car meeting and, since I was driving an antique car, I was welcome. He handed me a ticket, explaining this would get me a free second meal.
     How’s that for falling into it? So all I had to pay for was my scallop dinner. Sherry’s jumbo plate of oysters and the onion rigs were free!
     So there was our 1982 Mercedes, parked with the rows of other antique cars. There weren’t any real old cars. Most of ’em were from the sixties and seventies. Yes, I took some pictures. But you can bet we’ll be watching to see when the event happens again next year so we can get another free meal.
 
8/14/08
 
UFOs
     Our government, unable to do anything about the UFOs, has added them to their list of things better kept secret, perhaps out of a fear of stampeding the sheeple.
     There seems to be generally accepted that our visitors are coming here from some other star system or systems. Possibly due to a genetic fault, I often have a problem with generally accepted ideas. Gets me into trouble. Anyway, since all the star systems are so far away that in order to get here our visitors are going to have had to conquer time travel. Since they’re here, time travel must by possible. We just have been busy with other more basic discoveries and haven’t figured that one out yet. There’s no reason to suspect that we won’t, eventually.
     Okay, time travel is real and we’ll eventually be making time travel machines. And what’s the first thing we’ll do when science catches up with H.G. Wells? We’ll go back and document history for future PBS-type shows. Which may help explain how come there are UFOs on some of the cave paintings in France from 17,000 years ago. And Alexander The Great mentioning them in his journals as hovering over his battles .
     Which raises the question, in what’s left of my mind, about today’s UFO reports. Aliens? Or just visitors from the future? And the grays? Our currently dreamed-of living robots to do the routine work for the future us. Which helps explain why some of the UFOs crash every now and then. The grays aren’t thinking, they’re being remotely controlled, so they’re a bit clumsy.
     This helps explain why our visitors, who are way ahead of us technologically, haven’t shown any signs of being hostile. And how the UFOs are able to disappear in a blink, and then suddenly reappear moments later.
     It also helps explain the endless reports from contactees of the so-called ETs raising hybrids. WWIII, which would have been inevitably atomic, probably raised hell with the everyone’s DNA, so they need to come back and get some pre-war stuff. Which might explain why some of the ETs are just like us and some are weird.
 
8/14/08
 
  Starting From The Beginning   (A 1996 editorial)
     After a good deal of research, plus some thinking, the whole miserable picture of how badly we’ve been messing up our children finally dawned on me. Oh, I suspected, but I figured I must be wrong. We wouldn’t do that to our kids! Well we have and are…and it’s going to continue unless you and I are able to stop it.
     First, I hope you took the time to watch a PBS movie called “7-14-21-28.” It was a film showing interviews with seven-year old British kids. They asked them what they thought they might do in life. Then they interviewed them again at 14 to see how their lives had progressed by the time they were in their teens. Again they discussed their plans and interests. The third set of interviews with the kids was when they were 21. Now we could really begin to see how firmly their lives had been set when they were seven. The last interviews were when they were 28. This showed even more clearly how well established lifetime patterns are set by seven years old. The film is now available for rental, I understand, complete with interviews at 35 years of age. Don’t miss it.
     Now we can see that those psychologists have been right who have been claiming that by the time children get into school their minds are already closed to reading and intelligent speech. It makes sense if you know anything about how living things develop. If you interfere at any one stage of development, the whole organism is thrown out of kilter and can never really recover.
     With babies we know that without adequate stimulation at the right time their brains fail to ever build the neuron networks needed to speak, read, and even think very well. Enter Big Bird, who turns out to be a much greater ogre than ever imagined. Yep, Sesame Street comes on a villain. Both day care centers and parents have been using Sesame Street to keep children sedated. Well, it’s great for that. It hypnotizes them with flashing lights and constant action, but it doesn’t provide the stimulation children need to build the neuron networks in their brains which are involved with dealing with language, exploring their environment and thinking. The result is kids that schools are unable to teach…kids without brains developed enough to handle reading, kids with short attention spans who are used to instant gratification, kids who get bored easily and have few enthusiasms or even much of an interest in learning.
     The really awful part of this is that once the time has passed for the child’s brain to develop during this part of the normal growth cycle, there is no way to ever completely repair the damage. Children grow their minds and bodies step by step. When a step is skipped or mangled, it’s mangled permanently. And that’s what’s happening when we should be reading to our children. We fared better a couple of generations ago when we listened to the radio. That called for building pictures in our minds…our brains got some work to do and were not fed visual pap, with nothing lasting more than a few minutes. Is it any wonder kids have such short attention spans and find books bor-r-ring?
     Parents who are just too busy to read to their children should at least invest in some children’s stories on tape…and I don’t mean Dr. Seuss either. My mother read to me while I ate lunch every day. As soon as I learned to read I was hard at it, reading and re-reading the Oz books. I also loved the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson and Eugene Field, and could recite much of it.
     By ten years old I’d read all the Tom Swift and Tarzan books, Booth Tarkington, Mark Twain, books on flying and I even loved what few space travel books there were. So when’s the last time you read to your children or grandchildren? If they’ve been poisoned by Sesame Street it’s probably too late. I’ve been planning on making some tapes of me reading the Oz and the fascinating Ernest Thompson Seton nature books, but maybe I’m ahead of my time again.
     If we want kids to get interested in science and amateur radio, they’re going to have to be able to read and think. They’re going to have to be able to set goals and achieve them. We need these kids as amateurs to carry on for the next generation. We need them to keep our hobby from being blown away by commercial interests. But most of all we need them as potential high-tech career scientists, engineers and technicians to help protect our quality of life in the next century.
     Let’s say that you’re not being your usual contentious self and, for a change, you’re agreeing with me. The logical question then is, what can I do about the situation? Heck, I’m only one person. Yep, you’re one person…and so am I…and so are a hundred thousand other 73 readers. One thing I think you do recognize, if a hundred thousand people decide they’re going to do something, the chances are pretty good they’re going to get something done. And if you’ll take the time and effort to convince just one other person, that’s two hundred thousand…and we have a movement.
     Does this seem important enough for you to pitch in and try to help change things? Too much trouble, right?
 
8/13/08
 
Dear Occupant:
     Your body is designed with remarkable restorative powers. It’s enormously over-designed for survival. It’s able to keep going and repairing itself for years despite constant high stress, an input of coffee, Danish, Whoppers, fries and malts. Despite a lack of exercise, tons of beer and pretzels, a lack of sleep, an ungodly intake of chemicals via food preservatives, your water supply (which brings you fluoride, chlorine, lead, etc.) and pharmaceuticals. It even keeps going though we shovel in highly addictive and destructive drugs such as sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, and so on. It keeps going even when deprived of the ultra-violet light it was designed to need, and in the presence of electromagnetic fields which interfere with the ability of its cells to communicate. It does its best to keep going despite steady infusions of deadly poisons such as mercury and nickel via dental fillings. Even with all these destructive things most bodies are able to keep going for 50-60 years, a demonstration of the incredible repair system which is built in.
     Sure, there can be some genetically influenced repair problems which result in lowered performance. But most of these can be avoided if the occupant observes known, but not well known, health rules.
     Oh, we know we’ll live longer and healthier if we eat right, avoid drugs, get exercise, get enough sleep, and keep our stress to a minimum. We know it, but we keep putting all that off until tomorrow…the tomorrow that doesn’t ever quite come. It reminds me of the cartoon with two guys in lounge chairs, sitting back with their feet on the table, saying, "Next week we've got to get organized."
     We know now that we can have healthier, more intelligent, and better kids if we give them a good healthy start. And that means not screwing up our sperm and ova with drugs and magnetic fields before conception. It means being careful during pregnancy of magnetic fields, eating right, avoiding drugs and other chemicals, and avoiding stress or physical pain to the fetus.
     We know that we’ve really screwed up the first year of life by separating the baby from the mother. We know that few of our child-care facilities are worth the powder to blow them to hell. We know that our schools are a major disaster. And we know what damage most fast food does to bodies, yet there we are, at McDonald’s, queuing up at the counter, and not for their crappy salads, either.
     If we were to apply the things that have been discovered about keeping our immune system strong, most of us would be living over 100 years and in good health. Instead, we are constantly knocking our immune systems for a loop and thus giving ourselves cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, Alzheimer's and so on. Heck, we're even seeing kids two and three years old with cavities, and the only cause of that is incredibly stupid parenting in the food they're feeding their kids.
     All through childhood my teeth were absolutely perfect. I didn't get my first cavity until after I'd been in the Navy for four years.
 
8/12/08
 
  Jordan
     With Congress and the rest of the government, like the FDA, NIH, WHO, etc., plus the major media, bought and paid for by Big Pharma and the rest of the $2.5 trillion sickness industry, plus a couple trillion more for today’s food industry, getting the word out to an almost totally mesmerized public that any illness can be cured with a diet change to raw organic food is virtually impossible.
     I said virtually. Hey, when you’re a small force attacking a large army, you just get quickly killed if you charge into them. You have to get sneaky and fight “unfairly,” like we did during the revolution when we hid behind trees and mowed down the Red Coats, who lined up in fields for us. Well, it wasn’t sporting, but it won for us.
     Okay, it’s time for Plan B, a sneak attack. I think you’ll like it. I hope so, because I can use your help.
     Instead of fighting the sickness industry here in America, where it’s totally in control, how about doing it in a small country with a progressive leader? Like Jordan, where the king was educated in America and the country has been a good friend of ours for decades.
     Getting through to the king is the first step, and that isn’t going to be easy. So I’m sending him a short letter asking if he’ll talk with me about making Jordan the healthiest country in the world. Now, if you’ll send a note to Kin Abdulla, The Royal Palace, Amman, Jordan, asking “Your Majesty” to be sure he gets my letter, that could help break the protective barrier around him. One letter probably won’t get through, but letters from several dozen people will be much more difficult to ignore.
     If we can get through to him I’ll go over and explain how he can go about making Jordan the healthiest country in the world. It’ll make Jordan a star. A guiding light for the whole world. A country with no cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so on. The international news media will be rushing to document the phenomenon.
     Maybe I can even convince him to change their schools so Jordan will not only be number one in the world in health and longevity, but also number one in education.
     Now, become an honorary member of the Green Team by sending at least one letter to King Abdulla. It’s about time something really good came out of the Middle East.
   
8/11/08
 
Gutted
     What’s happened to the wonderful country we elected our politicians to manage? It’s a catastrastroke! 37th in health, and headed for 50th. By far the most expensive so-called health care in the world. The worst public schools in the developed world. Manufacturing fleeing to lower-wage, better educated countries. And white collar jobs, too. Debt in the trillions, with no way to stop it getting even worse.
     When a company gets into trouble like that the board of directors fires the management and brings in new people. Well, we, the people, are America’s board of directors and we are sleepily rubber stamping the management team at every board meeting (election). The half of us who even bother to vote re-elect 95% of the incumbents. Same old, same old. How bad do things have to get before people wake up?
     By re-electing your Senators and Representatives, you are helping allow the Federal Reserve to keep printing more money, further trashing the dollar. You’re helping make sure there are no major changes in our health system, that our schools keep turning out kids with the brains of turnips, that no work gets done to replace oil with cold fusion, that we keep troops in 144 countries, that the Mexican border stays wide open, that we’re up to here in drugs, that Social Security continues toward going broke instead of paying off ten times what it is now by adopting the system used in Chile, and so on.
     So, are you going to get mad and revolt at the election this November, or are you going to sit home watching TV so your representatives can enjoy another term in earmark heaven, tended by a horde of lobbyists offering them envelopes full of cash for favors? Instead, help them start enjoying the fantastic retirement benefits they've voted themselves. Never Re-elect Anyone!

8/10/08
 
  I’m Proud To Be An American!  (Another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     Just look at everything we have to be proud of. We all know that America is the greatest country in the world. Love it or leave it, right? Well, we all love America. And we are justly proud of a country which used to be the car capital of the world. Which used to be by far number one in electronics and high-tech.
     Well, we’re still number one in a great many ways and we shouldn’t forget it! We have one of the most corrupt governments in the world. We have one of the most expensive and least effective school systems in the world. We have one of the most expensive so-called health care systems in the world. We have some of the most corrupt unions in the world. We have the worst crime problem of any country in the world. We have more murders per capita than any other country. We have more racial strife and bigotry. We have one of the worst drug problems in the world. We have more lawyers and lawsuits per capita than any other country. We have the highest federal deficit in the world. We have the worst trade deficit in the world. We have the most homeless in the world. We have the most dangerous cities in the world. We have the best music in the world, but of course, 83% of our music comes from foreign-owned companies (mostly Japanese). We have more people in prison per capita than any other country. We have the wealthiest organized criminal groups in the world. We have more employees in government than in manufacturing.    And we’re world-class when it comes to encouraging entrepreneurs…to tap our government via HUD, food stamps, and endless health care scams, all dutifully reported on our exposé TV shows.
     We can well be proud of our street gangs, our riots, our welfare system, our decaying cities caused by rent control, our polluted rivers, our radioactive and industrial waste record, black family disintegration, smog and air pollution, the IRS, Bill and Hillary, our obscene music lyrics, guns in schools, vapid sitcoms, illegal immigrants, our foreign aid program, our lobbyists in Washington and all state capitols, our porno industry, our military procurement system, our banking mess, our savings and loan mess, our tobacco farmer subsidies, corruption on Wall Street, NASA’s monumental inefficiency, our eager acceptance of eco-scams…you continue the list please.
     Rome had its circuses, with Christians fighting lions and each other. We have TV so we can gawk at mayhem in Bosnia and Somalia, so we can spend our days enjoying important things like a severed penis, an attacked skater, our Bureau of Firearms killing a dangerous colony of religious nuts, and more religious nuts fighting or defending abortion. We relish every murder in the news, and then turn to crime shows for more. We shine our media spotlight on any protest group. We fan the flames of sensitivity. We’re sensitive to women, to homosexuals, to the “disadvantaged,” to blacks, to the poor, to the short, the fat (so don’t eat so damned much, you fat slob), the homeless, the lunatics, and so on.
     I’m proud of our choice of presidents. Of Lyndon Johnson who so enthusiastically pursued the expensive, pointless, and lost war in Vietnam and launched the long, expensive and lost war on poverty. Of Nixon, who insisted he was not a crook. Of Ford, who gave us lots of laughs. Of Carter, who gave us hyper-inflation. Of Reagan, who gave us the movie star president we’d always dreamed of. Of Bush who gave us…gave us? Oh yes, of Bush, who finally fed us up with both the Democratic and Republican parties, forcing us to turn to, ugh, Ross Perot…who then crumbled under the weight.
     And most of all, I’m truly proud of my fellow Americans, who are able to stomach all this corruption and waste with barely a whimper. I’m proud of how our factory production school system has changed what was once a fiercely proud nation into a nation of wimps. I’m enjoying the spectacle of a people trying to enact a constitutional change to limit terms…please stop me from endlessly re-electing my crook. And another to balance the budget…please stop me from letting my representatives spend my children’s money. I’m proud of our stomach for congressional pork.
     What other country would allow pedophile (man-boy love) groups to parade? Would provide police protection for hate groups to parade? Would listen by the millions for hours a day to Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and G. Gordon Litty? What other country would watch Donahue, Oprah, and Geraldo on TV every day exploiting sickos?
     I hope you are as proud to be an American as I. I’m proud of the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons for their effective lobbying, no matter what it is doing to our quality of life. Do you know that we have the most corrupt newsstand circulation system in the world? And the most corrupt music industry too? When it comes to superlatives, we’ve got most of ’em cornered.
     Now, if you happen to be a trouble-maker and less of a Pollyanna than I, you might look at the downside of some of the superlatives I’ve listed. Yes, the Mafia is ruthless and into hundreds of businesses, but by golly, it works! It works fabulously. The average Mafioso makes well over a million a year, and what spells success more in America than making big money?
     When we heard that Perot was a multi-billionaire millions wanted him for president, and never mind some screws that seemed to be loose. Maybe we’ll run Bill Gates next time. Bill, who I happen to know personally, also has some screws loose, but the recent media campaign to make him a household word should successfully hide those blemishes.
     But even if someone were to actually get upset over the negative aspects of the things I’ve mentioned, we’re all on this big train going a hundred miles an hour toward hell and there’s nothing any of us can do to change things. Right?
     Wrong, actually. I’ve got a challenge for you. Let’s see how creative you are. What is one thing that you could do which could change almost everything many probably clinically depressed people see as negatives? Let me make that even more of a challenge. What is one thing you could do which would take an average of about 12-seconds a day and which would inevitably change the welfare system, the social security mess, the deficit, crime, crowded prisons, the drug war, foreign aid waste, unemployment, housing values, lower taxes, and so on?
     Any takers?
     Now, if you look back over the list, you’ll see that virtually every outstanding misery in our country comes down to being caused or encouraged by the government. The government you elected and are paying for.
     Is the situation hopeless? Yes, unless you change. Look, your politicians aren’t going to change by themselves. It isn’t going to be easy to change them…but it actually can be done. Here’s a scenario for you to think about. Let’s suppose that no matter how good an elected politician seems to be doing his job, that without fail he is replaced in the next election by someone new. This would destroy the congressional seniority committee system, which lies at the heart of most of our problems. Many congressional freshmen come in hoping to make changes. It doesn’t take them long to learn that they either play ball or they’ll get zip. No committee appointments worth spit. No pork. Nil.
     Never, ever, re-elect any politician. If we keep flushing the toilet long enough we’ll finally begin to see clean water in the bowl. One term. Period. Next? I’d love to see NRA bumper stickers all over the country. Never Re-elect Anyone.
     Our founding fathers expected civic-minded businessmen to volunteer for Congress, and then to go back to their businesses. Instead, we’ve built a cadre of ex-lawyer political professionals who will do what it takes to keep their jobs.
     [Okay, now it’s 2008, so what has changed? Just Bush II instead of Bush I, Iraq, Afghanistan, Maury Povich, and The View.]
 
  Progress (Still another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     So here we are in 1996. And here I am using a Macintosh PowerBook for most of my work. And here I am without a simple program to keep track of and display the sales of my enterprises. This is ridiculous!
     The first practical microcomputer was the Radio Shack TRS-80, which debuted in August 1977, just two years after the first microcomputer kit was announced. The first was the MITS Altair 8800, but that lacked a few things. It came in kit form and had no operating software at all. A few months later Bill Gates showed up at MITS in Albuquerque with a jury-rigged BASIC program. The way I recall it, he’d written a BASIC interpreter for the 8008 chip as an exercise in his computer course at Harvard. When the Altair came along, desperately needing something to make it do more than be an expensive paperweight, he cobbled his interpreter so it would work on the 8080 chip, left school, and went to work for MITS. He’s doing fairly well.
     Commodore came out with a PET microcomputer in around March 1977, but it had a stupid square keyboard, and a marketing plan designed to screw any dealers dumb enough to be sucked into trying to sell it. My recollection is that Jack Tramiel, the president, set up his own separate mail order firm, Contemporary Marketing, in Bensenville, out near Chicago, just to sell the PETs. He refused to let Commodore run any ads for the computer, with only his mail order firm advertising. I visited the factory in California where I was told that only after his mail order company had all the inventory they needed would Commodore ship any units to dealers.
     But to use the PET you had to load BASIC from a cassette, and so on. Slo-o-ow. By the time Radio Shack announced their TRS-80 Model I, the customers were ready for it.
     I realized that the only practical way to provide the software these microcomputers were going to need was to manufacture and sell it in quantity. Up until then we had the mainframe computers, starting in the million-dollar range, complete with horrendously expensive software, also running in the million-dollar range. Then had come the minicomputers in the $100,000 bracket. The software for these systems was custom developed for each user and also ran around $100,000 on the average.    So I figured that now that we had $10,000 computer systems we were going to have to get software costs down too, and that meant mass production. That’s when I started Instant Software.
     My approach was simple. I got the readers of my magazines to send in software they’d developed for possible distribution. I set up a lab with around 30 work stations so we could cover the most popular micros. Incoming software was then evaluated by my gang and the best of it was put into shape for production. We started out with a lunar lander, and went on to develop all kinds of games, educational stuff, and quite a few rather good business programs. Our Typing Teacher won prizes, as did our geography programs.
     One of the best was Business Analysis. Though that was designed for the Model I, and was later updated for the Model III, it was so far beyond anything I’ve seen since that it is frustrating. I sure wish something like that was available for my Mac. If there’s a program like this and I’ve missed it, please let me know.
     It allowed me to enter the monthly sales figures for up to ten years of sales and would display them. Then I could ask it to do a graph of the figures and it would give me the max and min numbers and ask what max and min I preferred for the graph. Once I typed those in it would display the graph, showing the sales for the ten-year period. Okay, we probably have programs today that’ll do that much. The next step was to ask it to do a moving average of sales. It would ask over what period. I’d tell it 12 months. It would consider that for a minute and give me a chart of the numbers. Then I’d graph the moving average. These graphs and charts could be easily printed, just by hitting a three key combination.
     Now we come to the more valuable part. It could calculate the second derivative of the sales figures, showing the acceleration or deceleration of sales. I found that the number of pages of ads in 73 and in QST both had a curious 18-month sine curve that continued for years. Even more valuable was the ability of the program to project sales into the future, based on trends and taking into consideration periodic changes, such as seasonal sales changes. Is there anything out there that can do this? I’ll buy it!
     We’re not talking Einstein here. The math required for all this is relatively simple, it’s just that no one has bothered to build this into a program for the last 20 years. Phooey. Instead they’ve been busy providing us with three-dimensional graphs and junk like that. Hey, guys, keep it simple!
     So what happened to Instant Software? It was a good idea and it did well, but when I sold my computer magazines to IDG, they, being almost totally mini-computer oriented, didn’t believe in mass-produced software. And without the infrastructure provided by the magazines, I couldn’t continue. But we learned a lot and had tons of fun doing it.
     For instance, we learned not to try to sell educational software to schools. We wondered why some of our prize-winning stuff was selling so poorly. When we studied our sales we found that we were selling one copy to each school and they were making all further needed copies. A couple years later we did another study and found that by then we were selling one copy to each school district. I talked with several other software companies and found they had the same experience.        That’s when educational software stopped being developed. And that’s one reason we still don’t have much of it that’s any good.
     At our peak in 1983 we had around a hundred people employed, were supporting over 250 good programs, were expanding rapidly into Europe and considering opening an Irish plant. Then IDG pulled the plug.
     Let me know if you ever see a good business analysis program for the Mac.
     Ahh, the Mac. I went out to Cupertino and was there for the unveiling of the original Mac. There was tremendous hoopla, but I wasn’t impressed. The IBM PC had come on the market the year before and had almost instantly wiped out the TRS-80. Up until then the microcomputer market was split with Radio Shack having 40% of sales, Apple another 40% (Apple II), and about 200 smaller companies sharing the other 20%. Old-timers will remember CompuPro, Morrow, Ohio Scientific, Midwest Scientific, Polymorphic, and a bunch more.
     Apple was semi-friendly to third-party supporting businesses, but Radio Shack was hostile. Really hostile. So when IBM came along, they had no problem in capturing most of the third-party support from Radio Shack, and that collapsed Radio Shack sales. They went in about one year from 40% of the market to about 4%, and never recovered. The chairman, John Roach, never forgave me for predicting this would happen unless he changed his policy of vigorously fighting all third-party support. But did he learn from this? Har-de-har. So Radio Shack has been a very minor player ever since and Radio Shack lost billions in potential sales. Hundreds of billions. My view is that they could have prevented the IBM putsch if Roach hadn’t been so blinded by greed.
     The Mac didn’t really get anywhere until desktop publishing came along. The Mac has stayed a year or two ahead of the PC in that field, and that’s been its main strength. The Mac PowerBook was a major step ahead for writers like me. I’d tried several PC-type laptop computers, but none of them were as easy to use as my old Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, which I bought the day it came out in 1983. That baby went everywhere in the world with me.
     A couple years ago I was about to start a PowerBook magazine when I saw the trouble coming for Apple as a result of Scully’s ego-fascination with the Newton. That got him fired, which was well-deserved, I thought. But his replacement seemed no better, so I was afraid that Apple would be rudderless. And that’s about the way things turned out. My decision to not start the PowerBook magazine has proven to be prescient.
     Scully, swept up in his visions of the information superhighway, jumped without looking very carefully to another firm, which turned out to be built mostly on vapor, which is a common enough foundation in the computer field. So Scully is joining the parade of has-beens in the field…like Tramiel, Busey (TI), DeCastro (Data General), Olson (DEC), and An Wang.
     Oh, you probably don’t care about all that old stuff anyway. I just can’t help remembering how interesting it was in the early microcomputer days. I really should write about them some time.
 
  Long Ago        (A 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     When I first moved 73 to New Hampshire from Brooklyn in 1962, just two years after starting it, I hired a bunch of college dropout hams to come work for me. I paid $20 a week, plus room and board. I had up to eight hams living in my 40-room house and we had a great time. I cooked the meals, we put out a great magazine, and we set up one heck of a ham station way up on Mt. Monadnock, a few miles away.
     When I bought a small offset press we started also putting out a VHF magazine, a contester’s magazine, and one for club newsletter editors. High school kids came in after school and helped collate, staple, and address these publications for 50¢ an hour. They earned some spending money. It helped keep them out of trouble. And they got to learn about the responsibilities of working.
     I had one ham working with us who was so much trouble I finally gave up and tried to fire him. He pleaded with me to let him stay and keep working without any pay. Being a sucker, I said I’d give it a try. After a couple weeks I told him he wasn’t worth nothing. He then offered to pay me $20 a week if I’d let him stay.
     I finally agreed to let him stay if he’d live in the hamshack house up on the mountain and help clean out the brush around the place. Just don’t come down and aggravate us here. Well, for instance, I did the cooking and the live-in hams took turns washing the dishes. When it was Tedsy’s turn he managed to turn a half-hour job into a four hour job. The same when it was his job to empty the wastebaskets or shovel out the horse stalls.
     Tedsy came down from the mountain one day and asked if I minded if he put up a vee beam antenna for six meters, aiming it down the east coast. What could go wrong? I said sure. The next thing I knew, a few weeks later, he’d cut down over a dozen big trees to make a path for the two wires of his vee beam. Worse, he’d miscalculated a bit and the beam was actually aimed at Bermuda, so no one down the coast could hear him.
     I remember him walking up to me with a broken yardstick. He looked at me sheepishly and explained that he’d had it in his mouth and walked through a 30” door.
 
  Bless The League       (And yet another 1996 editorial repeat)
     One day the government arrived. They’d had a complaint about my paying less than the minimum wage. I pushed them to find out where the complaint had come from and they said it was the American Radio Relay League, my publishing competitor in Connecticut. They said I’d have to stop paying the hams with the room and board and $20 a week, pay them regular wages, and charge them for the room and board. And the after-school kids would have to get at least the minimum wage.
     I automated the collating and addressing of the publications I was printing, thus getting rid of the school kids. My live-in hams were replaced by local people doing most of the work. No more room and board. No more fun. And without the gang to keep the ham shack up on the mountain operating, I closed it down and sold the place. Well, we all had the time of our lives while it lasted. Several of my alumni have gone on to be successful entrepreneurs.
     You better believe that unions and the Washington lobbyists from Mexico and other low-wage countries are pushing Congress hard to increase our minimum wage. Every dollar it goes up will mean millions for their countries, and more welfare and unemployment problems for us.
     One alternative is to improve our school system so we’ll have better educated and better skilled workers so we can compete better internationally, but here we’re up against the most powerful lobbies in the country, the teacher’s unions. And they’re strongly supported by the mass ignorance and apathy of voters.
     Say, if Congress moves the minimum wage up to $15 an hour we’ll no longer have any poverty, right? Who could possibly be against that? If they move it to $20 I might even consider working again.
 
8/9/08
 
  Chess    (Yet another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     How’s your chess game? Chess is a wonderful game to teach kids because it’s totally skill, with no chance element whatever. When you get involved with chess you soon discover that the more you learn about the game, the better you play. A good player will always trounce a lesser player. Aha! So how does one get to be a good player?     You do that the same way you get good at anything else…you read a lot about it and you take some lessons from an expert. You’ll have to memorize hundreds of openings, and thousands of end-game closings. You learn to be aggressive or lose. The fact is that the game of chess is a wonderful teacher for life. It’ll teach you the fundamentals of business. You’ll learn to do your homework, be aggressive, and look for creative new approaches to old situations. You’ll learn the value of persistence.
     Go is another game of skill and its popularity in Asia has a good deal to do with the way the Asian countries have been running circles around us in business. Chess and Go teach qualities which are valuable to a country. They help teach the work ethic. You don’t win at chess unless you work at it, but if you do you’ll surely win. That’s great training for life.
 
  The American Holy War          (Yet another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     I’m asking all Americans to declare war…a holy war…a fundamentalist war…against socialism. Sure, we beat the heck out of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. We’ve even beat it in Vietnam, if you read the recent article in Rolling Stone by P.J. O’Rourke, on his visit there. The one place we haven’t beat socialism…the one place it’s going the strongest in the world and devastating the country in the process, is right here in America. That’s right, here in our US of A.
     It was socialism that destroyed the British Empire, turning Great Britain into Britain, and it’s socialism that is at the heart of what’s killing America. How did this pernicious anti-God, anti-life religion get such a powerful hold on the world?…and even on America? And how can we fight such a well inculcated religion?
     God? Religion? Yep, let me explain. A religion is defined as a belief upheld or pursued with zeal and devotion. Well, that’s what we have here.
 
  Getting Fundamental        (1996)
     Religious fundamentalism is causing wars all around the world. Perhaps it’s time for us to take a close look at the fundamentals of life and start fighting for them here in America. So let’s take a close look at what we’ve been doing and how it fits in with the most basic laws of nature. Will you be offended if I suggest that the laws of nature are the laws of God?
     Okay, what is the most fundamental law for all living things? What is the most basic law of all? It’s staying alive, right? At least unless we’re really screwed up we’ll fight the hardest of all to stay alive. Indeed, this is basic rule number one. This is built right into the genetic pattern of every living thing. This built-in law also causes us an enormous amount of trouble, it being at the heart of all our mental illnesses and aberrant behavior. That’s one of the problems that always crops up when you have a law which is enforced, no matter how unreasonable the enforcement. This is a law which helps to kill us. That’s a strange dichotomy and may be difficult to grasp, but it’s logical.
     If self-preservation is rule one, what’s rule two? The preservation of yourself through your offspring. That’s why we have love, lust, and all those other great-feeling things we think about, talk about, and sing about. We’re talking a very, very basic law of nature. I hope you’ll agree that this qualifies as rule two. This is the rule which we feel driving us every day. This has to do with bikinis, deodorant soap, tight jeans and so on. It also leads to the concept of the survival of the fittest, which we might consider as rule three and the result of rules one and two.
     The reason even the smallest of boys tend to fight is in preparation for later life when they are going to have to fight for the choicest girls. It’s genetic. Men fight off other men to ensure the survival of their offspring. Women build nests. This survival of the life forms best adapted to winning the battle to propagate has resulted in the survivors we see around us today.
     Now let’s look at that survival of the fittest concept and think about it. This is where socialism comes in and screws things up. Socialism has as a basic concept the protection of the weak. We see it in welfare payments. We see it in our non-profit institutions. We have hearts. We’ve been taught to try and go against nature. We see our whole government working on this fundamental basis, perhaps ignoring the fact that nature is merciless. Nature (God?) abhors the weak and sacrifices them for the long term good of all life.
     Did democracy win against socialism in Europe? Of course not! It was capitalism that won. Capitalism is the epitome of the survival of the fittest. Socialism is the opposite…to help the weak to survive. Adam Smith’s The Wealth Of Nations, written around two hundred years ago, describes how capitalism works with an “invisible hand.” It ties in closely with rule one, self-preservation. It also ties in with rule two, survival of your genes. No wonder capitalism is winning!
     Capitalism is winning everywhere it’s permitted. Hong Kong and Singapore are capitalist societies and enormously successful. Neither are democratic, by the way.     Vietnam is emerging from the chaos of its war at a record pace because capitalism is going strong there. Capitalism is doing pretty well here in America. It’s the socialist systems we have in place that are making us sick.
     Just take a look at our biggest social works…our public schools, the post office, the government bureaucracies, welfare, unemployment benefits, social security and so on. There isn’t one single thing that the socialist approach can do that the capitalist approach can’t do better and much, much cheaper.
     Our public schools cost more than double what our private schools do and provide a substantially lousier educational product. We have teacher’s unions to help protect the jobs of the incompetent teachers who are making a mess of our kids. Every study of the post office has shown that if the service was allowed to go private we’d get far better service at a fraction of the cost. Well, the same thing holds for every government-controlled service we enjoy.
     We know what a cesspool the whole welfare system is. Right here in my small town we have people on welfare. I’ve had employees quit so they could go on welfare and not have to bother working any more. They didn’t get as much money, but they never had to work again. One of my employees has a friend who does social work. One of her cases is a 22-year-old woman with two kids. She hasn’t worked in years. New Hampshire provides her with an apartment, it provides day care for the older child. None of your economy day care, mind you, we’re talking $90 a week day care. Plus the state spends $50 a week to provide taxi service to take the kid to the day care center and drive him back. Plus she gets food stamps.
     This woman has no marketable skills, nor is she being encouraged to develop any. She’s supposed to be getting advice from a social worker, but she’s refused to talk with the worker. No one knows how screwed up her younger baby is getting at the hands of this mother.
     I wish this was just an anomaly, but the more you read, the more exposés you see on TV, the more you know that something is fundamentally wrong in America. What was it about not screwing with Mother Nature? Well, we may have hundreds of millions of people who believe in the Koran, and hundreds of millions more who believe in The Bible, and more believing in the Baghavad Gita, and so on, but when I look for the hand of God, I see it in the fundamental rules of life. I see it clearly waving us on with rule one: self-preservation. With rule two: continue your life through your children. And I see capitalism in harmony with these dynamics and socialism fighting them…fighting God’s will. So that’s why I’m preaching fundamentalism. I’m not talking worship or spiritualism. I’m not talking mystical belief. I’m not talking churches and ritual. I’m not talking voodoo or reincarnation. I’m talking the rules which we all can see, feel and experience. I’m talking the rules which make sense.
     Are there any other self-evident rules? You bet, it’s just that they aren’t as all-powerful as number one and two. Our love and protection of family comes under number two. But beyond that we feel a kinship for our extended family…our group. We find there are times when belonging to a group definitely helps with self-preservation. I’m not sure this is a genetic rule. It may be a pragmatic one, but it’s one we learn, even if it isn’t genetic. Like the other rules, this one gets us into all sorts of trouble. You can see it going berserk in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, India, Sri Lanka, Timor, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, and so on. It’s doing fairly well here in America, helping keep the blacks, whites and Hispanics at odds.
     Yes, we do need government. We just don’t need anywhere near as much government. Most of what the government is doing…or perhaps trying to do, but failing…could be done for a fraction of the cost and done infinitely better if we could reject the socialist mind set.
     What would our government be like if it was run like a business? Suppose inefficient and arrogant workers could be fired as they are in most for-profit businesses?     Yes, we’d have to change our educational system so people would have the skills they need to do the work efficiently. Well, if we can get the government to stop forcing us under penalty of law to send our kids to public institutions, we’d have people with the needed skills and the enthusiasm to use them.
     We’ve made teaching such a lousy profession that it’s the poorest students who go for it…the people who don’t feel qualified to compete in the capitalist world. And who teaches the next generation of teachers? The lowest 20% of the previous generation. It’s no wonder we’re spending the most of any developed country on education and getting the worst results. Why, it’s almost enough to make a person think.
 
  Is There An Escape?        (1996)
     Sure there is, but it means war. We civilians just barely outnumber the socialists in America. By the time you add up everyone sucking on the public teat…teachers, postal workers, state and federal civil servants, social workers, school administrators, our labor unions, and the military, you can see why we’re paying such high taxes and getting so little for it. Nothing is working well. We’re up to here in drugs, in crime, prison problems, clogged courts, welfare, the homeless, riots, failed banks, failed loans, unemployment, lousy sewers, air we can see, polluted water, dying oceans, and so on.
     Now, are we game to start fighting back? Have we had enough yet? Or is it hopeless and we should just keep our heads down and avoid trouble as best we can? How many of us are “mad as hell” yet?
     Yes, I’m preaching revolution. I’m preaching war. No, not with guns and Molotov Cocktails, I’m talking about fighting first at the state level. I’m talking running for the state legislature and changing your state. I’m talking getting people who will bring change to Washington with a mandate to abolish compulsory education. Once they do that and private schools can compete with public schools, we’ll see capitalism take over.
     Once a private mail service is permitted the US Snail will blow away, just as Parcel Post has been decimated by UPS. Let’s privatize everything we can think of. Let’s get bids from private companies to run our prisons, car licensing, and so on.
      can get education out from under the socialist system we won’t need government jobs to take care of underachievers.
     The best part is that we should be able to cut the costs of government by around 75% and thus cut our taxes significantly. We might even see the return of the one wage earner family…and mothers with the time to devote to their children.
     It looks to me as if capitalism is an idea whose time has come. It’s in line with nature. It’s in line with God’s rules. We’re paying the penalty for fighting Mother Nature…and it’s a stiff one.
 
  Epileptic Fits (Another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     Thank heavens for the fast-forward on my VCR remote! Well, with exposé TV programs on almost every night, there’s always the chance that if I don’t record them I’ll miss finding out about another military-industrial complex scam, another congressional, medical, food stamp, welfare, and so on scam. The fast-forward button helps me avoid the commercials and luxuriating in the misfortune of others, which the networks squeeze for every tear drop on these shows.
     Did you catch the “Dateline” program with the exposé on the medical scandal over epilepsy? Any time you think that old Uncle Wayne is exaggerating about the mendacity of our so-called health care servers, who fight every low cost cure for a serious illness ferociously, all you have to do is a little reading. Like the Racketeering In Medicine book, which I recommended moons ago. Yes, it’s reviewed in my Secret Guide to Wisdom.
     The program explained that around 70 years ago a very successful cure was found for epilepsy. But since it did not call for the use of any pharmaceuticals, the medical industry buried it. Except for one woman, who fought the medical bureaucracy for years, this cure would have been lost. Now kids with epilepsy can get this dietary treatment at Johns Hopkins, but only if they learn about it. Unfortunately the AMA-FDA-NIH-WHO combo has done a magnificent job of keeping most doctors unaware of this simple cure.
     Maybe you saw the program about Dr. Marshall, the Australian doctor, who discovered an inexpensive quick cure for ulcers. He was fought by the medical establishment for years before he finally won. I think it was the article about him in The New Yorker which finally blew off the lid. The medical journals, which play only the pharmaceutical company tunes, refused to publish his papers, and they’re still fighting him. Most doctors are still unaware of the simple cure and are continuing to consider ulcer patients as a sort of medical annuity.
 
  Instinct?   (Yet another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     Now what in heck is instinct?
     European cuckoos, which are raised by birds of other species, migrate without guidance, to precisely the spot in Africa where their parents migrated before them. Fish return to the streams where they were born to spawn. Turtles find the exact same beaches where they were born. Monarch butterflies make one migration, from the Great Lakes region to specific butterfly trees in Mexico. The examples that “science” explains as instinct are endless. So, what’s instinct?
     What science can’t explain it gives a name to and ignores or denies.
     How do lost animals find their owners in places they’ve never been before? When a rat learns to navigate a maze, how can future unrelated generations be born with the knack for similar mazes? Is there a whole lot more to the adaptation of species than random Darwinian survival of the fittest?
     If you decide to do some research along these lines you’ll find organized science fighting you every inch of the way with ridicule, a refusal to publish your papers, and efforts to prevent any funding. Is it any wonder that our progress in non-accepted scientific fields has been so slow?
     In the US I’ve seen the efforts of the Department of Energy scientists to make absolutely sure that if a new cold fusion industry develops, it will be in Japan or China, not here in America.
     According to The Skeptical Inquirer, telepathy doesn’t exist, yet almost every day I experience it with Sherry. She’ll be driving along, with me in the back seat working, and I’ll suddenly look up and remark on a sign or something unusual. Every time, it’s something she’s particularly noted and wanted to tell me about, but didn’t want to interrupt my work.
     I’ve reviewed books for you on how to communicate with plants and animals. Science is doing well with microcircuit development, but sure has a long way to go, with other scientists vigorously resisting, toward understanding psi, instinct, and other such phenomenon it doesn’t understand and thus ignores or denies.
     The comforting thought is that virtually every scientific belief (law) is eventually shown to be either untrue, or just partly true. We do need to do a lot more research on human instincts. Obviously we have them, though they are not programmed in as powerfully as those of many animals, birds, reptiles and insects, but it would be nice to find out just what we’re up against in hard-wired programming.
 
  The Great Twins Fallacy    (Still another 1996 73 Magazine editorial)
     Yes, I know you have absolutely no interest in this, but who else am I going to tell? This has to do with all this baloney you’ve been reading—which makes the perhaps over-generous assumption that you have been reading—about what scientists have learned about genetics by studying identical twins separated at birth.
      The results of the studies have been amazing. Twins turn out to often smoke the same cigarette brand, be married to wives with the same names, name their children the same names and so on. Golly, how astounding that all this is genetic.
      Even the gays have been cheering at studies which show that about 50% of identical twins are both gay when one is. Genetics at work, obviously.
      Maybe. Maybe not. I think we may be able to rule out a lot of the coincidences between twins if we start investigating the possibility that there is some sort of completely unconscious communications between twins. That isn’t too difficult a concept to consider, is it? Since there are millions of people who’ve experienced some kind of ESP communications, we know that there are times when this happens. We haven’t had much luck in repeating it on demand. Scientists are very unhappy with non-repeatable experiments. Most of ’em refuse to accept anything non-repeatable as even being possible.
      Having personally experienced such communications where there was not even the remotest possibility for it to be a coincidence, I know it’s possible. We just have to learn more about it…and refusing to investigate the phenomenon because some scientists believe it’s impossible isn’t a very good scientific approach.
      Then there is the research reported in The Secret Life of Your Cells by Robert Stone, telling about the amazing work being done by Cleve Backster and others on the communications between the cells of our bodies. They’ve shown that our cells somehow stay in communication with us, even when separated by thousands of miles. Which may help explain some of the weird memories people with donated organs and blood transfusions experience. It could also help explain some sort of communication between twins.
      Anyway, the next time you read a report on how amazingly similar twins separated at birth are, forget the genetic implications. Sure, there may be some, but they aren’t going to be isolated this way.
      We do need to see if we can find out how people can communicate on a subconscious level. Alas, at the pace we’re moving now in our research on the mind it’ll be another fifty years before we learn enough to harness its incredible power. Maybe a hundred.
 
8/8/08
 
Books
     My Secret Guide to Wisdom (#02 $5) is a review of about a hundred books you might otherwise not know about, but should. There’s an awful lot of important things they don’t teach in schools. Well, the main purpose of our public school system is to keep kids busy and not teach them enough for them to cause trouble with the system.
     So we keep them busy memorizing stuff for tests (called homework), which is soon forgotten. Virtually all of the text books suck. I don’t recall one interesting course in grammar school, other than the two years I spent in P.S. 99 in Brooklyn where, once a week, the whole school would gather in the auditorium and they’d play classical music selections, with little ditties to help us remember them. And I still remember them. No, there were no tests.
     In high school there was one course that was fun, and only one. That was in art. It was the art teacher, Mr. Dockett, that made the difference. My mother went to the same high school and he so influenced her that she went on the Pratt Art Institute and became a commercial artist.
     Anyway, here’s a sample of the brief review of one of the books you really, really need to read.
 
  The Secret Life of Plants - Bird and Tompkins, Perennial Library, ISBN 0-06-091587-0, 402p, $14. This is a 1976 book that’s absolutely fantastic! It explains how plants are able to sense what people are thinking. This started with the work of Cleve Backster, the inventor of the lie detector. Well, he wanted to see how plants would react when he burnt a leaf, so he connected his philodendron to his lie detector and sure enough, it reacted wildly. Then he found that he got an even stronger reaction at the time he decided to damage the plant. It gets worse. His plants could instantly sense his thoughts just as accurately from a thousand miles away. The book is a must read. It’ll give you a whole new perspective on communicating with any living thing. They sure don’t teach this kind of thing in any school I’ve heard about.
 
8/8/08
 
Chewing
     In my Secret Guide to Health I briefly mentioned the importance of chewing your food thoroughly. The time for a second printing is approaching, so I’ll be going into more detail on some aspects of health in the new edition. I might even be able to come up with a better title for the next edition. Any suggestions?
     Chewing deserved a lot more coverage that I gave it, since it is such an important matter when it comes to health. Now that I appreciate the importance of thoroughly chewing my food it takes me around an hour to eat a meal instead of half that or less, like everyone else.
     The idea is to do what your body needs you to do, which is to chew each