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2/24/10
Wetbacks What's it take to get you fed up with that bunch of professional politicians you've been electing and endlessly re-electing? Please start getting together with your neighbors and help flush that Washington toilet come November. The head of Homeland Security admits that some 130,000 Other Than Mexicans (OTMs) cross our border every year, are caught, charged as immigration law violators, and then released, allowing them to disappear into our country. And we're paying the bill, for the OTMs and the Mexicans, not just for their healthcare, public schooling, in-state college tuition, and housing subsidies. They work for lower wages than taxpaying Americans, so they're contributing to our unemployment miseries. And worse, many of the illegal immigrants are criminals, making our cities more dangerous and increasing our police, court and prison costs enormously. There are an estimated twenty million illegals here, with a half million more streaming in every year. The Pew Research reported that there are forty million Mexicans that would like to come here. And you are helping to make it easy for them. Never Re-elect Anyone come November! 2/23/10 Amelia PBS did a show on Amelia Earhart which, like the recent movie, rewrote what actually happened to her and navigator Noonan. And this, despite the Fred Goerner 1966 book, The Search for Amelia Earhart, which explained exactly what happened to her. Why the big cover up? Our government is enormously embarrassed that President Roosevelt recruited the most famous woman in the world to be a spy, and the Japanese government is embarrassed that they killed her, since she was a spy and got caught with her spy pictures of the Japanese installations on Truk Island. See my 4/15/08 entry for the whole story and how I knew about her spy mission a year before she left on her flight around the world and knew about where she landed and what happened to her. So, both the recent movie and the PBS show continued the cover up. 2/20/10 Anti-Aging Time (2/22) devoted the cover and 21 pages of the issue to anti-aging. And the bottom line was that if we eat less we will live longer. Well, they haven't done any research with people yet, but with animals it works. It'll take a while to prove, but that may be partly true. However, it makes sense to me that if we give our bodies the food it has been designed to use, don't put in any poisons, give it plenty of exercise, sleep, laughter, sunlight, and plenty of pure water, it should give us the 120 to 200 years of reliable service scientists predict. Regarding eating less, my personal experience is that when I chew my food until it is liquid and don't drown my stomach while it is digesting my food, that it takes surprisingly few spoons of food before I feel satisfied. Full. Occasionally a non-raw fooder is visiting at lunch time, so we go to the Chinese buffet restaurant in Hillsborough. Yes, now and then I eat cooked food. What I've noticed is that now that I'm used to chewing my food tho roughly, while it takes me as long or even longer to eat, I'm full by the time I've eaten about half what I used to. I wonder, have you ever in your whole life chewed a bite of food until it was liquid? 2/20/10 About Me One of these days I'll find a hypnotist to regress me to my past lives, for I suspect that may be a key to much of my character. For instance, for some reason I've always been interested in the forefront of new technologies. Pioneering. When I got interested, at 15, in amateur radio, my main interest was with the newest ham technology, the ultra high frequencies (UHFs). My first ham contacts were with a 2-1/2 meter walkie-talkie I'd built. And when WWII came along I had a wonderful time learning about radar and sonar, becoming an Electronic Technician (ET1/c). After the war a ham friend invented narrow band FM (NBFM), Which preserved the benefits of frequency modulation, but required far less radio frequency band space. I was one of the earliest pioneers of that new communication mode. When I discovered a few hams exchanging messages with surplus teletype machines (RTTY), akin to today's email, I quickly started a small magazine to promote the technology. Pretty soon, where there had been a few dozen hams using RTTY, there were hundreds. Next came single-sideband (SSB) mode. Wow, six times the power with the same transmitter! I was one of the first to exploit that new mode. To help promote new ham radio modes I started my own ham magazine, pioneering building with transistors instead of tubes. The other ham magazines would have nothing to do with them. Next it was slow-scan television, allowing us to send photos on our ham bands. The real big one was when a few ham clubs started extending the range of their mobile and hand transceivers with automatic relay stations (repeaters) atop mountains and skyscrapers. I put one atop a nearby mountain (Pack Monadnock), which made it possible for mobile hams anywhere in New England to talk with each other, instead of being limited to just a few miles. So I started publishing repeater articles in my ham magazine, helping the technology to develop. Next I published, as well, a repeater journal and yearly atlases, listing the repeaters around the country and their coverage. What started out as a couple dozen grew, in a few years, to over 8,000 around the country. Plus many in other countries. When I was flying in a small plane from Johannesburg to Mbabane in Swaziland, I was having fun with my little handy-talkie (HT) talking with hams around South Africa via the Johannesburg repeater. Suddenly the Swaziland repeater came on, allowing me to talk with hams around that country. Repeaters were everywhere. I wrote editorials in my magazine telling about the fun of skiing the mountains of New Hampshire and Colorado with a little HT in my pocket, allowing me to make phone calls via a nearby repeater, anywhere in the world. I pointed out that everybody would want to be able to do this. Well, Art Housholder K9TRG, who worked for Motorola, took my editorials to the top brass and that got the cell phone industry started. In January 1975 I read about a small outfit in Albuquerque making a kit for computer hobbyists. I quickly got one…and again saw the future. Within weeks I started a magazine devoted to this new technology (Byte), which became the largest magazine in the country, running some 800 pages a month. When this caught on I started a second for the technical nuts, and then the first magazine devoted to a specific computer (80-Micro). That grew to 600-plus pages a month, becoming the third-largest magazine in the country. Then one for the Apple, one for the Commodore, and so on. The PC revolution was started. When compact discs were introduced in 1982 our hi-fi and music magazines ignored them. So I started CD Review magazine help the industry get going. Within a year it was the largest music magazine and CDs were off and running. I asked the readers to rate every CD they bought for sound quality and performance. Those with a 10-10 rating were big sellers. The major labels, most all foreign-owned, had to rebuild their recording studios to provide the sound quality the CD buyers demanded. Other than hoping to change the energy industry with cold fusion, our school system with a proven new paradigm, make healthcare almost unnecessary, and make it possible for cars to run maybe five hundred miles on one charge of a new type of battery, I'm taking it easy. 2/19/10 Minimum Wage Despite the fact that socialism has failed in every country where it's been tried, I see the US deep into this failed system, and digging deeper. For instance, Congress is considering increasing the minimum wage, ignoring the fact that Hong Kong has no minimum wage, but is one of the most prosperous economies in the world. It started out at 40¢ an hour. When I got my first job, as the chief engineer and announcer at a 5,000 watts broadcast station in North Carolina, I was making 50¢ an hour, then the minimum wage. But it mounted up since I was working 60 hours a week, plus time and a half over 40 hours. And no spare time to spend it. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and hour. It's the same in New Hampshire, but in Massachusetts it's $8 an hour…which is about the same as 40¢, considering the twenty times decrease in the value of the dollar (thank you, Federal Reserve). Increasing the minimum wage is a benefit for millions of illegal immigrants, who are working off the books. Well, those that aren't in prison, aren't making a good living in crime, or are on welfare. Our government-run school system (that's socialism) is a mess, turning out the worst educated kids of the developed world. Now the Dems are pushing for even more government-run healthcare than we have now, a recipe for disaster for the people. Businesses need to be run by businessmen, not bureaucrats. Government agencies tend to expand at an average of 7% a year, with no known end to the process. 2/18/10 No Accident There's a perfectly logical reason why the US, despite having a whopping healthcare tab, has one of the poorest health records, and are one of the shortest-living people of the developed world. Could it have anything to do with the millions our pharmaceutical industry lavishes on Congress via their swarm of lobbyists? Oh, and the same gang are the ones running most of the medical schools to make sure their products are used to the max. Three cheers for compulsory vaccinations! So they're causing Alzheimer's? Big deal, we've got drugs for that. There's a similar reason why our kids are coming in at the bottom on international educational tests, making the US less and less competitive in the world economy. With our SATs reaching newer lows every year. Oh, and despite many college grads being just barely able to read, skyrocketing tuition costs. There are still a few industries we haven't exported. When a 44¢ stamp buys poorer service than I got as a kid with a 2¢ stamp, I know that Congress gave our money supply to the Federal Reserve Banks. Thanks, guys. Our country went along for 137 years after it was founded with zero inflation, now we're being threatened with it accelerating at warp speed. When Congress instituted the income tax it was 2% for the wealthy. Now it's running almost 50%. How much of this baloney does it take to get people to wise up and stop making being a politician a career choice? I'm already starting to get mailing pieces asking for my vote this fall. Phooey! 2/17/10 Jobs No, not Steve Jobs, I mean employment…which is a hot topic these days, with millions out of work and new jobs few and hard to find. With the government admitting to 10% unemployed, the real number is probably closer to 17%, and the prospects of the situation improving very much seems slim. With millions of foreclosed houses on the market, the need for construction workers has faded. And with Congress encouraging our manufacturing industry to move to Asia, factory jobs aren't likely to grow. The big hope, according to U.S. News, lies in the growing healthcare field, what with millions of boomers retiring and some 98.5% of them having health problems (according to the Department of Health). Thus, my drive to get people to stop poisoning their immune systems and regain perfect health, could aggravate the unemployment problem. While some businesses thrive on selling the lowest price stuff, this has quietly moved much of our manufacturing to lower wage countries. If we returned to the old system of levying a tax on imported goods, this would help to even the playing field for American workers. Indeed, when we had tariffs, the revenues they produced made an income tax unneeded. I'd rather pay more for an iPod that was made in America than dish out almost half of my pay to the government for Congress to waste big time. When I was young something imported was a big deal. Now, something made or grown here in America is the rarity. Sure, I enjoy my dollar-a-pound grapes from Chile, but I'd much rather pay two dollars for California grapes and keep the other half of my pay check. With seven of the ten jobs listed the U.S. News article projected to grow fastest were in the healthcare field, perhaps, for the good of our workers, and to hell with our personal health, we should keep right on eating cooked food and cutting our potential lives about in half. Let's keep those hospitals full and home health aides busy. Let's see, will it be Pizza Hut or Wendy's for dinner tonight? 2/16/10 Haiti A couple hundred years ago Haiti was a major exporter of sugar. But that was when the French ran the country. Then, when the French passed a law abolishing slavery, the Haitian blacks mass-murdered all of the whites. In 1804 Haiti became the first black-ruled country. That soon ended the sugar exporting and the country became a poverty-stricken mess. In 1915 we sent the Marines to rebuild the place, feed its starving people, and get sugar growing again. We spent millions building roads, and towns, and re-establishing law and order. In 1934 the Haitian government demanded that we leave. Again run by blacks, the farms stopped growing sugar, people were starving again, and the rule of law blew away. When I first visited Haiti by boat in 1958 it was a god-awful mess. Our group came tha-a-at close to being killed. Only my high-school French saved our lives. In 1973 the U.S. started giving Haiti millions of dollars to help them survive. These handouts were of no more help to the Haitians than our billions of welfare handouts have been to American blacks. In 1994, having learned nothing from history, Clinton sent our military to again rebuild their infrastructure, followed by Peace Corps volunteers to help educate the Haitians. Indeed, we spent almost a billion dollars feeding and educating them between 1995 and 1999. After the earthquake we rushed our people and money down to help them. And, after we leave, it won't take long for the place to be a mess again. With no exportable crops or products, they'll soon run out of money. My 12/25/07 entry explains that when the British established the black African countries in the 19th century, unable to get the blacks to work, they had to bring in Indians to build the railroads and for other work. And when the British left, their African countries resumed tribal warfare, the farms all went to seed, and became poverty-stricken. Hundreds of thousands of blacks were massacred in Uganda, Rwanda, the Congo, and so on. Do you know of one black-run country in the world that isn't a poverty-stricken mess? I don't. 2/15/10 Schools Time (2/8/10) pointed out that under our present public school system the teacher unions have made it almost impossible to fire a teacher or to evaluate teachers by using student test results. And cave-man local school boards, along with apathetic parents haven't helped. We have an archaic, industrial age school system, with every effort to bring about change being vigorously fought. Alas, this is making the U.S. less and less competitive in the world economy. 2/14/10 Geniuses A baby's IQ is only partly determined by genetics…less than half, scientists tell us. The major IQ contributors are in the prenatal and in the early years (2/1/10 entry). Alas, our meekly re-electing, term after term, our Congressmen, has allowed Congress to first turn the government purse over to the Federal Reserve Banks, and then they quietly installed the income tax…which was an insignificant 2% on the rich. As we slept, the Fed has inflated our money, which had maintained it's value for the 137 years since the founding of the country, while under the control of the U.S. Treasury, to where almost everything today costs over twenty times what it did when I was a kid. Just in the last fifty years the Porsche I bought brand new for $3,300 in 1958 is now over $75,000. And Congress has continually increased the income tax,, with the result we're now taxed over 50% of our earnings, and this forces most families to have both parents to be out working every day. Thus, working mothers have to dump their babies into day-care centers, where they are kept quiet watching children's TV shows. Thus, few mothers have the luxury of helping their babies to expand their brains during the first few years, permanently stunting their IQs. A mother with the time and interest can teach her baby to read by the time it is two years old. And a baby can learn to speak several languages without any accent in the first three years…if given the opportunity. Day-care centers aren't staffed to give every baby the individual loving attention needed. By the age of five a baby's brain is 90% developed, so it's too late to do the early brain-expanding teaching, thus limiting the baby's brain potential for life. Pfft goes another potential genius. With good prenatal teaching, a baby will already have an understanding of up to a hundred words at birth. Then parents should start the baby with simple words and add new and bigger words as the baby is able to understand and use them. Parents who have never bothered to learn to speak good English will thus cripple their baby's ability to learn to speak well. By the time the baby is four the window of opportunity for learning languages is closing, and this includes the ability to learn to read. And since our public school system is geared to teach children to read when they are six (first grade), this helps explain why so many people have such trouble with reading, and never really learn. When I took a black recording artist who came to record in my studio out to dinner I had to read the menu to him…he couldn't read. It also helps explain the horrible time I had in high school trying to learn to speak and read French. Well, you had to have a second language to be accepted by most colleges, and the idea of not going to college was unthinkable in those days. Today, until colleges make some major curriculum changes, I'm advising teens to not waste four to six years and tens of thousands of dollars being educated mainly to work for large companies and, instead, to think in terms of starting their own businesses, where they'll have the potential to make much more money and have more freedom to enjoy it. Colleges, like our public schools, are still "teaching" by giving homework assignments to memorize things for tests. This fiendish system was instituted purposely by the government over 150 years ago under pressure from religious leaders to make sure that people didn't learn to think, just to do what they were told. Colleges of the future will offer entreprenurial courses in speaking, salesmanship, bookkeeping, business law, advertising and promotion, graphic arts, product photography, purchasing, ergonomics, building and site selection, production planning, office planning, dressing for success, print buying, bill collecting, taxes, word processing systems, communications systems—including paging, fax, bulletin boards, intercoms, data services, etc. (11/3/08 entry). My hope is that you'll help me get the word out on how to raise children with genius-level IQs, who have been permitted to learn to think, and to read books at a few seconds a page. And, with most of the entrepreneurial courses being available via the Internet, kids will be able to learn what they want, when they want. With an intelligent and educated citizenry we'll see an and to electing people like we have now in Congress, and then compounding the situation by endlessly re-electing them. We might even be able to look forward to an intelligent president! Preferably now a Muslim. It seems unlikely to me that intelligent, well educated people will keep the religions in business. 2/13/10 Haband I'm not cheap, I'm thrifty. For instance, I wear black clothes because they don't get dirty. So, even though I have 15 pairs of pants in my closet, I've been wearing just two of them for the last two years. In the warm weather it's a $10 pair of pants made in Mongolia for Haband. They're still going strong after two years of daily wear, seven months of the year. And, since they're black I haven't had to wash them. When it gets cold I shift to my Haband Ice-House flannel-lined pants, made in Pakistan. Well, after two years, about five months a year, of daily wear, they're beginning to wear out. I think they were $15. Both of these pants I wear every day both around the house and when going out to events, give talks, etc. My winter favorite shirt is a $15 Haband flannel-lined black Ice-House shirt-jacket, made in China It has snap buttons, so it's easy to whip on and off. And it has nice easy-to-use side pockets. They have a very similar lined shirt, but without the side pockets, made in Swaziland. When I go out in New Hampshire winters I need more warmth, so I wear a black $10 Weatherman shirt, also made in Swaziland (yes, I've been there). I have some of these in blue and red, but they get dirty and, when washed, tend to pill. I wear it under the Ice-House shirt-jacket. In the summer I wear the $10 Haband golf shirts, but they don't come in black, so they have to be washed now and then. They're from Mongolia. For shoes, most of the time I wear their $15 black Omega Joggers. With a Velcro strap instead of laces, they're easy and fast to put on and take off. Comfortable, too. Haband.com – 800-742-2263 will have you inundated with envelopes of their catalog pages, and I see their ads in the American Legion magazine. 2/12/10 I’m Proud To Be An American! 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 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. Gee, I almost forgot Blackwater and the other military contractors…and most of all our black, possibly Muslim, President. 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. 2/12/10 NH Budget Gov. Lynch announced a need to cut government expenses. If he’d bothered to read the letters I sent him four years ago he’d know how to drastically cut expenses,. My letter #10, which is on page 21 of my GREENPRINT for New Hampshire 2020 (#39 $5), and letter #21 on my web site, explains how any government department can be cut in half in three years with everyone involved enthusiastically cooperating. We’d end up with a much more efficient government, and savings in the millions. C. Northcote Parkinson’s research showed that governments normally grow at about 7% per year. You’ve sadly neglected your education if you haven’t read his books. Tsk. See pages 24 and 53 in my Secret Guide to Wisdom (#02 $5) for reviews of his marvelous books. 2/11/10 Clinton President Emeritus Clinton made the news when he went in for another operation for his blocked arteries. If some kind soul would send him a copy of my Secret Guide to Health he could save himself a lot of anguish, pain and humongous expense. A raw food diet would end his health problems. That would free up his immune system to clean his arteries. An alternative would be to get him a copy of Dick Quinn’s Left For Dead, which explains the power of cayenne to roto-root the arteries. In matters of health, ignorance sure isn’t bliss…it’s pain, expense and death. There are a lot of ways to have more fun with your money than paying for sickness insurance or hospital bills. 2/10/10 Bumper Sticker Some clever bumper stickers sayings have arrived via email. One that I particularly liked was: “So I guess we’re even on that slavery thing, eh?” Well, you’d be hard put to find blacks that aren’t still deeply resentful over their ancestors being brought over here as slaves from Africa. And they are “proud African-Americans.” The truth is that slavery was the best thing that ever happened to blacks, as I covered in some detail in my 7/6/09 entry. Slavery saved their ancestor’s lives! Check it out. 2/9/10 Iraq Why are we there? What are we doing, now that we’ve spent hundreds of billions and a few thousand lives? Sure, we know now that we were lied to about the reasons for the war. Saddam had nothing to do with 911. He had no weapons of mass destruction. He had no connection to Al Qaeda.…and we know now that Bush and company knew these were lies. So we went over there, bombed the hell out of Baghdad, killing thousands of civilians, and unleashed massive looting, all because Rumsfeld refused to pay any attention to the advice of his generals to send enough troops to maintain order. We could do a lot of good before we leave…if we actually have any plans to leave all that oil. We could help small businesses to get started with micro-loans, and larger businesses with Business Incubator Groups. We could also put a quick end to the suicide bombing as I explained in my 11/3/09 entry…and to most of the fighting. 2/8/10 Tariffs The income tax, when Congress started it, was about 2% and levied only on the wealthy. Like inflation, which started soon after Congress authorized the Federal Reserve Banks to issue our money, the income tax has followed the boiled frog syndrome, gradually growing to today’s monster without our noticing. As a side note, the income tax amendment to the Constitution has never been authorized by all of the states, so technically it is not a law. But that fine point is irrelevant to the IRS. Before the income tax, for 125 years, the federal government did just fine on the tariffs collected on imports. The eliminating of tariffs on imports has put American workers in competition with foreign workers, forcing much of our manufacturing industry to move to lower wage countries to be competitive. That’s why one major industry after another has left the country. I’d like to see tariffs reinstated so we could start rebuilding the industrial strength of America…and maybe even cut back or even eliminate the income tax. Of course, if you’ve been following the CAFR postings (Consolidated Audit Financial Reports), you know that the income our federal government, states, cities and towns make from some 85,000 invested retirement funds, which are now just rolled over into more stocks, would more than cover what the income tax is taking. Whew! No more IRS! This CAFR investment is so huge that it owns about 70% of the industries on the stock market. So, are you going to say “baa” and re-elect your Congressmen come November? Hey, it’s your money they’re stealing…close to half of what you’re earning. I’m sure going to say “bah” and vote out the incumbents. It’ll be great to see their damned gravy train derailed. And I’m going to do the same in 2012, which might help put a few thousand lobbyists out of work. Sure, we’d have to pay more for the imported stuff, but we’d have all that income tax money to ease that pain…until the manufacturing starts returning. 2/7/10 Suckers! The Bob Livingston Letter says it clearly, “Conventional allopathy medicine is harmful. It simply is a drug system for suppressing symptoms. What makes the system work is that it gives temporary relief by suppressing symptoms. So these repressive drugs must be taken again and again. Repeat business builds the drug culture.” Symptoms are the body’s alarm signal, telling you something is wrong. So, rather than checking to see what is causing the symptoms and curing that, our so-called health-care system only is trained on how to turn off the alarms. Medical schools teach almost nothing about the causes of illness, and even less about diet, so doctors, like almost everyone, think inside their familiar box. So, here comes Wayne, asking people to think…a process that has purposely almost been eliminated by our public school system. Though very few doctors are aware of it, scientists have investigated the human body and determined that the immune system, if permitted to do its job, can get rid of any invading germs, viruses, parasites and fungi, plus trash any starting cancers, and repair most things that go wrong with the body. That’s as long as you don’t dump poisons on it, which take priority and stop any other defense or repair work. Make sense? The poisons, scientists tell us, are cooked food, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, mercury, drugs, vaccinations, etc. So, it’s simple…if you are interested in being healthy you are going to eat a raw food diet and avoid the other popular poisons. My Secret Guide to Health goes into the details and backup. 2/6/10 Serendipity As I was driving to Peterborough, about ten miles away, for my regular Saturday morning raw milk pick up, I was listening to my iPod and had it on “shuffle” so it would randomly select tunes from the over 1,500 I keep in it. As I neared town the next selection it chose was Gottchalk’s Tarantella, one of my topmost favorites. The weird part was that, as it was playing, I was driving on the same place on the same road as the first time I heard the piece, while I was listening to a classical music station on my car radio. I was so taken by it I bought a Gottschalk CD, which included it. And, of course, it made it’s way into my iPod. Just random chance of such serendipity? Yeah, sure. 2/5/10 Alzheimer’s Since my mother died of this more and more popular disease, I’ve taken more than a casual interest in it. As I’ve pointed out in several of my entries, doctors tell us that getting flu shots three years in a row give one a ten times chance of developing Alzheimer’s. It’s the mercury and aluminum in the thimerosal adjutant in the flu shots. Another proven cause is the mercury in amalgam fillings. If you’ve got any amalgam fillings please find a dentist experienced in removing them and replace them with plastic. A cause of memory loss like that of Alzheimer’s is not allowing the brain to rest when one is sleeping. Sleeping with talk radio or the TV on prevents the brain from sorting out the day’s memories. You see, the brain can only do one thing at a time. It can’t multiprocess data. So, if one reads or does puzzles while watching TV, the brain has to jump back and forth between the sensory inputs, and has no way to put them orderly into memory. When you are sleeping you really must have total darkness and quiet so your brain can do it’s job without interference. Make sense? On the bright side for Alzheimer’s patients, a raw food diet has been proven to cure it. Once the immune system is freed from a steady input of poisons it has ton fight it can cure anything…as confirmed by Drs. Day and Comby. Well, that’s raw food and no sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and other known poisons, as per my Secret Guide to Health. 2/4/10 Belief Between inculcated beliefs, long ingrained habits, and addictions,making changes in our lives can be very difficult to achieve. Sure, smokers know it's bad for their health. But, hell, that's off somewhere in the future, where's my matches? And the grossly obese know that eating doughnuts isn't healthy, but gee, they sure taste good, particularly the honey-dipped. And they're hungry. Religious beliefs, ingrained from earliest childhood, are the basis for the largest business in the world, with several retail outlets in every town…called churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. The power of belief is no less when it comes to science and medicine, where every new discovery has followed Schaupenhauer's observation that, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” So, what do you believe in? Being a practicing pragmatist, I aim not to ridicule new ideas, nor oppose them, nor accept them. So I enjoy looking into conspiracy theories, and new discoveries, looking for data to support or discount them. There are so many wonderful mysteries out there to investigate when one's mind and imagination are not imprisoned by beliefs. 2/3/10 Megadocs So, here in America, we have some 800,000 medical doctors, few of which have a clue as to what causes most diseases, and some 70,000 psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who know little about how to fix problems of the mind. And then we have Wayne Green, who has learned how to cure any illness with no drugs, and how to cure any mental problems, usually in an hour or two. I don't expect these professionals to be even slightly interested in what I've learned…because it would put them out of business. And would cut our sickness costs by about $3 trillion a year, and that's just here in America. And worse, like any expert, they believe what they were taught in medical school and will vigorously oppose new concepts or developments. We'll need maybe a tenth as many doctors to deal with accidents. 2/2/10 The Deficit (A 1996 73 Editorial) Let’s say that you buy a house and find an old painting in the attic. You take it down to a local antique shop and they give you $100 for it. Wow! Found money! Then you read in the paper that the store has sold it for $7 million. Would you be upset? Remember, you got what you thought was a good price for it. Well, there’s this 1872 law on the books saying Uncle Sam has to sell land for $2.50 an acre. One parcel of 17,000 acres they sold recently for $42,500 was resold a few days later for $37 million. Did that make Uncle mad enough to change the law? Har de har. Some of the $2.50 parcels of land are near the gambling casinos in Las Vegas and have appraised values up to $47 million. Nearer to our hearts is the incredible Uncle Sam (and that means us taxpayers, buddy) giveaway of radio frequencies. We’re giving away our radio and TV channels for free, even though the users are making billions using them. Ditto cellular telephone channels, and so on. Isn’t it about time we started getting a piece of the action back from these humongous industries which are using our property to make money? Recent FCC auctions of spectrum have brought in billions, but that doesn’t change the free ride our radio and TV stations are getting. And the FCC should be leasing frequencies, not selling them. This is a non-renewable resource. If someone set up shop on your front lawn and started selling things, wouldn’t you at least expect a cut of the action? When you open a store in a shopping mall you have to agree to pay a percentage of your sales to the mall in exchange for the location. Is there any reason we shouldn’t ask the commercial radio and TV users to pay maybe 10% of their revenues for the use of our property? That would add a few billion to the Treasury. The estimate is that we’re giving away $32 billion a year just for the cellular channels. Of course, until you get Congress to change, all more revenues will mean is more spending. It won’t cut our taxes one nickel. There are tons of ways for Congress to cut spending, but none of them are yet deemed necessary. What most people don’t understand is that no one is actually running the government. Congress makes laws and the President handles foreign policy and is Commander in Chief of the military. But there’s no one minding the store, so we see endless bureaucratic waste, with no easy way to curb it. Waste? How about $4.9 billion (with a B) a year for outside consultants for government bureaus? That’s according to the Government Accounting Office. How about $1.5 billion for Congressional staffs? We could cut $30 billion if we ended farm subsidies, and that doesn’t count how much we’d save on lower food prices which are now being supported. Then, there are failed farm loans, where we’ve donated about $10 billion to the farmers. We might want to cut down on the $22 billion in food stamps too. Hmm, could we make it so the stamps would only be valid for buying raw food? There are some fascinating recent books which go into the gory details on how Congress is screwing us, but a warning—they might possibly make you mad. They could even put a strain on your twelve to sixteen years of conditioning in our school system to not cause trouble and to shut the hell up and do as you’re damned well told. I know I almost got mad. Worse, it almost made me think! One of the most amusing books on government waste is O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores. P.J. shows how Congress could quickly cut $337 billion off the budget, without even getting to the small, half-billion-dollar, items. Then there’s Gross’ Government Racket—Washington Waste From A to Z. And if that doesn’t hold you, read Kelly’s Adventures In Porkland—How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won’t Stop. These are just books on the subject. There’s nothing new about egregious waste in Washington. I’ve got stacks of books going back ten, twenty and thirty years, all describing the waste—and nothing has ever come of it—or changed. The probability is high that nothing will change this time, except that the deficit and taxes will continue to rise and the government’s percentage of your pay check will continue to grow. 2/1/10 Better Youngsters • (A 1996 73 Editorial) My search for a way to generate more young hams has taken a strange turn. My original goals were to (a) provide a solid excuse for the hobby to be kept alive, despite the pressures for our valuable spectrum by rapidly expanding commercial interests and (b) help provide the high-tech work force our country needs to compete against the other industrial countries. If we’re going to do this we have to get kids interested in amateur radio. This brought me head-to-head with the mess our schools are in. And that, in turn, got me to reading about our educational system. I’ve found that I’m not alone in criticizing our school system. Now, before I get really started on how lousy our schools are, let’s just consider what you might do if you were interested in having the very best child or grandchild you could. First, let’s talk about what can go wrong, and then we can discuss how to fix the situation. I’m presuming, of course, that you might have a shred of interest in giving your children the best start in life that you can. Maybe you don’t give a damn. Many parents obviously don’t. By the time your kids are seven the largest part of their characters will have already been formed. The child at seven won’t be very different fundamentally from the teenager at 15, or the grown-up at 30. Your child starts with the sperm and the ova. Anything you do to screw up your DNA before conception is going to affect your kid, and not positively. If you mess up your sperm enough, there’ll be a miscarriage. But a lesser disturbance of the DNA message will just burden your child with problems. There may be health, behavioral, or even cosmetic problems. So what can we do to give our kids the best possible start? Well, research has shown that there are a lot of things that affect our sperm. There are drugs such as caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. There are magnetic fields such as we find with electric blankets or living near power lines or power sub-stations. There are poisons such as mercury, silver, and nickel, which we can get from amalgam fillings in our teeth. Most of us already know about crack babies, and terrible problems from cocaine, pot, and the hard stuff. So let’s say that you and your wife go out of your way to give your kid the best start you can. The Prenatal Classroom by Van de Carr and Lehrer will help your baby get off to a fantastic start. Then comes birth. I’ve got to get you to read The Continuum Concept by Liedloff. That’ll keep you from letting the hospital put your baby in their nursery. This is a wonderful guidebook for the first year of life. Next comes the pre-school era from one to five. This is a time of incredibly rapid learning. It’s a wonderful time to teach babies several languages, if you have a way to continue and develop their use later on. Use it of lose it. Unfortunately, even if we’ve done everything the best we can until we send them to public school, this is when we will permanently screw up the rest of their lives. I hope I can get you to get the book by John Gatto, the New York State Teacher Of The Year, Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. It’s inexpensive and a humdinger. Of course, since you are an alumni of this school system, the chances are great that you do not have any interest in reading books. Do you know that the average American schoolteacher only reads one book a year. And then, even if you do read Gatto’s book and get all upset when you find out what’s been going on in schools, you have been so conditioned by your own school experience so the odds are that you have been made into a gutless wimp and won’t have the initiative to even try and do anything about it. Heck, I’ve discussed the major problems facing our society and proposed inexpensive, creative solutions to them in my Declare War book. Several thousand people have bought it, yet I’ve seen no movement to try and implement any of my proposals. “It can’t be done. It’s hopeless.” Until I read Gatto’s book I hadn’t realized why I was getting verbal and written support, but not seeing any sign of people actually doing anything. I was around eleven when it finally dawned on me that kids had no more rights than slaves. By law I had to go to school. The only rights I had in school were those the authorities let me have, and they have been backed up by the Supreme Court in this. I was forced to comply by the use of embarrassment and humiliation. You do nothing unless the teacher tells you to—which stifles thinking and makes you dependent on the teacher. I see this pattern in most of the youngsters I’ve hired. They are unable to think for themselves. They sit and wait until they’re told what to do. They are unable to plan work. They’ve always been stopped by the bell before finishing something, so they’re not familiar with the concept of completing work. Gatto says, “It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves.” Gatto points out that it only takes about one hundred hours for a person to learn to read, write and do arithmetic, as long as they’re willing to learn. From then on they can teach themselves. “Schooling, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified teacher. Nobody survives the curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it—don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education.” He points out that before television children had enough time to themselves to learn about self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love. Now kids, on the average, spend 55 hours a week in front of the TV. That’s one-third of their time. Add to that the stresses of a two-income or single-parent family, and our kids have too little time to learn to become human.Is it any wonder that our engineering universities are running out of potential students, and are having to continuously lower their admission standards? Only 7% of the high school graduates in America have enough math and science background to be accepted by an engineering college. The colleges have responded by turning to foreign students. That’s great for other countries, but it sure leaves ours in a fix. Here we are heading into a high-tech future and we’re turning out fewer and fewer American engineers, technicians and scientists. The time was, 60 years ago, that youngsters wanted to be hams so badly that they’d put up with learning the code as a barrier. I did, even though I hated being forced to do something which did not make sense to me even then. Very few of the kids these days have the passion to surmount obstacles, so we’ve instituted the no-code license. Well, we’ve been lowering the standards for school grades in order to get our kids through school, which is the same thing. They’ve even had to lower the SATs because our kid’s scores have dropped so much. Now I see some hams pleading that we lower the technical exam standards so kids won’t have to memorize so much to get a ham license. There may be some American schools that are pretty good. I’ve read about a few. But most of the better educated children today are being schooled at home by their parents. Maybe you’ve read about it in Newsweek. Home schooling will be a lot simpler once we have a good video educational series parents can use. These would use top-notch performers, plenty of graphics, and be fun to watch. PBS has been producing some superb educational videos. Now we need to have them to cover everything being taught in the K-12 years, plus everything that should be being taught. And also plus everything kids might want to learn, but which isn’t being taught. We need thousands of these videos. We’ll still need schools to provide the hardware and facilities to teach skills. You can teach a lot about driving with a simulator, but then you need a car. Ditto flight simulators, etc. You can’t lean to juggle with a simulator, or to throw a boomerang. Or do glass blowing. College? There may be some that are okay, but if you read the books on education you’ll find that most aren’t much good. Most of the “teaching” is done by student instructors. Get a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education, 1993, Free Press, $25. If you learn much about nutrition you won’t let your kids near a McDonalds. Granted, it’s difficult to get the facts on nutrition. The field is overgrown with fads and scams. But if you want to raise healthy, happy, intelligent children, you’d better learn. Though it’s far from perfect, the best school I’ve found so far is the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Mass. Here’s a school that accepts children from 4 through 20. It has no curriculum! No classrooms. No tests. No grades. The kids learn what they want, when they want, and if they want. The results are spectacular. I’ve read eight books about the school and visited it personally. It turns out that kids, if give the opportunity, love to learn and run circles around those forced to take courses. My Secret Guide to Wisdom reviews the books about the school and explains where to get them. I wonder what I might have been like and accomplished in life if I’d been able to go to a school like that. 1/31/10 Your Government At Work (A 1996 editorial of mine I thought worth repeating) Last year one of those TV shows devoted to the weird did a show interviewing farmers and their children who were involved with that supposed 1947 UFO crash in New Mexico. They sure made a good case for the reality of a crashed UFO and its dead occupants being covered up by the government. It certainly was enough to cause any intelligent person to shake off the bindings of “conventional wisdom” and start looking for more information. Or should that be called “conventional ignorance?” Of course, having always been interested in the UFO phenomenon, I’ve done a lot of homework. I’ve read dozens of books over the last 50 years or so, some very thoroughly researched, others a waste of time. I think I mentioned that back in 1963 Jay Stanton (darn, I forget his call!), a writer and ham friend who was a total UFO skeptic, set off to expose the whole UFO business as bunk. About two years later, no longer a skeptic, his book telling about his conversion was published. He cited some most convincing cases. I’ve read enough books, talked with enough people who have had personal experiences, and had enough experiences of my own to know that something real is happening. I also know from several incidents that our beloved government is up to here in a cover-up. Yeah, I know, the old government cover-up baloney. Well, if I hadn’t had a firsthand inside experience with the cover-up in the Amelia Earhart case, which is still being covered up over 60 years later, I might be less easily convinced. Then, a few days ago, there was another TV weirdo show on the New Mexico UFO crash. This program interviewed the children of some of the Air Force people who were involved. They, like the farmers, had seen the ETs. And their parents, like the farmers, had been threatened by government agents to keep quiet. Or else. Again, their story was most compelling. But a federal agency wouldn’t threaten private citizens, would they? Well, they did me. Agents from one federal agency got me into a room and explained that if I ever published anything about that agency again they would have me put in prison and make sure that I’d never get out alive. No, I have never written about them again. And I won’t, except in my memoirs, where I will have a whole lot of interesting things to write about. But unless you start paying attention to my advice on nutrition, drinking more water and avoiding poisons, the chances are I’m going to outlive you. 1/30/10 Trumpeting As Gilbert & Sullivan put it: 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. Far's I know, I'm unique in that I know how to deal with any health problems, either physical or mental. The physical is easy…just apply the Greenopathic cure of changing to a raw food diet, with no sugar, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, fluorides, chlorine, and other poisons. Oh, and get plenty of exercise and sleep. Dealing with mental problems calls for an expertise in Dianetics, with which any psychological or mental problems can be solved. The Dianetic approach is fairly simple. You see, when something either physically or mentally painful happens to us, our subconscious equates that pain with whatever it perceives at the time so that, in the future, if anything similar is perceived to be happening, we'll automatically avoid it. It's a simple survival strategy built into all living things. And it all happens on a subconscious level. So we have a whole bunch of what are called engrams. These are equations of pain to sounds, sights, and feelings. With Dianetics, we go back under a light hypnosis to the moments of pain and relive them, over and over, until the engrams have been eliminated. It doesn't take very long to eliminate each of these engrams. And then the person is no longer motivated by subconscious memories, plus the mind is freed up so it can think better. In my case we mainly had to go back and relive a whole bunch of beatings by my dad. When he'd get mad at something I'd said or done he'd take out his anger with a hairbrush or a razor strop on my butt. The 1950 book, Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron. Hubbard, is still in print. It explains step by step how and why it works, and how to initiate the hypnosis. You can do it right out of the book. I got the book when it first came out and tried it with a friend. It was so fantastic I quit my job and went to the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth NJ to learn more. After six weeks, and auditing (it's called) a couple dozen people, I got very good at it, and with the painful memories of my beatings no longer affecting me, I have never again been depressed. Before that I really didn't care much whether I lived or not. Researchers at UNH have shown that most teen suicides are the result of childhood beatings. Wild animal trainers have learned that the best way to train their animals is with love, not punishment. The lion tamers of old, with their chairs and whips, are a past era. Now, if only more dads would get the message. Give me any case of PTSD and I'll have it but a memory in an hour or two. But we Dianetic auditors had a major problem. We couldn't legally do our work because we weren't licensed like psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts. Hubbard solved that by forming a pseudo-religion, Scientology, making it legal to do religious consulting. I've never gotten involved with Scientology, so I don't know much about it. And I wasn't interested in making a business out of Dianetic processing people. Mostly I stuck to occasionally helping other Dianetic auditors who had problems. 1/29/10 EMPs Just in case my 12/6/09 piece didn't get you thinking, which unfortunately is probable, I now read that Iran's main rush to develop nukes has to do with their plans for using them to cripple America via EMPs. So, what plans have you made to protect your family should the power go off…probably permanently… along with all transportation, thus ending the public food supply? And, unlike Haiti, with no rush of emergency food and medical help from foreign countries? What a great way to take over a country, and with most everything in good shape except the people, who will have died of starvation. Well, all but a few people in farming communities who have planted gardens. 1/28/10 Dowsing Okay, what do you think about dowsing? Can people really find water underground dependably? Your answer will probably be determined by how knowledgeable or ignorant you are on the subject. It is easy for people to hold strong opinions on things of which they are ignorant. Some time ago I reviewed Vibrations by Owen Lehto. This is one of the most practical how-to books I’ve found on dowsing. But Owen doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to convince the ignorant. Christopher Bird does in his monumental The Divining Hand. Once you’ve read this book you will no longer be a skeptic. You won’t even be on the fence. Bird goes over the history of divining, which goes back at least a thousand years. Then he covers the scientific research done in the field. And there’s been plenty. One scientist set up an experiment with two iron posts in the ground. He fed a small voltage to them to see if dowsers could detect it. He found that 80% of the people he tested could invariably detect a 20 mA current. A few could detect currents of 1 mA, and one chap was able to detect 1 µA of current without fail. This chap was also able to direction-find any radio station while blindfolded. They gave him the frequency and his dowsing rod would point to it. There are well-drilling companies who use dowsing to find wells and charge nothing if they fail to provide water at the rate of flow they guarantee. They’ve never failed. Experienced dowsers can find water veins and tell you how far down they are and the flow in gallons per minute to expect. They can even do this working with a map. They can reliably find lost objects and people. They can dowse for metals, oil, coal and natural gas. With oil they can tell how far down the top of it is, the size of the deposit, and its depth. Dowsers can diagnose illnesses and locate the site of the trouble. They’ve found that many, if not most cases of arthritis and cancer involve people sleeping over several veins of water. When their beds are moved to a place where there are no underground water veins they miraculously recover. Well, if something coming from the water is making people sick, then it should be possible to detect it scientifically, right? They can! Using a gamma ray detector. In some way the moving water projects a narrow beam upward, which, over time can generate many different illnesses. But you don’t need a gamma ray detector when a simple pendulum will do the job. An experienced radiesthesiaist can use a pendulum to find the cause of an illness and to find the best medicine to cure it. They can even do this from afar! And it works on animals as well as people. By shielding a dowser’s body they’ve been able to locate the areas of the body which do the detecting, with one being located in the head by the pineal gland and the other by the adrenal glands. If you’d like to become an expert on the subject get the Bird book. It’s $30 and is available from several sources. It’s a big, glossy, well illustrated book. 1/27/10 Experiment If all the ways of stimulating plant growth for a science fair project I cover in my booklet #86 (Super-Organic Food) aren’t enough, I’ve got one more for you. This has to do with voo-do…no, it’s what’s called paramagnetism. It seems that if you hang things by a string and put a magnet near them those which are paramagnetic will be attracted a little bit. Stuff that’s weakly repelled is called diamagnetic. Like wood and water. Most organic stuff is diamagnetic and the most paramagnetic are volcanic rock and ash. Like basalt, which is almost off the chart. It’s difficult to measure paramagnetism with a string and a magnet, so the experts in the field use a pendulum. Well, why not. Once you get the hang of it a pendulum will dowse for just about anything you ask it to. But you don’t have to buy into any of this to do the experiment and see for yourself. Some high school kids have won local and state science fair contests with this one. Since basalt has the most power, if you can find or make a basalt rock about 3” in diameter and 12” long, you’re in business. Granite will do. The idea is to emulate in miniature the round towers of Ireland. About 65 of these still remain, and the fields around them are in much demand by local farmers, who want to fatten their cows on the luxurious grass that grows there. For the experiment use two plastic buckets or dishes filled with potting soil from the same bag. Plant radish seeds about a half inch deep around the pots, three or four seeds per hole. Water both pots the same and keep both in the sunlight the same, but in one place the stone in the middle. The shape of the rock isn’t critical. After eight days in a growing temperature of 70-80°F pull them up and weigh the roots “held in place” soil. You’ll see that the plants to the east are the smallest and lightest. Those to the north and south will be middle-sized, and those to the west of the rock will be the largest and heaviest. The plants in the control pot should all be the same. Now why should a rock in the pot have such a startling effect on plant growth? The next step, naturally, is to start using this phenomenon to our advantage. If you’re interested in reading more about this you can read Paramagnetism by Phil Callahan (#6158 from Acres USA - $15) and Enlivened Rock Powders by Harvey Lisle (#6103 Acres USA $15). I’ve been interested in the using of rock powders to both stimulate plant growth and as a way of providing the minerals which are missing from our commercially grown produce. In the Hamaker-Weaver book, The Survival of Civilization, Weaver mentions his eating a quarter to half teaspoon of rock dust very day to supply the missing minerals. Talk about nitty-gritty! But it solved his chronic constipation problem. There are a bunch of enlivened rock powders on the market that farmers feed to their livestock. It makes the animals more alert, have glossier coats and be generally much healthier, so they should help people too. Hmm, have you any rock powder recipes for me? Yum. 1/26/10 Selenium (Here's another 1996 disinterred editorial ) As I read the news magazines I kept seeing obits for local well-known people who have died of a heart attack or stroke. Veterinarians solved that problem for animals decades ago. Farm animals don’t die of heart attacks or strokes. Farmers add pellets with the minerals which are almost universally missing from today’s crops to their animal’s feed. But don’t ask your doctor about preventative medicine, vitamins or minerals; they’re not his field. If doctors were taught anything about health maintenance instead of just about sickness symptoms amelioration they wouldn’t be dying younger than the rest of us on the average. They’re only taught how to treat symptoms, not the illnesses causing them. Cows, pigs and horses don’t die of heart attacks or Alzheimer’s because farmers give them the minerals they need with their feed. Well, that’s something for you to think about as the ambulance rushes you to the emergency ward. That old ounce of prevention. Or more likely, 50 mg of selenium or some other missing mineral that’s critically important to your body’s function. No, I’m no MD, nor even a DVM, so I don’t ask that you believe me. But I recommend you do your homework the way I have. I realize that you may not have much time to read, what with your spending a little time at work, and then watching ball games, sitcoms, soaps, and talk shows, making you a living example of the boiled frog syndrome. That’s where, if you drop a frog into boiling water, he’ll jump right out. But if you put him in warm water with a fire under it he’ll enjoy the warmth until he's boiled. And that’s the way it is with sugar, white bread, smoking, using drugs, and eating food that lacks the basic minerals and vitamins our bodies developed a dependency on over millennia's of design. Our bodies were designed to work on raw wild foods. They were never designed to cope with coffee and doughnuts or Big Macs, fries, and a malt. So, either we have to figure some way to get our bodies the materials they need or settle for half a life. The expression, “You are what you eat,” is right. For instance, in one of the ham radio club newsletters there was a very nice obit about Travis Baird W9VQD. Travis stroked out (a mineral lack). He was into music, opera, speed skating, photography, sailing, football, computers, the violin, amateur television, and so on. Now he’s gone. Diet. Forty-one of the books in my review of “books you’re crazy if you don’t read” are health oriented. The most important is Maximize Immunity by Dr. Bruno Comby. If you read The Secrets of the Soil, another of my recommended books, you’ll find out how to grow food that has the missing minerals. Ever since the invention of the flush toilet we’ve been getting rid of the minerals in our crops instead of refertilizing our fields with them, as people did up until the 20th century. Now we use chemicals as fertilizer, and we’re suffering the consequences. Hmm, I wonder how many of you grew up on a farm with a back house and had to shovel out the privy every spring? My family’s farm in Bethlehem NH had no running water and no electricity, so I know what it is to take a flashlight out to the privy in back of the barn at night in the rain. And there was no heat until the first one up (me) started the fire in the kitchen stove with newspaper, kindling, and some kerosene to get the wood going fast. And another fire in the living room fireplace when it was really cold. While the stove was warming up I’d refill the kerosene lamps. The stove had a water tank at one end, so once the water was warm enough I’d scoop some out into a 5-gallon watering can. Then, in the summer kitchen, out by the woodpile, I’d hoist the can over my head with a pulley and take a fast shower. That part of the house was unheated by the stove, so 5 gallons of water was plenty. Few farms today have a privy, so farmers today are flushing what few minerals they’re getting in their food into their septic system, not into a privy and then the compost heap. You either get your missing trace minerals from a health store or you make the doctors even wealthier as you have your heart attack or stroke. Your choice. You can learn exactly what trace minerals your body needs by reading a most entertaining book by Dr. Joel Wallach. It’s Rare Earths—Forbidden Cures. 500 large pages, $20 from Wellness Lifestyle, Box 1222, Bonita CA 91908 - 800-755-4656. Yes, it’s reviewed in my Secret Guide to Wisdom. . 1/25/10 Kaku Kookoo? Art Bell has had Professor Kaku on his program several times (seven, actually) discussing cosmology. Unfortunately the Professor is completely mired in the Big Bang theory of how the universe got started. I wrote about this situation years ago when I reviewed Eric Lerner's 1992 book, The Big Bang Never Happened. In the interim, researchers have continued to make discoveries which have forced the Big Bang believers to ever more extravagant excuses to support their belief. Recent research has shown that photons are slowed down when they collide with ions in space. Space is not empty, it’s just that ions and hydrogen atoms are spread out. But, by the time a photon has traveled a few million light years it’s significantly slowed, causing the red shift. Hubble noticed that the further galaxies were away, the redder they were. He attributed this to the Doppler Effect, which meant that the further they were away, the faster they had to be moving away from us. Lordy, the universe was expanding! And that meant that, looking backwards in time, it had to have started from some point. Voilà, the Big Bang. I published an article by Bill Hoisington K1CLL around 40 years ago entitled, Light Naturally Runs Down. Bill had it right and Hawkins and Kaku have it wrong. So much for the age of the universe being 2 (cosmologist’s early guesses) to 14 billion years old. But, you ask, what about that universal background microwave radiation? That’s not echoes of the Big Bang, it’s the result of the interactions of light with charged particles in space. This fits in a lot better with Sir Fred Hoyle’s theories in his Evolution from Space (see page 11 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom for a review). The Hubble telescope has gone a long way toward destroying Hubble’s expanding universe theory. No matter how sparse the visible light in any direction, no matter where the telescope is aimed there are a seemingly infinite number of galaxies to be seen. A recent Art Bell guest said there are more than 10,000 galaxies for every blade of grass on Earth. He was probably being too conservative. 1/24/10 American Wars We are, at least for the time being, the world’s mightiest power…both militarily and in business. And boy, are we a mess! In the war department, there was our War on Poverty, which put millions on welfare and helped trigger the greatest foreign invasion of any country in history. And our War on Drugs, which has helped make millionaires out of over a million criminals. Drugs have never been more plentiful or so reasonably priced. How about that Vietnam war? We lost that one, too. Did we win in Korea? Yeah? What did we win? Let’s not discus our Somalia invasion. Or Grenada. Or Haiti. Or Panama. Well, how are we doing with our War on Terror? Har-de-har. Have you been reading about what a terrible mess we made of our Afghanistan invasion? Iraq? Let’s not discuss that mess, either. We have a dozen or so (or is it fifty?) so-called government intelligence organizations, with no hint of intelligence resulting. I’m pretty good at coming up with creative solutions to problems. In this case I see what the problem is, but I have no solutions to propose. Maybe you can come up with something? The same problem that’s making the government and the military so stupid, is doing the same thing to our major corporations. In the government…in the military…and in big business, you get ahead by sticking to your desk and looking busy. If you are crazy enough to propose changing the way things are, you’ll have almost everyone fighting you. You’re a goner. The status quo stifles any creativity or out-of-the-box thinking. The result, obviously, is that only those who play the game and are incapable of thinking, survive in an organization. So we end up with Generals, Admirals, CEOs, Presidents, and heads of government agencies who have never had an original thought and are used to fighting any they encounter. They surround themselves with people who make them comfortable. Yes-men. Ooops, I mean yes-people. Why are the student graduates of our most expensive in the world government public school system coming in absolutely last on international surveys? It's the bureaucracies running them. How come we’ve been outsmarted in our invasions of Cuba, Haiti, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, and on down the list? Dumb leadership. We’ve got dim bulbs lighting our way. This is nothing new. It’s what changed Great Britain into Britain. Sir William Gilbert, over a hundred years ago, twitted the British government with H.M.S. Pinafore (among other operettas). The Rt. Honorable Admiral Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., when asked how he got to that high position, finished his song, “So, stick close to your desks and never go to sea, and you all may be a Ruler of the Queen’s Navy.” If our forefathers hadn’t been creative and hid behind trees, mowing down the British ranks, instead of marching in rows like the British soldiers, we’d probably be another colony, like Canada. 1/23/10 DAV The Disabled American Veterans meetings are as dull as those of the American Legion, judging from a letter from a nearby member. Well, their magazine, like that of the Legion, has had nothing of interest in it. So I sent a letter to the editor offering to submit an article for his consideration on how veterans could improve their health substantially via a diet change. The response from Gary Weaver, their National Director of Communications, was that he had no interest in getting my submission. Figures. 1/22/10 The War We Lost—and Lost Big (This is a disinterred 73 editorial from 1996…14 years ago) Short quiz: What is the most expensive war in American history? It is a war that cost more than WWII, Korea, and Vietnam combined? Hint—it’s one we lost. One we lost in a big way. One that has brought about catastrophic changes in our country. It’s President Johnson’s (Lyndon) War on Poverty. Welfare. Welfare mothers. Hey, it’s your money your politicians are shoveling out. Over $5 trillion so far, and with no end in sight. When the government pays women welfare benefits equivalent to $12 an hour, two and a half times the minimum wage, in New York and Washington, not to work, what do you think this does to wages in those areas? To be “entitled” to this largess at our expense the women have to have children—the more the better—no job, and no husband that’s working. In 39 states welfare benefits are equivalent to about $16,600 a year. In eight it’s over $20,000. Later I’ll tell you about a woman with two children who is on welfare in my small New Hampshire town. Her food and apartment are provided, plus schooling for one child, complete with a paid driver to ferry the child to school and back every day. The woman is bitterly complaining that her welfare-provided cable TV only gives her two paid channels. Oh yes, her husband is working, but they are “separated.” A recent exposé on welfare showed a couple of women in Laconia (NH) sitting in their apartments getting fat on this same system. Work? And lose all those benefits? You’ve got to be kidding! So we complain about the single mothers. We complain about the loss of family values that’s turning out one generation after another of uneducated welfare mothers and resulting criminal children with no incentive or skills to work. Compassion gone berserk, and to hell with the survival of the fittest concept. We’re making sure that the least fit survive and proliferate, dragging us all down. What can you do about this mess you’ve meekly let fester? Two things. First, we’ve got to stop Congress from making things worse. Second, we’ve got to make sure Congress strikes out all of the laws they’ve made that are screwing us up. Get the feds out of the mercy business, which is just another name for socialism. My bumper-sticker approach to this is to start with Green’s NRA: Never Re-elect Anyone! Get those bribed (via lobbyists) scoundrels out of Washington. Let’s build a whole new breed of one-term semi-politicians. But most important is to take a few days off from watching mind-numbing TV and educate yourself. There are some damned good books which will help you understand what’s gone wrong with our school system (which is a disaster), with the war on poverty (which we lost), the war on drugs (which we’ve also lost), our so-called health-care system (another enormously overpriced disaster), our “correctional institutions” (which exacerbate, not correct) and so on. Hey, we have the potential for having a pretty good country, but it’s going to take a lot of work by a lot of people to undo Congressional mischief and make it happen. The multi-level marketing (chain-letter) approach will work for us. First you educate yourself. Then you get two or three other people started being educated. And they do the same for two or three more. Then form a local action group. The next thing you know, we’ll have a movement. I’d like to see local political action clubs (PACs) get going. Members would be encouraged to read a book and report on it at the next meeting. There are an awful lot of books out there, but only a small percentage of them are both interesting and educational. By distributing the work of separating the wheat from the chaff, a group can easily do something that no one person could possibly accomplish. The next thing you know some entrepreneur will start collecting the book reports and submit them to me for publication. And I’ll pay for ’em. The resulting sale of the better books will help discourage publishers from unloading crap on us, and will encourage the writing of even better books. My $5 Secret Guide to Wisdom is a review of “books you’re crazy if you don’t read,” and covers a wide variety of topics. Reading these books will beat the heck out of a college education, be thousands of dollars cheaper, and take several years less time. Maybe you can get some high school kids interested in learning to read. Perhaps I’ve let my idealism run away with me in even suggesting that we try to run our country on reason instead of fanaticism. Maybe screaming protesters and terrorism are the rule of the day and reason passé. Anyway, if you feel that people who prefer not to work are worth $335 billion of your money being taken out of your paycheck every year, then go back and watch that ball game on TV. As long as you’re satisfied that you’re getting your money’s worth it’s no problem. If you’d get Congress to stop wasting your money we could go back to where a one paycheck family could live comfortably and a mother could have the time to spend with her children. One reader suggested a way to solve the deficit problem would be to fire the top three layers of management of all federal bureaus on the basis that it’s unlikely that anyone lower down would notice much difference. Oh, the bureau’s jet planes would get less use. But why not fire ’em down five levels and start reducing the deficit instead of just stopping its growth? Oh yes, one more innovation. Since many of our more serious social problems have been caused by federal judges running amok, bypassing the legislative system, how about putting term limits on those rascals too? It would also be nice if we could somehow encourage the Supremes to stop trashing to Constitution. There is no place in the Constitution which supports the social programs Congress has enacted and the Supremes have endorsed. 1/21/10 Roswell If you're into the UFO world, you've read plenty about the UFO crash in Roswell NM in 1947, with the ensuing government cover-up. UFOs have been and still are being spotted all around the world. There was a recent TV show on USOs, Unidentified Submerged Objects…UFOs that dive into or come zooming out of the ocean or lakes. There are endless reports of sightings and contactees. Frankly, I'm pissed, considering my long interest, in their not bothering to contact me. Lousy bastards. Anyway, here's what I think is going on. First the occupants are not ETs, they're time travelers from the future. And those little grey things are their versions of live robots. Time travel? Ridiculous, you say? Well, go back to around 1850 and try to tell people that in the future there will be trolleys going around the world in the air at hundreds of miles an hour. Every home will have light in every room that can be instantly turned on and off, with no kerosene needed. Everyone will have a self-powered wagon, needing no horses, that can go a hundred miles an hour. Telephones, radio, TV, etc. Well, you make the list. They'd consider you a total nut case. I'm convinced that time travel will be invented because we see the images of the round UFOs in the cave paintings from 17,000 years ago. And they are described in Alexander The Great's notebooks as hovering over his battles. Of course, when time travel is made possible one of he first uses will be to document history. It may be that it's not easy to go to a specific date, which could explain the use of crop patterns, which only last a few days, and which no two are the same. We don't know much about time. There not being any money in it, there's little for researching time. But we do know there's been man, many cases of proven precognition, so something is going on we don't understand. And people that report back after death try to explain that time over "there" is no longer linear. They can go into the past or the future. Why all the secrecy from the UFO occupants? It probably has to do with their avoiding changing their future with things they do when going back. Can they go forward in time? I'll let you know when I find out. You'll get some powerful clues by reading Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe (reviewed on page 41 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom), and the Chet Snow's Mass Dreams of the Future (reviewed on page 46 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom). Yes, the so-called ETs communicate via telepathy. Radin describes the successful research that's already been done with that. Communicating thoughts avoids having to learn new languages. 1/20/10 Dancing While in high school in Brooklyn I used to take dancing lessons at a downtown dancing studio. Well, it was a great way to meet girls, and to be ready for the school proms. Having rarely, if ever, danced since, I doubt if I could deal with anything beyond a foxtrot now. If I was faced with an upcoming cruise or a party, where dancing is part of the evening's entertainment, I'd grab Sherry get busy relearning to dance. I was reminded of this when a book I picked up at the town dump had a program from a Virgin Islands cruise and they had dancing after dinner every evening, with disco going on to 2 AM. Having already been on all of the cruises I'll go on for this lifetime, and my high school reunions long gone, my need to know how to dance is remote. So I haven't bothered, even though Sherry is selling about 150 different how to dance DVDs that she's produced. She got started about 20 years ago. She got Kathy Blake, a prize-winning dancing teacher from a nearby town, to put some dance lessons on video tape, doing the taping in a TV studio. The customer reaction was so enthusiastic they kept taping more and more lessons. Beginning, intermediate, and expert for the more popular steps, and then into the Latin dances, disco, dirty, lambada, and so on. Well, dancing is great exercise, both for the body and the mind. And it's romantic, often leading to the bedroom. When Sherry is out I often take orders from her customers who call, so I get to hear their raves over how great Kathy is at teaching…often from people who've tried other dance lesson videos. When DVDs came along Sherry got all of her tapes put on that medium, so she has the titles available either on tape or DVD now. Look up Butterfly Video or Kathy Blake Dance Lessons. The last cruise I was on was around the Caribbean in a converted ferry with a deck for cars. They converted the car deck to hold small boats for scuba diving tours. So we cruised around every night, diving somewhere new every day. The ferry didn't have a dance floor area, so my lack of dancing skills didn't present any problems. Well, if another scuba diving cruise comes up, I might just go for one more cruise. 1/15/10 Saga When I was three I vaguely remember we were living in the ground floor of an old brownstone on Rodgers Avenue, in Brooklyn. Dad never (in his whole life) talked about his work, so I had no clue as to what he was doing. I know he was a Hupmobile salesman for a while. Then we moved to an apartment on the corner of Avenue K and East 14th Street, in Brooklyn, about three blocks from my mother's folks, on East 15th Street and just off Avenue N. By then dad was working for the Department of Commerce, testing people applying for pilot's licenses. I heard later that he'd refused to give Admiral Byrd, the Arctic and Antarctic explorer a license because he was a lousy pilot. Dad had pilot's license number 73 and commercial pilot's license number 89. His car license was C89. Then, when I was turning five, in 1927, we moved to an apartment (3,000 Samson Street) in Philadelphia, while he started building an airport across the river in Camden. Dad had made a trip around the country for the Department of Commerce, doing a report on the airports, which was put into a book for pilots. Central Airport, in Camden, was, I understand, the first with concrete runways. Dad designed and built it, and was the manager for several years. I went to kindergarten in Philly, and to first grade. When I was six, if someone will check the old newspapers, they'll find me listed as a passenger on the first commercial airline flight between Philadelphia and New York (actually, across the river, in Newark NJ), where there was a small airport with the usual cinder runway and something like a mobile home for the airport administration building. From there we flew to Lakehurst NJ, where they kept the dirigibles. I still remember the enormous hangers. At school the next day, since I'd made the newspapers, they had a special assembly where I got on stage and told about my flight. My first public speech. We moved from Philly across the river to Merchantville, NJ, to be closer to the airport. I'd often ride my bike to the airport after school and play around the planes…including Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega. Well, I think is was the Vega, but it may have been the Lockheed Orion. It was the nicest plane at the airport. Dad had an bar from a defunct speakeasy in the basement of our house at 1937 Hillcrest Avenue. This was, of course, during prohibition, so there were no bars for pilots to spend their time. Well, dad's basement bar made coming to dinner at our place popular. And that, several times, included Amelia Earhart. Jim Eaton, who had worked for Pan American, and had a blue and yellow macaw (Arrara) he'd brought from Brazil, had a hacienda-type house on the outskirts of Philadelphia. It even had a small pool, where I'd go swimming when we visited him for dinner. Jim had a Korean man-servant, Shi, and a chow dog that loved to play with Arrara. The next thing I knew we moved to Washington DC, where we had an apartment in Woodly Park Towers at 2737 Devonshire Place, across the street from the Washington Zoo. Dad was now passenger and cargo manager for Luddington Airlines and Jim Eaton was the president. Jim was now living in an apartment a couple blocks from ours, still with Arrara, Shi and the chow. And I was walking about four blocks to the Oyster School every day. When WWI got started in 1917, dad was 20 years old and prime trench bait for the Army. So his folks enrolled him in the New York Military Academy. He graduated as a lieutenant and opted for the Army Air Force. They sent him to Kelly field outside San Antonio to learn to fly. By the time he got his pilot's license the war was over. But the other pilots were frequent visitors for dinner at our house for the next few years. Like Tom Carroll and Carroll Cone. Mom and dad got married when he was back home in Littleton NH on leave, so after I was born we lived on the base at Langley Field in Hampton VA while I was one and two years old. That's where General Billy Mitchell came to our house for dinner a couple of times. They made a movie about his court marshal when he insisted that airplanes could sink a battleship. So, he proved it. When dad's enlistment was up we moved to Rodgers Avenue in Brooklyn. All went well with Luddington Airlines. I remember being on the inaugural flight between Washington and Norfolk VA, with a band playing, the governor and mayor being on the flight, much speeching and hoopla, and me loving the limelight. The airline was owned by Tommy Luddington and Amelia Earhart. Then, in 1933, they sold it to Eastern Air Transport, later to be Eastern Airlines…and then, many years later, Continental Airlines. So we went back to Brooklyn, moving in with my mom's folks on East 15th Street. And Jim Eaton moved to an apartment in Manhattan, where he wasn't allowed to keep the macaw, so Arrara lived with us for the next 30 years. I don't know what happened to Shi and the chow dog. Jim and dad were busy starting Marine Airlines, which would use flying boats and provide a daily service from downtown Manhattan to downtown Boston. Eastern and TWA (Transcontinental and Western Airlines at the time…later to become TransWorld Airlines) liked being able to add Boston to their destinations via Marine Airlines, so they invested in the stock. Everything was going fine until Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American, who wanted no competition in any flying boat airlines, got his good friend President Roosevelt, to issue a Presidential Order saying that no airline could own stock in another airline. Poof, Marine Airlines was out of business. So Jim and dad went to American Export steamship lines and proposed starting the first trans-Atlantic airline. American Export was, by far, the largest steamship line, with huge liners like the Exeter, Excambian, Exminister, and so on, mainly servicing the Mediterranean for vacationers. And the airline would use flying boats. American Export loved the idea. The route would be via Belem in Brazil, over to Dakar in Senegal and up to Genoa in the winter, and via Botwood, Newfoundland to the Azores and then to Genoa in the summer. Dad spent a year organizing the docking and support facilities around the Mediterranean They just got it up and going when WWII came along and the government stepped in. The airline was used during the war to move generals and their staffs over to Europe in hours instead of weeks via ships. Then, as the war was winding down, Juan Trippe got Roosevelt to issue another Presidential Order. This time it said that no steamship line could own an airline. American Export Airlines was up for sale. Pan Am wanted it, but American Export refused to sell to Trippe, so American Airlines bought it, making it American Overseas Airlines for a short while. Then they sold it to Pan Am. Jim and dad were out of work again. But not or long. It wasn't difficult to convince Ireland to extend their airline from just servicing Europe to adding a trans-Atlantic service. So Jim and dad set up offices in Manhattan, ordered the flying boats, and soon had another trans-Atlantic airline ready to go. The inaugural flights were sold out. Then, came an election in Ireland, with Eamon DeValera winning as the new Prime Minister. He was elected on an economy promise, so his first move was to cancel the Irish Airlines' trans-Atlantic venture. Oh, I've gotten so wrapped up in my dad's history, I almost forgot why I started writing about this. It was triggered by my remembering what happened to me when we were living with my mother's folks in Brooklyn, after we moved there from Washington in 1933. A couple blocks away, my grandfather, Tully, had a good friend, Bob Marriot, the man who founded the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). That later became the IEEE, when radio expanded into electronics. Bob almost invented a new kind of loud speaker system. But not quite. He was feeding a speaker into an array of cardboard tubes of different lengths. Each was reinforcing the sound according to it's length. If he'd had an infinite number of these pipes it would have worked just fine. It just never occurred to him to use one long organ pipe like tube and cut a notch down one side so it would resonate over the whole audio spectrum…the way the speaker enclosure I put on the market in 1951 was designed. Since I was interested in radio, when Bob died his widow gave me Bob's file box of his patents. I offered them to the IRE and they happily accepted. They're probably still somewhere in an old storeroom at IEEE. When I attended IEEE shows I noticed that a high percentage of the visitors and exhibitors were ham operators. Well, it made sense that kids interested in radio would go into the business. And when I was a delegate to the 1959 International Telecommunications Union conference in Geneva I found a high percentage of the delegates from other countries were also ham operators. Cut to 1966, when Robbie Robinson 5Z4ERR in Nairobi convinced me to come over and go on a hunting safari. Well, once I was there it didn't cost much more to go on and fly around the world on the way back after the safari, so that's what I did. And my first stop was Addis Ababa, where I looked up the ex-president of the ITU. I explained that if the ITU would encourage countries to set up ham radio clubs in their schools, they'd end up with a source of electronic engineers. He loved the idea and said he would arrange with me to meet the current ITU president when I was visiting India. Which I did, and he liked the plan. He said he'd get started on it right away. Wow! When I got home from my trip I learned that the ITU president had had a heart attack and died. Damn! Four years later, in 1970, when I heard that King Hussein of Jordan had been heard on the ham radio, I sent him a cable offering to come over and show him how to use it. I got one right back saying sure, come on over. So a few days later there I was in Amman, Jordan, shaking hands with the king! The next two weeks I spent at his Summer Palace, making short ham contacts by the thousands, giving hams all around the world credit for contacting in new country. Well, I wanted his majesty to have the fun of talking with hams, rather than making momentary contacts just to add one more country to their credit, so I tried to take care of as many of those guys for him as I could. And, indeed, his majesty did have a wonderful time sitting and actually talking with hams. We spent several nights (all night) making ham contacts like that. A couple days before it was time for me to go home I explained to his majesty that I'd been talking with his ministers and learned that the Jordanian schools weren't teaching anything about electricity. I suggested that by setting up ham radio club stations in the schools and youth clubs the kids would get interested in engineering, cutting the cost for things like installing telephones. At the time they had to bring in technicians and engineers from Europe at $200 and more a day to do these jobs. The next day his majesty had me explain this to his government, as his ministers sat around a big table. I said I'd be glad to write a set of rules and regulations for them, and get my readers to donate their no longer used ham equipment for the Jordanian youngsters. It didn't hurt when the king, sitting in the background, said, "And it shall be so." A few days after I got home I got a call from the CIA. King Hussein needed ham stations for the Jordanian schools, what should they send him? So I gave them a list. I also sent his majesty the proposed rules and regulations I'd promised, and asked in my editorials for my readers to send their used equipment to the Jordanian embassy in Washington. Three years later I was swapping slow-scan photos with a ham in Athens when his majesty broke in, "W2NSD, this is Julliet Yankee One." He was going to be in Washington and would like to see me. When I met him at Blair House, he gave me an envelope with two first class round trip tickets to Jordan. He said, "I want you to come see what you've done." Since I'd been promoting ham repeaters to extend the range of our handy-talkies with hundreds of articles and publishing a special Repeater Bulletin, I brought along a repeater and a suitcase full of handy-talkies to use with it. I set up the repeater on a hill across from the king's downtown Palace and gave him the handy talkies to distribute. His majesty set me up with a car and driver to take me from Irbid in the north to Aqaba in the south to meet and talk with the newly licensed Jordanian hams. And I met over 425 youngsters. Not bad for just three years! And they were already putting in the country's first electronics factory! On the tour we also visited the Lost City of Petra, and the ancient ruins at Jarash. Ten years later, on another trip around the world, I stopped off in Jordan to say hello to his majesty. His brother, Price Raad, held a special meeting of the Royal Jordanian Amateur Radio Society, where about 50 members turned out, and introduced me as the man who had done more for Jordan than anyone other than the king. Yep, I have a tape of that intro. Well, Jordan is by far the highest tech of all the Arab countries today. It sure would have been nice, if that president of the ITU hadn't dropped dead, to have had a few dozen countries benefit from their youngsters being exposed to ham radio with school radio clubs. 1/12/10 Warming The few people still left pushing global warming are oddly silent in the face of the recent record snowfalls and cold blasts. England and the rest of Europe are struggling with record snows. China also has set new snow records, almost bringing the country to a halt. Snow in Japan! And snow it goes. Oh, and record cold in balmy Florida, freezing the orange crops and discouraging me of any thoughts of getting down to Disney World for a few days so I could rebuild my tan and add some vitamin D to my body. I wonder if this has anything to do with the lack of sun spots. They're supposed to have been ramping up on another sun spot cycle, but hardly anything is happening. The last time this happened, some 500 years ago (the Maunder Minimum), Europe had record snows and a several years long cold spell. Only if Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and a bunch of worry-warts are right, and we're heading toward a pole shift, will we see another ice age. Oh, you haven't read Robert Felix's Not By Fire, But By Ice yet? I reviewed it on page 24 of my Secret Guide to Wisdom…a review of about a hundred books you really ought to read. Ice ages aren't gradual, they happen in a quarter to a half hour and raise holy hob with everything. 1/11/10 Cars My first car was a 1932 Ford, which I bought in 1941 while I was in college for $20. That's about $500 in today's Federal Reserve paper. Then came the war and pretty soon I was off for four years in the Navy. I gave the car to a fraternity brother. When the war ended I was teaching electronics at the Submarine School in New London CT. Being within driving distance of my folks in Brooklyn, I bought a 1940 Ford so I could get home on weekends. After I started the speaker cabinet business in 1951 I was doing well enough to buy a brand new 1954 Ford Country Squire…my first experience buying a new car. What I learned was that after taking delivery I had to make a list of the problems the factory had caused so the dealer could fix them. And it was a long list. A couple years later a ham friend with an MG introduced me to sports cars. Wow! So I shopped around and decided on a 1956 Porsche Speedster ($3,300 brand new). Even better, I flew over to the factory in Stuttgart to pick it up, then drove around Europe for a couple weeks before having it shipped back. Unlike the Ford, there were no factory problems to have fixed. Superb German workmanship! And a couple years after that, as the president of the Porsche Club of America, I organized a trip to the factory for about 150 Porsche buyers and got a second Porsche for myself. In 1960 I shipped my Speedster back to the factory to upgrade from the 60 HP engine to their new Super-90. What a thrill I had driving it on the famous Nürburg Ring race track! Needing a larger car at times, I made a trip to the VW factory, also in Stuttgart, and picked up a VW sedan. When my folks needed that, I made a trip to Sweden and got a Volvo. That was the trip where I visited Finland and Åland. None of those cars had any factory problems like I'd had with my Ford. My dad assured me that all American-made cars had manufacturing problems when delivered to their dealers, and he'd been a Hupmobile salesman at one time. That 1954 Ford was my last American car. More recently I've enjoyed Toyota and Honda station wagons. Currently I'm making do with Sherry's two old Mercedes coups. 1/10/10 10/10/10 Hey, in October we'll have 10/10/10! Over in Taiwan 10/10 is a big deal holiday. For several years, every October I went on an Asian electronics shows tour organized by Bob Chang of Commerce Tours in San Francisco. A two-week tour got us to the yearly electronic shows in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong. The Japanese show alternated between Tokyo and Osaka. The tour attracted between 200 and 400 Americans, going to shop for Asian electronics products to import. Well, as the publisher of a bunch of computer magazines, I helped recruit customers, so after a couple of years Bob made me the tour leader. It was fun! And I got to see the cities up close on my morning walks around them. Plus some of us made side trips from Hong Kong to Macao and up into Guandong, China, once China opened up for tourists. This was back when compact discs were brand new, so I still remember out-grabbing my friend Rod McKuen, the poet, for the remaining one of Dvorak's 16 Slavonic Dances CDs in a music store. I have it in my iPod now. I made a short trip from Seoul to the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) between North Korea, where I got to walk a few feet into North Korea. Does that count as a new country for me? And, one of the guards had a ham station, so I took the opportunity to get on the air for a while, making contacts with friends around the world. Well, as the publisher of 73 Magazine, most of the hams around the world knew me. 1/9/10 Congress Being the opposite of progress, it's aptly named. Well, with the help of our Presidents they've made a mess of what was a great country…a land of opportunity. Back in 1913 Congress turned over issuing our money to the Federal Reserve. In the 137 years before that, when our Treasury issued our money, the value of the dollar never changed. Since then it's been nothing but constant inflation. An email pointed out that Social Security, which was established 75 years ago, is broke. Ditto the War on Poverty, after 46 years. And Medicare and Medicaid, 45 years ago. And Freddie Mac after 40 years. Of course the number of bureaucrats in these federal programs continues to increase every year, along with their budgets. The Department of Energy, now 33 years old, which has ballooned to over 16,000 employees, with a $24 billion annual budget, keeping themselves busy shuffling paperwork, while totally ignoring cold fusion, which would end our need for oil, coal, and nuclear power. Forget your party affiliation come November and unelect the incumbents. Maybe you could spare a day to stand by the polling place with a poster. On the downside, new faces in Congress will upset thousands of lobbyists who have grown accustomed to buying earmark funds for their sponsors by passing along wads of money to incumbents. You needn't worry about the outgoing Congressmen because they've voted themselves a generous salary for life. Plus plenty of perks. 1/8/10 Stephen Hawking So we have this mighty brain, when it comes to string theory, going around in a motorized wheelchair because he has ALS. Who has apparently believed doctors and never researched his illness. If you know of any way to get through to him, let him know about my book, and the work of Dr. Comby. Dr. Day, Dr. Malkmus, etc. Dr. Comby has proven that ALS is totally curable. Alas, his approach, changing the patient to a raw food diet, does not sell pills. so our 788,948 practicing physicians have never heard of it. It would be great if a high-profile person like Hawking could be cured, since the media would be unable to totally ignore it. 1/7/10 The Wars I need some help here. Can someone explain to me why we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Neither had anything to do with the 911 mess. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. So, what the hell are we doing spending hundreds of billions of dollars and getting our kids killed over there? I don't see any signs of the natives thanking us for turning their country into a battlefield. Millions of ’em got the hell out. The biggest loss of life has been the natives (collateral losses), and by a wide margin. Sure, they're fighting back. We would too, if some country invaded us. Well, maybe our arms manufacturers are one of the largest remaining American industries and we need to keep it profitable. Obama claimed our attack on Afghanistan was authorized by the UN Security Council. Never happened. In fact only three of the 37 countries surveyed were not overwhelmingly opposed. So what's really going on? 1/6/10 2012a By 2012 I'll be 90, so what do I care if the world as we know it comes to an end? But for anyone who wants to worry about it, or even maybe prepare, there are a number of alarm bells tinkling away. Like Nostradamus' prediction that shortly after the millennium we'll have a pole shift which will wipe out 97% of us. Well, scientists looking at past pole shifts think we'll be lucky to have that many left after waves several miles high wash around the world, aided by thousand mile an hour winds, and followed by an instant super freeze. The movie, "The Day After Tomorrow," showed this happening. Well, it's happened before. Many times. So we've found five-ton mammoths frozen solid in the Siberian mud with flowers still in their mouths. That takes something like instant –80° cold! Hey, read some books on the subject and wise up. I don't know about the ark, but several civilizations have memories of a world flood around 6,500 years ago. Then there are the conspiracy buff reports of our (and other) governments building extensive underground refuges for the chosen…the saving of seeds "just in case"…Planet-X and the secret U.S. observatory in Antarctica…the weird behavior of the sun. As Alfred E. Neuman says, "What, me worry?" Since a couple of the maps of the future show my area surviving, maybe next year I'll start digging a hole to hide in as the super-sonic winds blow everything away the mile-high waves haven't. I'd take along some seeds and food. Well, I'd like to avoid the humongous lines at the Pearly Gates. 1/5/10 Curses One doesn't have to be very old before being exposed to the whole range of English curse words. Often from dad. But until recently publications have been editing out words like fuck, shit, cunt, prick, and so on. Books have enjoyed much more freedom in this area. Now The New Yorker has been leading the naughty word emancipation by freely leaving ’em in. This reached a peak with the Jan. 11th issue, where a four-column long article used fuck (or fucking) seventeen times and shit four times, plus a couple goddams for good measure. You'd think, with any creativity, the writer (Ian Frazier) could have worked in at least one "asshole." 1/4/10 Pensions Time was when larger companies put aside part of one's wages for a pension fund for when you retired. Like Social Security. In those days workers generally stayed with one company for most of their working years. But that perk evaporated as foreign competition forced companies to cut their costs. Not that all was rosy. My uncle, Dale Moore, who worked for G.E. in fairly high positions all his life, found himself laid off shortly before his pension eligibility would have kicked in. And the same thing happened to my good ham friend Bill Hoisington, who had worked for Diamond Horseshoe all his life. So I suspect that was not an unusual practice. Between Social Security and 401k's, pensions seem to have evaporated. It's tough enough for employees today to deal with the Social Security, unemployment, and medical insurance payments taken out of their pay. 1/3/01 Hunting Season I’d never thought much about hunting until a ham radio friend in Nairobi talked me into coming over to Kenya for a hunting safari. I got ham radio friends from Texas and California to come along and we had a fantastic time in northern Kenya. When I got back to New Hampshire it was easy for John Peterson, the Peterborough real estate agent who sold me my house, to talk me into hunting here with him. We hunted deer and geese around Peterborough and up at Lake Umbagog. The fresh venison was delicious. I think of those days when I look out the window and see several deer pulling fruit from the pear tree in back of the house. They’ve just about wrecked the tree. And when I have to stop and wait while a bunch of wild turkeys cross the road. They’re all over the place. Then there’s that darned black bear that ate all the wild blueberries before I could pick them, and was a competitor in my raspberry patch. Hmm, I wonder how tasty bear meat is? Those huge blueberries from the store don’t have much flavor compared to those wild berries. 1/2/10 Hitch-Hiking It's been years since I've seen anyone hitch-hiking. When I was a kid it was a common way, particularly for kids, to get around. I remember times I hitch-hiked from college in Troy NY the 150 miles to New York City, so I could be with my family for holidays. And when I got a car, after the war, I often gave hitch-hikers rides. But the newspaper stories of robberies by hitch-hikers gradually ended it. |