Live Free in an Unfree World

Today begins a new schedule at work - 12:00 noon to 9:00 pm - and a new surge to embed critical activities into my life.

I have no choice. The job is tough and beating me up, but diabetes is kicking my ass.

Actions I have to take at my age (54) include:

• testing my blood sugar levels daily
• absolute control over my food intake
• not giving in to food temptations
• walking twice a day (for diabetes and the dog’s sake)
• having sunshine hit my skin everyday(it’s South Florida - it’s always available)
• using dumbbells during breaks every hour from the computer
• getting serious about taking care of my teeth and oral hygiene in general
• write and post - daily - to my self-hosted blogs
• write like a scanner about what you like then find the products to monetize it
• work affiliate programs like a borrowed mule
• be collateral damage in a dangerous world
• be in a position to quit my job in 33 days - whether or not I decide to stay
• revive dating blogs where income was coming in
• keep my personal notes online in this blog so I can access them whenever I need to
• scratch and claw and be the online marketer and blogmeister I need to be
• master Twitter, Hubpages, Squidoo, and Facebook

Failure is not an option.

Charles Lamm

Here are just a few things the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the Bush (or next) administration could do to help this nation recover from the current recession - or prevent a larger depression - but are nearly 100% not likely to do:

1. require that each Member of Congress, under Penalty of Perjury, certify that he or she has read every word in every bill before voting on that piece of legislation
2. remove U.S. troops from every foreign country - we are a republic, not an empire
3. all future laws passed by Congress must have a sunset provision and be voted on again every 4 years
4. stop rescuing financial institutions that are about to fail just because they are large
5. stop the presses - the dollar has lost 96% of it’s value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913
6. no deficit financing of government expenditures
7. have a group of researchers whose job is to ferret out unnecessary regulations and to recommend them for quick decertification and repeal of the underlying statutes
8. every government job (non-appointee) that becomes vacant due to retirement or resignation must be kept vacant for 6 months to see if the position can just be eliminated

This is just a start. More tomorrow.

High gas prices will cause some interesting results:

• more people will shop for bargains online, rather than traveling from store to store
• delivery charges will be reasonable compared to picking it up yourself
• home gardening and locally grown food will enjoy a resurgence
• people will think twice about drives to the beach or to the lake
• going for a Sunday drive is a sign of wealth
• if your neighbor fills up his SUV at one visit to the pump, he is probably doing better than you are
• you may see some unlikely people - bankers, lawyers, doctors - use the gas crunch to justify commuting by motorcycle
• some smart commuters will get their exercise by commuting by bicycle
• people will need second jobs to stay afloat - most will create new businesses online to earn extra income
• small restaurants will suffer first as more workers shift lunch money to gas tanks
• fast food places will suffer next as prices of oil run up food prices
• over the next few years, temporary dips in oil prices will not be long-lived enough to let Americans drive huge cars and trucks again - SUVs will be like Cadillacs with fins
• supply increases will be sopped up by China and India
• alternative sources of energy will be great businesses but will not dethrone big oil
• Florida will be unhappy when offshore oil wells appear near their coastline in the Gulf of Mexico
• placement of refineries will be hot political topics and push abortion and gay marriage off the table
• politicians, as usual, will screw things up then demand more tax revenue to fix the problems they created in the first place

Just a few of the issues I believe will dominate the economic and political landscape over the next 10 years. With any luck, it will bring back some of the lean, mean, fighting spirit of the American people - but only if the politicians are pushed out of the way.

—

Charles Lamm is a junkyard philosopher whose blogs include Live Free in an Unfree World, the Asset Protection Iron Triangle, and Virtual Joe Friday.

Back in 2003, 100 people died in a nightclub fire when the band’s pyrotechnics got out of control. Families of victims sued. So far, so good.

Here’s the crazy part. Anheuser-Busch and their local distributor just settled for $21 million. Total settlement so far - $122 million. Others who have paid up include Home Depot and Clear Channel Broadcasting.

Home Depot was sued over insulation. The alleged liability of the others: promoting the concert.

Am I the only one here who doesn’t understand this. No media advertising can exist if the publisher of the advertising, or the sponsor, is responsible for the acts of the companies and individuals who actually caused the harm and death of the concert attendees.

A-B claims the cost of the litigation is running too high, but I can’t imagine a Board of Directors signing off on a $21 million settlement if they did not believe a jury was about to stick them with a larger bill.

One possibility - their insurance company decided to settle, and they have no choice. If they fought on, A-B would take on the additional expense and be liable for any jury award above the settlement amount.

Whoever decided to settle - you are the reason why our legal system is such a mess. If you are not liable - and unless you can explain otherwise, I don’t see how beer or promoting an event contributed to this tragedy - why not take it to the limit? You were being sued in Rhode Island, not Mississippi.

How do your actions compare to a man who spent 27 years in jail for a rape he did not commit? He could have been out of prison a dozen years ago if he had admitted the crime. He chose to man-up and not take the blame for something he did not do. The State of Texas may give him some monetary compensation in the future, but he can never get those years of freedom back.

Sometimes, you have to pay the price for what’s right.

~ Charles Lamm

“How can the government possibly preserve freedom by taking it away?”

~ Napolitano in a Nation of Sheep

Better re-think the war on terror/liberty…

read more | digg story

With the recent rate of resignations from the Bush White House, will there be any rats left on the sinking ship when a new President is inaugurated in January 2009?

Is it acceptable to incarcerate over 2.1 million Americans - half for drug crimes?

1. US Immigration just gets uglier and uglier. No solutions have been proposed by the House, Senate, or the President. My read - like the leadup to the invasion of Iraq, the demonizing of illegal immigrants is building a scapegoat for election time economic malaise.

2. Administration lies know no bounds. The passengers of Flight 93 may have been heroic, but the hijackers crashed the plane to prevent the passengers from resuming control. Like the Alan Shore speech on Boston Common, we as Americans just don’t seem to care.

3. Now working with ex-offenders, I can more clearly see the U.S. prison system (I would not call it criminal “justice”) as being totally disfunctional. With over 2.1 million people locked up in the US, more than China, there has to be a better way of achieving our goals. I have people who were locked up for driving with a suspended license. Not drunk drivers who killed someone, just normal driving on a suspended license. At $25,000 a year to keep someone in jail, this is nuts. Save the jails for the violent felons.

Reese believes we should look to ourselves to make changes in our cultural surroundings instead of running to Washington to have the government force others to conform to our notions of culture.

——————–

Title: Secession
From : www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese251.html
By: Charley Reese

” It’s my observation that most of what people vociferously complain about are not things they are forced to do, but things that other people choose to do. A favorite phrase of my father – “None of your business” – seems to have become obsolete in our busybody society. The government is a busybody, its supporters are busybodies, and its opponents are busybodies, making it a conflict among busybodies as to which aspects of people’s private lives the government should regulate.

The government should not regulate people’s private lives at all. It should protect them from force, fraud, usury, foreign attacks and the rape of our share of the planet. Other than those, if some people wish to self-destruct, it’s nobody else’s business, least of all the government’s. ”

Full story . . . Click Here.

——————–

FinalThoughts:

• no one makes you watch a particular TV show or read a particular book
• you can become an sane island in a sea of insanity
• we can change ourselves and therefore our culture by saying no