The United States Postal Service

I work for a small business (small: less than ten full time employees), and we do a lot of shipping of our products; we wouldn't even be in business at all without our ability to ship.  To say that your United States Postal Service (USPS -  it's important to remember what this stands for) is our best option, is a massive understatement.  A perennial attack on the USPS is occurring as you read this.  The usual so-called "free market conservatives" are once again working in our Congressional House of Representatives to further marginalize the USPS.  Any diminution in the scope of the USPS, would be a terrible blow to our local business and to our customers, and to you.

In this case, "free market" means: "Let two huge multinational corporations (corporations are people, my friend), increase their profits by decreasing the role of the USPS.  The corporations are the United Postal Service (UPS - gee what a great name, that couldn't possibly be designed to confuse users as to which country it owes allegiance to, could it?), and FedEx (again, "Fed"?  that couldn't be confused with our Federal Government could it?).  Both of these corporations do a reasonable job to shipping packages from businesses (corporations) to you and me.  The price that you pay  them to do so (included in the price your pay for your item) is almost always just a little higher than what  YOUR USPS would charge you.  So far so good.  I would like you to call and ask UPS or FedEx to come to your house and pick up a letter or package.  They won't do it.  Have you forgotten that your USPS picks up AND delivers letters and packages to your door?  On Saturdays too!  Ask UPS to do that.  They don't, not even for the corporations.  So we see that the USPS does twice the job at a lower price than those "free market" competitors.

Now just in case this doesn't move you, think about the fact that UPS and FedEx hire lots of part time workers, mostly at Thanksgiving to Christmas time.  They pay these people as little as they can get away with; no health, vacation, sick leave, or other benefits.  Great for the Corporations' bottom line... so why are their charges to you higher?  I guess that you'd have to ask the CEO's of these people/corporations...   In contrast, the USPS pays mostly full time employees a living wage with benefits and deliver a service to you at a lower cost to you..  The employees are people in your community that live with the same needs and desires that you have.  They give you better service than the "private sector" employees and they'll be here for you six days a week while doing twice the service of the alternatives.  Have you been moved to think about buying locally, spending locally?  Oh, by the way, the United States of American Constitution requires that your government maintain a United States Postal Service for your benefit.  That should be enough for you if you call yourself a patriot.  Now ask yourself what your Congressman (or woman) has been saying about the USPS.  Are they planning on closing YOUR Post Office?

Have You Been Scammed Lately?

I recently received a "SECOND NOTICE!"  About immediately important sensitive material that I NEED to address.  Apparently, I , and only I can save myself.  This is serious!  The form letter informs (don't you love the irony?) me,  that the warranty on my Honda will expire THIS MONTH!  Again, that sounds serious!  BUT, it offers me a helpful 1-800 phone number that I can call to save me from this terrible harm.  But I have to call soon, because this offer (to save me) will expire in less than TWO WEEKS!  I can tell that they are serious business people because their fine print protects them from having to deal with people that might not have the ability to pay (dead beats) or that might not meet their eligibility requirements.  Serious business!

The letter came with an ominous warning; "A $2000 fine and 5 years of imprisonment, OR BOTH! is applicable to any person that interferes with or obstructs the delivery of the letter to me... (U. S. Mail TTT.18 CODE)"  Boy that sounds serious too!

Except that these people have nothing to do with Honda, and it's a scam.

I've never understood why Mr. Honda (who certainly has the money and resources to do so) doesn't just hire some goons to go find these guys and break their fingers.  Sure, the scammers would sue, probably successfully, then Mr. Honda could pay the goons to go do it again.... And Mr. Honda would probably lose less money in the courts than he is losing to people that don't buy Hondas anymore because they think that the warranties are rip-offs.

As a proactive person, alternatively, I suggest that each of us who owns a Honda could call this Scammer's  posted number (1-800-785-3128)  and pretend to want to pay these fine people bunches of money for their valuable service.  I would talk to them for 5 minutes, and then say: "OH, OH! I can't find my checkbook or credit card." then I'd hang up.  Or perhaps say:  "Oh, Oh! your call is breaking up!", then hang up.  Or maybe: "Can you hold?  I'll look for my credit card; I really want to pay you...."  Then leave the phone off the hook and wait for THEM to hang up.  (I don't really hate telemarketers, I just want them to find real productive jobs).

A while ago, I heard about a service that was called something like: "Get even"; a company that you employ after you've given up being nice, reasonable, legal, and rational, but when you are just ready to extract revenge.  I like that concept; let's see if we can get someone to write an app for that.

Mr. Honda?  I'm waiting for you to act.

What do you remember? When?

I wasn’t wearing a skirt and my hair wasn’t in a bun, but my butt was high in the air and my elbows were planted firmly on my knees as I gleaned the dried bean pods and individual beans from our garden plot today. We had given up on the green beans when the weather got dry in late July, but they kept growing for a while. As I toiled on this relatively inefficient harvesting job, I saw myself as part of a Van Gogh painting from his "dark" period, and I was reminded of my friend, Claudio Naba Reyes, from Guererro, Mexico, back in 1972, when we spent the winter there camping in a homemade camper van, part of a 20,000 mile Odyssey through North and Central America.

Claudio lived in a tar paper shack with his wife Cruz and two toddler daughters, three hundred feet from the surf on a half mile wide beach between two rocky prominences, and his job was to watch over a partially finished house being built for a rich Mexico City lawyer. It was to be the lawyer’s summer home, part of a new, sort of , "time share" development on the coast of the Pacific Ocean about 50 miles west of Acapulco. Claudio was an Indio, he looked just like the Azteca profiles you see on artifacts from that area. He fished for his protein with a length of line wrapped around a beer can with a lead weighted hook and chicken feather lure, and he grew two crops, well up on the side of the mountain north of the shore. He grew honholee and maize, sesame and corn, slash and burn. He would hack down the native vegetation with a machete, and burn it during the dry period, then he would plant before the next rainy season.

Chris and I walked with him to his plot of ground (not his legally, assuredly) and we brought back some of his crop. We sat and chatted (in our bad Spanish, he had no English) with him and his wife, as they showed us how to harvest the dried corn kernels from off the cobs. These would be soaked in lime and water, and then ground into a paste that would be baked into traditional tortillas on the top of a hand thrown ceramic platter build into an adobe stand with a wood fire heat source (think frying pan/wok). Our fingers ached and were bloodied with the effort of popping the kernels from the cobs.

I didn’t bloody any fingers today, but the dried bean pods are sharp, and I picked up many an individual bean that tried to get away. My back got sore, and I remembered how hard it is to get some food out of the ground and into a place where it will keep so that you might eat it later. I remember you, Claudio.  And you, reading this, stop in at Food Lion and buy yourself a pound of dried beans; tell them Claudio sent you.

So, You're against The Dream Act?

Now for the Dream Act.

I would like to propose a hypothetical; a thought experiment where I lay out some possible actions and you get to decide on a just, fair, and legal result.

Suppose that when you were 13 years old, your beloved dad picked you up from school and told you it was your lucky day for your first driving lesson. Wow, you really want to be able to drive a car! So, he gets you started behind the wheel and you do pretty well; this is easy. He tells you to pull into the bank parking lot and tells you to wait for him. Five minutes later he comes out holding a canvas bag and tells you to drive home (he kind of scoots down in the seat beside you). Nothing comes of it right away; he gets away with the bank robbery for six years. Then he gets busted. Now, you are 19 years old and as an accessory to the felony, do you get charged and sent to jail? That’s the absence of The Dream Act; children directed by their parents to immigrate illegally, who are now being punished for it. Don’t tell me this couldn’t happen. The details might be a little different, but how many children have the courage and determination to disobey their parent under similar circumstances?

Now, imagine you're a little kid just holding your dad’s hand as you walk across a border....

Two Simple Questions

President Obama, or Governor Romney?

I'd like to cut through the rhetoric and partisan debate and ask two simple questions: In the last four years what have these two men been doing? President Obama has had the hardest job on the planet and has certainly learned more about the world and the American government and the condition of our economy than anyone else in the world. He has had access to advisers and information gathered by researchers and agencies second to none in the world. Governor Romney has been running for the Republican nomination and has learned what Republicans want him to say and be, and he’s learned how to get lots of their money.

Question number two:   Which guy is better prepared to be our president for the next four years?

Consequences

How many people ,characters, died in the movie, The Dark Knight?   How many people died in the Aurora movie theater in Colorado? I don’t even know, except that I think there just might be a connection between violence and violent movies. I gave up violent movies in 1969 (and I thank Sam Peckinpah for helping me to do so with the "Wild Bunch" - I think I got his point that there is no point to endlessly escalating the violence, and there is no reason to romanticize the old west and those violent times [gee, is anyone romanticizing these violent times?]).

Unfortunately, the irony of just pushing the "limits" of violence in movies was lost on the dead head movie makers (read: Let’$ make $ome Buck$ guy$!) and most certainly lost on the dead head VIEWERS of movies, some of whom will pay good (?) money for more and more gore (ain’t the free market grand?). There are no longer limits to anything.

There is no longer any peer pressure to consider taste or the consequences of one’s actions. This, my friends, is the real End of the World. Do I believe in censorship? No. But there must be a better way than we seem to be going now. It just might be that "free market" idea:   Let’s just not pay for those movies. You may disagree, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt me at all so far.  There are some images in my mind (some from books, and some from movies) that I would just as soon not have.  Self censorship, maybe, is the answer.  Closing you eyes at the right moment isn't enough.

Your Government wants to hear your opinion, I shared mine.

Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack
1400 Independence Ave, SW
Washington, DC 20250
e-mail:     agsec@usda.gov

Dear Secretary Vilsack;

As a resident of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and property owner bordering on the George Washington National Forest, I strongly oppose horizontal drilling (AKA Fracking). I am against any future federal oil and gas leases in the Forest Plan. I understand that opposition to hydraulic fracturing, has been voiced by the great majority (95 percent) of more than 53,000 public comments already received, as well as by many local governments adjacent to the Forest. I personally don’t know of anyone who is in favor of it in our National Forests.

Although there is much talk about "multiple use" for the GWNF, I do not believe that fracking is at all compatible with any of the other George Washington National Forest uses, and should not be incorporated into the new plan. The draft forest plan also proposed to make nearly the entire GW Forest available for vertical gas drilling. The potential impacts of vertical gas drilling on the GW should be more thoroughly studied, with public input, before a decision is made. At a minimum, priority watersheds, and other sensitive natural, scenic and recreational areas should be made unavailable to drilling. Further, I have seen the effects on native species that extensive road building causes in areas of the Monongahela Nation Forest where this practice is allowed. The fragmentation of the forest and the invasive effects of traffic are unacceptable impacts, to say nothing about the industrial invasion of our last natural areas in the Eastern United States.

Finally, it is not as if there aren’t plenty of private lands available for fracking. In addition, the lease fees and royalties would go to private citizens. The Federal Government (which doesn’t have a good record of obtaining fair market value for it’s resources) should not be in the business of competing with its own tax payers. If we are to believe in free market forces and individual freedom of choice, then we need to reject a government give a way of the resources that belong to every American.

Thank you for the opportunity to voice my opinions.

Sincerely, (and of course I signed it and supplied my address)