Tag Archives: United States

The real beavers of the recent Congressional dam

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As the world knows know, the GOP-ers & the Dems are duking it out on Capitol Hill as we speak.  The GOP-ers don’t like it that in March, 2010, over 3 years ago, Congress passed the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, and made it the law of the land just as many other laws have been passed, like Civil Rights laws.  Imagine the Republicans trying to hold up gov’t funding to stop that already-passed & signed law.

They’re currently trying to grind the government to a halt (which they’ve succeeded in doing for the most part already) and are willing to once again take a chance at not only causing a default of our nation’s debt (theoretically possible, but actually unlikely, as the president could step in & order payment of the debt by citing previous case law and/or legislation), but surely may cause its credit rating to soften once again, which happened the last time they put a stranglehold on government with their strong-arm tactics.  Turns out that the majority doesn’t rule — all it takes is a minority of a few motivated politicians to change the world.

Just in case you were wondering who to blame for the roadblock, here’s your smoking gun, straight out of a Texas babe’s mouth . . .

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the man who’s wanting to be the next George Bush, has recently said the following, and I quote:

Cruz: “We (read: Republicans in Congress & their idiotic supporters of this action) should look for 3 things — #1: We should look for some significant structural plan to reduce government spending.  #2: We should avoid new taxes.  And #3: We should look for ways to mitigate the harms from ‘Obamacare,’ ” He also said that the debt ceiling issue is the “best leverage the Congress has to rein in the executive.”

It’s an attempt to turn back a law agreed upon by a majority of both houses of Congress & signed by the President into law just a little over 3 years ago, a law which mainly helps Americans who have no insurance & can’t get it (“uninsurable” is what they call sick people) or who can’t afford it, and hurts those who have to provide the insurance (i.e., it greatly affects the bottom line of these rich & greedy insurance companies).

What’s amazing is that GOP-ers (both the politicians & their fanatics) actually believe (or at least act like) it’s going to affect them, but it really doesn’t affect much of anyone who has employer-based or gov’t-based insurance, and at last count, that was 80% of Americans.  If it does affect you, it’s simply because you have crummy insurance or your employer and/or your insurance company is using this as a (pardon the pun) lame excuse to raise your premiums, which they all did.

It’s really nothing more than a wedge the “White People of America Who Are Asses” are using to continually divide us socially & politically.

Gay sir-uh, sir-uhhhhhhhhhhh

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As of 2010, appx 2.3 million Americans are either active military (appx 1.45 million) or in the reserves (appx 850,000), and it’s been estimated by various reputable sources that the number of people in America who are members of the LGBT community are appx 4% (12 million people), so assuming that the military typically doesn’t attract the LGBT community, and assuming maybe only 1 in 100 of LGBT persons want to be soldiers (20,000), on the low side of this equation, there are appx 20,000 US soldiers who are either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

Of course, that’s strictly conjecture on my part, as nobody has a clue what the true numbers are, but there’s at least 1, and she’s an Army General (Brig. Gen. Tammy S. Smith), and if you support the troops, you should support ALL of them as long as they are doing the rightful, legal thing as Americans & soldiers, so since being LGBT soldier is not a crime (anymore), if you support ALL the troops, you should be supporting soldiers who are LGBT.

Most people don’t think about these things — they prefer to think in terms of “black & white” and ignore what they can’t get their arms around intellectually, but since the world is filled with shades of gray, looking for black & white answers in our world is a faulty premise, logically speaking.

So expand your mind and imagine the possibilities.  If you believe there is a God, certainly since He (or She) gave us a mind to think with, surely He/She hoped we’d use it every now and then to see how ignorant we are.

Politics preys on the weak

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Politics should not be about increasing the wealth & power of only certain individuals or segments of our population who clearly don’t need its help, including special-interest groups.  It should be about ideals that bring society together on a just & fair plane with a better societal direction & working to rectify problems, achieve goals & maintain a fair societal balance rather than separating us into unequal divisions fueled by hate, greed & egotistical values.

Our people should be taken care of in all their basic needs as needed, such as adequate safe housing that has access to proper infrastructure such as sanitary sewer/septic systems, public water & electricity, free & proper health care, treatment for mental issues & addictive disorders and given basic food if they cannot afford it. However, this help should be temporary and only as-needed, and those “in the system” need to be trained & educated to get out of it quickly, and failure to do so should land them in a minimum-security “educational prison” until they learn a trade they can use to earn a living. Many homeless are so simply of their own choosing/doing, and many people getting welfare refuse to improve themselves to try & get off it.

Unlike animals, our human minds are naturally geared toward compassion, reason & rationalization in a zero-sum game rather than being polar opposites fighting for survival — instead, we are taught to hate those who are different & see things differently & we despise the weak & less-fortunate in our society.

We do that because we’ve been taught to win at all costs & punish those who don’t make the grade for whatever reason, and that’s what will cost us as a society at some point — we’re paying for it now by worshiping people who have no business being idolized simply because our society looks upon them as strong, beautiful, or some other appealing yet superficial trait.

Until we can treat all of our citizens with respect, and until all our citizens work to earn that respect, we will be doomed to mediocrity.

How to fix an underwater housing market

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Here’s my plan to save America’s “underwater” homeowners when we eventually plummet into a “bear” housing market & find that we have a plethora of those who owe more on their home than its alleged fair-market worth — it’s a 4-step process:

1) Have the president create an agency within HUD funded initially by the US Treasury & later partially or (hopefully) wholly funded by fees that, upon application by a homeowner, they will issue a check at a short sale to cover the difference between the appraised value & the outstanding mortgage balance, which check will be paid to the mortgagee (the bank/entity holding the mortgage) at closing.  A fee must be paid by the seller along with the appraisal fee.  The homeowner also agrees to sign a note for the shortfall check that will become a gov’t debt (with no time limits/expiration) on any future homes they buy.  This debt/lien is not to be included on credit reports & instead entered on a gov’t database to let lenders & closing attorneys know there is a future debt to be paid at some point if they have a closing with this person as a seller so that if they have any equity in any new homes, that new equity will pay down the debt.  It would be an interest-free loan & it can’t be bankrupted upon for at least 25 years. This would allows sellers to move on to a hopefully more profitable/valuable home & free up the market to jumpstart sales again, as well as provide more liquidity for banks & more opportunities for homebuyers, which in turn would bring home values up again & would possibly cure the negative equity problem entirely.

2) Have the President remove the due-on-sale clause for all FHA, VA, USDA, FNMA & even private or other conventional mortgage loans that are more than 5 years old & are current so that ANY buyer can buy them so long as they meet these simple guidelines — A) Show income that meets the FNMA income ratio test or show assets equal to 20% of the price of the home, which you must pay down the loan with; B) Show a credit rating of at least 640, with only a 24-month lookback/seasoning for foreclosures & bankruptcies, and 12-month for any other negatives on your credit (i.e., no 30-day late pays within 12 months), and no consideration for any medical bills in collection (they won’t count against you as long as they’re not judgments). Only a $500 leader fee or 0.5% of the sales price may be charged by the lender (whichever is less) to transfer the loan. The loan must be “above-water”, i.e., not owe more than the home is worth or the “underwater” provisions apply above.  This would also apply to short-sales as explained above.

3) Bankruptcy & credit overhaul — Bar current & future prospective employers & insurance companies & anyone else from checking a person’s or a business’ credit history if not in direct relation to a request for credit, and insurance “premium financing” will not be considered a debt for this purpose. A person with bad credit is usually not a bad person; they just either got caught up in a situation that went sideways without warning or made a bad decision that looked good initially, or are burdened by medical bills or a student loan (which can’t be discharged, but they can discharge the other debt so they can afford to pay back the student loan). Restrict credit histories to 5 years instead of 7, and put Chapter 7 BK back to 5 years for reporting (from the current 10 years) & set repeat filings of BK at no earlier than 10 years (currently 8 years). Remove the $150,000 loan threshold & make it so that no one can go back & look at a person’s credit history more than 5 years for any amount of loan. FHA, VA, FHMA & USDA loan guidelines must restrict seasoning of BK & foreclosures to 2 years (current law is 3 yrs on foreclosures & 2 years on BK, which makes no sense) unless it’s an equity sale with 20% down, which would be no seasoning needed.  Require all creditors to allow the customer to reaffirm a debt in BK at no worse than its current terms, and require all interest & payments to be frozen until the BK case is discharged so that debts aren’t piling up between the date of filing & the date of discharge.

4) Require land developers to provide at least 33% upfront equity in the form of cash or other marketable liquid assets as collateral, and require spec home builders to provide 20% of the building cost in cash upfront which includes the cost of the land. This will slow down the supply, increase demand & slow down future speculative booms, plus get rid of speculative builders who have little capital.

All of this makes perfect sense & will step on the toes of many wealthy bankers & real estate moguls, which is why it won’t ever happen, but they can’t say they don’t have a plan to fix it now.

Paranoia or not?

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Humor me for a minute . . .

What if I told you that I believe there’s a man who’s watching me all the time, no matter what I do.  I can’t shake him out of my mind as I’m always thinking about him & what he’s doing, and I’m sure he’s infatuated with what I’m doing & sees my every move.  He doesn’t show his face, he doesn’t call me or give me any overt signs that he’s doing this, though sometimes I feel he is & I sometimes see signs of his trying to communicate with me non-verbally (though sometimes I hear his voice), but I feel and I see the results of his stalking, subconscious personality in my own eyes and deep within my psyche.  I have no proof that he’s doing this and I don’t even know who he really is and I can’t even proof that he even exists with any physical evidence of it, but I’m telling you, this guy is watching me and I have faith in it, and what’s more, I’m absolutely certain that he’s guiding my thoughts & actions & heaping sorrow or joy upon me in seemingly random fashion like he has a voodoo doll of me, strictly based upon whether he feels like doing it or not; you might say at his will & whim.  I’ve whispered & even yelled at him & I get no physical or verbal response from him, and sometimes I feel like he’s gone, then sometimes I feel he’s not, that’s he’s there & in total control of me, protecting & guiding me, and I feel he will always be there even after I die, that he will control me & my thoughts throughout eternity.

Sounds like I’ve lost my mind, right?  What if I told you I thought it was an old white man — would that help or hurt?  You’d think I’m really nuts, right.

But if I tell you that this person is God, all of sudden, it seems rational to you.  But why?

My question is, if you had not ever been exposed to religion & had grown up to rationalize your existence & your fate on your own, wouldn’t you think this was nuts?

For a moment there, you weren’t thinking of religion, and in the context of this story, your “religious brain” didn’t exist for a little while & you used your rational thought to try and figure out why I seemed to be “insane”.

That’s what I’m thinking with all the people who say they are religious — they are totally insane, or they fail to use the brain that their God gave them.  Surely their mind knows that there is no evidence that there’s an afterlife or a supreme being/spirit, and if there is, there’s no way to obtain proof of it.  As George Carlin once said, the results we have here on earth are not worthy of the work of a supreme being who is all-wise, all-knowing & has mercy.

If there is a God who made us & all this, he surely simply doesn’t care to get involved except at random, at best.  Surely with all the billions and billions of planets out there to tend to, God has to be busy elsewhere most, if not all of the time.  Maybe this was just a science project of his that has continued to flourish unattended.  All you have to do is look at all the suffering & hate that permeates this world to know that if God does exist, it’s a hands-off approach at best.

“Miracles” are nothing more than fate/chance & have plenty of physical explanation behind them; at least they have no otherworldly explanation that they came true due to it.  Case in point — my wife’s purse fell off her closet shelf & somehow the strap caught the doorknob next to it & that’s where she found it hanging.  That probably wouldn’t happen again if she sat it up there & knocked off herself 1,000 more times trying to get it to catch the doorknob.  A miracle?  No — just luck, coincidence, nothing at all actually — it just simply happened.

And if there is a God, you won’t know until you die, and nobody has ever came back to tell us what it’s like.  If you’re thinking about the Jesus “story”, know that there are plenty of other religions that came before and after Jesus that purported to tell of a messiah sent to save everyone, and the first reports of Jesus came only some 40 years after his alleged death from someone who didn’t know him. When I found that out, I became extremely curious as to why the life or death of someone so great wasn’t even noted in his own lifetime/era?

Note that we have plenty of contemporary writings of other people who lived in that time, so people were writing things down then, although they didn’t have a ballpoint pen (or blog), and there are no writings about Jesus during his lifetime or in anybody else’s stories, at least those that were written during Jesus’ alleged lifetime.  There’s more evidence that Shakespeare exists & wrote all those plays than Jesus existed, and I highly doubt that as well (yes, I’m an Oxfordian).

We are all born atheists. It’s the stories we are told to believe as children that shape our beliefs and make us religious. We would have no need or desire for religion if it weren’t foisted upon us by our elders & the religious powers that be. We don’t need religion to be good to one another or show compassion. Being atheist helps you to understand what’s going on, that there are people & organizations who use religion to control and separate us. Atheists are smart people who use logic & common sense & are willing to take responsibility for their own actions and their own fate here on earth & don’t need to know or believe that there’s a higher power that’s doing that for them. They are brave people in that they don’t need the palliative psyche care that death is not the end, as they know that all we have is this life and we need to do better now.

When you get to the crossroads and find yourself choosing between theology & atheism, the facts & logic are all on the atheists’ side.  Being atheist, agnostic or non-religious doesn’t mean you aren’t a good person — it simply means that you don’t believe in the religious dogma of our existence or an afterlife.  A person can be kind, compassionate, trustworthy, righteous, charitable, loving, nurturing, happy — all things that are good — without religion.  The fact that religion has sold the opposite upon people is the travesty and why I’m so against it, that and that theology flies in the face of facts as we know them.

People ask why are we here and why does what we see exist, and refute any scientific reasoning of it. Scientists know based on factual study that the universe is expanding, which means that the universe we know began billions of years ago in what scientists term as the “big bang”. Yes, that’s a theory based on scientific evidence, but it beats a universe created by a white man in the sky somewhere. What created the white man? What happened before him, or before time & space began? These are questions we may never definitively answer, but throwing logic & science out the window and believing in something that makes no logical or scientific sense is an irrational 7 ignorant as it gets.

I prefer to believe that we all should help one another and I believe more in the faith of the goodness that is inherent in most of mankind that we can find love, happiness and help from our fellow travelers here on earth without a need to believe in stories written by people from 2,000 years ago who were ignorant to the basic principles & facts that we know today & who lived like many animals do now.

We don’t hold much of what people said as being relevant today only a generation or two ago — why should we believe & follow the words of people from 2,000 years ago?

Sgt. Hosan’s troubles

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There was an article in May 2013 about a female US Soldier who changed her name because she was harassed about her last name, but mainly because of her ethnicity. Her name was Sgt. Hosan, and the soldiers called her Sgt Hussein. The article had her defending herself as being an patriotic Christian American soldier.

The problem with this story (and her own complaint) isn’t that she should have to assert herself as an American & a Christian; it’s rather that she (or anybody else) shouldn’t be persecuted by Americans & Christians simply because of her ethnicity, religion or lack thereof, whether she’s of Arab ethnicity or actually a Muslim or not.

Religious & political intolerance will be the next front we fight in this societal war we wage to get every one to set aside their prejudices, assuming we can get away from bashing each other over race, cultural differences & sexuality.

Then we’ll have to find some other way to separate us into little groups.  I say we use intelligence as the next societal wedge & keep it that way.