These facts are being treated as grand mysteries by most commentators. But may I invoke Occam’s Razor and suggest the simplest explanation is the right one: There’s not enough stuff going on in the economy that’s worth investing in. As the amount of money in the financial markets grows compared to the amount of worthwhile investments, it’s like having more and more rich people standing on a shrinking platform. Of course financial markets become more volatile, and begin panicking in response to what would have seemed, in earlier decades, like no big deal. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that … Continue reading Rich people have nowhere to put their money. This is a serious problem.

I can’t even guess how many times I have heard the phrase in the title above.  We all seem to say that we just don’t have enough time to get it all done. We wish life would slow down! But in reality you have the same amount of time in your day that your great great great great grandparents had. The twenty-four hour day is the same, it hasn’t been shortened during your lifetime. Yeah there are differences in how you spend your day compared to those heirs so many years ago. It took them several hours to prepare for … Continue reading Things Are Moving Too Fast!!

Part of questioning everything is to be suspicious of things you are “told” to be truth. If it doesn’t make sense it probably isn’t. That’s a version of Occam’s Razor that I follow. Another is that actions have consequences. Every decision we make in life causes some effects down the road. How does all of this relate to the title of this post? While I don’t deny anyone the right to believe in the god of their choice I tire of hearing so many put the results of their previous decisions on God.  They say things like “God why did … Continue reading Don’t Put It On God…Shit Happens…

I don’t know whether to give credit to El Nino or global warming for the forecast above but I welcome it whichever it is. I always dread mid-January to mid-February here in the Midwest as it is for the most part bitterly cold, windy, and often snowy and that is a combination that gets me down.  I am one of those who get pretty seriously depressed during this time of year but maybe it won’t be so bad this year. I know global warming is a bad thing but I kind of appreciate it this time of year. I wonder if … Continue reading Snow Birds…By Necessity..

There are a lot of improvements waiting to be made in our national tax structure but reducing tax brackets should be a very low priority in the work. The loop holes put into the structure over the years needs immediate changes.  It’s time to throw them all out and start over again and only add them back with a lot of restraint!  It is a simple as that… But, how to accomplish that is the gargantuan problem especially with a gridlocked congress and all the special interest groups tugging at them. Obviously from the graph above the largest portion of … Continue reading The case for more tax brackets

I must admit, at least in my senior years, I am a rebel rouser of the Don Quixote variety. That is I seemingly fight for lost causes. Things like less killing because of an overabundance of guns in our society or that we Christians should start acting like Christians. The latter is the topic for this post. For so many years I comfortably fell into the belief that Christianity is a “something for nothing” religion. That is all we have to do is to say the right words and believe the right things in order to self proclaim that we … Continue reading Christianity Is Hard…

I don’t know if the “all you can eat”  is just an American thing or is it more world wide? But I do know that obesity is a very prevalent in America.   Kind of like our obese military budget we rule the world when it come to overweight. I will readily admit that I, like most American I think, have a weight problem. I gain weight in the cold weather months when I am pretty much a couch potato. Going into this winter season I started out on the heavy side so I knew I had to do something … Continue reading All You Can Eat….

Of course the editorial cartoon above my Paul Combs is an exaggeration but it certainly has more than an ounce of truth in it. The media just seems to dominate almost everything in our lives now days. Cell phones are now on every restaurant table and are the main focus of those diners even to the exclusion of those sitting across the table from them. If it rings for whatever reason it almost always takes attention away from everything else. Fox News is the prime instigator of media bias. They have so many “ditto-heads” watching who totally fall in line … Continue reading The Power of the Media

I wanted to spend a little more time in reflecting on my recent trip to Branson MO the week before Christmas. This one has an artsy touch :) Continue reading Reflections…

Call it what you want but I kind of wonder what all the deniers are saying about this winter season? Certainly they can’t deny that things are much different this year than last. Tornadoes in December are just not normal and neither are blizzards in the south and balmy weather in the north. When we visited the Southwest last April I simply fell in love with the area and  dream of spending my final years there. As a result of my deafness I have a condition where my balance is tenuous at best so ice is a deadly enemy to … Continue reading El Nino… Climate Change…

Here is my favorite junkyard of all time.  It is located in La Fruto Colorado and I discovered it in April 2015 while traveling the back roads to from Santa Fe to Denver…  (click on it to see a larger image) Continue reading My Favorite All Time Junkyard

This is going to be one of those posts that wrenches my heart. It was one of the most tragic days of my life.  When my mother abandoned my father leaving him with two very young boys  we changed from a two-income family to one very low payed bread winner who struggled daily to make ends meet. Dad was never much of the communicator so he tried to shield us from all the problems he faced just getting by day-to-day. He never talked about his constant troubles with money and being so young I never realized what he faced in … Continue reading About Poverty… A Very Personal Story

Here is an afternoon thought to chew on….. Continue reading Cowboy Jihadists……

LaVoy Finicum says the Feds won’t take him alive One of the armed protesters occupying a federal wildlife refuge in rural Oregon said he would rather die defending the building than be arrested by the FBI. Source: Oregon Occupier Warns FBI He’d Take Death Over Jail | TIME I guess that not all the nuts in the country are running for president. Some of them are waving the flag and the constitution in the name of getting “free” stuff and saying they will die rather than pay for it. Ok, maybe that is a little harsh, lets look at it … Continue reading Let Me See If I Got This Right?

If strong enough, the storm of electrons and other charged particles from an EMP could disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, disable satellites and the internet, ground all commercial aviation, silence telecommunications, and fry much of the electrical grid — catapulting our society back to the 19th century for months or years. Peter Pry, executive director of the federal EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, told Congress this year that a major EMP could cause widespread “starvation, disease, and societal collapse” that could lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people. The Obama administration recently released a … Continue reading As If We Didn’t Have Enough To Fear…

Here is a thought that all us “mature” folks need to realize going into this new year. But even more so it needs to be learned by those at the other end of the message. Life teaches each of us lessons. Whether we use them to become better people is up to each of us. Continue reading Some Thoughts Going Into This New Year..

Here is wishing you all a Happy New Year filled with promise and hope. Yeah I know it is a presidential election year so it will be a dirty one but here is hoping that you will be able to ignore as much of that as possible but not so much as to not be able to come to an informed decision this coming November. Continue reading Happy New Years!!!

I was astounded when I heard that a Supreme Court Justice made the type of comments shown above during a Supreme Court hearing recently. Yes, I know it was Scalia and he is anything but for affirmative action or minority rights but still…  Maybe the Supreme Court is just not “supreme” right now? Kind of like the “Dred Scott” period… What scares me the most about any of the GOP presidential candidates actually getting into the White House is that they would be able to add more like Alito, Scalia or his “friend” Thomas to the bench and turn everything … Continue reading So Much for the “Supreme” Court..

I have always been a U.S. history reader since my first years of exposure to it from a gruffy old farmer/teacher in the public school system. He taught me that if you want to really understand something you need to get as close to the source as you can. Learn what the founders thought. During the years since that time I have read extensively about the people around the forming of our nation, most particularly Jefferson, Washington, and Madison.  Learning about their lives and how they thought gave me an insight into what the country was meant to be. It … Continue reading Redemptive Violence…

We spent a couple of days in Branson Missouri this past week to get us in the holiday spirit. It is on the list as the third most celebrated Christmas in the country.  Silver Dollar City which is a theme park near Branson was advertised as have over 5 million Christmas tree lights and they were impressive indeed!  Almost worth all the hassle to get there and manage the hordes! Below are some pictures of the park.  The tree in the center of the town square  was awesome.  I took an iPhone video of it but it is too big … Continue reading Branson Christmas

Let’s spend the next couple of days forgetting about our political situation and look exclusively at other things…. I know I am probably showing my age here but when I thought of the phrase in the title above I thought of Bing Crosby’s 1943 song about soldiers in WWII dreaming of Christmas. But when I put the phrase to Wiki I discovered that it now has multiple references. Aside from that this post is actually about the contents of personal dreams and how they let me live out an alternate life. Yeah, this is a Walter Mitty type post.  :) … Continue reading If Only In My Dreams…