The economy drags on. I’m very happy to have a job still given the market. As the Federal government keeps pumping money into the economy to keep it afloat (and for some stupid reason giving money to the banks that got us into the sh!t in the first place), I have to admire this simple plan to solve all of the issues at a single go.

Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ’s economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed.

4) They MUST buy their own health insurance. – Health Plan for seniors just fixed!!!

It can’t get any easier than that! If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes… If you think this would work, please tell everyone you know.

If not, please disregard. Then shoot yourself!!!! – 1 job opening

God Bless America.

I don’t think the cutoff age should be 50 years old… Perhaps more like 60. Still, there is something very compelling about the simplicity, and afterwards, if those folks who retired want to start brand new businesses, I’d be all for that, too. More jobs!

Meanwhile, I found this article about a man, Tom Graham, who has walked every single street in San Francisco. I like to walk (and kind of wish I did more of it) but this is a dedication I will simply admire from afar. Where the heck is DeForest (street? avenue? alley?)?

The heat’s hit San Francisco. I don’t like heat, but there it is. Most people hope the weekend ends up hot, or at least warm. I’m hoping this weekend cools off!

Photo by Jerome Abellar

So let’s get back to it, shall we? Yes!

World Cup is starting up. Here’s all the games, here are the game times set to Eastern Standard time and finally here is a map of where you can watch in the Bay Area. USA plays England first… Let’s make them suffer!

Meanwhile, while I haven’t been writing a whole lot, I have managed to watch the entire three “seasons” (Brits having a different idea of how many episodes constitutes a season than us) of an amazing BBC series called Black Books. See it. It’s comedy gold that will probably not be remade here in America (like The Office) because there’s too much smoking, drinking and swearing without any (well, only once) sex, murder or blowing things up. Brilliant. I need to find out who wrote the opening theme song…

Speaking of explosions, can anyone explain to me why they can’t simply blow up the hole in the Caribbean leaking all that oil? Or pour several thousand metric tons of concrete over the top? Seriously, it seems ridiculous they build these things without some sort of failsafe or cutoff valve.

Anyways, off we go!

Innately, people do not like to kill. … In World War II, for instance, only 15-25 percent of combat infantry soldiers were willing to fire their guns. By the time soldiers went to Korea, 50 percent were willing to shoot. In Vietnam, the figure was up to 90 percent.

I find this staggering. Maybe there is some sort of correlation between violence depicted in our American media (exposure and desensitization) and the rise of various forms of violent crime.

Regardless of that topic, though, it got me thinking about how someone from 60 or 70 years ago, teleported through time to our present, would find the world. Aside from the technological, scientific and medical changes that would make our world so very different, the levels of violence must be astonishingly high. If less than a quarter of people in a war are unwilling to fire their guns, imagine what it was like in a time of peace? No wonder the Mafia’s use of weapons was so shocking back in the 20s and 30s. We would seem almost callous in our disregard for the violence we see almost daily on the news.

How the world changes. And how different will it be in the future? Perhaps, instead of a statistic that says less than a quarter of the population was willing to shoot their gun in a time of war, we’ll have a statistic that says less than a quarter of our population actually killed another person in a time of war. And our descendants might look on that statistic and think, “How quaint.”

I ain’t married and I can still attest to the truth of this quote!

Here’s the official press release.

I’d be curious to hear what people’s thoughts might be concerning the incursion of the Super Bowl on Valentine’s Day (which should happen in 2016) and how this will affect gender relationships, if at all.

COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate what was happening, especially in places where people are averse to taxes. “You don’t want to pay taxes, then here are the consequences.” I think this is pretty much what the state of California needs to do. You don’t want to repeal Prop 13? You want to keep heaping on voter initiatives that cost the state money? Then you will have to deal with the consequences and, like Colorado Springs, it will be painful.

The book is billed as a sort of linguistic map that painstakingly documents today’s Spanish in all its richness — there are nearly 20 ways to say ballpoint pen, for instance — and how it varies from country to country, or within one, or from one social class to another.
…
The new grammar shies from setting cut-and-dry dogma on what is correct and what is not, making instead recommendations as to what the language gurus generally accept to be proper Spanish. The Puerto Rican twist, for instance, is respected as a localism but not something textbook traditional.

These gurus say languages are living things that embrace new words — often English intruders like Internet — and there is no use in trying to control them completely.

“Rules are set by speakers. What the academy does is observe and document,” Garcia de la Concha said at a news conference Wednesday night.

Congratulations to the Spanish Royal Academy on their work!

What else to bikers and dogs have in common? Try to keep it clean…

When I was kid growing up in the military we had a sort of universal health care. I say “sort of” because it only applied to military families. It was, within the context of the military, completely universal.

Whenever I would get sick, there was a hospital my parents would take me to and that would take care of me. We would go in and my parents would show their ID and that was it. Later, when I had an ID of my own, I could do all of this myself.

Military doctors, as I recall, aren’t necessarily the best doctors in the world. They aren’t called in to Harvard or Stanford to perform surgery on world leaders, for example. However, they are smart, efficient, concerned about your actual welfare as just an ordinary person. I hate hospitals. I have in innate fear of medicine. It’s completely irrational and based on a nurse who couldn’t find a vein in my arm to get a blood sample and took a few too many tries. Aside from that, though, military hospitals were the best. They take care of you. They help you because that’s their job and they can focus on that instead of insurance paperwork.

The United States military medical system is the greatest socialized health care system in the world.

When I finally got out into the civilian working world and had to face the civilian health care system I was completely overwhelmed. PPOs, HMOs, each from different providers with different kinds of coverage (and no coverage) based on the chance that you might get sick or injured. Worse, if anything goes even slightly wrong with the piles of paperwork you’re screwed because your health care insurance provider may cut the amount it pays or simply not pay. $5,000 may not seem like much to have to cover on your own for major cancer surgery, but you’re just as likely to have to pay $5,000 for a simple blood test if you’re not careful. Meanwhile the insurance company pockets your money. Cha-ching for them and bankruptcy for you!

Personally I live in fear of our civilian medical health care system. I know we have excellent doctors and nurses but what’s the use if the insurance, that I and my employer have been paying into regardless of having needed to use it, won’t cover my needs? Universal health care alleviates this problem. I walk into the hospital, I show them my ID, and I’m taken care of. That’s it. How much more simple could they make it?