BIGGEST LIES FROM THE 1%

1. It is a lie when people say that their vote does not count. The 1% want you to NOT vote. It makes it easier for them to control the agenda.

2. It is a lie when people say that voting is not "cool". It is the coolest of cool to be a person who can get things done. Complaining without voting is ineffective. To make your complaint valid in the minds of politicians, you have to VOTE.

3. It is a lie that voting will get you called for jury duty. Jury pools are taken from driver license records and other data bases in order to get an unbiased jury.

PLEASE VOTE. EVERY VOTE MAKES AN IMPACT ON WHAT LAWS GET PASSED.

DISABILITY AND FREEDOM

Many disabled people manage to live independently. All of us who are disabled and independent work hard at setting up systems so that we can live by ourselves. Sometimes the systems are so good that others do not even notice the disability. For others, the systems are critical for living.

Too many disabled people are losing in home care. Without in home care they might be forced into a nursing home, which is WAY more expensive than in home care.

When my friend was dying, she wanted to be at home. Kaiser provided a nurse who came by three times a week. Without that nurse, she would have been in the hospital, because none of us could handle bathing her. A visiting nurse three times a week is WAY less expensive than a hospital.

There are a lot of people who can not get around without a wheelchair. If they have in home help, they can remain independent and live among the rest of us. Without the help, they lose independence and the taxpayers end up paying much more for nursing home care.

It seems like a easy choice, but the budget people make decisions without noticing the impact of one budget item on another budget item.

I have arthritis and am not very mobile. No one usually notices as I have very carefully set up my living so that I can do as much as possible. Now that I have to move, I will have to reset up every system from the grab bar in the bathroom to how to charge my wheelchair while it is in my car. For months, I will be in greater pain while I work at resetting up critical systems. And I can walk short distances.

If moving is very difficult for me, it is nothing like permanently losing the help you need to do daily living. So much damage will be done to the disabled by cutting the funding for home care.

FACEBOOK TROUBLES

Facebook tried very hard to price its stock at the market value so that the stock would NOT rise on opening day. The reason IPOs do not usually price their stock at the estimated market value is that the value may be too high, as Facebook has learned.

The other lesson is that, even if you are under 30, you can NOT handle an IPO, birthday, and getting married, all in the same week.

Facebook badly needs to change the topic.

May I suggest that they use some of their new money and make an offer to purchase Yahoo? I think the cultures of Yahoo and Facebook would make a nice fit. It would also give people something new to talk about.

WILD ONION MILK

The wild onions that grow on the South Dakota prairie taste like no other onion. They are kind of a cross between chives and onions.

Did you know that cows who eat wild onions give wild onion flavor milk? I think that cooking with wild onion milk might give food a flavor that is different. It would also be very easy on the digestion of us older people. Just think what you could say in the menu.

When we were going to Blaine School, we would pull and eat wild onions just to irritate our teacher. We would all smell of onions. We NEVER told her where we got the onions. (Blaine had one teacher, nine students and eight grades.)

My first lesson in democracy came from my mother, who pointed out that all we four siblings had to do was nominate one of us, and encourage two other nominations, and then our four votes could control Blaine School. As I recall, it worked quite well.

This lesson in democracy is how I noticed that encouraging an Independent presidential candidate to run weakens the party closest to the Independent candidate.

MOM AND HER COOL CARS

My mother always had great taste in cars. When I was 4, Mom and Dad drove all of us, four children age 3 to 7, up the Alcan Highway to Alaska. (The South Dakota National Guard was in Alaska to protect against Russian invasion during the Korean War.)

For the drive up the Alcan Highway, our car was a real "woody" station wagon, the kind that surfers now long to own.

When I was about 11, Mom bought a DeSoto limited edition Adventurer. It was white, with gold trim, LOTS of chrome and HUGE tail fins with multiple tail lights. Mom drove it at or below the speed limit. The car's mechanic was forced, forced I tell you, to drive the car at high speeds in order to keep it operating correctly. Restored versions are selling for over $30,000.

When my brother, one year older than I am, went to college, Mom recovered the car seats of the Adventurer with gold material. She then gave it to my brother to drive back and forth between Onida and the University of South Dakota.

I joined my brother at USD one year later. We spent many hours in the car my brother called "The Golden Barge." He would laugh at the VW bugs just coming onto the South Dakota highways. "I am in a tank," he would say, "don't mess with me."

Later, when my own children went to college, I understood the impulse to surround a teenager with 2000 pounds of American steel. This was because I remember that my brother never had to have the mechanic drive the Adventurer at high speeds. I never had to ask why.

DERIVATIVES DEFINED

The concept of derivatives is not that hard to understand.

Derivatives are a bet on something happening in the future. It is usually a bet on the future price of something, but lately there are derivatives betting on the weather and on economic reports. Most of us are familiar with the futures market where people bet on the price of wheat, corn and chocolate.

I think there are four inherent problems with derivatives.

1. These are bets. Betting is MUCH MORE FUN than the tedious process of lending money. A bet is quick and exiting. A loan is credit checks, contracts, understanding the underlying need for the loan, and collecting the loan payments.

2. The bettor believes that he is lowering his risk by investing, then placing a derivative bet that the investment will fail. The reliance on the offsetting bet means that the original investment does not get the risk scrutiny that it should.

3. Many of these bets are done without the bettor putting up the money to cover any losses incurred when the bet is lost. The bettor fondly thinks that he is reducing his risk. But there is no risk reduction if the other party to the bet cannot pay for his losses.

4. All of this betting ties up capital that could be used to invest in real people and real business.

I am not the only one who dislikes derivatives. Warren Buffet does not like them either. In fact, he has offered a reward to anyone that can prove derivative betting makes more money than prudent investing over the long term.

All of this betting is almost totally unregulated. Banks regularly lose billions of dollars on derivative trading. Banks are risking the money deposited by customers to make derivative bets. Taxpayers guarantee these deposits.

Wikipedia says that AIG was betting on insurance derivatives, which is why they almost brought down the entire world economy. The betting made them think they had covered their risks, when it actually made them blind to their risks.

MONEY AND CAPITALISM

Money is an excellent way to tell if a group of people are willing to pay for something. Money tells us what CAN be done. Money does not tell us what SHOULD be done.

Money is one of the ways that we make collective choices. Money tells us what people can make that other people want to buy. How much something costs and what people will pay for something, is one of the main functions of money.

But money only works for THINGS. Money can be spent on selling ideas, but the morality of whether the idea is a good idea for society is not entirely a monetary decision. What to do about homeless people, what to do about sick people, what to do about diseases, all of these questions are not entirely an issue of money.

We are uncomfortable with issues of morality. We do not want to label something a immoral.

Capitalism is a great system for efficiently getting people what they want to buy. It is not such a great system for people without the money to purchase basic needs, like food, shelter and health care.

Is is also not a great system if large numbers of people are purchasing things that are not real, such as fraudulent securities.

The balance between having a capitalistic system and taking care of our children, our poor, our sick, and preventing fraud is not easy to achieve. Anyone who says there is a simple solution is wrong.

In trying to find to correct balance, we sometimes go wrong. What we think will fix something can actually make things much worse. The prohibition of some drugs is an excellent example of trying to do good and discovering that instead the policy is causing corruption and violence and is ineffective in stopping drug addiction. We have a really hard time facing even clear indications that a policy we adopted is causing huge problems.

CHANGE

The only thing that does not change is that everything changes.

My life is going through more change than normal. I am trying to remain positive about these changes. Fear of change is not helpful. It just makes dealing with the changes more difficult. Fear of change causes people to make stupid decisions.

Sometimes I wish more people were reading my blog. I have some ideas on what to do if people enjoyed my writing. It might be fun to be paid to write a book.

Speaking of books, you only have to read two or three of the 99 cent ebooks before you appreciate the value of editors and publishers. Some of the books would be decent if they had editing. I find I do not enjoy being brought out of the story due to numerous English language errors.

We need to figure out how to get fair payment for music, movies, books, newspapers that are published and/or copied on the internet.

RON PAUL & CALIFORNIA PRIMARY

If you want to vote for Ron Paul in the California primary, you MUST be registered as a Republican. The open primary does not apply to the presidential race. Ron Paul is a Republican, and you must be registered as a Republican by May 21 to vote in the California Republican primary.

It is easy to change parties, just re-register to vote. No one cares how many times you register to vote, and you can change parties any time you register.

I admire Ron Paul for his courage in introducing a bill to stop the prohibition of marijuana, HR 2306. I disagree with his ideas of small government, because small government usually means that the poor and disabled get way less funding. Life is already really tough for the poor and the disabled.

But anyone willing to tell the truth about the wasteful and violence fueling war on some drugs is really courageous.

A FLOGGING!

A UC Berkeley student from Singapore has wired his dorm room with a music and light show. An electrician could not find anything wrong with the wiring done by the student.

UC dorm police are upset and have called the young man in for a hearing. He might lose his dorm room as a result.

If he was in Singapore in 1994, the punishment might have been flogging. I am certain the UC has sometimes dreamed of being able to flog students, but luckily the US Supreme Court has deemed flogging to be unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment.

Since UC is only 30 miles from Silicon Valley, the student has already been offered a summer job.

If the kid has followed all of the UC rules, he should get to keep his room. Next time UC will have to get an electrical engineering professor to help write the dorm rules.

But this is the US. Unless it is against the rules, GO FOR IT!

ZERO TOLERANCE EQUALS INJUSTICE

Every time a particularly unjust school suspension is questioned, the school principle says, "We have a zero tolerance policy."

So first graders are suspended for bringing an aspirin to school. Middle school children get strip searched. A child is suspended for defending himself when physically attacked by a bully. All in the name of zero tolerance.

Schools, like courts, need to be flexible and reasonable. Zero tolerance is an easy sound bite, but it means that the school will not consider anything but punishment, even for an innocent mistake.

Currently, a San Francisco Bay Area school is being sued by a parent because his son was thrown out of an honors program for copying homework. The school is suspiciously silent about the nature of the homework. If the child copied the definitions of words instead of looking them up in a dictionary, the punishment is too much. If the child copied an essay from the internet, the punishment is reasonable.

School is a perfect opportunity to teach about justice. By following a nice sounding policy which results in injustice, the schools are teaching that school childen should not expect justice.

Zero tolerance allows the school administration to feel good about being unreasonable and inflexible.