http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/24/lkl.michael.moore/index.html

This is a complete waste-of-time exercise, but M.M. is worth approximately $50 million, according to the internet.  The average household income last year was $46K.   Now, on average, inflation goes around 3% p/y, and in the last 10 years incomes have risen around 5% annually with inflation, but hey, we will give him a generously combined 8% increase per year (it’s better than treasury!).  As we are in a very generous mood, let’s be nutty (I mean, really, just look at the man) and say he lives to 82 (Japan’s life expectancy, which is where he’ll surely go when we turn socialist), with modern science and medicine being “de-capitalized” for the masses J … that gives him 27 years of continued nuttiness.  Discounting the absurdity that 27 years from now he’ll make $367K alone, his combined, theoretical claim to his evil, capitalistic  fortune is $4.43 million.

I wonder how much bourgeois guilt $45.57 million buys you.

Sent: __

To: ‘_____________’

Subject: RE: A Little Gun History

Hi Dad,

Had time to think about this one and I want to put in my two cents….

I obviously can’t speak to Australian crime statistics, but Snopes (which I know you don’t like, but provides more info on the subject) hedges a bit, basically saying that the issue is too complex to quickly summarize.  And it probably is… pundits are still debating why crime in the US had gone down starting in the early 90′s (and now it’s actually back on the rise again).  As an aside, I believe in the controversial Roe-v-Wade theory on that one.

As for the  seven examples of history, the implied assumption is that an armed citizenry would have prevented the despot and/or tyrannical governments (and that’s what they all were)  from taking and holding power.

However, in five of the seven examples, the vast majority of the populace were illiterate peasant farmers/fisherman who would have no practical use for firearms in their normal, everyday lives.  They were not ‘hunters’ in the North American or Australian concept.  They were not even citizenry in the Western definition.   But even that’s missing the point.  A man with a gun does not stop tyranny.  It takes many men, many organized men, with money and freedom to logistically operate a resistance to stop it.  Mao wrote the book on it (creating a modern guerrilla army), he barely won, and he had a lot of external help.  Had Mao had a similar antagonist when he turned despot, he too would have certainly gone the way of Kia-shek.

As for Germany and Cambodia, they have complicated histories, with Germany the strongest in the context of the original thread’s message, which is why I’ll give it a couple of lines here.  Yes, Germany was educated, affluent, had a parliamentary democracy, and large veteran populace with experience using firearms.   Germany also had a very low ‘street’ crime rate from 1938-45, mainly due to low unemployment and high military service requirements of its citizenry.   But the holocaust, as horrible as it was, was a politically motivated atrocity tacitly approved by the majority populace at large.  So, had the Jews been organized enough in the beginning to incite an armed civil war in 1934-5, then there might be some discussion, but its chances of success were extremely minimal.  Look at the advantages that the American Indians and American Confederacy had in their resistance to our federal government, and they were still horribly and completely defeated.   A Jewish guerilla war against the German Army, in the ’fatherland’?  I seriously doubt it, but at least it would have been something.  The real atrocity was the German people turning  their backs on part of their own.

Regardless, this is not the 1930′s.  One US mechanized infantry battalion, with their accompanied fire and air support, to include a Predator drone, could annihilate a division of crack Soviet armored troops from 1985 (in a matter of minutes).  As the Afgani rebels have now figured out, the only way to attack the US military now is to go so low tech that organized resistance may take decades, and that is assuming the people will support  you in your own land for that long (think Ireland).   The Syrians and Iranians arming these rebels haven’t given them any tactical advantage, only a political one.   Is a gun in my hand enough to guarantee my right to political resistance?  Sure, as long as I stay alive to resist.  But if the US military ever deteriorated to the point that a soldier’s allegiance is to individual commanders (like in Caesar’s Rome), then it would take an organized, modernly equipped and funded State Militia(s) to defeat it, not just a few millions of individuals with handguns and hunting rifles.

I’ll illustrate my point using a fairly known ‘school-house’ example.  Until the development of smart, concrete-penetration bombs combined with drone planes with high optics and real-time satellite connections (it’s the combination all of these that make it important) in the late 1990s, well-constructed defensive emplacements had not changed all that much in 60+ years.  If we  fought the battle of Iwo Jima again in 1990 in largely the same numbers with the comparable armament of (our) era, the casualty rate would have been moderately similar.  Tactics just haven’t changed that much, and we still wouldn’t have been able to identify where the enemy was hiding when they are dug in under concrete and stone… that is, until now.  Now, they can find you 20 feet under reinforced concrete, and get the munitions deep enough to hurt you.  That’s a game changer for serious guerrillas/insurgents/rebels/etc. trying to protect against an aggressive occupying force.  The only way to fight a guerrilla war now is to attack the defenseless natives in their homes, to have them turn on the occupying force, which is more a political than tactical strategy.  As we have seen in Iraq and Vietnam, that is a two edged sword that may work at times, but not indefinitely, and completely depends on the occupiers will power (and do you think Stalin or Mao would have left Vietnam if they were running the show?).

So my conclusion is this… the 2nd Amendment, as least as an individual’s right to bear arms is concerned, doesn’t protect us from tyranny, and neither does my (or my neighbors) owning publically available firearms.  The armored machine gun carrier ended that illusion.  Neither does the 1st Amendment protect us absolutely (Tiananmen Square, anyone?).  Despots will kill as many people as it takes, down to the very last “citizen” until they feel comfortable their security is ensured, and some never feel secure (e.g., Stalin or Mao).  And they do this by controlling the nation’s (modern) military forces with an iron fist… that’s where the power has always lied.  In the US, we have an immensely modern and powerful National

Guard force (hey, they are fighting the current wars now…) that are mostly supported by their home states, and if a dissolution or invasion ever occurred, they would be the stabilizing influence in your region, not the federal, standing military.  I’m not going to debate whether the 2nd Amendment was meant to be for the individual citizen or solely for militia… it doesn’t really matter, because the militia in the Lexington-Concord tradition doesn’t exist any longer, and hasn’t in a cultural context since the end of the American Civil War.  If you think that individual counties and cities should have a standing militia ready to take on the military capabilities of the previous paragraphs, then you better be ready to give a good % of your income to taxes.  But, at least on paper, it would be our right to do so.

It is my belief that what protects us from tyranny isn’t the right to bear arms by itself;  it’s the citizen in our soldiers and the separation of the politicians from the field generals (the CiC excepted).  It so important that it trumps the separation of church and state because neither would have a reliably positive influence without the stable society that a strong  but restrained military provides.  You want to strengthen that society further?…  lobby for mandatory military service, in the Swiss or Israeli model.   Then you have a populace trained, armed, and with the means to actually hold an extremist government accountable at last resort… if they are motivated to do so.

As always, here’s some applicable John Adams quotes;

“The proposition, that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties, is not true; they are the worst conceivable; they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body”.

“We may appeal to every page of history we have hitherto turned over, for proofs irrefragable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power …. despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.”

And also, for the ‘one motivated marine with a rifle’ crowd:

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant, in cases of necessity, can no more be doubted, than to hang a robber, or kill a flea. But killing one tyrant only makes way for worse, unless the people have sense, spirit and honesty enough to establish and support a constitution guarded at all points against the tyranny of the one, the few, and the many.”  

As for Adm. Yamamoto, here is the actual quote:  “You cannot invade the mainland United States.  There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.”  I’m not sure what the context is on that quote, but when I get a chance, I’ll get back to you on that one.  

Love,

A_____________

Here is my husband’s email response to an article I sent him from the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-cap2-2009feb02,0,4875070.column

“As we are soon to leave the state, I really don’t care if CA falls into the ocean, much less how they will solve their budget crisis, but some of the facts are interesting because they are occurring in many if not most the states in the US.  Mildly infuriating, really.  I’m a big believer in immigration being the foundation of the diverse small business activity in the US and thus it’s broad impact on the GDP:  see (http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs299tot.pdf) and (http://www.kauffman.org/Details.aspx?id=104).  Now, no matter what anybody says or threatens, we are not going to be able to remove them. However, there has got to be a legal way to get them to leave on their own.  But what is driving me insane about CA is that the people (presumably voters) repetitively decide on issues that the courts later throw out (see Prop 8).  Who’s really in charge anymore?  Certainly not the voters.  But this a bad thing?  On one hand, if it was up to the voters, we probably still would have had slavery last a lot longer (definitely Jim Crow) or would have never entered WWI voluntarily, but then again we would had Al Gore as a president.  But call me crazy, I’ll trust the people before I trust some crazy judges, more of which seem bent on treating their position as one of legislator-advocate instead of impartial executor.  It seems like everyone is claiming to know what is best for us except us.

As a side (but not entirely unrelated) note, this new “stimulus” plan being sold to Congress feels like a major climatic event happening before our eyes, in slow motion.  European-style socialism seems to be more than a real possibility now, because more and more of our elected officials and their eggheads believe that the EU has it right, that communal governance implies sharing its resources.  Funny, I though the point of republican government was to provide for the common defense and protect our common economic freedoms (money is the key to power), the latter of which does not imply a right to charity and transparency.

The human condition, and its state in nature, does not exist in a state of parity.  Life is not fair, nor are we able to engineer a society to make it so. Balance is best achieved with less governance, not more.  Yes, civilization requires order (discipline), but not control.  We now have a government that wants to try to control everything… and is failing miserably at it.”

__________ HUSBAND’S REPLY  MESSAGE _________________

Strangely, there is some legitimate economic research to show that pseudo-socialism (free to work at will, but will not work for free) has some limited success with small countries (<= 1-2 million) where the population is homogeneous, relatively affluent and possesses a diverse economy that is projected outward (trade, exports, foreign banking, etc).  This means that external money pays for their socialist programs, not their high taxes (despite the fact that most still have them). But of course all of the above would mean that these countries are socialist in policy but not in actual practice.

As for Universities and communism, I think the author should replace communism with socialism.  Most educated people understand that communism is politically oppressive for its citizens, as we saw with the current Beijing Olympics.  But most students (other than maybe Economists and MBAs) don’t truly appreciate how dangerous socialism is.  Academically, Socialism has, in fact, been weighed and measured and found seriously wanting.  It is a
economic model that just won’t work, no matter how desperate the people are to make it so.  For more reading, see Hayek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom).  Unfortunately, we don’t see it taught in many university general ed courses because liberal-minded faculty don’t want to eat their own cooking.  Big surprise.

As for Empiricism, man’s experience with civilization building has been very poor.  An off-the cuff response is that the most successful governments have been benevolent dictatorships (think Pax Romana) or possibly a few constitutional monarchies (e.g., Great Britain).  Republics don’t last (see Greece, Rome) because the republican spirit/energy is to easily manipulated and consumed for destructive purposes.  We are experiencing this now through a cycle of foreign wars and self-reward.  Republicans or Democrats, liberal or conservative, it doesn’t matter, it’s the people who are the problem; slowly, year by year, the people are turning to their employer and/or their government (both are parental bureaucracies) to solve their problems (whatever they perceive them to be). The homesteading ethos of America is over, and we are now building our own version of the “Matrix”.  As such, Man is neither intentionally good or bad.  Man is only selfish. 

________________ORIGINAL ARTICLE REFERENCED ______

California college student: Terror is the New Communism
by Dennis Prager

As they say on the TV show “24,” the following took place last week
between 9 and 10 p.m. on a flight from Los Angeles to Denver.

I spoke for a few minutes to the 20-year-old woman seated across the
aisle from me.

She: What brings you to Denver?”

Me: I am giving a speech.

She: What do you do?

Me: I’m a radio talk show host.

She: Who did you vote for?

Me: McCain

She: Why?

Me: Smaller government and the war on terror.

She: Terror is the new communism.

Me: Communism killed about a hundred million people. And who do you think attacked and killed 3,000 of us on Sept. 11?

She: The government.

For the record, as I believe this to be essential to understanding this young woman’s views, she is a student attending the University of California Santa Barbara.

Truth is she had to be a student at a major university. She would never have come up with “Terror is the new Communism” on her own. It is a moral obscenity that one has to learn.

Of course, there is an irony to this statement. Meant in the opposite way she meant it, I could largely assent to the proposition that terror is the new communism. Communism was an enslaving and murderous threat in its time and the Jihadism is such a threat in our lifetime.

But that is not how this young woman meant the statement. As she has learned history and the contemporary world, communism was a bogeyman in its time and terror is a bogeyman in our time.

When I told her that communism had killed 100 million people, I could not tell if she even processed the words. It was as if had I uttered a series of nonsense syllables. She either didn’t believe me or didn’t care.

On the assumption that I had met a person with a normal conscience, the only rational explanation for her non-reaction is that she didn’t believe me and regarded what I said as right-wing propaganda (just as the belief in that Islamist terror threatens us).

In her belief that neither communism nor terror were/are real threats, I suspect this young woman represents many college students. If one wants to understand what left-wing dominance in university social sciences departments produces, one merely had to meet this young woman.

At most universities, communism is a non-evil, indeed, largely a non-issue. The most enslaving and murderous movement in history is almost never taught as such. When communism is mentioned at all, it is usually solely in order to show how vile anti-communists were. Thus, as little as students may know about McCarthyism, most students far more readily identify it with evil than they do communism. Indeed, more could probably identify Joseph McCarthy than Joseph Stalin.

Nor is this a matter of students not being taught to label anything as evil. They have no problem labeling Nazism, Fascism, George W. Bush, slavery, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and tobacco companies as evil. It’s just that they won’t label communism as such.

Does one in 10,000 students know of the communist terror-famine that took about 6 million Ukarainian lives. How many know about the communist Pol Pot, who butchered nearly one-third of his fellow Cambodians? Or how many innocents were murdered in the Gulag Archipelago (or could even identify it)? Or that China’s communist tyrant Mao Zedong killed about 60 million of his fellow Chinese? Or that Communist North Korea is essentially a concentration camp in the
guise of a country?

The answer to all these questions is very few.

And that, quite frankly, breaks my heart. I am currently reading “Mao: The Secret Life,” almost universally regarded, even in the mainstream media, as the most important book on Mao ever written. According to the authors, in 1930-31 alone, Mao and his gang developed 120 types of torture for use on innocent people he wanted to force into phony confessions so as to rule by terror. They included burning the vaginas of wives of opponents and pulling wires through men’s penises, which were then attached to their ears and plucked.

These poor souls have no memorial. Least of all at an American university.

This was very interesting. I agreed with some, disagreed with others. My comments are below in blue.

From: Dad__________________
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 6:29 AM
To: A__________________
Subject: Fw: 10 Things That Won’t Survive the Recession

A________,

Any comments?

Dad

Subject: 10 Things That Won’t Survive the Recession

10 Things That Won’t Survive the Recession
Tight times, and budgets, will hasten the end for some things
by Mike Elgan of Info World
December 23, 2008
The government says we’ve been in a recession for the past year. Experts say it’ll be at least another year before it’s over. And everybody says it’s the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Nice sound bite. What does that mean?
Who knows? We can be sure that this downturn will differ totally from the Depression, and also different from the many recessions we’ve suffered every decade or every other decade since the ’30s. I’m not an economist or a historian, but it seems to me that this recession will be something unprecedented.
One reason is that that there was no Internet or mobile technology in the 1930s. That means individual people and companies have very low-cost, high-efficiency alternatives for doing a wide range of activities. That will accelerate the demise of those things fated to be replaced anyway.
Here are 10 things that I believe won’t survive the recession.

1. Free tech support
The practice still employed by some companies of paying humans to answer phones and solve technical problems with hardware or software purchased for consumers will become a thing of the past. PCs, laptops, and hardware peripherals, as well as application software — these categories will be purchased like airline tickets, with price becoming the sole criteria for many buyers. In order to compete on price, companies who now offer real tech support will replace it with message boards (users helping users), wikis, wizards, software-based troubleshooting tools, and other unsatisfying alternatives.
Maybe. Depends on the product. Tech support will continue to be available for new products for a limited time, probably in sync with their manufacturer warranties. Actually, this has already happened for PCs. Products where the hardware and the service, such as cell phones, are integrated, service will be available for the length of the contract. The author describes an environment where live service goes away for most products; I disagree, but what will expand is pay-for-service, which the software industry (Microsoft, Adobe) went to ten years ago. Also, places like Fry’s, Best Buy, or even Walmart will start to offer hourly or by-the-minute live support. This has already started to happen.

So, yes, free support, where it still exists, will be increasingly rare, but live service will survive in a modified, pay-as-needed capacity.

2. Wi-Fi you have to pay for
Everyone is going to share the cost of public Wi-Fi because the penny-pinching public will gravitate to places that offer “free” Wi-Fi. Companies that charge extra for Wi-Fi will see their iPhone, BlackBerry, and netbook-toting customers — i.e., everybody — taking business elsewhere. The only place you’ll pay for Wi-Fi will be on an airplane.
Probably not. If anything, free Wi-Fi at places like McDonalds, Starbucks, and your local Marriott will gravitate to fee-by-the minute service. Again, this has already started to happen, but will continue as businesses need to squeeze out negative cash flow services associated with their products. Starbucks already has a loitering problem in busy areas due to their WiFi being free… a $2 coffee does equate to 4 hours of free internet.

3. Landline phones
Digital phone bundles for homes (where TV, home networking, and landline phone service are offered in a total package) will keep the landline idea alive for a while, but as millions of households drop their cable TV services and as consumers look to cut all needless costs, the trend toward dropping landline service in favor of cell phone service only will accelerate until it’s totally mainstream, and only grandma still has a landline phone.
Definitely not. Land line “phones” are a misleading moniker to data wires dedicated to voice only. The company that owns those lines can do anything they want with them, including using them for voice traffic. Yes, fewer and fewer new customers will activate only a voice line with a new account. Cell phones have become as functional and ubiquitous as refrigerators, and have contributed to fewer voice-only lines into homes. However, these lines are critical to what will be dozens, if not hundreds, of tools available to modernize homes.. for instance, to automatively call a plumber, buy groceries, control the heat, and eventually conserve more energy. And probably more big-brother things too, but that’s for another discussion.

Anyway, the lines aren’t going anywhere, and if anything, they will steadily be upgraded in the next few years to (more) highly efficient copper, co-axial or fiber, directly to and within the home. Also there’s a truism that the worse things get, the more people seek to escape. Multi-media TV is a very likely candidate, and those same lines make it possible, whether or not they are owned by the cable company or the phone company. If anything the concept of a “phone company” will go away before land-line phones.

4. Movie rental stores
The idea of retail stores where you drive there, pick a movie, stand in line, and drive home with it will become a quaint relic of the new fin de siecle (look it up!). The new old way to get movies will be discs by mail, and the new, new way will be downloading.
Probably. Much of the local video store space is dedicated to either video sales or games. I haven’t seen any Blockbusters or Hollywood video close yet, so they must be adjusting, but it certainly doesn’t look good too far in the future. I think movie theaters will survive because people want to “get out” for dates, the experience of super big screens, etc, but on-demand internet movies will begin to dominate entertainment sales.

5. Web 2.0 companies without a business plan
The era when Web-based companies could emerge and grow on venture capital, collecting eyeballs and members at a rapid clip and deferring the business plan until later are dead and gone. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Twitter. Sand Hill Road-style venture capital is shrinking toward nothing, and investors in general will be hard to come by. Those few remaining investors will want to see real, solid business plans before the first dollar is wired to any startup’s bank.
Definitely not. We heard this about any internet company when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, and now it’s social networking sites have a ‘bubble.’ The reality is that business analysts don’t understand 16-20 year olds, who dominate the internet, and the trends found from the internet. People thought YouTube could never survive the onslaught of lawsuits they were bound to get when people started posting copyrighted material. They’ve done just fine, thank you. Wealthy non-linear thinkers will continue to think outside the box and fund ideas that have no direct business merit. As most great ideas start out as. Business analysts and historians have one major commonality; their job is to analyze the past. Humans have a unique way of experiencing its present in spite of its past, which makes reliable prediction impossible. At least historians provide a context of our own ignorance; business analyst are nothing more than modern charlatans.

6. Most companies in Silicon Valley
Tech company failures and mergers will leave the industry with a low two-digit percentage (maybe 25 percent) of the total number of companies now in existence. Like the automobile industry, which had more than 200 car makers in the 1920s and emerged from the Depression with just a few, Silicon Valley is in for some serious contraction. The difference is that the auto industry ended up with the Big Three, whereas the number of tech companies will grow dramatically again during the next boom.
Maybe. I want to believe this is true for the sake of the consumer, but there are many reasons why it probably won’t happen. Mostly due to differences between information technology and the rest of manufacturing. IT is about ideas, often manifested in a digital program or presentation. Cars and airplanes are about labor and materials, medicine is about chemicals and testing, and banking is about, well, money and credit. IT shares one similarity with the entertainment business; it’s all about the people. Therefore, talented people go places that nurture their talent, and California appears to be that place right now. That could change at some point, but not due to back-office negotiations and bankruptcy lawyers, but due to the smartest youth/immigrants of America deciding where the new place ‘to be’ will be. Literally, that could be anywhere, but my guess is a liberal, social welfare government and 300 days of sunshine are pretty hard to compete with.

7. Palm Inc.
Elevation Partners, which has among its principals U2 lead singer Bono, pumped a whopping $100 million into the failing Palm Inc. this week.
The idea is to give the company time to release its forthcoming Nova operating system, which will take the cell phone world by storm and give Apple a run for its money. It would have been far more efficient, however, to just flush that money down the toilet. With the iPhone setting the handset interface agenda, BlackBerry maker RIM kicking butt in the businesses market, and Google stirring up trouble with its Android platform, this is no time for a clueless company like Palm to be introducing a new operating system. By this time next year, Palm will be gone. And so might Elevation Partners.
A highly likely yes, but Palm has one example to look up to in a similar situation; Apple. The iPod was launched in a recession one month after 9/11/2001. One simple product saved the company, at an equally unlikely time. Does Palm compare well with Apple? No. But stranger things have happened. If I were Palm, I would make one last gamble too, considering all other options.

8. Yahoo
Yahoo is another company that can’t seem to do anything right. Or, at least, can’t compete with Google. Yahoo will be acquired by someone, and its brand will become an empty shell — used for some inane set of services but appreciated only by armchair historians (joining the ranks of Netscape, Napster, and Commodore).
Maybe. Too early to tell. Yes, Yahoo has monumentally bad management and leadership, but they have a loyal customer base and still-large ad revenue base. But if I were Yahoo (and unlike Palm above), I would be looking to liquidate or sell, not reinvent. Competition is too fierce, the brand too stale, and despite a ton of money left to play with, the chances of a reversal are almost nil. They should take the money and run, but since they are so inept, they will stick around wasting their stockpile of cash for another 10+ years.

9. Half of all retail stores
Many retail stores are obsolete and will be replaced by online competitors. Entire malls will become ghost towns. By this time next year, most video game stores, book stores and toy stores — as well as many other categories — will simply vanish. Amazon.com will grow and grow.
Definitely not, and in fact, I predict the internet will allow for a recovery of the local mom-and-pop retailer with a 2-dimensional presence. So what it should say is a national chain retail store. Yes, those will start to be reduced as internet competition and a constantly re-invented Target-Wal-Mart will eat away regular “mall” customers. But I disagree that the malls will go away. Re-oriented maybe, but as much as I have tried to avoid them during this holiday season, I have been to several malls in the SF Bay Area and Houston, and they were packed. Exceeding fire code bad? No (well, maybe the Apple Store), but at least cramped. No parking. Long lines. Why? Not sure, but I wasn’t impressed with the bargains they claim to advertise, or the new kinds of ‘urban clothing’ stores that are becoming prominent. What might be changing are the customers at malls. I saw more and more immigrants and lower-income shoppers, which may be affecting other parts of the economy (Big Lots, Savers, Dollar General, etc), but the malls were at least holding steady. As for Amazon… I see it as an internet version of Kmart, where it has a generation or so of success, but will not be a permanent fixture.

10. Satellite radio
I’m sorry, Howard Stern. It’s over. The newly merged Sirius XM Radio simply cannot sustain its losses. The company is already deeply in debt and would need to dramatically increase subscribers over the next six months in order to meet its debt obligations. Unfortunately, new car sales, where a huge percentage of satellite radios are sold, are in the gutter and stand-alone subscriptions are way down.
A weak yes. Satellite radio wasn’t a bad idea in and of itself, but the concept of a national monopoly was an abysmal one. XM Radio would have survived by itself if it had gotten a few more exclusivity contracts, including the Beatles and the NFL. Sirius was hemorrhaging money due to overbidding on those same contracts. Now, both are drowning. The company will eventually be sold to a sleeker, slimmer multi-media company with need of a broader advertising exposure (Google?) and be eventually treated like a pay-for AM radio. My real thoughts are that our concept of satellite radio will be replaced by internet-ready cars (yes, it will happen), where music sites are subscribed to like most things internet.
Change is hard. But efficiency is good. While boom years gives us radical innovation and improve consumer choice, recessions help us focus on what’s really important and accelerate the demise of technologies and companies that are already obsolete.
So say good-bye to these 10 things, and say hello (eventually) to a new economy, a new boom and a new way of doing things.

The email starts with his friend writing this:

“Legit complaint or “only complaining because Walmart is more evil than banks and strip malls”? 

ttp://apnews.myway.com/article/20090102/D95F79I00.html

Husband replies:

  —–Original Message—–
From: A_______________ 
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 12:33 PM
To: B_______________
Subject: RE: Walmart

Some of the best memories of my youth were spent traveling this country looking at the 60+ parks that made up the American Revolution and Civil War. In short, I am conflicted.  There is considerable truth to the fear that urban sprawl is taking our national memories away.  Famously, in Franklin, TN (outside of Nashville) there is essentially no memorial (ok, there are some roadway markers), and it contributes to the fact that few know it was one of the last major battles in the Western theater.  Atlanta, too, is a lost cause, as you know… I am still amazed at the indifference that Buckhead locals have towards living (much less owning) on land that tens ofthousands died on.  There’s a reason they call it Peachtree Battle Rd. 

But I’ve been to many of the rinky-dink ones too and some are, well, underwhelming.  The area in the original article is a wide area of land where no less than four major engagements were fought;  essentially, every in major eastern campaign season, they fought a pitched, loser-goes-home battle there.  Archeologists usually don’t know when they dig something up whether it was from ’62 or after, so they have to test the ground for dye particles (the north had really bad uniforms through the ’62 campaign, where it rained like mother, and the blue die leached out onto the ground after they fell. 

The park assigned to The Wilderness Battle is the Spotsylvania Courthouse Park, which has a separate building for the Chancellorsville Battle (for all the Southerner’s who want to commemorate their ‘greatest moment’ and worship at the feet of the TJ Jackson shrine).  Of course I haven’t been there in over 15 years, but it hasn’t been a ‘wilderness’ in oh, probably 100 years.  You probably would think that this is more reason to preserve more land, since it was so active in a military sense.  In fact, I believe what they did was perfect.  To most people, the park is already mildly confusing, as the battles overlapped each other and there is no “oh, crap, that’s Seminary Ridge” moment, unless there’s some huge marble obelisk telling you to pay attention.  Then add to the fact that the town of Fredericksburg (a working river town then) sits on top of the battlefield(s) and had the distinction of the most exchanged/captured city during the war. 

How do you preserve this?  It’s a living, working town, as it was then.  Williamsburg/Yorktown, Boston, and Savannah have done their best, but it’s extremely difficult.  NYC and Philadelphia have all but given up beyond what they have already done. Atlanta never tried, and it, Richmond and Columbia burned to the ground.  Charleston looks like a movie set, but hurricanes took away any real history decades ago. The only other option is to put a halt on growth, like in St. Augustine, FL, but N. VA doesn’t have that option and 60% of the engagements and almost 70% of the war’s combatants fought in the 120 square miles between Richmond and Washington. 

Are we going to tell people that they can’t move to N.VA counties?  I doubt it.  As long as it isn’t in the park or in a otherwise ‘significant’ (meaning battle contested) piece of land, I say let Walmart build.  How would we get by without our 64oz shampoo?

For additional perspective, my two favorite parks in the US are Gettysburg and Vicksburg.  Gettysburg had advantages of being geographically obscure and essentially remains so (outside of the impact of tourism).  Vicksburg made a decision very early on to preserve the trench lines soon after the war, and that’s why it looks so accurate, and the town of Vicksburg never grew to enormous size.  Chickamauga, Shiloh and Stones River remain pristine, but they are just loose, mildly flat and forested fields, as it
reflected the western campaign…nothing to look at.  Lookout Mountain is, well, a mountain.  Manassas still looks largely the way it did, but that had more to do with the local farmers not selling out to developmental interests, as the protected park is not all that large.  The rest of the battles are mostly harbors, forts or houses/cemeteries, which either lend to preservation or make it practically impossible.

There is one in real danger, Cold Harbor. Important battle historically, but so close to Richmond that it will be all but gone in a few years.  The Park Service dropped the ball on that one, I think.  As for Antietam, the land is safe, but its location in Maryland is socially desirable.  People treat the park and its history like a golf course, and that’s why they want to bring in modern amenities like cell phone towers and gas stations. Simple solution… set up a community action board, which will effectively eliminate development while giving people a venue to rant at. 

As for Franklin, TN, my attitude is that the inhabitants wanted to forget the battle, and America obliged them by paving over it.

http://www.civilwar.org/mebr2008/
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2008-03-12-endangered-civil-war-battlefields_N.htm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E0DB173DF933A05757C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

He has formulated grand ideas on every topic dealing with politics, most of which I think are genius and exactly what the Country needs, however he believes it’s an utter waste of time to write editorials, submit articles, or even blog.  Since I’m a ‘glass half full’ personality I’ve decided to type down his ideas and stances on topics to see if they will be popular.

What’s my goal for doing this?  I deeply believe in his wisdom and want him to run for office to fix what is wrong before it’s too late.  Some readers will wonder if my husband is aware of this blog and the answer is yes.  I’ve told him that I’d like to start a blog since he won’t but he doesn’t know (yet) that I’ve actually started it.  Another question may be will I reveal his identity.  The short answer is yes, all in due time.

Keep in mind that everything written in this blog is my recollection of conversations he and I have.  I’d like to tape record him so that these posts eventually are all quoted verbatim but here at the start they are simply my summary of points.  I’m not going to act as a filter for content, therefore no topic is off limits and these are honest thoughts and feelings being written.  I refuse to type politically correct sentences.  They are a waste of my time.

These posts will aim to strike a nerve, make people uneasy, and get folks thinking, which will ultimately get you to act.  I’m taking the first step today in writing this blog.  Thanks, E.W.