Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Famine the Unanticipated Catastrophe

People assume that famines are caused by a poor growing season. This is true in agrarian societies where everyone farms. However, a financial world banking catastrophe could lead to the same result; where starvation occurs from lack of funds to purchase food. Also, we may be fast approaching a limit where food production can’t keep up with the increased population. War in the Middle East, is curbing a lot of farm production, which is leading to starvation for many.

And then there is global warming. Once the North polar ice cap melts, the Gulf Stream ocean current could change its direction a tad, making Eastern Europe too cold for food cultivation.

A famine could affect a large part of the world’s population. We are at a point now, where bad weather, financial instability or political instability, could determine who will live or die. A nuclear skirmish in a quest to grab resources, could make food very scarce in some areas.

The next famine will not be anticipated. It may be an economic or financial disaster that triggers it. When it happens, the logistics of transporting food to those that need it could be very hard to accomplish. Imagine a high-density population area like India, where many are already at starvation levels and barely surviving. This could be the end of the road for them.

Without the means to purchase food, life is a real struggle. Most of us are not in a position to grow and produce the food we need; we pay others to provide it to us. Those in the third world who are starving to death slowly, could be the medium for new super diseases that the rest of the world will have to deal with in the future. It is this group, with very weakened immune systems, that could be the incubator for a future plague far worse than any war imaginable.

The funny thing is, the third world was our source of cheap labor. As our economy slows down, the funds that made life possible for them will disappear. That thought worries me. A hungry mountain lion is not going to knock on your door and bargain with you over the price of its next meal -- your pet dog in the back yard.

Thursday, February 09, 2017

The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Mindset

Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t hard, I don’t think that an instruction manual was ever requested by someone desiring to put one together. One day at work, I thought aloud and mused as to how much jelly would be considered too much when making a sandwich. No one really commented, but I got the feeling that many of my associates, thought I was not playing with a full deck.

You make the sandwich put it in your lunchbox and eat it at work without a second thought. If someone asked me how I rated the sandwich, I’d probably look at them sideways and think they were being funny. PB&J is not an exotic expensive lunch.

Let’s do the impossible, add politics to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump both make a PB&J. We know from the start, that both will complain that the other sandwich has too much or too little of one or both ingredients. Neither one will like how the other’s sandwich was constructed. One will want to create a bureaucracy to regulate how the sandwich is made. The other will be against government controls on sandwiches.

So, when you turn on the news, and they have a Republican and a Democrat discussing the issues, you already know each side’s argument. It’s all about that peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There is no real skill in making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The real skill, is to not run out of peanut butter, jelly or the bread to put it on.

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Our Political System is in Shambles

When Obama won the election in 2008, I felt a loss, my party had not won. I lived with it for 4 years never protesting, and I noticed that most Republicans did the same. Obama came up for re election and won again and I lived with the loss even though I severely disagreed with everything he was doing.

In the last election, my candidate won over all odds. It hasn’t even been two weeks since Trump has been in office, and there are protests over every little thing he does.

Everyone that is a Democrat has an opinion that they believe that they have to enlighten the listening public with. They can’t sit still for this injustice and have to protest. The trouble is it is getting just as bad on the Republican side. They also have an opinion that they want to broadcast to the listener. I can point out the obvious. Everyone is talking, but nobody is listening to them, they don’t understand that.

The Republicans gave the Democrats 8 years of no protesting. The Democrats have given the President his first two weeks of nothing but protesting.

I would suggest that the people in the street protesting Trumps election, are the Fascists. If you are against immigration, you are perceived as unamerican. Of course, if we go back to pre-world war Germany, if you weren’t against the Jews, you were NOT considered a German patriot by the protesting masses. It was the people NOT in power, that wanted to dictate, the values the Democracy was to hold sacred. And we know how that turned out.

We have a new President that has been in office two weeks. My question, what has happened to the Democrats in Congress? They think that the end of the world is near with the election of Donald Trump?

I took a double blast of Obama for 8 years and the world was on a normal turn of events every day of his Presidency. Now we have President Trump and a bunch of Democratic Congressmen and news commentators that think the United States is in a horrible mess because of this transition of power. I question their judgement, only because, I accepted the last 8 years of a Democrat that I considered a complete idiot.

Where we go from here, is an open question, but I think we need to give President Trump more than two weeks to arrive at a conclusion.

Congressman Schumer is the sort of idiot that need to understand that they don’t give Congresswusses an Emmy for crying on TV. Forgive me, I have digressed.

Let’s give our new President one year, and then voice an opinion. Why do I think that this will not happen? Ans: Democrats want it their way or the highway. A fine way to define Democracy!