Christopher Hitchens disproves religion in less than ten minutes

Atheists state that it may not be said that there is no god, but that it may be said that there is no reason to think there is one. It is an extraordinary claim which would, under reasonable circumstances, require extraordinary evidence, according to author and noted atheist Christopher Hitchens.

He says deists Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne and Albert Einstein may wish not to abandon the idea that there must be some cause for the universe. Even if you can get yourself to that position, which unbelievers maintain is always subject to better and more elegant explanations, all your work is still ahead of you.

If you advance from deist to theist, you must believe god cares about you, knows who you are, minds what you do, answers your prayers, cares which bits of your penis or clitoris you saw away or have sawn away for you, minds who you go to bed with and in what way, minds what holy days you observe, minds what you eat, minds what positions you use for pleasure, all your work is still ahead of you – and lots of luck.

There's no one who can move from the first position to the second.

This is a totalitarian belief; a wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority that can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who must subject you to total surveillance, around the clock, every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born, and even worse – and this is where the real fun begins – after your death.

It’s a celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?  North Korea has a dead man as its president. It's a necrosity. It's the most heartless tyranny the human species has thought of, but at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.

It attacks us at our deepest intellect and integrity. It means that we could not arrive at a right action without celestial, divine permission. We would not know right from wrong if we did not have heaven’s permission to do so. Our acute awareness of what is fair and unfair comes to us as a gift from the great unassailable dictator.

Religion is our first attempt as a species to explain the universe. It’s what we tried when we didn't know anything. We didn't know we lived on a spherical planet that revolved around the sun. We didn't know there were micro-organisms that would explain disease. We thought diseases came from curses or witches or ill-wishing devils.  It's also our first attempt at philosophy and morality; our first attempt at health care.

But because it is our first, it is our worst. We now have better explanations for all these dreads. And we have cleared up all these mysteries. Yet we still dwell.  And in some countries live in a totalitarian regime that forbids us from thinking about the progress that has been made and denies us the knowledge that these advances have in fact occurred.

Where once it probably was an aid to our survival, it is a great peril to our continued civilized species.

It relies on the supernatural more than the much more miraculous, much more beautiful, much more elegant, much more harmonious universe. You cannot compare Darwin and Einstein to the burning bush or to the idea that there can be no redemption without the mutilation of genitalia.

This is what you have to believe if you're a monotheist, and do so in the face of all we know now that we didn't before.

The human race is estimated to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old. Let's say 100,000 for argument’s sake. For much of 100,000 years the life expectancy was maybe 25 years.  Infant mortality was rife; micro-organism disease was terrifying. Earthquakes and volcanoes would have been seen as extraordinary forces. There would have been great fights over land, territory, women, food, water and tribalism.

For 95-96,000 years heaven watches this with folded arms, with indifference, with coldness. And then around 3-4,000 years ago, but only in really barbaric, literate parts of the Middle East – not in China or where people can read or think or do science, no, no, no – in barbaric, illiterate, backwoods parts of the Middle East, it decided we can't let this go on. We better intervene.  And what better way than by human sacrifices and plagues and mass murder. And if that doesn't make them behave morally, we just don't know what does.

If there are any people that can still bring themselves to believe anything remotely like that, they convict themselves first of being very stupid, and second, immoral.

At last the case for divine intervention of the supernatural has fallen, Hitchens concludes, and we should be glad that it has fallen.


[ Video ]

Are Blue States Leaving the Union?

Received this via forwarded email.  The author is unknown.

We're ticked off at your Neanderthal attitudes and politics and we've decided we're leaving.

We in New York and California intend to form our own country and we're taking the other Blue States with us.

In case you aren't aware, that will include New York, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and the rest of the Northeast.

We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation and especially to the people of the new country of The Enlightened States of America (E.S.A).

To sum up briefly:

• You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.
• We get stem cell research and the best beaches.
• We get Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren. You get Bobby Jindal and Todd Akin.
• We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.
• We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
• We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.
• We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs.
• You get Alabama.
• We get two-thirds of the tax revenue. You get to make the red states pay their fair share.
• Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.
• With the Blue States in hand we will have firm control of 80% of the country’s fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90% of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the US low sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Cal, Stanford, Chicago, Michigan, Cal Tech and MIT.
• With the Red States you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans and their projected health care costs, 92% of all US mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
• We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
• 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.
• We're taking the good weed too. You can have that crap they grow in Mexico.

Sincerely,

Citizen of the Enlightened States of America

Why Romney lost

I sincerely hope that the video I shot of Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) and Iowa radio talkshow host Jan Mickelson five years ago can finally die a dignified death.  An edited version of it was recently resurrected and posted on YouTube in an apparent attempt to expose a prickly side of the former Massachusetts governor and Mormonism.

I'm tired of seeing this clip show up partly because it's always mischaracterized by the press who toil over it, getting even the basic facts wrong.  No media has contacted me for several years about the facts surrounding the shooting of this video, so I'll answer a few claims here.

Claim: The exchange was off the record.

False.  There were no less than eight people within earshot of the governor, with various affiliations, so even if an assurance had been extended, such a promise would have been impossible to keep.  The host stated at one point: "While we're off the air..."  The camcorders were not part of the broadcast.

Claim:  The radio interview and the off-air exchange were captured by a hidden camera.

False.  I set up two camcorders for the shoot, both in plain site and mounted to tripods.  One was pointed at the governor's position and the other toward the host.  I started both camcorders and stood by one of them during the entire exchange.  The governor was flanked on both sides by these camcorders. I red recording light was plainly visible from his perspective.

Claim: Romney lied on national television about the camera being hidden.

True.  The governor told Katie Couric (during a CBS News interview) a few weeks later that, unbeknownst to him, the host had a camera "hidden on the console."  There's no possible way, judging from the studio setup and the shot angles, that any footage emanated from the console.  Any accusation that I shot this footage nefariously is provably wrong and insulting.  While I can't know the governor ever looked at the cameras, I can assure you there's no possibility his statement concerning a hidden camera is true.

Claim: The host attacked the governor's religion.

False.  Any objective observer would have to conclude this wasn't an attack on Mormonism.  Mickelson even went so far as to tell Mr. Romney that he agreed with his religion.  The questions actually centered around overturning the landmark US Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade and how Mr. Romney rationalized his former pro-choice position in light of his faith.  After several conversations with Mr. Mickelson on this encounter, my sense is that he felt the faithful and conservative members of his audience would need to hear Romney weigh in on these points before they could comfortably choose the former Massachusetts governor as a viable Presidential candidate.  Even those who didn't agree with Mormonism, Mickelson asserted, they could still "...vote for you if they feel you are a loyal Mormon."

Mickelson has said he believed these two points on abortion would be dispensed of quickly so the two would have time to discuss the other issues of the day.  Unfortunately they had an "extraordinarily limited time," considering the governor showed up 20 minutes late for scheduled the interview.  They literally had less than ten minutes on the air together.

It was intended to be a grand opportunity for the candidate to square things for the radio audience.  That's unfortunately when Gov. Romney became combative and defensive, stalling the discussion and destroying any traction he might have earned.

"I'm running for President and I'm not here to talk about Mormonism."

The host invited the governor to stay on to talk after the news break, but Romney declined.  Mickelson also invited Gov. Romney to come back another time so they could have a more lengthy discussion.  "No, I don't want to come on a show like yours and have it be all about Mormonism..."

In the five years and two Presidential campaigns since that interview, Mr. Romney has never darkened the doorstep of WHO Radio.  Gov. Mitt Romney has lost both of those Presidential bids, due in some small way, I believe because of the behavior shown in this video.

Three excuses for not using online video

One of my marketing mentors, Drew McLellan of McLellan Marketing Group in Des Moines, has always been very open about making your marketing successful, and in his recent column he shares one that caught my eye: Stop Making These Three Excuses for Not Making Videos.

As a thirty-year radio vet, I've been shooting online videos for a fraction of that time, but I do because I recognize the value in putting it to work.  I don't shoot the high-end pieces or create animations, but I do like clean, well lit videos that are easy to understand -- someplace in between the glossy agency presentations and Flipcam-style quickies.

Drew's warning go directly to the objections business owners often use that stop them from using videos before they even get started.  I encourage you to read the article and see if you've used any of these objections and what you should consider to overcome them.

Why is this important?  Here are a few facts he relays and a few of my own.  Drew says 88-million people watch videos online, including executives and they represent upwards of nearly half of all internet traffic.  I'm aware that YouTube reached a compelling milestone a few years ago in become the #2 search engine, behind Google.  All forms of research is done with online videos, from reviewing products to solving home repair issues.

There are virtues of increasing your exposure and building an audience through consistent and long term marketing strategies, but there's a huge lift to your brand when you let your most satisfied customers speak candidly about their positive experiences doing business with you.  Many marketers will tell you the most compelling commercial is a testimonial.

Seniors Still Need Print Media

An email arrived a few minutes ago.  It was from a co-worker and contained a forwarded joke:


I was visiting my son last night when I asked if I could borrow a newspaper.

"This is the 21st century," he said. "I don't waste money on newspapers. Here, you can borrow my iPad."

I can tell you this, that damn fly never knew what hit him.


I was mildly amused.  But how about this?

“Grandma,” my nephew said to my mother, who handed him a Ladies Home Journal to amuse him, “this is broke… the pictures don’t get bigger when I try to stretch them.”

But score one for granny because newspapers have many functions beyond crossword puzzles and swatting flies.  They’re great for cleaning windows and laying out cookies, too!  Most importantly, they’re impervious to electromagnet pulses, which could be a big deal some day.  An enemy E.M.P. blast could easily melt the microprocessors inside iPads and computers and phones – and nearly every household appliance made in the last 30 years.  The ever-shrinking micro components inside all new devices -- and the infrastructure on which most of them rely -- are all extremely vulnerable.  Well-placed interference could cause the complete collapse of all communication systems – including the press.

Disruptive medicine technology

Medicine, like education, is a convoluted industry that seems more interested in bilking people out of their earnings than one in which public service is the goal.

The monstrosity we now call health care is so enormous that it's eating the US government's budget -- feeding off the gigantic teat of the wage earners in this country.

Medicine, as a model, is now ripe for an infusion of technology, the likes of which created a subeconomy out of a music player. we can do for diagnostic medicine what Apple and Steve Jobs did for portable computing.

Four years ago the President told us that we were embarking on a jorney to digitize health care records in a way that would streamline the industry and the patient experience.

That didn't happen. i recently visited a walk-in clinic that was in my health care insurance "network" and stepped up to the counter, where I was asked, "Who sent you?"

"Nobody. Me." How else was I supposed to answer that question? I'd never been asked that when visiting a medical facility. I had an issue and decided to take myself in for an expert diagnosis and treatment. How else do people find themselves in a doctor's office?

Then I remembered when I had worked for a turkey processing plant and how they had medical staff onsite that dealt with work injuries and other issues that would otherwise hit the plant's productivity. When their was an injury that required medical treatment, the worker was sent to the plant physician -- usually a private doctor under contract with the plant for just such occasions.

So the majority of the patience entering this clinic were workers of a plant who had a business relationhip with the facility; it was common for plant medical personnel to send a worker in for treatment.

But the look and feel of the clinic, as well as the way I was handled, felt like something I would expect from one in a third-world country. I was surrounded by people who were obviously poor, didn't speak the language or were dressed in work attire. This was not the clientele of any doctor's office I had ever visited before.

My next thought was that my company had obviously made a deal with the lowest grade health care provider they could possibly find -- a way to save some money on their health care costs.

This is only my most recent encounter with today's medical industry. I'm thinking this is probably the tip of the iceberg nightmare faced by the broader population.

What has happened to medicine? In 1958, all the medical expenses for the birth of my parents' first child cost about two weeks of Dad's salary, without insurance. In today's dollars, let's call that $2,500. IA friend recently had a baby and their out-of-pocket expenses alone were more than $10,000, and their insurance company paid the lion's share of the costs.

To answer the question above, regarding what's happened to medicine, insurance. That's right, insurance is the reason this has become such a huge profit center of our very culture.

Over time, preditory business interests have taken over the entire medical establishment to the point where they have the resources to write legislation to enrich themselves and ensure market advantages while holding the American people hostage.

It was a slow process that began with a simple promise. You pay an insurance company a little out of your paycheck every month, and they'll pay your medical bills. If you required treatment catastrophic injury or disease, the insurance company would pay the bills.

Fast forward to today. You not only have to pay skyrocketing premiums, but you also have to pay huge annual (or per illness) deductibles and growing amounts for copays at every turn.

Insurance companies have effectively removed market forces out of the health care market and have successfuly driven up the prices of everything having to do with the practice of medicine.

Technology and science can solve these problems. We can essentially knock the legs out from under the insurance companies and handle 95% of our own medical needs through self care.

The technology now exists that will allow us to monitor our health and detect abnormalities that were once only in the wheelhouse of big hospitals. And this can be done far more efficiently and with a granularity of data that has never been possible before.

How often is your heartrate or blood pressure or core body temperature read? Usually when you visit the doctor, whch for some of us is practically never. At best it's a few times a year. It's statistically impossible to get rolling averages and trends that have any meaning when your data set has between 0 and 3 entries. Technology can increase the resolution to hundreds of times every day -- and correlate that data with events.

That's just one approach. There are many other dagnostic tools that we can put in our hands that will advance medicine for both the patient and the doctors, moving disgnostics ahead by miles instead of inches.

A lot of times a doctor only gets to see a snapshot of your vitals in one instance. The values themselves can only give current state information. But it's the changes over time that can give the big picture far more clarity, revealing much more about what's happening inside your body and why.

Now if we take that richer dataset and combine it with everyone's trends, averages and causal factors, we can now build disgnostic models that tell an elaborate story about how to treat illness and injury.

It's ridiculous that medicine is in such a dark age today, knowing what we have learned in the last 100 years. Doctors and medicine in general is almost secretive about human health. What is known about the human body should be accessible by everyone at a glance. What is well known and understood by the medical community should be presented in an open-source way so that everyone has a clear understanding of what causes illnesss and what can be done immediately to prevent it, treat it or cure it.

There ought to be an app that tells us everything that can be known about our bodies. More thought has gone into monitoring the mechanical health of cars and trucks than has gone into the health of the human body. A mechanic at the shop can know instantly the speed, location and fuel efficiency of a fleet truck 1,000 miles away. In fact he get a graph of all his fleet vehicles' statistical trends, even making any number of adjustments on the fly.

Why can't we as a civilized society give the same attention to the human condition? Why can't we decide to end medical profiteering because it's immoral to let it continue?

Bringing medicine into the 21st century is a moral calling and it's not beyond the human capacity to push back against powerful lobbies; they only have the power we permit them to have through our legislature and courts.

The true entitlement society is not the young or the poor or the elderly, but corporations -- and the industry as a whole -- who believe it their calling to generate huge and growing profits from the suffering of an entire society, and will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it.

The pledge every political candidate should be to end this kind of entitlement thinking. No judge and no legislator should think it beyond his or her own moral calling to weed out the takers of our wealth who would keep us in the dark ages of medicine and deny us the right to flourish with the skill and knowledge we have gained since the American revolution.

We need a truly disruptive technology in medicine that will make obsolete the corporatist health care complex.

Are you better off?

The phrase, "perception is reality" has taken flight among US press organizations, ignoring factual information and relying on public opinion and the viewpoints of the most extreme partisan pundits as the basis for its news coverage.

The founding fathers viewed the press as so fundamental in the political process that they gave it special privilege and protections under the Constitution.  The press is afforded the opportunity to shine a light on the government and investigate claims made by politicians -- and to reveal truths not otherwise available to the average individual.  But today members of the press happily enrich themselves by advancing corporate propaganda on a wholesale level.  Their only measures of success are opinion polls and their bottom line.

Like the media, Congress is merely another operative --  a tool of a corporatist government profiting through propaganda.  But that's another article.

The way the media operates today is an obvious disservice to the country.  It's bad because in this scenario we are not holding a president accountable for his actual performance, but for his (and your) ability to manipulate public opinion.  Wouldn't it be nice if public opinion was informed by actual facts instead of the viewpoints of the loudest voices?

Every time I hear a political news story, I find myself begging the reporter to stop telling me what other people think.  Don't merely influence my opinion with other opinions.  For instance, on the economy, give me objective economic metrics so I can make an informed choice in November.

The only thing polls are good for is to show how well the propaganda is working.  Paid pundits then report cherry-picked poll data that parrots their propaganda, creating the perception of a populist guideline for the people to follow.

The theme for this year's presidential election is the now-familiar recycled catch phrase coined by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

That's not even mildly clever, but for reasons I don't understand, that's now the political measuring stick.  In today's media environment, we now weigh the success of the president by the viewpoints of survey participants and not the actual vital signs pointing to the health of the country.

Mitt Romney is delighted to play this game and is obviously hoping your answer to the questions is no, the people do not think they're better off, that it's time to replace the President.  While that's simplistic, it's probably effective and compelling to the intellectually inept.  This invokes a vision of the man wearing a cowboy vest and a hat fashioned from a cardboard 12-pack beer box sitting in the audience at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

But if we are introduced to nearly any economic metric, we begin to see that the country is actually healthier than it was four years ago.  Unfortunately nobody is talking about that.

The economic indicators were bottoming out by the end of 2008 and have been on a gradual recovery since then.  Unemployment was at 10.2% and that is objectively improved today at around 8.2%.  The job creation index saw a low point four years ago, but has been on the rise since.  Consumer daily spending was at an all time low at the end of the Bush administration and has risen from $59 to $74 over Obama's term.  Even the confidence index is much better; it tanked to -60 at the end of Bush's second term and is now at a four year high at -20.

Corporate media, you are all so quick to slide the soapbox over to paid campaign consultants and party cheerleaders -- people who are obviously not guided by thoughtful and impartial analysis of available information, but by bought loyalty.  What those people have to say is tainted and definitely not useful in the election process.  You would rather set the stage for conflict that generates catchy headlines for the sole purpose of attracting an audience and improving the bottom line.  It's a pity you don't provide a service directed by integrity.

So #usmedia, please report objective metrics comparing the nation's economic state four years ago to today instead of are-you-better-off polls.

The Ryan Compromise

The question Republican voters are left with is this: which of Paul Ryan's beliefs will be compromised now that he's hitched his political wagon to Gov. Romney's Presidential campaign?

One of Romney's most notable traits is that he changes positions with the winds of public opinion, leaving voters confused and confounded by the candidate's ambiguity.

Choosing a running mate that is a polar opposite -- in terms of his explicitly stated positions -- is unquestionably good for Romney, but how badly will this marriage hurt Ryan? What of his values? His moral consistency?

Imagine if you will, in light of the number of times Romney has had to apologize for his own mistakes in positions (abortion), the level at which he will be forced to qualify Ryan's incompatible policy statements.

Rep. Ryan's a spreadsheet guy; he'll always turn to the numbers to inform his own initiatives. The now-infamous Ryan Budget is the elephant in the room. Which parts of that budget conflict with Romney's plan? Which of them will he quietly dismiss?

The one major consistency between Romney and Ryan is the belief that big businesses should not be encumbered by taxes or reguations as they profit from US markets, but instead milking wage earners for all they're worth.

What conservatives don't want to talk about is that wage earners no longer have the spending power that drives economies; poverty creates no demand.

You can give all the tax and regulatory advantages to big businesses that you want, but unless they can convert those advantages into advancing sales, the economy will continue to stall.

This idea that it's now more fashionable to weigh down the buyer's spending power and pump up the nation's debt is a relatively new one -- driven buy greed and sustained by ignorance.

War on Wage Earners Gets a New Lieutenant

Like stealing the weak kids' lunch money, the corporate class is constantly figuring new ways to enrich themselves on the backs of the working class in this country. And today one of the color guards of that movement has been selected to be the number two man in a new government.

Paul Ryan, whose budget proposal would have given every advantage to commercial interests while the middle class would be left to pick up the load, is Mitt Romney's Vice Presidential pick.

Like a recent Supreme Court decision, Romney and Ryan believe corporations are people, too, which is code for freedom to amass unlimited funds to derail the peoples' choice for public office. But the Romney camp goes one further; the way they see it, corporations should not be saddled with taxes imposed on the poorest of families.

Ryan will fit right in. He's for gutting government programs that help the people, but ensuring the elite keep their power positions and riches.

Isn't it ironic how one political faction claims to hold moral high ground on family values while turning a blind eye to the suffering caused by unemployment, depressed wages, oppressive taxes and the mortgage crisis? All that talk of conservative trickle-down economics served to line the pockets of the richest and most powerful while pushing America so far into debt that there's no possibility it can be paid back.

Elite of any stripe would say I'm stricken by class envy, but that's only an attempt to divert attention away from depressed wages created by cheap labor and offshoring of production.

Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives of the ruling class are all in the pockets of the speculators, coordinating to shift economic advantages away from the actual producers of American output -- the wage earners. Ryan is now in the fight to keep this dynamic just as it has been for generations.

US Drought: an untold tax story

We've been told most grain producers have crop insurance to cover their losses during catastrophes like drought. And that might lead some to believe all's well in the heartland. But it's not good news.

Even if farmers are made whole by their insurance policies, the grain shortages are going to ripple through food and fuels markets in ways we can't imagine. And nobody's talking about it.

Many of us rightly believe the drought will increase food and fuel prices at a time when unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression -- and those that do have jobs have seen their wages stagnate at generational lows. That is indeed difficult to swallow.

But that's not the scary part. Did you know that taxpayers, not insurance companies, hold the lion's share of the exposure to crop insurance liabilities?

Iowa State University economics professor Bruce Babcock has said that 50 percent to 80 percent of underwriting losses will be shouldered by the federal government through a federal backstop ag subsidy program.

This is yet another alarm bell sounding for the wage earners of America.

We can have the debate about whether it's economically feasible to produce ethanol, that the energy expended to create the gasoline additive is a wash in relationship to the energy it can produce when combusted in car engines, but the facts tell us that the price of gas at the pump does not reflect the true cost to the people.

It's not enough to know that with all the layers of government subsidies and road use taxes added on, the actual price for a gallon of petro could be closer to $15 or more.

There's much more to this story.

My paranoia tells me there's dark chapter in this downturn story. Between ponzi schemes and accounting fraud we learned we'd been tricked into thinking government regulated financial instruments were adequately capitalized to endure the kinds of catastrophes we're seeing today, and likewise my fear was that insurance companies are not ready for the havoc this drought will wreak on their financial standing.

I'm sure that's another shoe bound to drop, but after realizing it's the government whose underwriting most of these policies, my fear has turned to panic. There is no taxpayer money in the federal coffers, not to mention funds to cover crop insurance payouts. Zip. Zero. There's only debt for as far as the eye can see -- more than wage earners can ever hope "grow our way out of".

Our worst nightmare comes when it becomes fashionable to admit our money has no value. That's anarchy. That's when the grocery store, gas station and utility company closes its doors because the workers have all been let go. No electricity, no water and the sewer's backed up. Infrastructure quickly crumbles. Police are gone, so crime is ramped; whatever food and gas is left will be a target for theft, and those that would try to stop it are in grave jeopardy. For a decade or longer we'll live in squaller, much like the conditions witnessed in public service commercials of third-world poverty.

You could say we'll all be -- in a word -- fu__ed.

The mini pad

I want a a super-handy, single-handed device that's more usable than iPhone & iPod.

I've been very seriously considering buying Google's Nexus 7 tablet because it has a larger-than-iPod screen and its Android implementation is not crippled like the ones other retailers are pushing.

Then, today, seemingly reliable reports that Apple is definitely announcing a mini version of the iPad with a 7.85-inch screen that'll sell for significantly less than iPad's $499 tag. That's according to "several people with knowledge of the project who declined to be named discussing confidential plans." Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said, "No comment."

Invest in the Cayman Islands

Whether you're a non-profit or a presumptive GOP Presidential nominee, the conventional belief is that you put money in Cayman Islands accounts to keep the prying eyes of the U.S. government away from those investments, which is only important if you want to avoid U.S. taxes.

The reason United States Senator Charles Grassley (R-Ia.) distinguishes between a non-profit and a Presidential candidate escapes me. Wouldn't such a practice be slimy in either case?

Sorry, Senator. I hate to throw your own words back in your face, but if those words were meaningful for a non-profit, then they are also fair game for anyone running for public office.

I get it. My ex wife hated it when I'd repeat her words, mainly because she preferred I'd forget about her inconsistencies.

I don't see the dishonesty in taking Grassley's remarks made in 2010, disparaging offshore investments made by a non-profit, and applying them to an offshore investor who wants to lead this country. Senator, as you know, someone with the kind of wealth and wherewithal to leverage such artful tax shelters is clearly not someone with whom wage earners would relate.

I'll make a deal with you. I'll stop calling lean, finely textured beef "pink slime" if you and Gov. Branstad will admit that shit is disgusting under any moniker.

Healthcare: we're missing the point

The problem with the healthcare conversation in this country is the way we make presumptions about what it is and should be. First and foremost, medicine has become a profit center for large corporations and the super rich.

I heard a political pundit last Sunday suggest it's a problem that sick people are showing up at the doctor's office without healthcare insurance. There's never even a remote possibility that the patient might pay for services rendered. And that's a new dynamic that took hold in my lifetime.

In 1958, when my mother gave birth to my oldest brother, the doctor and hospital bills combined equalled two weeks' of my dad's salary. That reveals two major changes in medicine in the last half-century: costs have tremendously outpaced inflation and the patient-as-the-payer model is dead.

Secondly, health care professionals have resisted modern technology that would improve both the quality and accessibility of health care.

In the tech and statistical realms, we understand that the higher the granularity of collected data, the higher the resolution of the system or model.

There is no shortage of devices that can collect and store a patient's vital signs. Heartrate, blood pressure, respirations, temperature and other diagnostic information can easily be collected and studied by a patient (or family & friends of the patient) by devices and appliances that can and should be widely available to consumers.

The collection and storage -- and subsequent analysis -- of this data is not a complex thing, yet the established routine remains a personal visit to your doctor's office to establish these.

Imagine that. Someone under 50 years old sees a doctor maybe annually, and usually much less than that if he's a man. We rarely know what our heartrate is at any given moment and may only see blood pressure readings at the Walmart pharmacy while playing with their sphygmomanometer.

From a statistical standpoint, that's a pretty awful data sample.

With today's technology, people could potentially increase their awareness of their state of health to levels never before seen. I don't mean merely increasing vitals collection to monthly or weekly, but minute-by-minute.

Imagine pulling out your phone and opening your health monitor to see idiot-proof gages and alerts and trends based on your vital signs. Add the ability to to take high-resolution photos of areas of concern, sonograms and personal observations -- all over a period of time (showing changes) and you can begin to predict with much more accuracy the internal workings of a person's body.

This would undoubtedly modify one's behavior -- and provide invaluable diagnostic data to a health care provider, who now has access to a gold mine of information from which to assess and treat ailments. Together, between the patient's input, the collected data and the doctor's observations & expertise, a patient would then have the best possible chance for a positive outcome.

But today, we needed a President to tell the health care industry that they suck at record keeping and overall patient care. It takes a Supreme Court case to expose just how broken the health care industry is today. It takes people of a certain age to remind the country that it hasn't always been this bad.

I've always said that if Apple was in the health care business, everyone would carry a health monitor capable of managing their own health -- cheaper and more reliably.

Doctor's would always have an established baseline from which to judge the meaning of tell-tale changes in vitals. Patients would always be able to glance at the monitor and make more informed and objective decisions about their own health care needs.

There's a wealth of knowledge about the human body available to all of us and there's no good reason the health care industry should shroud this critical information and medicine-as-a-profession behind enormous pay-walls and bureaucratic bullshit.

How did this system get so badly broken? Easy. We let insurance companies transform medicine into a profit center. And they did so insidiously and gradually. Big Hospital and Big Pharmaceutical leveraged Congress to advance health care in a way that restricts access to only those doing business with the big pockets of big insurance.

It's one of the country's worst morale failings since slavery. Withholding medicine except to the highest bidder is legalized extortion, and the only ones that can stop it are too busy engaged in partisan bickering or playing video games.

If we use common sense and follow the money, we usually find out it's about money and greed. This case is no different.

I said that there's no good reason to shroud the health care system behind paywalls and bureaucracy, but there is a reason nevertheless. It's much more profitable to extort money from sick people, a dynamic facilitated by the insurance companies' promise to pay the bills for us.

Along with that promise comes sacrifice and a lawyer-rich environment.

We continue to see Washington trying to fix symptoms of the health care system, one of which is the litigious nature of the business and subsequent limits on lawsuits called tort reform.

There wouldn't be a need for tort reform if there wasn't this enormous pool of money from which to draw million-dollar settlements commonly referred to as "deep pockets".

You're starting to see how the insurance companies are at the center of the healthcare problem and issues surrounding it. Litigiousness is the symptom of the problem and the fix isn't restricting meaningful lawsuits. Washington politicians and lobbies know it, but none of them will ever want to talk about it.

The fix is insurance reform and rule changes for doctors and hospitals.

• Absolutely no risk pool should ever be used as a profit center under any circumstance whatsoever
• Malpractice insurance should be abolished to eliminate frivolous litigation
• All risk pools should be tightly regulated and monitored by the state.
• All financials should be reported to the public on an ongoing basis, down to the individual claim (identified by number known only to the insured).
• There can be no criteria for coverage and absolutely no personal medical information can be supplied to a pool manager (insurance company).
• No health care provider can use coverage as pricing measure and all pricing must be published in clear and plain language, accessible by any prospective patient.
• Patient information is owned solely by the patient and cannot be released to any third-party or face imprisonment.

Using medicine as a profit center is immoral and will always lead to legalized extortion committed on the elderly, sick and injured -- the weakest and most vulnerable of our society.

To fix health care in this country is to reform risk pool management and to force health care facilities to become transparent with patients with regard to their business and medical practices and policies.

I'm appalled at the restrictions placed on frontline health care providers -- the truly good-spirited, kind and giving souls we want to see greeting us in our hour of need. Doctors and nurses and technicians are the heroes, but have given way to impositions that restrict their ability to provide quality health care. It's practically unheard of to see a doctor that isn't bound by government regulations that enslave him to large corporations, like Big Hospital, Big Pharmaceutical and Big Insurance.

There was a time when the most important insurance decision you had to make was deciding whether it was worth letting your insurance company know all your health issues in exchange for having them pay your medical bills.  Now there's no choice whatsoever; it's no optional but assumed that you have a health insurance plan -- and they get to make all decisions about what care they'll pay for.

And the government seems to have it out for you and your doctor.  The clinic is stifled under the weight of regulations that make it difficult at best, not to mention very expensive, to meet all the legal criteria imposed on them.  All of these compliance measures mean more employees and third-party vendors who specialize in government compliance consulting, drives up the cost of health care -- and drives many smaller practices out of business altogether.

There's no way you can tell me that today's restrictive health care environment is better for patient care under the current set of rules. There would be less suffering through better access and higher quality diagnostic methods and treatment and medications if we were truly on a level playing field.

Medicine is a field that should be occupied by caring, generous individuals who want to do good, reduce society's suffering and serve their communities.

The corporate tycoons that are driven by greed, whose only concern is enriching themselves over the good of patients' health, should be sent packing on their Leerjets to their private islands to die a horrible and lonely death.

Finally, if you fix the culture in a way that embraces Silicon Valley, you'll see product development in consumer-targeted medical devices and instruments skyrocket, which will give doctors and patience an incredible advancement in diagnostic medicine that will transform health care -- and human behavior itself -- in unimaginable ways.

The death of local radio

The title is a cliche that has become the bitter moniker of the displaced and disgruntled local radio personality and the signs are pointing to more dramatic reductions in local facilities, considering the recent bolstering of centralized management teams and infrastructure.

No one should be surprised when radio leaves Main Street USA; it's been coming for 16 years.

If you work in local radio and you're 25 or younger, your grandchildren may not believe you when you tell your stories about local radio. "They did what with 100,000 watts? And a thousand-foot tower? That's stupid!"

I took a four year hiatus from radio in the nineties and when I returned, the carts and card catalog were gone and automation had been rolled out and the the President had just signed the 1996 telecommunications bill, essentially opening the door for the massive corporatization of my beloved career.

What happened in '96 was not the death of local radio, but the seeds of a gradual streamlining of worldwide media.  What I had been secretly daydreaming about while pulling overnight shifts at a small-market 100KW in the eighties was coming true.  Back then I had free-run of the station and all night to imagine dozens of better ways to do what we were doing in our building, some spurred from John Schad's innovations with audio and computer hard drives.  The tasks we laboriously repeated hour after hour and day after day were also being repeated by station after station, and all of it was wasted on inefficiency.

So to me today's changes are not all bad.  The old-timers will say, "It was a fun ride," but as the days of local terrestrial radio and television stations makes way for personalized pocket media, we'll realize we were just too bloated to compete with what was started by a teenager from his college dorm room.  We'll recognize that the term 'local' has actually been upgraded to 'location-aware'.

Radio people can continue to hopelessly cling to their antiquated processes until the last receiver goes to static, but the evidence is mounting that there's nothing so special about what they actually do when it can be done more efficiently from a datacenter.

Think about what we do.  Today we sell air time to local businesses, then write and produce commercials.  A local traffic team schedules those commercials into the daily logs, producing pounds of paper along the way.  The rest of the programming is done in much the same way; local folks drop in nationally syndicated songs, nationally distributed voice tracks and weather from national prediction centers into the daily schedules and click 'save'.  Old-timer tube-heads spend most of their days struggling to bridge the technology gap between antiques and modern devices with soldering irons and duct tape.

The sales staff has already been trained to input everything into a central computer, unwittingly making way for centralization of the other moving parts -- functions which could just as easily be performed from a coffee shop.

That begs for a revelation: local businesses can just as easily use online tools to buy air time and website banner ads.  They already buy banner ads from Google and Facebook, just like they buy direct mail services from Vista Print.  Select a theme, enter some text, drag & drop in an element, enter the number of impressions, select a target audience, and voila!

What's that, you say?  That business model couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to build and maintain massive broadcast facilities?  Exactly!  Therein lies the rub. In this digital age, what media company can justify keeping hundreds of local office buildings and a thousand high-powered transmitter facilities scattered around the countryside to do what Facebook and Google can do with a fraction of the capital?

Enter Bob Pittman, the leader of the newly-minted Clear Channel Media + Entertainment.  He is steering an antiquated industry into an era that began 16 years ago, but that clung hopelessly to its past.

Why the gas tax is unfair to wage earners

 When the state tacks fees on the price of a gallon of gas, it's punishing a class of people that are not only the least deserving, but the weakest element of the government. The wage earner.

The reason we, the weak, are taxed in the first place is because we don't have the power to fight back.

The US Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations are sovereign entities above and beyond the individuals that comprise them by upholding their ability to speak with a louder, more pervasive voice in government via campaign contributions. That gives the very rich incredible influence in government that the rest of us cannot access.

The reason the wage earner, the people that drive their cars for reasons of personal travel or to get to their jobs and many other non-commercial reasons, should not have to pay a gas tax is because they cause a minuscule amount of wear and tear on the roads in comparison to that of commercial users.

The unmistakable beneficiary of our roads are the corporations that use them to generate vast amounts of revenue. Pound-for-pound, semi trucks cause 60 times more damage than a passenger car. Even if I thought the people, who have a natural right to move about the country unencumbered by government regulations or corporate restrictions, were to fork over an equitable share for their road use, then it would be a tiny fraction of what they currently pay.

Let's also remember that the gas tax is not the only way in which the people subsidize over-the-road commerce. We pay huge in state and federal taxes on wages, tax on purchases, tax to give health care to elderly, disabled and poor people, and tax to supplement the incomes elderly people after they retire, without respect for financial need. Any of these moneys can be leveraged or converted to directly or indirectly fund road construction or gas subsidies -- on the backs of the wage earner.

There are no delusions that the government needs revenue to operate and keep the country on the rails. The question is, from which spigots should it be able to derive it? The problem is that some very powerful people and entities regard the wage earners as an enormous teat from which to enrich themselves.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little sick and tired of being the schmuck who has to pay all the damn bills around this place!

Free digital TV means $140 in monthly savings

I always threatened to cancel my cable TV subscription, but when my bill jumped from $78 to $140 a month, it was suddenly a lot easier to return the gear to Mediacom and end the relationship.

What I had not fully realized was that 95% of what I watch is free.  In fact, all the top shows are in fact broadcast OTA (over-the-air).  What am I missing?  I can't watch Mad Men and The Daily Show at their initial air times anymore, but for $9 (Netflix) I can catch up on almost any cable show, like Mad Men, and there's a free app for The Daily Show.

For the sake of full disclosure, I had to replace the Internet connection my cable company provided as a part of their $140 package.  I found a company that provides DSL for $45/mo.  And I still have my Tivo DVR, so that's another $129/yr ($10.75/mo).  I can drop that (see below) and still enjoy all my shows.  Finally, my phone bill is $45 a month.  I'm keeping that.

What you need to cut the cable:

• $35 TV antenna (and the guts to instal it)
• $50 chimney mount and RG6 coaxial cable
• $35 signal splitter/amplifier
• $100 over-the-air DVR

Now, even if I give up my Tivo, I still can record two shows at once, and watch them on my computer, or TV (via Apple TV [$99]) or on my iPad if I want.

Branstad endorses a big, fat liar

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad announced today that he's backing Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) for the Presidency.

It's pretty late in the race to be choosing horses, and this particular stallion has some issues from a previous run.

Romney showed us there's nothing he wouldn't lie about.  So the question is whether it hurt Branstad to back the better of the evils, when in fact the lesser man is evil.

Let me take you back to august of 2007 when the former governor of Massachusetts appeared on a radio show while stumping in Des Moines during his ask-me-anything tour.

Several minutes into a filler segment, the talk show host abruptly shifted gears, noting that Romney was walking into the studio. "Good morning, sir, welcome aboard," Jan Mickelson said.  But the niceties didn't last.

After a significant kerfuffle on and off the air, Mickelson said, "I hope we can do this when we can spend some quality time on the air."  "No, I get a little tired of coming on a show like yours and having it be all about Mormon," Mr. Romney fired back.

If it's not bad enough that Romney was argumentative, defensive and combative, he told Katie Couric that the host had a hidden camera on the console.

More than this being about a potential US President's dishonesty, I'm disheartened that the governor of my state would back him in that role.

Pink slime saga will not end well for producers

I've lived in Iowa all my life and I owe it to the agriculture community a measure of gratitude for sustaining an economy here so that I can be gainfully employed my entire adult life.  But should that mean I can't speak openly about the elephant in the room?

Would I be a bad Iowan if I was critical of its producers?  Listen to any politician or company or industry communication director and you're going to hear some one-sided dialog.  But as an ordinary resident, that's not my job.

As an individual I have a right to take the available information and assess it with as much critical thinking as I can muster on a given day and form an opinion about it.  Unfortunately it's well known that the industries see their jobs as managing public perception through spin in the name of sustaining our economy here.

As a lifelong Iowan, I've long known you don't ask what's in a hot dog.  I've long known that hamburger consists of about the lowest grade meat imaginable.  It probably has a high connective tissue count.  That's why it's ground up; to break those tissues to make it more palatable.  You expect a certain amount of bovine gut matter to be there that you presume to be incidental to the meat cutting process.

What one does not expect is that they take the undesirable trimmings offsite to a facility that specializes in engineering those trimmings into some kind of substance that is then added back into the ground beef as a filler.  That's obviously to save money, but it also serves to let the beef company advertise a lower fat content that is free from bacteria.  It's now a leaner product and is safe.

But as is always the case when the conversation is controlled by the industry, you have to ask what are the yeah-but rebuttals that are left out.

"We have just begun to fight," said Gov. Terry Brandstad (R-Ia) about the presumed smear campaign being waged against the non-meat filler product being added to some 70% of all ground beef sold in the US.

Branstad was dancing as he called on college student at Texas A&M and Iowa State University to counter what "Hollywood and the media elites and the people spreading these...misinformation..."

He now says wants a congressional investigation into how this image-busting smear campaign got started.

US Rep. Steve King (R-Ia) thinks sworn testimony will repair the damage caused by what the governor calls a conspiracy to hurt producers.

The media is helping.  The Des Moines Register refers to "pink slime" as "trimmings from other cuts of meat."  Local television news has been covering the story nightly, but has yet to suggest the additive is anything other than meat.

But the glaring omission -- what nobody bothers mentioning -- is what precisely the misinformation is.

Yes, people have called it "pink slime," which I stipulate paints the additive in an unappetizing light. I'm told that images purporting to represent the substance have not been accurate. I am also aware that there have been exaggerations about how "lean, finely textured beef" is exposed to ammonia.

BFI in Sioux City, Iowa was treated to a gathering of beef industry supporters who have launched a campaign with the rallying cry, "Dude, it's Beef".

True.  But it ain't exactly meat, is it?

This is a war without an enemy. Nobody wants the beef economy to suffer unduly. There is no upside to saying things that are untrue about the food we eat and rely on for our livelihood.  But I hope we can talk about it candidly.

We've been told it's not dangerous.  But what precisely does lean, finely textured beef do to advance human or animal nutrition?

The sad fact is that the louder the governor of Iowa speaks on behalf of his generous campaign donors, the more attention is drawn to a substance in our food that is almost universally repulsive.

It seems to me the problem is the fact that they've been using filler to artificially lower the production costs of ground beef and passing it on to unwitting consumers as pure and good.

Well it's not good.  And it's not honest. This is the most vile and disgusting part of the bovine. Salvage matter, if you will. It's cow guts pulverized into an unrecognizable paste, which has been sanitized with ammonia (Cargill at least uses citrus).

Yes, it's beef. No, it's not meat.

In some cases, it's been reported that the actual pink slime content in a typical pound of ground beef is as high as 30%.

No one I've talked to about this wants pink slime deliberately added to their diet at any cost savings.

The bottom line is that we don't have to make up lies about finely textured beef because there are plenty of accurate truths available that are positively disgusting to the consumer.

I'm mortified that there are entire plants dedicated to turning the most awful part of the cow into filler to stretch hamburger.

And then there's the labeling issue. The plant owners say it's all beef, therefore requires no disclaimers.

But wouldn't people want to know about this stuff? Yes. And it's unpleasant. And growing up in Iowa I've learned there's a lot of unpleasant things you can learn about how food makes it from the farm to the dining room tables of America. Hot dogs come to mind. "If you knew how they were made, you'd never eat another."

Shortly after the story blew up, I bought 10 lbs. of 80% lean ground beef at Hy-Vee for $2.89 a pound. I did this knowing it probably contained 15% of the most unspeakable parts of the cow. Call me disgusting, but it's beef, afterall.

I only wish the beef producers had the guts to be honest about their products.

I want to see farm-of-origin labeling. The FDA demands to know, but they keep it a secret from the people who actually buy the meat. Why do they need to keep this a secret? I suppose there could be a plausibly legitimate reason for that, but I can't think of one.

The corn-based feed they gorge the cos with at feedlots makes for more fat on the meat, which is said to produce a tasty steak when grilled. In the west, they'll tell you grass-fed beef tastes so much better than midwest's corn-fed variety.

I'm of the opinion there's a lot we're not supposed to know because it's not terribly appetizing to contemplate at the dinner table.

We know the cruelty imposed by meat producers, but Iowa just passed a law to put down those who would expose the suffering.

I would rather go on believing my hamburger is not the best cut of meat,, but that the part therein that isn't considered meat is inconsequential But instead we learn that they actually ptoduce the additive offsite and ship it in to the meat plants to deliberately dilute the product with salvage matter.

The real danger to the beef industry isn't that people are spreading lies or misinformation. What's going to change the business of beef is that consumers now know more accurate information about what goes into the Big Mac that just doesn't sound good to them, which will eventually affect demand for their products.

I'll give you this: cow guts might in fact qualify as beef, by definition.  But let's be honest. It doesn't even qualify as a low-grade cut of meat...dude!

Pet diaries

This has been circulating for a while and I enjoy seeing it every time it rolls back to me.

The Dog's Diary

8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm - Dinner! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

The Cat's Diary

Day 983 of My Captivity

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates my capabilities. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies." I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow, but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released, and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded. The bird must be an informant. I observe him communicate with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe. For now.

This is my thirtieth year in radio and I'm still inspired by the spirit of the business, with all of its varied aspects.  There are layers stacked on entertainment, journalism, community service, marketing and a camaraderie that has always spoken to me.  It touches people and binds us to those in other worlds and about town.

There's also a moving timeline that is intriguing and exciting.  There's a rich history that creates this aura of heritage, yet it's full of people always working to enhance and polish the processes that make the sound come out of the speakers and the words ever-relevant.

I'm not a purist.  I think that's too limiting for such an evolving medium.  I love new ideas and exploring ways to change up my craft.  Besides, pure is relative to an individual and the period of his entry into the business.

The earliest broadcasts were always live, as there was no means to record them.  Later, programming was produced using test acetate (lacquer-coated discs cut using a needle modulated by sound), reel-to-reel and "carts" (continuous loop tape cartridges of various lengths).  However the basic gear -- the mic, a transmitter and many inexpensive receivers -- still comprises the magic of radio.

It's okay to wear your tape-splicing ability on your sleeve or to extol the virtues of the cart deck, but you have to be amazed at our ability to edit in the digital realm and file reports, with photos and video, armed with nothing more than a mobile phone and the radio smarts to know what to capture.

Radio is as it's always been; people with eyes on the streets and a smile in their voices.  The constant is that talent creates the imagery of a window that looks over the city to an extent that one might think of them as omniscient.  Listening makes you feel connected to the world outside while you may be confined to your home or your car or your office.  They are a collective voice coming from several places seemingly at onces, providing comfort and a sense of companionship.

People will forever pontificate about whether radio is dying.  Until it's dead.  But I know on this day it's not.  It's thriving as a medium and reaches impressive audiences over-the-air -- and now across a global digital fabric.  The biggest challenge today is not that the medium is losing its viability, but rather the challenges facing the guiding business model.

I have been extremely fortunate to be able to work at some of the most prolific radio stations of the midwest.  I've always worked alongside stellar performers who carry on the positive spirit.  They've been unquestionable assets to our industry and the stations they support.

But if radio ever does die, I hope entertainment, journalism, community service, marketing and a camaraderie survive.

Voter ID efforts suspect

I keep hearing that Iowa needs to pass legislation that prevents voter fraud.  And the proponents of the measure use language that appeals to the sensibilities of regular people, saying, "If you need an ID to (insert any common activity), then why not require ID to make sure elections are fair?"

And that's when my ears perk up.  That sure has the ring of demagoguery, the same rhetoric used in every debate on nearly any polarizing issues where someone has a thinly veiled agenda.

I must ask if this insistence on requiring government identification at the polling place is based on actual voter fraud problems or does this amount to statistical wizardry crafted by some organized elite faction to sway outcomes to their preferred side.

Voting is a fundamental right in our republic and it should not be a difficult undertaking for citizens to exercise. True, government and businesses are pushing harder to ask us to prove our identity at every turn, but the reasons for that climate are not the fault of the citizen. It's a mere convenience for the automation of information, correspondence and transactions.

The question you ought to ask is, should people have to jump through extra hoops to exercise their rights as US citizens? If I, as an American, have the right to be left alone, for example, then I have a right to not obtain government identification papers. You must not be forced to forfeit one right in order to exercise another.

If every time we turn around, the government demands that we produce papers, then we become a controlled state; we forfeit our personal sovereignty. We associate that kind of state-control with Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, which we vehemently oppose and find repulsive. We value the idea that the government has no cause, right or standing to stop, detain, inconvenience or generally bother people for any reason, unless the people have committed a crime against other people, or their property, or that public safety requires it.

There's no public safety issue here. And there appears to be no voter fraud issue either. People are trying to solve a problem in Iowa that simply doesn't exist -- at the behest of a well-funded organization that wants to use the peoples' government for its own profit and purpose.

Those who value liberty and freedom need to think critically about what this will mean for us. We need to understand the direction such measures would take us as a nation; more toward government control and the loss of the freedoms guaranteed by our charter.

While you were busy fighting, thieves stole America

I've suggested divisive infighting has been a useful distraction that enables corporatism.  Much evidence of that in social conversations I read on facebook.

There's plenty of common ground among the wage earners, but folks in the cheap seats are paired into political and social subsets, provoked to attack each other instead of directing their energy at restraining Washington.

We're the useful idiots perpetuating the crime by doing...nothing but bickering and name-calling.

The political parties have become bastardized versions of their former selves, directed by operatives who have but one common interest: to suck from the enormous teet of the federal government.

OWS and Teaparty movements are symptomatic of common unrest by the populous, yet the perception is sold to us that their forces oppose one another.

Seeing a thread here?

We're never allowed to forget the fights. The black/white issue keeps popping up in the media. But ask yourself who is advancing these conversations. It's either those on the dole or unwitting shills for said cause.

You know the message permeates the American psychie when the talking points of group X are exalted in man-on-the-street stand-ups.

I don't know who's responsible for provoking, nor would it be useful to argue over it, but I do know the left-right, black-white, rich-poor battles are playing out in all forms of TV, talk radio, blogosphere and social media.

Whether the ones we see on TV have anything to gain personally is less important than transcending the rhetoric altogether and working as a people in this and every election, firing incumbants of all stripes until Washington is rid of the bug that sucks the life blood from this republic.

We can break down immorality into its most basic form by relating it to something as primal as suffering, something most of us can relate to on varying levels and degrees.

Abortion is subject usually presented as a polar issue, either hard-left or hard-right position.  But attitudes change when you present it this way: "How about an abortion today?"  In its most basic form, no one wants one or thinks it's a suffer-free zone.  From that common ground, we can begin a thoughtful conversation.

Voters need a class in American Government

I have a hard time understanding how such large numbers of citizens of this country don't understand what it means that states are sovereign entities.  That means the federal government is restricted to power specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and all other powers of governance belong to the states and citizens.  Put another way, it is required by law to stay out of the business of drug policy, marriage, education, abortion and host of other issues because these are not under the purview of the job of President of the United States, and candidates for the office thereof.

Many think of the US as a single assemblage of people under one governing body and that the President is sort of like a King commanding an army.  I imagine some are just used to the fact that the federal government often comes along and tries to impose laws on all of us, even though our state-run schools are charged with the responsibility of teaching this stuff to every kid.

It is this very misguided assumption that is at the center of the confusion caused when candidates accuse Ron Paul of somehow being a proponent of drug abuse.  Trust me when I say the candidates are banking on your ignorance regarding states' rights.  Prove them wrong!  Let them know you're more informed than they think you are.

You see this every day.  The government is into everything it's not supposed to be into…and fails miserably at the very few fundamental things it is required to do, like regulate commerce, borders and currency.  It's the ignorance that seems to enable the rhetoric candidates and pundits are using to describe Ron Paul, suggesting he's some sort of radical nut-job.  But when you take more than a cursory look, you recognize he's the only candidate that really understands how this country is supposed to operate.  He knows this stuff by heart, and he stands firmly for these principles, even against a wall of opposition.  Ask yourself what might inspire opposition to what we know to be right and decent.

I feel sorry for all Dr. Paul has had to deal with and I'm truly sad so many people misunderstand such basic issues.  I'm glad he's out there, that more people are beginning to figure out that he's exactly correct in his assessments, but I do fear it's too late to reach enough people to make a difference.  The country's an airplane already on a steep downward spiral and any chance to pull the nose up is fleeting fast.

When I was younger I would never have guessed this country would take the very same hard-line stance in world affairs that our staunch enemies had once taken -- before their demise.  Through our perpetual war footing, aggression toward innocent people, occupations and operations in other sovereign nations, we have now become the thing we once despised.  All we have to do is ask the USSR how this will end for the USA.  How has East Germany fared?  What up North Korea?  Ask Rome and Britain how their empires are doing now.

One moment you abhor Washington for their distance from Constitutional rule of law and the next you reject the most valuable morals purportedly guaranteed by that document, which was once thought to be a sacred promise to its citizens.  You spout off about how our service members fight for our liberties, but you so easily dismiss those same liberties out of some irrational fear for your safety.  This is disgraceful behavior and pure injustice to our military heroes.  America is akin to Germany as the Reishtag burned and brought about the fear that enabled a monster to scorch the European landscape, leaving a stench that shocked the planet.

He who swears an oath to the Constitution and then so radically violates it should be exiled from this land.  Yet he remains here and stands in judgment of another who committed his life to upholding those standards, calling him dangerous and out-of-touch.  It is detestable these people are given any notoriety in the media.  Dare I say Washington ought to be pushed into the Atlantic?

You are either for or against the principles of our Constitution.  One of the very few reasons I believe it's proper to question someone's patriotism is on this point.  If you want to be part of a civilized society that believes with it's heart and soul in freedom and liberty, then you should stand for that and not waiver.  If, on the other hand, you wave your flag despite your ineptitude, and choose instead to advance a police state, virtual martial law, and don't mind forcing citizens to subsidize corporations and fellow politicians with hard-fought earnings, then perhaps you don't belong here, in the places where our ancestors willingly shed their blood so that their people could thereafter live unencumbered from such things.

If you can stand against man because he prefers we promote non-intervention over unjustified aggressions against other peoples, or that the federal government get out of the states' business, then you align yourself with the criminals and enemies of this nation.  There might be a place for you at the axis of evil.

At some point it's time to stop blaming Congress for the shortcomings of our nation and take some responsibility for our own weaknesses; our failing to hold our elected leaders' feet to the fire.  There is a proper remedy, but it takes people who will exorcise the strength and decency to cast out the corruption and greed.  That means even America's most passive citizens must stop sitting on the sidelines saying, "it's not my job; my vote doesn't count."

We must ignore the electability rhetoric and vote with integrity and our brains for a leader who has spent more than forty years fighting for the same values that made America the land of the free and the home of the brave.  There is only one person who has, without fail, come down on the side of Constitutional principles, even when it caused great conflict with his colleagues.  One single member of Congress has stood out above the rest in defense of this nation.  And this nation desperately needs him on that wall to defend the rule of law.

But true change will only occur if we dramatically change the way we think and act about our responsibilities as citizens.  Every able-bodied person should get out and make commanding choices this election.  By pressing Ron Paul to lead the executive branch of government, you will cause shock & awe among the corrupt and inept elements.  You will horrify Washington lobbies, corporations and the media.  But you will flex your muscles as a strong citizen and cause sweeping improvements in the future of our country.