Is Subway shorting customers?

I find recent news reports on the lawsuits being filed against Subway for selling shorter-than-12-inch subs curious.

Why are people concerned with the actual length, which to me seems somewhat arbitrary? What if I promised you a foot of gold but delivered on 11? How much does an inch of gold weigh?

How much less sandwich are people receiving in an eleven-inch sub compared to a 12" sandwich? I imagine it matters whether you judge strictly by length, as opposed to volume or weight. For my money, I'd rather use the weight of the various parts, bun and contents, to determine the answer.

Length can be affected by shape or density of the bun without affecting weight, assuming strict adherence to portion control of the dough is maintained.

If I were asked to decide the damages, I would demand to know what criteria the plaintiff values and at what rate. I might also ascertain whether the plaintiff bothered measuring depth and width, because those dimensions could make up for any loss in length.

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.