Don’s Random Thoughts

I often receive spam chain messages, you know, the type. They always say you will die if you don’t send it to all your friends or similar text causing them to arrive in my inbox. They always take some partial fact or something out of context and try to push people’s buttons.

This most recent one was anti Justice Kagan and pro NRA neither of which I agree with. I happen to think Ms Kagan will make a good justice and think everyone would be better off if there were no NRA.

Things have been going well recently for the NRA. The actual ruling against Chicago may not be too bad since it only allows a gun within your own home. Even I might not be able to entirely disagree with that. The idea of allowing everyone to carry or even continue to allow those that do carry firearms worries me. I am possibly a little extreme in that I’d also like to not allow the police to carry a firearm nor a taser either. Obviously they aren’t any more qualified in their use than John Q. Public.Not having guns seems to work in England. When the police need them they can get them. Now if we really need a militia, that the constitution does allow to carry firearms, then form and regulate them. Seems to me the National Guard replaced the militia many years ago. Just what is the difference in a rogue militia and a gang of thugs? They don’t seem to be helping in Africa, Afghanistan or Iraq!

The second amendment to the US constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

If you want the second part you need the first part. regulation. Regulation apparently isn’t infringing per the amendment.

Since guns are banned in England reference are often made as to how bad it is there or how it got worse since guns were outlawed. There are also claims that knife attacks increase. The facts don’t support the claims.

US gun homicide deaths are three times those in the UK, same for death by knives. Total deaths by gun (accident, homicide, suicide, etc) in the US are 36 times those of Britain. Reducing the availability of guns should reduce gun deaths. There is no real assurance than knife deaths will rise as a consequence. Most murders are a consequence of the availability of a weapon, not premeditation. A knife has a very limited range, about 3 feet. A bullet from a gun has very much larger range. Mass murderers tend to choose a gun over a knife.

It’s hard to do direct comparisons but it can be determined that you are less likely to be murdered in the UK by a gun or a knife. If you are murdered there it is almost assuredly by a knife. But you are eight times more likely to be killed in the US by knife than in the UK. It is true there has been a recent rise in knife deaths in the UK, especially in Glasgow, but the new total is used in these comparisons and is still 1/8th that of the US. One problem in comparing is classifications, fire arms/handguns and knives/sharp objects.

Statistics are easy to misuse. The spam messages and the above prove Mark Twain was correct when he said “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  Use common sense.

I often wonder why people act as they do, especially how they vote. I have a sign on my refrigerator that says a lot to me about why things are proceeding so poorly, especially recently. The sign says “Don’t Underestimate The Power Of Stupid People In Large Groups”. I think the need for that concern has increased vastly in the past 60 years due mostly to television. The Internet accelerated the development of the problem even more. The problem is stupid people. I have to admit that I am too often in the group. The election of George Bush was a true indicator of the voting by the group. The re-election as well. I wasn’t part of the group for either. I have said all this to say this.

What if people made their decisions as if they eventually would have a conversation with God. Isn’t that the expressed idea of Christians?

• “I gave you a wonderful Earth, why did you pollute it?”
• “How could you allow so many people to starve?”
• “Why didn’t you use the science I gave you to prevent Aids?”
• “Why did you think a church group was intended to persecute other people?”

God would have a lot of questions.

If most of those “stupid” people actually acted with the interests of the whole rather than just selfish interests, we’d all be much better off.

While stupid people are not hypothetical, the idea of my belief in God or that the bible is more than a good book is. I do try to think globally and about what would be best for all. Unfortunately, I haven’t ever taken it to an extreme, yet. I do watch TV, though less every day. I haven’t joined the peace corp, yet. I occasionally feel guilty about both. Someday, maybe I’ll leave the group for good?

An observation today on the state of the economy and wise decisions. Our neighborhood, like most, has a lot of traffic. Some of that traffic is the postman, the UPS, Fedex, and other deliveries. Much of that traffic has gone down recently. High gas prices, failing economy? The real interesting thing is that the postman still drives into the neighborhood every day to deliver less mail (Is that what it takes to reduce junk mail, a bad economy?). They tend to drive a lot more than necessary driving to each block segment to deliver both sides of the street. Some in the past drove to each house but that seems to have died down. Back in the old days, postmen used to be dropped off and they carried the mail house to house and picked up more as needed in a lockbox on the street that a delivery truck dropped off after delivering the postmen. Quite efficient. I don’t know why each postman now has a vehicle. Is that the main reason for the rise in postage?Anyway, I noticed that the UPS truck doesn’t come by any more and I rarely see the Fedex truck. That is probably a sign of the reduction in the economy, but what is really interesting is that the UPS man does still come by, just not in his truck. He pushes a handtruck down the street with all sorts of packages on it. I don’t even see his truck anywhere nearby? I don’t know what the Fedex guy is doing since I don’t see it come by as often but haven’t seen him walking either? Looks like UPS is smarter than the postal service, as usual. In lean times, reduce costs, do things more efficiently. Take notice USPS! I don’t know if this is UPS wide or just a smarter driver but I like the idea.

Efficiency! UPS is great! I received a package this morning. I happened to check my email 30 minutes later and noticed I had received an email from UPS stating my package was delivered to my front door. The email was 28 minutes old. Basically the package delivery information and notification was instantaneous and detailed. Are you listening postal service? We live in a realtime world, join us. I am disappointed a little though. The package left Sunnyvale (about 10 miles from our home) Friday evening. It wentup to South San Francisco and spent the weekend there (vacation?). It was delivered at 1pm. That’s basically a one day delivery if you don’t count the time sitting around all weekend. I did get an email Friday evening that it would be delivered Monday, again effeciency. Now, can they work on not wasting gas (oil) on carrying a package the unnecessary extra 60 miles. Not as bad as Fedex that would probably have flown it to Kansas or somewhere to go across the street.

Our “justice” system prevailed. It hung another black man. OJ Simpson was sentenced to 15 years for his heinous crime. He “stole” his own possessions back from a fence. Some of his friends helped and some of them may have had weapons. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, it may have been criminal if it were true. The evidence, as usual points both ways. But…

What is wrong with this result is that he was hung for it. for something that  is much less a hazard to society than say an armed bank rodder that may serve three years and be paroled early. That armed robber would probably serve less than a year if it was his first conviction. An arogant black man gets 15 years for his first conviction.

What about the Enron folks? how many of them really served any time and get out still rich? Their actions affected millions of people, not some criminal fence selling stolen property.

What about police thugs that assault people, finally get caught for one of their many inproprieties and then retire?

What about mortgage bankers swindling homeowners and then suffering the penanty of accepting a bailout from the government?

OJ gets to spend the rest of his life in jail for a crime similar to stealing a loaf of bread, stealing from a theif. POOR OJ! Poor us. We really need to work on our “justice’ system.

As usual with elections, you win some and lose some.

Of course Barak Obama winning is a great sign of hope for the future.

I’m really happy to see that Proposition 1A, the High Speed Rail initiative has won. As usual, California leads the way and hopefully the rest of the country will follow and rebuild our passenger rail system, a much more effective and efficient method of travel.

I’m VERY disappointed that Proposition 8 won. It is an extreme step backwards for California. It is the anti gay marriage initiative. Government should NOT support religious views as a function of government. It should maintain order, and the safety and security of ALL citizens. This measure doesn’t do that. Government should regulate marriages similar to the businesses they are. If people don’t want the government to sanction marriage for gays, it shouldn’t for straights either. Let the churches copyright the use and definition of marriage. Take all reference to marriage out of the laws and substitute civil union for all, gay and straight. It would have been a lot easier to just use marriage for all and apply it equitably instead and let the those churches that only want straights limit themselves, not others. Of course, it should have been obvious that it shouldn’t pass. No initiative modification to the constitution is ever an improvement to the original document.

I was watching the old TV show Perry Mason as I often do at lunch time and was considering why people would murder someone for $5,000 or why someone with $50,000 would be considered wealthy. That’s a problem with old black and white TV shows, they are kind of dated. Anyway, I had to remember that up into the mid ’60’s you might be able to buy a house for that $5,000. That puts a different perspective on it.

With the recent crash of housing prices most everywhere I was trying to put it all into perspective. My parent’s bought a house about 1940 in Bakersfield that I was raised in. It probably cost them $5,000 and included 2.5 acres. It was a nice three bedroom house with big rooms and the yard made for a nice playground. They yard was actually made much bigger because there were open oilfields adjacent to it.

In the early 60’s I remember the family went house looking and similar sized houses with a much smaller lot cost about $10,000. 20 some years and a doubling of price.

In 1974, I bought my first house in South San Jose for $23,000. To me, that seemed like a lot but other areas of town and other nearby towns had ordinary housing going for the mid 30’s. A little over 10 years and another two or three times increase in price.

In 1979 we bought our house in downtown San Jose for $75,000. Five years and the price of a house tripled. The next year, our new neighbor downtown sold his house, 1/2 the size of ours and 30 years older for $130,000. He did it by placing a sign on the main street one weekend and had three offers that weekend. I measure that as one year and a 100% increase. Do you see a problem here?

In 1988 we bought our house in Bakersfield for $95,000. It remained at that price for years slowly rising to about 110,000 by the late 90’s. We decided to sell in 2005 but delayed putting it on the market to do some fixup. Similar houses were now, suddenly selling in the high $300,000 having been in the mid $200,000 just the previous year. All this in a market that one has to wonder why anyone would want a house in. We tried to sell the house ourselves when we were through fixing it up but prices were now dropping. While we were holding open houses we dropped the price each week and still didn’t sell it. When our “listing” with Help-U-Sell over, we signed with an agent who sold the house in the first weekend for our asking price which was now $70,000 less than we started at. It sold for $300,000. That house now might sell for $200,000. A really significant drop in price from the boom we saw when we decided to sell. Bakersfield is typical of much of the real estate market in California, Nevada, Arizona,Texas, Florida, and probably lots of other places to some lesser but still very significant extent.

In 1989 we bought our current house in Palo Alto for $300,000. Six months previously, the people we bought from had turned down an offer of $375,00 for the same house. The market was correcting and fortunately we got in at the bottom. Houses in the neighborhood are now still selling with 7 figure prices. There hasn’t been a drop here, yet. The price increased 300-400% in 18 years.

So what’s the story here? Housing prices rise and fall but usually they drop to their real value after an unrealistic increase to an un-real value. You usually don’t loose money if you buy when it’s priced realistically.

Another thing about housing in the US. People buy too big of a house. Nobody really needs a 2000 sq ft house unless they have more than the usual 2-3 kids. First there is the waste of extra materials and then there is the waste of extra utilities like lights and heating. I think we’re in for an extended period of adjustment in housing. Too much of it, too much of the wrong size, and too much in the wrong place. This adjustment period will take a bit longer than the adjustments in the mid 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.Of course, that’s assuming we do have a soft landing and not a crash.

If it didn’t affect people so much it might be funny. The inept Bush administration has added another feather in their bonnet, the failure of our countries financial system. This is the result of lax regulation quite often counter to the law not just because of deregulation. This can be added to the failure of our police action in Iraq where we never should have gone in the sake of anti terrorism. Our military is near collapse due to overuse. The rights of citizens went away due to abuse of the administration.

Aren’t we fortunate that by some miracle, congress didn’t go along with the privatization of Social Security as Bush so much wanted for his cronies. If they had, this current financial problem wouldn’t seem like such a big deal at all. Of course, they only want an unrestricted check for 700 billion dollars this time, again for the cronies, not the people. Kind of makes the savings and loan failure, and the Enron collapse seem kind of insignificant doesn’t it.

A pretty good record for Bush. Failure, failure failure. Try hard to think of something he’s accomplished of benefit to the country. Try again, there must be something. How could anyone get everything wrong.

Don’t let McCain distract you either, his actions are at the root of this failure. He’s definitely not a potential savior.

I have always believed that the economy was going down toward a day of reckoning.  Mr Bush tried to liven up the economy by allowing the loan requirements to be adjusted to allow sales of homes to expand and imply a growing economy. We have been in recession for his whole term and now it may be impossible to stop. Good job George.

We’re all in for a tough time. The next president will have a lot to do and getting us out of this hole is going to be difficult. If, by some disaster, McCain is elected, the following president will have even a deeper whole, if that’s possible, to dig us out of.

I’m a retired person but so far don’t have to worry about these financial losses, if the fall can be stopped. If we continue to fall I guess I’ll be looking for work with everyone else. These past four years of retirement have been fun, I’d hate to see them end. My belief that this was going to occur is a primary reason for my early retirement.

VOTE OBAMA PLEASE! If not for your own sake, for mine!

Sometimes, laws are needed to assure people and businesses act responsibly. More often than not such laws are not well thought out. While enjoying my breakfast this morning at a new Kaiser hospital, I noticed a sign on the wall, much like you now see at all businesses in California. It’s a proposition 65 required posting about the potential for cancer causing chemicals being used. Every business posts them because everything causes cancer. So wouldn’t it be better to save the environment and not waste resources saying to obvious just to prevent some lawyer from suing you? I think the intent was to point out real hazards like air pollution, or such but it becomes less than worthless when it’s posted everywhere for everything.

This case was even worse here at Kaiser because the wording of the sign wasn’t just the standard “we may have something that causes cancer around here” type of sign. They mention in their sign that the drugs they prescribe may cause cancer but the doctor considered well before prescribing the drugs. That’s comforting but is it really necessary to tell us something everyone should already be aware of. What a waste of effort! Dreaming up the wording, posting the sign, reading the sign, all a waste of time.
Someday I’m going to have to start the campaign for a law mandating PERSONAL responsibility. You’re responsible for the obvious fellow. Someday!

I’ve thought all along that Mr Bush’s War was an evangelical crusade. While watching a report on the training of army chaplains on the News Hour on PBS I learned that more than half the army chaplains are evangelical protestants. Should that be interpreted as war mongers? Having a volunteer military is dangerous enough but adding too strong of an evangelical element to the mix is extremely dangerous. Is the mix adequate to assure extremists don’t take over the military possibly at the expense of civilian control?

Sorry folks, we really need the draft, not to fuel wars but to prevent them.

I’m not really a Democrat but I am anti Republican. I believe in Democracy and in our Constitution. I wish we could rid ourselves of this two party system, or at least these two parties. It would be nice if there were more of a difference on the honesty and doing the peoples work side. The main reason I am anti elephants is because in addition to doing neither of those, they don’t believe in democracy at all.

I changed from Independent 10-15 years ago when it was apparent we needed to rid ourselves of the Republican infestation and its threat to any remaining freedom in this country.

The choice of parties isn’t great because I haven’t found a party that uses reason as their core policy. I’m a realist and have to remain a “registered’ Democrat for now. Damn!