Web Of Reason

As a dad, I am very aware about how my attitude is reflected in my children. It seems like they quickly pick up on my attitude and reflect it back causing a downward spiral. So it am trying to be happy and make the most of everyday.

One of the hardest things is listening to is the news about scum-organizations like AIG who will take bailout money from tax payers and spend it on executive bonuses. This boils my blood. 180 million dollars in bonuses for some of the worlds worst executive. This type of behavior from our government and our business sector makes me think they should let them eat their own desert. Let AIG go down and have the government organize a buyout where all the executive get the ax and the government get a bargain company. Force the buyout at a dollar a share so the executives loss all their stock options too. That is a closer to a free economy than just throwing money at the executives of a failing business. These guys should be walking the street looking for a job. They are total failures. What does the rest of the world think when they hear about the blatant corruption in Washington and in our financial sector. I have been studying history lately and there has always been a lot of it in our government but I was hoping to see Obama actually make some changes.

Anyways, I digressed. I have stopped listening to the news because it it too sad. When I am sad, my kids are sad so I need to turn it off for while. I hope there is still some government officials out there that will fight to clean up current mess. I will focus on raising balanced children who, hopefully. will make a difference in the future. We will see if writing about it on this blog will help me be a happier person or will I just spend more time thinking about scum like AIG.

As an Obama supporter, I am rapidly losing HOPE that Obama is going to establish a high level of ethics in our government. Every day I hear more about the horrible PORK and unnecessary spending that our current administration is loading on the taxpayers. Already, the main word I associate with Obama is PORK. The Original Obama HOPE poster was illegally copied from an AP artist so I am not sure who will hate my version more, the original artist or the artist who stole the work. Here is my interpretation of the Obama HOPE poster based on the recent bailout package with over 8000 PORK attachments. It is an embarrassment to me as a democrat.
During the past 8 years, Bush established a new low for leadership by using Terrorist fear to manipulate the public so he could do unethical and immoral things. I was hoping that the Obama administration would show the republicans how to govern for the people and not for self interests. What actually has happened is that now the democrats are using Economic Fear so they can manipulate the public for their own self interests.

For the first time every, I wish we had a third party choice. One that did not govern using corruption, lies, payback and PORK.
Mr. Obama. You should be ashamed. I thought you were going down in history as new type of president. I was wrong.

Now that I have 2 kids, I am much more aware of the world and how it affects them. During the last couple decades, there is another area where ethics have been the lowest priority and money has been the highest; Marketing. Recently marketing has been taken to a whole new level.  Unethical marketing companies have found that a huge number of American suffer from low self esteem. Now they have practically perfected using this weakness to trick people into buying stuff.  In hundreds of subtle ways, they tell everyone that you can’t be happy unless you own our special piece of junk. These people have helped drive anti-depressant usage to record levels by making everyone think the are incomplete because they don’t own everything they see on commercials. When I comes to my kids, I want to protect them from being manipulated.

About 10 years ago, a small company called Sonic Blue developed a product that helps regular people battle the unethical marketing companies. I think the Replay TV is the best consumer electronics product ever sold. I would rank it up there with the Iphone (but for a different reason) as a great product. The Replay TV is a personal video recorder that detect inaudible signals that are part of the video transmission and uses this information to automatically skip from the beginning to the end of each group of commercials. It does this seamlessly about 95% of the time. I purchased one of these products 9 years ago, hoping that the product would work for 3 years before the evil commercial companies would sue the Sonic Blue out of business.  The product has worked perfectly now for 9 years. My kids have almost never seen a commercial and it has had a major effect on them.

Last Christmas, we were out with friends discussing Santa and gifts for the kids. Our friend’s kids had huge lists of commercial products that they wanted from Santa. My kids did not know what to ask for. My daughter wanted a big flower that she could sit in. Because of the Replay TV, her mind was not full of desire for disposable junk and other things that marketing companies tricked her into wanting.

During the past year, I purchased 2 more Replay TVs to keep in case my current one eventually fails. I got them on Ebay for $175 with a lifetime subscriptions so there are no monthly fees to get the programming guide. Since they use the same database as TiVO, they should continue to work for years. The later versions have additional features like video sharing. The newer product can send video to your computer over your home network, where you can save it. You can also download videos (that others have recorded on their Replay TVs) from the web at DVarchive.org and send them directly to your TV.

TiVO is a far inferior product that has been well marketed so they have dominated the standalone PVR market. The Replay TV is one of the best consumer products ever build but very few people know about it and the unethical marketing organizations like it that way. If you want to live the commercial free lifestyle, buy a used Replay TV with a lifetime subscription. It can really change the way you your kids see the world, it saves you time every day (watching a one hour show in forty minutes) and it helps keep the marketing companies out of your head.

Is Obama an Atheist? Is he a Muslim? Is he a Christian? It really doesn’t matter. What really matters is that:

• He believes in the separation of church and state
• He establishes a new level of ethics for the US.

This country was founded on religious freedom. Not just the right to worship Christ but the right to worship anyone or no-one. This distinction is so important. The day after religion was invented, corruption of religion began and arrogant power-hungry unethical individuals have been trying to use religion for their personal benefit. If these unethical individuals get enough power in political circles, they usually try to marry religion and politics together for their own self-interests.

Religion and Politics seem to have 2 things in common. To get to the top, you have to leave your ethics behind you. That doesn’t mean that the people at the bottom don’t have the highest ethics. All over every world, there are people working at the bottom for the common good. With a few possible exceptions, very few of those people who manage to make it to the top still have the common good at their main focus. If you study the history of England, you will see how time and time again, the Christian religion was used as a tool of government to do unspeakable thing to the common people. The last 8 years of corruption and manipulation in the US (God told Bush to go to War) show that the US is not much better.

Today, we have HOPE. More than anything I HOPE that we will see ethics in government and that Obama is not just another politician advancing his personal agenda. Up to this point, it is unclear. I HOPE he will establish himself as an ethical leader.

I had Hoped for a clear definition that the Democratic Party would establish new standard for ethical governance, instead they voted themselves a 90,000 petty cash raise. They packed the bailout bill with so much pork it seems like this is continuation of the Bush Administration’s fun and games with taxpayer’s money.

Please Mr. Obama, Everyone is looking at you to establish ethical standards for the entire county and the world.

You can go down in history as “first and worst” black president or your can show the world that the US still has some ethics.

I HOPE you can do it or we are all in deep, deep trouble.