Northern Ireland is playing host to a high-stakes sporting event:  Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama will see verbal combat in a heavyweight bout.  Neither one is John Wayne’s “Quiet Man.”  Neither combatant likes the other.  This time, Maureen O’Hara’s role will be played by Bashar al-Assad.  The stakes are high because Russia and the U.S. have been posturing and fighting in the Middle East for over fifty years, and neither one has delivered a knock-out blow.

Proud Putin is between a rock and a hard place these days.  The rock is the U.S. with its huge economy and Yankee ingenuity.  The hard place is China, whose leaders have morphed Mao’s brand of communism (never a copy of the Kremlin’s) into a fascist capitalism that’s engine for another huge economy.  How successful the latter will be in the long-run is an interesting question, but Putin’s immediate problem is how to turn Russia’s failed economy run by him and the rest of the Kremlin oligarchy into something positive before things get out of hand.

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You win a few and lose a few in this life—and you just hope by the end the balance is positive.  I’ve always felt this wonder about life and the universe around me.  If you haven’t looked in the mirror in the morning and asked “Why am I here?” something is terribly wrong with you.  My “why?” was often projected outwards, a pitiful soliloquy to an unresponding Universe that seemed to pose great mysteries I must strive to solve, a scientific sleuth tracking down answers.  I did my small part and relished the successes of others.  I’ve never stopped wondering.

I was an avid reader from the time I discovered comic books at age four—or was it three?  I wanted to fill in my own balloons and make my own comics.  My mother helped me.  My love of reading was helped along by an older brother who joined a sci-fi book club.  Writing and wonder made for a heady mixed drink that addicted me to both science and the written word.  You might know me for the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” (my interest in mysteries and thrillers came later) or “The Clones and Mutants Series” (futuristic or techno-thrillers), but “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” my Foundation series, is more closely related to those early days spent reading books from my brother’s collection (Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun were my introduction to the mystery genre).  By the time I ended junior high, I had forsaken those comic books and perused all the sci-fi books in our public library…and decided I wanted to be a writer.

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Whether good or bad, our economy depends on consumers.  When young people have to enter the working force with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, it’s a drag on the economy and detrimental to their future security.  How can we attack the problem?

First, let’s analyze the root of the problem: higher education in this country suffers from the same disease that the medical system does—the incorrect idea that colleges and universities have to make a profit.  Whoa! you say.  Aren’t they non-profit organizations?  Some of them say they are, but more and more are admitting their goal is to make money, especially online outfits and those “professional schools” who pay their professors very little and charge their students big dollars to “learn a trade.”

Even prestigious schools are in it for the money.  Harvard, for example, is connected to hospitals in Boston, MIT has its Lincoln Laboratory, Cal Tech its JPL, Berkeley its Lawrence Livermore, and so forth.  Institutes and national labs funnel taxpayers’ money into big universities, many of them private.  And these schools charge the most—obviously, prestige, earned or otherwise, is worth gold.  I’m not saying that a full professor at MIT or Harvard makes a hefty salary compared to a corporate CEO, but they’re both overpaid.  Academia also sports the tenure system—there’s a lot of deadwood among those tenured professors.

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September 11, 1973, a tragic day for Chile.  A CIA-engineered coup brought Augusto Pinochet to power.  Following in the steps of Nazi-lover Stroessner in Paraguay and blazing trails for Argentina’s military junta, the Generalisimo was evil incarnate.  His and his evil twins’ fascism in southern South America set a new standard for torture and killing.  If there is a Catholic hell, he is probably the Devil’s right-hand man.  As in Argentina, everyone that crossed his regime was declared a communist or Jewish terrorist, brought up before a military tribunal, if they were lucky, tortured in jail, and dumped into mass graves with other bullet-riddled corpses.

During most of the second half of the 20^th century, anti-communist paranoia reigned supreme in Washington D.C.  Starting with McCarthy, many politicians made their names by jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon.  Nixon made his name in trumped-up proceedings in Congress, playing his anti-pinko cards just right to eventually become president.  The Dulles brothers ruined the Middle East for years to come.  Reagan became famous by running actors out of the country and nearly destroying the University of California.  If you questioned American foreign policy, you were declared a puppet of Moscow or Peking.  Many progressives, myself included, learned to keep mouths shut and eyes watchful.  Anyone to the left of the Rotary Club was a bleeding-heart pinko communist.

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There are many important issues in the never-ending battle between the 99% v. 1%.  One such issue is likely to affect the 1% just as much as the 99%–the environment human beings live in.  Worldwide, many of the 99% live in poverty, experiencing war, famine, and filth without shelter and clean water.  This could be the future of the 1% too—when Gaia suffers, we all suffer.  Gaia, Mother Earth, or whatever you call Her, is currently being violently gang-raped by the 1% for power and profit.  Her silent scream is what I see in the famous Edvard Munch painting.

The 1% and its power brokers, i.e. most conservatives, America’s GOP, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are notorious Gaia rapists on America’s most wanted list of environmental criminals who are repeatedly indicted for their sociopathic abuse and lack of concern for Mother Earth.  To be fair, some born-agains, a large constituency of the GOP, have expressed concern about environmental issues.  Even some Republicans revolted against Romney’s leadership and voted for tax breaks for wind farms, a small victory probably aimed at vocally environmental constituents they need to appease in order to be re-elected to a second term.  Nevertheless, the political sycophants to the 1% generally turn a blind eye to Gaia’s rape.

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A nail in the coffin for the U.S. in the future is the ubiquitous use of offshore bank accounts by the 1%.  It’s not just banking for the rich elites either, as many companies like General Electric incorporate overseas.  The common goal is to avoid paying U.S. taxes.  It’s a similar goal for European companies that want to avoid paying taxes to the E.U. (GE avoids them both).  Whether companies or individuals, the effect is the same: to keep a country’s infrastructure running and the worker bees moderately happy as good and healthy consumers, taxes are paid by the 99%, not the 1%.  While governments struggle to keep their heads above water in these lean times for the 99%, more money is hidden beyond their tax horizons by the 1%.  The problem is not big government—the problem is the rich elites who socialize costs and privatize profits.

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Trekkies know that there were two starship Enterprises, the first named after the aircraft carrier and the second after the first.  I claim there are three.  In a few days, the true first starship Enterprise will end its life as a museum on the decks of the old aircraft carrier Intrepid berthed in New York City’s harbor.

The demise of NASA’s shuttle program ranks as one of the most asinine decisions the government has ever made in its mismanagement of science funding.  Another, of course, was the cancellation of the SSC (short for “Superconducting Super Collider”).  The first killed America’s capability to put an astronaut in space, thus all but ending an all too brief era of space exploration.  The second ended U.S. dominance in experimental particle physics.  The Higgs particle, if it exists, won’t be discovered by American scientists, at least not by those working in this country.

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Up to now, I’ve been confining my opinions on the lawsuit of the U.S. Justice Department versus Apple and the gang of five of the Big Six to my “News and Notices.”  While I’m definitely biased about this and my blog is basically op-ed, I started out thinking that this case is small potatoes compared to some of the bigger issues of our day.  Now I’m not so sure that the case is not a big, messy pommes de terre au gratin with lots of cheese where cleanup will be a challenge to any dishwasher, human or otherwise.

Let me elaborate on one compound word that is key here: price-fixing.  I didn’t quite understand where the government was coming from, but now I see the issues better.  Apple’s alleged behavior is ironically a 180-degree turn-around from their behavior with the music industry.  Steve Jobs’ company allegedly undercut record companies’ prices and forever changed the music industry.  What they allegedly offered to the Big Six publishers was a mechanism for the latter to avoid Amazon’s undercutting their prices—this is the agency model, where Apple agreed to sell eBooks at a publisher-determined price at their iStore as long as the publisher guaranteed that Amazon and every other online retailer couldn’t sell for less.  Amazon could sell the publishers’ eBooks (so they’re available for Kindle) but they couldn’t sell them for less (thus indirectly favoring the Kindle).

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#145: What’s next on my agenda?  While I’ve been thinking lately that my muses have discovered tasers, torturing me and Donna Carrick of Carrick Publishing to release my next books, I want to slow down a bit and think about what my next releases will be.  I have a plethora of old and new ideas.  It’s good to reassess which ones I will follow through on in the immediate future.  Here are some of my thoughts.

I liked both my old character, the DHS agent Ashley Scott, and the new one, Mossad agent Judy Epstein—two strong women you will find helping detectives Chen and Castilblanco in Angels Need not Apply (although Judy works behind the scenes).  Perhaps they deserve a more important role.  That would be something new to explore in my writing.  Although I haven’t neglected writing about strong women—Dao-Ming Chen and the two agents named above are but three examples—sometimes a character grabs a taser from a muse and goes at me too.

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It’s Saturday, December 31, 2011, and Mr. Obama has just given a New Year’s gift to terrorists.  Barack, the Avenger, just became Barack, the Santa Claus, with respect to Mr. Karzai and his entire corrupt government.  And Mrs. Clinton, his head elf, just goes along with it.  The Afghan leader, who knows he sits on a powder keg, is trying to make peace with the Taliban—our foreign policy gurus just helped him along the way.

Come on, Barack!  The friends of my enemies are my enemies—the Taliban showed their true nature many years ago.  They gave safe haven to al Qaeda members and terrorized and killed their own people.  They have killed our soldiers and civilian contractors whose only crime in that God-forsaken land was to work for the betterment of the Afghan people.  They have falsely accused men under their strict Sharia law and beheaded them.  They have stoned women who have been raped after accusing them of adultery.  They have killed girls whose only sin was wanting to study.  In brief, the Taliban are a blight on humanity, a pestilence that Pandora could have never imagined.

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