January 2004, Week 3

Monday  January 12, 2003

I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless: the poison is in the sugar.

Stanislaw Lec

My Glucose levels are coming down... that's good, If I can control this business with my diet I will be better off.

I took "B" to see BJ, he seemed to be in pretty good humor when he got out... he had a good day at school too.

The ACLU is defending Rush Limbaugh in that it is illegal to demand the medical records of anyone on a fishing expedition... It will be interesting to see how poor Limbaugh is going to explain this to his Ditto Brain minions after years of denouncing them as a bunch of Liberal Whacko's.

Isn't it interesting that the main thing John Kerry is being attacked for is the fact that he voted to allow Bush to attack Iraq... His sin is apparently that he believed the President of the United States. What a bunch of hypocrites.

Tuesday  January 13, 2003

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII--and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

Douglas Adams

I had to take Lumpy and "B" to the Orthodontist... it took an hour. Then I had to take Christian back to the house to get his backpack so I stuck him on the back of the Suzuki and took him to school... he seemed to enjoy it.

I talked to my (Distant) cousin Sally up in Presque Isle, Maine, this is the forecast;

Tomorrow:  Bitterly cold. Windy and partly cloudy with a chance of flurries during the afternoon. Dangerous wind chills may approach -50F. High -14F. Winds WNW at 25 to 35 mph.

... I can't imagine.

I met fella (80 years old) who I had talked to before. The last time I saw him he was riding a BMW RT1100, this time he was riding a Honda ST1300, talkint to him I found out he has a Honda Interstate and a Honda Hawk at home... I told him that I was looking for a BMW and asked him how he would compare the BMW and the Honda ST... he said the BMW is more fun to ride... but it has warts... the Honda is a dream to ride, handles as good or better, shifts cleaner and costs about a quarter as much as the Beemer to maintain... plus the initial outlay is about half... he talked me into the Honda. The clincher was wnen he told me that the Honda was so effortless to ride it was almost boring...

Wednesday  January 14, 2003

"From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone."

-- Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941), American author
 

I had to go to Kaiser, I have an infection in my eye and needed to get a prescription for a topical antibiotic. I took the bike, it sure is fun to ride.

We got a phone notice that someone was calling 900/976 numbers, not the first time that has happened here, apparently "B" spent 51 minutes on the "Date Line" $94.51. Stupid... SBC will take it off the bill but that's not the point at all....

My Glucose levels are all over the map... I am not sure what I am doing wrong. I hate the thought of calorie counting, I just find that to be such a pain in the butt that it makes getting through the day such a tedious drag it hardly seems worthwhile. I am staying away from foods that are bad for me, I am not drinking anything but tea and water damn, this Diabetes is a tedious pain...

Thursday  January 15, 2003

Your life lies before you like freshly fallen snow. Be careful where you step, for every step will show.

Today was tripping along swimmingly until Christy called at 1330 to tell me I had to have Cindy at Dr. S. at 14:00 I was in Palmdale at the time. I got Cindy to Chris at about 1355, I spun around to go get "B" and Christy took Cindy the next 12 miles into Lancaster... Another instance where I let my guard drop and deluded myself into believing I was in control of my life... damn.

My Glucose tests were better today, I need to get with my exercise program and stick to the diet... I think I will be alright.

Friday  January 16, 2003

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)

Bush is still polarizing America, Republicans and Democrats may as well be of different species. Bush says "Bring em on" and Republicans hear a decisive leader refusing to back down from a threat. Democrats hear a blowhard poking his finger in the eye of an enemy and issuing a challenge he won't have to back up. Bush says we will spend 200 billion to put a manned base on the moon and send people to Mars in 20 years... Republican see a daring visionary, Democrats see a politician looking to look like a visionary by making promises and commitments he won't have to keep at the same time he mortgages the future of their children.

Hector de los Santos passed away on Wednesday, complications from the Flu and Diabetes...

John wrote "..why can't God kill the dead-beats and keep the valuable people." I wrote back "If you were God, would you want a lot of deadbeats hanging around...?" I guess God is having some Fiber optics trouble and he needed a good man.

Saturday  January 17, 2003

Karen (Christy's sister) called last night and invited the family over to celebrate my in-law's 62 wedding anniversary... we went and had a good time but we had to leave in time to get Christian, Calie and Monica to their basketball game... The opposing teams didn't show up but they found a team from a local church group after school program. They had a good game, they actually won... the opposing team had kids ranging from about 10 to 15, our team was about the same, one kid was only a 4th grader, he was really cute

Sunday  January 18, 2003

Football

Mike

America's Red Ink

The International Monetary Fund has long been accused of failing to sound the alarm before countries with reckless fiscal policies implode. So it was nice to see staff members of the fund's Western Hemisphere department hold a press conference last week to publicize one nation's worrisome trends, which threaten foreign investors and the global economy.

Who was in for the scolding? Haiti? Argentina? Mexico? Not exactly. It's the United States the fund is worried about. An economic slowdown and President Bush's huge tax cuts conspired to swing America's federal budget from a surplus of 2.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to a deficit of some 4 percent in 2003. Add the states' own budget shortfalls and the country's trade deficit, the I.M.F. report notes, and the United States faces an "unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country."

Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and Donald Kohn, a Federal Reserve governor, have also railed against the deficit in recent days. But there is something humbling about hearing it from an international organization charged with monitoring economies on the brink.

In most countries, the I.M.F. is often viewed as America's agent, preaching the inconvenient gospel of fiscal discipline and austerity. There is a certain poignancy now in having the I.M.F. preach the so-called "Washington consensus" to Washington.

The I.M.F. forcefully argues that the United States will need to adjust taxes and spending to bring its finances under control; the recovery alone won't do it. The fund's report warns that America's profligacy and its voracious appetite for credit will drive up interest rates around the world, threatening the global economic recovery and American productivity growth.

Foreign investors are already selling the dollar in reaction to Washington's fiscal recklessness, but the fund warns that this selling could accelerate and create a currency crisis. It also notes that present trends pose dangers for the future of Medicare and Social Security.

Most damning of all, the report attacks the "complicated and nontransparent manner" in which the administration's $1.7 trillion in tax cuts were enacted, designed as they were to mask their true budgetary impact. The I.M.F.'s frustration is understandable. The United States has provided other nations with a terrible model of obfuscatory governance. Congress and the Bush administration enacted "phased in" tax cuts that were supposed to be retired in a decade, accelerated their phasing in and then, after they were priced under the assumption that they would fade away, pledged to make them permanent.

No wonder the rest of the world is appalled.