Author: Rev. Joe Dirt

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Bah…Humbug…

Folks around here have started decorating for Christmas. I, being who I am, have hung pictures of Scrooge and the Grinch on the outside wall of my cube.  I’ve also added a picture of a Santa Claus hat with a big diagonal slash through it.

This morning I added a stuffed Santa Claus that makes Scrooge like comments when he is squeezed.  He has a Christmas tree with a slash through it as part of his outfit.  Some anonymous person hung this on my cube wall last year.

My boss got a call at home last night complaining about my decorations.  My boss declined to identify the caller.  The caller told my boss, “You know that David is not of our belief.”

“What belief is that?”

“Well… he does not believe in Santa Claus” Continue reading “Bah…Humbug…”

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Do I have this right?

Do I have this right?

  • We are not going to extend unemployment payments…
  • We are going to raise the retirement age…
  • We are going to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction…
  • We are going to freeze Federal salaries…
  • We have made it tougher for individuals to file bankruptcy…
  • We are not funding schools to the point where we are no longer providing quality education.  Our children are falling behind the rest of the industrialized word…
  • We are thinking about cutting Social Security benefits…
  • The Republicans are trying to repeal the new health care law, weak though it was…

Yet the Republicans are going to hold our legislative process hostage until their rich benefactors get the tax break none of them need…

Do I have this right?

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Size Does Matter

How Germany got it right on the economy by Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post

The above link is an article on a different form capitalism, one that values social democratic ideals.  This is not the capitalism found in the good ole USA, but it is found in Germany.  Despite the bad economic times, and the raising economic power of Asia, their economy is still doing very well.

I have had some of the same thoughts as the author of this article, only mine were about farming.  I have occasionally had the same thoughts about small retail shops as Wal-Mart and other big box stores kill downtowns and mom and pop operations. I have just never made the logical progression to our manufacturing base. Continue reading “Size Does Matter”

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Just Imagine — No Taxes

There is personal wealth and then there is community wealth.  I read this a while back in a discussion of the growing wealth gap in this country.  One measure of wealth that has a lot to with the general happiness of a population is community wealth. This includes such things as parks, good roads, support of the arts, community buildings, education, etc.

I started thinking about this again as I have just come back from the Shelby County Clerks Office where I was registering my vehicle.   It is not an awful government building, I’ve been in a lot worse, but neither is it grand.  I still remember where they housed the County Sanitarians in Pulaski County, Arkansas.  It was an old hospital that had long been past its prime when the medicos abandoned it.  Now the County was trying to use it for office space.   It does seem to me that many government buildings get short shrift. Continue reading “Just Imagine — No Taxes”

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Buying Vehicles via Internet

I’ve bought two cars via the Internet now.  The first was a used car and the second was a new vehicle.

I found my 2006 Mazda MX-5 on Autotrader.com.  It was 9 months old at the time.  A guy about my age had it, but was marrying a younger woman with two kids.  He needed a family car, and was sadly selling his sports car.  She must have been quite a woman.  I checked the Carfax report and that came back clean.  The car was actually in Albuquerque and I was in St. Louis.  However, I have a cousin in Albuquerque who is a car guy and into sports cars.  He went by and took a look at the Mazda and drove it, and reassured me that it was in good condition.  I made a very good deal with the gentleman because as “they” say he was a very motivated seller.  That motivation and the fact that he had been having a hard time finding a buyer worked in my favor.  I hopped on a plane, Continue reading “Buying Vehicles via Internet”

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“Sometimes anal is good”

We had a minor crisis at work.  I work on the Oracle HRMS system for a utility.  After applying a patch and upgrade we could not transfer the time from the time card system over to the Payroll system.  People like to get paid so we were more than a little motivated to get it fixed.

We gathered together as a team to work on the problem which took more than a few hours to fix.  People were getting somewhat tense.  Programmers as a group are on the OCD side and when we get stressed it tends to bring out this side even more.

Somebody wanted to double check something a different way.  He apologized for being anal, but he said he needed to do this.

I remarked that, “Sometimes anal is good.”

The room all of sudden got real quite.

I realized what I had just said.

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Huge concentrations of wealth corrodes the soul of any nation

A couple quotes from the Nicholas Kristof editoral linked to below:

A Hedge Fund Republic? Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times

“But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?’

“I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.”

I’ve been watching and crying over this growing problem for years.  Part of me just cannot understand how in a democratic society where the vast majority of folks are in the middle and lower economic classes this happened.  After all 9 to 1 should win ever time, right?

In large part it has happened because both political parties are unabashedly junkies when it comes to financing political campaigns.  Continue reading “Huge concentrations of wealth corrodes the soul of any nation”