random neuron misfires

I received this in my email this morning, and found that it was legit, from his website. I’m reposting it here (hyperlinks added by me).

Friends,

Everyone said the bill would pass. The masters of the universe were already making celebratory dinner reservations at Manhattan’s finest restaurants. Personal shoppers in Dallas and Atlanta were dispatched to do the early Christmas gifting. Mad Men of Chicago and Miami were popping corks and toasting each other long before the morning latte run.

But what they didn’t know was that hundreds of thousands of Americans woke up yesterday morning and decided it was time for revolt. The politicians never saw it coming. Millions of phone calls and emails hit Congress so hard it was as if Marshall Dillon, Elliot Ness and Dog the Bounty Hunter had descended on D.C. to stop the looting and arrest the thieves.

The Corporate Crime of the Century was halted by a vote of 228 to 205. It was rare and historic; no one could remember a time when a bill supported by the president and the leadership of both parties went down in defeat. That just never happens.

A lot of people are wondering why the right wing of the Republican Party joined with the left wing of the Democratic Party in voting down the thievery. Forty percent of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans voted against the bill.

Here’s what happened:

The presidential race may still be close in the polls, but the Congressional races are pointing toward a landslide for the Democrats. Few dispute the prediction that the Republicans are in for a whoopin’ on November 4th. Up to 30 Republican House seats could be lost in what would be a stunning repudiation of their agenda.

The Republican reps are so scared of losing their seats, when this “financial crisis” reared its head two weeks ago, they realized they had just been handed their one and only chance to separate themselves from Bush before the election, while doing something that would make them look like they were on the side of “the people.”

Watching C-Span yesterday morning was one of the best comedy shows I’d seen in ages. There they were, one Republican after another who had backed the war and sunk the country into record debt, who had voted to kill every regulation that would have kept Wall Street in check — there they were, now crying foul and standing up for the little guy! One after another, they stood at the microphone on the House floor and threw Bush under the bus, under the train (even though they had voted to kill off our nation’s trains, too), heck, they would’ve thrown him under the rising waters of the Lower Ninth Ward if they could’ve conjured up another hurricane. You know how your dog acts when sprayed by a skunk? He howls and runs around trying to shake it off, rubbing and rolling himself on every piece of your carpet, trying to get rid of the stench. That’s what it looked like on the Republican side of the aisle yesterday, and it was a sight to behold.

The 95 brave Dems who broke with Barney Frank (Wikipedia) and Chris Dodd (Wikipedia) were the real heroes, just like those few who stood up and voted against the war in October of 2002. Watch the remarks from yesterday of Reps. Marcy Kaptur (Wikipedia), Sheila Jackson Lee (Wikipedia), and Dennis Kucinich (Wikipedia). They spoke the truth.

The Dems who voted for the giveaway did so mostly because they were scared by the threats of Wall Street, that if the rich didn’t get their handout, the market would go nuts and then it’s bye-bye stock-based pension and retirement funds.

And guess what? That’s exactly what Wall Street did! The largest, single-day drop in the Dow in the history of the New York Stock exchange. The news anchors last night screamed it out: Americans just lost 1.2 trillion dollars in the stock market!! It’s a financial Pearl Harbor! The sky is falling! Bird flu! Killer Bees!

Of course, sane people know that nobody “lost” anything yesterday, that stocks go up and down and this too shall pass because the rich will now buy low, hold, then sell off, then buy low again.

But for now, Wall Street and its propaganda arm (the networks and media it owns) will continue to try and scare the bejesus out of you. It will be harder to get a loan. Some people will lose their jobs. A weak nation of wimps won’t last long under this torture. Or will we? Is this our line in the sand?

Here’s my guess: The Democratic leadership in the House secretly hoped all along that this lousy bill would go down. With Bush’s proposals shredded, the Dems knew they could then write their own bill that favors the average American, not the upper 10% who were hoping for another kegger of gold.

So the ball is in the Democrats’ hands. The gun from Wall Street remains at their head. Before they make their next move, let me tell you what the media kept silent about while this bill was being debated:

1. The bailout bill had NO enforcement provisions for the so-called oversight group that was going to monitor Wall Street’s spending of the $700 billion;

2. It had NO penalties, fines or imprisonment for any executive who might steal any of the people’s money;

3. It did NOTHING to force banks and lenders to rewrite people’s mortgages to avoid foreclosures — this bill would not have stopped ONE foreclosure!;

4. It had NO teeth anywhere in the entire piece of legislation, using words like “suggested” when referring to the government being paid back for the bailout;

5. Over 200 economists wrote to Congress and said this bill might actually WORSEN the “financial crisis” and cause even MORE of a meltdown.

Put a fork in this slab of pork. It’s over. Now it is time for our side to state very clearly the laws WE want passed. I will send you my proposals later today. We’ve bought ourselves less than 72 hours.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com

I was asked this question from one of the conductors on the departing train home late this afternoon… the same conductor who was on my arriving train early this morning;

“So how was YOUR day”?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s how my day went:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Stocks skidded Monday, with the Dow slumping nearly 778 points, in the biggest single-day point loss ever, after the House rejected the government’s $700 billion bank bailout plan.

The day’s loss knocked out approximately $1.2 trillion in market value, the first post-$1 trillion day ever, according to a drop in the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000, the broadest measure of the stock market.

Actually, I spent the majority of my day in back-to-back meetings with only 1 hour of my day free to schedule with my own work (which included inhaling a lunch in that 60 minutes somewhere), and then back to another 1-hour meeting with another project team.

If you haven’t already guessed, I work in Manhattan for one of the largest (remaining) financial services institutions downtown.

Tomorrow should be fun. Sigh.

“One often meets his destiny
on the road he takes to avoid it.”

Here was how my Saturday morning started when I was cooking us breakfast and some lunch for our picnic.

“Daddy?”

“Yes sweetheart?”

“You cook the best food in the whole world!”

“You like the way I cook for you?”

“Daddy. You’re not a cook, you’re a chef!”

Sigh. Her words could have melted titanium on that day. Seryn rocks my world.

It’s not too hard to see you left this inside me.
This new emotion that I didn’t know I needed.
Thank you for teaching me that I could never trust you.
The day will come when I can ask you why.

— “Heal In Time”, Dark New Day

For some reason, I’m wide awake at 2:30am, after getting up at 7am Sunday morning. I’ve been exhaustingly-busy all day today running around doing errands and exercise and cleaning up my living space… but I’m still wide awake.

19 hours awake and still going… and I have to be out the door by 7am to catch a train to NYC in just over 4 hours.

I just noticed the new WordPress v2.6.2 is out. I guess I’ll upgrade all of my blog sites to that version and kill some time before I have to begin another Monday morning in the office.

2:48am, and all 14 blog sites are now updated with the latest core version of WordPress.

Maybe my body will finally call it quits and I can get a little bit of sleep on the train.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand, and very poignant given our current situation in the Middle East and in our own economy:

“The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

“I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life…. It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

“There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.”

“Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.”

“Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.”

“Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.”

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”

Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.

“Your phone conversations should be those wee hours of the morning type – when you talk about everything under the sun, from your favorite color to your dream house to which super power you’d choose if you could pick only one…

They shouldn’t be spent rehashing some misunderstanding earlier in the day or establishing parameters for how you are to speak to each other so that the other doesn’t get upset.”

How true, how true.

It’s been an interesting last couple of months for me since my last few posts… A lot has changed and I’ve been exposed to a LOT more people than before, on a very regular basis.

Across the board, what I’ve found is that there is a very large percentage of people who are “takers”; people who exist solely to try to drain the life-force of others, to (falsely) make themselves feel stronger in the process.

These people don’t just accept or receive what you’re willing to offer them, they expect, require and take it from you. These are the same people who don’t give at all, or reciprocate anything in any way. Take, take, take. That is their mantra.

• People who lack a spine and respect, honor and discipline in their lives. They don’t do what is right because it’s right, they do it because they expect something larger in return.
• People who can’t even be honest with themselves, yet require and demand forthright honesty from others.
• Hypocrites that live by one set of rules, yet demand that others live by another, completely incompatible set of rules.
• People who open their mouths and deliver nothing but hurt. Every single thing out of their mouth is hurt. In reality, they’re the ones hurting deep inside, and they lash out to keep people from getting close enough to see it.

It’s pretty consistent across the board.. in my experience and very broad sample set. Something like 80%-90% of people that I’ve met in my life across all manner of lifestyles, locations and industries share these “traits”, and it is really unhealthy to be around; physically and mentally.

With the economy rapidly sliding down further into the blackness, more and more people are pulling back into themselves, becoming more and more selfish and they’re just making the problem a lot worse.

I’m not going to expose myself or my daughter to these people, and I’m aggressively making changes in my life to put myself (and my daughter) among groups of people who do not exhibit these “damaged” qualities.