Various Stuff Before I Start Cutting Wood Again

Not been doing much about writing this week.  My Mother had to have serious surgery on Wednesday.  Well, the surgery was to correct a serious problem, a seven centimeter aneurysm on her aorta, but the surgery itself wasn't apparently major  She is in Florida with two sister-in-laws and one brother.   I'm going down later this month.  The thing was found by accident when she went in to have x- rays for her back pain.  It turned out that the pain was being caused by the pressure of the aneurysm on her spine. 

At any rate the surgery took about an hour through the groin area, micro, I guess.  Out of the hospital by Saturday and back home.  Now if we can only get her to do something about her one eye (cataract which can be easily fixed, and then something about the fact that she is deaf as a stump, something that can also be easily fixed by out patient surgery) she'll be as good as a 75 year old.  I think eight-nine is the new seventy-five, isn't it?

I was drifting over the net and completely forgot that yesterday was the anniversary of Hiroshima:  Happy Nuclear Power Day.

Then I went to Executed Today a site that I "enjoy" starting my day with.  Kind of, oh I don't know, just interesting.  And found out that apparently there was a time in our history when a president did not feel able to go to war without congressional approval.  Now I do admit that we were apparently getting ready to kill each other at a rate we hadn't before considered possible, but still it is an interesting factoid, isn't it?

I have little or nothing to comment on the S & P downgrade with the two trillion mathematical error.  Still, I am kind of a little bemused by it all.  I am still reading as much as I can find out about economics, but perhaps the guy I work with said it all:  "Learning about economics right now, is as useful as learning about hydrology while you are going over Niagara Falls in a barrel."

I find it interesting that S & P is still considered an organization that has any relevance at all to anything at all in the economic world.  The other thought is how is it that these private corporations have the power to say whether or not a government's bonds are safe.  Added to the fact that since these corporations are licensed in the U.S.A., these guys should be concerned that today they could be dragged from their homes and kept in prison until they decide that they rating is going to be AAA.

We live in strange times.  Obama is not a particularly smart guy, but given the fact that he is surrounded by mental midgets, he appears relatively impressive.  I guess, I personally don't think so, but then I knew that there were no WMDs (an acronym I hate) before we invaded Iraq. 

I kept expecting the Media to recognize just how stupid Bush and his advisers were, but didn't happen.  My thought is that they are all so inbred at this point, that they are something like sheep in the intelligence field.  But with nice fluffy wool because that is apparently what they are bred for.  Not only that but I suspect that they actively seek to keep out those who see things clearly and are more intelligent then they are because smarter people in positions of power are a threat to the ruling class. 

As for their supporters generally, as they say half of the population is of below average intelligence.  Then there are those who simply feel a kind of need to tug at their forelock when their "betters" pass by.  And there you are.  A few outsiders are let into the class (Obama again) but they are the types who believe (or should I say BELIEVE) in the system as it is.  The same thing went on during the middle ages, but they had the advantage of continuous wars and disease to regularly cull the ruling classes and allow new blood in and even that didn't work for ever.