Juicing Up the Economy

The CEO of General Motors comes on the television and says they paid their entire loan plus interest five years ahead of schedule.  If this is true, we should be hearing more stuff like it.  You want to see the stock market take off like a kite in a November wind? Publicize that kind of thing everywhere, everyday, all day long.

We are living in a troubled world....

I sort of suspected it, but not until Father Murnane and the rest of the priests started asking at every mass for the prayers of everyone for all priests.  He didn't say for all religious...... brothers, deacons, nuns, lay-brothers and sisters.......just priests.  This has nothing to do with us praying for more vocations to increase the population of priests and nuns because people just tend not to do it anymore.  No.......we are even praying that Pope Benedict's burdens be lightened.  I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but if this pope had, at the time he was merely a prince of the church, done what he should have done, perhaps his burden wouldn't be so heavy now and a lot of children, now grown, would have been spared the tragic misery of violation.  I do not fear homosexuals in the priesthood.  They are adults who, if they have sex, have it with other consenting adults, unlike the monstrous pedophile, who takes advantage of his own authority and his victim's innocence for the selfish purpose of sexual gratification.  A priest having sex with another adult, regardless of gender, may be a no-no to the church and to society, but if the other adult consents, there is no crime.  Pedophilia is a crime...........period.

The church's role in all of this should be as any specialized employer, to screen applicants thoroughly and monitor any suspicious activity.  I don't mean a continuous witch-hunt, but I do mean that the church should have a strong role, as the arbiter of morality, in educating the public at large and children about the hazards of life including the potential exposure to sexual predators.

Be brave, O Bride of Christ, and make the effort to protect your children, not just figuratively, but literally.

It isn't funny at all...........

Ever since the crash of the plane carrying the president of Poland and his wife and a host of governmental officials, the Polish joke have been flying thick and fast........even from the Polish-American community.  I shall repeat NONE of them here.  What a horrific tragedy.  What happened to the time-honored practical practice of everybody taking separate flights?  Can we please go back to that?  I never want to hear about this kind of thing happening again.......... ever.

Getting out of the trouble we are in......

Sometimes I think that we may have progressed too far in the pursuit of free-time.  In the old days, say when our country was being founded, men and women pretty much spent all of their waking hours trying to stay alive.  It was a full-time occupation to keep some kind of shelter overhead, food in the belly and protected from predators, both the four-legged and two-legged varieties.  The mortality rate was high and life-expectancy was low.

There was no electricity and there were no appliances, so you worked til the sun went down and the light disappeared and you dropped from exhaustion.  There was no time for all the back-biting, lying and terrorizing of the public.  Of course, the fastest form of communication was drums and smoke-signals, so it might take a while for an idea to make around to the general public.  Rumor and innuendo were not effective weapons in the political world at that time because they required much more rapid communication forms to be meaningful.

Nowadays, we can say everything longer, louder, faster, and to many more people than ever before.  And, you and I know that if you say it long enough, often enough and to enough people.....you can convince those people of anything.

I say turn off the electricity, make everybody hunt and grow their own food, make their own clothes, let them barter for everything.  That ought to keep them busy enough to stay out of trouble.....at least...the kind of trouble we are in today.

Is there light at the end of the mortgage?

Who knows?  It took me five month in arrears before I could get any change.  Mind you, they were always thoughtful, supportive and considerate when I called, first Wachovia, then Wells Fargo.  Then I got a two thousand dollar a month reduction and a ninety day trial period.  We have been doing that for six months.  There hasn't been any real correspondence, just statements that show my ever-increasing arrearages.  It is sort of scary.  Now our president tells us that there are going to be pressures brought to bear and incentives for banks to move forward with the permanent loan modifications.  Maybe there is light at the end of this tunnel.
However, experience has taught us all the same thing. "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is."