Finding Balance

Burping Luke

There are ways of knowing beyond the logical and empirical. We can know things in our hearts with certainty. Most of you probably understand this already, but I’m just getting used to it, having overused my brain and underused my heart for most of my sixty-two years. I’m striving for more balance during my final years on this side of the turf and my grandchildren are helping me in that effort.

Young children operate mostly on a feeling level and I’ve been spending lots of time with four of them - all under four years old. They require close supervision until their judgement develops and this will come about largely by making mistakes. My job as their grandfather is to let them do so, but not hurt themselves too much while they’re at it - then encourage them to think about their experience. I help them think and they help me feel as I watch them become completely absorbed in their play with each other. We also dance a lot.

Claire catching snowflakes

My grandchildren are out of balance too, but they’re supposed to be at their age. Much of their play is fantasy and quite magical. I’d mostly forgotten that realm and it’s nice to be reminded of how it feels as they involve me in their world of make-believe. It’s a balm for the soul. They pretend to shop for groceries and pretend to cook dinner. They help me when I cook for real too. It takes longer, but I like it better. They can’t chop vegetables yet, but they can put them into the saucepan after I do. Note to self: buy more string beans so they can snap them.

Luke and Henry

The twins will be a month old this Friday and they’re all feelings. They nurse and sleep mostly, but lately they’re capable of sustained eye contact. Henry, the younger by 32 minutes, smiled last week while we were looking intensely into each other’s eyes. It wasn’t a gas pain either; it was a genuine smile. It’s going to be interesting to observe their development while we’re living under the same roof, especially from a nature/nurture perspective if the obstetrician who delivered them is correct and they are identical twins - but there I go again being analytical. They look similar but are not difficult to tell apart. Luke has a narrower face and thicker hair than Henry. The obstetrician said they shared one placenta and are therefore identical, but Annie said two placentas can fuse sometimes and maybe that happened in this case. Time will reveal the truth.

Introvert Claire at her third birthday

The girls are verbal and quite different from one another. Claire, the three-year-old, is a thoughtful introvert, not unlike this writer. Her two-year-old sister, Lila, is outgoing and more playful - and determined to do whatever her older sister does. They quarrel over dolls and other toys and I sometimes function as referee, even pulling them apart physically occastionally. There’s a lot of dancing, picking up toys, wiping bums and emptying the potty chair, reading “Little Golden Books” and Berenstain Bears,” watching “Dora the Explorer” and “Winnie The Pooh,” coloring, going for walks and to play-group, and doing crafts. I even learned to brush hair and make pony tails that stay put for hours in their very fine hair.

Claire and Lila out with the dollies

With the boys, it’s wiping their smaller bums, burping them, keeping them awake to establish a sleeping schedule, and assuring my daughter, Annie, that it will eventually get easier as she nurses the two of them simultaneously. Then, realizing there are good reasons we have children when we’re young, I have little trouble falling asleep at the end of the day.

On the potty chair

Three days and two nights, paternal grandparents Roger and Chris come over and spell my wife and me and we go to our city house for a rest. They put in as much time as we do and thank God for them. Other extended family come when they can - a day here and a day there. Many of Annie’s friends have been sending suppers for all of us and I’m tasting some very creative cooking.

When the time comes for all of them to move back into their own home I’ll miss them - and I’ll be a better man, or more balanced at least. It’s happening already.

Genius And Schools

Did I need college to become a teacher? Yes and no. Yes, because college degrees were required for a teaching license. No, because it took time to unlearn university thought patterns that inhibited good teaching.

Colleges in the late 20th century and early 21st can be stultifying, especially for highly-intelligent and imaginative people. I do not claim to be such a person, but I’m smart enough to recognize that some brilliant Americans kept themselves unencumbered by formal education and the rest of us benefited. Two well-known examples are Thomas Edison and Bill Gates, but a couple of local examples are illustrative as well: Philo Farnsworth and Rufus Porter.

Bill Gates

Edison and Gates need no introduction, nor any description of what resulted from their genius. Philo Farnsworth and Rufus Porter are less well-known and both have connections here in western Maine where I live: Farnsworth invented the electronic television and held over 300 patents. Porter is best known as a painter of portraits and murals, but he was a prolific inventor as well. His inventions include the revolving rifle, the rights to which he sold to Samuel Colt who then became famous for producing the first revolver handguns. He designed, built, and flew an airship 240 feet long and founded Scientific American magazine.

Philo Farnsworth

Philo Farnsworth was born near Beaver Creek, Utah in 1906, but later in life lived for several years in Brownfield, Maine. He invested in his property there and in a business venture in Fryeburg. He was burned out in 1947 by the devastating fire that destroyed most the the town and moved on. His son, nick-named “Skee,” still uses the property.

Rufus Porter was born in Boxford, Massachusetts in 1792, but his family moved to a part of Denmark, Maine that is now part of Bridgton, Maine when Porter was a boy.

Rufus Porter

My contention here is that because all four lacked formal education, they weren’t encumbered by contemporary thought patterns. They weren’t burdened by notions of how they were supposed to think. They weren’t fitted with intellectual blinders by the academy. They didn’t have to complete a rigid course of study and, consequently, weren’t bound to think along a rigid course. They didn’t know how they weren’t supposed to think, so they let their thoughts go wheresoever they would. The rest of us are beneficiaries of their lack of formal schooling.

Rufus Porter Mural

Thomas Edison had three months. Rufus Porter had six months (at our local Fryeburg Academy). Philo Farnsworth went to high school, was accepted at Annapolis but didn’t attend. Bill Gates had a couple of years at Harvard before he dropped out.

Another Rufus Porter Mural

From his biography on the Rufus Porter Museum site we learn: “[Rufus’s] sole teacher was the Rev. Amos Cook [at Fryeburg Academy which he attended for six months at age 12], and he never had formal instruction thereafter. He profited from independence of the self-taught, though lacking disciplines of scholars. The narrow prejudices and conventions escaped him and he became the most progressive American of the 19th Century as he developed his ideas from within.”

Rufus Porter Airship Design

From Wikipedia, we learn: “When [Bill Gates] was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer.”

Harry Truman

Opinions vary as to who were America’s greatest presidents, but most lists would include Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman - neither of whom went to college.

No schools at any level have a monopoly on learning. As their control by unions and government increase, costs go up and effectiveness goes down. Nowhere is this more true than New York City where they spend more than $20,000 per student per year but, according to CBS New York, 80% of high school graduates are illiterate. Taxpayers should insist on educational vouchers to smash the government/union monopoly.

As an educator for thirty-six years, I believe the US Department of Education should be eliminated but for one function: it should decide on a minimum set of skills for each grade level and develop tests to measure them. The tests should be voluntary for each school district. If people don’t want to know how their community schools measure up, it would be useless to pour   state or federal money into them. They have to want to fix themselves before they’ll be any progress.

As long as their children can pass tests of basic skills appropriate to their age level, give parents vouchers for ½ to ¾ of local per-pupil costs to use on any educational strategy they wish. If parents want to home-school, fine. If they want to pool that money and form independent schools, let them.

The Women's Medical Society

“The Women’s Medical Society.” That’s what Dr. Kermit Gosnell called his Philadelphia “House of Horrors.” Jury selection for his murder trial began last Monday and we have to wonder how much attention it will get from the Mainstream Media (MSM).

My guess is little or none. Abortion is sacrosanct for liberals in control of what we see on network news - and of what we don’t see. Abortion is foremost in the pantheon of “women’s rights” and must be protected from public scrutiny. Gosnell is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder after a police raid three years ago on his “Women’s Medical Society.” He’s charged with killing babies, but isn’t that what all abortionists do? Why single him out?

We would never have known about the horrors Dr. Gosnell was perpetrating on women and their babies unless Philadelphia police had raided Gosnell’s “clinic” looking for evidence that he was selling prescriptions for oxycontin. What they found was a charnel house. The Report of the Grand Jury states:

When the team members entered the clinic, they were appalled, describing it to the Grand Jury as ‘filthy,’ ‘deplorable,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘very unsanitary,’ ‘very outdated,’ ‘horrendous,’ and ‘by far, the worst’ that these experienced investigators had ever encountered.

 Then it gets worse:

There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.  . . . The search team discovered fetal [human] remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic – in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers. Some fetal [human] remains were in a refrigerator, others were frozen. Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood that at least 10 to 20 percent of the fetuses [babies] were probably older than 24 weeks in gestation – even though Pennsylvania law prohibits abortions after 24 weeks. In some instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal [baby] skulls. The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses [babies].

The DA’s office estimates that Dr. Gosnell “took in as much as $10,000-$15,000 a night, mostly in cash, for a few hours of work performing abortions [killing babies]. And this amount does not include the money he made as one of the top Oxycontin prescribers in the state.” At Dr. Gosnell’s house “they found $240,000 in cash and a gun.”

Gosnell wasn’t a skilled doctor - a product of Affirmative Action? He lacked the surgical expertise to legally perform partial-birth abortions in which the baby is delivered but for its head which remains inside its mother. He was supposed to puncture the lower back of the baby’s skull and insert a tube to suck out its brains before it was fully delivered. Instead, he just delivered the baby alive and then killed it, which is illegal. That’s first degree murder as the Report states: “ . . . [Dr. Gosnell] killed live, viable, moving, breathing, crying babies. He killed them by cutting their spinal cords after their mothers had delivered them . . .”

But really, what’s the difference between what Gosnell did and what many other abortionists do around the country? Planned Parenthood clinics have sanitary facilities and licensed staff but are they not also houses of horror? Perhaps their doctors have the skills to suck baby brains out the way the law requires, but does that make them any less horrific? For low-information voters who may be reading this column, abortion law dictates that a baby lacks human rights so long as its head is still inside its mother, so it’s not murder to kill it at that point. It’s a “women’s health” issue. But it’s first degree murder to do it the way Dr. Gosnell did it. Is one more gruesome than the other? Not to this writer.

When President Obama was in the Illinois State Senate, he repeatedly voted against bills that would protect the lives of babies born alive after failed abortions. He believed they should be left to die without medical assistance. That’s the prevailing view of the “Pro-Choice” community and those in the MSM as well. So let’s ask ourselves: should these babies be left alone to slowly die as Senator Obama wanted, or should they be put out of their misery more quickly by snipping their spines as Dr. Gosnell did?

As graphic testimony and pictures of dead babies are presented at the murder trial, what will the MSM do? Will they repeatedly showcase it on evening news broadcasts the way they did the Trayvon Martin case? The Newtown Connecticut shootings? Not likely. If it did, the horror of the abortion industry would be rubbed in America’s face.

So? Not gonna happen. You’ll have to Google it to know what’s going on.

No Moderates Please

Vatican City

The Mainstream Media (MSM) get very interested in the Catholic Church when they want it to pick a “more modern” or “moderate” pope. They’re running lots of pieces on what American Catholics want. For one local example, The Portland Press Herald - biggest newspaper in Maine - proclaimed “Maine Catholics hope for a younger, more moderate pope.”

As a Maine Catholic I had to comment, because what the MSM means by “more moderate” is a pope who won’t call abortion “murdering babies.” A “more moderate” pope would play down the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and would lift Pope Benedict’s ban on homosexuals being admitted to seminaries. A “more moderate” won’t believe as Pope Benedict does that the Church’s nightmare scandal in America and Europe was a homosexual priest scandal and not a pedophile priest scandal.

Benedict XVI

A “more moderate” pope would be “worth a bucket of warm spit,” as Vice President John Nance Garner said about the vice presidency. Revelation 3:16 says “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." A moderate pope is what the Catholic Church absolutely does not need, especially at this critical juncture. So-called “moderate” Catholics are people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, to name just a few and there is no shortage of their counterparts in the Vatican.

I’m fine with a young pope, as long as he is on fire in his faith. He’ll need energy to cope with the “moderates” from Europe and the United States because he’ll have a tough time with them. My advice to those who want the Catholic Church to moderate itself? Leave. Join the Episcopalians or the Unitarians.

Conservatives John Paul II and Benedict XVI were in office long enough to appoint lots of like-minded young cardinals who will be electing the next pope. When that guy, whoever he is, takes over, he’ll be reading the 300-page dossier prepared at the request of Pope Benedict to look into what’s being called the “Vatileaks” affair - when Benedict’s butler smuggled out some of his private papers. Benedict appointed three trusted cardinals to investigate this and they reported back last December.

We don’t know what’s in their report, but two Italian media outlets published articles last week purporting to know and they suggest that Benedict chose to resign after reading it. They allege the existence of a homosexual cabal or gay mafia within the powerful Roman Curia - governing structure of the Church in the Vatican - which conspires against Benedict.

That there’s a homosexual cabal in the Vatican wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That Benedict was shocked to discover it just last December I don’t believe for a minute. As Philip Lawler points out at Catholicculture.org:

Pope Benedict, who has lived in Rome and worked with the Roman Curia for more than 30 years, has surely heard the reports and the rumors. He cannot possibly have been shocked by the news that some Vatican officials are homosexual. ‘He is probably the last person who would be surprised by such a so-called revelation,’ remarked Jean-Marie Guenois, another veteran Vatican journalist and editor of Le Figaro.

That fits with my view. As former editor of The Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic newspaper and official media outlet of the Archdiocese of Boston, Lawler is quite familiar with the workings of powerful homosexuals in the Catholic Church. He wrote about them in a brilliant but depressing book entitled “The Faithful Departed.” Do you want to understand why Boston Cardinal Bernard Law resigned? Want to understand why New Hampshire’s Republican house majority leader called [then NH] Bishop John McCormack a “pedophile pimp who should have been led away from the State House in handcuffs with a raincoat over his head”? Read Lawler’s book. Lawler ran The Pilot from 1992 to 2005 during the thick of the homosexual priest scandal and knew both men very well.

You won’t see Phil Lawler on the “Today Show” or in any other MSM outlet. He knows what was really caused the scandal and so does Michael Rose, who in his book “Good-bye Good Men” claimed that upwards of 40% of American priests who went to seminary between the seventies and the nineties were actively homosexual. You won’t see Rose on “The Today Show” either. Their analyses don’t fit the MSM spin on the sex scandal set in motion by “The Boston Globe” in 2002.

John Paul II. No moderate he.

The Catholic Church in Europe and America has suffered severe decline under the leadership of “moderate” priests, bishops and cardinals. God save us from a moderate pope.

Dancing With The Girls

Tea Party

Been doing quite a lot of spontaneous dancing lately. It’s fun, good exercise, and not something I’d done much of since I was a teenager, but I’m liking it. Sometimes my granddaughters hold hands with me as we dance and other times we cut loose in what I guess you’d call “free-form.” It could be sparked by the intro score to “Shaun The Sheep,” or most any other kind of music that comes over various electronic media in the house. We sing a lot too, usually old favorites like “Wheels on the Bus” or “Old McDonald.” We’re having a grand time and we read a lot of books also, many of which I hadn’t read for thirty years. There are tea parties too, almost every day.

Babies in their bellies

It’s seldom dull here since we invited my daughter and her family to stay with us for a while. She’s having twin boys any day now, and looking more pregnant than any woman I’ve ever seen. With three-year-old Claire and two-year-old Lila - my dance partners - she can’t reasonably be expected to handle twin boys as well - not for a while at least. The boys’ names aren’t firm yet, but right now they’re Luke and Henry. Various suggestions included Daryl and Daryl or Hans and Frans, but those monikers didn’t seem to fit. We’ll know for sure what to call them when they finally emerge.

We eat ice cream too sometimes

We thought they’d come three weeks ago when she had contractions for several hours, but it wasn’t to be. If she hasn’t delivered by the time you read this, it will be thirty-nine weeks - a long time for twins. She’d like the pregnancy to be over and we’re all ready for the births - except for Luke and Henry that is, who are estimated to weigh around six pounds each at this writing. They’re biding their time.

Claire is three

Life is different for my wife and I, but it’s the same in a way too, because we were in this mode thirty-something years ago. But it’s soon to become still more different. Twins will be a new experience.

Lila is two

We moved our bedroom back downstairs where we slept when our own children were teenagers. Back then I wanted them to have to walk by our bedroom when trying to sneak in late. After they were grown and gone, we moved upstairs to the master bedroom. Now my daughter and family have the whole second floor with a couple of bathrooms to themselves, except for a small office where I’m writing this. The main floor now has lots of doll carriages, doll houses, a potty chair, puzzles, games, miniature table and chairs, as well as several other items too numerous to list. The girls are both housebroken, so there’ll be just the boys in diapers, a large supply of which have already been donated.

Eating lunch

After our nest emptied, It took my wife and I a while to get used to cooking for only the two of us. Now we’re cooking for six again and resurrecting old recipes. It’s like old times, but now we’re older.

Another tea party

My son-in-law has to work at his building and remodeling business and my wife has her counseling practice Mondays and Tuesdays, so I do most of my dancing and singing on those days. I can come up here to my office once in a while other days, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue banging out a column every week after the boys arrive. We’ll see. Other extended family members will hopefully spell us once in a while so we can get respite at our South Portland house.

I used to dance, sing, and attend tea parties decades ago, but not with as much abandon as I do now. I didn’t have nearly enough time back then and I enjoy it more this time around. It’s not what I expected to be doing when I retired but hey, there are worse ways to spend my time and energy.

Lila and mother with their babies

When the boys come, I’ll take on the added duty of gatekeeper. There are scores of well-meaning friends and relatives on both sides who will want to visit and see the twins, and my job will be to keep them away for four to six weeks as my daughter adjusts. She intends to nurse both of them and it will be interesting to see how that’s accomplished. Diaper-changing might cut into my frolicking a bit as well. I thought those days were behind me, but no.

At their cabin last summer

The little log cabin in the woods where my daughter and her family lived is too small now, so I guess I’ll leave the South Portland house alone for a while and continue renewing my hammer-and-saw skills helping my son-in-law expand the cabin - when I’m not busy dancing and singing, that is.

Vacation Cottage in the City

It’s strange waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where I am. The house in the City of South Portland, Maine my wife and I bought for an investment is coming along, and we’ve been staying there a couple of nights a week as we work on it, so when waking, I need a few seconds to get my bearings. (For readers not familiar with Maine, South Portland is a separate municipality just across the Casco Bay Bridge from better-known Portland.)

Portland from Mill Creek in South Portland

Usually it’s noise that rouses me at night. In the city, I think I’m hearing coyotes howling as they often do outside my bedroom windows in rural Lovell. Then, gradually, I realize it’s not coyotes I’m hearing; it’s sirens, which are just as common in the city as coyotes are in the country. When I realize where I am, I know in which direction I’ll find the bathroom.

My morning run

It’s a relatively quiet neighborhood, and when the leaves fall we can see Portland across the harbor to the north. Even when windows are closed for winter I hear foghorns and ships blasting a deep base as they cruise out of the harbor in the night. Far-off trains sound horns too and there’s a dull roar of airliners as they fly over on their way up the Fore River to the Portland Jetport. Never did I expect to enjoy these things after thirty-five years in rural Lovell, to which I considered myself totally adapted.

Kite Flying at Bug Light in South Portland

All those sounds are comforting in another way too. Together with the sound of automobiles and trucks, they’re the sound of commerce. As I walk from my house to my truck, I sometimes get a whiff of crude oil from a tanker unloading over at the Portland Pipeline As our economy continues to struggle, I like hearing and smelling products and people still moving as more than half of Maine’s economy is generated by the Greater Portland area.

Tanker unloading at night in South Portland

Cities used to repulse me. For more than a year, I had to commute in and out of Boston twice a day as a student and for my job there - and I developed a deep hatred for traffic. My twenty-mile commute from Lovell to Fryeburg and back for thirty-four years was peaceful and enjoyable - no traffic lights, few STOP signs, and very little traffic except during Fryeburg Fair. Now, however, my schedule is flexible. I can usually avoid morning and evening rush hours while I’m down there. The house is close to still-rural Cape Elizabeth with numerous ocean-front parks and beaches, and our neighbors are friendly. We bought it with the intention of fixing it up and renting it, but we like going there so much we’re just going to keep using it. Heating with natural gas is surprisingly cheap, especially with a new, state-of-the-art boiler and old radiators.

Mill Creek South Portland

And nobody knows me there. I’m almost completely anonymous as I go about. Once in a while I’ll bump into a friend or a former student living in that area now, but that’s it - and I like that. It’s also nice to come back to Lovell where, as they used to say on Cheers: “I wanna be where everybody knows your name.” It’s also nice being close to the airport and only ninety minutes to the Boston area where we have lots of relatives. And another thing: there are no bugs. No black flies. No mosquitoes, except a few near Bug Light at night where we enjoy “watchin’ the ships roll in, and watch ’em roll away again,” to quote Otis Redding.

Sunset over Portland from Bug Light

Interviewing for teaching jobs in Maine thirty-six years ago, my wife and I had a difficult time deciding whether we wanted to live on the coast or in the mountains. Both have their charms. Now, we have some of both, with a bit of city life thrown in as well.

Because They're Allowed To

Lots of things caused the Great Recession we’re in, but the biggest was the subprime mortgage crisis. And what caused that? Government meddling in the housing market, that’s what. Guess we’ll never do that again, right? Wrong. We’re at it again and this time it’s worse.

The full faith and credit of the United States of America - which used to mean something - is getting behind mortgages for up to 150% of what a house is worth. Yes, you read that right. Our brilliant federal officials are guaranteeing mortgages to underwater homeowners for more than their houses are worth! It was bad enough that our government caused the housing bubble by strong-arming banks into writing mortgages to people who couldn’t pay them back. Now that housing prices have tumbled and foreclosures have gone through the roof, our government is propping up what’s left of the housing market by pushing 150% mortgages with all of us on the hook for them.

Oh and by the way: we’re more than $16 trillion in debt. That means we’re the absolutely biggest debtor nation in history and getting bigger by the hour. So what are those geniuses we elected to the White House and Congress doing about this? Furrowing their brows and pretending to do something while making it worse all the time. They keep borrowing, and now 70% of our new debt is “purchased” by the Federal Reserve. For you low-information voters who gave Dear Leader his second term, here’s a little economics lesson:

When the US Government borrows money, it issues bonds. Think of these bonds as IOUs the government gives to people it borrows from. Remember the US Savings Bonds your grandmother gave you for your birthday? Those pieces of paper didn’t represent the US saving anything. They represented the US borrowing from your grandmother and promising to pay back whatever number of dollars it printed on the bonds. They were IOUs with interest. Got that? Our government was going further into debt and Grammy believed it would pay her (or you) back.

Well, that belief about the US Government’s ability to pay back what it borrows has been shaken severely. The rest of the world is nervous about the financial stability of the US Government and you should be too - but clearly you aren’t, or you wouldn’t have voted for the Dear Leader.

When Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner issues bonds, (tries to borrow more trillions of dollars), buyers say “Uh-uh. No way am I going to lend you any more money. Not for that low interest rate.” However, the US Government isn’t about to let interest rates go up because that would hasten its bankruptcy.

So what does it do? It hints to Bald, Bearded Ben Bernanke - Chairman of the “independent” Federal Reserve - that it needs more “Quantitative Easing.” And what the heck is “Quantitative Easing” you may ask? It’s Bald Bearded Ben creating trillions of dollars out of thin air. He’s printing monopoly money. When he denies that the “independent” Federal Reserve prints money, he’s not telling the truth. Oh, technically he’s right. The dollars he’s creating out of thin air are not paper dollars or what we call “hard copy.” They’re digital dollars.

We all know people with huge credit card debt. How did they get there? Did they pass hard-copy dollars when they bought things? No. They used digital dollars. When they reached their debt ceiling, what did they do? They got another credit card and rolled their debt over onto it. Did any hard copy dollars change hands? No. They continued doing this as long as they were allowed to. Let me repeat that: As long as they were allowed to. This is what the US Government is doing through the Federal Reserve - rolling old debt into ever-increasing new debt. How long will they continue doing this? As long as they’re allowed to.

And who allows them? We do.

Now think what would happen if people with huge credit-card debt obtained printing presses that could print dollars - or super computers that could create digital dollars - without going to jail. What would happen to our economy with all that funny money in circulation? It would collapse, right? But that’s what Bald, Bearded Ben Bernanke is going at the Federal Reserve in his third round of printing/creating dollars - that he calls “Quantitative Easing.”

Low-information voters gave us the Ivy-League educated, government leaders who assure us that all this is okay because they know what they’re doing. Barack and Ben must know what they’re doing because they went to Harvard, right? They’re smarter than the rest of us and we’ve put our faith in them, so everything will be all right, won’t it?

Dream on.

The economic mess Dear Leader inherited from Bush is nothing compared to what he’s inheriting from his own first term.