Knowledge and passion are a formidable combination.

We all knew Senator Ted Kennedy was dying. He made sure of that and used his terminal illness to publicize the cause nearest his heart: universal health care. Mr. Kennedy’s losing battle with brain cancer was as public as everything else Kennedy-related. His own attitude towards his date with mortality was that his death was no tragedy after a long and active life, but one more arrow in his quiver for fighting the good fight for the American people, the battle to get health care for every American as a fundamental right on an equal footing with those guaranteed by the Bill Of Rights.

Youngest son of a wealthy family, Ted Kennedy witnessed his eldest brother being killed in action during World War 2 and his other two brothers assassinated, one a president and the other trying to be. He ruined his own chances of ever gaining the White House himself by driving his car into a river in 1969, drowning a young woman and not reporting the incident for 10 hours, a shameful incident that threatened to ruin his career completely. Still, he managed to become the Senate’s most effective legislator and a champion of progressive causes, serving 47 distinguished years. His voice was consistently raised to champion causes that would benefit ordinary working Americans in spite of the great wealth into which he was born. He knew that social justice was for everyone.

No matter what the issue, Kennedy voted his conscience and was one of the few dissenters in either house of Congress to vote against the Iraq war, a position that has since been validated by events. And if people insist on branding him liberal, so be it, even though he was unusually adept at finding common cause and co-sponsors for his legislation from the ranks of his conservative “opposition.” So this American Dreamer was one who lived in the real world and acknowledged that politics is the act of the doable. Ted Kennedy got things done.

He introduced the first bill into the Senate to give every American health insurance 40 years ago. There were times when it seemed that he was the lone voice crying in the wilderness for health care reform while others abandoned it or buckled under to powerful industry lobbyists. Democratic President Clinton forgot about it after receiving an eye-opening defeat in the early days of his presidency. Senator Kennedy vowed to fight on, enduring 8 years of Bush-Cheney disasters, authoring the Patients Bill of Rights with Republican cosponsor Senator John McCain and important Education legislation during these years and keeping a light on for progressive thought.

When America finally got sick of the Neoconman bumblers and thieves and elected  Barack Obama our president, Kennedy was ready with advice and ideas about health care, seeing the opportunity to finally make this American Dream a reality. It became a knock-down-drag-out fight but Kennedy was more than up to it even as his days were numbered. The bill is before the Senate now, certain to pass in one form or another.

Whether or not this is the final solution to Universal Heath Care remains to be seen, but the important thing is that it will be on the books as the policy of the United States of America to care for its citizens’ health. It can always be reformed or amended as the need arises like any other program or legislation, but it will be the law of the land. Senator Ted Kennedy is the one man most responsible for this landmark bill, just one more battle for working people that Kennedy was in the thick of, raising his voice for yet another America Dream. He was not a perfect man, but he was a decent man, a hard working man and a complex and passionate American original whose like we won’t see again. So long, Senator.

It seems the more things change (hope and change, that is) the more they stay the same. It’s nice to know that President Obama is carrying on the proud Bush tradition of rewarding big oil (remember Halliburton and Dick Cheney?).

Obama just gave Brazil oil giant Petrobras (symbol PBR) $5 Billion dollars for offshore exploration and sending the stock skyward. Yes, Brazil is our strongest South American ally, but why? Maybe because George Soros is the single largest investor in Petrobras. Soros is also intimately associated with the left-leaning Air America Radio and  MoveOn.org website. Besides sending jobs overseas, Brazil has very lax environmental laws compared to the US.  Since oil is a fungible resource (the oil will go into a worldwide market), there’s no guarantee the oil will ever be used by US taxpayers.

Oh well, sounds like Obama continues to support big oil and send jobs overseas.

Ramblings from a Reformed Lefty

There’s no fool like an old fool, except maybe another damned old fool. They’re actually pretty much alike.

Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, has finally decided to get actual experts and scholars to review contributions to its pages, which sort of gets you wondering why they never did so in the first place. When any user can edit any entry in an encyclopedia, well, then it’s really not an encyclopedia, is it? More like playground for the ignorant and the playful. How else can one explain the paragraph on Mahatma Gandhi’s page about his 4 years in Miami as a balloon animal-twisting street mime? Or the line in Lincoln’s biography about him inventing velcro. That’s just not true! It was Zip-Loc bags that Honest Abe invented, everyone knows that. How about that entire entry on the country of Freedonia, a fictional nation from a Marx Brothers movie? Good trick to pull on all those sixth graders, though, when it’s time to make that school report on the small nation of their choice

Seems those fun days are over for those of us who enjoy editing encyclopedias with misleading or comic information. But wait! Wikipedia has not implemented this rule yet! It’s still in it’s final planning stages and won’t be put into place for several more weeks yet, plenty of time for people to have the honor of contributing to an encyclopedia without the benefit of having any letters after their name! PhD, shmee-hD! Let’s get busy here, and get our two cents in before the so-called experts take over! Hasn’t accuracy and detachment in journalism been rendered obsolete by the internet and the Misinformation Age? Why should encyclopedia authors get to lord it over us with their factual and precise content just because they know stuff, the snobby geeks?

Who can prove otherwise if someone claims that Aristotle was really Irish? And where’s the harm in claiming that the Peloponnesian Wars were fought over the proper recipe for souvlaki? It’s possible, and as good a guess as any. Let the new “expert” editors sort these things out. With 3 million entries and counting in Wikipedia, it will take them years and years and meanwhile your version of things will stand as the official one. How cool is that? So Google a subject dear to your heart and get busy! Insert the name of one of your neer-do-well ancestors into the history of some royal family or other and claim to be a Baron or an Archduke if you like. Anybody questions you, tell them to look it up in Wiki. “And call me Sir Jimmy!”

Or you could do the same to some billionaire industrialist’s family tree and show up at their lawyer’s office claiming your cut of the family fortune for long-lost cousin Loretta. Worth a shot. All they can do is say no, but even then if you want to sue the family your claim will carry the weight of inclusion in an encyclopedia. With any luck the jury will be pretty dumb and they’ll award you a few mil. At the very least maybe the family will give you a couple of grand just to go away and save them the legal fees. Either way, not a bad payday for a few minutes time having fun with your computer. Beats Twitter any day of the week.

If you’re the kind of person who just can’t stand to admit being wrong (and which of us isn’t?), well, now you don’t ever have to, do you? You know that long-running argument you have with your best friend about what is the largest ocean, where you insist that’s it’s not really the Pacific but the Caspian Sea? Well, Wikipedia can back you up on that with a few minimal changes to the entries on both bodies of water! So there! Or maybe you don’t agree with the accepted wisdom of any given subject, and damn the proof to the contrary! Just change the encyclopedia and now Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo and cotton candy is the best possible nutrition available.

In this modern age of the squeaky wheel getting the most grease even when it is already the greasiest wheel ever but has learned to squeak like a thousand rubber duckies over a loudspeaker, truth is now an elastic concept at best. Truth is what is repeated loudest and most often, and if we can back up our absurd claims with a few Google entries, then those claims become automatic facts. Look it up, pal! It’s a beautiful thing. We can now laugh at those earnest fools neglecting their Twitter accounts and chat rooms by sticking their noses into books and journals seeking the truth when they can simply create their own damned truth and have done with it. But time is running out, so get busy making it official that the Suez Canal was built by Druids and Leprechauns and the greatest person who ever lived was yourself. Wikipedia is about to take all our fun away, the spoil sports.

Humans and dogs are the only creatures who know how to be genuinely funny. The only question is: Who picked it up from who?

Good news, citizens! The financial wizards who keep track of such things inform us that The Great Recession is lifting. Of course these wizards seem to be the same bunch who stole all the money in the world last year after 10 years of playing Monopoly with everybody else’s dough, then proceeded to make the rest disappear, Presto-Change-o! So perhaps we should temper our jubilation a wee bit. So, why should we trust them this time around? Simple, because there is no one else! Other than a few mega-thieves who went to the slammer and one or two that got fired with mucho millions in severance pay, it looks like the same cast of characters is still in charge of all the money in the world, so that’s that. Might as well give them the benefit of the doubt, no? Anybody can have a bad decade, right? Right?

So, being that we’re going to be in the chips again real soon, might as well start planning to go all entrepreneurial again. Good old American ingenuity and sticktoitiveness ought to get the old markets booming again pronto. The dot com boys are salivating already, certain that their new web thingy will be the next FaceBook or YouTube and they’ll be raking in the billions in no time. Go for it, dweeb guys! Manufacturers are dusting off their machinery and planning exciting new lines of useless products to be foisted off on a gullible public. Lemon-scented denture cement, anyone? Cell phones that double as geiger counters? Move over, ShamWow! The possibilities are infinite in this day and age of digital miracles. But, like any age of innovation, some ideas are better than others. Steer clear of investing in these:

The iEye: The latest gizmo offered by Apple Computers, the iEye replaces one of your old fashioned organic analog eyes and fits neatly into the socket! You want Aps, you got Aps! You can not only see better but you can see for miles with the iEye telescopic lens and spy camera, and that’s not all! Phone calls, music downloads, GPS locator, video games, you name it, all your favorite applications operated on a virtual screen that appears inches from your face and operated by micro-implants in your fingertips. Twitter in your sleep! Guaranteed to match your remaining eye.

Bloodwater, USA: Exciting and lucrative careers beckon! Bloodwater USA, inspired by the successful private army corporations that made billions getting hired to fight wars and providing high paying jobs to trained killers, Bloodwater is designed to augment a different branch of civil service. What could that possibly be, you say? Two words: Private Firefighters! State and local governments are eager to replace this revenue-negative drain on their treasuries with private workers. The pay? Sky’s the limit! It’s amazing how quickly people will fork over their cash and credit cards in order to get the flames destroying  their homes extinguished ASAP! Now hiring.

Mop Socks: Clean and wax your floor while walking around your house! One-size-fits-all Mop Socks are made from sturdy, stylish and absorbent polyethylene resin that is soapy on the outside, dry and snuggly on the inside. Just dip one foot in soapy water and go about your regular morning routine, dragging your “dry foot” behind you. Repeat the process with wax-foot, buffing-foot in the evening (You’ll get the hang of it no time, ladies!) and your floors will stay clean and shiny with no extra work! The perfect solution for the Mom on the go. Comes in four designer colors. Coming soon: Duster Gloves!

The Home Orthodontist: Mom and Dad, what’s it going to be, a college fund for the kids or buying Cadillacs for know-it-all Orthodontists when Junior needs braces? Now you don’t have to choose! With the affordable and easy to use Home Orthodontist and a pair of needle nose pliers you can install the braces on your kid’s twisted teeth yourself! After all, it’s only wires and rubber bands! Follow our easy instructions and give them something to smile about on graduation day! Act now and get a complementary EZ Stitcher & Bone Setting Kit complete with hospital-grade suturing needle and Plaster of Paris!

Geek Whisperer: Job openings are starting to appear in this brand new category, with tech employers seeking individuals who can get through to their software engineers when they get out of hand. It seems that the geeks who come up with all those cell phone applications and video games sometimes get absorbed for days on end with Harry Potter movies, Twitter marathons and reading how-to manuals on dating real live non-inflatable girls. Techniques include repetitions of the phrase “dude… dude?… duuuude… dude!”, pizza deliveries, dismantling computers and challenging them to reassemble them and a lightweight rubber mallet to the back of their heads. Now hiring.

Baby Boomer Groomers: With the largest generation of Americans ever born getting decidedly long in the tooth, there will be an increasing demand for make-over specialists to teach these scruffy old hippies how to dress for a graceful old age. Baldies with red bandanas and ponytails, sagging cleavage flower children with by now unsightly butterfly tattoos beginning to resemble dying centipedes, tie-dyed T-shirt wearing tubbies and leather vest bikers driving minivans are finally realizing how ridiculous and downright creepy this all looks. That’s where Boomer Groomers come in, showing them how to look and act like proper grandparents so they can stop embarrassing their Neo-con Yuppie offspring. Training begins now!

The Euthanator: Die with dignity in the privacy of your own home! Face it Gramps, you’re old and in the way. That giant goiter on your neck isn’t getting any smaller, and neither is your enlarged prostate. And that nest egg you salted away for your golden years? Does the name Bernie Madoff ring a bell? So, before you get foreclosed on and dragged off to the poor house, die like a man in your own house! The Euthenator comes complete with a blank Last Will and Testament in case you’ve got two nickels left, a fluffy down pillow upon which to dream your final dreams and enough morphine to kill a moose. Shuffle off this mortal coil on your own terms. Get the Deluxe Two-Pack for mutual suicide pacts for you and the lovely wife! No prescription necessary. Made in Canada.

The way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach. Wrong organ, but close. Always acknowledge the obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has spent a leisurely summer doing what we always do; spotting trends, analyzing worldwide news reports and cultural shifts and then pointing out the obvious (we take our name seriously) to interested parties, albeit in a more relaxed way than usual in deference to the season. This has been an especially rainy summer in the Northeast, where DOPOTO headquarters is located, but plenty hot as usual, the odd weather indicative of nothing more momentous than just one of those things. Others would have the world believe that the inordinate amount of rainfall is indicative of some coming ecological or climatological apocalypse, but our dedicated research staff has found that to be as reliable as when many people complained that the moon landings 40 years ago changed the weather forever. Which is to say, unreliable.

While 40 years ago those reports were generated mostly by old ladies just for something to complain about or to make enough noise so that people would realize they were still alive so hold off on the funeral plans already, today’s ecological apocalypse Paul Reveres all seem to have some sort of psuedo-scientific axe to grind. Some were saying that the planet has been subject to more hurricanes, typhoons and other violent tropical storms than ever before and that their severity is increasing every year. It turns out there is really no way of knowing that for sure since measuring these things is only a fairly recent phenomenon and a process that has improved very quickly in the past couple of years, just like every other technical aspect of modern society. The Digital Revolution and the Information Age brings us amazing new devices and sources of information more rapidly than our ability to process them can adjust. So naturally conflicting schools of thought emerge as we struggle to keep up with the dizzying pace of our own inventions.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is human nature in this constantly changing world. We are a curious race of beings, eager to know what’s what about everything under the sun. And so we often take this quest to extremes and jump to conclusions that are not always justified. The only real reason we are aware of so many storms is that we only very recently gained the ability to count so many of them that previously blew themselves out without the benefit of human detection and measurement. The Department has long since established that trees that fall in the forest without people there to hear them do indeed make a sound. It is not always about us. There is no concrete reason to believe that we are subject to more or fewer storms than 200 years ago, when the method of remote storm detection for humans was having your flimsy wooden sailing ship sunk to the bottom of the deep blue sea with all hands and no one the wiser until Jaques Costeau came along in the 20th Century and put Davey Jones’ Locker on television.

But, as DOPOTO researchers and analysts have learned during our tenure as pointers-out of the 800 pound gorilla in the room, there are those people who cannot stand not to know about every mystery that has puzzled mankind since the dawn of time and so latch onto any theory that seems to explain these things, no matter how unrealistic or even outlandish, or worse, at least in this department’s admittedly biased view, contrary to the obvious. And so they gravitate to an explanation of why the sky is blue according to their personal bent, either religious, scientific or just for the sake of being a know-it-all-blowhard uninterested in actual truth as long as he or she is perceived as an authority in possession of knowledge above and beyond their peers.

Unfortunately, the rapid dissemination of information and the dizzying pace of technological advancement has produced no shortage of people who fall into the blowhard category, usually lazy minds that latch onto a piece of valid information or revealed truth but are too lethargic to explore a subject any further once they have formed a theory. They completely discount any new insights into their pet idea that might serve to contradict their notions. On such practices are built many fine religions and impressive political theories, but no valid science. Science (at the risk of being too obvious even for an organization that specializes exlusively in obvious) is the discipline of seeking provable truth. A true scientist always bows to the obvious and to solid proof, even though that proof may have just wiped out their life’s work and long-held theories, rendering their “knowledge” null and void. Plausibility cannot be confused with fact. That’s the risk a person takes when they enter any branch of scientific study.

Which is why science is a rare calling, since by definition the scientist is required to be the ultimate realist. A person with the most extensive knowledge is the person most aware of how little they really know for certain. The finest brain surgeon in the world cannot cure the common cold, a humbling realization. True scientists don’t leap to hasty conclusions, using terms like “tests indicate” or “results are consistent with” or “field study and experimentation points to” and avoid making definitive pronouncements until proof positive is obtained. True scientists don’t have the luxury the rest of us have, to be so certain of something without really knowing why. Which explains why there are so few true scientists. In this lighting-fast age of technology and information, at least human nature is our Rock of Gibraltar for unreasonable assumptions. Nothing much new to report under the sun in that regard. Besides, it’s late August, it’s hot as blazes, it’s sticky and humid and here at DOPOTO we are compelled to admit that we are just as brain-fried as anyone else at this point.

This has obviously been a half-baked speculative lazy-ass summertime doldrums report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

Always save the extra hardware. You just never know when you might need a wingnut.