Mary ju wanna & Elephants

The good stuff

I don't care if you want to smoke weed or you don't want to smoke weed but there is an elephant in the room and it seems to be getting very little notice.
When I was eleven my father caught me lighting my first cigarette.  The match was already lit  but when I saw my father I put the match out.  He gave me a long non threatening look  and said, "OK light it up".  So I did and I took a mouth full of smoke, blowing it out without inhaling.  He said, "What's the matter with you.  That's not the way to smoke a cigarette."  Here he said, "Watch me."  He took my cigarette, took a big drag, and then rounded  his lips and blew some very perfectly round smoke rings.  He smoked cigars and I had seen him do it before.  It looked terrific.  Real cool.  He gave the cigarette back to me and I took a deep drag . . . I was still puking three days later.  I didn't smoke again till I was about fifteen.  And after that, my first and only weed tryout was not til years later.  I was an accomplished smoker by then and I could blow smoke rings just like my pop.  But, my first drag on a weed made me just as sick as my first cigarette, except the puking.  It only lasted about one very long, very painful puke.  

  In Colorado.  (Cartoon:Mark Brayer)

Before I got married I was the manager for the largest record store in Philadelphia.  High Point Record Shop, on 19th and Market Streets.  I was  hired away from my job at the Decca  Records distributor.  In less than a year I became the manager of the store. (Just bragging.)  While working there I made many fiends and they and some other customers invited me to a party on the weekend.  So I went.  It was held at a big hotel on Broad Street.  A mixture of musicians and some local entertainers were hosting the party and they had invited some locals and a musical group from Detroit, who were doing a gig   featured at one of our most advertised night clubs..  Everybody was talking about the 'shit' (the name for weed in those days) they had brought to the party and that it was the best.  No doubt about it, the way everybody was reacting, they were right.  When my turn to try it  came, I said, "No thanks, I don't smoke shit."    OMG!!  The reaction was astounding.  You would have thought my collar was turned around and I had a bible in my hand.  They were ready to bounce me.  The door to the hall was already open when I said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute.  Tell me whatever the %&8##  hell it is, that you will do, after you get  high, that you think I wont do, without the pot?  I'll probably do it and I don't need any of that 'shit' as an excuse for doing  it. And you ought to try doing some of that stuff without getting high, you might enjoy it more, just like me.  Especially you (I forgot her name) she was a customer of the store.  I went over to her, pulled her to me and gave her a long kiss.  Ummummm.  It got a laugh and some people who knew me said, "He's hip.  He's ok. He's hip."  So somehow I lasted to the end of the party.  And believe me it was some party.  The smoke was so heavy in the rooms that when you opened the door and walked into the hallway you could inhale and get high on the second hand smoke before you made it to the elevator or your room.  Boy oh boy, those were the days.  When I got married my wife didn't appreciate all the stuff I stopped doing.
 
But what is overlooked here is, if smoking regular cigarettes damages your lungs and your health system, how much damage does smoking weed do?   I mean, you drag the smoke deep into your lungs.  We used to do the handkerchief test with cigarettes all the time.  You know, after you take a  drag you blow the smoke right from your lungs through your stretched tight hanky.  But we never inhaled the smoke that deep, like a weed drag,  or held it that long in our lungs, like you do with weed..  And yet the  yellow stain on the hanky was oily, ugly as hell and hard to wash out of the hanky.  I  never saw anyone do the hanky thing with weed.  And if you are still smoking, try it.  For most people, the arguments should be over, thank goodness.  But, forget about it.  I'm not a doctor and I'm not qualified to give medical advice, but to me its a no brainer.  I'm not moralizing either.  I have been  in the middle of clouds of weed smoke with entertainers and wanna be entertainers, and others just hanging out or having fun, like the party above, who were or got higher than the proverbial kite.  But to me common sense says, "It must do damage to your lungs, just like cigarettes."   Just common sense.  The elephant?   There he is!

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WE are getting, SCREWED!!.

 Take it easy, will ya,           (Anunews.net)

Keep some soft gooey lubricant handy.  We are all getting screwed all the time so you're going to need it.  
And socking it to the guy who is having trouble paying his bills has been the name of the game, forever.
Who the hell figured out that 'late fee' thing?  For sure a credit card executive.  Late fee?  That's an euphemism for exorbitant interest rates.   You take someone who already is having trouble  paying his/her bill, when he is late paying the damn bill, he gets charged  an extra 12% to  18% interest penalty for not paying it on time. (that's the actual annual interest rate for 1%  a month or 1.5% a month interest on the unpaid balance. That's a high amount of interest.  And then that person gets charged a late fee.  What?  There used to be state laws protecting the public against high interest rates.  But, because some bonus creating executive figured out there are no State laws against gouging customers with a late fee, they began this 'extra interest poop..   Charging 'late fees' are not in any state regulations protecting the public from  unsavory practices.  This is outrageous.  It is really interest and what they are doing, its just another lube job.  In most instances,  its the public that gets charged, you know the ones, Romney called them the  47%.  If you saw the first Rocky picture, Rocky's job before he got big fights, he  was a collector for the mob.  Collecting loan repayments.   If you didn't pay you could get your leg broken, or worse.  Well, often the late fees charged by our high profile  supposedly respectable companies amounts to an interest rate higher that what loan sharks charge.    Us suckers might as well carry a mattress around with us.   As a kid, when I was in Philadelphia, I could borrow money on the street at better interest rates.   (Was the lender mobbed up?  I don't know.  I only know I didn't want him to get mad at me.)    And when I moved to Florida, if a company charged somebody more than 15% interest for late bills, they were breaking the law.  Some years ago that law was changed by our well lobbied political leaders.  I call it legal stealing.  No different than when lobbyists get tax laws changed just for the people who pay them to get the votes.
But the thing is, you can't bring in transparency and emphasize all this kind of legal stealing poop.  Like switching a light on or off.  If you switched the transparency light on everything, all hell could break loose.  Do pharmaceutical companies make  lubricants?  Whoops!!
Like that Libor thing in England.  (London Inter Bank Offered Rate)   A few guys in London, at the top of Europe's  banking business, who were charged with setting the Libor interest rate for banks throughout most of Europe,  were sitting around having tea and determining what interest rate to make effective.  Normally the new Libor rates go into effect after they paid their luncheon check.  Just a routine day.  Something their grandfather's grandfathers had been doing forever before they passed down the rights to do it, to them.   I think its a Royal family inheritance thing.  You know for Lords and stuff.   A little while ago somebody put the light on.  All they were doing is something like knowing the opening price of a commodity before the futures market opens.   You don't think bankers would profit from knowing  this kind of information in advance, do you?  And then, when the light was turned on. . . .Omg!!!   The banking and the financial community had a fit.  But the Libor people couldn't understand what all the hullabaloo was about.  They have always been doing it that way.
So here is the thing.  Things like Libor are only indicative of what almost all businesses, who can do stuff and get away with doing it, do.  And have been doing to the public forever. 
And what about new technology?  After the innovation wears off a little, it just inspires more poop.   Its so prevalent nobody even thinks about it and if they did, it might be a catastrophe for doing business in the Democratic free world.  Example???  Pfffft! 

Ink Jets plus

How about every time you pass by a trash heap.  What's in that trash heap?  What is it that's blocking your view of the sky?  Along  with other stuff is your old ink jet and  the discarded cartridges from that old inkjet.  What possible reason could there be for the buyer of a new printer, with the same ink jet technology as the old one, not being able to use the remaining ink in the cartridges (including new and unused spares) from his old 'outdated' printer??  None, right?  Open the tube.
When did this poop start?  Forget about it.  Its always been going on.  Its just that new technology, which we think is being used for ever-new products, well, a big chunk of it gets bought up by these park their money off-shore people, who are only looking for new ways to screw the 47%. 

Remember when new cars were bought to keep up with the Joneses?  I remember wondering why you should buy a new car, when the only change of any consequence, was a different bumper.   No question, the American automobile manufactures are the reason Japanese car makers were able to gain such a large share of the U.S. market.
Now, here comes Michael Lewis who writes a book (Flash Boys), revealing  another way to really make money.  Pffffffttt!!!  Money!!!  And believe it or not it has little or nothing to do with the 47%. 
That's the only good part of these shenanigans?   Most of  the rip off  is to the 48 and over percent.  And the bending over guys are mostly on Wall Street.  You know, the guys who think lubricant is for keeping the sun off..    How the hell did Romney miss this one?  Or did they go to Mitt first?  ("You make money  by doing stuff to somebody else.")  That's his stock in trade.
The scam?  You order shares of stock from a Wall Street connected firm.  Doesn't matter the number of shares. A separate company (we'll call them 'XYZ'), that has their own exchange, arranged to have a computer located alongside all computers that do the trading for the Wall Street exchanges.  The deal allowed them to rent computer space right in the places where most of the originating stock transactions are executed.  That seems harmless enough.  I guess they said they only  wanted to receive more timely information.  So, the 'stated purpose' of each monitoring computer, is to send a copy of each trade to 'XYZ'. 


Pink Panther

Now, in milliseconds, (and I thought running a 4 minute mile was fast) before a transaction can be completed, the information is forwarded to the 'XYZ'  exchange by the monitoring computer.  When it gets there, remember, in milliseconds, they add a penny or a fraction of a penny to the price of a transaction, also in milliseconds, and then they send that 'higher by a penny or piece of a penny price' (for them) back to Wall Street.  Its an extra transaction but executed so fast, with such a small additional amount, who's going to notice?  Got it?   All of this stuff is finished before returning the  transaction, now with the higher price, for completion on Wall Street.  Whew!!. Now that is fast.  Even before you can feel anything!! 
Because the added on amount, per transaction, is so small, a mere pittance, it goes completely unnoticed.   The total amount can be millions.  Even I wouldn't get that one.  Beautiful.  Absolutely beautiful.   And, since this stuff was happening without any notice of it, there were no  complaints.  I love it.   The pink  panther would be having spasms.
I thought of something like this myself, this happened many years ago, but it was based on the slowness of executing orders on one side of 'futures' orders.  Of course the  Chicago Board of Trade caught on after I made a few bucks.  So they changed some stuff and it stopped me. They speed-ed up the trades.  But not too fast for them to do it themselves.  They called it arbitrage.  Which is what I called it.   'Ce le guerre.'
This computer genius stuff is kind of like figuring out a way of catching the excess drops of gas, which spill out of the gas pump nozzle, when you pull it out of your car and replace it to its slot at the pump, after you finish putting gas in your car.  Excess droplets of gas captured at every gas pump in the country.  If you could do that, you could drive from here to there without paying to refuel, no matter where 'there' was.  And nobody needing any lube.  And in this one not only does nobody get hurt, its good for the environment.  (I don't have a patent on this idea yet so you're on your honor not to steal it.)  And, did you feel anything when you were eased into putting gas in your own car gas tank?  Did gas prices get higher, or lower, because you, the driver of the car were pumping your own and gas station employees who used to do it were getting fired?
Who pockets the savings caused by eliminating all those gas station jobs?
Lets go back to the milliseconds stuff.  I have a solution.  Instead of screaming and yelling sick birds (ill eagles), the government decides to make a settlement with the perpetrators, resulting in no jail time, just some community service, and then, the government takes over the whole shebang. (There is precedent.)  The siphoned off millions can be used by the government to pay for food stamps and find other good stuff for the group Romney called the 47%.  And maybe even coupons for tubes of lubricant.
But, after nationalization, it should not become  operational until the black guy is out of office. Because if he is still the president, the Republicans will call it a tax and say its just another way for him to raise taxes on farmers, on the air we breath or on the middle class or on small businesses,  and anything else they can think of.
Even the bad guys, who thought this up, can come out good.  They can take the fifth to avoid prosecution on any laws they broke and then they can move to Florida and run for governor.  But if they win they have to promise; no more of that peeing into bottles stuff.

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