Mustang Ranch, Chicken Dance or What?

Posted by Charlie on Apr 24, 2012

Here’s what happened. As a result of losing a federal case for racketeering and fraud in 1999, the Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel near Reno, Nevada, was forfeited to the federal government. The Mustang Ranch was the first brothel in Nevada to be licensed. It was by far and away the biggest legal brothel as measured by annual revenue. At that time, its revenues reportedly were greater than the combined revenues of all the other legal brothels in Nevada. In 2002, a mere three years later, the assets of the Mustang Ranch including its paintings, its furniture, its accessories, etc. were auctioned off by the federal government. In fact, the bar stools, the beds and bedding, the bidets and the room numbers were auctioned off in an attempt to recover the former owner’s back taxes. Ultimately, the government got creative and put the Mustang Ranch up for bid on eBay where it sold for the grand sum of $145,100. It has since been reopened by the successful bidder.

The point here is that if the federal government could not make a go of a legal business entity whose principal products were prostitution and liquor, what is their real motive for getting into the banking, automotive and health care industries? It certainly can’t be profit motivated! Are we now looking at using our taxpayer dollars on a continuing basis to provide ongoing bailouts to industries where the federal government has increased their involvement and gained more control? Is this the beginning of another giant chicken dance, where we the taxpayers are being dragged to the dance floor involuntarily, or is it something more in line with what used to go on at the Mustang Ranch?

From where I sit, the conclusion is pretty obvious. If you cannot make money at the oldest profession in the world, you have no business running any other enterprise!

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More Fact than Fiction

Posted by Charlie on Jun 14, 2011

There always have been many truisms put forth by well known people as they relate to the government and the press. Some, however, seem to be even more appropriate today than ever before. Here are a few examples:

~ “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” Will Rogers

~ “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” George Bernard Shaw

~ “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” P.J. O’Rourke

~ “In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give
to the other.” Voltaire

~ “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” Pericles

~ “If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” Mark Twain

Any others you want to add to this list?

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Get Ready for Change Before It Is Too Late – Part II

Posted by Charlie on Jan 19, 2011

6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It’s the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates simply self-destruction. Over 40% of the music purchased today is “catalog items,” meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, “Appetite for Self-Destruction” by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, “Before the Music Dies.”

7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they’re playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it It’s time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

8. The “Things.” That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in “the cloud.” Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest “cloud services.” That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system.

So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That’s the good news. But, will you actually own any of this “stuff” or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big “Poof?” Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That’s gone. It’s been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7 “They” know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And “They” will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again. All we will have that can’t be changed are Memories, but from my perspective that’s all we get to take with us when all is said and done so maybe it’s not all that bad.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT….. MOST OF THESE THINGS ALREADY ARE TAKING PLACE AND THE OUTCOME ALREADY MAY BE SET IN STONE, SO DON’T JUST WAIT FOR IT TO HAPPEN; PLAN FOR IT !!!

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Get Ready for Change Before It Is Too Late – Part I

Posted by Charlie on Jan 18, 2011

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them but, ready or not, here they come!
The key is to ensure that you are well prepared by having an effective plan in place to deal with these changes before they are here and you have to react to them.

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the Post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn’t read newspapers. They certainly don’t subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. Just think of the convenience once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can’t wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you’re holding a gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don’t need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they’ve always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.

Not concerned about these changes? There are more on the horizon. Check out Part II in tomorrow’s blog.

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WOW! Here Are Some Real Eye Opening Statistics

Posted by Charlie on Oct 21, 2010

As seen on the internet:

WHY is the USA BANKRUPT?

Informative, and mind boggling! You think it was the war in Iraq in and by itself? Read this: Here are fourteen reasons that suggest otherwise. Even if the statistics are not 100% accurate, these data certainly contain a significant amount of food for thought.

To the extent available, I included the URL’s where the following statements were published..

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecenters7fd8

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexecHTML

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.HTML

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt..0.HTML!

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/%20TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.CNN.com/TRANscriptS/0604/01/ldt.01.HTML

http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.HTML

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSC%20RI%20PTS/0604/01/ldt.01.HML

10.Illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. :

http://transcripts.cnn..com/TRANscriptS/0606/12/ldt..01.HTML

11. Duringf 2005 there were between 4 and 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border. Also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries that are not included in that number. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, also crossed into the US from the Southern border. Verify at: Homeland Security Report:

12. The National Policy Institute estimated the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute..org/PDF/deportation.PDF

13. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.

http://www/.! ..rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14.The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes are committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States each year.

http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

www.http://articleshtml.com

www.drdsk.com20w.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 billion per uear and remember, that goes on each and every year, it is not a one time cost..

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“It’s in the Mail”

Posted by Charlie on Oct 18, 2010

By Kevin Hasset, Monday October 11, 2010, 4:07 pm EDT

“Start with the fact the Postal Service is a great jobs machine, employing 712,000 people at an average annual compensation, including wages and benefits, of $83,000. And those hefty pay checks are a great source of political contributions for Democrats. In 2010, almost 90 percent of the approximately $4 million contributed to campaigns by postal unions went to Democrats. Take a guess where much of the opposition to reform comes from.

But high-priced labor, which accounts each year for about 80 percent of costs, leads to high-priced mail services, and even higher costs for taxpayers. Over the past 10 years, the price of a stamp has risen from 33 cents to 44 cents, exceeding the inflation rate at a time when computerization should have been leading to big cost savings. Even so the Postal Service lost about $6 billion this year and by its own projections it will drop a cool $238 billion over the next decade. By 2020, the last year in the projections, the Postal Service will be losing $33 billion annually.

If its losses level off and it continues to lose that much each year, the Postal Service will lose $550 billion from 2010 to 2030. If the growth rate of losses projected over the next decade continues until 2030, it will lose more than $1 trillion in that span. The fiscal black hole that the Postal Service has become is no small potatoes, even in government terms.

Broken Model

In April 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report that analyzed the operations of the Postal Service and concluded that, “USPS’s business model is not viable due to USPS’s inability to reduce costs sufficiently.”

A 2007 GAO study looked at the Postal Service’s use of facilities, and concluded that, “A 2005 contractor assessment of 651 randomly selected postal facilities revealed that two- thirds of these facilities were in less than “acceptable” condition, including 22 percent that were rated “poor.” Inspection of one facility in Dallas led the inspector to recommend that the building be immediately evacuated.

The decaying buildings provide a handy visual clue to the quality of service. Unfortunately, we don’t know how bad the service is, because the Postal Service collects data on its own service quality, but it refuses to make the data public. Isn’t it nice that your tax dollars pay for data that you’re not allowed to see?”

Now here is the kicker!

“The Postal Service’s ability to lose mail is, of course, legendary. Here is an example of how bad it has become: last week the American Postal Workers Union had to postpone their national election of officers because so many of the ballots were lost in the mail.”

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