Or so claims former astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchel.

Moon-walker claims alien contact cover-up | NEWS.com.au

What I'd like to know is: How can governments that are pretty much incompetent to do much of anything right be able to keep something like this covered up for 60 years?

( Read more... )

Wal-Mart Is Right

by Charley Reese
by Charley Reese

Wal-Mart is the only corporation in the world that I know of or have ever heard of that is hated because it is successful. What do these critics want Wal-Mart to do? Fail? Start selling $300 shirts like Saks Fifth Avenue?

Of course, some of the hatred is coming from unions, which have tried but, so far as I know, failed to unionize Wal-Mart's work force. That one thing tells you that it must be a much better deal to work for Wal-Mart than its critics let on. Some of the disdain comes from leftist snobs who think they should run the lives of the peasants who work and shop there.

I am a small-town guy who has hated to see so many locally owned small businesses go under, but that's not Wal-Mart's fault. That trend started years ago with suburban sprawl (a major contributor to the energy crisis, by the way), suburban shopping malls, strip malls and all the other discounters that preceded Wal-Mart in prominence. It was caused by the American public's preference to buy based on price, rather than on service or quality. It was caused by local politicians converting the National Defense Highway System (the interstates) into suburban and urban commuter systems by routing them through instead of around the cities.

Wal-Mart is one of the best-run corporations in the world. The individual consumer has no clout with suppliers and manufacturers. Wal-Mart uses its enormous buying clout to get consumers the best price at the best quality possible. Being a supplier to Wal-Mart is no picnic, as the company is quite demanding.

It's not Wal-Mart's fault that much of its merchandise is manufactured in China. The late Sam Walton went to extraordinary lengths to help American manufacturers, but Wal-Mart doesn't control any corporation except itself. The move to China is not coming from Wal-Mart, but from greedy manufacturing corporations that love cheap and controlled labor. If your competitor is selling an American brand-name product made in China cheaper than you can buy one here, and if the customer says, "I don't care where it's made as long as I can afford it," what are you going to do?

More recently, Wal-Mart has been slammed for not providing what its critics think it should in the way of medical insurance. Well, why is General Motors flirting with bankruptcy? Why is Ford Motor Co. in financial trouble? Why, for that matter, is the federal government in financial trouble? The stinking hag in this room that everyone is ignoring is the high cost of medical service.

You can't provide low-cost health care or low-cost medical insurance for a system run by millionaire doctors and six-figure hospital administrators, and that has 1,200 percent profit margins for drugs and medical devices. The health-industry attitude is, we'll profiteer like crazy, and you people find a way to pay us. If Congress were not a bought-and-paid-for whore, America could join the rest of the industrialized world with a reasonable health-care system.

Health-care costs are one of the key factors in making American manufacturers uncompetitive. Now that the state of Maryland has presumed to dictate what kind of benefits Wal-Mart provides, if I ran the company, I'd close every store in the state and put the property up for sale. This is just one more ploy in the anti-Wal-Mart crusade.

We have reached a sick and perverted point in our culture when honesty and success bring attacks, mainly from people who either don't know what they are talking about or have a hidden agenda.

Millions of Americans who earn low wages from other employers rely on Wal-Mart to help them stretch their family budget. Wal-Mart has kept faith with those people. I've never found a dirty store, a rude employee or a defective product in a Wal-Mart store.

If you prefer to pay more than something's worth in exchange for some phony ambience or fancy label, go right ahead. In the meantime, get off Wal-Mart's back. It's one of the few entities in this country that is doing the right thing the right way for the right reasons.

May 8, 2006

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese280.html

We're Here, We're Square, Get Used to It

Why the Democratic Party is losing the housewife vote

By CAITLIN FLANAGAN

I am a 44-year-old woman who grew up in Berkeley who has never once voted for a Republican, or crossed a picket line, or failed to send in a small check when the Doctors Without Borders envelope showed up. I believe that we should not have invaded Iraq, that we should have signed the Kyoto treaty, that the Starr Report was, in part, the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy. I believe that poverty is our most pressing issue and that we should be pouring money and energy into its eradication. I believe that allowing migrant women and children to die of thirst in American deserts is a moral transgression that will stain us forever.

But despite all that, there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. And the bayonet at my back isn't in the hands of the Republicans; the Democrats are the bullyboys. Such lions of the left as Barbara Ehrenreich, the writers at Salon and much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have made it abundantly clear to me that I ought to start packing my bags. I'm not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Here's why they're after me: I have made a lifestyle choice that they can't stand, and I'm not cowering in the closet because of it. I'm out, and I'm proud. I am a happy member of an exceedingly "traditional" family. I'm in charge of the house and the kids, my husband is in charge of the finances and the car maintenance, and we all go to church every Sunday. This month Little, Brown published a collection of my essays about family life called To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. It's written in the spirit of one of my great heroes, the late housewife writer and feminist Erma Bombeck. It's not a book about social policy or alternative lifestyles or anything even vaguely political. It's a book about how much I miss my mother, who died recently, and about the struggles I have had fighting breast cancer without my mom around to help me. It's a book that pays tribute to the '50s housewife instead of ridiculing her.

As far as I can tell, every reviewer and reporter who has encountered my book has assumed that I'm a conservative Republican. At the end of an interview on a national TV network, a reporter said, "Caitlin, I can't let you go without asking you one question." Here was her question: Was it really true that I'm a Democrat? Those reporters' assumptions don't tell you anything about me, nor do they tell you much about the reporters themselves: they made an honest mistake. What it tells you a whole lot about is the Democratic Party and the face it projects to the world. It's a party that supports gay families, as I do, and has vast sympathy for many other kinds of alternative lifestyles. But we let the Republicans have complete ownership of the image of the traditional family. And that's one reason we keep losing elections.

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit. Most of us aren't the Hollywood elite or the nontraditional family. Many of us do what I do, which is go to church on Sunday, work hard and value my marriage. Again, it's not so much my party's platform that rejects the family; God help us all if Bush's brutality to the poor continues much longer. It's a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison. Fifty years ago, a stay-at-home mom who loved her husband would not automatically be assumed to be a Republican. The image of the Democratic Party that used to come to mind was of a workingman and his wife sitting at the kitchen table worrying about how they were going to pay the bills and voting for Adlai Stevenson because he was going to help them squeak by every month and maybe even afford to send their kids to college.

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s -- civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion -- we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues-paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.

It's the contempt, stupid.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1189224,00.html

After reading belmikey 's entry earlier today, I decided another online calendar is just what I needed. :-D

So, I've created one for each of my gmail accounts - to keep stuff in context.

My SCA stuff will go into the calendar associated with curwinus@gmail.com, my stuff dealing SJ Games (con games, store demos, etc) will go into mib2932@gmail.com, and everything else (personal stuff, local gaming, etc) goes into mario.butter@gmail.com.

Those of you with gmail accounts, feel free to attach my calendar to yours so you can see what I'm up to.

Those of you without gmail accounts, drop me an email at one of the above, and I'll hook you up. ;-)

Our ship arrived in port. Dinky little place, just some flat spots near a water source on a larger moon of a gas giant. Couple of interesting things happened. Our delivery was denied by customs agents - something about the stuff we were hauling was supposed to be illegal. And we heard that news was arriving that the Imperial / Terran border was being closed.

Crap. Now we gotta unload the cargo to get paid, and take off. Don't know how we'll make it back to Terran space, being illegal and all. The jar-heads ship's infantry went into town drinking. They were, umm, impressed with the native beer. Here is what the description sounded like:

It was very dark, but not completely opaque. Light passed through it in a very diffused manner. The head was small, but persistent, and the aroma was heavy, yeasty, and faintly reminiscent of newly baked rye bread on Terra, with subtle hints of spices and seasonings I cannot describe. My first sip convinced me that I had been given water drained from aging sweat socks. I thought for a moment it was a joke until I noticed others swigging theirs with gusto.

Well, someone was in contact with us, and let us know that we could drop the shipment on one of the inner planets. We met someone there who accepted shipment, and paid what was due. He also had some contact info that could help us out, some kind of underground movement, maybe insurgents. Gave us a load to take, too. While we unloading and loading, we had some Vilani troops show up. The infantry took 'em out, came back with a few trophies, too.

Then we had to split and make fast for the breakout point so we could jump. We figured the news about the border had just arrived, and we would be persona non grata around he real fast. Especially if those Vilani we took out were government troops. Heard something about getting us a new transponder that squawked Vilani ident codes. That might be a good thing...

You scored as Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix). You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends. </td> Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 88% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 81% Serenity (Firefly) 81% SG-1 (Stargate) 81% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 81% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 75% Moya (Farscape) 69% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 56% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 56% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 50% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com