Some of you have figured out that I don’t own this web site. The guy who does has decided that it’s not making any money and just isn’t worth his effort. So he’s pulling the plug. He offered to sell it to me – lock, stock and histrionics – for $100. But I’m not going to take him up on it. The net-net on the net: ColorComments.com will soon be no more.

This site got started when I replied to an ad on Craigslist. It seemed like a straight-up deal so I went for it. It was a straight-up deal! I have to admit that the guy who owns the site lived up to his end of the deal and I did my part too. In the beginning, there were maybe six or eight of us who answered the Craigslist ad. After 454 blogs, I think I’m the last one still online. It was just the wrong idea at the wrong time.

When I started trying to be a writer, I invented a “rule” for myself: I don’t write for free. That’s the reason I won’t buy the site. The rule helps me stay focused on reality. I used to use computer wallpaper featuring a quote from the great English writer, Samuel Johnson to help me remember the rule.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

The purpose of the rule is not to get rich, but rather to stop myself from drifting off into irrelevance. The only real guarantee I have that my writing is actually worth anything is that someone is willing to pay for it. I don’t need much. This site has paid about $10 every six months but that’s actually enough. If someone went through the trouble of actually writing a check for ten cents, it would still be an affirmative act that would be enough. Self-delusion is a disease that ruins more minds than drugs. I don’t want to be another victim.

I’ve been trying to be a writer for about ten years now. It’s a tough biz. I don’t know how other people do it. I’ve been a “contributing editor” of a computer magazine that went belly up. I’ve written articles for several other magazines. I’ve gone to writing classes and seminars. And I’ve won prizes in two writing contests. I’ve been trying! You might think that would give me an entrée into greater things but I’ve discovered that the writing world is full of walls.

I’ve written one novel and another is almost finished. To my knowledge, exactly three people have read my novel completely through. (A couple of others claim they’re going to. They lie. You know who you are.) I really only have a file of rejection form letters from literary agents to show for my fiction writing effort.

My biggest success so far is a different web site I write for: visualbasic.about.com. People go to that site for technical answers about the Visual Basic programming language. It actually pays a decent amount of money. Even Samuel Johnson had to write a dictionary to pay the bills.

About.com is a web portal site owned by the New York Times. They’re probably the biggest money maker for the New York Times corporation, but that says more about the newspaper business and the average intelligence of Americans than About.com. The New York Times is a first class organization with amazingly excellent journalism. But they’re a money toilet. About.com mainly features topics like recipies and body-piercing advice. They scrape up lots of the money to be made by not underestimating the taste of the American public. The real money is in trivial and ignorant bloviation in America today. The fact that Limbaugh is the most highly paid radio personality on the air is a filthy stain on American culture. But my “rule” says that it’s “reality” regardless of my personal opinion about it.

Still, I can say that it has been a very rewarding experience for me. I hope the handful of you who have been readers can say the same.

Access to the Eagle Craigs is from Rockville. The Eagle Craigs are part of a “Wilderness Study Area” but there’s always controversy. For example, a few years ago, Dan Jessop (one of the “Colorado City” Jessops) turned a fine for trespassing with 4X4 trucks on a nearby Wilderness Study Area into a multi-year legal battle that has become the poster child case for every off-road group in the country. By most accounts, about a hundred thousand dollars has been spent fighting a fine of a few hundred dollars. I couldn’t find any information about what eventually happened. Perhaps someone will let me know.

The view is toward the southeast across State Road 9 just at the entrance to Zion Canyon. The left side of the picture shows the entrance to Parunuweap Canyon – AKA – the East Fork of the Virgin. The entire access to Parunuweap is private property and it’s difficult to get there. You can hike down from the top, but it’s a difficult descent. One section of the trail has the name “Fat Man’s Misery”.

During yesterday’s health care summit, they kept repeating this lie over and over.

Minority Leader Representative John Boehner:

“We may have problems in our health care system, but we do have the best health care system in the world by far.”

Representative Joe Barton:

“… the fundamental market system that’s made the American health care system the best in the world.”

Cowardly Democrats let them get away with it.

Senator Dick Durbin:

“When I hear my friend John Boehner say that we have the best health care in the world, I don’t dispute it for a moment. If I were sick, this is the country I want to be in, with these doctors, these hospitals, and these medical professionals.”

No! It’s not!

By any objective measurement, health care in the United States isn’t even in the top ten. In the US, our health care sucks! SUCKS!

I’ve written about this before: The Sorry Performance of the U.S. Health Care System.

That article highlights the broadest measure of a health care system, overall life expectancy. We rank 37th on that list. Let’s look at a few more. (All data from the 2009 World Health Organization report)

Infant Mortality: 36rd Place – We’re just ahead of Brunei.

Maternal Mortality: All the way down to 60th place! Costa Rica and Uruguay are both significantly ahead of us. But we’re ahead of 60 or 70 other countries in the fertility rate of adolescent girls (15-19)!

41 countries have more physicians per person than the US does.

But, of course, health care REMAINS far and away … much, much more … expensive here in the US than in any other country. And, of course, we’re the only developed country totally lacking a comprehensive national health care program.

We’re certainly “outstanding” … like a train wreck is.

So … why do so many people think we have such great heath care? My theory is that we have been bamboozled by the “shiny chrome cover” syndrome. It’s also one reason it’s so expensive. Take the great Washington County here in Color Country. The biggest, most impressive building in the whole county is the hospital in St. George. Even in the second biggest population area, Hurricane, the biggest, most impressive building is the new health clinic. But “big and impressive” isn’t the same thing as “good”. Due to systemic failure, health care simply is not good in the US.

I’d be willing to admit that, in narrow specialties, we might have some of the most technically advanced physicians. And if you happen to be one of the obscenely rich Americans for whom cost is simply not a consideration anymore, you actually can get great health care here. So … OK … health care only sucks for the rest of us.

The problem starts because, as soon-to-be-former Senator Bayh said earlier this week, our political system is broken. Yesterday’s “Summit” showed that as clearly as you’re ever going to see it. For all of those politicians who have been repeatedly “selected” by our broken political system (and President Obama is one of the very few who doesn’t suffer from this defect), “honesty” is just a word you use in campaign speeches.

But just for comparison, here’s how a former political insider … who now has nothing to lose anymore … describes our health care. Tom Daschle is a former U.S. Senator from South Dakota and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader. He says this about health care:

“We don’t really have one problem in health care, we have three problems. We have a serious cost problem. We have serious access problem. The third problem we have is a quality problem. The World Health Organization when they last reviewed all the of the systems and markets in the world, listed the United States as 37th – just below Costa Rica and above Slovenia – in overall quality.”

Daschle also noted that about 26,000 people a year die because they don’t have access to health care. Daschle quoted a statistic from the Institute of Medicine that 98,000 people a year die because of medical mistakes. (Daschle was President Obama’s first pick for Health and Human Services Secretary. He withdrew when his own finances started to come under the microscope.)

We are being bled by our health care “system” like a vampire’s victim. The cost of health care insurance premiums has gone up four times faster than wages since 2000. The billions that we pay for health care is also paying for one of the greatest con-jobs in all of history.

First, the facts. The Ethics Committee has concluded that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel knowingly accepted Caribbean trips in violation of House rules that forbid hidden financing by corporations.

My first reaction was, “What about all those other crimes? The multiple rent-controlled apartments in direct violation of the law. The failure to pay taxes on income from rentals he owns. His failure to report assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on required congressional disclosure forms.

The guy is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg!

Humility and remorse just isn’t in these guys. Rangel himself says he is being “admonished” by the Committee. Given the velvet gloves treatment that they give their own powerful members, that might be sadly close to the truth.

This is a real problem for reform. Rangel’s committee writes the tax laws. Republicans are dug in like ticks on the question of forcing the rich (who have been getting richer at an even faster rate during the eight years of the idiot Bush) to pay their share of the burden keeping the country afloat. When the most visible Democrat in the fight is a tax cheat himself, it hands the Republicans a road-side bomb to blast any progress apart. That’s why the New York Times, the home town newspaper for Rangel, has said his crimes disqualify him for that job.

The problem is that he’s also one of the most accomplished “politicians” – in both the best and the worst senses of that word – in Congress. He’s thoroughly versed in mutual back-scratching, favor banking, good-ol-boy group membership, and even ethnic camoflauge. And they just love him in his district in Harlem. Just as it took a federal courtroom to get rid of Louisiana’s “Cold Cash” Jefferson, it will probably take something like that to get rid of Rangel. Rangel’s district is the one formerly owned (that is the correct word) by the flamoyant Adam Clayton Powell for over twenty-five years.

But then, how long has Utah been relecting Hatch? (Hint … A lot more than twenty-five years.)

Flashback – 2002 – Salt Lake Winter Olympics – Frustrated by the way volunteers were handling traffic at an Olympics venue in Huntsville, the Mittster jumps out of his limo, swears at the people, including police officers, trying to do their job and takes over directing traffic himself.

Flashforward again to last Monday on an Air Canada flight preparing to take off from the Vancouver Olympics. Frustrated when the passenger in front of him fails to return his seat to the upright position as required, the Mittster takes over, swears at the guy, and decides to get physical to ensure compliance.

Before anybody else points it out … Mitt also swears that these incidents didn’t go down that way. And the other parties involved say they did. In the first incident, Mitt was in charge of the entire Salt Lake Olympics. The other guys didn’t have a chance, police officers or not. In the second incident, the other passenger was a Detroit rapper (and looked like it). Mitt is a well-recognized politician with conservative steel gray hair. The airline believed Mitt and ejected the other passenger. But I wonder how it could happen that someone would turn around in the seat and pick a fight with someone behind them on an airline. I’ve been in those seats. You can’t turn around.

These aren’t the only times Mitt has been in trouble for resorting to personal violence. (See Note 1) In June 1981, he was arrested for disorderly conduct when he got physical with a park ranger at a state park in Massachusetts. The ranger was just trying to do his job enforcing the rules on the registration of boats. Again, during the second act, Romney forced everyone else to back down. After all, he’s “The Mittster” !! These were all just little people.

I believe the other guys. The Mittster sounds just like the kind of guy we need with his finger on the nuclear button.

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Note 1: The web page, http://romneyfacts.com/issue_rap.php, has references to the media documents about these incidents.

Readers of this page know that I don’t care. Golf has gotta be the second most contrived and silly thing I can imagine someone who calls themselves an adult doing. (Watching golf is the first.) Suppose we make ‘em whack their little white ball past the vanes of a windmill. Oh … we already do. But that’s not serious golf. (Sorry.)…(Not really.) Besides, golf courses are right up there with those environment destroying four-wheelers as a toy that is helping us create our our own oblivion.

I don’t know why anyone cares about who, how, or when Tiger has sex. There’s no evidence that it was anything but consenting adults. Happens millions of times a day. So that’s not what seems really interesting to me.

I’m fascinated by the Russian Doll-like layers of blame and lies surrounding this whole affair. It starts with Tiger himself. From the moment this scandal broke, it became more and more clear that Tiger’s whole public image was a polished and professionally managed, deliberate and premeditated lie maintained just for money. Certainly, the carefully scripted and transparently fake “apology” fits perfectly in that mold. If there was a grain of honesty in him, you’d see him polishing his clubs with the panties of his latest conquest and flipping off the media when he finished. Ah-nold, during his first campaign for governor of California, impressed me with his honesty when a bunch of women accused him of improper behavior on movie sets. That whole attack against him dried up when he just walked away from a gang of reporters who were trying to build up the media value of the incident with an over-the-shoulder last comment, “Old news!” Ah-nold remains one of the few Republicans that I might actually vote for.

The next layer of lies and responsibility is the media. The Sports Illustrated piece about Tiger’s “apology” pictured above just drips with righteous indignation at Tiger’s betrayal of all that’s good and holy. All the while the ad just above it continues SI’s great tradition of sex, sex, and more sex. Yah baby! Show us what ya got!! Anyone who knows me also knows that I like sex … well … maybe even a little more than the next guy. But I don’t lie about it.

To see an illustration of the final layer of lies and responsibility, check out the crowd at any WalMart, the traffic on any freeway, or the audience at a movie. Yep! It’s us. I predict: Tiger’s lies will put his money machine back on track. (If he hasn’t lost his ability to put little white balls into holes in the ground with a stick – always a possiblity.) “Us” loves the lie; eats it up; just wants that good gratification.

The New York Times recently featured another example of the investigative reporting that has made it the best damn paper still being published. The piece that has captured my attention is about what actually happened to drive AIG – the huge insurance company – into a financial crisis so bad that they needed $185 billion dollars of taxpayer money to avoid dragging the rest of us into their hole with them. (Keep in mind that “bad” and “worse” are still different things. What we experienced was “bad”.)

Before getting into the most recent revelation, I think it’s necessary to put down a little bit of foundation about a different company, the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs.

As I wrote in Consider the Economy as an Engine, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority in England was talking about Goldman Sachs when he used the phrase “socially useless activity.” He was being kind, as it turns out. Goldman is far, far worse than just useless.

Google, to its credit, has reintroduced the concept of “good” and “evil” into the corporate vocabulary. Their corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”. (See Note 1) It doesn’t have to be “anything, anything at all” in the name of profit. Goldman is clearly a leader in the forces of actual “evil”.

While the government was passing out money, Goldman took their share – about $23 billion. Not as much as AIG, of course. AIG was clinically dead but was revived. Goldman just had a cold. Since then, it’s become more and more clear that Goldman was just playing us. They were in good enough financial condition to repay $10 billion in direct federal bailout money early. We the people made a profit on that part of it. But in return, they got to ability to pay obscene bonuses to their executives. Then they announced all time record earnings in July to justify those obscene bonuses.

How did Goldman fall into the outhouse and emerge smelling like a rose? Answer: they’re profiting on our misery. The worse it got for us, the better it has been for them.

The New York Times article is filled with financial details that show how Goldman placed huge bets on the collapse of the mortgage market – that is, millions of people losing their homes – and then insured those losses with AIG. The result amounted to “betting against your own team”. Except that Goldman isn’t on anybody’s team.

When everything blew up, Goldman still found a way to turn our loss into their profit. With the Federal Reserve Board’s blessing, AIG used $12.9 billion in taxpayers’ dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman for insurance claims. Did you lose money? I did. The executives at Goldman Sachs didn’t.

Like the international super corporation they are, Goldman is now busy ruining other economies besides ours. You may have heard that all of Europe is in a brand new financial crisis because the Greek economy is close to failing. According to the Los Angeles Times:

“It appears that Goldman Sachs have colluded with past Greek governments to reduce the appearance of Greece’s debt for short-term gain, while in reality making it worse than ever,” said Arlene McCarthy, the vice-president of the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee. “These deals have increased costs for Greek taxpayers and left a mess behind for Greece’s citizens and the eurozone.”

Corporations are not sovereign beings. They exist, in theory, to make it possible for us to work together in cooperative enterprise. Goldman Sachs is one of the best examples of one that has turned into a malignant cancer. We need a cure and with cancer, you know what that is.

———

Note 1: Google has also painted a target on themselves with this motto. Some writers have said that Google has changed their stripes and this motto is coming back to bite them. They’re a tough and sometimes ruthless competitor, no doubt. But I’ve never held that against anybody. So is Microsoft. We need some toughness. It’s a tough world. In their stand against Chinese censorship, they have demonstrated to me, at least, that they haven’t totally forgotten their motto.

Joe Biden was talking to Larry King about Sara Palin yesterday. He said her level of support doesn’t represent a “significant portion of the population.” When King asked him if he “feared” her politically, he said, “Nah, I don’t.”

There’s Joe, running off his mouth and spilling the beans again!

Sarah! We NEED you! Please run. Please, please, please! At least pick somebody else, like Tom Tancredo or Jim DeMint, to throw your enthusiastic support behind.

Bush won in 2000 because he was such a consummate liar. Remember, “I’m a uniter, not a divider!” Remember, “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Voters love to swallow a nice, juicy, fat, comfortable lie. But people don’t like it when a leader speaks honestly and (Shriek! Scream!) wants us to think about hard problems too. President Obama is losing support because he’s making people just a little too uncomfortable by telling us too much of the actual truth. It’s really hard to win an election making people feel uncomfortable.

Joe’s political instinct is right on the money. (He hasn’t won those elections in Delaware by being stupid.) Only a few voters will respond to Sarah’s whack-job version of reality. Certainly not enough people would ever vote for her to win any kind of national election. Sarah, although delusional, is being honest in her own way. And she makes far too many people uncomfortable too.

My greatest hope for the future is that just enough voters will give Sarah their unconditional, unqualified, and totally devoted support to wreck the chances of even a really skilled liar like Bush. There are plenty of them thirsting to get back into power in the ‘Party of No’. We need Sarah to lead enough voters over a cliff in the next election to ensure the relection of the best chance we’ve been given since George Washington agreed to lead the Continental Army against the British.

One thing’s for sure! Another like Bush and we’re cooked!

I dunno … this is just too weird to pass up.

If you go to this link, you can buy something called “This is a test product and nothing will be sent to you” from Amazon.com. There are four resellers. Two only want $0.01 for it but one guy wants twenty bucks. But you have to pay about five bucks shipping charge.

The customer reviews are worth going to the site to read.

Quote:

“I was thrilled beyond belief when I saw Amazon was selling, “This Is a Test Product and Nothing Will Be Sent to You.” $4.99 shipping and handling is a bit steep, but we all know how fragile a pound of Test Product can be so I assume that the packaging & handling must warrant it. I have to wonder though … do they package it up and then just store it in a warehouse somewhere?

I hastily pressed “Buy with 1-Click®” with an almost orgasmic delight! I can now daydream about what I might have received if they had actually sent me the Test Product. Was it some sleek new notebook computer? A successor to the iPhone? An improved K-Y Your+Mine? Slinky negligée? One of those cool inflatable cars?

Ooooh! I get tingles ruminating over all of the tasty possibilities.

The best $5 I ever spent on nothing.”

–Kort Kramer “Art, Music, Book & Movie Enthusiast” (South Florida, USA)

Great!

I got this one this morning in my email:

————————

Dear Customer,

Craiglist online department temporary disabled your account.
Your account was temporary disabled until further investigations.
You must reactivate your account at Craiglist immediately or will be deleted forever.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your cooperation.

To continue, please: Click Here

Craigslist Team. All Rights Reserved.

————————

It’s a fairly standard scam and I was just about to delete it when I noticed that the link did look interesting. The link pointed to the URL:

http://www.i-cast.co.kr/accounts.craiglist.org

First, the country code “kr” is South Korea. It’s really doubtful that Craigslist is doing anything there. But what was the domain “i-cast.co”? A quick check revealed that it’s a little iron casting company headquartered in Japan. This particular URL is probably a branch office.

What happened here is that somebody took over the server in the branch office and turned it into a “zombie”. The scum who create these viruses like to hide, so when they find an unguarded server they can take over, they install a system that makes the server send out the emails and collect the responses in a file. Then they download the file and see if there is anything in it they can exploit. That way, they don’t even have to leave any identifying tracks on the server. To collect the file, they just break into the server again. The trail ends there for anyone trying to track them down. (Fantasy computer science on TV cop shows notwithstanding.)

Just thought you might like to see a real-world example.