Pearls

Here are some freshwater cultured pearls of wisdom for a civilized person:

1. Do no harm, and never ever run out of toilet paper.

2. I cannot remember who told us this joke, but it bears repeating:
Define politics – a gathering of many blood sucking bugs

3. It took me a while to figure it out. Corporate taxes in the United States are higher than almost any other industrialized nation in the world. The United States military is the largest in the world, so large that our military budget alone almost equals the combined military budget of all the other nations of the world combined. What does this mean? It means that Corporate America is paying protection to the US government.

4. Upon hearing that the peasants had no bread, Marie Antoinette famously said, :Let them eat cake!” this was not arrogance or malevolence talking, it was a pure misunderstanding of the realities of her world. Marie was in full disconnect. I fear that we Americans today have reached the let-them-eat-cake level of compassion. The average American household has cell phones, iPads, computers and more than one TV. What people who have tend to forget is the profound difference between having and not – a chasm that grows wider, not more narrow. If you have four phones, three TVs and two computers in your house, along with a DVR and BlueRay player for every set, and you do your banking online, do your shopping online, share your information online, and even date online, you lose sight of the millions right here in the US who can’t, let alone the billions worldwide who live – or try to live – on less than it costs you per day to run just one of your phones.

5. The American Dream may not be a myth, but it has been severely downsized and outsourced.

6. And, finally, this month marks the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest albums of all time, Paul Simon's GRACELAND. I saw a photo of Paul today. Anyone else notice that now he looks a great deal like Mel Brooks' slightly younger brother?

7. Afterthought: Bernie Williams