The-Asterisk

Now that President Obama has gotten "the speech" out of the way, we can try to look objectively at where we (the US) is in our foreign policy, now. The speech sounded almost like one President Bush would have given. Of course, turnabout is fair play, so the right is justified in excoriating Obama while all but the most fervent left remain mum, or at least muted. Where does The-Asterisk come down on the intervention scale ? Well I am right about at 75%. Let's get real, here. If you are walking down the street and some dude in front of you starts mercilessly punching the woman he is with, or you come across some street punks mugging someone for their shoulder bag, should you do anything? If you get right down to it, it is in your best interests to avoid any involvement in the situation. Keep right on walking. Don't look back. Lest we compare it to the murder of Kitty Genovese , there are major societal reasons why you should put yourself into harm's way to assist ...

Isn't GE saying that all of it's "tax treatments" are perfectly legal, like a man taking the word of his young date that she is "18 years old, honest...", even though both of them know that they are hearing exactly what they want to hear? In the man's case, he is paying all expenses for his date and GE paid a lot of the expenses for their tax deductions and rulings. But, is it legal? I would bet the man has a better chance of taking a legal hit than GE. It is these huge corporate giants that create fodder for the anarchists, the Marxists and the Socialists. None of us want to pay taxes. We all want someone else to pay them because what we are doing is GOOD for society, right? Show me ANYONE and I mean ANYONE that truly wants to pay taxes, to the point of taking no deductions and even paying a little more because it is a good thing. I will believe it when I see it. When I say no one wants to pay taxes, I mean it. If this was not true, then tax incentives ...

Have I told you lately how much I like Twitter ? Yes, I am on Facebook (I actually have two Facebook pages plus one company fan page), but Twitter is where I hang. I use TweetDeck which is a great way to manage my feed. All in all, I have about 10 columns set up. The first is where I watch about 100 of the 1400 people that I follow, the next is where I filter for mentions about me (no, this is not vanity... I just don't want to miss any non-direct messages to me) and then I track conversations for a few notable people that I follow. One of the people for whom I have carved out a column of my valuable screen real estate is Tom Peters ( @Tom_Peters ) of Search for Excellence fame. Tom always comes up with intriguing, thought-provoking comments and he will actually tweet back if you say something that is interesting. Today he made this comment: That comment caught my attention, since I am VERY interested in solar power. I tweeted back and asked him to cite his source. He replied th...

They say a generation can be defined by its music. I spent my teenage years in the late 60's and the early 70's. I bailed out of being a typical teen by joining the Navy at age 17, but still there was a lot of good music during my "formative" years. Yes, some of the music was 'poppy'. Current teens have Justin Bieber, we had 1910 Fruitgum Company . But there was some awesome music and there was also a lot of protest music. For us naive teens (most teens were naive since there was no cable TV and no Internet), the music was just tunes. The words were interesting but didn't have as big of an impact on us as it did on the college students of the time, who were just coming into their "I know everything and all adults are stupid" age. Hippies were everywhere and the Summer of Love was still fresh in everyone's mind. Vietnam was still raging and most of the youth were either protesting or at least non-supportive, probably as much out of fear of the...