Mustang Rambles

This was a question my wife asked this morning.  She has been visiting her daughter for three weeks and is amazed that all the appointments she had cancelled had still called the house to remind her of them.  Her hair care place called to remind her after she had called and talked to a girl and cancelled her appointment.  Her eye doctor called about her “Missed” appointment after she had called and talked to the automatic appointment cancellation machine.  She is miffed.  She worked in offices for years and she can’t understand why these “workers” can’t do the simple job of cancelling and appointment.

With just a moments thought, all of us over 60 can wonder with her.  When most of us were growing up, we were imbued with a desire to do a good job.  As our teachers would tell, “Remember to do it right, your name will be on it.”  It was important to us that our job reflected our abilities and we wanted that reflection to sparkle.  Somehow, somewhere, that need was lost.

Today’s workers too often are there for the pay, and they shirk their work as much as the boss will let them.  I worked in a government office where women would come to work and clock in and then go to the restroom for forty-five minutes to put their make-up on.  Many employees spend most of their day surfing the Internet if they can.  It seems that there is an attitude of “entitlement” that says we don’t really need to work for a living. 

My personal observation is that the lowest, most menial jobs are excused from this observation because the workers need the work to survive and the work is highly visible.  The worst offenders are those who work in air-conditioned splendor, in permanent press fashion, and who have no professional training or no monetary stake in the success of the business.  There is no loyalty to the business or the business owner.  These workers are content to flutter from job to job and to do as little as possible. 

Some of the blame goes to bosses who care little or nothing about their employees.  Most of the blame must be put on the American culture of the 70’s and 80’s when the public at large became self-centered.

I don’t see it getting any better.  There is no push in society for personal pride. All we teach our children in school is that anything they do is wonderful, not matter how bad or ill-behaved they are. It’s called building self-esteem and teachers’ unions just love it!

Vin Diesel once again wasted his talents on a movie with a very thin plot and little character development.  I keep hoping that he will start selecting roles that stretch his talents beyond the scarred, dedicated brute.  The movie was very anticlimatic, all the good action coming early in the show, and the ending a meaningless hodge-podge of esoteric mush.  Perhaps I should have read the book first, if there was a book.  But, then I think, movies should be self-explanatory.  You should be able to figure out the moral of the story.  I couldn’t grasp the meaning in this one.  Nor were my questions answered to my satisfaction. 

I like Vin Diesel, I think he has a style and personality that needs deeper development.  This was the wrong vehicle to display it. 

Christopher Meyers, in an article in The TimesOnLine raises a few points that most Americans don’t think about very much. Meyers is a former ambassador to Washington and has very good experience with Europe and European problems. In this article he raises the question of what are the current spheres of influence in Europe and how are they defined.

Basically, since the fall of the Soviet Empire the US and NATO have rushed to fill in the power void caused by Russian collapse of military might and economic turmoil. Now that the Russians are more stabilized, they are beginning to reassert their influence and military presence. However, they find that the US and NATO are infringing on what have been traditionally influenced or governed by Russia. Ukraine and Georgia are two sterling examples. For many long years the Ukraine was one of the breadbaskets of Russia, and Georgia was the birthplace of Stalin. Russia feels as if we are staking our claim in their back yard, something they did in Cuba when they put missiles there in the early 1960’s.

Russia is not a country you can bully. Nor can you merely dismiss its national needs and interests. While it is true it is a fledgling democracy, it still responds to strict discipline and order and will act with a cohesive unity a more mature democracy like ourselves lacks. If we gracelessly move into the Ukraine and Georgia with membership in NATO, we had better be prepared to fully commit ourselves militarily to their defense.

The article made a case for the leading nations to sit down and formalize an agreement on “spheres of influence”. Kind of makes sense to me. Let’s do that before someone screws up and the guns go off.

When asked by Anderson Cooper about the experience factor, Obama denigrated Palin’s experience as mayor for having only 250 employees. Obama then went on to say that his campaign has been a much bigger operation over the last two years and his experience with that outweighs Palin’s experience. This brings up two points

1. Obama failed to mention her experience as Governor of Alaska over the last 20 months.
2. Obama, in extolling his experience in the last two years in running his campaign, didn’t realize that if his actual management was a major factor in his campaign, then he must have spent so much time that it destroys any claim he may have to being a seated working senator during the last two years.

Maybe that note going around that he has only spent 143 working days in the senate is correct.  And I bet, that he had heavy duty day-to-day management running the nuts and bolts of his campaign.

According to a story in the Jerusalem Post Dutch Intelligence has pulled an infiltration program because it expects America to launch an unmanned air raid at strategic nuclear and missile fabrication sites in Iran.

Sounds like wishful thinking and a red hot rumor to me. America is in the middle of a great election process and I don’t think President Bush would want to have this particular international incident on his watch. Additionally, I don’t think we have the stealth drones capable of causing sufficient damage to the protected sites in Iran.

So, just another rumor in my opinion.

I went to see Tropic Thunder with no real knowledge of Ben Stiller’s body of work. I went because the premise of the movie intrigued me, and as a Viet Nam veteran I wanted to see how they treated the country and the people. My recommendation is that if you can stand a bucket full of the “f-word” then by all means go and enjoy the humor.

The main stars of Stiller, Downey, Jr., and Black were the main focus of the action and the major part of the the script development. The other actors were excellent in their supporting roles and I would like to see them again.

1. Now, Stiller is a funny man and made a great parody of the action hero. His performance was very good.
2. Jack Black was stuck with an unsympathetic role and did a journeyman’s job on it. I must also confess that I’ve never been impressed by his body of work.
3. Robert Downey, Jr. has been in several other movies that I’ve seen and did an adequate job, but in this one, I think he did award winning work. His character of a method-acting white Aussie actor playing a 1960’s black man was a masterpiece of internalized character. He was hilarious in his attempts to portray the emerging black consciousness of the 60’s, and he was actually believable as a black soldier of the time. I was enthralled at his performance

I have to think that this movie was a good afternoon’s entertainment with some surprises, a few great comic events, and fond memories. I recommend you see it if you can take the language and the spirit in which it was written.

Looks like New Orleans is going to be hit by another hurricane. The dikes and levees will probably fail and it will be flooded all over again. Millions or billions of dollars will have been wasted since Katrina and no progress will have been made.

I must inform you that I have been to New Orleans. I walked down Bourbon Street and had a drink or two. I really had a better time at the Art Museum. I am perfectly willing to save taxpayers dollars by evacuating the people, blowing the dikes and levees, and forming a recreation area called Lake New Orleans. Move all the port, civil, and economic functions to higher ground and rebuild the city there. The new lake could make millions in revenue by catering to sightseers, fishing fans, scuba divers, and other water enthusiasts.

As a tax payer, I’m really tired of paying for repairs to flooded areas that flood repeatedly. New Orleans is a great example of stupidity. It is below sea and river levels people!! It will flood! If you don’t like floods, move. If you don’t mind the floods and want to stay, fine, but don’t ask me to pay for it.

Was reading an article today about the other possible running mates that McCain could have picked for his vice president.  While I’ve always been a fan of Romney, the rest of them, well, lackluster at best.  So, if you have a drink today, please pause a moment and raise your glass in a toast to Sarah Palin, the woman who has put life and fun back into the election process.  The next two months are going to be so different from the past two years!

The UK’s TimesOnLine
tells us that Russia will absorb South Ossetia so that its peoples would be one with its ethnic neighbor in North Ossetia, currently a part of Russia. How nice that Russia should be so concerned with a really small, insignificant group of people in another sovereign country.

Hey, it really makes sense and has historical precedence. Didn’t Hitler want the Sudetenland for the same reason, and by extension, Austria? We gave those peoples to Hitler, why not these people to Putin? Didn’t the Soviet Union support North Vietnam and the Viet Cong for the same reason? Didn’t China support North Korea for the same reasons? While the evils of partition have shown it to be a wet-nurse of war, maybe we need to look hard at it as a geo-political solution in the future.

In the meantime, The G-7, NATO, EU, China, and four other central Asian states have rebuffed Russia’s efforts to secure allies in this venture. What will happen when Russia actually starts to build bases and station troops there is a big question. What will our leaders do and say? What will our people be willing to back and sacrifice themselves for?

One of the most vexing problems after the world terrorism problem, is why are there so many small ethnic groups intent on killing other small ethnic groups? Every year it seems we are faced with another armed conflict between some group that has hated another group for hundreds of years and just now feels justified in wiping the others out. Sure, we had a civil war here in America, but we got over it. The state of Virginia never felt the need to forcibly reconcile the break-away state of West Virginia. It sounds inane, but economic freedom and well-being, the future of our children demands that we get along better than these small groups do. It all sounds like a bunch of African tribes that need to massacre each other.

Maybe that is the point I’m missing. Maybe most of the world is just a mass of primitive tribesmen following traditional, barbarous religious needs to kill, because they haven’t learned to talk and compromise.

Obama, who has no foreign policy experience, claims that Palin has no foreign policy experience and is only a heartbeat away from the presidency. So he’s saying she is a lot like him? I don’t think so. At least Governor Palin has run something, has been a boss of something substantial, has been a winner for a leadership position. Obama has done none of that.

Perhaps, Obama thinks his recent tour of Europe and a trip to Iraq makes him savvy in foreign policy. If that is true, then we should all be voting for Madonna, the Rolling Stones, The Who, and the hundreds of other rock groups that have spent far much more time in many more countries than Obama can name. In fact, I bet any of those rockers could find more cities and countries on a map of the world than Obama could.

Sounds to me that the Obama camp is completely engulfed by dismay and chaos. Maybe in three or four days they will have a better reaction to this event. The really sad thing is that if they should actually win in November, they will never have three or four days to react to startling world events. What stupid things will they say or do then?