love and my real heart

This seems to be the theme of Spring Break for me. Firstly, I am asking "what is love?" That's a biggie, right. The second part of this theme is that my real heart is ailing - such that I am advised to get an angiogram to determine if I need a stint to regain the proper amount of blood supply to it. In other words, I may have (coronary or pulmonary) heart disease. Well, this was an unpleasant, however untimely, discovery. You could say I haven't quite processed this dual reality - my nearness to passing now having only just found a possible partner I so deeply desire to share what time I have left with!

"Failing States"(?) or more correctly: hijacked newly independent Democracies.

All this sounds too familiar - eg.: US fruit in Latin-/South America blocking the progress of small independent democracies so they could rob their natural resources, as well as take advantage of social strife to gain a ready made cheap labor force, etc!:

"The deal [Rio Tinto and Chinalco combining to plunder West Africa's Guinea] also covers rail and port infrastructure and could create tens of thousands of jobs in Guinea." www.news.bbc.co.uk; 19 March 2010.

and this (portrait of Guinea from BBC dated 20 February 2010):

"Though Capt Camara declared himself "president of the republic" the day after the coup, he also maintained that he had no intention of clinging to power and would hold elections after a two-year transitional period. In August 2009, he announced that presidential elections would be held on 31 January 2010 and elections for parliament in March. A month later, more than 150 people died when government troops opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators...."

"Radio and TV stations, as well as the country's largest and only daily newspaper, are state-controlled and offer little coverage of the opposition and scant criticism of the government...."

Failed or TROUNCED!

"The Wrong Kind of Green" Johann Hari of the Nation

These kinds of reports ("The Wrong Kind of Green") just get me down.

The groups that are the point men for protecting our environment and the poor are being covertly and overtly attacked.

The Big Murkowski and ACORN's demolition...

un-Real Estate

This is from a Forbes Newsletter "The Housing Crisis isn'tover" (Gary Shilling):

...Dangerous Levels of Government Dependence

High and chronically rising unemployment is clearly unacceptable politically and will spawn massive federal job-creating projects—and many more Americans who are dependent on the government for major parts of their income. They already numbered 58.2% of the population in 2007.

From 1950 to 1980, those with their feet planted firmly in the government feeding trough swelled from 28.7% of the population to 61.2% as state and local aid programs brought on tens of millions of new food stamp recipients.

By 2018, 67.3% of the population will be financially dependent on government...

So, in this virtual world of personal profiles and professional websites couldn't we say that we've all become kind of anonymous or at least that the facade of who we are is jellied and contorted by our own efforts to leave out the vice, the defect or ill intent?! And, really - even in the real-time world of day to day, don't you think we kind of edit who we are for our acquaintences and friends. Don't we project different faces for each encounter?

My point now then is why the heck shouldn't an individual be able to drape a cloth over their face and not even participate in the sharade!? We're all wearing masks anyway, so what gives.

What it is, is that we in the west in particular see robbers in ambush when we see a masked visage. We see criminals, gangsters and now terrorists. So what about all those pedestrians and bus-riders with hospital masks on?! Should we take their masks off too? Say, if bank robbers were to start wearing those we'd really be confused, wouldn't we.

Globally rail-roaded and snake bitten communities...

Ghost Towns
Sounds surreal to say it... but this is the vacuum left behind the new world orders global economy. Run-away factories, out sourced labor, migrant labor force. All the efforts to improve our Nation really amounted to a sell out of American communities. Just the same, it was consumer short sightedness, too, that came back and bit us in the ass - and brought us low-prices at the cost of our own jobs.