(Opinion) Afghanistan…Why are we still there?

The fact that Obama, a lawyer, has a war plan for Afghanistan is in itself outrageous to say the very least. Our Generals and the pentagon no longer plan war strategies and have actually become as useless as the United Nations and as laughable as the Nobel Peace Prize since Obama, a lawyer, was awarded it…go figure.

Congress and the Senate, all lawyers, also have no more business involved in war decisions of strategy and the release of information that endanger our troops. If we are going to be a warring nation, a country that tries to impose our capitalist ways and Christianity on everyone else in the world shouldn’t our generals, the pentagon, and Pat Robertson be running the country?

Scary and makes no more sense than Lawyers running a war and lawyers running our country…after all no one trust a lawyer!

Wouldn’t we be better served if top notch and trusted academics ran the country and the pentagon charged with building the best defensive military and stop the lawyers from taking us to war to satisfy their egos, greed, and bullying ways and to impose our ways on the world.

Back to my question (Afghanistan…Why are we still there?) It is a losing battle, a war we can’t win, there is no saving face. Afghanistan has a drug based economy and nothing to replace it with, i.e. it can’t be fixed. We should leave asap and stop the loss of American lives and the flood of money that would be better placed in the rebuilding and improvement of our countries infrastructure thus creating much needed jobs; what the money should have been being used for all along as well as the money spent on the presidents special interest entities—financial institutions and the auto industry…

D L Ennis © July 24, 2010

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Degenerating Industry

Just like our economy, infrastructure, and moral fiber are deteriorating our industry in America is getting too old to sustain itself. America is a dying super power and our demise is being hastened by our corrupt and self-serving leaders!

© 2010 D L Ennis, All rights reserved.

NOTE: Permission for the use of my images is granted for personal websites and blogs but is to include a link back to this site and proper credit given to me, D L Ennis. Link to be used…(Visual Thoughts https://dlennis.wordpress.com/)

NOTE: Commercial use, and the creation of prints, must be purchased! For more information you can contact me here.

The U.S. Capital

The U.S. Capital where a lot of overgrown bad seed children claim to work; they should all be medicated and put away somewhere where they can do no more harm! While at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue is the spendthrift American President who in his first year in office has shown no interest in anything but the PERKS of the office.

Entertaining friends and celebrities, viewing movies before anyone else gets to see them, jetting his family around Europe showing them the sights that most Americans will never see, and while 85000 more Americans lost their jobs in December, Americans died in Afghanistan and were wrongly imprisoned in Iran and North Korea, and America came as close as we have been to another terrorist attack since 9/11, he spent two weeks living large in Hawaii all at the expense of the taxpayer.

© 2009 D L Ennis, All rights reserved.

NOTE: Permission for the use of my images is granted for personal websites and blogs but is to include a link back to this site and proper credit given to me, D L Ennis. Link to be used…(Visual Thoughts https://dlennis.wordpress.com/)

NOTE: Commercial use, and the creation of prints, must be purchased! For more information you can contact me here.

Politics in D.C.

This image is not representative of my politics but just something I saw on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. last week.

© 2009 D L Ennis, All rights reserved.

NOTE: Permission for the use of my images is granted for personal websites and blogs but is to include a link back to this site and proper credit given to me, D L Ennis. Link to be used…(Visual Thoughts https://dlennis.wordpress.com/)

NOTE: Commercial use, and the creation of prints, must be purchased! For more information you can contact me here.

The Right to Choose

In Virginia, you cannot go into a bar and have a cigarette with your drink but, still, no safeguards have been put in place to keep you from having one to many drinks, getting into your car, and killing a whole family on your way home. Go figure.

Saw this in the window of a pub in Lynchburg, Virginia.

© 2009 D L Ennis, All rights reserved.

NOTE: Permission for the use of my images is granted for personal websites and blogs but is to include a link back to this site and proper credit given to me, D L Ennis. Link to be used…(Visual Thoughts https://dlennis.wordpress.com/)

NOTE: Commercial use, and the creation of prints, must be purchased! For more information you can contact me here.

A Cost of $1.1 Billion to Screw the People and Create More Profitable Insurance Companies

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill approved by Congress will, for the first time, provide substantial amounts of money for the federal government to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same illness.

Under the legislation, researchers will receive $1.1 billion to compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and other ways of treating specific conditions. The bill creates a council of up to 15 federal employees to coordinate the research and to advise President Obama and Congress on how to spend the money.

To begin with, with the multitude of medical scenarios and differences in people there is no effective way to set guidelines for any one of the following things, “…drugs, medical devices, surgery and other ways of treating specific conditions.” There are most always extenuating circumstances attached each diagnosis and each individual.

We will more than likely never see anything come from this $1.1 billion but if we do it can’t do anything but harm the uninsured, underinsured, poor, disabled, and elderly. On the other side of the coin if the research is ever completed and implemented it will boost the profitability of insurance companies, slow advances in innovative techniques, drugs, and tools as well create the need to greatly expand the FDA or create another government agency to oversee the new regulations and approval or disapproval of new discoveries in medical technology.

This program will also put in the governments hands more power over the decisions that we make concerning our own lives. It’s wrong and just another way of bolstering big business at our expense.

Speaking as someone who has lived with endless health issues since birth where I see the problem in excessive medical spending is in the laziness and lack of keeping up to speed by doctors. I know it is an exhausting experience getting through medical school and an internship but doctors seem to think they can take a break from learning and thinking once they are settled into a practice. This is especially true where GP’s (your family doctor) is concerned. These are the ones how send you for countless, some perhaps necessary and some that are totally irrelevant to your symptoms. A lot of times it would be in everyone’s best interest to send you to a specialist rather than blindly testing for a half dozen different things or misdiagnosing, simply because they don’t want to admit that they have no clue what’s wrong with you.

If the government wants to cut out some of the needless spending in the world of medicine they should put in place a program that would require further educating and yearly testing of doctors. This is the underlying problem and tying doctor’s hands who are capable and competent can only serve to lessen the quality of health care.

Andrew Witty, the chief executive of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, said European officials often considered the costs as well as the clinical benefits of new drugs — with mixed results.

“Comparative effectiveness is a useful tool in the tool kit, but it’s not the answer to anything,” Mr. Witty said in an interview. “Other countries have fallen in love with the concept, then spent years figuring out how on earth to make it work.”

Quotes from this article, U.S. to Compare Medical Treatments, in the New York Times.

Dumping Crops at Sea—Good Idea? Bad Idea?

I say…BAD IDEA!

Stuart Strand of the University of Washington and co-author Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine say they have a simple way of appropriating carbon.

“Sucked from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and sequestered in leftover husks and stalks are 150 million tons of carbon. Scientists now claim that all we need to do is toss them to the bottom of the sea, and a huge quantity of greenhouse gases be banished at a stroke.”

To begin with, harvesting and transporting this waste to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, where they propose dumping it, could become much more costly than the $340 a ton that they propose it would cost…especially if fuel cost soar to prices we saw early this year, and there is no reason to believe that they won’t if not higher. Also, wouldn’t it be a better idea to develop a more efficient way of turning this waste under to rebuild the soil where the crops grow and then planting a cover crop?

(Soapbox)

I believe that leaving any farm land lay fallow at any time is a sin with so many hungry people in the world. If we could remove politics and greed from the task of feeding people it could easily be done…think about it, our government pays farmers not to grow crops…what a waste!

(End of Soapbox)

Next, they have no idea what the long term effects would be on the Gulfs ecosystem. I really can’t imagine that could be anything but detrimental to the Gulfs health. I mean, don’t we already dump too much crap into our oceans and seas on this planet? Haven’t we already done too much damage to our waters? Shouldn’t we be looking for ways to restore our waters of the world which provides food and livelihood for a great number of the world’s population?

At the end of the article on Discovery News, And John Harte of the University of California, Berkeley questions the wisdom of this idea and says, “The real message of this paper is that to solve the problem of global warming, we need to keep thinking of new things,”

I agree with Mr. Harte in that we need to solve the problem of global warming, and continue seeking new ideas but I really don’t think that Stuart Strand and Gregory Benford have done anything here but waste time and resources.

Read the article “Dumping Crops at Sea Proposed as Way to Bury Carbon” by Michael Reilly, Discovery News…here.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/01/30/carbon-sequestration.html