the new royalty

i have always believed that the history of western society is anchored in the history of the struggle of the common man against the royalty. revolutions happened when the proletariat and bourgeoisie banded together because there came a time when they BOTH realized they were being screwed by the royalty. the proletariat always knew/know that they are getting the shaft, but the bourgeoisie, because they were somewhat better off, did not; but when they fnally realized it...ba da boom, ba da bing, heads rolled and down went the king. now that is simplified but it is accurate. if you look at the english revolution in 1066, the american war for independence in the latter part of the 1700's and the french revolution right afterwards and then look at the russian revolution of the early 1900's you will see that one thing in common: the people knew that the royalty, be they kings or czars, were doing none of the work and taking most of the profits, so to speak.

well, now the royalty is, for the most part, a thing of the past but they have been replaced by the new boss, the major corporations. they are the new royalty, they now control the finances and the resources of nations. they are now the ones who want us to do the work while they make the money. our founding fathers saw this danger on the horizon and tried to warn us but not enough listened then and hardly any are listening now.

thomas jefferson said in 1816, that he hoped to "CRUSH IN ITS BIRTH THE ARISTOCRACY OF OUR MONEYED CORPORATIONS, WHICH DARE ALREADY TO CHALLENGE OUR GOVERNMENT TO TRIAL OF STRENGTH AND DID DEFIANCE TO THE LAWS OF OUR COUNTRY." wow, huh? had we listened to t.j., we would not have had a bail-out of goldman sachs or aig or bank of america or general motors, etc, etc. we wouldn't have creeps like daschle working as a lobbyist for united healthcare while he advises the government on healthcare reform.

and, thanks to the right wing, the supreme court is poised to lift the ban on corporate financing of political campaigns. the origin of the ban goes back to 1896 when republican william mckinley defeated william jennings byrant. byrant was far and away the better man for the job, but thanks to corporate money, mckinley out spent him 10-to-1. mckinley's political advisor, mark hanna(think karl rove), said it best, "there are two things important in politics. the first is money and i can't remember what the second one is."

if the ban is lifted, then corporate america will elect almost every politician at every level, state and national. we would then become the UNITED STATES OF CORPORATE AMERICA. we already have a taste of what that would be like; wars in foreign countries where they just happen to have natural resourses that corporations want (iraqi oil) or are where they would like to build pipelines (afghanistan), bail-outs of the banks who stole the money in the first place, bailouts of giant insurance companies, bail-outs of all those who devised devious ways to scam consumers, give tax cuts to the rich and lessen services for the rest of us.

my only hope is that, one day, the american people will pull their collective heads out of their collective asses and realize that the country they have is not the country they thought they had. that is the fear of many of the corporations and their lackeys in government. that is why american troops have been and are being trained to put down civil unrest right here in america. that is also why we are constantly pitted against one another; black vs. white, brown vs. yellow, liberal vs. conservative; us vs. them (whoever "them" are). that is why we demonize other countries and other religions. it is why we have the fake war on drugs, which is really a war on civil liberties and has nothing to do with drugs...if it did it would surely include nicotine and alcohol which are the main killers but, guess what?, they are marketed by, are you ready, corporations.

but my hopes are dim and my vision of the coming age is dark. i, personally, will survive because i know how to make it outside of the system, always have and always will but my children and my grandchildren are fucked and are going to see their standard of living go down and down.

we have been sold down the proverbial river and one day in some coming decade, revolution will happen here again and the streets will run red with blood and the bankers, the oil men, the polluters and the insurance honchos will be dragged out of their gilded offices and estates and be hanged from lamp posts and the people will cheer and my only regret is that i probably won't be alive to see it.

woodstock and me

i was not at woodstock since i was way too busy making money in 1969 but it inspired me to help set up a similar outdoor rock festival in australia in the early 70's. it was called the Oddessy Festival and was held in a large field right outside of walicha. my friend, bobby oliver, was married on stage by a hippie guru and he and his wife rode off the stage on a motorcycle. it was too cool. my partner, ray patton, and i helped finance the shindig and made some money off of it but we would have been happy just being there.

woodstock had 450,000 people there for 3 days; to my knowledge no one got killed, no one got mugged, no one got raped, there were very few fights and for the vast most part everyone got along just fine. all this in the mud and rain while a very large number were doing all kinds of drugs and still it was peaceful. show me a town of that has 450,000 people between the ages of say 16-30 (which would mean a city of what? a couple of million or so?) where over any given weekend they had no murders, no rapes, no muggings by any of those 450.000 and i would kiss your ass in the middle of main street and give you a couple of hours to draw a crowd to watch me do it.

love and peace, brothers and sisters!

those days of love and peace and rock and roll and lsd helped change my life and from them i evolved into the man i am today, for better or worse. the 1968 democratic convention in chicago made me a pacifist. previous to that event, being from a family that had sent men off to war in WWI and WWII and being ex-army myself, i thought that the protesters against our involvement in vietnam were just cowards but when i saw those young people, all of whom were about my age or a little younger, face those cops and offered flowers to men who were about to beat them with clubs i knew that while they may have been many things, cowards they weren't. that lead me to do something i had not done before and that is look critically at what we were doing and why we were doing it and i realized that i, and the country had been conned and we were totally in the wrong in southeast asia.

BY THE WAY, ON MY FACEBOOK PAGE I RECENTLY LISTED ALL OF THE COUNTRIES WE HAVE BOMBED SINCE THE END OF WORLD WAR II. CHECK IT OUT.

on to michael vick. fuck him. he does not deserve another shot at the nfl. killing dogs shows a moral compass that is totally out of wack. most mass murderers start by killing animals. his brother is a creep too and got kicked off v.t.'s football team. there is something seriously wrong with mv and you just watch, he is going to do something horrible to somebody before his miserable life is over. wanna bet?

poker has been a disaster this month. the worst month i have ever had. every decision i make is wrong and if a miracle card can come up for my opponent it does so. shit.

i know i haven't been writing much on this page recently so i have probably lost a good number of readers but i just have had nothing to say so that is what i said.

i am also VERY disappointed in obama and will go into that on my next post whenever that may be.

vegas good and bad and minor poker talk.

the good and the bad about vegas from yesterday's paper.


the good: a couple wishing to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary called a restaurant, INTIMATE FINE DINING RESTAURANT in henderson (a suburb of las vegas)because they had been there once before and had enjoyed it. they wanted a reservation for the 4th but were told by the man on the phone that they were only open thursday through saturday. the woman was very disappointed and explained that they had canceled a trip just to do this. the man then said, "well, come on and i (turns out he was the owner, DON ESPANILA) and i will cook a meal just for you and your husband."

the place is really small, 8 tables, but when they got there they found out that he had put a table in the kitchen so they could watch him cook. the menu: lobster, osso bucco, fois gras, lamb chops and fresh veggies. the desert was a black and blueberry chessecake cobbler with lemon verbena.

isn't that just so cool? guarantee you that rhonda and i will eat at this place.

a guy named don barker, former health and safety manager for boyd gaming who quit in protest of the company's handling of safety issues following the death of two workers went on to teach osha rules at unlv. so far, so good huh? a guy who cares, right? well, there's more. the government suspended his license to teach because, "he was submitting falsified information regarding the instructional time spent on topics, failing to collect and retain required documentation and inappropriately ADVISING STUDENTS NOT TO CONTACT OSHA TO REPORT SAFETY ISSUES"!!!!"


now on to, as cows would say, udder things: i have won every session since that disaster but they were small wins, which are, of course, better than losses both from a financial and mental basis but i need to hit a big one. also, i am not really playing my A game..don't know why. every month this year has been over a grand profit and that is with and average of only 50 hours per month of play.

coincidentally, yesterday i played at the mgm room and sat next to a nice young man who reads this blog. he and his wife had seen me at the trop one time and became fans. he beat me on my very first hand (if i am going to make mistakes at a table it will be in the first hour of play...seems like it takes an hour for me to get 'into' the flow of the game) when i made a horrible call on the river. so here is a shout out to (i hope i remember the spelling) mr. and mrs. sonnar.

if it could go wrong...it did.

i should have known by the very first hand that this wasn't going to be a good day... i am on small blind and flop second nut flush. i check and so does everyone else. great. next card is a nothing, i bet 15 dollars and only the bb calls. river is a nothing so i bet 25 and bb raises to 65, i call...he has nuts. the last hand of the day is the real clincher. i have been down all day and at one time was 250 in the hole but have brought it back to only 120 down or so when i am dealt a pair of 7's. 8 people are in hand. flop comes 7-9-10. checked to me and i bet ten dollars into 16 dollar pot and am called in three places. turn is a queen and the whole board is a rainbow. i bet 25 dollars and am called in one place. river is another queen and the only player in front of me who has been checking now bets 60 dollars, i go all in. he had queen 9 for queens full. i had 7's full. shit.

overall, i had aces twice, queens twice, nut straight, second nut flush and a full house. lost three hundred dollars. lol

oh, the horror.

man oh man, some of the stuff that people are spreading out here in cyber space about obama, his programs, health care etc, is way beyond the pale.

no thinking person could possibly believe that obama was not born in hawaii (oh, for you neo-cons a little secret...hawaii is a state) the state of hawaii has posted his birth certificate on the web, the newspaper in his home town published a birth notice when he was born. so to believe he was not born there is to believe a conspiracy that started in, what? 1961 i believe, where they posted a false birth certificate under the name of barack hussian obama because they were going to get him elected president 47 years later. and the world is flat. and we really didn't land on the moon. and obama has a secret plan to take your guns away. oh, the horror.

the new out-and-out lie is that the new health care plan is going to make elderly people commit suicide. oh the horror.

i think we have developed a rather large group people that have lost or never had the ability to think critically.

we need a national health care plan. we pay more for health care than any other country on a per capita basis. the rest of the industrialized world has national health care. they have longer life spans, lower infant mortality rates and their people are not put into bankruptcy by medical bills. only the insurance companies would be hurt by a n.h.c.; not you, not me, not our families. the insurance companies.

plus you are paying for health care over and over and over and over again. every time you buy a product you pay for the health care of every company involved in the manufacturing and shipping and storing and selling of that product. they all add the cost of their health care to the cost of the product. that is how business works. cost + certain %. duh. so if you buy a car that has 25 different companies involved in making it, you are paying 25 times for health insurance plus the health insurance of the truckers that brought it there plus the health care of the dealership. how much does that add to the cost?

every service company that has health care adds it to the cost.
every state, every city, every county has health care and we pay for that.

if we had a national single payer health care plan the cost of practically everything could go down. (oh, it won't because companies would make such a huge profit by eliminating their health care costs but not subtracting it from the retail price)

we already pay for it. but we don't have it. wake up.

tell the family that lost their home because of medical expenses that we don't need it.

and, by the way, this does not affect me. i am covered. i am in the v.a. and have medicare a and b. (both of which are a single payer system...duh)

our government officials have a single payer system but some of them, mostly republicans, don't want you and i to have it. i wonder why. could it be money from the insurance companies? nah, that couldn't be it.

oh well, i am farting in the wind. no one listens. besides obama is a foreign agent is going to sap our precious bodily fluids.

grand kids

two of my grand kids have been here since the middle of last week and we have had a very good time getting to know each other. they have been to THE LION KING and to CARROT TOP and tonight we go to see todd paul and his show at hooters. as i said on facebook, i have introduced them to some exotic foods which they liked a lot.

last night, we were up on sunrise mountain looking over the city and paris says "screw it, i am not going back to north carolina, i want to live here!" guess she likes vegas.

their cousin from l.a. came over and they all went out to ride roller coasters and shop.

i had never spent much time with these two kids, not being the family guy type, and it has been a great experience me and i believe for them. they are bright, aware and hip. we have had some great conversations and, i believe, have formed a bond that was not there before. today we head out to hoover dam and lake mead and tonight i am going to take them out into the desert after the show. the desert at night is a wonderful place, unlike anything they have seen or experienced; hopefully we will be there for the moon rise since it is either full or almost full tonight.

i wanted to take them over to los angeles for a day or so but that will have to wait.

anyway, blah, blah, blah.