Shock Thoughts

Ron Has Cancer

2012-01-09T20:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Fans,

I have been diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive form of cancer. I have been fortunate to be accepted for treatment at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. You can follow my progress on my Facebook Page or on Youtube under "Ron Shock: The Cancer Chronicles" (I start with Part I and progress from there.)

Due to the rarity of this cancer, most oncologists have never seen a case. Therefore, Rhonda and I felt that the best place for me to be was at MD Anderson, as it is among the best, if not the best Cancer Centers in the United States.

I have an exploratory assessment procedure on January 10th and from there it will be determined if surgery is an option. In the best case scenario, my treatment will require radical surgery, followed by radiation and chemo (the unholy trinity).

Please keep Rhonda, my kids and me in your thoughts and prayers as you find it appropriate. We are humbled and grateful for the donations you have made to help us afford this treatment and I will try not to let you down. It is my hope that I will, once again, walk on a stage and blow the room away.

Your friend and storyteller,
Ron Shock

they way we are and how we got here.

2011-12-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

name recognition test: enron, raptor, condor, chewbacca, dennis kozlowski, tyco, worldcom, bernard ebbers, adelphia communications, martha stewart/merrill lynch, subprimes, cdo's and last, but certainly not least, standard and poors. they are the rougues gallery of the collapse of the american dream

m. stewart got included because she is a symbol of insider trader information, not because she brought anything or anyone down. all the others cost us trillions when added together, ruined tens of thousands of lifes, brought europe to ints knees and cost a gppd portion of the american public their life savings. nothing serious. and all these scams got great tiple AAA ratings from standard and poors, you know, the PRIVATE company that downgraded the usa's credit rating. repeat after me: we are so fucked.

if you don't know what or who these names represent then you are part of the problem. they are lessons in how we got to where we are, the facilitators of the collapse of the american dream. they are the scams and scammers of the past 15 years or so, look them up. read about the housing market collapse...nothing happens in a vacuum; anyone who stays silent is cupable,

i tried to warn people about the housing collapse way before it happened but no one listens to a drug addled comic in las vegas, everyone is smarter than i am, everyone knew that housing prices could go up 15-20% per year while wages stayed flat, why listen to me? everyone knew that giving loans to people with poor credit and a bad job resume was jut a hunky dory idea for public money (fannie mae and mac) and private banks (countrywide and bank of america to name two) why listen to me?

i said when bush II came into office that he was going to set up some kind of financial scam for his cohorts because that is what the bush family does....see neal bush and the savings and loans of the 80's. find out more about the brother the press NEVER mentions, marvin. see how exactly georgie boy became a "successful businessman" with his holdings in the texas rangers and the sudden infusion of PUBLIC money into that forlorn franchise. but no one listened, i was obviously just ranting and raving and what did i know anyway?

so, now here we are, no jobs, no credit, no manufucturing, europe staggering, the middle east still sucking lives and money out of the treasury and so who does the american public blame?...why, obviously it is barrack obama's fault. fuck me. fuck you. fuck us all. oh, and merry christmas.

occupy america

2011-11-22T11:07:00.000-08:00

one of the good things that has come out of the OCCUPY WALL STREET protests and the police response to it (tear gas, pepper spray, beatings etc) is that the american public is finally seeing the dark underbelly of our capitalistic society, where the bankers who sold toxic mortgage securities and thus caused the financial meltdown are not arrested, not charged, not vilified but are given bonuses of millions of dollars while the average person on main street is left jobless with the strong possibilty of homelessness, occupy wall street people are beaten with batons in new york city, a iraq war veteran was hit with a tear gas canister fracturing his skull and sitting students are pepper sprayed in california. (incidently pepper spraying a prisoner who is sitting down even during a riot is not only forbidden if a guard does spray a sitting prisoner they are subject to dismissal...which means that murderers in prison have more rights than peaceful protesters on the uc davis campus) as pogo once said, "we have found the enemy and it is us."

our capitalistic economy has failed all but the ultra/uber rich and the people of this once great country are left holding the bag. i have said this before but it bears repeating....revolutions happen when the poor and the middle class unite because they are BOTH being fucked by the ruling class. the ruling class used to be the royalty but now it is the corporations and the ultra rich; we live in an oliarchy not a democracy. we are spoon fed candidates who are beholden to the monied people who support their campaigns so we get to choose not the lesser of two evils but the equal evils "running". citizens united is an insult to all of us who cherish our democracy; corporations are NOT PEOPLE.

i am so mad right now that i could spit. my words fail me and violent behavior is not in my make up but revolution is in the air and in my soul.

2011-08-03T18:41:00.001-07:00

he Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
- Patrick Henry -

I think almost all of us – from the most conservative to the most liberal – can agree that Congress sucks. Those people are losers and need to get with the program. So, I’m sending this along; it sounds like a great idea. Maybe if they had to live like the rest of us they’d get the picture and stop participating in their endless political masturbation.
I hope you all read this completely You will be glad you did.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it.

That was in 1971...before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

I'm asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately.

All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.

The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people, it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!

If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete. You are one of my 20+. Please keep it going.
"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

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listen to the lion (inside of you)

2011-07-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

don't know if there is a lion inside of everyone but you will never know if there is one in you until you look for it and if it is found... then you must listen. remember i walked away from more money than most people will ever make to do something that a. i had never thought of doing until i actually did it and b. even if mastered did not promise much financial rewards but it what i was supposed to do and i knew that when it was presented to me. i had something that a lot of people don't have and that is courage of my convictions. i AM a comic and will remain one until i die. i didn't get into this to "see if i could do it"; that is not what the lion would do; i got into it to be a comic. hell or high water, low pay, long travel, big expenses, etc never deterred me, never discouraged me, never got me down; not then, not now, not ever. i know lots of people who were in the business and called themselves comics but they were wantobes and i have proof...they are not doing comedy now. comedy is not a job it is a advocation. look for yours, listen to the lion inside of you and he/she will tell you what you are. then have the courage to follow that advice, cast aside your doubts, your fears, your worries and jump in whatever waters you have chosen. like the old army slogan went..be all you can be....you were created for something, find it, do it, be happy.

republicans and medicare...article for vegas voice

2011-07-12T08:05:00.001-07:00

The Republicans are proposing a wide-ranging change to Medicare and they are all walking in lock-step to the same drummer; the drums of moving the cost of this recession onto the backs of the poor and the elderly, while at the same time, giving as much money as possible to large corporations, in this case, the giant insurance companies.

Under the Paul Ryan plan, Medicare as we know it today, would disappear from the American landscape and would be replaced by Federal subsidies to help pay for private insurance that would be issued by insurance companies. In some ways, it mirrors President Obama's health care plan, because both rely on private insurance companies to issue the actual insurance. I oppose both for that very reason; the involvement of private insurance companies in what, in the case of Medicare, has always been a government program that was paid for by everybody through payroll deductions. A real national healthcare plan, when one is finally put in place, should be a truly government program, and paid for in same way as medicare is paid for now.

Having worked as a consultant to several large insurance companies, I can tell you one thing for sure, and that is insurance companies are not in the business of paying claims; they are in the business of collecting premiums. You can rest assured as health care costs go up, the insurance companies will raise the premiums and not just by the % of the rising cost but the % plus a profit and not a small profit at that. Just like they have raised the premiums each and every year on almost every single kind of insurance they issue but, in particular, health care premiums. Overall, Insurance company profits were up 56% in 2009 (last year available) even though 2.7 million Americans lost their insurance that year and some companies, especially those involved in group health, did much better than that. To wit: Wellpoint increased profits in 09 over 08 by, are you ready?, 91%! United Healthcare was a real pauper, increasing only 28% in same period while , at the same time, losing 3.9% of enrollment. However, the real winner was Cigna, who dropped 5.5% in enrollment, but increased profits by 346%! A private insurance company must make a profit and, as figures show, they do a good job of that. Government insurance, on the other hand, is not required to meet a profit figure and is only obligated to pay the bills plus maybe a percentage to cover rising health care costs in the next year. In addition, if government stays in the medicare business (so to speak), they have a huge advantage over private companies because of their control of all the payments, which helps them negotiate costs for hospital stays, costs of surgery, cost of drugs, etc. etc. Whereas private companies can, and do negotiate, but to their advantage, not that of their customers. Plus, on the philosophical side, Medicare and Social Security were, and are, a promise made to the American People by the American government. To change it now, after people have paid in all their lives, would be unconscionable and the breaking of a sacred trust.

To anyone who is really, truly, serious about Social Security and Medicare reform, the answer is quite obvious...make everyone pay into the system on all income. For instance, how fair is it for a private person, in business for themselves, to pay 12.4% into social security with a max of $11,107.20 (this year but is going up next year), whereas someone making 100 million dollars per year would still pay the same $11,107.20 they and no more. Yet the very same multimillionaire is still eligible for medicare and social security.

To wrap this argument up, let me say that I trust the Social Security Administration a whole lot more than I trust any insurance company. Plus I can petition my government, but I cannot petition an insurance company. Social Security and Medicare are two of the most successful government programs of all time let's keep them that way.

here you go if you were wondering why

2011-07-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

E.j. Frericks July 9 at 10:20am Report
Caught this on Andrew Tobias site:
Watch This 30-Second Spot
Published on July 07, 2011

Here it is in 30 seconds: “You can’t rebuild America if you tear down the middle class.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY1l9OOxtqo&feature=player_embedded

The Republicans have made it clear from the get-go – explicitly – that their number-one priority is Obama’s failure.

Why?

Is it because he wanted to start an educational race to the top? Or because he hoped to take out Bin laden?

No.

Is it because he wanted to reform the financial system and establish a consumer financial protection bureau?

No.

Was their concern that he wanted every American to have access to affordable health care, along the lines of the Mitt Romney model?

That he wanted to save the U.S. auto industry?

That he wanted to wind down combat operations in Iraq?

That he wanted to empanel a bipartisan budget deficit commission (their idea)? Or establish a free-market cap-and-trade system (their idea)?

Or modernize our decaying infrastructure?

Were they alarmed that a Nobel-prize winning physicist was named to head the Department of Energy or that investments were made to help the private sector fund potentially game-changing energy technologies?

Nope. None of that.

Could they have wanted his Presidency to fail because he would sign the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act or initiate an anti-bullying campaign or encourage potentially life-saving embryonic stem cell research or appoint non-white-male-conservatives to the Supreme Court? Or include gays and lesbians and transgender citizens in his vision of America?

Because he hoped to tighten tobacco regulation or check the sale of assault weapons at gun shows?

Well, we may be getting a little warmer, but still no.

They have wanted him to fail (remember their cheering when Chicago failed in its Olympic bid?) because they want their power back – an inclination natural to both parties – and because they want to protect the rich and powerful (an inclination natural only to one).

The rich must not be taxed.* Corporations must not be regulated. Government is bad, especially to the extent it gives power or rights to the non-wealthy.

That’s the nub of it. To win, they need unemployment to be high and the economy stalled.

And the rest of us are caught in the crossfire.

Have a nice day.

*Or at least be protected from the tax rates they suffered under Clinton (let alone Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter – or even Reagan, who set the tax on investment income at 28%, nearly double George W. Bush’s 15% rate.

2011-06-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

this is something i wrote about how the workers are being fucked and someone wrote back and said that it was a perversion of capitalism and i answer:

well, actually it is capitalism taken to its logical conclusion. since i am one of the 16 americans (or so it seems) who read marx, who was a, for lack of better term, a financial philosopher, and he forsaw just what is happening here and in europe verily as we speak and that is that capitalism will eventually eat itself as the big get bigger and the small are swallowed up in the feeding frenzy. where profits take precendent over everything else which includes, of course, worker safety, worker wages, worker working enviroment and worker safety net such as pensions, retirement, health care etc. for years, unions stood in the way of capitalism running amok but since ronnie, i can't recall, reagan was in office there has been a concerted effort to break the unions and, for the most, that effort has succeeded and we all are paying the price. marx said that communism will only come to being in an industrialized country (which is why it didn't work in russia) because capitalism is necessary for the establishment of factories, roads, shipping, warehouses, etc etc etc etc but once that was accomplished, which it has been, then the inherent weakness of capitalism will become evident to all with the exception of the ultra rich. the computer age and robotic factories are hurrying the process along. see, the rich have a real problem and that is what are they going to do with all of us who are no longer necessary? communism is only a threat to the ultra rich and that is why for almost 100 years capitalistic countries have said what a horrible thing communism is. the very idea of equality is foriegn to a capitalist, the very idea of living wages and upward mobility is frowned upon by the rich. you may think otherwise but history is going to show that i am right. there will come a revolution of the people here and in europe and out of that revolution will come chaos and out of the chaos will come a new form of government which will be either a dictatorship or communism. i probably won't be alive to see the end result but many of you reading this will be. a strong leader here could push back the arrival time of said revolution but it is inevitable, we are seeing a forerunner of sorts all across the middle east where the common denominator in egypt, lybia, tunisia, syria, yeman, et al is the lack of work and the income disparity. hmmmm. all of the dictators of those countries and their cohorts stole billions from the people and now the people want an accounting. our wealth has been stolen as well but we had a middle class which acted as a buffer between the modern robber barons and the rest of us but that middle class is being battered on all sides and so now, who speaks for you and me? NO ONE.
about an hour ago · Like

cwp

2011-06-29T07:22:00.001-07:00

it is early in the morning, rhonda still asleep and i find myself worrying more and more about the state of the union as i read the morning paper. in the last couple of days there have been articles about ceo's increasing their pay while at the same time cutting benefits for the workers. all of this while health care costs go up 48% as the insurance companies are trying to get every last dime they possibly can before a national health care system comes into play. (of course, the nhc that obama passed is so complex, so convoluted and still slanted towards the insurance companies as to be better than nothing but not by much.) unless something is done by the national government we are going to slide farther and farther down the ladder to depression. on the other hand, however, the national government is so tied up in partisan quibbling that we ought to give each and ever person in congress and obama himself a violin to play while america burns.

no one in washington seems to grasp the obvious...we need jobs. the republicans say that the government cannot create jobs only the private sector can do that but the fact of the matter is that american corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash while at the same time they are making the workers put in longer hours and do more tasks instead of hiring.

in the depths of the great depression fdr tried two things...first the cpa which put money into the hands of private contractors and they were supposed to create the jobs. what happened, of course, is that the contractors made off with the money and very few jobs were created and the situation got worse. finally harry hopkins convinced fdr to put people to work directly through the government and the cwp was created. FOUR MILLION JOBS WERE CREATED IN THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS. and depression was avoided. will we do the same here in 2011? not a fucking chance.

the president's speech...

2011-06-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

ah jesus, even though i knew basically what obama was going to say actually hearing it made me feel ill to my stomach. what bullshit! what gall! what warmongering jingoistic bombast! i am amazed he was not booed by the camera people. so, as i said on face book here is the great peacemaker at work...he increases troop levels in the "surge" by 30,000 and now he is "withdrawing" 33,000 leaving "only" 67,000 (or thereabouts) which, oh fellow liberals, about twice the number of troops there when he took office. smoke and mirrors. and next year, he will consult with his "generals" to get their view on what to do then. (here is a prediction...generals are going to be in favor of war....what cha think?) and during the speech not nary a word about what to do about the troops in iraq.

now, not to be outdone in warmongering, rep. boehner was quick to beat the drums of war and death immediately after obama's litany of lies and pussyfooting by saying that we had to stay until the taliban is defeated...which, of course, would be like...oh let's say...never.

the only good thing i heard on tv today was on msnbc where rachael m. said that polls showed that 72% of the american people wanted us out of afghanistan ASAP. of course, the american people want jobs too but hey, fuck 'em, what do they know? i think that they may know that the large amounts of money we are spending (giving to the military industrial complex that is) in iraq and afghanistan would be put to better use and betterment of the american people if that same amount of money was spent here on say building bridges or repairing roads or even paying down the debt. but no, that ain't gonna happen. the war party has spoken and we will be in the middle east until we piss enough of them off to actually explode a nuclear weapon here. and they will get that weapon from pakistan. that is the end result if we don't get out. the people in afghanistan, pakistan, iraq, iran, yeman, saudi arabia et al see us as imperialistic invaders, which, of course, we are. and they will resort to the most desperate of means to get us out. and that is what is going to happen unless we, the people, demand that we stop these stupid, foolish, expensive, murderous wars that are being fought in our name.

in the meantime, republican candidate for president , john huntsman, has been running a commercial on tv that shows him riding a motorcycle through rough country. (set to music of course but no dialogue, just his name...huntsman for president.) ahhhh, but it is not huntsman on the bike. lol. unfuckingbelievable.

to quote the late great bill hicks WAKE UP AMERICA

back to blogging

2011-06-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

for the last year or so, most of the 'blogs' i have posted have been on face book but rhonda wants me to start here again so that later she can edit some of these and put them in a book. matter of fact, now that i think about it, since i have been toying with the idea to do what hundreds, if not thousands, of you have asked me to do which is to write a book about my life and times, i may just write many of these with that exact thought in mind. the problem with facebook is that the comments and posts disappear and finding them again is a real time consuming process. anyway....

the republican field for president is filled with a. nuts,b. religious fanatics and c. people who just make shit up when they have nothing to say. in class a. we have michelle bachman and the undeclared favorite of the tea party, sarah (read my lips since i don't read anything) palin....just google up their statements on you tube, the examples of nuttiness are rampant. leading the pack for b. is gov. rick perry of texas who is having a big "prayer meeting" where only christians and right wing fundamentalist christians at that are welcome (apparently muslims, jews, hindus, unitarians, methodists, native americans, animists, buddhists et al are neither americans nor do they pray) plus it is co-sponsered by the american family association which is an anti-gay right wing group so gays don't count either in rick's america. my favorite little fact (and not little at that) is his belief that abstinance works to cut down on teenage pregnacies. with this belief firmly in mind, rick perry cut sex education in texas schools and guess what? teenage pregnancies in texas are now the largest in america. when this was pointed out to him, the good guv said, and i quote, "abstinace works." he also cut funding for schools across texas hoping, i guess, to grab that #50 spot in studnet achievements...presently the grand state of texas (republican to the core) is 48th in reading and 49th in science. of course, all of the republicans claim to be staunch christians and all will tell you that america was founded by christians but they neglect to say that a good number of our founding fathers were unitarians...including thomas jefferson. ah well, never let facts get in the way of a good campaign speech; which brings us to

b. tom pawlenty another favorite of the republican right. being a member of the war party, tommy boy said this past week that "iraq is a shining example for the entire middle east." man oh man. the week before the cia said that THE LARGEST CONCENTRATION OF AL QUAIDA FIGHTERS IS IN IRAQ!.. and in today's new york times 96-22-11) are these examples of that shining example. 1. suicide bombers detonated two car bombs on tues outside the governor's compound in baghdad killing at least 27 people, many of them police officers. 2. roadside bombs were detonated near american convoys in the cities of hilla, tikrit and samarra. 3.militants fired rockets into a u.s. military base in baghdad, where five soldiers were killed in a rocket attact two weeks earlier and a sixth soldier has died since then of wounds from that same attack. 4. a military convoy in basra was attacked on tuesday but no one died. and 5. "although villence in iraq has decreased significantly in recent YEARS, there is still a STEADY stream of attacks, particularly against government officials and security forces. last week, suicide bombers attacked a provincial council office in baquba, killing seven. (maybe tommy boy was referring to the movie..the shining...since the horror continues daily) and now for ...

c. the erstwhile, newt ginrich, (you know, the family values guy who left his dying wife for a helmet-headed bimbo) has been tauting himself as a professor. which he is not. but why quibble? and why question a man who has a million dollar line of credit at tiffany's? to buy baubles for his baby....

on the democratic side of the war party (the only party we have), though obama is highly unpopular, not a single democrat has said that they will oppose him. i guess they are just super happy with how things are going.

in final comment for today, we are building bridges and roads and providing job training not here in america where we so desperately need it but in afghanistan and iraq. can you say...."we are so fucked"?

rep. peter king for hypocrite of the year.

2011-03-13T12:24:00.001-07:00

my nominee for hypocrite of the year: peter king. he supported the ira while they were in bed with...(drum roll please)...momar khadafi. now he is on his mc carthy type witch hunt against american muslims,who are, according to the fbi or main source of info about potential terrrorists.
14 minutes ago · · Like ·
Ron Shock if you don't think that this plays right into al quaida's propoganda then you don't think. proof that america is anti muslim is how bin laden is going to present this misguided, egotistical, racist idiot and his "fact finding mission."

instead of "investigating" our fellow citizens who just happen to have a different religion than mr. king we should be reaching out more and more to the american muslims. the press should devote more ink to all the anti-terrorism sermons being preached daily in the american mosques. more ink to all the contributions of the muslim community to the over all good of america. to the obvious numbers involved, 8 million muslims here and if only 1% were terrorists then there would be 80,000 terrorists and expodentially more attacks BUT THERE AREN'T. same for the world wide numbers, a billion muslims and 1% would be ten million terrorists and obviously there isn't anywhere near that number or there would be multiple attacks PER DAY all over the western world. most of the so-called terrorist attacks happen in iraq and afghanistan whereas the people involved there would call it resistance to a foriegn invader.

there is a terrorist in my shed
there is a terrorist under my bed
no wait,
there is a terrorist in my head.

mubarak and us. my feb 15th article for vegas voice.

2011-02-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

In watching the coverage of the Egyptian revolution I could not help but notice that one thing that was, as far as I heard, not mentioned on any of the networks and that includes MSNBC was that Egypt was one of the countries the we, The United States of America, sent people to for them to be tortured. Others in that rather dubious list are Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Morrocco,Saudi Arabia, and Isreal. Now, if I know this and it is indeed public knowledge then surely the talking heads on tv must have known that as well and if they didn't, it is damn sure their bosses did but still no mention of a very, very salient point. Mubarak was a brutal dictator that used emergency powers (which were in effect for 30 years....if something exists for thirty years it is not an "emergency" it is a lifestyle) to not only imprison his own people and subject them to unspeakable horrors it did it to other people in OUR name. And you know who else knew that he tortured people in our name? Every single Muslim in the Middle East, that's who. When those same Muslims hear us giving our oh so pious platitudes about how much we love democracy and abhor torture, the see us as the world's biggest hypocrites.

Now the so-called "leaders" in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria and probably Turkey are pooing in their collective pants because they see the handwriting of liberty on the walls of their secret prisons, the murmers of revolution in their streets, the ringing of the bell of freedom in the cell phones and computers of their down-trodden subjects. So what are we to do? Continue to prop up these countries who kill, maim, torture and imprison their own people so that they, like Mubarak, can reap the rewards of American dollars and live in luxory while their subjects live in squalor? Or are we finally going to quit selling our soul for oil and pull out of the Middle East and expand our own oil industry here in our country?

Where do you think we get the majority of our oil from? Here is the list of the top nine countries from whom we get our oil. 1. Canada 2. Mexico. 3. Saudi Arabia. 4. Venezuela. 5. Nigeria. 6. Angola. 7. Iraq. 8. United Kingdom. 9. Brazil. Two countries in the Middle East and we are occupying one of them. We DON'T NEED MIDDLE EASTERN OIL. Save our country, save our souls, save our dignity, save our honor......get out of the middle east. Let them eat that damn oil if they don't want to make us a fair deal. Let freedom spread across that area of the world and if they choose radical Islam, so be it. They no bitch against us if we are out of there.

Hmmmmm....

2011-01-25T22:52:00.000-08:00

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathe rs conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

~~~ Thomas Jefferson

on the tuscon shootings

2011-01-12T09:55:00.000-08:00

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.

This is also the term for what Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, and others do. And this is what led directly and predictably to a number of cases of ideologically-motivated murder similar to the Tucson shootings.

G2geek's diary :: ::
Update: the mechanism spelled out.

(This update is to resolve some ambiguity.)

The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the "missile" set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those "missiles" in motion.

Here's the mechanism spelled out concisely:

The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.

One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act. While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. "given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such"), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

The lone wolf who was the "missile" gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.

Further, the stochastic terrorist may be acting either negligently or deliberately, or may be in complete denial of their impact, just like a drunk driver who runs over a pedestrian without even realizing it.

Finally, there is no conspiracy here: merely the twisted acts of individuals who are promoting extremism, who get access to national media in which to do it, and the rest follows naturally just as an increase in violent storms follows from an increase in average global temperature.

And now we return to the rest of the original diary...
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The lone wolves.

The term "lone wolf" is used in law enforcement and intel to refer to an individual who is emotionally unstable, who lacks obvious ties to known criminal gangs or terrorist groups, and who pops up seemingly out of nowhere to commit a violent or terrorist act.

The three-letter agencies can keep an eye on organized groups, and do a damn good job at stopping violent actors associated with those groups. At least three intended car bombings were stopped last year by the FBI intercepting the bombers and substituting fake explosives in time to save hundreds of lives and arrest the would-be bombers.

Lone wolves don't have obvious connections through which they can be discovered. They don't communicate much if at all about their intentions. They keep their plans to themselves. And then, apparently at random, they pop up from obscurity and commit murder. They are law enforcement's and intel's worst nightmare, and on Saturday one of them became America's nightmare.
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Stirring the pot.

At any given time there are hundreds of thousands of Americans with combinations of personality characteristics (such as emotional instability, a paranoid ideology, and a propensity for violence) that put them at risk of going off the deep end and becoming lone wolves. All it takes is the right push, the right nudge at the right time, to dislodge a few of them and send them on their way to fifteen minutes of fame surrounded by dead bodies.

There's nothing mysterious about this process. It is not much different to other instances where a person is almost ready to make a decision, and the right combination of inputs makes them act. For example you have an old car and it begins to break down more often: now you're thinking about replacing it, and you might be swayed by something in an automobile advertisement. Anyone who is familiar with marketing and advertising knows how this works, and advertisers often target their messages to people who are "ready to buy" and just need a little persuading. Political candidates often target their ads to the undecideds, hoping that a little nudge will win them some votes. This is perfectly normal and hardly insidious.

It becomes insidious when these practices are used in such a manner as to deliberately or negligently stir up lone wolf violence.

So let's take Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly. There is no question that their emotional rhetoric appeals to people who are emotionally unstable. And, since their audiences are tracked and analyzed in detail, there is no question that they know it.

When they go on TV and shout and sputter, rant and rave, and weep and wail, they are not expecting to persuade liberals or even undecideds to change their votes. They are "playing to their base," that they know includes people who are emotionally unstable. In short they are "stirring the pot." And if you turn up the temperature and keep stirring, you know that the pot will boil. Little bubbles will come up from the depths and pop.
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Pop go the lone wolves.

Some lone wolves have no provable connection to the hate-talkers and pot-stirrers, other than memes in common. One example of this type is James Wenneker von Brunn who shot and killed security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Another is Andrew Joseph Stack III, who flew a Piper Dakota into the Austin Texas field office of the Internal Revenue Service, killing IRS manager Vernon Hunter and himself, and injuring thirteen others. At this point it appears as if Jared Loughner is one of these: all-over-the-map crazy, with an incoherent ideology that is mostly rightwing but difficult to trace to specific sources.

(UPDATE: to be very clear about this: at this point I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that Loughner falls under the definition of stochastic terrorism, because there is nothing yet to link him to being a fan of one of the mass media hate-talkers. However there are enough other cases out there to make this issue topical and relevant right now.)

On the other hand...

On 27 July 2008, lone wolf shooter Jim David Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and shot nine people, killing two and wounding seven. Adkisson said he was motivated by hatred of "Democrats, liberals, n-----s, and faggots." A police search of his home found books by Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly.

On 4 February 2009, he accepted a plea bargain: guilty on two counts of murder, in exchange for a life sentence w/o possibility of parole (LWOP).

On 4 April 2009, Richard Poplawski shot five Pittsburgh PA police officers, leaving three dead and two seriously wounded.

According to people who knew him, he was a birther and white supremacist, was paranoid that Obama was going to take away his guns, and was consumed with anti-semitic conspiracy theories. A police search of his computer found links to various groups and to a YouTube video of Glenn Beck talking about FEMA concentration camps.

Poplawski's trial has been delayed until 25 April 2011, where it is possible he will face the death penalty for the murder of police officers.

On 31 May 2009, lone wolf Scott Roeder shot and killed gynecologist Dr. George Tiller while Tiller was attending church services. At first it appeared that he acted alone, but research by some fellow Kossaks and I uncovered evidence that he had at least one accomplice. That issue is presently being investigated by a federal grand jury.

In the months leading up to the assassination, Bill O'Reilly had waged a "relentless campaign" against Tiller, a campaign of exactly the type that would be expected to stir up violence against the doctor. The details can be found here: http://www.salon.com/...

In January 2010 Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. At present his accomplices and enablers have not yet been indicted and charged.

On 18 July 2010, Byron Williams set out from his mother's home in Groveland CA, heading for San Francisco to shoot up the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, with the intention of "starting a revolution."

Williams, a convicted felon (two bank robberies), was stopped by the CHP (California Highway Patrol) for weaving in and out of traffic at high speed. When stopped, he immediately opened fire on the CHP officers, wounding two. They returned fire, wounding him in the leg, and then took him into custody. At first they thought they were dealing with a garden-variety cop shooter. Then they found the notebook in his car, with the details of his plans.

Quoting the Wikipedia article on Williams: http://en.wikipedia.org/...

Quote: Williams has identified Glenn Beck as his primary motivation for the shootings. According to Williams, Beck is "like a schoolteacher on TV... he's been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption." Continuing: "Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. He'll never do anything ... of this nature. But he'll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need." End quote.

Prior to Williams' planned attack, Beck had mentioned the obscure Tides Foundation 29 times on his program. He had drawn numerous charts on his infamous blackboard, showing how Tides is the funding source behind much of the "liberal conspiracy." He had stoked and fueled, turned up the heat on the pot, and stirred it real good. He devoted two of his broadcasts to Tides in the very week preceding the shooting.

Quoting the Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Quote: Beck has at times spoken against violence, but he more often forecasts it, warning that "it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid." Most every broadcast has some violent imagery: "The clock is ticking. . . . The war is just beginning. . . . Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government. . . . You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head. . . . The other side is attacking. . . . There is a coup going on. . . . Grab a torch! . . . Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers. . . . They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered. . . . They are putting a gun to America's head. . . . Hold these people responsible." Unquote.
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Every ounce of evidence you could possibly need.

One dead doctor.

Two dead churchgoers.

Seven wounded churchgoers.

Three dead police officers.

Four wounded police officers.

How many more that I couldn't remember while writing this?

Meanwhile the jury is still out on whether Loughner's victims belong on the list of people who "got Becked."

As someone on dKos wrote in a comment about this a few months ago, there was a saying among his buddies in the Air Force: "Once is a tragedy, twice is a terrible coincidence, three times is enemy action."

If you were a media personality known for rants & raves on the air, and it came out that some random killer had possibly been influenced by you or one of your colleagues, what would you do? Would you apologize? Would you tone it down?

If it happened again, what would you do? And if it happened yet again after that? What would you do?

It takes more than just a special type of sociopath to fail to be moved by the murders of doctors, churchgoers, and police officers in the line of duty, and the could-have-been-murders of more.

I submit to you that it takes something between callous disregard and deliberate intent.
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Pulling the trigger by remote control.

If you wanted certain people dead, but you wanted plausible deniability, you would have someone else do the deed for you at a distance, the greater the distance the better.

One way to do it would be to use your position on radio or TV to hurl emotional rhetoric that is calculated to appeal to people who are psychologically unstable. Some of them will go out and vote, some will go forth and spread your rant-memes, some will get into bar-room brawls over one issue or another.

But a few, who have already demonstrated a lack of respect for the law, will do more than that. Maybe they'll assault someone on the street who is black or gay or speaking Spanish in public or wearing traditional Islamic garb. Maybe they'll make a bomb and put it in the mail or plant it at a women's clinic.

Maybe they'll go out and shoot someone. Maybe they'll shoot someone who, in your heart of hearts, you want dead. If you have a list of targets in mind, such as Operation Rescue's website with crosshairs on doctors, or Palin's crosshairs on elected officials, it won't matter who gets killed first and who gets killed later: any hit will do.

This is stochastic terrorism: you heat up the waters and stir the pot, knowing full well that sooner or later a lone wolf will pop up and do the deed. The fact that it will happen is as predictable as the fact that a heated pot of water will eventually boil. But the exact time and place of each incident will remain as random as the appearance of the first bubbles in the boiling pot.

And so the unstable shooter, the sick kid or crazy grownup, will be taken into custody where they will rant a disconnected version of your own rants. The fact that they are clearly nuts will enable shifting the public discussion away from your hateful rhetoric and toward the overt insanity of the shooter or bomber.

After that, you get to go on the air and tut-tut along with everyone else, and say Oh So Sad, and all that crap. But behind the scenes you drink a toast and cheer: one down, a bunch more to go.

Or perhaps you're just crazy enough to truly believe that you really don't have anything to do with it. You collect your media star paycheck and tootle along to the next day in front of cameras and microphones, ready to do it again, as oblivious as the drunk driver who runs over a flock of schoolchildren and keeps driving, and then when the cops pull him over, says "Who, me??"
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The guilty-knowledge test.

Someone needs to corral Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, and the rest of them, in front of a microphone and camera that are not of their own choosing.

For example think of Sixty Minutes and their famed unannounced appearances at the offices and even homes of various wrongdoers over the years. Or think of press conferences or other scheduled appearances, where someone pops up and asks the inconvenient question or two, and the question captures the headlines.

And someone needs to ask them: In light of this latest in a series of ideologically-motivated murders, are you willing to tone down your rhetoric even a little?

Listen very closely to their answers. They will duck and weave, evade and deny, or at most give the standard reply of "lone nuts, oh so sad." But they may also let slip a subtle hint of guilty knowledge.

The author of the aforementioned WaPo article says in passing, "It's not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show."

I say it damn well is fair to blame them when it happens again and again and predictably again.

Once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.

And now we know how it's done: stir the pot and wait for the inevitable, and then deny it and do it again. That's stochastic terrorism as surely as when Bin Laden does it. And Beck and his fellow hate-mongers are terrorists by remote control.

Tags: Tucson shooting, Giffords, terrorism, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Fox, hate speech, Recommended (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

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drug laws and sanity.

2010-12-23T11:30:00.001-08:00

Missoula District Court: Jury pool in marijuana case stages ‘mutiny’
billingsgazette.com
A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County District Court last week.
36 minutes ago · Like · Comment · Share
Jennifer Montz likes this.
We want Ron Shock back on Television!!! Please. ‎"In fact, one juror wondered why the county was wasting time and money prosecuting the case at all, said a flummoxed Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul.

Ron Shock ah, sanity rears its lovely head. of course it is a waste of time and money. all of you who have followed me over the years know my position on this: we should legalize marijuana and tax it. i will even go another step...we should legalize all drugs and instead of locking people up help people break any addictions they may have. i came to this conclusion based on the a certain reality and that is: YOU CAN GET ANY KIND OF DRUG THAT YOU WANT RIGHT NOW. i can go into a strange city and within three hours score, if i so desire, any drug known to man. and you know that is true.

the war on drugs is a miserable failure and they knew it would be one when they started. what it does is give the police untold powers over the populace. drug testing, for instance, is a direct violation of the 4th and 5th admendments to the constitution. it is an illegal search of one's person without a warrent and it is making someone testify against themselves. what ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? a drug test assumes you are guilty until you prove you are innocent.

i have read that the so-called war on drugs has cost us over one trillion dollars so far and i think that figure is grossly understated. we have tens of thousands of people in prison on drug related charges. what does that cost? their families are left, in many cases, destitute and therefore on some kind of assistance from state or federal governments. what does that cost? legalize them and spend only a tiny proportion of money already being spent on treatment instead of incarceration and you save billions upon billions upon billions.

the same goes for prostitution...legalize it and tax it. it is already everywhere (you know and i know and the police know that on certain corners in every city there are hookers standing waiting for customers) if we legalize it, put in red light districts, have brothels then you eliminate pimps and disease. the girls are safe, the customers are safe, the city and state and federal governments get tax revenues. and that would be a lot of fucking money....so to speak.

i was asked about wilileaks and this is what i said

2010-12-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

et me preface this with i know a writer who is very progressive and he thinks that the wikileaks release of these memos, emails etc is the greatest thing since the pentagon papers. you must remember that the p.p. broke the truth about the "tonkin gulf episode" and proved that the government flat out lied to us and because of THAT LIE the majority of the 58,000 deaths in vietnam HAPPENED! a lie that cost tens of thousands of young american men their lives and also caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of vietnamnese. remember that.

when i looked at it from that prespective ...

now, what these new leaks show is that the government of afghanistan is corrupt to its very core and WE KNOW IT. hmmm does this start to have an erie feel to it? we also know that the so-called afghan army is a sham and probably won't fight (just like the south vietnamnese army was unreliable and we knew it) we plan on staying until the afghanistan army can control the countryside and the government is stable. right? yet we know that the afgan army is more a figment of our imagination and we also know the the current government, which we installed, is horribly corrupt and not trusted by the people of afghanistan. BUT WE ARE STILL STAYING. based on what we know IS BASICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO HAPPEN AND THEN WHEN IT DOESNT HAPPEN WE WILL HAVE TO STAY EVEN LONGER and longer and longer and longer and longer and longer.......

when the pentagon papers were leaked to the press, oh the horror cried the politicians and commentators not of the government lies mind you but the release of the papers. hmm just as we are seeing now. and the beat goes on.

the detractors are using the same arguments....it jepordizes people who sympathize with us. here is a clue, jack, they were in jepordy anyway...they sympathized with the invaded army and the people knew it. hmmmm. what would put them in real danger is when we finally leave.....ask some of the south vietnamnese who co-operated with us and then we abandoned them.

so, fuck a bunch of secrets. the government and the military industrial comples doesn't want us to know the truth about afghanistan and iraq. we are there to stay. that is the plan. and they are pissed that we, the people, might just actually figure that out.

health care and you..vegas voice article

2010-12-15T11:48:00.001-08:00

The national health care system was ruled unconstitutional by a republican-appointed federal judge the other day because it required everyone to buy into the system but previously two other federal judges, both appointed by Clinton, ruled that it was constitutional so the eventually the decision will be made by the Supreme Court. We, the people, though need to really think this through and in this column today I am going to ask you to drop any preconceived ideas about it and read this with an open mind. Because it is such an important subject, this little screed may take two issues to complete but here is my main thrust and my reasoning behind it.

If we let the national health care program go down the costs to the country will be horrendous! Right now Americans pay more for health care than any other industrialized country and, by all measures such as obesity, child deaths, age expectancy etc, we get less. Not only that when the national inflation rate is practically nil, health care costs have gone up over 9% per year over the last four years and is expected to top 10% in 2010 when all the figures are in. Many people are covered by group health plans through their work but when the insurance companies raise the rates employers shift most, if not all, of the increase down to the workers. However since wages have been flat since George Bush took office in 2000 and continues so under Obama this increase to the workers is not balanced out by raises in wages so consequently these workers, instead of getting raises, are getting real money reductions in their pay checks so, logically speaking, they have less money to spend which hurts ALL other business and thus keeps the national economy from expanding at the rate we need. Not only that but the cost of health care for employees is factored into the cost of whatever product or service the company provides so that it becomes inflationary for the nation as a whole. Whenever you buy literally anything in America you are paying for some one else's health care plan and when you buy something big such as a car you are paying a dozen companies health care costs; the tire company provides health care, all of the suppliers such as batteries, cables, spark plugs, door handles, seats, dashboards etc etc etc all provide health care and each and EVERY one of them passes that cost onto the car company who then adds X percent to that and then includes their own health care outlay so the cost of the car goes up by hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Put in a NATIONAL health care plan and the cost of all things made in America goes down. Even the companies that outsource their manufacturing have to pay health care costs for the American companies that ship it, truck it, package it, stock it etc. And here, once again, you and I pay for it.

Under a NATIONAL health care plan we would be able to control costs much more efficiently at the doctor and hospital level. You must always remember this axiom: INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF PAYING CLAIMS, THEY ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF COLLECTING PREMIUMS! Every one of you reading this knows a horror story about an insurance company denying obvious legitimate claims or lowering what they will pay leaving the private person in deep financial straits. And here is a dirty little secret that most do not know, hospitals will not negotiate with private people over costs but have to negotiate these same costs if they are being paid by the insurance company so the hospitals and doctors don't get their full pay so what do they do? Why, guess what?, they pass those costs onto everybody else. Under a national health care plan costs would be negotiated and put into place for all people at all times. And if we put in some kind of tort reform, doctors would be freed from the ungodly costs of insurance against frivolous lawsuits thus being able to lower their costs to all of us. Not only that but hospitals are required by law to treat all people who come through their doors and this includes not only poor citizens but illegals as well and these people do NOT pay but payment is made by you and I. Having a requirement that ALL people have a national insurance card means that the hospitals will always be reimbursed for their costs and not have to pass them on to the general public.

Next month we will cover the tremendous cost of insurance fraud and how a national health care system will put a huge dent in that and we will cover how all the other industrialized countries handle their national health plans.

I leave you with this quote: "Let us put an end to the teachings and preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far let and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation's bloodstream." Lyndon Johnson.

why i am voting for senator reid.

2010-10-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

rhonda and i both voted for sen. reid and here is why.

1. as a resident of nevada which is a very small state population wise, if senator reid were defeated we would have no stroke in washington. ms. angle could not even get the state legislature to back any of (well, she only had two) measures, and in washington she will be dead last on the pecking order which would put nevada dead last as well. if you think the republican establishment is going to let ms. angle have a voice you are delusional.

2. senator reid is against yucca mountain as a depository for nuclear waste until it can be shown, beyond any doubt that it is safe. ms. angle backs the republican side and wants yucca mountain to go forward.

3. senator reid has tried over and over again to "fix" social security and has presented good ideas on the subject. ms. angle wants to phase out ss and replace it with private accounts in the stock market, which is an absolutely horrible idea. the recent crash was bad enough but had bush managed to privatize ss it would have devasted the elderly in this country.

4. senator reid and the democrats realize that our schools are falling behind all other industrialized countries and has worked tirelessly to improve school performance and managed to get a big part of the stimulus for nevada which saved thousands of teachers jobs. ms. angle wants to do away with the dept. of education which would start a movement that ensures the rich kids have good schools and the poor (blacks and browns especially) would be stuck with the very worst if any at all.

5. senator reid is very knowledgeable in foreign affairs while ms. angle refuses to answer any question whatsoever about f.a.'s probably because she knows nothing about it. (what other reason could there be for her refusal?)

6. senator reid has reached out to all minorities while ms. angle has run a campaign based on fear. her latest tv ad which shows supposed "illegals" coming supposedly acrosss our borders shows them to all look like gang members in a blatant attempt to demonize all hispanics. look, if we were to actually fix our immigration policies and make it easier for people to achieve citizenship we would all be better off. and if corporations were not using illegals they wouldn't be coming. i repeat something i have said before, check out tyson foods or any of the meat packing plants and you will see that at least 50% of the workers are lillegals. senator reid has tried over and over to get reform through while the republicans use it as a campaign issue and offer no plans other than strict enforcement but that is just a smoke screen because of SEE CORPORATIONS USING ILLEGALS. the constitution which republicans so often want to quote leave the question of immigration to the federal government so, knowing that, the arizona bill is just pure politics and offers no long term solution.

7.ms. angles repeated use of the term "second ammendment solutions" reeks of treason. it is a thinly disquised call for assissination of public officals including senator reid. she said, "i hope we solve this by this election and that we won't have to use our second ammendment rights". WHAT THE FUCK!!! and she has said this OVER AND OVER. and will not answer any questions about it. my god, people, this woman is not only out of touch, she is flat out dangerous. there are some real kooks out there with hate in their hearts and guns in their homes who can be easily led to violence. (does timothy mcveight come to mind? he was motivated by rhetoric very similar to ms. angles.

8. senator reid worked for the passage of a national health care system, which is something we desperately need in this country. the one passed is only a step in the right direction and needs much more work but WE MUST HAVE A NATIONAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEM. we have millions of people without health care ins. and they are in daily risk of losing everything to medical costs. facts are facts and the fact of the matter is we spend more on health care and get less than any other industrialized nation. we are the only industrialized nation that has citizens going bankrupt because of medical bills. ithe insurance companies and the hospital cartels have increased costs way beyond the rate of inflation for the past two decades while they are swimming in profits and we are drowning in debt. ms. angle wants to overthrow the health care passed and go back to where we were.
unacceptable to me.

9. i believe the right wing of the republican party and ms angle is surely part of the RIGHT WING is so beholden to the corporations that support them that a republican senate would move our country backwards to the days of gwb with tax breaks for the rich and the corporations and the erosian of all social services to the poor and the needy.

it is our country, it is our state of nevada and it is our future and our children's future at stake here; a republican victory and god forbid a republican president in 2012 would destroy our country. reagan, bush and bush damn well tried and the next time they may succeed. however, i must also say that the democrats are not much better (but they are better) and we really do need a true THIRD PARTY. one that is not beholden to the monied interests, one that speaks for the majority of the people who are believe are IN THE MIDDLE AND NOT ON THE EXTREMES WHETHER THEY BE LEFT OR RIGHT...EXTREME IS EXTREME. but until then, i must put my hopes and my vote in the hands of the democrats who i believe are more in tune with the common man than the republican party which, i believe, are corporate hacks.

USA! USA! USA! WE'RE NUMBER 48!!!

2010-09-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

USA TODAY united states is fattest among advanced countries.
USA TODAY united states students ranks 48th in math and science.
USA TODAY 49% of americans don't know how long it takes the earth to circle the sun.

‎"if the usa's students matched finland analysis suggests the us economy would grow 9-16 percent"

so, it turns out that our problems are what i have always feared: we are fat and stupid.

on cnn this morning they had a piece about farm workers in california's grape orchards, the workers, who are all mexicans, make 8 dollars per hour but they take taxes out though most of the workers are illegal. they asked the farm's labor manager how many 'americans' have ever applied for the work. answer.. NONE. so many we can add lazy to fat and stupid.

those statistics should stun and dismay all of you. we are going to end up a second rate country if we don't a. improve our educational system (and i don't have the slightest idea of how to do that since, i feel, the real problem lies with the parents who do not get involved in their childrens education .. oh the schools could be better, the teachers better trained but if parents aren't involved then kids will continue to fall way behind the rest of the world) and at the same time b. get americans off their fat asses and take some of the shit jobs that are out there. hey go pick some grapes for three months and you will lose some weight..

over the years on my blogs and in private letters to various people i have espoused the idea that americans don't really want to get rich because that requires way too much work, they just want to live like they are. during boom times, americans buy more and bigger STUFF. a bigger car, though they don't need it, a bigger house, though they don't need it, new furniture, though they don't need it, another tv, another gaget or gizmo and at the same time, save nothing. facts bear me out: during the bush years we went on a shopping spree but wages remained FLAT. so, we weren't earning more, we were just buying more. and, of course, eating more.

the jobs of the future are going to require specialized knowledge and our kids aren't getting that. you know where more people speak english than any other country? CHINA. how many of our kids are learning chinese? people in europe speak 5 or more languages and here we don't even speak english properly much less be fluent in others.

fat, stupid, lazy and poorly educated. dat's us.

life in city

2010-09-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

Ron Shock according to a study by pbs there are somewhere between 2.3 and 3.5 homeless people in america. (3 million would be TEN PERCENT OF OUR TOTAL POPULATION!!!). according to a 2009 study on any given day 200,000 veterans are homeless. to think that 200k of men and women who served their country, risked their lives, left their families behing to go fight one of our non-stop wars in some far away place are now living in the streets is a national disgrace.

i have a very dear friend who is quite active in social work (especially battered women) and has a lot of contact with the homeless and the people who work with them. i asked her what percentage of the homeless are there because of mental problems and she said probably 75%. this is, of course, thanks to that great patriot, ronald reagan, who stopped funding for federal mental health hospitals which then put 3 quarters of million people on the streets back in 83 (i think) and the figure has risen with each passing year. now, even middle class people of untold numbers are facing homelessness because of the continuing recession.

we, and that includes me, have a tendency to overlook (or not look at all) the thousands of homeless in our cities. we see them, not as our fellow citizens or our brothers and sisters, but as bums or addicts and some of them surely are bums or addicts but the vast majority are not in those catagories and study after study shows that to be true. i, for one, cannot, in good conscious, continue to do that.

i know that what ever little i do will have only a tiny, tiny bit of difference or no difference at all but if i don't do it, who will?

so, now i am asking you to do a little something to help. volunteer one day a month at a shelter or at a food kitchen or as a driver to get people to medical care. if you can't do that, go to the store and buy a big bag of rice and a big bag of beans (cost, what? 5 dollars??) and donate them to some organization which feeds the hungry. buy some school clothes and donate them. take some of the clothes you no longer wear and donate them. if you won't do it..who will?

i, for one, have sat on my ass and not done what my christian upbringing commands me to do and i really don't want to meet my maker and have to explain how i was just too busy to help my fellow man.

state of the union (in my opinion)

2010-07-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

it has been 234 years since our founding fathers published the declaration of independence and here in 2010 we live in a country that they would not, in many ways, recognize. we are mired in an economic slump of our own doing with no end in sight while our two major political parties spend their time casting verbal stones at each other. (john adams thought the "party" system was the greatest threat to our political process and i think he was right but that is for another blog) while millions are out of work here in america due to greed of corporations and stupidity of government while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and those of us in the middle watch our fortunes and futures slide farther and farther downward. karl marx said that the only true wealth of a country was the tangible goods that the country produced and if he was right, and i think he was, then america has made a horrible and possibly deadly mistake in letting our manufacturing to be allowed to be taken to third world countries in the name of greater profits for the rich and slightly lower prices for the public. now we have lost the greatest creator of jobs which is the manufacturing sector. even in hard times people need to buy shoes, shirts, underwear, sheets, towels, socks, etc and guess what? almost none of these is made in america. those "slightly" lower prices don't look so good when weighed against the millions unemployed because there are far fewer customers to buy those "slightly" lower priced (and often shabbily made) items and thus the spiral continues downward.

our founding fathers would be aghast at the following fact: we have troops stationed in 144 countries! so much for not getting involved in foreign affairs which was something that the fathers were very adamant about but because our military industrial complex now rules our foreign policy our young men and women in uniform find themselves spread out around the globe. not only does that cause economic drain on our resources it has a double whammy, we pay those troops and they then spend that money in foreign lands. we have to rent space to put house those troops and that money goes to foreign contractors (with the exception of course for haliburton which then pays no taxes on the money it makes overseas.) but all of that is not the real problem which is that those troops create more terrorists! no one wants the empire to have their storm troopers in their country and resentment against the empire grows and grows each day. (ask yourself, how would you like chinese troops in your home town?)

we have an enemy alright but we have mislabeled him (her) as "islamic terrorists" because the powers that be here don't you and i to recognize just why our "enemy" is fighting us. they are NOT islamic terrorists they are middle eastern/arab/persian/muslim people who resent and hate us for having our troops on what they consider to be holy land. they resent us for propping up brutal dictatorships in yemen, saudi arabia and egypt (whose secret police rivals anything that hitler had) and our blind and unyielding support for isreal regardless of what they do. we do not have an even handed approach to the middle east and you can rest assured that every single arab, persian and muslim inhabitant of those lands knows that. they resent us for turning a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinian people trapped in refuge camps in their own land. ask yourself again, what do you think our founding fathers would think of this?

we refuse to accept the obvious and that is if we want peace in the middle east we must get out of there. period. albert einstein said "peace cannot be kept by force it can only be kept by understanding." but hey, what did he know?

after 9-11 almost the entire population of the middle east was on our side and they thought they attack but that disappeared when bush invaded for iraq based on either incredibly faulty intelligence (and i use that word lightly) or just plain old lies. (gee, i wonder why iran wants more weapons; they have american nuclear armed troops to the west in iraq, nuclear armed american forces on the east in afghanistan and a nuclear armed isreal to the south...make anyone paranoid wouldn't it?)

so, now we are involved in a war with no possible victory in afghanistan and thus each and every day creating more and more people who have valid reasons to hate us.

we demand greatness of our athletes but we accept mediocrity in our statesmen. we elect people based on what they say they will do but when they do the opposite we look the other way or continue playing our video games or reading about the latest scandal coming out of hollywood. we write trivia on face book and care about paris hilton but we don't hold our politician's feet to the fire for their lying. we remain uninvolved in politics and only 55-60% of our REGISTERED voters vote. for shame! but, here on the fourth of july, we wave our flags and shoot our fireworks and watch our ballgames and tell each other how great we are.

i have traveled the world and thus i know that the american people are, for the most part, friendly and kind. i also know they are woefully unaware of what is going on in the world and most couldn't find iraq or afghanistan on a globe is all the countries were un-named. they can't tell you the name of the president of iraq or afghanistan or pakistan or england or germany or italy or greece or spain and all of those countries have a vital role in our future.

and one thing we must become aware of is that we, as a people, are partially responsible for the mess we are in. we, as citizens, must become more involved in politics, we, as a people, must demand accountability of our political leaders (another word i use lightly). we must pay more attention to national affairs than we do to sports. we must demand of our schools that they actually teach the little monsters to read and write and do math. we must demand of the parents of the little monsters that they get involved in their children's education.

we have porous borders and scream about "illegals" but refuse to recognize that it is the corporations who are hiring them who are the real problems. (see tyson foods or any of the meat packing plants to see just how many illegals work there.) if no one was hiring these people they wouldn't come. and, by the way, how many times have we found some congressperson using an illegal for household work? if we were to go to all the rich people in this country who have a gardner or a maid or a cook or a butler or a pool boy or.....any menial laborer working for them and then arrested not the illegals but the rich who hire them we would need to build some more jails that is for sure. yet, it is these same rich people who are screaming about the illegals.

happy birthday america.

once upon a time, pogo said......

2010-05-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

every thing that happens does so as the result of other things happening. back in the early part of the century when gw bush and (he's a) dick cheney the regulations pertaining to the oil business were relaxed across the board. not only that members of the mms were chummy with the oil companies and often went right to work for them after leaving the government. those still our the national payroll were, according to recent press releases, using drugs and watching porn while at work. they took bribes oh, excuse me, gifts, from the oil companies such as dinners, nights at the theaters and baseball tickets.

british petroleum has been one of the major culprits when it come to safety regulations and their two refineries in the united states accounted for 97% of all the complaints regarding that industry. 97%.!!!! their refinery in houston exploded killing 30 people and they paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines but they did not fix the problems and paid hundred of millions more. they paid the highest osha fine ever levied against an oil company.

so why are we surprised when a bp well blew up in the gulf and threatens to engulf the whole region in a disaster that may take decades upon decades to recover from? who would have thunk it??? an unregulated, greedy, accident prone, foreign oil company that has a history of safety violations, drilling for oil in an area that USED TO BE off limits, right off the gulf coast where the environment is especially fragile all at a mile below the sea where apparently no-one has a clue as to what to do if something goes wrong. WHAT DID WE EXPECT TO HAPPEN? with all of that, a disaster such as the one we have had to happen eventually. it had to; what else could have happened? if not this time, the next or the one after that...but it was going to happen. and now it has. and it may take us a hundred years, if ever, to recuperate from it.

we let bush deregulate the oil companies and then to really top it off, deregulate the financial markets as well. what could wrong with that? and then to make sure that every last dime was extracted from the unsuspecting american public, the whole propaganda system went into full tilt boogie and convinced the aforementioned public that the price of homes really did go up 20% or more per year (while wages remained stagnant) and would do so, why fucking forever..don't you know. FLIP THIS HOUSE! GET A SECOND MORTGAGE! it will keep going up. hey, here's and idea, let's let people with poor credit buy homes at inflated prices and then have their payments quintuple up in a couple of years. what could go wrong with that? sure they couldn't pay their bills before (hence the bad fucking credit) but somehow, miraculously (hey this is america..don't cha know, all things are possible..lol) they would find a way to pay the huge payment coming due. and then bundle up these toxic mortages together and sell them to someone else as, are you ready for the punchline???.......(drum roll please....)..an INVESTMENT!

we are in the shape we are as a country because we as a people weren't fucking paying attention or as pogo said, "we have met the enemy and it is us."

vegas comedy school.

2010-05-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

i haven't put anything up here for quite some time mainly because i have become addicted to face book and do most of my ranting and raving there. however, since i am starting a comedy school here in vegas, hopefully in july, i thought it would behoove me to write something about the school and why i am doing it.

the school will be a 6 week course and is modeled after les mc curdy's comedy school in sarasota. it will consist of group and individual instruction and will cover things such as writing and telling jokes, how to write material out of your life or stories out of the newspapers, how to use the mic, stagecraft, finding work as comic and how to find agents and managers.

the course is not just for people who want to get into comedy or people who have already started in comedy but want to improve all their skills but also for anyone who does public speaking or has to give seminars or presentations in their work. just knowing how to tell a joke helps anyone who has to be in front of an audience. for instance; the average attention span during a seminar or presentation is about 5-7 minutes depending on subject and speaker but if you know 5 good jokes and how to tell them you can use that knowledge and skill to break up the presentation and get the audience back.

before i became a comic i was a hot shot sales trainer which led me to high office in the publishing business (macmillan, grolier, british printing) and later as a consultant to some huge companies, (itt, aig, general electric, john hancock life, among others). in all of my training sessions i used humor to get points across. as a comic, i have performed thousands upon thousands of shows and have appeared on 38 different television shows plus one really bad movie. my reviews have been to die for and some are listed here on my website.

i am now almost 68 years old and though i have left a legacy of sorts, 5 c.d.'s and 4 dvd's so far, i would also like to help people get into what i consider to be the best job in the whole world. is it easy? of course not. can i teach someone to be funny? no, i can't but if they have "funny" in them i can show them how to bring it out. i can help them get over "stage fright" if it is holding them back in their present job. and on top of that, the course will be fun and students will have a great time.

for anyone taking the course, they also get free tickets to several comedy shows here in town and i will always be available to them for any follow-up that they feel they need.

well, that is my little sales pitch for the school. anyone who is interested can write me at hrshock@cox.net.

creativity

2010-01-18T17:58:00.000-08:00

one of the things i must start doing more of is hanging out with other people in the business. when i was in houston during the comedy workshop days i experienced my greatest burst of creativity and the reason was that i was around creative people every day i was in town. bill hicks, brett butler, sam kinison, carl falkenbury, jimmy pineapple, john farnetti, tshawn shannon and dozens of others were all there and you cannot be around those kind of people and not be at the top of your game menally because they sure as hell were.

i have two projects going on here in vegas, the hicks chronicles and the shock stories and am fortunate enough to have creative people working with me; todd paul in particular. we are going to put out some ART. the first little film is being edited right now and by the time i get back from texas we should be able to put it up on this site, face book and you tube. the hicks chronicles start filming again when i get back and we have found new locations.

when i started on this blog i thought i had much more to say but apparently...i was wrong.

odds and ends on a sunday morning.

2010-01-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

in my routine which i call "the time i got caught in bed with the wife of a jealous hillbilly who carried a loaded 45 with him at all times", a rather cumbersome title, i must admit, i tell how one of my plans was to run out of the hall, jump on the bed and dive through the window because nobody could draw and fire that quick to hit me. i can, at times, feel skepticism in the audience. as proof of my contention, let me point out that in the gunfight here in vegas the other day where a man went into the federal building and opened fire with a shotgun; there was a running gun battle that went from the foyer of the building out into the street and 81 shots were fired by law enforcement people. the gunman was hit two or three times (the press reports only say that he was hit in stomach and head..but an earlier tv report, which could have been wrong, put the "hits" as two) and at least one of those happen inside the building. so, 78 (or so) of 81 shots fired by professionals missed. this is not unusual, it is VERY HARD to hit someone or something with a hand gun especially when under pressure. forget the fucking movies, forget john wayne, forget shooting the gun out the hand, those are fantasies, reality is much different.

the unlv running rebels were the only team in america to play two ranked teams on the road this past week. we barely lost to byu on their court, where they are 69-3 since david rose took over as bb coach and then last night we beat new mexico in the "pit" in alburquerque where they had won 29 straight. go rebels. we should be ranked again this coming week.

in retrospect, i should have voted for and campaigned for, hillary clinton; she would have done a better job than obama maily because she is MUCH tougher. it is almost ironic that i had not gotten involved in politics over all these years and then back the wrong guy. proving that i can be an idiot.

oh well, happy sunday to all.

blame game

2010-01-09T12:03:00.000-08:00

all of last year, we kept hearing how this "great recession" would be over sometime this summer but today, in the paper, "experts" (lol) say that it will continue all the way into 2012 and that job growth will be meager at best. and, knowing the american public to be easily panicked and always eager to assign blame, obama and the democrats will pay a big price at the voting booths. oddly enough the american public never blames themselves. they were the ones who bought into the idea that home prices could go up EVERY YEAR by double digits while at the same time INCOMES WERE FLAT. they thought that though nobody was making more money (other than the rich, of course..but the rich aint buying those middle class homes) people would somehow or another be able to afford grossly inflated prices for new (and poorly built, i might add) cookie cutter homes ranging from small poorly built to rather massive poorly built mac mansions. the american public did not pay any attention to the ney Sayer's when we pointed out that deregulation of the financial markets would lead to horrendous consequences for the average american because it allowed insiders to rule the market even more than they did. the american public did not rise up in outrage when g.w. bush invaded iraq, a country WHO DIDN'T DO ANYTHING TO US AND HAD NO CONNECTION WHATSOEVER TO AL QAIADA..MATTER OF FACT OBL HATED SADAAM HUSSIAN AND THE FEELING WAS MUTUAL. OSAMA THOUGHT HUSSIAN WAS WAY TOO LIBERAL (LOL)., the american public didn't complain when bush kept the costs of the wars OFF THE BOOKS. they didn't complain when bush gave tax cuts to the rich which cost over ONE TRILLION dollars (add that to the cost of the war in Iraq and you can see where our large national debt came from...and it didn't come from the job stimulus money...)
the american public didn't complain nearly loud enough when company after company after company closed their factories here and moved to third world countries and the result of that is that we (the people) got SLIGHTLY LOWER prices and the corporations made MUCH LARGER PROFITS BUT THEY MADE THEM IN OTHER COUNTRIES WHERE THEY DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO PAY TAX. and now they are going to blame obama and the democrats. in fact, our hens have come home to roost.

historically, manufacturing has been the engine that drove recoveries. but what manufacturing do we have left. the things that must be bought...shoes, socks, underwear, shirts, pants and coats and etc. are ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY MADE ELSEWHERE so we don't even get that little bit. but blame obama.

now we are ratcheting up for more involement in yeman (another muslim country led by an oppressive regime THAT WE BACK) and the "war" in afghanistan gets more costly in money and lives daily. for that we can blame obama.

anyway, fuck them all. is there an honest man with a plan for america in america? i am beginning to doubt it. fuck them all because they all are fucking us. vote socialistic. (that will rattle 'em...lol)

but you know what we are going to do? some, like liz, will stay home and not vote but the majority is going to elect some republicans and the beat will go on and nothing will change. the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer. the social safety net will have a million holes in it and the wars in the middle east will drag on and on and on and on and on....why do they hate us so?

back to bloggin

2010-01-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

well, i am back blogging. i have been on facebook almost exclusively for quite a while but that venue is not proper for my rants and raves and extensive posts so here i am. once i figure out (or, more accurately put, once rhonda figures it out) how to post a link to this on that we will do so.

so on to other things:

as most of you know, i was an ardent supporter of senator obama in 08 but i must tell you i am extremely upset with what he has done so far. to wit:

the stimulus: it seemed to me that his first priority was bailing out the banks (who then went and gave out huge bonuses to the idiots who brought all of this down on us (well them and the extreme stupidity of the masses of people who thought that home prices would continue to go up double digits each and every year apparently forever even though wages WERE NOT GOING UP and the bankers who decided that they could loan money to people with bad credit to buy houses that were overvalued and, on top of all of that, think that they (the poor credit buyers) would be able to not only afford the original payment but would, somehow, miraculously come up with even more money to pay the higher payments two years down the line) instead of making THE PEOPLE, you know, the ones who elected his skinny ass to the highest office in the land. the stimulus that he did make for the people was way too little and did not include projects that were grand in scope nor any that would employ vast numbers of people for long periods of time. he repaired bridges but did not build new ones. he paved roads but did not build new ones. there was no really big projects such as the TVA in the roosevlt years; no projects such as desalination plants that could have employed thousands upon thousands and then when finished would have created thousands upon thousands more jobs as once arid lands became fertile.

then his appointments. my fucking god! timmy gaither and rubin in the cabinet??? their footprints are all over the deregulation of the financial markets that led to the derivatives that sank the world economy. foxes guarding the henhouse indeed.

obama told us that lobbyists would no longer have say so over national policies. bullshit.

he told us we would have a national health care system so instead they want to make it a law that citizens HAVE TO BUY INSURANCE FROM INSURANCE COMPANIES. (and the insurance companies, slimeballs that they be, immediately raised their rates by up to 40%).

anyway, cue up the WHO because we have been fooled again.

bill gates for president. no more republicans, no more democrats and, for god's sake, don't even think about the libertarians. what to do? how about someone who is not affliated with any party? maybe bill gates.

in the meantime i am stocking up on food and ammo and writing new jokes. all i can do.

into the night

2009-12-31T18:32:00.001-08:00

a drive into the mojave, late at night, down a winding, hilly, very dark and totally deserted road at the wheel of a sports car is one of life's unique pleasures.
i went up over sunrise mountain and down into lake mead national park. nobody out there, and if they were, well then you could see their lights from 2 miles off, but tonight there was nobody. just me, putting the slk through its paces, listening to growl of the pipes and feeling the grip on the road, running north along the western edge of what used to be the colorado river but is now lake mead. in the great mojave desert, under a witches' moon in a hazy sky and 40 miles from anybody. the sky clears and the stars seem close enough to touch. the road winds and climbs and drops and twists and turns and the headlights are swallowed by the blackness ahead. It is a night for a drive.

the mojave, at night, in the winter, is beyond quiet and into the rhelm of the silent. during the summer, if you can turn off the conversation in your head and let yourself be aware of the great what-is, then you find you can hear the desert; what once seemed to be a special kind of quiet is, in fact, full of small but distinct sounds as the creatures of the night go about their business of life and death and food and reproduction. in the winter night, however, not a creature is stirring ( to borrow a phrase) nor doing anything else above ground and the silence is rather stunning. i stood there and let the night engulf me and draw me out of myself and into it.

they say that only prophets and madmen come out of the desert. in that silent darkness one sees what's coming and the other sees what is.
i had a very nice drive.

letter in response to jonah goldberg article 11-13 on attack at fort hood

2009-11-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

mr. goldberg,

i read your column today on the killings at ft. hood, and you make some very good points about our reluctance to point out the obvious (i.e. that major hasan was a muslim and was, if the reports are true, in fact, a radical, terrorist muslim at that.

that being said, you did make a statement, that puts you into somewhat of a radical category yourself: "there is a powerful case to made that islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream of islamic life around the world."

what exactly is that "powerful case?" you don't back up that inflammatory statement with any proof or facts. there is no evidence whatsoever that islamic extremism is part of the muslim mainstream. indeed, there is ample evidence that it is not. to wit: there are 1.1 BILLION muslims in the world, and if even 10% of those people (110 million) were extremists then there would be thousands upon thousands of terrorist attacks against western targets, if not monthly, then yearly, and there are not. according to the united nations charter, resistance to an occupying army is NOT terrorism but something that is EXPECTED of the population of the occupied country. whether or not we americans think we are occupying afghanistan or iraq, you can rest assured that the citizens of those two countries do. in the early '60's, the CIA overthrew the duly elected government of iran, installed the shah and continued to meddle in their affairs for years. were the iranians who protested and took americans hostage (but did not harm them) terrorists? radicals? or were they iranian patriots?

here in the united states, there are millions of muslims. where are all the attacks? where are the bombs in the shopping malls? at the sporting events? in the vegas casinos? all of those are what the military would call "soft targets" and yet none of those millions of american muslims have planted a bomb in any of those. where is your case? where is your proof? what statistics can you quote?

and fyi, i am not muslim nor am i from the middle east. i'm just a catholic boy from oklahoma who happens to believe in fair play; who would rather the world live in peace than in constant conflict and would wish that respected writers such as yourself refrain from making broad, inflammatory, accusations against millions of our fellow citizens.

i surmise that you are jewish, based upon your name and, if so, shame on you. surely you must be sensitive to broad, racist, statements, directed against the people of the jewish faith or nationality and surely you would not want to be lumped in with the bigots and monsters who made those broad un-provable statements by making broad un-provable statements against people of the muslim faith.

i look forward to your follow-up article where you retract that statement...knowing you to be a generally fair-minded, intelligent and thinking man.

ron shock
las vegas

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ron Shock

the new royalty

2009-08-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-05T22:39:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-08-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

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.

1 percenters fucking 99 percenters.

2009-07-29T16:59:00.000-07:00

according to government figures, 1 percenters' share of america's total income is the highest it has been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they have faced in two decades. through bonuses, many 1 percenters will profit from the 23 trillion dollar bailout largesse the treasury department now says could be headed to financial firms. most of them benefit from irs decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.

but what really makes the ultra-wealthy so fortunate, what truly separates this moment from a run of the mill gilded age, is the unprecedented protection the 1 percenters have bought for themselves on the most pressing issues.

to review: with 22,000 americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, congress is considering universal health care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000- that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1 percenters. this surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1 percenters received from the bush tax cuts. in fact, it is so miniscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year or said another way, 9/10ths of their 12 month haul.

nonetheless, the 1 percenters have deployed an army to destroy the initiative.

the foot soldiers are the land rover liberals. these democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink ribbon lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion rights. however, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic interests. hence, this week's letter from boulder's dot com tycoon rep. jared polis and other so called liberals calling for the surtax's death.

echoing that demand are the corrupt cowboys--those like sen. max baucus, of montana, who come from the heartland's culturally conservative and economically impoverished locales. these cavalrymen in both parties quietly build insurmountable campaign war chests as the biggest corporate fundraisers in congress. at the same time, they publicly preen as jes' folks, make twangy references to "voters back home" and now promise to kill the health-care surtax because they say that is what their communities want.

that fantastical fairy tale, of course, couldn't exist without the millionaire media- the elite journalists and opinionmongers who represent corporate media conglomerates and or are themselves extremely wealthy. ignoring all the data about inequality, they legitimize the assertions of the 1 percenters' first two battalions, while actually claiming america's fat cats are unfairly persecuted.

most brazenly, nbc's meredith vieira asks president obama why the surtax is intent on "PUNISHING THE RICH"?

for his part, obama has responded with characteristic coolness-and a powerful counter-strike, "no, it is not punishing the rich," he said, "if i can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when i already have security, that is being part of a community.

from the coloradoan and written by david sirota.

politics, police, professor, perspective and poker

2009-07-25T09:15:00.001-07:00

3 of the BILL HICKS CHRONICLES are now in the can and one of them will be posted on utube soon with links on my web site and on face book.

as soon as obama made the "stupid" remark about the professor and the cops i knew he had stepped into some shit. he cannot, under any circumstances, be seen as the BLACK president and he came across that way by those ill conceived statements. he is now trying to make ammends and probably will but the republicans will play the race card over and over and in these times with so many important things on his plate obama cannot afford these kind of distractions.

on the surface of it, the cops were doing the right thing. they had a call from a neighbor that two black men were breaking into a house. the "black" in the statement was not racial it was descriptive. apparently the professor took umbrage at someone accusing him of being a burglar and refused, at first, to show i.d. well, what did he expect the cops to do?

not every time a black person is stopped or questioned by the police is racism involved. to the contrary, i would say that the majority of the time there is a good reason on the cops part for the incident whatever it was. and i say this as a strong supported of civil rights for all and have stood on that side of the fence all my life but a crime is a crime and a criminal is a criminal regardless of race. the police have a very, very dangerous job and they are, for the most part, good men and women (of all races...one of the cops in mass. was black) of good character and good intentions. are there rotten apples in the cops cart? of course. are there black (or brown) people stopped just for racism? of course. but some long haired white kids are stopped because of a "profile" as well. perfection is really hard to come by and, as far as i know, no one person nor one race is perfect.

i hope that obama will make an apology for his remarks, not just to say that he could have said it better but an out and out apology. we shall see.

on the poker front: one of the reasons i like mandalay bay is their "high hand bonuses" where they pay extra money for 4 of a kind or better with both hole cards playing and 20 dollars in the pot to qualify. yesterday, rhonda and i were playing there and we were at a short table of 5 when i said that i was not going to play where my money, so to speak, was 40% of the total so i went and got some coffee and cigarette. finally someone else sat down and i came back. even though i would have the blind in two hands i went ahead and posted my 3 dollars (fair is fair) and took my seat. i look down and there is a pair of tens, so i raise to 10 dollars and am called by one person. flop comes ten, ten, jack. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS thank you very much.

heads up

2009-07-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

the road does something to my head
vampire poems
and odes to the dead

i saw psycho killer eating a burger
at jack in the box
he had a head in a box
everybody knew
but said nothing
he might have room for two

while i am not happy with a lot of things that president obama has done so far (and some of his plans for the future) but i still feel that his head and heart are in the right place. i saw a poll today that his support on job creation is falling and i can, in a way, understand that, however he has been in office for all of SEVEN MONTHS and things move very slowly in washington. as he said, it took years for us to get into this mess and it will take quite some time to get us out of it.

my biggest complaint so far is that the "work" he has envisioned leaves no lasting monuments to it. no hoover dam, no tva, no grand scheme to rally the people around. i have said it before but...what he should do, in my opinion, is build a series of desalination plants along the pacific and gulf coasts. then we build water pipe lines to california, nevada, lake mead, arizona, new mexico, utah and idaho and in the gulf we build pipe lines going up to the midwest, kansas, oklahoma, nebraska, iowa, etc. we would then be in a position of not being dependent on the whims of nature. we would always have water and thus we would always have crops. it would open so many places to agriculture that we could see a whole new wave of small farmers. droughts would not be the disaster there are now and we would be more secure. plus, our food exports could triple without in any way decreasing the supply for the homefront. ah but i dream of big things but we have a government of little minds.

oh well, life goes on. rock and roll.

back in vegas and glad to be here

2009-07-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

back from a very long, very tiring trip to the northeast. providence and atlantic city (where, as a comic once said, it is halloween every day). providence is a pretty little town with lots of history and the club was in a slot casino out of town. thousands upon thousands of people were there putting their hard earned money into slots whose payouts are much, much lower than l.v. or a.c. slots are testament to americans inability to understand math. they are not good here but in indian or state casinos they are just short of highway robbery. blah. will not be going back to providence and may not be going back to atlantic city; it is too long a flight and too much hassle for me now. i don't want to work any more than 20 gigs next year and 11 of those will be in texas so there will have to be clubs cut from my schedule. san francisco, sacramento, indy, louisville, hilton head, lexington, sarasota will also make the cut leaving only a couple of other weeks to be filled. i have picked up some new clubs in oklahoma, kansas and arkansas and i will do a couple of them next year so that may be all. i will, of course, be working here in vegas multiple weeks so you can always see me here.

i will say that the new jersey turnpike between philly and nyc is one of the best roads in the world. what a piece of work that is! at times there are 16 lanes and the rest of the time 14. beats anything i have seen in this country.

both of the acts with me in a.c. were just great, eric o'shay and joe mulligan. it was a fabulous show!

gotta go, glad to be back, stay tuned for poker and politics and pontificating.

Ron and the oldest of his 8 grandchildren...Paris.

2009-07-17T23:04:00.001-07:00

2009-07-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

my beautiful wife rhonda smiling at me.

2009-07-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

One wall in the living room at the Shock Household when house was being remodeled...you can see the dust from the drywall...these masks are Memories of New Orleans and days gone by and great times had by one and all...

The Shock Girls and Dad

2009-07-14T00:49:00.000-07:00

another poker story, liz..just to bug you

2009-07-08T17:51:00.000-07:00

in reference to my post, "you want them to make that call" when i flopped three kings with ace kicker and lost to a king/ten offsuit when they filled on river. the very next day i lost when i raised with kings and caught one on flop and lost to runner runner flush. the reason i bring this up is that yesterday i was down about 80 dollars in a 1-2 game and changed seats and took the big blind immediately. it is called by two people prior to the button who raises to 18 dollars. I look down and see my favorite hand, ACES both black. i take the bet up to 45 dollars and only the button calls. the flop is Kc, Kh, Qc. I check and he checks. At this point i figure he has AK because he was fairly short stacked and probably would have come back over the top with kings or queens. the turn is the Jc, I check and he goes all in for his last 100 dollars or so which is about what i have and I call figuring that any club, any ace or any ten (the club ten would give me a royal) would win and lo and behold, a club comes and i win the pot and from there i can't seem to lose for the rest of the evening and carry a couple of racks of reds to the cashier later on. moral of story: what goes around, comes around. another moral; you better bet 'em out when you can...if he had gone all in on the flop i would have thrown them away.

(hey liz, it is another poker story)

anyway, tomorrow i head back east for the weekend in providence rhode island and then atlantic city, tropicana. since my traveling computer is on blink, probably won't post any until i get back a week from this coming monday. but then again, you never know.

i cannot recommend the article in rolling stone about goldman sachs highly enough. read it!!!

love dem 3's; part two

2009-07-06T17:54:00.001-07:00

while calling with small pairs in early position is not something i would recommend as a regular habit, the make-up of the table has to be taken into consideration. if you have a loose passive type of table with little or no raising going on then you can speculate with these giant killers. the day of the four threes, i went back to play that evening after a nap and dinner. lo and behold, i had the right kind of table and there were those 3's again in early position so i call the two dollars. this time i didn't flop 4 of them but did flop a full house! 3-8-8. lordy lordy.
got paid off on that one by someone who had tens but did not raise with them. there is a moral here.

off to see my friend TODD PAUL who has his room at HOOTERS CASINO. todd is a great act, combining comedy, magic and an unicycle. you know, just like my act.

today at the tables i lost 49 dollars and realized that i was not playing my A game so i came home. there is a moral there as well; if you are not playing correctly or if you feel bad or are sick or are tired DON'T PLAY. the game goes on forever, it will be there when you can be your best so go home, take a nap or come back another day.

5th of july.

2009-07-05T17:19:00.000-07:00

well, a belated happy birthday, america, where, for all its faults, it still is the best place to be. one day, i hope, america will live up to its ideals, where talent and integrity count more than money, where contributions to mankind are looked upon with more favor than contributions to the sporting field. where a mother teresa would get a bigger funeral and farewell than a michael jackson. (not that mj didn't contribute to the world, he did, he wrote some wonderful music and revolutionized the idea of music videos...but you know what i mean.) where financial shenanigans are punished with the same severity as, say, armed robbery. (the motherfuckers of goldman sachs and aig stole their money with a pencil not a gun but they have ruined more lives than all the armed robbers of the last ten decades) a country that has its military only for the purpose of defending our own country and not defending the interests of, say for instance, the oil companies. where we become more like switzerland and less like imperial rome. oh well, one can always hope and dream.

great opinion piece in today's LAS VEGAS SUN by THOMAS FRIEDMAN about how, in olden days, john dillinger didn't steal nearly what the bankers stole and neither did bernie madoff.

on the poker front, today i flopped 4 threes and had two people betting and raising into me. it was a nice pot.

another good opinion piece in the sun by paul krugman who says that obama needs to get off his ass and put more money into job creation.

the republicans must be spinning after s. palin's latest stunt. she resigned to follow a higher path. i think sarah may be high anyway. just think she could have been vice president of the united states. another scary thought: john edwards could have been president.

you want them to make that call.

2009-07-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

at mandalay bay, i dropped about 170 into a really good game and rebought for another hundred. worked my stack back up to within 30-40 dollars of even when this hand occurred: i am in big blind and it has been straddled to 4 dollars and there are 6 callers plus the original straddler and the two blinds, small blind folds and i look down at Ah, Kh. there is 31 dollars in the pot so i raise to 24 dollars and get one caller. flop comes Kd Kc 7c. i go all in and am called. we turn over our hands and he shows ks Th. great!!! fucking river is, you guessed it, a ten. man.

on the other hand, my philosophy on this is: I WANT HIM TO MAKE THAT CALL. I JUST DON'T WANT HIM TO HIT HIS 3 OUTER. but i am never upset over a deal like this, if people didn't make those foolish calls then i would never make any money. you can't get mad over something like this, you just say, "nice hand, sir" and move on. in this case however, i pulled out my gun and shot the motherfucker.

smashing assholes, how sweet it is.

2009-07-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

i go to the venetian to play but the list is so long that it will be hours before i get in (they are having a tournament and most of the tables were for that) so i go over to mandalay bay where i get into a rock-em, sock-em game with two maniacs and several bad players who are calling station. one of the maniacs has about 900 in front of him which is not bad for a 300 dollar buy-in game and is the time of guy who will raise with anything and push hard with draws; dangerous but potentially profitable. after about a half an hour it is obvious that the guy is an asshole as well. shitty attitude, saying snide remarks to other players, smirking when he wins and bitching if he gets beat. ah, but lo and behold, eventually his wild ways catch up with him and he busts out and on the hand he busts with he has to put in pretty much his last 390 dollars into the pot, he counts out 385 dollars in three stacks and then pushes them over into the pot. dealer says, "you are 5 dollars short." he says that he isn't and makes the dealer restack everything, lay out the bets, etc and the dealers says, "you are still 5 dollars short." he still wants to argue but finally throws in the last five dollars with cuss words to go along. he leaves but we haven't seen the last of him. he goes and gets another 300 and sits back down about an hour later. i get all of that when i flop the nut straight and i sucker him into an all-in bet. it was sweet.

latest issue of rolling stone has scathing article on goldman sachs and how they have been scamming the system for over a hundred years. what motherfuckers these guys are and how they are so entrenched in our government especially in the treasury department. REQUIRED READING FOR THOSE WHO WONDER HOW WE GOT IN THIS MESS. a couple of years ago, i said in this blog that someone once told me the following: "the stock market moves on lies, rumors and bullshit and the only people who make money in the long run were those with insider information." he was the guy who got me to buy travelodge at 8.5 one day and see it go to 12 and 7/8ths the next. he knew of a tender offer that was coming. 50% profit overnight. and goldman sachs apparently does this on a daily basis. cool, huh?

oh well, gotta go. see ya at the tables or in some smokey nightclub on down the line.

home at last, home at last!

2009-06-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

four weeks on the road and i am home! man, that was a long one but on the other hand it was quite soul-satisfying since i think i reached new levels of comedy. each town got at least one MAGICAL show, those that reach far and above what i do on a nightly basis, where the audience and i are in a separate universe, cut off from the rest of the world and its cares, its problems, its worries and its responsibilities, where old material is done in new and improved ways and new material flows forth from my mouth with no pre-thought whatsoever. the "zone" as sport players call it. where i can do no wrong and every word, every phrase, every pause, every emphasis is just exactly perfect. when i have shows like these it is though i am, in a way, a part of the audience and what i am hearing is brand new to me as it is to them. when you have crowds that flat ass will not let you off the stage you know you are doing something right.

i am never so happy, never so fulfilled, never so one with the ONE as i am in these shows. they keep me alive and they keep me healthy. they restoreth my soul. they are when i am my fullest me. they are a reminder of why i do what i do and that i am doing what i am supposed to do. they are performance art, a word painting that is just for those ones in front of me at that time, never to be duplicated, a one of a kind show. magical and mystical, they will always remain in my memory and the memory of those who were there.

now that i have said all that, i am going to close this post and will start writing again every day about this or that or something in between.

go dodgers!

There's no place like home...

2009-06-22T00:43:00.001-07:00

(view of the straposphere from in front of the house)

off to louisville, so long to bloomington,

2009-06-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

rainy day in bloomington and i am off to louisville as soon as i get myself gathered. shows here went very well, one of the comics who was with me was blown away because i did two entirely different one shows. the first show, the crowd was small but almost all of them had seen me before so it was like a "conversation with ron shock" more than so-called 'material.' i just sat up there and told stories, some of which are hardly ever in a show. over the years i have done some incredible shows here, this small club in the back of a pizza joint seems to bring out the very best in me.

they had the best house m.c. in the nation, a young man named brad. well, a couple of months ago, brad went a did a guest spot on a thursday night at the funny bone here in town and the owner of bear's place (actually the new owner, the old one would have never done something like this) fired brad because of that. now, brad had never been told he couldn't perform at fb, and bear's does monday night so ... why the big uproar? apparently the owner is what is commonly called a "dick." brad is not a full time comic, on the contrary he works with disadvantaged youth here in bloomington, so not only is he the best house m.c. in america he is truly a GOOD GUY and the world is rather short on that species. some of the girls who work there or had worked there told me the owner would make passes at them and when they objected he told them that if they didn't like it they could try to sue him and he had better lawyers than they did. hmmmm, i think the word, "dick" fits. maybe "prick." maybe "bastard". maybe "s.o.b." maybe...well, you get the point.

this club, bear's place, is one of if not the longest running one-nighter in america and i have been playing it off and on since 86. i don't know exactly when the new guy took over but one of the many things he did was to no longer give the comics a free pizza between shows. (now it is half price but what does a pizza cost to make? a dollar maybe? it is the principle of the thing) the food is no longer as good as it was before..(bear's place was once so good it got national press) i would stop coming here but that wouldn't punish the prick, it would just disappoint my many fans here so i kept my mouth shut at the club but if this blog gets back to him, i will probably be banned....but, what the hell, the truth is the truth. and, one other thing, brad was so popular here that when he left, business went way down, this prick has pissed off many and many of that many won't come back to his club regardless of who is playing.

oh well, now that is off my chest...

kobe missed more freethrows last night than i would have. ratings?

anyway, gotta go, rock and roll, thanks for reading, maybe next time i will have something worthwhile to say.

more indy dates for the old man

2009-06-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

at last, a usuable computer. at the hotel in indy, the computers would not let me go to my blog because it contained "objectionable material." i didn't bother to ask anyone just how they determined this and, even more important, who did it because i was going to hear that home office did it and they, the local people, have no control over this. oh well.

indy went very well. the crowds were never large but with only the exception of second show saturday, they were very good. first show saturday was balls to the wall good and the owner/booker of the club was at that show and she wants me to play that club 3 times in a year and also wants me to be the new year's act for next year. back when i played indy multiple times per year i had a nice little following there and both ruth-anne and i both think it could be done again. while going to indy in the dead of winter is not all that appealing, it is nice, and an honor, to have a club like you and want you that much especially in today's economic times. not only that there are a lot of comics out there and to get 3 weeks in a year is a coup.

i have always been good about keeping myself booked. incidently, i never use an agent, i do my own booking and except for a very short time in the 80's, always have. i want to have a possible 30 weeks of work for me out there on any given year. not that i will work that many weeks because i won't as long as rhonda has a job but it is could to have for that "just in case" scenerio. know what i mean? i lost the trop in vegas but have replaced it with two other clubs and will probably get back in the riv and possibly in planet hollywood. i picked up a guy who has 4 clubs, okla city, tulsa, wichita and little rock of which i am working okc this year and will get all 4 next year. i get 11 weeks in texas next year, 6 in houston, 2 in san antonio and then ft. worth, dallas and arlington. i also picked up providence, rhode island this year and 4 casinos in northern california. of course, i will be in hilton head a couple of times per year, chattanooga once, louisville and lexington, sacramento and san francisco punch lines, ( i am s.f. week-before-christmas-act each year which is cool because rhonda can with me and san francisco does christmas right) sarasota is once a year as is (i think) mrytle beach but i may not get back in there, i felt as though i wasn't sure just how much the owners like me. i am also going back to anne arbor next year. i would like to have more clubs in the west but i don't. i ought to take shot at portland, vancouver and seattle but probably won't. once the economy is back on an even keel i will cut back to around 20 weeks per year plus a new years somewhere or another and that will be plenty.

my grand-daughter, paris, came over from purdue with her boyfriend to see the saturday shows. no, i don't change anything or censor myself in any way with her in room. she is a very impressive young woman, bright, insightful and quite pretty to top it all off. i told her that her grandmother, my first wife, was crazy and i know that she had made my daughter, stefanie, crazy as well and that i had been worried that stef would have then made her, paris, crazy as well. paris told me that thought had occured to her as well so she has been in therapy for the last couple of years. lol.

am in bloomington staying with friend of ours and will perform here tomorrow night and then off to louisville for the rest of this week.

another friend of mine, glen morshower, has major role in the new TRANSFORMER movie and he and i are going to the opening up in reno when i am performing there. glen is on 24, friday night lights and did have a reoccuring role on west wing. he is the person who got me started on hold-em way back when. OH, and something cool, in the movie glen plays a general named MORSHOWER. they liked his name so much they used it for the character...how cool is that?

hope to see amos chang this week, he is a poker-playing comic who used to be a cop. once they put us on the same bill as cops and robbers and did some nice press about it.

anyway, dat's all for now, folks.

on the road again

2009-06-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

it is the first of june, summer just starting. dogs are out in their room chewing on bones, pool was inviting so i took its offer up and now i am taking a break from packing for a 4 week road trip. (speaking of dogs, i give maverick, the great dane, cow femur bones and he EATS them. listening to that dog's jaws literally crushing a bone the size of our leg bone, if not a little bigger, is one of the reasons i don't worry about rhonda when i am on the road)

george burns has always been my idol in comedy for what he said way back when; "i can't die, i'm booked." that is what keeps me healthy, keeps me happy and i truly believe keeps me alive...i am booked. solid for the rest of the year. matter of fact, when i get back i will start booking 2010.

all that being said, i will only be posting my feeble ramblings on here every couple of days or so because my traveling computer is on the blink but i should be able to use the clubs or the hotels...we shall see. not that i have anything to say anyway.

i will be in indy this week at the downtown crackers club, bloomington indiana on monday and then louisville comedy caravan through that week and then off to dayton for wiley's, which is one of my favorite clubs. it pays very little and the crowds are small but the owner is one of the all time good guys, the staff is great and the crowds, though small, are as hip as any you could want..they come for comedy and they know the difference. dave chappel used to come in there to watch my show. there is another club in dayton but wiley's gets the best comics because they also know the difference and would rather work for less than work a corporate club which is only in the business of selling liquor and doesn't really give a shit about the comics or the show per se as long as those drinks are flowing. then i fly home for ONE day and then off to reno for catch a rising star. all in all it makes for a long month but some good money, good clubs, good friends to see and good times to be had. my grand daughter, paris, is coming to one of the shows with her boyfriend. she saw me for the first time early this year in mrytle beach and now is hooked on comedy.

well, my friends, be well, be safe and for those who play poker may all your flops be good.

but what did gibbons know?

2009-05-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

just back from poker and with a story to tell: in my very first played hand i had aces under the gun so i raised to 12 dollars (1-2 nl game) and two people went all in, one for his last 60 dollars and another one for his last 120 or so. i, of course, called. here were the hands: first player Ah, Kh, second player Kc,Kd. perfect! flop was amazing A,K,3 no hearts. nice way to start. for the rest of the session, however, i pretty much stayed where i was and came home after a couple of hours with close to 200 dollar win.

so, okay, okay, i can't help myself...more politics.

dick, 5 deferments during vietnam war, cheney is off telling lies about the value of torture and trying to scare people about putting the gitmo prisoners into american supermax prisons. somebody needs to tell this man to shut up. no one has ever nor will ever escape from a supermax prison. as a former prisoner and someone who did manage to escape from l.a. county jail, let me tell you there is NO FUCKING WAY you could get out of one of those joints other than being released or dying. PERIOD.

clinton and gwb are off speaking together. makes one think that all of them are in cahoots together. how could the man who left us a record surplus share the stage with the man who, not only spent that surplus, but then left us with record deficits and an economy in such dire straits that comparisons are being made to the great depression? how could clinton, who gave gwb a security memo that said, OSAMA BIN LADEN IS PLANNING ON ATTACKING THE UNITED STATES BY FLYING AIRPLANES INTO BUILDINGS, and then had that warning ignored stand on the same stage and smile and joke with bush???? could it be that all of our presidents are of the same party, THE WAR PARTY?

methinks that in a real democracy bush would be in the dock along with cheney and rummy. methinks that an invasion of a country which had done nothing to us and was no threat to do anything to us and that invasion lead to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, iraqis dead and millions displaced would be a WAR CRIME. if it is not, please tell me why. and that begs the question of why is obama willing to overlook the past and tell us to focus on the future? we didn't do that at Nuremberg (sp?) nor did we do it with pot pol in cambodia. why is the bush/cheney gang exempt from the law?

i can kind of understand the argument that the photos of the real atrocities committed by american troops in iraq not be released because they would put american troops in more danger but THOSE PHOTOS ARE EVIDENCE OF WAR CRIMES AND WE SHOULD RELEASE THEM AND LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY!!!!!! our troops should not be there in the first place so their argument is flimsy at best. they tell us, "oh those photos would enrage the people there." but what they are really afraid of is that those photos would ENRAGE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. and then, perhaps, we would demand accountability and demand our troops come home. remember, if the reports are right, we are talking about beyond torture to things such as rape, which is, in some states a capital crime and in the rest carries prison sentences in the decades range. if one of our troops raped an iraqi prisoner and we knew about it and did not bring that man to justice then everyone in the chain of command that knew is FUCKING GUILTY. what kind of country are we that we would let this slide?

have you read THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by gibbons? if not, do so. if you have don't you see the sameness here? the decadence, the looting of the treasury to support foreign wars, the bread and circus (oh we call it tv and sports but it is the same) and how we have alienated entire sections of the world? no? oh well.

go dodgers. lol

who was that riderless horse?

2009-05-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

so i wasn't going to write about politics but the comments i got, for the most part, were about politics. sincity has the best point in that we need to rail against the puppet masters. those monsters in the military industrial complex who are running and ruining the country. some of my readers write directly to me and one of them said that we all need to keep involved by writing our congresspeople and speaking our minds. politicians are whores and their only loyalty is to getting re-elected so they can keep sucking on the public teat. by writing them about our concerns and if enough of us do it then they will respond...not out of love of country but love of self...they will do what they think will keep them in office. i, for one, will write all my congress people, democrats especially, and tell them that the promise was to GET US OUT OF IRAQ and that is what we expect. we are an occupying force in someone else's land. we bombed their cities, we killed their people, we ruined their lives, the least we can do is to get our bloody asses out of their country. if iraq disintegrates into civil war so be it. it is their country. let them have it and do with it as they will. i have said before the only way to insure that we will not have radical islamic terrorists attack us is for us to quit giving them reasons to attack us and we can only do that by getting out of the middle east.

anyway....lakers will take orlando in 5 or 6. i was pleased that the cavs were eliminated after hearing one of their players brag that they were the best team in basketball. no, you aren't. you may have the best player but you are far, far from being the best TEAM.

a guy at the poker tables today said that the last horse he bet on came in last and that was behind the horse whose rider fell off.

hit three teamer yesterday, dodger/cubs to go under, sf to win and the lakers on the money line. how sweet it was.

yesterday as well i got two people to put all of their money in when i had the best hand. how sweet it was.

dodgers to win national league pennant and the world series are two bets i also have.

back again

2009-05-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

it has been quite a while since i have "blogged" on this site and the reason was/is that i had run out of words, of thoughts, of comments, of importance (if there ever were any), of humor, of etc. my disappointment with obama and his catering to the military industrial complex (see dwight eisenhower's farewell speech) and his insistance on giving money to the banks without getting money into the pipeline for the american people runs very deep. while i am sure in my heart that we made the right choice for president OF THE THREE WE COULD CHOOSE FROM, he is showing himself to be another puppet of the military. we are NOT getting out of iraq and we have esculated the "war" in afghanastan. while he talks tough with the israelies, we still give them billions of dollars in so-called 'aid' and billions more in military assistance. (gee, why to the muslims hate us?) in the meantime, millions upon millions of our fellow citizens are out of jobs, out of their homes and out of luck. ah well, fuck-em, huh? what happened to the "urgency of now"? NOW is when we need assistance to the citizens. tell it to someone who is out of a job and his children are sick and he has no health care and no money that sometime in 2010 the money for the people will be forthcoming.

with all those thoughts running through my head, i couldn't write. but, my voice is not heard beyond a few dozen people and who the fuck cares what i think about politics anyway? so, i am going back to what i did before the election of 08 and write about my life, poker, my dogs, my wife and other inconsequentual topics.

in the paper today it said that mixed race people were the fastest growing racial group in america. that is great news! mutts are healthier than pure breeds and when you cross races you get the better genes from each. so fuck each other and save the country. if we were all mixed race then racism would no longer exist and if you expand it out for, say, two thousand more years we will all be one race and that would help end wars.

a lot of baseball fans had many bad things to say about juan pierre of the dodgers and how they were paying him too much, he has no arm, is defensive liability, don't need him and so on and so forth but since manny r went down, pierre is hitting over 400 and is scoring runs and batting them in. the dodgers would not be having the season that they are without him. i, on the other hand, have always been a big fan of that little wisp of a man who battles every at bad and can run like the wind. so there you go.

a real shame about mike tyson's little girl. just when iron mike looked as though he was finally getting his shit together this tragedy strikes. tyson is a much more interesting man than people give him credit for. he has always been a mixture of rage and calm, of hate and love and boy and man. if one looks beyond the hype and what other people say and really looks at tyson they will see a different man than is presented in the press. (he has copped to all of his misdeeds with the exception of the rape charge which, to this day, he denies doing and maybe he is right) when he bit holyfields ear he was in one of the dirtest fights ever, holyfield was a very dirty fighter, he just had good press. go back and look at some of his fights and you will see what i mean. tyson basically said that night, 'oh, you want dirty? i'll show you dirty, motherfucker!"

poker is going very well and my win rate is over 65% and my wins are MUCH bigger than my losses. i have a cut off number for losses so i never lose more than that amount on any given day. so i have had 24 wins over 200 and 0 losses of over 200. that makes a big difference.

so, there you are, a new post from the old man.

back home

2009-05-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

twenty years ago or so, downtown fort worth was a dive. matter of fact, the whole town basically sucked. times change and now downtown fort worth is thriving and has a wonderful mixture of old and new. on the weekends the whole place rocks with night clubs, bars, shows, movies and outdoor activities during the warmer months. (there was a fight card put on in sundance square this past weekend) they have festivals and other special events there as well.

the shows were pretty much packed and the old man rocked the room over and over. (ask anyone who was there)

back home for a couple of days then off to arlington and dallas the following weekend.

is manny stupid or what? these guys think they will never get caught, amazing. oh well, still think the dodgers will make playoffs but won't go to world series unless manny comes back and has a great second half.

scully and the dodgers.

2009-05-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

the dodgers have been on local radio since i first moved here in late 89 but this year the station went to kiddie music and did away with the dodgers. (a great article was in the las vegas review journal today in the sports section..the writer was ed graney if you would like a good read google it up) i have been a dodger fan since 1963 when i was incarcerated in a california prison. due to some rather violent acts i was sent to disciplinary segregation (the hole) for 18 months. we had two radio stations that we could listen to in our cells and one carried the dodger games. vince scully got me through most of my time in there, since they broadcast some of the spring training games then the season, post season and world series. his call of the game was so eloquent, his cadence so soothing, his knowledge so complete that i was able to escape the horror of my day to day existence and transport myself from a concrete dungeon to another place where the breeze blew softly and the grass was green and koufax was on the mound and drysdale was going tomorrow and the yankees didn't stand a chance. roseboro behind the plate, wills at short, fairly at first and others whose names escape me but the third pitcher was johnny padres who pitched the final game of the four game sweep of the hated yankees in the series.

if you have never listened to scully, you have missed the greatest baseball announcer of all time. he has been broadcasting the dodger games since the 1950's and must be in his 80's by now so he won't be around much longer. when he goes, we will lose an icon and on that day i will cry.

hopefully he will last this season because this may be the best dodger team since the early 80's and i have already bet them to go all the way. we have 4 youngsters who are going to be super stars; martin behind the plate, looney at first, eithier in left and kemp in center. they are all in their early 20's and have an unlimited future in front of them.

go dodgers.

no knowledge---no problem

2009-05-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

aha! some stimulus money is going to jobs as road and bridge repair gears up for the summer. the only problem with these jobs is that they end when the money quits flowing. i would also like to see the government get into the building business by financing v.a. hospitals, v.a. retirement homes, schools, homes in new orleans to replace those destroyed by katrina and say, libraries. (that is if anyone reads any more..which judging by just watching and listening to the american public, i doubt) because these kinds of construction use more skilled labor than just roads and bridges do; ie. carpenters, plumbers, roofers and all the assorted material suppliers that would be needed.

there was an article in usa today that said that the next supreme court justice may not be a lawyer. oh good idea, let's get someone in there who knows nothing about the law. jesus!

oh well.

and yesterday i had aces cracked TWICE! once by 3-6 off and k-4 off. jesus!

gotta go take a nap. see you in texas. ye hah!

DANNY GANS

2009-05-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

DANNY GANS died at home in his sleep last night. he was the biggest name in vegas even if he wasn't known nationwide. for those of you who don't know who he was, his act was musical impressions of all the greats, sinatra, presley, cole, armstrong and some of the current singers. apparently (i never saw his show) he was a fabulous entertainer and, by all reports, a good guy. there was never a hint of scandal attached to his name. in his last performance he changed the ending from APPOLO to bobby darin's closer, THE FINAL CURTAIN. here are the final stanza of that song and it one that i would wish they would play at my funeral.

"your cheers and laughter will linger after
they have torn down these dusty walls
people say i was made for this
nothing else would i trade for this
and just think i am paid for this

goodnight ladies and gentlemen and God love you all"

rest in peace, danny

jefferson, adams, biden and obama.

2009-05-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

just some thoughts while i am waiting for the "stimulus plan" to create some real NEW jobs for unemployed americans and, at the same time, watch our government grow and our debt increase:

"government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have. the course of history shows that as government grows, liberty decreases."

thomas jefferson.

and

"there are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. one is by the sword. the other is by debt."

john adams

this is not to say that i think that what obama is doing is wrong, it is to say that we, the people, need, for once, to pay really close attention to what is going on. as a nation, we were asleep at the wheel when gwb was getting us into wars and deregulating the financial institutions. now we are still in those wars, both of which should which should not have been started in the first place. and YES, i mean BOTH of them, afghanastan is bogus as well, though we did have to try to capture or kill bin laden (and still do) but we did not need to occupy a country to do so. we could have worked with the taliban (everyone and every nation will do what is in their own best self interest and the taliban would have gotten out of the way if we had a. declared not a "war on terror" but a MAN HUNT FOR A COMMON CRIMINAL and b. offered them some face-saving way to co-operate in his capture.) at the same time we are putting trillions of dollars into the greedy little hands of greedy little bankers and the corrupt financial institutions that got us into this mess instead of taking back our own banking system by nationalizing it and letting the "bad" banks go under.

on to something else: the republicans are having conniptions over specter's defection saying that we should be afraid of what a one party control can do to a country. THEY SHOULD FUCKING KNOW! LOOK WHAT THEY DID WITH THAT POWER. (see above) i don't think the administration should have promised specter anything. the demos would have won pennsylvania without him and would have then had a new, young go getter in place instead of an old political hack.

i used to really like joe biden but apparently i just didn't know enough about him. hey joe. PUT YOUR MIND IN GEAR BEFORE YOU PUT YOUR MOUTH IN MOTION. jesusfuckingchrist, this guy is a moron at times.

obama talks a great "green" talk but consider this: he went to des moines for EARTH DAY and to give yet another speech on how we must reduce our carbon footprint (as the current popular fad calls it). well, that is all well and good...BUT when he went he flew on air force One and along with it came a C-17 which is a HUGE cargo plane and out of that plane came his limo and a helicopter and many, many black suburbans for his security detail. JUST HOW MUCH GAS WAS USED FOR THIS POLITICAL TRIP TO PROMOTE USING LESS GAS?????? an armored limo must get all of 2 mpg and the suburbans which are also armored must get 5. not counting the planes and copter.
hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another. at least that is what the dictionary says.

i read where there is a movement afoot to make the presidential election decided by the popular vote and to do away with the electoral college. hmmm. i don't know whether i like that or not. i just don't know. i do know that if it were in place in 2000 we would not be in the mess we are now so that is a good argument for it but i have reservations about letting the big states control the election. california, new york, texas, florida, pennsylvannia and ohio would really be in the drivers seat. but, then on the other hand, it would be DEMOCRACY which we claim to be a big supporter of..........

anyway, off to texas next week, come on out and see me if you can.

more;

the swine flu is panicking america and we have had only one death from it. are we a nation of scaridy kats or what? so, come out and see me anyway, chances are all you will catch is a good time.

aint we got fun?

2009-04-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

back on the subject of when i was a kid....i left out in the jobs i had catagory, pushing a hot dog cart in new orleans when i was 16 and working as a "barker" in front of a strip joint on bourbon street. what i said was: "come on in! 48 DOUBLE D BIGGEST PAIR YOU'LL EVER SEE!" now that was a good job! as a bonus on that job, i lost my virginity to a stripper in that club in a booth. too cool. when the girls found out i was a virgin they decided that something should be done about that. god bless those girls.

in the paper today i saw where we, the united states of america, hire UGANDAN soldiers to, are you ready?, guard american ARMY BASES IN IRAQ. what the fuck? i just can't get my head around that. we HIRED some african soldiers to guard american soldiers in an arab land. you know.... when i was in the army, we actually did guard work ourselves. imagine that. we also did kp (kitchen patrol) ourselves. we hire that out as well. we also drove our own trucks. we hire that out as well. we did the fighting ourselves and had no mercenaries along for the ride. (see blackwater) what the fuck? what kind of army hires people to do army work? army strong indeed.

swine flu
bird flu
killing me and you
mad cow disease
disappearing bees
somebody please
tell me what to do

homeless
helpless
living in the streets

gotta get a gun
gotta get a gun
kill the next one
kill the NEXT one
then run, run, run
aint we got fun?
right here in america.
right here in america.

(those are the words to my next big hit)

shit.

i've lost my fucking mind.

rant for the day

2009-04-26T12:43:00.000-07:00

there was a list of things that are disappearing posted on aol (i think..rhonda showed it to me) and these caught my attention:

the bees. this is a real problem; we depend on the bees and they are dying out and no one seems to know why. i do. it is mother nature and she is pissed. we are, as bill hicks once said, a virus with shoes and we are contaminating the planet.

kids to do chores in the neighborhood. i had a fair amount of work to be done in my front yard, leaves to be racked, weeds to be pulled, trees and bushes to be trimmed. i live on a corner lot and there is both a high school and a middle school within three blocks of me and every school day dozens of kids walk by my house. NOT ONE EVER STOPPED AND ASKED IF THEY COULD DO THESE CHORES. NOT ONE. i eventually went and got two day laborers, both probably illegal, and paid them one hundred dollars to do the work. i would have paid a couple of kids the same but... i don't want to sound like the typical old man (why, when i was a boy etc etc etc) BUT when i was a boy, i mowed lawns, washed cars and windows, had a paper route, worked at the grocery store as a sacker and all of those jobs i went out and hustled up. the kids walking by my house seem to all have cell phones and ipods and hundred dollar sneakers. where are they getting the money from? i can only imagine if i had asked my folks for the money to buy a pair of tennis shoes that cost 5 times more than the just regular cheap ones what would have happened. but, one thing, i know is that they would have never given me the money though they did have it...we were not poor nor rich but true middle class and they were very big on earning your own money. so i ask: what the fuck is going on? from what i read about the schools here in vegas a good many kids are going out into the world with a piss poor education and to top it off, no work habits. good luck to them.

a catholic education. both rhonda and i went to catholic schools. both rhonda and i can read and write, know history, know math, know science (not my strong suit), etc. while catholic schools had and have many things about them i don't like they did one thing really well...THEY FUCKING MADE YOU GET THE GRADES BECAUSE IF YOU DIDN'T YOU DID THE YEAR OVER. PERIOD. NO FUCKING AROUND. YOU DID IT OVER. and no kid likes that. also, because they did cost a pretty penny, the parents were involved and today, the teachers i speak to who are from public schools tell me that it is like pulling teeth to get parents involved. when kimberly and mica were going to school be it public or private (they did both depending on how much money we were earning) their mom and i knew their teachers, talked to their teachers, supervised their homework etc etc. guess what? they were good students who went on to college and now have good careers and their kids get good grades. not that i was a great parent, i wasn't because i left, but when i was there, books were in the house, we read to the kids from almost day one of their lives and guess what again? they grew up with a love of books, learning and reading. those are great assets to take into the world. (here i must give almost all credit to their mothers but i did my part when i was there...hell, stefanie's first word was "daddy" because i was a stay at home dad for the first two years of her life.) ((hudson i can take no credit for at all other than being a sperm donar as sharon liked to call me...lol...but he turned out great as well))

those that is my rant for today. off to play poker.

just some thoughts to lighten up your day

2009-04-25T10:13:00.000-07:00

the reason i have not written anything here for quite some time is that my mind has been spinning and my thoughts have been scattered. i find myself worrying more and more about my country and the direction it is heading. all empires collapse and our time may have come. our karma is bad and maybe the piper of history wants to be paid and paid NOW. the saddest part is that we started so well with such fine ideas and even finer ideals. life and liberty and freedom and justice for all (except the slaves of course, but why quibble?) then, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, we freed the slaves and kept the union. but to do what? kill the indians? steal land from mexico? import chinese and make them slaves to build the railroads? get involved in foreign wars? make us a land for the rich and everyone else be damned?

you read our REAL history, not the namby pamby claptrap that is fed our children, and you read a history of greed and corruption, of conquest and exploitation, of rewarding dishonesty and crushing honest dissent. we are feared and hated around the world and for good reason. we use the poor of africa to experiment on with our new drugs, we prop up dictatorships in central america so we can rape the land, we use the so-called "war on drugs" to justify a police state here at home. could you or i find a totally honest politician among our current crop? probably not. i can't name one. (obama was my last great hope but he has reneged on so many of his promises that he is beginning to seem like same old, same old, just with a different colored face. maybe his goals were pure but he is kowtowing to the same old forces, the banks, the military, the pharmaceutical companies, the rich and the powerful. we are not out of iraq nor do we plan on being so, we are shifting wars but not ending them, bailing out banks but forgetting the people. where are the jobs? were are the public works? where is the relief to the people?) our founding fathers were giants and now we have gnats.

now we are having arguments over whether or not torture should be used in the pursuit of national security. man oh man. if we torture ONE PERSON we are different from nazi germany only in degrees. we still are the ONLY country to use an atomic bomb. and not only did we use it, we used it on CIVILIANS. the first, on Hiroshima could be explained but the second on Nagasaki was mass murder. oh, that is not what WE call it, it is only what EVERYONE ELSE calls it and what history will call it. so what the hell, if we are mass murderers then we might as well torture huh?

we have raped our planet and one day mother nature will have her due. be it global warming or pandemics or whatever that piper is going to be paid as well. all we, that's you and me, can hope for is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. but, that would mean our children are fucked.

so, aren't you glad i am writing again? always nice to have a comic to lighten up the day.

small talk

2009-04-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

have landed in Hilton Head where they have a computer i can use. last week in mrytle beach was very cool and one of those "once in a lifetime" experiences: two of my grand kids came to see me perform for the very first time. they saw all four of the weekend shows and they got the whole gauntlet, a magical show, a great show, an okay show and LATE SHOW FRIDAY complete with drunks yelling and screaming. and what impressed paris and hunter the most was how i handled the bad show with that audience who had just slaughtered the first two comics. i actually got those people but it was hand to hand combat for a while...but i got the mothers. teach 'em to fuck with me.

paris and hunter got to hang out with comics and the owners of the club and were accepted immediately. they thought that was very cool. comics and comedy club people are just good people and, for the most part, great fun to be with. the kids are going to come out to vegas to hang out with me for a while this summer. it will be very cool. rhonda is just going to love these kids, she already likes them just from their pictures but is going to have a wonderful time with them.

nothing really to say, just checking back in and letting you know i am still around.

off to south carolina

2009-04-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

i leave tomorrow for south carolina and will get back in a couple of weeks. not taking computer with me but i am sure i will be able to use one in mrytle beach and KNOW there is one for me in hilton head.

last night rhonda and i had another one of our magical restaurant experiences: we went to Lucio's way out west on sahara for some italian food. we heard about it through the BEST IN VEGAS that newspaper puts out each year and it was the reader's choice. cool place. service was a little slow but we think it was for a reason; the waiter kept telling us that they had a pretty good band that was going to play later on. so we had a leisurely meal of multiple hors d'ouerves,(sp) a filet for her and pasta with meat balls and a red wine sauce for me. very, very good. the pasta plate was the best i have ever had in a restaurant (rhonda's is the best) ah, but then the band came on. started with a piano player, bassist and drummer, soon electric guitar showed up, then two trombone players, one of which blew a great sax later. then they brought up a woman singer, whose name we did not get, who did a rendition of "stormy weather" that you feel in your toes, followed by "foggy day in london town" and she left to a standing ovation. but wait, that's not all, another female, a spunky little mixed race woman who looked to be maybe Jamaican was next and did some ella fitzgerald skat followed by "get your kicks on route 66" that brought the house down. a man who was there with his wife for her birthday got up and sang "funny valentine." each one of these people were real pros and were, at one time, members of big bands that had played here in vegas. there are hundreds of really gifted musicians living in vegas who show up a various night clubs and cafes and share their gifts. i left a hundred dollar tip for a night that we will never forget...it was truly magical.

THE COMING BILL HICKS CHRONICLES

2009-04-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

what i am going to do is to post on utube some little stories about BILL HICKS that are not in the books nor have i ever heard mentioned in any interview with bill. to be truthful, i am doing for two reasons: a. (and philosophically, the most important) to tell the stories and to do them justice in the telling. b. (most important selfishly) to introduce myself to the hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more, hicks fans. i have never met a hicks fan who didn't like what i do. never. i am no bill nor do i try to be. i'm ron shock and i do me quite well and bill thought i was one funny motherfucker. his fans will too.

bill and i go back to my very first road trip where bill hicks and i do lsd at the second night of the GIG FROM HELL. bill tells that one in an interview that is posted on my website. (and he tells it wrong! he has the town wrong and how it came to be and he doesn't make himself out to be the real hero that he was. he downplays his role. for real. the real story is much better than the way bill tells it.) bill and i were two of the seven comics who became known as the TEXAS OUTLAW COMICS. we did dozens of shows together. we wrote bits together. we had a very strong friendship. i was not, by any stretch of the imagination, his "best" friend, far from it, i was 18 years older than bill and had a life outside of comedy. on the other hand, bill and i did have some fabulous times together, deep conversations together, hallucinogenic experiences together and we liked and respected each other. i spoke to bill the night before he died and on the night he did die, kenny moore and i had a mind boggling experience that we attribute to bill. it's a hell of a story.

bill liked talking to me because i had experienced things that he hadn't; i had been in prison and i was a hot shot in the corporate world. i could talk about places and thoughts and events and feelings and because i can tell a story well, bill was able to grasp the "essence" of what i was saying. for instance: (i think i have written about this one before, but it bears repeating) one night in houston, bill and i were walking my great dane, che dog, (dog of the people!!), and i got to espousing about the money system; silver standard vs. gold standard, federal reserve, banking systems, etc. blah, blah, blah. THE NEXT NIGHT, BILL HICKS WENT ON STAGE AND DID TEN KILLER FUCKING MINUTES ON MONEY! i thought, "you know, i have known that information for 15 years (at that time) and i haven't thought of a single funny fucking thing to say about it yet. (and still haven't)

i'm getting old and if i am going to ever penetrate the american mind, then i am going to have to do it viz the internet. i'm funny and i'm different and, for the most part, nobody knows who i am. i am going to use the net to introduce myself to an already established target market: bill hicks fans. they'll like me.

i have already filmed some of the stories and may keep one or two of the ones i have but really want to tell them over and over and over again until i just nail it. know what i mean?

i've got some great bill stories. stay tuned

poker and republican bashing

2009-04-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

sooo, i went on facebook where i have upteen million friends and asked them to read the previous blog and give me their thoughts. none did. so much for that. apparently i have shrunk to about 5 readers but what the hell, i do this more for me and rhonda than anything else. it is sort of a daily diary and probably will just concentrate on poker with a little bit of rebulican bashing just for fun.

speaking of which: did you read the republican "alternate budget" proposal? brilliant. these people have no clue of what middle america (dat's you and me) want or need. to wit: they propose to cut the taxes of the WEALTHY so that the ceo's of wall street and the banks would pay a much lower rate on their already obscene pay packages. boy, that will resound with american workers! then they propose freezing all discreationary spending which has historically shown to be very important in lifting the country out of recession. no sense in expanding say, unemployment for instance, let us eat cake. and to top it off they want much higher premiums for the elderly on medicare. not only are the republicans heartless they are clueless and soon will be only a force in the intellectual wilderness of alabama, georgia, south carolina, arkansas and louisiana. with some folk in kansas, nebraska and montana coming along. the rest of america will go about their business and just ignore them.

in poker today, i had a woman who has a very slow learning curve (probably republican) i won three huge pots from her when she called my very large bets. first one, i had a set of tens on the turn and she had the nut flush...but didn't raise my little 15 dollar bet. board pairs on river. she pays off 75 dollars. next, there is a raise to 8 dollars and i and 6 others call. i have a pair of 6's. the flop comes 6-3-J. player number one who was in blind bets 50 dollars into a 56 dollar pot. everyone folds except this lady. i raise to 100 dollars and orginal player folds but she calls. turn is a blank and i go all in and she calls and shows a pair of queens. after she rebuys again and ten minutes goes by and i am now in small blind. there are 5 callers plus bb already in...i look down and there are aces. I raise to 20 dollars and everyone except her folds. flop comes Q-7-3. I bet 75 dollars and she goes all in, showing me a queen-ten suited. i show her the aces and take the pot. she leaves then and the dealer, who has been there for two of these hands, says "that woman just won't learn will she?" i said, "i hope not."

so that's it for today.

peace for us all.

my thoughts on the gm situation and i want to know what you think

2009-03-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

i watched a very good discussion last night on cnn about the obama plan for the car companies. the show had people both pro and con and one kind of inbetween and after it was over, rhonda and i talked for hours about what was presented.

you know part of me believes that we are on our way not to economic recovery but to a world wide depression that could make the depression of the 1930's seem tame while at the same time i think that we could pull out of this within a year. i would be interested in reading what any of you think because i just don't know.

back to the car companies, gm in particular. here is my take: i think that any company needing tax payer assistance must be held to some standards. (i will get to the banks and insurance companies later) by that thinking, gm must come up with a viable plan to start on the road to recovery. gm has been making bad decisions for a couple of decades by not concentrating on building cars that americans want. they make superior trucks and suvs and i have bought one, a 1993 gmc Z-71 pickemup truck that was, dollar for dollar, one of the best vehicles i have ever owned but trucks really should be for a very limited market; cars are what most people drive. every year, honda and toyota sold more cars than gm, the japanese cars ran better, looked better, got better gas mileage, lasted longer, were better appointed inside and had higher resale value. did gm (or ford or chryler for that fact) look at what was happening and try to bring cars of equal quality and reliability? hyandia (sp) is another prime example; they started, what? 10, 15 years ago? at first their cars were crap but each year they got better and better and better and now their ratings are sky high. if a south korean company can start from scratch and within two decades become not only viable but a leader then why couldn't gm or chrysler? it is not the unions fault that the powers that be in those companies didn't design and build superior cars. ford on the other hand has increased their small car department and the FIT is doing quite well in europe and probably will here as well. the new mustang is a much better car than the mustang of the 90's.

the car makers of america and all the suppliers and dealers make up about 16% of the american work force and account for a huge percentage of gnp. how can we let them fail? also our national security is tied to the car makers, they provide vehicles for the military as well. how can we let them fail?

BUT on the other hand, if a company makes bad decisions year after year, makes bad products year after year, squanders money year after year HOW CAN THEY NOT FAIL? if you or i had a business that did those things we WOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS AND GOOD RIDDANCE TO US. right? so how can they not fail? should we, the taxpayers, keep pouring money into companies that will continue a proven bad business plan just because the companies are "too big to fail?"

and why was not the same kind of pressure put on the banks and aig? why do we keep throwing money at them when they have cost us much more than the car companies? why are we willing to have thousands of blue collar workers be put on the bread lines when we coddle the bankers and the wall street fat cats. obama makes the head of gm step down but citibank and boa keep rocking along with the same management as before. why is that gander not as good as that goose?

(personally i think, wagner at gm, did something or said something that brought the hammer down on him. flying to the d.c. meetings in his private jet didn't help his cause at all but i think it was something more and he pushed obama and thought he could get away with it but obama has shown he is willing and able to play really hard ball. besides it was a "shot across the bow" for all chief executives of all the companies looking for tax payer money and you can rest assured that they all took notice)

i have no answers. i have questions. i have worries. i have anger. i have concern for my country. i think the american public better start paying really close attention and start getting more and more information. the power still rests with the people as it always has but the people must realize that and use their power. the power of the vote, the power of the protest, the power of unrest.

i always had a certain amount of regret that i was born when i was, i missed the great events that shaped world history. i was a baby during wwII, too old for vietnam, wasn't here for the civil war or the american revolution or the french revolution or wwI or roman empire etc etc, but, sure as shit, i could be here for the fall of america. bummer. especially since i am old and not really ready for the barricades but if it comes to that, well, count me in. i won't be violent and i won't hurt my fellow man but i bet i could come up with some mischief to perform.

dis and dat and a new tooth

2009-03-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

and that is why i didn't bet on louisville. i did bet on the tarheels to cover the 7 against ou and that was all for yesterday. for the tourney, i am ahead. also won again yesterday, but small. 13 out 14 is the streak since i moved to the venetian poker room and i'll take that.

if you come to vegas, go see LOVE at the mirage. best show in vegas. words fail me.

gotta go do stress test for my heart at the v.a. and then off to get my new tooth. glad i am getting it before i go on road. it is right there in front and i look weird. (not that i will look "good" when it is back in but ...)

LATER THIS DAY...

won again today after getting tooth. now i can smile without looking like someone out of DELIVERANCE. "squeal for me, boy, squeal like a pig". sorry.

a thought on a proposal that some congress people put forth about AIG where they were going to write a law and tax those bonuses at 90%. amazing how they could want to write a law just to get some people they DIDN'T LIKE. those men and women who were to get those bonuses did nothing illegal. their bonuses were guaranteed by contracts. regardless of how reprehensible they were, they still did nothing wrong. if congress had gone forth with this idea it would set a precedent where they could do it to anyone that crossed them. as dr. martin luther king said, "an injustice to one is an injustice to all." that is why the KKK will be supported by the ACLU (of which i am a dues paying, card carrying member), not because they agree with them but the rights of citizens apply to ALL citizens. we cannot pick and chose who has the right to free speech or the right of assembly. either we all do or none of us do.

but anyway, rock and roll

and

peace to us all.

READ THE NEW ROLLING STONE ARTICLE

2009-03-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

MATT TAIBBI (who is a great writer) has an article in the april 2nd issue titled THE BIG TAKEOVER in which he lays out a case that "the global economic crisis isn't about money--it is about POWER. How wall street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution." it is fucking scary. he names names and takes us through a step by step explanation of how these bastards are basically taking over the government. (which is merely an extension of the ideas laid out in WEB OF DEBT). read it and weep.

we are so fucked, my friends. however, one of these day, this year, next year or 50 years from now, there will be a worldwide revolution of the people. throughout history, one theme has remained constant, the battle between the people and royalty. the kings always wanted to do no work yet get 98% of the proceeds from work. now the kings and queens have morphed into the international banks and corporations but the battle is the same. as RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE said, CLASS WARFARE--JUST DO IT.

see every time someone brings up class warfare it is shouted down by the powers that be. BUT CLASS WARFARE IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW. the rich have gotten richer and we have gotten poorer. hmmmm. the deck is stacked for the banks and corporations. when they get into a mess, such as right now, we, the people, fools that we are, bail them out. "hey peons, give us your money" "oh, yessir, massa, yessir, we'se gonna bail yer ass out again, oh yessir massa, yessir. whatever you say, massa" you see, to the ultra rich, we are all niggers. just slaves to the machine. the black people know this but haven't been able to convince their white brothers and sisters that THE MAN is not on any one's side except his own.

AS GWB SAID TO A GROUP OF ULTRA RICH SUPPORTERS, "SOME MAY CALL YOU THE HAVE MORES BUT I CALL YOU MY CONSTITUENCY" since he took office in 01, real wages have gone down and the rich have gotten MUCH MORE RICH. check it out.

and obama is playing right into their hands. whether it is on purpose or not, i don't know but, my friends, we are fucked. my hope is that the american people will come out of their self induced stupor and really get mad. i mean REALLY GET MAD. the old I AM MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!" speak up, let us have a peaceful revolution of the people before we have to have a violent one. when there are 30 million homeless in america it will be too late for peaceful means. act now. we have been stupid and greedy and blind and uninformed for way too long. the net allows to contact our fellow citizens, obama showed us that if he does nothing else. "yes we can" shouldn't just apply to his campaign but to us the people; yes, we can make a difference but not by being silent, not by being afraid, not by being blind. open your eyes. then open your mouth.

and a happy saturday to you.

p.s. watched SOUTH PACIFIC on PBS last night as it was performed at CARNEGIE HALL on the GREAT PERFORMANCES series. it was so good. reba mcintyre played nellie furbush. each performer had the script book in their hands, so it wasn't like the original play but it still was an amazing piece of work. from our front room, rhonda and i gave it a standing ovation at the end. check it out.

tonight we go see LOVE. i can hardly wait, it should be great.

seat position

2009-03-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

very seldom put up two posts in one day but ....

one of the things you have to be aware of is seat position and by this what i mean is that you want the strong players to your right and weak to your left. today there was a fellow who had over 2k in front of him which is HUGE at a 1-2 table and i moved to another seat so he would be to my right. he liked to push all in and i wanted to be able to trap him. also he raises a lot and that will keep me from playing so-so hands, which is cool.

well, i trapped him on basically my very first hand after moving. i am in bb with 5-7 off suit and there is no raise. flop comes 3-4-6 rainbow. da nutz. i check and everyone checks. fuck. jack of diamonds comes on turn putting two diamonds on board. i bet 15 dollars into pot and everyone folds to big stack who is on button. he goes all in. i call. he had 5-2 for the smaller straight. YES.

ended up about 400 to the good today.

and that doesn't count my winnings on bb yesterday where i had uconn, xavier, missouri, and villenava (sp) on a parlay and uconn by itself. YES!!!!

today i have okla., n.carolina and michigan state. we shall see. probably should have taken louisville to cover but i am not sure about them. hell, unlv beat them.

pssst. afghanistan is not a country. pass it on.

2009-03-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

anback to winning ways, making it 9 out of last 10 at the venetian. small win but will take it. so, for 3 days of basically no cards, i still won a minor amount and that is good. minimizing losses and all...

rhonda has put me on face book but it all seems rather silly to me. not to be rude, but why would someone put on the net that "am bored."? "going to store" ?? eating a cookie, wiping their ass etc etc? this is not networking but i don't know quite what to call it. maybe it has some value as far as introducing people to me and my comedy but we haven't figured out how to make it work in that direction. i have no desire to skim through several hundred messages, most of which are trivial in content on any kind of regular basis. oh well, maybe i am missing something. if you know of a way to put it to work...enlighten me.

i have a very close and dear friend who thinks that obama is a demon and is going to bring the country down. i do surely hope they are wrong. i am, however, getting more nervous by the day with not only his appointments but now i see he is going to put even more troops in Afghanistan.

one of the real problems that we have in dealing with Afghanistan is that the united states keeps on acting as if Afghanistan was a COUNTRY. it is not. it is a collection of war lords and tribes that live in that part of the world. they don't think of themselves as afghans so why should we think of them as such? get out of that hell hole. and for that fact, get out TOTALLY from iraq. yes, it is going to descend into violence as the shiites fight the sunnis, the sunnis fight the shiites, the arabs fight the kurds, the persians fight the arabs and the kurds, the kurds fight the arabs, the shiites, the sunnis, the persians and the turks. AND WE WANT TO STAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THAT? jesus.

want peace? want to eliminate so-called islamic terrorism? GET OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST! it is the one and only way. there is no other way. duh. we and the british have been fucking around there since world war one. and incidentally, the jews didn't take isreal from the Palestinians, they took it from the british who took it from the Palestinians. duh. our fingerprints are all over the wars and conflicts of the middle east and while the people of that region know this the people of america do not.

want to live in peace?
get out of the middle east.

poker streak comes to an end and what is obama thinking?

2009-03-25T17:03:00.000-07:00

all good things come to end and today i lost a grand sum total of 65 dollars. i made a 40 dollar mistake and the rest was just 9-3 followed by 6-2 followed by Q-4 followed by......blinded out basically. that's alright, it happens and when i saw that it just wasn't going to be my day and, on top of that, it was a very dangerous table i got up and left and came home to pick up dog shit. from shit to shit, so to speak.

i am becoming very concerned about some of the nominees that the president has put forth because of their ties to the very companies that got us into this mess. his latest, gary gensler to be chairman of the COMMODITY FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION is a point in fact. he played a central role in blocking regulations for some of the exotic financial instruments used for hedging. also he spent 18 years at GOLDMAN SACHS. hmmmm

BERNIE SANDERS tried to block the nomination pointing out that sanders had worked with phil gramham to except CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS from regulation. it is those very things that brought down AIG. he also worked to deregulate electric energy swaps which is what our boys at ENRON were doing. what in the fuck is obama thinking?

he keeps putting men into place that were knee deep in the shit. what is he thinking. have we been fooled again? is obama just a spokesperson for the huge financial institutions? i certainly hope not. but facts are facts and crooks are crooks and deregulators are the enemy of the common man and the ally of wall street and all that implies. man oh man. we shall see but my concern is growing.

another win and a quote from jefferson

2009-03-24T18:03:00.000-07:00

won again today for the 8th straight session but it was very small. in a way, i played better today than most of the other 7 times because i was card dead for hours at a time and picked off only a few little pots to keep my head above water. you have to recognize when it is just not your day and don't stay when things aren't going well at all. i made some very good lay downs today and almost sprained my wrist from throwing cards away.

oh well, off to watch obama's press conference. i am beginning to have my doubts about the wisdom of his bank bailouts; i would much rather he just nationalize them and concentrate more on jobs but will see what he has to say this evening.

"i fear for my country when i contemplate that god is just"

thomas jefferson.

we, as a country, have piled up some really karma over the last 8 years what with our naked aggression and corporate greed.

just a thought

poker commentary from captain hook.

2009-03-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

since i am so tight i hear the criticism that no one will call my raises or big bets because they would know that i have the goods. also, i hear that i can't just wait for aces and kings or big pairs that i have to mix up my game. one other thing i hear is how much people hate jacks (or aces...they say, "i always lose with aces") all three of these are dead wrong. remember something, my fellow good players, we don't win by being better than our opponents, we win by not being as bad as our opponents. we win by outwaiting our opponents. we win by throwing away hands that are beat. we win by maximizing our winnings and minimizing our losses. some cases in point from today's session:

still playing at venetian and the game today was wild and woolly at times with several loose aggressive players who had big stacks. not my favorite kind of game but there i was. first hour i don't play in a single hand and am down 15 bucks or so. i call under the gun with pair of 4's. wild and woolly next to me raises to ten dollars and since everyone at the table knows by now that he could have anything from a pair of aces to 3-7 off suit (for real) he gets 5 callers so i put in the extra 8 dollars to see the flop. flop comes Qc 9d 4d. i check, he bets ten dollars which is raised to 30 dollars and is called by button. i raise to 90 dollars and take down the pot. (eliminate the draws). another hour goes by and i am on little blind with jacks. button raises to 12 dollars and i call as do three other people including one of the loose aggressive players. flop comes Ad Jc 3h. beautiful. i check, loose aggressive bets 20 dollars, button calls and i raise to 75 and loose aggressive goes all in. i call. he had ace king. ba da boom. 45 minutes later from button i raise to 12 with jacks again. four callers and one of them has BIG stack. flop comes Qc, Jc, 4c. hmmmmm. it is checked around to me and i bet 40 dollars and big stack calls while everyone else folds. i am afraid he has flush. turn is the 4 of diamonds. beautiful. he checks. i check. river is a nothing. he bets 50 dollars. i raise to 100. he raises all in. i call. he shows nut flush. thank you. after i won another hand with jacks they started calling me captain hook.

another example: i raise to ten with ace king of diamonds. flop comes Ac Ts 6s. an asian woman bets 40 dollars right into me and i fold. why? because i was beat and i had no spades. she is called in one place. she had tens and 6's and lost to a spade flush on river.

poker and plans

2009-03-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

i am running really good at poker and i am doing so by being super tight. i have had people tell me that since i am so tight that people will not call me when i raise or bet because of my table image. WRONG! for instance, i had been at the table for several hours and was up big when this hand happened....i raise to 17 with aces and am called in two places. flop comes Q, 5, 7 rainbow. they check and i bet 50 dollars and am called by one guy. next card is a 2. he checks and i bet 75 dollars and he goes all in with his last 100. i call. he has QJ and i take the pot. earlier in the day i had raised with jacks and spiked a jack on the flop against two opponents but the board was dangerous. Tc, Jh Kh. ace queen or 9-Q and they have a straight and, of course there is the heart draw. I bet 60 dollars into a 50 dollar pot and get called in both places. hmmmm. turn is 7c putting two flush plus another straight. they check, i bet 75 dollars and both call. well, shit. river is perfect, the 2 of clubs, they check and so do i and they were both on a draw.

the great advantage of 1-2 no limit hold-em is the quality of your opponents which is poor. like i have said before, i am not out to make tens of thousands of dollars per month; i am out to make a grand or so every month. i am not trying to win a lot of hands; i looking to win a couple of real big hands. slow and easy and super tight will do the trick at low limit no limit.

on to another subject; the more i read about the people and companies that got us into this position the more i realize that it is many people and many companies and they all seem to be inter-related. larry summers in the clinton administration lead the way to deregulate. gaithner (sp) is right in there with him. citibank, goldman sachs, aig, bank of america. peas in a fucking pod. we have foxes guarding the hen house. we are so fucked.

all of us better batten down the hatches and start making some plans of what to do if everything does go to shit which it very well may. i have poker and a small ss check and rhonda can always do individual taxes, that is assuming that somebody still has a job. also, i know how to hustle by buying some little thing that i can sell and double or triple my money on it; whether it be peace buttons or pool cues that double as a walking stick (hey heather). we also have a very low mortgage payment that we should always be able to cover. and if all else fails, i have a brother in law up in nebraska who has a small farm that grows enough food for several families and he also is a hunter and has always brought home fresh game. he has told rhonda and me that if it all goes down, we are to scoot on up there and we will ride it out together. so we have plans, a, b, c and d.

fear and loathing in america brothers and sisters. fear and loathing.

what did they call with?

2009-03-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

another mistake that 1-2 players make is that they don't ask themselves "what did he call with?" if you fail to do that, you can walk into some real problems.

i raised with aces to 18 dollars which was a big raise for the table i was on and am called by two people. flop comes Q, 9, 3 rainbow. it is checked to me and i bet 50 dollars and one guy, who i know to be fairly loose, calls. there is now aprx. 150 in the pot. turn is a K. he checks. now, what did he call with? ten jack? he has a straight. Q,K? two pair. AQ, i am golden. QJ? could still be good but he picked up draw. i check.

river is another King. he debates and checks. cool. if he had QK he would have bet since i checked the turn, same if he had straight because he would be afraid that i wouldn't bet. i bet 100 dollars and he calls with AQ. thank you. my check on the turn got me an extra hundred. (and let me know what he had by how he played the river.)

i am on button with pair of 4's. flop comes 9-4-2 rainbow. three people plus bb in pot. bb checks, next player bets 10 dollars, player to my right calls, i raise to 20 dollars. bb folds, first bettor folds and other guy calls. turn is Q. he bets 50 dollars into me. now, he either has two pair or a set of 9's or 2's. (would have raised with queens) i think he has Q-9 so i call. river is a blank and he fires 100 dollars into pot. i call. he turns over Q-9. thank you.

nothing of real importance in those two examples just telling you how it thought it through.

ENOUGH ALREADY!

2009-03-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

AIG'S CEO edward m. liddy was on tv earlier today spewing forth his lies and justifications about the bonuses but no senator brought up mr. liddy's background and just how deep he personally was in this whole thing.

he was A DIRECTOR OF GOLDMAN SACHS and was paid 685,770 dollars in 2007 and would have been brought in for questioning if g.s. hadn't gone belly up. liddy even headed their AUDIT COMMITTEE during the 5 years before he resigned to take over AIG in 2008. as for his salary sacrifice, not to worry, in 05 when he as still ceo of allstate insurance he received 26.7 MILLION dollars in compensation.

in other words this creep should have been very aware of underwriting practices at aig since he had been paid millions by another insurance company. between aig and goldman sachs he oversaw the collapse of the american financial sector and there he is being referred to as "sir" instead of "motherfucker" which may be what the "m" in his name stands for.

all these guys seem to be in cohoots with each other. chris dodd was chairman of the committee that should have been overseeing the financial sector but there he is acting all sanctimonious.

what does it take to get the american people stirred up enough to DEMAND some rolling of heads? i am not advocating violence (but i would understand it) but i am advocating some civil unrest until we see some actual and factual and effectual actions, not words, coming out of washington.

(thanks to yvonne c. for sending me the information on edward motherfucker liddy.)

it's the congress, stupid.

2009-03-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

$807,500 for nevada fair housing foreclosure effort
$507,000 access to healthcare network for uninsured
523,000 to fight hepatitis c
$ 1 million to assist the university of nevada health sciences nursing program
856,000 to school system to school district to prevent dropout
856,000 to another school district for same thing
800,000 for university of nevada reno for agricultural related programs
269,000 to help carson city battle erosion
300,000 to city of fernley for law enforcement equipment
235,000 to nevada dept. of agriculture for weed control
4.78 million for truckee meadows flood control project
2.5 million for truckee canal reconstruction
3 million for water treatment at lake tahoe
18 million for rural nevada water infrastructure and water quality projects
money to study wildlife habitat in central nevada lakes and to restore the lahonthon cutthroat trout population
608,000 to help wells recover from earthquake
150,000 to restore a church
475,000 for the virginia and truckee railroad
190,000 for amargosa valley community center
300,000 for wastewater treatment in goldfield
190,000 for community center in elko
285,000 truckee meadows community college low income student recruitment
1.5 million for interpretive center in elko
24,000 to help poor schoolchildren in lincoln county
381,000 for nevada cancer institute to fund hope coach mammovans

how many jobs do these projects create? and the ones that are created, how long will they last?

while each of these is commendable in a way, they are not what we need. WE NEED SOME FUCKING GOOD PAYING LONG LASTING JOBS!!! jesusfuckingchrist. without jobs for the unemployed all other things are just farting in the wind.

this is just a partial list and god only knows what is in the "stimulus bill" for other states. i know that obama has said that these PORK projects only make up 1% of the overall bill but i don't believe him. i believe that the congress in general and the demos in particular are loading this up with enough pork to choke us all. obama promised no more pork but he has gone back on his word.

i told all of you why i was voting for obama and i also told you that i would bitch and moan if he didn't live up to his promises. well, i am beginning to bitch and moan.

the treasury secretary, gaither (sp), sounds like he has no clue as to what he is doing.

congress must be reigned in. the democrats, now that they control congress, are acting like children in the candy store and showing no restraint at all. fuck.

write your congressperson and DEMAND no more pork and DEMAND that it is jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs that get the money.

NAMES AND PHOTOS WOULD DO THE TRICK

2009-03-17T10:02:00.001-07:00

the president is taking a lot of heat for the AIG fiasco bonuses and the wolves are howling but most people don't understand the bind he (we) is (are) in. these bonuses were contracted last year and are legally binding. now, since we, the taxpayer, have a stake in the company and we don't pay the bonuses then there will be lawsuits which they will win.

i have an idea though that would keep us from paying these outrageous bonuses to people who got us in the mess in the first place: publish their names, their addresses and their photos in the national press and on the internet. then let us see if these greedy motherfuckers still want to take that money. already, aig hq is under armed guard because the people are more than a little upset over this and it is hard to blame them.

it has a good chance of getting really ugly here in america and fear and loathing is sweeping the land. the barricades are being erected and the pitchforks are being sharpened. somewhere, some old lady is stitching names into a blanket. those names are going to be checked and heads will roll. (re: tale of two cities)

in the nit tonight, take kentucky and give the 7 over unlv.

nationalize the banks and do away with the federal reserve. the f.r. is a PRIVATE bank that LOANS our money to US. now is the time for real change. it may get a little bloody but as thomas jefferson said, "the tree of liberty must watered with blood of patriots and tyrants."

oh well, i am old and have lived through the golden age of america, the richest times in the richest land the world has ever seen. my children and grandchildren will not have it nearly as good as i did.

top of the morning to you.

a little dose of epictetus

2009-03-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

what a relief it is to feel good again. i don't do "sick" with any kind of aplomb and am, in fact, a real woosy when i am feeling bad. but i am back, feeling my oats, full of piss and vinager so let's rock on.

the purpose of the exorcise in poker is twofold: minimize your losses and maximize your winnings. with that in mind, here is what i believe to be the best way to play those dueces that we have talked about: remember sets are very, very powerful hands and can be huge winners because they are hidden.

preflop. call the two dollars and then call the small raise. (there is another way right here but very dangerous and that is to raise big when it gets back around and that way either take the money right then and there or eliminate weak speculative hands. if you are called however, you are in horrible position and would have to make all in bet on flop when you spike the 2)

flop: you are first to act and it is a dangerous drawing board with both straight and flush possiblities. CHECK AND CALL

turn. now there is a flush and straight possibility on board. check and call any bet up to 25 dollars because pot odds are so good at this point, if board pairs on river you will take down big pot more than likely. if it is bet big, fold.

river. was another heart incidently so folding is easy. if board pairs or miracle 2 shows up, you should bet it straight out big.

this way of playing it keeps your exposure small and your possible gain big. you can abandon ship easily enough when scare cards come up and then someone bets big.

aggression is a winning tactic, obviously, but there are times you must temper aggression with a little common sense. i am always looking to trap; i want the hand that i know will win not the one i hope will win.

so that's it for the 2's.

"in theory it is easy to convince an ignorant person: in actual life, men not only object to offer themselves to be convinced, but hate the man who has convinced them. whereas Socrates used to say that we should never lead a life not subjected to examination"

Epictetus

that quote has nothing to do with the 2's other than it has something to do with everything.

dis and dat on a sunday night

2009-03-15T23:48:00.001-07:00

dr john and the neville brothers were beyond words!

scotty, i got to hear aaron neville sing AMAZING GRACE and he sang the verses we couldn't come up with. unfuckingbelievable. it was great!

over the past three years of this blog i have said over and over we need to get our ass out of the middle east. we meddle, we sign agreements with isreal that are not in our best interests but theirs, we give money to egypt and take money from the saudis, we do the biddings of the kuwaitis, we invade iraq, we threaten iran, we invade afghanastan, piss off pakistan, bomb by proxie the syrians, abandon the kurds and invest in dubai. we are so incredibly stupid and arrogant. we don't read history and get our information from 30 second sound bites.

so just some thought from other bloggers, much more knowledgeable than i, throughout history.....

Now it is not good the the Christian's health to hustle
the Aryan brown,

For the Christian riles, and Ayran smiles and
he weareth the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name
of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear; "A fool lies here who tried
to hustle the east."

---Rudyard Kipling, "the naulahka"

"You have eyes but you do not see
And you have ears but not hear."

Jesus H. Christ

"how many times can a man be robbed--on the same street, by the same people---before they call him a rube?"

Hunter S. Thompson

"there's a sucker born every minute."

P.T. Barnum

beware the cure

2009-03-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

not only am i not getting better, i seem to be getting worse and i think it is from the medicine i am taking. how this came down was the dentist who did the surgery gave me an antibiotic but then after taking it for a week i end up with a fever of 102 so i go to the v.a. and my doctor there gives me AVELOX, a much more powerful antibiotic, and then the real fun begins: oh my fever goes down after a couple of days but my left hand cramps up so much that it is unusable, my right leg cramps up, my right arm cramps up, my lips break out in blisters, sweat pours off me at night and when i wake up the bed is drenched. i then read the warnings about the drug and all of these things are side effects and can be very serious. each one of them with the exception of the blistering lips (which is highly unattractive, i might add) comes with the warning "see your doctor immediately". fucking great, the v.a. is closed on weekends and i am not going to some emergency room where there are people stacked up to the ceiling and get charged several thousand dollars to be told, "see your doctor for another prescription." so what i am doing is not taking any more of this until i talk to dr. leon on monday. it has been 24 hours since i last took a pill and guess what?, hand is okay, leg is okay, blisters are gone, arm is okay. think i should take another pill? guess not.

besides all of that, unless i am on my death bed tonight, i am going to see DR.JOHN AND THE NEVILLE BROTHERS at the hilton where i have 4th row center tickets. this is the very first time they have ever toured together and should be a tremendous show. i saw the neville brothers in new orleans last year at jazz fest which was the first time they had played in new orleans since katrina and, as i told you then, it was a spiritual experience and brought tears to the eyes of all who were there. arron neville's voice is a national treasure and if you have never heard these guys....DO SO! dr. john also is something special. i do hope he does WALK ON GILDED SPLINTERS because it is the most unusual version of that song ever recorded. and what a show man he is. if i am still alive tomorrow i will tell you about the concert.

i know that almost everyone who reads this is someone who reads, i can tell by your comments, and i want to tell you again to read WEB OF DEBT which is so incredibly relevant to what is going on that it is scary. same with SHOCK DOCTRINE. it is the banks who have done this to us and there is a cure but it is radical. read these books. educate yourself and then pass it on. it is we the people who have to turn things around, we cannot count on politicians to do it. obama, as sincere as he is, is tied to the old ways and unless we speak up and demand some fundamental changes in our money policies the current situation will reoccur over and over and over again as it as done for the past century.

oh well, back to basketball and fruit juices.

peace to us all

random thoughts from my sick bed

2009-03-13T15:48:00.000-07:00

you won't ever see a better basketball game than syracuse and uconn last night. big east bb allows contact to go uncalled that would be felonies in some states. no a league for the faint of heart. gamblers had to be living and dying.

i have been sick as dog for past week hence the absense of blog but if a sports fan is going to be under the weather this was a good week to do so.

just when is this stimulus money going to create a job? it has proped up banks and insurance companies and credit card companies and has created a hog heaven of pork but so far as i know not a single dollar has gotten to the people who need it. and congress did grant themselves a new pay raise. cocksuckers.

no wait, some of the finest people i know are cocksuckers so let's just call them insensitive pigs.

next week the ncaa's kick off and unlv will not be there; they went out with a whimper. we failed to live up to our hype. oh well, wait till next year.

if san diego state gets in and his a high enough seed to not be playing one of the top three or four in their bracket in the first game they will be a good bet, they are good athletic team that is peaking at the right time. you heard it here first.

too tired, too sick, too medicated to write anything of consequence, not that i ever do, so this is just to let you know i am still around

flop and turn for the ages

2009-03-08T21:57:00.001-07:00

i started out the day at MGM but after about an hour of just being card dead and down about 30 bucks i decide to go check out the venetian poker room and so off i went and am glad i did. first of all, the room is just GREAT, big room, big tables, comfy chairs, food service to your table and dollar an hour comps. i have been at table for about ten minutes and in first position i find a pair of jacks and raise to ten dollars and five people call. and lordy, lordy, how sweet it was, flop comes JACK, JACK, ACE! gotta love that. i of course check as does everyone else and then, my friends, the miracle card comes...another ace. the guy with ace king thought he had a hand.......lol.

all told today i won 520 dollars in about 3 hours and came on home.

more stories and the end of the poker quiz/lesson/example tomorrow (i hope)

peace to us all.

mistakes in poker and politics

2009-03-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

since i play at the 1-2 tables, i am playing with players who are not real good on the whole and i see them make many mistakes, the biggest two are not raising big enough with big pairs and then after the flop not betting enough to run people off hands. yesterday, i was in the big blind and 5 people call and then the button raises to 7$. i look down and i have the 4s-7s, obviously not a very good hand but i know that everyone else is going to call so i put in the extra 5 dollars. sure enough, the other 5 call so now 7x7 or 49 in the pot. flop comes Jc, 5s, 6s. i bet ten dollars into the pot to represent the jack and everyone folds except the button who raises me to 20 dollars; i call. the turn is the 3h. i check and now he wants to bet big and bets 30 dollars. i raise to 60 dollars and he then compounds his mistake (s) by going all in and i am now 200 dollars richer. he had kings. had he raise to 15-20$ preflop as he should with that many people in before him i would, of course, mucked that piece of cheese and he would have won the pot. plus, if he had bet huge on the flop i would have had to drop my cards but he priced me in and it cost him his stack. you gotta remember what grandma said....always raise big with big pairs....grandma didn't fuck around and neither should you.

today, i played for a little over 4 hours and won 152 dollars and was in maybe ten hands not counting blinds all day. i just refused to get involved with less than premium cards and just waited those people out and paid off on the few hands i won.

i will go back to the case of the dueces tomorrow and maybe another shoot-em up story.

sure hope that stimulus money gets into the economy quickly before everybody is unemployed. i agree with paul krugman that the only problem with what obama has done is that it is not big enough. we gotta fix things (bridges, roads, levies,) and build things, (schools, high speed rail, desalination plants) because just giving the money to banks to loan isn't going to work. we've tried that and all they did was go buy other banks and still refuse to loan our money back to us. (it is a good thing for the bankers and stockbrokers and politicians who got us into this mess that we don't live in france of the 17 hundreds because we would have those motherfuckers up against the wall or on the chopping block....not that i would do that but, truth be known, i probably wouldn't stop others from doing it) jobs is what we need. manufacturing is what we need. not only do we have to fix the immediate problem we have to face the fact that we don't make enough here anymore. true wealth of a nation is in WHAT THEY MAKE, tangible goods not intangible services.

oh well, our greed and stupidity got us into this and hopefully the nation as a whole will learn some very vaulable lessons from this disaster. number one of which is never elect another republican to the presidencey. check out when unemployment was the highest over the last 50 years, see how it was ALWAYS the republicans who got us into these messes. nixon, reagan, bush and bush all brought us recessions. we are slow learners.

poker, robbers, shooters and always keep your cool

2009-03-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

at this point i have to get more specific because the action heats up. (this happened at the mgm and it was a buddy of mine who had the 2's and he was sitting right next to me and i had folded and he showed me his cards preflop. after the hand we discussed at great length.....

he bet 30 dollars into the pot and was called by the maniac and the button. pot is now pretty big.

the next card was the 8h. now what? do you back off or do you bet and if so, how much?

speaking of buddies, one of mine got robbed at gun point the other night and it reminded me of something that happened in the 60's......

it is late night in oklahoma city and i was running a book office at the time and on that night i had gone to see a boxing match downtown and afterwards i had to go to the bus station to pick up supplies that had been sent to me. (back in those days, shipping by greyhound was the fastest and most economical way to get boxes of whatever sent from a to b) i go in and pick up two boxes weighing maybe 15 pounds each and go to leave. the bus station sits on a corner and my car is parked right across the street if i were to go to my right it is right there. as i am leaving with my hands obviously full, i notice two rather scruffy looking young black guys get up and follow me out. downtown is deserted at this time of night and i am a little skeptical of the action so instead of turning right to go to car, i go straight across the street and they follow, maybe ten yards behind me. i then take a right and cross the street and they follow. now so far it could be just a coincidence but then i take a right again so i am going back the way i came but just across the street. they follow. now i know something is amiss. i get to my car and throw the boxes on my trunk and spin around with my right fist cocked, i am going to punch the first guy before they can jump me. however, as i turn i find myself facing a snub nosed .38! (lesson: don't bring a fist to a gun fight) i freeze in mid punch and the guy with the gun says, "be cool." i say, "i am the coolest motherfucker you have ever seen." he says, "give me your money" and i reach very slowly to my wallet and hand it to him. inside is about ten dollars. he says, "fuck! you are more broke than we are." i say, "look, keep the money, give me back my wallet and i.d. and i will get in my car and go about my business and will not call the cops" he says, "promise?" i say, "absofuckinglutely." and that is what we did.

the lesson here is threefold: be aware of your surroundings and be willing to change tactics is the situation changes are the first two and the third one is always keep your cool.

and that story reminds me of the times i have been shot at and maybe next post i will tell one or two of those. yeah, yeah, i know; everyone of you have been shot at multiple times...... lol.

peace to us all.

rock and roll.

enjoy today, tomorrow could be worse.

2009-03-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

for those of you who are still in game. raise was called by everyone so pot now contains 7x7 or 49 dollars.

flop is Jh, 7h, 2c. your hand contains two red dueces.

you are first to act.

bad tooth and poker problem part II

2009-03-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

for any of you who were planning on seeing me this week up in northern california at a couple of casinos...i aint gonna be dere. yesterday i had to go to the dentist because one of my teeth had abscessed and it was full of infection. tooth was pulled...not a lot of fun but it was the aftermath which was horrible. the infection was so severe that it "ate" the (the word that i can't spell but is the pain killer that a doctor shoots into your mouth) and thus the nerves were exposed. let me tell you, you don't want that! i screamed in pain. i cried. i moaned. i screamed some more. rhonda, poor thing, was going crazy with worry; she had taken off work and here she is with screaming husband. we get me home and i gobble down some pain pills and finally get to sleep. it was a long day.

now for poker puzzle from previous post: (all except one, decided to call) well, 6 people call and then the button raises but only to 7 dollars or 5 dollars more each. bb calls but lb throws away and now it is back to you.

politics and poker

2009-03-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

aig wants (and will get)more money and so do some (dare i say, foolish) banks. i have a problem with bailing out companies that are bad shape because they made bad decisions. while i have socialistic ideals and believe in my heart of hearts that a nation's worth or greatness lies not in the power of their military but how they treat their citizens, i have enough free enterprise in my personal system that failure should not be rewarded. aig is in the situation that they created. like i have said before, i called the housing collapse waaaaay before it happened and if i, drug addled, poker playing stand-up comic with no college education could read that writing on the wall then how come these "masters of the universe" could not? did they know that if they failed then someone would come along and bail their sorry asses out? same with the banks. why not, if we are giving out money, support those banks who did not play the fools game of derivatives and shaky loans to shaky people? let them continue to prosper and give them more capital to work with since they seem to know what they are doing?

i can understand the rationale behind the support for the car companies in as they employ so many people and we, the people, will get benefits from them recovering whereas what is the benefit to the american people if aig makes a comeback? they are an insurance company, there are LOTS of insurance companies. and we all know just what fair minded people insurance executives are. (speaking of which, according to tv commercials we all ought to change our car insurance to x, y or z because each and every one of them has the lowest rates.....could it be that they are lying? nah? not an insurance company)

"getting out of iraq" does NOT mean leaving 50,000 troops there. that is not getting out. that is reducing forces. and there is a huge difference.

my wife, rhonda, says that we should not be nitpicking right now because that just plays into the republicans game but i say that life and death on foreign soil is not nitpicking. while i agree with 90% of what president obama has done so far, i cannot in good conscience support leaving american boys and girls in iraq for any reason. yes, i know that violence is going to break out and that there will be blood letting on all sides, shiites, sunnis and kurds but let us not shed another drop of american blood there. we broke it and we can't fix it. so let us get the fuck out. a new strong man will come out of the chaos and establish a new dictatorship there. so be it. once that happens we can establish some kind of relief fund for them with strings attached of course and help who ever it is to right that particular ship of state.

as far as the republicans go they are committing political suicide right in front of our eyes. bobby jindal in louisiana is a joke and so is samford in south carolina. they have NO ideas, NO plans, NO proposals other than give tax cuts to the rich. man. and to hear rush Limburger cheese (they both smell) say that he wants obama to FAIL is beyond my comprehension. for obama to fail the country fails. unemployment reaches TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. that is what he wants? talk about unpatriotic. if they had an alternate plan that would be one thing...but they don't.

oh well, tomorrow we go back to poker blogs for a while ... i have some interesting hands to discuss.

matter of fact here is one now but with a twist. i am only going to give you the hand as it came out and you write me and tell me what you would have done. once we get enough people to comment on preflop we will then go to flop and start the process over again.

you are in first position at a table that usually gets lots of callers but few raises preflop but can get really hairy from there on out with one certified maniac who has lots of money in front of him but i have already seen him bluff off several hundred dollars in the short time i have been there. there are others who are loose and will gamble but he is the only maniac.

first question on this problem: you have a pair of 2's. what do you do? fold, call or raise?

saturday's song

2009-02-21T16:59:00.000-08:00

grey days and grey times
country falling apart
millions jobless, homeless
daggers through the heart
of america

smiley people on tv
selling things
that no one needs
in their home
but thank god
they cured
restless leg syndrome

land of opportunity
they come from wide and far
working hard, got a job
living in their car
opportunity wasn't lost
it was stolen

all that money wasn't lost
on stocks and bonds
don't you see
it was stolen
from you and me

somebody has got it

and they ain't giving it back

jack

preachers speaking of a god
that they don't believe in
money changers in the temple
exchanging souls
for dollars

happy saturday to you too

maverick is home

2009-02-20T14:15:00.000-08:00

maverick came home this afternoon but he is pretty heavily medicated so he is rather doped up and not interested in anything other than a drink of water and nice soft bed. annie d. dog is quite upset that she has to be separated from him and sits and howls. sad but irritating. hard to explain things to a dog; she feels as though she is, in some way or another, being punished but she knows not why. i understand but wish she would lighten up on the music.

but what cha gonna do?

looks like rhonda got out of her previous company just in time, she heard from a past fellow co-worker that they are laying off a lot of people while rhonda's little company is thriving. another example of god working in mysterious ways.

speaking of which; may i recommend highly the book LAMB: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BIFF by christopher moore. REALLY GOOD. reminds me somewhat of tom robbins, who is, far and away, my favorite author. if you have never read JITTERBUG PERFUME do yourself a favor and do so. tremendous book. robbins best known book was EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES but it is, in my opinion, not anywhere close to several others of his creations. FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM WARM CLIMATES is my second favorite of his. read jitterbug and you will be hooked, he is able to pull off funny and deep at the same time.

on the subject of books, i finally got around to watching the HBO version of JOHN ADAMS and though it was good, it fails to live up to the book. tv, being such, puts too much emphasis on drama of the personal sort and not enough on history. this is our history and one of our all time great men....read the book.

reading seems to be something that vast numbers of people don't do. or they read just fluff without ever taxing their mind or their imagination. i can not imagine what it would be like not to read and to read constantly. from childhood and even through prison i have read thousands of books and some of them i have read multiple times. moby dick is so much better the second time through; as is cicero, plato, emmerson, twain, jung, (i have read everything this man ever wrote and that is enough to fill a small library) and numerous others but you get the point. and it is never too late to start reading. keep your mind engaged and your life will be fuller.

oh well, nothing to say but needed something to do while watching over sick dog.

rock and roll

peace to us all

a very long night

2009-02-19T17:32:00.000-08:00

last night was one of the longest nights that rhonda and i have gone through: our two dogs, maverick (the great dane) and annie d. dog (the mutt) sleep in the pool room and last night when i went out to close the door for them and give them their evening treats, i noticed that maverick was obviously not feeling well. nose was dry and he was extremely lethargic. rhonda and i immediately took him to an emergency animal clinic and it was a good thing that we did: his stomach had torn loose and had twisted in his body and he was going into shock. we had him operated on then and there and i was at that clinic until almost 4 this morning. the doctor said that the operation had gone exceptionally well and he thought maverick was going to make it. we had him transported to his regular vet clinic at 7:30 this morning and at 2 this afternoon, our vet said that he was doing "wonderfully well."

when we found out about his stomach tearing last night, it really hit me hard because i had lost my first great dane to this horrible event. it strikes mostly large breeds and the great dane in particular. the stomach literally turns over in his body. fucking horrible. they have to open him completely up, take out his spleen, turn the stomach around and attach it to the walls of the body. it can go either way and if not caught in time it leads to an extremely painful death for the dog. anyway, when the doctor told us what was going on, i broke down in tears and, my brothers and sisters, i really thought i was going to have a heart attack right there on the spot. i almost died of grief. for real. i do love that dog.

maverick is one of the most magnificent beasts you will ever see. his grand dad was a national champion as was one of his aunts. when you see maverick, you see what a great dane should look like. he is 35 inches at the shoulder and weighs aprox. 160-170 lbs. (you try getting a dane on a scale...i used to weigh zeus by putting him in my car and then weighing the car with him and without him. lol) the danes are loyal, intelligent, powerful, protective, playful animals that were bred to be a personal protection dog from bandits and the european wild boar. the ewb weighs in at about 4-500 pounds and the great dane can grab that animal by the neck and lift it off the ground and then snap it's neck. that is a powerful dog, jack. only the big bull mastiff is more powerful.

anyway, just spoke to the vet and she said that maverick is doing quite well and in fact, wants to PLAY, can you fucking believe that? he comes home tomorrow.

i don't pray a lot but saint francis of assisi got some calls last night.

peace to us all and may maverick be with us for years to come.

MAKE THE BANKS COME UP WITH CONTRACT

2009-02-18T09:18:00.000-08:00

TOO COOL! i thought i might be right when i wrote about making the banks come up with the actual contract. (SEE POST, SOMETHING FROM THE PAST....from just a couple of posts ago...)

from this mornings l.v. paper: (and a.p. story by mitch stacy) "kathy lovelace lost her job and was about to lose her house, too. but then she made a seemingly simple request of the bank: show me the original mortgage paperwork.

"and just like that, the foreclosure proceedings came to a standstill."

the story goes on to say that thousands are using this to stall foreclosure while they try to get their financial houses back in order.

SO, IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO IS FACING THIS HORRIBLE FATE POINT THIS STORY AND TACTIC OUT TO THEM...IT COULD BUY THEM ENOUGH TIME TO WORK THINGS OUT.

on to something else....

maybe muzzammil "mo" hassan was just mad at his wife for not giving him head.

and something else....

i want to make it perfectly clear: roland burris did not raise any money for me. (that prick!)

and something else....

back on just chit and chat; the weather here has finally let up and we are back to bright sunshine and warmer temps. i have very low tolerance for cold which is one of the reasons i like vegas, though it can be cold for about 30 days out of the year, the rest of the time it ranges from warm to FUCKING HOT which is fine with me.

gotta go, i hear a poker table calling.

mumble mumble

2009-02-17T15:54:00.000-08:00

one of my very best attributes at poker is my incredible patience; i can sit there and throw away cards for hours and not get tempted. none of this, "well, i can't get good cards so let me play this 6-7 off suit here in the cut-off"...or something equally as stupid.

today at mandalay bay, i had no cards, no pairs, no fucking nothing and have blinded out some 70 dollars when this hand happens: i am on the small blind with 7 callers and i look down and there is the jack-4 of diamonds so i put in the other dollar, let's take a peek. the flp comes Jc, 7c, 4c. i have flopped two pair but, of course, there is a possible flush already out there. I bet ten dollars and am called in two places. pot now contains 46 dollars. the turn card is the 4s, giving me a full house. COOL. now to get the max out of the hand so i check. next player checks and the other bets 20 dollars, i raise to 40 dollars and the other player folds and the bettor calls. the last card is the 8c, i bet twenty dollars and the other guy goes ALL IN. cool. i put in all my chips and he shows me the STRAIGHT FLUSH. fuck.

and that is why most people can't play no limit, the swings are brutal and can leave you talking to yourself.

mumble mumble grumble grumble toil and trouble.

peace to us all.

rainy days

2009-02-16T16:53:00.000-08:00

cold and wet here in sin city, bedraggled and drenched whores under the awnings looking for a dry fuck somewhere. streets are flooded washing away the city grime and all the used needles.

we have more illegal pain pills here in vegas than in any other city according to something i read a month or so ago. we are a lortab kind of town. a lot of pain here, might as well stay medicated.

poker rooms are full though so money is still flowing into ye old bankroll. so let it rain, let it rain and don't let me die in the winter.

hopefully spring is just around the corner and i can get back in the pool and do some laps. we are going to put the diving board back up this year but it will probably be more for show than for my use, i surely would hurt myself, just not as cordinated as i used to be.

in the "our father", the word for father should have been translated as "source" taking the personality out of it. the word "heaven" could be translated as "expanding everywhere." so then it becomes "our (my) source which are everywhere"
big difference.

may parnell rot in hell

2009-02-12T17:55:00.000-08:00

i have been asked many times why i up and left the corporate world, the world of "business", the world of profit and the world the three piece suit. the world where you are judged by how much money you make or what private country club you belong to or the car you drive and the place you live. that world. well, let me present as evidence of why, mr. stewart parnell, president of peanut corporation of america.

if you missed this story this morning, mr. parnell when presented with evidence that his plant was selling peanut butter that was contaminated with salmonella tried to a. get another company to run tests, b. pressured regulators to allow him to ship the product anyway and c. went ahead and shipped contaminated product with homemade certificate that falsely attested to the purity of the product. though people were dying from his product, mr. parnell complained about the money he was losing.

read the story. google it up. it is the story of capitalistic america. money rules and the people be damned. wall street and banks with their unmittagated gall and arrogance, the car companies who refused to see the writing on the wall and then when the house came tumbling down blamed it on the unions. jesusfuckingchrist. can't recall that peanut butter because it will cost us money. jesusfuckingchrist.

(they even sent the peanut butter to nursing homes...there is a special place in hell for mr. parnell.)

also today's paper was this little jewel of a story: in wilkes-barre pa., juvinelle court judges were sending kids to private owned prisons in exchange for bribes. many of these kids were up on extremely minor offenses and even the prosecutors and police said that there was no reason for them to be incarcerated. the two judges got over a million dollars each in bribes. money rules and the people be damned.

i may have written this before but i told one of the talk show hosts that i met more honest people in prison than i did in corporate boardrooms. here is a list of the companies that either i worked for or was a high paid consultant to: i.t.t., itt life, itt financial services, beneficial life, aig, mcmillan publishing, grolier, british printing and c & s. each and every one of those companies lied in their sales presentations and in their advertizing. my crime was that i knew they were lies and i trained the sales forces and advertizing sections how to tell the lies. one day, i just couldn't do it anymore. i got honest and it has cost me millions. but honesty gave me peace of mind and ability to look at myself in the mirror. (and i was never as low as mr. parnell.)

anyway, peace to us all. rock and roll.

something from the past that may help today

2009-02-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

let me tell you a story from days gone bye that may have some bearing on what is going on in the housing market and maybe a way for people to keep from being thrown out of their houses.....

i started a company in the 70's which, because of its nature, required that i and my managers presented a "successful" front. i found a luxury car leasing company that was getting ready to go under and i bought 6 cars from them, two panteras, two lincoln mark IV's and two lincoln town cars. i made a very small down payment and took delivery. when the first monthly payments came due i refused to make them because the company had indeed gone under and the "banks" owned the paper on the cars. problem was (for them) no one knew just which bank owned the paper on which car since there were multiple banks involved and they had, as in today's housing market, "bundled" them and sold and resold the paper. i would tell the person calling about my notes that i was glad to make the payments but i had to know that whoever was collecting the money actually had the title to which ever car. since they could not come up with the proper documentation i made no payments for a year. (as a side note, by the time they had figured it out, my company had gone broke so i just gave the cars back....all except one pantera which had caught on fire while driving across the lake ponchetrain bridge)

i think, but do not know, that the same tactic could be used by homeowners who are being evicted. does the bank actually have the physical title to the home? i don't think they can produce a clear ownership of title because these mortgages were sold and resold and then resold again. someone ought to look into this because if i am right, hundreds of thousands of folks could keep the wolves from the door while they get their ducks in a line. (lot of wildlife in that sentence)

if any of you do look into this please let me know what you found out.

on to the stimulus plan, i find the republicans hypocritcal to the nth degree by screaming fiscal responsiblity and fighting tooth and nail to keep the plan from going forward. this after years of fiscal diaster as bush and company fought wars without raising taxes (first time in our history) and running up huge debts. now that the piper has to be paid, the republicans are screaming like banshees. (more wildlife)

the plan is far from perfect and, in my opinion, does not do enough NOW to putting people to work. fdr had dozens, if not hundreds, of programs going and almost all of which put huge numbers of people to work and today those projects are still viable and are being used by millions. i think that obama has to face the fact that the republicans are not willing to go bipartisan and he will have to just run over them. by taking his plan to the people and pointing out what the repubs are doing then the people will put enough pressure on to get things going.

one of the things the country has to realize is that we all are to blame. citizens spent money like crazy running up huge debts on credit cards and home equity loans. the government under bush had no restraint whatsoever. when we went to war the citizens were not asked to sacrifice in any way and in fact were told to "go shopping" as our duty in the war effort. what a crock. businesses and citizens saved nothing for the rainy day nor did the state, local and national government. what a crock. we, as a country, acted like immature teenagers buying all the gadgets and status symbols we could put on our visa cards. (i must say that rhonda and i did not fall into that trap nor did we refinance our home, matter of fact, we made such a large downpayment that our house note is less than 900 per month and that includes taxes and insurance so we should always be able to keep roof over our head...but you never know.)

one final comment...i think they should have left in the BUY AMERICAN part of the plan. i am not buying the argument that if we only spend money with american manufactures then we could cause a trade war. that sounds like the international corporations just covering their asses. but what do i know?