Many Americans seem to be confusing rising prices with rising worth.

“What’s making the price of gas go so high?”, we ask, like there must be something — a tanker spill, broken pipeline, price gouging — mucking up the supply and demand ratio. But, in reality, price and worth are two different animals.

Try to think about it this way: The price of oil is rising, but is it really worth more than last year? There’s one way to find out: fill up your transportation device with petrol and see how many miles it takes you.

I’m no economist, but I’ll bet the gas in your tank is still worth the same as the gas you had in your tank last year? And the price of gold…it’s rising, too. I don’t see how it’s worth more, either. The ring on my finger (about all the gold I have) hasn’t made me any more married lately than when I kissed my bride a few years ago.

What about the U.S. dollar?

Now, there’s finally something which hasn’t gone up in price. A good old dollar bill — actually, it’s a Federal Reserve Note — still costs one dollar. But you know what? It’s worth a helluva lot less than it was worth a year ago. It now takes 110 of the Fed’s fiat notes to buy a barrel of oil, and a thousand to buy an ounce of gold.

Why?

Jackson Pollock and Inflation

In 2006, Jackson Pollock’s painting, No. 5, sold for $140 million.

Now, what if there were suddenly another 199,999,999,999 original, signed, exact duplicates of No. 5 on the street?

I’ll tell you what would happen: none of them would be worth $140 million any more, and the worth of an original Pollock No. 5 would fall off a cliff.

So, pay attention, now. If you have one, take a Federal Reserve Note out of your pocket and hold it in your hand as tight as you can…

Last week, the Federal Reserve decided to create another $200 billion out of thin air. There’s now another 199,999,999,999 plus 1 more dollars out there on the street, just like the one in your hand. Did you feel its worth vanish? If you didn’t feel it, go buy some gas, or bread, or gold, or anything…

Now you’re getting it.

The worth of everything else in the world didn’t go up. What happened was this: the Federal Reserve just gave everybody a significant pay cut.

Iraq War Bills Come Due

Yes, now you may recall all the unpatriotic protestors who’ve whined about the cost of the Iraq War, who keep sending you that link to the cost of war site where the cost is climbing faster than the population of rats in NYC. The total is over $500 billion, and every day it goes up by $275 million, and there’s that figure about how the total comes to over $4,000 per household.

You didn’t think you were really going to have to pay, right?

Think again.

The Federal Reserve has begun accepting remittance, and boy…those crooked bankers are just getting warmed up. They also want us to pay interest on all the money Bush borrowed to bomb the cradle of civilization in our name, and all the money he paid Halliburton to forget to build it back before the company moved its headquarters to Dubai.

How To Prepare for the End of the World

So, you didn’t buy gold when you had the chance and now, even if you could get the bank to hand over your entire savings, it’ll only be worth burning in a few weeks. What the heck can you do?

Mike Rogers has a good idea; he calls it the poor man’s disaster hedge fund:

…we bought about 50 gallons of water with expiration dates of October, 2010. Six cases of canned tuna (108 tins per case), three cases of canned whole tomatoes (24 cans per case), six cases of canned corn (my kid eats canned corn like crazy), 24 tins of Sardines, 10 packages of crackers, 120 cans of Campbell’s canned soup, 100 cans of Corned Beef, three cases of Refried Beans, 108 rolls of toilet paper, several gallons of vodka – in case of the end of the world, got to have that (there’ll be nothing else to do), as well as medical supplies and antiseptic, my usual daily medicine, and a can opener, lighters, candles, batteries, and Sterno.
…While everyone is freaking out, I’ll be enjoying booze and Sardines on crackers for at least a little while.

More and more, this sounds like a fine idea. And don’t worry too much, because this was the plan all along. As soon as everybody’s hungry enough, Bush will replace the dollar with the Amero, and we can be united with Canada and Mexico in the coming North American Union.

Read More: crude oil price, increased gas prices, Federal Reserve Bank, Iraq War, U.S. Dollar, End of the World

What better day to discuss Net Neutrality than the Ides of March?

The Romans referred to the 15th of every month as “the ides” but Shakespeare made the Ides of March forever associated with ominous doom in his play Julius Caesar:

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry “Caesar”. Speak, Caesar is turned to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.

We know what happened to Caesar that day, and it WAS a conspiracy, so don’t say they don’t exist.

So, what’s ominous doom got to do with net neutrality?

Net Neutrality

During the American Revolution, the people were in control of their own communication via the printing press, but corporate-owned newspapers eventually buried their voices with the main stream media leading to the propaganda spit out by folks like William Hearst that incited the Spanish-American War.

Then, people got a voice back with local DJs and local radio…until conglomerates like Clear Channel came to town and bought as many as 247 of the nation’s 250 biggest radio stations.

And then the Internet, and podcasting, and youtube came along. It’s free. People have a voice again. Could we really be in danger of losing our voice again?

Ask the people today who own printing presses and radio stations if we could lose it.

And watch the following video, which is perhaps one of the best videos ever explaining net neutrality.

Click on the embedded video below, or go to this link: Humanity Lobotomy.

Read More: network neutrality, ides of march, YouTube, Clear Channel, Humanity Lobotomy

Tested positive for drugs lately? Yeah, everybody’s doing it, even if they don’t inhale.

The big commotion is over an Associated Press investigation of American drinking water:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.

The AP report goes on to fill in the blanks, just in case the picture isn’t clear: People take pills. The medication passes through their bodies and into the sewers, maybe via one of these super-duper fancy toilets. It comes out the other end of the toilet as wastewater, which is a nicer word for the two things most often found in a diaper.

This wastewater runs through a sewer to a wastewater plant where it’s treated and then dumped into a reservoir/river/lake. Then, other cities pump water out of the reservoir/river/lake, clean it up a bit, and pipe it to your refrigerator’s chilled water dispenser.

But don’t worry, because, as columnist Gordon Dillow points out, the amounts of pharmaceutical drugs found in the drinking water were “tiny” and are measured in “parts per billion.” For example: in Orange County, California, you’d have to drink 250,000 gallons of water to get a 100-milligram dose of a popular mood stabilizing drug called carbamazepine.

The Big Wastewater Swimming Pool

But that’s a small comfort, because I don’t think it’s the amount of drugs in the water that has shocked so many readers. I think it’s the realization that they are drinking from the same giant swimming pool into which we’ve all been relieving ourselves.

The lightbulb has turned on, and millions who never thought this thought before are now pondering it: before my drinking water becomes drinking water, it flows downhill, but it’s certainly not the only thing that flows downhill.

Thus, people who turn squeamish in the face at the mention of astronauts drinking recycled water on the International Space Station, are coming to realize the Earth is very literally just a spaceship, and every ounce of water we drink has passed through another person’s plumbing.

Paranoid BushCo and the EPA

And, if you’re wondering what turns the Bush administration squeamish, there’s this clue:

While [Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] said the EPA had analyzed 287 pharmaceuticals for possible inclusion on a draft list of candidates for regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, he said only one, nitroglycerin, was on the list. Nitroglycerin can be used as a drug for heart problems, but the key reason it’s being considered is its widespread use in making explosives.

That’s right! The EPA doesn’t care about the other 286 body and mind tainting drugs Americans are drinking. But they want to screen for nitroglycerin, otherwise, those dadburn terrorists might just bomb us with our own drinking water! Shazam!

And humans aren’t the only creatures drinking the drug-laden wastewater.

In a landmark, seven-year study of a Canadian lake published last year, researchers deliberately dripped the active ingredient in birth control pills into the water in amounts similar to those found to have contaminated aquatic life, plants and water in nature. The result:

After just seven weeks, male fathead minnows began producing yolk proteins, their gonads shrank, and their behavior was feminized — they fought less, floating passively. They also stopped reproducing, resulting in “ultimately, a near extinction of this species from the lake,” said the scientists.

The “glass is half full” takeaway is this: if Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the chickenhawk neocons continue to pollute their own drinking water, they too may experience shrinking gonads, fight less, and stop reproducing.

Amen to that.

Read More: pharmaceuticals, drugs in drinking water, EPA, environment, wastewater

This week, it’s back to daylight savings time. When I was a kid, I used to think I hated daylight savings time, and then I found out it was the non-daylight savings time I hated.

So, why not just stay on daylight savings time all year round? Or, why not just do away with daylight savings time, and have the 10:00 PM news come on at 11:00 PM, and get the schools to start an hour later, which would automatically move rush hour back an hour, and…

Living on Elvis Time

In a famous experiment, Michel Siffre, a French cave explorer, spent six months in a cave, with no clues to tell him what time of day it was. His biological clock eventually settled on a 25-hour day instead of a 24 hour day.

One theory was that the earth used to have a 25-hour day before the moon started slowing down the rotation, back before our ancestors evolved legs and crawled out of the ocean. Another theory was that humans were transplanted from Mars a long time ago in a cosmic crisis far away, but that’s delving into Arthur C. Clarke territory.

The closest I’ve come to Siffre’s experiment is having a week off at Christmas, when I find myself staying up later each night and rising later each morning, until I’m on what I call “Elvis Time,” because, like, the king lived in a sort of bizarre reverse time where he and his friends and the Memphis Mafia slept all day and stayed awake all night.

But, anyway, it’s great to be driving home from work before the sun sets, and it really makes me think how wonderful the people in Longyearbyen, Norway must be feeling right about now.

Here Comes the Sun

Longyearbyen, Norway bills itself as the northernmost town in the world–about 600 miles from the North Pole. And every year about this time in March, the sun returns after last being seen in October. After a few weeks of increasingly longer days, the nights will give way to solid daylight from April till next September.

Read More: daylight savings time, Elvis, Norway

Yes, President George W. Bush’s recent trip to Africa probably had plenty of ulterior motives.

Consider this: there’s a lot of untapped oil on the continent…oil that U.S. energy officials estimate will provide one-quarter of America’s oil imports in the next decade.

But still…

On this trip to Africa, Bush didn’t bomb civilians to get the oil.

And he didn’t wax paranoid over terrorists, insurgents, and Al Qaeda.

And he didn’t play a guitar while people died in the aftermath of a hurricane.

Instead, what he did was respectfully offer help, encourage friendship, and — no kidding — save millions of lives.

In Who-ville terms, the Whos might say the Grinch’s small heart grew about three sizes. In America, most people said Where the HELL has THIS Bush been for the last seven freakin’ years?!

A Compassionate President…Finally

Yes, there is still much to find fault with, like Bush’s abstinence-only approach to AIDS prevention. But there is a lot to be proud of, like his increasing aid from $15 billion to $30 billion over the next five years. Granted, $30 billion is only a few months worth of Iraq War spending, but it’s much more than any other American president’s set aside for Africa.

Reading about Bush’s Africa trip here, I was surprised to learn that since Bush took office, he’s quadrupled humanitarian aid to the African continent. And, on this trip, Bush announced another gift from America: every child in the country up to the age of five will get a bed net, which at $5 a pop is a no-brainer that will save millions and millions of children from malaria.

Again, where has THIS president been for the last seven years?!

So, if you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a leader genuinely loved by foreigners, and if you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a leader speak of hope and unselfish solutions instead of preaching fear and never-ending war, you can catch a refreshing glimpse watching a very good trip slideshow at the link below.

White House slideshow: President Bush’s Trip to Africa.

Read More: George W. Bush, Africa, AIDS, Malaria, USAID