by Ian Punnett

This is a blog just for the listeners of Coast to Coast AM.

Just the other night I took a few phone calls from some folks who were expressing fatigue about living in complicated times.  One caller expressed his cynicism on staying optimistic in his interactions with others when tempers are hot and trigger fingers are itchy.  Many people are concerned that it will never get any better, that somehow we have turned a corner where hostility is the norm and civility is out of fashion.  Emotions, one caller pointed out, seem so heightened politically and socially that he was unsure how we would survive October, never mind the outcome of the election.

I’m paraphrasing his sentiments but I hope you catch the core of it.  It reminded me of how somebody slammed me the other night.  In an e-mail and a posting on a website, somebody, I think he called himself “William,” contended I won’t let other people express opposing views.

This is, of course, to me beyond ridiculous.  I love opposing views, new points of view and changing my own opinion as well as discourse that leads others to change theirs.  I have built my career on it and it has served me well.  Every single day I have been on the air--and this goes long back to my days as disc jockey--I have invited and cherished opinions on any subject.  

But what I won’t do--never have and never will--is to allow anybody’s pure emotionalism to take over a phone call or a show.  The same thing should be true in all of our discourse, wherever it is.  Be passionate--great.  Be confident in the rightness of your opinion, amen, but, at least as far as I’m concerned, if you can’t express your opinion without making it a personal attack on the person with whom you disagree, then keep it to yourself.

Also, if we are so worked up in our frustrations, our angers, our resentments that all we can do is lash out and swing, try to dominate others so that every conversation we have is a “zero-sum game,” no middle ground, no mutual respect for each being humans or fellow citizens, then we will lose even when we win.

Being in dialogue with somebody with whom you disagree means resisting the impulse to invalidate the other person before they’ve even had a chance to speak.  Don’t start with your charges, don’t dehumanize the person you’re speaking with by trying to define them as crazy, un-American, the enemy or not worthy of your respect before they’ve even had a chance to speak.  If the other person is not worthy of your respect, why are you even talking to them?  

I know that stakes are high and many people feel the coarse scratchiness of a their backs up against the wall.  

But there are lots of reasons to keep our cool, to keep our ears open, our minds from shutting down and volume in check.  For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll mention one of them: it’s the Coast to Coast way.   Resisting the impulse to reject each other or invalidate your conversation partner is the way we try to do it in the overnight hours.  

Right now, that’s a dual challenge.  First order of business is to refrain from the rudeness of the closed-minded, the usual laundry list of negativity, the usual kitchen sinking, the usual pump and run caller style of ideologically driven talk radio out of Coast to Coast.

And at the same time, let’s export the free-thinking, conversational, deep, alternative thinking that is the hallmark of C2C to a world has forgotten how to think out of the box, how to talk to itself, how to re-imagine its future, to re-assess how we got here.

It’s the free man who is not afraid to go to the end of his ideas.

The world needs us.  Let’s not lose our way before we can help others find theirs.

by Ian Punnett

What a week.  If you’ve got the money, I'm told we should all be buying for the economy will come roaring back  . . . someday.  Well, maybe not roaring but meowing, anyway.  Someday.  So, while you can buy!   Buy silver, gold, Blue Chip stocks, real estate, my friend Darryl’s house, General Motors, the banking institution of your choice, all of the above, whatever.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street capped one of its worst weeks ever with a wild session Friday that saw the Dow Jones industrials gyrate within a 1,000 point range before closing with a relatively mild loss and the Nasdaq composite index actually ending with a modest advance. Investors were still agonizing over frozen credit markets, but seven days of massive losses and the possibility of further government support for the markets tempted some investors late in the session.

That’ll be the key, of course, to getting the markets back:  Luring investors.  What will lure investors?  Hank Paulsen in a short dress and fishnets?  No, I hope. Confidence in the economy, confidence that their investment will pay off.  But if that doesn’t work, let’s keep the fishnets around as Plan B.

Right now I’m pleasure reading Amity Schlaes book “The Forgotten Man,” a reexamination of the Great Depression, its root causes and how it was perpetuated longer than it needed to be by the wrong kind of government intervention.  Schlaes is a CFR fellow and she is frequently quoted by Newt Gingrich.

So, are we in a Depression?  How can we tell?  This week, the market lost 18% of it’s value just since Monday, Oct. 5th.

How does that compare to Great Depression? According to Wikipedia:

In September of 1929, the market fell sharply for a month, losing 17% of its value on the initial leg down. Prices then recovered more than half of the losses over the next week, only to turn back down immediately afterwards. The decline then accelerated into the so-called "Black Thursday", October 24, 1929.

What took a month for the stock market to do in 1929, Wall Street did in five days.  But is the past always prologue?

Veteran C2C guest and indefatigable researcher Howard Bloom has been studying the history of economic collapses in this country and Europe to see what we can learn from them.  Who has been behind the collapses?  What kept them going on longer?  Sunday night on C2C, Howard will reveal his results.

Have bailouts helped historically?  Sunday night on C2C.

You heard that AIG is getting another “mini-bailout.”  

And speaking of "Superworms, " this story from the Daily Mail . . . 

Newly evolved "superworms" that feast on toxic waste could help cleanse polluted industrial land, a new study says. 

These hardcore heavy metal fans, unearthed at disused mining sites in England and Wales, devour lead, zinc, arsenic, and copper. 

The earthworms excrete a slightly different version of the metals, making them easier for plants to suck up. Harvesting the plants would leave cleaner soil behind. 

"These worms seem to be able to tolerate incredibly high concentrations of heavy metals, and the metals seem to be driving their evolution," said lead researcher Mark Hodson of the University of Reading in England. 

"If you took an earthworm from the back of your garden and put it in these soils, it would die," Hodson said. 

DNA analysis of lead-tolerant worms show they belong to a newly evolved species that has yet to be named, he said. 

So they need a name for this new superworm, huh?  I forgot.  What was the name of the President of AIG who spent $440,000 on a spa weekend for his cronies?

Speaking of names, I assume you heard about the so-called “Jesus Shark”?

National Geographic News

October 10, 2008

A female blacktip shark in Virginia fertilized her own egg without mating with a male shark, new DNA evidence shows.

This is the second time scientists have used DNA testing to verify shark parthenogenesis—the process that allows females of some species to produce offspring without sperm. 

Question:  If it can happen with sharks, is it out of the question that it could happen with people?  I don’t think so.  For example, my parents had my oldest brother when they were practically newlyweds but I’m pretty sure by the time I came along, I was parthenogenitically conceived.

Self-reproducing sharks can’t be any scarier than killer catfish of India.

A FEARSOME mutant fish has started killing people after feeding on human corpses, scientists fear.

They reckon that a huge type of catfish, called a goonch, may have developed a taste for flesh in an Indian river where bodies are dumped after funerals.

Locals have believed for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to snatching unwary bathers who venture into the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border.

The extraordinary creature has been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade for a TV do****entary to be shown soon.  (The Sun)

Nature loves her monsters.  Mutant, recently micro-evolved metal-eating superworms, mutant man-eating catfish--and vampires.  Or at least--the undead, such as the story of the Zombie Johnson.

By SEAN O'SULLIVAN
The News Journal

When Louis Johnson brought his wife to the emergency room on May 6, 2007, he didn't think they would be there long -- she just had a bad case of indigestion.

About an hour later, Johnson said, he was "blown away" when staffers at Beebe Medical Center in Lewes took him into a room to tell him his wife was dead.

But she wasn't.

As they later learned, when the body of Judith Johnson, 61, was set to be taken to the morgue, someone noticed the "corpse" was breathing -- even with a tube still down her throat.

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that this type of medical misdiagnosis and the against-all-odds recovery is the kind of phenomenon that created an interest in vampires but it’s doesn’t define it.

The annotated Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is definitive, however.  I re-read “Dracula” a couple years ago and I was amazed at how well it stood up.  I am re-re-reading it in this new complete, annotated version and it’s like I’ve never read it before.

And there’s something about curling up with a Gothic horror story on a windy, October night with the leaves blowing around my porch that lets you know it is the season of the un-dead.

I don’t just mean the annual time when thousands of men and women rise from the grave in cities like Chicago and Boston and linger around just long enough to vote before re-entering the underworld.

And when I say vampires I don’t mean the kind bleeding us dry in Washington.

Congress isn’t cool enough to be the un-dead,  So far, they’re just the un-smart.

 

by Ian Punnett

 

Greetings from the water-rich Upper Midwest of the US.  At least for now, it appears we will stay this way:

TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan (AP) -- Great Lakes water cannot be diverted to thirsty areas elsewhere in the United States and abroad under an agreement approved Friday by President Bush.

Approval of the Great Lakes Compact was the final step in a nearly decadelong quest to strengthen legal protections for the use of water from the five Great Lakes, their connecting channels and the St. Lawrence River. 

The pact bans new diversions of water to places outside the region -- eight states and two Canadian provinces with a combined population of roughly 40 million. There are limited exceptions.

The lakes contain nearly 20 percent of the world's fresh surface water.

I’m sure many of the desert states are disappointed.  It’s no secret they’ve been coveting the water of those of us up around the nation’s North Coast so allow me please to re-issue an invitation.  To anybody who is living in a drought-stricken area of North America, you are welcome to take as much as water from the Great Lakes as you would like--as soon as you move here.  I know the name of a good realtor In Minnesota:

www.tomstrom.com

If you’re so inclined, say a prayer for all the hundreds of families who are still awaiting word from hundreds of adults and children still missing after Hurricane Ike.

Has the McCain-Palin campaign “jumped the shark” too early?  Not saying it’s over but it can’t be a sign of a healthy campaign if the message to the masses is that Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists," a description Gov. Palin used today in regard to the relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, a Chicago professor and an un-indicted conspirators from the 60s radical group the Weather Underground and a man who lives three blocks from Obama. 

Seems to me that if that's what the campaign is coming down to, then Obama has won.  These so-called "pals" claims have been investigated and vetted many times and while there is no doubt that the two men know each other, have met many times and might even describe themselves as "friendly," it seems a stretch to try to tie Ayers and Obama together at the hip.  Ayers might endorse Obama but nobody has brought forward anything that says Obama endorses this sitting, popular professor's past views or uncharged crimes.

Take it or leave it but I maintain that there are bigger issues out there that our country is facing.  McCain ought to be running on his record and his beliefs.

Lets see if McCain brings it up in the next debate.

Here’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard all week about the big VP debate:

CNN) -- An analysis carried out by a language monitoring service said Friday that Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at a more than ninth-grade level and Sen. Joseph Biden spoke at a nearly eighth-grade level in Thursday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates.

(Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)

Sentences per paragraph: statistically tied at 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.

Letters per word: tied at 4.4.

There’s no doubt that Gov. Palin connected more emotionally during the debate and that Sen. Biden connected more intellectually with the audience, judging by the poling data, but who knew that Biden did that would beat Palin by talking in easier to chew bites?  And they’re tied at letters per word at 4.4?  Amazing.  What would that have been like if Gov. Palin hadn’t dropped all the “g”s at the end of her verbs. 

Have you seen the Youtube video where that Kenyan missionary is praying over to fight off the witches that were standing in the way of her becoming governor?  I’ve never heard her comment on whether she believes that witchcraft ever had anything to do with her political fortunes but just in case, don’t tell her about this story?

MIAMI - For generations, Voodoo practitioners in rural Haiti have sworn by the mystic qualities of Jatropha, an indigenous plant believed to purge evil spirits and release the trapped souls of the dead.

But the shrub may soon be in bigger demand among the living. Jatropha shows tremendous promise as a source of biofuel in Latin America and the Caribbean, and especially Haiti, which suffers from chronic shortages of diesel fuel, electricity - just about everything except Jatropha.

In June, Miami hosted a Jatropha World 2008 Conference that trumpeted the plant's properties. And this week, alternative fuel sources such as Jatropha will likely share the spotlight again at an energy panel during the annual Americas Conference in Miami.

It’s a bio-fuel and it purges evil and releases the trapped souls of the dead!  Try doing that, “corn.”

Sounds a lot like our very own hemp which someday might get the respect it deserves as opposed to its country cousin, pot, that might be getting more disrespect that it deserves too.  According to Physorg.com:

Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, according to a report by a British research charity Thursday, which called for a "serious rethink" of drug policy. 

The Beckley Foundation, a charity which numbers senior British and other academics among its advisors, said banning cannabis has no impact on supply and turns users into criminals. 

"Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," says the report by the Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not endorsing pot but speaking of great Columbian:

A homeowner whose beachfront property in Texas was destroyed during Hurricane Ike has found a football-size fossil tooth in the debris.

Dorothy Sisk asked her colleague, Lamar University paleontologist Jim Westgate, to accompany her to her Bolivar Peninsula home after Ike hit. Together they found something unusual in the remains of Sisk's front yard: a six-pound fossil tooth.

Westgate believes the fossil is from a Columbian mammoth common in North America until around 10,000 years ago.  (AP)

What else could go the way of the woolly mammoth sooner than later?  Your flat screen, HD-TV!

Traditional flat-screen televisions could soon become a thing of the past since scientists have revealed an ultra-thin, flexible screen that could fold up and fit in your pocket.

The bendy screens - less than a millimeter thick - could be used for televisions, computers and phones, and may pave the way for easy-to-carry digital newspaper displays, which readers could upload their news on to daily.

Some speculate that the technology could even lead to wearable TV jackets, flexible laptop screens, and TV blankets.  (Daily Mail)

It’s about time.  It’s not enough that we have TV shows and movies delivered on our computers, cell phones, and watches, finally we will be able to enjoy the latest shenanigans of “Two and a Half Men” on our underwear.

by Ian Punnett

 

The following are clips from various columns, news articles and postings from the internet.  I cannot, will not and am not interested  in vouching for their veracity but I am compelled by the thematic nature of the content which at one time sounded ridiculous but now doesn’t sound so crazy.  Maybe still very unlikely, but you’ve got to give these people props for taking a stand on their predictions:

Congressman John Olver Believes Bush Will Cancel 2008 Elections, Still Refuses to Support Impeaching Him or Cheney

www.scoop.co.nz

From Now Public.com

Now that President G. W. Bush has meet with leader around the world, officially for his last tour, yet still trying to find Money and allies to attack yet another country, Iran that is!

Obama and Mc Cain may have to wait for another decade or so to complete their campaign, until then they may be given a job in terror prevention with a great compensation package of course to keep them in line!

Unlikely? Well, maybe so and yet not really either. Remember 1933!?

It did actually happened exactly like that in the Weimar Republic! The Minority Government of the NSDAP (Nazi) suspended the Constitution, and much more to protect the good People from Terrorist attacks, back then it was Communist and Polish Terrorist and soon after the invation of Poland! It was the beginning of the Second World War! 

Believe it or not Germany was a Democracy just as the USA are today before the NSDAP (Nazi) legally I may add, suspended the Constitution and well we all know what happened afterwards. 

(www.nowpublic.com)

U.S. To Declare October 'Economic Emergency ' Suspend Elections

The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) is reporting in the Kremlin today that the Bank of England has received from the United States Federal Reserve Bank a ‘notice’ that President Bush is preparing to declare an ‘Economic Emergency’ during the week of October 5th and will further announce that the American Presidential election due to be held on November 4th will be ‘indefinitely suspended’. 

(www.abovetopsecret.com)

Do you think Bush will declare martial law, suspend the constitution and elections before the the 2008 election for presidency due to some sort of catatrophe or terrorist attack?  Answerbag-- Question posted Jan 08

That is very possible and even probable. He and his handlers have not quite finished what they set out to do when they stole the election twice. They need more time to set up their One World Government, which will be run by an elite group of powerful corporations and families, including Bush and Company. They will create some catastrophe sometime before the November election.  Answer July 08

I believe the trigger for martial law will be either another natural disaster like New Orleans or a total economic crash which ever happens before the end of the year.  Answer posted Jul 08

Welcome to my further adventures in affordable self-improvement. Last month I tried Botox for the first time for my wrinkly forehead.  This month at the Hair Restoration Institute in Bloomington I am experimenting with the product called "Juvederm."

Applied with a thin needle directly into deeper facial lines, Juvederm is a wrinkle filler that begins to show immediately.

At the recommendation of Dr. Nancy Shannon, we addressed the "parentheses" around my mouth that you can see so easily in this photo taken earlier this summer.

 

Here you can see Dr. Nancy applying the Juvederm directly into my 
deepest wrinkles.

Almost in front of your eyes, the parentheses are gone!

Here I am with Dr. Nancy Shannon of the Hair Restoration Institute who 
is going to work on my male pattern baldness next month as part of my 
on-going effort to be "Nifty By Fifty."

Just let me know what else you would want me to try and I'll see if I 
can do it.

Adding the Botox together with the Juvederm and all my exercise and 
weight loss, things are coming together.  I'm not trying to look like 
something I'm not, just a fresher version of who I am.

By the way, you see Dr. Nancy to my left.

She is 118 years old.

'Nuff said.