Ted Bailey: The Official Website

America is known for freedom of speech, but the usage of the infamous F word is definitely not free anymore.  One mother of a middle school student recently found that out when she was awarded a $385 fine for her son's usage of the F word in class. 

 

It seems there was an argument between the young person and his teacher that resulted in the student being sent to the principal's office for using the F word.  Surprisingly, the principal contacted the police, a questionable act by any standard, seeing as how the child was using words, not violence.  Regardless, the police actually stepped up and made a decision to issue a fine to the child's parents and send him home for a three-day suspension.

 

The mother accepted the fine, but took the issue to the city council and is expected to file a lawsuit against the school district.  She is contending the police had no jusisdiction in school matters of non-violence or non-criminal acts.  Additionally, she was contacted by local radio stations to report the actions more for humor than anything else. 

 

The F word issue is called the F-bomb, and now it seems, if the court makes a ruling it is an illegal word in society, may stem more argument about freedom of speech and could possibly find its way all the way to the American Supreme Court as a constitutional issue of free speech.

 

 

Kicking Out Old Rules in Modern Warfare

By Ted R Bailey

 

The problem has been growing for a long time, and now it’s time something is done about it on an international scale.  After all, the world is “global” now, right?  Somebody has to make a ruling.

 

That’s the problem:  rules.

 

Every game has rules.  Even social gatherings, business or otherwise, have rules, written or unwritten, that facilitate the flow of ….whatever is flowing.  Let’s take war, for example.

 

Just this week a story on msn.com tells about a raid on the Pakistan army headquarters in Islamabad, Pakistan where several top officers were killed.  A huge gunfight ensued where bullets were flying everywhere, but no one knew who to shoot at.  And, for one big reason:  everyone was wearing the same color clothing. 

 

The Pakistani guards at two gates made the statement after the battle:  “We were confused by the uniforms they were wearing.”  What’s up with that?

 

Come on, people, anyone who watches sports knows the teams wear different colors.  Otherwise, watching sports becomes futile.  You can’t see who has the ball.  Even members of the sports teams can’t distinguish their prospective receiver of the ball, or whom to tackle or block or help.  Certainly, watching the game becomes boring really quickly without colors.  Aghast! A sudden loss of interest in a war is unforgivable.

 

Whatever the game, as long as there are teams that take sides and compete, be it sports, war, cooking, or sex, there must me some immediate method to determine the players of each side.  It’s a bottom-line, self-explanatory, intuitive principle of competing.  Wear different colors!  Even gangs chose “colors”, don’t they?

 

Looking back at the success of the two wars between the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan, one thing stands out like a sore thumb:  seeing the enemy is difficult.  A soldier can walk right by an enemy soldier in a crowd of people and never recognize him because of the clothing.  Yet, the enemy soldier can always readily identify the American soldier by the fashion he is wearing:  the spotty camouflaged uniform with video game type headgear, not too much unlike Master Chief of Halo.  Easy, and an unfair advantage.

 

Why hasn’t someone already dealt with this problem of identification?  One would think the leadership of both sides would eventually call a time out and make some rules, more logically in this case, the American side, since they are at the obvious disadvantage. 

 

After all, the American military went out on a limb in allocating all of that money for research and development to make the really neat clothing for their soldiers.  It doesn’t seem fair that other team gets to wear whatever they want to the game and make so much headway in the score by winning so many rounds, due to the element of surprise, like the raid on the Pakistan army headquarters.

 

Somebody has to make some rules.  Of course, one of the principles of winning a battle is based on breaking the rules to gain the advantage. 

 

Well, okay then.  That being the case, what about the leadership making their team more even by wearing the same thing the other team is wearing?  “Beep, beep,” the alarm goes off, again.  “Then, we don’t know whom to shoot,” exclaim the generals.  Back where we started.

 

What was that?  Beep, beep?  That’s the answer:  electronically find a hidden weapon and sound an alarm to warn American soldiers of impending danger, sort-of a long range weapon detector like in the airports, just longer distance.

 

In today’s high tech weaponry development, the most important element of all, identifying the enemy in a crowd, seems to have been sadly relegated to last place.  While DARPA is throwing millions at colleges around the country to promote autonomous robotics, from flying and shooting to crawling around on the ground and finding hidden bombs, no mention has been given to the possibly more sensible technology of a device for finding weapons under clothing before it can be used to kill.  What an advantage that could be.

 

Now, of course, the argument here will most certainly be:  what if a regular civilian is carrying a gun?  The answer must be: too bad for him; he should not have been carrying a gun in the first place.

 

Ah, but wait!  The problem with that is it’s too expensive to manufacture it in the US, so they’ll most undoubtedly be forced to outsource it to China to keep the cost down.  Then, there are security concerns…financing…loss of American taxes...

 

No, forget it.  It’s better to just stay at the status quo and fight the wars endlessly from generation to generation until we’ve all forgotten why they started in the first place.  That way, the blame can be spread out among all the applicable sources.  Politics is a spectator sport, too, you know.

 

From the entertainment angle, now that war has become a huge spectator sport, maybe an international organization should intervene and make some rules, something like the NBA or NASCAR.  The monetary gain could be huge from all of this.  That’s what we’re really talking about in the war game, isn’t it, economic gain?

 

Just think.  If medical care in the US can gain so much advertising revenue on television and the print media on everything from drugs to elaborate cancer treatments, with all of that marketing cost being passed on to the consumer anyway, why can’t war do the same?  They’re both based on the life or death premise, aren’t they?  “Use our drug, Use our hospital…or, Call Dr. Somebody and live longer…Support the new war by buying...whatever.”

 

Visualize the potential.

 

How about Fantasy War?  Entire websites could be dedicated to it.  You could pick players, dress, weapons, locations, or whatever you want.  Cash in on the war effort at home and make a killing (pun intended)!  It could be fun.

 

Hey, why hasn’t someone come up with the obvious, war insurance?  It’s only natural.  All of your children should be patriotic and go to war, why not insure their existence?  Make sure that having a baby is risk free in the world today.  War insurance could even be a requirement, set by the government of each country, if you have children.  It’s a proven money maker round the world, even for governments, unless, of course, the “social” option is adopted.

 

Maybe Europe could make the rules.  Now that Europe is becoming a new nation, sort of a United States of Europe, with the possibilities of electing a ruling body, globalization is a fact in the world now.  No one can deny the possibility of a new world leadership soon to come.  With that, more is around the corner:  new rules, new games, new enforcers, new money, even a new international language, perhaps. 

 

But wait!  Who will be able to fight whom, at that point?  This is becoming too confusing.

 

Back to the conversation about establishing team colors:  What about setting colors for the various armies at war? 

 

Forget it.  Besides, America has such a huge advantage, victory is guaranteed. 

 

Right?

 

 

 

It's sad, but true.  America is not the country it used to be.  Even as the top 30 best cities list came out the other day on MSN, few of the American cities, I think only two, made the list at all.  What seems to be the trouble?

 

People blame the ecomony, but that's only the symptom.  The real cause stems from the loss of a real substantial industrial base.  Now that most of our manufacturing has been outsourced overseas, mostly to China, the basis of a the great industrial nation America was from 1900 to 1970 is now gone.  Without it America has become a beggar nation of huge debt and joblessness. 

 

With jobs scarce, the great consumer life America always enjoyed is gone.  Buying power is gone.  Stores are dimishing.  Cities are becoming delapidated, with entire shopping centers vacant.  Large numbers of retail store pads are available for rent, but few entrepreneurs are willing or able to take advantage of them, for one, and they distrust the economy to spring back and support retail in the near future, for two, and bank loans are almost extinct, for three.  The small businessman is a dying breed in America.  Sad.

 

Amazingly, real estate prices are just as high as ever.  Why?  Owners don't want to relinquish their equity in their investment, hoping real estate value will be maintained. 

 

Michael Moore of the George Bush/911 movie fame is still at it with his new movie, called Capitalism:  A Love Affair.  He's talking about how the rich love their money more than anything to the point of destroying the very essence of capitalism as it was designed.  He claims capitalism is dead and socialism is the order of the day in America, touting Obama's attempts to bring back the economy as a push toward socialism, the new savior of the American society.  We'll see.

 

Ted

 

 

 

 

The largest single barrier to human development is the physical lifespan.  

 

What you accomplish in life is lost when you die.  In order for your life's work to continue, several factors have to be put in place.  The biggest factor is your personal drive to accomplish your goals.  Only you can perpetuate them, but you are limited by physical degeneration and ultimate death.

 

Typically, career productivity spans about thirty years before most of what you accomplish is simply lost should you fail to record your advancements.  Even if you do find a way to preserve your discoveries, the skills you gain in your life, the vision, the drive to achieve, and more importantly, your personality, are gone after you die.  

 

Now, there is real hope.  Recent scientific discoveries have found a way to completely eliminate death.

 

Yes!  Completely stop the dying process. 

 

How can this be possible, you may ask?

 

The answer has been there all along in the DNA.  DNA is our program of life.   Soon, it will be possible to simply reprogram the human body to regenerate the cells, instead of falling apart after so many years and die.  The results:  indefinite life.

 

Why is this process being kept quiet?  There are several scientific and social barriers keeping immortality under wraps.

 

Professionally, doctors and scientists are quite aware of the possibilities of immortality, but they are under the scrutiny of the scientific community to maintain thier reputation as a professional and not make rash, untested claims.  The science of reprogramming the human body is still being tested.  Anything that changes humanity is still controversial both scientifically and morally.

 

One of the biggest challenges to immortality is the church, or religion.  What would happen to religion if the basic tenets of religion: faith, heaven, life after death, or God, if death becomes less prominent?  That's another story for another time.

 

Of course, people will still die, just not as quickly.  Lifespans would go into the hundreds of years, maybe the thousands.  Old age would be a thing of past, since the cells would constantly regenerate, speculatively keeping your age somewhere in your twenties, as far as appearance is concerned. 

 

Productively, humans would be able to continue developing skills for thousands of years.  Human development would progress geometrically by building on each other's skills throughout a span of many hundreds or even thousands of years, instead of just thirty, as it is now.

 

Imagine if Dr. Albert Einstein was still coming up with theories for space and time, or if Thomas Edison was still making his wonderful inventions, or if Steven Hawking could collaborate with Einstein.  Don't you think humanity would already be exploring the universe in innumerous ways, from worm holes to quantum drives, to whatever?  No doubt, other intelligent beings of the universe would be common contacts for trade and exchanges of information on health, science, engineering, and social development.

 

In summary, scientific advancement is held back by individual lifespan.  This lifespan is about to be increased by hundreds of years, thus boosting humanity into super advancement.  Two hundred years of deathless development would equal two thousand years of the present system.

 

 

 

 

The question of what makes a good writer springs up in my mind from time to time like a quest for a secret formula.  At least, finding that secret was foremost on my mind many years ago when I decided to stick my pen forward and offer my own ideas in the written format instead of the spoken one as I had more conveniently been accustomed in the broadcasting world.

 

I decided to start my writing career with a boost from a writing course online with a group of like-minded beginning writers on www.writersvillage.com.  The secret formula should be there, I thought.  All I have to do is find it, learn it, and put it to use.  It’s as simple as that.

 

The course was great.  Like a Marine drill instructor, the teacher had us pour over written material and write a homework lesson every day.  Everyone was required to read every other student’s work online and give a detailed review as it related to the assignment at hand.  It was very time consuming but worth it.  All the while I was intent on finding the secret formula.

 

After three or four weeks of this, I became impatient.  I wanted to know the formula. 

 

I finally decided to email one of the students in the group who was already a published author on several counts:  a book, many magazine articles, and website stuff.  Maybe he could slip the secret to me and I would know.  What he said astounded me.

 

“You’re already a good writer, Ted.  I thought you realized that.”

 

“What do you mean?” I asked, frantically.  I thought the formula had somehow eluded me and I would never know for sure.  Maybe he was keeping it a secret. 

 

“You’re the best writer in the group.  Why aren’t you already publishing material?” he asked.

 

I told him I didn’t know the real secret. 

 

He laughed.

 

“You already have it, my friend.  Don’t you see?  There is no secret.  The secret is just writing.  No one can tell you you’re wrong.  It’s a matter of style, art, and good linguistics.  That’s it.  Go for it.”

 

If he was right, I wondered why certain editors in the publishing business simply ignored my writing.  If I was as good as all that, why did publishers ignore me? 

 

The answer came soon after going to China.  I found in America, if you don’t have a journalism degree or an English degree from a reputable university, you lose.  Your writing is junk in the mind of an editor from the minute he sees your lack of writing credentials. 

 

In China, on the other hand, my writing found many outlets in magazines that needed material from good writers, regardless of degrees.  My confidence soared.

 

Of course, I did, in fact, graduate from broadcasting school where I was taught to write proficient journalism for the spoken word, which is quite a bit different than the printed word.  The distinction had always knocked me out of the contention of getting my works published.  Also, as a graduate from the University of North Texas with a BBA in Marketing, my writing took on an advertising edge.

 

Now, I realize the real solution:  It’s not a secret formula for writing, it’s writing something that’s needed and doing it with style and the required research for getting your facts straight.  In other words, find the truth and say in an interesting way. 

 

The reason most editors shy away from the non-journalism majors and the unknown authors is the fear of incorrect information through poor research.  Libel suits in America are dime a dozen.  No editor wants to be responsible for losing the magazine because of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, all because he chose an article from an unknown author.

 

So, what’s the secret of good writing?  Just write.  But, make sure you do the research, first.  Then, get it in the face of a bunch of editors.  Once you do, be prepared to be a writer with deadlines to meet.  Uh-oh, but that’s another problem for another article.  –T-