Getting rid of bankrupted Greece would compromise already shaky agreements and treaties on the old continent concerning borders, economy and political alliance.

Greece may be the weak link for the European Union, but another Balkan country is in a similar position when NATO is concerned: Turkey. According to Article V of the Washington Treaty from April 1949:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

So what are we (the people of the NATO countries) going to do if Turkey is attacked? Will Nicolas Sarkozy go to war to defend it? Can NATO get rid of a member in orderly fashion? Not likely. Turkey is one of the oldest members of NATO and often has been of some help in the US strategy in the region (unfortunately, often not as big help as the US would hope for). Ignoring an attack on Turkey would mean the end of NATO. What would be the point of the whole organization if it fails to help a member in trouble?

So what are the chances for Turkey to be attacked? I hope little, but let’s see.

Syria is in civil war. Prominent members of the opposition are stationed in Turkey. Refugees also are headed for safety there. Senator John McCain is meeting with rebels at the Turkish-Syrian border and is calling for arming of the fighters. It seems to me, Turkey is definitely taking sides in the Syrian civil war and is pushing for regime change. The whole thing really irritates Russia. Putin would not like to go in history as the President who lost the Russian naval presence in Syria. Russia and Turkey (then Ottoman Empire) were fighting wars (on average one every 15 years) over access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean since 1676. Russia is on the map again for a couple of decades – it is about time those two to grab each other by the throat, according to the statistics. Alaska is a US territory today, because the Russians needed money to finance their twelfth war with the Ottomans. This is how important the matter is for Kremlin. During the last two centuries Russia and Turkey signed so many treaties with ‘friends’ (including the creation of the Soviet Union) that they manage to suck in the whole world into their bloody quarrel.

If the USA wants to get rid of NATO it can be done by stopping the financing of the organization. America pays two thirds of the bill anyway. There is no need to send John McCain with a lighter to the Powder Keg.

Let’s hope all countries meddling in the Syrian conflict will “settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force”.

The real surprise comes from the 2010 Top 10 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government report where the GSA is ranked only eight. Imagine what is going on in the top three agencies, if $4 shrimp in Vegas wasn’t able to bring the GSA crowd in the top 5 of satisfied bureaucrats.

The 2010 report also found that the federal employees, as a whole, had record high job satisfaction score that year:

The Best Places government-wide employee satisfaction score for 2010 reached an all-time high of 65 out of 100, representing a 2.7 percent increase from 2009 and a 7.4 percent jump from 2003 when our rankings were first published.

Ironically, the record high job satisfaction of the public servants coincides with low public satisfaction with the government’s job.

According to Gallup, 48% of the people disapprove of the Obama administration performance and almost half of the population rates the economic conditions as poor. Roughly two thirds believe the country is on a wrong track, according to Rasmussen Reports.

The Congress is currently investigating the waste and abuse in the GSA. It is interesting also to find out if the lavish federal spending in Vegas in 2010 has anything to do with the re-election of the Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Was Sharron Angle that bad or was the Obama administration that generous?

It would be fun to know, also, why in 2010 the GSA sold to the public $45 million worth of clunkers while at the same time the Obama administration was buying out for destruction clunkers from the public with $3 billion pile of cash.

In July 2010 President Obama signed a law that limits the amount of formaldehyde that is allowed in wood products. In September, the same year, GSA was selling trailers with the following warning: “The government may not have tested all of these units for formaldehyde”. After all the speeches slamming the emergency housing during hurricane Katrina disaster the Obama GSA was selling possibly toxic trailers.

That is coming from the same federal administration that attempted to regulate yard sales with the excuse that people may be giving away dangerous stuff and is investigating Amish farmers for selling milk across state lines.

Obama is joking with the CIA director: I work for the Russians.

Petreaus is joking back: I didn’t know that!

—
Dear President Obama, my name is Fyodor Ivanovich. Osama Bin Laden is currently living with my mother-in-law. Please, help with the bombing. The address is: Russia…
—
Mikhail Gorbachev received his Nobel Peace Prize for the crash of the USSR.

The Nobel Foundation is giving the Prize to Barack Obama with great hopes…

—
President Obama was asked how much is two plus two. Silence. .. He knew, but was waiting for confirmation from Moscow.
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President Bush looked Putin in the eyes and saw his soul.

President Obama looked Medvedev in the eyes and read: I want iPhone.
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President Obama suggested that Israel should return to its 1967 borders. Israel promised to do that right after the USA returns Alaska to Russia and reminded Obama that it is against the protocol for a president of British colony to talk without the Her Majesty’s approval.
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President Obama called for Turkey to be admitted in the European Union. President Sarkozy called for Turkey to be admitted in the USA.
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President Obama demanded the whole world to start using new technologies. CIA needs more information.
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President Obama is among this year’s Nobel Prize nominees for literature… for his birth certificate.

Big insurance corporations negotiate with health care providers prices that are much lower than the one officially advertised by the hospitals and clinics. Often the co-pay is calculated based on the full price, not on the negotiated lower one (patient/client is not aware of the real price the insurance company pays for the care received). When the patient/client pays 10% co-payment they may cover in fact 50% and more of the actual bill. So, the higher the difference between the official price and the negotiated price, the higher is the percentage the folks pay out of their own pocket.

This is why the insurance companies have no incentive to bring down the official prices. They have incentive to protect their monopoly in price negotiations. The health insurance business will look very different if the people could go to the hospital and get the same price as the corporations.

Majority of folks who have health insurance are clueless what the real cost of the care in America is and this gives the insurance companies room to play for profits. I am not trying to demonize the industry. Their profits are much lower comparing to communication or pharmaceutical industries.

The Cadillac health plans often carried by union and government workers cover goodies way outside of the realm of basic care. Since they are paid or subsidized by tax-payers there is little incentive to negotiate the costs. It is other people’s money after all.

Nancy Pelosi famously proclaimed that being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition after passing the ObamaCare into law. What she failed to explain is that now being a woman is a medical condition.

From birth control to postpartum depression: ObamaCare guarantees a pill paid by somebody else.

In the cases of gender change Nancy Pelosi considers being a woman (or a man) to be almost a genetic disorder.

The new ObamaCare policy of treating being a woman as a ‘medical condition’ may prove to be a costly one.

Expanding the rolls of Medicaid, which barely reimburses the health care providers, is another cost bomb for the private insurance premiums set in ObamaCare.

Republicans who chose to demonize the people from the middle class who cannot afford to buy health insurance ( but are not poor enough to be on government dough) in defense of the Individual mandate and Mitt Romney’s presidential  candidacy may regret it in November.

There are many reasons for the rising health care prices including inflation, new (expensive) medical technologies and mismanagement by federal, state or corporate bureaucrats that need to be addressed first… before sending IRS after the American people over health insurance.

The Individual Mandate in ObamaCare has one purpose and one purpose only: to feed the Beast of the US federal government, part of which is the Department of Health and Human Services that already is mismanaging grossly over $800 billion a year.

…The nation is now in debt for money applied to the benefit of these so-called seceding States, in common with the rest. Is it just, either that creditors shall go unpaid, or the remaining States pay the whole?…

Again, if one State may secede, so may another; and when all shall have seceded, none is left to pay the debts. Is this quite just to creditors? Did we notify them of this sage view of ours, when we borrowed their money? If we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace, it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to extort terms upon which they will promise to remain…

- Message to Congress in Special Session: President Abraham Lincoln, July 4, 1861

The US national debt was 90,580,873 on July 1,1861. When adjusted for inflation it was about $2 billion.

Century and a half later the US national debt is $15.6 trillion.

In 1861 America was too indebted to fail. Today the USA may become too indebted to stand, if the US Congress fails to put the People’s House in fiscal order soon.

OK. I admit, the IMF does not call it ObamaCare, but the health care ‘cost cutting’ measures in Greece have eerie resemblance with the ‘historical’ achievement of President Obama . The cost reduction in Greece will come mostly from less care for the seniors (ObamaCare cut $500 billion from Medicare). The IMF is sponsoring also transition to electronic medical records. Officially they are supposed to help eliminate unnecessary procedures.  My guess, based on the IMF work in other places around the globe, is that the electronic records will facilitate the tracking of one’s contribution to health care (resembling the individual mandate in ObamaCare) and will make more efficient the collection of taxes related to medical care in the near future. The Greek health care reform pushes the use of generic drugs (which is cost cutting, but in the US it is already leading to shortage of life-saving drugs).

The IMF has a creepy record of pushing over the cliff and then saving countries using its ‘expert’ authority. The victims are usually corrupt and fiscally undisciplined countries that are not too big to fail and with GDP small enough for the IMF bureaucrats to feel important next to some prime minister with hard-to-pronounce-name. Until the European economic crisis the annual US contribution to the IMF budget was about the size of the Obama Stimulus slice for the US Department of Education. That unimportant! The IMF had the money to ruin and ‘save’ Greece or Egypt, but Spain, Italy and France are way bigger than the International ‘Monster’ Fund. Let’s be honest, those countries are as corrupt and indepted as Greece, only the IMF doesn’t have the money power to provide alternative to the status quo. When S&P downgraded the US credit rating the market decided there is no better alternative than the US Treasury. The IMF can bully the small and the weak, but is no match to the big national economies and the big banks, yet.

The scary part for EU and America is that IMF is growing its budget and growing it fast. The new, but still French, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has already succeeded to secure additional $500 billion in landing power. It is still not enough to kick the bucket under Spain and France, but the woman is so determined that she  is asking China, Russia and Saudi Arabia to fill the gap to $2 trillion, which is her dream target. If Lagarde can bundle that much cash, then some big European nations may join Greece on the wagon of misery forced by the IMF inspired economic shock therapy.

The possible growth of the IMF budget to $2trillion should not pass unnoticed.

The US is already implementing ObamaCare and the chances of repeal of the policy are as strong (or as weak) as the next Republican presidential nominee.

It is possible that the Washington DC elite would prefer to have President Obama for another four years while setting the rest of the Greek reforms in America: which translates in military cuts, Social Security cuts, federal and state workforce cuts, privatization of assets. After all, if the ObamaCare was named BushCare and was proposed by republican president, the protests would not be a-la-church-gathering- style, but more like Occupy DC bloodbath. About two thirds of the voters in America would support their R or D team and attack the other no matter what. So, to implement unpopular social reforms, the Washington DC career experts would prefer Democrat in the White House to keep the social unrest away from the streets. It is no coincidence that Bill Clinton reformed welfare and Barack Obama passed cuts in Medicare, health care rationing and taxation inspired by republicans like Mitt Romney, while Ronald Reagan gave America the earned income credit, free phones for the poor and amnesty for illegals. George Bush gave away drug benefits and was pushing immigration reform.

Judging by history, the almost $16 trillion US debt will require President Obama staying in office for four more years of ‘creative’ taxation and benefit cuts.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, but so far the team of inspiring superheroes that would bring prosperity instead of Greek tragedy to America is nowhere to be seen. We have Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul instead. Bummer!

But here’s the kicker. Remember that group of economists who said our jobs plan would create jobs? Well, one of those same economists took a look at the Republican plan and said that it could actually cost us jobs…

-          Remarks by President Obama on the American Jobs Act — Jamestown, NC – October 18, 2011

Go ask the Republicans what their jobs plan is if they’re opposed to the American Jobs Act, and have it scored, have it assessed by the same independent economists that have assessed our jobs plan… I think it would be interesting to have them do a similar assessment — same people. Some of these folks, by the way, traditionally have worked for Republicans, not just Democrats. Have those economists evaluate what, over the next two years, the Republican jobs plan would do. I’ll be interested in the answer…

-          News Conference by the President Obama, East Room, October 06, 2011

My seven-years-old is obsessed with collecting Cub-Scout belt loops, so to earn one for Science I had to discuss with him the scientific method. It was a bit of a challenge for the kid to grasp the difference between hypothesis and hypnosis, but at the end the scientist-wannabe was fluent in all the steps and the loop was presented to him yesterday during Scouts’ Day celebrations.

One would expect that President Obama, being a professor and all, can do better than elementary school kid. Instead, he is insisting that every economic proposal should be examined by the same scientists that he, apparently, approves. Same people will be the judges. What about the other scientists, which are not the same scientists? What disqualifies the other scientists from participating in the discussion? Is President Obama’s approach scientific?

The establishment of government approved economists (and government created ‘independent’ credit rating agencies provisioned in the Dodd-Frank law, for that matter) is not the only totalitarian phenomenon in today’s America. The whole premise of ObamaCare is that the healthcare in the USA is un-scientific, because hospitals give different amount of care for the same medical condition. To fix ‘the problem’ the government is taking out the Procrustean iron bed and will impose national standards of health care. Using government sponsored and orchestrated ‘scientific’ research, the same scientists (or board members) will be the judges of what is scientific and what is not in medicine. The set-up and cost analysis of the new health care norms will take some time, so the doctors are not screaming yet.

The first to complaint against the government imposed health care standards is the Catholic Church. According to their norms a copy of the Gregorian calendar with a complimentary pencil is sufficient to help most married couple, blessed with human intellect, to plan the size of their family. The chances to forget to place a circle around a date are about the same as the one of skipping a birth control pill. On the positive side the wife doesn’t grow a beard or a tumor, unless God intended her to have one.

The American people surrendered their freedom accepting ObamaCare. Since almost every human activity can be connected to one’s health, Washington DC now has the law, created by Congress, on their side letting the politicians to meddle in one’s business, whether it is about employee coverage, length of hospital stay, or school lunches, the folks often will not be in compliance with some federal guideline on health care.

It is important to remember, that the assault on free thought is bipartisan. ObamaCare is inspired by crazy ideas coming both from the democrats and from the republicans. They have common goal: concentrating more power in Washington DC. There is not much the folks can do. Thankfully, we can still say something, until the government decides that blogging is unhealthy.

The Red Army marched in field boots instead of parade uniforms on the last Victory Day celebration in Moscow signaling the world that the Russian Bear is out of hibernation and sharpening its claws in readiness to defend its territory.

The Syrian crisis presents Kremlin with dilemma between enjoying the high oil prices after eventual Iranian involvement and losing major naval base and weapon contracts.  Both the Iraqis and the Libyans did not keep their obligations toward Russia in the era after Saddam and Qaddafi. Moscow has no reason to believe that Syria will be more honorable.

The oil prices have to go really high to pay off Russia’s eventual strategic loss in Syria. US involvement there would be equivalent of Red Army offense in Bahrain. Expensive oil will enrich the OPEC gang, but may kill the fragile economic recovery in America and deepen the European recession.

The good news is: President Obama needs better economy to get re-elected. On the spooky side: plan in which ‘the energy prices will necessarily skyrocket’ fits very well  his circle of friends ideology of de-growth of the western economies for the sake of ‘sustainable development’.

While the Leader of the Free World is spending his time cheer-leading and campaigning around America, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who already announced that she will leave the position after the November elections) is building her historical legacy by stirring revolutions around the world. So far, the US supported regime changes across the Arab world successfully sent millions of people back to the Dark Ages, economically (in short term) and culturally (in long term). No surprise here. The US tolerates the medieval social structure of its Arab allies. Hillary Clinton is not going around the UN criticizing the Saudi regime or the Emirates and their creepy human rights record.

The oil revenues may not be enough for Russia to give away Syria without a fight. Moscow also needs to be able to continue to sell its nuclear technologies. After the General Electric Fukushima fiasco proved that corporations can produce Chernobyl-like disasters too, Russians continued to work with Iran with invigorated enthusiasm. As a result, President Obama withdrew all the US troops from Iraq, giving Israel a chance to fly over to attack the Iranian nuclear program without having to ask America for permission to use the airspace.

Europe and America are making a lot of noise over Syria and Iran and are dangerously close to war that none of them can really afford. The Chinese have the money and so far are siding with Russia.

The Syrian civil war, like the Libyan one can topple the regime only if the opposition gets help from outside. Among the dead in the clashes are police and military that are fighting to protect public order and prevent Egyptian style bloody chaos in their land.

By meddling in the Muslim world the United States is achieving such a mess that there are attempts to mainstream enemies like the Taliban and Hamas by portraying them to be not that creepy in comparison with the new crazies that pop up.

If somebody knows how the Syrian/Iranian crisis is going to end, they probably already made their bets on Wall Street. The rest of us humans are left to pray that Hillary Clinton is not coming to protect in our neighborhood and is focused in creating bloody mess in some kingdom far away…