Remember when the credit card offers came in your mail by the handful? Those days maybe about to return. Credit card debt backed securities (they call them bonds now) are now the hot investment with tens of billions being issued by the big banks. The reason these new bonds are so popular is that investors are suddenly seeing credit card debt as a safe again. In fact they are so popular that they aren't paying returns all that much better than government bonds that pay hardly anything at all.

The reason for this that's being given by the business news is that consumers are newly reliable since all the 'bad risk' accounts have already gone bankrupt since 2008. But that would have been true last year and the year before that. The reason consumer bankruptcies are now seen an acceptable risk is that prior to Obamacare coming online, fully two thirds of bankruptcy filings listed medical debt as the primary cause. Health insurance companies are now required to pay the bills with no annual or lifetime caps and rescission is prohibited. That's where you think you have insurance until you actually need it,  - half of medical debt driven bankruptcy filers had insurance.

It's a chicken-and-egg sort of a situation, wondering how much language determines thought, and the amount that's the other way around.  Maybe there's no way to know which came first, or whether it's at all relevant -- or if "both" is the correct answer.

Somehow, I find it easy to get distracted by such chicken-and-egg considerations, especially whenever the feathers really get flying at the Congressional chicken coop, and when every besotted member of that prideful roost feels the urgent, imperious need to crow, squawk, cry, or flail around in the dirt and mud.

While it is not useful behavior, it does provide backers, constituents, and media a puffed-up show of Big Foul's power, I suppose.  (Although just why it is these chicken-hawks, chicken-hearts, and youngsters-playing-chicken would want to advertise such empty, boneheaded actions is anyone's guess.)

These periodic explosions of feathers and eruptions of busy-beaked cacophony are also twin signals that the adults have left the room, leaving the children to govern.  Thing is, all of these children are hitting the full stride of their Terrible Twos all at once, en masse, as a terrorizing group.

The mega store chain Walmart, that one that likes to drape itself in Red, White and Blue in order to better sell its Communist Chinese goods, has announced it will 'create' 100,000 jobs for military veterans. Why will it push 100,000 already poor people out of the way in favor of giving poverty wage jobs to the veterans of George Bush's imperialist follies? Because it will get hundreds of millions in cash from the government for doing so. They wouldn't do it otherwise, this isn't without risk. These people are trained in combat, and have served under fire...

Even more risky for Walmart is that these people have been instilled with certain 'liberal' values. Things like real teamwork, where all pull together for the whole, and 'no one is left behind', the kind of thinking the Walton family really doesn't want their workers to even dream about. After all, in just 30 years the five Walton heirs have accumulated  more wealth than the bottom 40% of the entire United States of America, and they're only getting started.

Scribbles on a page are just placeholders for errant thoughts and daydreams, drifting here and there, looking for anchor points of purchase.  These symbols and squiggles we call writing are feeble things, unable to hold a candle to personal observation.  It is a shame we haven't evolved the ability to directly share our observations with one another, whether singly or a few million at a time.

In a science fiction film, there would have to be wires, connections, and a massive control panel choked and jammed with clusters of lights and switches.  In my version, it would be accomplished without machines or equipment, but be done by a simple thought process one could learn early in life -- and be about as complex and demanding of you as having the inspiration to move across the room in order to get a drink of water, and then doing so.

Perhaps that broadcasted-direct-empathy ability would make the Game we all play, the one we typically call Life -- and Our Lives -- just too easy for a species on our particular trajectory. That ability, if we had it, would allow us to communicate too much, too deeply, and too fast:  It could blow out all our circuits.

Through the power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, Christian Crusader and Faith Healer Kathryn Kuhlman cured my father-in-law twice from liver cancer … before he died of liver cancer. I do not hold Jesus responsible for the death of my father-in-law. I’d say Jesus’ role in the whole affair was pretty much nonexistent because at the time He, The Son of Gawd, had been dead for almost two millennia. You can’t blame Him if His batteries were running a little low.

My father-in-law was a very pragmatic, no-nonsense, Richard Nixon-Republican, until his doctors told him he was Going To Die. Fearing for his life, he drove down to the Shrine Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles and joined the thousands of disciples, the desperate, and the doomed. He went onstage, Kathryn Kuhlman simply touched him, and filled with the Holy Spirit, he keeled right over. When he got to his feet he was cured. Later his doctors continued to tell him Very Bad News about his liver so he went back to LA for a Holy Spirit Booster Shot. That cure worked as well as the first one did. Soon after my father-in-law continued along the 5-step Kübler-Ross path, regained his dignity, and died about as well as anyone could.

Teasing out a thought sometimes means pulling along any number of odds and ends you didn't know were attached, like tugging a thread on your sweater.  Such is the case with plain ol', unpretentious Patience.  I had no idea it was hooked to so much until I started messing around with the concept.

I thought about Patience and gave it a short jerk -- like a test-yank, to see what was attached to what -- and all sorts of things fell off my mental shelf onto the floor of my skull.

I should not have been surprised Patience has that much pull.  If it is at all true we are here on this Earth, and in this Life to Work on Certain Things,  then Patience was certainly poured out of the Master Assignment Spigot and handed off to me in its beat-up tin cup.  (My Work was probably given out in a very hurried manner, too, so anxious were they to get Patience, and me, off the premises as quickly as they possibly could.)

Here's the thing, in a long overview burst:  When people are under building pressure and increasing stress, more Patience is required, not less.  It may seem counter-intuitive, like communication being much more needed by all sides during times of trouble or tension, not less.