Thoughts on a Saturday morning....

It is becoming increasingly clear and simple. If the American people are going to take back the agenda for a more fair and compassionate society, there is only one man out there really speaking to the serious issues facing us. That man is +Bernie Sanders. As far as I am concerned he is the only candidate that can demonstrate through a long, committed and interesting career that he is a man of integrity and honesty.

No matter what your political persuasion take the time to listen to his videos and study his background. As with all candidates keep an open mind. Do not let sound bytes govern your thinking.

This man turned around a dying city - Burlington Vermont and made it into an interesting and dynamic place again. He calls himself a democratic socialist but do not let labels put you off. He is not a card carrying communist who is going to radically install a different type of government. He understands free markets very well. In fact he understands that America no longer has free markets in many parts of our economy - banking, health care, big pharma, etc. which have become oligopolistic and are destroying our economy through reckless behaviors and greed.

Vermonters are people who are inherently fiscally conservative and abhor waste. On the other hand they are socially progressive and compassionate because they understand you have to depend on your neighbors sometimes. Your life may depend on it in a cold winter. They have trusted Bernie with a very long mandate first as mayor then to Congress. Despite being an independent and not part of the established political parties he has been re-elected time and again. Vermonters have trusted this man and he has fulfilled their trust. Mainstream America should not dismiss him and his unique leadership qualities of bringing people together to work as a team toward a more fair America.

American needs a President they can trust. A man of his word. Someone who is not afraid to speak directly to the issues that are dragging us down. With full disclosure that I am part of the privileged 10%, I am disgusted by the inability of our government to move forward on many issues. The immense wealth inequality and stagnation of wages for the vast majority of citizens is simply not sustainable. We all know it. The wealthy, most of all, know it. This doesn't mean Senator Sanders intends to steal outright from the rich and give to the poor. He quite rightly says that if you work 40 hours, you deserve not to live in poverty. While the chief executives pay themselves egregious sums of money and leave the people who really do the drudge work of running America penniless at the end of the week is simply not fair. There is enough wealth in America for it to be spread around in a more equitable way simply by paying workers a fair wage. In the long run, in a capitalistic system all wealth cannot simply accrue to the shareholders and limited top management without putting extraordinary societal pressures in place, which is what we have now. If you want to avoid social unrest there must be some fairness in the equation.

Moreover a capitalistic system requires true savings. Vermonters are thrifty people and they understand that you must set something aside for the future for healthy growth. You do not grow by going deeper and deeper into debt. For many years in postwar America the middle class grew and prosperity accrued. Many young people today are not aware that the FED actually required savings and loans and community banks to pay a minimum 6% interest on savings. These local banks underwrote most of the mortgages across the country and to a great extent lenders knew borrowers on a more personal level. The system worked well until a few bad apples managed to destroy the S&L's and this resulted in the end with an opportunity for the bigger banks to get Glass Steagall repealed and a new system of oligopolistic banking put in place. This as we all know has led to even greater abuse that the original S&L mess with the American public bailing out the Wall Street Bankers in 2008 and who persist in their egregious greed even today. The zero interest policy of the FED has been detrimental to savers and to the economy as a whole. It has led to a mentality of growth by debt which is impossible and it has led to increasing asset bubbles that eventually will have a perverse affect on all of us. It is a totally fallacious and irresponsible policy. You cannot push on a string forever and sadly the FED is seeing it now. The banks need to be reigned in and they need to be broken up into their respective classes of retail, commercial and investment activities once again. I believe Senator Sanders has the resolve to do this. If it is not done and we continue on the present path, the financial crash that will eventually result will destroy the America Republic. You simply cannot create money out of thin air forever.

It seems something has seriously been lost in the banking and much of the business community. It is an understanding of fairness and honesty in all dealings – with employees, with customers and with ourselves. I would remind Mr. Trump it is not how great you are or how expert you are in demeaning people with your oratory, it is all about building everyone up together through leadership and responsible example. The age of rip-off must end. It must be replaced with a balanced and fair approach to business in America for all and not a rigged system.

We were fortunate to have the Pope visit us this past month. Although I am not a terribly religious man, I recognize the wealth of wisdom in many of the world's religions. Foremost is love and compassion for your fellow human being. This nation is unbelievable rich and it is simply unacceptable that a responsible universal health care system is not in place. The health care system has evolved into a predatory business with a focus on making money and not on the sick patient or access to care whatsoever. If a person is ill through no fault of their own, our society should be compassionate enough to provide care. No one should be bankrupted and made a slave to lenders. It is a question of fairness to all. America has always led in so many areas and America should have the best public universal health system in the world as an example to all others. Instead we shamefully fall short.

I was fortunate to go to University when tuitions were more manageable and young people were not forced into debt slavery. If I remember correctly when I took my MBA at Cornell from 1968 to 1970, the tuition was roughly $2,200 per year. I had good summer jobs and when I graduated, I was debt free and able to start my own business. I believe every person starting in life should be debt free. To force egregious amounts of debt upon young people is immoral and does not set a very good example. In fact it only promotes a society of greed and predation. After all, a nation is only as strong as the cumulative knowledge of its citizenry.

Human capital is also a key quotient of a capitalist system as much as money. A nation of dumb people will go nowhere. Universal free college and university tuition maybe should not be an entrenched right but it should be an objective that we all, as a society, take seriously and work towards. Educating our young people makes the country strong and as Senator Sanders has pointed out, you have a stark choice as a society to house people in prisons or educate them to become productive members of a fair society. If someone has the grades and intelligence, they deserve four years of college debt free to become productive citizens and future leaders.

As for prisons, making a business out of them is the antithesis of a responsible social policy. We are a creative and intelligent people and to have gone down this path of locking up huge numbers of our youth who are largely in trouble because of a lack of opportunity or job is senseless. Yes you need prisons for the violent, but surely a more creative way of dealing with the drug offenders and non violent would be to send them into quasi military or peace corps programs where they could learn a skill and become productive. Most of them have lacked responsible mentors growing up and all they lack is strong guidance and support. I say shame on us for being so short sighted and stupid in handling this problem.

As a nation we have an enormous opportunity to get behind a leader who I believe will set America on a better path for the future and who provides a vision for a more caring, compassionate society that we would be proud to live in. I, like everyone I think, am disgusted by the corruption and self- dealing. I don't want my children and grandchildren to grow up in an increasingly dangerous America because of social tensions that is trending towards a repressive police state. We have had leaders lie without any conscience to us. We need to break from this behavior and set a new course.

I was 14 When Jack Kennedy challenged us with ask not what you can do for yourself, but what can you do for your country. I remember well the excitement of his vision for America and setting the goal for the moon. I have seen nine Presidents since come and go and none of them instilled a sense of excitement the way Kennedy did. In Sanders I see a visionary President again who is calling out all the bad and corrupt to accountability and challenging us with a really tough job to turn the country around and make it fair again for all the people.

It is time to be honest with ourselves. It is time to make America fair again.

#makeamericafairagain

#feelthebern






I sent this email this morning to John Coull at Google this morning.

John, 
 
As I said in a previous email I am not sure how you fit into the picture at Google. I would appreciate an understanding of your role.
 
After temporarily restoring the functionality of the old ISP partnership account that my identity goodfellow@bahama.com operated on and  that you had deleted June 16th, and, at Google’s (yours and Mario’s) recommendation I did a full archive of all the data – google+, gmail, drive, calendar, photos etc. I have that in six zip files. I was not concerned with the mail, calendar, contacts, drive as I already had full backups on local machines anyway but I had made it very clear to you that the most important thing from my point of view as I had all other data already backed up was to be able to restore the MH370 archive of postings and comments so that all of this would not be lost to the google+ community.
 
After again deleting the old isp account and creating a new google apps for work account and installing the domain again and creating the identity and email functionality again, I then asked Mario “so how do we restore the google+ archive?”. It was at this point, he then informed me that there was no way to do this. I thought and was under the impression that we went through the process precisely so that this would not be lost to Google+ users. Many, many people made comments over an entire year and put forth constructive and intelligent comments regarding the MH370 story. The MH370 circle included over 3,000 users and millions of views..
 
I am extremely disappointed to say the least. I was certainly led to believe we could restore the zip files back on the new account. In fact I am sure there is a way for this to be done and Google should do it. I know the data is still on your servers as well as my zip files. Surely this is not too large a technical challenge for Google to figure out?
 
I have had numerous emails from people who are understandably upset and I daresay somewhat angry that all the postings and comments and links to it have simply
and effectively disappeared. From my perspective you are only decreasing the activity and eyeballs on Google+ by this action and, simply put, it is not a smart business decision and would seem to discourage the use of Google+ if information and longstanding links from your search engines all disappear.
 
I would also appreciate a clarification regarding the privacy of data on Google+ because your actions would seem to contravene common sense. When I post a public comment on Google+, I am under the impression that I have effectively renounced any claim to privacy and people commenting on that post can have no expectation of privacy. The post and subsequent comments become in effect public records. However when you delete my private account you are effectively deleting other users who have made public comments on the postings with the full expectation  I am sure  that these would not be deleted without their permission except for contraventions stemming from your terms of use.
 
In effect the Google+ community need to know and understand that entire longstanding archives of information can be arbitrarily removed and made no longer available for reference, review or other historical interest. As I say this seems to contravene common sense. I understand “technical platforms” may have been different in this case and it was Google’s desire and choice to terminate the ISP Partnership agreements made many years ago that operated on different platforms but in your technical planning there should have been and maybe there still is the ability not to simply lose what had become a public record with millions of views.
 
I would appreciate your comments at the earliest opportunity.
 
 
Christopher C. Goodfellow

To those of you who followed and made comments on the #mh370  postings, this information is evidently not restorable on the new platform they are running my identity under...or so they say. 

anyway if you were a member of my mh370 circle please let me know and I will add you back. Other friends and family in my circles have been lost. I will try and add you back. 

#mh370  
#malaysiaairlines     

This morning I noticed that  the limit of 500 comments on the last posting regarding #mh370  had been met.  So, I am starting a new post here to continue the thread....

We look forward perhaps to getting a real look at the BEA final report that was transmitted to the prosecutor's office last week. It bothers me that the French are evidently unable to commit 100% to the flaperon being part of the MH370 wreckage. This leaves open the tiniest door to speculation that the part is a hoax as I pointed out in the last post. It is a shame that really very few facts in this entire disappearance can be confirmed as true fact. Could not the French investigators look at where the local man in Reunion burned the debris of the seats and dig up some forensic evidence of matching fibres or something....and what about the suitcase and contents quite clearly presented in photographs with the gentleman in La Reunion? Where is it and what was in it and can anyone link the small Chinese inscribed medical bottle to a victim on MH 370?  There just seems to be this total lack of intelligent factfinding and dropping the ball which leads me to either concluding the investigators are idiots or there is something else going on here. 

Mysteries of course always invite speculation but it would be nice to have one unequivocal piece of evidence that says "this is MH370"!


+Andrew Jens has really got his thinking cap on in his last comment on the last post.

I continue to search through You Tube looking for snippets of interviews with the eye witnesses on Kudahuvatoo. As I previously remarked it would be nice if we got those eyewitness statements that they supposedly gave to the police....

The easiest explanation for me now is a catastrophic  explosive decompression either caused by an external object (missile, small meteor) or by the Acars antenna issue supported by Cap. They just had time to twirl the heading bug to bring it around before expiring.

Our only chance to really know is the black boxes.

If it was an accidental shoot down we never will know - the evidence is gone and buried. Many who write me think this is the case now and the plane went down in the south china sea off Vietnam and was cleaned up. There was something happening there with unusual ship activity and there was most definitely a large fuel slick spotted and photographed by a Cathay Pacific over-flight that morning.  This means all the other stories are just that, stories. Some intentional, some just attention seeking.
  
What is the truth today?  

#MH370  
#CNN  
#Goodfellow  

I am constantly amazed at how the media can distort things....and perhaps NOT perform their role of critical analysis.

I know this post may well crete a firestorm of debate and we have certainly had enough of those regarding MH370 but here goes....

Sometimes a photo can tell a thousand words....this is the photo that was on CNN showing four gendarmes carrying the flapperon debris off the beach.

Note behind the beach is all stones. The debris was reported to have been half buried in sand. What sand? Where?

Notice the waves. Look at the leading edge and surface of this piece. Rather smooth wouldn't you say?

A piece of aluminum washing up on a rocky shore like that would be beat to hell I should think.

Is there any explanation? I am at a loss here. Now if the reported suitcase washes up with clearly identifiable objects within that a relative can verify, that may help me in accepting this is a piece of flap from the plane but at this point something doesn't add up for me. Smooth metal on a rocky shore?. Have any of you seen a plane that has flown through hail? the entire surface is dented. This rocky shoreline would do worse.

Seriously could this all be a hoax simply to bring the Australian search to an end and a form of closure for the relatives. The fact the piece has now been whisked off to France for "verification" ... I sure would like to be there and see firsthand.

Just up the beach from me is Washington Oaks State Park with some of the meanest rocks on Florida's east coast. When waves bring in debris on those rocks they beat it up. Water weighs 12 pounds a gallon. A three foot wave pushing a piece of metal the size of that flap on hard rock is going to leave a lot of marks and indentations.

Why was an identification not made in situ? I am unable to find any close up photos.
Does anyone know of any better hi- res photos out there so I can personally dispel the feelings I have about this? Has it occurred to anyone else this might be a hoax to simply close the door on further search and lead us to conclude it simply crashed in the Indian Ocean. Here is confirmation. We cannot find it. End of story.

Please share this postAs widely as possible.


#mh370

#goodfellow
#cnn