We’re now officially in the autumn season. It’ll get colder despite global warming. Maybe an early snowfall in late November or early December. And of course Thanksgiving.

I learned today that a tax is not a tax. So went the words of the Anointed One on the ABC Sunday Program with George Stephanopolis. The A.O. once said that words count. How about counting the dollars that will be taken from us by the non-tax?

It seems that the National Endowment for the Arts(NEA), a non-profit supported by tax dollars has become the official appendage of the Obama White House. It’s becoming just like Acorn. What’s happened to our country? You don’t believe this? The link to it for anyone interested is entitled NEA, Acorn.

The Philadelphia Eagles are off to a bad start––– “chaos city.” My prediction: six wins and 10 losses. Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb will be gone when the season ends, and the “Dog Killer” (Michael Vick) becomes the first string quarterback. Oh my, what’s become of football?

But before I close, I’d like to tell you about something amazing! From the New York Times no less. The Science Times section of the NYT(9/22) reported that The United States has been put at the bottom of international health scorecards because of uninsured citizens and its relatively low life expectancy. But Dr. Samuel H. Preston found that the U.S.healthcare system provides superior treatment even when the uninsured are included in his analysis. Dr. Preston’s work indicates that The U.S. actually does a quite satisfactory job of identifying and treating major diseases. The longevity gap, Dr. Preston indicates, is mostly due to the relatively high rates of illness and death among middle-aged Americans, primarily from heart disease and cancer. Those deaths have been blamed on the healthcare system, a convenient target for those who are pushing for “Healthcare Reform” and a single payer government program as found in Canada and Europe. But, perhaps what we are dealing with is a societal problem, a demographic problem, that is unrelated to the medical care system itself. Will anybody listen. Not likely.

I just finished another great book in which fabulous characters abound. Matthew Sobel is literature’s greatest villain who is dead and cremated at a funeral where his family is not allowed to attend. Police Sgt. Peter Sebeck is a great hero who is executed as the country’s consummate villain. Then there are a dozen other characters, most of them not what they’re supposed to be, some good, some bad, but each with a personal agenda, like my favorite, SS Oberstleutnant, Heinrich Boerner of the computer game, Over the Rhine. And of course there’s the Daemon who boasts the title of this book by Daniel Suarez and published by Dutton. For those of you who aren’t computer geeks, a daemon is a computer program that runs in the background waiting for some event to take place and then acts. Sobel’s Daemon, activated after Sobel’s death, busies itself with irresistible electronic plans to control the world, while this page turner proceeds more quickly then your computer can boot up.
Those readers who are not IT savvy, might be put off by some of the marvelous technical descriptions in this gripping novel. But, they shouldn’t be. Every move, every machination, every mind-blowing event makes sense as the diabolical Daemon parries every human effort to stop it.
I’ve found this novel to be among the top science fiction offerings of this decade. It’s terrific. Read it!