And now Tom is back on Oprah’s couch. He’s not jumping for joy this time, but he is celebrating 25 years of being a leading actor in films. In other words it’s been 25 years since Risky Business was released.

Two sites worth seeing about Tom:

Oprah’s slide show

and the new Tom Cruise official site

Very slick videos on that official site.

Have fun! I did. And let me know what you think.

I try to keep my attention instead on all the opportunities that exist today for families to get ahead, for children to succeed, for adults to prosper. The Americans who whine about how hard it is here have no clue what it’s like to scrape together an existence in a third world country. I’ve seen the desperation in the eyes of beggars in Merida (capital of the Yucatan in Mexico) pleading for pennies to feed their diseased children another day — that’s real misery.

Why would 38 million illegal immigrants have flocked to this country if things were as bad as the news claims?

Here’s a great quote on the subject from Winston Churchill, written in the middle of World War II, with London being pounded by German bombs every day and night and a very real possibility of the obliteration of his country being threatened by the Nazis, who were certainly trying:

“These are not dark days; these are great days–the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.”

We Scientologists have a saying, “Make it go right.”

It’s now how right things are — sometimes things are not right at all; they can be quite horrible. It’s how right you make things go, where you are and with what you have and can scrape together as resources. We also have the saying, “Something can be done about it.” And it’s always true.

Anyone can seem to be doing well when propped up by a social system — but how right are they making things go? Are they contributing their own survival and that of their loved ones and the society at large, or are they sucking survival away from others?

Today I find myself thanking God that I live in this age of miraculous convenience, instant communication, increasing health and security. I’ve made a lot of things go right–we all have–to get to a position of relative security at this point in my life, for me and my children and grandchildren. There’s a lot more to do, and always will be — it’s all part of the great game of life.

For which, today, I am grateful to Providence and all those who’ve helped.

“We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.”

– Thomas Jefferson

The gist of it (for those who have a hard time following Jefferson’s long sentences) is that the government’s racking up of debts, with the taxes that the government levies on him, puts such a strain on the average tax-payer that he has no time to try to fix the system.

In America today, not only do we have to PAY the taxes, we have to do the government’s work to figure out how much we owe them. I believe the fair tax system (a national sales tax that abolishes the need for the IRS) is the way to go. This is a wildly popular tax scheme that will simply do away with the IRS and replace it with a huge sales tax. If you don’t spend your money, you won’t be taxed on it. No more estate taxes, inheritance taxes, death taxes, etc.

What’s your view?

Here’s a cute little test of your knowledge of Global Warming, in honor of Earth Day. How hysterical should we all be, and to what degree should we all be trying to shut down carbon emissions and cripple industry, in an attempt to “handle” the causes of global warming? The test will help you figure that out for yourself.

BTW, lest anyone get incensed about my callous disregard for the environment — I’ve cleaned up an enormous amount of trash in my life. I firmly believe in taking care of the environment, starting with where I live and working out from there. I carry a bag with me when I go hiking, and I routinely find and pick up crap left from previous generations of people, as well as beer cans and candy wrappers from this generation.

I’m just not that easy to tip to hysteria about what appears to be a naturally occurring geological cycle.

What’s your view?

I think I’ll keep this widget in place until he does something mean, rude, or in some other way offends my sensibilities.

It seems like Spring only arrived yesterday, in that we haven’t had to have a fire going in the woodstove the last couple of days. That’s a lovely break as it seems like we’re always chucking wood in the firebox.

I was out trimming down some brush along the road to the top of the hill near our house, and took a couple of photos to document the lovely spring weather.

The little white dot in the bottom left of that is the house nearest to ours, about a mile and a half away. There was a little haze on the horizon; there often is here as it’s a natural byproduct of the trees themselves, and when it is still and warm it’s quite hazy here.

That’s my stand.

What’s your take on this issue? What do you say to the parents of the kids who are shot because a psychiatrist prescribes a drug known to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation (murderous thoughts) in patients to whom it is prescribed. When the “black box warning” clearly says that’s what it does?

Recently my own sister (never a Scientologist) who has been in reality an alcoholic and drug abuser for the last decade, was prescribed one of these drugs by her friendly neighborhood psych when she went in seeking help. While taking this drug, within a couple of weeks she then tried to commit suicide twice and physically attacked her boyfriend. She wound up being involuntarily committed for 72 hours, twice.

When I let her know about the link between suicidal thoughts, homicidal thoughts, and these drugs, she was outraged and stopped taking them. As I told her, this kind of betrayal in the name of help makes my blood boil. She wanted to know why this had been allowed to happen, how it could ever happen? I had no answer for her except that there’s a lot of money in these drugs and big pharma has the psychs in their pocket.

In the clinician’s handbook for diagnosing mental disorders (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-IV-TR), caffeine-related disorders are classified under the category of substance-related disorders. DSM-IV-TR specifies four caffeine-related disorders:

• caffeine intoxication
• caffeine-induced anxiety disorder
• caffeine-induced sleep disorder
• caffeine related disorder not otherwise specified

What a pantload of crap!

It’s true that caffeine is a mild drug with euphoric symptoms, which can be abused. Those who drink more than a cup or two a day are caught in some cycle of highs and lows. And over the long term, coffee is bad for your adrenal gland and other internal organs.

All these things are known–any Chiropractor or Natural Doctor will tell you about the horrors of caffeine.

And yet — that first cup of java in the morning is heavenly.

You know, psychiatrists should just vote into existence another few thousand disorders making every human thought, every feeling and every emotion a disorder of some kind. And of course each one must have its own drug to counter it, that only psychiatrists are allowed to make kickbacks from prescribe. And of course only Big Pharma can be trusted to make billions more in profits from selling these dangerous, unproven and mostly unworkable drugs to their hapless victims know what’s best for us.

I guess we can all stand idle while Big Pharma and their puppets the psychiatrists drug 8 million kids with highly-addictive Ritalin (a drug very similar to cocaine), but when they start calling our sacred coffee a disorder, we will have to rise up as one and throw off their chains, clear our heads with a big cuppa joe, and start rounding up the psychiatrists, institutionalizing their crazy asses, and giving them and the drug company execs some of their own drugs.

On second thought, that’s a fate worse than death–maybe that’s too harsh a penalty.

Maybe we should just withhold coffee from them.