The Mark of the Beast

Hurray for the New Hampshire House of Representatives. They have voted to prohibit their state from implementing the new drivers license requirements in the Real ID Act. Congress and the President are using peoples fears of terrorists and illegal immigrants as a way to back door in a nation id system. New Hampshire is calling them out on it. As one lady explained in the article, it woould be a identity theft nightmare. I agree with the pastor who said it is just a step on the way to the mark of the beast.

Drugs Are Bad, mmk, But......

Drug Prohibition does not work.

Good For Him

CBS news reports that Congressman Charles Taylor has blocked purchase of land for a flight 93 memorial. His stated reason for blocking the proposal is that the federal government already owns more land in this country than anyone else and does not need to be spending money to buy more land. Congressman Taylor is exactly right. I think that for the federal government to buy any more land, it should be required to sell land of equal or greater value to a private individual, not a corporation, a private individual to raise teh funds for the purchase.

If the people proposing this memorial feel strongly about it, and if the government won't raise the money to purchase the property by selling some of its existing property, then they (the people supporting the memorial) should raise the money for the memorial, purchase the land and create the memorial as a private enterprise.

Regime Change

Looks to me like Iraq is not the only country that needs a regime change.

What If?

Back in the early sixties, President John Kennedy sent this country on a path to reach the moon by the end of the decade. It took a lot of work and money, but we made it. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if W had decided early on in his presidency that by the end of the decade, we were gonna have fusion reactors. You know about fusion, it is the clean nuclear reaction. Like what the sun does. Little or no messy waste. Instead of spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives slogging around in the middle east what if all that money and effort had been spent on developing a practical fusion reactor? Cheap electricity with no nuclear waste, no acid rain, no coal trains. Could we do it? Can we do it? Probably not. The United States is not the same country it was in the early sixties. Too many lawyers, lobbyists and radical "environmentalists." Still it is nice to think about what could have been.

Amen Brother!

This article about the mass murder at Waco says it all.

Sister Woman's Children

I have found sister woman's children. No not my sister, sister woman from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." You remember them, the little no neck monsters. Well I have found them and guess what, they are all policemen. I rode by a police car parked on a residential street this morning with his radar set up to get all the folks driving 40 mph to work in a 35 mph zone. Just as I passed him, I looked to the side to see what he looked like and there he was, one of sister woman's kids. You know what I mean. Instead of a head and neck, he just had this big truncated cone sitting on top of his shoulders.

I was immediately reminded of an accident I had in downtown Birmingham a few years back. I was driving along on 3rd Ave North, a one way going west, and a lady from out of town made a left turn out of the middle lane right into the side of my Datsun. I called the police and about an hour later a police car arrived. The policeman instructed us to drive to a parking lot down by the interstate. It was raining so he did not get out of his car. Instead, he had me and this lady stand in the rain and tell him what happened while he wrote it up. I notice at the time that he had no neck. Also he apparently had a bad case of hemorrhoids or a risen on his ass because he sat cocked one sided in the seat.

Since that time to the present, I have seen a lot of no neck policemen and few no neck police women, but it had never occurred to me until this morning that what I was seeing was sister woman's kids. Next time I see one of them I'm gonna stop and ask them if they have heard from Maggie the Cat lately.

Wanta Oughta Gotta

I have basically lived my life as a lumpen. Sure I graduated from college, but today that only serves to make you one of the more easily employed lumpens. Being a lumpen, I don't spend a lot of time philosophizing about the meaning of life in general or mine in specific. Nope, for the most part I have just lived a life of wanta, oughta, and gotta.

Went I was a child, it was all about wanta. I don't remember back that far but I am sure at some point is was entirely wanta. You pee in your diaper, you want it changed, you cry, someone changes it. Your belly growls, you cry, someone sticks a bottle in your mouth.

A few months pass and you grow to where you can start moving about, exploring, getting into things. Up pops oughta, or more appropriately, ought not. You reach for a cutsie on the end table and you hear, "no no" or "un uh" or "stop." You try to climb a chair and get onto the dining room table and someone pops you on your diapered behind. Oughta kind of permeates your life through the process of elimination. Gradually many of the things that you wanta do get replaced by things you oughta do.

Gotta comes along later. For most of us it comes when we get six and have to start going to school. For me it came a few months earlier. When my sister was a small baby we went down to my Aunt Annie's house for a visit. We had started to leave and were in the front yard when my mom realized that she had left the diaper bag in the house. My father told me to go back in and get it. I was about 5 years old and there were a bunch of scary old relatives sitting on the front porch so I didn’t want to go back by them. (I'm 58 now and some of my relatives would still be scary sitting on the front porch but that is a story for another time.) Anyway I told my father no. He tore a limb off an adjacent apple tree and whipped the dogshit out of me. At that moment I got my first big lesson in gotta. From that day in 1951 until February of 2001, I lived a life dominated by gotta. You gotta go to school, you gotta work in the summer, you gotta go to college, you gotta get a job, you gotta come to work, you gotta take lunch at 11:30, you gotta be back in 1 hour, you gotta go to meetings, you gotta... yada, yada, yada.

When I retired, all that changed. I still have a lot of things that I gotta do and many, many more that I ought to do but now I do get to concentrate more on what I wanta do. If I am lucky, I will be able to make it this way until I die. If my finances collapse, I may have to go back to more gotta and less wanta. I suppose that if I live long enough, I will get back to where I started. When I pee in my Depends, I will want it changed, I will yell and some one will eventually change it and when I get hungry, I’ll complain and some one will stick a spoonful of ground ham in my mouth. God, I hope I die before I get back to all wanta.

Tax Day 2006

According to an article in the Washington Times, the majority of Americans feel that the existing income tax system is unjust. The article goes on to say that some people feel that low-income families are unduly affected. Others complain that too much burden is placed on middle income workers. Still others complain that wealthy people pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes. The question: who is correct. The answer: all of the above. Everybody pays too much tax because the government spends too much money. The solution: Eliminate all income taxes and let the government get by on what it collects by other methods. The chance of that happening: About as good as the survival odds for a snowball in hell.

There are a couple of things that would get us started in the right direction. One is to replace the existing income tax nightmare with a flat tax. Everybody pays the same rate. The other is to eliminate withholding and move the tax filing date to Halloween, just before the November elections. This would cause everyone to see just how much they are paying to the governemt and have it still fresh on their minds when they cast their ballots. I think if those two changes were made, we would see some very positive changes in the way the politicians running this country handle the country's money.

Global Warming again

The linked article contains more interesting information about Global Warming.

GC the wonder drug

There is a lot of interesting and practical information in this article.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Frequently I despair at the direction that I think this country is taking and then I read an article like this and I realize that some good things are happening. Now that Nebraska has passed a Right-To-Carry law, there are only two states, Illinois and Wisconsin, which do not recognize the right of an individual to carry firearms for self-protection. This is important. Not just from the standpoint of citizens being able to protect themselves but also for what it means to us as a free society. Assuming the various state legislatures represent the will of the people, that means that a majority of individuals in 48 of the 50 states recognize that carrying a firearm can be of value in protecting themselves. People who think like that also are most certainly aware that an armed society is a free society. Not all of the criminals are breaking and entering or doing muggings. I have read that during WWII the Japanese who were in charge of planning an invasion of the US said that it even if they managed a military victory it would be an untenable occupation because the citizens of the US had too many firearms. Thank God the majority of our citizens seem to still realize how important that is. Others can have their Homeland Security if they choose, I'll rely on my Home Security AKA Remington 870 12 Ga. pump.

W on Global Warming

Got to give W credit on the Global Warming thing. He seems to have it right. I've said all along that mankind's puny little efforts are nowhere near significant enough to alter climate. After reading this article , I think we had better be more concerned on how we are gonna avoid freezing our asses off and stop worrying about Global Warming.

Bubba, Bubber, and Brother

Bubba jokes are everywhere. Stories about Bubba abound. I often hear comedians, especially northern comedians making light of the name Bubba, but what I never hear is anyone acknowledging where the name Bubba comes from. Maybe everybody already knows this and just thinks it is not worth mentioning. But I don’t think that a lot of them do.

Where I come from, brothers especially older brothers are called Brother. My sister called me Brother. Since she called me Brother, so did my mom and dad. When I worked at my dad’s shop, he called me Brother, so everyone who came by the shop started calling me Brother. That was the only name they had ever heard me called, it was all they knew. One of the most embarrassing aspects of that whole thing was that I knew my wife’s father many years before I knew her. He met me at the shop and, just like everybody else, he called me Brother. Now talking about an awkward situation when your father-in-law calls you Brother. I suspect that would have elicited a lot of lodge pole pine family tree jokes. He quickly replaced Brother with Kenneth when I started dating his daughter and continued to call me Kenneth until his death.

My lady friend Linda calls her brother Ricky, Brother, but she also calls her oldest son Andy, Brother and her younger son John, Brother. Any time Linda starts a sentence off with the name Brother, I have to wait and see what context it is offered up in to determine who she is talking about. I say all this to make the point that Brother is a very common name in my part of the south. Now little babies when they first start to talk don’t pronounce Brother very well. The best of them usually manage something like Bubber. Others are more apt to settle on Bubba. Often the parents will correct them until they learn how to say Brother correctly. This is what my parents did. But many parents think that the mispronunciation is cute. It is a matter of taste. Whatever the case, these names stick. Just as I was Brother to a whole community until I was 24 years old, and just as Ricky, Andy and John are still Brother to Linda, so there are Bubbers and Bubbas through out the south. You don’t have to be a redneck to be called Bubba or Bubber, all you ready need is a younger sibling with average pronunciation skills and laid back parents.

Cussing

My grandmother died when I was eleven. Later on, my grandfather married a woman named Nora. One year for my birthday, Nora gave me a little wooden bank. On its side the bank had the following poem:

“Cussin ain’t the nicest thing
And friends to you it sure don’t bring
But if you really have to say them
Here’s a way you’ll have to pay them.”

The next verse was something about numbers of cuss words and nickels, dimes, quarters, you get the picture. It was a small bank and if I had followed the pay scale it would have filled up everyday before lunch, provided I could have come up with the money. You see I was cussing before I can remember. I grew up in an adult world where most of my male role models were just back from World War II. Most of my friends and classmates had the same kind of environment. We all learned cuss words right in with getting potty trained and learning to tie our shoes. We all cussed.

When I got to the fifth grade, I had a woman for a teacher who should have never been allowed into a school. She openly showed preference to the children who lived inside the town limit versus the ‘country’ kids. She was particularly fond of the kids who went to the Baptist church. She was Baptist. Among the many ‘truths’ that she routinely bestowed upon our little pre-adolescent minds was the fact that “pro-fan-i-ty” was the tool of the ignorant person, the person who knew no better way to express themselves. Now I wasn’t dumb enough to cuss in her presence, but that constant harping about how only stupid people cussed did have its effect on me.

Some how I managed to get through all that indoctrination and remained only slightly warped. I went on to finish elementary school, graduate from high school and complete two year of junior college. Cussing all along the way and knowing deep down that I was stupid and would never amount to anything, but continuing to plug along because I did not know what else to do. Then I got to Auburn. Instant ice water bath. Auburn hit me between the eyes like a mule’s kick. I was immediately in over my head, failing everything I was taking at mid-term. I was just about at my wits end. Seemed like the ole Baptist bitch had hit the nail on the head. But fortunately, I was taking physics. I say fortunately, not because I was doing well in physics, I wasn’t. In fact I was failing it right along with my other courses. No, the beauty of physics was that it was being taught by one of the smartest men I had ever met. In addition to being smart, this man cussed. He ranked right up there with my dad and all those other WWII vets. Gradually I began to realize that my physics teacher was about 10 thousand times smarter than my fifth grade teacher. I figured out that while I was in a world of hurt at Auburn, it did not have anything to do with my cussing. I began to work harder, study more and gradually things started to improve. I even managed to get a C in physics that quarter. Eventually I went on to graduate from Auburn.

Sometimes now I look back and wonder where I would be today if my first physics professor at Auburn had been a minister or deacon. If you have school age children, make a point of knowing what their teachers are saying to them. The things that your children's elementary school teachers tell them will have an effect whether they are true or not. Remember, your kids may not be fortunate enough to have a foul mouth physics teacher when they get to college.

IVOTD4W

I live in Central Alabama. I've lived here all my life. The county where I grew up is mostly democratic, but for the past 30 years I have lived across the river in a republican county. Everywhere you turn are those little black "W The President" bumper stickers. Because this county is so strongly republican I was not too surprised to see a custom license tag the other day with IVOTD4W on it. I suspect that most of my neighbors could truthfully have that very same tag on their vehicle. Considering some of the things that have become known lately, I wonder if those folks are having second thoughts about their tag? Probably not, like I said this is a republican county and one thing I have learned about the republicans and the democrats during my lifetime is they are loyal to their party's candidates. I think it was Huey P. Long that said the only way he could fail to get re-elected was if he was found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. I'm not sure even that would stop the folks around here if the candidate were a republican.

Three Government Workers

This is from today's Joke Of The Day :

A fellow stopped at a rural gas station and, after filling his tank, he bought a soft drink. He stood by his car to drink his cola and he watched a couple of men working along the roadside.

One man would dig a hole two or three feet deep and then move on. The other man came along behind and filled in the hole. While one was digging a new hole, the other was about 25 feet behind filling in the old.

"Hold it, hold it," the fellow said to the men. "Can you tell me what's going on here with this digging?"

"Well, we work for the county government," one of the men said.

"But one of you is digging a hole and the other is filling it up. You're not accomplishing anything. Aren't you wasting the county's money?"

"You don't understand, mister," one of the men said, leaning on his shovel and wiping his brow. "Normally there's three of us, me, Joe and Mike. I dig the hole, Joe sticks in the tree and Mike here puts the dirt back."

"Yea," piped up Mike. "Now just because Joe is sick, that doesn't mean we can't work, does it?"

Most of My Mail is From Credit Card Companies

Or at least it seems that way. Every day my mailbox is full of new credit card offers. Listen up credit card companies, I've already got my quota. And what is the deal with the change of terms letters? Most of the mail that I get that isn't an offer for a new credit card is a letter from an existing credit card provider saying that attached is important information about changes to my user agreement. Warning me to read it carefully and file it away with my important papers. Bullshit. What is attached is a new 7-page user agreement. I am sure that there were some changes made between it and the old agreement but who knows what they are? Who has the time or the old agreement to do the comparison? What difference does it make anyway? Am I gonna take them to court if they have changed something I don't like?

It's not just snail mail either. Yesterday I got an email from the company that issued the MasterCard that I actually use advising me that my MasterCard was being upgraded. I looked that email over pretty carefully and the best I could determine the only change was a different account number. How is that an upgrade?

I had a co-worker one time that canceled his membership in the NRA because they kept sending him unsolicited mail. I've thought about canceling all my credit cards so I won't get those annoying change of user agreement letters. That probably would not help. I suspect that those companies I canceled with would start sending me applications to get one of their cards so the amount of credit card mail would stay the same.

What This Country Needs

Thomas Riley Marshall who was vice president of the United States from 1913 to 1921 said, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." Times have changed since Mr. Marshall’s day. Today I can think of two things this country needs and neither of them is a good five-cent cigar.

First we need massive tax cuts. I don’t mean this hocus pocus carp that they come up with where they estimate expenses will grow by 8 percent next year and they are only going to increase taxes by 7.5 percent so they are giving us a tax cut. No, I mean an honest to God cut. A significant cut. Reduce Income tax, excise tax, gasoline tax, tobacco tax, and any others the feds collect. Cut all of them. Take in a smaller percentage and less dollars. Why you ask? Well, Think of it like this, if you had an alcoholic brother in law that took all the money he could get his hands on and bought whiskey with it, would you have your paycheck directly deposited into his checking account? Giving money to the federal government is just as ridiculous. They do much more harm than they do good and they suck up the nations resources like a dry sponge in a pan of dishwater.

After the tax cutting is done, we need to move on the second thing this country needs, which is a massive cut in government spending. This cut will have to be much more severe than the tax cuts because we are already spending a lot more than we are taking in. The feds need to cut government spending back to a point where the money they collect with their new greatly reduced taxes provides a surplus. In fact I suggest that we pass a constitutional amendment that requires the federal government run an annual budget surplus and that it be required by law that the amount of that surplus get larger every year. That way we will be providing something positive for our children’s and our grandchildren’s future instead of leaving them a bankrupt nation. That will also make congress more effective since they won’t continually have to be voting to raise the debt ceiling.

Without money, most of the questionable government programs will go away. The good people in all those worthless government jobs will change occupations and become useful, productive citizens. All and all, I can’t think of any two things that would help this country more than a big tax cut and a bigger spending cut.

Read The Bills Act

Congress keeps voting on and passing legislation without really knowing what it says. An organization called DownsizeDC.org has provided members of congress with a draft of legislation called the Read The Bills Act. I have read what they propose and it makes sense to me. I have written my congressman and senators and asked them to sponsor and pass this bill. I think it is little enough to ask that they at least read what they are voting on, before they vote on it.

Alabama Legislature Gets Something Right

I used to work with a guy that liked to say that even a blind hog could find an acorn occasionally. I am not a big fan of the Alabama Legislature; most of what they do is useless. However their bill strengthening the right of a citizen to use deadly force when being attacked is a good move. If I were a real optimist, I might think that this is the start of good things to come from the legislature, but I suspect it is just a singular acorn.

Out Of Control

The folks in Washington have lost it. There is no fiscal responsibility left. To say that they are spending money like a drunken sailor would be an insult to drunken sailors everywhere. Spending is definitely out of control.

You Know What Really Pisses Me Off?

Well there are a lot of things, but right now I am only thinking of one, pseudo lawyers. You know; they are the ones that are on every message board, Google group, Yahoo group, and mailing list in the world handling out unsolicited legal advice. All of them have some other primary occupation but when it comes to groups, they constantly offer cautionary legal advice. Like, "if you do that you will be opening yourself up to litigation."

Well listen up pseudo lawyers, I've got news for you. All you are doing is restating the obvious. Ours (USofA) is the most litigious society ever known to man. Anything, and I do mean anything, you do in this country is subject to getting you sued. So stop it already. If there is anyone out there that does not already know that any time you stick your head up above the crowd you are an instant target for a law suit then let them find out on their own. Quit with the redundant cautionary ramblings. It only wastes bandwidth and really pisses me off.

My New Rule Of Thumb

I am a gambler at heart. Not to say that I go to casinos or place sports bets or anything like that. Living, as I do, in central Alabama that would require more effort than I am willing to expend. Even buying a lottery ticket requires a tank of gas and 5 hours driving. No, when I say I am a gambler I mean a risk-taker. But more importantly, I am a risk observer (i.e. a handicapper). Some things like a bet on a roulette wheel have high odds against the player. I know that and I don't do. Other things like buying a lottery ticket are even higher risk, but everytime I go to Georgia or Tennessee I pick one up. I like the day dreaming that goes along with the ever so slight possibility of winning. Things, like betting the sun will come up, are pretty much a sure thing. These “pretty much sure things” enable us all to come up with rules of thumb to simplify our lives. In the case of the sunrise, most everyone observes that and acts accordingly. My sunrise rule of thumb is the same as everyone else’s’, “It’s gonna happen, count on it.” My rule of thumb for roulette is: “It ain’t likely, don’t mess with it.” And my rule for lottery tickets is “it’s damn near impossible but pick one up anyway and day dream until after the drawing.”

Lately I have been working on a new rule of thumb. It involves something that is not as certain as the sunrise but looks to me to be close. My new rule of thumb is: "If the government does it, I am against it." With government understood to mean city, county or parish, state and federal.

Now I know that a lot of you are already thinking, yeah but what about roads, what about police, what about fire protection, what about ______ (fill in the blank with the one thing you think some branch of government does that you can’t live without). Well first let me say that this is a rule of thumb. Not fool proof, just works MOST of the time. Second let me say that I am fairly certain that roads and police and fire protection could be provided with no assistance from the aforementioned governments if we just had the desire and fortitude to try. As for the thing you put in the blank, I leave that to you. Can you figure out a way that it could be done without the government? If not, it is an exception to the rule.

So there it is my new rule of thumb. "If the government does it, I am against it." Its not guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate but it seems to work for me the majority of the time.

Give The Devil His Due

Or more correctly, give a CNN reporter credit for a good idea. This article by Karen Kwiatkowski does just that. I liked it the minute I read it.

Write Your Senators and Representative in Congress

If you like everything that your federal government is doing, congratulations. You are indeed fortunate that your elected officials are doing just what you want. On the other hand, if you are like me and see a lot of room for improvement, why not take a moment and let them know how you feel. I found this website which enabled me to send a message to my congressman. It appears that it would work for anyone. So if there is something that you would like changed, drop them a line, or call them or whatever. If you think everything is alright just like it is, I guess you can contact them and tell them that as well and while you are at it, contact me and tell me what meds your doctor is giving you. I might want to get a perscription for myself.

More Gardening

It is kind of overcast today and has sprinkled rain so it seemed to me to be a good time to add to my garden. I had some potatoes in the pantry that were beginning to sprout. I wanted to fix hash browns for breakfast so instead of just peeling the potatoes, I cut off the sections of three that had sprouts. That left me enough potato to have my hash browns but left the little spouts with something to get them going. I planted them in the garden. Next I got down a little plastic bag that had some Indian corn in it. This is some that was off of a dried arrangement that my daughter had. It is a couple of years old so I don't know how it is gonna do, but I put two kernels in each hill. Finally I took some of the little pods of pepper off last years pepper plants and planted them in six little pots. If they do well, I will transplant them into the garden later on. I've already got the wire cages set for my tomatoes but I am going to wait until Good Friday to set them out.

Slippery Slope

I am a firm believer in the slippery slope argument. I said it when the government first started targeting smokers. I don't smoke, never have, except on one or two occasions when I was drinking at a party, but that is a story for another time. But I knew that regulating smokers would lead to unreasonable constraints on the rest of us. Anytime the government starts regulating something, even if it seems at the time to be perfectly reasonable, sooner or later it leads to regulatory abuse. It is just the nature of governments.