Why Are People Lemmings?

I can ask why are people idiots, or why are they stupid?  I guess it doesn’t matter. What I observe is they are lemmings and will follow the nut cases to which they are attracted.  Liberal types hang on any and all words liberal while conservative types do likewise. What is wrong with moderate?  What is wrong with having a little of both?  In addition what is wrong with thinking for oneself? 

Start thinking for yourself, people.  Extremism of any type is pretty ugly. Look around you.  Ugly.  Too liberal, chaos; too conservative, religious myopia.  A little bit of both, a calm steady mind, and an open mind. 

Work to live, don’t live to work.  Eat moderately and thoughtful, and you will be healthy.  The list goes on.  Use common sense and you will live long and prosper. 

‘We are the 99%,’ L.A. marchers chant at protest

‘We are the 99%,’ L.A. marchers chant at protest – http://pulse.me/s/2iISq

First government makes it hard for businesses to run. Now the people want these same businesses out. The same one that hires these same protesters. It is ironic.

Now don’t get me wrong:  the same businesses also put billions in the hands of politicians. I think these people should be protesting how government screws them by making wacky deals with mega-corporations.  Unfortunately the small businesses are going to get hurt, too.  This country was built by people with vision. Let’s not lose track of that. Let’s innovate and move forward.

Innovate. Educate. Build your future. Stay focused.

Baseball “Fans”?

Watching baseball live is no longer a family event. We were enjoying a game last night with our 5 year old. Until the end of the 5th inning when 5 Hispanic gentlemen sat down behind us and began having a loud conversation not related to the game. This is what they sounded like in print,

“Hey motherfucker, these are great seats for the price.”
“Fuck ya. I thought sitting in the fucking corner was going to suck, man. Shit, these are awesome.”
“We were sitting fucking way up there. Fucking good seats, too, but these are better motherfucker.”

You get the gist. Every other word out of their mouth was a profanity. My wife asked politely if they can refrain a bit due to the 5 year old. They start muttering, “that’s the difference between an East coast game and a West coast game.” Of course at this point they are talking out of their asses.

How sad to think that no one has any consideration any longer. You can cheer and support your team. Profanities are the norm in that respect. Just grow up and be aware that some of us are trying to raise children who understand respect and consideration. I’m not talking the “liberal” kind, either. I’m talking real values.

My attitude changed when I checked the score this morning. I don’t like hoping our team would lose, but this time I did, and they lost big time after holding a lead all game.

Take that you motherfuckers. Inconsiderate jackasses.

Black Boxes in Car?

Transportation Department to propose mandatory black boxes in passenger vehicles? – http://pulsene.ws/1KAr2

I’ve been holding off comment, but I am getting quite perturbed by the government trying to protect us from ourselves. Actually it is protecting idiots from themselves. Way too many laws. When it comes to this subject, maybe black boxes can protect non-idiots from idiots.

When it comes to drivers there are numerous idiots on the road. Just yesterday between home and work my blood pressure went up due to those who cannot merge, those who thing 55mph is the speed limit, and those who panic break when they see a cop busy writing some other idiot a citation.  These are the same idiots that cause wrecks.  The same who do not know when to slow down in the rain.  Having a black box may be what we need to control insurance costs and drop frivolous law suits. Getting rid of no-fault insurance laws and making people responsible for their actions may be a good thing, and the black box may be a start.

No, I do not like the government potential of looking into our private lives and tracking our movements, but this box could be regulated to just it’s purpose of nailing idiots.

Edit:  Look what device I used to post this.  OMG!  Spell check sucks!

Posted from WordPress on NookColor

Trusting Money Handlers

I just visited CNN’s home page. I saw their never ending “Quick Vote” stupidity. Today: Which party do you trust more on the budget? So far the results show Democrats getting the most votes. Personally I would like to see a stat showing which party members maintain their own personal budgets? Who lives in “debt” and who manages their money the best. That is who I would like to manage the budget!

If I spent MORE than I MADE, I would be in debt, too. These weasels need to spend our money wisely and not tax us to death like other countries. In tough times I need to cut back, why can’t the government? Why do these social programs and what-not need to be in there. Take them out for a year or two until things get better. I don’t know, I’m no expert. I just feel we as a nation is getting screwed by politicians, lobbyists, unions, and all the special interests that go with it. Everyone is out for themselves. Ugh.

CALIFORNIA’S PARADOX

I’ve seen this posted in many places now and I just received it again via email.  Below, read, and comment.  How close is California to implosion?  Is there any good that will come of what the State is trying to do?  It does make for some interesting reading, though.

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CALIFORNIA’S PARADOX

Your FED/CA tax dollars at work!!?!!

This is an article from  Victor Davis Hansen, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University…
The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more  forgotten areas of central California . I wanted to witness, even if  superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and  income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based  on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking  manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and  productivity without curbing consumption.

During  this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip  over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County . I also drove my car  over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin , Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping,  and  touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers,  Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma . My own farmhouse is now in an  area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary  school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent  white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here  are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to  what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these  areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming – to such an extent that the 20-  to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural  California , for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the  western side of the Central Valley , the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal  irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural  land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these  areas – which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers,  food-processing equipment – have largely shut down; their production has been  shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself – from almonds  to raisins – has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by  half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between  15 and 20  percent.
Many of  the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different  from what I have seen in the Third World . There is  a Caribbean look to the  junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic  tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as  auxiliary  housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming  around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California  regulations that stymie business – rigid zoning laws, strict building codes,  constant inspections – but apparently  none of that applies out here.

It is  almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its  public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify  our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden  areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one  get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

Many of  the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms  – the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow.  I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from  the loss of  thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of  production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded.  Apparently it is  simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new  orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly – with suddenly soaring farm prices, still  we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or  in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers?  Are the schools  so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all  terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?

California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available  to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem  to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic  substances throughout California ‘s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I  rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of  raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my  broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three  of them, and one of me. So I was  lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing  that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

In  fact, trash piles are commonplace out here – composed of everything from  half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I  have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers  cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area  scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more  irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green  dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear  about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the  state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific  observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in  California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a  “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park  by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp  canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants.  There are no “facilities” such as  toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads  I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and  sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels  love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle  of the road.

At  crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here  is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes,  hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The  merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two  supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a  social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were  embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use  of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned  by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that  I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had  iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with  public-assistance credit.  This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just  ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of  any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who  apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the  technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market  surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day  supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?

Do  diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile  stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through  Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern  Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic – there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those  who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland  communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the  first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of  income – whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools,  or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites  and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps  in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

Again,  I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20  years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from  Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural  resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of  whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially  diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the  student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the  requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation  per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think  it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American  Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I  mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than  its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far  more common than their American counterparts.

I note  this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being  deported to Mexico . I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their  own long residency in the United States . But here is what still confuses me: If  one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is  a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.

So  there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send  me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture  that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been  far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S.   for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead  explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a  youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this  country rather than return to the place of his birth?

I think  I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is  the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed  “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here  or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant –  no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no  proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the  public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and  apparently waives enforcement of most of California ‘s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens  and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not  regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging  millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd – to paraphrase what Critias  once said of ancient Sparta – that California is at once both the nation’s most  unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both  into and out of California – and the result is a sort of social, cultural,  economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.

Victor Davis Hanson is  a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient  Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome , and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
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So maybe these people who are in this country, complain they do not like this country, but remain in this country, are really squatters or settlers in a passive maneuver by Mexico to take back what they think is theirs?  Only a thought.

Government & Money

This may seem a bit disjointed, but since I am so simple-minded, I figured I would release a thought on this tax stuff, unions in government, and common sense.

My first question to the Wisconsin protesters and other states with fiscal issues:  Where do you think the government gets most of its money?  TAXES.  From people WHO WORK.  If people do not work, they cannot pay taxes; then, no money for stupid government programs or YOUR State PENSIONS.  If you keep raising your pension plan contribution from tax money, you will tax yourself and your state to oblivion.  Are you that stupid? 

2.  In my state we pay some of the highest taxes in the country.  Where does this money go?  Why cannot the administrators we elect manage the money?  Greed?  Stupidity?  Lack of education? 

3.  I have to cut out items from my personal budget to make ends meet.  Why cannot people agree that stupid government programs should be cut, and so “tighten the belt” a bit until things improve?  Do we have to fund, with our tax money, unnecessary programs while necessary infrastructure needs maintaining? 

Help me out folks.  I’m at a loss in understanding your need for government support.  Why do you need someone else to take care of you?  Are you incompetent? 

Stop Being Babies

Why do people feel they should be given everything like a spoiled child?  Are people that lazy that they cannot get up, get out, and EARN their own lives?  Make something of youself no matter how insignificant it may seem to the outside.  Quit accepting handouts.

Another thought. Are people so stupid that they do not realize where the government gets most of its money for programs?  From taxes!  If you want the government to take care of you, then work and pay taxes. Otherwise the deficit will continue to get bigger. Remember JFK:  Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

I may have hacked that, but think about it. Now think of this:  ask not what your government can do for you, but what YOU can do for YOU!

Now this really makes me sick!

100 Sled Dogs Slaughtered by Canadian Outdoor Adventure Company – FoxNews.com

Should this situation ever have occurred?

I guess there is justice, sometimes

Text message blows up suicide bomber by accident

A friend sent this link.  I found it quite satisfying.  You?