Miscellaneous stuff

We took some time off to visit Branson and see some shows, then go to War Eagle Craft Fair.  I have a few observations.

Have you ever noticed at just about every craft show, half the sellers have something Christian?  Signs and doormats say things like “As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord”, crosses and symbols made in hundreds of ways, Christian books, Christian logos, etc. Then walk through any mall and notice Christianity is almost banned.  What this says to me is that people want their faith and they buy it at craft shows.  Meanwhile the big businesses who market nationwide big box stores, are scared of a few rare complaints about showing some faith.  That’s why they were quick to adopt “Happy Holidays” and made the public angry over the banishment of Christmas. 

We saw a country show, the Chinese acrobats, and Shoji Tabuchi.  In all three cases they had good things to say about USA.  Even the acrobats, who don’t talk during the show were outside in the lobby gushing about how happy they were to have been selected to come to America to perform and what a wonderful experience this is.  Shoji is the Japanese classical violinist who loved country fiddling and came to America, tells lame jokes while making all sorts of noises on his violin.  His endearing feature isn’t just the music but his love for his adopted land.  And of course country shows always end with something patriotic.  Democrats are turned off by patriotism.  Do they not go to country music shows? 

I hear Trump is now blaming W. for 9/11.  Why does he remind me of Floyd R. Turbo under that hat, spouting idiocy? But I will tell you where I am sympathetic toward a guy like Trump.  I believe it is nearly impossible for a businessman to become President.  That’s because to be a successful businessman you have to take risks and fail often.  Most people are risk averse.  Politicians pretend they have never been wrong and get more votes.  But then we will never change government unless we have someone who will take risks politically.  I still hold out hope for Carly and Ben, but already they are damning Carly because she was fired from HP.  That’s because she tried to take HP in a direction of personal computers where the founders didn’t want to go.  But today, HP’s computers are proof she was right.  I’d be proud to have been fired that way.  Just don’t try to sell that to the 80% of Americans who cling to their jobs and don’t want changes.  (Realistically, I think Cruz might bridge this gap.)

While I was gone, about 20% of our city’s voters voted for a huge school bond.  I say ‘school’  with some irony, because it was 6 million for a new football stadium pressbox, 4 million for a new weightroom, and 10 million for a performing arts center.  Almost nothing for education where it counts.  I asked a couple guys in Arkansas, one a teacher selling crafts, how Arkansas has the fifth rated schools in the country.  They pay teachers better, as well as Kansas and Missouri, and 10% more than Oklahoma.  But Arkansas’s total tax take is lowest in the nation at 6.7% of average person’s earnings.  How so?  They have very low property taxes and pass modest school bonds. This fits with what I see.  I drive all over OK and see towns with run down houses, but the school looks like some Frank Lloyd Wright marvel.  Do we need this?  Some of my best education took place in temporary trailer houses.

Dems seem stumped when asked what the difference is between themselves and socialists.  Let me help.  Socialism is the philosophy that government controls most everything.  International socialism is where the gov’t owns all the means of production—communism.  National Socialism is where gov’t owns or controls only certain large industries but sufficient to control society overall.  Let the street flower vendors remain as is.  For industries government doesn’t own, this has a corollary. Government can’t control a scattered industry with thousands of players, so it seeks to consolidate everyone into a few large companies, giving mega-corporations favors, while persecuting the small guys out of businesss.  This is precisely Obama’s intent, as it was also Mussolini’s, Peron’s, and Hitler’s, and every progressive’s since Debs and LaFollette.

Cubs beat the Cards this year and from this point forward I am hoping the Cubs win it.  What! You say, has an old Cardinals fan lost his rudder?  Nope.  I am sick and tired of hearing the Cubs blather on about their darned goat or some other spell that has been cast.  Maybe they can turn it around and become a normal team.  Look, you team lost in the past because they didn’t play so well.  All the world can tell you this.  Just like all the world can tell Chicago that the reason they have so many teens killing teens is because you have gangs and incomplete families.  On second thought, maybe I’ll be all in for the Royals.

Speaking of baseball playoffs, I think the modern system of a month’s worth of playoffs with 10 teams is a failure.  When I was a child, it often became apparent who was going to be in the World Series by mid-September. People who normally rooted for the KC A’s who were 30 games out, nonetheless studied the likely pennant winners, got familiar with their players and still watched the Series.  Today, half the people are interested at the beginning, but root only for their favorite team.  Once your team loses, you turn off the championship.  MLB’s big horror is when two small market teams, far from the east and west coasts, play in the Series because no one is watching.  The season is too long—everybody says this! Once you start playing in cold weather, curve balls and sinkers don’t curve and sink. It advantages the hitting teams.   All the off days mean that a team with just 3 good pitchers instead of 5 is advantaged.  Wild card teams, often the hot team of September are often advantaged. You don’t have to play a good season, just finish hot.  Good grief! Go back to just a single playoff series and get it over with by Oct. 7.

2014

2014 has been hereby designated the year of “I can’t breathe!”  As in

“I can’t breathe.”—Robin Williams

“I can’t breathe.”—Michael Brown

“I can’t breathe.”—Democrat Senators and Obama who went underwater with the slogan, “E.B.O.L.A.—Enjoy, Barack Obama’s Legacy, America”

“I can’t breathe.”—Malaysia airlines passengers

Oh, and there was something about that Eric Garner guy too, but I think he said something different.  And LeBron James who showed up with teammates and tee shirts that said, “I can’t breath”.  Hmm.  Can’t spell either.

            Each year I make up a byline for the year because it helps me remember oddball facts that happened that year.  The all time favorite was 1998, the year of Kaczinski, Lupinski, and Lewinsky. (for unibombing, Olympic skating, and Presidential services).  2006 was the year of the Blessed Virgin and the Cardinals.  The former was Nancy Pelosi (why do both libs and cons chuckle when I say this?) and the St. Louis Cardinals who came from the worst-ever record as a wild card team to win the World Series.  2011 was the year of High, Low, Jack Joker, and Game.  High was the record 62 days over 100 degrees in Oklahoma, Low was the -31F record  low set at Nowata (PC had a record -24), the Jack(ass) Joker was Obama who lost an attempt to use the EEOC to dictate who can be the minister at your church in the Hosanna supreme court decision by 9-0 vote.  And finally Game was Game 6 of the World Series, where the Cardinals came back twice in the same game from the final strike from losing and then won the game.  Never duplicated in MLB history, let alone in the World Series.      

Last year, 2013, was the year of Indy 500.  Indy is the indiscretion, indictable scandals that came out of Obamaland almost weekly—IRS, NSA, Benghazi, ISIS cluelessness, etc.  It is also the indignity of singing great, Whitney Houston’s death by drug overdose.  The 500 is the anniversary of Luther’s Tower Experience, his eureka moment connecting Psalm 31 and Rom. 1:17 and all of faith into “Faith Alone, Grace Alone, Scripture Alone.” Thus began the Reformation. 

Who knows what is coming?   I leave the year with a memorable joke.  Did you hear about how the Pakistani Taliban are trying to take over India?  They took over an 800 call center.  It was a suicide prevention number and if you call and say you are thinking about suicide, they enthuse, “Can you drive a truck?!” Okay you need a better joke?  How about this, “We can’t drill our way to cheap gas prices.”—Barack Obama, 2010.

Or maybe you prefer some inspiration from an economist.  “Keynes said we can boost output by burying trash and then digging it up. All supervised by the government, I suppose. If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.  And what is fascism?  It is private ownership, private enterprise, but total government control and regulation.  Well, isn’t this the liberal philosophy? The conservative is the one that says, less government, get off my back, get out of my pocket, and let me have more control over my own destiny.  That’s the American Dream.”

 –Ronald Reagan, 1975.

Inadvertent Rabble Rouser

We sometimes laugh that our careers have been lived on the edge, a couple of Rabble Rousers.  Of course these days, I just try to stay out of trouble.  But as I led a Bible Study the other night a name reminded me how I once roused a rabble rather humorously and without meaning to.  Stuff follows you around. 

We were reading about Dionysius a 3^rd century bishop of Alexandria who wrote about how Christians rushed into a plague to nurse the sick while the pagans rushed the other way.  And then I remembered that weird teenage thing that happened to me.  In 1973 I saw old friend Ted Mayes who put his grin on and his finger in my chest and said, ‘So here’s the guy who got societies abolished at St. Johns.’  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then he explained and we both had a laugh. 

In 1969 I was a freshman at St. Johns College.  Missouri Synod Lutheran colleges didn’t have fraternities since LCMS frowns on secret societies in a big way.  Instead they had Societies where you just joined and raised money for good causes, etc.  There were six societies at SJC, three for men and three for women.  Only one, the Demosthenians, was by invite only.  They were a group of big studs on campus, and I wanted to be invited like my roommate had been.  No such luck. So in a fit of sophomoric spite, I proudly declared myself GDI, an independent.  What I didn’t know was that the Demosthenians were a huge barb in the side of the faculty and staff of the college.  They had named themselves after a non-Christian, a failed Greek orator who committed suicide and called themselves “Demons” as a nickname.  Often they played practical jokes which bordered on vandalistic and they had a lot of beer parties down along the river.  Everything a rebellious teen loves and adults hate. 

I was vice president of our class and Ted was Prez.  Our Treasurer, I think was Pam Ochs, heard me proclaiming my independence and she decided she wanted to be one too.  But, she told me, everyone knows that GDI stands for “God Damned Independent” and the other girls didn’t like this label.  Did I know any early church father whose name started with a D.  “Ugh—Dionysius?” “Good, then we can be God’s Dionysian Independents,” she chuckled.  And so that year, the whole campus which normally divided itself into 3 groups, had about 40% of students who stayed independent.  And after that year I left to go to Kansas State and pursue a degree in physics. 

But, Ted related, the faculty, chagrinned over this rivalry and the Demons, decided it was the time to outlaw all societies—with almost half the students uncommitted.  “And you are the guy whose example gets thrown around all the time,” Ted said. “A promising Lutheran School Teacher who got discouraged over the atmosphere at the college.”  Whoa! That was hardly true, but good for an argument by the adults. Weird thing was that I learned about it ex post facto.  An absentee Rabble Rouser, no less!

Maybe this stuff runs in the family.  My seven-generations ago great grandfather was General Dan Morgan in the Revolutionary War.  October 7, 1777 marks the second battle of Saratoga at Freeman’s Farm.  Dastardly Dan re-wrote the rules of warfare. Prior to this, women were non-combatants and nobody shot at them.  But the women of the Hudson valley were tough women. [If the man of the house was felled in an Indian raid, the women grabbed the rifle and started shooting.] When British General Burgoyne brought merciless Hessian mercenaries with his army, rumors rose that the Hessians carried small pox. The women were ready to fight to the death for their families and farms.  So Dan posted them as sharpshooters and snipers behind trees and rocks.  The dumbfounded British and Hessian troups didn’t know how to handle this.  Burgoyne surrendered against an army that seemed to just rise out of the ground at Saratoga.  Subsequently, the French joined the war on America’s side, declaring us an independent country and the rest is history.

Okay, so once you get on Medicare, it may be cheap but not too smart to jump off a cliff.  I just need to learn to behave myself.

Risk

Confession time.  My partner and I do a lot of risky things.  Not the skydiving and Alaskan hunting sorts of things, but business risks.  Why?  What makes us start a B&B, 2 hotels, restaurant, catering service, limo service, rentals and flips, Christmas Market Oklahoma, foster kids, and a number of other things.  I’m no great businessman.  Only the hotels and rentals made a sustainable living. But we laugh the failures off and say we survived to tell about it. Even the system kid who pulled a knife and is now in prison.

Becoming a single parent at age 19, I read a fair number of child psychologists--Dodson, Dobson, Spock and more recently Eldridge.  They say that kids who have a stable family become people who take risks.  Don’t confuse this with gambling.  Gamblers are the guys who will spend a dollar on a lottery ticket simply because it has a million dollar payoff.  Never mind the billion to one odds.  But if you offer people a $50 bill or the chance to win $120 with two-to-one odds, most people will take the less risky route of 50 bucks.  The fewer risk takers will opt for the average payoff of $60.     

When Eldridge explained so clearly that having a family that encouraged you to try something new, that even bad  mistakes can be overcome by intellectual honesty, persistence, and discipline, it gave me pause.  So then what is in store for USA as our social fabric disintegrates?  Will children raised by single parents (or more realistically by a gang of peers), will abuse and neglect and bullying and government schools cause us to become a nation that no longer takes much risk? It seems to be coming true.  I find a spiritual component to risk as well.  If God care for you, is in the process of making your life worth something he planned, then go for it.

Indeed, USA has gone from economic growth of 4.5% in the eighties, to 3.5% in the 90s to 3% in the 2000s to 1.8% in the big recovery last year.  Risk-taking has been disturbingly scarce in America of late: the number of self-employed, job creation at start-ups and the sums invested in businesses have been low.  The rich and educated have always been more daring.  But then you find out they got that way by living on the edge more.  Comes now a growing body of economic research that links low tolerance of risk with past emotional trauma (“from which there seems no escape”, the psychologists would add).  They have been studying personal financial behavior of Europeans after their recession of the early 1990s, tsunami survivors of 2004 in SE Asia, and Americans after 2007.  The results are that people are much more risk averse, even if they didn’t sustain personal loss.  Another study of Italian banking students, half of whom were shown a gory horror flick just prior to a test on risk, saw significantly more cautious scores among those who watched the movie—except those who love and laugh at horror movies.

All this makes sense to me since I hired onto a major company in the seventies, whose bosses had grown up in the Depression and fought in WW II.  They didn’t understand the new generation.  Traditionally, factories who had an assembly line worker who screwed something up would punish the worker by making them take the day off.  The traumatized employee returned fearful of job loss the next day vowing to do better.  But when my generation came along and wanted a day off, the threw bolts into the assembly conveyors on purpose. Temporary joblessnes was no punishment. Management didn’t know how to deal with it.

I think I drove my bosses nuts.  I would make goals to do what seemed very hard at times and commit to doing whatever it took to finish it.  The customers who were division offices within our company loved such things, heralded the jobs, but back home it was icy.  I remember a boss closing the door to my office and going ballistic over me promising too much.  “You should never promise ANYthing!  That way no one can say you didn’t achieve something you promised! And your reputation follows you around. If you don’t make waves you will get promoted.”  Hmm.  I read about Boone Pickens and why he quit Phillips for exactly this kind of management. 

I had to think about the invitation to become a campaign manager.  Politics is about telling people what they want to hear, and I always took too much delight in seeing the fallacy, the buffoonery, the pitfall, the opportunity in their assurance of failure.  Would I do okay? But at least I didn’t have to do the talking and I had a guy who could.  We muddled through and won.  Now we laugh about how we survived when everyone expected us to go up in smoke.

America has always confounded the critics by succeeding where they could only foresee abject failure.  Having supportive parents while just outside the window was a world waiting to be conquered, was our secret weapon.  Having a God who held us in the palm of His hand and didn’t mind us floundering was our secret weapon.  I just hope it is not so secret that we lose it without ever knowing what it is that we lost.  

Mary Jane and Facebook

            I’ve been looking around for a retirement business opportunity and found a cigarette distributorship available.  The brand is Cemetery Fillers, the same brand Hitler tried to give to the Jews for free.  It has some side effects and I don’t know if people would buy it so I am soliciting your input. 

            First, it cuts sperm count drastically.  90% loss of fertility in males is typical, with heavy users becoming impotent.  But it has a great calming effect on ones nerves and those who smoke this brand seem to like it very well.  Secondly, it is a non-tobacco cig and twice as carcinogenic as tobacco.  Lung cancer is one of the worst ways to die.  The patient dies fighting for a breath with lungs that will not function—rather like crucifixion.  But most smokers don’t seem to be that worried about cancer, I have found.   Third side effect is that people have used the raw plant leaves as an additive in foods and children have died by eating sweets laced with the substance. 

            I dunno.  Maybe people will be loathe to partake in something that has been proven to kill children and sperm.  I guess that is why the Food & Drug Administration won’t okay these smokes and probably never will.  Their charter says that if a substance is harmful they can’t approve it. So the only recourse is for a vote of the people to okay usage. 

            If I distribute the cigs, I will probably change the name back to marijuana as it is usually referred to.  Or maybe make up something like Beefier Reefer since the buds have been bred to produce 7-12 times the tetrahydrocannibinal that marijuana did in the sixties.

 

            I have to tell one on Steve.  He had a terrible article in the newspaper recently concerning his bird dogging of a gas leak problem in south Ponca City.  The family who have a gas lead under their house is understandably frustrated.  Once gas is detected, ONG has to shut off service.  Phillips 66 was not sure of their involvement since they have pipelines that run under the area.  They paid for hotel lodging.  Oklahoma Corporation Commission are not required to dig in city locations, but found money to do some testing.  The newspaper  wrote an article quoting the wife of the family lambasting everyone, including the state representative for not boarding their dog and saying the Corporation Commission was run by monkeys.  They gave Steve a chance to respond.  It caught him offguard and he said, “Well, I didn’t help them personally but exchanged about 20 emails and phone calls with OCC.”  The paparazzi decided to use only the comment, “I didn’t help them personally.”  The OCC showed up the day the article came out and we both watched the tests take place.  They would get gas readings in some places around the house and not others.  It was spurious and concentrations were low.  OCC had done some prior testing and determined that it wasn’t ONG’s dry gas but formation gas from the deep earth.  They said they would file a report that concludes “indeterminate”. And the family will have to come up with some sort of abatement on their own before they can get ONG back on. 

            Now here’s the catch.  The newspaper reporter did not ask the wife for statements or do an interview.  Comments were taken off the woman’s facebook page where she ranted about their troubles.  The husband came to Steve apologetically and said he valued their friendship and the help Steve had done on the project. Evidently Steve had offered to board their dog and they missed connections over Christmas when he was gone to see relatives.  Vaughan is more kindly than I.  I wouldn't even have offered to keep their darned pit bull with my grandchildren around the house. 

            But who thinks facebook is a news source?  The following Sunday the newspaper had an article about how First Lutheran Church was starting a High School.  I read it and it made my eyebrows go up.  I hadn’t heard a thing at church. These kind of ponderous decisions take a big vote at a voters meeting. Turns out they are toying with the idea of interactive 9^th grade classes using an online source.  And the school had put out a feeler survey on facebook asking how many parents would be interested in this, even up through grades 12. Newspaper picked it up and interpreted it in their own way and ran with a big lead article about how we were starting a high school.

            Moral of the story, be careful what you post on facebook.  
Finally, let me add this which appeared on my email.

Who said it?

       

       1) "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the  

common good."

        A. Karl Marx

        B. Adolph Hitler

        C. Joseph Stalin

        D. Barack Obama

         

        2) "It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government

of the few, by the few, and for the few ...  and to replace it with  

shared

responsibility, for shared prosperity."

        A. Lenin

        B. Mussolini

        C. Idi Amin

        D. Barack Obama

         

        3) "(We) .... can't just let business as usual go on, and

that means something has to be taken away from some people."

        A.  Nikita  Khrushev

        B. Josef Goebbels

        C. Boris Yeltsin

        D. Barack Obama

       

        4) "We have to build a political consensus and that requires

people to give up a little bit of their own ...  in order to create this

common ground."

        A. Mao Tse Dung

        B. Hugo Chavez

        C. Kim Jong Il

        D. Barack Obama

       

        5) "I certainly think the free-market has failed."

        A.  Karl Marx

        B. Lenin

        C. Molotov

        D. Barack Obama

       

        6) "I think it's time to send a clear message to what has

become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are

being watched."

        A. Pinochet

        B. Milosevic

        C. Saddam Hussein

        D. Barack Obama

       

       

        Scroll down for answers    

       

       

       

        Answers

        (1) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary

Clinton ... 6/29/2004

        (2) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary

Clinton ... 5/29/2007

        (3) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary

Clinton ... 6/4/2007

        (4) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary

Clinton ... 6/4/2007

        (5) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary

Clinton ... 6/4/2007

        (6) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary

Clinton ... 9/2/2005

       

there are times

There are times when I simply don’t understand the world and that is why they invented the St. Louis Cardinals. 

            I was listening to Chelsea Clinton lament the fact that her maternal grandmother didn’t have access to Planned Parenthood.  Yeah, so now we are stuck with Hillary and Chelsea.  Does she realize how stupid this sounds?  Sean Hannity was busy debating a liberal caller who was pro-choice.  I would have gone for the jugular.  Ask the guy if he believes the woman should have a choice.  Not the mother but the little woman in the womb.  And since I have asked this question often the lib who is delivering up wisdom often blurts out something like, “Well, as long as a child isn’t born or can’t speak their wishes, you can’t ask that.”  Oh? So if the kid is 2 and still doesn’t talk, you can’t decide on life or death?  If the baby is born ala Gosnell, you can’t decide? At one point the caller said, with much authority, he was just in favor of women having a choice to abort in all cases.  I guess I would have told him he sounded like a guy who favors sex without consequences.  How can a man be so sure of what a woman wants?

            Then some actor whose name sounds like Gondola-finny (never heard of him) who played a mobster is being lauded and magnified all over the media today.  What a wonderful guy!  But then no one seems to come up with anything laudatory except that they liked the way he played the bloodthirsty mob boss.  They showed clips of his much exhulted acting and I didn’t even get the gist of the scenes.  Suppose he had spoken out on taxpayer rights or had two dozen foster kids in real life, would that have made him admirable?  Wait, I think I have him mixed up with Michele Bachmann.

            Then we learn from Business Investors Daily that the Obamacare exchange money isn’t going so much for setting up exchanges as it is pork going to SEIU, NAACP, Planned Parenthood, and some outfit that is against fracking and drilling.  Millions apiece.  Verified by California records. What does this have to do with getting insurance marketplaces set up?  Nothing.  Just money in the pockets of Dem allies.  Is this not a strange world?

            And then they announced that Zimmerman trial was all women.  I am in disbelief.  A bunch of women would immediately conclude that the two dudes, Zimmerman and Martin, were wrong altogether in physically fighting in the first place.  Women just stand back and shout insults at each other and then rant to their friends.  Is this called a jury of one’s peers? Isn’t that what my great grandfather 23 generations ago demanded as he signed the Magna Charta?  Tune in next week when that court case between Warren Buffet and the Rockefeller family will be judged by a jury of welfare recipients.

            I’m going to watch Molina and the ‘Birds.