Foolish Blog

  The Mayor of Portland, Oregon is knee jerking a response to the recent up swing in gang violence.  So we are all clear on where I’m coming from, we are talking about a bunch of gang bangers, who have already demonstrated their lack of following the law.  The knee jerk is: new gun laws!  Because we all know, the people who are currently shooting and killing people, with illegally obtained guns I might add, would more than respect the new gun laws.  How stupid to politicians think we are?  There are hundreds if not thousands of gun related laws on the books already.  Enforce them and I bet you’ll find a lot of our problems go away. 

  I say we put video cameras all over the Memorial Coliseum.  Invite all the gang bangers in, give them an area to defend and their choice of firearms.  Kind of like paint ball, but with bullets.  We could cover the costs of clean up by having it on pay per view.  When it’s all over we pump in some gas to ensure none of them come out alive, (we keep that part secret though).  Portland could rent out the space to other cities having the same problem, it’s a money maker.

  Get a grip Sam, new laws are not going to fix your problem.  It will get more people arrested for gun violations.  But what will happen to them.  The city, county or state can’t afford to keep them in jail, so it will release them.  God forbid we check to see if they are in the country legally, that would be wrong.  So they would be released to pick up where they left off, but now they’ll have some street credit for spending time in the big house.  Again, a bunch of crap from our elected officials!

  I’ve read half of the Pip and Flinx books.  This one was excellent.  I really like Alan Dean Foster’s style of writing.  In the first seven books, Flinx has grown from a young boy to a man in his twenties.  Traveling around the universe in his personal space ship in a quest to find out who he is.  The start of this story finds him on some back water world, trying to find peace and a quite.  His ever evolving talent has taken a turn for the worse, the on set of terrible headaches, whenever he is around too many people.

  While minding his own business, and trying to finish his meal, he attracts the attention of the head of a large local trading house.  More to the point, Pip, the flying minidrag, catches the man’s eye.  The merchant Coerlis has made up his mind he needs the mindrag for his personal zoo.  Flinx refuses and makes a run for it.  After getting back to his ship he orders it to get him out of there and head for the next habitual planet.  After a long time the ship comes out of space-plus to orbit an unnamed planet.  A planet whose land mass is nearly covered in enormous trees, hundreds of meters tall.  Finding one of the few landing spots, Flinx brings his shuttle down to explore this extraordinary world. 

  Flinx quickly learns this world is an extremely dangerous place.  At every turn the flora or fauna can be lethal.  After taking a misstep and finding himself in the clutches of a man-eating plant he is saved by a couple of intelligent creatures.  The two mastiff sized creatures debate rather Flinx is a person or not, but decide to save him anyway.  After which our hero finds the two creatures are part of a group of six.  Three humans and three of the intelligent creatures.  Flinx agrees to help the group return to their home tree.  During their journey Flinx discovers many secrets about the forest world and comes to bond with the humans. 

  One morning they are surprised by Coerlis and his hired thugs.  They force the natives to lead them back to the shuttle.  As Coerlis looses one after another of this thugs he decides it’s time to just take the minidrag and go.  Just as Flinx is about to be pushed to his death help unexpected arrives.  However, the help is not what Flinx would call good, out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the old saying goes.  (Here I won’t spoil it for you.) 

  The book is really great and I highly recommend reading them.  Make sure you look up online the chronological order to read the series in.  I don’t think Alan Dean Foster wrote them in order.  I do find a mistake or two in this fashion, some skill Flinx learned and then didn’t have or mention ever again.  But still an excellent series!

  In my Navy days, I lived eight or so years in the southern states, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia.  I was in Kingsland, GA when Hugo went by and destroyed Charleston, SC.  Every year from the beginning of June to the end of November you had to worry about Mother Nature gutting your home and ravishing everything you hold dear.  People would ask me why I wanted to move back to Oregon when I got out of the Navy.  My response was always the same, I didn’t have to put up with hurricanes, tornadoes, killer lightening strikes, snakes or alligators.  They’d come back with, but it rains all the time.  So here we are at the fifth anniversary of Katrina.  I remember when that storm hit my thought was this rain isn’t so bad.  I’m not as sure about the Gulf Coast, but on the East Coast, if a hurricane misses you and hits fifty miles to the north, it doesn’t affect you, at all.  This is one of the reasons people wait until the last minute to evacuate.  It’s a sad situation they can’t predict better where the hurricane will make land fall, but there are just too many things that influence the storm.

  I understood why the people of New Orleans didn’t evacuate the city immediately.  But once the order went out they did not seem to have a good plan to get people out.  Which is a huge problem.  Remember the school buses still in the parking garage?  I thought it laughable that everyone blamed the government for the problems of New Orleans.  Why didn’t they get aid in sooner?  I talked with truck drivers who drive the area from time to time.  They said the roads where impassable.  The harbor was a mess.  The only way in was by helicopter, which takes a while to get organized.  If you live in an area where a major storm, of any type, can cut you off from essentials of life, you need to keep a supply on hand.  How many of us has a week or so supply on food on hand, or water?

  If people want to live in these storm plagued areas, they should pay a little more insurance than the rest of us.  Granted I don’t want all those people living in the Pacific Northwest, but why should I supplement their cost of insurance.  I remember a guy who had a vacation home on one of the islands off Charleston, SC.  Twice in the same year hurricanes took his roof off the house.  His said it wasn’t a problem, insurance would cover it.  How much did Katrina cost the American people?  Just so a bunch of people can live in an area below sea level and susceptible to hurricanes.  I’ll be completely honest, I really don’t care about the people of New Orleans.  I am sorry for those who lost loved ones.  But if you moved back into the city after the water level was back to normal, then you are a fool and deserve what you get in the future.

Shirley Sherrod

  Another liberal / progressive is setting the standard for us to follow.  She is suing someone for taking something she said out of context.  To give you a quick and dirty background, as I understand it anyway.  Shirley was talking at a NAACP fund raiser.  She related a story on how she overcame her prejudice against a white farmer about to lose his farm.  She initially brushed him off on another white person, but when she saw the guy wasn’t being helped she took the case again and was able to save the guys farm.   A conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a portion of her video, making it seem like she was a racist.  Her boss, not looking at all the facts, ask her for her resignation, which she gave.    As the entire video surfaced, her complete statement was made public.  She has been offered her job back, but has refused at this time.

  Today I heard on the news she is still considering suing Breitbart.  For what?  Slander?  Is she not a public figure?  If she successfully sues Breitbart no news agency will be safe.  I’m a big Glenn Beck fan, he is all the time taken out of context.  Will he be able to sue the Huffington Post?  So now can I sue her since she is hampering my right of ‘pursuit of happiness’?  I say everyone sue everyone.  Make the lawyers rich.  Then we can tax the lawyers and distribute the money back to the poor and everyone will be happy…

  I live in Washington State where we contribute nearly 30% of our budget to education.  This over twenty billion of state and local taxes going to the schools, more if you add in the federal dollars.  But is it really a money issue or a political one.  It always seems to come back to how can they punish us most by not wanting to pay more taxes.  The perfect place is the highly visible schools.

  But I digress, the point I really was going for is a couple of letters we received in the mail stating the two schools are kids are going to attend don’t meet standards.  If we wish we can bring our kids to another school in the area which meets the standards.  Of course we will be re-imbursed for the expense of taking our kids to the new school.  If we qualified for free school lunches, we could also get a free tutor for our kids. 

  Why are we spending thirty cents of every tax dollar on schools that are failing our children.  Should we throw more money at them or should we demand they clean house and find out what is wrong first.  The government method is throw enough money at it and the problem will go away.  However, it’s not the government’s money, it’s ours.  The people with the kids getting poorly educated.

  One of the problems I see is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning or WASL.  The students are taught the WASL.  Not necessarily the exact test they will take, but the subject matter of the test.  In my opinion, (which is of course the most important), there should be a standard curriculum which all students are taught to.  Then the test material can be pulled off that curriculum to see if the kids have learned it adequately.  This way no freaking out and cramming for the test.  Now granted, I passed Nuclear Power School in the Navy doing that.  But you tend to not really learn the material as well as you should.  No long term knowledge.

  One area I’d be willing to spend more tax money up front on is an independent audit group.  Someone who could go into the various government agencies and see what they are really spending the money on.  I bet this group would pay for itself in short order.  And maybe once the different agencies learned how to spend the peoples money more responsibly we could scale down the audit group.  Think how much more successful this country would be if the PEOPLE had their money to spend and invest.

  It’s been awhile since Terry Brooks graced us with a Landover novel.  I enjoyed this novel a lot.  A couple of places it turned out to be predictable but it didn’t ruin the story at all.  I did like it he left it open for more to be written.

  Princess Mistaya, daughter of Ben Holiday, King of Landover is not your typical fifteen year old girl.  Yes she has controlling parents who sent her off to boarding school.  She is passionate about her causes.  And she can summon the image of a dragon to stop the school bully from picking on her.  She is a spirit of three worlds, her fathers, Landover and Fairy.  Able to walk freely between her fathers land and Landover through the mists of Fairy.  After getting kicked out of the boarding school for girls she heads for home, only to be lectured by her father. 

  When she discovers her fathers plans for her she has had enough and runs away to the safety of the Lake Country and her grandfathers protection.  Mistaya’s grandfather decides not to get between his granddaughter and her parents and tells Mistaya she must leave the Lake Country and go home.  With the help of a strange cat she runs away again and heads for the one place no one will think to look for her.

  Not to give too much away, of course it’s a story of hardship and growth.  If you’ve never read any of the Landover books I highly recommend them all.  I think there are six now.  It’s a great change from the Shannara series, which he is writing a new one of now.

  Another one of our elite is promising to leave the country if the Democrats lose big in the upcoming elections…  Do you think Sheryl Crow will be missed?  Alec Baldwin said he’d leave the country if George Bush was elected president.  Did he leave, no!  They get our hopes up and and then never carry through.  They know, just like we do, that this is the greatest country on the planet, no matter what money spender is in charge.

  But even if Sheryl Crow moves to the Great White North it won’t be the last we hear from her.  This is one area where the Internet is a bad thing…   Unfortunately we’ll still have to listen to her hate filled songs from across the border.  Here is an example of the lyrics from her current song, “Say What You Want”.

I saw you ranting on tv today
I heard you tell me to reload
You got a lot of nerve to talk that way
Someone unplug the microphone

I’m tired of all the fighting
Cynicism and back biting
Can’t even hear myself think
Your pour the kool-aid and then we drink

So much noise so much chatter
Does the truth even matter

  Supposedly she was singing about Sarah Palin.  Sarah must really scare the liberals / progressives.  To have such a non-artist like Sheryl Crow singing such thoughtful lyrics about her.  Ms. Crow claims in the song she is tired of the fighting, but yet she is the one who is always crying out how bad things are and with “I don’t believe in your war Mr. Bush” t-shirts on.  I guess it’s not fighting when the liberal/ progressives are saying it, but when the silent majority has finally had enough and are speaking out, then it’s fighting. 

  Let me know where I can donate money to.  I’ll help by the ticket so she can move her ass to Canada. 

  I’m going to take them…  I figured I’d burn a couple days of vacation, take a sanity break.  I have some things I need to design for the haunted house.  I really need to paint a stand for my office so I can get it back there.  I should probably do some yard work while it’s cool.  Hmmm, this is starting to sound like more work than I wanted…

  When ever you see most environmentalist or anarchist they are ragged, dirty, hippy types.  I imagine they indulge in a little maryjane now and then.  So of course I had to laugh when I heard a news story on the radio.  In the Northwest there are quite a few illegal pot grows, and they are posing a problem to the streams which flow by them.  Seems our enterprising “farmers” use a lot of rat poison and insecticides to keep the critters from getting into their crops.  I guess they don’t want to be responsible for the rehabilitating all the wild life in the area.  Pot growers are always decent people who care about other living creatures…  The new slogan: Save the environment, stop smoking pot!

  For a long time in this country the silent majority has allowed themselves to be pushed around.  I think that time is coming to an end.  During WWII it is rumored that Japanese Admiral Yamamoto spoke these prophetic words after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  ”I fear all we have done is to wake a sleeping giant, and fill him with a terrible resolve”.  The past always repeats itself and the storm is brewing.  I can see change in the future.  I just hope we can catch it in time to return this great country to the right path.  All you greenies had better hope this country doesn’t fail.  Without the money the big businesses make there will be no way to clean up all those environmental problems that keep you awake at night.  Just think what would happen without the resources to clean a major oil spill, or give aid after a major storm event.  These progressives are lucky the majority of the people in this country are hard working and just want to live and be happy.  But, as they see their way of life being attacked they will fight back.  It’s time to vote in some good conservative people to our government.  I don’t care if they are Republican or Democrat, just stop the progressive / liberal policies we are experiencing now.