Road Rage Solution

When you just have to respond.







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Baseball, gardens, etc, etc

Bits and pieces....

Week started warm and finished chilly... global warming blamed for Arctic Ice increasing.

Onions, bell peppers, cabbages and tomatoes set out. Still too cold for planting cucumbers and okra. Patience. Patience I tell myself.

In the meantime the rabbits ate my cabbage plants. All of them. They also tried one bell pepper but it must have not been to their taste. Revenge is best served as Rabbit Stew.

Dean C sent me this. The rumor that it is Dean piloting is just that. A rumor.

Speaking of a different kind of piloting.



You know it is spring baseball time when the weather turns cold and wet. The Grandson hit a batter, by accident he says, then discovered the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction when it was his turn to bat.

Baseball mimics life in so many ways.

Popped a V-belt on the big tiller. Called my usual repair shop and was told they had one. Went there. They didn't. Called four other places. Found one. Everyone told me the same. They had reduced their inventory because of the economy and so many people were buying over the Internet.

Internet shopping works great except when you need a part to complete a job NOW.

Been arguing with a Leftie about poverty and its relationship with crime. He claimed that crime and poverty increase together. That's intuitive, right?

Well, this link doesn't show that. In hard times the results are flat or slightly less.

In 1960 the crime rate as a percent of population was around 2%. As of 2007 it was around 3.7% or almost double versus the population increase of around 70%. As we have grown we have become more violent, more prone to commit crimes. And the increase has outstripped population growth.

That tells me that we are doing something wrong.

Of course the poverty level keeps climbing. The government said the poverty level in 2008 was $21,834 for a family with two children. Where does it stop and how do we fix it? LBJ's "War On Poverty" is a demonstrated total abject failure.

I was raised poor but very few around me had more. I was also raised to understand that the way to get things was to work. Study and education was just part of the solution. I don't think we are raising people to work anymore. And study and education has become the solution, not part of it.

Now it is study and educate and then somehow a job will appear that matches all of your expectations for fulfilment, travel and adventure.

Ain't gonna happen children. You're gonna have to work to find a job and work to keep that job and the boss may be an ass and no one will give you a prize for just showing up and being part of the team. Childhood has ended.

No prizes for just doing what you are supposed to. Prizes are for doing more than you're supposed to.





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Post Office honors Bill Mauldin

Bill Mauldin stamp honors grunts' hero.

By Bob Greene

The post office gets a lot of criticism. Always has, always will. And with the renewed push to get rid of Saturday mail delivery, expect complaints to intensify. But the United States Postal Service deserves a standing ovation for something that's going to happen this month: Bill Mauldin is getting his own postage stamp.

Mauldin died at age 81 in the early days of 2003. The end of his life had been rugged. He had been scalded in a bathtub, which led to terrible injuries and infections; Alzheimer's disease was inflicting it's cruelties. Unable to care for himself after the scalding, he became a resident of a California nursing home, his health and spirits in rapid decline.

He was not forgotten, though. Mauldin, and his work, meant so much to the millions of Americans who fought in World War II, and to those who had waited for them to come home. He was a kid cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper; Mauldin's drawings of his muddy, exhausted, whisker-stubbled infantrymen Willie and Joe were the voice of truth about what it was like on the front lines.

Mauldin was an enlisted man just like the soldiers he drew for; his gripes were their gripes, his laughs were their laughs, his heartaches were their heartaches. He was one of them. They loved him. He never held back. Sometimes, when his cartoons cut too close for comfort, his superior officers tried to tone him down. In one memorable incident, he enraged Gen. George S. Patton, and Patton informed Mauldin he wanted the pointed cartoons -- celebrating the fighting men, lampooning the high-ranking officers -- to stop. Now.

The news passed from soldier to soldier. How was Sgt. Bill Mauldin going to stand up to Gen. Patton? It seemed impossible. Not quite. Mauldin, it turned out, had an ardent fan: Five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Ike put out the word: Mauldin draws what Mauldin wants. Mauldin won. Patton lost.

If, in your line of work, you've ever considered yourself a young hotshot, or if you've ever known anyone who has felt that way about himself or herself, the story of Mauldin's young manhood will humble you. Here is what, by the time he was 23 years old, Mauldin had accomplished: He won the Pulitzer Prize. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine. His book "Up Front" was the No. 1 best-seller in the United States. All of that at 23. Yet when he returned to civilian life and he grew older, he never lost that boyish Mauldin grin, he never outgrew his excitement about doing his job, he never big-shotted or high-hatted the people with whom he worked every day.

I was lucky enough to be one of them; Mauldin roamed the hallways of the Chicago Sun-Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s with no more officiousness or air of haughtiness than if he was a copyboy. That impish look on his face remained. He had achieved so much. He had won a second Pulitzer Prize, and he should have won a third, for what may be the single greatest editorial cartoon in the history of the craft: his deadline rendering, on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, of the statue at the Lincoln Memorial slumped in grief, its head cradled in its hands. But he never acted as if he was better than the people he met. He was still Mauldin the enlisted man.

During the late summer of 2002, as Mauldin lay in that California nursing home, some of the old World War II infantry guys caught wind of it. They didn't want Mauldin to go out that way. They thought he should know that he was still their hero. Gordon Dillow, a columnist for the Orange County Register, put out the call in Southern California for people in the area to send their best wishes to Mauldin; I joined Dillow in the effort, helping to spread the appeal nationally so that Bill would not feel so alone. Soon more than 10,000 letters and cards had arrived at Mauldin's bedside. Even better than that, the old soldiers began to show up just to sit with Mauldin, to let him know that they were there for him, as he, long ago, had been there for them. So many volunteered to visit Bill that there was a waiting list. Here is how Todd DePastino, in the first paragraph of his wonderful biography of Mauldin, described it: "Almost every day in the summer and fall of 2002 they came to Park Superior nursing home in Newport Beach, California, to honor Army Sergeant, Technician Third Grade, Bill Mauldin. They came bearing relics of their youth: medals, insignia, photographs, and carefully folded newspaper clippings. Some wore old garrison caps. Others arrived resplendent in uniforms over a half century old. Almost all of them wept as they filed down the corridor like pilgrims fulfilling some long-neglected obligation." One of the veterans explained to me why it was so important: "You would have to be part of a combat infantry unit to appreciate what moments of relief Bill gave us. You had to be reading a soaking wet Stars and Stripes in a water-filled foxhole and then see one of his cartoons."

Mauldin is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. This month, the kid cartoonist makes it onto a first-class postage stamp. It's an honor that most generals and admirals never receive. What Mauldin would have loved most, I believe, is the sight of the two guys who are keeping him company on that stamp. Take a look at it. There's Willie. There's Joe. And there, to the side, drawing them and smiling that shy, quietly observant smile, is Mauldin himself. With his buddies, right where he belongs. Forever.

Hat tip to Mike L for sending the above to me.

There is little I can add. His comments are nearing 75 years old but they are as accurate today as they were then.

Here are some samples from Stars and Stripes.




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Why the Tea Party is growing

If you want to understand why the Tea Party is so attractive to millions, I give you two articles to read.

The first is a review of a play being performed at the NYC Public Theater. And, since it uses the word "Public" I'm betting that it gets money from the government.

The play being reviewed is "Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson." Presumably somewhat about our seventh President. In between sighs that it foretold Obama, we get this:

As the irresistible Mr. Walker plays him, Old Hickory is a petulant, impulsive outsider with a sulky charisma that makes members of his electorate say they want to have his baby. He’s a man so enamored of the ecstasy of his own pain that he and the woman he notoriously wooed and wedded, the already married Rachel (Maria Elena Ramirez), take to cutting themselves ritually as a bond of love.

Yeah. We are paying for this.

Then read this:

Budget cuts may cause thousands to lose rental vouchers.

Under Section 8, residents typically pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, and the voucher covers the balance. In New York City, about 102,000 families now have vouchers, which are administered by the authority and allow families to live in units where private landlords accept Section 8 benefits. An additional 178,000 or so families live in public housing complexes owned by the authority.

That's like 280,000 people. That's like half the size of the city of Denver.

You know, New York has long been too expensive for the average Joe to live. The same can be said of San Fran and LA and guess what. They had a net loss of population. I suspect the same is true of NYC. And I also suspect that those lost had jobs and paid taxes.

But in paying people to not move to lower cost areas and having lives based on what they could afford, the government has spent billions maintaining the status quo and transferring wealth from the tax payer to the slum lords. And look at this example:

Among the many families with newer vouchers in New York are Izolda Mandelblat, 77, and her husband, Moisey Frenkel, 85, who live in a one-bedroom apartment in Inwood, in Upper Manhattan. The couple, immigrants from Ukraine, had been on a Section 8 waiting list for 13 years. After their benefits finally started in November, the couple began to blossom, according to their granddaughter, Nera Lerner, 19.

That's a sad story. But the real story that should not be forgotten is this.

They should have never been there.

And I say again these two examples explain why the Tea Party is growing. Ordinary people are tired of junk plays being foisted on us as "art" paid for with public funds and welfare programs that don't solve problems that should never have existed.






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Paul Volker, don't let yourself be used

Tall Cotton to Paul Volker:

Paul, your actions during the Reagan administration to wring out inflation was sold as necessary. Having lived through that I can truthfully say that I don't know if they were necessary.

I do know that they extended the recession for months and months.

Now you want to extend this recession months and months by adding taxes.

Paul, as we grow older we all reach a point where our brains don't function well and we are apt to make poor decisions. Driver Licenses are pulled, medications are given by visiting nurses and we live more in the past than in the future.

Let me be gentle.

Paul, retire. And don't let yourself be used by the Left as a poster child for more taxes and a possible depression.






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Oil hits $87... $150 seen in near future

As the country spirals into economic chaos, Obamie pledges to destroy our defense capabilities.








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Put the pedal to the metal

PHOENIX -- Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is implementing a new inmate program at Tent City Jail called “Pedal Vision.”

The program uses inmate-powered cycles to generate electricity for televisions.

Reports say Arpaio’s recent visit to Tent City inspired the idea, when he saw that many of the inmates were overweight.

The stationary bikes are customized so that as an inmate pedals, a connected television is powered once the cycle generates 12 volts of electricity.

One hour of pedaling equals one hour of television viewing for the inmates, according to Arpaio.

Arpaio said the inmates will only be able to watch television in the television room if they choose to pedal.

Sheriff Joe is always a little bit in front of the rest of us......

I think this is a wonderful idea. We could always cut out the middle man and install them in Congress and the Whitehouse.....

Can you imagine seeing Majority Pedaler in cycling pants...?

We could tie the power grid to these generators, Not only could they provide power for themselves but sell the excess kilowatts to the DC utility. Start paying down the debt.

It would help keep Obamie out of our face. One hour of pedaling could equal one hour of TelePrompter viewing.

The Apps are endless......


Link







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