Category Archives: Big Thoughts

2015

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At the end of each year, we tot up the people who died and I wonder if, years from now, if there will be any people of accomplishment whom we mourn. This year, we lost:

NASA’s Alberto Behar.
Batmobile creator George Barris
Civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs
Physicist Val Fitch
Medical researcher Alfred Gilman
Activist and Nearly an Astronaut Jane Hart
American chemist Richard Heck
Mathematician John Nash
Actress Maureen O’Hara
Marine aviator Frank Petersen

So what noteworthy, prize-winning event or invention or legislation happened this year?

It became illegal to pose for a selfie with a tiger in New York.

The Far Green got the largest city in the U.S. to ban polystyrene foam simply because the Far Green is determined to cut down our forests. Want to save the environment? Political “science” isn’t real. Study real science.

We caught Mr. Obama in 1,157 lies, starting with his first State of the Union and most recently with “I will give up vacations” which he did again this week.

!@#$%^Comcast earned its name, at least as far as “Asshole Brown,” “Super Bitch” Bauer, and “Bitch Dog” Govan are concerned. The company’s CEO, Brian “Dummy Whore” Roberts, approved.

Toyota sold a Partial Zero Emission Vehicle.

Say what?

In California.

Figures.

A federal judge ruled that Boardwalk Pizza here in the Keys didn’t infringe on the Garden State Parkway’s trademark, basically ruling the Parkway’s lawsuit half-baked.

Miami-Dade Animal Services removed 42 Chihuahuas from a Miami-Dade home. There was no abuse; Animal Services cited “uncontrolled breeding.”

A 61-year old postal carrier managed to land his flying bicycle on the Capitol lawn.

The Marathon, Florida, Home Depot has ice scrapers for sale in the heart of the Florida Keys.

Texas A&M Professor Irwin Horwitz called his Strategic Management students “a disgrace to the school” for cheating and other academic dishonor. Then he flunked every last one of them. Results of today’s search of Texas A&M Faculty for Mr. Horwitz: “No matches found.”

We discovered that the same people in the First World who would fire Mr. Horwitz believe they can change the climate but not one of them could make it rain in California to end the drought there.

People nearly went on strike to return to the hyperinflation of the go-go 80s. A huge swath of American lib’ruls are too young to remember those extraordinary days of 15-21% mortgage interest.

Having learned how by stealing General Motors from stockholders like thee and me, Mr. Obama did the same to the coal industry: he broke it and handed it to George Soros.

Vermont’s plans for a statewide amnesty day made the news. “Drivers!” Billy Mays might have shouted, “get your suspended license reinstated for the low, low cost of just $20 per ticket.” It was a one day only deal! Until the next time.

Vermont Health Connect went offline for another software upgrade. The website went dark so the latest, newest, greatest, most perfect software could be uploaded. Again.

City residents in Plattsburgh NY learned that they will be fined if they don’t clear the snow off their own property.

Fortunately it pretty much hasn’t snowed in Plattsburgh NY or North Puffin since last spring.

We had the best pope and the worst politicians. I predickted that the 2016 general election would be Trump v. Sanders.

There was some light in 2015.

“Stephen Hawking dead”: After the Brief History of Time author was killed by an Internet death hoax, we found that he is, fortunately, still very much alive.

je suis Charlie came to life around the world after an horrific religious murder in Paris.

NASA found evidence of water on Mars.

Astronomers discovered “Fat Jupiter” which got kicked out of the solar system, twin planets that could host life, and a host of other findings about our galactic neighbors.

UNC researchers discovered “Q-carbon,” a new phase of carbon that makes it possible to create a diamond at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.

Scientists discovered 211 new species in the Eastern Himalayas.

3D-Printing moved into medicine to make a sternum and ribs for a cancer patient and prosthetic limbs for pets.

Nest Labs opened a new engineering center inside Google’s Kirkland campus to “enable other people to do it.”

Welcome back! Blue Origin test-launched its New Shepard rocket to the edge of space and then brought it home land in Texas. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at Cape Canaveral with a payload of eleven satellites. The rocket returned to land upright.

It is hard, after decades of tying shoelaces the same way day-after-day to learn a new trick but it can be done.

 

Roads! We Need More Roads!

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This bright idea is making the rounds among the True Believers on social media these days:


Millions are unemployed and our roads and bridges are falling apart!

Will all these political proposals really create jobs? If so, why not just keep adding new programs until we achieve full employment? Heck, according to USDOT, we get 47,000 new jobs per $1 billion spent building roads. Let’s guess that it costs about $5 million to build the average mile of road (not so far off overall), so that works out to 235 jobs per mile.

The US labor force stats show 7.9 million unemployed.

Bernie’s right. All we need is to build about 34,000 miles of road and there won’t be a single, solitary unemployed person anywhere in the country!

My work here is done.

 

Not Lion

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My Liberal friends are very afraid.

Cowards need everyone else to be cowardly.

My Liberal friends are afraid of all the things that are little real danger.
My Liberal friends embrace all the actors who would kill them.

Example 1 (murder):
Wesley Cook who took the name Mumia Abu-Jamal murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mr. Cook was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982. End of story, right?

The black nationalist and member of the Black Panther Party became the cause célèbre of activists and actors and liberal groups so our Liberal friends invited this murderer to give the commencement addresses at Antioch College and Goddard College.

“Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Example 2 (mayhem):
Payton Head grew up on Chicago’s South Side where black murderers killed 282 other blacks by mid-year. Mr. Head enrolled in the University of Missouri where someone called him the n-word. They didn’t shoot him dead. They didn’t beat him senseless. They called him names. He ran for and won election as class president.

Our Liberal friends were so afraid of the n-word that they forced Mizzou’s president to resign.

“A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

Examples 3 (murder):
The four coordinated September 11 attacks were committed by Islamic terrorists. A homegrown Islamic jihadist fatally shot a Canadian soldier on ceremonial sentry duty at Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 2014. 20 died in the mass Islamic terrorist murders at Charlie Hebdo. At least 129 people have died at six separate sites in the Islamic terrorist massacre Paris last week.

“Canadians know acts such as these committed in the name of Islam are an aberration of your faith…” Justin Trudeau said in an address to Parliament just after the Ottawa attack.

“I just hope that people realize that once again this was not the action of innocent Muslims who want peace in the world as much as we do,” a Liberal friend wrote immediately after the Paris murders.

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.”
–Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Example 4 (control):
The Independence USA PAC targets politicians with millions in television ads to scare you.

“Joe Baca sided with polluters voting for a dirty water bill…” Michael “I’m a bully and proud of it” Bloomberg proclaimed in his Independence USA ad aired days before the 2012 elections. He took aim at two candidates in Illinois because the NRA gave them each an “A.” He calls Florida’s Pam Bondi “an attorney general for polluters, not for us” because she joined a majority of U.S. states to sue the EPA for their overreaching new regulation.

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
— Thucydides

Mr. Baca called the ad “gutter politics at its worst” but it’s more. It’s a fear campaign.

We’re made to fear “pollution.” When that loses its edge, we’re made to fear “guns.” When that loses its edge, we’re made to fear “global warming.”

“Carbon will fucking kill you,” Mr. Bloomberg would have you believe in these latest ads. So where is the Independence USA ad showing the EPA as polluters, Mr. Bloomberg?

Liberals take control by making the rest of us fearful, not by giving us the facts.

Note: My very Liberal editor requires the following caveat — This rant applies only to those Liberal politicians who bend over for terrorists and the fellow travelers who elect and support and nurture them. My other Liberal friends are no more cowardly than the rest of us. Other than in their choice of politics. And, yes, I know that Audie Murphy was probably a Democrat.

 

Another Good Man

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Black Lies Matter.

Shannon J. Miles, a “dark-complexioned” person of interest, is in custody after the deadly ambush of Harris County sheriff’s deputy Darren Goforth, fatally gunned down without warning Friday night while gasing up his patrol car.

Police lives matter.

This man was gunned down “execution style.” Where are the protestors?

Where is Al Sharpton?

Where are the outside agitators?

Why isn’t Houston burning?

Could it be that the only people who play the race card think only their racists’ lives matter? Could it be that Mr. Sharpton and the other muttonheads just don’t get it?

“Lives matter.”

66

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Wow. I turned 66 this year. I can smell my impending 50th high school reunion and I’ve long passed my 40th college. I founded an arts council 33 years ago. George Orwell and I started a business 31 years ago. It’s six years since I shaved my head. A year since I qualified for Medicare. A day since I reached “full retirement age.”

Today is Monday, July 20, the 201st day of 2015. On this day 46 years ago, astronaut Neil Armstrong took one small step …

I’ve had an epiphany. I don’t want to retire. Mostly.

My mom had a real problem when I turned forty. “How can a 39-year-old woman have a 40-year-old son,” she asked me. My own son mentioned that he’s just eight years from retirement.

Say what???

My mom was about my age now when she stepped out on Gay Street in West Chester and darned near got run over by a cab.

“The headline in the Daily Lack of News flashed before my eyes,” she told me: “‘Elderly woman smushed by hack’.”

Elderly?

I don’t like the idea that this is middle age, let alone geezerhood, this time when before a hard day of yard work my manly brain feels like 40 and after a hard day of yard work my manly body feels like 80. I suppose it’s justified.

Or maybe I just need some exercise. I almost put “more” there, but I am supposed to be a teller of truths.

I need to plan for my mid-life crisis.

I’m getting stale in my job and in the arts council. When I ran for the Legislature, I campaigned for term limits. Staleness was one of the reasons I gave.

So I’m making lists. Lists of the things I want to do, lists of the things I don’t, and lists of the things that would be fun but I won’t. It’s interesting (to me) that the lists seem to have stuff that belongs on a resume, rather than stuff that belongs on a tombstone. I don’t know what’s up with that. One interesting exercise is over here in the form of a “did ya do it” list.

The BIG chunk of my life that I spent goofing off in school, hanging around noisy greasy places like race tracks, and pursuing wanton women–usually shamelessly and usually unrequitedly–was only a single decade.

WANTs
A long time ago I discovered that my ideal job was to be paid (handsomely) to sit around being a Very Smart Person. People in my company (and even others) could seek me out and pose questions. After appropriate rumination, I would — in Carnac-brilliance — provide answers. A Fortune 500 company is the best place to have that happen. Big companies or even divisions of same have the necessary support staffs to keep a smart person looking smart.

I do sit around now being a Very Smart Person. People do seek me out and pose questions. And after rumination, I do provide answers with appropriate fanfare. I guess the down side, and the reason this job is not satisfying enough, is that I am also the support staff required to keep this smart person looking smart. Google has become a lifeline.

Although that is still my ideal, I haven’t found a Fortune 500 willing to provide the desk. Of course, the search might go faster if I actually, well, looked.

It’s still up there on my list.

~

FUN BUT I WON’Ts
Race cars. Probably not even vintage. BTDT. Have the Nomex long johns. They still fit. If I stretch them a little.

Get a pilot’s license. Can’t afford it.

Race boats. That’s like racing cars in three dimensions.

~

DON’T WANTs
Plenty of examples but really just one category. I went south last fall and discovered I needed to repair my roof. I came north this spring and discovered I needed to replace the water heater and fix the lawnmower.

The category? Home repairs. BTDT. I’d like to retire from that.

~

DON’T WON’T NOT EVERs
Twenty-mumble years ago, I ran for the state legislature. I still like the idea of telling people what to do, but the gamesmanship has gotten worse and it just doesn’t interest me today.

Work at Walmart.

Work in a factory. Been there, done that, have the scars.

~

WOT TO DO, WOT TO DO
It’s time for a little shift. I’ve been putting more emphasis on the commercial side of my photography so I have an online gallery and everything, but you can still buy a photo from me direct. And I’ll keep on telling stories. And solving universal questions like why can’t we teach kids to do math.

My big epiphany is pretty simple. Like most folks, I’ve found that the things I don’t want to do keep getting in the way of the things I do. I need a support staff so here’s your chance.

HELP WANTED: Support staffer able to raise enough business to keep me in the guru seat and the rest of the staff employed.

Easy peasy!

The Proust Questionnaire
I believe Marcel Proust answered these questions every five years:
• what do you consider your greatest achievement?
• what is your idea of perfect happiness?
• what is your current state of mind?
• what is your favorite occupation?
• what is your most treasured possession?
• what or who is the greatest love of your life?
• what is your favorite journey?
• what is your most marked characteristic?
• when and where were you the most happiest?
• what is it that you most dislike?
• what is your greatest fear?
• what is your greatest extravagence?
• which living person do you most despise?
• what is your greatest regret?
• which talent would you most like to have?
• where would you like to live?
• what do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
• what is the quality you most like in a man?
• what is the quality you most like in a woman?
• what is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
• what is the trait you most deplore in others?
• what do you most value in your friends?
• who is your favorite hero of fiction?
• who are your heroes in real life?
• which living person do you most admire?
• what do you consider the most overrated virtue?
• on what occasions do you lie?
• which words or phrases do you most overuse?
• if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
• what are your favorite names?
• how would you like to die?
• if you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
• what is your motto?