Alas today, as I’m reading this prescient article “The Young and the Lazy” by Gavin McInnes I get an e-mail from one of the Scout leaders saying his kids won’t be coming, and that he just can’t get them “up” for doing anything.  The kicker was that they were looking forward to another shooting event where we supply the guns, ammo, and high quality (as in among the best in the nation) instructors.  Uhmm… right.

So I’m left with 20 from our local Sheriff Explorers – who are on a track for law enforcement or military careers – and who once committed can be expected to be there, in uniform, working their butts off.  They will work, and they will also get thousands of rounds of ammo, and days of cool times on the range in the coming months.

And I wondered… when did Scouts get lazy?

My next call… our local Jr. ROTC liaison. That’s the only group of kids I can think of that I think will understand the value of working from dawn to dusk on a Saturday.

As to Gavin’s article… read it (be prepared for salty language).  I’ve had some encounter with the “meh” attitude  towards work he’s encountered, but not as bad as he’s had.  And generally during interviews of folks I didn’t hire.  But he is in the belly of the best – NYC – and hiring from the worst of the worst – eastern “elite” colleges. 

My advice to Gavin… search for his interns amongst returning veterans. They will empty his trash bins with glee – and figure out a better way to do it while at it.

I don’t usually let politics guide my minute to minute thinking, but I couldn’t avoid thinking as I watched this that this coach probably voted for Obama (95% chance), who absolutely doesn’t want to hold his team (our country) to this standard.

Do speeches like this work?  On me, not at all. I wanted to win so badly that nothing coach would say would affect my effort.  I prefer soft spoken coaches that teach. I hope this coach is normally like that.

And of course in golf, tennis and shooting – the major sports in my life (other than baseball), such ranting and raving would be counterproductive to the quiet mental focus needed to avoid unforced errors that dictate who wins or loses.

H/T  Facebook friend

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I woke and saw that life was duty. I acted, and behold, duty was joy.

Rabindranath Tagore
Poet

H/T/  for quotation to David French of the National Review. He submits it in context of news of woman selectively aborting one of the twins they carry because they don’t want two college payments, or generally, the hassle of having two children.

In other words… they want it to be about them.

I like to work.  I like to get things done. I like to learn through study, travel and experience. I can’t imagine life on the dole. I wouldn’t call it a life I recognize.

That is what is so dispiriting about modern America, and especially modern England.  Sure, I’m irritated at pulling the wagon, but the bigger concern, to me at least, is that the people in the wagon seem to have such pitiful lives.

Frankly, I’m quite ready to throw folks without serious physical or mental disabilities out the wagon and into the water to see them swim. I’m pretty sure they will swim, and frankly, I don’t really care if they sink.

I don’t know if this is what Tagore had in mind when he wrote the lines above. I suspect not. He may view duty as paying for those on the dole.

I want to give those on the dole the chance to see the joy of duty.  It will give their life more purpose and meaning than the latest reality show on a state provided flat screen.

Not a protein in sight.

This morning I went out to my hotel’s common room to read in its comfortable chairs.  The large space also serves as the breakfast room. 

Of the approximately 40 adults I counted, most were fat. Not ‘plump’, but fat. The rest were just overweight, except for one guy who was very skinny.  I suspect he was a meth user (based on tattoos, dress and other mannerisms).

So, including the meth guy, I figured… yep, all of them are going to be pretty expensive for the “free” health care I was forced to fund in 2010.

Since most of them likely aren’t spending their own tax dollars on their health care, they are spending my money  to cover their biscuit and gravy induced diabetes.  And I can’t say I’m too happy with their choice for my money. Nope. Not at all!  Not personally. And not as a nation.

If you want to force me to pay for nuclear plants so we can have cheap electricity… heck I might even chip in more than you ask.  But putting a gun to my head and forcing me to cover your pastry and Frosted Flakes habit… doesn’t that seem wrong even to you?

If you inherited diabetes, or had an accident, hey, …I’m happy to help. But paying for your Type 2 diabetes caused by a pancreas blown by a syrup and cola induced perpetual sugar load hardly seems “charity”. It’s theft.

As an aside, I asked myself, “What would happen if the hotel put out good food to eat?”. Sadly I knew the answer… A lot of chunky folks griping. Sigh.

Since 9/11 2001, almost 11 years ago, nothing had been built to replace the Twin Towers. A hole in the ground remains.  Why didn’t we build a tower twice as big? Why didn’t we call it “FU” Towers?   Most American’s would concur with this sentiment.  Why didn’t we? Our government.

The largest thing created since 9/11 was the Homeland Security department, and our mountain of debt that yielded no return on investment.

I’m traveling, but a couple of days ago my wife called me saying that the non-profit organization I’m President of had gotten a nasty letter from the state of Utah, including a $15,000 lien. This was because, even though we had no sales yet,  we hadn’t filed our sales/use tax report for the 2nd quarter, which as it happened was our 1st quarter of existence as a non-profit entity.  I wondered about the state’s demand for money. What had they done to earn it?  They’d provided no service. They’d done nothing but make it hard to get setup and extract fees and make us pay for expensive legal and accountancy services. When I had a question about hiring people they took a week to answer “you need to ask somebody else”.  They were quite prompt, however, in noticing we hadn’t done some minor paperwork with them.

When I drive back home, I’ll have to run a gauntlet of police, nominally there to “protect me”, but really just modern day highway man eager extract money from me as I drive thru.   When I actually get home my threat of being stopped and extorted will actually rise, as my home town police live to stop and take.  They call it “community policing”. I call it… theft. These are the police, by the way, that certainly weren’t very eager, alas, to prevent my truck from being stolen.  Or to catch who did it. Or to prevent who did it from roaming about hoisting cars at 3AM.

At the root of all this nonsense is the bureaucrat.  You know them, they get pay raises during a recession. They audit my company in the winter when it’s cold in Northern Utah. They live to stop. They live to extort.  They live to micro-regulate everybody else, and then go home at 5 o’clock and pretend they accomplished something productive.

How do they do it? How do they justify such an existence? Preying on the productivity of others. Stopping. Halting. Plundering. Is human rationalization so powerful that they just don’t see it?   It must be because they get up each morning, hit the Starbucks drive-thru, and get to the office to move a pile of paper from one spot to another. To say no a thousands more times.  It’s enough to make one wonder if maybe we already met St. Peter and this was the judgment.

Mark Steyn
In “After America”

Via Polipundit

Obama consistently shows that he is a crude, vile, petty man that is narcissistic to the core. 

This week’s affront?   Photo op at the Dover AFB casualty receiving ceremony.  Family didn’t want him there. Families the day or week before probably wonder why their husband or child wasn’t as important.  As will families later.

Photos aren’t permitted, well, except for Barry.

The affronts just never end with this guy. And it’s all so that Sony can interleave his visit to the Presidential poll improving Osama killing Seal Team 6’s tragedy into the movie they are making that is sure to feature Blair Underwood pensively saying “go”.

It’s all Barry all the time at this White House. The nation??? just props, victims or productive people ripe for exploitation.

If you voted for this fool, you should be ashamed. And if you still support him then you really need your head examined.

I’m tempted to tell England it is getting what it deserves. It sucked opportunity from these young people’s futures many decades ago.  But at the same time the responsible person in me abhors the waste of a life they represent.  To me, acting as they do now, they are just targets. Something to be destroyed.   England should treat them as such or expect more ill behavior.

We aren’t immune, as recent events in Wisconsin and Philadelphia show.

Compare and contrast to an entirely different sort of person.

Night and day. The difference?  Generally… family. The rioters no doubt had government as their primary caretaker. Those rolling out of a Chinook?  Quite different.

These crazed youth in England, Wisconsin, Philadelphia represent the new breed of unproductive. Not content to just take and whine. They now want to take, whine and destroy.

I hope you liberals are happy. This is what happens when you suck opportunity from the future to pay for your votes, your cushy federal / state pensions, and your lattes.

President Downgrade hopes to borrow from more future youth and tax the currently productive to keep you happy, donating, organizing and voting for him.   Never mind that we are now facing the fruit of Lyndon Johnson’s similar purchases.

But, alas, in that they keep good company with most of the rest of the country.

Let me clear it up for you…. the #1 problem our country faces is unproductive use of our resources.

It isn’t the deficit. It isn’t Al Qaida.  The biggest problem is ultimately US and how stupid we are.

Put another way, if the deficit was funding investments that would reap vast returns, then the deficit would be SMART.  The real problem is that the deficit is simply buying the votes of old people. That is productive for our political class, and for old people either too stupid or too callous to care about the damage they are causing.

The problem isn’t limited to government either. Sure, government wastes trillions of dollars. They buy old people votes. They buy regional votes with highways that go nowhere. They buy teacher union and female votes with vast and unproductive education spending increases.  

But the general public does it too.  They spend $5 bucks on lattes.  They spend $100K on an education that gets them a $20K a year job.   They buy huge houses and park 2 people in them. They refuse to save for retirement. In general, they mimic our government, albeit on a personally smaller scale.  They rack up debt that is consumption not investment. Stupid!

But… I don’t really care about controlling bad decisions made by individuals. They will pay the price soon enough and learn, we hope, to change their ways.

Government, however, has a unique ability to reach out into the FUTURE and pull in resources to fund current stupidity.

And that HAS TO STOP.

And IT WON’T.

So… what’s left?  Doom. Sorry, but that’s my view.  Feel free to disagree, but also feel free to tell me what is going to stop this sea of stupid people from ruining themselves and the future?

Individually I know they will stop. Because they will feel the pain. Collectively the picture isn’t so rosy.

By my estimate, this song, played live on BBC1, perfectly, represents about 150,000 hours of dedicated practice – or 17.1 years by the musicians involved.

The song’s style  isn’t really my normal fare.  It is good, no doubt, but what I’m drawn to is the expertise the performance represents. The effort. The dedication.

So much in life means time.  I often think of it that way.  A car represents some fraction of my work year. Taxes too.

So, for instance, when I see a soldier killed, I feel sadness at the loss of life, and potential future, but I also know that parents spent years of their lives preparing the soldier to be an adult.   The investment staggers the mind when considered cumulatively. When politicians kill they are really spending other people’s past and future time.  We really ought to include that investment when calculating the possible returns from our “wars”.

I’m not advocating some silly peace platform. I’m just suggesting that if you want to make the case for taking away my son’s future, and squandering my past investment,  you (the collective, government “you”),  better offer up a better reason that you’ve been doing lately.

As an adult, I’ve lived in the city, and I’ve lived on a farm, and I’ve lived in the burbs. They each have their charm, but I prefer the city on a personal level, and the burbs for better family environment.  Cities could have decent family environments, but most due to an unhealthy mix of corruption and culture, most don’t.

Some will see this picture as abhorrent “how could they live there”.  I see it and wouldn’t mind a few tweaks, such as a neighborhood shop or office area within walking distance of each home, say no more than 1/2 mile. That would be living.

Alas modern zoning, which is really driven by developer desires to cram as many houses as possible into a parcel of land, have created a huge swing of drive to here, drive to there, and pretty much made walking an impossible option for most Americans.

Too bad. It’s a nice way to get around.

I wouldn’t mind if where I lived would rezone so that investors could buy up forclosed houses and put in local offices, eateries and shops – right admidst  hundreds of other homes.   It is an interesting idea,  and others I suggested it to thought it would be cool. But it will never happen, as our “leaders”  lack the creativity, initiative, and frankly are often too bought and sold by developers, to consider anything bold and lifestyle driven.

This is a 1941 picture of German soldier, Josef Schultz, shortly before his death at the hands of his own comrades.

He refused to shoot Serbian civilians. After a quarrel with his NCO, he dropped his helmet and firearm, and walked to stand with the civilians. They were all shot.

His actions accomplished nothing. He died. The civilians died. The German Army clearly didn’t have our American Army concept of legal and illegal orders.

Should he have “worked within the system”? Should he have fired and missed? Who knows?  The details are lost to time. His actions inspire, but probably aren’t practical.

His result, however, is a clear message from the past, that dissenters to central authority end up on the wrong end of a gun.  Hence, we should be EXTREMELY reluctant to grant central, unquestionable authority of ANY kind.  The power will be abused.

Gold sure has been touted of late, and it is the next bubble. Well, one of the next bubbles.

But is gold “right”? It really depends on what problem you are trying to solve.

It has been seized before by the US government.  Remember, if you have it, they want it. Whether it is cash, gold, or time.

And if you have it in any form that isn’t physically in your safe at home, do you really “have it”?

To be safe, Rickards says you should take out your gold out of the banks before governments freeze physical holdings.

Sellers of gold, like Goldline for instance, say you should buy collectable coins, which were exempt from past seizures. But those are generally over priced and who knows if they will really be marketable.

I think practically about what problem I’m trying to solve. Gold cannot solve inflation, the government will keep you from using it to solve inflation.  They have before, they will again.  Well, it can, but only if you time getting off the train right.  But that is true of any inflation protection device.

Gold is basically an alternate currency. That is GOVERNMENT’s domain, and they jealously guard it. You go around buying stuff with gold and… well, eventually, you will get a visit from your local Fed.

I see two scenarios… one is that the government will forbid the use of gold, and shoot me if I’m found spending it. Or send troops to come get it.  The other is that others know I have gold and come over to steal it from me.  Unless, of course, I’m part of the government.  KGB officers, for instance, seemed to have plenty of US dollars even though they were denied “regular” Soviet citizens.

Assuming you are concerned about such “end of time” matters, or you have enough money to just be “safe not sorry”, then I’d recommend this instead of gold:

– food for a year
– water for a year, including filtration
– ammo for a year. Basic gun maintenance stuff as well.
– basic medical supplies for a year
– 2 major trauma kits, these handle gun shots and other major bleeding wounds
– basic hand tools and construction supplies. Hammers, nails, hand saws, screws, so forth.
– tarps. Light and when forced to evacuate, you’ve got shelter.

This is what I’ve got, except for the trauma kits, which I’m still trying to decide on which to get.

Those wanting an inflation hedge would use their money wiser to fund political efforts to restore a Constitutional low involvement government.  After all, anything you can think of, a government with no rules can take.

We arrived to find an unbelievable outpouring of support from her town, Lake Stevens, Washington. I’d never seen anything like it. The various kindnesses and generosities we encountered are too numerous to name. Literally hundreds of families all actively supported efforts to help my cousin’s family cope, including an overflowing memorial at the Lake Steven’s High School, fund raising, and an inspiring football game.  The Lake Steven’s community represents the America that I want to live in.

My wife had never been to the Pacific Northwest. So we took the chance afterwards to explore. We spent a day in Seattle, enjoying the vibrancy of the Pikes Market and surrounding downtown. We then ferried over to the beautiful San Juan Islands. After exploring San Juan Island we then drove down the coast, crossing over the massive Columbia River bay at Astoria, and then cut inland to Portland. Along the way we encountered invariably helpful, cheerful, people.

From Portland we took a circuitous route to Crater Lake National Park.  I’d heard it was one of the most beautiful parks in the country, and agree. Again, we met many  friendly, happy people. Usually because I’m happy to take photos for other people, and once people seem me doing it, other people ask me to run their camera too.

Cutting through the high mountains of Northern California, and into the farming communities, I felt I was in the “real” California. And that California would make a great country, or 3 or 4 great States.

Driving home yesterday through Nevada on Route 50, the “Lonliest Road in America”, and then cutting down on the “Extraterrestrial Highway”. We left a struggling Reno, and went across a flooded desert through towns that were clearly losing their struggle to exist.

We arrived home last evening, tired, and happy to see the kids and to rest in our temporary home.   From a flooded home, to two deaths in the family, a nearly dismembered finger, and the continuing economic and political uncertainty – it’s been a tough summer.  I’m ready for it to end, and for Fall to be a calm respite full of good news.

I agree with Victor Davis Hanson that our nation’s problems are solvable. I’d maintain that our problems will, in fact, be solved – one way or the other.  The market doesn’t care if you believe in it. It does what it does. You are welcome to do what you do and pay the consequence.

The problem is that the “solutions” could be quite onerous. That is really the choice we have to make. Will the solutions to our problems kill millions, take away the freedoms of hundreds of millions, and devolve our nation into regional states?

Or will we recognize the OPPORTUNITY we have as the only real remaining slightly free large country in the world?

We in turn can easily outdistance any country should we remain the most free, law-abiding, and economically open society as in our past. A race-gender-ethnic-blind meritocracy, equal application of the law, low taxes, small government, and a transparent political and legal system are at the heart of that renewal. America could within a decade become a creditor nation again, with a trade balance and budget surplus, drawing in the world’s talent and capital in a way not possible in the more inflexible or less meritocratic China, Japan, or Germany. Again that is our choice, not a superimposed destiny from someone else.

I  know which route I prefer.  Will we let the UAW, and NEA, public unions, and the current political class – all the special interests who think they can be a  comfortable “elite” in a failed US -  drag us down to fund their “specialness”. Or  will we tell them “hell no” and kick them to the curb?

The small pip of light known as the Tea Party may be grown into a bonfire that will save us from the harsher solutions.  Ultimately, which way we will go isn’t obvious. History, alas, is against us.