Blago now Obama next?

Ding dong the witch is dead!

Which old witch?

Blagojevich.


Oh, joy. One of the blood-suckers is down. Who is next? The Mayor of Chicago? The President of the United States of America?

All these rotten Illinois pols need a good thorough reaming out by the FBI. Can ANYTHING good come out of Chicago politics?

Update: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/18/whistleblower-hits-obama-friends-appraisal/

Who benefits, Rich or Poor

William Briggs posts an excellent analysis of the growth of government spending, and asks who benefits. Well worth a read, and the comments are useful too. Click on the title above.

GM Bailout

Have not posted in a long while, busy writing a story. My kids like it anyway...


So GM wants a bailout. Well. Of course they do.

But that would just lead to more of the same same. What GM really needs is to go belly-up. Then they can reorganise, dump, or at least curb the union, and maybe make cars that can compete on price with the imports.

It is the union that is killing the US car makers. No honest person can deny that.

But we have elected a socialist president and have a socialist congress. So, expect the gov to fork over big cash in exchange for power over the industry.

Return of the Ice Age?

Are we readying for a return to the glacial age?

Walk down any city street and tell me the typical modern woman doesn't look a lot like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines

I suspect the cooling is on and the human race is getting ready. All us skinnies better move south or prepare for extinction. It"s in our genes.

Is Sarah Palin a Lawyer?

Wiki doesn't mention a law degree, just journalism. Hmm.

Obama and Biden are lawyers.

McCain? Have to check. (Checked. Nope)

Be nice to have a no-lawyer ticket, wouldn't it.

Russia, Georgia, Israel?

Just a weird thought I had. Nobody is going to put out any effort to save Georgia.

Who could? Europe is a genderless dog. The US has other things going on (sorry Georgia, too busy right now, call back in 09).

But Israel, now. Ready for war? Check.
Ready for a long-distance air war? Check.
Experienced against Russian equipment? Check.
Reasons to dislike Russia? Check.

OK it is just a fantasy. Israel can't really afford to be distracted right now. But I wish, I wish...

Soros at it again?

Follow the link. Now who do we know, a speculator, who doesn't mind impoverishing whole countries, who has an abiding hatred of conservatives and is ready spend millions in search of an electoral victory for Democrats?

George Soros, of course. A man wanted in Europe, hated in Asia, sole cause of vast misery (not an exaggeration). A man who simply does not care how much pain he causes, if it advanced global socialism, and of course his own pocketbook.

My bet is the high gas prices are due at least in part on Soros and his cronies speculating in oil, hoping to cause both their own enrichment and a Democrat victory.

Heller. Hot time in Chicago

Mayor Daley is unhappy. Ooooh, so sad. I just can not wait to see the fireworks when the fallout from Heller hits Chicago. Will Chicago be forced to rejoin the United States of America? Seems to hard to believe after all the long years of communist rule there.

Heller is a tiny, baby step in the direction of recovering our lost rights. Someday..... someday Illinois will rejoin the US in the 21st Century.

Currently only Wisconsin and Illinois still have the antiquated illiberal laws against gun ownership and use. New York and California and a few others are close, with vastly restricted 'rights'. But in the main the US has made great advances toward more liberal gun laws.

Stimulus Check. Hurrah.

Got my $1200 today. Oh, glorious. Immediately wrote a $1600+ check to pay the first installment of my real estate taxes. So I am stimulating the local school teachers, certainly, but not much myself.

It really hurts when I look at the long list of 'services' and especially at the list of various pensions we all are paying for. Pensions are over 1/4 of the total tax bill.

Hmm, seems to me most small towns have volunteer-staffed libraries. And don't get me started on the Taj-Mahal new library they are building right now. Who knows how many new staff they will be demanding to run the place.

The government at all levels certainly seems to hate low-income people.

Violets

I mowed one quarter of my lawn today. I usually do half at a time but am still tired from the overtime this week. I also walked the back lawn looking for thistles.

I found lots of violets blooming. There have been for two weeks now, but right now they are blooming in great bunches. So beautiful, tiny and perfect.

There seem to be three varieties, a very deep purple that blooms in full sun, and a light purple and a white that prefer shade.

I have seen vari-colored purple and white violets, but don't have any of those in my yard. I will have to see if I can find any at my Dad's place and transplant some. In the woods back of his place there are also very delicate yellow violets that I only find in deep shade. Be nice to get some of those too.

I foumd a pretty orange wildflower I don't know the name of. I put some seeds out last year, maybe it is a holdover.

Of course I also looked over on my neighbor's lawn. Nope, no flowers except a few puny dandelions that survived the last herbicide attack, just last week.

My strawberries look great this year too, lots of flowers and already some fruit setting. The raspberries also look great, but the lone blackberry vine barely survived the winter, just a few green leaves. I am thinking of digging up some wild blackberries and planting them. No worries about them surviving!

my new house

I listed a home for sale this weekend. A very nice 3 or 4 bedroom ranch in Rockford.Only $100,000, very competitive price for the neighborhood. The seller knows the roof needs replacement, and knocked $5000 off the top of what he wanted, to cover a roof replacement.

I listed it formally today, and already have had one showing!

Poverty and Debt, don't they just love them

Democrats want us to be poor and in debt. Republicans don't much care one way or the other. Neither is on the side of the little guy. At least Republicans are not usually an active enemy, the way Democrats are.

Look at the facts. What does the government encourage, and what discourage. Debt is encouraged. What is most peoples' biggest tax deduction? The mortgage. We are encouraged to take on more and bigger debt.

What is discouraged? Savings and investments that pay returns. Do your taxes this year? Have any investments? Pay a big tax on any gains, don't you?

All this combined to make it a lot tougher for the average person to get ahead. Debt dragging our heels, taxes a head-wind.

I recently started working a wage-paying job, for the first time in many years. Just looking at my Social Security and Medicare payments makes me sick. If I had control of that money it would be invested, or used to buy insurance. What a joke that I have to pay all the leeches in Washington for the at best potential and minuscule benefits they promise to someday return to me.

Besides all this, Democrats insist that our kids be given the worst of possible educations, the public schools.

Democrats hate people and want the worst for them. Republicans just want to be left alone to enrich themselves. What other conclusion can there be?

Politics

Pity the poor Democrat voter. All their 'man-of-the-people' candidates are revealed as nothing but run of the mill pols.

Pity the poor Republican voter. Same-same.

Mr. Obama. What a work of art. He has even managed to make Hillery look like she has the common touch, and I would never have thought that possible.

Can anyone name a single accomplishment that Obama has done? With all his talent and brains? (Getting elected is an accomplishment of sorts, Chicago-style).

Ouch!

Dropped a heavy steel rack on my fingers last night. I got real lucky, just a bruise and some blood. Washed it, bandaged it and went back to work. Even with the hour or so off I spent getting it taken care of and the mandatory safety committee meeting I managed to move more product than all but 5 of my co-workers.

I got lucky. I could be missing a finger-tip right now.

New Fruit

Whatever happened to tangerines? When I was a kid they were little things, all wrinkly with the skin loose, very easy to peel.

I bought some the other day and the skin was thin and pretty easy to peel, but nothing like they used to be.

And besides that, modern tangerines don't have much flavor. They still more or less taste the same, but the sharp tangerine flavor is very weak.

Fruit can change. Funny. Grapefruit are a lot sweeter than they used to be too. Used to be we put spoonfuls of sugar on them just to make them sweet enough to eat. Does anyone still do that?

One of the nice things about traveling to other countries is sampling the fruit. Most tropical countries have unique varieties of citrus we never get. Japan has dozens, maybe hundreds of different fruits that can't be called oranges, nor tangarines, nor grapefruits. Most of them are pretty good, and not as bland as American fruits.

Self-Sabotage

Link above is to The Smallest Minority.

I work with people on the low end of the employment ladder. Either young people just out of school who are just getting started, or older people who are winding down, and those who just can't do better for themselves. There are also some of us in the middle who for whatever reasons have to take a job below what our education and work history would suggest.

I started last December with a group of 26. We went through orientation together and started working 3 days later. Now, remember, about a third of applicants are sent packing before they even start, not being able to pass the drug test.

It wasn't long before people started dropping out. The work is tough, physically demanding. The pattern is similar, first someone misses a day, then comes back. Then they miss another day, or two, and come back. Then they miss again and come back long enough to be told not to bother coming in again.

Why? Excuses range from being in jail to having to go to Chicago to see their kids to being sick. All legitimate excuses. If it happens once.

But the people who come to work and do their jobs do it in spite of problems. The people who take time off always seem to have one more reason to take time off.

The difference is in attitude. I can see it day by day on the job. It isn't hard to figure out, working alongside someone, if he is going to stick it out or just quit.

This job is no piece of cake. The pay is not high and the work is hard. But the benefits are what you expect of any large, successful American company. Not too bad, with insurance, dental, vision etc. A man can make a decent living here for his family, if not a really high-class one. And chances to move on to less demanding work, and higher-paid positions are plentiful, if you can just get through the first six-month trial period.

The difference is mental. I see guys in their 50s working along side young bucks just out of high school. I see skinny young women doing the work. Some people just don't want to work hard, even knowing that six months they can get out and move up to better pay and easier (physically) work.

The cold reality is that there are people who would work even if they were not paid, and their are those who won't work even if paid.

New Listing!

I have not been posting here much recently. Just too busy with my two jobs.

I listed a very nice house last week. If you are looking for a home in Rockford Illinois check this one out.

5 bedrooms, fireplace, in the woods. Click on the title above to see the property. $250,000.

Stupid People and the Minimum Wage

Some jobs it just isn't worth paying people to do, even if it were nice they be done. In my shipping job we have to move pallets weighing up to 2000 pounds. Those heavy ones are moved with fork-lifts, but some not much lighter we have to move using muscle power and pallet jacks.

The floor is very smooth, polished concrete, because the wide, low wheels of the pallet jacks hang up on any tiny little obstruction. Like a little wood chip or lost nail off the pallets.

On slow nights we have time to sweep the floors, so the pallet jacks can move smoothly. Just one little wood chip can bind up the jack wheel and bring you to a dead halt. This costs time, efficiency and money. Plus it is exhausting to the workers having to back up the jack and then get it moving forward again. With a dirty floor this goes on all night long, over and over again.

It comes down to do we lose time sweeping, or lose time moving product on a dirty floor.

Hillary Clinton wants to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour. How nice that she is concerned for the wages of the intelligent and sound bodied among us. She does not care about those of sub-normal intelligence and those with handicaps.

My company simply can not afford to hire anyone who is less than fully able. No company can.

I talk with everyone who is willing to talk with me, including the janitorial staff. Now, these people are not very bright. They are of low-normal intelligence. No amount of training and schooling would make them able to become high-powered executives. But they are physically and mentally 'normal'.

But what about all those people who are not even normal? They have two choices right now, either they work at some sort of fake charity job, or they don't work at all.

And no sputtering now about a 'living wage'. Few really dumb people have to support themselves. Either their families subsidise them, or the government does. But is it fair to them that they have to work at fake jobs their whole lives, never really contributing anything to their families or the greater society?

It does not take a really smart person to sweep floors. There are dozens of useful jobs going undone where I work. Jobs that it just is not worth paying anyone minimum wage to do, even though the jobs do have real value.

The minimum wage is a killer of hope for the less able among us. Have some sympathy, Hillary! Think for a moment of those who did not have all the advantages you have had in life. Show some concern for the weakest among us.

Obama and Lincoln

Listening to NPR today and heard them asking three candidates their favorite former presidents.

Rather revealing. Fred Thompson mentioned George Washington for his integrity. McCain mentioned Lincoln, TR, and Truman, for their guts and energy. OK, not surprising choices given their messages on the campaign trail.

But the most revealing was Obama. He said only Lincoln. His reason? Lincoln did not attack his political opponents. Huh? Obama is simply ignorant. Lincoln sent federal agents to close opposition newspapers. He had people arrested and detained and denied Habeus Corpus simply for opposing him. The list goes on of Lincoln's oppressive activities against Northern political enemies.

If these choices reflect real opinions and not just campaign rhetoric then Obama is a dangerous man. I suppose he is just ignorant and poorly read in history. The alternative is scary.

In either case Obama is not competent or qualified to be President of the United States.

Made in Japan

I work in a large distribution center for a big retailer. We get thousands of products through every night. One interesting thing I see is the countries where things are made. China, of course is the biggest. Lots from the US too, and some occasionally from India, Thailand, Italy and a few others.

I have yet to se a product made in Japan. A lot of things from Japanese companies, but not made in Japan. China, of course.

I am old enough to remember when Japan was well on its way to conquering the world. Now they seem sadly behind the times. I lived there for some 15 years, and I am not surprised by this. For the last decade Japanese companies have been transfering production to China and other cheap-labor countries.

Lets keep this in mind when hearing pundits bewailing the rise of China. China has an interesting set of self-made problems, not the least of which is its unbalanced population. They will age fast.

Fred Thompson

Well, it is late in the game, but I have to admit to preferring Fred Thompson. None of the others are anywhere near conservative enough or libertarian enough to interest me. Click the link above to find out how to donate to Fred.

Fred faces some unique problems. He is too much like what Reagan claimed to be. We have to remember that Reagan was hated not only by the liberal left but also disliked by Republican insiders. He won in spite of the party, not because of it that first time around. Then of course they all made like vultures and began circling around hoping to tear off their own hunks of meat.

Fred is also being ignored by the party and by the press. They all hope he will just fade away.

I have never had a chance to vote for a presidential candidate I really liked. I hope to this time around.

Recent Low Posting

A death in the family.

Race Realtions, Real World

My new job brings me into contact with a lot of people. I have been interested to observe how the different races are interacting. First, there are very very few Hispanics and only two Asians in the company. I don't know why that should be, I was expecting to find lots of Hispanics.

So the two groups are mainly Whites and Blacks, ranging in age from 18 to about 60, and the full educational scale.

In school Blacks and Whites tended to segregate themselves. Separate tables at lunch, separate frats and sororities. I hung out a bit with a few blacks because I was on the track team.

But in the real world I don't see much of that segregation. My 'team' sits together at lunch, All ages and both Blacks and Whites together. And the other tables are the same.On the job we do the same work, side by side.

Now, this is small town Mid-West. Are things different in the big cities? If you read the newspapers you would think so, from all the race-war articles about provocations like racial slurs and nooses and the like.

Most of these seem to involve schools, either staff or students. Professors mouthing racist slogans in class inciting kids to stupidity.

In the real world things are not really that bad.