Dark night, cold chilling rain falling hard on me...

I am up too early, but weighed measured and medicated now. The garbage is out of the home and beside the curb. The muck and mud sucked at my boots and there are little rills of waters running in various directions in the yard, too many days of what west Texas needs more than us. This is the great NorthWest, and it is still Winter Wet. Cold wet. It continues to rain.

I have a Ron Paul meeting tonight, the Republican Party has contacted me and wants my lunch order for the caucus in Tacoma next weekend. Exciting, ponderously slow movement to making a Presidential election campaign. I have quit paying attention to the media coverage of what is going on... I could predict what they will key on and what they will say. I do think that the great orators of the 19th Century would not be able to use modern technology to get their messages out. Too many needed commercial interruptions (have you ever measured how much time is advertising? Even previews and hang on 'we will be right back' is a tease but advertising of things to come), and so the bites get to just nibbles of knowledge, and for the ObamaScare, 2700 pages of it - where are the Cliff Notes?

I spent some time yesterday working on my dry fire with my M1. As I ignored the Fox News behind me, should have had the Blues on instead, but wanted to know what is not going on. I thought seriously about cultures that ignore stupid behavior of themselves and how that happens. Look, Communist China, Soviet Union, British Empire to Commonwealth to what ever they are doing now. Seems the rival tribes of Afghanistan are truer to their cause and nature than most of the progressive folks. Change, it just isn't good enough, let us spend more money on our dreams.
Leftist Peace Symbol and the Right's ?

It is past time to bring them all home...

The politicians and their flunkies in Washington, DC, really don't have a clue - to include the professional 'Yes'men' of the senior ranks drifting around the Pentagon making things happen.

The disarming of our military for a briefing/photop in Afghanistan just shows it - we are not at war, not protecting anything and just spinning wheels wasting the troops time. NFO is right.

Celebration dinner with my wife, the woman in my

life. So, nice dinner, and she asked me, which were my favorite of the forty years. Put a man on the spot, so like a woman. It wasn't the time she hadn't kissed me good-bye as I went to work to make Iraq rethink its border disputes. That was not the way I wanted to spend that time. But the rest of them, they were all different and good - hard to remember a bad one. So many, how do they go so fast? I slept through them? Nah, I was there.

You start out with so little... how do we become so...

arrogant? Really, I was reminded by my wife that tomorrow is a day she would like me to remember and celebrate with her. Did I have any plans? Just to wonder where the forty years got away and why we aren't rich yet.

My parents hadn't been married twenty-five years yet when this picture was snapped. Their anniversary would be on the twenty-third and we would be back for it. My mother would be waiting for her fiftieth, her Golden anniversary, she was always waiting, but Dad and the Lord had other plans.

1972 I owned a used Pontiac Lemans, a 1948 flathead Harley-Davison, several hundred dollars in US Savings Bonds and a couple of hundred dollars in the bank, three rifles, three custom made knives and a job jumping out of airplanes and helicopters. The stuff dreams are built upon. I would make nine thousand dollars that year. Buy a new trailer to live in and a new car, a puppy and a television all on time. And some of the happiest years of my life, except for the bad parts. Isn't it always that way? For all the rest of you out there, I wish you all the best in your lives, and happily ever after.

Whom do you trust?

I have been thinking about the inability of the politicians to get it right, around the world - not just in America, and looking at History and how many die because they won't change although changing wouldn't have stopped the problem, which seemed to be the leadership. So looking at the enormous debt that the current and last few generations got us into as they fooled with money, power and projects. Who do you trust? The money says 'IN GOD WE TRUST". But we are a secular culture, which means we don't really trust God (as a people), we trust the government instead.

There is an idea, and those in dangerous businesses practice for it, that one must prepare for an emergency. Sitting on the 98th floor waiting for rescue only works in Hollywood movies if Steve McQueen is a Fire Captain. You should know where the exit is, you should know how to put on a life vest, you should know how to swim or tread water, you should know how to use a compass, you should know what is safe to eat, to drink, you should know how to build temporary shelter, treat shock and stop bleeding or clear the airway. There isn't a lot of time to think, one must act and having thought about acting before the emergency is a wonderful thing. How do you act in the emergency?

Perhaps I should think about how to know there is an emergency, there aren't always tornado alarms. The power grids seem to go out a bit too regularly, how many cases of batteries do you own, on the shelf ready to power the radios - why do you have so many radios that you aren't maintaining for that emergency? Oh, listening to the iPod, not the radio? Take it all away, break everything strip yourself of protection - what do you do first? Prayer is a good start to clear thinking. THEN ACT! The Federal and State governments will be around as soon as they have control of the media coverage of the events. They, the more power they have the sillier the answers - will shut down all air traffic for days, because they never trust the people to be more than a cause. Example, the Federal Government is making sure you have good food to buy, they watch and inspect it, but no one in that government hangs when someone dies from bad food - do they? I trust the farmer more about food production than the government. But then I am buying processed and prepared foods, because the system hasn't broken down - yet. I should know some local farmers or have more land?

Just know that the only people I can trust are the ones I can reach out and throttle if I am angry. I will never get that close to the President or most Congressfolks. Not that I would throttle anyone, I just want to have a conversation, an opinion, and a hand with the heavy lifting - being me I don't look for a hug, but have noticed that it works well often. Whom do you trust?

See what reading gets you....

Long ago, my mother made sure I liked books, stories and the Bible. So I had nursery rhymes and poetry, picture books and somewhere along there came Dr. Seuss and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street. Cartoons in the newspapers, comics books by Disney. I had it all, and it was never enough so I was always looking for more - adventures and stuff. I started Zane Grey, then found Tarzan, and jumped to John Carter of Mars. Which likely helped me into Science Fiction, when I started noticing busty babes on the pulp fictions I went right into Mike Hammer and others. No one told me that they were Westerns set in modern America.

Today I dragged my wife off to see John Carter by Disney, in 3D! Yeah, do I remember the story? Is the new movie faithful to the books? Well, it has been so long that I can't tell you, but like a Frazetta poster, it was true to the vision in my mind. Lots of fun and if I were to complain, it would be of the hero with four day beard growth and shaved (or waxed?) chest. But young people today think everyone is like that. Go see, it is a fun movie.

Dreams, waking from more bad dreams...

Army, in the field, trucks that need to get down the mountain dirt roads, no one in charge, lots of soldiers time up with stuff that are ready to leave and go to happier places. No drivers, and no one in charge, and there are no brakes that work. Two trucks get off the road and bounce down the hillside, losing everything and themselves. I get excited, jump into an empty drivers seat and stop one truck and feel like I should scream madly at someone, but end up waking up sweating ...

I feel like it is seven fat cows being eaten by seven lean ones, but it should have been Ron Paul jumping into the empty drivers seat and slowing the progress of the truck without brakes, which to me had to be the financial and government collapse of the United States of America. Although I am sure there are lots of people that would have jumped into the drivers seat and geared down and used the side of the hill to slow the truck to a stop... everyone knows how to fix American love affair with bigger, and better and borrowing more money to make everyone think we can make it back?

Nevermind, go back to sleep, someone else can take care of getting the truck off the mountain and everyone back home, right?