The Last Blog Post - "Don't Be Safe"

This is a tough one to write, for emotional, physical, and coordination reasons....
A few months ago, I started having problems driving, walking, and accomplishing basic tasks.  After a quick trip to the ER,I was diagnosed with some nasty brain tumors.
So this is it, folks.....
Starting this website has been one of the best decisions I've ever made.  I't's gotten me politically involved, and has earned me friends and readers all over the world.
Im' gonna try really hard not go get too maudlin or sentimental here....

For the last 20 years or so, I've been responsible for running my company's morning Production Meeting.  I never figured out why I was the one to do it.   Perhaps it's because I'm the guy who hates meetings the most, and I was always able to keep the thing moving along at a decent pace.

Several years ago, some of our owners went to a trade show that featured some presenters from Disney.
The Disney people said that their #1 priority was to "Be Safe".
Well, that's bullshit.
Their #1 priority is to bring happiness to families everywhere" (you can look it up -- it's in their mission statement).
You don't dress a teenager up like Tinkerbell and zipline her from Cindederella's Castle to the top of The Matterhorn every night if your #1 priority is to be safe.
That's what you do if you want to be awesome.
Anyway,because of the report on the Disney speakers,  I got into a rut of saying "Be Safe" at the end of every meeting  It was our Amen,our dismissal, and our Benediction.  .  If I could take a "Do Over" on anything I've done at work in the last few years, it would be to come up with another closing line to use at the end of that meeting.

People once told my father that if he ever started growing and irrigating rice on his farm, it would poison the land.  Because of his decision to go ahead with a new rice  crop instead of cotton and sobybeans, I got to see The Colisseum in Rome.  I got to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
Because Darrell Cooper Sr decided to have some "Entrepreneurial Seizures", I've had the glorious privilege of seeing the sun come up twice on the same day while flying over the Great Wall Of China.
So what should I have said for the last 20 years?
How about "Be Wise?"  "Be Cautious"?
I dunno.
But I'm now working with a very short clock, so to speak.  If I fit into the statistical norms, I've got anywhere from 15 to 18 months to be around.   I know that the first time I sat down with my daughter at a Blackjack table and saw her split 10's against a dealer Ace, that she would do just fine.  She was going to be ok.  She was going to terrify me, but she wasn't going to be held back by anything or anybody.
She will never (in TS Eliot
's phrase)  measure out her life with coffee spoons.  She's going to live it up to 11 every chance she gets.
So please don't ever, ever waste another minute of your wonderful life with "being safe"Take risks.
 Destroy your perrectly laid-out shop and put in a Specialty Department. (Hello Ray!!) Get involved in politics and put Mary Kelleher to work disrupting the most corrupt institution in Fort Worth  .Raise Hell.  Find some activists to associate with, and bang some pots and pans together in the street.  WIN the Fort Worth Gay Pride parade  and then wake up the nest morning to staff your booth at a gun rights show.  I promise you that if you ever get brain tumors everyone of of those beautiful people you meet will come see you in the hospital.
And yes, I'm very much aware that I'm one of the few people I know who has had to use a helicopter pilot as a designated driver.
That's part of the package.  (Yeah, there probably is some middle ground between getting drunk enough to see dead people and "Being safe".)
I'm writing this post with a head full of creepy-crawlies, and sorry for the lack of spelling, grammar, and coherence.
But folk, please don't ever, ever, ever waste your time in being too safe.
You know that idea you have of a better way to fix broken windshields?  Do it.  Start that business.  That book you've always wanted to write?  Those earrings you want to start designing to sell online?
Do it now.  Yeah, people might laugh.  Who cares?  There will always be people willing to wait in line to laugh at your ambitions.  Let them be the ones to be safe.
Whether you know it or not, you too, are working with a short clock.
If you can to one thing right now for me or for yourself, don't be safe.
It's been real.
Don't be safe.

In Praise Of Mario Cuomo

Go here to enjoy Samizdata's Perry Metzger opening a can of whoop-ass and sprinkling it on the grave of Mario Cuomo.  "I encourage all to mourn his loss in whatever manner they feel appropriate."

Good job, sir. 

 

A Dead Statesman - Rudyard Kipling

A Dead Statesman


I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

 - Rudyard Kipling

I see dead people. But not many from marijuana use.

I found this link on Samizdata. 

In the year 2010 in the U.K., there were 81,400 tobacco-related deaths and 8,644 alcohol-related deaths. 

Take out the big two (that have been subsidized by the U.S. government), and you're left with these, the drugs that are produced or distributed by the Mexican Drug Lords:

The numbers drop even further if you eliminate Poly-Drug deaths, (snorting coke while drinking Jim Beam, mixing any two in an unwise combination, etc.)  Call it 900 people. 

Here's a handy chart:

Please go here and read the whole thing, and to gather zingers like this one: 

According to the ONS data, in 2010 there were more helium deaths than cannabis, ecstasy, mephedrone and GHB related deaths combined. Helium is an inert gas which kills when people use helium to deprive themselves of oxygen. The recent explosion in helium deaths from under two per year until 2008 to 32 last year appears to be due to it’s recent promotion as a form of suicide.

In the meantime, here's how many Mexicans (most of them innocent civilians) have been slaughtered in the four years since Mexican President Felipe Calderon decided to participate in the War On Drugs four years ago:

34,612

Here's how many Mexicans died in the Drug War in 2010, the year in which 900 died from drug abuse in the U.K.:

15,273

When we decided to end prohibition of alcohol, the violence on the U.S./Canadian border ended. Alcholism didn't increase.  Corruption decreased. 
Yeah, people still died from alcohol abuse, just like they were already dying from alcohol abuse.
We could do the same thing tomorrow, and save thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
We could reduce the pain and suffering of cancer patients. 
But thanks to the Narc lobby, the prison lobby, and yes, the alcohol lobby, we won't do it. 

   
Mr. Obama, please end your dirty little war. 

The pic of the float from El Salvador's Anti Obama Drug War protest came from here. 
The conclusions about the massive waste of resources in the UK Drug War are terrifying, and the UK Drug War ain't nothing like our Drug War in the U.S. 

Kim Jong-Il is dead !

I've been swamped at work for about two weeks, and have gotten behind. 

So....

KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !  KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !  KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !  KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !  KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !  KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD ! KIM JONG-IL IS DEAD !

Ah..., that felt good.  I don't believe in any of the various Hells, but in the words of my friend Denny, I kinda hope they invent one just for that Totalitarian bastard. 

How bad a dictator was Kim?  He was so bad that even our State Department wouldn't give him any support, training, or money, despite their willingness to hand out money to every other despot who asked.  Now that's a bad dictator. 

Let us all hope that Kim is closely followed by Fidel Castro. 

I'm not the only person to post this bit o' greatness from "Team America: World Police" in honor of this occasion:



The Kim goes to hell cartoon came from here. 

Children: The Ultimate Renewable Military Resource !!

From Big Daddy John Spivey's Facebook page:

Hey GOP buddies! 6,327 US Soldiers dead;
22,490 US Soldiers Wounded;
$4 Trillion total price tag (just for the wars);
700+ International US Military Installations;
$711 Billion Defense Budget (2011)...
If you think we should or even CAN continue on this way, please don't vote for Ron Paul.
He's the only one with plans to completely reverse this.
I guess we can always have more kids and print more money!

"Nobody Messes With Joe" - But Dead people don't count

WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says.
Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks keep going out even after the former employees pass away and the deaths are not reported, according to the report this week from the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, Patrick McFarland.

In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father's death in 1971. The payments—totaling more than $515,000—were only discovered when the son died in 2008.

Last year, government investigators found that more than 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each from the massive economic recovery package went to people who were either dead or in prison.

This video is only 37 seconds long. Worth watching.

Fred Bastiat Quote Of The Day

“Poor people!” he lamented of the duped French populace in the same tumultuous year [1848]. “How much disillusionment is in store for them! It would have been so simple and so just to ease their burden by decreasing their taxes; they want to achieve this through the plentiful bounty of the state and they cannot see that the whole mechanism consists in taking away ten to give it back eight, not to mention the true freedom that will be destroyed in the operation!” - Frederic Bastiat

From The Coyote Blog

Picture of Fred Bastiat The Dachshund and Fred Bastiat The French Economist came from my dining room table. 

Barack Freakin' Obama just wrote the wrong damn year in the damn guestbook at Westminster Freakin' Abbey

He should not be in charge of your healthcare.
He shouldn't be in charge of sending your kids to die in Middle Eastern sandboxes.
He shouldn't be in charge of deciding who can and can't marry, what drugs you can and can't purchase or consume, what guns you can own, or what food you should be allowed eat. 
He shouldn't be allowed to spend your money bailing out auto companies, stimulating the economy, swapping your cash for someone else's clunkers, or investing in green energy. 
No one else should be given this much power, either.  Not George Bush, not Ron Paul, not Saddam Hussein, not Harry Reid.  They are all normal people, just like you and me. 

Barack Obama is a generic, normal human that people want to turn their lives over to.  I'll never, ever understand it.  This is the man who gave the Queen Of England an iPod pre-loaded with his speeches. 

Obama doesn't even know what freakin' year it is. 

This is how Barack Obama signed the damn guestbook at Westminster Freakin' Abbey. 

24 May 2008

And yes, he's the one who wrote the wrong year. 

Barack Obama makes "Larry The Cable Guy" look like Cary Grant. 

British Hospitals - People are dying to get in !!

From The Manchester Evening News comes a preview of what we'll experience with our new ObamaCare© medical system:

Two patients died after being left waiting in ambulances outside an over-stretched hospital.
The patients, believed to have been in their 80s, couldn’t get into the Royal Oldham Hospital for seven and 20 minutes respectively.

They were assessed by ambulance crews as ‘very sick’ and were both suspected of having suffered heart attacks.
The A and E department was so busy that all but the most urgent cases were being sent to other hospitals at the time. All five resuscitation beds at Oldham were full.
The two patients were assessed and treated by a casualty doctor and senior nurse in the ambulances.

It is understood neither actually had suffered a heart attack by the time they were admitted – although both later died at the hospital. One died in the resuscitation unit the following day and the other three days after being admitted to a ward.
A probe has been launched after ambulance chiefs reported the incident to regional health authority NHS North West.

Ah, the joys of Socialism.  From the comments, someone named Jay Tilzey writes:

After 35 working years of never bothering the NHS (but paying my contributions) I now need it and am appalled at how badly I am being let down by it. Hospitals are depressing, overcrowded, untidy places, I am rushed in and out of appointments (having waited months for them) without being given a chance to express myself, and find myself almost crippled with pain because of budgetary restraints or overloaded doctors (who should, nonetheless, ensure that their patients are not affected). It is no consolation to me, nor doubtless to the families of these unfortunate people, that many people have "positive experiences".

Only to be rebutted by someone calling himself Bolton Lad:

Thank you for insulting my many thousands of colleagues. It is lovely to know that our hard work and determination isn't appreciated anymore. Next time you need emergency treatment we'll just kick you out the door and you can crawl along to The Alexandra who will turn you away as they don't want blood on their carpet.

The main problem with the NHS is it is used as a political football and every time there is a Goverment change they feel the need to tinker with it. Just leave us alone and let us get on with what we were set up to do. Labour's reorganisations were only just settling in repairing years of cronic under investment and now the new kids on the block are making us change again. Is it any wonder beuracracy is rife.

Sorry, Bolton Lad, but for politicians, that's not a bug, that's a feature.  If you socialize medicine, it's going to be a political football.  Just like education, the roads, the sewers and the dog pound.  Why bother getting elected if you can't kick the political football?  Any time you turn something over to a gang of beauty contest winners, you surrender your control over it, and it becomes a political football.   


Seriously.  Would it not be best to keep the government out of medical care, turn it into a free market system, and let private charities take care of the rest? 


And to readers in the U.S.....  What levels of expertise do you think John Bolton, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Bachmann, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman and Charlie Rangel are going to bring to our medical system when ObamaCare© kicks in?  Those characters are going to make the British look like Seal Team 6. 

At this point, people are seeking waivers by the hundreds and hundreds (with an astounding number from Ms. Pelosi's district.)  What do you think will happen when your broken leg becomes a political football? 

One last thing about the picture above...I was looking for a good picture of the Royal Oldham Hospital, and found it here, in an article about The Royal Oldham's staff wheeling a man outside to die of a brain hemorrhage because they thought he was drunk. 

Osama Bin Laden has gone on to collect his reward

Yep.  They got the s.o.b. sometime last night, and he now sleeps with the fishes. 
He is now about to lift the veils and burkhas of his first couple of virgins (with 70 more to go). 

The picture of Gretrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas came from www.FamousLiteraryLesbians.com.

Hope. Change. Fewer payouts to dead people.

They're boasting about this and having a public signing ceremony. 

President Barack Obama on Thursday signed legislation intended to slash by $50 billion the taxpayer money improperly paid to dead people, fugitives and those in jail who shouldn't be getting benefits.


But that goal, if achieved, would not even halve the $110 billion made in such payments last year.

Well, it is a start.  Before they stop giving away money to undeserving contractors, bomb-makers, consultants, freeloaders, Afghan warlords, stimulus recipients, agribusiness millionaires, Wars On _______ (fill in the blank), Wall Street, Acorn, car manufacturers, and other undeserving living people, they have to stop giving money to dead people. 

We're starting to see some of the basic competence we were promised a couple of years ago. 

Photo Opportunity

Does anyone in Fort Worth know the location of one of these billboards?

A mortuary transport service owner named Donald Short was ordered by the courts to pay for them as part of a corpse abuse plea bargain deal.
I have a deep, genuine need to climb onto one of these billboards and have my picture taken while holding a bucket of white paint and a brush. If anyone has an old hearse that I could rent for the day, I'd like to park it underneath. It would draw a crowd, don't you think?

Corpse Wheeled to Check-Cashing Store Leads to 2 Arrests

See Comments below....These guys deserve a medal for trying to save $355.00 from the grasp of the government beast.

Corpse Wheeled to Check-Cashing Store Leads to 2 Arrests
By BRUCE LAMBERT and CHRISTINE HAUSER
Even for the once-notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, it may have been a first: Two men were arrested on Tuesday after pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check-cashing store to cash the dead man’s Social Security check, the police said.
When Virgilio Cintron, 66, died at his apartment at 436 West 52nd Street recently, his roommate and a friend saw an opportunity to cash his $355 check, the police said.
They did not go about it the easy way, the police said, choosing a ruse that resembled the plot of “Weekend at Bernie’s,” a film about two young men who prop up their dead employer to pretend that he is alive.
“Hell’s Kitchen has a rich history,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, “but this is one for the books.”
There was no sign of foul play in Mr. Cintron’s death, he added.
The roommate, James P. O’Hare, and his friend, David J. Dalaia, both 65 and unemployed, placed Mr. Cintron’s body in the chair and wheeled it around the corner, south along Ninth Avenue on Tuesday afternoon, the police said. The men parked the chair with the corpse in front of Pay-O-Matic at 763 Ninth Avenue, a check-cashing business that Mr. Cintron had patronized.
They went inside to present the check, but a clerk said Mr. Cintron would have to cash it himself, and asked where he was, the police said.
“He is outside,” Mr. O’Hare said, indicating the body in the chair, according to Mr. Browne.
The two men started to bring the chair inside, but it was too late.
Their sidewalk procession had already attracted the stares of passers-by who were startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up, the police said. The late Mr. Cintron was dressed in a faded black T-shirt and blue-and-white sneakers. His pants were pulled up part of the way, and his midsection was covered by a jacket, the police said. While the two men were inside the check-cashing office, a small crowd had gathered around the chair. A detective, Travis Rapp, eating a late lunch at a nearby Empanada Mama saw the crowd and notified the Midtown North station house.
Police officers and an ambulance arrived as the two men were trying to maneuver the corpse and chair into the check-cashing office.
The two men were taken into custody and questioned. The police said they were considering charging them with check-cashing fraud.
Mr. Cintron’s body was taken to a hospital morgue. The medical examiner’s office said its preliminary assessment was that he had died of natural causes within the past 24 hours.

This leads to the question: If we can continue paying subsidies to farmers for years after they're dead, how come these guys got arrested? Mr. Cintron wasn't going to use the money, and the government woulda wasted it....