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.

Barack Obama's Writing Tips

David Maraniss has a new Barack Obama bio coming out on June 19th. 

According to Maraniss, a friend sent Obama a manuscript for editing, and Obama wrote back with five tips:

1) "Careful about too many adverbs, particularly describing how people speak (Paul asked disbelievingly, etc.). It can be cumbersome and a bit intrusive on the reader."

2) "Resist the temptation of easy satire. ... Good satire has to be a little muted. Should spill out from under a seemingly somber situation."

3) "Try to get the basic stats on the characters out of the way early {Paul was 24} so that you can spend the rest of the story revealing character."

4) "Think about the key moments in the story, and build tension leading to those key moments."

5) "Write outside your own experience. ... I find that this works the fictive imagination harder."

A lot of this meshes with what Stephen King and Elmore Leonard have said in their writing books (On Writing and Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules Of Writing).  Death to adverbs.  Leave out the parts that most people skip.  Mute it a little - don't tell everything you know. 

"Since this is great writing advice, I won't mention Obama's reliance on Rule #5,"  said The Whited Sepulchre, regretfully. 
"Why not?" asked the reader, curiously.
"Because the satire would be too easy," said The Whited Sepulchre, indignantly.  "We've all suffered because Obama has been writing outside his own experience for the last four years." 

Helpful Advice

Never go online to ask for proof...

If you really don't want something to be proven. 

Some tax advice for Stephen King

Here's one of my typing heroes, Stephen King, on the tax code, compliments of a link from Don Surber:

Some of the highlights:

Now you might say, what are you doing up there? Aren’t you rich? The answer is: thank God, yes. Because I grew up poor. I lived in a family where my mother asked donated commodities from a Republican administration and got turned down. That’s where I came from. And you know what, as a rich person I pay 28% tax.

What I want to ask you is why am I not paying fifty?

The answer, Mr. King, is that you have chosen to pay less.  Just like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Michael Moore, Harry Reid all pay less than they could.  Why do they pay less than they could? 

Because none of them are idiots, and because all of them pay accountants to ensure that they pay less. 
Stephen King, unless he's a total idiot, has a tax advisor.  This person works very hard to see to it that Stephen King's money isn't wasted. 

If Stephen King wants to pay more, he can write a check to:

Gifts to the United States

U.S. Department of the Treasury
Credit Accounting Branch
3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D
Hyattsville, MD 20782

In defense of Rand Paul

Within 48 hours, Kentucky Republican senatorial candidate Rand Paul has managed to 1) attack the now-venerated 1964 Civil Rights Act, and 2) defend the now-villainous British Petroleum Company. 
Well, maybe he'll be more subtle in the future. 

Here's one of the transcripts of what Paul did and didn't say, according to The Wall Street Journal:

"What I've always said is, I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would have--if I was alive at the time, I think--had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism," he said in response to a first question about the act.



"You would have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater?" asked an interviewer.


"I think it's confusing in a lot of cases in what's actually in the Civil Rights Case (sic)," Paul replied. "A lot of things that were actually in the bill I'm actually in favor of. I'm in favor of--everything with regards to ending institutional racism. So I think there's a lot to be desired in the Civil Rights--and indeed the truth is, I haven't read all through it, because it was passed 40 years ago and hadn't been a real pressing issue on the campaign on whether I'm going to vote for the Civil Rights Act."
 
Here's his take on the public vs. private property portions of the act:
 
Paul explained that he backed the portion of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public places and institutions, but that he thinks private businesses should be permitted to discriminate by race.



"I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I'm all in favor of that," he said. "I don't like the idea of telling private business owners. . . ."
 
And then, in another interview:
 
Interviewer: But under your philosophy, it would be OK for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?



Paul: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part--and this is the hard part about believing in freedom--is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example--you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things. . . . It's the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.
 
Paul has said elsewhere that his preference for ending segregation would be through boycotts, shaming, and other forms of peer pressure. 
 
What Rand Paul should have said, of course, is that he loves, no, he actually adores the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its entirety, including the punctuation, and that he sleeps with a copy of it under his pillow. 
That is the only sensible answer for a politician to give.  
The distinction between "government" and "private" property is lost on most voters. 
Private property owners are free to say "No shoes, no shirt, no service".  Others have signs up that state that they reserve the right to refuse service for any reason. 
If it is your castle, you really should be able to refuse entry to anyone you want to refuse: left-handers, Okies, blacks, whites, Palin supporters, or people who think To Kill A Mockingbird is overrated.
And the left-handers, Okies, blacks, whites, Palinites, and Harper Lee fans should be free to boycott your ass and encourage all their friends to do the same.  
 
As far as the effectiveness of the CRA of '64 goes, my public school classes at A.W. James Elementary school in Drew, Mississippi, were de facto segregated until 1969.   
My doctor's office in Merigold, Mississippi, had segregated waiting rooms (hello, Westerfields !) until the Doctor retired sometime in the mid-1970's. 
 
What changed everything?  Simple economics.  Boycotts.  Shaming.  The same remedies that Paul (foolishly, but truthfully) proposed in his interviews (as if he could go back in time to '64, and vote as a two-year-old senator).  People generally don't move to places that discriminate unfairly just for the hell of it.  And they eventually stop shopping there. 
 
What would have worked better for Paul would be to ignore the Bill's attacks on property rights and say "I support the goals of the Act, if not some of the wording.  I especially support the provisions that ended the Democrat party's vile segregationist practices.  When this bill came to Congress, there were Democrat politicians standing in the front doors of public schools and universities.  Racist, Yellow-Dog Democrats were setting attack dogs loose on citizens who merely wanted to use public transportation that their taxes paid for." 
 
Then remind the country that when the Act came up for a vote in '64, three-fourths of the "nay" votes in the House Of Representatives came from Democrats.  
Remind the country that 80% of the "nay" votes in the Senate came from Democrats, and that those voting "nay" included Al Gore's Daddy, plus  a former Ku Klux Klan Community Organizer named Robert Byrd, who, last I checked, is still a Democrat Senator representing the subsidy hawgs of West Virginia. 
 

Moving onward through the fog ! !

 

Here's the British Petroleum portion of the Rand Paul/George Stephanopoulosformerclintonadvisor interview:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you don’t want to get rid of the EPA?

PAUL: No, the thing is is that drilling right now and the problem we’re having now is in international waters and I think there needs to be regulation of that and always has been regulation. What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, you know, “I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.” I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I’ve heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I’ve met a lot of these miners and their families. They’re very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, you believe that the regulation of BP was adequate?

PAUL: I don’t know exactly what the regulation of BP is. I think there’s hundreds of pages of regulation of drilling in the ocean and I think most of that’s justified. I think we’ll have to figure out from this accident, is there anything that could have beend one to prevent it? What can we do in the future to make sure that it doesn’t happen again? So, I think we use logic. We use objective facts. And yeah, we try to go forward. Nobody wants this to happen. I love the beautiful beaches down in the panhandle of Florida and nobody wants to see oil washing up on those white sand beaches. 

All of that sound plenty vague to me, but if you pull the "shit happens" quotes out of context, and ignore the point he's trying to make about our Nutcase-In-Chief trying to demagogue the issue, you won't hear anything except a defense of BP. 
I would still trust Rand Paul to protect the beaches of Kentucky.

As an officer in the Libertarian Party, I can't endorse any non-Libertarians, but I can give some advice.

Someone in Paul's campaign needs to go to the Louisville, Kentucky, Border's or Barnes & Noble, and get Dr. Paul a copy of Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals. 

Then Dr. Paul needs to go to that Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, the one where Thomas Merton lived, and spend two weeks there, studying Alinsky's book, the playbook that the Statists have used since the day it was published. 

When Paul leaves the monastery, he will perfectly understand what has just happened to his campaign.  He will understand how to avoid those situations in the future.  He will understand that the public cannot understand nuance or ambiguity.  He will understand that whoever controls the narratives about the past will control the narratives about the future. 

And maybe he'll never play into his opponents' hands again.  He'll use every interview, every position statement, and every editorial to attack, attack, attack, even if the attack has nothing to do with the topic at hand.  That's how the game is played.   

Here's a video of Barack Obama picking his nose: