GONE FISHIN

 

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Chinese proverbs are fascinating to many because they can say so much in just a few words. Proverbs can be very thought provoking and when my thoughts are provoked they tend to defend themselves. So I wonder how this ancient phrase of wisdom would weave itself into the fabric of some of our current political trends and philosophies. Let’s have a little fun at the same time and throw it into a medieval time theme shall we!

In the Kingdom called USA, the emperor begrudgingly lets people learn how to fish and catch their own. This is not the emperor’s way however; he would prefer you just take the free fish he gives you and let his government do the fishing. For those independent, hard working fisherman who do well for themselves, there exists the constant danger that you may incur the wrath of this emperor because you have too many fish. This also creates anger and jealousy among his loyal subjects who don’t think fishing is worth all the hard work. They will grow full of discontent, complaining that it’s not fair that you have more fish then they do. They only get one free fish a day from the emperor.

And because you did not support the emperor in his attempts to have fishing regulated so as to favor his friends and supporters, he will be forced to send his Chancellor of the Exchequer Eric Holder to seize your fishing equipment and boat because they suspect you of disloyalty to the kingdom.

Now the people of the kingdom who were given their one free daily fish decided they should get two fish a day because you and the other fisherman who went out every day and worked from dawn to dusk had two. They didn’t want to fish for their own food so they decided to pitch tents in your cottage yard and poop all over your plum orchard. The plum orchard you tended after working all day to provide your family with fresh fruit. The emperor’s subjects don’t want you have more then they do so they block access to your boat in the morning and you cannot get to work. The unruly crowd grows loud and smelly and they yell weird chants and smoke sweet smelling plants. They are angry because, according to them you have too many fish and you won’t re-distribute them among everyone……for free.

You cannot understand why so many subjects of the kingdom are angry with you. Before you decided to learn how to fish for yourself, you received the same free fish as the others and everybody received you well. Now you work hard to make a decent life for your family and they throw rocks at you and ruin your plum orchard. You already have to give the emperor half of all the fish you catch each day when you return to the dock and he is giving those fish to the very same subjects who are turning your property into a cesspool. The emperor then stands up in front of his subjects and announces that you are an evil fisherman who does not pay his fair share of fish. He forsakes you and your hard work and proclaims this inequality of fish to be unfair and supports the smelly poopers who refuse to fish. He declares in his empire there will be fairness for all. Why do you treat me so emperor?

Then something happens; the emperor realizes that each time one of his subjects learns how to fish, they don’t have to rely on him for their very existence. The emperor seethes with anger. He cannot understand why commoners choose to work hard all day and live free from the emperor’s entitlements. Those ingrates!

The emperor immediately seeks to implement strict regulations that will hamper the fisherman and make it nearly impossible for them survive without him! He declares by executive emperor order that all fishing lines must be made with energy efficient hemp even though the lines will break as soon as they get wet and be useless. He further declares all fishermen must use boats that run on ferry dust, a product only the emperor’s close friends and supporters have for sale. The emperor’s minions all become very rich.

The emperor declares that he has made life better for all and the kingdom is strong. He has brought fairness to the land and he commands his loyal jesters Pelosi and Reid to prepare a feast in his honor because he has declared himself the greatest emperor of all time.

But during the feast, a messenger runs nervously up to the emperor and whispers something. The fishermen are leaving! They are going to a far off land where they will be rewarded for their efforts and will not be the subject of ridicule and protest. They will be able to keep more of their fish to offer other tradesman for goods and services that help to make everyone better off. The emperor realizes now he has no one left to catch the free fish for his kingdom’s subjects!

With nobody fishing and more subjects wanting free fish, the emperor decides to make fake gold coins and buy fish from afar, knowing other generations will have to take responsibility for his irresponsible actions. His coins are not worth anything and he knows that soon the tradesmen will find out and stop selling to him.

The emperor is broke and his words have no substance. All but his two jesters are experiencing doubt in his abilities. He is hoping the upcoming emperor election will arrive before his lack of respect for personal freedom and knowledge about the human spirit is exposed and he is banished from the kingdom in disgrace. Bring me my jesters!

ETTIQUIT

I am the grocery shopper in the household. I took over this responsibility from my better half a number of years back and for the most part I enjoy doing it. I visit three stores each week; each store serves a particular need consistent with its offerings and my preferences/prejudices. Each store has its own personality and each store has its own type of customer base. I go to trader Joes; TJ’s has a host of reasonably priced healthy foods that I can choose from and the other people that shop there are cordial, polite and considerate, if not maybe a touch earthy. I hit Raleys. Raleys requires that I stumble upon a good value or store special in order to shop there, save for the last minute grab item while coming home from work, but I find the other shoppers there to be regular folk that are generally cognizant of their surroundings.  And then there’s the third store. I shop at this store for most of my basic need items because it’s cheaper then the others by a healthy margin and I am a public servant who doesn’t receive the Nancy Pelosi stock tips. That third store is Winco. Winco has a more “comprehensive” clientele then the others and you are more likely to see interesting and sometimes disturbing examples of unique customer behavior.

Now I must confess right off that when it comes to buying groceries I am a creature of efficiency. Although I enjoy bringing home the food and filling up the frig, I do not necessarily want to spend a lot of time in any one store, particularly if that store is Winco. So….I memorized the Winco store layout. Before I walk inside I know exactly what it is I am there to get. I navigate the store aisles with Indy car precision and very little wasted movement. I torment myself with the need to improve my in store time from start to finish with each trip. It’s who I am and I make no apologies. But Winco has its obstacles.

For reasons I cannot comprehend, there are those whose grocery shopping experience is not so much a chore to be crossed off the list as it is an event unto itself! This casual, inefficient, disorganized, lackadaisical behavior by other shoppers creates havoc with my routine and greatly diminishes my ability to successfully execute a pre-planned, coordinated tactical grocery trip! I have also become aware that Winco supermarket can be a place where social decorum takes a holiday; where consideration for others can often be non-existent, rules of common courtesy go ignored and parenting responsibilities are temporarily suspended. There are things I see in Winco that I don’t see in any other grocery store and very few are appealing or pleasant. Winco desperately needs some etiquette guidelines for their customers to observe. May I be of some assistance?

As an altruist, (cough cough) I cant help but believe that a well thought out series of posted guidelines, strategically placed in conspicuous locations around the store would go a long way toward making everybody’s Winco experience a rewarding one. I humbly submit to you a rough draft of selected signs with suggestions for what I call, “Winco Etiquette;”

                                             ATTENTION WINCO SHOPPERS;

1. If you have stopped in the aisle to ponder a selection please do not park your cart in the center of the aisle sideways. Move your cart to the side. This allows your fellow humans using the very same store as you to move up and down in the same aisle while you stare endlessly at two different cans of tomato sauce.
2. If you and your loved one are using the “two cart method” please do not form an impassable gauntlet with your carts while you settle a lengthy purchase/spousal dispute. Please refer to Rule #1.
3. When picking fruit or vegetables from a display, please be reminded that you are not the sole remaining person on the planet and that the carburetor you took apart just before coming to the store may have left massive grease stains on your hands.     
4. When selecting produce, please do not consider this to be an offer for a free meal complements of Winco. We encourage all shoppers to purchase their selections prior to consuming them. This allows those customers who have not yet projectile vomited watching you, to select uneaten food for their meals.
5. Please notify a Winco Employee if you have a spill or breakage. Your fellow shoppers will not directly appreciate having to perform a Triple Sow Cow from pike position after walking onto a dozen of your spilled eggs.
6. Please ensure that you have the present ability to pay for your selections. The math can be difficult, but the difference between the $157.00 of groceries you brought to the check stand and the $85.00 you brought to the store can be fairly easily recognized with the appropriate attention.
7. Please be reminded that this is in fact a Winco, not Nugget or Bel Air, so the produce at the bottom of the display is not likely to be any better then the ones on top and you won’t find a golden ticket to the chocolate factory there either.
8. Please be advised that your children are adorable and we love them here at Winco, however; we would love them even more if they would not pick their nose and then dive their hands into each and every bulk food bin.  
9. Please do not confuse our store with Wal-Mart when deciding what to wear. There is no film crew here taking horrific pictures of your choice of attire relative to your body type. Online fame is only a mile away…please leave.
10. Thank you for shopping at Winco. As you return to your vehicle please note the empty cart retrieval corrals positioned every 30 feet for you to ignore. Have a great day!

I’m done.

  

A WEALTH OF IGNORANCE

Since the beginning of the emperor’s administration he has made it clear that he is determined to rip this country to social shreds with his daily war of words condemning the wealthy in this country. His quote, “I do think at some point you’ve made enough money” is socialist lunacy.

And yet for all the moaning and sniveling —  and drum beating in Zuccotti park- almost everything that people presume about income inequality and wealth in America is wrong. It is painfully obvious that we have a serious problem with a significant percentage of the population who has no concept of the nature of wealth and how in many instances this wealth is created. Class warfare it seems thrives greatly on this ignorance about the sources of income. I can't help but believe there are those who think there is a big pile of money somewhere that is supposed to be shared equally among Americans and the rich are taking an unfiar share of it. I believe this view point stems from the misguided notion that the economy is a pie of fixed size. If one person gets a bigger portion of the pie, others then must get smaller pieces, and the role of the government is to ensure all the pieces are the same. In reality, though, the size of the pie is infinite. It is not a zero sum game. The Marxist commentators on network programming speak of millionaires and billionaires as if they are racist cretins, sexist cavemen or just plain greedy. To an alarmingly high percentage of young people, economic justice seems to mean redistributing or spreading this “pile” of money back to the rightful owners, whoever they are.

The United States of America, at least for the moment, is and has been a free society. In a free society people have the opportunity to prosper, based in large part on their personal drive, motivation, ingenuity, skill and work ethic. This country's economic expansion that we have come to expect is in large measure becuae of this inequality and would have been almost impossible without it. It would be hard to motivate most people if everyone had the same earnings, status, prestige, and other rewards. Progress and wealth must be accomplished in echelon fashion.

People with high incomes in our free society have usually demonstrated an exceptional ability to produce valuable services for their fellow citizens. Citizens that spend their own money on the products developed and produced by Microsoft, Intel, and Apple to name just a few. The people responsible for these products like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires. They became billionaires because you and I spent our money on their product. How can anyone then justify suggesting to them they have made enough money? It is in the order of hypocrisy and selfish laziness. It is the bottom feeders of our society who will not pick themselves up, but will work feverishly to pull everyone down. A nation goes extinct in quick order when it holds the less productive up as role models and condemns the productive. The United States became the worlds most industrious, wealthy and powerful country on earth in meteoric fashion because our founding fathers took heed of the weaknesses inherent in the European system of social control and government largesse.

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb and the phonograph and became wealthy. Everyone benefitted from artificial light and music. Lloyd Conover became wealthy after creating the antibiotic tetracycline and the sick benefitted from it. If they had developed the mind set of our current emperor we would have lost much of their valuable contributions to the rational that they “made enough money”. Does a free market capitalist system produce some bad apples? Absolutely. It’s not a perfect system, but it has shown itself to be the best by far. We should not throw the baby out with the bath water because of a few con artists and crooks. This country’s criminal justice system routinely lets guilty people go free in order to safeguard the rights of the innocent. We cannot demonize a tried and true economic system because of the actions of a few. Yet some of this country’s politicians seek to do just that.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is in a dead heat with Nancy Pelosi for my choice as the most addle minded politician alive, recently stated flatly on the floor of the Senate that “millionaire job creators are like Unicorns, they don’t exist.” This example of brainlessness is unexplainable. Millionaires own companies. Millionaires own property. Millionaires buy things. Millionaires invest. Millionaires create millions of jobs. I can only hope that his Fantasyland statement fails to pass muster with the voters’ basic sense of economic heuristics. Here again however is another example of the assault by members of the emperor’s administration to demonize the rich and use income inequality to impugn capitalism and free market enterprise.

Ignorant, lazy and entitled people find it comforting and somehow self affirming to view capitalism as evil and benefitting only the wealthy. This philosophy is being taught in our schools and universities by socialist professors who have zero understanding of what capitalism has done for the citizens of this county because they never left the campus and got a job. Most of what they think and know is based upon what their prior professors told them to think. Evidence disputes everything they preach. Most people in this country, including those at the “poverty level” enjoy goods and services such a radio, television, air conditioning, cable, computers, smart phones, washing machines, wash and wear clothing and cars because of the efforts of the wealthy. To label them as Wall Street is wrong and intellectually bankrupt. The emperor recently told a gym full of high school students in Kansas that the free market doesn’t work. Yes the one who is called the president of the world’s most successful free market country said that. He said the free market is not fair. This should scare you.

This begs the obvious questions for the emperor. What then is fair? Who decides how much is too much and how much is just right? How much is not enough? Who decides what is equal?? Will we eventually see a newly appointed “Fairness Czar” and a staff of 10,000 fairness bureaucrats in the White House? Will we raise taxes in order to reward the unproductive in the interest of fairness and condemn and punish the productive? What happens when the productive simply stop producing because it is not fair to them? What will we do then Mr. Emperor?

If he has his way, we may find out soon.

VIVA LA RAZA

If anyone is still uncertain about the emperor’s intentions during this upcoming election year to secure the Latino vote by any means necessary, let me help you along some. Barry recently appointed amnesty advocate Cecilia Munoz to be the head of the Domestic Policy Council. Munoz was a strong supporter of the failed DREAM Act and is the former senior vice president for the radical open-border National Council of La Raza. La Raza means “The Race”.

Munoz will be the director of intergovernmental affairs and will oversee outreach to state and local governments. Watch out for terms like “outreach”.

La Raza is the largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. Munoz served there as an immigration expert until 2009 when she joined the emperor’s administration.

Let’s take a look at the La Raza organization for a moment. La Raza makes no bones about their blatantly radical nature. They don’t fly the American flag at their pro amnesty rallies, they fly the Mexican flag. They organize rallies that promote lawless disregard for American laws and they set thousands of illegal immigrants loose on streets, brazenly waving Mexican flags and making demands. These by the way are predominantly illegal immigrants doing the demanding.

Under Munoz, The Race advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty in the United States. Mexico's Institute for Mexicans Residing Abroad rewarded her with its Ohtli Prize for her service to the country. Their country, not ours.

The Race vehemently protested post-9/11 homeland security measures and joined a failed lawsuit to block immigration information-sharing between the feds and local police. The group also has called for TV and cable news networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves, in addition to pushing for Fairness Doctrine policies to shut up their foes.

La Raza has secured “strategic partnerships" with Wachovia and Bank of America, which allows for lower mortgage application requirements and watered down documentation standards. Illegal aliens have secured countless federal and private home loans over the past decade thanks to the lending industry's silent partnerships.

The Council of La Raza received $4 million dollars of taxpayer money this year from an anonymous Senator to promote open borders and amnesty for illegals. The recent incidents in Tucson had the full support and backing of La Raza. As summarized from a reporting piece;

“Yesterday a Tucson Unified School District board meeting was scheduled to   discuss making La Raza Studies, or Race Studies, an elective in public schools rather than banning the program all together. The “ethnic studies” programmed was banned earlier this year because of the material being taught in the program.

Instructors of the Raza studies, also known as Mexican –American studies, teach students that Arizona belongs to Mexico, to over throw the U.S. government, to take back that land and trains students to conduct several acts of civil disobedience, including chaining themselves to chairs in order take over school district board meetings.”

It was also these same open-border activists that recently blocked off a major freeway (I-19) with tires, tar and glass, putting the lives of people driving on the freeway at risk. Their goal was to stop all deportations back to Mexico and to disrupt the flow of commerce to damage the economy. This with the full support and involvement of la Raza and Cecilia Munoz, former La Raza VP and now the emperor’s new advisor on Domestic Policy.

Make no mistake. The emperor wants to open the floodgates and let our borders gush freely with democratic voters. He will channel his policy though Cecilia Munoz to give himself plausible deniability should events take a turn for the worse, which is highly likely, and he will tout La Raza as a proud civil rights group as a defense mechanism for his selection.

I want everyone who desires a chance to live and work here in this great country to have that opportunity. There is however a right way and a wrong way. This is just plain wrong. The emperor should be developing an efficient and effective process by which to legally integrate immigrants into our country as American citizens by meeting a pre-determined set of standards and adopting our culture. Yes….OUR CULTURE. Instead he is using subterfuge to allow another country’s culture to force itself into and attempt to eradicate ours. He has removed 75% of the National Guard presence at the border and stymied border patrol agents with prohibitive operational guidelines. He has sued any state who seeks to protect its sovereign boundaries and citizens therein from the violence of narco terrorism, human trafficking and the massive economic drain of illegal residents. You have to ask yourself the sobering question. Why?

FIVE MINUTES

The view was breathtaking yet foreboding. I was standing ankle deep in the waters off the sugar white sandy shores of Panama City Beach Florida just before dawn, gazing out at the endless waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It was just me and my thoughts. It was just me and my dreams. It was just me and two thousand eight hundred other people all standing next to me wearing wetsuits, goggles and bright colored neoprene caps. It was the Ford Florida Ironman Triathlon and it was going to start in five minutes!

I know it was five minutes because the authoritative voice speaking out over the PA system announced to all participants that the race would start in five minutes. Five minutes. Hummm. Why five minutes? Why did he have to announce the five minute mark? I’m fairly certain every other horrified athlete out there knew damn well what time the race started. I’m pretty sure most of them also laid awake all night like I did trying to keep from flipping out emotionally over what was about to happen. They always give us a one minute warning for final prayers, crying and maybe a goggle adjustment. So why did he have to announce five minutes?

Five minutes can be a long time to stand still and wait and five minutes can be but a fleeting speck of a moment. Now I have to wonder when four minutes is the time and then three minutes. Is that all really necessary? I mean for gawds sake man I will be swimming two and half miles, then cycling 112 miles and then running 26.2 miles today….in Five..or maybe four minutes from now! Or is it three? Geezus why did he have to say five minutes!!

Now I have to stand here frozen in a trance which is a mixture of focus and fear until I hear the one minute warning. I can handle one minute. One minute is nothing. At one minute I go straight into pre race mental prep and readiness. At one minute the fear is gone and it’s all focus. That’s always been my strength, just before GO time is my moment of relaxation, my moment of reflection of what I put myself through to get here. My reward is that one minute.

Five minutes is torture! What am I going to do for five friggin minutes? I have to get rid of a significant amount of Gatorade but that will remedy itself soon enough. I can’t start a conversation because nobody can put a complete sentence together at that point, including me. I’ve done everything and more to prepare for the eleven plus hours of work ahead of me and that’s it. No…..I strongly feel that the announcer made an egregious mistake by announcing the five minute mark! Completely unnecessary, total BS is what it was! He probably just wanted to hear his voice on the microphone. What in the hell possessed him to do that to us!! No I’m serious now, this is killing me! There’s too much time and I………………..

            “Sixty seconds……….Attention all athletes, the race will start in sixty seconds….”

That’s better………….