Ever wonder what you might have caused

In August of 2012 I took my mother to Colonial Williamsburg for vacation.  I had taken my family there in 2004 and 2007 and knew she would love it.  My mother is a costumer and specializes in renascence and colonial attire.  This was a special trip with the family that dad had no interest in but mom was really excited about.

We didn’t do “vacations” when I was a kid.  We weren’t poor but we weren’t rich either.  Dad was a civil servant working on an Air Force base and mom worked from time to time at various part time jobs.  Our annual “vacation” was a trip to the Santa Cruz / Monterrey area for dad to play some very ritzy golf courses (at an extremely discounted price) with his golf club from McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento.  Make no mistake, those courses are absolutely beautiful parks and forests, but caddying for dad isn’t exactly a vacation…

Dad didn’t do “vacation”.  It wasn’t in him.  He was an incredibly driven man.  He had a purpose and a plan for everything, including even a night out with “the boys”.  He spent every moment of every day doing “something”, whether that was working, reading, doing work on the house, golfing, flying, or whatever.  He was the guy that watched golf on TV, and he was watching it intently to “learn from the pros”, so just to put a point on it, he actually learned things from it!

Mom loves the old costumes.  She loves the flowing robes, the frilly lace, the hoop skirts, the tunics and pumpkin pants, tights and codpieces, bodices and whale bone, she loves it all.  She loves learning about the times of old and how they dressed, how they lived.  She had volunteered with several organizations that re-created various eras and currently volunteers at Ft. Vancouver, Washington doing costuming for them.

I wanted to take my mother on a vacation that dad could never take her on.  It wasn’t in him, it wasn’t who he was.  I have no animosity toward him because I understand who he was and respect him for who he was.  I just wanted to do this something special for mom, something she would love.

I drove down to Vancouver to pick up mom and decided to take dad out on a little excursion.  We hadn’t shot guns together for over 30 years, so I found a range in the Vancouver area called the “English Pit” and brought all of the supplies needed.  We found the place and shot for a couple of hours having a good old time.  It was not a “father/son” outing, it was just a couple of guys out having fun.  We went back to the house and sat at the kitchen table cleaning guns and talking like just a couple of good ’ole boys.  It was a unique experience and something I will never forget.

The following morning I headed out with mom to my house so we could fly out of Sea-Tac the following morning.  On retrospect, dad’s goodbyes seemed particularly … complete.

We stayed at the Williamsburg Woodlands hotel which is right next to the Colonial Williamsburg visitor’s center which meant we just got up and walked into Colonial Williamsburg.  For those that have never been there, Colonial Williamsburg is a living museum.  It is staffed with some of the most well studied historians on the colonial times and the revolutionary period there are.  The entire crew is dedicated to bringing to life the history of this great nation.  This is true immersion into the founding of our country and the culture that brought it about.  Chris Matthews may have got a “thrill up his leg” when he saw a speech from “Stalin with a great tan”, but Colonial Williamsburg gives me the tingles all over!

One of the really wonderful things that Williamsburg has is some historical taverns that operate as restaurants.  The three that were operating on this trip had lunch and dinner services.  One of them had a special dinner theater that we had to register in advance for but the other two were just a show up and sign up, first come first served plan.

The first night we went to Christiana Campbell’s Tavern which is a nice tavern at the end of the revolutionary city.  The service is full immersion with the staff dressed and behaving as the staff would have at the time, complete with entertainment.  In this case the entertainment was a particular Scottish Bard who wore about his person several fiddles and flutes, playing tunes of the time.  My mother was thrilled and insisted on tipping him.  We have Scottish heritage on my mother’s side that we are quite proud of.  He stayed close to the table for the rest of the service and educated us on a variety of instruments and how they related to the times.

Two nights later we attended the special dinner theater at another tavern.  They had a melodrama play as would be the custom of the time during the dinner service that was really quite good.  During the intermission, in wandered the same Scottish Bard we had seen before.  He recognized us and gave us some special attention while playing his tunes he so obviously enjoyed.

Two nights later we went to the third tavern for dinner and, while we were signing up for dinner at the outside stand, I saw the Scottish Bard through the window in the door just a split second before he spotted us.  He stopped and put his face with a big smile in the window and waved to us.  We waved back and we could see he was quite happy to see us.  He hovered around our table giving playful banter not just to us but to other tables around us.  He was having a great time being a playful soul.  He is a person that enriches the lives of everyone he encounters.  We need more like him.

The following morning was Sunday.  I took my mother to Sunday morning services at Bruton Parish Church.  It was the first time in over 20 years we had attended church together and it was truly magical.  I hadn’t been to church at all in over 15 years but I knew the hymns and stories.  The sermon was meaningful for both present day and for the period.  For the first time in three decades I shared communion with my mother.  It was a magnificent morning.

That was the morning dad died.

He laid back in his lazy chair, and ceased.

Dad’s life was done.  He couldn’t do anything that really gave him meaning to his life.  He was a pilot and loved to fly, but he developed diabetes and could no longer fly.  He was athletic and an avid golfer, but his knees deteriorated to the point that he could barely walk let alone play golf.  He was always a voracious reader but could not transition in to the new information age of computers and e-books.  He got a trailer on the vague hope of touring the country, but he hated it.  He had nothing left, but mom.

I took my mother on a trip that dad never could.  He didn’t have it in him.  He said his goodbye and was done.  Did he know?  Did he know it would be best for mom if he went when mom was on the other side of the country? (it was)  Or did he just think he had nothing left to offer?  If so, what role did I play in that?

That is what will always haunt me.  What part of this did I play?  Is it worse if I made him feel he had nothing left to offer, or if I had no role in it at all?

 

A Dozen Years Ago, A Lifetime Ago

Twelve years ago today, much like today, I woke up, ate breakfast, and rode in to work.  I sat down at my desk, logged in to my computer, and started to read my email.  A few minutes later my manager came rushing down the hallway, sticking his head into each office and just said "Go Home" with a forceful urgency I hadn't heard from him before.  Puzzled, I opened up a browser and saw the horrible sight of the smoking north tower of the World Trade Center.  I didn't even read the headline.  I grabbed my gear, jumped on the bike and rode home as quickly as the Harley would get me there.  I turned on the news just in time to see the first footage released of the South Tower being hit.  The newscasters didn't yet call it an attack, but the footage said it all.  I heard the distinctive sound of those engines spooling up as the plane approached the tower and I knew it was a deliberate attack.  I didn't know who did it, but I knew it was an attack.  My gut wrenched and I had to run into the bathroom to throw up.

This morning, I woke up, ate breakfast, and rode in to work.  I sat down at my computer, opened up a browser, and right there on my home page was a picture of the smoking towers and I remembered that fateful morning like it had just happened.  Once again my gut wrenched and I had to run into the bathroom to throw up.  I was right there again.  I excused myself from work and rode home.
In previous years I had vowed to plow on and not let it stop me.  In previous years I defiantly went to work and did my job, vowing the monsters wouldn't win.  In 2010 when I attended the 9/11 rally followed by the 9/12 Tea Party on the National Mall in DC.  That was a special event.  Not only did I march with many thousands of my best friends, I also walked from the Pit of Vipers (The Capitol) to the Pillars of Virtue (Lincoln Memorial) with several of them.  I did so with purpose and vigor, meaning and intent, and I vowed the monsters would not win.

Today is a sad day for me.  The monsters are winning.  Our president is incoherent, insincere, and being played like a fiddle by the Russian president.  Our foreign policy is the laughing stock of the world, and the forces of evil no longer fear us.  The voices of reason and strength in this country are few and far between and it looks like the vast majority of my fellow citizens are ready to just give up, roll over, and welcome the chains of slavery.  And there is not a damned thing I can do about it.

It is written that no man shall know the time when the end happens, but that time is rapidly approaching.  The signs are all showing up and lining up.  Whether it is a deliberate act by the president and his friends or simple incompetence is irrelevant, they are hell bent to start another war.  After years of complaining that the previous wars were misguided and dishonestly sold to the people, the president isn't even trying to convince anyone that this one is a good idea.  In fact it looks like he is taking great pleasure in defiantly pressing on with one of the worst ideas in history, and the press is singing his praises for it.  Most of them are at least.  There are a few voices of reason out there, but they are few and far between, and have no real power or influence.

This is a sad day for me.  It is a sad day for my country.  It is a sad day for the world.  And all I can do about it is pray for guidance and wisdom to weather the coming storm.  But then, that is really like no other day when it comes right down to it, isn't it.

The forces of evil are at it again still

I’ve been away a while since I was feeling uninspired to write, but I can no longer be silent. The race baiters / liberals / progressives are going crazy over the George Zimmerman trial verdict. They got exactly what they wanted and will be able to use it to fire up race riots, incalculable property damage and endless violence. The (in)Justice Department will use this to strip (white) people of the ability to defend themselves, promote violence among black people and push gun control. The Democrats will use it to fire up minorities to vote for them and give up even more rights and more quality of life. The anti-American media is screaming about how horrible a country we are in and demanding that all freedom and quality of life be eliminated. The New Black Panthers are demanding that all white people be killed, but then they always are so nothing has changed here.

The facts don’t matter to the forces of evil. They will distort, contort, misrepresent and pervert anything they can in order to push their agenda to destroy the greatest nation on earth and burn it to the ground. They will forever be dividing people and stirring up hatred between different groups in order to promote violence and destruction. The entire point is to cause the government to lock the country down in an absolute totalitarian police state with no freedom, no quality of life, no possibility of anything other than misery, pain and suffering, with no hope at all. They will not rest until this country is a prison, and they will continue to stir up hatred and violence even after that. The forces of evil hate freedom. They hate the idea that a single peasant would have a single choice in their own life. They passed a law that proclaims that the federal government has dominion over all of the peasants bodies. The peasants are property of the government for bureaucrats to toy with as pleases them. The bureaucrats will decide what is done to the peasant’s body and the peasant has no choice.

The forces of evil will viciously attack anyone that stands for the United States Constitution, the rule of law, the concept of hard work and personal responsibility, real education and prosperity. Anyone that acknowledges that people are different, have different abilities and different interests, therefore will have different outcomes, is pilloried and demonized as being greedy and selfish. (Nevermind that the ones claiming they have rights to someone else’s life and labor are the true greedy ones.) Anyone that says that culture matters and that some cultures are better than others, and some cultures are outright evil, will receive endless streams of hate and derision and occasionally violent reactions.

And it will never end. Evil is as evil does, and it will always be with us. Even when Jesus returns it will still exist, it will just be separated from the forgiven. You have a choice. The text is available. Which side are you on? Free will or tyranny? Good or evil?

Go for the win

M.D. Creekmore at The Survivalist Blog – a survival blog dedicated to helping others prepare for and survive disaster – with articles on bug out bag contents, survival knife choices and a wealth of other survival information is giving away a 1,000 round case of 9mm – 124 Grain FMJ (a $200 value – donated by LuckyGunner)! To enter, you just have to post about it on your blog. This is my entry. Visit The Survivalist Blog for the details.

How about that global warming?

The blogosphere, at least the intellectually honest portion of it, is all a-twitter about the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and the revelation that the so called scientists have been tampering with data, manipulating models, and outright lying about climate change and the causes thereof. While that is a very interesting story, there is a much larger and more insidious one.

The larger story is not really that greedy politicians latched on to the "science" to grab power either. The real story is the complicity of the media and the willingness of the sheeple to believe the lies. A large segment of the population in the "Western World" are completely incapable of critical thinking, once the cornerstone of our institutions of higher education. How did this happen?
The short answer is that our education system was infiltrated and corrupted by people who thought themselves so superior to the peasants that they should have the right to tell everyone else how to live. But that answer is not actually correct because of a few important assumptions it is based on.

The fundamental assumption in the above answer is that the education system was "infiltrated". Nothing could be further from the truth. The very concept of "education" was invented by people who thought they knew better than everyone else. This isn't nessisarily a bad thing since it is arguable that everyone knows something better than someone else, but it is a path to egalitarian arrogance. And that is where we find ourselves, especially in the more prestigious institutions of higher indoctrination we have today.

Egalitarian arrogance is not just limited to Princeton and Harvard and Cambridge though, it permeates the education system all the way down to our local elementary schools these days. From there, it moves out into the general population generationally. What we have ended up with is an "education" system that is nothing more than a socialist indoctrination system that turns out good little slaves that believe what the media and the "leaders" tell them without ever questionining it. They dutifully believe that they have to be told by their betters, everything they should do in their lives and everything they should think.

This, of course, doesn't happen to every child, but it does happen to a large section of them. And it is worse in large population centers than it is in more rural ones. I could speculate on a large number of reasons why this occurs, but it is sufficient to say that it does. This is one of the reasons that large population centers gravitate toward socialist "leaders" and believe that the subsequent suffering and decline that inevitibly happens is the fault of someone else.

We have always had egalitarians, and unfortunately we always will. Most of the founders of the United States of America qualified as such. That is why they kept the tradition that only landowners could actually vote, the commoners could not. This was the case up until the passage of the 14th ammendment to the US Constitution which opened up voting and office holding privileges to common men, and it wasn't until the passage of the 19th ammendment that women were allowed to vote and hold office, and even then the voting age was generally 21 although some states allowed for lower ages. That changed with the 26th ammendment which set the voting age at 18 throughout the country. I'm not certain that was an improvement, but at least it made the right uniformly applied.

What was different about our founders from today is that they had enough humility to recognize their own arrogance, and took steps to limit the negative effects. This is one of the reasons the US Constitution was written to be limitations on the government, not a document that grants rights to the people. This concept has been completely reversed by the tyrants of the last century but had started longer ago than that.

The tyrants didn't come from nowhere, they came from our institutions of learning, that were indoctrinated to believe they were better than everyone else. The institutions became self fulfilling feedback loops where every generation of professers believed themselves to be better and smarter than the previous generation, and produced students that thoguhgt even higher of themselves. What we have now is a whole bunch of people that are absolutely incapable of intellectually accepting ever making an error, indoctrinated with philosophies that have failed every time they have been imposed. We have generations of people that are only capable of being indoctrinated, they are incapable of actual learning.

The result is predictable: We keep seeing the same errors of the past being repeated and it is just accepted as inevitible. I guess it is given the nature of the socialist indoctrination.

We don't just see this in government, which would be bad enough by itself. We see this in the corporate world too. Enron was not an anomoly, it was the rule. We saw the same type of bad judgement in Worldcom, and Fannie Maye, and AGI, and in GM and ... you get the picture. We are seeing this same egalitarian arrogance at all levels of management, in all industries and in government. They are all being run by people that cannot admit, at any level, to ever being wrong. That means they are incapable of actually learning or ever improving. If allowed to run their course they will not only destroy our economy, but civilization itself.

The real question, is how do we fix it? I don't have that answer, but I know someone who does. It must be time to get on my knees and talk to him, how about you?

God love Alan Keyes

Alan Keyes and a group of pro-life patriots were arrested protesting Notre Dame (a noted Catholic school) honoring Barak Obama who not only suports but promotes abortion. Some people are getting the word out though.
Alan Keyes is a nut, but he is my kind of nut. I disagree with him in some areas but I agree with him in more. One thing you have to give him, the man does live his principles. He leads by example and reaches out to show people how to be good people. God love him.

Last weekend he gathered up a bunch of like-minded, peaceable people who oppose abortion to go protest at Notre Dame. They were protesting the, theoretically, Catholic institution giving honors to Barak Obama. The Catholic church vehemently opposes abortion. Barak Obama not only supports, but promotes and steals money from the US population to fund, abortion not only here but abroad. How ever on earth can a Catholic institution honor a person that has such an obvious disdain for human life. That beats the twinkies out of me!

So here is where we enter bizzarro land. Notre Dame had Mr. Keyes and his group arrested and sent to JAIL for having the audacity to tell the school to uphold its own, theoretically at least, principles that it had decided to ignore. If The Pope isn't spitting bullets by now, it is just because the story hasn't been translated for him yet.

Here is the video of the arrest:


And here is video of Jason Bermas on Alex Jones Tv talking to Randall Terry about the incident:


If you find this stifling of free speech as apalling as I do, then go contribute to Stop Obama at Notre Dame And if you agree with Alan Keyes, double the ammount you were thinking of giving them.

What we do for our children

I hate parades. The crowds, the standing around, the cheesy floats, the grandstanding politicians, the NOISE! Not to mention shutting down the section of town they are in, and causing traffic problems everywhere else. Ugh! I detest them.

My children, they are barely children at this point, are both in the marching band in their high school. This is one of the top marching bands in the state, they routinely win band competitions all over the state. This band is going to be playing in the Olympics next year. This band is run by an exceptionally good instructor, conductor, and all around person. The involvement with the band is an extremely positive factor in their lives.


Marching bands play in parades. Part and parcel of the whole gig.

Last Saturday was a parade in Wenatchee, WA where my kids were marching and competing against other bands. Wenatchee is just under two hours away from the house, a lot closer than some of the competitions. And apparently the "Apple Blossom Festival" (I think that is what it is called) is a pretty bigh deal in their world. It is also a farm town, and I like farm town folks.

So my wife (who has no issues with parades) and I jumped in the car and drove over the Cascades to attend. It was pretty neat to see the band marching and to be able to compare them to the other bands I saw. Unfortunately my daughter is having some issues with marching in the band uniform boots and her ankle gave out before they got to where we were watching so I missed her. But here is a picture, from my cell phone because I forgot the camera, of my son caryying the Washington State flag.

So it was good to go show them support. They both appreciated it. It wasn't all that bad and my wife and I had a quiet lunch together, just the two of us, on the way back. This is one of the little things we do to support our kids. Family is important.