Uncle Matt!
Posted by: Jamie
Matt,
Say hello to you’re future niece or nephew! This was taken last week. You can see the head, and the arms. The legs are hard to see even in the actual picture.
Bryan said, “Boy he sure does have a big head! Get’s that from me I’m sure.” To which I replied, “No he has a big brain, and he gets that from ME!” Ha ha.
I think it’s a boy, but if my baby instinct is anything like my sense of direction, (if I think something’s on the right, then it’s really on the left, and vice versa) then it’s going to be a girl. But, I think it’s a boy. :o)
Had another appointment at 11 today, but the doctor was in Lakin doing a surgury. I go back at 3:45.
Take care, I’ll keep you posted. Adios!
In the Works
If all goes according to plan, the blog will soon be on the move.
www.bgwillers.com has been reserved and preparations are being made to host the blog on my own webserver. This should give me a little more freedom to add some extra content (besides just the blog) and break out of the mold a bit.
You can help! Right now I need to make sure everybody can access the new website. When you go to
www.bgwillers.com you should see the teaser banner. If you get nothing, or somekind of error, please let me know!
And for those that are uninformed about B.G. Willers meaning (or just plain forgot), it’s roots can be traced back to being very bored in pre-algebra and creating a ludicrous line of ficticious products. Not the least of which was “B.G. Willers: Premium Beverage“. Like so many things, the name has just kind of hung around through the years waiting to be tacked on anything obscure.
My kitty loves board games!
Posted By: Jamie
Halfway through our game, we had an uninvited player! Is it bad that I got beat by a cat?! :o)
eBay To Buy Skype For $2.6 Billion
hmmm i wonder what going to be instore for skype now
Intersting last name…
While working today, I ran across an ad for a man with an unusual last name. And all day I’ve been pondering if it’s pronounced how it looks. His last name is “Fuchs”.
I just think, “Meet the Parents” when he says, it’s pronounced just like it’s spelled, F-o-c-k-e-r. Just goes to show how simple minded I am! :o)
awwe I got a warm fuzzy feeling
Posted By: Justin
Today as I was driving my base housing I saw something cute/awesome.
There were three girls (about 7 years old average) selling kool-aid and cookies to raise money for the Katrina Survivors. (while I’m aware of the concerns of some coming out ahead, much help is needed). I won’t comment on how much I paid but the bucket was extremely full.
I see it unlikely they are scamming. Their mother and father were out there, and as I said, this was base housing.
Just thought I’d share. It was cute
an article i read
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
An Objectivist Review
by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist
September 2, 2005
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire….
“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
“‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ ”
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl”–the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels–gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit–but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters–not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Source: TIA Daily — September 2, 2005
Copyright© 2002 The Intellectual Activist
Cox Suckers
Well, here I thought that the internet was all good to go. Who was I kidding? The thing still doesn’t work. Well, it works better than it did. We can at least have both hooked up at the same time now. But the internet connection just drops off sometime. Sometimes it’s 10 minutes, sometimes it’s an hour. Then it’s back working fine again.
I called the lovely tech support staff and they said that they were doing matainance in the neighborhood tonight and that it’d be running better than ever tomorrow….we’ll see about that.
Need an opinion…
Posted by: Jamie
What do you think of a boss sending an employee off to do personal stuff for them. My husband has been sent to mow his bosses lawn, wash and wax his truck, pick up his jet ski from the shop, even said one of the guys he works with was sent up to paint the bosses house!
I personally think this is rediculous! Not to mention degrading! However, someone I was chatting with about this said that, they thought it was wonderful and that they get a break from work to do other things. I thought, NO ONE likes to paint a house! NO ONE likes to mow their lawn, it’s not even their lawn, it’s their idiot bosses!
Yes they do get paid to do it, so I guess I shouldn’t bitch. Just seems like this boss is just a lazy, cheap bastard! To lazy to mow his own lawn, and can’t pay the neighbor boy $10 to do it.
You’re thoughts?
ok this is the suck
iv been sick with sinus crud the last few days. the medicine im taking makes it very hard to operate a vehicle or heavy machinery. i tried calling friends yesturday to see if they would be as so kind to bring me food. WELL!! i pick the wrong weekend to be sick no one was here or answered their phones finally after about about 3 hours i was able to find some one online that was in hays. shanna drove up and took me to go get food. now i owe her one.