Providing for continuity
Needs high salaries and ingenuity
Retirement and health care
Assurance of wealth care
And uniformed Homeland Security.
Old Jules
Incidently, notice the other cats under the cars. Snitches, most likely. Especially the one peeking out from behind the front tire.
Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, limericks, Poetry
Tagged creative writing, economy, government, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, limerick, limericks, philosophy, poems, poetry, politics, psychology, security, society, sociology
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
During almost a decade when most of my salary was paid by FEMA I used to have to go to FEMA Regional Headquarters every quarter for meetings with people doing the same job I was doing in New Mexico, but from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and hmm if there’s another state in this FEMA Region I can’t recall it at the moment. But you get the idea.
Fairly dreadful meetings and nowhere near as interesting as the weeks spent in the training center at Emmitsburg, MD, or the various other meetings in places where there were Civil War battlegrounds to drift off and walk around on studying how those poor bastards delt with their differences of opinion.
But that’s another story for another time.
The Regional meetings for Emergency Management people and Flood Plain Management people were held on the top floor of an amazing bunker complex at FEMA Region 6 Headquarters outside Denton, Texas. A venal, truly hidebound lot of bureaucrats we were, too. Although the worst of us was nowhere near as anal, ugly, downright arrogant as the FEMA people.
And that was before 9/11 and FEMA becoming a part of Homeland Security. I hate to think how it must be today.
But what I wanted to tell you about is that bunker complex. Damnedest thing I’ve ever beheld this side of Carlsbad Caverns if it was set up for the US Congress, the 82nd Airborne Division and MD Anderson Hospital were all planned to be housed inside it. For a long, long while.
Just the parts I was allowed to visit and mull over were several stories underground and probably several acres diameter. Above ground under all the festooning of antenna, cable and concrete was a pillbox so the people underground could go up and peek out to shoot the occasional mutant, malcontent, or just enjoy the sight of all the devastation.
The first level entryway was a hallway with sprinklers to wash off the radioactivity lingering on anyone going inside, along with slots to allow shooting anyone who didn’t use soap or wash long enough. And just beyond that was a huge freezer for dragging the carcasses into of people who either got shot or didn’t get clear of the radiation quickly enough to avoid the blind staggers.
Nearby was a huge, amazing, pristine, empty hospital complex with supplies, stacked along the walls, equipment, tables, clean shining stainless steel waiting for some doctors to show up to treat any patients that might show up.
Next floor down was the ‘Continuity of Government’ facility. A place designated for the Governors of all the Region 6 States, their staffs, their families to wait out whatever difficulties led to them being there. Hallways with State Flags for each of the member States hung in front of entranceways to avoid Louisiana confusing itself with New Mexico.
An entire floor was devoted to warehousing food, water, all manner of supplies the people living down there would be consuming. Another floor devoted to Security and Military personnel, along with their equipment and ammunition. That floor also contained the communications equipment so’s they could talk to anyone who still was alive outside and able to speak English. Or to whomever else was left out there with radio equipment still working.
And those were just the floors I was allowed to visit. The FEMA folk hinted there was a lot more, winked knowingly, but wouldn’t discuss what was there.
Soothing thought, I found it, knowing the government had arranged for a place for all those folks I considered more important than regular people to get in out of the rain and keep doing whatever needed doing for the people outside with their eyeballs running down their faces and their flesh sloughing off.
I surely hope they’re still maintaining those bunkers. I’d hate to think the politicos aren’t being looked after if something happens.
Old Jules
Posted in 1990's, 2012, America, Current Issues, Emergency Preparedness, Government, Human Behavior, Military, Politics, Survival, Texas
Tagged continuity of government, culture, emergency preparedness, environment, FEMA, FEMA bunkers, government, homeland security, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, politics, psychology, society, sociology, survival
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by. I’ve told you before I don’t vote and never intend to vote, would rather not even know who’s king.
However, my buddy Rich tells me one of the wannabe king-guys is a Mormon. Which I find cool and exciting. If I were going to vote, I’d vote for him, same as I’d have voted for this guy now because he’s black. No way I could have predicted he’d turn out to be some white guy wearing dark makeup.
So, why would I vote Mormon?
Old Jules
What can a person say about Spiro Agnew? Most of you readers are too young to remember the most well-known, most popular Vice President in US history. He served at a time when the US was torn apart by civil strife, an undeclared, unpopular foreign war, and a level of corruption in the Executive Branch few citizens allowed themselves to suspect.
Agnew. Forced from office for accepting bribes before, “Everyone does it,” became a defense.
But, of course, that was long before Iran-Contra, Bush 1&2, Billary Clinton, Blackwater, and the current king. Nowadays Spiro would seem clean, honest and soft-spoken. A pristine choice for wannabe king for either of the parties:
In April 1973, when revelations about Watergate began to surface, Agnew was the choice of 35 percent of Republican voters to be the next Republican nominee for President, while then-California Governor Ronald Reagan was second on the Gallup Poll. [18]
Spiro Theodore Agnew (pronunciation: /ˈspɪroʊ ˈæɡnjuː/; November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th Vice President of the United States (1969–1973), serving under President Richard Nixon, and the 55th Governor of Maryland (1967–1969). He was the first Greek American to hold these offices.
During his fifth year as Vice President, in the late summer of 1973, Agnew was under investigation by the United States Attorney‘s office in Baltimore, Maryland, on charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy. In October, he was formally charged with having accepted bribes totaling more than $100,000 while holding office as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland, and Vice President of the United States. On October 10, 1973, Agnew was allowed to plead no contest to a single charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967, with the condition that he resign the office of Vice President. Nixon replaced him by appointing by then House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford to the office of Vice President.
Agnew is the only Vice President in United States history to resign because of criminal charges. Ten years after leaving office, in January 1983, Agnew paid the state of Maryland nearly $270,000 as a result of a civil suit that stemmed from the bribery allegations.
Agnew soon found his role as the voice of the so-called “silent majority“, and by late 1969 he was ranking high on national “Most Admired Men” polls. He also inspired a fashion craze when one entrepreneur introduced Spiro Agnew watches (a take off on the popular Mickey Mouse watch); conservatives wore them to show their support for Agnew, while many liberals wore them to signify their contempt.
Agnew was known for his scathing criticisms of political opponents, especially journalists and anti-war activists. He attacked his adversaries with relish, hurling unusual, often alliterative epithets—some of which were coined by White House speechwriters William Safire and Pat Buchanan—including “pusillanimous pussyfooters”, “nattering nabobs of negativism” (written by Safire), and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”.[15] He once described a group of opponents as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
Posted in 1970's, America, History, Liars
Tagged government, History, politicians, politics, representative democracy
The old or the new Comandante
Dilecto in flagrante
Won’t burst the balloon,
Just play the worn tune:
Vote Virgil or choose a Dante
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, Government, limericks, Poetry, Politics
Tagged culture, government, Human Behavior, humor, limerick, limericks, philosophy, poems, poetry, politics, psychology, society, sociology, wrting
Venerated equally by rednecks and aristocrats
Caligula, Julius or Nero
Take your pick. He’s an unlikely hero.
Far better E. Gantry
Or phony philantry
Or maybe just bring back old Spiro.
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, Communication, Government, Human Behavior, limericks, Politics
Tagged creative writing, culture, democracy, economy, government, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, limerick, limericks, philosophy, poems, poetry, politics, psychology, society, sociology, spiro agnew, writing
Good morning readers. I appreciate your visit and read. I hope you won’t consider this frivolous.
It’s Daddy Day, and there’s a growing body of shrill opinion being expressed on the Web concerning those out-of-control nuclear reactors in Japan and how Big Daddy United States needs to step up to the plate to fix it. Even though Big Daddy has no more clue than anyone else how to go about doing it.
First off, those reactors haven’t reached their full potential yet, so it’s probably too soon to have the Lincoln Memorial try to jump a motorcycle across them.
Even though PT Barnham’s loose in Washington and trying to perfect that method of solving historical difficulties, jumping a motorcycle across the problem is still considered extreme, untested, uncertain, at best.
Probably it would be better to try time-tested methods first. Some of the ways Big Daddy US has solved other pesky difficulties. Homeland Security and attempts to deal with illegal immigration might provide a model.
Or failing that, there’s always the old airbag fix:
Anyone strangled to death by an airbag isn’t going to be worrying about mutants, teeth falling out, that sort of thing.
Sending some crews of jailbirds out to pick the fallout up before it can do any damage offers some hope. Got lots of jailbirds and not-all-that-much radiation yet. If the radiation increases, hell it won’t do it faster than our number of prisons.
People who never learned to program a VCR, [including me] might find radiation detection instruments confusing, so sniffer dogs trained to detect it could answer the question of where it is and where it ain’t.
Naturally they’d have to be provided facilities.
And protection from reckless drivers.
Failing that, a little magic might help.
Or just an acknowledgement there’s a problem.
If everything else fails, this worked for grandaddy and there’s no reason to think it won’t work again.
The Japanese have never been all that receptive to allowing imports from the US, but I’ll bet they’d welcome a few shiploads of those signs. And there’s potential for a new manufacturing industry here to replace what went to Asia.
It ain’t as though there’s nothing to do in a fallout shelter.
Big Daddy’s tour d’force is entertainment. Still is. Never been better.
You can’t argue with a history of success. I say, “Let’s go for it!” What are we waiting for?
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, Government, History, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, Politics, Science, Survival
Tagged animals, crisis, culture, entertainment, environment, Events, fallout, government, History, Human Behavior, humor, motorcycles, mutants, nuclear meltdowns, politics, problem solving, psychology, radiation, radioactivity, society, sociology, technology
I used to know a guy named Mike, down in Socorro. A man with a lot of ideas.
During the mid-‘90s, about the time the Internet was cranking up big-time, Mike had the idea it would be cool to start an online raffle.
Mike had some money lying around. Just about enough to buy a full-sized Harley, and a large RV. But he thought he could increase the amount of money he had by taking a risk. He’d sell raffle tickets online for a Harley and a large RV without buying them until someone won the raffle. If he didn’t sell enough tickets, he’d make up the difference with his savings. But if he did sell enough tickets, he’d give away the Harley and RV, and pocket whatever extra came in.
It turns out raffles are illegal at almost any level, though the cops and prosecutors look the other way if they feel the cause is a good one, or if it’s just small potatoes. But item one for Mike turned out to be that if he went online he’d be almost certain to be prosecuted.
Item 2, was the fact he was, in effect, proposing to raffle a motorcycle and an RV that didn’t exist. The fact he didn’t own them yet compounded the felony he would be committing.
Now what Mike was proposing to do was precisely what lotteries do. Raffling off something that doesn’t exist…. Money that they plan on earning as interest.
But, of course, when a government-sanctioned, or government-owned administrative entity commits an act that rhymes with something that would be a felony if an individual behaved identically, all’s well with the world.
Unless they happen to have a lot of attention focused on their behavior, which sometimes happens.
Similarly, I used to know a guy named Dan, who had a lot of cash lying around doing nothing. He dreamed up an online something he called a ‘money club’, or ‘money pool’. Members, Dan dreamed, would pay $5 per month into the pool. Every month the total proceeds, minus 10 percent (to Dan as operational and administrative fees) would be handed out to some lucky member by a process known as Random Number Generator…. Something nearly identical to what’s being done by lotteries. Except it would be private enterprise….. private sector.
Dan figured the payout percentages would be so much better, the odds so much better than any lottery that it would cause players to flock to him. He might have been right.
But there was naturally a catch. What he was proposing was and is a herd of felonies at almost every level of jurisdiction. Even though what he proposed was a lot better for the players involved, than the competition (the government and the various legally recognized mob) could (read ‘would’) offer.
So neither of these ideas ever came to fruition, though each represented the cleaned up versions of corrupted first-cousins we all accept as normal in the lottery systems.
It’s surprising sometimes to see people who claim to believe in free enterprise so blindly support any government monopoly.
Old Jules
Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Gambling, Government, Human Behavior, Internet, Lottery, New Mexico
Tagged economy, government, Human Behavior, lifestyle, lottery, miscellaneous, money, money pool, musings, New Mexico, other, personal, raffle, Random Number Generator, Reflections, society, thoughts
Morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
There was a long email in inbox this morning wanting me to join some protest by ‘blacking out’ this blog. The idea is for me to go to the settings and do something or other to cause the blog to look different, which will result in my having somehow sent as message to someone in the US government that I’m opposed to them doing something or other. In this case, passing something or other limiting ‘freedom’ on the web.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much a proponent of empty meaningless gestures as the next person. But I don’t want to go to a lot of trouble changing settings and possibly not being able to get them back the way they were before.
So, I’m going to take a more direct approach:
TO ALL YOU SENATORS, CONGRESSMEN AND PRESIDENTS OF THE US WHO READ THIS BLOG:
I’M OPPOSED TO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU’RE DOING.
There. If that doesn’t set them straight, nothing will.
Old Jules
Tagged black out, communications, country life, Events, government, Human Behavior, humor, lifestyle, misc, musings, politics, protest, society, sociology, technology
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came for a visit and read.
I’m going to start this morning by telling you something you ought to know already, but mightn’t:
Sometimes I take myself a lot more seriously than is justified by my history of being ‘right’ compared to my history of being ‘wrong’. People who’ve known me forever are acutely aware of this. The terms, ‘alarmist‘ and ‘melodramatic‘ have occasionally been used with brutal accuracy by people in a position to arrive at informed judgements.
Keep in mind I’m the guy who dumped a second career within a couple of years of being able to draw a hefty retirement check because I believed so thoroughly Y2K was going to happen, leading eventually to my current situation. Keep in mind I also spent a lot of years climbing and unclimbing mountains searching for a lost gold mine I believed I’d find.
And keep in mind I don’t regret any of it.
So with all that in mind, I think those of you who read my ‘indefinite detention’ posts of the past few days would be well advised to examine other opinions, even though I still believe I’m generally right. My believing it shouldn’t carry any weight for you.
Here’s another viewpoint offering up a mitigated set of possibilities regarding the same situation and the activities leading to it:
Addicting Info – The Knowledge You Crave http://tinyurl.com/cjs4xav
The NDAA Is A Horrible Bill, And Why Obama Is Going To Sign It
December 17, 2011 By Wendy Gittleson
If you’ve formed any opinions based on anything I’ve said here I think you owe it to yourself to read it. Wendy Gittleson is certainly a lot more qualified to have an opinion than I am, most likely. Even though I don’t necessarily agree.
Old Jules
Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Current Issues, Politics
Tagged activism, culture, economy, Education, government, History, Human Behavior, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, musings, occupy, opinion, other, personal, philosophy, politics, psychology, Reflections, thoughts, wisdom
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
So Far From Heaven 