Journals
Monday,Apr 24 2006, 06:50:22 AMPolitical Stuff - articles, letters, observations
Open Letter To the Secretary of Defense
As our side so aptly declared in Afghanistan, "The night belongs to us".
We ruled the night because we had the technology to see, and thereby act, in darkness.
If there is actually warfare on this continent our foe will face the most highly armed civilian population in the history of the world.
We will make a formidable front line civilian defense...but we will fail if the night belongs to our foe.
Therefore, it is in the interest of freedom to provide America's civilian front-line with the high quality, night vision equipment necessary to defeat the enemy.
We don't need the cheap, first generation, monocular night vision scopes. They are better than nothing but certainly inferior to the night vision equipment with which an invading foe would assuredly be equipped.
In fact, hostile forces already in the country can purchase, through the mail, the best night vision equipment, body armor, semi-automatic weapons and the book detailing how to make them fully automatic, explosive materials from dozens of different sources, heat sensing equipment (easily made from Radio Shack items) for locating people inside buildings, books detailing how to make a silencer for you weapon and what ever else a dedicated enemy might find useful in his assault on us.
We must also develop a night time warning system of some sort or we may all die at the hands of those who have purchased all their equipment legally, through the mail. Assassins with night vision equipment, silencers, high powered rifles, heat sensor equipment and the best communications equipment available, could start on the coast at sunset and by morning killed thousands of people...with out taking a shot in return. A kid with a single shot 22 could kill most of us.
We need third generation, head-held binocular night vision scopes if we want to be reasonably efficient as a front line defense.
We, the front-line defense, need many tens of thousands of high quality star light, binocular scopes. If we don't have them we will die quickly during the night and not be the powerful force that is potentially in place. To not use the folks already in the area, ready to serve, would be a terrible, bloody mistake. We are willing and capable, even anxious, to do what we must to save our families, our community and our country.
Sincerely,
Grey Wolf
[If this letter is made public, for any reason, please, use my pseudonym, Grey Wolf; I want to remain, at this precarious time in our history, as anonymous as possible. Thank you.]
OLD FASHION CASTLE STORMING: BRING PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES
The Frankenstein Monster must be stopped. It knows no boundaries. It is without pity or sensibilities of any sort.
The Monster can't help it: It's a monster.
The CEOs who are devastating the life savings of so many certainly are monsters. Those 'savings' are the bucks saved over a life time in preparation for what one hopes will be a comfortable future...not knowing that monster greed would one day rip away most or all of those savings.
The public employees are guaranteed, in their retirement fund, that no investment will return less than 8% a year. If they invest in Dumbluck Corporation and it's loses 2%, the taxpayers will pick up the tab for the 8% plus the 2% minus giving the public employees retirement fund 10% right out of our pockets. If Dumbluck makes 17% they get to keep all of it. That's the best deal I have ever heard of anyone voting for themselves. They are also guaranteed regular wage increases. If they appear to be passing on a wage increase or some perks, they aren't; they will pick up the missed wage increase and perks, plus whatever the package calls for, in some future negotiation.
The Eugene County Commissioners, poor, underpaid, fat cats with their public cars, expense accounts, assistants and secretaries and 30%, at least, above their salary in great perks, voted themselves a repugnant, horribly timed 31 percent wage increase.
A technique used by devious individuals to increase their personal salary is to point at someone else's hugely, overblown salary and say, "Gee, our county is bigger, even though we have fewer people, so we should be paid a higher salary than that other county that has more people but is smaller." The reply, from the smaller, more populated county, is, "Gee, our county is smaller but our population is larger so we should be paid more than the other county." And, within a relatively short period of time, the bigger county will demand more because....and on and on and on right into the grave. This attitude is insanely myopic because it must lead to disaster.
Bureaucrat, who have never really worried about paying a bill or worried about the health costs that come with being a parent or worried about college for the children or worried about tires for the car, or worried about....well, you know the rest of the worries, assure us they understand. They don't! They can't! Not with a steady salary, lots of wonderful perks and a job that just goes on forever.
When we weren't looking, or paying attention, or however it occurred, they took control of their own salaries. How propitious for them.
The inevitable happened, as it does with all special interest groups; over the years those running for union offices had to promise more and more to get the votes of the members. So, over the years, the public servants became public employees and now those very servants that use to do our bidding expect, no demand, that we do their bidding. They demand that we pay higher everything, every time they meet.
Poor folks have always had to storm the castle to kill the monster; tear down the walls of the citadel, break the tortured out of the Bastille. There has always been a Robin Hood, Lone Ranger, Zerro, the Scarlet Pimpernel...masked men who stood up to the Frankenstein monster. All those heroes understood that monsters don't, no, monsters can't walk away from their monster activities. What they have is consolidated power and that is never given back. It must be taken.
I don't want to get out in front on this one. I have before and it has cost me dearly; my time, my energy, my personal money and, as the Frankenstein monster knew would happen, I ran out of money and eventually disappeared. The citizens, who were watching me, began to believe that something really important was happening...and it wasn't...it was an illusion. Ten years later I went to a County Commissioners meeting and they same Commissioners, for the most part, sat on the same chairs behind the same desks and the audience, almost completely changed from those with whom I went to meetings, attempted to force the same, sane behavior on a monster.
Folks from all over Oregon, even out of Oregon, should meet in front local court houses with pitchforks and torches. We must tell them that cancer can not be allowed to live in healthy tissue because a cancer will always grow until the host begins to wither and then both the host and the cancer will die. But, you know what, the cancer doesn't even care, right up to the end...except, perhaps, for those last, few moments when the cancer sees itself (that is, its children, its homes, its future) beginning to die..
Can't those who stumble about, arms outstretched, grabbing everything in sight, see what they are doing? Some do, I suppose, but they would be traitors if they spoke out against their own best interests, their health plan, dental plan, eye care plan, retirement plan, or the 'every day that is possible to take off with pay' plan. Meanwhile, I've had to sign a contract with the power company to make payments on the last couple of months of my electric bill.
The utilities? I own them and yet I endlessly pay more. They need the money, they say. Sure, they do.
Someone or some group should call for the 'Storming of the Castle', with pitchforks and torches. It is time. Warn them. Let them know that they have become a terminal cancer and that they can not kill us and our children with out killing themselves and their children. They will not die peacefully, isolated from the rest of us.
Listen all you CEOs, politicians, bureaucrats, public employees, at every level, if you can't be made to see this that the very nature of your powerful, special interests are killing your neighbors with tax burdens that are sucking them dry, destroying the lives of many in the private sector, and leading, perhaps, much sooner than you think, to a real storming of the castle with pitchforks, guns, bombs, hatchets, battering rams and a lot of really angry people then it will mean the end of American and, dominoes falling, the end of civilization as we know it You must be made to see the damage you are doing to your friends and neighbors and also to yourself and your children..
...and yata, yata, yata. Nothing will change. The motion, like a wave, is already generated but I must make one last plea for sane behavior by those who control things. I'd like my children and grandchildren to have an opportunity to experience some of the marvelous adventures I've had during my life but instead, I'm afraid, they are going to die soon. I'm really beginning to despise those responsible. Their blind selfishness is going to kill my family.
See you on the County Commissioner's office building steps when ever some one with courage and vision asks me to be there...and I swear to God I will bring my pitchfork and torch.
Grey Wolf (greywolfdrums.com)
An old time radical who is watching the actualization of his life-long nightmare. There is nothing unexpected...except, perhaps, for the nonexistent effort, from within the castle, to bring sanity to the monster's activities.
THE DECLINE OF ETHICS, MORALITY AND HOPE FOR THE WORLD
How did the wonderful, American family life, so much a part of my childhood, cease to be a part of our culture. Was it t.v.? Was it drugs? What single part of our modern life separate us from each other like a sharp knife slicing through Jell-O? What object prevents mothers and fathers from passing on their ethics and morality to their children? When did my family, in those good, old days, share their individual experiences? When did my mother and father have an opportunity to say to me, both directly and indirectly, "Clifford, think about this..."?
I remember dinner, the family meal. We had breakfast together, too, but it was a rushed meal as my dad and we children were getting ready to leave for the day. Breakfast was about eating and getting to work and school. But dinner was much different and the microwave ended dinner.
It all started when we started to replace meals with easy foods like the 4 minute potato and we human beings, basically simple creatures who follow the path of least resistance, could not avoid the tendency to use the microwave.
When the microwave became a part of our household we ceased to have evening meals together. When the family no longer ate together there was no longer the opportunity for my parents to share their values with the children. When we no longer sat down to dinner together my parents ceased to have the opportunity to feed us their ethics and morality along with the evening meal. When my dad and mom and my brothers and sister and I were able to stick a microwave dinner or a potato or wiener into the microwave, at each person's convenience, and have a meal in minutes there ceased to be a reason for dinner. My mom was no longer the prepare of food. The microwave took over that job. The problem is, of course, the microwave has no ethics or morality to feed a person along with the food. Hence, the death of a crucial element in our lives, the evening meal was, perhaps, pivotal in setting the stage for the death of our culture and maybe the world.
GREEN GRASS, BLUE SKIES
By Clifford Latta 03-17-06
Even when I was in prison this life of mine was a Green Grass, Blue Skies experience.
Technology has been on the move for a hundred plus years in an inexorable march toward utter, absolute, complete destruction. Once the technological march starts the end result is absolutely predictable.
A small degree of modern technology is insinuated here and there in this or that primitive culture. Like a fire these small insinuations send out sparks starting fires everywhere. Eventually the culture is on fire and there is no going back. The fire destroys the past. As cultures become dependent on ‘progress’ (consumption) all past options disappear; all that was known about nature and what it provides is soon lost; never again will the people be able to actually use the plants, insects, animals, dirts and muds, lichen, and the abundance learned over a culture’s life time of growing. Survival skills will become a fading memory. All that will be left of the evolved harmony between humankind and Nature will be a black hole. Once having lost the past we can only go forward, moving with the automated mindlessness wrought by an absolute dependence on ‘things being done for us’.
Hello Lars,
There’s a lot we don’t agree about but, then again, I do agree with you on many fundamental issues...like abuses by the public employee system and unfair taxes.
About ten years ago I was Chairman of Tax Payers In Control. Mabel Royce and I wrote the three enclosed Initiatives. The problems that we were addressing are still problems and the Initiatives still point toward something that needs to be done.
I’m sending you this material in the hopes that you will read it and, hopeful, agree with the direction that we were attempting to take the state of Oregon. You know folks; you have a forum; you have an adgenda...the truth and fairness in governement. Perhaps, you can make use of this stuff. I’ve done all I can do. Please, use any and all of this material any way you choose.
I’m now 67 years old and too tired to attempt to resurrect this effort; perhaps, you will be willing and able to help bring our ten year old ideas into the present political arena.
More than ten years ago Bill Sizmore told me to give up the efforts of Tax Payers In Control unless I had someone willing to pay me a salary. He said, "You’ll run out of money and fall to the wayside." That is exactly what happened. I ended up thousands of dollars in the hole and we fell apart as an organization. It must be noted that we were all amateurs, willing to take on the giant bureaucracy because we despised what was going on...and those of us still somewhat involved continue to despise the inequities of a political system apparently unable to control itself. It is the inability of the political system to exercise control that makes it absolutely necessary to impose controls.
I pass this material on to you, Lars, hoping you can make some positive use of it.
Namaste.
Clifford Latta (Grey Wolf the Drum Maker)
Monday,Apr 17 2006, 04:50:10 AMA LIFE TIME OF POETRY AND STUFF (more coming)
SAFE SEX
You've been my friend as long as I can remember.
You've always been there when I needed you. ...
Read More...
Saturday,Apr 15 2006, 06:47:09 AMTHE MAN WHO MADE THE STRONGEST RABBITS IN THE WORL
THE MAN WHO MADE THE STRONGEST RABBITS IN THE WORLD
by
Clifford Latta 12-10-94 ...
Read More...
Thursday,Apr 13 2006, 07:38:44 AMFemale Gray Matter - It's a Matter of Survival
FEMALE GRAY MATTER - IT'S A MATTER OF SURVIVAL
Inspired by Valerie Lindhout
There are only two ways for the human race to continue with some semblance of civilization as we know it: 1) God wiggles his/her fingers around in our chromosomes and, WHAM-O, overnight we become new beings - [NOTE: This change MUST occur almost instantly, not over generations, because we exist on the edge of a fatal precipice and we are leaning at a catastrophic angle.], or 2) we change the way we do business. THAT'S IT! THERE ARE NO OTHER CHOICES!!! ...
Read More...
Tuesday,Apr 4 2006, 08:03:11 AMThe Year 2110
The Year 2110
By
Clifford Latta ...
Read More...