In my current bout of unemployment, I was seriously considering returning to the mine to work in a few weeks. No more. The mine has been shut down for three weeks, first because of an MSHA (mine safety & health admin) violation, now because of flooding in Death Valley, where the mine is located. The MSHA citation came because they continued to produce ore after the fans broke, meaning the only ventilation going into the mine was that which was drifting down naturally, and there was very...

OK, folks. This time, I am going to post the entire article, from yahoo! news on this one. This is upsetting that such a mistake was made: Co. Pulls Toys Depicting 9-11 Attack Fri Aug 27, 2:40 PM ET Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo! MIAMI - Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled. AP Photo Toys With Twin Towers and Plan...

For this blog to make sense, I am going to have to go back a bit to a time I don't like to revisit. One of my past stepfathers (a man we'll call John Doe) was a man my mother met in a casino in Wendover, Nevada, and married in jail when he was in on a burglary charge. He was also the most sadistic man I ever met. One example of his twisted ways of doing things was when he beat me severely for leaving a coat at school (until I was bleeding rather steadily), then took us to the Great Salt La...

For many years, my family and I lived in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For those of you who don't know, Oshkosh is the site of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA)'s annual fly-in. Over a million people come from around the globe for the week long event, which features flight demonstrations, notable aviators, and celebrity enthusiasts of all kind (John Denver was a regular when he was alive; Chuck Yeager and Dick Rutan make the trip every year as well). It is the largest civilian airshow in t...

Just over 7 years ago, I received the job that I truly thought would be my career. I was working with developmentally disabled adults in a group home setting. The following years seemed to confirm my feeling that this would become my career, as I advanced up the ladder as quickly as I could. Within a year, I was an assistant manager. Two years after that I was manager. I coauthored the Y2k disaster program for the 50 programs under our care, and authored the individual Y2k support plans fo...

OK, this one off the funny papers. In the now growing war against me (no, I'm not kidding, it's gotten pretty stupid), I have been accused of violating someone's human rights. Did I hack into their computer and edit their blogs? Did I manipulate joeuser's servers and hide them? No...I CRITICIZED them. For this, I get categorized as a "human rights" violator. Please show me any international agreement that stipulates the right to blog without criticism. It isn't there. What I canno...

This "tales from the road" is going to be different than the previous entries, as it describes hiking, one of my favorite activities. We set out to hike the entire Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which follows Lake Superior's southern shoreline in Michigan's upper peninsula. Our guide was experienced to the area, and had the trip plotted out for 43 miles over 5 days. We set out on day one to rain, which continued the entire day and was a delige until two of us reached camp, as breakoffs...

I stated in my earlier blogs about the error of my younger days, and how I spent time in the county jail. During that time, I gained a good deal of insight as to how stereotypes are built up. I have found that ex inmates almost always have some level of prejudice. During my time in the Pierce County Correctional Center in late 1988-early 1989, I found out a good deal why. Inside many of the cell blocks, the blacks tend to mingle with the blacks, the hispanics with the hispanics, and so ...

The five and a half years I spent managing group homes for the developmentally disabled were my best time for road trips, as I had to get out and away from the madness and frustration that was my job (and would eventually result in my leaving the field altogether). For months, we had planned to travel to Lincoln, Nebraska to see some friends of ours who performed in a family band in their home state. As I pored over the road atlas, I saw there was more that we could do with that trip. W...

Gilbert Deya, a Kenyan based pastor, is a miracle worker, or so his followers believe. Deya and his wife have prayed over infertile women who have made a poilgrimage to Kenya, and these women have conceived, given birth to their babies in Kenya, and returned home. That's his story, at least. Investigators have begun investigating the claims, and questioning whether Deya is involved in a baby smuggling ring. Police discovered a woman with 11 children between the ages of 5 months and 13 y...

II THE BEST FIELDS FOR PHILANTHROPY WHILE " The Gospel of Wealth" has met a cordial reception upon this side of the Atlantic, it is natural that in the motherland it should have attracted more attention, because the older civilization is at present brought more clearly face to face with socialistic questions. The contrast between the classes and the masses, between rich and poor, is not yet quite so sharp in this vast, fertile, and developing continent, with less than twenty persons per...

I was asked on another thread about altruism in a Libertarian society. As I referenced Andrew Carnegie, I thought it only fair to present his treatise, "the Gospel of Wealth" as an explanation of his position, and an example of how altrusim can work within capitalism. I will present this in two parts, with part 2 to follow immediately, for the convenience of the reader: THE GOSPEL OF WEALTH Andrew Carnegie I THE PROBLEM OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WEALTH THE problem of our age is t...

ok, folks. Here's a topic for you. What are your favorite words that sound dirty but actually are not? Here are my submissions: *rectify *masticate *thespian *Lake Titticaca ok, now...let's hear yours signing off, Gideon MacLeish

Jeff woke up in the morning with a horrible hangover. His first conscious thought was to rid himself of any visible evidence of the hangover, as the new prohibition laws were rather strict, and he didn't relish the thought of spending his 35th birthday in the stocks. He grabbed his bible and opened it, reading the requisite passage in Ezekial, logging carefully his notes in case the government questioned his commitment to the government's new Compulsory Religion laws. As he stumbled into the ...

Every once in awhile, I'm prone to hit a topic that perks the eyebrows of my fellow libertarians. This is one of those. One of the core mistakes we make in our zeal to create a capitalist society is to miss the role that collective bargaining rightly plays in such a society. It is not necessarily inconsistent with capitalism, nor is it necessarily a component of a socialist society. In the following paragraphs I intend to lay out how collective bargaining and capitalism can be not only com...