Abandon all hope ye who enter here, lest ye learn something morbid today. Today, I am gonna talk about suicide. My way. A couple of days ago, I was listening to one of the satellite news channels on my way home from Reno. During the course of the broadcast, they talked about a nurse who had killed herself after two radio disc jockeys had pulled a prank involving her. She was not the target of the prank but apparently, she felt duped. The Australian disc jockeys had called a hospital in London pretending to be the queen mother and Prince Charles- and had actually conned a nurse into delivering the phone call to Kate Middleton who had been admitted for morning sickness. It should have just been a stupid prank with little or no repercussions other than a boat load of teasing. Catch the wrong people at the wrong time and they do some outlandish things. Like kill themselves. Thus it was her turn- to pull a prank. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kate-middleton-prank-call-rec...

This woman was shootng video of her son when she caught this precious scene. Sometimes, when you least expect it, justice comes on really slow wings. *Update. Just received email saying this vid was a hoax and produced for a TV ad. I haven't been able to prove it...but I suspect it probably was. If something is too good to be true- it usually is.

Today I was reading about how one of the architects and writers of Obamacare jumped ship to take a job within the industry that will benefit the most from the bill. She is also one of the architects of the medicare prescription plan which benefitted who? The drug industry. So after a lifetime of sucking taxpayer money out of the government trough, Liz Fowler landed a job at Johnson and Johnson for 1.5 million a year. And you thought bribes came in envelopes.  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-07/meet-liz-fowler-architect-obamacare-jumps-ship-johnson-johnson Not to be outdone, Jim DeMint, tea party Senator and alleged great conservative from South Carolina, also announced he was jumping ship to take a job for a million a year. That job, which is a 550% pay increase over his current 174,000 dollar Senate salary will be to head up the great Heritage Foundation think tank.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/07/jim-demint-heritage-foundation_n_2258631.html (I used...

When you grow up in a mining town, you learn to live like the miners do. I am not proud of what I'm about to tell you, but it's true. I was drinking, chewing tobacco, cursing, and gambling at the ripe old age of 11. That's how it was in Butte. In fact, all of my friends did the same things and I never really thought twice about my lifestyle as a kid. It was exciting and I thought it was normal.  That's probably why I loved Butte. I quit tobacco and booze years ago. Profanity is proving hard. Anyone that knows me- knows that I have always been a serious gambler. Now days, I bet horses. For 25 years, I actually played Texas Hold Em well enough to win quite a few tournaments and supplement my income. I played many nights with the likes of Phil Hellmuth, Johnny Moss, Bulldog Bill Sykes, Bones Berland, Puggy Pearson, Bill Smith, Stu Unger,  and even David Brenner...just to name a few. I used to play low limit with Steve Wynn's mother at the Golden Nugget. So ...

Most of my trip to Reno yesterday was uneventful- except for a potential collision and near death experience I had on the "on" ramp at Winnemucca.  Unlike normally engineered ramps, there are a few ramps in Nevada that simply dump you onto the interstate and right into the slow lane. Yesterday while I was merging on the Winnemucca ramp, a trucker with his head up his ass and no traffic in the neighboring lane, decided not to let me in which sent me down the shoulder for about an eighth of a mile. I very rarely flip these assholes off anymore- choosing instead to suffer alone in my car while dodging debris on the shoulder- muttering things I learned in Butte as a child. This incident was uniquely special and as such, I offered a friendly "wave." There was a road sign a few miles down the road that implored drivers not to drive aggressively around trucks. No kidding. So as I rolled into Reno, I noted that the place looks like a ghost town. There is a very signi...

Late last week, I watched as JP Morgan and a couple of other banks drove the price of gold and silver down as far they could before the Dec. delivery date. It is so predictable. It really pisses me off that not only do the CFTC regulators look the other way and absolutely refuse to stop this collusion- but that bankers like JP Morgan get free money via the Fed's counterfeiting  QE schemes... to screw us over with. Stealing our own money which they in turn use to take more money from us. You couldn't invent a scheme as perfect as that. Precious metals are the mortal enemy of our worthless dollar. Ultimately people will pile into precious metals because there will be no other way for people to preserve their wealth. So I stumbled onto this piece on TF Metals site. It is a must read- especially for Idaho boys and girls. It seems that Boise's favorite son and potato magnate,  JR Simplot, was driving the price of Maine potatoes down back in 1976. He was shorting the ma...

One of the problems with writing publicly is people have no idea what you know or how you came to know it. Wrapped tightly in their own little cocoons, devoid of facts to substantiate a position, they utter their opinions like they know what they are talking about. Now if you didn't know that we are 16.3 trillion in debt, that we are running medicare and social security deficits already in the billions, that we spend 1.2 trillion more than we take in year after year after year, and that we have another 77 trillion due and payable in the next 30 years.... well if you didn't know all of that....and you didn't know that Freddie, Fannie, and Sallie Mae are all bankrupt to the tune of well over a trillion...and that we have lost 50 million jobs and our capacity to pay off all this debt... You might think we are just fine. Like this guy who left his comment to me on Huffpo. This is what we are up against. He apparently has a different set of facts than the rest of us. “...

Every once in awhile- I mean a GREAT while- something which is useful to all of us actually gets published on Huffington Post. Mostly, I have found that Huffpo writes superfluous, vacuous, and shallow bullshit- stuff which I discovered in my teens and have long since forgotten. My friend Lisa sent me one of those rare pieces, which as it turns out, was initially put up on TED. It is about how near death experiences change the course of our lives. Or events that are so traumatic- that they initiate a whole new perspective and outlook in us. I loved the message here. It's a departure from the usual stuff I write. This is actually entertaining, informative, and upbeat.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/june-cohen/near-death-experiences_b_2213630.html?icid=maing-grid7%7cmain5%7cdl5%7csec1_lnk1%26pLid%3D240280

"We don't fix things anymore. When something breaks, we simply replace it. It's cheaper." -Phil at the radiator shop One of the most difficult adjustments that I've had to make since retiring a few years ago- is adjusting to life outside of law enforcement. Here's the weird part. In terms of what I have seen in the private sector, we had our shit together. I thought the reverse would be true. Let me tell you what it was like. We hired and trained the right people back then. We took an active interest in their lives and their development. We spent a lot of money on education. We had discipline too. But unlike life out here when something went wrong- we didn't blame the employee first- we asked ourselves, "Where did we fail to train? What did we do wrong as managers?" Three things happened. The problem was solved about 95% of the time because we realized we had overlooked something as managers. Our employees knew that we were going to look a...