Warning: If you have kids, had kids, like kids ….don’t read this.

I warned ya!

SHKA (Second Hand Kid Affect). What is it? Well, like second hand smoke from cigarettes has proven to be dangerous to those non-smokers in the general vicinity, now scientists and health care workers are becoming aware of just how dangerous Second Hand Kid Affect can be! Take this afternoon, as my wife and I tried to go shopping at the Publix grocery store. Holy red assed bugged eyed caterpillars Batman! The kids were running amuck! Screaming, yelling, pushing grocery carts into nuns! It was worse than ‘Nam!

Parents were exhausted, shell shocked, as they stumbled through the aisles, routinely blabbing to their kids.

“Charlie, don’t open that jar of spaghetti sauce, there ya go! I told YOU!!! Don’t lick it up off the floor!”

The sad part is she was yelling at her husband…..

Of course, grocery stores are designed for kids. All the crappy food products that are designed to give you diabetes and high blood pressure before high school are right THERE – eye level for kids. That means if me, a responsible adult shopping want one of those products, I have to bend down and kick the slobbering little rascal out of the way before he grabs the last box of Coco Puffs!

But it is hard to not bring kids to the store. So, I can live with that. I usually go shopping early in the morning, before the exhausted parents wake up.

But kids are everywhere! Pharmacies, doctor offices, auto repair centers, Am-Way/Jehovah Witness training camps – just everywhere! However, by far the very worse place kids can be in my humble opinion is restaurants. I’m not talking Burger King or Chuck-up-Cheese pizza joints. I’m talking about real adult establishments; cozy places with candles on the table, with real cloth tablecloths, red or white wine, and no plastic eating utensil or funny hats. A place where no one will stomp about in platoons singing “Happy Birthday” off key. A nice, quiet pleasant dining establishment. And then……..kids show up!!!! Aggghhhhhhh……..

Parents bring babies, who puke up their napkins, scream at the top of their lungs, while their slightly older siblings are blowing snot at each other across the table through their straws. The parents? Ignoring them. I figure they are either stone deaf or just stoned. Or maybe they are so angry at God for giving them kids they are going to make the whole world suffer too!

So, there goes that dignified eating experience. A fine dinner is 60% mood, 40% food.

It has been proven that non-kid people when exposed to Second Hand Kid Affect suffer from high blood pressure, mental distraction, stress disorder, severe heart burn and jock itch. And that is jsut the women!

So, I propose that establishments, especially restaurants, be required to have a No Kid Zone. Preferably an area encased in soundproof NASA engineered plastic that will block out the screams as well as the drool. Not the drool from the kids, but those from the poor brain fried parents.

Peace be with your butt!
PBWYB

It seems that the “self help” section of bookstores are growing so large that it is consuming 50% of the super stores now. Amazing. And they will continue to grow, because everyone has something they want to change about themselves. The problem is, by and large, these books are worthless. Yes, some offer some interesting and informative insight. But the problem is these books miss the mark. They tell us what to do, how to do it, but they can’t offer us personal resolve, will power, to do them. Without that, we will accomplish nothing. Other then keeping self help authors rich.

In my past I was a big user of self help books. Being human, I’ve had several failings to deal with in my past. But no self help book ever did the trick. You see, the best self help book ever published is the Bible. Read that, put those principles to work, and the rest falls in place. Got a problem? Follow these steps:

1. Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior.
2. Read the bible under good direction.
3. Apply the principles in the bible in your daily life.

We are really souls riding around in the brain of an animal. The body is our vehicle, the brain the computer system, and the soul is who we really are. Most of us let the animal (flesh) run too many things in our life. And when we try to change our behaviors, we try to force our animal part to act unlike animals. That is tough. The key is to diminish the animal within us, allowing the soul to consume more. I must decrease. He must increase.

The more we are controlled by the soul in alignment with God’s principles, the stronger we will be, and weaker our flesh will be. You can’t force an animal to be anything other than an animal. My spirit decides to lose weight. My animal decides to eat blueberry muffins for lunch. Did my spirit, my soul want that? No. But the animal was stronger than the spirit. No amount of will power is going to overpower the flesh. I must take in God’s word daily, apply His word to my life moment by moment. Grow the muscle of the soul, and let it take over more of my systems. Increase the spirit, decrease the animal.

I know this may sound odd or weird to you. Especially if you aren’t a Christian. But we are either soul-less chemical and electrical impulses without a destiny, or we are life forms, souls, inhibiting these bodies temporarily. I believe we are souls. Eternal life forms. I believe the solution to most if not all of our internal problems is to increase the influence of the soul over that of the animal body we indwell.

Yeah, even if you are a Christian, this may still sound weird to you. But think about it a bit, will ya? Just give it some thought.

Peace out people.

OK folks, this is brilliant! Some guy wants you to sign up for the Time Travel Fund. All it costs is $10 bucks! And 500 years from now when they invent the time machne, this fund, after earning compounded interest for centuries, will pay for someone to come back to this time and grab you, bringing you to the future! Wow. Sounds like an interesting plan to me, eh?
Here is the web site

http://www.timetravelfund.com/

Of course, not all of your $10 dollars will go into the fund. They have to keep some out for expenses. My guess is abuot $9.99. Still an interesting concept, and an even more interesting way to collect cash via the internet!

My rant today, and indeed, this is a rant, is airlines outsourcing heavy airliner maintenance to third world countries. Like El Salvador. Why are greedy corporate CEOs (who earn anywhere from $2 million to $30 mil a year when you count all of their benefits) sending their airliners to Asia or Central America instead of allowing well trained and certified US workers to fix the planes? Because they are greedy bastards who only care about money, and not passenger or crew safety. That’s why.

Fixing airline engines can pay a well trained and certified airline mechanic in America $60 an hour. Third world countries? Their mechanics are lucky to get $8 an hour.

Hmmm……let me think about this, do I want an English speaking, well trained, certified American worker trying to figure out what that strange noise is in the number 2 engine, or do I want some third world low paid uncertified non-English reading or speaking “mechanic” thumping the side of the engine with a wrench until the noise stops?

Well, that’s a tough question isn’t it? No. Not really. I want a well paid, well trained English reading and speaking professional mechanic working on the engine of the airliner I’m gonna sit in. It helps too that terrorists might have a slightly more difficult time sneaking into the Cleveland or Boston facility than El Salvador. So, even if the same mechanics worked on the planes in both locations, you gotta figure Asia or Central America locations are more exposed to terrorists than America. Just on that alone, I would want major airliner repairs performed within our borders.

Of course, there are other factors too. How about the poor people in America put out of work due to outsourcing airline maintenance? What about the strain on our social systems when so many mechanics and other airliner personnel are jobless?

Outsourcing tech support for your laptop is one thing. Worse thing that can happen there is you lose all your laptop data. But outsourcing airline repairs to third world countries? I don’t even want to think about what could happen.

But then again, what is American Capitalism all about? Dollars. Nothing else. Old Time Capitalism used to be about people too. About making “an honest buck” and one you would be proud of. Today’s capitalism is all about the dollar and not about people are all.

I’ve collected some news articles about airline repair outsourcing:
Here

And here.

And then I found this really interesting website. It gives all kinds of data on airplane crashes. Which airline has the best record, descriptions of the crashes, causes, last words of airline captains (Often “Shit!” occasionally “Oh shit!”. And it also gives some other interesting info.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/index.html

Well, hope none of you were planning on flying this week…..hey, remember, God is in charge of your birth and departure, so don’t sweat it.