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Old Patriot's Pen

Personal pontifications of an old geezer born 200 years too late.

NOTE The views I express on this site are mine and mine alone. Nothing I say should be construed as being "official" or the views of any group, whether I've been a member of that group or not. The advertisings on this page are from Google, and do not constitute an endorsement on my part.

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Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States

I've been everywhere That was the title of a hit country-and-western song from the late 1950's, originally sung by Hank Snow, and made famous by Johnny Cash. I resemble that! My 26-year career in the Air Force took me to more than sixty nations on five continents - sometimes only for a few minutes, other times for as long as four years at a time. In all that travel, I also managed to find the perfect partner, help rear three children, earn more than 200 hours of college credit, write more than 3000 reports, papers, documents, pamphlets, and even a handful of novels, take about 10,000 photographs, and met a huge crowd of interesting people. I use this weblog and my personal website here to document my life, and discuss my views on subjects I find interesting.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Books online

Just a quick post to say that I've uploaded three of my books to the Amazon Digital Editions (Kindle) self-publishing program, and one to Barnes & Noble's NookBook program.

"Cynthia" is available from both programs. Amazon Kindle also has "The Wizard of Skye" and "Last Flight from Queensland Station" available. I hope to have two others ("King's Cross" and "Hukata") available in the near future, and all available from both locations by the end of March.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Cranking up the economy.

I think any halfway intelligent person can build a better plan than the one President Obama is working on right now. Here is mine:

1. Cut spending. Half or more of it's a waste anyway.
2. Fire the "Czars". They only get in the way and cost far more than they're worth.
3. Reduce taxes, especially those on business and investment.
4. Reduce the regulatory burden. It costs us over $1 trillion a year.
5. Reduce or eliminate most of the burden on developing domestic energy production.
6. Allow more drilling, faster.
7. Speed up the approval for nuclear energy plants.
8. Reduce the regulatory burden on the development of domestic mineral resources.
9. Quit the stupidity of CO2 being a "pollutant".
10. Reduce or eliminate farm subsidies, especially on ethanol.
11. Reduce the power of labor unions and their drag on the economy. Why are the railroads still saddled with a 1942-era Executive Order requiring them to be unionized?
12. Start fighting wars to WIN, not "tied". Build up the national defense structure to where we can fight two wars simultaneously without being totally dependent upon the National Guard and Reserves. We're going to have MORE wars in the future, not fewer.
13. Restore public confidence in the voting process by actually prosecuting voter fraud, instead of sweeping it under the rug.
14. Secure the borders and start cleaning house of all the "undocumented immigrants" - i.e. illegal aliens. We have a process for immigration - strengthen it and ensure it's followed.
15. Cut the size of government by at LEAST one-fourth. We have far too many "civil servants".
16. Stop putting burdens on the states they didn't ask for, and can ill afford.

That didn't even take me five minutes. I'd bet that if these suggestions were implemented, even if only 50% of them were implemented, or if they all were only halfway implemented, our economy would BOOM.

I'll elaborate on what I mean for each of these in a later post.