Creative Endeavors, The Home of BoxcarOkie.com

August 14, 2008

The Frog and the Scorpion

A frog and a scorpion are standing on the banks of a river. The scorpion looks at the frog and says, “Can you give me a lift to the other side of the river? I cannot swim.” The frog looks at the scorpion warily and says, “No.” The scorpion says, “Why not?” And the frog replies, “because you will sting me and then we will die.”

The scorpion says to the frog, “no, I would never do that. Trust me.” And then convinces the lowly little frog to do it. So the frog says, “Okay, climb on my back and I will take you across.” About mid river, the scorpion stings the little frog, and the frog looks back and says, “Why? Why did you do that? Now we will both die.” The scorpion looks at the frog and replies … “It’s just my nature.”

Morale of the story? Don’t believe everything that you hear.

T. Boone Pickens is all over the daily paper. He is holding town meetings on his proposed energy plan for America. The media is calling him a “Native Son” or “Patron Saint of the Prairie” because of his philanthropy towards state colleges, one in particular. It is almost comical the way the media is trying to “clean this boy up” and make him look semi-palatable.

They don’t talk about his corporate raiding in the seventies, purchasing perfectly good companies, and then gutting them and sending the workers to the barn. They don’t talk about how he is establishing his own private water company in the panhandle of Texas, with him, his wife and one employee on the payroll to be trustees.

No one wants to tell people about his getting the Texas legislature to rewrite law to give the right of imminent domain to a “private entity” to grant him authority to lay his water pipe to Dallas. A thing that up and until now has been unheard of, imminent domain was always a governmental body type of thing, not a private ownership entity privilege or right.

Also they have rewritten Texas law to give the same rights to “good old boys” who build wind farms and need a corridor for their power lines, which I suppose the “public will eventually end up paying for” good old boys seldom pay for all of it.

Most of the time, they go to the banker, open up the wallet and say, “Here is all my money and I want to do this.” And then they use “the bankers money” and keep theirs. Which is most likely what is in play here, but I am not a player, you see I don’t have the $5 million buy in for BP Capital Partners and neither do you.

Makes me wonder, why isn’t the paper quick to point out that the O0lahogah (sp?) Aquifer is going dry right now, because too many people are pumping from it. That, in some parts of it they are now sucking up sand on the fringes and outlying areas of the vast underground reservoir.

If the Sierra Club shut down a proposed packing plant in Amarillo, that only wanted to use a measly 180,000 gallons of water a year, how does T. Boone get the right to deliver some undisclosed millions of acre feet of water to Dallas every year.

Water that so far, no one has asked him to deliver.

While it is surely fine to applaud Pickens for wanting to bridge the partisan gap in politics and help America get back on its feet. To stop this stranglehold the Arabs have on us concerning oil (I refuse to call it an addiction; it is not an addiction as some have proposed). It should be noted that this guy is not doing this out of the “goodness of his heart” he has plenty of what this country needs, and he and his partners are going to be making a lot of money off the deal.

Just as soon as he can convince everyone to “give him” what he needs to pull it off.

000

Rooster Tales …

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:  “For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.”

A bad day to be a frog.  CBS or NBC, I cannot remember, is now reporting that frogs are dying all over the planet.  Increased temperatures in the water, foster the growth of a fungus-viral type organism that is killing them off at an unprecedented rate, some 40% of the worlds species of frogs have either died or have completely disappeared.

These are the little guys, natures’ survivors, that made it thru the Ice Age, planetary collisions and collapse of entire eco systems in the past, for possibly millions of years.  When all the dinosaurs were toast, we still had the lowly little frog.  Now their days seem to be numbered, time is running out people, best wise up and do something.

San Antonio, Texas.  News from the America that Mr. Bush says “has no problems.”  More and more families are turning to food banks and public assistance because of high food prices and an ailing economy.  The San Antonio food bank helped nearly 316,000 families in the fiscal year that ended in June.  That was up 85% from last year.

The problem is just not a local thing it is global.

Now we are seeing entire countries outsourcing their problems.  Nations like Kenya, Cambodia, and Georgia, for example are proving that they cannot provide carrying out of basic functions of statehood.  Assorted aid agencies, international charities and philanthropists are replacing traditional donors and government influence.  Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are increasingly taking over key state functions, providing for the health, welfare and safety of citizens.

I hope they leave a little for us in the end.

ExxonMobil posted second quarter earnings of $11.7 billion, the largest quarterly profit ever recorded by any company.  ExxonMobil also posted the previous record setter which was 11.6 billion in profit in the 4th quarter of the year 2007.  Americans are using 800,000 barrels less oil per day now because of extreme cost and conservation and yesterday the American refiners announced that they were not the bad guys … “We are only making 3 to 4 cents profit” on a gallon of fuel, and that their profits are down 85% over last year.

Yeah, I believe that, like I believe in …….. Well, y’know the rest of it, dont’cha?

Nissan says that next year it will introduce a gas pedal that pushes back when it sense drivers are accelerating too quickly.  The “ECO Pedal” system is said to improve fuel efficiency by 5% to 10%.  What I need is a wallet that will grow a new gasoline dollar each time I take one out, something like a lizards tail.  You can think on that one for awhile, this ends today’s science portion of the post, boys n girls.

The computer mouse, which turned 40 years old this year, will be obsolete in three to five years.  Touch screen programming, joysticks and possibly facial recognition will replace it.  We had mouse problems this past week, but we discovered the culprit was right here in the office all the time.

Now I like this one.

Metro officials are using police style laser type radar guns to track the speed of buses in Washington DC area.    Over the past year Metro bus supervisors have issued 152 speeding citations to drivers ….  Even though the bus drivers know the location of the daily speed traps in advance … Now that is pretty bad, you KNOW where they are going to be, and you still get caught speeding?

How many dollars does it take to protect the Presidential candidates?  It takes or is estimated to take, $40,000 per day for each of them, and the bill for this expense will be some $106 million this year alone.

John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called “pullets”, and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs.

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn’t perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer’s favorite rooster was old Butch, a very fine specimen he was too.  But on this particular morning John noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all! John went to investigate. The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.

But to Farmer John’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result…The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making: who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.

Vote carefully this year… the bells are not always audible.

000

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