The city of Mitchell, South Dakota. is hell-bent on destroying one of the oldest homes in the city. The couple living there has been slow to repair fire damage and is apparently elderly. The Mitchell Daily Republic has the sad story.
This kind of trashing of landmarks and historical structures shows a tremendous lack of foresight and respect for the past. I found it interesting that homes lived in by William Shakespere or his wife still existed in Britain. Not only that, but taxes paid by his father were recorded on hides if my recollection is correct and those "files" were still readable and findable.
It seems to me from a distance of a hundred miles or so that the wizards in Mitchell City government could find a way to get a grant or way to fund repair of the house to meet modern standards and also work out a way for the couple to live there until they died. Perhaps the home could then become part of a local historic trust.
The smashing and trashing of homes with good lumber or historical significance in South Dakota towns and cities seems to be an incredible waste of lumber and also needless waste of landfill space. City condemnation processes seem short-sighted and also short of the right kind of imagination.
The justification here in Winner is to control rodents among other things. Past incompetent zoning has a lot of small homes on lots too small now to allow building. The primary beneficiaries of such condemnation and destruction are those influentials with rental apartments and houses. The local ordinance requiring cats to not be loose is probably the actual cause of an increase in rodents. Unintended consequences of ideas that might be good leading into ideas and heavy-handed enforcement which is wasteful and a trashing of property rights.
***Stay tuned even if the world won't end if a few thousand homes in South Dakota are condemed and trashed--- Doug Wiken
It appears that TypePad was down from about 7AM until a few minutes ago. TypePad has been having more trouble in the last month or two than I remembered in several years.
Not that I had a lot to say anyway, but at least I know why there were zero hits today.
I listened to most of the SD GOP debate radio broadcast today. I did not get all of the BS just as I missed some of the TV broadcast. The SDPB-Radio broadcast started around noon today, May 19,2014. The GOP pack of dwarf candidates for US Senator from South Dakota apparently have no fear of underestimating the intelligence of most GOP primary voters. There was much bladerdash and humbug from the collection. A couple of choice examples below.
Dr. Annette Bosworth, the non-candidate-material candidate, when asked about improving rural medicine in South Dakota took off after the federal government standing in the way of new technology apparently aimed getting medical information from rural settings to metropolitan analysis. Of course no details from her on this and apparently she is unaware of the source of the internet and much of the federal funding aimed at making it sufficently broadband to work with detailed medical information.
Of course, almost all of them had some version of medical end times that swirl around the idea that "Obamacare" will destroy America. I suspect most of sane America wonders just how that process of destruction will work. They might better fixate on global warming making the earth uninhabitable for their fossil fuel burning descendants. That is more likely the end time for America than anything connected with "Obamacare". But, these GOP candidates running on fossil fuel contributions will never say a bad word about that industry or human's influencing God's work of balancing the world and its ecology in his hand.
Marion Michael Rounds was prime purveyor of the mythology that "Obamacare" can destroy the USA. Bosworth asked if Rounds had ever had an original idea in his life. She who believes women think differently than men . Women know how to see the gray in issues while men can only see black and white. I guess that wasn't quite my experience when working with men and women in state government or with my wife's experience working primarily with women in a hospital setting. I don't really think she is the one to come up with new ways of looking at old problems.
In the other really important news about the GOP and its broken heroes, The MDR today had about 4 column inches on the death of George W. Bush's dog which died of leukemia. Dog death the media can handle. Reagan's dementia in and out of office not so much.
Listening to the dwarfs, it is no wonder they don't want to fund education and to kill the US Department of Education. No telling how dangerous an informed electorate would be to their humbug. Rounds wants to kill the US Department of Education, but as Cory at Madville Times, Bob Mercer, and John Tsitrian have indicated he isn't mentioning the tax increases for South Dakotans or alternately the slashing of education in South Dakota if federal funding for education dried up overnight.
*** Stay tuned, and I hope TypePad stays up running for a couple of readers to see this today--- Doug Wiken
And for something completely different, a short story about vehicle repair. A friend who lives a few hundred miles from SD drives (when it is running) a 1995 Chevrolet G20 Van. He literally searches for gold and other twinkly minerals. Anyway, the van headlights have been working erratically recently. The first problem that showed up was that he low beams would not come on. Driving with only brights there will lead to traffic tickets in a hurry. He has a back problem from a serious work injury and can't crawl under the dash or under the engine, so he took it to one of the better vehicle repair shops.
They nailed him a healthy chunk of change for the parts and labor and said it was fixed. Friend then took off to visit his son a 100 miles or so down the interstate. He decided to return that night since his vehicle now had good lights. He drove about 50 miles and then lost both brights and dims..total blackness at 65mph except for reflectors along road illuminated by a vehicle behind him. He eased off to the shoulder and flipped the combination turnsignal, dimmer do-it-all and finally the dim lights came on. He drove a few miles and they went out, but then the brights worked until he got off interstate onto highway heading home. The lights flickered off a few more times.
He got the Van back to the shop a few days later and told them that they must have missed something. They checked everything and claimed nothing was wrong. He drove the van to get groceries and turned on the lights. He noticed no left side dim light coming on in the store reflection. About that time the lights started blinking off and on like lights connected to a hazard flasher. He got it back to the shop to show them the recent problem and that he was not dreaming.
The shop called him back later that afternoon and told them they had figured out what was wrong, "Alien beings had taken control of his Van." This morning they called and told him that actually Alien beings were not responsible after all. The new switch they had put in was defective and one headlight had a broken low-beam filament.
*** Stay tuned and beware the aliens and vehicle gremlins--- Doug Wiken
The Sunday Argus Leader has a story from USA Today on compensation of the 10 most highly paid US Executives. I will spare you the details, but you may be able to find more of them at FOOTNOTED.ORG
A rough total of the realized total of those 10 executive is roughly $500,000,000...or about $50,000,000 per executive. The President of the US gets $400,000 and a lot of perks. US Senators get $125,000 per year I think, and they are whining that they are underpaid. With the mediocre performance we get from congress critters, I think they should be paying us for being there and getting cheap health insurance to boot.
It is time to put Social Security tax on every dime of income of whatever kind. That would be a start. Then provide some negative incentives to corporations strongly suggesting that such obscene payments to executives are unwarranted. The windfall corporate salary penalties should be increasing in multiples of the US President pay.
Example: A corporation decides their executive should get $400,000 per year. No penalty tax. A corporation decides to pay their executive $800,000 per year. That corporation would immediately have to pay $400,000 penalty tax. Should a corporation decide to pay $1.200,000 to an executive, they would pay the $400,000 penalty tax plus twice that for the additional $400,000 of pay making the total penalty total on $1.2 million salary would be $1,200,000. Make that pay $1,600,000 and the penalty tax would be $2,400,000. Lets go to $2,000,000 salary and the tax would be $4,000,000. Such very progressive windfall corporate salaries immediately due from corporations and also non-deductible as an expense might discourage obscene pay like the $131,947,291 given the Viacom executive. Executive bonuses seem to be a windfall result from the Obama economic recovery rather than anything any executive does to warrant such obscene pay.
Everytime we buy anything, we are paying some executive for sitting on his ass in a corporate airplane or dumping money into Congress to make Congress irrelevant for the interests of the rest of us.
These weirdly obscene compensation packages are a big drag on the economy as they inflate the price of everything we buy and as we pay income tax on our own social security if we happen to be over 65.
***Stay tuned, but take time to raise hell with our very nearly worthless Congress Critters--- Doug Wiken
OPINION:Tomorrow night President Barrack Obama will again make a State of the Union speech. I hope he remembers that Abraham Lincoln used something like 88 words for the Gettysburg Address which PBS and SDPB-TV are celebrating with contests for classroom videos.
Obama should cut this speech to a few numbered points that everybody can remember. He and Kerry have the ability to talk on and on and not make a simple declarative sentence that anybody can remember for more than five minutes.
Suggestion:
1. We will get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. We will stop illegal immigration. We will deport illegal aliens.
3. The economy is improving.
4. The economy and education could improve rapidly if members of the US Congress would think more about real issues and problems and less about raising contribution money and services from corporations and the very rich.
5. Taxes must be greatly increased on the rich and corporations which pay absurdly high executive salaries. Insanely high executive pay both raises consumer prices and reduces corporate profits and serves no purpose beyond inflating egos and increasing the income disparity.
6. President Kennedy got the race to the moon started. I will start the race to near energy independence from fossil fuels. Wind, Solar, and hydro energy and greatly improved home insulation are easily possible. We can improve our security without huge military expenditures and this energy project will stimulate our economy and provide savings for generations.
Thank you for your interest and time. Now, get to work. Ask not what you can do for your donors, but what you can do for your country.
But, we all know that he will ramble on for an hour or more introducing every dog and pony in the US and give us a laundry list and a grocery list.
NOTE AFTER SPEECH: And he did ramble on for an hour and a half or so ...something like 7200 Words. I have a transcript at RAUCUS CAUCUS. Not anything I could particularly disagree with as he gave the speech, but also by an hour later, I can't remember a single memorable phrase in the whole thing.
*** Stay tuned even if you have much more patience for flim-flam and humbug oratory than I have ever had--- Doug Wiken
Not sure about this source, but there are claims that a US agency interupted shipment of new computers enroute to customers and installed spyware, etc. on them.
Computer companies deny knowledge of the interceptions. Take a look at site below. The believability of it might be hampered by the 100 photos of the best looking football cheerleaders also on the site however.
David Montgomery ([email protected]) of the Argus Leader Sunday, November 17. 2013 has a column on Rick Weiland, Democratic candidate for the US Senate. Weiland and Dr. Howard Dean have similar attitudes toward what needs to be done to improve health care in the US.
This morning on ABC, Howard Dean made the case for "Medicare for All". He correctly pointed out the problems with "Obamacare" result from Republican insistence that private insurance companies be injected into the mix at the well-panned Obamacare website. The complexity involved and the problems are a product of GOP pandering to the very rich medical and medical insurance industries. Howard Dean also noted he turned 65 and spent all of 10 minutes online getting signed up for Medicare.
Montgomery reports that Weiland says, "Medicare ought to be given the opportunity to compete by giving people (of all ages) an option..about whether or not they want to enroll in Medicare or private health insurance." He noted that Medicare works and people understand it. Weiland promises to introduce legislation to add the inclusive medicare option into law.
Montgomery reports a spattering of Republican uncharitable views regarding the idea. The goofiness seems to spin around the idea that South Dakotans just don't like Obama and thus should oppose anything supported by Obama. Shades of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Only, that did not work so well for the GOP.
In the Winner,SD community families have been devasted by medical expense selling off assets or being bankrupted. The medicare option would do much for many families and probably cost much less than running people through the hospital emergency doors for too late and too expensive care. In Rapid City a doctor is whining that Obamacare might cut income by 30% costing the doctor $60,000. Simple arithmetic of the kind favored by Bill Clinton suggests doctor's current income is around $180,000 per year.
Some of us might not have a whole lot of sympathy for the doctor and a lot of sympathy for those devasted by medical costs. Republican leaders and talking heads apparently have a lot of sympathy for the Doctor and the medical insurance executives getting $millions per year and zero empathy or sympathy for the sick and their or their family's devastation from exorbitant medical expense and huge deductibles and limitations of existing medical insurance policies.
The "Medicare option" would provide a competitive benchmark for insurance companies or if complete enough allow insurance companies to provide medicare supplement plans for all rather than just for those of us over 65.
Weiland and Dr. Howard Dean may irritate the very rich and influential, but they may also be very correct and also make both economic and social sense. This proposal is sensible liberalism and deserves support. That is a marked contrast to the GOP Party of No.
Now if Demcrats in Congress would sever their money ties to the very rich and make sure social security and medicare taxes apply to all income rather than just the first dollars everybody makes, the system won't go broke or need to be hobbled and crippled by the obstructionists.
*** Stay tuned and stay healthy and vote smart so Democrats can undo the GOP mischief and obstructionism.---Doug Wiken
I find it interesting that somebody from New York is getting so much press attention regarding DWI law changes in South Dakota. He and his wife have a powerful reason for doing it since a drunken driver killed their daughter while she was working here in South Dakota. Some of his ideas may make sense, others don't, or are not as good as other ideas. The fact that he and his wife are statisticians does not necessarily make his ideas good or even necessarily data-driven.
Spindler has two ideas which make sense. One is increasing taxes on alcohol sales. Taxes on alcohol and liquor licenses cover only a fraction of the social costs generated by this narcotic. Responsible citizens end up paying the price for this and the liquor industry makes out like bandits in a third-world country. I am not so sure about his ideas of dropping the BAC level from 0.08% to 0.05 percent however. He notes that the drunk who killed his daughter had a BAC of 0.23%. That is roughly three times the current limit. Changing it to 0.05% would mean it was nearly 5 times that legal limit. However, such a change would make little difference in the case. And, I don't see how this change is so simple as to not be rocket science. It isn't even logic.
Spindler's idea of roadsize suspension seems to have some potential constitutional or legal problems. I can see that a patrolman should be able to confiscate the license and the drunk driver should then be prevented from driving until a court-driven process and something like the reforms driven by Larry Long using alcohol tests, alcohol-sensing personal and vehicle monitors, etc. This approach makes more sense than long prison terms which cost taxpayers a lot and often do nothing more than chaining a drunken driver to a tree would do in the way of rehabilitation. Confiscating a vehicle may also generate problems for innocent family members and generate other costs to taxpayers and families of the drunken driver.
I am glad that Spindler and wife are making the attempt to get changes made in South Dakota and I am glad that newspapers and other media are presenting his ideas. Spindler probably does not realize the changes that have been made with regard to DWI and DUI laws since the SD:ASAP federal demonstration project over 40 years ago. I won't go into the problems we had getting press coverage and a fair legislative hearing when a good percentage of legislators had serious alcohol addiction problems themselves and many were regularly driving drunk.
Here are some other ideas that our Governor and legislators should consider seriously even if in South Dakota, a prophet has no honor in his home town and anybody from over 100 miles away is an expert,
1. Require licenses to purchase alcohol at any level in any venue.
2. Require records be kept by sellers of purchasers name and license number and amount and character of alcoholic bulk or drinks purchased.
3. Any cans, bottles sold containing consumable alcohol should be stamped with a date of sale and license number of purchaser. This would reduce movement of alcohol to underage drinkers and inexperienced drivers.
4. Increase taxes on alcohol and use such taxes to subsidize purchasers of vehicle and health insurance. Alcohol is a totally needless and useless product that does not deserve special protection for the related industry. If you are a responsible, non-drinking driver, spending $1000 per year for vehicle insurance, you are probably giving the liquor industry a $500 gift.
5. A week after a fatal traffic crash involving alcohol as a contributing factor, every establishment selling alcoholic beverages should be shut for a day with a closure notice on chained entrance indicating the reason for the closure. Shut these businesses down for a few days every month, and the industry will decide to be responsible.
6. And as Spindler has suggested, high-visibility enforcement efforts by highway law enforcement needs to be expanded. Highway road blocks and alcohol testing might be the most effective DETERRENT available.
Spindler and, in the past MADD, are and were working mostly on the wrong end of the problem. Alcohol destroys common sense, logic and self restraint. It is unrealistic to think that increased penalties would make much difference to addicts of alcohol.
Spindler is doing a good job raising the level of concern and knowledge of the need for changes with regulation of alcohol and driving. He has some good ideas and some not so good ideas. There are other options and our Governor, legislators, and court system need to be doing much more effect work on the problems.
You may be able to find a copy of the Mitchell Daily Republic story by Chris Mueller, but if not, let me know. I have a few copies.
SD media is now filled with images and video of Governor Daugaard and Sen. Thune flying over dead cattle country and nearly sobbing about the inability of the government to act now. It is all nearly heart-breaking even if not helpful. Rep. Noem is jumping into TV calling for federal aid to western South Dakota.
I don't see anything wrong with helping the cattlemen who lost many head of cattle and possibly a good share of their livlihood, but the GOP stooge actions are graphic indicators of the need for the very same "big government" they have spent years hammering as evil tools of liberals aiming to gain control of everything. County governments, local taxpayers, state governments, and state taxpayers are often not in a position to do anything significant in the face of catastrophe..weather or otherwise.
The federal government obviously covers the whole country and has a large enough "critical mass" to handle local and state catastrophes in most cases that don't somehow blanket the whole US. The difference in mass and scale is a fundamental difference between federal government and other governments. Obviously that mass and scale can also generate problems, but our GOP and TEA party retrograde obstructionists focus rather blindly on such problems and magnify them with the help of their rich sponsors into a huge pile of their steaming irrelevant deceptive mythology.
I do hope that others in South Dakota notice the incongruity of opponents of big government doing their very best to exploit those resources that they spend so much time and breath attacking mindlessly.
*** Stay tuned, there is always enough GOP hypocrisy for millions of pixels--- Doug Wiken
The Mitchell Daily Republic Saturday Sept 28, 2013 has a story reporting the details of a New Yorker's plan for SD DWI laws and regulations. His daughter was killed here by a drunken driver. The MDR story might be available for a few days but the link below will turn into a pay only link.
About 40 years ago, I worked as a public information officer and assistant director of the SD:ASAP (Alcohol Safety Action Project). It was a federal highway safety "demonstration" project. The project was instrumental in getting the full extent of the DWI problem in SD known. We wrote the first laws requiring blood alcohol tests when there was a highway crash fatality. Something around 68% of crash fatalities in those days involved alcohol-impaired driving. My memory if fading, but we may also have guided a bit of the attempt to get the DWI BAC reduced from 0.15 to 0.10 which was reduced again after SDASAP was killed by the SD legislature down to 0.08.
Anyway, at the same time, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was campaigning nationally and in-state for much tougher penalties on drunken driving. About that time, my father-in-law died and we moved to Winner, SD. Here, a number of teens and young adults have been killed because of drunken driving and not wearing seatbelts.
It soon became obvious to me that tough DWI penalties were not doing a whole lot to actually stop drunken driving and it later was interesting to see drunken drivers sent to prison for many years only to come out and within weeks again be arrested for drunken driving or be involved in a crash. That penalty system was not changed until SD Attorney General Larry Long came up with the very good idea to use daily breath tests and supervision so that drunken drivers could keep working and supporting their families, but also be kept sober on the highways.
There are a few ideas in the New Yorker's package that make sense, but extending penalites will likely only cost taxpayers a lot more for prisons and actually do little to change drunken driving behavior.
Drunks lose self-control and sense as they again alcohol-fueled over-confidence. They become unable to concentrate on multple things and that appears to be a form of tunnel vision. It makes little sense to expect people already in that condition to understand they should not be driving. They are not thinking about a long prison term or the costs an arrest will add to their driving expense.. The problem starts before drunks ever get into a vehicle.
The problem starts with the SD alcoholic beverage and liquor industry selling alcohol to alcohol addicts and underage drinkers. That industry will continue to be irresponsible in pursuit of profit while all of us pay extra taxes and car insurance premiums to allow that irrsponsible industry to continue making profits.
I have suggested that one week after a traffic death consequent to an alcohol-related crash that every business of any kind selling alcoholic beverages be shut for one day with a notice posted on their closed door saying, "Closed because of an alcohol-related traffic crash". This might cause the industry to be more careful about who they sell booze to, but also would give responsible bar tenders, waiters, and waitresses a good reason for stopping serving a customer already tipsy.
And, we should tax liquor business and liquor sales so that the tax provides a 50% subsidy to South Dakota vehicle driver insurance. Otherwise, those of us who are responsible drivers end up paying for cleaning up the destruction, death, social misery, etc related to drunken driving and all of us thus effectively support the liquor industry which bears little of the expense it gnerates for the rest of us...
While the New Yorkers have the eye of the media, I hope they look at something that might actually work instead of returning South Dakota to expensive measures that don't work
*** Stay tuned and be a Good Neighbor and Drive Sober.-- Doug Wiken
Residents of South Dakota. Check your broadband speed with the SD Speedtest. Your test will both let you know how speedy is your ISP and also help get us better service in South Dakota.
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