Teenage rural drivers and fatal car crashes.

A recent study by Allstate Insurance company reveals this sobering statistic:

Examining the rate of fatal crashes involving teens, the study finds that
rural areas have a much higher rate of fatal crashes involving teen drivers than
the rate in metro areas. Nationally, fatal crash rates for teens were over twice
as high for rural areas (51.5 crashes per 100,000 teens) than for metro areas
(25.4).

My first thought was 'drunk driving', because I think attitudes towards drinking and driving tend to be more lax in rural areas, but the article states speeding (34%) and lack of seat belt use (33%) as the two highest contributors, with alcohol use contributing to 12% of fatal teen accidents. And upon reflection that makes some sense. I never wore a seat belt with any regularity until my wife got pregnant with our daughter. And I drove much faster as a teenager than I do now.

One thing that is no mentioned in the report but which I am 100% confident is a contributing factor: roads. Accidents happen much easier on dirt or gravel roads, especially if you are speeding, and most rural blacktop roads do not have a shoulder, meaning there is no forgiveness if your tire strays past the white line. Locally, in our local townhall meetings with state representatives, one of the most common pleas is for state funding to put a shoulder on the highway north of our town.

Another thing that is not mentioned is that in virtually every rural town in America, there is a passtime shared among teenagers known as 'backroading', which I guess would be the rural equivelant to 'cruising', the main idea being that you pile as many people as possible into a car and drive around dirt roads for hours (often at night, often whilst drinking beer) with the music cranked up. I would imagine that, on the whole, rural teenagers spend a lot more time in automobiles backroading than metropolitan kids spend cruising (back in the day it wasn't unusual for me and my buddies to run through two full tanks of gas backroading on the weekends). This increased time driving, on bad roads, with no seatbelts, often intoxicated, probably adds to the problem as well (although, interestingly, speeding is usually not an issue... backroading generally occurs at a snail's pace).

I just thought this was interesting because I believe many parents move to rural towns with the belief that it is a safer environment for their children to grow up in, and in many respects this is true... but these figures were fairly shocking to me.

Rural Wisdom

"Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six."

Self Defense or Cold Blooded Murder?

This case is picking up traction here in OK:

Jerome Ersland is a disabled Gulf War veteran who works as a pharmacist in a crime ridden Oklahoma City neighborhood. Last week, two masked men held up the pharmacy at gunpoint demanding money and drugs. Mr. Ersland pulled a gun and shot one of the robbers in the face, then chased the second out the door (well, to the degree that a disabled 57-year-old man wearing a back brace can chase somebody). He then returned inside, claims he saw that the first man was still alive and trying to get up, so he retrieved a larger caliber gun and fired 5 more rounds into the abdomen of the downed man, and then immediately called the police. The second volley of shots killed the perpetrator, who turned out to be 16 years old (his accomplice was 14).

Yesterday, the Oklahoma DA's office charged Jerome Ersland with first degree murder.

I don't believe an Oklahoma jury will convict this man, but am interested to hear the thoughts of any readers who may still occasionally check this site in spite of my 30 day plus hiatus from posting.

Video below (you can't ever see the downed perp after he was shot the first time, so the claim that he was trying to get back up is based solely on the word of Mr. Ersland, a citizen with a clean record and military training.)




Lessons learned from this:

1) Use large calibers for self defense. I don't know what kind of pea shooter was used in the first shot, but very few perps will survive a shot to the head with a .45 round.

2) If you are ever involved in a self-defense killing, keep your mouth shut as far as the press is concerned. Mr. Ersland gave multiple accounts of the event to multiple news agencies just hours after it happened, and all of those will now be gone over with a fine-toothed comb for any discrepancies.

3) If you work in a place with video surveilance, save two rounds: One for the camera and one for the tape!

4) Even in Oklahoma, one of the friendliest states for gun rights and self defense, a man who leaves his house in the morning just trying to make it through an honest day of work isn't safe to defend himself in a reasonable manner from the tyranny of evil men, thanks their pernicious civic defenders.

Money and Politics

I was watching an interview with billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens on C-SPAN this weekend. Even though I"m not 100% on-board with his energy plan, I have to give Pickens kudos for being one of the few successful businessmen in this country who is addressing our energy issues with any sense of reason. He also has the kind of wit that I appreciate... he sounds like every old and successful Okie oilman I know, and those are some of my favorite people to converse with.

Anyway, during this interview somebody asked him about what he has learned about a citizen's ability to influence their government, and what it will take to get wholesale change in our energy policy. His answer was very informing. I don't have a direct quote, but paraphrased, it went something like this:

When I first became a millionaire many years ago, I petitioned my Congressman for a meeting about some issues that were important to me. It took months to set up the meeting, and I had to spend hours waiting in his office before he finally saw me. He gave me about 30 minutes of his time, listened patiently to my comments, asked a few questions, and nothing ever came of it. Now, I've stayed politically engaged over the years, been a huge contributor to many campaigns and issues, and what I've learned is that as my wealth has increased, the only thing that's changed is the amount of time it takes me to get an appointment and how long I have to wait once I get there. As a billionaire, I can get an appointment with a Senator tomorrow, and they'll be waiting for me as soon as I get off the plane... and they'll listen patiently for about 30 minutes, ask a few questions, and nothing ever comes of it. I don't know exactly what it takes to get our politicians to take action, but contrary to popular belief, money ain't it!

Rural Wisdom: To The Dogs

My grandad, viewing the earth's worn cogs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in his house of logs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in the Flemish bogs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in his old skin togs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
There's one thing that I have to state-
Those dogs have had a good long wait.

-Unsourced (I found this in an old book full of random quotes, and would love to know who it is attributed to!)

Live Bald Eagle Cam

I thought this was pretty cool. The Sutton Center in Stillwater, OK set up an artifical tree last year after the regular tree, used annually by a pair of nesting balg eagles, fell down. They put a digital movie camera in the new tree, and now there are three eggs due to hatch sometime around March 15th. The live footage updates a few times per second, so it is more like a video than still pictures. Lots of good clips of the mommy bird.

http://www.suttoncenter.org/eaglecam.html

Bald Eagles are awesome creatures. I'm glad Benjamin Franklin lost out on his plan to make the turkey our national bird. Turkeys are interesting in their own way, and anybody who has ever hunted one knows they are pretty bright, but who wants to eat their own national emblem?

Thoughts on Obama, two months in, and on the state of the GOP.

What to make of President Obama so far?   I'll set aside policy for a moment, so that I may write with a clear head.  I think Obama is a decent man who genuinely wants what he considers to be good things for this country.  I think he is intelligent, thoughtful, extremely well spoken, and can offer many conservatives a lesson or two on rhetoric, poise, and style.  Obama is the real deal when it comes to giving a thoughtful speech.  I was watching a Q&A session he did for CSPAN that had been recorded in 2004, weeks after he won his Senate seat, plugging his 'Dreams Of My Father' book.  There was no teleprompter, he was taking random questions from the crowd and speaking off the cuff and at length about his life's story and his thoughts on race and politics in America (not a word of policy though) and in that context I completely understand why his supporters have such a respect for his heart and his intellect.  When given the time to speak candidly (something we likely won't see again now that he is President), he cares about the issues he is discussing enough to make an intellectual trip all the way around their orbit, even if he knows in advance exactly where he is going to land.   (Republicans don't do that enough, myself included.  They don't give the other side any respect or credibility at all, and it comes off looking like either arrogance, which it often is, or ignorance, which it usually isn't.) He would make a great college professor, or as a male version of Oprah he would be unparallelled on television (and before that is written off as a snub, consider the power Oprah has in America, especially over many issues Obama holds near and dear to his heart).  And I believe he is an intellectually curious person, in ways that his predecessor was not.  I heard General Petraeus questioned on one of the Sunday morning talk shows the other day, about what were some of the differences in Obama's cabinet meetings as compared to President Bush's, and I thought his answer was very telling, it went something like this:  President Obama proactively seeks an opinion from every person in the room, while President Bush was content to just hear from those who were willing to speak up.    I've worked for both kinds of people, and I prefer the ones who solicit opinions.   The ones who wait for people to speak usually end up hearing only from the people who know their words will find an ear receptive to their ideas, and the people who don't speak are often misjudged as having given consent to an idea they may actually disagree with.

If Obama were just exactly like he is now, except with conservative/libertarian principals and values, he would be my favorite President of the modern era.

But alas, the proof is in the pudding, and this pudding tastes like the cat pissed in it.

All the nicey-nice things I have heretofore said about our President do nothing to change the fact that, in just under two months, he has embraced and enacted more lousy policy than we've seen in this country in the last 25 years combined.   I opposed Obama during the election, even though I found little solace in the McCain/Palin alternative, because I knew he had a socialist streak in him that was capable of doing great harm to this country.  But I never in a million years imagined he could do so much harm, so fast, with so little debate, discussion, or obstruction.   Even President Bush, whose big spending domestic policies I often despised, took the time to bring them forward for study, debate, and amendment.   Obama simply gave us the bum rush, workin the nation up into a frothy tizzy, and then shoving this legislation down our throats before anybody had time to think about it.  I bought a car under similar duress once and it did not turn out well.

And even in the face of all this, I'm willing to give Obama credit for following his heart.  It is what liberals do when they see a problem: ANYTHING to fix it, and to hell with the consequences.   I've got people like that in my family, and they are all Democrats, and there is nobody I'd rather have on my side if I was in trouble.  It is a quality that is easy to find endearing, but it is also what makes them such miserable and even suicidal policy makers.

You can't govern with a blind eye to consequences and expect to survive long.  Ask the GOP how that worked out for them.

Obama says this is the change he was elected to enact, but the polling numbers don't back him up on this.  A clear majority are worried that he has spent too much, with too little understanding of what it is supposed to do, where the end zone lies, or what the metrics of success are supposed to be (and the increasingly hard to find supporters of his initiatives find themselves in the odd position of defending the kinds of open-ended policies they raised bloody hell about when George W. Bush enacted them).   Are we supposed to feel better about the state of the country if the economy improves but inflation cranks 30%?  Are we supposed to feel like things have improved if we get a health care plan that is funded entirely by borrowed money?  I'm not for the type of government sponsored health care that Obama supports, but even if I was I'd have the common sense to know it has to be bankrolled by something more tangible than hope.

The Democrats have already lost the 2010 elections, if the Republicans are smart enough to capitalize on their stupidity, which is a big 'if'.  The Democrats may have already lost the White House in 2012, if the Republicans can find somebody with equal measures of brain and spine to run (OK, maybe the Dems have the WH locked up for awhile).   The Republican field is not very inspiring right now, but they stand to benefit from the exact same phenomenon that brought the Dems to power in '06, which is to say that they aren't the other party.   

My completely unsolicited advice for Republican politicians and officials is as follows:

-Keep talking about personal responsibility.

-Tie that discussion to another one, about how responsible Americans must decide how to fund the type of government Obama is creating.  Obama has never once breached this topic in any serious way, and the answer is untenable for Americans of every class, color, religion, and creed, because it involves more than half of their take home pay.

-Press for a balanced budget amendment, it will be popular and it will force Obama's hand on explaining how he intends to fund the new utopia.

-Now would be the absolute perfect time to start hashing out the terms of 'Contract With America, Part II'.  Make a big production out of it, let its existance be known but keep the details top secret for months.  Keep it simple, no more than 5 objectives, and they should all be big, paradigm shifting objectives that focus on stuff like fiscal responsibility, tax reform, broken political machinery, and protection of constitutional rights.  No marriage amendments or flag burning amendment.  No wordy plattitudes about things you can't do anything about.  Stuff with teeth, and that only. 

-Your alternative to the Stimulus plan and the various bailouts shouldn't be a smaller version of those same atrocities, your alternative should be that we are going to take our lumps now over the short term instead of forcing them on our children over the long term, starting with people who can't afford their McMansion, the banks who loaned them the money, and the people who invested in the banks.  They're called 'losses' and have been a part of the business cycle from the dawn of history, right up until a few months ago when Obama and Bush decided we would just do away with them.

-When discussing the above point, memorize the following quote, which I stole and combined from two different sources, and use it liberally: "There is nothing quite so depressing as good advice, but we have to remember right now despair is the only mortal sin."

-Study old footage of Milton Friedman.  He was an intellectual conservative who had a unique way of debating liberals.  He didn't antagonize them, or split hairs with them, or negotiate away valuable principals with them...  he calmly and confidently reasoned with them, and he made them think.   Conservative politicians seem increasingly unable to  do this, and for the life of me I do not understand why.

-Attend these 'Tea Parties' with your constituents.  They are the most logical place to look for the future leadership of the party.  And if they someday decide to start lynching politicians, maybe they'll remember you were there.

-If a mortgage has been sold, cut up, and resold so many times that nobody is really sure who owns what part of it anymore,  give the mortgage holders 60 days to figure it out, and after that put the damn thing up for public auction.   (you'll only have to auction a few of them, because once the mortgage holders understand you are serious, they'll get their shit together and take their lumps, rather than lose entire mortgages).

-Any time oil is under $50 a barrel, any Republican who utters the words 'national energy policy' should get kicked hard in the nuts by the party chairman.

-Obama is a smooth enough character and has enough sycophants in the national media that he will likely retain decent popularity no matter what happens in the economy.  Use this to your advantage.  Instead of insulting him all the time, scour his old speeches and campaign documents with an eye for all the moderate and even conservative sounding rhetoric he has espoused over the years.   Find things you could agree with him about that he has since backtracked on (such as funding new programs by making cuts in old programs, or going over every government program line by line to see if they work) and hold his toes to the fire in a very pubic way.  

  -You don't have to diss or distance yourself from Rush or Hannity or Coulter, but realize they are ultimately (and rightfully) more concerned about getting paid than about adding anything substantial to the debate, so it is fine to respectfully dismiss them when they are controversially grandstanding for ratings, even if you agree with them in principal.  And don't ever apologize for doing so.  Dumbass.

 

- Social Networking is your friend.  Learn it. Use it.  The dems are kicking your ass at this.  Plus it is cheap and your base still doesn't trust you enough to fork over any money, and they will all be out of a job soon anyway,  so you better make due with what you got.

-If the median price of a home in Michigan is really $18,000 (or whatever ridiculously low price they keep saying on the news) then every person who is in mortgage trouble in another state who has a job that would allow them to telecommute should be excluded from getting any mortgage assistance.  There is affordable housing elsewhere.  Very affordable. 

That's all I got folks.  Your mileage may vary.