Sunday, March 18, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Horseback Riding Near San Antonio, TX
Bandera
Area
Ø Bar M
o
(830)796-9096 Office
o
(830)796-1164 Cell Phone
o
830-796-7771
Ø Flying L
o
800-292-5134
o
“Day
at the Ranch”
o
(830) 796-9339
o
830-796-3984
9266 Bandera Creek Road
Bandera TX
78003
Phone:
(830)796-3037
Fax:
(830)796-7170
o
833.640.3222 – Carol
o
Email for reservations: Carol@yoranch.com
Boerne
Ø SisterCreek Ranch (Do not rent their own horses.)
o
1818 FM 1376
o
Boerne, TX. 78006
o
830-324-6525
o
4 miles west of IH-10 on
John’s Road near Tapatio Golf Resort
o
Willie – 210-508-9349
o
Harry – 830-446-2228
o
email: wbstricker@att.net
San Antonio
o 1703 Creekview Dr.
San Antonio, TX 78219
San Antonio, TX 78219
o
210-279-6505
o
210-695-2299
General
link to horseback riding in San Antonio, TX.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Destroying America, Bill by Bill
by Simon Black
As
you’re probably aware, yesterday was the much ballyhooed blackout of
several popular web sites in protest of new legislation that threatens
the Internet as we know it.
The United States Congress has teed up two separate bills which give
government agencies sweeping new powers to punish millions of innocent
users, criminalize harmless activities, and effectively make entire web
sites disappear at their sole discretion without any judicial oversight.
In a nutshell, these bills would create the online equivalent of Nazi Germany.
But what can we really expect from these people? It’s not the first time that Congress has gone out of its way to destroy freedom and prosperity, and it certainly won’t be the last. Just look at the last decade for a plethora of examples:
But what can we really expect from these people? It’s not the first time that Congress has gone out of its way to destroy freedom and prosperity, and it certainly won’t be the last. Just look at the last decade for a plethora of examples:
USA PATRIOT Act, 2001. The US Constitution officially became toilet
paper when this bill of over 60,000 words just happened to be introduced
only a few weeks after 9/11. Roving wiretaps, suspension of due
process, and a complete loss of privacy became the norm.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 2002. In the wake of the Enron scandal, Congress
did the only thing it knows how to do– pass stupid laws with no thought
of long-term consequences. SOX, as it became known, was one of the most
burdensome pieces of legislation to American business in history.
The disclosure requirements alone added millions of dollars of
unnecessary expenses to US businesses and sent foreign companies who
were thinking about listing on the formerly prestigious NYSE running for
the hills. Places like Hong Kong and Singapore benefitted from such
short-sighted regulation, and the US became less competitive. Again.
Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act, 2010. The
inappropriately named HIRE Act essentially puts a gun to foreign banks’
heads and forces them to make a decision: any bank with US clients must
either enter into a costly information sharing agreement with the IRS,
or be subject to a 30% withholding tax on US-sourced capital flows.
Consequently, a number of foreign banks have begun dropping their US
clients. Taken in conjunction with various US Securities rules, many
foreign businesses have also begun dropping US citizens as partners,
shareholders, and directors. It’s simply too onerous to have to deal
with all the disclosure filings and risk action by the SEC or IRS.
Net result? US citizens are less capable of competing internationally in a world where the economic power is shifting overseas.
National Defense Authorization Act, 2011. Signed by President Obama
on Saturday, December 31st with little fanfare when hardly anyone was
looking, NDAA is the latest gem in a long line of liberty-destroying
legislation that authorizes indefinite military detention (without
trial) of suspected terrorists.
Thing is, NDAA provides a ridiculously broad definition of ‘suspected
terrorist’, essentially giving carte blanche to local, state, and
federal police agencies who no longer need to worry about justifying
their decisions in front of a judge.
Don’t worry, though. President Obama issued a statement acknowledging
the controversy of the bill, but clarified that his administration
“will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of
American citizens.”
Heartwarming. But hardly a secure guarantee. President Obama isn’t
exactly batting 1,000 on his promises to the American public, and future
presidents certainly won’t be obliged by the same pledge.
There are, of course, dozens of other examples. Obamacare. Dodd-Frank
‘financial reform’. And now the Stop Online Piracy Act / Personal
Information Protection Act.
Hey, these laws like SOPA and PIPA always have great names. Just like
wars. Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ was the moniker given to the early
days of the US War of Terror. It all sounds very noble. The reality is
always different.
Throughout history, governments on the brink of insolvency have
routinely enacted similar policies. Sliding into economic obscurity,
they’ll engage in reckless, cannibalistic initiatives– higher taxes,
burdensome regulation, war, destruction of the productive class, etc. It
only hastens the end game.
This time is not different. And we can expect more and more of the same. Up next will be new laws that:
- restrict cash transactions over a certain amount (Italy has already passed such measures for amounts exceeding 1,000 euros)
- nationalize pension funds and private retirement accounts (again,
has already happened around the world from Ireland to Argentina)
- impose a national sales tax and reduce death tax exemptions (already at the forefront of the ongoing tax debate in the US)
- ban gold and silver personal holdings (if you think this can’t
happen, ask any of the 250,000 people who used to own Liberty Dollar
coins before they were seized by the FBI in 2007…)
And more.
The thing is, every time one of these new bills crops up, there
always seems to be a small resistance movement fighting it tooth and
nail on the ground. Hence yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA blackout. But
ultimately, the political establishment wins.
It’s impossible to shake the public from its apathy… to steer people
from the mind-numbing drivel of prime time airwaves… to rescue them from
the PSYOPS campaigns of the 24/7 news channels.
We can only take care of ourselves. Any money or energy spent
fighting the government or rousing grassroots support is inherently
better spent looking after your own interests and making sure that you
and your family aren’t victims of historical certainty.
And make no mistake, collapse of empire is a historical certainty.
From the Babylonians to the Persians to the Romans to the Mayans to the
Mongolians to the Ottomans, no empire is built to last. And the final
years are anything but smooth-sailing.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Rx for Pain: Swear, Loud and Often
"S - - T!!!" Admit it, letting loose with an expletive somehow makes
you feel better after you accidentally slice your finger or stub your
toe. Now that research has confirmed that cursing does indeed reduce the
sensation of pain, perhaps we can sometimes give ourselves permission
to yell bad words even louder, without worrying about what anyone will
think.
Swear When It Hurts
Richard Stephens, PhD, a lecturer in psychology and the director of the
master’s degree program in psychological research methods at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, conducted a study exploring how cursing provides pain relief. It was published in the journal NeuroReport. His study involved a mixed-gender group of university
students who were asked to repeat either a curse word or a neutral
control word while their hands were submerged in icy water. Researchers
found that swearing enabled participants to withstand the uncomfortably
icy
water for significantly longer. It brought about a measurable reduction
in the perception of pain (calibrated with a pain perception
questionnaire) and significantly increased heart rate (measured with an
electronic heart-rate monitor).
Dr. Stephens told me that
participants were asked to repeat their assigned word over and over
again at a consistent pace. "By using the same word over and over, we
were attempting to keep conditions consistent," he said. "We looked
specifically at pain tolerance and perception. When the study
participants swore while experiencing the pain stimulus, they found the
cold water less painful."
Ladies First...
Women, in
particular, experienced a greater drop in pain perception when they were
swearing. "We know that swearing evokes certain emotional responses,
and that, in general, men tend to swear more than women," Dr. Stephens
explained. "We speculated that in people who
swear frequently, the emotional response erodes, making it a less
effective mechanism in reducing the perception of pain or the ability to
tolerate it."
Dr. Stephens also found that swearing was less
effective in male participants who had been identified as being
predisposed toward catastrophizing pain. For example, he said that if a
person is prone to thinking that a small cut on his hand is likely to
result in a nasty infection or some other catastrophic outcome, swearing
will be
less effective as a coping mechanism.
I may not feel
particularly proud of myself the next time I bump my head and blurt out a
naughty word -- but at least I know there’s science to justify my
reaction.
Richard Stephens, PhD, is a lecturer in psychology and the director of the master’s degree program in psychological research methods at Keele University in Staffordshire, England.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Anatomy of a Stimulus Package
It is a slow day
in the small Saskatchewan town of Pumphandle and streets are deserted. Times
are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.
A tourist
visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill
on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks
upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to
the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his
debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his
bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs
to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times
and has had to offer her "services" on credit. The hooker rushes to
the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.
The hotel proprietor
then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect
anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the
rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves. No one produced
anything. No one earned anything... However, the whole town is now out of debt
and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, ladies and
gentlemen, is how a "stimulus package" works.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Student jailed for 2 nights when she can't show ID
Student jailed for 2 nights when she can't show ID
By JIM DWYER
updated 11/2/2011 1:25:46 PM ET
NEW YORK — The arresting officer came by the cell, Samantha Zucker said, to make snide remarks about finding her with a friend in Riverside Park after its 1 a.m. closing.
For instance:
“He was telling me that I needed to get a new boyfriend, that I should get a guy who takes me out to dinner,” Ms. Zucker said. “He mocked me for being from Westchester.”
Early in the morning on Oct. 22, a Saturday, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.
She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought back to Harlem.
There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a second night in custody.
The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute.
News about the Police Department lately could run under the headline of the daily Dismal Development, starting with a judge declaring Tuesday that an officer was guilty of planting drugs on entirely innocent people and continuing back a few days to gun-smuggling, pepper-spraying and ticket-fixing.
Here, in the pointless arrest of Ms. Zucker, is a crime that is not even on the books: the staggering waste of spirit, the squandering of public resources, the follies disguised as crime-fighting. About 40,000 people a year — the vast majority of them young black and Latino men — are fed like widgets onto a conveyor belt of arrest, booking and court, after being told to empty their pockets and thus commit the misdemeanor of “open display” of marijuana.
Such arrests are a drain on the human economy.
Ms. Zucker said that throughout her stay in police station cells, other officers were shocked that she had not been given a chance to have a friend fetch her ID. “The female officers were gossiping that the officer who arrested me had an incredibly short fuse,” she said.
We are instructed by the mayor that the garish crimes of police gun-running and fake arrests are the work of rogues, not the daily toil of honest police officers. A fair point — but no more than Ms. Zucker’s observations of spiritual corruption.
“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”
After two days of storming design firms around the city with about 80 classmates, Ms. Zucker stopped at the hotel near West 103rd Street where the group was staying so she could drop off the bag she had been schlepping. Then she got Mr. Fischer — a classmate, not a boyfriend, the leering remark of the police officer to the contrary — to walk with her a few blocks to the park, at about 3 a.m. They wanted to see the Hudson River, which runs past her hometown of Ardsley, N.Y.
“We’re there five minutes when a police car came up and told us we had to leave because the park was closed,” Mr. Fischer said. “We said, ‘O.K., we didn’t know,’ and turned around to leave. Almost immediately, a second police car pulls up.”
Its driver said they would get tickets for trespassing and demanded their IDs. Ms. Zucker suggested that someone could bring her papers from the hotel. “He said it was too late for that, I should have thought of it earlier,” she said.
Asked about the policy, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said officers can allow a friend or relative to retrieve ID. He did not say if a supervisor approved the arrest of Ms. Zucker, which was attributed in court papers to a Police Officer Durrell of the 26th Precinct.
Twice, she said, the officer told her not to call him by a specific foul term.
“I said, ‘Sir, I never used that word.’ ”
Advertise | AdChoices
No doubt he was hearing things: the unspoken truth about his unspeakable actions.
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt
This article, "Dismal Tale of Arrest for Tiniest of Crimes," first appeared in The New York Times.
By JIM DWYER
updated 11/2/2011 1:25:46 PM ET
NEW YORK — The arresting officer came by the cell, Samantha Zucker said, to make snide remarks about finding her with a friend in Riverside Park after its 1 a.m. closing.
For instance:
“He was telling me that I needed to get a new boyfriend, that I should get a guy who takes me out to dinner,” Ms. Zucker said. “He mocked me for being from Westchester.”
Early in the morning on Oct. 22, a Saturday, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.
She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought back to Harlem.
There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a second night in custody.
The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute.
News about the Police Department lately could run under the headline of the daily Dismal Development, starting with a judge declaring Tuesday that an officer was guilty of planting drugs on entirely innocent people and continuing back a few days to gun-smuggling, pepper-spraying and ticket-fixing.
Here, in the pointless arrest of Ms. Zucker, is a crime that is not even on the books: the staggering waste of spirit, the squandering of public resources, the follies disguised as crime-fighting. About 40,000 people a year — the vast majority of them young black and Latino men — are fed like widgets onto a conveyor belt of arrest, booking and court, after being told to empty their pockets and thus commit the misdemeanor of “open display” of marijuana.
Such arrests are a drain on the human economy.
Ms. Zucker said that throughout her stay in police station cells, other officers were shocked that she had not been given a chance to have a friend fetch her ID. “The female officers were gossiping that the officer who arrested me had an incredibly short fuse,” she said.
We are instructed by the mayor that the garish crimes of police gun-running and fake arrests are the work of rogues, not the daily toil of honest police officers. A fair point — but no more than Ms. Zucker’s observations of spiritual corruption.
“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”
After two days of storming design firms around the city with about 80 classmates, Ms. Zucker stopped at the hotel near West 103rd Street where the group was staying so she could drop off the bag she had been schlepping. Then she got Mr. Fischer — a classmate, not a boyfriend, the leering remark of the police officer to the contrary — to walk with her a few blocks to the park, at about 3 a.m. They wanted to see the Hudson River, which runs past her hometown of Ardsley, N.Y.
“We’re there five minutes when a police car came up and told us we had to leave because the park was closed,” Mr. Fischer said. “We said, ‘O.K., we didn’t know,’ and turned around to leave. Almost immediately, a second police car pulls up.”
Its driver said they would get tickets for trespassing and demanded their IDs. Ms. Zucker suggested that someone could bring her papers from the hotel. “He said it was too late for that, I should have thought of it earlier,” she said.
Asked about the policy, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said officers can allow a friend or relative to retrieve ID. He did not say if a supervisor approved the arrest of Ms. Zucker, which was attributed in court papers to a Police Officer Durrell of the 26th Precinct.
Twice, she said, the officer told her not to call him by a specific foul term.
“I said, ‘Sir, I never used that word.’ ”
Advertise | AdChoices
No doubt he was hearing things: the unspoken truth about his unspeakable actions.
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt
This article, "Dismal Tale of Arrest for Tiniest of Crimes," first appeared in The New York Times.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
How to mend a broken heart
"Faced with such overwhelming evidence of human lunacy, I let go of the notion that there is, somewhere, a proper, measured response to losing love. A broken heart makes us human, and sometimes being human is a ridiculous, painful, desperate thing." ~ Shannon Service
How to mend a broken heart
How to mend a broken heart
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)