I hope I’ve managed to put together a helpful book that will bring a lot of value to people.  My premise was that normal travel guides were kind of useless for Las Vegas.  They just go out of date so quickly.  I worked in Vegas for years and saw just how fast things changed.

Not just tearing down and building new casinos, but inside the casinos too.  One day there’s a restaurant and seemingly the next, it’s a poker room.  If you bought a typical travel guide just a year ago, it’s out of date.  Now you need to buy another?  Screw that.

I’ve tried to explain how to use the resources on the internet to not only get the best Las Vegas deals, but to figure out where to eat and what to see and do.  It’s full of advice, recommendations and tips & tricks.  All stuff I learned traveling there for work for almost 15 years.  Hopefully people will find it helpful.

Anyway, you can find Las Vegas – Cheap and Easy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and soon on iBooks, Sony and Diesel.  If you’re headed to Vegas, check it out.  Can’t go wrong for $6.99.  You can get months of my hard work for the cost of a value meal.  Mmmm, Jumbaco!

Who are we kidding?  They are not the 99%.  They’re the 20%.  Those failures in life that won’t amount to anything because they have no work ethic, no sense of self-worth and no courage.  They are the people who think taxpayers should fund their lifestyles, cover their medical costs and pay for their college degrees in underwater BB stacking.  They’re stupid to be sure, but even worse, they are ignorant.

Most have no idea how the economy works, how the government functions, how the government is supposed to function, or where all the money they want handed to them comes from.  To them it’s all magic.  Steal from the rich and give it to us, they cry, not understanding that there is a finite amount of money and we’ve already spent that and more.

The worst part is they pretend to represent you and me.  The middle class.  They don’t.  We have jobs and are productive members of society.  We pay our own way.  We might smoke pot and play X-Box, but it’s after work and mommy and daddy didn’t buy it for us.  I don’t identify with these jackasses in the least.  They don’t represent me and, in fact, they represent the worst in humanity.

Now that the politicians are being to realize these people aren’t going away, honestly where would they go, and have few, if any, legitimate points to make, they are kicking them out of the parks and city squares.  It’s about f’ing time.  Back home to your mom’s basement, losers.  The sooner they go home and the media stops fawning over them (and they stop raping each other) the better!

By their definition, I’m the 1% and they can’t have my fucking money!

Politicians love Keynes and his ideas.  Why not?  His ideas rely on central planning and big government.  More taxes, more spending and more debt.  A virtual party for politicians, bureaucrats and the mainstream media they are in bed with.  However, there is another view of economics out there that you will rarely hear about.

F.A. Hayak wrote several books on his ideas, the most famous of which is “The Road to Serfdom”.  It talks about another way to stimulate a sagging economy.  Lower taxes, less spending and reduced regulation.  Let the free markets be free to do what they do best.  Let individual consumer and the decisions they make drive the economy, not some central planners.

Central planning sounds great, but it has two major flaws.  One, it ignores the desires of individuals and two the central planners can never know enough to make proper decisions.  Economies are too complex.  They might get things right from time to time, but in the long run they just don’t know enough.  The Soviet Union tried this and failed.

They tried to guess what the price of tens of thousands of products should be.  The result?  Shortages of goods priced to low and a glut of goods priced to high and often not any of the things they really wanted.  The people, even in that system, knew what they wanted and what they were willing to pay.    The wants and needs of individuals drives an economy, sets prices and acts as the invisible hand that guides the economy.

A bureaucrat can’t ever know enough to guess what we want or how much we might value goods or service.  Individuals, however, making their own plans, deciding what has value and what doesn’t, guides the economy.  The plans of many individuals, rather than those of a few elites, are what will bring this economy around.  The government has a role by regulating commerce, as in “to make regular”, not as in over reaching, centrally planned, stagnating rules designed to elicit some politically preferred outcome.

Worse yet, all of these usually well-meaning laws, regulations and taxes come with unintended consequences.  One of the most famous was the recent ethanol subsidies.  Those subsidies made the production of ethanol so favorable, despite the lack of demand, that the price of corn went through the roof.  Ethanol producers were buying so much corn, what was left just wasn’t affordable.  What happened?

Suddenly, folks in Mexico, who use a lot of corn in their daily diet, couldn’t to buy corn.  A staple of their diet was out of reach for many Mexicans.  Some blame that, at least in part, for the heightened drug violence as more and more poor people turned to the drug trade to make enough money to eat. This is judt one example.

Hayak says that these unintended consequences can never be planned for because they are unintended.  Consider that every time Congress passes some well meaning legislation that goes awry and seems to screw things up even more than they were before.  Obamacare, anyone?

Want to learn more?  Watch those videos or read that book shown above.  America was built by individuals working to satisfy themselves, and in turn serve the greater good, not by politicians and bureaucrats picking winners and losers through oppressive rules and taxes.  Nothing’s changed.  America will be saved the same way it was built.  By the people, for the people and of the people.

The Milky Way

That image is a 30 second exposure at F4 and ISO 6400 with the kit lens at 18mm.  No stacking, just a dark frame applied and a little correction in Paint Shop Pro 8.

This shot of the Big Dipper, or the back half of Ursa Major, is a stack of three lights and one dark.  The single light images are pretty nice all by themselves, but the stack image has a nice dark sky with the glow from Carson City and Reno illuminating the bottom of the frame.

The Big Dipper

These are 25 second exposures at F4 and ISO1600.  By the way, both are shot with a Canon T2i.  I’m still working on my processing skills, but these turned out pretty good.  Next week the moon will be out of sight most of the night.  I hope to get some shots of the Milky Way near Sagittarius.  Here’s hoping for clear skies.

Freakin’ awesome, right?  All I can say is better them than me.

Here's one of the raw images before processing. Still kind of a cool image.

Last night I took the set up out and tried to get a shot of the night sky.  I aimed the camera up at Cassiopeia and took twelve 25-second exposures along with 4 darks.  Darks are taking a picture with the lens cap on using the same settings as the other pictures, or lights, to capture the noise generated by the sensor.

And here's the final after stacking and processing. I like it, but I can do better.

Once I had those I went inside and used some software to stack the images.  this brings out more details and clarity and the dark frames cancel out the sensor noise.  After some playing around I got pretty neat image.  Since the sky was still a little light and the moon was out the image isn’t all it could be, but its a start.

And to help you get oriented, here Cassiopeia and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy labeled for your viewing pleasure, although for those of you that like to pick nits, Cassiopeia is a little off. You get the idea though.

Garden at the end of August

I wanted to do more updates on the garden, but it turned out it wasn’t really interesting.  Things just aren’t growing as well as I’d hoped.  We are just now starting to get some veggies, but even those are few and far between.  Been kind of disappointing.  Lots of green stuff, but not as many veggies I would expect.

The peppers are doing well.

I have a few theories.  For one I have a bird problem.  Not just quail, but I suspect magpies are in there too.  The yellow squash plants were just picked apart, but they survived.  We get some tomatoes pecked, but not eaten.  I think the birds thing they will be sweet but they are a little tart so they leave them.  I gotta figure out how to discourage the magpies.  They even harass the cats and eat their food!

The tomatoes just aren't doing as well as usual.

I also think the soil needs some more amendments.  I fertilized the plants a couple of times and they took off for about a week, then slowed again.  I think the soil just doesn’t have enough nutrients and the compost and manure I tilled in just isn’t broken down enough to be accessible to the veggies.  Who the heck knows?  It can’t hurt.  Maybe it was just the weird weather this year.

Egg plant. We've been eating these breaded & baked.

Anyway, we have managed to get quite a few peas, hot and sweet peppers, collards and eggplants.  The tomatoes are doing OK, but not as prolific as I’m used to or even last year.  We are starting to get few yellow squash and the beans are finally producing, though not heavily yet.  We planted mesclun and lettuce, but the lettuce never made it past seedlings.  I think the birds got em.  The mesclum was just too bitter.  I’m not sure if it is supposed to be like that, but yuck!

I grow the peas just to eat as snacks when I'm watering. I don't like them cooked.

As soon as things start to die off in a month or so, I will add some amendments and let them sit over the winter.  I also want to plant a few winter crops, onions, garlic, etc.  I’ve already sowed some lettuce for fall.  It’s not great, but we got a little food so far.  We’ve got a few more weeks, at least.  If we are lucky we might have a month or more.  The garden might still surprise us.

For those that don’t know, I am a guitar player.  I’m a really shitty guitar player, but I play none the less.  This grabbed my attention, but not only because I like guitars, I’m actually a Fender player, but because this is wrong!  The government is using its considerable power to harass Gibson Guitars (see link above).

Some feel it’s because Gibson is one of the few guitar manufacturers in a right-to-work state and this payback for not having a union shop.  Others think it’s just environmental protection gone crazy.  Whatever it is, its wrong!

This is not the purpose of the federal government!  The government is so big and complex with so many laws it’s hard not to be a criminal.  You’re probably breaking some law just reading this and if you aren’t, some bureaucrat is working on the situation.

And just to lighten the mood, here's my Fender Stratocaster. I love that guitar!

The government is in every aspect of our lives.  Our cars, homes, computers, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, etc., etc., etc.  The government is no longer of, by and for the people, it is an enemy against us.  Its sees us a children, unable to run our own lives.  It sees us as common criminals because the laws have become so complex it’s hard not to break one.

This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind, not even close.  I’m not worried that America is fading, I’m afraid it’s already gone.  It’s been replaced right under our noses with a European style, socialist nanny-state.  This isn’t Europe though and some of us aren’t going to go to sleep.

14 months and we can continue what we started in 2010.  We can take this country back.  Libertarians and Constitutional Conservatives can take the Senate and the White House and start undoing the progressive schemes of the last 80 years.  This is our country.  You can believe what you want, but stop trying to shove your ideology down my throat!

You want socialism, big government, high taxes and, ultimately, failure, move to New York or California.  50 experiments on democracy is what the Founders had in mind, not one overarching authority.  Plans by the many, not by the few.  Freedom is a beautiful thing, but we’ve taken it for granted.  It’s time to stop being subjects and start being citizens.

P.S.  I have a garden update, and I’ll get it posted someday.  Promise!

Knowing this we’ve been treated to a solution, Washington style.  Only apply for one more credit card you plan on maxing out.  Is that solution better than applying for two?  Surely, but it only prolongs the inevitable.  The day your credit card bills exceed your income, and you ability to generate more income, and you go bankrupt.

Again, I might be simple, but that’s where we are headed.  The debt-ceiling deal added 7 trillion in new debt over the next ten years.  It did not reduce the debt, it just slowed its growth slightly.  Washington did not tackle military spending, Social Security or Medicare.  Obamacare still looms large over our heads as well.

This is irresponsible.  At some point we will need to stop spending so much money.  Do you realize that if tax rates were double that would still not generate enough money to pay for Washington’s yearly budget?  No matter when we decide to become responsible and spend less it will hurt, but the longer we wait the worse it will be.

Are we going to wait until Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt and can no longer pay benefits?  Are we going to let military spending increase without any checks.  Most of the defense budget is not buying bullets and paying soldiers.  It could be slashed without affecting our readiness or technological advantage.  Are we going to just keep spending irresponsibly, using old people, children and terrorists as the excuse?

God, I hope not.  There are some responsible people in Washington (not to mention you state legislature and city council), but we need more.  We made promises we need to keep, like Social Security and Medicare for people already retired or close to it, but we need to make some hard decisions.  We need to send people to Washington who are willing to do so, not just kick the can down the road.

If you have a good Congressman or Senator that gets it, work hard to send them back.  If you’ve got a politician that is more concerned about re-election and power than doing the right thing, Republican or Democrat doesn’t matter, send them packing and fill their job with someone who will do the right thing.  Our future depends on it, but then again I might be a little too simple.

The new KC light mounts with lights, not to mention the clean hood free of pine pitch.

Nothing major yet like a lift or something, but a couple of easy upgrades that make the jeep look a little better.  First I took of the stupid light bar.  I hate those things, but at least it had about $300 in KC off-road lights mounted on it.  I decided to put two on the front bumper and two on the windshield hinges.

I bought a pair of KC windshield light mounts.  They not only hold lights, but they cover up the scratches left by the light bar.  I think they look nice, though the lights aren’t wired yet.  I have yet to mount the lights on the bumper and I will wire them all at once.

And a close up. Nice rugged utilitarian look. I like it.

The reason the lights aren’t on the bumper yet is the winch and bumper are coming off to get repainted and cleaned up.  I will also rewire the winch.  The current wiring job works, but is ugly and half-assed.  After that is done the lights will get wired.

And my new Sony head unit with the iPod attached.

But wait, there’s more!  I also put in a new stereo.  It’s a Sony with full iPod control.  It’s nice and loud, though the speakers need to be upgraded to take full advantage, and no more static listening to my iPod with one of those crappy FM transmitters.  It drowns out the flapping of the soft top nicely too, which by the way is on now instead of the hard top.

The soft top. Looks more Jeep with the soft top, I think.

In the next few weeks I will start working on the winch and bumper and I will post up pictures showing what I did.  I will also be changing out the 2-inch spacers that are my lift now for 2-inch springs.  should give me a better ride and more articulation off-road.  I’m also replacing the stock wheels for some black steel wheels with a little less back spacing.  Better looks and the tires won’t rub.