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My Kind Of Sticker

Looking For The Best Place To Retire In Oregon?

You might want to pass on Portland, although if you're pretty well-to-do, you can rent a 565 square-foot "apartment" here for a mere $1600 per month. But it's walkable, green&sustainable™. The building even has a "green roof"! How cool is that?

But even with all that going for it, Portland didn't come close to making the cut for retirees. Nope the top place in Oregon is:

Hood River.

Forget kite boarding, wind surfing, skiing, brewing and all that other cool stuff. Hood River's got all the doctors' offices, recreation centers and retirement centers it needs — plus a senior population of 12 percent — to make it the best place to retire in Oregon.

Astoria made the top ten list, though. Still, it might be better to look across the river at Washington; Oregon's looking like it won't be attractive at all in the coming years.

Here We Go Again

Although it's been on a downward trend for a few years, violent crime is climbing again. You can't keep the devil down for long.

"I grew up in the Salem area," wrote another reader. "What the hell is going on in Salem lately?"

Although the city's homicide rate was higher than the state's, it remained lower than Portland (5.38), Coos Bay (18.68) and similarly-sized Springfield, Missouri (5.99).

Coos Bay is a very pretty area, but since there's no work, a lot of folks have become meth addicts. Thus, violent crime far out of proportion to the population. But it's happening all over; not necessarily the meth, but the violent crime. It's on the upswing again. Might be time to rebuild the bunker.

It Seems That Al Quaeda Are Training Birds

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (AP) — A utility company says two crows triggered a power outage in mid-July that knocked out service to about 100,000 customers in three Western states.

Rocky Mountain Power spokesman David Eskelsen tells the Post Register newspaper (http://bit.ly/2dugkoM) in a Thursday story that an investigation shows the crows touched a capacitor bank — a device that controls voltage — at a substation in southwest Idaho.

Eskelsen says the capacitor bank caught fire, and a separate device that should have rerouted electricity malfunctioned, sending the entire substation offline.

But he also says that the crows were vaporized in the incident. That raises a few questions: how do they know it was caused by two crows? What - did they do DNA tests of the freaking air around the place or something?

Nope, this was clearly a test run by Daesh or other Muslim terrorists to determine the effectiveness of their new round of suicide attackers.

 

Amish: The Election Is Up To God

Many of the Amish in Pennsylvania and Ohio simply won't be voting come November, despite the fact that, living in the eastern part of the country, their votes would actually count - unlike the situation for those of us on the left coast, as election results are announced before our votes are even tabulated. But they are extremely conservative.

They're also patriarchal; if they had their druthers, then, they certainly wouldn't like to see Pantsuit in office. Trump, some opine, is at least a businessman - and that's something the Amish respect, if insufficient to motivate them to vote.

"I don't vote; I'm just not interested," says Sam, an Amish craftsman from Lancaster County. Like many in the community, Sam did not want to use his full name -  a common habit among the Amish, who shy away from public attention, particularly outside of their communities

Similarly, Freida, 18, who works at an ice cream shop in a neighbouring village, says that while she does have concerns about the next four years, ultimately, the election "is up to God", which is why she won't be voting.

Not to burst Freida's bubble, but it seems unlikely that God has anything to do with this election - although it's entirely possible that a different entity may have had a hand in it.

In related news, the Amish have traditionally been left alone but are now increasingly running afoul of government regulations involving everything from failing to attach manure bags to the butts of their horses to failing to install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in their homes. And although reluctant to get involved with the legal system, they have on occasion done so, and have achieved some positive results not only for themselves and their communities, but for the nation as a whole:

His group defended the Amish in the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Yoder v. Wisconsin, which paved the way for Amish religious exemptions from the higher grades of formal education. The ruling also strengthened the home-school movement in the U.S., he said.

He said that while the Amish are generally averse to litigation, they will often go along if they see some greater good involved.

“When I took Wisconsin v. Yoder, I went there and said, ‘I’d like to defend you. Look at it this way — I believe you’d be of help to many people if you’d allow us to use your case to make a ruling.’ It used to be illegal to home-school. That Amish case has helped thousands of people who are not Amish. That is the only way I was able to persuade the Amish to take their case,” he said.

Today, home-schooling is not only on the rise, home-schooled kids are frequently taking first place in education-based competitions. The teacher's unions lost big on that one. It used to be that home-schooling was the only schooling. In later years, townspeople pooled their money to pay for a teacher to come live in their towns and educate their children. As towns became cities, tax-funded education districts were formed.

Then came the unions, who successfully pushed to get home-schooling made illegal - mainly because the more students a district could retain by mandate, the more tax money they could extract. Education became secondary, and it remains secondary to this day:

ALOHA, Ore. — Some parents in Aloha are concerned about a "white privilege" survey their children received as homework.

Jason Schmidt's son, a senior at Aloha High School, was given the survey as homework. Schmidt said he's not too happy about the form.

"I think he should be learning actual education and not be a part of some social experiment or some teacher's political agenda," Schmidt said.

"With the amount of money we pay for schools, they should be educating not indoctrinating our students about the latest political fad or political agenda a teacher wants to get across," Schmidt said.

Among the statements in the "survey":

I can go shopping alone, pretty well assured that I won't be followed or hassled.

I can turn on the television and see people of my race widely and positively represented.

No wonder more families are turning back to home-schooling.

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Will the Amish come out and vote for Donald Trump?

Funny Picture

I'm not voting for either of these two clowns, but I did find the image amusing:

How sweet.

Patch Your Refrigerator? No Thanks.

That whole "Internet of Things" that some have been pushing just never made a lick of sense in the first place, so it was only a matter of time before something like this happened:

Hackers used an army of hijacked security cameras and video recorders to launch several massive internet attacks last week, prompting fresh concern about the vulnerability of millions of “smart” devices in homes and businesses connected to the internet. 

There's a good reason not to buy "smart" refrigerators and "smart" televisions and "smart" thermostats, and that's because they're dumb. There is now way on God's green earth that anyone would ever be able convince me to buy something like that; I figured out some time ago that they're a huge security risk. And I'm not about to program a firewall into my fridge. Or my thermostat.

Of course, we have a fridge and a thermostat and security cameras and motion detectors, but none of them connect to the internet, and they never will. Companies like Nest push their "smart" thermostats and other devices, while Comcast touts their security systems on a regular basis as well. Everybody in the ads is smiling, of course, as they use their phones to check in on the kids or bump the temperature in the house up or down. But that's in the ads, where people are paid to smile.

"Smart" devices are dumb, and people who actually buy them and have them installed are stupid.

Don't be stupid.

 

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The Oregonian Shines Again

Talk about solid reporting! From today's Oregonian:

The Rev. Franklin Graham testified Friday that he flew his own plane from North Carolina to Oregon in mid-February to try to save lives, concerned about the four holdouts occupying a federal wildlife sanctuary as well as the FBI agents attempting to get them to surrender.

Evidently, somebody at The Oregonian is a Time Lord, able to move from Thursday to Friday, transcribe testimony, and return to report it on Thursday. Man, those are some incredible journalists!

Kiss Me, Kate

(Bending over to make it easier for her - did I remember to wipe? No matter.)

Only one other elected official attended last Wednesday’s Portland Business Alliance breakfast forum where Oregon Gov. Kate Brown was the featured speaker, and he wasn’t even from Portland. He was Metro Councilor Craig Dirksen, the former mayor of Tigard.

Brown could have used the support of her fellow Portland Democrats. She was repeatedly challenged by business leaders in the audience for endorsing Ballot Measure 97, the corporate tax increase on the Nov. 8 general election ballot. Although Brown said the decision was the hardest of her political career, questioners continued asking whether she understands the measure.

Well, that's easy: Brown has never made a hard decision in her life-long career as a Democrat politician, so she went with her public employee union donors' wishes and endorsed their measure. Understanding things has never been in her playbook.

Meanwhile, get ready to party on October first!

Months before the Oregon Department of Transportation asks the Legislature for a massive increase in taxes and fees to support new spending on roads and bridges, the agency plans to “celebrate” a newly completed project that went $230 million over budget and seven years past the original due date — all to straighten a 10-mile stretch of highway.

That fiasco was worse than the "Cover Oregon" disaster. They went low-bid and did the "straightening" project on an active landslide. They spent $365 million to straighten the road to eliminate the hairpin curves by the time all was said and done. They spent $20 million on four brand-new bridges that had to be blown up because the landslide was taking them downhill. ODOT claims that they have learned from these mistakes. That seems doubtful.

What's surprising is that the professional litigants in the environmeddlist community didn't file lawsuit after lawsuit to further increase the costs to taxpayers.

It will be interesting to see whether or not ODOT replants the clearcuts now that they've "stabilized" the landslide.

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Say Goodbye To The Pacific Ocean

It looks as though Thor's Well, on the central Oregon coast, is draining it.

But no worries, looks can be deceiving. It's the remains of a sea cave, located near Spouting Horn, which is itself the remnant of a sea cave.

In both cases, the roof of the cave collapsed; the Spouting Horn was a smaller cave, and located a bit higher in elevation. Its roof collapse therefore produced a small hole, and as the surf enters the cave opening, seawater shoots through the hole in the roof, producing the spout.

The cave that formed Thor's Well was considerably larger and deeper, and when its roof collapsed, it left a huge hole, into which it appears as though the ocean is being drained.

It can be seen at Cape Perpetua Scenic Area, a rather large coastal state park located just south of the town of Yachats, where our family generally spends a few days each year on vacation getaways. The Yachats area also features a number of other mostly hidden treasures: there's a small botanical garden along a spring-fed creek near the border of Siuslaw National Forest which is free to access, and considerable history as well. Chinook Indians frequented the area in season, harvesting sea smelt at what is now called "Smelt Sands Beach" in the state park there; they also harvested volumes of mussels that cover the easily-accessed rocks there. Middens primarily containing discarded mussel shells can still be seen along the cliffs.