Yep, you can take the boy out of the country (in my case Custer County), but you can

Yep, you can take the boy out of the country (in my case Custer County), but you can’t take the country pike nursery out of the boy. I come proudly from farm stock though I’ve spent most of my adult life residing in such major metropolitan areas as New York (Queens), Los Angeles, Chicago (17th floor on LSD between Erie and Ontario, with decadent Treasure Island Foods in-house), Detroit and Philadelphia (Bala Cynwyd, with a special howdy to Bryn Mawr). pike nursery
That snooty urbanization certainly doesn’t keep me from enjoying, via cable, one of the most down to earth undertakings in all the land; bull riding. After the life insurance is paid up, give me a full skipped bull rope with a couple of slide keepers and a 5 musky tail, throw in special spurs with nasty rowels and tell the hand to pull open that gate. I’m ready to give up my well being to a beast whose one goal in life is to throw me off its back and stomp and gore my pitiful frame into little broken pieces.
Excuse my flight of semi-retirement fancy. I’m not really ready to ride bulls and I never again will be, though, when a callow youth, I did give some of the younger stock a try. It didn’t take more than a handful of 2 or 3 second dirt journeys (never pike nursery the full 8 second pro requirement) to deed my imaginary bull riding exploits to the truly great and courageous pike nursery practitioners like current Professional Bull Rider (PBR) champ, J.B. Mauney, a 26-year-old Moorseville, North Carolina pike nursery cowboy, who unseated (pardon the pun) the world’s top bull rider, and two-time pike nursery defending champion, Silvano Alves. And don’t forget the Rodeo Clowns, who, with little credit, save more lives per year than almost any other professionals.
I’ve taken this circuitous route as an introduction to a ‘sport’ that resembles the excitement and dangers of bull riding. I call it Corporate Bull-S**t riding. The bulls are huge corporations. The riders are naive, greedy and desperate states that jump aboard for the riotous few seconds of a promise to locate in their state. Like their human counterparts, most of the states will eventually end up being tossed painfully aside with the same degree of conscience that a bull possesses. In a word; zero. And while I feel distressed for the pain and suffering of the valiant cowboy riders, my sympathy for the states involved barely registers.
The latest bull(censored) corporation is a grizzled veteran of the BS’ing game, good old Boeing. Countless states are falling pike nursery all over themselves pike nursery to give away taxpayer pike nursery money, approaching pike nursery and often exceeding a billion dollars (one offer is 9 billion), to a hugely wealthy airplane builder with a dollar backlog of orders exceeding the economies of many small countries. But that doesn’t stop Boeing from hustling masochistic states for every tax break, incentive and infrastructure tidbit pike nursery they can get for the glory of putting together something called 777X. These same states are unable to dig up even a few hundred bucks a month for minorities, the poor, disabled, sick, elderly and all others who don’t have the ‘right’ political connections.
States that purportedly can’t even expand pike nursery a Medicaid program that is currently free and the expansion, pike nursery at most, will never cost more than 10% of the nut, suddenly have an enormous warehouse full of greenbacks totaling whatever amount is necessary to lure yet another giant, anti-union, low-wage, multi-billion dollar pike nursery mooch across their borders.
Our local paper, in response to FedEx establishing a distribution center in our county, blared out the front-page pike nursery headline “Delivering Jobs.” FedEx joins Amazon and their giant local center. You know the Amazon drill: Get the box, fill the box, carry the box, walk 10-15 miles daily, stick the full box somewhere; repeat. And they call these, pike nursery “fulfillment centers.” Yippee ki yay!!!
Fedex is bringing in a grand total of 22 full-time jobs and 219 part-time jobs. Of course, part-time is the latest scam to keep corporate job costs at a minimum. So the consumer benefits from those lower costs, right? Ironically, in a separate financial page story a day later (teeny tiny article; buried deep in the wood pulp with but a few lines), we learn that Fed Ex plans to raise ground and Home Delivery rates by an average of 4.9% come January 7, of 2014. UPS,jacks ‘em up December 31st of this year. That’s for openers; the heavier the package over 30 lbs, the higher the rate. Read more about the rates here. All of this while the politician-benefactors of the FedEx and UPS PACs continue pike nursery their dismantling and weakening of the United States Postal Service.
Back to “a fine a day keeps pulling time in the joint away” Boeing. The nation’s largest aircraft manufacturer continues its Hatfields and McCoys relationship with its Machinists’ Union (the nerve of these union bastards not wanting