North Carolina man hit by plane while riding lawn mower

Gotta say, you don't see this everyday!

North Carolina man hit by plane while riding lawn mower

Posted: Apr 26, 2014 7:40 PM CDTUpdated: Apr 26, 2014 08:33 PM

 

A man riding a lawn mower was hit by a small plane. (Courtesy: NY Daily News)

More on the Web

• NY Daily News: Small plane crashes onto lawn mower operator, severs his hand

TAYLORSVILLE, NC -A  man was hit by a small plane while he was on a riding lawn mower.

The incident happened Saturday at North Carolina’s Taylorsville Airport.

The NY Daily News reports the pilot, 84-year-old Edward Sisson, was flying in from Crossville, Tennessee and was trying to touch down on a grassy landing strip. Sisson ended up hitting John Ruffy, 74, as he rode a lawn mower going in the same direction.

Ruffy’s hand was severed by the plane’s propeller. He was airlifted to a nearby hospitalized where he remains in critical condition. Sisson was not injured.

Officials said the airport is privately owned and does not have a traffic control operator.

The National Transportation and Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the incident. No charges have been filed in the case.

*NY Daily News contributed to this report.

Obamacare and the Edsel: A Tale of Two Lemons

With the government shutdown you may have missed the press (what little there was) about the problems www.healthcare.gov.  So let me ask a question, if the government after spending over a $500 million dollars with a Canadian firm, can't design and implement a web site that works, how is the world do you think they are going to provide healthcare more efficiently that private providers, whose web sites work, do now!

David Carton at The American Spectator wrote a great article that you might enjoy!

Marc

A Grand Compromise for consideration by the GOP

Offer up a bill that:

1. Eliminates the debt ceiling.  It is a false number anyway, provides no real control, is never enforced, and allows the idiots to aggravate themselves and the taxpayers with their stupidity.
2. Enact zero based budgeting effective immediately, no further automatic increases for anything.
3. Sunset all current legislation and government programs over the next five years.  All programs will have to be re-jusified every five years including welfare, food stamps, and income taxes.
4. Require every American and illegal immigrant, including those on government assistance (welfare, food stamps, AFDC, etc) pay a minimum 5% tax on all funds received from all sources.
5. Since the Democrats have yet to pass a budget, we revert to the 2006 budget levels upon passage of the bill.  
6. In future years require a firm budget to be passed prior to the start of the fiscal year.  If a new budget is not passed then the prior year budget, cut by 20%, automatically takes affect. If Congress fails to pass a budget automatic budget reductions will go into effect and no one in the House, Senate or White House (or their staffs) will be paid until the next budget cycle.  If they can't live with that, they can resign and get a real job!
7. Once a budget is set Congress & White House must live within the budget, no exceptions.  If extraordinary measures (direct attack on the US mainland by some idiotic nut cases) require a budget increase, Congress must pass a clean budget approval for the specific event.  No other amendments, special projects, ear marks or other non related attachments.
8. Stop all multi-topic bills.  One bill one topic, vote for or against.  Amendments related to the bills topic will be allowed but no none related amendments or ear marks!
9. Revoke all special provisions for Senators, Congressmen and the White House, and their staff members, starting with all Obamacare subsidies. Force them to live under the same laws, same benefits as our military.
10. Let Obamacare continue to evolve, let all delays and waivers put in place by the White House stay, except for the congressional subsidies (see 9 above).  Obamacare will fail on its on, once the low info voters realize they actually have to pay for healthcare.  Let next years congress take up the fate of Obamacare.

 Marc

Gong to Hell in a Hand Basket!

I grew up in the 50’s & 60”s, a child of the Greatest Generation.  I remember my parents telling me how much the world had changed since they were my age.   Things just weren’t the same as when they grew up. . . more crime, the government out of control, too many regulations, the economy was bad, no work for anyone, wars and more wars.    I vividly remember one very hot summer day when I heard the local service station owner saying, “Man it so hot, look at that sun, it just keeps getting closer and closer to the earth, in 20 years the world will be on fire and we will all burn up!” (I do not believe he was related to Al Gore, but I don’t know for certain!)

In the 50’s & 60’s in Somerville, Texas where I grew up, the adults subscribed to the local weekly paper, the Somerville Tribune and some folks had one of the Houston papers delivered by someone in town who had a “paper route”.  If you didn’t subscribe to any of the papers you would pick up a copy every now and then for 5 or 10 cents at the drug store or City Café.  If you didn’t have the money for a paper or you just wanted to get the “real” inside scoop on anything you would go down to Harvey Neutzler’s barber shop and catch up on what you had been missing.  Often you only did that when you went in to get that exorbitantly priced $0.50 haircut.

Folks listened to the AM radio station, the closest station was KWHI in Brenham, which mostly played music and did the farm report but would also have news usually at 8 am, noon and 5 pm, usually a 15 minute or less program that focused on really big world issues, none of which I can remember, and the local news.  

Then in the 1950’s television came on the screen.  The closest TV stations were in Houston and Temple.  Folks installed very tall antennas and pointed them toward the station they wanted to watch.  If you changed the channel you went out and literally twisted the antenna mast to point the antenna toward the City where the station was located that you were trying to watch. 

The Evening News was a 30 minute program at 5:00 PM every night.  You got some local news (Houston or Temple) and national news.  Walter Cronkite is the first person I actually remember as newsman.   There were two networks NBC and CBS, ABC came later.   

So if you were keeping up with all that math the media outlets had less than a hour a day (after commercials) for their news.  They had to pack into that time what they thought were the biggest and most important issues of the day.  And at the time you could not DVR anything to watch later, hell you were lucky if you could watch it when it was on, especially if you lived in Somerville where TV signals were not reliable.

Newspapers were printed once a day or once a week, and magazines were printed once a month.  Their editors had an even bigger job trying to select what they thought were the “really important” stories for you to know about. 

To say a limited amount of data was available from around the world was an understatement!

If you heard about anything happening in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Caribbean, the South Pacific or even California or New York, it was likely history, by at least a day, week or month before you were able to consume or process the data.

Yet even with this limited access to the national and world news all I heard growing up was how the world was “going to hell in a hand basket”. The sun was going to crash into the earth, crime was rampant, life was complicated and the government was out of control. 

And guess what their parents who lived through WWI told my parents the same thing.  And their parents who grew up when Lincoln was assassinated told them the same thing.  

Thanks, in some part, to the business that has been my fascination and business for the last 40 years, electronic communications, the world continues to shrink.  Now we know almost instantly when something happens anywhere is the world.

If you Google (and none of our parents ever heard of Google and only few of us really have clue about how it works) “how many news outlets in the world” Wikipedia will return what they admit is an incomplete list of over 225 news outlets most of which operate 24 X 7 either on the air, the radio, or on electronic blogs and in some cases on all media simultaneously.  Add to that anyone with an opinion and computer and enough skills to set up a blog also provides you with all the news you care to consume.  But let’s just do some math on the 225 + that showed up in Wikipedia’s incomplete list. 

Assuming each of them have 24 hour news shows, that increases the available news time to fill from 1 hour a day in the 1960’s to over 5000 hours a day today.  And when you consider that this 5000 hours has to be filled every day of the week, you soon realize that now anything that happens in the world has a chance of being brought to you, live and in living color, within minutes or live in living color in your living room, on your computer or on your Smartphone while driving.  Combined with the massive number of hours to fill each day, there is a “rush” to beat the competition to the airways.  So you get to hear and see any news, many times within seconds of it happening.  But you can be sure it has not been vetted, checked or verified and often it is gathered and reported on by young reports who have limited life experience and who get rewarded for their “scoops” but not necessarily for their accuracy.  My view and experience is that in the competitive world of news today, breaking the news story is immanently more important to most outlets than accurately reporting the facts of the story.  

So, while we are much more aware of what is going on around the world, we are not necessarily better informed.  In fact Mark Twain once wrote,

“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.”

If that was the feeling in the 1850’s imagine what Mark Twain would say today.

My point in all this is that I personally think the world is a much better place than it was in the 1850’s, the 1950’s, and even at the turn of the Century way back in 2000.  The fact that we are more informed makes the world a less dangerous place, regardless of what you might see in the media. 

But, if you want to maintain some degree of your sanity, you simply cannot get caught up in the minutia of every event. If you do you will go from being informed to being misinformed and extremely frustrated very quickly.   Keep in mind that not everything being reported is accurate!

My experience has been the news outlets usually get the big things right, America was attacked by Islamic fundamentalist nut cases in 2001; the Texas Aggies had a phenomenal season of football in 2012; there was a horrible mass murder in Newton, Connecticut; there is a huge controversy over gun control going on in Washington; Barack Obama won re-election in November of 2012; the American consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012; there is a major uprising in Syria and some nut case wacko's set off bombs in Boston during the Boston marathon.  But if you take any one of those issues, follow ever story, every opinion, and every blog post or Twitter post about it, you will soon be on the verge of thinking, “My God, the world is going to hell in hand basket!” and the cycle for your kids will continue. 

Break the chain, absorb the news with a degree of skepticism and apply common sense to what the “worldly” reporters (sometimes are simplysome kid with a camera phone) feed to the media outlets! 

The Difference between advising on a decision, and making a decision!

This is an article about presidential decisions but I assure you every business leader is faced with this each and every day.  There are always many people who will tell you what you should do or how they think things should be done, but like in politics those advisors come and go, and it is the leader who has to make and live with the final decision.  

One of the things employees want and need is a person with life experience, some gut feel, and the willingness to take risk on their behalf!  The leader is not always right, but he/she is always responsible and accountable for his/her decisions!  

Peter Wehner | @Peter_Wehner03.25.2013 - 12:00 PM

  MATERIAL DELETED . . . . ENDING PARAGEAPH HERE

When asked by ABC’s William Lawrence to look back over the first two years of his presidency, John Kennedy said this:

I would say that the problems are more difficult than I had imagined them to be. The responsibilities placed on the United States are greater than I imagined them to be, and there are greater limitations upon our ability to bring about a favorable result than I had imagined them to be. And I think that is probably true of anyone who becomes President, because there is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate, and between the man who must select from the various alternatives proposed and say that this shall be the policy of the United States. It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments, because unfortunately your advisers are frequently divided. If you take the wrong course, and on occasion I have, the President bears the burden of the responsibility quite rightly. The advisers may move on to new advice.  

It is in the nature of things that in America, the leader is the individual who has to sort through competing counsel and decide which course of action to take. And then he or she must do all in his or her power to execute effectively and take responsibility for the decision.  

People want to be lead but they need leaders with experience, character and willingness to lead and adjust to accomplish well defined goals.  

Remember this when you are selecting some one to lead you, be they leaders of Companies, Countries, or Cities.  

What's Your 45?

This was written by Regina Brett, 90 years old, of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio .

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most requested column I've ever written.

My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short, enjoy it.

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and family will.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye, but don't worry, God never blinks.

16.. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful. Clutter weighs you down in many ways.

18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

19.. It's never too late to be happy. But its all up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative of dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have, not what you need

42. The best is yet to come...

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

The Travis Letter from the Alamo, February 24, 1836

For those of you who visit my blog and are not Texas natives or Texas History buffs you may not have ever heard of the Travis Letter.

Colonel William Barret Travis, Commander of the Texas forces at the Alamo wrote a plea for help.  His plea is known as one of the most stirring documents in American history. Help came but in the end the Alamo was overrun by the invading armies of Mexican Dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

If you have not had the chance to see this letter in person you can read the letter here but even better you can visit the Alamo between February 24, 2013 (177 years after it was written) and March 7, 2013 (177 years and 1 day after the Alamo siege ended in 1836),  in San Antonio, Texas.

If you are Texan you you should not miss the chance to see Travis' actual letter in the Alamo, where it was written.  If you are not a Texan you should use this event as a great time to explore our State and find out why living here and being part of the Texas culture is so very special.

Before you go be sure to watch the 1960 movie about the Alamo.  

Marc
Good Bless Texas!

The Two Minute Drill!

The Two Minute Drill

Marc Lockard mlockard@lockardandwhite.com

Have you ever noticed, while watching professional football, how exciting the last two minutes of each half are?  Two mediocre teams can play an entirely boring game right up until the officials stop the game at two-minutes before the end of each half of the game to notify the teams that there is now only two more minutes of playing time left in the half.  All of a sudden, when the networks come back from commercial, the tempo of the game magically picks up.  Players that looked lethargic when the network broke for commercial are all of a sudden are making great plays and putting forth extra effort!  The quarterback makes use of every available second.  Multiple plays are called, everyone moves with new quickness, the clock is worked judiciously.  The enthusiasm of the team, the crowd, and even the television audience is raised to a new high.   As a viewer I find myself asking why isn’t the whole game played this way?

Then you realize that the really good teams do play the entire game with the same degree of intensity and excitement for the entire game that the mediocre teams do only in the last two minutes before each half.  The teams that play with intensity and excitement the entire game are the consistent winners.  Well the same is true in your life and your career!

Those individuals who put enthusiasm and excitement into everything they do somehow always to be the same individuals who are given the best promotions, who rocket through the corporate ranks or who own and operate their own successful business.  These same individuals also seem to be the ones who have the best families, and enjoy all the better things in life, and always seem to have what appears to a lot of free time.  Their success is simply not an accident!  Their success is a direct result of the effort they put forth.  They operate as if they are always in the last two minutes of the game where every second counts.  They approach all aspects of their life with enthusiasm and excitement, and work consistently to seek out additional opportunities and challenges. 

So why don’t we all participate in the two minute drill?  We all have the capability to do so; we just don’t always focus on the tasks at hand.  Think about the last two days in the office before you left on your last vacation.  You probably attacked every opportunity presented to you with consistent, enthusiastic effort, and you persistently pursued each opportunity as if every second counted.  You knew that those tasks not completed before you left would be there to stare you in the face when you returned.  Your pace quickened, you didn’t waste anytime or energy.  You were committed to clearing out the back-log!  Chances are you accomplished more in those last two days before you left than you had in the last few weeks.  The reason you were able to accomplish so much is that you now HAD to complete those tasks and you knew you simply couldn’t put off any task.  You became focused! 

So why don’t we approach all our opportunities and challenges with this same degree of effort and enthusiasm? Honestly the reason is that for most of us, without an absolute time limit (the last two minutes of the game), we all tend to misuse our time and resources.  After all, if we don’t get that task done today, we can always complete it tomorrow!  But can we?  There always seems to be some new opportunity or some unexpected diversion!  You know you just had to see that new YouTube video everyone is talking about or check out the latest sports scores, or check your Facebook or Twitter account or knock off a few “Angry Birds”.   

But what if you practiced the two minute drill everyday?  What if you played the game of life with enthusiasm and excitement?  What if you methodically and persistently attacked each opportunity that presented itself, when it presented itself? 

One way to find out, try it!  My bet is that you will feel better, discover a new level of confidence in yourself, and begin to feel refreshed and relaxed!

Give it a shot!

Oh, the irony of stupidity!

Liberals Vs Conservatives

The most Powerful Equation in the World!

E + R = O

This is the most powerful equation in the universe!  Used properly and consistently this equation can completely change your life and the lives of those around you and that is a fact, not speculation.  I would like to tell you I put this equation together but I read about this many years ago and I know it works.  Appling the equation is easy and when applied it always works, the hard part is having the courage to trust the equation.   So here is the equation. 

the Event + your Reaction to the event = the Outcome of the event

You do not have much, if any, control over the Events that happen in your life, but you always have total control over your Reaction to the event, and thus you can control the Outcome. 

Now you are probably thinking,  “Marc, you are crazy!”  and you would not be the first person to claim that about me, but let’s focus on the equation.

It is a fact that Events do affect our lives, particularly horrific events that happen to you or your family but how any event affects our life is totally driven by our Reaction to the Event.  People simply can’t make us happy or sad, our bosses can’t put us under pressure, and traffic does not drive us to outrage.   It is our reaction to all these events that actually cause us stress!

To test this equation, consciously keep track of the events, your reactions to them and the outcome for week.  Then, seriously analyze each event and see if you don’t agree that you could, and that in fact you did, shape the outcome of the event had on you by your reaction to the event.  Once you are a believer in the theory you can begin to shape your life by adjusting your reaction to each event as it occurs.  The best outcome will be achieved if you think before you react!

The adage that you fight fire, with fire, is simply bad advice.  When you do that everyone gets burned and the situation usually goes from bad to worse.   I have found, although I will admit that I don’t always follow my own advice, that it is much better to fight fire with water and a great deal of respect, than fire. 

Trust me you can make your life different (and hopefully better) by applying  the above equation constantly.   Learn to use what you know from the equation, chose your reaction to the event carefully to get the results you want.  Do it often enough it will become a positive habit and one that will give you positive results every time.

After you master the use of this equation, you will find that you can in fact “reap what you sow!”

Bin Ladin is Dead, but when did he die?

Last night I was catching up on some reading and stumbled into the web site of Patrick Robinson, an outstanding writer whose works include writing with Marcus Luttrell the book Lone Survivor.

For many years I have advocated that Osama Bin Ladin was dead in some mountain cave in somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan!  So when our Organizer in Chief announced last May 1, 2011 that he had "killed" Osama Bin Ladin, I told everyone that would listen that I believed he was dead but that Obama's story just didn't hold up.

Well I am just a guy with a gut feel.  My feeling has been for many years that Bin Ladin was dead but that we couldn't afford to let the world know because we needed him to be perceived to be alive to make sure that we could continue to take the fight to the bad guys.

But Patrick Robinson a man who knows what he is talking about and has access way beyond my "gut feel", pinned an article on May 2, 2011 entitled,  Bin Laden Is Dead. But He Didn’t Die Last Night.  I highly encourage you to read his article by clicking on this link and you should definitely read his books.
Enjoy the article and make his books a regular read!
Marc