Hey Ya'll
Thought I'd check in with ya and ask what’s going on your way and let ya know what's going on here.

Well let's see Topeka has become a real interesting place recently. Funeral missions have been up. A couple of weeks ago one of our guys Blaine lost his wife to cancer. So we had to go and stand at his wife's funeral. Poor guy. It's sad to lose your true love. And she was his. Then One of our former Supreme court Justices and an Air Force Veteran went down. The Ugly people were there with their ugly songs and ugly signs and their ugly little attitudes. Good thing we were there, and we were there in a good number. Way more than I expected on a weekday. I was proud. But right after that we had to pack up the flags and beat it up to the north end of town. Remember Blaine? Well his brother died. So we had to bury his brother. What a shame! So we had a day to take a break and then bam we had a memorial for some young fellow named Galloway. A PFC in the Army. He left a wife. That tugs at your heart to see a real young wife crying like that. At our age they look like high school kids, did you ever notice?

Then there's the biker scene, which we are on the edge of. Late last fall some of our guys took advantage of the decent weather to ride down to the S.E. corner of Kansas. From here that's quite a ride. They stopped in a town named Liberal on the way back. There were Sons of Silence everywhere. Well the guys thought they would see what was up. It turns out that some motorcycle club in Liberal patched over to S.O.S. that day. A couple of beers and a couple of death threats from the Sons and our guys were on the road and out of there at a high rate of speed. We're no pansies but we do not fight when there are a hundred of them and only a couple of us. Well we adjusted our patches to get rid of the TOPEKA banner at the bottom and hopefully that will not happen again. Meanwhile the Sons of Silence are threatening the American veterans motorcycle club and generally making a nuisance of themselves. See there have been Sons here for quite a while but no patches. Now we're seeing full patch wearing Sons around. Then Wednesday after the funerals I parked the bike and went out in the truck to do some grocery shopping. While I'm at the store I run into some Iron Horsemen nomads. Well I'm curious and I talked to them and they tell me that they are opening a clubhouse in Topeka and are having an open house. I got invited. Well I'm thinking this is weird. Now we have full patch wearing Sons of Silence and Iron Horsemen. But that's not all dear friends, not by a long shot. Today my friend and club brother called me up after the memorial service while I was visiting with Jerry at the gun shop. He says "Herb you'll never believe what I just saw ridding into the south side of town." So I says "what did you see Robert?" He says "I just saw a dozen or so Bandidos ride in." Well heck we've got a clique of Bloods and a clique of Crips and some Sur 13s and a couple of other little street gangs. Now we've got Sons of Silence and Iron Horsemen and Bandidos in town. Oh yeah and my friend in the Legacy Vets mc is looking around for body armor because of the Sons. Most of us are carrying a pistol and or a big knife when we're out. And we aren't 1%ers we just go to funerals and do charity work and have fun. Most of us are combat vets and some of us are or have been law enforcement. Allot of us have PTSD. Now this is a great situation. There's talk of American veterans mc and Legacy Veterans mc and the ALR doing more things together with our numbers we far outnumber the Sons. They leave ya alone when they are out numbered.
By the way have you heard that Topeka is trying to be the safest capitol city in the USA? This all is going on in Topeka n Shawnee County in little ole Kansas. Our county, on a good day, has about 170,000 residents.

Our illustrious legislature can't learn how to spend what they have and no more, anyway they can't do the math necessary to balance the budget right, and they can't figure out that it's the business in this state that brings in the tax dollars for them to spend so they do stupid stuff like running off business. They think that if they just raise the tax rates then there the money will be, magically, right in front of them for them to spend. The dumb asses can't figure out that when so much of the business that is done is done with other businesses in this state and the dollars that change hands are the very same dollars that have been changing hand in this state for some time we are in trouble. Sure we export our crops but we need to export more stuff. Even if it's just value added. However if some idiot that thinks that someone might so much as change the smell of the air in one room they all get enviro conscious and shut everything down. So now we don't have the money to spend on their little pet projects that are totally unnecessary and what do they do they want to shorten up on dollars for the law enforcement and judiciary.

I think the idiots should come to Topeka and work for exactly 30 days. And I mean 30 x 8 hours. We should build a dorm for them out at Forbes industrial park where they bunk up with an appropriate room mate. Something like a college dorm, no more. They should have a kitchen that prepares simple Army type mess. And they get paid $15.00/hr plus travel pay from their home to Topeka and back one time at a rate of 1.5 times the cost of a gallon of gas. And no more voting themselves a pay raise. The bill for a pay raise goes to the people to pass. No more than $2.00/hr increase per year or the increase in cost of living for this state whichever is higher. And they have to pass a test in economics at a college Bachelors level. No more of these people who wouldn't know Laissaez-faire from Keynesian economics to save their lives.

I Know that things aren't good in the whole USA, but if things are going sour in the rest of the states and business is looking for a place to relocate, create low tax, low restriction, business friendly atmosphere here. Give the beleaguered businesses a place to go other than Mexico or China. This is the ideal place in the USA to make and distribute things for the USA. But our legislature is more worried about banning smoking a cigarette in a damn bar than getting a business in here so we can afford the cigarettes and the bar. It seems to me that most all of the representatives in our state house are “Richie Riches” and they have the cash reserves and property to weather a recession without a problem. But if you go to the Tennessee town area or Central Park area of Topeka those people tend to live hand to mouth. Each and every meager pay check means a great deal to those folks. They do not have the resources to care about the piddling little things that seem to disturb our “oh so sensitive” legislators who just care so much for everything under the sun except getting jobs into this state.

Case in point. We had a chance recently to get a modern low sulfur coal fired power plant here. The environmentally concerned legislature turned them away. This was the kind of place that would produce so little pollution that you could hang your white washing down wind and when it dries it would still be white. Oh yeah they were worried about that plant. But what about the pesticides and herbicides and chemical fertilizers that their friends spray all over the place? But then that isn’t the point. The point is preserving their vision of what Kansas should be, even if that vision is so romanticized and unrealistic that it overlooks most Kansans. So they run off the energy plant that would have required so many people to build and run it and provided quite a few jobs to unemployed Kansans and would have exported electric power along the national grid. So it goes with other business. They see our brilliant legislature and they see the restrictions and the taxes and they run screaming to China or Mexico.

We are facing at least a 100% increase in gang activity and the idiot legislature is twiddling their thumbs. The gangs are here because we don't have the resources to run them off, we don't have the resources to run them off because we don't have the business we need to generate the tax revenue and we don't have the businesses because the legislature ran them off. It will eventually come about that the manufacture of meth and the redistribution of pot and cocaine will take place in Kansas. Can you think of a better place?

The elitist legislature wants to preserve Kansas as it is for their children. Of course our children will have to go begging for food because they have no jobs but as long as their children have roundabouts to drive around and don't have to smell cigarette smoke that’s the point isn't it?
Ipsa Conteret
Herb