Stop trying to make things perfect.
The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists.
It rewards people who get things done.

Recently, I visited my insurance agent, whose office is located in a building that used to house a country radio station I worked for back in the 90’s. While I cannot recall the stations call letters, I do remember the several times one or two of the windows in our offices were shattered by a foul-ball from the stadium across the street.

The memory got me to thinks and eventually researching some history of the place.

Moana Springs sits along a subterranean thermal belt which passes through eastern California and western Nevada. Located on the Haines Ranch, south of Reno, the property was purchased by Charles T. Short, Al North and John N. Evans n the summer of 1905 with the idea of putting up a resort.

Short had spent some time in the Hawaiian Islands in 1904 and had stayed at a resort by the name of Moana Springs, and that’s how the place got its name. Work on the bath house and the clubhouse got under way in August 1905 and opened on October 29, with a hotel opening a year or so later.

The Nevada Interurban Railway, a trolley line owned by Louis W. Berrum, began service to Moana from the Reno city limits southward along Plumas Street in October of 1907. Berrum eventually became a stockholder in the springs and well as owned an adjoining ranch.

The springs and trolley both shut down in 1911 following a disagreement between the partners, with Berrum finally buying out every one in early 1913. The acquisition meant that Moana Springs would stay in the Berrum family for the next forty-years.

Moana had a dance hall, a movie theater, baseball diamond, ice skating and boating facilities and a picnic grounds. The site was also the home of school parties, circus performances, rodeos, trap-shoots, baseball games and other sporting events.

Jim Jefferies trained at Moana Springs in the early summer months 1910 during for his attempt to regain his heavyweight boxing crown. Three years later, Jess Willard fought at the resort, two years before he became heavyweight champion of the world.

Following World War II Louis Berrum Jr. began promoting baseball, opening a new stadium in 1947 which hosted the Reno Oilers, Reno Silver Sox, Reno Blackjacks, Reno Padres, Reno Chukars and Reno Astros. Less than a decade later, the City of Reno purchased the property and in December 1957, the original buildings were demolished.

My son, Kyle was six or seven when he and his step-brother’s little league baseball team were publicly introduced before the start of a Silver Sox game. They handed out commemorative mini-baseball bats to all the kids that day – yeah – children with weapons.

The Triple-A Tucson Sidewinders, a farm team for the Arizona Diamondbacks, relocated to Reno in 2009 to become the Reno Aces. The Aces and the city built a new state-of-the-art stadium in downtown Reno, rendering Moana Stadium useless.

In 2011, plans were drawn up to demolish the stadium and nearby Moana Pool in order to build several public soccer fields and a new city pool and aquatics center. Parts of the stadium were auctioned off in April, 2012. The demolition was completed in July 2012.

In October 2012, the City of Reno voted to return Moana Park’s name to it original name of Moana Springs.

As Albert Einstein stated, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

All three outages came one after another: one of the nation’s biggest airlines, its largest financial news publication and its main stock exchange. But were they really ‘glitches’ or were they something more serious?

The New York Stock Exchange said their troubles were due to a technical issue – adding it was not the result of a cyber-breach.

“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber-breach,” a statement said. “We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue. NYSE-listed securities continue to trade unaffected on other market centers.”

In response, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at an early afternoon press briefing: “There is no indication that malicious actors were involved.”

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson also tried to allay fears, saying, “It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and at the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor.”

He added, “We know less about the Wall Street Journal at this point except that their system is back up again as is the United Airline system.”

The Wall Street Journal’s homepage displayed an ‘Error 504’ message meaning it was suffering from a satellite-link outage. Prior to Wall Street’s problems, United put a hold on international flights for two hours due to what the airline later claimed to be “an issue with a router.”

Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland confronted FBI Director James Comey saying, “I don’t believe in coincidences. Is the FBI investigating these as breaches?”

“We’re not big believers in coincidence either,” Comey replied, “We’ve been in contact with all three companies to see what’s going on. We don’t see a connection to a cyber-breach or cyber-attack.”

But there’s at least one possibility missed among the various headlines. At 11:45 p.m., the night before the NYSE experienced a shutdown of trading; the hacker group Anonymous left a cryptic message on Twitter: “Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street…we can only hope.”

Move along – nothing to see here.

“From the motif in westerns where the wind blows tumbleweeds through the scene, usually to establish that the place is desolate or empty…a period of dead air or stony, unresponsive silence,” explains Wikipedia about a ‘tumbleweed moment.’

Documents have surfaced from October 2010 about a meeting between Lois Lerner, the Department of Justice and the FBI on how to develop the prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations. Judicial Watch confirms the IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks containing 1.25 million pages of information from more than 113,000 tax returns.

Lerner, a former IRS official, was at the center of past allegations that the agency had targeted conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) nonprofit status. More than 6,000 Lerner emails thought to be lost were turned over to the Senate Finance Committee in April.

“One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing the stuff,” Lerner said in a 2013 email.

The goal was to stop the flow of other conservative non-profits, opposed to President Obama’s agenda, from applying for tax exempt status and therefore becoming more effective. Congress launched a probe into the IRS in 2013 after the inspector general released a report saying officials had subjected conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status to additional scrutiny.

When Congress voted to find her in contempt and referred her to the DOJ for prosecution, the DOJ, refused to prosecute. We now know why.

As reported by Judicial Watch, the document from IRS Exempt Organizations Tax Law Specialist Siri Buller to Lerner referenced a meeting with the DOJ’s Criminal Division and the FBI about the “possible criminal prosecution of nonprofit organizations.”

Another document shows there were ideas from “Lois” on how the IRS could revoke or change “an organization’s exemption retroactively if it omitted or misstated a material fact or operated in a manner different from that originally presented.”

“We discussed the hypothetical situation of a section 501(c)(4) organization that declares itself exempt as a social welfare organization, but at the end of the taxable year has in fact functioned as a political organization,” the memo reveals.

Other documents states: “Lois stated that although we do not believe that organizations which are subject to a civil audit subsequently receive any type of immunity from a criminal investigation, she will refer them to individuals from CI who can better answer that question. She explained that we are legally required to separate the civil and criminal aspects of any examination and that while we do not have EO law experts in CI, our FIU agents are experienced in coordinating with CI.”

The documents also show how the Obama’s IRS developed plans to get a hold of documents forbidden under federal tax law. One email goes as far as showing there was a request asking that copies of employee statements to Congress be provided to the DOJ first: “If any of your clients have documents they are providing to Congress that you can (or would like to) provide to us before their testimony, we would be pleased to receive them.”

Between 4 p.m. Thursday, July 3, and 3:30 a.m. Monday, July 5, 82 people were shot on the streets of Chicago, with 14 dying. Even with a 30-percent increase in the number of police on the streets gun violence was out of hand, with one illegal handgun being confiscated per hour across the city during the same time period.

For the same period in 2014, there were 64 shootings, 69 nonfatal victims in those incidents and 15 slayings. In 2013, 12 people were killed and nearly 75 injured during the four-day holiday weekend. Independence Day fell on a Thursday last year.

Syracuse University’s track data on enforcement of federal gun laws in 2012 found that “out of 90 jurisdictions in the country, (Chicago) ranked 90th.” A 2011 Chicago police analysis found 90 percent of murder victims in the city are men, 76 percent of victims have prior arrest records, and the most common ages of killers are 17 and 18 years old.

Since the 70s, Chicago and its surrounding municipalities have taken a national lead in enacting firearms control legislation. Citizens’ groups like the Committee for Handgun Control, formed in 1973 and renamed Illinois Citizens for Handgun Control in 1982, have worked pass some of the nation’s toughest gun control laws.

In 1981 the suburb of Morton Grove became the first municipality in the U.S. to ban the sale, transportation, and ownership of handguns. In 1982, the city of Chicago instituted a similar a ban, barring civilians from possessing handguns except for those registered with the city before the enactment of the law.

The law also specified that handguns had to be re-registered every two years or owners would lose their handgun. In 1994, the law was amended to require annual re-registration.

Also in 1982, Mayor Jane Byrne and the city council began to hold hearings on an ordinance banning the sale and registration of handguns in Chicago. The ordinance passed making Chicago the first major U.S. city to enact a handgun ban.

Since the outset of the Chicago handgun ban, the percentage of Chicago murders committed with handguns has averaged about 40 percent higher than it was before the law took effect.

Soon other suburbs began passing gun control legislation. In the fall of 1982, Evanston banned handguns; Oak Park did the same in 1984 followed by Highland Park in 1989.

In June of 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban. Because of the decision, Chicago and the other municipalities came under pressure to change their laws.

Soon handgun bans were repealed in the suburbs of Wilmette, Morton Grove, Evanston, and Winnetka. However, the city of Chicago and Oak Park kept their laws in effect.

A map provided by the Chicago Sun-Times shows the majority of the shootings from this weekend happened in the Oak Park and Chicago area. The Sun-Times also ran a “deflection” story with the headline: “For its size, Milwaukee had an even more violent holiday weekend.”

Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the handgun bans of Chicago and Oak Park to be unconstitutional. And a month later a new Chicago city ordinance took effect that allowed the possession of handguns, but with heavy restrictions.

Residents were required to get a Chicago Firearms Permit. To get the permit they had to complete a firearms training course, pass a background check including fingerprinting, and pay a $100 permit fee.

Furthermore, possession of firearms was permitted only inside a dwelling, not in a garage or on the outside grounds of the property. And only one gun at a time was allowed to be kept in a usable state.

That same July, Oak Park amended its ordinance to allow handgun possession in one’s home, leaving no remaining town in Illinois that completely banned handguns.

In 2013, Illinois enacted the Firearm Concealed Carry Act, which set up a permitting system for the concealed carry of firearms. Another provision of this law is state preemption for “the regulation, licensing, possession, and registration of handguns and ammunition for a handgun, and the transportation of any firearm and ammunition”.

This invalidated Chicago’s requirements for gun registration and for an additional permit for the possession of firearms.

Chicago City Council soon repealed the law requiring the registration of firearms and the law requiring a city issued firearm owners permit. They also changed the law to allow the carrying of firearms on the grounds of one’s property outside as well as inside the home.

So why don’t law-abiding Chicagoan’s shoot back at criminals? Simply put — fear.

Following the state’s 2013 passage of its concealed carry act, Chicago’s Police Chief Gary McCarthy threatened: “I don’t care if they’re licensed legal firearms — people who are not highly trained — putting guns in their hands is a recipe for disaster. So I’ll train our officers that there is a concealed carry law, but when somebody turns with a firearm in their hand the officer does not have an obligation to wait to get shot to return fire and we’re going to have tragedies as a result of that. I’m telling you right up front.”

“For six years the brainiacs at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union have devised one bailout and debt restructuring scheme after another,” writes the Washington Time’s Stephen Moore. “None of them have worked.”

Let’s try and make sense of what’s happening in Greece and how it’ll affect the U.S.

Greece’s crisis began in late 2009 and is getting worse now that the country voted not to repay their creditors. More than 61-percent voted “no” on austerity measures and other overhauls that European and International Monetary Fund officials had demanded.

Despite ongoing financial struggles, Greece spent nearly 60 percent of its gross domestic product on government benefits and programs in 2013. Because of this, their private economy shrank as government bureaucracy and ‘handouts’ expanded.

The current ruling Syriza party see’s the rejection of creditors’ demands as a ‘win.’ The collaboration of Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Marxist–Leninist, and Maoist claim they can now press creditors for a ‘better’ bailout deal with fewer ‘painful’ fiscal measures and ‘more’ debt relief.

But it may prove a hard sell because it’s being seen as proof that Greece doesn’t want to repay its loans at all. And because of the recent ‘no’ vote, the IMF insists debt restructuring’s needed first to make Greece solvent again.

And the situation will get worse as Greece’s European Central Bank (ECB) bonds become due. Greece must repay a $3.9 billion bond held by the ECB on July 20, and another large ECB-held bond that falls due August 20.

Officials say how the ECB reacts to the bond default depends on if there is progress toward a financing agreement between Greece and other governments. If there is, then the ECB is likely to continue supporting Greece’s banks, but if the ECB cuts Greece off, the result is a run on Greek banks.

This is where the water gets muddy for those well versed in ‘social economics,’ but who have trouble balancing a simple checking account: The ‘run’ will affect Portugal, Italy and Spain (who are all in the same financial shape as Greece,) creating a ripple effect across Europe. Its predicted that this same ‘ripple’ will affect the U.S. equity markets first then the U.S. bond market, but the average American will hardly notice it – save for a “slight dip in their 401(K)’s.”

However, these same ‘social economists’ are willfully forgetting that with the Obama administration’s Federal welfare spending continuing to grow in both the private and corporate sectors, the U.S. is well on the road to joining Greece in financial ruin.

The man arrested for killing Kathryn Steinle, who was out for a stroll with her father along Pier 14 in San Francisco, is an illegal alien from Mexico who had been deported five times. San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr said Francisco Sanchez was arrested and has admitted to the woman’s murder.

ICE records show Sanchez, whose from Mexico, has been deported five times. San Francisco had him in custody earlier this year but didn’t notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they released him.

“(Department of Homeland Security) records indicate ICE lodged an immigration detainer on the subject at that time, requesting notification prior to his release so ICE officers could make arrangements to take custody. The detainer was not honored,” the agency said in a statement.

“His criminal history includes seven prior felony convictions, four involving narcotics charges,” their statement continued.

ICE had him in their custody briefly in March after he served his latest sentence for “felony re-entry,” but then turned him over to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department on an outstanding drug warrant. At the time ICE asking that Sanchez be returned to ICE once the city was done with him.

Unfortunately they didn’t, because in 2013, city officials voted to give San Francisco sanctuary city status. The Federation for American Immigration Reform says sanctuary cities have policies in place to “bar any local official, including law enforcement officials, from asking people about their immigration status, reporting them to federal immigration authorities, or otherwise cooperating with or assisting federal immigration authorities.”

Meanwhile Republican presidential candidate and real estate mogul Donald Trump stood by his statement that many illegals from Mexico are criminals.
“And if you talk about it, it’s racist,” Trump said.

Trump first made his remarks during his June 16 presidential announcement: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best…They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…”

Since then, NBCUniversal, Univision, Macy’s, Serta, New York City and NASCAR among others are cutting ties with Trump. For his part, Trump is suing Univision for $500 million citing breach of contract and planning to take legal action against NBC for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the WaPo ran a headline the day after Steinle was killed, proclaiming, “Surprise! Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime.”

Though illegal in Nevada, it began about an hour after sundown, with a few “Lady Finger” firecrackers. The pop-pop-pop was slight and didn’t bother the dogs at all.

Soon the M-80’s burst onto the scene, literally. The multiple loud concussions caused the animals to nervously pace up and down the hallway.

Then it grew quite, save for the pop-pop-pop of another round of “Lady Fingers,” and a few ‘whistlers’ lit off somewhere in the distance. They were suddenly drowned out by the massive crescendo of a firework display blasting away at the Western evening sky.

Red, green, yellow, orange and white.

The dogs scrambled under our bed for safety, shaken by the “rockets red-glare,’ in the near-distance. I stepped out on the front porch to watch the show, hoping no wildfire would come of it and that the sheriff’s office might catch the culprits.

As I observed the noise-filled illuminations, my pulse quickened, my breathing grew shallow and rapid and sweat developed on my forehead and the palms of my hands. PTSD.

Then I heard the panicked scrambling of paw pads and claws raking the asphalt, drawing closer from where the fireworks lit up the night. Three canine shapes came dashing headlong around the corner and down our street, heads low, bushy tails tucked between their hind legs.

Only after they sprinted by, blending into the darkness at the east end of our street, did I realize the trio were a small pack of coyotes, scared witless, speeding for safety from the aerial blasts and bright lights.

It’s been nearly three decades now since I was warned by my friend and mentor, Paul Steward (now passed) that I should be careful that I didn’t get so involved with technology that I forget to go outside and use my imagination. And to think that was long before today’s Internet, truly personal computers, smart-phones and digital TV.

But here I sit – involved in the very technology I was warned over.

Oddly, my life has always been about adventure, after all one of my favorite quotes is “Get action!” I read it at about the age of 12, the same ages as its author, Teddy Roosevelt wrote it in his journal.

One of the many ‘action’ jobs I had over the years was ‘Cowboying.’ My first few weeks were spent washing pots and pans and dishes, carrying out the garbage, slopping pigs, mopping the kitchen floor, mucking the horse shit out of the stalls, feeding and watering stock, cleaning the saddles and tack, washing the saddle blankets, and milking an old cow.

Not quite the idea of being a cowboy I had imagines as there was no romance in any of that. I ended up working long ass days – filthy, sweaty and smelling half-dead.

At the end of the day – long after daylight had left in many cases – the rest of hands used me as a target for their practical jokes. They put spiders in my boots, snakes in my bunk and laughed as I screamed, jumped in fright or ran across the room.

They even took to calling me “Sierra Tom” behind my back, thus my moniker on many of my Internet pages.

Eventually, after proving myself around the main house, I was given more important job, including hanging barbed wire fencing. This led to being trusted enough to hold down a few winter months overseeing some of the cattle that lived farther out from civilization.

All of this, I share so I can explain that whether I was washing and drying dishes or riding through the snow to aid a birthing cow, I was able to day-dream, using my imagination, inventing stories far more glamorous than the one I was living. I would later draw on those ‘romanticized’ versions to help me write detailed accounts of what really happened.

So in the end Paul was right – get outside, do something and don’t spend all day in front of the computer. Paul was about action too and was out and about when he was stuck by a car as he crossed the street one evening – it left him hospitalized for a long time, whereupon he eventually succumbed.

I’m shutting down the computer for the day and heading outdoors to ‘Get action.’

The journal ‘Science’ published a report in May 2015 after “analyzing how 10.1 million of the most partisan American users on Facebook,” saying researchers found people’s networks of friends and the stories they see lean toward their ideological preferences. Then last month, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed homosexual marriage to be constitutional across all 50 states.

Shortly after the decision, more than 26 million people changed their Facebook profile pictures to a rainbow filter in support of homosexual marriage. While it seems like a lot, there are 1.44 billion monthly active users on Facebook globally, so it translates as about 1.8 percent of total users.

But the filter may have actually been Facebook’s way of performing psychological testing on users. Experts say that by setting up the tool, Facebook was able to get an insight on how to influence their users.

“This is probably a Facebook experiment!” wrote the MIT network scientist Cesar Hidalgo on Facebook. “The question is, how long will it take for people to change their profile pictures back to normal.”

Facebook has denied the claim: “This was not an experiment or test, but rather something that enables people to show their support of the LGBTQ community on Facebook.”

But Facebook has long been involved in research to better see how information spreads in a social network. For instance, in March 2013, the company published a study that looked at the factors that predicted support for marriage equality through its network.

Back in 2014, Facebook conducted psychological experiments on its users without their knowledge. The social media giant studied how different users’ moods and statuses reflected what they saw on their own news feed, even going so far as to cater specific content to users to find out how it would affect their own mood.

And if your Facebook friends suddenly debuts a patriotic American flag filter this weekend, it may not simply be they’re excited about the Independence Day holiday, rather it might be in response to all the rainbow flags. So remember, amid the social media onslaught for hearts and minds, as WaPo’s Peter Moskowitz writes, “…holding up a victory flag without acquiring the battle scars is an empty gesture at best.”

And it’s even emptier if the ‘gesture’ is actually part of a greater social media experiment.