Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/735672
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@ redbluffdailynews.com Fax: 530-527-9251 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 728Main St., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS There is a rather severe shortage of OB-GYN nurse midwives in California, especially in rural areas of our great north state where nearby hospitals or medical clinics are o en sparse or not even available. Certifiedmidwivesdoagreat deal to improve services dur- ing the birthing process. Cali- fornia is one of just six states that require mid- wives work under the supervision of a physician to make certain a trained expert is always available. This topic comes to my attention be- cause a very close friend and neighbor of mine named Kan- sas in Oak Run has used a nurse midwife more than once as she has her babies. This last time, as she gave birth to a very cute child named Thomas, she was having a suf- ficiently difficult time that she asked her husband, John Henry, to drive her to a hospi- tal 30 miles away in Redding to temporarily finish adding to California's population. I asked Kansas to give me her thoughts on the advantages of using a nurse midwife. The first thing she said was quite memorable. She said midwives add another definition to the word family. As a human being, home be- comes even more important. It's a wonderful thing to start one's life where most people actually prefer to end it. And, Kansas concluded, "our son Bob and the other kids can learn of the joy at home," she said. "You should re- member that home is where the heart is, so why not have your children there?" Well, in Kansas' small rural community I have sometimes jokingly called her a "moun- tain woman." After all, her mountain man gets to watch her ride their horses, cook wild turkeys, pick blackberries and still count the deer as they in- crease the number of their off- spring. Kansas has used the capable services of a nurse midwife more than once. That reminds me of the fa- mous Jimmy Stewart movie "It's a Wonderful Life." My personal take now is that midwives give a woman and her family many advan- tages. For instance, with mid- wives the experience is more personal and it is not as ex- pensive as our hospital indus- try likes to tell us the beautiful birthing experience has to be. Unfortunately, my first mar- riage was not that successful. However, it was quite mem- orable. When my daughter was born at the Enloe Hos- pital in Chico, it seems like it was a more difficult time. I was much younger and pretty much out of funds. Services of a nurse midwife could have made that experience more enjoyable and financially fea- sible. I can still remember what my first wife said dur- ing the birthing process as my daughter, Jennifer Statham, arrived. It was not a scream, but she probably wanted to scream as she pointedly told me, "It's not worth it." As her husband, I did feel a bit worthless because all I had to do was ask her to breath, de- spite the fact that I was the one you could call "instrumental" in creating the whole situation. Mytakeonthemovies A good thriller to see is "When the Bough Breaks," starring Morris Chestnut, Re- gina Hall and Jaz Sinclair. I probably should have re- viewed a different movie for this column, but it was a well done movie about an attrac- tive surrogate mother who de- cides, after the fact, to fall in love with the guy who impreg- nated her through the surro- gate medical procedure. The husband and wife char- acters had tried but were bio- logically incapable of having their own child. StanStathamserved1976-1994 in the California Assembly and was a television news anchor at KHSL-TV in Chico 1965- 1975. He is past president of the California Broadcasters Association and can be reached at StanStatham@gmail.com. Stan Statham Mytakeon midwifery I asked Kansas to give me her thoughts on the advantages of using a nurse midwife. The first thing she said was quite memorable. She said midwives add another definition to the word family. Kids have to read history books to learn there was once an indelible American excite- ment to explore the universe. Sure, Transformers stage their animated attack from the moon, but there was once a time when real Americans risked their lives to pave the way for future generations to boldly go where no one has gone before. Now, some of us boldly click Space.com to wonder at the high def Hubble pictures of Eu- ropa's icy water plume, antic- ipating JunoCam's wondrous eye on Jupiter. Sadly, President Obama has relegated most of NASA's bud- get to the politically charged mission of proving man-made climate change. President Obama's 2017 bud- get proposal cuts deep space exploration programs by more than $800 million. Also, the administration proposes even more cuts of more than $100 million to the Planetary Sci- ence accounts, which have been used to fund missions like the Pluto flyby. Instead, Obama pushes for over $2 billion for the "Earth Science Mission Directorate" for global warming science. In other words, the science of space exploration is being replaced with the politics of climate change, of which there is a serious debate among thousands of scientists. Over 31,000 scientists firmly believe that mankind's activity has no significant impact on earth's climate. Still, partisan alarmists in- sist there is only one "science" in this debate and while they insist on spending billions of dollars to try to convince un- convinced climate scientists just how wrong they are, the government's role in space ex- ploration is diminishing. President Bush's 2004 chal- lenge for NASA to again "ex- plore space and extend a hu- man presence across our solar system" has been replaced with the private sector picking up the fallen mantle and carrying it into the great unknown. Elon Musk, the billionaire en- trepreneurial founder of Tesla Motors and the Space X pro- gram, is such a vision warrior. Ironically, Musk is a propo- nent of the theory that man is causing climate change. Still, he's not counting on the govern- ment to make his life perfect. He has built his own solar com- pany and electric car company. Now, he is proposing his private Space X company de- sign and build a rocket to take humans to Mars and plant a greenhouse to see if Earth plants can grow there. Naturally, he's asking for some government money to help finance this multi-year, $10 billion project. Maybe it's time to disband NASA and fund private partnerships. While we've seen billions of dollars thrown away into failed "green" projects wherein Demo- cratic party bundlers walk away with millions in their golden parachutes, perhaps that money would be better invested in what was once a grand adven- ture in the history of human be- ings: space exploration. Musk told reporters each of the SpaceX vehicles would take 100 passengers on the journey to Mars, with trips planned every 26 months. Tickets per person might cost $500,000 at first, and drop to about a third of that later on. To establish a self-sustain- ing Mars civilization of a mil- lion people would take 10,000 flights, with many more to ferry equipment and supplies. "We're going to need some- thing quite large to do that," Mr. Musk said. "It would take between 40 years to a century before the city on Mars be- came self-sufficient." Musk has been pretty suc- cessful launching satellites with his Falcon 9 rocket as well as delivering supplies to the Inter- national Space Station. There are dangers, of course. Three of the 29 launches experienced explo- sive failures to achieve orbit. Not a good day were 100 pas- sengers aboard those flights. These are the risks many would be willing to take and in these times of political un- ease and general malaise in this country, maybe it's time for what was Newt Gingrich's great space vision: a colony on the moon and then Mars. Democrats and liberals laughed at Newt's vision when he passionately proposed it on my radio program in 2012. Obama forbade any funding. Perhaps they'll scrape the partisan scales from their eyes when promoted by fellow trav- eler Elon Musk. Rick Jensen is Delaware's award-winning conservative talk show host on WDEL, streaming live on WDEL.com from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. local time. Contact Rick at rick@ wdel.com, or follow him on Twitter @Jensen1150WDEL. Rick Jensen NASA has lost its way Cartoonist's take Lots of folks have a picture of retirement as sitting on a porch, relaxing in a rocking chair, and taking it easy. My retirement dream came from a scene in the movie "Sec- ondhand Lions." I love that movie. Michael Caine and Robert Du- vall played two old codger broth- ers who retired from an exciting life in the French Foreign Legion in the early sixties. They had amassed a small fortune that was hidden out in the barn. De- spite all that money, they lived in a falling-down house on a ranch in a dust bowl in Texas. Although they kept a low pro- file, everyone in the county knew the two old brothers were loaded. Every kind of door to door sales- man would make his way up the long dirt drive to the farmhouse, hoping to make a sale. What they would find were the two broth- ers sitting on their front porch, each with a 12 gauge across his lap. And when the salesman stepped out of his car, he'd be greeted with a rain of buckshot and hightail it pronto. I just couldn't forget the scene of these two tough codgers in their rocking chairs, look- ing across their land from their porch, enjoying life in a Zen- like fashion. Yup, that was my dream. And now I have it! We're lucky enough to have two porches on our cabin, al- though the rear one is pretty much uninhabitable during the summer. But the front porch is in the trees and faces my wife's new garden. Since we finally got the irrigation working, it looks like Costa Rica out there. As I said in another column, I watch my wife work her magic in the dirt while my butt is firmly planted in the rocking chair. But during the week, I'm sit- ting there alone in the morning, drinking my coffee and check- ing my email and Facebook, like many of us do now. I've read articles that say one of the reasons for anxiety in the modern world is man's sep- aration from nature. I remem- ber sitting outside at Starbucks in San Francisco, looking up at my office window on the eighth floor. I doubted that life could really mean sitting up in a pile of concrete, totally divorced from nature. That must be why I can now spend hours on the porch amongst the nature of Te- hama County. I think I'm catch- ing up for lost time spent in the concrete jungle — communing now with the real world. We have two rocking chairs — a smaller one for Momma Bear and a big one for Papa Bear. I love the green of spring and the gold in summer, and watch- ing all the birds, lizards and such from the porch. The rat- tle snakes don't seem to come out in the open much, but lie in wait in the shrubs for my wife. The hummingbirds sometimes fly right up and hover in front of my face, checking me out. That's really special. I've also become something of an expert with the fly swatter. I rarely miss now. And the wind chimes don't drive me nuts anymore. I haven't completely gotten away from the electronics as I do have my trusty smartphone. I love sending annoying texts to my children — entitled "from the porch" — asking what they're up to and sharing photos that show how things are looking from my rocking chair. Dad's "porch cam." So I've got my dream, just like the old brothers. Nature, the porch, and the rocking chair. And occasionally the shotgun as well, when the ground squirrels get out of control. Corky Pickering and his wife relocated from the Bay Area to Cottonwood in 2014. He recently retired from the federal government as an attorney advising law enforcement. He has been a rock and roll bass player and a Marine JAG. He can be reached at thecork6@gmail.com. Corky Pickering Greetings from the porch and my rocking chair Corky Pickering Stan Statham By Rick Jensen OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Thursday, October 6, 2016 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A4