I recently read a book about the tragic demise of an interesting group of native North Americans.

These people called themselves "People of the Deer," as in reindeer or caribou, and they lived up around the Great Slave Lake in way northern Canada. The aspect of their culture that intrigued me was their requirement to give away anything of value to any stranger, or family member, who showed up. If it meant giving away their hunting bow or rifle when that tool was their family's means of survival so be it. Give it up. Of course the end result of that societal flaw is the people didn't survive, their entire culture has died out and is gone forever.

Which reminds me of the recent election where "we the people," at least the majority of us who voted, elected to give up their treasure, their total means of survival, in the form of sales tax.

Now I think it was necessary to vote in favor of investing in our future, the one fourth cent that will go to economic development, for which I voted YES. But by continuing the one-cent tax to puff up the city coffers is a mistake.

That one cent will only cause city government to grow, no matter if our population declines or not. You can bet that "they" will find ways to spend all that money coming in and the larger appetite for tax funds will make it "imperative" to continue to raise taxes because they will need, always, more.

McCook's new Instrument Landing System, The Honorable Senator Ben Nelson's pork spending for his home town, is not quite yet officially commissioned but it is up and running. I have flown it a couple of times and found it be without flaw. Just keep the needles centered and it brings the airplane perfectly down the slot positioned exactly in the right spot over the runway to make the landing.

Ironically it is built on the wrong runway, which will necessitate either downwind landings, or more dangerously, circling at low altitude under low-hanging clouds and coming around to land the other way into the wind. The system was constructed that way, backwards, because cars on the highway passing underneath the south end of the runway messes with the electronic projection of the glide slope.  Nevertheless having an ILS finally here is great and long overdue for our airport.

Ironically the long wait to build the ILS has made it almost obsolete. Recently I upgraded the GPS navigation system in my airplane to provide for vertical guidance in addition to its long suit of horizontal navigation. Wow, it is a neat system. Being satellite-based rather than broadcasting signals from ground-based antennas like the ILS does, the GPS allows choosing the runway most aligned into the wind.  Impressively it is as accurate as the old state-of-the-art ILS as reflected in its ability to bring one to the perfect position to land whether in the clouds or not.

A large farmer commented to me just this week that it is interesting that agriculture has been using GPS guidance down to less than an inch in error for years and only now is that accuracy being adapted to air navigation. Right down to sub-inch accuracy. Impressive indeed.

Go Bison, win STATE!

That is the way I see it.