It's a mystery?

One of my virtual friends, a person whose Facebook posts make it abundantly clear is a complete and total extrovert, is currently in an ICU. They've been there for over two weeks. They have admitted to coming about as close to dying as it's possible to get without actually taking a dirt nap. They have COVID. They have apparently survived the crisis stage and are now recovering to the point where they were able to get back online and update acquaintances on how they're doing. 

This brush with mortality is not a surprise. This person is so far over into the extrovert quadrant of Meyer-Briggs that it was clear early on the social isolation was not going to be easy. Neither, I'm sure, was the need for masking. This person just likes people too much to be able to self-quarantine long. As soon as it was possible to do dine-in at restaurants, they were doing dine-in. There were frequent posts from various eateries, usually accompanied by comments about how it was a shame they had to travel into Wisconsin to eat in a restaurant because Michigan eateries were still take-out only. 

The person is not a complete fool, so I'm confident they did try as best as any total extrovert could to protect themselves from COVID. It didn't work. I'm also reasonably sure, based on what I've observed of human behavior (including my own), that the longer the  need for social distancing went on the  more chances this person took. Everyone is careful when they first get warned about something, but the more time that passes without you getting snake-bit the sloppier you get about looking where you're stepping in the woods. Like I said, not a surprise.

What floored me were the number of online comments from well-wishers saying stuff like "How could this happen?!" and "It just shows how COVID can hit anyone!" 

Well, yes, COVID can hit anyone. So can lightning. But most of us know that when lightning is predicted you avoid standing on hill tops in the rain while holding a metal rod in your hand. 

Bottom line: wear the mask, people. Vaccinations may be happening, but the virus isn't done with us yet. 

Why civilized dialogue doesn't work

I've been getting sucked in some odd debates on Facebook lately. I know I shouldn't because it's generally a total waste of time, but I'm still enough of an idealist (aka naive idiot) that I believe that if the reasons why something is an obvious fake are made clear someone may have one of those dope slap moments, that brief instance of clarity, where they go "Fuck, how could I have been fooled by that?!" And having realized one fairly meaningless meme was actually a photoshopped piece of crap they'll be a little more critical the next time they see something that's a little too good to be true. Yes, I know I'm dreaming, but still I try.

Yesterday was a classic. The item in question was a badly photoshopped supposed official State of Texas marker that commemorated the Second Amendment. It included what purported to be a quote from George Washington. It was so wrong on so many levels that from the viewpoint of someone whose career (and personal inclinations) included spending a lot of time looking at real books-on-sticks ranging from the vintage wayside signage in cannonball parks to brand new historic markers put up by various states it was flat out laughable.

To begin, the only thing the fake marker got right was the general shape of a typical State of Texas historic marker. The underlying template was probably a photo of a really old marker -- maybe. The really early metal markers in Texas had a circular seal at the top with the outline of the state in the middle and 3 stars at the bottom but they changed pretty quickly to including two phrases in the border of the circle: Texas Historical Commission at the top and Official Historical Medallion at the bottom. Note illustration to the right. There may be some old examples standing that don't include the medallion as shown, but that gets us to the next clue.

That clue was the reference to the Second Amendment. Although it can seem at times like American society has been arguing about the Second Amendment forever, it hasn't. It's actually a recent debate. The National Rifle Association didn't start stirring up shit on this issue until the 1970s. Gun manufacturers were experiencing dwindling sales so the NRA (which exists to support manufacturers and not gun owners) begun pushing the importance of self defense. I'm not going to try outlining recent history, but trust me on this one. No one cared about the 2nd Amendment 50 years ago. It was not a hot political issue. After Lee Harvey Oswald used a mail order rifle to shoot John F. Kennedy, the federal government passed regulations making it harder to get guns that easily, but you didn't have high profile celebrities posturing about guns being taken from their cold dead fingers (that speech happened a mere 18 years ago).

In any case, supposedly commemorating the Second Amendment on a state marker is pretty bizarre in itself. That's clue number 3. It would make sense if it mentioned something that happened in Texas that had to do with the Second Amendment, but it doesn't. It's just weird when it comes to the general category of books on sticks. It makes no sense.

Clue Number Four: The purported George Washington quote and its anachronistic phrasing. It referred to "arms and ammunition." This is one of those points that a nonhistorian probably wouldn't pick up on, but back in the George's day that phrase would have been considered redundant. Arms were ammunition. So was everything else used in a military campaign. The word was still evolving; it hadn't yet come to narrowly meaning only what went into the guns.

Clue Number Five: Two different fonts were used -- one for a brief phrase about the Second Amendment; one for the George Washington quote.

Clue Number Six: The extreme brevity of the text. It is amazing just how many words the people who put up the markers can fit on to one of the books on a stick. The people who write the content manage to cram a lot of information on to one metal slab. If you see a photo of a supposed marker that has less than 100 words on it, it's a fake.

Anyway, this was a case of attempting to have a dialogue with people where I didn't even get into the Second Amendment debate at all. I just pointed the photo was a badly done photoshop. Holy wah. First I got told that the reason the text was so terse (and badly written) was space considerations. Pshaw. I countered that one with a photo of a genuine State of Texas book on a stick. The response to that was that it was different because it was newer. So then I found one from 1962.

End result of this useless exchange? The person who was so insistent the marker was real trotted out his ultimate argument: he's almost 70 and used to live in Texas. He's seen a bunch of the markers by the side of the road so he knows for sure what they look like.

That's when I figured out it was pointless. The dude is so locked in to believing something that he saw on Facebook that even if it's something that doesn't really say anything at all he still refuses to believe it's not genuine. I guess it's true. You can't cure stupid.

Weirdness overload

Astute readers (all two of you) may have noticed I haven't had much to say about The Donald lately. I'm suffering from what is probably a common affliction these days: weirdness overload. I'll see the news first thing in the morning (the little bit of news I do see), think "Aha! That calls for a blog post!"but before I manage to start typing, something even more bizarre or outrageous or just flatout stupid has popped up.

Ivanka Trump's fashion line tanking and The Donald declaring war on Nordstrom. Kellyanne Conway violating federal employee ethics rules. The Donald indicating he plans to spend every weekend jetting between D.C. and Florida (and people had the nerve to complain when President Obama went to Hawaii once a year?). The Donald holding policy meetings discussing classified information in the middle of a public resaturant. Betsy DeVos. Michael Flynn and the Russians. Oprah scuttling a cabinet pick. Learning that he'd filed for re-election on what was basically his first day in office. Three weekends in a row of golfing in Florida after the man spent multiple years complaining about how much it cost taxpayers any time President Obama left Washington. It's a never ending shit storm. How the more political bloggers manage to deal with it all is beyond me.

Part of me has to wonder, as I've noticed a number of the more conspiracy minded types are doing, if the weirdness overload is all part of a nefarious plan, a deliberate attempt to keep everyone distracted while the truly evil stuff happens behind the scenes. I don't know. Is it really plausible that anyone, be it Vladimir Putin or Steve Bannon or whichever the puppet master you prefer, would deliberately set out to cross The Manchurian Candidate with a Three Stooges movie? I doubt it. (And I am now mentally casting movies about the Trump administration and trying to figure out which role Josh Rogen would be good in. And how on earth could any casting director mange to persuade any actor to portray a human toad like Bannon?)

As I noted in a previous post, The Donald doesn't appear to be a particularly smart man. He's a rich guy who succeeded primarily because he inherited money and has spent his entire life surrounded by butt snorklers and enablers who helped him survive in a gilded bubble. With one or two rare exceptions, everyone of his appointees and advisors falls into that same category: not particularly smart or talented, although some do possess a certain amount of avaricious cunning (his now irrelevant pick for Secretary of Labor fell into that category). Nope. In the case of the floundering, chaotic Trump administration, I don't think we need to look for conspiracies or grand schemes. Like the old saying goes, Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity -- and in the Trump administration there's definitely more than enough stupidity to go around.

On a positive note, it has been fun lately watching news clips of various Congress critters being confronted by their constituents. Anyone who thinks that showing up for town hall meetings and asking hard questions doesn't make a difference should take a look at the clips of representatives like Jason Chaffetz (Republican from Utah) freaking out as voters chant "Do your job!" and "Your last term!" Chaffetz was getting enough crap from the voters that he actually withdrew a resolution he had introduced that would have made it easier for the Bureau of Land Management to sell land. The resolution was actually fairly innocuous -- it dealt with lands that had been previously designated as suitable for sale and not as some activists seemed to think a wholesale auctioning off of national parks -- but given current public sentiment about keeping public lands public Chaffetz managed to stir up considerably more controversy than he'd anticipated.

An aberration or typical?

A friend had shared one of those interesting screen shots of a comment thread where the names are blocked out to protect people's privacy, not to mention saving them from public humiliation for being idiots. Some poor sap had done a comment about how happy he was that evil, evil Obamacare was going to be repealed by the U.S. Congress soon. Someone asked why he was so happy about it when he had benefited from Obamacare. His response was that he didn't have Obamacare; his health care benefits were thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

The stupid, it burns. The poor sap did not realize the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are the exact same thing. Obamacare is what the Republicans started calling the ACA because they were canny enough to recognize that it's pretty hard to successfully badmouth something called the Affordable Care Act. You know, people would kind of wonder just what was wrong with the idea of making care affordable?

Unfortunately, the Democrats and others who supported the Affordable Care Act and do not want to see it repealed have done a truly piss poor job of branding. They allowed the nickname Obamacare to go relatively unchallenged. Even worse, they haven't been exactly enthusiastic about touting all the good stuff that has happened under the Affordable Care Act, like allowing young adults to stay on their parentts' insurance plans until they're 26. I actually know someone who benefited in a huge way from that provision; she was a recent college graduate who hadn't found a fulltime, permanent job yet so in the pre-ACA days would have been uninsured. She got hit with a major medical problem, one that involved multiple trips to specialists, surgery, and follow-up treatments. Pre-ACA she'd have been shit out of luck, her parents would have had to go into debt in a huge way if she was able to get seen by specialists at all (surprising numbers of doctors flat out refuse to see you if you cannot provide proof of insurance in advance), and odds are she'd now be dead. Obamacare saved her life.

But I digress. Although there's been a lot of recent talk about all the good stuff the ACA has done, attempts at saving it are probably coming too late. Too many Republicans have spent the last six years telling their constituents how evil Obamacare is. End result? Poor ignorant saps like that fellow who's been getting mocked on the Internet for his cluelessness. Too many  voters want Obamacare gone because they don't realize that it's the same thing as the legislation they appreciate, the ACA. Like I said, the stupid, it burns.

Once again, I need to stop asking how stupid people can get

We're in kind of a black hole at the park while we're campground hosting. No cell service worth mentioning, no Internet access, no television (although to be honest we haven't tried connecting the tv to the antenna so for all we know there are over the air broadcasts available). We do, however, have a radio. The station selection is rather poor -- the All Bluegrass All the Time NPR station from Rolla won't come in but a gazillion Bible-thumping Christian stations will -- but we did manage to find one local station that plays innocuous country music and does local news and weather.

Which means that we haven't escaped hearing about Missouri's proposed anti-LGBT legislation. It's been presented as a religious liberty issue, of course. Unfortunately, one of the bill's supporters is relatively local so we've gotten to hear her blathering on about it way more than we'd like to. Her talking point is that "no one should be forced to perform a ceremony" that goes against his or her religious beliefs. WTF? Just how does selling someone a cupcake or serving them a meal constitute "performing a ceremony?" When did a commercial transaction become a religious ritual? As I noted in a previous blog post, people who are actually ordained ministers, priests, whatever, have always had the right to refuse to marry anyone they want to and for any bizarre reason. Ministers enjoy religious freedom. They always have. No one is threatening to take their rights away. And does anyone actually believe that gays and lesbians are going to want to have their wedding ceremonies performed by clergy who consider same sex marriage an abomination?

The truth is that what the folks preaching religious liberty are doing is exactly what they're being accused of doing: trying to wrap religion around their bigotry so they can pretend they aren't the ignorant, hateful asshats they really are. Then when they go public with their bigotry, they bitch about their rights being violated or they're being persecuted when people stop shopping at their bakery or stop renting out their private banquet halls. One of the poster children, so to speak, of the religious liberty movement, is a couple from Iowa who owned a de-sanctified church (i.e., a building that had once been an actual church but was now in private ownership). Neither of the owners were clergy, the "chapel" was not a real church, it was a hall they rented out the same way a local hotel, VFW, or other secular organization or business might rent out a banquet hall. As a commercial for-profit business that dealt with the public, their refusal to lease the hall to a same sex couple for a wedding constituted discrimination under the law. They got fined. They also got boycotted. A whole lot of people looked at them and said, "holy wah, those seemingly nice people are actually hateful bigots. I don't want to do business with them." No customers, no business. That's not persecution or a loss of freedom. It's market forces in action because the business owners were stupid enough not to realize that there are more people appalled by discrimination than there are people who support it.

The same thing happened to a couple out in Oregon who had a bakery and were dumb enough to go public with their dislike of gays. Once the frosting hit the fan, their business withered and died. Why? Because most people, the majority of people, are not homophobic asshats or religious fundamentalists. And we don't want to do business with people who are. We're not trying to suppress your right to practice your religion. We just don't think that selling us a cupcake or serving us a meal constitutes a religious practice, and we think that if you think it does, you're way too fracking nuts for us to want to do business with you.

Definitely one of those WTF? days

I really need to spend less time sitting in front of this computer. Every time I go wandering around the Intertubes reminders of just how few cylinders most people seem to operate on keep popping up.

First, for those of you who may not have noticed, coloring books for adults have become A Thing in recent months. You can get coloring books that have a specific theme (I have been tempted by the Outlander one) or you can get ones that are just vaguely psychedelic or mandala-like patterns. The idea is that coloring relaxes you. You zone out as you focus on staying inside the lines, you forget about big problems (your boss is a jerk, the roof has started leaking, you just found out one of your adult children has decided to move back home) and mellow out while fussing over the exactly right shade of red to color the rose petals. It all seems pretty harmless. A bit odd, true, but harmless.

Or so I thought. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, I now know that coloring can lead to demon possession. Start filling in one of those mandalas and the next thing you know you're on the short road to Hell. After all, mandalas aren't "Christian." Christ on a crutch -- the only way coloring a picture of anything (a Buddhist mandala, the Millennium Falcon, a rose bush) is going to send you on the express route to damnation is if that's where you wanted to go to begin with. I really need to stop asking how stupid people can get. . .

I should have stepped away from the computer after the coloring leads to selling one's soul to Satan post. Instead I kept scrolling on down. And that's when I learned that the United States Postal Service has decided it's no longer selling stamps for overseas postage. The person sharing this bit of knowledge said that she'd gone to her local Post Office to pick up some Global stamps and they didn't have any. When she asked, she got told they're not selling them anymore. Ever. She was told to just slap 3 domestic postage Forever stamps on her letters.

To say this struck me as bizarre would be the usual massive understatement. For a start, the Global stamp costs $1.20; the current domestic 1 ounce or less rate is 49 cents. If I had to substitute regular stamps for the Global, I'd use two 49 and one 22 cents. The last time I checked, 49 + 49 + 22 = 120. I usually keep a stash of 22-cent stamps on hand because that's what you slap on a domestic letter for every ounce over that first ounce. But did this occur to anyone in the discussion thread that followed the dread news that the post office was going to force us all to spend $1.47 for overseas mail? Nope. These people, who supposedly write to a lot of pen pals and therefore buy a lot of stamps, apparently do not know that the USPS issues stamps in more than 2 values. Holy shit. Saying "the stupid, it burns" doesn't begin to cover it.

In any case, the Post Office has not stopped issuing Global stamps. They issued a brand new design on February 22 -- it's kind of cool; it has a picture of the moon on it -- and they're available in most post offices as well as through the USPS website.

As someone who mails a fair amount of stuff on a regular basis, I know that local post offices do occasionally run out of some types of stamps. It happens every year before Christmas: one particular holiday stamp design will be more popular than the others so it sells out fast. I've even had it happen where I needed Global stamps and they were sold out, so the postal clerk would (and here's a real news flash for all the gullible types who were freaking about OMG no Global stamps!!) meter the postage. You know, like when you mail a package and they print out the postage sticker with the exact amount required printed on it and slap it on the parcel? Believe it or not, dumbfucks gullible people, it is possible to mail stuff without even having a stamp on it. Just hand your money to the clerk and he or she will print out the sticker and affix to the envelope.

It's on afternoons like this that I understand exactly why Donald Trump can win elections. 

Fears of a jihadi mail order bride? You're kidding, right?

It must be hard being a comic doing topical humor these days. It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between parody and real life. The latest example? The "jihadi wife." There's been an incredible amount of air time being wasted on speculating whether or not the mail order bride in the San Bernadino shooting was part of a nefarious plot to ensnare American Muslim men into participating in terrorism by setting them up with radicalized wives. Government officials and various "experts" who really should know better were tossing around phrases like "This could be a game changer" and "we need to look at fiancee visas more closely."

The stupid, it burns. In one breath, they're talking about how both Sayeed and Tashfeen were expressing radical Islamic ideas online before Daesh emerged as a formal organization in Iraq and Syria. In the next, they're speculating about whether or not Tashfeen could have been part of a larger plan by groups like Daesh to lure lonely American men, some sort of "honey pot" scheme. You know, even if it was, it would have to be one of the dumbest, most inefficient schemes of all time. This is not something that should be inspiring fear. It's more like, "Are you guys shitting me? Your plan is to strike fear into the hearts of the American people by sneaking in an occasional jihadi bride? Just how much hashish have you guys been indulging in while doing your plotting?" Because let's get real -- the whole jihadi bride fantasy has so many uncontrollable factors involved that there's no way it would be worth the effort.

First, you've got to recruit the women. And, yes, it's pretty clear that there are women who would be willing to be recruited. After all, there are naive teenagers running away from home in England to hook up with Daesh in Syria and Iraq, so logically there must be women who would be willing to go in the other direction. Of course, if you're recruiting the potential brides from women who are living in Islamic nations like Pakistan, there's always the risk you're going to recruit women who will go along with the scheme not because they want to don a suicide vest when they get to the U.S. but simply because they want to get away from wherever they happen to be now. Then you've got to get them to set up reasonably attractive profiles on whatever the Islamic equivalent of Cherry Blossoms happens to be, all the while remembering you've got no control over the potential bridegrooms who may view those profiles. Toss in the "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog" factor, i.e., the possibility that the prospective bridegroom is lying his ass off to the potential bride because he's probably motivated a whole lot more by the desire to acquire a woman -- any woman! -- to share his bed than he is by any mutual interest in reading religious texts or making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the odds of being able to get a bunch of radicalized potential terrorists placed in locations that would make sense strategically drops to effectively zero.

In short, what you're looking at is a remarkably awkward scheme. So why waste time talking about it as though it was a serious possibility? I'd guess it's because no one wants to say out loud that they don't have a clue as to what exactly led up to the shooting in San Bernadino. Speculating vaguely about convoluted plots sounds marginally better than admitting ignorance. In fact, if it wasn't for the inconvenient fact that the shooters were Muslim, San Bernadino would fit fairly comfortable into an American classic: the disgruntled worker coming back to wreak revenge on the co-workers against whom he had a grudge of some sort. Unfortunately, that particular narrative feeds the push for gun control and raises uncomfortable questions about why no one noticed the guy was disgruntled. It's actually a more uncomfortable scenario than the alternative: the long arm of Daesh reaching out to instill fear in Americans. Thus, the shooters were Muslim, we're at war with Islamist terrorists, ergo (and conveniently), the shooting had to be part of larger scheme. And if speculating about unrealistic, highly improbable plots helps it all fit into that larger narrative, then the experts will speculate away. Whether or not jihadi brides make sense is, of course, completely irrelevant.

Random thoughts

Thanks to being relatively isolated from news media here at Montauk, about all we know about the latest round of Benghazi hearings comes from a few comments on the local NPR station and some clips on the Internet. We did not go looking for more -- the Republicans have been obsessing about Benghazi for several years now, and, like most people, we're thoroughly sick of hearing about it. At this point, the only question I have is why the idiots in Congress who keep wasting time with these hearings can't seem to figure out what everyone else already has: it doesn't matter what any of the witnesses say, no one is going to change their minds.

There is a sizable percentage of the American populace that is convinced that Hillary Clinton is evil incarnate, an incorrigible liar and opportunist who doesn't give a rat's patoot about anything other than her own political career. There is an equally sizable percentage of Americans who view her as the best qualified person to be the next President of the United States. Neither group is ever going to change its collective mind. As for those of us who fall somewhere in between those camps, we're so sick of hearing about Benghazi we're tuning out the whole thing. So what's the point? If anything, each round of hearings makes it more and more obvious that it's all political theater, and rather ineptly done political theater at that. At this point, the only people who are paying any attention are the ones who get paid to or are ideologically committed to one of the two camps mentioned above.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, people seem to be paying a lot of attention to the weather. It's sounding like the folks down in Texas need to invest in arks. A friend who lives near Waco said they got 12 inches of rain down there a day or two ago. That is a lot of rain in a very short period of time. The upper Midwest is being told (depending on which source to believe) to brace for a lot more snow or a lot less. Given that the county is no longer plowing our driveway, I'm voting for the "lot less," but I'm probably going to be disappointed. I'll just have to hope that our POS Dodge plow truck functions through another winter -- and if it doesn't, there's always the Guppy and the highway south.

More and more people do seem to be willing to concede that climate change is real, we can no longer count on much of anything being the same from year to year. Not that we ever really could, but guesstimates of last Spring frost and first Fall frost used to be reasonably accurate. Not anymore. I saw a headline recently that said the sea level rise is going to make it inevitable that both Miami and New Orleans end up underwater. For that matter, most of the state of Florida could vanish in a few decades -- there's quite a bit of it that's only a few feet above current sea level. We have a friend who owns some property in Florida that he inherited from his parents. He's been trying to figure out what to do with it. My suggestion? Sell it now before it reverts back to swampland or worse.

Here in southeast Missouri it's definitely fall. The leaf colors seem to be at peak, or close to it. The rainbow tree (sweet gum) I see out the Guppy's windows is still about half green, but those green leaves are mixed with red and yellow. In some ways the fall colors in Missouri are less spectacular than those of the upper Midwest. Oak tends to be the dominant species in much of the forest, and oaks turn a russet color so don't have quite the drama of the brilliant red of hard maples. On the other hand, there are those rainbow trees. . .

The weather this month has been, I think, slightly warmer than it was when we were here a year ago. We haven't had to run the furnace much, although I did turn it on this morning (it was 40 outside and 50 here in the Guppy when I got up). There also hasn't been as much rain, which means fewer problems with condensation and dampness. I think the S.O. is a little disappointed. He invested a fair number of hours in sealing the front window by the bunk over the cab but we haven't really had enough rain for him to be sure his repairs worked. It would be good if it did rain -- things are tinder dry in the woods; it wouldn't take much when the ground is covered with leaves for some spectacular wildfires to get going. Given that people in Missouri are every bit as inclined to burn trash in the ditches as the folks in Texas, I'm a little surprised we haven't been hearing wildfire warnings on the radio. Of course, we listen to KMST, a public radio station "broadcasting from the campus of the Missouri College of Science and Technology in Rolla," and this is fund-raising time. Lately we're a lot more likely to hear about your chance to win an I-phone if you donate than about anything else.  

In any case, our month here at Montauk is now winding down. The campground (at least our loop) is a little fuller than one would expect for the last week in October -- lots of people staying through the end of the month instead of just coming for this weekend -- but promises to be relatively quiet. This is the time of year when the park gets a fair number of snowbirds from the St. Louis area who stop here for a week or two to make sure their equipment is working right and they didn't forget to pack whatever they need before they head farther south for the winter. We talked with one fellow last fall who gave us a pep talk about the Del Rio, Texas, area. I'm not sure we're interested in that particular part of the state, but you never know. He made it sound pretty nice so we researched it -- the fees at most of the RV parks around there are remarkably low.

We have had slightly more excitement this month than on previous stays here. More weirdness, more knocks on the door late in the evening. Had two strange ones yesterday. First, late in the afternoon a close to hysterical camper came to tell us that some idiot was burning leaves down at the other end of the loop. We looked down that way and sure enough, there was a huge column of smoke wafting through the trees. Got on the radio to alert someone with more authority than we have to go deal with it. Turned out the guy doing the burning wasn't a complete idiot -- he had raked up the dry leaves on his campsite and piled them in the fire ring to burn. His plan was to clear all the leaves in a fairly large radius around the fire ring so they wouldn't be a hazard when he did an actual campfire. Except he had such a huge pile they basically buried the fire ring so to a passerby it looked like he was just burning a pile of leaves out in the open . . . and it's never a particularly smart idea to burn leaves anywhere when an area is in drought conditions and you're surrounded by many square miles of forest where the ground is covered with dry leaves. All it would have taken was one strong gust of wind to scatter those burning leaves and it could have been a major problem.

Then, around 9 pm we had another camper at the door reporting an emergency. Someone had managed to lock himself in one of the individual showers at the showerhouse in Loop 4. I was a little puzzled as to why the guy came to tell us when there is a host in Loop 4 (we're Loop 2), but then I remembered that those hosts were off duty. Still, I'm a little surprised they weren't available -- even on their days off we tend to see them cruising around the park on the golf cart for no apparent reason. If they have a life outside campground hosting, it's not obvious.

In any case, some poor sap managed to lock himself into a shower room. These are individual showers on the end of the building; each opens directly to the great outdoors. They lock with a deadbolt. Apparently, after the man finished his shower and dressed, he wasn't able to get the door unlocked from the inside. That's got to be moderately embarrassing -- here's hoping it doesn't turn into one of those stories his wife likes to trot out when people ask them about camping at Montauk. We contacted the park's assistant superintendent; he called back not long after to let us know he'd been able to open the door. The fellow was actually lucky he was part of a couple. If he'd been someone camping alone (and the park gets a fair number of people who come on their own for a few quiet days of fishing), he could have been stuck in that room a lot longer.

Life (and death) in a delusional bubble

I've been reading The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II. Nicholas was the last of the Romanov tsars to rule Russia. Except it's pretty clear that in a lot of ways he never did rule the country; he and his immediate family existed in a lovely bubble and were pretty much out of touch with any sort of reality.

I'm into the section of the book now where Nicholas and his family have been exiled to Siberia and are living under house arrest. They're only a few months away from being executed, but they're all cruising along as though everything is going to be fine. One indignity after another, more and more things stripped from them, and they still don't get it that they're heading down the same road as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They're given opportunities to flee the country, to go live in exile, sponge off some of their numerous royal relatives scattered around Europe, but they refuse to leave Russia. It's bizarre. I can halfway understand why Nicholas would decide to stay in Russia -- he really bought into the notion that the tsar was Russia -- but why didn't he try to get his kids or his lunatic wife out of the the country? He was reading the papers; he knew about the riots and social disorder. Did he really believe that because he had abdicated, they were now safe?

Then again, considering that he'd spent his entire life being passive, maybe it's not so surprising "Nicky" just sat back and waited for events to happen. Most of the time he was tsar he was pretty much oblivious to what was actually happening in the country or being done in his name. On the rare occasions when he actually asserted his authority, it usually wasn't his idea -- it was his wife's. And his wife was, to put it mildly, delusional. She was even more out of touch with reality than Nicky was.

And what were the underlying reasons for their happy, delusional life? There were actually two things. One was the Tsarina Alexandra. Nicholas and Alexander were that rare royal couple: they'd married for love against the wishes of various relatives, including Nicky's parents. They'd met as teenagers, Nicholas had fallen for Alexandra at first sight, and never gave up on the idea that someday they'd marry. His parents had consented only because they'd figured out that Nicholas wasn't going to agree to any other arrangements. His father had even tried the classic Russian aristocratic technique of hooking his son up with a ballet dancer in the hopes that he'd become sufficiently enamored of his mistress that he wouldn't care who his legal wife was -- it didn't work. Once Nicholas and Alexandra were married, they formed a self-sufficient bubble. This might not have been a problem if Alexandra hadn't been quite so insecure. She was easily offended and good at holding grudges. Nicky adored Alix so refused to do anything that might upset her. End result? Their social circle kept shrinking until it consisted of a handful of people who would tell the Empress only what she wanted to hear. If someone tried to insert an unpleasant truth, they'd find themselves cut off.

The other reason was religion. The tsar's only son, the heir to the throne, had hemophilia. The condition was diagnosed when Alexei was an infant. Alexandra's life became basically a search for a miracle cure. She absolutely refused to admit that her son had what was a terminal condition, that no matter how careful they were or how intensely she prayed, Alexei was not going to live long enough to be Tsar. It's not surprising that she fell for the lies told by Grigory Rasputin, a con man who was remarkably adept at telling Alexandra exactly what she wanted to hear. As anyone who's ever read any Russian history knows, Rasputin's influence on the royal family became widely known and despised. At the same time, articles and political cartoons in the newspapers openly suggested scandalous behavior -- Rasputin's public behavior away from the palace was, in a word, debauched so it was easy for ordinary people to believe the worst of the rumors circulating about the tsarina. Naturally, the worse Rasputin behaved away from the royal family, the less Alexandra was willing to believe she was being conned. Even when stories reached her about virtually public orgies, she just said this was proof of his holiness. Apparently there's a long Russian tradition of holy men indulging in remarkably outrageous ways and it somehow serving as proof not that they're perverts or degenerates but are instead especially blessed by God. I know -- it makes no sense, but Alexandra 's surviving letters and journals confirm that she believed it.

And then when you throw in World War I, the fact the Russians were getting slaughtered by the Germans, and Alexandra was a German princess who tried to meddle in politics by writing privately to her cousins? It didn't take many years of warfare and Russian losses for most of the country to believe Alexandra was a German spy and the tsar himself was betraying his country by not locking her up. I guess the biggest mystery when it comes to the last of the Romanovs isn't so much how they happened to end up lined up and shot in a basement, but why it took until the Bolshevik Revolution for it to happen. By the time Nicholas abdicated in 1917, he and Alexandra were so universally hated that it's moderately amazing they survived as long as they did.

One thing I have always wondered about, though, is why the Reds felt the need to execute the grand duchesses -- the tsar's daughters. They had no rights of succession; the throne followed the male line. No one was going to rouse the populace by saying "Let's put Princess Olga on the throne." Then again, fanatics have always had a problem with overkill -- and the Bolshevik leadership definitely qualified as fanatics.

As I was reading this book, I found myself thinking about how easy it is for people in leadership positions to fall into the same trap Nicholas II did: just listen to the happy news, chase away anyone who tries to do a reality check, and then find themselves wondering why their company is going bankrupt or their favorite policies are failing. The sad thing is that there probably is no good cure for the problem: the more powerful a person becomes, the less willing other people are to tell them the unvarnished truth.

So would I recommend Nicholas II to other readers? I'm not sure. It's probably a good one for anyone interested in Russian history -- the author does look at various events from a different perspective than I'd read before -- but the structure of the book is odd. It felt choppy and tended to be a little hard to follow. For someone with only a casual interest, though, it's not a good choice.

A few thoughts on why small businesses fail

The other day the S.O. and I drove over to Hurley, approximately 100 miles one way, to help the older grandson with his income taxes. He'd never done them online before and was a little apprehensive about the process, something that's not going to be true in the future. Companies like TurboTax have gotten it down to where if you can read at anything above a 3rd grade level, you can follow their instructions and fill in the blanks with no trouble. We had a good time bonding over his taxes, we imparted some words of wisdom ("Try not to blow your refund as fast as we would"), and headed home. It was not a bad way to spend an afternoon. It kind of made up for the unpleasant experience we'd had at lunch.

On the drive over, we decided to stop for lunch in Bergland. A new restaurant had opened there a few months ago, a place that calls itself JW's BBQ and Brew. We walked in around 12:45, the place was relatively busy but not packed (about a third of the tables were occupied and there were a couple guys sitting at the bar). Our first impression was good -- it's a brand new building and it does look nice inside. It's a seat yourself place so we found a table and waited for the server. Anyone care to take a guess at how long it took for a server to bother coming over to our table? Or, for that matter acknowledge our existence? There was a huge clock hanging on the wall so it was easy to time it. Ten minutes.

The fact that it took ten minutes just to get a server to the table did not bode well for this particular establishment. The S.O. and I looked over the menu and both opted to order items that should have taken nanoseconds to prepare. We both ordered sandwiches. He asked for the brisket with fries as a side; I ordered pulled pork with a side of cole slaw. Half an hour later. . .

I repeat, half an hour later we finally saw some food. It took so long the server actually wound up refilling my Coke once. That never happens. Never. Invariably when we stop for lunch somewhere half my drink ends up still in the glass when we leave. The fact the server did do that one refill meant we did decide to tip, although not as much as we normally would.

You know, I could semi-understand it taking a while to build a sandwich if there was some actual cooking involved, but when it's a barbecue place? The pork is sitting in a metal tub ready to go, and the brisket is ready for slicing. The only cooking our order required was the fries, and just how long do french fries take? Not half an hour.

After we got home, I thought about doing a scathing review on Yelp but changed my mind. We'll never stop there again, but who knows? Maybe if enough people bitch about slow service, they'll get their act together. I did leave a comment on their Facebook page about all the stuff they're doing wrong. I couldn't resist: their latest post was basically a Help Wanted ad. They're looking to hire cooks and wait staff. I suggested that if they do, they try training them. The server who waited on us didn't have a clue what she was doing.

A short list of stuff she did wrong:
1. She saw us come in, but made several trips to other tables and then back to behind the bar or into the kitchen before bothering to acknowledge our existence.
2. When she did come to the table, she came empty-handed to ask if we'd like to see menus. She should have had them in her hand. People don't enter restaurants and sit at tables just to enjoy the view of the parking lot. In fact, she wasted a lot of time and energy running around empty-handed. Obviously, no one ever bothered telling her one of the fundamental rules of working in a restaurant: your hands are never empty.
3. When she asked if we'd like menus, she did not bother to ask what we'd like to drink. We didn't get to order a beverage until she came back to take the food order -- the place sells beer, wine, and mixed drinks. Which beings me to
4. She should have been pushing the local beers they either have on tap or available in cans and bottles. She never said a word about any of the booze, but that's where the profit margin for a lot of restaurants with liquor licenses falls.  Doesn't matter if it's lunch or dinner, when customers come in, one of the first things the server should do is ask them if they'd like a glass of wine, beer, or a mixed drink. This is especially true if the kitchen has a tendency to be slow. We wouldn't have ordered anything alcoholic, but she didn't know that.
5. She did not push the daily special (a half-rack of ribs), nor did she mention the soup of the day.
6. She didn't try to sell us a dessert. They weren't very busy; it was a situation that calls for trying to get customers to linger and spend more money instead of encouraging them to leave.

I have a hunch she figured out we weren't exactly happy customers when she came to collect and we had the exact amount, right down to the penny, ready for her. There was going to be no cheerful "Keep the change" from us. The rather miserly (for us) tip she found after we left probably came as a moderately pleasant surprise.

Right now the restaurant is apparently doing reasonably well. It's been a good winter for snowmobiling, the motels in Bergland seem to be doing a booming business, and there aren't a lot of local choices when it comes to going out to eat. But you can't count on tourists to keep a restaurant going 12 months out of the year. You have to get repeat local business -- and they lost ours. How many others have they managed to turn off since they opened? I can see it now. Business will slow down, they'll start losing money, and you know who'll they blame? The government for all its onerous regulations. If only they didn't have to meet health department standards they'd be making money. Or if they didn't have to pay legal wages. Or if there were no taxes. They won't take a long hard look at themselves and realize that maybe, just maybe, they should have trained their staff -- or not hired their wife's best friend, their slacker brother-in-law, or a cousin or two.

I have no idea just what percentage of new restaurants fail quickly after opening, but I have noticed they seem to come and go quickly. And, of course, I've watched  Kitchen Nightmares enough times to see the many ways in which people can drive businesses into the ground. I think if I was going to open a restaurant or a pub, I'd at least do a few marathon sessions of watching Gordon Ramsay or Jon Taffer (Bar Rescue) in action. Somehow, though, I have a hunch that instead of consulting with Gordon Ramsay via television, the owners of J.W.'s BBQ & Brew decided that hey, we like to cook -- we should open a restaurant -- and now the only question is how long it'll be before there's a For Sale sign on the building. Or, more likely, the smoldering ashes of the insurance fire. After all, there's precedent. That's how the last restaurant on that site went out of business.

We would, incidentally, put up with lousy service if the food was better than average. It's not. It's bland and it's overpriced. It's a shame, because there really aren't many options left on the western end of M-28.

Have you heard of this thing called Google?

Back when I was teaching, one of the predictable irritations each semester was the student who wanted the instructor to do all the work. You know, the instructor presents an essay assignment -- "Write a 1,000 word paper on a topic relating to X" -- and the student doesn't just want the instructor to hand over a precise, narrowly defined topic on a silver platter (complete with thesis statement and a detailed outline) he or she also expects the instructor to hold their hand every step of the way and basically write the paper for them. I always kind of wondered what happened to those people once they got out in the real world.

Now I know. They write to historical societies asking us to do research for them that they could just as easily do themselves with a couple of mouse clicks. Apparently there are still members of the general population that have never heard of this thing called Google. I'm one of the people who follows up on requests the county historical society gets from folks doing genealogy or other research relating to Baraga County. I've dealt with two in the past couple of weeks that had me wishing for the proverbial 2 x 4 with which to get the mule's attention.

One actually isn't too bad. The request came in the form of a hand-written letter. It's quite possible the person asking for research assistance is one of those rare individuals (and they do still exist, although they're becoming as rare as unicorns) who either doesn't own a computer or is sufficiently computer illiterate that even running a simple, preliminary search is something they don't know how to do. In any event, it turned out that although Google would have answered a couple of quick questions, it would not have yielded all the information the person wanted. For them, Google would have been a start, but they probably would have written to us anyway to track down things like photocopies of death certificates and marriage licenses.

The other request, however, really did remind me of the snot-nosed freshmen who used to annoy me back in my glory days as an academic. The person did a lengthy email laying out in excruciating detail what they hoped to find. After multiple paragraphs of verbiage, the bottom line was, in essence, a simple yes or no question: did a certain person hold a specific title at a certain point in time. WTF? Two seconds on the Internet and I had the answer. If you can find an answer using Google, why waste anyone else's time? And why on earth do multiple paragraphs of build-up to get to the question?

So how did I respond to the lengthy email with its stupid question? Did I answer it? Well, no. I was in a snarky mood. I reminded the person that the museum's website states clearly that we charge for research assistance. And, not only do we charge, we want money in advance before we do anything. Will the person send us $25 to get an answer that could be obtained for free with a 3 word search phrase and a mouse click or two? I don't know, but I'm kind of hoping they do. You can't cure stupid, but you can make it pay.

What if it was Texas?

The news lately seems to be all Ukraine all the time. If there ever was a time and place for the U.S. to just keep its collective mouth shut and back away slowly, this is probably it. Ukrainian and Russian history have been intertwined for centuries, Ukraine was part of tsarist Russia before it was a Soviet Republic, its history as an independent nation is brief, and we Americans are notoriously bad at understanding what's actually going on in any foreign country. Instead of trying to provoke Putin into doing something that make him look even better in Russia, the Obama administration should be as mealy-mouthed as possible and hope something else pops up someplace else in the world to distract the news media. Tempting though it always is to meddle, this is one of those no-win situations.

Ukrainian internal politics are twisted, to say the least. Various politicians in the past have seemed quite willing to switch sides at the drop of a hryvnia, Ukraine itself has an ethnically mixed population, you can't always tell by the language spoken (i.e., Ukrainian vs. Russian) just who is who when it comes to loyalties, and the reason for the current unrest seems murky at best. There's a lot of talk in the media about "freedom" and cleaning up corruption, but it actually seems a lot more like one group of special interests was lusting after the opportunity to make money by aligning with the European Union while the other group was lusting after the opportunity to make money by sticking with Russia. In other words, one group of wannabe corrupt politicians decided to boot the already corrupt politicians out. No matter who gains control in the end, the average Ukrainian's everyday life is unlikely to improve much, at least not in the short term.

Besides, why on earth would we want to be stupid enough to do anything remotely provocative right on the Russian border? Anyone willing to do some mental role reversal can see how insane that could be. How would we react if Mexico had a revolution and the Russians or Chinese decided to help out one side or the other in that conflict? If the Russians put boots on the ground or poured massive amounts of aid into Chihuahua or Tamaulipas, we'd freak out. It would be, holy fuck, the Russians are massing on the Texas border! They're coming after our oil!! They're going to destroy our refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. I mean, we went ballistic when the leftist government on the island of Grenada starting building a bigger airport with Cuban help; imagine several thousand Russians hanging out just south of Brownsville or El Paso. Or, even better, over on the West Coast in Baja California just south of San Diego. So how do you think the Russians would react if the Obama administration was stupid enough to listen to John McCain or Lindsey Graham and do something even remotely aggressive in Ukraine?

As for the billion dollars in aid that John Kerry just promised the Ukrainians, why does the above image immediately come to mind?

The lost art of conversation

We seem to be devolving into a nation of people who have lost the ability to talk with each other. We want validation, not discussion. We make statements but don't want questions or comments that suggest less than 100 percent agreement with whatever it is we've said. It doesn't matter if the topic is one that's potentially contentious (e.g., politics) or totally innocuous (a purchase from Menard's). If someone asks a question, the original speaker freaks out. It's a personal attack. The questioner is being an elitist, a jerk, a socialist, a fascist, or whatever the preferred insult of the day is. Or, and I really don't get how this is supposed to be an insult, it's "an attempt to start an argument."

Well, what's wrong with that? Healthy debate is how we learn stuff. And it doesn't even have to be actual debate -- just kicking different ideas around, different perspectives on a topic where you're basically in agreement but coming at it from slightly different angles can be good. Besides, if you're secure in your knowledge, happy with whatever it is you may have said, why should you feel defensive about it? Why assume that if someone is less than effusive in their praise of your opinion that you're being attacked? People used to be able to have discussions, debates, arguments, whatever, without participants reacting as though their interlocutors were attacking them personally. You could ask someone why they supported a particular position, whether it was a model of car they'd bought or a choice of a political candidate, without that person freaking out and accusing you of trying to start a fight or calling them stupid.

Should I blame the Internet? It can do a lot of damage. It's real easy to find yourself a bunch of cheerleaders when you're wandering around Facebook or the blogosphere. There are lots of what the S.O. refers to as "circle jerk echo chambers" available. Don't want to think too hard about anything? Just find groups where everyone agrees with you, whether it's which NASCAR drivers are total asshats or where Barack Obama was actually born. Have a weak ego? Start a blog and then chase away anyone who says stuff that isn't some variation on you're so wonderful and everything you say is a sparkling pearl of wisdom.

Hand me the tinfoil

I need to make a hat for a friend.

She's always been a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I think she's slipped over the edge. She has fallen victim to one of the more venerable chestnuts among conspiracy theories, the absolutely classic belief that the current occupant of the White House is about to declare martial law and turn the United States into a Pinochet-style dictatorship, one that will no doubt come complete with NFL stadiums being filled with dissenters who have been targeted to "disappear." This particular delusion goes way back. It's so old that not only does it predate the Internet, it predates telephones and telegraphs. In fact, it goes back so far we were listing Presidents using single digits, as in One.

Yep, it goes back to George Washington. As soon as he announced he would accept a second term, there were political opponents and conspiracy-mongers telling anyone who would listen that the venerable George Washington, father of our country, was planning to have himself declared King. Today we have this image of Washington as being universally loved and respected; back in the 1790s it was a different story, especially after Washington authorized the use of the military to stamp out the Whiskey Rebellion. The theory faded a bit when John Adams became president -- it kind of killed the "Washington wants to be King!" rumors when he stepped down gracefully -- but it would re-emerge periodically, usually when the current President was someone who aroused particularly strong opposition from some segment of society. In the 19th century, Andrew Jackson was suspected of having dictatorial designs upon the country, ditto Abraham Lincoln. In the 20th, conservatives feared that Franklin D. Roosevelt would never relinquish his grasp on the White House (and they were right; it took death to get him out of the Oval Office), although World War II was enough of a distraction that most people welcomed a strong presidency rather than fearing it.

More recently, when the Watergate scandal broke in the 1970s, many people sincerely believed that Tricky Dicky would never go quietly. Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Elder escaped conspiracy theorizing, but Clinton and Bush the Younger were both star players in the minds of the tinfoil hat crowd. Clinton was going to seize power and declare Hillary was the next President (which sort of indicates who was perceived as being the scarier half of that particular power couple); Bush was going to declare martial law and void the 2008 election to prevent himself and members of his administration from being prosecuted for war crimes. (An alternate popular theory was that Bush was preparing to flee to a ranch in Paraguay to avoid prosecution for treason when it came out that he and Cheney were responsible for 9/11.) The fact both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the subject of conspiracy theories is a rare example where you can say in all honesty that "both sides do it." It doesn't matter who's actually in office; both ends of the political spectrum have people sporting tinfoil hats.

In short, if a President can manage to be elected to a second term and is sufficiently disliked by enough people, he's going to be the star player in a conspiracy theory. The motives may vary along with the "evidence" being trotted out to support the theory, but the supposed ultimate goal is always a dictatorship. If you ask people what the evidence actually is, it falls into the classic urban legend pattern. That used to be "a friend of a friend knows all about this;" now it's "I read it on the Internet so it must be true." Either that, or it's perched upon such a slender reed that one marvels that anyone would pin their hopes on it. One general gets fired for being a drunken sot who caroused with hookers, and through the miracle of exaggeration and wishful thinking suddenly the President is eliminating all the senior military staff who disagree with him.  

The stupid, it burns.

People are strange

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the left, Harry Houdini on the right.

I've been reading Harry Houdini's explication of spiritualism, A Magician Among the Spirits. At the time Houdini wrote the book, spiritualism was in vogue. Quite a few famous people -- most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes -- were totally convinced it was possible to communicate with the spirit world. Houdini described himself as someone who wanted to believe in spiritualism, but he knew too much about how easy it is to deceive people to fall for any of the typical medium's tricks himself.

In A Magician Among the Spirits Houdini details the history of spiritualism in the United States and elsewhere. The first well-known mediums to become a public sensation were the Fox sisters, two little girls from New York who in the 1840s began playing tricks on their mother. They managed to convince her their house was haunted. Pretty soon the neighbors also believed that the girls could communicate with the ghost. No doubt the dim lighting (candles, oil lamps) common in homes at the time made it easy for the girls to get away with their pranks. They created rapping noises by using an apple tied to a string; later they figured out how to make rapping noises with their feet. The girls' oldest sister decided there was money to be made from people who wanted to believe in spirits and communication with the dead; she took charge of the girls' career and toured the country with them. Both sisters eventually confessed to having committed fraud, but only after decades of conning a gullible public.They described how they had trained themselves to make rapping noises using their toes after they began holding seances in places that were too well-lighted to allow them to use the same tricks they had used on their parents.

The American Civil War gave a tremendous boost to spiritualism, both as a belief system and as a lucrative career. The death toll during the war was staggering; grieving parents and widows were desperate for a chance to communicate with their deceased loved ones. Spiritualists and mediums quickly learned to adapt new technology to their trade: some spiritualists became adept at creating "spirit photographs" using the simple technique of double exposure. Others invented electrical devices to create the various noises associated with communicating with the spirits. Houdini describes one battery-operated device that was fitted into the heel of a woman's shoe; the wires ran up the medium's leg and the long, full skirts with the multiple petticoats in vogue at the time ensured that the device remained undetected.

Houdini made an intense investigation of spiritualism because he hoped that the basic premise -- communication with the dead -- was possible. He describes himself as having been devastated when his mother died; he kept hoping for evidence of true communication with her, but of course never found it. Numerous spiritualists would claim that her spirit was present, but none ever produced any evidence that Houdini found credible. His thought processes were simply too logical to accept the "proof" the mediums offered. Among other things, his mother never spoke a word of English -- she was a Hungarian immigrant -- yet the communications from beyond were always in English. The spiritualists explained that in the spirit world, people learned things they hadn't known here. Houdini naturally thought that was ridiculous.

Still, although Houdini remained skeptical his entire life, he did sympathize with the victims of spiritualism. He understood why they were so anxious to believe what they were hearing. He was good friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a fervent believer in spiritualism, although they were often in complete opposition on the issue. Doyle kept hoping to convince Houdini of the validity of spiritualism; Houdini kept hoping his good friend Doyle would see through the charlatans.

What Houdini had absolute scorn for were the spiritualists who preyed upon grief-stricken widows and bereaved parents. He cooperated with numerous investigations of fraudulent mediums and, along with other magicians, was able to expose a number of con artists. He was able to show that many of the supposedly inexplicable results achieved by mediums were easily duplicated by anyone who was shown the proper techniques. Table raisings, for example, were accomplished through a combination of using one foot under the leg of a table and a special belt with a stiff metal rod concealed in it. Other results were achieved through the power of suggestion.

Houdini also noted that skilled mediums were adept at fishing: they would learn enough in conversation with a client to be able to say something that led to the client spilling more information that the medium could build on. If there was enough money on the line, mediums were known to have engaged in active snooping: reading mail, planting a spy in a household (e.g., having an accomplice take a position as a housemaid or other servant), and bribing hotel staff. Houdini describes several mediums who actually paid burglars to break into clients' homes to obtain personal correspondence and other documents that the medium would carefully study and then have the burglars return. When spiritualism was at its height, there were numerous cases of wealthy clients being fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not surprisingly, many of the victims of these cons by unscrupulous mediums refused to believe the spiritualists had lied to them.

One thing that did baffle Houdini was why so many people persisted in wanting a magical or supernatural explanation for what were purely physical and easily explainable phenomena. Over and over Houdini and other magicians would find their work, which they described honestly as sleight of hand or illusion accomplished through various tricks, described by others as actual magic. Houdini specialized as an escape artist. He worked hard at perfecting techniques for escaping from handcuffs, straight jackets, and other restraints and had various devices built to his specifications that he would use for his performances. Rather than admit that Houdini was simply extremely skilled at what he did, many of the advocates of spiritualism would claim that Houdini had actually dematerialized and transported himself outside whatever restraints or container he had been in. Today, of course, when people see someone like David Blaine or Criss Angel perform the typical reaction is "wow, cool trick. I wonder how he did that?" We don't think Criss Angel has supernatural powers when he performs an illusion like walking on water; we just think he's really good at what he does. It must have been incredibly frustrating for Houdini to have the people who believed in spiritualism touting Houdini's illusions and escapes as examples of the spirit world at work. He'd spend many months or even years perfecting a trick only to have the spiritualists dismissing his hard work as simply being his ability to teleport himself.

What struck me as I read that chapter was that the spiritualists' insistence that Houdini had supernatural powers was a classic example of the human tendency to insist on a complicated or unrealistic explanation when a simple truth exists. For some strange reason, we humans want life to be messier than it actually is. It's not enough that there be an explanation for something; it has to be a complicated or improbable explanation rather than a simple one. And then when something is debunked, we don't want it to stay debunked.

Here in the western Upper Peninsula for quite a few years people were intrigued, some might say fascinated, by a phenomenon known as the Paulding Light. Paulding is a tiny community located on US-45 between Watersmeet and Bruce Crossing. The Paulding Light was a mysterious light that could be seen through the woods when a person stood in a certain location. I personally never made the pilgrimage to Paulding after dark even though it's not that far from where we live (about an hour's drive), but both of our kids did at some point in the 1990s. I think one saw the light; the other just complained about mosquito bites and boredom. Local stores sold tee-shirts and other souvenirs touting the Paulding Light, and one of those ridiculous ghost hunter type shows actually came and filmed a segment on the light. There were various explanations as to why the light existed. I vaguely recall some odd story about a train and brakeman and a tragic accident, and no doubt I'd find a few other anecdotes if I bothered to Google Paulding Light.

This went on for years, people coming to the Paulding area in hopes of seeing the light. Then those damned logical engineering students at Michigan Tech decided to check it out. They did a controlled experiment and proved pretty quickly that the mysterious, ghostly Paulding light was nothing more than car lights on the highway. They went to the observation spot where people claimed to have seen the light, they saw a light, they got out a telescope, and it was obviously car lights. They were even able to locate the exact spot where the lights originated: there was an Adopt A Highway sign visible. Since then, other people have been able to confirm that, yep, car lights. No doubt if US-45 was a busier highway the explanation would have emerged much sooner because people would have seen more lights closer together long before the Tech students set up their telescope. Not surprisingly, once the car lights explanation became widely known, other people visiting the site quickly agreed that yes, the light is obviously a light from a vehicle.

At least that's what most people say. Having been provided with an explanation, suddenly most people no longer see a railroad lantern being held by a dead brakeman but instead see tail lights on a Ford truck. There are still a few die hard would-be spiritualists, however, who keep right on insisting the light is a paranormal phenomenon. They still see a ghostly trainman.

People are strange.

Or, to put it another way, the stupid, it burns.

So what's the point?

The House of Representatives has voted unanimously to provide retroactive pay to furloughed federal employees when they return to work. This is a fairly clear sign they all expect the shutdown to end soon. So what's the point of the shutdown other than to provide sound bites and toss some red meat to the extreme right wing base back in the hollers and swamps of the deep South? I speak figuratively of the hollers and swamps, of course. After all, there must be a few Tea Baggers who live in perfectly respectable trailer parks or have family trees that actually fork. 

The government shutdown has now gone on for five days (counting today). What has it accomplished? U.S. prestige is plummeting globally. We're looking more and more like a banana republic, a third world nation that's going to end up about as influential on the world stage as the Maldives or East Timor if the extreme right wing keeps its posturing up much longer. The U.S. is really keen on telling other countries how to run their governments, but after this debacle why should anyone listen? 

The shutdown is also damaging the economy: in addition to the federal employees placed on indefinite furlough, contractors and concessioners are shut down, and businesses that rely indirectly on the government are also hurting. How many days can a guy who operates a hot dog cart in front of an office building go with no customers before he's forced out of business? Whatever the economic cost ultimately is, it's probably going to be more than the current estimates of approximately $300 million a day. 

Given that the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 and has been rolling out incrementally ever since, it truly baffles me as to what the Tea Party minority within the Republican Party hoped to accomplish with their last minute grandstanding. Their posturing is the metaphorical equivalent of standing right in front of a 1,000-car BNSF coal train that's already moving at a good clip and hoping to stop it on a dime. Not going to happen. At this point, all one can do is hope the clown car that's parked on the tracks gets flattened, but, unfortunately for the country, its occupants are probably going to emerge unscathed. 

When did they stop teaching civics in high school?

Words fail me. I feel the urge to do a rant about the idiocy currently happening in Congress, but I'm finding the depths of stupidity on parade render me speechless.

As an opinion piece on CNN notes,

For politicians in Washington, and for the American people, angry and frustrated with the increasingly partisan and dysfunctional government, the shutdown that started on Tuesday looks like a battle over domestic politics. For the rest of the world, the closure of U.S. government institutions says America is growing small, small-minded and unreliable. 

A small band of extreme right-wing politicians couldn't win the debate, or the vote, or the legal argument over health care, so they decided to close down the government instead. A system that allows that to happen is dangerously flawed and in urgent need of repairs.

It probably doesn't help my mood that when I do listen to the news or even talk with various acquaintances, I keep hearing the same old bullshit: the ACA was crammed down our throats, no one knows what's in it, the Obama administration is a tyranny. . . ad nauseum. How anyone could claim that no one knows what's in the Affordable Care Act when it was debated for over a year before it was passed in 2010 and it's been endlessly debated since then is beyond me.

Then again, when I read the local newspaper (another mistake I made yesterday) and see letters to the editor in which the writers basically brag about their complete lack of knowledge of how a democracy actually functions, I find myself hoping the zombie apocalypse happens soon.

Can't cure stupid

Lately the S.O. has been indulging in an exercise in frustration in trying to communicate with some right-wing relatives. He spends way too much time exchanging comments on Facebook while muttering about how fucking stupid some people are. This behavior tells me it's definitely time for us to hit the road back to Michigan -- he needs to be using that energy to finish filling the woodshed before the snow gets to be asshole deep instead of wasting it in cyberspace. He could type until his fingers bled and it wouldn't change anyone's mind. The relatives in question are the classic example of what I (elitist left-wing Commie that I am) tend to think of as the brainwashed proletariat -- they fret a lot about creeping socialism and President Obama being a Marxist without having a clue as to what socialism or Marxism actually are.* They just know that they've been told that socialism is evil so it's become a convenient label to slap on to anything and everything they've been told to oppose.

I don't know why the S.O. bothers. I figured out quite awhile ago that there are some people who like to talk but are incapable of listening, so it's pointless to try to engage in a dialogue. It's especially pointless when you're dealing with people who have trouble understanding some fairly basic concepts, like the difference between socialism and fascism, or who rant about the evils of big government while working for a corporation that depends 100% on government funding. When people are so oblivious or willfully ignorant that they don't get it that shrinking government would result in their own unemployment or eliminate their benefits arguing with them is a waste of time and energy. All you can do is walk away while being quietly grateful that the people in question are fairly distant relatives, not close ones, and that they don't live next door.

[*As an actual Marxist who has known genuine, ideologically committed Socialists and Communists, it always annoys the crap out of me to see the labels applied to corporatist politicians like Barack Obama who 50 years ago would have been Eisenhower Republicans.]

How ignorant is the American public?

Every so often I think I've seen the ultimate in stupidity being mouthed (or, more accurately, typed) by the tinfoil hat types on the Internet. Then I'll make the mistake of looking at the comments following a news article or opinion piece at a site like CNN, the Washington Post, or MSN. Today's gems came from the comments opining about an article about the Supreme Court's ruling regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), television broadcasts, and indecency. Basically, the court ruled that the FCC had treated broadcasters unfairly by not warning them in advance that fleeing nudity or spontaneous profanity during a live broadcast might be subject to hefty fines. There were a fair number of reasonably sane comments along the usual lines, e.g., if people think a program is obscene they can always change the channel. Then the comment string deteriorated in a really strange direction. . . .

Bottom line, as expressed by the mouth breathers: Why was the FCC involved? After all, it's NOT a government agency.

Did these people sleep through civics classes? What type of cognitive impairment does it take to not understand that when an agency has a name like "Federal Communications Commission" the odds are it is indeed part of the federal government?

Then again, this is no doubt the same crowd that wants the government to keep its hands off their Social Security and worries about socialized medicine interfering with their Medicare. The stupid, it burns.

I guess Communism isn't dead after all

Down in Alabama, the members of the state legislature have managed to pass legislation designed to hold off the evils of a dastardly Commie plot. As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Since September, the [John Birch Society] has sponsored a national lecture tour on the supposed dangers of Agenda 21. Using slideshows replete with images of Karl Marx and Alger Hiss, the accused communist spy who helped draft the U.N. Charter, JBS scare-mongers have fanned out across the country to warn locals of the evils of the U.N.’s sustainability initiative. Agenda 21, they claim, calls for “a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.” According to the JBS, the ultimate purpose of this decades-old plan is nothing less than a new world order in which rural regions will be depopulated and foreign bureaucrats will mandate family size here in the United States, imposing forced abortions as they do in communist China.

Apparently, these threats were enough to spook the Republican National Committee, which in January passed a resolution opposing Agenda 21, decrying the nonbinding measure as “a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” Counties in various states have adopted similar resolutions, as has the Tennessee House of Representatives. According to The New American, activists in New Hampshire are lobbying to pass anti-Agenda 21 legislation. Arizona’s state Senate this spring passed a bill similar to Alabama’s, but it died before the session ended.

Community sustainability efforts are coordinated through something known as ICLEI – the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives. Under its auspices, more than 1,000 cities and municipalities around the world, including hundreds in the U.S., have received grants (or bribes, if you agree with the JBS version of the story) that will help implement local sustainability proposals.

News of the Alabama passage heartened anti-ICLEI activists across the nation. The headline on one Virginia blog, for example, reads:  “VICTORY! ICLEI BAN PASSED ALABAMA LEGISLATURE! YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Read it and weep, globalists!”

The Alabama cities of Birmingham and Huntsville are both ICLEI members (though depending on how this law is interpreted, they may not be for long). As their residents gear up for another long, hot Deep South summer, they – and the rest of us Alabamians – can breathe a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that the communist menace of environmental protection has been beaten back from our doors.

I've been reading about the hysteria over Agenda 21 for awhile now. Paranoia about black helicopters and blue helmets has led to the defeat of land use planning for smart growth in Colorado, for example, and, as the SPLC notes, the conspiracy theorists are popping up elsewhere around the country. If it wasn't having serious consequences, it would be laughable. You know, "Omigod. The oppressive and evil one world government is going to force us to breathe clean air!!" Only the tinfoil hat types on the extreme right could manage to come up with a conspiracy theory that takes a suggestion to stop wasting resources and trashing the planet and turns it into a plot for global domination.

I'm also real intrigued by the way the tinfoil hat types are doing their best to turn sustainability ("Sustainable: a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged") into a dirty word. The stupid, it burns.