Welcome to Wag the Dog

Does YamTits really believe stealing Venezuela's oil will make the Epstein files go away? Or is he assuming this is just another grift he can manage to get away with?

Years ago I read a book called, if I remember correctly, The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight. It was about a group of incompetent New York gangsters. If those guys were around today they'd be in the Trump administration. The Maduro fiasco is yet another example of Trump minions (and Trump himself) thinking that cosplay is all it takes. Planning? Considering what to do besides providing news media with dramatic footage of things blowing up in Caracas? Not in their skill set.

I have been wondering just what they planned to charge Maduro with. There was a lot of blustering about a cartel. Rubio designated said cartel as a terrorist organization a couple months ago. Turns out said cartel does not exist. The "cartel" was a nickname South American journalists had coined to describe the loose collection of corrupt officials and businesses that were taking advantage of the system in Venezuela to enrich themselves. No actual organization, no coordinated narco trafficking, Just a conspiracy fantasy. 

Then when you toss in the overall incompetence of the current crop of U.S. Department of Justice attorneys you know that any Maduro trial will be a shit show of stupidity of epic proportions. Does Court TV still exist? I smell a ratings boost. 

As for more evidence that the whole escapade was meant as a squirrel and not to cause serious regime change in Venezuela, the only change is that Maduro is gone. Maduro's vice president is now president, the Maduro administration remains intact, and other than about 80 people being dead (killed in the attack on the Presidential home) nothing has changed in Venezuela.

Turkeys have really big feet

1874 turkey track quilt

I spotted the biggest bird tracks I'd ever seen in the snow recently. I was ambling up the driveway to the Woman Cave when I saw the largest prints I'd ever seen outside of a zoo. My first thought was, holy wah, do the new neighbors have emus? If I'd spotted huge bird foot prints in the summer I'd have thought "sandhill crane" because we have a pair that nest on the edge of our property every year, but in early March? It didn't hit me immediately that lately most of the turkeys I've seen have been single birds, not flocks. 

The turkey tracks were, in any case, a nice distraction from the flaming dumpster fire that is the tRump administration's incredibly chaotic approach to governance. How incompetent do you have to be to think that first telling remote workers that they have to return to an office and then turning around and cancelling the leases on the offices they're supposed to come back to is some sort of genius solution to eliminating waste and fraud? I can understand (sort of) the decision to cancel leases on some facilities, the part-time offices where maybe a representative from the IRS or Social Security visits once a week, but cancelling leases for a national park's headquarters? Which is what the DOGE geniuses did in Arkansas: cancelled the lease on the headquarters for Buffalo National River. I've been to BUFF's headquarters multiple times. 

The park occupied multiple rooms in their leased space in Harrison. All of that space was used, packed full of stuff. The park historian's space alone was crammed with files and books and enough material that it would take several large U-Haul's to empty just that one room -- which does beg the question, where is that material supposed to go? Is it saving any money when the park then ends up having to rent storage elsewhere? Where do the fifty-plus years of park administrative records go? The archeological artifacts collection? The employees who were not fired but no longer have an office to go to? No planning, no thought, just a bunch of mindless Musk acolytes crossing stuff off lists and then bragging about how much they're saving the country by causing chaos. 

I noticed the news item about BUFF because it was (and still is) one of my favorite parks but the Younger Daughter tells me DOGE also hit facilities in Fayetteville, although she wasn't sure exactly what. She's actually been paying more attention to Cheeto Mussolini's antics than I have. She is a federal employee and she does worry about just how safe anyone's job is now. It's easy to imagine tRump deciding entire job categories aren't necessary, like historian or writer. If something doesn't have an obvious immediate resale value, the orange cockwomble figures it's useless or should be trashed. 

Only 202 weeks left to go, assuming we all survive.  

Jackie Sue was right

 

We're fucked. 

I've been watching Cheeto Mussolini and his minions in action since the inauguration. Every time I think they've done the dumbest thing ever they manage to do something even dumber. Planes are falling out of the sky? Not a problem. Just blame it on a nonissue (committing the sin of hiring people who aren't white or male) and say it's all Biden's or Obama's or maybe even Carter's fault. Claiming you're going to eliminate waste in government spending? Solution: fire every low level employee unlucky enough to still be on probation and ignore all the GS-15 dead weight, the various managers and supervisors who have been Retired on Active Duty (ROAD) or Retired in Place (RIP) for years. 

Anyone who's ever had a government job knows about the RIPs.  I think most agencies have slots where the people who fill them are the codgers (geezettes?) who are already eligible for retirement but want to keep getting a full paycheck for a few more years. When I worked for the National Park Service I swear there were a couple parks where the superintendents were already mentally on their bass boat. They were useless as managers. They'd found a geographic location they liked, they had the government move them (the higher in the food chain a position is, the more generous Transfer of Station funds become), help with the purchase of a house (their retirement cabin on the river or on a hillside with a great mountain view), and be bitched about by park staff for the next two, three, or four years. I doubt if any of that dead weight got noticed by the Musk's DOGE tech bros. 

But talking about RIP personnel is a bit of a digression. I'm more intrigued by Musk deciding he needed to re-invent the wheel, and do a piss poor job in the process. Some of us geezers still remember the 1990s and Clinton-Gore. Clinton et al. decided the Vice President should have more to do than attend funerals in foreign countries. Al Gore got tasked with reducing waste and redundancies in government. Spoiler alert: he actually did it. The task force cut the federal government's payroll by a significant amount, duplicate offices and agencies were eliminated. The one I always remember most clearly was in regulating coal mining. The Bureau of Mines vanished. My faith in the tRump administration to always fuck stuff up is so strong that I firmly believe the government will emerge from the DOGE purge with zero funds saved, gazillions being doled out to private contractors, and several new offices, task forces, agencies, etc., created to provide jobs to loyal suck-ups. They may even bring the Bureau of Mines back from the dead. No reason to, of course, but it could make some good sound bites for the orange cockwomble to brag about helping America's coal industry.

The way the Clinton administration's task force succeeded in shrinking government was, of course, to do it carefully. No blanket across the board reductions in force, just a meticulous examination of who was doing what and where. Had Musk possessed more brain cells than a gerbil (or had a shit ton less ego) he'd have followed similar methods. Less trauma, more good press, and for sure no internet memes speculating about the Muskrat's micro penis and/or botched dick enlargement surgery. (Those memes must be comforting to all the broke-ass dudes out there. If the richest man in the world can't buy himself a macro member then maybe being poor isn't so horrible after all.)

Low information voters

The S.O. and I have been trying to get our heads around the fact that the Human Yam managed to win the election despite being an incredibly vile human being and obviously sliding rapidly into full blown senile dementia. Given my usual cynicism I was leaning toward Americans in general being too stupid to recognize a grifter even when he tells people explicitly they're all dumb as rocks. 

My belief in Stupidity as an explanation met with confirmation recently. I was at an event where a group of people were chatting about contacting our U.S. Congressman- a carpetbagger named Jack Bergmann (he's from Louisiana but claims his primary residence is a deer camp here in the U.P.). It'd been less than 2 weeks since the election but a couple people had no idea who Bergmann is. He's been our Congress critter for 4 terms now. He's pretty useless in general but his staff is apparently competent at helping constituents, hence, the suggestion to contact his office. 

So my question is basically just how willfully ignorant do you have to be to not know who the local Congress critter is when the election just happened and we've been inundated with nonstop advertising for months? And if you don't know who the Congress critter is what are the odds you've got a Made in China red hat and think that immigrants are barbecuing cats?

Back a gazillion years ago I had acquaintances from inner city neighborhoods who referred to cats as "roof rabbits." That label always made me wonder about the ingredients in traditional Southern cuisine. You know, is the deep fried chicken really chicken? Made me resolve to stick with just cole slaw and fries if I ever got asked to dine in a local eatery on Chicago's Southside. But, as usual, I digress.

Bottom line is that Americans in general tend to be on the dumb side so the spectacle of them voting for the guy who 4 years ago had most of the country wondering if coffee filters would work as toilet paper wasn't a huge surprise. Disappointing, yes, but a total shock? Nope. 

I am, of course, amused by the MAGAts who think that Donny Convict is going to lower gas prices. Given that his pick to head the Department of Energy is head of a fracking company does anyone seriously believe a fossil fuels executive is going to push for cheaper gas? Right now gas is going for about $3 per gallon. When the price doubles next year you know they'll blame Biden. Or Obama. Anyone but the fools who voted for Trump.

Lies, damn lies, and political ads

A bizarre political flyer landed in our mailbox the other day. The right-wing nut jobs have decided the way to defeat the reproductive freedom proposition that's on the ballot here in Michigan is by enrolling the specter of prepubescent children being allowed to request elective hysterectomies without bothering to obtain parental consent first. Apparently the Betsy DeVos crowd believes the average person is so brain dead that he or she will believe that allowing adult women to obtain abortions is going to lead to children deciding to change genders. 

The television equivalent of the print ad is pretty strange, too. As the text of the proposed resolution is displayed on screen, the word "sterilization" is highlighted while the voice-over talks about protecting children. The reason sterilization is in the resolution, of course, is that women often find it next to impossible to obtain procedures such as a tubal ligation if they're still of child-bearing age. Adults can make fully informed, conscious decisions that they do not want to have children and then discover doctors will refuse to perform the minor surgery involved because "you might change your mind." Doesn't matter if you already have multiple children and have decided that's enough, you've learned your family's medical history includes some potentially nasty disorders, or you simply do not want to be a parent, many physicians will still refuse to allow you to obtain a voluntary sterilization. Somehow that anti-choice crowd equates that with allowing minors to receive care for gender dysphoria.

The part where the stupid truly burns, of course, is when they suggest that children as young as 10 or 11 will be able to obtain prescription drugs or elective surgeries without parental consent. Does anyone with even half a brain believe there are physicians practicing who'd treat pre-pubescent minors without a parent or guardian present? Would a child even make it past the clinic receptionist?    

Then again, I find the whole trans-phobia phenomenon pretty strange to begin with -- trans people are not exactly everywhere so I don't get the fear factor at all. Ditto the paranoia about an occasional trans girl participating in sports and thus having an unfair advantage just through the possible possession of a penis. A few months ago there was a lot of fulminating about a trans woman on a college swim team who's came in first in a meet or two. Lots and lots of ranting about unfair advantage, especially from the young women who lost to her. What was totally ignored is that particular college athlete had been in quite a few meets and lost a bunch of them. If the having been born with a dick gave her a special advantage, her winning stats would be better than they are. 

In any case, it's definitely weird how the known existence of one trans person participating in a sport will suddenly have the bigots freaking out and apparently seeing trans people everywhere. I'm willing to bet that if you were to do a survey of college swimmers asking how many trans women are on swim teams the nation-wide answer would be "one." But that one person's existence has insecure cis people freaking out and warning that pretty soon hordes of men pretending to be trans will be trying to get on swim teams everywhere. It must be exhausting to be that paranoid and fearful all the time. 

And while we're on the subject of sports, why isn't anyone freaking out about girls playing traditional boys' sports, like football. One of our local high schools has at least one girl on its football team. I can't recall what position she plays*, but no one that I know of is throwing fits about it. On a macro level, I've noticed a number of articles this fall celebrating female high school football players, like the quarterback in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, whose team won their homecoming game 66-6. Of course, girls playing boys sports aren't view as threats because societal ingrained sexism doesn't take them seriously. It's more like, "How cute. She'll outgrow it."   

*I'm guessing either kicker or quarterback, as those seem to be the positions girls most commonly end up playing, although if she's fast on her feet running back would be a good bet, too.

When are we going to stop wasting our time?

The S.O. and I made a classic mistake (for us) last night. We decided to watch Real Time with Bill Maher. Once again we found ourselves being relieved we don't actually pay for HBO -- the S.O. has become quite adept at figuring out how to stream stuff free that is supposedly only available by subscription so the only cost was to our time. 

Maher really has crossed pretty far over the line into old-man-ranting-at-clouds-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn ridiculous geezer territory. Some of the shit that emerges from his mouth definitely falls into the totally out of touch moron category, some is flat out stupid, and some is. . . I don't know. Bizarre? I mean, one of the weirder things Maher did in his latest show was disagree with the idea that good comedy should punch up, not down. You know, have the balls to make people in power wince instead of attacking folks already being shit on by society. This was in reference to Dave Chappelle getting chastised for doing exactly that: punching down with transphobic jokes.

Of course, Maher himself is pretty transphobic. He's right there with the TERFs in saying that if you emerged into the world with a dick instead of a clit you can never be a "real" woman. He's jumped right on the right-wing bandwagon that is pushing for doing actual genital checks of female high school athletes to make sure the girls are really girls. Unreal. Why don't these concern trolls ever talk about doing similar checks in boys' locker rooms to make sure everyone claiming to be a dude actually has a penis? (Obvious answer: because the middle-aged male perverts who come up with these ideas have no interest in seeing dicks; they want an excuse to sexually abuse adolescent girls.) 

And then there's Maher's pet obsession. The man really hates fat people. All the troubles in the world apparently can be blamed on obesity. He does say some remarkably dumb stuff when it comes to obesity, like saying there are no fat 90-year-olds. Obviously, he's never worked in a nursing home. Hoyer lifts exist for a reason. There are a lot of nurse aides out there who suffer from bad backs because they've had to work with incredibly hefty old people. If your genetics want you to pack on poundage, it's damn hard not to even when you've lost most control over what you're fed.

Sometimes the people on the panel can make up for the fact that Bill Maher is a shit. Some pretty smart and witty people are still willing to go on his show. Unfortunately, this latest episode wasn't one of those nights. Matt Taibbi used to fall into the smart and witty category but last night he just wanted to do his pet rant about internet censorship. Lis Smith, also a smart person, fell into the same trap of just wanting to rant about one thing. And then there was Maher, who for some reason seemed to view Pete Buttigieg* as endangering the Democratic Party's mid-term election chances by being too openly, happily normal while gay. So basically the audience got treated to three separate monologues. Taibbi would do a couple sentences on his pet theme, Smith would talk about abortion being on the ballot in November (which it isn't, at least not in a literal sense), and Maher would shout at clouds.  

One of these years, maybe we'll learn. . .

*Speaking of Buttigieg, he's changed his residency to Michigan. I am going to be vaguely hopeful that one of these days he'll run for either Governor or Senator. He's smart, he's personable, and he manages to tell unpleasant truths in a way that doesn't piss most people off. Senator Stabenow is 72 now and has been in the Senate for over 20 years; she needs to concede that she's earned a rocking chair and retire gracefully. 

I hate fake surveys

As if listening to the impeachment hearing yesterday wasn't depressing enough, this morning the first item in my email was a thinly disguised fund-raising plea from the Democratic National Committee. It was masquerading as a poll and asked if the most hated woman in American (aka Hillary Clinton) should jump into the Presidential race. Unfortunately, none of the choices listed included "No Fucking Way!!"

I know Putin is scared silly by her and she would be a lot better than the Current Occupant, but I also know she ran a horrible campaign last time, neither she or her minions want to admit she ran a horrible campaign, and if past performance is any indicator of future results. . . Everyone on her team was so imbued with the belief that it was her turn that they either totally ignored or took for granted states and groups they really needed to pay attention to, like Michigan and Wisconsin and people of faith. I wonder how many religious voters even knew Hillary is a Methodist and is personally pretty devout? I'd guess zero to none.

In any case, from the discussions I've read and interview clips I've seen, she still hasn't figured out that it wasn't just Russian meddling that caused her to lose. She needs to look in the mirror more.

I wonder if she's working on becoming the Harold Stassen of the 21st century?

Sneetches, elites, and other tribal weirdness

I've been thinking about the bizarre tendency people have to separate themselves into groups, Us vs. Them. I saw a strange example recently in the RV group I'm part of on Facebook. People's minds can do some weird contortions in their efforts to differentiate themselves (the good guys, the elite, the people worth knowing) from the riff raff, the hoi polloi who aren't worthy of being associated with.

I already knew that the RV-ing world is full of ridiculous amounts of elitism and tribalism. The people with the high dollar Class As (the motor homes that resemble buses) are perceived as snobs by some other campers. I'm not sure why, other than the fact that it seems that many of the folks who buy brand new Class As tend to prefer camping at privately owned RV resorts rather than hanging out in state parks or doing dispersed camping in National Forests. But that's definitely not true for all of them -- when we've been campground hosts, there were always a few Class As around. Granted, most were not brand new Leviathans, but they were Class As.

There's also kind of a split in the Class C world between the folks who have the brand new equipment and obsess about keeping it looking like it just rolled off the dealer's lot ("OMG. My decals are fading!! What can I do?") and those folks who have older equipment and stopped worrying about waxing a long time ago. I cannot begin to fathom why anyone would want to wax an RV. . . but then I don't wax my car, and it's only a Focus.

There's the split between the RV owners who obsess about the interiors -- must make sure the flooring is perfect, have to cover the ugly wallpaper in the bathroom with glass tiles, must acquire lots of RV-themed knickknacks to clutter up the place and/or bounce off the walls when we hit some rough pavement -- and those owners who figure as long as it's clean and comfortable it doesn't need to look like a spread from House Beautiful.  They spend tons of time obsessing about decorating, finally hit the road, and then we're treated to posts about an alternator failing or tires blowing out.  Maybe if they thought less about how pretty the inside was and spent more time thinking about mechanical stuff, they wouldn't end up sitting by the side of the road waiting for a wrecker.

There are the RV owners who absolutely have to have full hookups (electric, water, sewer) before they'll "camp" anywhere and there are those who are sure it's not camping unless they're on a dispersed site in the middle of nowhere in a National Forest or on Bureau of Land Management land. You name it, and you've got one group that's totally for it and another group that thinks the opposite.

The weirdest example I've seen lately, though, of someone drawing a line between Us and Them was a dude who advised someone who was new to RV-ing to join an organization that operates RV "resorts" around the country. You pay for your membership and you get to camp at the properties that are affiliated with the organization/parent company/whatever. He laid it on thick about how by staying at these "exclusive" RV resorts you know you're safe because the riff raff like you find at state and national parks are kept out. You know, the resorts are gated and have private security. WTF?

The first bizarre part, of course, is that business of riff raff in state and national parks. If you're staying at a state-owned campground, you've paid for the privilege, and, depending on the campground, it may not have been a particularly cheap privilege. You're also limited as to how long you can linger in those campgrounds. No one in a state park is squatting there indefinitely. It's not an environment that is riff raff friendly. (FWIW, I am interpreting "riff raff" as low income, poor, possibly homeless.)

As for security, you know what you have at the privately owned resorts? Rent-a-cops, security guards whose training may have consisted solely of "drive around once an hour so visitors think we're doing something." I've known people who worked as security guards. The basic requirement for being hired was that they were still breathing and could stand upright. In contrast, if you stay at a public campground -- state or federal -- you're going to see commissioned law enforcement officers coming through on a regular basis. Real cops, not pretend ones, men and women who have had extensive training and actually know what they're doing.  When we camp hosted at a national park, we'd see a law enforcement ranger come through several times a day. They were a highly visible presence and a whole lot more intimidating than a rent-a-cop would have been. Why would anyone willingly delude themselves into believing that they were safer under the watchful eye of a mall cop when they could camp where there's real police?

It's not always tin foil hat time

As a rule, I tend to discount conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve the government. I'm a retired federal employee. I've seen first hand just how remarkably incompetent the government can be. Unfortunately, every so often an actual real world example comes along that can bolster the tin foil hat wearers' belief in a truly wide range of weirdness, especially when the real world example is something that has most people with two brain cells to rub together wondering how anyone anywhere could have believed what they were doing was a good idea.

The U.S. government does have, if not a long list, enough examples of really stupid projects and policies that they either pretended didn't exist or tried to deny once they were uncovered to make you wonder if some agencies have reverse IQ tests they use for hiring managers. Like the Tuskegee Experiment, an exercise in medical malpractice that served absolutely no useful purpose and sentenced innocent participants to suffer and die in particularly nasty ways. The supposed justification for the project was to observe the progress of untreated syphilis, a truly stupid rationale when the disease course of syphilis had been well-documented for decades and its final outcomes were extremely well-known.

The Public Health Service began the study in 1932 at a time when the treatments for syphilis could be as bad as the disease itself (injections of mercury or arsenic into the urethra, for example), but once penicillin became available a few years later the ethical thing to do was to stop the study and treat every participant. Except they didn't. And then they lied about it for decades.

Ditto the drug testing military intelligence did during the Cold War. For years there were rumors that the government had administered various hallucinogenic drugs to enlisted personnel without their knowledge. Oh, sometimes the men involved were aware they were part of a medical experiment.  Note the word "sometimes." What they often weren't aware of was what drugs were involved and when and how they might be administered. One poor sap, for example, had LSD slipped into his coffee and totally flipped out in public when he began hallucinating. Another committed suicide. Many suffered flashbacks and psychological problems for decades.

At the time the weirdness was going on the military did its best to keep it all super secret, but rumors did creep out. The S.O. and I even know someone who may have been a victim of the military's bizarre experiments: he wasn't in the Army very long, wound up with a medical discharge, and now collects a disability pension. He came back from the military with some odd personality quirks, and suffered enough "episodes" that he did a stint or two in the state mental hospital. If someone calls him crazy, he can say, "yes, I am, and here are the papers to prove it." He swore for years that the Army had experimented on him with LSD. We all laughed and made jokes about how he was crazy before he went in so how would he know the difference?

Except then we found out the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency both did a lot of experimenting with hallucinogenics and other drugs in the 1950's and '60's. Maybe our slightly odd neighbor wasn't lying after all.

Which brings me to the 1980's, Iran-Contra, and the tidal wave of cocaine that swept over the United States about thirty years ago. The S.O. and I just watched Kill the Messenger, a film based on the life of journalist Gary Webb. Webb was an investigative reporter in California who stumbled across another U.S. government operation that was unbelievably misguided and wound up doing lasting major damage to the country. Webb had been digging into stories related in various ways to drug dealing and drug trafficking.

After Webb had a story published highlighting the way local, state, and federal government benefited from forfeiture laws (i.e., the seizure of any and all property that could have been obtained using illegal drug trafficking money) he was approached by a woman whose boyfriend was about to be tried as a drug dealer. She had a copy of the transcript of grand jury proceedings that indicated a key government witness was a paid informant who had gone well beyond simply observing drug dealers in action. The prosecuting attorney's minions had screwed up and inadvertently included the document in a stack of other material requested during the discovery process. The transcript indicated the informant had been an active participant and worked with U.S. government agents in transporting cocaine from central America into the United States.

Webb was intrigued and began digging into it. It didn't take him long to discover that the story was even worse than the initial clues suggested. Turned out the U.S. government in the form of the Reagan administration and the CIA were so focused on helping the Contras fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua that they were willing to engage in multiple levels of shady dealings. Congress didn't want to provide funding for a covert dirty war in Central America so the CIA got creative. They actively facilitated smuggling thousands and thousands of pounds of cocaine into the United States and then passed the proceeds from the sales of the drugs on to the Contras in Nicaragua. End result? A cocaine and crack cocaine epidemic in this country. Dealers told Webb that there was so much cocaine coming in the market was saturated. They had so much to move they had trouble selling it. When the price of crack cocoaine dropped so low it was cheaper to get than a few 40-ouncers from the corner liquor store, you know the number of users is going to climb. In short, the CIA created the crack cocaine problem in America's inner cities.

Webb spent a lot of time investigating the story, tracked down various sources in Central America, and in general did a stellar job of journalism. His reporting was published as three part series in the San Jose Mercury News. So what was the reaction? The CIA freaked out, of course, and set out to kill the story and destroy Webb. They did a nice job of doing both. They managed to get the mainstream media -- both print and broadcast -- to paint Webb as someone who had a past record of shoddy work, that the story itself was unverifiable and basically a work of fiction, and no way, no how would an agency of the U.S. government ever do such a thing. Terrified of being cut off from the pathways of power inside the Beltway, the major news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times fell all over themselves trashing Webb instead of doing any in depth investigation themselves.  Somehow the fact that all their sources claiming Webb was wrong came from folks either inside the CIA or with ties to it wasn't a problem for them. Webb's career went down in flames, he wound up resigning his job with the Mercury News, and never worked as a journalist again. He died in 2004, becoming, so far as I know, the only suicide victim to manage to shoot himself in the head twice. (So, yes, there are quite a few people who believe Webb was whacked by someone doing wet work for the CIA. It would have been a delayed payback, but no one has ever accused the government of moving fast on anything.)

As we all now know, Webb was right. The CIA was indeed deeply enmeshed in peddling drugs to Americans so the Contras could fight the Communist scourge in Nicaragua. Webb's article caught the attention of Congresswoman Maxine Waters and other urban leaders. Various rocks got flipped over, and the proverbial fecal matter hit the fan. Within a few years, everyone who bothered to pay attention knew that Webb's accusations were dead on: One agency within the U.S. government had actively worked with drug smugglers and contributed in a major way to the same drug epidemic other agencies claimed to be fighting. There is a certain bizarre irony in the fact that while Nancy Reagan was busy telling America's young people to "just say No" Ronnie's boys at the CIA were hauling coke in by the C-130 load.

It is also worth noting that as in true in just about everything the CIA touches, in the end nothing good came of it. Inner cities in this country still haven't recovered from the crack epidemic. Americans were given one more reason to never trust anything our government tells us. If the CIA was willing to sell crack in Compton, why should we believe them when they say Area 51 doesn't exist and that they're not implanting RIF chips in people's butts?

And, despite all the money funneled to the Contras, the Sandinistas still won elections in Nicaragua-- the country has had a progressive, left of center, democratically elected government for a couple decades now. The country has in fact become one of those places that shows up on "Househunters International" occasionally as a destination for Americans looking for a safe and cheaper lifestyle than what's available in the U.S. (It looks nice. If it wasn't for the active volcanoes and devastating earthquakes, it might not be a bad place to live.)

In any case, if Congress was serious about cutting waste from the budget and eliminating unnecessary agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency would be a good place to start. They're consistently wrong on just about everything they do and they leave a trail of domestic wreckage and trashed international relations wherever they go.

Final thought: Kill the Messenger is worth watching. It's not great cinema, but it is a compelling and interesting story. Depressing, because you know that poor sap Gary Webb is just going to get totally screwed at the end, but nonetheless interesting. It also evokes waves of nostalgia in anyone who's ever worked for a newspaper -- it's a sad reminder of the glory days a mere 20 years ago when newspapers still had multiple reporters and relied on them for local news instead of conning unpaid local writers into contributing free web content.

Talk about shooting yourself in the metaphorical foot

Listening to NPR this morning. For a change, the most interesting news is international, like the troubled election going on in Kenya. Kenyans had voted earlier this year, but that election was nullified by the courts due to overwhelming evidence of widespread election fraud. I'd say this election is the mulligan, the do-over because they screwed up the first time, but it's apparently actually the third time this year that the Kenyans have tried to hold a nation-wide election.

Well, in what has to be one of the more bizarre opposition ploys I have seen, people who oppose the current government of President Uhuru Kenyatta are boycotting the election. You read that right. In order to register their opposition and try to bring about change to the existing government, they're going to stay home, just sit it out. The only people voting will probably be Kenyatta's supporters. Assuming, that is, that anyone at all votes. The latest report on the BBC mentioned violence and physical attacks on polling places, but it wasn't clear just who was instigating the violence -- the opposition? The party currently in power? Who knows. In any case, none of should be surprised when we hear that Kenyatta won re-election by an overwhelming margin.

I'd say people talking about boycotting voting in Kenya has to be the dumbest electoral ploy I've ever seen except it's not unusual. Not long ago the same thing happened in Spain. People who opposed the separatist movement sat out the election held in Catalonia to determine whether or not Catalonia should become an independent nation. Naturally, when most of the people voting were the ones who supported separatism the election results were in favor of independence. This happened despite the fact various polls showed that the separatists were a distinct minority in the region. If all the people who opposed separatism had bothered to vote Catalonian independence would now be a nonissue.

Apparently opponents of the existing government in Venezuela also did something similar a few months back -- decided they weren't going to dignify the socialist regime of President Maduro by participating in the election -- so, wow, what a surprise, Maduro is still in power. The country is a mess, but at least the opposition has its dignity intact.

We saw something similar happen in this country a year ago. Lots of people who didn't like either candidate very much, who claimed that they didn't want to vote for the "lesser of two evils" opted to not vote at all. We saw how well that worked out.

The stupid, it burns.

Holy wah, the stupid is running deep

I screwed up recently. I joined an RV discussion group on Facebook.

Now I already knew, thanks to having been a campground host, that some of the people who take to the road in motorhomes or drag travel trailers around aren't the brightest examples of humanity on the planet. We've seen people do some remarkably stupid stuff in campgrounds. To be honest, we've done some dumb stuff ourselves through inexperience or ignorance, although I'd like to believe nothing that comes close to plumbing the depths of stupid I'm seeing in the questions people ask.

For example, it floors me to read posts from people admitting in a public forum that they just dropped $150,000 or more on a leviathan (class A motorhome) but they have no clue how to back it up, level it, or even figure out what some of the cabinets are for. Here's a clue, people: if it's an empty storage space, you use it to hold stuff you don't want sitting around out in the open. For some people, that might be board games and DVDs. For others, it could be extra bedding. The whole point of an empty cabinet is that you can fill it with whatever items you personally need to stash somewhere. You don't need to ask the Internet for permission to use any empty cabinet to store your Captain Crunch, your DVDs, or your sex toys.

But I digress, at least a little. In the last 24 hours I have seen a person ask about getting a 50 foot extension cord to connect a 50 amp service because they can't back into a space and there aren't any pull-through sites, another person inquire about jacking up a leviathan to "get the back wheels off the ground and level the motorhome," and a third blockhead inquire about whether or not a 1-ton diesel pickup was powerful enough to tow the giant 5th wheel trailer he plans to buy. The person who wanted advice on leveling was apparently unaware that the brand new motorhome she'd bought had self-levelers. She was at a Corps of Engineers campground so there couldn't have a whole lot of slope to the site. The self-levelling should have been more than enough. For sure she didn't know you can buy plastic blocks to place under your rig's wheels, kind of like adult legos, at any Walmart. How can anyone invest in an RV and not even know where to buy accessories for it?! (Personally, we carry pieces of scrap lumber, but the S.O. and I are notoriously cheap frugal. We are, after all, the same people who decided a free used llama stall mat makes a great patio rug.)

In any case, these are all people who are apparently planning to go straight from never having owned an RV into playing around with the largest, most awkward to use equipment they can find. No intermediary stages of owning a pop-up camper, a conversion van, or a small travel trailer. Nope. Straight from being couch potatoes to living the good life in the biggest RV they can finance.

And then having made that decision instead of actually going to an RV dealership and talking with experts, you know, maybe looking at the 5th wheel of your dreams and then asking the sales rep "Just what does it take to tow something that big?" you decide to consult the collective ignorance of a Facebook discussion group.

Jesus wept.

On the other hand, the cheerful ignorance does explain why there are so many ads out there for not very used equipment, leviathans with only a few hundred miles on them and travel trailers that were used for less than 4 months. If you go into something not having a clue just what it is you're doing, it's not going to take you very long to decide it was a colossal mistake.

Another installment in the ongoing series Why Businesses Fail

Also known as The Stupid, It Burns.

A while back the good people of Arizona approved a ballot proposal to raise the state minimum wage. Proposition 206 mandated that the state minimum wage, which had been set at $8.05 per hour, would increase to $10 in 2017 and will be raised incrementally to $12 per hour by the year 2020. If Proposition 206 hadn't passed, the minimum wage would still have gone up this year but only by a dime to $8.15. Arizona law already requires, thanks to a proposition approved in 2006, that minimum wage be adjusted annually for increases in the cost of living.

Naturally, many business owners had the usual reaction to this change in the law. They freaked out. They did a lot of posturing about how it was going to drive them out of business while all sounding as if each was a special case subjected to increased costs that none of their competitors had to deal with. This is typical. I've blogged about it before. The self-centered business owner totally ignores that fact that if he's having to pay his dishwashers or his widget assemblers an additional $1.95 per hour, so are his competitors down the street. The competitive playing field is still level; no one business has suddenly gained or lost an advantage over any other. It may be true that in the short term he or she will have to eliminate a position or two while they figure out how to compensate for the added expense in payroll, but it's going to be equally true that every other business is going to be doing the same thing.

So how have various businesses responded? Well, I've noticed a couple interesting examples lately of What Not to Do. Both examples are restaurants. In the case of one, a steakhouse, they've tacked on an 18% surchange to every meal to, as they helpfully explain, help pay for the increase in the minimum wage. Holy wah, the stupid, it burns.

You're telling me that because you're now paying the dishwashers in the kitchen $10 an hour instead of $8.05, my $25 steak dinner is now going to cost me $29.50? Joe Shmoe washing dishes gets an additional $1.95; No Longer Loyal Customer gets hosed to the tune of $4.50. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that charging every customer in the place an 18% surcharge goes way beyond compensating for a higher payroll cost. Plus, of course, no one particularly enjoys hearing a business owner whine about being so frelling stupid that they can't figure out a way to cover added expenses without standing up and screaming to the world that they're asshats who would prefer to pay their employees nothing at all if only they could figure out a way to get away with it.

Second example: ate at a local place that has a lot of vaguely Mexican food on the menu. I say vaguely Mexican because Safford has apparently suffered from the influence of having way too many snowbirds with timid tastebuds wintering around here. So far all the "Mexican" places we've tried have served salsa made with chilis that seemingly achieve the impossible: score a negative number on the Scoville scale. But I digress. Naturally, the establishment of which I speak does the bowl of corn chips and some salsa as an automatic freebie on the tables. Except the chips and salsa are no longer free. The server made a point of saying that if we wanted a second bowl, we'd have to pay for them. They've also stopped doing free refills on drinks. Why? Because minimum wage went up. Not quite as annoying or as in your face as the surcharge, but still annoying, particularly when the astute diner recognizes that chips and soft drinks are some of the items on the menu with the highest profit margins. A throw-away cup for a soft drink costs the restaurant more than the soda it contains. It costs the restauranteur literally pnnies to refill your Coke when the glass runs dry.

In any case, what the restaurant has done is taken two of the most visible and cheapest ways to curry customer good will (endless chips and free refills on soft drinks and coffee) and eliminated them, a truly dumb move when the competition hasn't done something similar. Again, the stupid, it burns.

So how would I, the ominiscient blogger, have dealt with the increased labor costs? First, of course, I'd have kept my mouth shut. Second, I'd have started preparing for it as soon as I heard the proposition passed and made various adjustments to the menu accordingly. No doubt some business owners were indulging in a fantasy that the state supreme court would rule the change illegal, but that hasn't happened, at least not yet. Besides, it was inevitable that wages would climb. Anyone thinking they'd stay static was living in a dream world.

Anyway, shifting prices up slightly across the board -- 50 cents here, maybe a dollar there -- would be a lot less noticeable than a huge honking extra charge tacked on at the end. People willing to pay $20 for a rack of ribs or a steak aren't suddenly going to turn vegan if the price shifts to $21.50.  Look for stuff you can eliminate. From watching Gordon Ramsey in action I know way too many restaurants waste food. They provide side salads no one eats and serve portions that are much bigger than they need to be. (Which could be the subject of a different rant: the unrealistic ideas people end up with concerning healthy serving sizes based on what they see heaped on some restaurant plates.)

A small example of eliminating waste: we've eaten at a couple of places locally that do the usual salsa and chips but with a small twist. They bring you the basket of chips and a small bowl. The salsa is in squeeze bottles so you can use as little or as much as you wnat; definite reduction in waste there. For that matter, restaurants could eliminate the chips and salsa entirely. People munch on them when the chips are staring them in the face, but quite a few wouldn't care if they vanished. It's always struck me as a little weird that restaurants would put out a free appetizer while also having half a dozen other types of appetizers listed on the menu.

I am thinking that I'll ask The Younger Daughter to keep an eye on how those particular businesses fare over the coming year. It'll be interesting to see if they're still around a few months from now. Their floundering attempts suggest their days are numbered, but you never know. Sometimes even the most inept business owners manage to survive despite their best attempts to destroy themselves.

As for finding some Mexican food that isn't so bland it could be served in nursing homes, I'm beginning to think that we'll have to venture south of the border. The Younger Daughter tells me that co-workers have mentioned there are good restaurants in Agua Prieta, although I'm not sure it's worth the hassle to go that far.

Post Election Thoughts

Holy wah, Americans are dumb. We as a people are so good at metaphorically shooting ourselves in the foot it's unreal. Granted, Hillary Clinton had so much baggage that it would have overloaded a Conestoga wagon drawn by a dozen oxen, but still. . . It astounds me that so many people would willingly and cheerfully vote against their own self interests. Worried about Social Security staying viable? Then vote for Republicans who have been trying to get rid of it for the past 80 years. Worried about jobs getting outsourced? Then vote for the guy who has all his own products made in other countries. Concerned about family values? Put the guy who's been accused of raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old, cheated on his first two wives, and is now married to a high dollar hooker who did soft core porn into the White House. The stupid, it burns. . .

Then again, given that for the past 8 years the news media abetted the Republicans in convincing the public we're already living in some sort of dystopian hellhole with rising crime rates, a cratering economy, and misery in general, the results are no surprise. There was evidence all around that the economy was actually doing quite well -- businesses complaining about not being able to find applicants for job openings they had posted, new construction going up, crime rates falling -- but we're all pretty good at ignoring what's right in front of our faces. An alluring fantasy that lines up with what we'd like to believe is always so much more attractive than reality.

Of course, now that the Yam in Human Form has won the election, all the horrible things Faux News has been saying for 8 years were occuring under an Obama administration are about to happen for real in a Trump one. The global financial markets are in a tail-spin, the stock market is in free fall, there's a fair amount of panicking going on. The gullible public may have bought Trump's hype about being a successful businessman, but the actual economic experts know perfectly well that he's an idiot who got lucky by inheriting money and indulging in shameless self-promotion.

I do have mixed feelings about Hillary losing. On the one hand, I thought she should never have been a candidate to begin with. Instead of being as egoistic as any other politician, once she lost in 2008 she should have looked at the calendar and acknowledged she'd had her shot, missed, and it was time to move on, focus on building the Democratic Party as a whole and not just her own machine. She had a chance to work with the party to promote younger politicians, the next generation of policy makers, and instead it was all about Hillary and it being her turn next. Well, that worked out real well, didn't it? The voting public handed her a rather resounding FOAD.

On the other hand. . . Trump. Holy wah. We are so fucked. 

What I'm wondering at the moment is how long it's going to take for gas to hit $5 a gallon. Anyone else want to bet it gets there by New Year's?

A feeble grasp on reality

One of the key themes of this political season has been Donald Trump's repeated assertions that he's going to make America great again, he's going to bring back the manufacturing jobs that vanished overseas, he's going to make it harder for countries like China to export cheap consumer goods to the United States. Polls of his supporters show that something liek 65% of them agree that protective tariffs are a good idea -- we do indeed need to stop the flow of cheap consumer goods ASAP.

Leaving aside some of the other questions most sane people have about Trump's campaign, I've got just one query this morning: just where do all those America First people plan to shop once the shelves in Walmart go bare? The last time I saw a statistic, something like 98% of the merchandise in Walmart came from another country. Ditto Family Dollar, Dollar General, and all the other cheap places to shop.

Actually, I have a second query. Just how loud are these same America First people going to howl when U.S. labor costs are factored into what are now incredibly cheap goods? One reason many businesses moved manufacturing overseas was to keep costs low. What happens when the price of their widgets climbs? Will people still buy them? Will they be self-reflexive enough to realize that they shouldn't be complaining because they got exactly what they asked for?

I doubt it.

I cheerfully predict that if and when Walmart ever ceases to be perceived as bargain central, consumers will howl like wounded banshees and be unbelievably angry that they're now stuck paying for the policies they pushed for. After all, if they truly believed that it's wrong to buy stuff made in China they wouldn't be shopping at Walmart now.

Missing the obvious

I was in the Woman Cave doing some sewing the other day. As usual, the radio was on WGGL, the NPR station from the Michigan Tech campus. They carry a 2-hour talk show, "On Point," from 10 to noon every day. It being only a couple days after the event, it was no surprise that the first hour was devoted to a lot of bloviating about the bomb detonated in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. Two things struck me.

First, the complete sense of self-delusion and denial in the repeated statements that the U.S. will not give in to fear, we're going to respond with resolve and courage and general bravery. Bullshit. Osama won 15 years ago. Ever since 9/11 as a country we've been running scared. We see terrorists and potential terrorists every time we hear an Arabic name. We freak out when we see a woman wearing a hijab -- if head scarves scare the crap out of us, just how brave are we? We collectively agreed to treat a handful of fanatics as though they posed as existential threat, which is nonsense, and have been paying the price ever since. We're more risk of being shot by accident by a toddler who found a parent's unsecured handgun than we are of being the victim of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, we talk a lot about how brave and courageous we are while behaving like the world's biggest cowards.

Second, the complete cluelessness about motive. Lots and lots of bloviating about the influence of on-line recruiting and the possible impact of trips the man made back to Afghanistan, as if all it takes are words from an outside source to inspire someone to turn radical. Neither of the so-called experts said one word about the fact that for words to have much impact they have to land on fertile ground. At the same time that news reports discussed the fact the man's family experienced harassment and discrimination on a pretty steady basis for years because they were Muslim, the experts were musing about what could possibly have turned someone who'd been in this country since he was 7 years old into a "terrorist." The stupid it burns.

The big question isn't what might have motivated a 28-year-old man who'd been in this country for 3/4s of his life to turn radical. What turned a person described by the neighbors as an "ordinary kid" into someone buying bomb components through Ebay was a whole lot of little incidents that eventually hit some trigger point. And it wasn't stuff happening in some Arab country -- it was what was happening in New Jersey. It was day after day, week after week, month after month of Islamaphobic neighbors calling in bullshit noise complaints, it was the city hassling his family's restaurant if it stayed open one minute too late but ignoring other restaurants in the same neighborhood doing the same thing, it was being repeatedly being accused of being a jihadi or called a raghead simply for looking Arab -- although Afghanis aren't Arabs, but most Americans are too dumb to know that.

There's a well-established principle in sociology and education: if you label someone and if you label them over and over again, sooner or later they're going to decide to live up (or down) to the label. Tell kids they're smart and they start to behave as though they are. Tell them they're dumb and before long they can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Tell young men they're not wanted because they're terrorists and, what do you know? They start buying 6-quart pressure cookers and filling them with shrapnel.

Of course, it's a whole lot easier to blame videos produced by Da'esh than it is to do some serious soul-searching here at home. Experts aren't going to get booked on to talk shows if they're honest enough to say we're fucking ourselves -- everyone wants a scapegoat after all -- so we're going to keep right on fucking ourselves. Once again I'm really happy I live in a rural area.

Wild optimism at the museum

The Politics and Voting exhibit came down the other day, and with it out of the way the S.O. and I started tackling what's left in the attic. With nothing up against the wall in that part of the museum, it was possible to remove the lattice that screened the loft and get things down without having to go through the office.

And what did we find hiding up there? A couple huge boxes, the kind in which toilet paper used to get delivered to stores, stuffed full of hats. I'd been curious about those boxes because I could see them through the lattice but couldn't get at them until quite a few smaller boxes got moved out of the way. The ginormous hat boxes did cause me once again to think dark thoughts: there were loose cards in the boxes giving identifying information (e.g., "donated by. . ." or "worn by. . .") but none of them were attached to any particular hats. More artifacts with no known provenance. I'm not sure just how many face palms that calls for, but I'm thinking Multiple. And of course they were all just dumped into the boxes. No attempt whatsoever at providing any padding or tissue wrapping or anything at all to protect them. You know what happens when you pile hats a couple feet high in large cardboard carton? The ones on the bottom end up looking like pancakes. Okay, so maybe it calls for a "The Stupid It Burns."

Obviously, the hats were not the source of the title shown above. Nope, the wild optimism comes from another attic find, the smaller boxes blocking access to the hats. When we started clearing out that attic, I got asked about various things that had been donated to the museum over the years and I kept telling people they might be in the attic. Lots of boxes I hadn't gotten to yet.

Well, now I can tell people that I don't have a clue what happened to the missing objects. Turned out most of the boxes in the attic were filled with pageant books, or the equivalent thereof. Back in 1969, the Historical Society sponsored a history pageant. As part of that pageant, they put together a program book that included the script for the play and a few essays on local history, most of which focused on the history of the missionaries, especially (no surprise here) Father (later Bishop) Frederic Baraga. They had several thousand copies of that book printed. The following year, they did another pageant (same script, one assumes). Had another book put together for it. And then L'Anse and Arvon Township celebrated their centennials so in 1971 yet another book got printed. And in 1972-73. There was a long hiatus, but then in the early 1980s some of the people who been involved in the original pageants decided it would nice to try again so they put together an ethnic pageant. Naturally, it included a book.

Why the actors in the pageant got stuck looking like extras from "F Troop" is a mystery to me. Loin cloths were made from Naugahyde; shirts and leggings were faux suede.  

I've been told by some people that the 1972-73 book, also known as "the one with the red cover," is the best of the lot. I don't know. It does have a good description of the archeological work done at Sand Point. Still, I kind of lean towards the ethnic pageant: it's got a nice essay by Matti Kaups about Finns in Baraga County, there's another interesting article by Myrtle Tolonen (former KBIC tribal chairman) on Native American history. . . to me, the ethnic pageant book seems to have the highest quality of writing. Too bad more people didn't think that way at the time it came out. And this is where the wild optimism comes in.

Turns out most of the boxes in the attic were packed full of pageant books. Hundreds and hundreds of pageant books. I already knew we had a lot of copies of books that our now deceased president had told people we were sold out of. Over the past 3 years as I've worked my way through various boxes and file drawers and the more accessible stuff I kept finding more copies of all of them. And then I pulled 11 cases -- eleven!! -- of the ethnic pageant books down from the attic. Each box holds between 80 and 100 books. We've got over 1,000 copies of a book that if we're lucky we sell maybe one a year.

It got worse. That book with the red cover? At least a dozen cases of it. The L'Anse-Arvon centennial? Not quite as bad, but still multiple boxes. Multiple cases of unsold calendars. Two cases of a postcard book that I think we've sold one copy of in the past 4 years. Just who was the incurable optimist who thought that the fact that a mountain of unsold publications was not a sign that maybe it wasn't such a hot idea to subsidize Globe Printing by ordering thousands of copies of a book at a shot? By the time they did the ethnic pageant, they already had dozens of cases of unsold books from their previous four publishing attempts. I've dealt with printers. I somehow doubt Globe told the Historical Society that the minimum press run had to be thousands of copies of anything. What type of rich fantasy life did the person who suggested that as the order have? There are barely 7,000 people in the whole county -- who did they think was going to buy all those books?

Bottom line is that the attic that I'd been assured was full of stuff that people had donated was actually half full of unsold historical society publications. Words almost fail me. I wish I possessed the fluency to curse in Finn (my mother's curses were always way more colorful than anything I can come up with in English).

You want to hear the best part? We sell these books in our little gift shop for $5 each. In a typical season, we'll unload a couple, usually purchased by people who recognize a relative in one of the pageant photos. However, there's a used book store in another U.P. community that gets more tourist traffic than we do. The owners come into the museum about once a year, buy a few pageant books, and then resell them at $20 per copy. It amazes me. I guess they get the tourists with money to burn on weird souvenirs and we get the locals wondering if it's worth $5 to get the copy of the book with their grandmother on the cover.

Oh, and that "rifle" the pioneer woman is holding? It's a toy single shot cap gun manufactured by a company in Kentucky.

So which is she?

Super villain whose reach extends across time or frail old lady worried that her stash of Depends is about to run out?

I speak, of course, of Hillary Clinton and alt-right cognitive dissonance. The same people who will go on at great length about all the (nonexistent) signs that Hillary is failing physically seem to think she's capable of engaging in time travel to have people whacked. Julian Assange's lawyer dies in an accident the coroner rules a suicide and suddenly it's something Hillary did. Their reasoning? This summer Assange has been hinting that Wikileaks has dirt on Hillary, that he's going to do a data dump that will destroy her campaign. After all, there were all those leaked Democratic National Committee emails released just before the July convention that showed that the party insiders weren't too thrilled with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Supposedly Assange has even more troublesome material stashed and is just waiting for the right time to use it. And that's why the lawyer got whacked, as a warning to Assange.

Only one problem with that latest conspiracy theory. The lawyer stepped in front of a train back in April.

I repeat, April. Almost three full months before the Democratic national convention. Four full months before the lunatic theory about Hillary having him whacked as a warning to Assange showed up in my Facebook feed. The lunatic conspiracy theory meme makes it pretty clear that whoever began circulating it thinks the lawyer died because of the threatened still-to-come data dump. The stupid, it burns.

On the other hand, massive props to Hillary. The alt-right hates Obama and are notable for blaming him for everything, but even at their most fervent they've never seriously suggested he was capable of time travel. Way to go, Hill,you've achieved another first for women everywhere.

Another bad idea

Pastel colored hand guns. I'm told they're supposed to appeal to the ladies. How fracking stupid do the gun companies think women are? If you're interested in a hand gun for whatever reason (personal protection, penis envy, Midol makes you crazy, who knows?), why on earth would any woman with two brain cells to rub together want a weapon that looks like it's an accessory for a Barbie playhouse?

The S.O. and I stopped into the Cabela's store in Prairie du Chien recently. We were camping at a nearby Corps of Engineers campground (Blackhawk Park, located a few miles north of Lock & Dam No. 9 on the Mississippi) for a couple nights, noticed the Cabela's enroute to the campground, and decided to check out the camping and RV-ing stuff the store carried. The first thing I noticed (as I usually do when stepping into a Cabela's) was, holy wah, their prices are high compared to some other vendors. The next thing were the clamps on the stuffed moose's ears -- that was bizarre. I really should have taken a photo. But I digress.

Shortly after we stepped into the store, a Cabela's minion thrust a stack of advertising material at me while doing a sales pitch for their credit card. Considering that we get to a Cabela's about once every 3 years (I'm much more of an REI type when it comes to outdoor gear), there was no way I'd fall for the credit card pitch but I did take the flyers and then found a convenient place to sit and read through them while test driving a folding recliner in the camping area (conclusion: overpriced and uncomfortable). Lo and behold, tucked into the Mother's Day specials was a pitch for a 9 mm Ruger offered in multiple colors, including purple.

Yep, you read that right. Purple. Sort of. The official name of the color is "Lady Lilac." It appears that in their never-ending quest to make firearms attractive to persons of all ages the manufacturers are resorting to making weapons look more and more like toys. You know, if you're wondering why toddlers are killing more Americans than terrorists do perhaps the answer can be traced back to the morons at various companies who decided women would prefer to purchase handguns that strongly resemble toys. You know, if it looks like a toy to me, just what does it look like to the kids in the households where women are dumb enough to own them? If you want to own a gun, ladies, at least invest in a weapon that looks lethal, not cute.

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.