Showing posts with label Miscellaneous assholery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miscellaneous assholery. Show all posts

Aug 2, 2012

Joshua for president

Now here's a feel-good story for you. Joshua Smith is nine. He heard his hometown, Detroit, was broke. So he set up a lemonade and popcorn stand in front of his modest home. He dedicates the proceeds to the city, to pay down its debt.

I will not be cynical about Joshua. Good kid. Willing to work. Heart in the right place. Plus, undoubtedly, other virtues once associated with the idea of being American.

However, I'm a little concerned about the city he is trying to help. Detroit is, of course, ruled by grasping politicians who control a regulatory Stasi even Honecker would have been proud of. Unt dey haf ways. That's why Detroit is broke.

Who can doubt that  someone with a badge is checking on this lad? Street vending license? Health department license? Zoning approval? Local EPA-like organization hazmat clearances? City, county, state, and federal tax ID number? Sales tax permit?  Compliance with EOE dictates?  Timely filed reports to OSHA?

Young men like Josh both irritate and frighten the Hacks of City Hall (and Congress etc.).

For one thing, they  cringe at yet another shot of publicity calling attention to the results of their stupid and venal ways.  Worse yet, they detest a demonstration that a nine-year-old boy knows more about the problems and their solutions than they do.

Of course there's one large structural problem with Joshua's plan. When he turns his profits over to the city he is, by definition, handing money to the politicians. They will piss it away. Or steal it.






Jul 12, 2012

The Honey Trap or, "Why We're Broke"

Iowa again; no apologies.

Even in Hicksville a fellow can find excellent evidence to counter the widely accepted fallacy that government officials are occasionally smart enough to pour piss out of a boot.

I suppose this one caught my attention because a certain number gives me something in common with a big Iowa DNR enterprise. Calculating my income and outgo for last year, I wound up with an operating profit of $4,230.*  Coincidentally, so did the DNR owned and operated Honey Creek Resort.

There's one slight difference. I am not in hock for $30 million, meaning I don't have to stick a gun in my neighbors' ribs and lift the interest payment on $30 million from their wallets.

A few years ago DNR commissars got together with dullards in the legislature  and Governor Tom Vilsack.  There's no hard evidence they were smoking, drinking, or injecting mind-altering substances at the party, but you can be forgiven for harboring suspicion because, collectively,  they decided they were experts in the resort business. A flurry of architecting and market studying and public relationing followed. And borrowing.

In 2006 Honey Creek Resort opened its mortgaged doors down on Lake Rathbun, itself a government invention. (The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ignored the banjos and throttled the unobjectionable little Chariton River. I don't really know why. The best guess seems to be a Corps of Engineers desired to economically stimulate itself by giving the Corps of Engineers something new to  manage, but that's a subject for another essay.)

And the Honey joint has been sucking on taxpayers ever since. Even the DNR admits it and in a left-handed way concedes there is no exit strategy.  New DNR Boss Chuck Gipp:

Some legislators have argued Honey Creek should be sold. Gipp says the state should keep it. “At this point in time, unless there’s somebody that comes along and is willing to pay what the worth of what that facility is, we’re not going to sell it at 10-cents-on-the-dollar. That would be foolish,” 


Mr. Gipp, incidentally, is a conservative small-government Republican. He was in the legislature when the Honey Creek Dacha was approved. He voted to sign my name to the IOU. If he's embarrassed that the asset is now worth 10 per cent of the debt, it doesn't show.

As I say, it's only a little Iowa issue, but, 'course, if you root around in your own state's forays into enterprises requiring several sentient neurons, who knows what you might find. Thirty million here, thirty million there -- pretty soon you're talking about enough money to send a First Lady on a couple-three vacations.

---
*An estimate. If an audit proves it unreliable, I claim the same poetic license His Ineptness gets when he reports, oh, say, the unemployment or inflation statistics.



Jun 14, 2012

Texas justice

The urge to kill neighbors who blast high-decibel rock across the block is understandable. It is not defensible, and a jury in Texas got it right.

Danaher was part of a loud party in the wee hours. Rodriguez got a gun, walked onto Danaher's driveway and, after a long and moronic argument fueled by the demon rum, shot him dead.

He claimed self-defense under the Texas stand-your-ground law.  The jury disagreed, even after learning that Danaher and some of his partying pals added their own boozy stupidity to the fracas.

Ladies and Gentlemen, when we initiate a confrontation, intrude on our neighbor's property, and then kill him we are not "standing our ground."  We are  behaving like an especially stupid asshole who misses the whole point of self-defense statutes.

Their purpose is to permit lethal response to a gratuitous threat of lethal force. It is a doctrine designed to allow you to preserve your life, not your ego.

Nor even your right to be free of 100-decibel juvie music intruding on your sleep.  That's a job for the cops.

This guilty verdict should sustain the arguments for stand-your-ground by making the point clearer. It becomes part of the case law, and we ought to cite it freely when ever we are contesting the issue with the dupes of Ste. Sarah.

Jun 11, 2012

Shrewd Al Sharpton

Romney said  there's only a limited amount of money available to hire teachers, cops, and firemen.

That gave Al Sharpton the theme for his daily diatribe. Sarcastically, he just asked if we really wanted to be  nation of "fewer firefighters, teachers, and first responders."

Notice the omission of  "police officers."

Sharpton knows his audience.
.

Jun 8, 2012

Being a devout Philistine, I wouldn't reach across the table for a bite of fat duck liver sausage. If someone forced a gob of pay dee foy grass on me, I'd get a doggie bag and save it for catfish bait.

Furthermore -- and even if you could double for the young Marilyn Monroe --  if you put that crap in your mouth and suddenly wished to kiss me, I would delay the pleasure until you wiped out a quart of Lavoris.

So, why do I have this notion that the Constitution of the United States would be well served if someone flew to Berkeley, choked down a piece of diseased duck organ, and waited calmly, a Louisville Slugger in hand, for the first phucking phood cop to approach the table?


---

h/t -- J


May 15, 2012

Father of the Year

I understand the impulse to call the cops on your teenage kid.  It's an urge a father should resist, and I predict a bad outcome for a family down in Everly.

The head of the household was rooting around in his 17-year-old's bedroom. He found a little pot and some drug paraphernalia, so he called the sheriff and invited Officer Friendly to search the rest of the house. More contraband was discovered, and Pops waved bye-bye to Junior as the forces of law and order hauled him off to  the clink.

Family values, eh?

Better alternatives suggest themselves. You might have been able to talk to the kid. If not, a boxing lesson was in order, from you if you're fit enough or otherwise  from a well-muscled uncle, maybe. Choosing to invite the po-po to handle your family dysfunction leads to problems you weren't smart enough to think of. Among them:

1. Sooner or later the cops are going to send him back, and Father's Day at your house is likely to be a restrained celebration.

2. You're probably stuck with him for longer than you planned. The arrest makes him a good deal less employable. Even the Army won't be anxious to take him off your hands.

3. If your motive was to teach the lad a good lesson, you undoubtedly did: "My Old Man is a Treacherous Bastard."  


















May 9, 2012

Losing Lugar

We may need to supply mouth guards to every liberal and neocon (as though they really are two separate snake balls) in America. Indiana fomented a national tragedy by tarring and feathering  Senator Richard Lugar in yesterday's GOP primary. Already the establishment politicians have ground their teeth down to nubs.

Without Lugar the Senate is doomed to deadlock. Worse,  the era of "collegiality" and  "bipartisanship" is in danger of doing a do-do.

----

Bipartisanship:

Senator Lugar: I'm getting bored with this, Ted. You let me push my wars in Afghanistan and Iran and I'll support your $2 billion to hire more cops and teachers. Okay?

Senator Kennedy: We're getting close,  but you get one war or the other, not both. C'mon, I got Harvard AND Williams to worry about.

Lugar:
Okay, Afghanistan, then. But  I also want that $250 million for Wabash River beautification. Hell, we're borrowing it all from the Chinese, anyway.


Kennedy: Done! Let's go to the Monicle in a bipartisan manner and find a lobbyist to pay and drink martinis and be collegial together. 

May 2, 2012

Hey Jack, you seen my boots?

Let's say this college student got caught in a dragnet. Let's say he was hauled to a California Lubyanka. Let's say he was told he would be released and driven home. Let's say he was then tossed into a tiny holding cell and left there for five days, without food, water, or a toilet.  The reason? "We just forgot."

And let's add, just for good measure, that the jailers accidentally left a dose or two of meth in that cell.

Now, what would you call authorities like that? Incompetent? Criminally insane? Thugs? Guards-in-training for the next Dachau?

Wrong, Bunkie. You should call them dedicated employees of your federal government, specifically of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

.

May 1, 2012

A sterling idea

The  Republican lawmaker probably didn't mean to be  taken too seriously when he said the deadlocked Iowa legislature should throw up its hands, go home, and try again next year. I suspect he was just amusing himself  by jerking chains.

Our Capitol Theatre of the Absurd is skivvy-knotted over -- you guessed it -- how much to extort and spend. Most of the hot air is being belched over commercial property taxes which are too high. Republicans want to cut them. Democrats, secure in their knowledge that all business people are thieving plutocrats, don't.

If our solons go home without writing a budget, the state would, theoretically, have to shut down. And we learn the results from Senate Boss Michael Gronstal, who represents  AFSCME, SIEU, the teacher's union, and, incidentally at best, the people who elected him.

“Therefore, one-quarter of all people in nursing homes would be thrown out ... and schools would lose thousands of teachers. It’s not really a plan that works.”

Of course. And conservatives, being what they are, would delay evicting your nonagenarian grandma from the care center until a nice January blizzard. Just to make the point more vividly. Gurneys in the snow banks. What a photo op.

---

Both sides bring considerable financial lunacy to the tax debate.  Democrats argue that lower business rates will mean higher residential rates. Quite true. Republicans say,"So what?" although in much subtler terms and accompanied by various plans to delay and disguise the rape of the smaller taxpayer.

Neither likes to soil its hands with the ultimate solution to confiscatory  property taxes. Which is, broadly sketched, to ravish goofy spending programs, swinging sabres and thrusting spears with all the fervor of a Mongol horde riding down a Crimean village.

True, school districts might have to do way with a few administrators who never deal with an actual student from one year to the next.  Cities and towns would face survival without the services of a a third-assistant deputy  zoning administrator. Other horrors would likewise exist, but, in the end, the more lightly taxed proletarian might no longer need to pick his neighbor's pocket to finance great-gram's bedroom.













Apr 19, 2012

Working at the outermost boundaries of human thought...

I first heard that phrase decades ago from the lips of Kingman Brewster, president of  Yale. I was a a working-stiff reporter, and Connecticut Bureau Chief John Armstrong sent me over to interview him about a Yale tuition increase.

The charming Dr. Brewster explained that the new and complicated tuition structure would actually save money for the students even as it fattened Yale coffers.*  Besides, even if it didn't, it was a small price for student access to professors "working at the outermost boundaries of human thought."

I filed a report including but short-shrifting that bit of puffery and concentrated on trying to explain what the incredibly dense set of new tuition rules would actually mean to Yalies. But I never forgot about all that ivory tower outermosting, and I have since heard it repeated verbatim by academic after academic -- usually when they were in their fund-raising mode.

---

Now it is quite a long way in both time and space from Brewster-at-Yale to little Buena Vista college down in Storm Lake where a Ph.D'ed lady decided to outermost think about overdosing her students with coffee.


The study began Monday afternoon and after a couple of hours, the students began showing the effects of excessive caffeine ingestion and were taken to Buena Vista Regional Medical Center in Storm Lake. Medical authorities estimate the students ingested about 6,000 milligrams of caffeine.


A dose becomes a threat of  (sic) body functions at about 6,200 milligrams. The students remain hospitalized for observation. University Dean of Students Doctor Meg McKeon, in a University-wide e-mail, said the administration is very concerned and is conducting an investigation.


I don't usually think in milligrams, so I looked it up on the internet. The caffeine content of a cup of coffee varies from roughly 95mg to 200mg. The high-end concentration seems to be about what speed freaks use when they can't get hold of their meth contact.

So, Ms. Professor fed the kids the equivalent of some 30 cups of high-test Arbuckles in about two hours? Enough to send them to the emergency room.

Pardon me for suggesting that the outermost limits of common sense were violated. And for suggesting that, in addition to the suspension, this outermost thinker ought to be kicked soundly and repeatedly in her outermost ass.

---

*Dr. Brewster, needless to say, was a Keynesian.

Apr 18, 2012

Blowing up cows and stealing the hookers' rubbers

Sometimes you shouldn't read below the fold.

In the high Colorado Rockies a bunch of cows sought winter shelter in a cabin and froze to death. Their frosted corpses are worrying the game wardens who are thinking of  converting them to pink slime via dynamite or C4 or something. It's a big controversy. Fer krissake.  Since they're still frozen, why not get local radio to announce "Free beef; first-come, first served; don't forget your rechargeable recipro saws."

In New York the guardians of our morals have been confiscating the working girls' condom inventory. It's evidence, don't you know, that they intended to profit by  violating  the Seventh Commandment as it is interpreted by the pure souls in Albany and Gracie Mansion. (if you dare utter "Huh? Spitzer? Weiner?," you are a cynical anti-government sorehead and should lose your free-speech rights.)  The hooker-rubber controversy is costing millions, generating ill-will among the joy-for-pay set,  and stimulating the AIDS contagion. How about a moratorium, say for ten years, on all government cervix oversight? If it creates a hole lot of trouble we can always return to a program of sex-by-official-permit only. (Yes, whoredom can be a sleazy empire, just like New York politics.  If that's important to you, you should, in fairness, agitate to outlaw both.)

And don't even get me started about a few million the feds spent on a top-to-bottom study of gay men's penis sizes.

Maybe the Victorian-era British Colonial Ministry had the long and the short of it. Perhaps some countries are not ready for self-government.

Apr 13, 2012

Your papers! Quickly!

After a couple of months of technical problems, The World's Greatest Travel Blog is back with a summary of bureaucratic crap you need to deal with if you want to visit some far and exotic place --Toronto or Tijuana, for instance.

Apr 12, 2012

Minnesota vice, Volume 2

A schedule conflict will keep me away from another big extra-Constitutional money grab by Minnesota's Finest. The perps here are the fish and game cops whose arms lockers overflow with hundreds of guns, along with bows and fishing gear.

They got them by accusing guys of breaking laws and confiscating their property prior to any criminal conviction. Citizens found not guilty can probably get their property returned if they're willing to spend the time and money necessary to jump through enough hoops.

I have no doubt they set aside the hot merchandise they'll find useful in their duties. The rest are sold to the highest bidder. I don't know which state government slush fund the money fattens, but it's probably a safe bet that the original MDNR confiscators get a nice cut to keep the line officers motivated.

If you care to be a party to this kind of thing on April 28, here's the dope. 

And even if you won't aid and abet the civil forfeiture thugs, wouldn't that be a nice time and place for a good ol' libertarian rally? Some short and cogent speeches about the real RICO menace, the one fomented by governments who think a certain line from the Constitution, Amendment Five, is a quaint relic.


(No person shall) ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.




---


My state's  motto is,  "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain."  We do the same damned thing.

Minnesota vice

Marko has a pretty definitive report on Moorhead, Minnesota, cops trying to rob a sore-footed waitress struggling to feed her five kids.

You'll recall the lady was given $12,000 by a mysterious customer who called it a tip and refused her effort to return it. She reported it to the cops who took her money and told her she could have it back in three months if no one claimed it. Three months passed and it  suddenly became "drug" money which they would keep in their cop-toy fund. They offered her a $1,000 bribe to shut up, roll over, and play dead. She hired a lawyer instead, and the cops had an epiphany. Maybe it wasn't drug money after all, even though it drew sniffy interest from their Constitutional consultant Fido.  They returned her  money to her.

Which is probably the end of the story. But it should not be.

Somewhere in the Moorhead police bureaucracy is at least one command-level cop who decided he could get away with robbing this woman and gave it his best shot.  The criminal offense that leaps to mind is attempted grand larceny, though I suppose it's a bad idea to hold our breath until we see Officer Swindly indicted.

Apr 10, 2012

The pregnant virgins of Arizona

It  would no longer take a man, men. We are to be redundant. Pregnancy would occur when the Arizona legislature says it does.

(The bill to round pi to 3 remains stuck in committee.)

Mar 15, 2012

The ultimate question

The GOP governor is coming back to the neighborhood Saturday. He'll join our two local GOP legislators for "Eggs and Issues" -- one of those little confabs where the lawmakers try to persuade a skeptical dozen or so people that know WTF they're talking about. It's usually an informal thing with no ground rules other than common courtesy and a bit of Iowa nice.

But the governor is expected to be a big draw. Organizers booked a bigger room and limited attendance to 100 subjects.* They also changed the ground rules. Questions must be written.  The emcee will read them from the podium.

Leading to a pleasant little fantasy. I would write and slip into the middle of  stack, "Sir, why did you give such a bullshit answer to the last question?"

Update: Turns out there will be two meetings. The other one will admit 250.

---

*How's that for political savvy? They don't call it the stupid party for nothing.

Mar 7, 2012

Super Tuesday

Romney won the cities, Santorum won the countryside, Gingrich won Georgia, and the Dutch make cheese.

Three scoundrels, alike in their lust to replace the sitting Scoundrel in Chief. Their differences reflect only marketing judgements as to which popular superstitions are most panderable in the amoral quest for fifty per cent plus one.

H.L. Mencken, from Dayton, Tennessee, on July 14, 1925:.


In his argument yesterday judge Neal had to admit pathetically that it was hopeless to fight for a repeal of the anti-evolution law. The Legislature of Tennessee, like the Legislature of every other American state, is made up of cheap job-seekers and ignoramuses. The Governor of the State is a politician ten times cheaper and trashier. It is vain to look for relief from such men. If the State is to be saved at all, it must be saved by the courts. For one, I have little hope of relief in that direction, despite Hays' logic and Darrow's eloquence. Constitutions, in America, no longer mean what they say. To mention the Bill of Rights is to be damned as a Red.

---

If asked, Mencken would surely have agreed that secular superstitions exist. Free money. The nobility of pre-emptive war. Widely diffused responsibility for individual actions.

I don't know if he would praise Ron Paul, but I think that, at a minimum, he would concede that Paul's ideas are not those of an ignoramus, a word he would have found accurate in describing the Others.

Mar 6, 2012

Have you heard the one about squawberry shortcake?

Every time this claptrap about offensive place names hits the press I recall a jingle in one of the old Boy Scout handbooks. How to make a fire:

"First you get your tinder, dry as can be,
"Then a little squaw wood, dead but from a tree...".

As far as I know this did not lead to widespread disrespect for female Indians, or Native Americans, or if you must, indigenous people of the American continents.  If it had any implication at all beyond simple bush craft, it taught scouts an anthropological fact. In many tribes, men hunted and made war.  Women cooked and kept wigwam.

"Squaw wood" was the term for firewood light enough to be handled by women.  I know of no case in which a lad, upon hearing it, was carried off into perverted reveries about primitive females' private parts or had even heard that "squaw" is a vulgar synonym for the v-word. (Which it probably isn't.)

That came later when white (mostly) America became rich enough to afford to pay idlers to point out and rectify the moral failures of our fathers in naming the new places they ran across. It continues to this day.

And so it is that the board (of  Geographic Place Names) , which tends to listen to what locals want, has slowly set about scrubbing the word from the landscape. Late last year, for example, Squaw Peak in California’s Inyo National Forest became Wunupu Peak, a Paiute name for “tall pine” or “pine-nut tree area” ... and Squaw Creek in Montana became Two Moons Creek, in honor of a Cheyenne leader of the 1870s.

"Wanupu?" Say it out loud and think thoughts of wholesome purity.

"Two Moons?"  If I were a Cheyenne I'd be less than thrilled about a place named for a turncoat who -- after helping lead his band in a couple of victories against the white eyes -- became a turncoat and spent most of the rest of his life as a lackey for paleface General Bear Coat Miles.

I was pleased to see the term "niggerhead" (a rock awash) disappear from United States nautical charts, but beyond that sort of thing this preoccupation with titivating the language of our fathers strikes me as expensive, time-wasting, history-denying bullshit.

And if that ain't the Taku-Wakan's own sweet truth I'll kiss your arse in the shadow of the Grand Tetons and give you three sleeps to gather the tribes.

Feb 29, 2012

The case of the runaway hoplophobes

"Those guns are scary, aren't they, Fauntleroy? We must  run and hide."

Thus spake one Iowa Democrat house member to another this morning, whereupon all 40 Democrats skeddaddled rather than debate reasonable gun control. At this writing they're still missing,  and the 60 Republicans down there are sitting around, twiddling their thumbs.

At issue are one bill and one resolution scheduled for consideration today. The latter would begin the process of amending the state Constitution to guarantee certain firearms rights.

The bill is a stand-your-ground measure permitting the citizen to defend himself anywhere and remove our current "duty to retreat."

May I say a word or two directly to my Democrat friends? Thank you.

"Guys and gals, you weren't elected to pitch hissy fits and hit the mattresses. You're being paid to debate and vote, even on things which require a change of your dainty linen. This point may not be lost on your constituents on a Tuesday about eight months from now."

---

My primary reaction, however, is an uncontrollable giggle. Life in the political monkey house, etc.

Feb 24, 2012

Memo, Prime Minister to Minister of Colonies

I say, Cyril. Does this not verify our view on the inadvisability of  self-government by  colonials obviously unready to accept mature resonsibility?  Bearing in mind of course that our own English youth may sometimes over-enthuse about a sporting event. But further bearing in mind that they only rarely riot over shoes which might be worn at sporting venues. 


---


More than 100 officers in riot gear were needed to disperse several hundred people who law enforcement officials said became unruly as they waited for the $220 Nike Galaxy Air Foamposite Ones to go on sale.