Franklin had a point

They come around in flocks fairly often, but a solo appearance is unusual.

He's a handsome fellow, so I offer the picture even though it shows the world I am still shamefully behind in yard care

FEMA Speaks

Ask a simple question: "What is a flood plain?"

And get an answer wondrous in scope, from FEMA

"Our experience leads us to advise the public that everyone lives in a floodplain," said Louis Botta, federal coordinating officer for FEMA.

About three sentences later, FEMA says:

FEMA statistics show that homes in a floodplain are 26 times more likely to incur damage from a flood than from a fire during a 30-year mortgage.

Okay Louis, if "everyone" lives in a flood plain, to what are you comparing "homes in a floodplain?"

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This is the sort of thing you run into when your Podunk city council unanimously passes an ordinance to apply for federal flood insurance, a FEMA operation.

Our local gentlemen didn't seem to have a very good sense of what they were voting for, so I thought it would be a kindness to point them to a fact or two. The most disheartening one is that bedding down with the Feds adds one more complete layer of building, zoning, and land-use laws to what ever such gobshitery has been dreamed up and enacted by the local authoritarians.

I may or may not persevere in the research. Reading stuff written in Washington makes my head ache and embeds in my butt a deep sense of fatigue.

Big Heroic Me and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Yep, I put on my UDT gear, slipped the M3 grease gun into a plastic bag and hit that Vietnam beach like Errol Flynn jumping Joan Blondell. Man, you shudda seen me when I....

Oh. Wait a minute. I misspoke a little there. It was actually a beach north of San Diego and what I really had was scout knife and a fifth of Three Feathers in a brown paper bag. But, I mean, I wasn't lying at first. Honest. Just misspoke. By, like, accident, y'know.

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Blumenthal, you damned liar. With any decency at all you would at least refrain from insulting our intelligence with this "I misspoke" crap. You lied your ass off to try to look like a USMC hero and you got caught. Would God I had the power to lock you in a room with a squad of Khe Sanh survivors.

A legacy terrorist

I was trained in a remote area of the the Great Plains of North America by a uniformed paramilitary organization emphasizing survivalism, preparedness, and extreme patriotic and religious values.

At the age of 11 the indoctrination began including weapons training. And damned if New Jovian Thunderbolt didn't just now catch me up by discovering the lethal weapons content in what appears to be a simple camping manual.