Bearish on America

Two days ago a big bow hunters' jamboree in the Colorado Rockies hit a sour note. A black bear swiped eggs at the camp site, then raided a tent and bloodied a boy. (He's fine, T and R.)

Reuters decided its report should include something indirectly related:

Earlier this month, witnesses reported seeing a black bear sow and her two cubs rummaging in an outdoor trash receptacle at a Burger King restaurant in Eagle, Colorado. The spectacle attracted a crowd, and at least two people were seen feeding the bruins hamburgers.

It's hard to have any long-term faith in a nation which produces even two (there were probably more) such cretins in one small town. The connection isn't hard to make: People feed bear. Bear learns people equal food. Very bad.)

Then there is the factor of knowledge transference and projection, just a fancy way of saying you can apply the lessons of one situation to similar ones. The human zipiddydoodahs hovering around the restaurant trash didn't learn the basic lesson, so they won't have a clue when we warn them:

"When you see a bunch of  elected officials hovering around the Burger King garbage, do not feed them. If you do, they'll soon be in your tent, chomping on private parts. Very bad." 

Virtuous Me

The flooding, heat, and humidity accelerate my brainrot, so I'm sometimes an easy mark for internet memes.

One site purports to measure -- in microseconds -- the good and evil of any site.

I am pleased to report that the Travis McGee Reader is only 35 per cent evil. Greater demons include Borepatch at 37 and Guffaw at 39. (H/T to the latter)

I knew studying the complete works of Jimmie Swaggert would reward me in the end.

Dear Guam: WTF?

Guam is again demanding reparations for atrocities committed against its Chamarro people in World War Two.

It wants the United States to cough up something like $14  $125 million to compensate for its suffering,  1942-1944. (Edit to fix error in cost estimate.)

Pardon me, but aren't you petitioning the wrong country,  Governor Calvo?

I know that Washington has more soft-hearted mush brains than Tokyo, but you're the one talking about "moral obligations," so why don't you go speak morally to Akihito? It was his daddy who condoned the torture. It was American daddies and granddaddies who bled on your soil to expel the Japs and restore your freedom; 1747 of them died.

I suppose Congress will eventually cave in. That's another reason why we'll continue to stay broke.

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It isn't as though we Mainlanders are niggardly with any of our territories, but that's a topic for a separate essay.

Roger Clemens

Roger Clemens gets a mistrial.

Roger is a baseball pitcher, but this isn't about baseball. My limpid interest in the professional version of the pastime died years ago when it bloated its roster and schedules to commandeer teevee time that would otherwise have been filled with synchronized swimming. It isn't even about Clemens as such. He may be an admirable man with seven Cy Young awards. He may be a jerk, thug, dope addict, or golfer for all I know or care.

Clemens may or may not have taken steroids when he was winning all those trophies. After he got famous enough, he was accused of it. So what? At the time there was no law forbidding it. If he doped himself he violated a private contract with a private employer.

Enter Henry Waxman, a righteous congressthing  representing the virtuous settlement of Beverly Hills. Hank summoned him to testify under oath before his House Oversight Committee. Roger said he took no steroids. Others said he did. Waxman believed the others and called the federal cops.

The charge was perjury, lying to Congress, which is like charging a guy in a Nevada whore house with eyeballing a boob.

The prosecutors had to win this one to uphold the principle that citizens may not lie. That usurps a congressional privilege. So the desperate federal  lawyers decided to ignore  explicit directions from Judge Reggie Walton, and I think one of the lessons here is that you don't piss off a guy like Reggie by presenting evidence he had explicitly forbidden.

"A first-year law student would know that you can't bolster the credibility of one witness with clearly inadmissible evidence," Walton said, raising his voice in anger at (prosecutor Steven) Durham."


(That should be a career buster for Steve, but he works for Holder so you never know.)

You may want to consider all this in terms of cost -- millions of dollars to hound a meaningless player of a boy's game at a time when we're scaring Hell out of grandma, telling her she may starve in the cold when her social security checks stop coming.

You may want to wonder how much more it will cost if the feds decide it's worth trying to get around his double-jeopardy protection and try him again.

The larger question here is about how petty an alleged transgression must be to avoid becoming a subject of monumental government concern.

Roger, I don't know you, never will, but, by God, I'm glad you beat those overbearing, self-important, bastards in this round.