Time for “Connect-the-dots”

Smell my finger. Smells like intern with a hint of “fuck your petty laws…I’m the fucking President”.

I’m going to try and keep this one short and to the point.  Yes, I know, I’ve said such before and that normally precedes a rambling soliloquy that probably ought to come with chapters and probably more pictures (for those of you with Attention Deficit Disorder).  I say “short and to the point” on this one because circumstances have, just this week, conspired to pull aside the nearly omnipresent curtain of time diminishment when it comes to apparently disparate issues that are, in fact, joined but that most think are not.  I guess what I’m really saying is that, for some issues, most people simply don’t get why some of us get all worked up about things because they don’t see how or why the issue, by itself, is such a big deal.  And the reason almost always is: because the issue ISN’T “by itself” at all.  For example, remember when Slick Willy got his willy slicked by Ho-monica in the Oral Office and the huge national debate about the impeachment that followed?  There are still, today, many people (the majority, in fact) that believe the entire impeachment process was about President Clinton getting a blowjob from a White House intern…when, in fact, the issue was that he lied to a grand jury when directly asked that question earlier.  That is: the president of the United States, the guy who stands at the pinnacle of American society, committed blatant perjury in front of a federal grand jury.  None of our jobs require us taking an oath when we accept the job offer.  The president’s does and the part of that oath he takes that says “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” actually means something.  If we accept that it’s A-Ok for the president to lie his ass off to a federal grand jury then we pretty much say he’s not subject to ANY laws of the land.  That’s not the way America works and in Clinton’s case it wasn’t about the oral sex but that he LIED ABOUT IT and we as a people cannot let even a single instance of presidential law breaking slide.  This week’s example of issues being connected has kind of the same circuitous, but entirely valid and appropriate, logic involved.

By now, we should all know and accept that President Obama’s most recent attempt to neuter our 2nd Amendment rights has and will continue to fail.  Oh, the debate is still going on and those who want to see all of us disarmed in the absolutely laughably utopian result of no gun violence are still out there trying to shame people into supporting their position by saying that by not supporting them we instead support the mass murder of little children.  To Obama and his ilk in this debate, it’s about people “clinging” to their guns for no reason other that some misplaced aggression, some paranoia about crime busting through your door or even as a replacement for a small penis (I have no idea which body part they pick on if you’re a female 2nd Amendment defender though).  In fact, let’s quote Barry directly.  This is what Barry had to say in April 2008 at a fundraising event in San Francisco:

We’ve got a couple of folks who are heading out to Pennsylvania to go door to door with us. And the question was: What kinds of questions should I expect them to get?…The places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government…You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio—like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration. And each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate. And they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or, you know, anti-trade sentiment [as] a way to explain their frustrations.

It’s only “clinging to your guns and religion” when you’re a Christian American. If you’re Muslim, hey, that’s your “culture” and we should be sensitive to that.

So, just so we’re clear here: the reason some of us want to retain our right to keep and bear arms, to Barack Obama apparently, is because times are bad, jobs have fled and the promised “progress” hasn’t reached these folks so they’re frustrated, racist, Christian, country folk.  THAT’S who wants to keep and bear arms and why…to those on the left.  To them, we don’t wish to keep and bear our arms through any actual thought out, rationally explained reason: we’re just jobless, poor, pissed off, Bible-thumping bumpkins.  Unfortunately though, for the anti-gun crowd, this week’s news pretty much illustrates what most of the rest of us actually believe and that is the 2nd Amendment exists as an ultimate means to address the encroachment of our rights by government when that encroachment goes too far.  In other words, when the government becomes despotic the 2nd Amendment means the people have the option (through force of arms) to overthrow that government.  Now, absent any evidence of the government being despotic, that kind of confirms Obama’s description of such people as “cynical about government”.  But like I said, this week put that whole “oh, you’re just being dramatic…the government isn’t like that” kind of leftist dismissal to the lie that it is.

First off, we had the evolving story of the IRS targeting groups whose political beliefs oppose those of the current administration for harassment via increased scrutiny of their applications for tax exempt status and higher than normal levels of audits and such.  Ever evolving in that initially it was explained as overzealous low level workers in isolated district offices but that turned out to be total bullshit with the revelation that the top guy at the IRS was aware of the activities and had been for more than a couple of years.  In short, the government tried to squelch dissenting political views in what we thought was our free society.  But that entire and ever growing debacle was joined today by the news that this same government demanded and got records listing telephone calls for the work and personal phone numbers of AP (Associated Press) reporters and various AP offices.  This was ostensibly done for a government investigation of a leak that lead to a report by the AP last year of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an Al Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

So, in literally successive days, we have our government actively suppressing free political speech of specific groups it doesn’t like through intimidation via our tax collecting apparatus AND violating the law, free speech, freedom of the press and individual privacy rights by seizing phone records for individuals that might have been associated with publicizing a story the government didn’t want told.  In both these cases, direct violations of the law were made by members of our government acting on instructions from someone higher up in our government…and all to suppress constitutional rights that the government found inconvenient.  In summary, we have government acting against entirely legal organizations solely due to the activities of those organizations being contrary to the pleasure of the existing administration.  This isn’t the first time this has happened.  Back in the 1970′s this identical situation was called Watergate and it lead to the one and only resignation of a sitting president (Richard Nixon).  Back then, the left was up in arms over the government disregarding the law and rights of organizations (like the DNC).  Time to find out if the left was outraged over the actual abuses…or by who committed them.

So, yes gun grabbers, some of us DO see a direct correlation between our 2nd Amendment rights and the fear (now somewhat more justified than before) that our government may one day decide that our rights are superfluous and disposable.  It can’t happen, you said last week?  How about now?  How many examples of our government acting like our individual rights are merely guiding principles and not the very foundation of our country does it take before you agree “we the people” need a means to address that?  Exactly when do these government excesses become enough to acknowledge that our Founding Fathers weren’t misguided idiots when they presumed our (the peoples’) need to protect ourselves one day from our own government?  Guess what, that was a rhetorical question because I don’t care what YOUR opinion is of where that imaginary line is in your head.  I just place my faith in the guys who did the hard and revolutionary work that built our country and not the dismissive assholes that dysfunctionally mismanage it today.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

Ask Your Doctor If Sequesterol® Is Right For You

“Graahhrr!!!”
["Bite the pillow. I'm going to love you now...vigorously".]

So, here we are in Sequester-land.  It’s not so bad, right?  I mean, all the advance hype about it from some quarters would have led one to believe it would rate on the enjoyment scale somewhere between being boiled alive and being date raped by Godzilla.  The government hasn’t collapsed.  The world continues to turn.  Western civilization hasn’t collapsed in on itself despite the promised Armageddon that would result when the Air Force wouldn’t be able to purchase $10,000 toilet seats for their aircraft.  Barry did close the White House to tours but almost immediately backpedaled on that idiocy when he realized that closing the People’s House to tours claiming budget strictures (and blaming the Secret Service in the process) was laughable when we were also still spending money on his weekend golf outings (think “commandeered Air Force aircraft”).  In fact, spitting in school groups’ faces (the ones who’d planned months in advance and spent a fair amount of money to travel to Washington D.C.) is just one facet of the president’s plan to make the mandatory budget cuts hurt.  Memos have since surfaced at the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture and at Homeland Security instructing managers to cut back on services visible to the public, presumably to underscore their point that the government can’t possibly function without a daily exponentially increasing amount of tax money.  It seems kind of obvious, after the first week anyway, that the public won’t tolerate this kind of underhanded political gaming and so the forecasted doom and gloom hasn’t appeared and, even when it does, it likely won’t be nearly as apocalyptic as we were all told it would be.  In the meantime, enjoy crapping on the Air Force Gulfstream on the way to your tee off time Barry.  You’d damn well better use that gold plated pooper perch we paid for.

Anyway, something caught my eye today as I was perusing the news.  Barry wants to fund ways to encourage the United States to wean ourselves entirely off foreign petroleum.  Calling it the Energy Security Trust fund, Barry wants to encourage private industry to develop new ways to lower the cost of vehicles that run on electricity, biofuels, natural gas or other non-oil fuel sources.  He proposes drawing $2 billion over 10 years from royalties the government receives from offshore drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf.  Now, those who have read previous post on this blog may recall that I supported not just Barry’s decisive statement about wanting to move America away from a petroleum based energy infrastructure but also Bush’s bold statement during his State of the Union address which is going on…what…12, 13 years ago now?…to move the United States toward a hydrogen based economy.  Both statements turned out to be total politician lies so why does this pronouncement from Barry rate even a comment?  Well, something has changed and that something is that the United States is now nearly off foreign oil or are in a position to be if we decided to do so.  Recent technological leaps and the price of a barrel of crude have made extracting the oil under our own feet a viable activity.  Because of that, the Dakotas these days are booming oil fields and we’re sitting on so much untapped natural gas in this country that some experts suggest that even applying the curve of our ever increasing hunger for energy, we have about 200 years worth of natural gas under our back yards here.  So, Obama’s desire to set up a fund to encourage alternate energy technology sounds great right?  I mean, it’s even revenue neutral (or at least paid for) because it’d come out of the fees the government collects from offshore drilling permits.  Who could be against such a great idea?

All those who remember the Solyndra debacle, for starters.

Cost of White House public tours for one year: $936K
2010 White House state dinner for Mexican president: $970K
You kids wanna see the White House? Go get elected President of Mexico.

Look, as I’ve said before, I’m an American before I’ll accept any other label people like to use to describe their stances on things.  I personally think Obama has been a substandard president and shows the damage that can be done in electing a novice ideologue solely on the basis of race (and yeah, that’s why he’s there folks…unless you think Hope and Change would have worked for a similar white Democrat which we all know it would not have).  But he’s what we have to work with/endure so that’s that.  One of the reasons I dislike him though is that either his naivete about giving public tax dollars to private firms with no strings attached or his bald corruption of giving public tax dollars to private firms with no strings attached who contributed to his campaign as a kickback reward (pick whichever one works for you) is much less effective than simply crafting a tax incentive for such industries.  Why give these firms money we can ill afford to simply give away these days in the midst of Sequesterpalooza when writing a tax refund for successful such firms would be much more likely to, you know, actually produce the results you say you’re after?  The reason why is because Barry is simultaneously locked in an ideological battle with his Republican opponents over how best to form the nation’s financial house such that we don’t end up being Greece or Spain’s bigger idiot bailout brother several years down the road.  Front and center in Barry’s plan to do so is to…raise taxes on corporations.  It’d be kind of hard (even for Barry) to say “raise taxes on corporations” while at the same time saying “give tax breaks to some of them”.  He’s also railed about tax moneys that go to “big petroleum” but it’s those very firms that’d probably be best positioned and knowledgeable about how to create and deploy ways to lower the cost of vehicles that run on alternative energy.

To sum it up: great idea Barry (even if not even a single atom of it is from an original thought) but lousy way to implement it.  Reduce government spending (like maybe demand to know what’s so compelling about lesbians and gay men being fat that the NIH feels compelled to hand out $1.5M in a study to find out), create incentives for private business such that they grow, employ people (maybe even some fat gay ones) and create increased tax revenues…and stand the fuck aside and let America do what it does best: innovate.  Know why we’re nearly energy independent today?  It’s because it now makes good business sense to come up with the new drilling and extraction technologies.  The government had little direct role in encouraging or funding that.  That was nearly all private enterprise doing what it does: serving a need and responding to economic conditions.  Give those companies a tax break for doing the work we want them to do and, by God, they’ll do it.  It’s not like 240 years of history of free enterprise in this country could be mistaken.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

Sports are dope

Kind of lends new meaning to the phrase “nut up or shut up” doesn’t it?

I like sports.  I enjoy watching hockey, football, auto racing and a couple of others.  When I was younger I played baseball and football and would have loved to have played hockey except that when you arrive in Canada at age 13 (from Florida via West Virginia no less), you’re already behind the other kids by…oh…12 years or so.  I did learn to skate and did enjoy playing pick up games on the local park’s tennis courts that the city of Mississauga parks and rec flooded each winter.  Point is, worldwide, sport is a big deal.  It’s a socially unifying force.  People who wouldn’t normally have anything to do with one another will sit in the stands next to each other and cheer for their common team.  Being a fan gives people a sense of belonging to a larger group and athletes are elevated to the status of heroes and gods for their accomplishments and mastery of their arena of competition.  Sport, via record keeping, allows us to compare ourselves to our predecessors.  Rushing touchdowns, passing yards, strikeouts, home runs, 100 meter dash times, weightlifting records…they allow us to compare today’s athletes to those of bygone eras.  But you know what?

Professional sports these days is an utter fraud

Amongst all the accomplishments of athletes around the world, one that seemed like it was the most amazing of them all, revealed itself yesterday as the total and complete lie that a lot of people suspected that it was.  Lance Armstrong, the seven time winner of the Tour de France, finally admitted that all of his Tour titles (of which he had already been stripped previously via an investigation) were due to cheating.  Now, let’s be clear, cheating in sports is wrong but there are “levels” of cheating that are wrong-er than others.  Take baseball for instance.  For many years I was a huge baseball fan.  I played.  I watched it on TV.  I’d go with my friends down to Exhibition stadium in Toronto with my $2 left field general admission ticket I’d buy at Dominion and watch the Blue Jays when they were still an awful expansion franchise.  I’d wait in the players’ parking lot for an hour after the game ended and meet the players.  I had a friend who babysat one of the Blue Jays player’s kids.  I got a ride home one time from one of the third basemen even.  Back in those days (the early 1980′s), baseball indeed had cheating.  Spitballs, scuffballs, and corked bats.  Players on base would steal signs from the catcher and relay them to the batter.  If you got caught, the most severe penalty for cheating was to be ejected from the game.  Football, hockey, basketball, soccer also had cheating but cheating there was in the form of holding or offside in football, interference, tripping, and so on in hockey and similar things in other sports.  Those instances of cheating is why referees exist and referees hand out penalties for cheating.  5, 10, or 15 yards field position is awarded to the opposing team in football.  2, 5, or 10 minutes (or even, GASP, game misconduct ejections) in the penalty box are handed out to the offending players in hockey.  Free or corner kicks in soccer and so on.  Sport was born, evolved and long ago recognized that players will always try to find an advantage over their opponents and some will circumvent the rules to do so.  The common thing all cheating in sport had in common back then was that it was something you could witness happening or be able to detect.  You can see a player getting held in football.  You can see a skater getting hauled to the ice in hockey and you can check the ball and detect Vaseline or pine tar or see that it’s been scuffed in baseball.  The offense can be discerned, the penalty for it imposed and the game resumes.  In other words, sports adapted to handle cheating and incorporated it’s own mini judicial system to manage it.

Barry Bonds before and after. Because, you know, some people magically grow enormous muscles and a new Cro Magnon brow ridge IN THEIR LATE THIRTIES.

However, there is a form of cheating that has always been difficult if not impossible to detect and it has now grown to such a degree that it nearly renders the things that make sports compelling, useless.  That is, of course, the explosion of athletes using performance enhancing drugs.  Now, let’s be clear here for a moment: the use of ingested substances isn’t a new thing.  It’s as old as sport itself.  Even the Greeks back in the BC days of the early Olympics would use things like opium juice, various hallucinogens and herbal concoctions to try and gain a competitive edge.  The early 1900′s saw Olympic athletes using things like strychnine, heroin, cocaine, and caffeine to try and boost the performance of athletes.  And starting in the mid 1950s amphetamines began to make an appearance in the amateur cycling world.  I would think that amongst most sports fans these represent a range of what most would call “minor” substances.  Herbs, alcohol and things like cocaine, amphetamines and heroin all exist but for other purposes (clearly some of them are illegal for those other purposes as well) but none of those were specifically created for athletes.  But then, in the late 1950s, that all changed with the introduction of anabolic steroids.  Steroids, in general, synthesize the strength-building properties of testosterone while minimizing the negative health effects.  Testosterone is a natural steroid found in everyone (men more than women) and promotes the building of muscle amongst other things.  However, the human body only produces a limited amount of testosterone.  Anabolic steroids are used to blow right past that natural restriction and allow athletes to build larger, stronger and faster muscles which will give them a strength and endurance edge in some sports.  All the substances I mentioned above are cheating…but steroids have that quality that seems to go over the line for most sports fans.

Which brings me back to baseball and ultimately Lance Armstrong.  I mentioned earlier that I was a huge baseball fan.  WAS.  I quit caring about baseball around the same time the Oakland A’s had “the Bash Brothers” Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.  Major league baseball has had tandems of home run hitters before but there was just something about those two that pretty much everyone in baseball suspected wasn’t right.  For me, it was that baseball, more than any other sport I can think of, relies upon its history and stats.  When some of baseball’s longest standing records started falling in the late 1980s and at an ever increasing pace, it seemed obvious to me that baseball was allowing the abuse of performance enhancing drugs to sully their rich legacy.  Today if you look at the record books you see the name Barry Bonds has replaced both Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron in some important categories, Roger Clemens in a few others.  Both players, whether actually admitting guilt or not, used anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs to erase the names of players who didn’t.  In fact, my original suspicions about McGwire and Canseco were eventually proved correct.  Both admitted to using steroids back then.  Today, I don’t know or even care about baseball records as they have no meaning.  Who cares how many home runs Barry Bonds hit in a season if the reason he hit them (at THIRTY SEVEN YEARS OLD!) was because it wasn’t him at all but because he was a muscular freak of nature due to rampant cheating?  Baseball does apparently because he’s still the official single season and career home run king…even after he was convicted of obstruction of justice during a government investigation of illegal steroid use.  He couldn’t even properly deny (he never knowingly took any illegal steroids) that was cheating because he had also already been indicted on perjury charges and probably feared that evidence would eventually surface that would fully expose his cheating.  But Lance Armstrong…

But apparently he can win one of the most grueling and physically demanding sporting events not once but 7 times. If that’s what it takes to nail Cheryl Cole, I get it. But still…

What can you say about this guy?  In a sport (competitive cycling) that practically INVENTED cheating via substance abuse we have a guy who, at age 34 won his final of SEVEN Tour de France titles after having survived cancer and the loss of one of his testicles.  Against a field of other athletes, where you can be reasonably assured the vast majority are abusing PEDs and who are years younger, here you have a guy who is missing half his testosterone production and yet not just competing in but dominating his sport.  If you ever needed a living illustration of the old saw “if it seems too good to be true” well, you have it in spades with Lance.  After retiring in 2005 the allegations, suspicions and investigations didn’t stop and eventually enough of his former teammates and enablers had fessed up leaving Lance practically alone in proclaiming his innocence.  Investigations finally determined there was enough evidence of cheating that professional cycling and finally the sanctioning body that governs the Tour stripped Armstrong of his 7 Tour titles in October of this past year…so 4 months later, Lance finally confessed to a long history of using EPO, testosterone, cortisone and human growth hormone, blood doping and transfusions.  And this brings me to the point of why I wrote this:

He admitted doing these things over a period of more than 20 YEARS!

Think on that admission a moment and let it digest.  He admits he started cheating like this in the mid 1990′s.  He was suspected from the very beginning and was tested almost continuously and constantly during his competitive years right up through his retirement in 2005…and he never once, not a single time, tested positive for any of those substances.  To a fan of cycling that means one thing but consider that cycling has access to all the same testing apparatus, methods and techniques that every other sport does.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that competitive cycling is a pioneer (right up there with the Olympics) in the field of detecting use of performance enhancing drugs by their competitors.  And yet, despite all that and despite the fact that Lance Armstrong was probably rivalled only by Barry Bonds as being the most obvious abuser of such substances in the history of sports, no test ever actually detected his cheating.  If athletes like Bonds, Armstrong, Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, and a raft of others too lengthy to list here can cheat like this and not get caught, do you think that any professional athlete today is “clean”?  I mean, if you play a sport and someone will pay you to play it and then pay you a whole hell of a lot more to be one of the premiere athletes in that sport and you know that the agencies that exist to catch your perfidy are unlikely to do so…do you think an athlete will pass on that opportunity to make themselves rich, famous and adored by legions of fans?

Until professional sports starts taking an extremely hard line on athletes, it’s clear they’ll never get the upper hand on this kind of cheating.  In my opinion, you need to admit to yourself that you will not catch the majority of cheaters.  You therefore need to make the consequences for ever getting caught so severe that athletes won’t even start to consider doing it in the first place.  For one, a positive test that is verified by a follow up test should mean you’re suspended for one year from competing.  Once you return, testing is compulsory on a frequent and unannounced basis.  Missing a subsequent test or failing it gets you banned for life.  Period.  Further, all contracts for that sport should include a clause that the athlete will forfeit and refund all salary and other compensation to their team should they fail a test and any subsequent contract must be at the sport minimum the first year they’re back from their suspension.  Finally, for sports with a Hall of Fame, all star game or other recognition that you’re an elite athlete…yeah, you’re banned from that too.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

I know how to fix gun violence

Not too many days ago, I went through this blog’s posts over the past couple of years and made an interesting discovery: for the most part, I’m getting too damned serious about shit.  I used to be a less caring (read: “younger”) kinda guy and my attitude was that I’d probably be best served confining my attentions to bettering me and mine and our situation.  Lately, it seems that my previous attitude is running head on into a newer “we better start thinking about saving the country” attitude more often than it did before.  I’m guessing that’s probably because the situation for the country and our future seems a lot less rosy than it did just a few years ago and while I’ll get old eventually and revert to wearing Pampers, my grandkids (should my children ever exercise enough indiscretion to flirt with such disaster) will probably be wearing them too…and they’ll have a lot longer to deal with the mess we’re making right now than I likely will.  Case in point is the recent debate over the role of guns in our nation in the wake of the whack-a-doo who shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School a month back.  The overall knee-jerk reaction has been an increase in support for banning guns, banning certain types of guns, banning some kinds of accessories for guns and other assorted bans and things that look and sound like bans.  New York state snuck a ban past their Senate in the dead of night day before yesterday that, among other things, limits gun magazines to a maximum of 7 shots, and in another provision, a therapist who believes a mental health patient made a credible threat to use a gun illegally would be required to report it to a mental health director who would have to notify the state.  President Obama, just earlier today said he wants Congress to pass universal background checks and bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines and used his executive powers to order federal agencies to make more data available for background checks, appointed a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence.   Great ideas, right?  I mean, surely these kinds of measures will fix our violence crisis once and for all, right?  Well, to be brutally honest:

They won’t do a damned thing about violence in general and gun violence in particular

And here’s why:

Every single gun comes with one of these. Application of a finger (not shown and not included with gun) is necessary to operate.

1./  The effort that pretty much everyone is talking about is directed at a class of inanimate objects.  In every fatal shooting, mass or otherwise, there are but 3 components involved: the shooter, the victim(s) and the gun(s).  I don’t think anyone is seriously discussing any measures regarding potential victims (well, actually, that’s not at all true but it’s not on the mass media agenda so it gets ignored).  So that leaves the government and pundits to consider the two remaining aspects.  Addressing one has the option of possibly being effective but more difficult to do (and philosophically problematic) while addressing the other, while easier to do, won’t likely be even marginally effective.  Given that it’s our government acting, you probably don’t need a hint to guess that the government is going to focus on the easy but ultimately useless option: the guns.

Well, why won’t banning “assault rifles”, larger magazines and such work?  Because criminals, by their very nature, don’t obey rules, restrictions or laws.  Let’s face it: if your grand plan is to go out in a blaze of glory and waste as many innocent lives around you as possible, you’re pretty much already contemplating breaking much more serious laws…like murder.  Seriously.  Murder is illegal, has been for some time and the penalties for doing it can be quite severe.  If you don’t believe me, look it up for yourself.  Anyway, if you’re planning to murder a whole bunch of people and the illegality and the prospect for the sanctions against murder don’t deter you, what makes anyone think a misdemeanor or minor felony infraction for using a banned weapon or banned magazine is going to effect your decision?  The truth is, and even proponents of these measures mostly admit such, they won’t.  People bent on murder and mayhem won’t give a flying rat turd for some minor weapons law.  What’s more, the same crowd that tends to think that prohibiting guns will cut down on gun violence also tend to have a large Venn diagram convergence zone with those who will tell you that the war on drugs is useless and should be abolished.  Think about that moment: banning drugs is stupid, useless, expensive, ineffective, hasn’t worked and violates the right to do what you wish with your own body…but banning guns will fix everything.

Right.

So, if banning guns, gun accessories and such isn’t the answer, what is?  For a novel approach, how about we address the actual issue, and that is:

Shown here: the proper way to disarm the criminally insane and prevent mass shootings.

2./  Consider addressing the supremacy of personal freedom over community security when it comes to the mentally ill.  Not once, in my recollection, has a gun gotten up, walked over and shot the everloving shit out of some person…all by itself.  In all the uncertainty there is in today’s world there is one thing you can pretty much take to the bank: gun violence always requires a person to be doing the violent part.  What gun laws truly hope to accomplish is to separate certain people from guns.  It’s just that their approach means that ALL OF US get deprived of our rights and separated from guns when it’s only a small fraction of us who actually need to be separated from them.  That small fraction are the people who are mentally unstable.  Now, I mentioned personal freedom versus community security for a reason and it’s this: have you ever seen the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?  In short, it was a movie made in 1975 about a book published in 1962 about the antics of an inmate in a psychiatric ward who wasn’t really mentally unstable.  The movie and book are very sympathetic to the cause of mental patients and helped form a public impetus (we’ll discuss Hollywood’s role in all this in a moment) that resulted in the ACLU filing many suits against states and mental health facilities arguing against involuntary institutionalization (read: “getting sent to the funny farm”) and even greatly weakened measures like AOT (“assisted outpatient treatment”) laws which feature preventative institutionalization and forced medication BEFORE they harm someone or themselves.  Today, it’s nearly impossible to commit someone to a mental institution because they have rights.  This is not altogether bad.  There is indeed a compelling argument that people ought not to be deprived of their liberty if they suffer from a mental condition.  That said, if you’re okay with placing the individual’s rights over the rights of the community for a safer society for all…incidents like Sandy Hook and Columbine are prices that society will pay for such largesse.  However, if you are going to respond to such massacres by discussing a curtailment of a person’s rights, should it not be the rights of the people who are doing wrong that should be discussed?

3./  Our society is a gun oriented and violent one and we should consider reeling that back some.  Listen, I play video games.  I’m a gamer.  And I like playing video games that feature combat, things exploding and, in general, mayhem and unimaginable violence.  I like action movies that feature guns and violence.  That said, I like those things in moderation and don’t mold my life and my actions to comport with a world view that the way characters act in video games and movies is something to be emulated in real life.  However, everywhere you turn these days, especially for children, you see violence.  Now, cartoon violence (like a coyote getting outsmarted by a speedy bird and suffering an anvil to the noggin for his failure) has always been around since the earliest days of both film and television and children that grew up in those circumstances didn’t turn into a bunch of crazed mass murdering psychopaths.  But that was also back in the day when kids got spanked in school, had expectations placed upon them, weren’t coddled and told they’re all winners no matter what they do and so on.  In short, back then, kids were still parented and learned that actions have consequences.  Not so much these days.  Since we as a society have decided to not actually directly raise our kids but sort of let them free range grow up any old which way, it may be that we need to revisit obscenity laws and perhaps some small return to censorship.  This, naturally, would be violently opposed by Hollywood who, in perhaps the biggest recent display of colossal irony this week, came out with a list of celebrities who think that guns should be banned/restricted when the movies and TV shows they themselves make a lavish and privileged living from glorify and exploit the violence that guns can wreak.  You see, taking responsibility for their own actions would be absurd and it’s the rest of us who should have our freedoms curtailed whilst they champion their freedoms of speech and expression.

Looking good here Hollywood! A-OK! In fact, let’s make a movie, TV series and a toy merchandise line to sell to kids! Thank God there’s no guns though, right?

And of course that’s fucking ridiculous and, of course, because Hollywood overwhelming supports liberal and Democrat politics, the president neatly skipped over any measures that might have even hinted that Hollywood scale back their 24/7 diet of violence and guns in the entertainment they churn out for society’s consumption.  So, in short, to truly curb gun violence we need to look at who it is that’s presenting the problem, address that problem and get serious about doing so while the other side blithely demands to know why we should even have a second amendment (the right to keep and bear arms).

If, after what I’ve said above, you’re still one of those people let me ask: were you one of the people who shrieked and moaned about how the Patriot Act trampled your rights? Maybe not but many did. Were you one of the ones who didn’t care for the government ordering banks to report deposits over a certain amount supposedly as a measure to curtail drug activity? Again, maybe not. Maybe you’re one of the ones who don’t care for government defined “free speech zones” for people who wish to protest. Maybe, maybe not. Regardless of how you answer on any of those, do you see the government ever relinquishing any of those restrictions on your rights? Ever seen a government spend LESS in a year than in a previous year? Even when we had the surplus not too many years ago, did you see the government go “whoops, took too much money…we’ll give that back”?

I’m going to go ahead and guess you wouldn’t like the government telling you what you can and cannot say or write. I’ll guess you probably wouldn’t like it if the police decided to pull you over and subject you and yours to a cavity search on the side of the road. Maybe if the police claimed they found you were smuggling 10 pounds of heroin in your rectum that you’d like to actually have a trial before being sentenced to life in prison? Or maybe, rather than prison, they decide to simply sell you into a life of slavery. You’d be okay with that? Maybe if you’re a woman you’d like to have a vote?

See, I’ll go ahead and guess that just because the constitution says you have a right to free speech, to not be subjected to unreasonable search and seizure, to a trial by judge and jury, to not be made a slave and allowing women to vote that you will follow that reasoning blindly and fully demand your constitutional rights.  However, would you be cool giving up THOSE rights that mean little to you personally? I mean, if you’re not saying anything then losing the right to free speech wouldn’t mean anything to you personally right? If you’re not a criminal then you really have nothing to fear from warrantless searches of you and your property, right? You’re not a criminal so the right to a trial won’t affect you…so surely you must be okay with jettisoning the 5th through 8th amendments, right? And hey, since you might not be black or a woman losing the 13th, 15th and 19th amendments won’t even affect you.

But here’s the rub: suppose, one day, our dysfunctional government decides that those rights ARE frivolous and superfluous and you don’t need them. Guess which amendment represents the ultimate means to address the loss of the others. The 2nd Amendment was written at a time that Americans were actively revolting against a government that was taxing them without representation, that would seize personal property to house foreign soldiers (3rd Amendment), that forced a government on them for which the people had no say and other assorted affronts. The 2nd Amendment is the only one that not only states a right but then goes further and explicitly declares that the right “shall not be infringed”. No other right takes that extra statement but the second. That’s because the framers had only a single example of a republic to work from when they were modelling ours: the Roman republic. Know what happened to the Romans?

They knew that even as good a system as a republic could falter and the government could turn against its own people. In Rome’s case, the senate handed over power to a strong man (an emperor) when (see if this sounds familiar) they were so gridlocked and their finances so screwed they couldn’t effect a solution via their existing government. The founding fathers likewise knew that no matter how thoroughly they tried to set it up, our government can and will eventually falter…and when governments go bad it’s the people that suffer and its the people that have to do something about it. Ergo, give the people the right to keep and bear arms so that if/when the situation warrants it, they can effect change.

Just because you’re short sighted enough to want to kiss off the only right that has any chance of guaranteeing the rest of them doesn’t mean your decision is wise or even informed. There are costs to trusting people with the power to change their own government when the government one day decides it doesn’t want to change. You can’t have that ability and have it have no repercussions.

Sandy Hook was a terrible tragedy.  The next Sandy Hook will also be a terrible tragedy.  However, if we’re going to start voluntarily giving up our rights for the illusion of security know in advance that the government almost never relinquishes power once it has taken it.  The way to reduce incidents like Sandy Hook is to identify those people whose mental state makes them more likely to commit such deeds and get them the help (or isolation) they and society both need.  Until we get serious about that then the next Sandy Hook is down the road a ways who knows how near or far.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

No Cure For Stupid

As I mentioned last week, I wanted to take a few days to digest the recent election activity and then comment on it.  I’ll spare you all from a rant and tirade about how the election turned out, who did underhanded what to whom and so on and so forth.  You can find those a dime a dozen on the intarwebz and I strive to deliver a somewhat fresh (or at least different perspective) on not so much what happened but what it will mean to our country.  To that end, after a week of somewhat erratic contemplation, I have come to two conclusive opinions:

These guys actively modeled our country on the Roman Republic. They even knew that one day, we’d screw it up just like Rome managed to.

1./ The decline of the American Republic is at hand – Well, THAT sounds all doom and gloomy, doesn’t it?  Exactly the kind of bombast you’d expect from some dyed in the wool, hard core conservative, right?  Well, my assertion is based on history and not partisan politics.  I don’t really care who won the election…what I care about is who was elected, what those people have demonstrated over the past several years and what it means to America’s future.  What I’m talking about, of course, is our national debt.  Currently, the national debt stands at (get this) $16,260,696,626,397.55.  I kid you not.  I got that figure from here.  Said in plain English that’s “sixteen trillion, two hundred sixty billion, six hundred ninety six million, six hundred twenty six thousand, three hundred ninety seven dollars and fifty five cents”.  However, by the time you read that number out loud it was already obsolete by nine million additional dollars or so.  Yep, we here in the United States pile up debt by the assload like nobody else.  Anyway, everyone knows (or thinks they do) that the debt is one big ass number, right?  Well, it is and most people think it’s always been this big.  But the word “big” in this context has dramatically changed over the past 5 years.  This year, we’ll add another $1.5T or so in new debt.  Prior to President Obama taking over though, our deficits were more in the neighborhood of 200 to 400 billion per year.  Truly bad numbers back then to be sure…but those numbers are less than 1/3 of what we’re doing these days.  Go back even further to the last time Congress claimed to get serious about controlling the debt and budget deficits and you see deficits of less than $200B per year.  Just so we’re clear: days where we ran deficits around $200B = shit’s serious enough to enact legislation to try and control Congress spending like a drunk sailor on shore leave.  Days where our deficits are more than 6 times that much = meh, who cares (aka: “today”).

Since you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering: how does this equal the decline of the American Republic?  It’s not complicated but it does require understanding how the process for funding our debt works and accepting that history has a tendency to repeat itself.  Our debt is funded by our treasury issuing something called “T-bills” or treasury bills.  The government makes such bills available for purchase and buyers of those bills receive a guaranteed modest amount of interest on their investment.  That means that for every dollar the government borrows, it ends up paying like $1.10 or so which is the original debt plus the t-bill’s interest.  Governments, private firms, banks and individual investors buy t-bills because their return is guaranteed.  However, “guaranteed” is the sticky point here.  Every country issues debt bonds (t-bills) to fund their debts, public works projects, etc.  Every entity that issues such a debt bond receives a debt rating from several international ratings agencies.  This is basically nothing more than an assessment of the risk of that issuing country making good on their guarantee to repay.  For countries that’s called their “credit rating”.  On August 5 of 2011, for the first time in the history of our country, our credit rating was reduced by first one then all the major rating agencies from AAA (outstanding) to AA+ (excellent).  The reason this happened was explained as two main reasons: our debt to revenue ratio and our political gridlock (Dems and Repubs not playing nice together).  In short, what the international ratings agencies said to investors worldwide was “while we still like America as an investment, they’re not as solid as they used to be and they don’t appear to have a plan to improve the situation”.

What does this have to do with the American Republic?  Just this: we just re-elected both a president and a Congress who, collectively, have added somewhere north of SIX TRILLION DOLLARS IN NEW DEBT IN THE PAST FOUR YEARS.  Re-elected.  That means, that despite the fact that we all supposedly knew how bad the debt was, we still returned the same buffoons who have proved they can’t and won’t control their spending.  Alright, you might say, but still…what does that have to do with the health of the Republic?  Just this: the only real parallel we have to historically compare ourselves with is the Roman Republic that disappeared in 27 B.C. when the Roman Senate granted exceptional ruling powers to one man (Octavian) who proclaimed himself Augustus and became, in essence, a Roman emperor.  To understand why this happened and why it’s a parallel to our situation you only need to know the the Roman Republic was experiencing many of the same types of pressures we are today:

- rapid expansion from a small entity to a large, world spanning nation (the United States only really became the world spanning nation in 1945 after the end of WW2)

- both nations maintained large, well funded armies (Rome because they were conquering the world, ours because we can no longer allow Europe the luxury of fighting amongst themselves every other generation now that we have atomic weapons) that placed a drain on the nation’s finances

- both nations polarized into conservative and popular (liberal) factions where the former derived power from the elite class while the latter looked to the lower classes for support, dividing the people and classes into what seemed like warring factions

- both experienced eras of huge social upheaval.  For Rome it was the importation of millions of slaves who took over the menial work of nearly everyone while in the United States we preside over the continual destruction of the traditional family while redefining both societal and gender roles for men, women, adults and children

With society changing at such a rapid pace, the demands of the nations required more and more revenue.  Rome acquired theirs via conquest and higher taxes.  Already in the United States, the call has begun for higher taxes to support lavish social entitlement spending.  In Rome’s case, taxes then were sold as “patriotic” and many people paid them gladly.  However, they eventually discerned that their taxes were being misspent and wasted and many stopped paying their taxes.  In other words, Rome couldn’t fund their debts.  That coupled with the rapid remaking of society, gridlocked politics and no real reasonable solution in sight was when people started thinking that their only salvation was to turn everything over to a single person who would have absolute power.  In the United States, we already have the fiscal hole we’ve dug ourselves and the societal upheaval.  We lack only the rapid shutoff of financial solutions for our spending.  Should our debt and deficit problems remain unaddressed, the rating agencies will have no choice but to downgrade our credit rating yet again.  Do that enough times and suddenly you have a scenario where the United States can no longer find buyers for our t-bills.  If you think this is impossible, you have only to look at Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and a host of others around the world to see the lie.  There is nothing special about the United States that magically insulates us from economical reality.  If we keep on this path we will eventually be truly broke…and then rather than a dictatorship, we’ll have another revolution.  Either way, it’s the end of the American Republic…and our re-affirming election last week means we’re at least another 2 years away from even starting to address the problem responsibly.

Don’t tell me this isn’t every Democrat strategist’s wet dream

2/ The Democratic Party may not nominate another white male for president again – There.  I’ve gone ahead and said it.  Democrat white dudes winning the nomination may never happen again.  While to some that may sound racist, I submit that a suspension of social outrage is in order while we examine the election’s demographic breakdown.  That link goes to demographic results that are, well, fairly stark in terms of demographic politics.  To put it bluntly: if you were white you voted for the Republican to the tune of nearly 60%.  White voters in this country made up 72% of all those casting votes and Obama got just 39% of you.  And yet, he won the general election by 3%.  How is that?

He won because he carried blacks by 93%, hispanics by 71% and asians by 73%.  That being the case, what does that mean?  Well, let’s look at the last times Democrats ran white men as their candidate: Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000.  Both men ran against Bush who, by all reasonable accounts, was vulnerable in both elections, yet he managed to win.  The numbers though, tell the tale:

In 2000 the non white vote was 19% of the total.  In 2004 it was 23% and in 2008 it was 27%.  In none of the elections (2000, 2004, 2008, 2012) did the Democrat candidate carry the white vote despite it making no less than 72% of all votes cast.  The Democrats lost the elections in 2000 and 2004 by close margins.  In fact, in each year except 2008, the white vote decreased for the Democrats each election.  While Al Gore carried 42% of the white vote in 2000, Obama got just 39% of the vote in 2012.

What it means is this: the Democrats know (or should know) that they cannot win the presidency by counting on the white voter.  That voter has become ever more hostile to their message over the years (albeit gradually as Clinton carried only 44% then 39%)…but the white voter is losing influence in this country to the hispanic voter bloc.  While I was aware of these numbers somewhat (I didn’t know their exact breakdowns), last week I asked myself a fairly straightforward question and didn’t like the honest answer: if Obama had been a white male running on the record of his deficits, poor employment numbers and such, would he have been re-elected?  The answer to that, I believe, is “not a chance in hell”.  I have to say, given that the minority vote in this country (especially black and hispanic) is so skewed by the race of the candidate, that the Democrats will eventually come to realize that they won’t win the presidency unless their candidate is a minority or is female (although no polling back in 2008 showed Hillary doing well should she have won the nomination).  That, to me, is a rather sobering thought.  White voters have split between Democrats and Republicans fairly reliably regardless of the ethnicity of the Democrat candidate.  Not so for blacks and hispanics.  This suggests a low level racial component when campaigning for minority votes would not only be advisable but beneficial.  It also suggests that, for a block representing more than 1/4 of American voters, issues and platforms matter less than the race of the candidate does.  In fact, if these numbers were somehow reversed and showed a race bias on the part of white voters, I shudder to contemplate the volume of the racial protests that would follow.  However, in this current era of media-sponsored political correctness, not only will there not be a protest, the very existence of these numbers won’t even be mentioned and if they are mentioned, they’ll be summarily dismissed.

Except, I expect, by the king makers in the Democratic party who are just as good with such numbers as I or any of you would be…and they look for any edge they can get in the biggest political game on the planet.  Oh, and by the way, for the time it took me to write this post, the United States added an additional $227 million dollars in debt.  Nice, huh?

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

Your Thanksgiving turkey probably sucks

So, being 2 days after the election I’m sure some of you thought I’d likely be on here ranting and raving.  In truth, I had contemplated a post to discuss just where the hell America lost its collective mind.  However, while that post will likely go up sometime next week (unlike many, I like to think about what I want to say rather than merely blurting it out) I decided that I’d help out some of my fellow Americans regardless of whether they deserve the benefit of my generosity or not (that goes doubly for you assholes in Ohio, Virginia and especially Florida).  I refer, of course, to the upcoming Thanksgiving Day holiday and the iconic roast turkey supper that’s normally the centerpiece of such.  Now, a great many of you may believe that you are already adequately served by whatever passes for turkey at your house on our day of national reflection and thanks for the bounty that is (or used to be anyway) America.  You are, sadly but not unpredictably, incorrect.  I know this because I have sampled Thanksgiving turkey varieties in my many years of divinely tortured existence and over those years I came to one inescapable truth:

Lots of you have no fucking clue how to cook a turkey

Now, you may say “hey, wait a minute…I like our T-Day bird” and, while it’s statistically possible that you may be one of the vanishingly few people who know how to properly cook a turkey, chances are you’re not and as a result you’re laughably wrong via ignorance.  Don’t feel bad though.  Not many folk know how to produce a Thanksgiving turkey whose taste will have your tongue slapping your brain clean out of your skull.  By now you’re either offended and wondering how it is I came to be drinking so early on a Thursday (my employer in New Jersey STILL doesn’t have communications since Sandy blew through town…BTW, thanks a fuckload, Verizon/Earthlink) or you’re offended and waiting to see a demonstration of my claims of superior foul-based meal preparation.  Well, be offended no longer as I am about to reveal to you all, the recipe by which my father and I have been producing exceptional T-Day turkey meals for the past 44 years.  As a family, we have few traditions…but this is one of them.  My father started this and passed it on to me and I passed onto my stepson (although he hasn’t attempted this on his own yet).  I will, this year, take my 10 year old son aside and involve him in this effort.  In fact, we’ll be doing Thanksgiving supper down with my in-laws in Florida and my presence there was specifically requested so that I may cook the bird (presumably while the ladies commune with my wife’s 89 year old grandmother as she passes on the secrets to her sweet potato casserole and mashed potatoes…she has managed to break both her wrists as of 2 days ago and she’ll still be in casts come Thanksgiving day).

Before we begin, I want to stress that this process is a Man’s Job.  Yes, that sounds chauvinistic as all get out and sexist (and it is) but it’s also traditional and…well…that’s just the way it’s done.  The men folk wrangle the bird and commit breathtaking acts of culinary derring-do while the women folk wrangle whatever else we’re going to eat with supper.  Both genders get to claim they’re busting ass and working hard all the while consuming heroic amounts of alcohol supposedly unbeknownst to the other.  It’s like “Fair but Equal” except that it pertains to participating in meal prep.  So, without further ado, allow me to share the secret for producing a nearly perfect Thanksgiving day turkey.

First off: most of this process is accomplished outdoors (the cooking part anyway) because we’re going to use a grill.  Now, for those of you who may be “regionally challenged” (read: “not from the South and possibly also afflicted with a wife who hyphenated her last name”) when I say “grill” I mean a Weber charcoal grill, like so:

If you don’t recognize this or know how to use it, stop reading now, travel to the nearest Home Depot or other commonly accepted “man place” and turn in your man card (if you haven’t already done so).

You see, roasting a turkey in an oven (sometimes in a bag…good God) is wimmen work.  Yes, you can plant your fat pasty ass on your couch and watch the Cowboys and Lions play football but why do that when you can do those same things AND get full man credit for cooking the turkey…and it turns out not tasting like soggy cardboard with the consistency of a piece of wood?  Do you enjoy the disapproving glares of your wife and possibly mother and/or mother-in-law while they do all the work?  I get that you may not be into breaking off a piece but with my process/recipe, YOU might get to have a say in your ongoing marital celibacy (but in all honestly, not likely).  Anyway, we’re using a grill and not an oven.  In addition to above mentioned grill, I have this handy recipe you can follow through to male culinary victory (and perhaps a small amount of restoration of your abandoned male dignity…this IS a public service announcement then).

Ingredients/materials:

1 whole 18-22 lb turkey (I prefer Butterball but any will do)
2 sticks of butter
1 8oz bottle of Italian dressing (room temp)
1 1/2 cup white wine (also room temp)
2 quarts water
various spices (thyme, marjoram, oregano, salt, McCormick’s Season Salt, pepper – basically any leaf spices and nothing citrus and no cayenne, chili powder, etc)
1 bag Kingsford charcoal (none of that easy lite crap)
1 bag hickory chips
1 disposable aluminum drip pan
Cooking twine or wire
Large handled measuring cup (I use a quart size glass measuring cup with handle)
Medium sized bowl of water
Baste brush
Metal bulb baster (plastic can melt but is usable)
Bamboo skewers
Beer proportional to number of cooks/bystanders (recommend something seasonal like Sam Adams Oktoberfest)
Buffalo Trace bourbon (for myself and any of you who consider yourselves to NOT be pussies)

Good example of the bird centered over the drip pan with the banks of charcoal and chips to either side. Not pictured: women, children, other irritants, my drink.

In the measuring cup melt both sticks of butter in the microwave. To the melted butter add the Italian dressing and white wine. Add additional spices/salt/pepper if desired.  Mix together and set aside.  The room temp dressing and wine is important as using cold versions of either will cause the melted butter to re-congeal and make mixing near impossible.

Clean/wash turkey, remove neck, giblet bag (some like my wife’s grandmother make a gravy from these parts, we don’t tend to). Once bird is washed inside and out, twist each wing around to the back and bind wings together with twine or wire so that bird rests wings side down, breast side up. Apply generous amounts of all spices to neck opening and breast cavity using hand to rub the spices into the meat from the inside (that part’s messy). Once done, use bamboo skewers to close the skin flap over the neck opening.  This completes the bird’s pre-grill preparation.  You should now acquire an adult beverage of your choice.  As an aside, Thanksgiving is one of those few days on the calendar that it’s entirely okay to start drinking before noon.  It might even be a law in some places.

Place at least two handfuls of hickory chips in bowl with water and set aside. In either a chimney starter or in a mound in the grill and with lighter fluid (I prefer chimney starter) start 30 charcoal briquettes. When briquettes are ready to spread, divide into two parts (15 coals each) on each side of grill with disposable aluminum drip pan in center. The coals should be mounded on each side of the pan with a few to several in direct contact with the pan. Add 2 quarts of water to the drip pan and replace cooking grill. This process is otherwise known as indirect grilling. Place turkey breast side up (wings down) on cooking grill centered over drip pan. Baste generously with dressing/butter/wine baste. Retrieve handful of wet hickory chips from bowl, shake excess water from chips and divide evenly to briquette piles on either side of the turkey and close lid (allow for half open vents on both top and bottom).

Every 15 minutes, open grill, baste turkey and apply handful of damp hickory chips to either side of the bird. Try and baste/chip the bird as quickly as possible. Remember to baste first, chip second as chips will start to smoke/burn within moment of applying them to briquettes. Every 45 minutes, add 9 charcoal briquettes to each side of the drip pan when basting/chipping (baste first, add coals, add chips).

Depending on the temperature, a 20 lb bird will take anywhere from 4-5 hours total to cook. You know cooking is finishing when the skin on the legs starts to pull up the bones on each side. Once that starts, I usually give the bird around 30-45 additional minutes of grill time.

When removing the bird from the grill (you’ll want a large spatula or two to scrape it from the grill and two wads of paper towels to grip the bird to place on a pan or platter) be aware that the chest cavity will have an excess of juices and baste and will be very hot. Having it pour out onto your arm is unpleasant.  Take this from me…I know.

With the metal bulb baster, draw a sufficient amount of liquid both from the bird cavity and additionally from the drip pan if necessary with which to make a turkey gravy in a small saucepan.

Allow the turkey to rest at least 30 minutes after removal from grill before carving. The bird can and probably will be nearly black. That’s normal. If done correctly, it’ll come out looking something like this:

As a helpful hint: if it’s cold out, you can keep your baste running free by leaving it on top of the kettle lid when you close it. The warmth from the lid will keep the baste nicely heated. And no matter how drunk you get, you won’t likely have trouble finding it.

Anyway, that’s all there is to producing probably the best turkey you’ll ever enjoy on a Thanksgiving.  The recipe has evolved over the years since my Dad started to do this.  For instance, the bottle of Italian dressing supplanted a much more complicated process where he basically made Italian dressing from all its constituent parts.  Only about 5-6 years ago my stepson suggested the white wine to cut an extra thick baste I had produced (because the dressing had been put into the fridge).  It worked great, the taste was better and hey, it’s wine so you can bet that stayed in the recipe.  This recipe has not only served us at Thanksgiving but also at Christmas a few times and, when we lived in Canada (where using a grill anytime after Labor Day produces incredulous neighbors who wonder aloud at such weather defying perversity) my Dad was asked to cook turkeys for neighbors/friends.

So, have a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving holiday and should you decide to use this recipe let me know how it turned out for you.  I’ll get around to examining America’s national IQ disgrace in my next post.  In the meantime, enjoy!

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

America: Land of the Free, Home of Incurable Terminal Imbecility

Yep, you really effed it up Newt. I’d say “next time keep it in yer pants” but I already dispensed that advice to Herman Cain.

So, as you can see, I’ve successfully held off posting a political rant for pretty much the entire year.  I didn’t mention the Republican primaries (I liked Newt), I haven’t mentioned the conventions (while I like Clint, if anyone needs a teleprompter more than Barry, it’s him) and I didn’t chime in on the debates (I thought Obama looked smug and Biden is nothing less than a national disgrace).  That all said, the pressure has been building for some time and while I haven’t been busy posting here of late, I have dropped opinions on several sites scattered about the intarwebz tubez and generally pissing people off through the power of, you know, actually being informed.  It’s this late discovered superpower that I’m here to discuss today.  A few minutes ago I had occasion to decide to end a running debate I found myself engaged in on a friend’s Facebook status.  I was happily rebutting ignorance with facts when one of my debating opponents snapped and suggested her point “was to[o] simple for some to grasp”.  I sat and ruminated on her comment for a time before I posted a response assuring her I got her point, that it was based on faulty information and that if being informed was now viewed as some kind of fault or flaw that I’ll simply have to find a way to live with it.  Naturally, she assumed that she had somehow won some kind of internet debating contest and couldn’t resist the urge to post even more ignorant blather which I’ve decided to simply let lie.  After departing the field with the opponent figuratively chanting “nana booboo” to my retreating back, I had a moment to reflect on the general state of affairs these days and have stumbled across a monumental glaring truth:

Many Americans these days are fucking idiots.

Now, now…I know, that seems like a rather shocking revelation but I assure you: my recent experiences reveals this as unmistakable, fundamental, universal, indisputable truth.  It was only this most recent episode that acted like the philosophical catalyst, finally delivering me over the unpalatable hump of my desperate hope that the mass ignorance I encounter everyday was just a freakish concentration localized to the places I occasionally stray online.  Alas and alack, this is sadly untrue.  No, instead, it’s been demonstrated to me so repeatedly that most people are dumber than a crate of anvils that I am now forced to regard such as a Law of Nature (much like gravity, the speed of light and cats always landing on their feet).  However, as this is my blog and I am a patriotic American, I feel a compelling need to expose this rampant idiocy.  To that end, I’m going to recap the subjects of just the last two debate events that I engaged in which covers merely yesterday afternoon and earlier this morning.

Subject 1: Banks are bad

Sweet Jebus on a pogostick…the stupid is so intense with this typical Occupy protester, it literally burns.

Now, allow me to state at the outset: I dislike banks.  The reasons for my dislike are myriad.  I cannot fathom that a business that is engaged in the holding, lending and management of other peoples’ money can be as haphazard, careless and error prone as banks are.  We’re talking about institutions who make astronomical profits (BoA, for example made $2.1B in profits…just in three months this year, April, May and June) but who will tell you to your apparently assumed ignorant face that the computer system their teller uses cannot draw the same information their ATM draws and neither again can draw the same info you see when banking online.  It’s data for crying out loud.  It’s not fucking magic.  These same banks will do things deliberately to squeeze every last penny out of their customers (which seems like kind of a counter intuitive thing to do) via shady and inexplicable practices such as processing all debit transactions at the end of the day as a single value before they process any pending credit transactions…and then if your debits exceed your balance (because they haven’t credited your deposits yet) they assess NSF or overdraft fees against each single debit transaction.  Aside from bending you, their customer, over to roger your bunghole, there is no reason to operate like this.  Yet they do.  Anyway, with all that out of the way, there are a ton of people who believe, because it’s the standard party line of Democrats and the Occupy crowd, that the recent housing bubble collapse is all due to banks writing loans to people who shouldn’t have gotten them.  And that’s where the story ends.  Bad loans = blame banks.  It was voiced like this the other day in a comment thread by some anonymous poster:

So how about when a bank gives a $500,000 high interest mortgage loan to an uneducated, low income father of four with no credit check or verification of income. The bank then sells off the remaining mortgage payments to various hedge funds to ensure their profits avoid liability when the man defaults on his payments. 2 years later the man loses his job and can no longer make his mortgage payments and he and his family are fucked.

I chose to engage this particular comment because…well…I’d seen it echoed literally hundreds of times the past few years and I’m fed up that such uninformed ignorance drives opinion in this country.  My initial response:

Eh, you lost me when you said “…and the uneducated, low income father of four APPLIED FOR A FREAKIN’ HALF MILLION DOLLAR LOAN because his personal responsibility and self control had been kidnapped by a bank”. It’s stunning how many people completely skip the part dealing with personal responsibility in even asking for a loan they know they’ll never repay in the first place for things they can’t afford.

I was actually somewhat rude in an additional sentence that followed and regretted posting it so I’m not going to repeat my mistake here.  That said, the initial poster responded:

Ok, maybe a half million dollar loan was a bit dramatic. But to an uneducated man with poor financial management skills even a $100,000 loan may seem payable when realistically he doesn’t stand a chance of paying it off.

Believe me I’m a huge proponent of personal responsibility but when you get a poorly educated man in a room and tell him he can move his kids out of a shitty studio apartment and into an actual house, and that he can have the money now, you bet his judgment is clouded and those mortgage payments seem possible.

I don’t blame banks for wanting their money, I just think they should earn it ethically.

Earning things ethically is something I think everyone can agree on.  However, it was apparent that I was debating someone who lacked any real knowledge of how the housing crisis came to be and this is a very common blind spot with lots of Americans.   So, because he didn’t take offense at my omitted rudeness, I decided to try the oft failing educational route:

Fair enough…but if we’re being fair, let’s be fair all around. Banks made those loans because in 1993 and further in 1999 the federal government told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to loosen their underwriting standards for the loans they guaranteed low and middle income applicants (and especially those in inner cities) to banks so that those banks would write those notes and, presumably, get such folks into mortgages and out of leases.

This was done after a fairly racially charged campaign alleging banks wouldn’t write mortgages for minority applicants despite there not being a place asking for race or ethnicity on the application form (such being banned by the Fair Housing Law of 1968). In essence, banks were encouraged to write loans whose applicants would not normally qualify for such per their underwriting rules because of the increased risk of default. The federal government, in a move to pander to those voters, essentially overruled sound business sense and ordered the FMs to guarantee those loans so the banks wouldn’t be left holding the bag and would be encouraged to issue such loans.

There were no additional responses by the guy I was exchanging with so I don’t even know if he saw it.  However, in this campaign season we’ve all heard the oft trotted out mantra by Obama that Republicans are all for the rich at the expense of the middle and lower class and that Obama believes the failure of the banking industry and the subprime loan crisis is entirely the responsibility of the banks and thus requires more federal oversight.  Very few people appear to know that prior to the mid to late 1990′s, the home mortgage industry was on ridiculously solid ground.  They had long tested and proven actuarial data that informed their loan underwriting practices.  Then along comes Bill Clinton and, in the interest of pandering to minority voters, ends up having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac adjust their underwriting policies for FHA backed loans (banks wrote the loans, the FMs insured them) so that banks would increase their lending to minorities.  Essentially abandon sound business lending practices in favor of politically based practices, make the federal corporations (the FMs) assume all the risk and reap the electoral benefits.  However, as was expected and predicted by many at the time, all the new underwriting policies did was allow banks to write loans to people they normally would not have offered them to and, ironically, enough even though the entire scheme was designed to see more minority home ownership in low income neighborhoods, a study by the federal reserve concluded that it didn’t end up affecting those ownership rates at all.  All we got out of it was a glut of bad loans whose collapse was only staved off due to ever increasing property values.  Once those values stopped accelerating, people found themselves unable to pay and so, rather than have a housing foundation built on sound and proven business principles, it was built on speculation and consumer confidence.  It was destined to self destruct and it did.

So, monkey with sound business practices for short term political minority favor = people getting loans they couldn’t afford, shouldn’t apply for and when housing prices eventually imploded, the wealth accumulation vehicle of the middle class (home equity) gets virtually annihilated.  And rather than fess up that it was their idiotic pandering for minority votes that started the entire debacle, the Left in this country conveniently blames the banks…forgetting the government’s urging and complicity.

Whoopsie.

Subject 2: Republicans hate minorities/are racists

This is one that’s entirely foisted upon the right by the left.  It’s a lot like the first Obama/Romney debate: all the negative political ads define the other guy and so some people (most people?) regard the targeted candidate as being as he/she was described in the negative ad and then when they’re actually exposed to the candidate some say “wow, that’s not at all what I expected”…and then those who were predisposed to dislike him anyway claim he’s flip-flopped on issues and/or he’s a liar.  I’m never at a loss to be disappointed in the total inability of many supposedly capable adults to discern their own inability to think critically and just simply swallow whatever the latest slogan du jour is from their particular party.  Much like how Democrats are portrayed  by some as Godless atheists (although mainstream media never lets that out over the airwaves), Republicans are always anti-minority no matter what.  This was the crux of the exchange I enjoyed this morning on Facebook.  The original topic was that campaign signs for Romney were disappearing from lawns and one friend had had their mailbox vandalized the same evening they planted a Romney sign in their yard:

And for your friend Doug, threats to shoot and shooting candidates has been going on for a very long time. In my lifetime we had George Wallace shot while running for president. Martin Luther King assassinated and Bobby Kennedy assassinated while running for president. I might add they were all Democrats but NO ONE EVER accused the the Republicans of conspiring to do these dastardly deeds. These things are done and committed by lone loose cannons just as in the case of Gabby Giffords. They are nut cases or irrespponsible people just playing pranks. They usually do not represent the candidates on either side. I have worked on enough campaigns than I can even count and it has happened since time immemoriam. It is a sad and dark side of campaigns and believe me it happens on both sides. Neither side is a sainted and neither side is full of that kind of scoundrel. There is enough guilt to go all around.

To which I replied:

MLK was a candidate?

I did that because so many people who identify themselves as Democrats make a very common error.  In truth, I was kind of baiting the one who commented seeing if she would bite.  She did:

Just majoy [major] figures in the Dem. Party at the time that had a tremendous empact [impact] on the politics of the day.

And so, with the fish swallowing and the bait in the mouth, I set the hook:

Um…about MLK, Jr. being a Democrat. He was a registered Republican as were nearly all blacks in the south at that time. I hear that one trotted out a lot and the standard line of how Republicans don’t care about the black folk (which would come as a rather large surprise to both MLK, Jr. and Lincoln).

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 for instance…better than 80% voted in favor by Republicans in both houses of Congress but only 62% by Democrats. Voting Rights Act of 1965 was much the same: supported by a 94% vote by Republicans, only 73% by Democrats. It wasn’t until LBJ and the 1964 Democrat congress began passing out money via welfare, Medicaid and such through the War on Poverty that blacks switched whole-heartedly to being Democrats.

Now, was I a troll to maneuver this clueless woman into this conversation?  Maybe.  But the intent was to expose and possibly educate people about a fairly common misconception.  The facts are that blacks were overwhelmingly Republican right through the mid-1960′s.  Republicans, ever since their very founding, were about rights for the black man in America.  That issue was literally their major founding principle.  Equality for all.  In addition to equality for all races, Republicans were the party of women’s suffrage as well.  Susan B. Anthony, the very champion of women voting, was a staunch Republican and derived the vast amount of her political support from the Republican Party…so when you also hear about the Republican “War on Women”, well, this is another example of how taking a stand on one or two issues is conflated by a hostile and biased media into something much larger, more sinister and essentially entirely fraudulent.  Anyway, having delivered the pertinent facts about who it was that was responsible for not only freeing the slaves but sponsoring and passing civil rights legislation, you’d think that those facts would have some impact on the fish.  Well, you’d be wrong.  I was presented with an entire non-sequitur (meaning, it wasn’t related whatsoever) and then, my failing to see the obvious connection of the two totally unrelated events was described as “Evidently to[o] simple for some to grasp“…implying that I lacked the requisite smarts to see the relationship where none existed prior to the moment I corrected her incorrect claims with actual facts.  It was at this point that I pretty much shook my head and mourned that this woman, who likely doesn’t call a local sanitarium “home”, will undoubtedly take her ignorance to the polls and using that as her guiding principle, will cast a vote.

The election…it’s pretty much like this.

I’ve done this kind of thing on FB quite a bit.  I see a reposted crock of shit political zinger by my friends and I correct them when the lie is so egregious and I see people posting the text equivalent of nodding in agreement.  I’m like the Don Quixote of Facebook.  And yes, I chide my friends on the right for their excessive, facts-bereft zeal when they indulge as well (although, in all truth, the things they take Obama to task for are fairly starkly established facts like the debt and deficit and such).  And yeah, I DO need to find a better hobby.

But in the meantime, my point is this: we have an election coming up.  We have two viable candidates and, in my personal opinion, neither is worthy of being the town dog catcher much less president of the United States.  However, we need to choose one of them and, again in my opinion, we ought to be looking at established facts.  Candidates will lie their everloving ass off to get that extra vote so I don’t hold to much of what a candidate claims he’ll do if elected/re-elected.  Congress is where legislation is introduced, debated and passed.  The president merely signs them into law…so much of what either Romney or Obama promises they’ll do is so much crap.  There are lots of facts to be found regarding either candidate and yet despite those facts, the primary driver of who will win the election will be how well they perform in two more debates (and perhaps the September jobs numbers that are due to be released just 4 days before the election).

So, to all Americans who intend to vote (and by that I mean those who aren’t illegal aliens, convicted felons and so on), I say this: cast your vote as an American and not as a Democrat or Republican.  Listen to what each candidate says, inform yourself of the facts and make an informed choice.  Mass ignorance ought not to rule this nation…or influence the outcome in the choosing of its leaders.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

Yet another gone

So…one of my childhood heroes died this past weekend.  My hero was an old man.  He led a full and very interesting life.  His passing marks what I think will be the beginning of a era that marks a long slide backward for, well, not just our generation or even our country but perhaps all of mankind.  This is sad to me not because of the slide we’ll all experience but because it’s entirely avoidable.  It’ll happen anyway and when it’s done someone will one day finally stick their head up, look around and ask “hey, whatever happened to that guy” and someone else will have to say “oh, he died” and we’ll all collectively realize (or maybe not) that we’ve lost something that used to be a really important part of being an American.

Yes, my hero was an American.  The funny thing about heroes: there are a lot of them.  Another funny thing about heroes: they tend to be heroes because of a single defining moment or event.  My hero was one of many such heroes.  He was an ordinary man that did extraordinary things.  He also tends to be associated with a single defining moment for so many people and indeed, when I was a kid, he was my hero for that one thing he’d done.  However, my hero was a hero’s hero because as I got older and learned more about him, he got even more heroic.  Normal heroes have their moment in the sun and then they either bask in it for a time or pass out of it and move on.  My hero kind of didn’t really do either.  He accomplished something nobody can top but rather than even linger a moment in the limelight as quite possibly the world’s most famous man, not only did he move on he never really moved into the limelight in the first place.  Unlike so many others, he didn’t try to parlay his fame and accomplishments into a political career, didn’t endorse products, didn’t seek out new publicity or even try and capitalize on his old fame.  In fact, he refused most requests for interviews, quit autographing various items when he discovered they were being resold for large amounts of money.  He even had to go to court twice to keep others from cashing in on his fame and when he won both times…he donated the suit proceeds to charities.

Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 on the way to the Moon

Neil Alden Armstrong personified service, modesty, accomplishment and humility as no person I’ve ever been aware of before.  He was not only the first man to walk on a heavenly body other than the Earth, he was also the man who saved Gemini 8 from the first in-space emergency and did it with a cool head and no doubts.  He oversaw the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster and eventually went on to sit on the board of the company whose O-rings were found to be at fault for the disaster…solely so he could help ensure such never happened again.  He walked on the Moon in July of 1969 but upon returning said he’d step aside and let other astronauts take his place and less than 2 years later, he retired from NASA altogether.  When he and the crew of Apollo 11 returned and after their 45 day tour of the United States to celebrate their achievement, when Armstrong had his pick of literally thousands of options for what he’d do next, he chose to go to Vietnam with Bob Hope and visit the troops there during some of the darkest days of the war.

There is literally so many things to say about Armstrong that define his humility and humble nature that I can’t even begin to list them all.  If I just keep it to Apollo 11 (and ignore the years as a navy aviator, his service during the Korean War, his years as a test pilot, his astronaut career during the Gemini program) Armstrong:

• Manually landed the lunar lander, Eagle, after realizing via several emergency alarms and observing that they were erroneously drifting toward a hazardous rocky area.  Later it was discovered that Armstrong’s takeover from the automatic landing system likely saved their lives and that he’d used nearly all the planned and reserve fuel to do so.
• That while on the Moon, and in the midst of a fierce United States/Soviet Union space race, Armstrong left a small package of memorial items to deceased Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov, and Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee.  For having just over 145 minutes on the surface of the Moon and the fact that nearly every action was scripted down to the second, this was a memorial he insisted, as mission commander, be included in the itinerary when he learned of it.
• After they re-entered the Eagle and closed and sealed the hatch, Armstrong and Aldrin discovered that, in their bulky spacesuits, they had broken the breaker ignition switch for the ascent engine.  Rather than radio Houston with an emergency Armstrong broke off and used part of a ballpoint pen and managed to push the circuit breaker in to activate the launch sequence.
• Despite being the first man on the Moon and there being preserved video of his first steps, in the entire Apollo 11 photographic record, there are only five images of Armstrong partly shown or reflected…mostly because he was the man taking the pictures.  No direct still photographs of the man who took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” while on the Moon.

But perhaps the truly most remarkable thing about Neil Armstrong was how he passed on.  He died on a summer Saturday afternoon, perhaps the man credited with the most famous accomplishment in the history of mankind, and his passing was merely noted by most media outlets.  In a day and age where network news channels broke into their scheduled programming to gnash teeth, whine, moan and wring hands at the passing of Steve Jobs, Armstrong’s passing wasn’t mentioned for hours after the event and even then initially only in the scrolling news line at the bottom of the screen.  Obit writers spend more time writing about people who are still alive so when they do pass, the article is complete, without error, and unemotional.  The only real writing they do when someone does pass is fill in the blanks about how and surviving relatives, etc.  There should have certainly been more on hand for someone like Armstrong, without a doubt and by the fact that there wasn’t is a testament not only to the man’s desire to live his life privately but that he was successful in doing so.  That even when America discovered they’d lost a hero of the stature of a Neil Armstrong that they collectively shrugged their shoulders is more an indictment of how far we’ve fallen as a people and how much further we’ll still fall as our only crop of astronaut heroes who have walked on the surface of another worlds starts to die off from old age and nobody standing behind them to replace them.

Godspeed Neil Armstrong.  You’ll be missed by those who know how great you were and how much poorer we all collectively are with your absence.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

Dear Diary…

I'd just wished I'd happened across this image BEFORE I went to Las Vegas...

So, I have waited to accumulate enough of recent happenings to fill out a decent sized blog post.  I won’t be going on about Treyvon Martin or Zimmerman or Iran being perpetual douches or the Secret Service banging Colombian whores or how Obama might try and spin that as “the Secret Service created/supported 15 new jobs”.  No, I figure I’ll just toss out the latest items in the life of Euroranger because, I know you guys hang on my every word like that.  Prepare to be riveted!

Item 1: Starting about 3 weeks back, I applied for a life insurance policy.  Don’t know what in particular prompted it but I’m thinking it was the amount of time we spent with Mrs. Ranger’s uncle and aunt in Las Vegas a little over a month back that finally pushed me over the line.  I made passing mention of it here somewhere but my wife’s uncle (who is a year younger than me) has been diagnosed with Stage 4 adenocarcinoma and is actually classified as “terminal”.  He’s cashed out his life insurance policy, has the family fairly well set up and he’s now kinda sorta doing a “bucket list”.  Las Vegas was on that list and when I mentioned many moons back that I was taking the lovely and talented Mrs. Ranger to Vegas for her milestone birthday, he announced they’d be attending.  Turned out, my mother in law and her husband, my brother in law and his baby mama (God in heaven I fucking can’t believe I just used that term) and a couple more couples from our neck of the woods ended up going.  We had a blast and…well…I have no idea how that inspired me to thinking about life insurance.  Anyway, that process has gone mostly smoothly and the phlebotomist came by this morning bright and early to my house to lance me and take the drippings.  I now have a new hole in my arm.  Oddly this was the second time in a week I’d been lanced thusly because…

Item 2: …I now have a new physician.  While this news isn’t of particular import (switching doctors) I did so this time because, while I was in Vegas, I had yet another gall stone/gall bladder attack (this would be my third).  In the midst of the 4-5 hours of feeling like someone had run me through with the world’s largest steak knife, I pledged that “by God, that’s enough” (edited to remove the copious, newly invented profanity I was producing in truly heroic amounts at the time).  I said that as soon as I got home I’d start the process for getting rid of the damn thing if it was going to do this to me.  Anyway, I had my first appointment with the new doc last Wednesday and they too have a fondness for leeching or blood gathering and whatnot.  Anyway, they took an amount and got back with me to tell me that a previous blood glucose level that was high (I had my annual physical with the previous doc back in…December I think it was) was now not high and that a pesky liver enzyme (that had come back also as out of range high) was now back in range.  I now believe my gall bladder, liver and pancreas are plotting against me and simply didn’t suspect a second check of their activities so soon after the previous one.  And I have a second new hole in my arm.  Anyhow, I also went back on Thursday of last week…

Item 3: …for an ultrasound.  Because I had described the experiences of my recent gall bladder episode in such glowing and exquisite detail, the new doc thought it prudent that I should undergo an ultrasound to ascertain my bile organ’s villainy.  He also felt the need, for some unknown reason, to assign Nurse Jackhammer to this task.  Nurse Jackhammer is clearly from the “no pain, NO PAIN?!?!” School of Spanish Inquisitorial Medicine as she sought to remedy the clearly mistaken notion that an ultrasound is a non-invasive procedure.  In addition to her somewhat unsurprising discovery of my gall bladder secretly producing two more stones for my future surprise “ago-nastics” routine I was also gifted with a series of bruised ribs, a well kneaded liver and possibly a punctured diaphragm…and a referral to a surgeon for preparations to have this offending piece of bilious tortuous gristle removed (as an example to my other internal organs as to what’ll happen to them if they don’t shape the fuck up).  So, I have to complain that Nurse Jackhammer hurt me…

Our swingset wasn't quite this gold standard of bastardry but it still needed to go all the same.

Item 4: …but not nearly as bad as the kids’ backyard swingset.  Pursuant to my foolishly unguarded stated desire to be rid of the wooden monstrosity from my back 40, my ever so attentive wife arranged to give the structure away to some unsuspecting strangers.  In the future I will need to exercise studious care in my expressions as my version of “be rid of” involved visions of chainsaws and vigorously burning wood or pretty much anything that resulted in the swingset’s demise that did not also involve excessive physical effort on my part.  The lovely and eternally talented Mrs. Ranger however felt that the edifice deserved another good home and astonishingly, even after having to come see it themselves before agreeing to beforehand, some other couple from the next county over agreed to come remove it.  They showed up Saturday afternoon to, nimble as you please, pluck the offending recreational device from my yard and whisk it onto a rental truck they brought especial for the occasion.  They’re also Jewish and Israeli so I discovered that the words “nimble”, “pluck” and “whisk” either aren’t in the Hebrew dictionary or, if they are, they are used only in a sarcastic manner.  Describing the removal of the behemoth as “physically taxing” is like describing the Great Flood as a “couple of sprinkles”.  Nurse Jackhammer would have heartily approved in any case.  As is my habit with much of humanity to whom I generously ascribe the basic IQ levels you would take to be common amongst steaming piles of dog crap, I assumed that had the people actually come to see this thing first they might have considered measuring it to…oh, I don’t know…see if it fit on their truck.  I am frequently disappointed with much of humanity however and no such foresight was exercised.  That these folks are Israelis REALLY doesn’t speak well about Palestinians who find they are consistently outwitted by these Colossi of Planning and Execution.  Anyway, in addition to 2 new holes in my arm and a series of abused and indignant ribs I am now also the proud owner of a virtual insurrection amongst most of the musculature along my back left side as well as a right elbow (coincidentally the same site chosen for the exsanguination merriments) who, I believe would very much like to call 911 to press charges against me for assault and battery.  The swingset did indeed make it onto the truck but I am also now without a side gate and accompanying fence panel.  This would be the same gate and fence panel my dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers Golden Retriever has been diligently excavating for the past 5 or so years…surely in far-sighted anticipation that I would one day like to move something the size of the Titanic out of my backyard but lacked the requisite iceberg to make it happen.  I wonder if he realizes that digging down just another few inches would also qualify his proud archaeological “piece de resistance” as a “shallow grave”.  He is undoubtedly incredibly fortunate that should my hand even likely approach a shovel my entire central nervous system would likely implode just from the anticipation.

Item 5: Mrs. Ranger broke her wedding/engagement band.  This has actually happened before and we have actually had it repaired before.  She hadn’t actually selected a weekend like “pay-the-government-every-single-penny-you-have-left” weekend on which to announce the destruction of the physical manifestation of our vows love and eternal devotion…that is until now.  We are now awaiting the return of said ring set from the jeweler and my wallet has already suffered a grievous although not-lucky-enough-to-actually-be-fatal wound.  As a pleasant aside, the nice lady who took the ring advised Mrs. Ranger that her band combo has, apparently, skyrocketed in value since last we discussed it’s possible replacement price.  This lady gave her reason to believe that the ring set that we had, once upon a time, been told was worth somewhere around $2500 was now dancing somewhere in the neighborhood of $12K – $13K.  This naturally necessitates a new appraisal for which we will need to advise our homeowners insurance so that we are adequately covered should the Mrs. actually lose this small fortune from her finger.  It would be rude not to give State Farm a chance to prepare an adequately worded rejection of our claim in advance, you know.  Anyway, I mention this because some of you too might find that your jewelry has appreciated in value (mostly due to the ridiculous prices for precious metals these days) and you may wish to consider having them re-appraised for that reason.  Lord knows, the only reason the pantheon of hateful Gods has deigned to let me know of this change in value is likely so I cry all the harder when my lovely wife manages to lose it in the next few months.

Anyway, that and playoff hockey started this past week.  I may have mentioned it before but if I hadn’t: playoff hockey is, by far, the best and most entertaining sports available on television for your viewing enjoyment.  You don’t have to like hockey, know how to spell hockey or even ever having witnessed iced in its natural habitat (outside of a highball glass) to enjoy playoff hockey.  It’s that good.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.

ObamaCare vs. SCOTUS, Round 1

Yeah...too little, too late, too false, sport. No amount of divine intervention's gonna save this steaming turd of a law now.

In the interest of holy brevity (which I rarely observe), I’ll try and keep this short today…mostly because, in a few months, this post will be rendered obsolete.

Today is day 2 of the Supreme Court hearing the case of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al v. Florida…or otherwise and more famously known as “Obamacare”.  So far, the news today is that one of the thought-to-be crucial swing votes, Justice Anthony Kennedy, has been posing some skeptical questions to the government’s lawyers (the ones defending Obamacare) which, in turn, makes people start to think the court may indeed rule against Obamacare.  This is all info that can be found practically anywhere on the web today.  What’s interesting though is that we have a fight in court simply because of political cowardice…and that cowardice ought to be nigh unforgivable should this law be struck down as unconstitutional (which, I believe, it will be).

Why cowardice?  Well, it’s because of the issue that’s actually being argued in court today: does the federal government have the right to compel a private citizen to purchase a product they may not want to purchase?  This is being argued because of the coverage mandate language of the Obamacare law that states that, with only few exceptions, everyone must be covered by a health insurance policy by some future date or risk being assessed a penalty (call it a tax as well if you like) by the IRS on your next tax return.  The government is arguing that they can enforce this clause via the rights ensured to Congress via the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.  The law’s opponents, naturally, have responded with the legal language equivalent of “bullshit”.

Anyway, if the federal government’s goal was for everyone to have medical insurance, wasn’t there a better and easier (and constitutional) way to do this?  Oh, you bet your ass there was.  It’s called “taxation”…something the federal government positively excels at.  The cowardice charge comes from me because this law SHOULD fail because the Congress didn’t have the stomach to do this the way they should have (if they were going to go this route of ensuring everyone is insured) and copped out by saying they were requiring people to buy their own.  Had the Democrats in Congress simply manned up and said “we’re imposing a new tax to pay for health care coverage”, issued people a voucher for X dollars per year to pay for it (probably via their tax return) OR simply given the taxpayer a choice of insurers their voucher could be sent to (so they wouldn’t simply pocket the money) so as to pay for the premiums then this law would likely survive and maybe do what it was intended to do.

But they DIDN’T man up, didn’t call it a tax when it really IS a tax and instead pussed their way out so that they could run for office back in 2010 without the claim hanging over them that they just ushered in the single biggest taxation increase in United States history.  What it boils down to is: they wanted to be re-elected more than they wanted (ostensibly) to help the country and its citizens.

This is one of those times you see the depth of wisdom of the Founding Fathers to have a Supreme Court to ride herd on the government.

The SCOTUS, I think, will strike down at least this portion of the law and rightfully so.  If you allow the Congress to get away with passing a law saying you MUST buy something then you’ve opened the Pandora’s Box a crack to allow them to decide you need to eat certain things, engage in certain activities, must read and possess certain texts, etc.  It is a way too intrusive step of the federal government into our lives and hopefully the Supreme Court will bitchslap this stupid law back to the frickin’ Stone Age.

You want universal healthcare?  Fine.  There’s really only one way to do it: expand Medicare to cover every single American for a minimum of basic medical coverage.  This will mean that your tax bill WILL increase but you get to do away with Medicaid and the VA.  Also, your private insurers will still survive because the coverage provided is basic…and they’ll sell supplemental policies which (if I had my way) would be strictly regulated.  But none of this will happen because our Congress doesn’t give a flying rat turd for the country when that care is opposed to their getting re-elected to office.  So, this law will fail, Obama was an idiot for proposing it, an even bigger idiot for going along with all the concessions he made to get it to pass and he deserves the full blame (along with Reid and Pelosi) when the court rightfully squashes this idiocy as it almost surely should and probably will.  And just so I’m on the record: I too believe we have a major problem with health care in this country and I believe the only ultimate solution is to go to some form of a single payer solution.  Only problem with Obamacare is: this ain’t it and it deserves to die so we can all deal with the shock of that and move to address the situation with a mature, comprehensive, bi-partisan plan.

I almost typed that last part without laughing out loud.  Almost.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.