English, People

“Stimulus was supposed to be quick. In fact, they never intended to spend it and will not completely have effectively spent it until after the president’s re-elect. Always looking at how do you get the maximum hit when the president was up for re-elect.”

— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, March 19, 2012

I came across this on March 21. Issa's lying about the stimulus, and his office, when asked for any evidence of the charge, had only slanders against Obama and no evidence. If you want to read about the falsehood of the charge about the stimulus, go to the Washington Post's Fact Checker.

Instead, I'm going to comment on Issa's illiteracy. For years now Republicans like Issa, who engage in eye poking and bomb throwing rather than reasoned policy dispute, have referred to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. It's a Rush kind of childishness that I've presumed is intended to be a needling of Democrats.

Now, I see it's not childishness. It's just stupidity. Issa doesn't grasp that re-elect and re-election are two different forms of speech. The former is a verb and the latter a noun. Obama is seeking to have the voting public re-elect him. The campaign is for his re-election. See, not that hard to distinguish between them.

I guess the extra syllable of re-election was just too hard for Issa to muster. He had to save his energy for futile, fact free attacks on Obama. After all, he couldn't be bothered to put "the" in front of stimulus or a noun or pronoun in front of always.

Lazy thinking. The hallmark of today's GOP.

Conspiracy Advocation

Among the many things I'm reading is 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso. I'm reading it in trade paperback form, being late to the bandwagon. It's a great book that I'll talk about more on Comics and... at some point.

In the fourth trade, titled A Foregone Tomorrow, there's a forward by Bill Savage, who's a Ph.D. in American lit at Northwestern U. He's a bit wordy, and I'll not get into all of the praises he sings for the book. They're deserved.

One of the premises of the book is that the US is run by thirteen powerful families who operate extralegally. These families have been running the US since its founding, or before. Savage wrote the forward during the Bush II years and, evidently addressing some previously spoken concerns about the believability of the premise, says "We live right now in a nation whose President is the son of a President and grandson of a Senator, who defeated a forme Vice President, himself the son and grandson of Senators, in an election in part decided by a Supreme Court Justice appointd by the winnder's father. Such a world of self-perpetuating political power is not htat far off, really, from Azzarello's vision of the thirteen families of the Trust running America from behind a screen of absolute secrecy and murderous violence."

Non-existent Lord save me from conspiracy theorists. Let's just start with 50 years of history in America. In particular, let's start with Presidents. Fifty years ago JFK was president. What was his big, controlling family connection? None at that point. The best they'd reached was him being Senator and his father being Ambassador. Not a lot of juice there.

Then there's LBJ. Poor kid from Texas with no family connections. Nixon? Another guy with no family connections. Same with Ford, Carter, and Reagan. It's not until Bush I that you get to someone with a family history in the higher eschelons of politics. And he couldn't even manage to get re-elected when facing a bumpkin from Arkansas with zippo connections. Next is Bush II and the royal history he and Gore have, such as it is, but the next president is Obama, who, again, has no family connections whatsoever, nor did his opponent, McCain.

So, out of 9 presidents in 50 years, only 2 have a family royalty at the time of their election. Kennedy's family wasn't political royalty until after his election. Even so, including him would only make for a third of Presidents having an American royalty pedigree. And as noted, one of them couldn't manage his own re-election, while another was assassinated.

And the Supreme Court allusion is even more suspect. For one, the Supreme Court didn't decide the election. The eventual recount that was halted by the Supreme Court showed that Bush won Florida, so even if it had continued, he would have won. For another, there are 9 Justices on the court. Bush I appointed only 2, and Souter didn't even agree with 2 of the 3 reasons for stopping the vote recount. In fact, there was a 5 Justice majority sufficient to stop the recount that didn't consist of either of the 2 appointees (the other being Thomas).

I don't care if Azzarello has has a dubious conspiracy at the heart of his story. I read conspiracy stories for the fun of the things. I haven't come across one conspiracy yet that was remotely believable. The only way to enjoy them is to take them for the fiction they are, just like an alternate history story where the South won the Civil War or something.

Savage's attempted defense of it as realistic is less realistic than the posited conspiracy. Say what you will about the influence of money in politics, it's the direct kind, not the behind closed doors machinations of murder that 100 Bullets has. In fact, at this point, it's not even the direct payment of money to representatives. It's the corruption of vast sums of money being used to anonymously slur candidates that's the problem. Lies are put out about a person with no requirement that it be known who's making the claims so that person's or organization's motivations can be known.

It's kind of funny because Savage is a liberal conspiracy theorist. Now it's the wingnuts of the Know Nothings (aka Tea Party) who are the big conspiracy advocates. Obama is ruining their lives, personally, you know. Just another proof that conspiracy theory is riddled with holes but will continue to be popular with whoever is sympathetic to whatever political position isn't currently in ascendency.

Planning Ahead

In the living room at my house there are a pair of matching 8x10 pictures. One has Karen and Katya while the other has me and Hob. They're about 10 years old, so Hob's about 2. In those days he didn't like getting his picture taken, to the point of crying about it. He did like hanging out with me, so I'm in the picture. We did the Karen and Katya one to balance it out.

In the picture Hob's still roly-poly. It's a casual picture, with both of us in T-shirts and shorts. He's sitting on my lap facing me as I sit on the floor. He's playing with my necklace. He still looks distrustingly toward the camera, even though he's a bit happier now that I'm in the picture with him. It's quite cute.

In recent weeks Karen commented to Katya how cute the picture is and that it's one of her favorites of Hob. Katya concurred and took it one step further. "If Robbie (everyone else in the family calls him Robbie) dies before I do, I'm going to have that picture in the collage at his funeral."

Nice to see she's planning ahead.

Speed Constancy

The route I take to get my daughter to dance class is frequently traveled. It also has some speed limit changes as the areas it traverses change. On the Baltimore County side, when it's Nicodemus Rd, it's 30 mph. When it crosses into Carroll Co and becomes Deer Park Rd it's in the reservoir and the speed limit goes to 45 mph. Once the reservoir ends and there are some sporadic residences, the speed drops to 40 mph, though that's newly dropped from 45 mph.

Anyway, far too many people drive the same speed on the road, regardless of the speed limit. Sometimes I'm stuck behind someone who was driving well over 40 mph in the 30 mph zone, but doesn't pick up to 55 mph for the 45 mph zone. Other times I'll have one of them come flying up behind me in the 30 mph zone, only to leave them behind when I hit the 45 mph zone. Then I may get them back in the 40 mph zone.

Look, people, the speed limit changes on roads for good reason. It's not random. Conditions have changed. On the Baltimore County side, housing is more dense, as is the frequency of side streets, even though it's zoned rural. Slow down. It's not the highway, or even Reisterstown Rd. But in the reservoir there's nothing. Pick up the pace.

These lessons apply to other roads, too. It's a good rule of thumb that you can safely drive 10 mph over the posted speed. Cops tend to leave you alone, too. Hell, even the speed cameras won't hit you until you hit 12 mph over the posted speed. So, keep it to 10 mph over the posted speed, and you'll get there safe, sound and timely, with no delays for a speeding ticket.

Nonlinear Dying

As invasive species go, stink bugs kind of suck. Unlike other invasive species, like humans and honey bees, they're entirely detrimental. All they do is eat crops and emit odor. And their population keeps increasing because nothing in the Western hemisphere eats the blighters.

So I do my part by killing them whenever possible. I don't find their stink so offensive to put off killing. At worst it's a smell of damp socks. Most of the time there's no smell at all.

The most irritating thing about them, other than that they get into the house in large numbers, is that they're erratic. They can't fly worth a damn and just veer into you. Even in death, the damn things go off in wild directions. More often than not, when I whack one with the fly swatter, the thing doesn't just drop with gravity. It goes off at some angle and disappears somewhere to be found some time later.

The only good stink bug is a dead stink bug.

Unintened Consequences

VW has been running this 2012 Tiguan commercial since somewhere around the Super Bowl. You know the one. The mom's riding around doing errands in the tuner car with no trunk space due to speaker consumption while her daughter's out with her boyfriend in the Tiguan. When they switch cars and the boyfriend asks why the girl's mom always makes them take her Tiguan, the presumptive lesson is that the Tiguan is safer than the tuner.

Here's the lesson I'm getting out of it. There's nowhere near enough room in the tuner for the daughter to be having sex with her boyfriend. That damn thing's tiny and full of electronics. The Tiguan's nice and roomy. Mom's fostering a healthy sexual envirnoment for daughter so there aren't any cramped car injuries. Either that or mom just gets off on the smell left in her car after daughter and boyfriend are done. Not sure which is funnier.

Vegan Myths

For the first time in a week I was exercising on March 19, pneumonia being an impediment to that sort of thing. My daughter likes to watch Ellen so that was on while I was doing some weight lifting. I don't recall a lot of details about celebrities. Most of them are of no interest to me. Nonetheless, I wasn't surprised to find Ellen is a vegan. This came up because she had guest on hawking a book of easy steps to convert us all to vegans.

I'm not going to argue with Ellen or her guest whether being a vegan actually provides them with more energy. That's subjective, so it's their own opinion.

I also don't know what's in the book, but their discussion sets up a false dichotomy that seems to me is common with the vegan crowd, small as it is. They did this with a "typical" American family by going to their house to start them on a vegan diet. The house has lots of junk food, which is not healthy. To Ellen and her guest, the alternative, and the only viable one, is being a vegan. That's not so.

For one thing, plenty of junk food is vegan. There's nothing animal product in it. Doesn't mean it's good for you.

For another, a balanced diet is what's good for you. Vegan is just another extreme. Eating no animal products is simply not consistent with the evolution of the species. We're omnivores, not herbivores. Eating meat is one of the things that fostered our brain growth. We wouldn't be human without our ancestors having been meat eaters. Just eat it in moderation and don't eat the junk with no nutritional value at all or at a minimum. The occasional junk isn't going to kill anyone. It's junk as staple that's a problem.

To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of health is a vice.

Mmm... Cheese.