Chelsea Hubbell

It’s pretty obvious to anyone with facial recognition skills that Chelsea Clinton’s father is Webb Hubbell. It seems mean to point this out. It is mean. Who cares? Trashing the Clintons is less than they deserve.

Hey, Chelsea, DNA tests. C’mon, just do it. Quit flapping your big Webb Hubbell flapping lips and take the test.

Ding Dong the Bitch Is Gone

Keith Olbermann just got the boot from MSNBC. They let him have 6 minutes to rant and self-aggrandize and conjure the ghost of Tim Russert, who is no longer here to defend himself, but who I hope will go Christmas Carol on Olbermann’s ass for this.

Keith Olbermann has always been a known asshole, not just in his opinions and persona, but in real life.

He’s a triple threat: he’s everything wrong with the left, everything wrong with Hollywood, and the real life Ted Knight on crystal.

If he ends up homeless, that’s one more good reason to cut off all assistance to the homeless.

The Metaphysics of Gun Control

We won’t find common ground on gun control because it’s about conflicting worldviews.

I will call the first worldview, Eeek! A gun!

I will call the second worldview, Eww! a dead bad guy is getting blood all over my shoes!

Bet you can’t guess which worldview I’m in.

The first worldview is that we’ll reduce violence by taking guns away from people. Disarming good people is worth it if you catch bad people in the net. In fact, most bad people wouldn’t find another way to do significant violence if they didn’t have guns. How many bad people would be able to take out 20 people at once with a knife?

The second worldview is that the genie is out of the bottle and the best way to deal with the minority of bad people with guns is to make them worry about being surrounded by a lot of good people who have guns. In a shopping mall. On a street. In a restaurant. At school, for Christ’s sake.

I live in a concealed carry state. I don’t carry. I’m a lazy, selfish sonofabitch. I’m starting to feel guilty about not carrying after the Arizona debacle. Concealed carry is not about protecting yourself. It’s about protecting your community. You’re more likely in this wonderful country to be a witness to violence than a victim of violence.

Give back. Carry.

UPDATE 2016: I have a CCP, I’ve spent a fair amount of time and money getting trained, and I still seldom carry a firearm. In the last few months, I’ve realized I feel competent to carry, after a couple of years of training. I do carry pepper spray and sharp weapons, and the only thing really stopping me from carrying a firearm regularly is shelling out the bucks for a good carry gun, one that is small enough to conceal without having to wear cargo shorts and an untucked Hawaiian shirt everywhere I go.

I also no longer believe in concealed carry as a public duty to protect your fellow citizens, except as a statistical deterrent to the bad guys. . The more training I’ve gotten, the less I care about protecting strangers who refuse to protect themselves.

 

 

Can we drop the Chilean miners back in the hole?

27 of the 33 rescued have already filed lawsuits. Let’s plug the hole by bulldozing their lawyers into it and then putting in a giant concrete butt plug.

The Lasting Memory Paw

Your pet has always been an important part of your family. You’ve built so many lasting memories together. But our special friends pass on too soon and when they leave it feels like a part of the family is gone.

Now, there’s a truly special way to honor the memory of your cherished dog or cat with the new Lasting Memory Paw (TM). This beautiful, personalized memorial contains a weather resistant photo holder that displays any picture of your cherished dog or cat, indoors or outdoors. DISPLAY OUTDOORS!

It’s the perfect way to honor the memory of your pet. Each Lasting Memory Paw is specially inscribed with this touching poem:

Our hearts still ache in sadness, and secret tears still flow. What it meant to lose you, no one will ever know.

The Lasting Memory Paw special paw print shape is expertly crafted to look and feel like authentic stone.  Place the Paw in your back yard…place it at the front door to remember your loyal friend every time you come home. There’s no better gift…it even comes with a hook…call now to order…

If you did call, please turn yourself in for spaying.

be-pee

British Petroleum, the douchebags who’ve been for years putting out those stupid ads with “normal” people offering their opinions about energy production (you know the ads, they’re boring, yellow and have a synthesizer music bed) have now set up a hotline for “normal” people to offer suggestions about how they should clean up their giant oil spill.

I don’t know what to say after that. Great job, BP-eenie.

Annual Mother’s Day Rant

I don’t celebrate Mother’s Day. Because the majority of moms are bad moms.

If you think I’m being too harsh, look around at your friends and see what percentage give a thumbs up to their moms.

Only Congress has lower actual approval ratings.

If you like your mom, honor her on a day not dedicated to all moms, most of whom suck at their jobs and who deserve to be fired. Out of a cannon loaded with a real cannon ball.

Think about it. You’re lumping your mom in with them. That’s not nice.

Nellie Olsen grows up….to become a socialist

There are two deep, implicit beliefs that all socialists and progressives share:

• I’m smarter|wiser|more compassionate than most people AND THEREFORE everyone would be better off doing what I say. I’ll call this the Nellie Olsen Principle.
• Unless smarter|wiser|more compassionate people impose order on society, society will be a disorganized mess. I’ll call this the Adam Who? Principle.

I have many friends who define themselves as liberal|Progressive. I don’t have any friends who call themselves socialists,  since I consider self-proclaimed socialists to be fair game like self-proclaimed racists. Pretty much, if you proclaim you’re a socialist or a racist, I flip the bozo bit on you.

UPDATE March 2019: Things have escalated a lot in the last decade in terms of playing the race card. I’m thinking about declaring myself a racist at the beginning of any argument with a Democrat/Leftist/Progressive.

They’re going to call me a racist in a minute anyway, so why not get it out of the way right up front? “By the way, I’m a racist, so it won’t help for you to call me a racist, and, after all, there are a lot worse things than being a racist, like being a Democrat.”

My l|P friends are perfectly nice people. Like Obama. You get the sense he’s a pretty nice guy, even a little hen-pecked. I’m probably being a little not-nice, comparing them to Nellie Olsen. It’s something of a caricature, like comparing conservatives to Scrooge.

These nice l|P people don’t end up in control of other people–the Nellie Olsen’s they empower do. Like Nancy Pelolsen.

Ok, I’m going to try to stop being just snarky for a microsecond and be really mean and say what I seriously think about all my nice l|P friends.

On some level, either they never grew up, or more often, they’re afraid that most other people didn’t. They need rules and order and teacher telling them to “use their words.” They’re not really about the Nellie Olsen Principle, that was just me being snarky, but they’re all about the Adam Who? (Smith, by the way) Principle. They distrusted the Schumpeter-ian chaos that ensued whenever the teacher left the room. I think this is an unrealistic attitude and shows how they don’t apply the lessons of ecology to political economy and social order.

Then again, I’m not particularly realistic. When the teacher left the room in 4th grade, I went up and wrote on the blackboard (yes, blackboard, with chalk, that’s how old I am), “Miss Smith is a nut, she has a rubber butt, and every time she turns around, she goes putt putt.” (Yes, that’s how old I am, spinster teachers were called Miss, not Ms.) I was shocked, shocked when a classmate turned me in. I thought I was the Huey Long of the 4th grade and everybody would be in solidarity with me.

My point here is that where you land politically has a lot to do with how you were when you were a kid. What scared you? What outraged you? Who did you side with? What did you resist? When did you submit? Who did you despise? Who despised you? What did you retreat to? Who did you hurt? Who hurt you? Who would you love to have a second chance with (to apologize, to confront, to get an apology)? How did you treat adults? What did you think of them? Which adults did you despise? Pity? Want to be like?

I don’t think many people have a consistent record on any of this, but there is always a thread. I think I’m going to start talking more to my l|P friends about this kind of stuff because I’d really like to understand and I think they might understand me better too.

For myself, for every  “Miss Smith is a nut…” moment, I had 50 knuckle-under moments. But I’d have that hard-hitting telling-limericks-to-power moment now and then…

There was this juvenile delinquent in my 8th grade class. He was 16 and used to punch me (and, eventually, protect me a lot. And cheat off me. Forcibly. He ended up in prison by his early 20’s. I’d say his name, but I had a crush on his little sister, and I don’t want to embarrass her.

As long as I got him through academically, I was roughly protected. I’d get arm-bruises, but nobody else was allowed to hit me. I was his bitch. One day, I lost it. I told him to lick his own fucking test, or something like that. When you’re in the 8th grade, swearing is Tourette-ish at best.

Then came PE, next period. We were playing football. He was quarterback, since he was 2 feet taller than anyone else. He was in the end zone. Tall doesn’t necessarily mean smart. Still enraged about injustice on that day, I rushed him with everything I had and put him into the pricker bushes behind the end zone. I must have been going 130 mph of pure pissed off 90 lb nerd to launch him like that. Then I ran like hell the other way. I had a good 300 yard start on him before he extricated himself bleeding from a thousand pricks. So it was no problem for me to make it behind a locked door and let the teachers dart him.

Next day…   nothing. He didn’t punch me or cheat off me or hit me and I tutored him after that. I got a little respect from other kids for that sack, but not much. Had I not hidden behind a locked door and tried to climb through the acoustical ceiling in case he made it through, maybe I would have gotten more respect. Pissing myself probably didn’t help either.

He didn’t stop bullying everyone else, but something changed between us. He wasn’t broken–he was still a terror, but I was exempt and he wasn’t seeking revenge for his humiliation either. He never hit me again, never demanded test answers, and we were actually friends. It was very complex, way too complex for an 8th grader to figure out. I was sad when I found out that he fulfilled his destiny and went to jail for a long time.  And none of this ever got me near his hot sister. That’s the worst part.

There are lots of things that go on when we are kids that are hugely significant. We don’t have the ability to process them at the time, and it’s hard to process them later. So here’s my start. What the hell was that all about?

One thing I do know–that event has a lot to do with me thinking the only hope for the Muslim world is if we knock them into the pricker bushes.

Trust

Incredible how we think everyone’s an irresponsible idiot, yet we drive in traffic.

The above line has been sitting in my drafts for a couple of weeks.  Last night, I read email from my daughter. She’d just gotten a cool new job! I called to congratulate her, and it took her about 45 seconds to slow me down and let me know that she was in an ambulance.

A 16 year old in Dad’s Buick (seriously, Dad’s Buick, with Dad in the passenger seat and Grandma on oxygen in the back seat) made a very poor new driver left turn decision. Totaled my daughter’s beloved Impreza. As she said to me today, “That’s the only inanimate object I’ve loved since Kitty!”

Kitty was a stuffed animal I bought her at the Jacob’s Lake gift shop near the north rim of the Grand Canyon when she was barely toddling. Kitty was her constant companion through all childhood misadventures and trials, including a Kitty-napping by a jealous schoolgirl friend. Kitty eventually shuffled off this mortal coil, and is in an urn or a pillow or a jar of formaldehyde now, I can’t remember which. Kitty and Blankie, RIP. Probably in the same pillow.

So she’s fine today, if in mourning for her Impreza, and bruised as hell.

But that truth remains. Every day, we drive at lethal velocities, trusting our lives to people we despise–people we wouldn’t trust to make the right decision about anything else, but we trust them to make split-second right decisions and they trust us and we get home every day.

Once every 11 years, like with my daughter, that trust is violated. But given how stupid you (and I) think most people are, shouldn’t it be every 11 minutes that we get slammed into?

Seattle PI: BIH not RIP

Everyone  says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (what a stupid name for a newspaper) is about to go out of business. I am happy dancing on their grave, even if it isn’t filled quite yet.

My wife loves everything that is printed on paper. Even newspapers. When Kindle gets it right every book in my house is history, except for the thousands she will insist remain shelved.

Every morning, 5-am-ish, there’s a loud slap on my driveway, my security lights come on and an engine is gunned, simultaneously. 2 of 3 days, this wakes me up an hour before the alarm and ruins my last hour of sleep. GD newspaper.

7am, the newspaper is in the driveway as I’m leaving to drive to work. I pick it up and heave it at the porch. 95% of the time it’s a direct hit. My wife hates it that I heave her paper. She’s annoyed because 5% of the time I behead one of her flowers. Well, I think I did that once, but it might as well be 5%. The other 4% when I miss I have to go pick the slimy thing up and put it on the porch. When I miss the porch it’s  because the day’s paper is a flimsy little thing that handles heaving 20 feet about as well as a paper airplane. Because they have no ads and almost no news.

If I don’t heave the newspaper, she’ll drive out for the day without picking it up, and I get to have the fun of heaving it when I get home or heaving a few of them on Wednesday and Friday when I get sick of seeing them in the driveway inviting thieves.

My wife wants to read the newspaper with her coffee. I’ve seen her do that on the occasional Sunday, not even every Sunday. Never seen her do it on a weekday. Instead, weekdays, we watch the bimbos and himbos on Fox and make fun of them. Then I kiss her goodbye, and heave the paper on my way out. Maybe she takes the papers to work and reads them after I heave them. At least, when I heave them at the porch, she does clean them off. Left on the driveway, they tend to accumulate.

I like the Sunday paper. It’s easy to heave on Monday morning. It still has the heft to be accurately heaved.

We go away on vacation and she forgets to suspend the paper, and when we come back, there are several loose pink condoms filled with newsprint sitting on our driveway advertising, hey, nobody’s home!

Burn In Hell, Seattle PI.