Randomny

I'm back. Seven-day cruise along the Alaska Panhandle. Pics later, maybe.

Apparently 33% of people don't send in census forms, so the gummint is thinking to add prize drawings. That right there tells you our society is on the verge of collapse. Serving on a jury and filling out your census forms are civic duties you have no business not doing. Well, unless you have a philosophical reason not to send in your family info. If you don't do it for an actual reason, I respect that. It's a free country, or could be, so go ahead and don't send it in. But if you're just lazy, then what the fuck, huh? You need a fuckin' prize drawing? Puss.

I am so sick of Obama. He has no credentials beyond the ability to get elected to the Senate and run an exciting Presidential campaign*. I am so sick of Hillary. She is bound and determined to prove either that a Democrat can be a fighter, or that the Democrats are hopelessly broken, or that she's a psycho control freak. I'll take the first one, but I don't really believe it. And now Moveon is trying to make McCain look Bush-like. Of course they are, they're desperate, especially now that they oppose free speech.

* - Obviously, given history and all, this is not a disqualification.

Gawd. I go away for a week and the world gets even stupider.

Yes, McClellan is a scumbag, especially for claiming he knew the shit was wrong even while he was spouting it. He's worse than McNamara. It's one thing to lie for the good of the party (or of the corporation, after all, I'm in marketing these days), but if people are dying for it, you need to stop cold, or face a chain whipping. But! If he can make one last sad buck writing a book about it, let him. This is America, after all.

The cruise ship was full of old married people. I so wanted to ask them how they did it. I really want to know. But I wouldn't get the whole story. "Oh, we're in love," or whatever. No. That's not how men work. They have their own ways of keeping their sanity through decades of getting older and meaner while married to someone getting older and meaner too, and the immense profitability of pornography and worldwide prostitution under various labels proves it. Given endless news stories about substantial news-worthy men getting caught dining out on the wrong gash, I have a hard time believing more than a small percentage of us nasty old boys are truly keeping it where it belongs. The vast majority don't get caught, is all, and have found ways to maintain a veneer of rare innocence. This is, of course, why prostitution remains illegal. The lawmakers have to maintain their cover just as much as everyone else. I hate the hypocrisy*. But fuck, it's probably all for the best. We can't go back to the days of well-heeled men keeping mistresses, evidently, and paying for it outright is just so soul-less, so empty, and damages lives and the whole bit. At the end of the day, this enlightened age probably owes its stability to women who let their husbands go away on long fishing trips.

* - Which is why I don't do it, which is why I'm getting even meaner as I get older.

Four seventeen a gallon! And we don't even use all that much Middle East oil. My preferred supplier (Arco, cuz they're cheap) uses none. Evidently someone fucked up predicting demand for diesel fuel and this is driving up the raw oil price? I don't buy it. Even NPR's sober explanation of this business made no sense (last I heard, which was like two weeks ago). Doesn't matter anyway. We need to shift off the oil base. There's plenty of it still out there, in our own territory (can you spell ANWR?), and we should use it not to keep the prices down but to keep the prices under control, rising steadily but not at a catastrophic rate, so that we maintain a strong enough economy to pay for development of the next big thing. After all, R&D is expensive and simply doesn't happen when too many people are starving. The time to switch is now and not when we're desperate. Of course, our government is at cross-purposes on this, as you'd expect any government to be. And the oil companies are just trying to milk their investments, like good stewards of capital should. Bastards.

Enough pointless raving. Time to go get the dogs from their puppy doctor visit.