Meanderings in Blogland

I’m fascinated by the wingnuts’ reactions to their recent electoral drubbing. There’s nothing quite so entartaining as the sight of Republican cannibalism. It’s wholesome entertainment for the whole family.

Sometimes the right wingers will write something so completely bizzarre that it occurs to me that maybe they’re right, after all. Maybe I’m just too unbelievably stupid to understand. If only I had a functional nueron or two I could comprehend their profound wisdom.

I just visitted one of my favorite comedy sites, townhall.com. In one essay, that tower of intellectual insight, David Limbaugh, shares his ideas on the future of the Republican Party. In it he writes a paragraph that’s so far over my head it might as well be written in Sanskrit:

Traditionalists don’t oppose this or that “high-minded” plan aimed at delivering security (e.g., health care) or prosperity (e.g., direct transfer payments from producers to nonproducers) because they don’t want more people to be prosperous but because they do and because they cherish freedom. We know that socialism never works and always results in less prosperity, on top of its obvious freedom-stripping inevitabilities.

The freedom-stripping inevitabilities of access to health care are so completely obvious that we don’t even need to discuss what they might be. It’s just dumbass hippie Communist degenerates like me who are puzzled by this, I’m sure.

I really should spend my time more productively…

I’ve caught the youtube bug lately, mostly watching and commenting on ads and news videos relating to the upcoming presidential election. Oh, my goodness there are some incredibly stupid people out there! The comment forums there are such a sewer that I figured anything I type would raise the level of discourse a little. Hey, at least I can spell and punctuate. I doubt I’ve changed anybody’s mind about anything, but all I can do is try.

One particularly irritating theme is taking something Obama says, stripping it from context, and trying to turn it into an outrageous gaffe. The classic is the now hot, but soon-to-be-forgotten, lipstick on a pig statement. Obama was talking about McCain (McSame? McWorse?) trying to position himself as the candidate of change. Obama listed a whole host of ways McCain’s policies are the same as Bush’s, and compared the re-branding to putting lipstick on a pig. An apt metaphor. But, somehow, the rightwingers are shocked, just shocked I tell you, that Obama would say such a crude and sexist thing about Palin, despite the fact that he wasn’t talking about Palin. Since Palin had used the word “lipstick” a week before, all subsequent mentions of lipstick are automatically a reference to her. I guess that’s what passes for “logic” these days.

Was it disgustingly sexist when McCain used the same figure of speech in reference to Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals? No. McCain was a POW. That makes it OK.

Anyway, since I was commenting and stuff, I figured I should type up a profile, and, while I was at it, upload a video. So I posted a montage of my nature photography. Check it out:

Floating Rocks, Living Water video

All Hell is breaking loose here in Mendocino County… where to begin?

Well for starters, the weather. We had a very wet January, but from the middle of February on, it’s been frightfully dry. Pretty much all Spring, it’s been dry, windy, chilly, and dry.

Last Friday evening, I noticed some interesting clouds; it looked like we were going to have a nice sunset. I wanted to go out and do some photography, but I had to do some chores a couple of miles inland. As the chores dragged on and on, a strange thing happened: distant, and not-so-distant, rumblings of thunder. We don’t get thunderstorms here very often. On the rare occasion it rumbles we usually get lots of rain with it. But this was different. I usually love thunderstorms, but this was scary. Lotsa thunder and lightning, hardly any rain.

I did manage to get out for some tail-end-of-the-sunset photography. Here’s a shot of the Mendocino Presbyterian Church:

Later on the Mendocino Headlands, I shot a series of frames with different exposure and focus values for this composite:

Ah, peace and tranquility on the Mendocino Headlands!

The next day I started to hear reports of the fires from friends whose houses were near fires, from news reports, overheard conversations, etc. More than a hundred fires in Mendocino County alone, with many, many more in nearby counties. Whole towns with (voluntary) evacuations. So few government resources that many of the fires were burning without crews even trying to slow them down. Local fire departments running out of gas money.

But still, the feds are in the area in force, busting pot farmers. Priorities, people!

It’s almost a week later now, and we’ve got 87 active fires in Mendo County (some fires have merged with other fires, few are out). Even here on the coast, with most of our air blowing straight of the ocean, the Sun is an eerie orange color.

The scariest thing is, it’s only June. It may not rain significantly until October.

Dang, I don’t remember moving to Florida, but it looks like I have. It seems like with each election, Mendocino County becomes more and more Florida-esque. A coupla years back, Mendo County closed most of its precincts and went to mail-in ballots. I hear this has to do with handicapped access—they can’t get penalized for precincts that aren’t accessible if the precincts aren’t open at all—or something like that, I guess.

Howzabout a system where people who want/need mail-in ballots can get them, but people who like to vote the old fashioned way can? Dang, I hate mail-in ballots.

But for true-blue Florida-ishness, just look at the “results” of Measure B. More than three weeks after the voting, we still don’t know the results. Maybe they’ll announce the results Friday. Maybe. They’re still counting 10,000+ “absentee” ballots. In a sparsely populated county like Mendocino, that’s a good chunk of the total. For crying out loud, how long can it take even a small staff to count 10k votes?

The Measure B foolishness is further compounded by the fact that the California Supreme Court threw out California’s limits on medical marijuana before the election. These are the same limits that Measure B seeks to inflict on Mendocino. Nobody seems to know if Measure B will mean anything if it passes.

If the county ever bothers to count the votes, and the measure passes, it’ll be up to the courts to figure it out.

During a few minutes I should have spent on something more productive, I recently designed a lovely McCain bumper sticker. I printed a copy, took it to my friendly neighborhood copy shop, had them make a bunch on adhesive-backed paper, and gave them to a few of my friends. Voila! Instant bumper sticker. Absolutely certain to convince those commie terrorist Obamabots of the righteousness of the McCain cause. Here’s a version you can print and share:

mcsame

Hmm… that’s a pdf file. If you click on the “mcsame” you should be able to download the printable file. For preview’s sake, here’s a jpg:

It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which marijuana permeates the economy and culture of Mendocino County. The traditional foundations of the local economy—timber and fishing—are either dead or comatose, leaving us with a tourism-based service economy and a few wine grapes. We can’t all get jobs as $7/hour motel maids, even if we wanted to.

I’ve worked a few retail sales jobs since I moved to Mendocino 13 years ago. Frequently, people would come in to the store, make large puchases, and pay with cash. Often, I could literally smell the marijuana on the money. How many of the retail purchases in the area are paid for with pot money? How many of the people staying in the inns are celebrating their harvests? How many of the real estate transactions are for growing facilities? There’s no way to know for sure, but cannabis—and cannabis money—are omnipresent here.

Over the last several years, Mendocino County has liberalized its regulations regarding cannabis cultivation. As of last year, a gardener with a doctor’s prescription could legally grow 25 plants at a time as medicine. Inevitably, many people conjured up medical excuses to grow, and much of this pot wound up on the market for receational use. Is that a bad thing? It depends on who you ask.

There are always some law and order Republican types who think of cannabis as the evil killer weed and want it eradicated and its growers and users imprisoned. Another group opposed to liberalized medical marijuana is the the large growers. Their business was illegal before medical marijuana cultivation was allowed, it’s illegal now, and it’ll continue to be illegal for the foreseeable future. They’re opposed to medical marijuana out of economic self interest: all of those small growers flood the market and lower the price they receive.

From this only-in-Mendocino alliance has sprung Measure B. It dramatically lowers the legal cultivation limit to six plants. It’s billed as an effort to crack down on the large growers, but it actually benefits large growers; not only does it reduce their competition, but it diverts law enforcement to the Mom and Pop 25 plant gardens and away from real crime.

Meaure B is a big step backwards. I recommend voting NO.

You can read more about Measure B from the No on B Coalition, the supporters of B have a site, too of course, full of horror stories of how cannabis is destroying Mendocino County. It even has some feeble attempts at satire.