Florida Libertarians want to eat your flesh!

If there's anything left worth eating after reading the Daily Kos.

Florida-bashing has become a popular sport and of course there's plenty to bash, it being a Red State. It's a corrupt state as well, but then Florida is not unique in either respect nor are we unique in supporting parties and agendas that don't benefit and do harm our quality of life.  But sports and parties take on lives of their own and like all things that live, the prime motivation is to live and prosper at all costs.  So when we run out of  Flori-Duh stories, we confect some tasty and blog-nourishing stories out of a few carefully selected observations and peddle them everywhere. The Daily Kos ran an article the other day putting forth notion that because, in the heat of  tropical Summers, a kind of dangerous bacteria knows as vibrio vulnificus can be found in ocean waters.  It's warm in Florida in the summer, this is not news.

Now if  this "necrotizing" bacteria gets into a cut or scrape it can begin eating your flesh.  If it gets into your blood stream, it can kill you.  Hot climates everywhere have certain dangers and every year we read of  all the many children and dogs that die from being left in hot cars and every year we're made to think there's something new about it. We're never told whether the long term trends, if there are any, are up or down.  In fact we're usually made to believe there's a crisis at hand and that we need to be afraid or angry or motivated to read all about it: motivated to vote one way or the other. Florida is deadly! Says the Kos and the comment section is full of hissing hatevipers.  Never mind that you can get the bacteria anywhere the ocean is warm, at the beach in Texas or from eating raw oysters in Mobile Alabama. Never mind that you can die from Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba, anywhere: at  a Kansas swimming hole or a Minnesota water park, but Florida is dangerous, let us scare you, let us not inform you of the risks or whether it's getting better or getting worse, let's blame it on someone we don't like. You know, there are more boating accidents in Florida than in Utah -- must be the politics.

Perhaps the major difference between the swimming pool drownings, the lightening strikes, the heat stroke deaths, the shark and alligator attacks one finds more of in this climate, and the ordinary risks of disease and accident that account for so many deaths everywhere, is that they can be pinned like a paper tail on that old donkey, Florida by any half-baked  blogger or scandal hungry TV station and so all the media needs is some mold to press it into and sell it like candy. Florida is dangerous whether because of the lightening or the gun laws or the sharks or the bacteria or predatory racists.

You see all these people - all 11 of them are getting sick because of the Libertarians in Florida.  It's their fault that we don't test the waters at the beaches says Kos -- on our entire  2,276 Statute Miles of tidal coastline, the bays and estuaries although they offer no evidence of it.  Of course we do -- of course bacteria levels are monitored constantly in populated areas and beach closings and openings are announced all the time. When someone contracts the disease, it makes headlines even in right wing newspapers.

 Water pollution in fact is a very political and very hot issue here, with huge quantities of toxic industrial and agricultural waste being dumped into heretofore pristine waters, but even the Republican populace, if not the Republican representatives, is up in arms about cleaning it up.  Fishing and all water sports, in fact, are a very major support to the local economy.  The current Gubernatorial race seems to be all bout who will spend the most money on the environment, but nobody in Keokuk, Iowa or Manhattan will question the story and particularly not if they're jealous of Florida's climate or if they just need cheap reasons to be smug about living where the sun don't shine.

Bullshit

"The wheels of commerce are greased with bullshit"

I don't know who first said it, but it's been passed down in my family for at least a couple of generations. It's true, of course, and it's doubly true of politics. Americans seem to have more fondness for the substance than an African dung beetle and far more ability to swallow huge quantities of it. Bullshit is perhaps the one thing you can have and eat and you certainly can do both and pass on more. Despite our horror of wealth distribution, we do love to share it.

A local souvenir shop made the papers over the weekend, for a huge display of Obamahate items, including an alleged explanation by the president of why Michelle hates the flag. Of course he never said it and it was long ago exposed as having been invented by the Bullshit machine formerly known as the Republican party. Yet it's too precious to let go and the dung beetles formerly known as Republicans are still eager to rub it all over themselves, smear their own walls with it and share it with you without any concern for facts.

Remember the headless bodies Arizona Governor Jan Brewer talked about - the rising crime rate that necessitated 'special handling' for anyone appearing to be of native American descent?
You guessed it, like Saddam's WMD, it's all bullshit and unlike the perpetrators of that disastrous hoax, she's willing to admit she made the whole damned thing up to get votes. Think that's the end of it? Surely not and the headless Mexicans will be talked about long after Washington Irving's tale of Sleepy Hollow disappears into the past -- and they'll be blamed on Obama. It will all be blamed on Obama and more so because more aliens are being deported than by the previous administration, fewer are getting in and crime associated with illegal immigration is going down. Why drink the watery light beer of fact when that Bullshit brew is so much more filling?

Does it matter that the President is not a Muslim? Not as long as Fox is out there spending millions, contributing millions, to tell you he is and that they are doing it is Obama's fault anyway. Bullshit sells the worse it smells.

Think Climate change has nothing to do with human activity? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but what you think you know about it has much to do with the Oil Tycoon Koch Brothers who spend a fortune fighting the idea and financing the "Tea Party." Why does that tea taste so much like bullshit?

Think those Climategate e-mails were proof of a vast conspiracy? Sure you do and sure you don't care that they were edited and redacted to make them seem to say something they didn't. Rupert Murdoch and his Arab Oil allies spent more millions to produce enough bullshit to roll in to make all the dogs in America happy.

Those incriminating ACORN pimp videos --- smell that warm bullshit! Why give it up just because it was another right wing media hoax? Since Fox never bothered to tell you that, you can pretend it's still true and you can just keep rolling in it.

I could go on, because the bullshit never stops, but I'm tired of the futility of living in a country where "if it feels good, believe it" is the state religion and where people will fight for their beliefs to the death. We don't live in an information age, we live in a bullshit age. We love Bullshit because it fertilizes the egos of the uninformed.

If these are indeed at last the end times, we can be sure it will not all end with floods and it won't be by any divine agency. It will end with bullshit nd it will be your own damned fault.

Some say insurance, some say IN-shurns, some say fraud

Ever get the impression that the Insurance industry has no idea what it's doing? Well of course you have if you've ever bought insurance. I remember buying my first house 40 years ago and being told my premiums were high because of the average distances to hydrants and fire departments in my town. I got nowhere with the argument that there was a hydrant on my front lawn and the firehouse was 150 yards around the corner. As with religion and political doctrine, the reasoning always refers back to the unsubstantiated assertion rather than to observable reality.

So when I read today on CNN.com that buying a smaller car might cost you more in insurance than your megatruck, I was amused. Seems that without taking into account better braking, better handling and more stability of cars over trucks, they're assuming that people in smaller cars, particularly ones chosen for fuel economy are, they guess, driving farther and probably are younger thus probably driving more aggressively and faster and such people probably have more accidents. Is there any difference between this sloppy sophistry and rank conjecture? How many probablys to we have to count before deciding they have no idea and are just making it up to maximize profits?

It seems odd since only two years ago they were saying that SUV drivers were four times more likely to kill someone and ten times more likely to suffer serious injury because they wind up rolling in the gutter more often than Barak's bowling ball. Could it be that they have no idea and don't care? And then there are the fast cars like Corvettes and Vipers. They have to assume, they say, that such people like them because they drive over the speed limit, which I have not observed. What I have observed are SUVs with their noses up Corvette tailpipes trying to prove that they are king of the road -- and I've been observing this for decades. Iv'e observed that my Ferrari friends never take their cars out of the garage for fear of the kids with winged economy cars and Hummermoms.

And then of course there's the assumption that fast drivers cause more accidents, which hasn't been credibly supported by any facts I've seen published by anyone not connected with the insurance racket industry. The National Motorists Association, for instance has studies showing the opposite to be true.

I've also observed that on the Interstates, it's the econoboxes and pickup trucks; it's Escalades and H2's weaving at 90 plus while the folks with expensive cars cower in the right lane. Keep in mind that the demographics for supercars are similar to those for wheelchairs -- very few youngsters.

Of course they're making it all up, but since the Insurance industry is large and powerful enough to do whatever it likes, no one really can refute them or argue successfully against them, so I'll go on paying twice as much to insure my car than Hard Drinking Harry does for his jacked up pickemup or that young lady in the 8000 pound behemoth who has a cigarette in one hand and a cellphone in the other who habitually uses four lanes in a turn and rolls through stop signs. Haven't had a claim in 40 years? Never mind, our records lead us to guess that I probably might be maybe sorta in a category that would lead someone on Mars to speculate that I might be dangerous.