~
THE PROCESS

I got put in my place the other day. I was standing in line at Eckerds trying to buy some drugs...an antibiotic cure for my sore throat and sniffles... hoping that the Vietnamese refugee behind the counter would take pity on me... standing in line behind a well dressed, obviously middle class white woman, who was trying to connect her world with the man behind the counter... and I suppose, spread the message of her guy John Kerry. She was complaining about the cost of the meds she was buying... Oh, it's just terrible you know. It's that damned Bush, He's giving the drug companies carte blanche... I mean carte blanche! The little Vietnamese guy made some sort of mumbled comment that the woman took as agreement. She didn't know the guy was a early immigrant to the neighborhood like I did. The guy she was talking to was a rabid Republican, a man who thought Reagan was something close to god, and a proud card carrying NRA gun advocate... just the kind of guy who you'd expect to meet... a first generation immigrant who had escaped the horror of Communist VietNam. Just the kind of fellow who would have paid the patriot's price of freedom with his own blood... the kind of man with sand in his craw who would have the steel backbone necessary to fight his way out of his homeland and be a "boat people refugee" back in the days of the evacuation of Viet Nam. I knew him from the Bakua games that Sunny (the gangster and this man's cousin, who had paid for his family's relocation to sunny Florida ten years ago) runs in the back rooms of the Viet Nam cafe' next to my office. He's an ex Vietnamese military officer, a man who was a translator and (I suppose) an intelligence officer who was an important, university educated man , who got his family (wife and 3 kids) out in the last days before the fall of Saigon. Now this Kerry supporter is going to tell him that "help is on the way".

Yeah. Help is on the way. Anyhow, as she ran out of steam with the pharmacist/soldier she turned to me. Don't you think that it's just a shame how these Republican fat cats have made medicine too expensive for people to buy? I do. Well, once Mr. Kerry gets in there he's going to make the drug company Republican fatcats wish they had been a little less greedy. Don't you agree?

What is Mr. Kerry gonna do?

Why, he's going to shake things up and get us back on the right track.

I guess that he'll be starting on that as soon as he gets back from Cambodia.

What do you mean, Mr. Kerry was never in Cambodia.

But I distinctly remember him saying that it was "seared in his memory" how he was there doing war crimes and stuff.

The woman sniffed and said I don't think I want to talk to you. And then she gathered up her overpriced miracle drugs and marched out.

The pharmacist/refugee, a man who used to be an officer in the Vietnamese army who had seen the price of freedom, smiled but was silent. He was amused but didn't want to lose a customer.

Sorry.

Oh, that's OK. But Bob... you make many enemies. What will you do when they take away your freedom?

Maybe I'll go back to school and become a pharmacist. You've done OK.

It's not the same. You have everything and have lost nothing. I have lost everything and I still miss my country. My parents are still in VietNam. My mother will not come here. I even went back to our home to get her several years ago but she will not come. She will not come. Now, THIS is my country and I am an American citizen. But I miss my family. You have not paid for your freedom. It was given to you. And that woman... and with that he made one of those small gestures of dismissal that his culture uses to cast away sorrows... that woman will never know the price paid by others for her freedom. You should have more respect.

Mr. Sun, I apologize. And with that, I gathered up my purchases and nodded to him.

Some day this war is gonna end. And Mr. Sun will still miss his home. And his mama. And John Kerry will still miss his chance to be an honorable man living among honorable men.

And I suppose I'll still be a smart ass in need of being put in my place.


Bob

~
Passages

Another week. I'm sitting here thinking about the function of this little journal. I suppose that one of its primaries is the role that is played by being a public forum of private addictions.... uh.... of course, such a thing is almost instantly defined as solipsistic crap. I tend to rush good news forward so that it will be made fixed and unchanging. Then when things don't go as planned I'm stuck with vile pseudo-explanations.

What I need to learn is to keep quiet about good news until it actually happens. Short answer to the question: I lost the boat. The owner got the money, but he didn't properly secure the thing. I think that what he did was just anchor the thing off of the docks in Branford, CT and walk away with the cash. And, a storm came through and put a nice old Irwin 27 into the rocks. Nothing I could do but wring my hands and curse my bad karma.

Of course, the possiblity of a straight up scam crossed my mind, but that seems far fetched. It is more likely that the guy was just a hustler and not much of a real boat lover. Who else could just abandon a classic like that to the cruel winds of October.

Anyhow, I'm back in boat search mode. I think that I'll revert to my original plan of finding a 30-35 foot Piver trimaran. Maybe I can look back on this incident as a diversion in my long term plan to get what I've always wanted.

There's a really nice 40 footer available, but that would just be another boat too big for me to single hand. There should be a properly equipped 30 out there looking for someone to love.

And believe me. The next time I buy a boat I will not send the man the money until I'm backing the damned thing out of the slip and I'm motoring down the ICW with a title in my hot little hands.

As Dax would say --- Just Damn.


Bob

~
GOOD NEWS!!

I have something to live for! DBD is coming back!

Thanks John.

Bob

~
THE FIX THAT ISN'T


For a long time I've felt that the smartest guy in the Bloggosphere is Wretchard over at the Belmont Club. Of course, I feel that way because I agree with most of the stuff that he posts. Thus...

He's commented on something that I've noticed in the last week or so... how the poll numbers seem to be wildly fluctuating... not actually deviating, but "fuzzing". That usually means that there are unknown factors being introduced into a stable frequency population. Hmmm... if I was looking at data that involved any money or academic outcomes my mathematical ears would be coming to a point. Hmmm..... first pushing down the Kerry numbers then having them bounce up after the first debate. Now, I know those things move around, but if you look at the long trend lines they don't really move around all that much. That's why they're called trend lines.

I'm slow to talk about fraud, but if you make all of the decisions towards a certain direction, then the numbers will foster that illusion... for a while. The key to that is the for a while. But the minute that the external influence is removed then the data will settle down and return to the predicted line. What ever it is.

If the data has been tinkered with or pushed into extreme sampling errors or whatever, it will tend to "jitter". It's sort of like bumping into a stereo while the record is playing. Distortion.

Anyhow, I suspect that den beste and Wretchard are right in their take on this piece of the nuancing. Is there collusion and criminal skulduggery at work here? I doubt it. The libs just want things to go their way so badly that they will do anything... anything... to make the dream come true. They're not voting for Kerry. They're casting their vote for "Anybody but Bush". Pitiful.

The election will settle all of the foolishness once and for all. Of course, it is at that point that any attempts to steal the election must be stopped. The democrats got a lot of practice in publicly tinkering with the process when the prez was accused of stealing the last election. You remember the State of Florida getting the sharp end of all those Leno and Letterman jokes about crooked politics? We can not allow them to pull that particular rope from both ends again this November.

No matter what... I'm really tired of all this crap. Don't you wish that it was all over with so that we could go back to our usual news-fare of car wrecks and dead rock stars filling the front pages? Hmmm... I wonder where my old Ramones albums could be?

Bob

~
A RE-ASSERTION

I've always liked Bill Whittle's Eject!Eject!. Liked him and quietly admired his ability to express what a whole lot of us feel. Me included. We all avidly awaited the most recent essay from him. This most recent did not disappoint.

Now I find myself re-reading it. As we come down to the last few weeks of this campaign I find myself wondering if it is possible to just give it away. I see the numbers and think about friends of mine who are practicing Donks (like Dan and Mike... and others)who are rabidly anti-Bush... and I think about how this whole race is a toss up. A toss up. Amazing.

And I think that it may be time for a reassessment... or perhaps a re-approachment might be a better word. What we need to do is back away from the "contest" and put our hands around the core distinctions that divide the parties. Do we really want Bush or do we really want Kerry? Not the men. Not the personality contests and all that TV packaging crap, but the culture war stuff that Whittle talks through. Can we afford to be Kerry-esque? Or must we be "mean" like President Bush is described by Wittle?

I'm most inclined to hang in there with the Prez. I just don't believe that we can afford to be "nice" with these enemies. And I don't believe that we can recruit new friends in the fight. I think that the world has already made choices. The Brits are with us. And a cadre of honest and honorable men. The Aussies. We know who our friends are. The rest of them can live with what ever they have. I really don't care what the French think.

Anyhow, it would be a useful exercise for all of us to go re-read Wittle's essay (part 1 and part 2) on Deterrence. If you have already read it.. go through it again just to clear the pre-November air. If you haven't, then for God's sake do so. Now. Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat.

Damn. I wish that I could write that good.

Bob

~
MORE .17


Here's a review of the S&W 647 and the Hornaday rimfire from the
Shooting Times. Suddenly I feel like Kim DuToit. I hope I don't get one of those S. African accents.

Bob

~
.17

I can't help myself. I just got myself a 17 cal Smith and Wesson wheel gun. This is the flattest shooting varmit killer ever made. And the ammo even looks sexy. I'll go hunt some pictures and come back with goodies.

Hmmm... it wouldn't kill me to fire up theMavica, would it?

Bob

~
COLD SWEAT

The "debates" and the predictable outcomes are probably a good thing. I have felt for a while that we... I mean us bloggers who are all Republican genetically... have been just talking to ourselves: Babbling smug certainties to each other without noticing the beast slumbering off stage. I suppose it's because I have an office across the street from the Kerry headquarters in Orlando and I see folks coming and going through the doors over there... Not many, but enough for me to know that they are doing business... Suddenly I see Kerry stickers all over town.

And now the biased press is trumpeting the Kerry landslide and how their guy hammered the Prez in the debates and that Mr. Bush might as well throw in the towel now and save us all the hassle of staging elections.

This is a good thing? I suppose not. I would have liked it better if Mr. Bush had come out of the lop sided debates with a absolutely uncontested outcome, but we all know that that was impossible. Hell, the thing was staged by PBS in the first place, and they are gonna have the whole thing rigged to slant towards Kerry from the get-go. Bush went in and held his own and stated his positions, but without an absolute slam dunk that couldn't be spun towrds Kerry, you know that they're gonna declare a Democrat victory. What did you expect?

My point is that I can remember when W's daddy was running for a second term. He had earned a second pass at the job. He had won the war and had successfully negotiated all of the brokering of a collective peace that passed for success back in those days. But... the liberals spun things around so that he was made to look like Mr. Too Little Too Late and they gave the job to You Know Who. Ah, the power of the media on the great unwashed masses. Unfortunately, most people are willing to give up their freedom and their honor for the promise of a quiet life. Only when they are faced with the possibility of losing their own personal lives, or losing their own personal freedom, will they rise up in indignation... then they are likely to boot out the politicians that put them in such a predicament. Remember that Churchill was voted out as a warmonger after he had won the war for the British.

All I'm saying is that we can't just assume that because W deserves the job that he will get it. That's not how it works. The Democrats are literally fighting for their very existence. If the forces of liberalism lose this round they may very well not be in the game at all four years from now. And I suspect that is when the Big Mama of all Liberals gets the baton to run. Just think.... another Clinton in the White House... and my daughter couldn't be happier than to see that happen. Brrr.

We can expect the Donks to pull out all of their dirty tricks... and I mean all... of the stops in the next month. No level is too low to stoop. No lie is going to be eschewed. They're fighting for their very existence here folks. There will be no infamy too nauseating, no fabrication too foolish. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't find canker sores on Mrs. Bush's vulva before the week is out. It doesn't matter what infamy is proposed. You know that the mainstream media is gonna promulgate it. Dan Rather is just the tip of the iceberg.

We are witness to the last round of politics as usual in this country. If Bush wins, we will be witness to the demise of the old Democrat Party as we understand it, and we will have a fragmented collection of small liberal parties similar to the British or the Italians: Socialists, Communists, Mugwumps, Flat Earthers, Anarchists, you name it. And opposing parties of Conservatives, Whigs, Libertarians, you name it, including Social Democrats, Fascists, Pajamaed Bloggers, Warlocks... you name it.

Bush's people hoped to give Kerry a grand slam the other night and it didn't happen. Now the surrender monkies have a new lease on life. Stand braced for another month of the nastiest run of hate politics you've ever seen.

Bob

~
NUGGETS FROM THE NUGGISPHERE

I went to get my new car tag yesterday. That's the best way that you can tell if a guy has had a birthday. New tag, new insurance, new wave of bills in the mail. Renewal, renewal, renewal. When I got to the tag office the lady said that my car had been stolen. Huh? It's sitting out in the parking lot in front of the tag office. Love those computers. They went and looked again and it seems that there was some sort of a mistake. But in the meanwhile, a Sheriff's deputy had to run me and everything about me through the computer again and again. You might not know it, but I'm a fairly well known bail bondsman as well as working for the Dept. of Juvenile Justice and I'm known by just about every cop in the seven county area known as central Florida. Aside from teaching at the local university for twenty years (statistics is one of the things that every cop and school teacher have to pass to get a masters degree so a whole lot of cops know Dr. Baird.) Unfortunately, the guy who came to check me out was new to me.

The upshot of everything was that there was some sort of a computer glitch so the whole process came to an abrupt halt. Hell, there's the damned car sitting right there... right? Fortunately, I had the title with me. I have the bad habit of carrying the title around with me in the same envelope that the insurance junk is in... in the glove compartment. Then I had to prove that I was who I said I was. It turns out that there's my doppelganger out there, lives in Ocala and has a felony record. Well, gee. I have twelve different kinds of photo ID... bail bonds license, Fla. drivers license, concealed weapons carry permit, DJJ officer ID... FDLE...uh... my YMCA membership card.... give me a minute to get to the safety deposit box and I can get my passport. Anyhow, Bill Allen, a old buddy of mine from Sanford, who is the MIS guy and computer guru for Seminole County government, came out of his cave of an office there at the court house and vouched for me. "Yeah, I know the guy. He's OK as long as he agrees to buy lunch." Sigh. The cops weren't really doubting me, they were just being thorough. I know how it works. But it took all morning.

The trouble was that I was scheduled to be at a send-off farewell luncheon for my boss and friend Jeff for lunch. The whole Unit took him out to wish him well with his new assignment (a promotion I think... at this point in his career just about anything is anti-climactic.) and I wasn't there. By the time I got back to Orlando the whole show was over and rumor had it that... 1) Baird had a heart attack and was dead..... No, 2) Baird had been in a car accident and was dead.... No, 3) Baird had been kidnapped by Mollucan terrorists and was last seen being beheaded on Al-Jazeer TV. No....

You get the idea. Anyhow, at least I didn't get stuck with the bill from the restaurant. And believe me, those women can run up an impressive bar bill. I've got scars to prove it. It was nice to know that they were concerned about me.

And... I know for sure that the car out in the parking lot is definitely mine and not some wierd switch made by one of the X-file car swap gangs from outer space. And I also know that I have a criminal twin over in Ocala. All good stuff to know.

I guess.

Bob