Conflicted again ... but not very much

So Hugo Chavez is dead. The bastard was two years younger than I am, and managed to do a lot more damage in his time than I ever could, so I'm somewhat jealous. A bit more seriously, a public death of an incurable disease is nothing I'd wish on anyone (with a few exceptions, I suppose.) And for the people who had been conned into seeing him as a great savior, standing between them and Yankee neocolonialism, my sympathies. Being deeply confused doesn't exempt one from grief and dispair (consider the Tea Baggers in our own nation, for example.)

But in the course of all the breast-beating and US-blaming in which his party is now wallowing, let's recall what he was: a South American dictator. History records almost none of that breed, on the left or the right, who were anything more than the scum that rose to the surface of the soup pot.

It was sad to watch the resurgence of so-called Socialism in the South, driven by Chavez' Venezuela and his antics. Socialism was not at all what they were offering, and none of them, Chavez included, actually wanted any such thing. When you're rebelling, you claim to be a socialist because it sounds like the antithesis of whatever you're rebelling against; when you get into power, you claim that you've carried out a socialist revolution, and you tell the nation that everyone has to get in line and oppose the forces that are trying to undermine ... etc., etc. This is all straight out of "Being a Despot for Dummies." Standard stuff, but the truly poor, the truly downtrodden keep buying it, decade after decade, despot after despot.

Problem is, when your newly-empowered despot starts running around the globe, fraternizing with Iran, talking smack at the UN, and nationalizng oil refineries, then foreign investment declines. The economy becomes a zero-sum game, and instead of building a better life for all, the country is faced with a choice of whose lives will be improved. And that, friends, is where Socialism in the underdeveloped world falls flat on its ass. Suddenly, there's an opposition party (or several), repression becomes necessary, the army and police become concerned with "maintaining order," and civil liberties begin to vanish. You turn up the rhetoric against whoever it is, externally, that you can blame (and they may, in fact, be to blame for some of your woes.) As the result of a process, not necessarily a plan, you slip into totalitarianism. Many of the Arab Spring revolutions will go or have already gone this path; bet on it in Syria. Chavez, the Castros, Mohamed Morsi -- they're nothing new, just a batch of jumped-up faction fighters "from the back of Nephin Mountain," as Patrick O'Brian put it.

Another piece of good advice

Some time back, I said about one of my various ailments, "You really don't want to get this," or words to that effect. Well, WRT slipping on the ice and breaking your dominant wrist, ditto.

I am getting back most of the use of it, including some typing, but I still have substantial numbness in the fingers, making precision questionable. I drop a lot of stuff. However, I can now wield my chef's knife with the right hand, a distinct sign of progress.

Anyway, Linda and I strongly recommend Stabilicers as a way of not slipping. Yaktrax not so much; they wear out and break, leaving you with a broken coil spring dangling from your boot.

Needless, I hope, to say, I wasn't wearing anything like this when I went off the side of the porch.

This has been your good advice of the day.

Interesting choice of words

Michigan is considering a bill that would make it harder (although not very hard) on people who own abandoned property and do nothing about it. Well and good and not especially fascinating except for this quote from Sen. Virgil Smith, D-Detroit, who introduced the bill:

"The banks have been proactive working with us. They don't want to sit on property. It hurts their bottom line."

I bet it does.

Many years ago, we took on a small data processing contract from the Girl Scouts. Basically a matter of doing the data entry and some cross-tabs for a member-satisfaction survey. Besides scalar responses, there was a lot of free text, and we read all of it in an effort to reduce it to something the Council could act on. One pair of questions was something like this: "Which activity do you like least?" and "Why?"

One of the younger respondents answered, "Sitting on the floor" and "Hurts my butt." Somehow, the quote above about the banks brought that to mind.

Dog fighting station wagons?

Video here of some idiots shooting paintballs at each other while flailing around in a couple of overweight Audis. The still above is circa 1972, with me driving and a gentleman who shall remain nameless on the roof rack.

Catching up

So I got the pins out of my wrist, and I feel better. Better enough that I'm actually typing this with my left hand and at least three fingers of the right. That's a distinct improvement. Meanwhile:

• Kwame Kilpatric's trial goes to jury
  
• He pays his last two months' worth of restitution with money from his mother
  
• The state gov't discovers what I've known for years: L. Brooks Patterson is a looney
  
• Ann Arbor acknowledges that its public art program might need a bit of tweaking
  
• Press got its knickers twisted over "access" to the President playing ... golf? As in, they actually wanted to watch golf?
  
• The pope finally took my advice and resigned
  

Back in the snow

Alert readers of this blog (all two of you) may perhaps have noted a distinct lack of content for the last, oh, two weeks. That would be because the last, oh, two weeks, we've been away. We're back now, and once we shake the sand out of our socks, we'll catch up on the crucial news of Southeastern Michigan, things like the Kwame Kilpatrick trial, the apparently appalling weather you've been having while we were gone, and the ever present question, "is Rick Snyder a Republican or what?"

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a new friend we met.

Local news

As is their wont, various media continue to compile their best and worst lists of things. (I wonder, actually, if anyone's thought of compiling a list of the best and worst lists of the best and worst things?)

Anyway, Detroit has recently been named the fourth worst managed city in the country, behind Stockton, California; Miami; and San Bernardino, California. The article, which I did not bother to read in detail because it's too damned depressing, was a touch vague about the criteria they used, and I think they did Detroit a great injustice, knocking them back down to fourth place. All the hard work that's been done in the last 15 years to turn it into the worst managed city, bar none, deserves greater recognition than this.

Needless to say, Ann Arbor doesn't even make the list. But it's not to say we don't try. Paula Gardner, of Ann Arbor.com, even dared to use the "CC" words in this article. No, ye of short memory, I don't mean cubic centimeters, I mean convention center! Here we go again.

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Update: Snyder is about to name an Emergency Manager for Detroit.

Wrist pins

No, not like this:

More like this:

I've been skeptical of alternative medicine for a long time, but this tears it. I'm not falling for those door-to-door acupuncture guys again.

Probably a hoax

Amazing. Lends a whole new meaning the term "gated community."

I found this just weird enough that I sent it to Snopes.com for their attention.

Leave the wolves alone

Please consider supporting, donating to or otherwise cheerleading for the following group keep Michigan wolves protected. I've been a hunter in the past, and if I Weren't so consistently unhealthy, crippled up, and generally confined to quarters, I would probably still go out and shoot a bird or even a deer, given the chance. But especially in a state like Michigan, where almost none of our employment, agriculture, or state revenue is threatened in any way by large mammalian carnivores (Except us), instituting a wolf hunt is bloodthirsty and just plain dumb. Plus it would be nice to have a proposition on the ballot that you could actually vote for with a clear conscience.