Is a Raised by Wolves cookbook on the horizon?

Over the years, I have posted I don't know how many food porn posts. Between game food porn, comfort food porn, shit-my-wife-wanted food porn, dessert food porn and God knows what else, I have posted a metric shit ton of food porn posts. Usually, but not always, I made it pretty easy to turn the post into a recipe, with ingredients lists, instructions and, usually, pictures. Never really thought about it much, and haven't done much of that lately.

Well, it has come to my attention that a loyal reader is compiling all of my food porn posts and putting each of them into recipe form. This sounds like a lot of work. I have no damn idea how many food porn posts I have, but it has to approach hundreds. Anyone interested in a cookbook?

I actually have a pretty good excuse for not posting much

I have to admit, I have been nothing short of lame when it comes to posting lately. Go ahead. Throw stones. I'm OK with that. But I have a pretty good excuse.

Since August, I have been doing a lot of freelance writing. Not great money, but not bad. And very time-consuming relative to the amount of time I have available. I usually get home at 9 or 10 pm, which gives me only a couple hours to do anything before I go to bed. Walking Jeb the Wonder Dog takes up almost a full hour. I used to spend the other hour or so putting shit on the blog. Now, I generally spend that time writing for money. Much as I love putting stuff on the blog, money wins. So, there's that.

A new document review haiku

Started a new gig last week after a very short gig that followed a gig that had a decent run but ended far earlier than expected. Get all that?

Anyway, the new gig is mostly folks I don't know, but a couple good people on it. The rest, meh. The room we're in is crowded and the air conditioning seems to be non-functional. It's hot as hell, and summer is coming. But our latest addition to the document review haiku pantheon is about what really matters:

I've got a new gig
Moderate overtime but
Fucking awesome rate.

Political correctness is eating itself

At some point, someone on the left is going to realize that the "values" they espouse contradict each other all over the place. They haven't reached that point yet:

A Pride event in Glasgow has banned drag queens from performing, after committee members decided acts could offend trans people.
Free Pride Glasgow, which bills itself as an anti-commercialist alternative to the Scottish city’s main Pride event, said trans and non-binary committee members were “uncomfortable with having drag performances“.
The organisation said in a statement that it hopes to create a safe space for all members of the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual) community, and that while the decision may "disappoint" some people "the needs of the most marginalised groups within our community come first."
It went on to stress that attendees can wear "what they want" and "express their gender how they please", but that "self-described drag acts" would not be allowed to perform.

Last I heard, drag queens were part of the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZwhatthefuckkareyoutalkingabout movement. Fuck, drag queens were way out front, decades before anybody worried about people who not only dressed like chicks but also got a choppadickoffamee operation. Hell, I still vividly remember taking a new kid at my high school to a "boys will be girls" show at The Glade in Honolulu and he didn't know the show girls actually were dudes. That was 40 years ago, and nobody in the show was thinking about cutting their dick off. They just liked to dress like women, and they were good at it. We had to intervene to keep John from leaving with one of the dancers.  They were that good.

The Glade couldn't operate today, and not because conservatives would try to shut it down. Liberals would.

It would appear things are getting really ugly -- South Carolina ready to secede?

South Carolina has a history of this, of course. They threatened to secede over a trade embargo with Great Britain in 1832 and then actually seceded in in 1860 because the Union was pushing for the abolition of slavery. The Union was right, of course, because slavery is an abomination, but South Carolina was within its rights under the Constitution and everybody knew it. Read the Constitution, including the 10th Amendment. States have the right to secede. Don't think so? Then why did the Confederate states have to be readmitted after the War Between the States? If they never left the Union because they did not have the right to do so, why the requirement to readmit them? Just sayin'.

Anyway, it isn't slavery this time, but at least some people in South Carolina want to secede. (So do some people in California, and I'm inclined to let them, but that's a song for another time.) A couple of legislators in South Carolina have introduced a bill calling for the state to secede if the federal government confiscates weapons in violation of the Second Amendment:

The measure, which was referred to the South Carolina State House Judiciary Committee on April 5, would open the possibility of the state seceding from the U.S. if the federal government began confiscating legally purchased firearms. The bill states:

Notwithstanding another provision of law, the General Assembly shall convene to consider whether to secede from the United States based upon the federal government's unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, if the federal government confiscates legally purchased firearms in this State."

The thing is, the federal government, no matter how bad Democrats wish it were so -- and they do -- is not going to start confiscating firearms. It is, for starter, unconstitutional, and, from a real-world perspective, simply not going to happen. Consider how many people with firearms would refuse to turn them over, and what they might do when someone showed up to confiscate them. Not going to happen.

Given all that, I think the guys who introduced this bill are trying to make a point rather than address a problem or, for that matter, to actually try to secede. The point? Don't go there, Dems. You might not like what you find.

RIP, Barbara Bush

The classiest First Lady of my lifetime, Barbara Bush, has died at the age of 92. RIP, Babs.

People worried about gun violence in the U.S. cheerfully lie to make it seem like they actually have something to worry about

Over and over again, we hear that guns kill more people every year than do automobile accidents in the U.S. The U.S., of course, has more automobile deaths than pretty much any other country, because we have more people driving cars than pretty much any other country. I'm not even going to look up the numbers. The U.S. is a prosperous country, with more cars per capita than pretty much anybody, I'll bet, and more miles driven per capita than pretty much anybody else, too. So it sounds pretty serious to say that we have more gun deaths than traffic accident deaths. And it's true.

And it's meaningless. Some ignorant bitch screeches in a recent New York Times op-ed that Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than car accidents. Um, maybe, depending upong what you're talking about. About 35,000 people in the U.S. die every year in car accidents. Ditto for gun deaths. But roughly two-thirds of those "gun deaths" are suicides. The whack bitch in the New York Times is claiming the likelihood of being murdered with a gun is rising. It isn't. She claims that mass shootings, however you define those, are on the rise, and they aren't. The fact is that the risk of being killed with a gun in the U.S. is much lower than it has ever been, and that the rate is declining every year.

So how about people like her just shut the fuck up and worry about stuff that's actually worth worrying about? I'm not even sure what that is at this point, but I know I'm not worried about being killed in a mass shooting.

Shit is getting real between Iran and Israel

It is possible that the level of nastiness between Iran and Israel -- always high to begin with -- is going up. Early this morning, the Israelis launched a strike at Iran's buddies in Syria:

In the early hours of Monday morning, two Israeli fighter jets crossed into southern Lebanon and launched a number of missiles at Syria’s strategic T4—or Tiyas—airbase in Homs province. The missiles struck a section of the base used exclusively by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its external specialist Quds Force and Hezbollah to house senior personnel, strategic weaponry and sophisticated drones in semi-hardened air hangars. At least 14 people were killed in the missile strike, which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later labeled a “very dangerous development” in an unusually harsh rebuke of the sort of Israeli action that Moscow usually has glossed over quietly.

Apparently, Israel has hit this airbase before but, because Russian aircraft operate from the base, has always chosen to notify the Russians before striking. This time, they did not. This could be a big deal. It follows a clash in February in which Iran apparently lured an Israeli response by sending a drone across the Israeli border. After the Israelis launched a retaliatory strike against the Tiyas airfield that launched the drone, striking the IRGC section of the airfield, Iranian and Syrian surface-to-air missile sites shot down an Israeli aircraft. Apparently it took a call from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt further Israeli retaliatory strikes. Looks like the gloves might be off.


Yeah, it did.

I am officially being given shit for not posting

I confess, I have been delinquent in my duties in operating this blog. Basically, I haven't been doing much of anything for a good while. I apologize. That, apparently, is not enough for one of my loyal readers, who sent me an email bitching about the lack of anything to read. Yes, I've been busy with work, with lots of overtime in the last six months or so. On the other hand, in the last year or so I've had a lot of down time, and still didn't post. Yes, I am doing a lot of freelance writing lately, but I also have been lazy when it comes to the blog. Remiss. Delinquent. Call it what you will. Consider me shamed. I shall try to do better.

Oregon governor defies Trump, says she won't do what no one is asking her to do

Not only is no one asking, they can't. Apparently, the governor of Oregon is a little unclear on how the National Guard works. Oregon Governor Kate Brown is boldly joining the "Resistance," and has refused to send Oregon National Guard troops to help enforce immigration law along the Mexican border. Of course, no one is asking her to do that. President Donald Trump has said he will use National Guard troops to protect the border with Mexico, and it is to the states that share a border with Mexico that the request has been issued. The governors of those states are all on board with the initiative:

Other governors welcomed President Trump's decision, including in Texas, which shares a border with Mexico.
. . .
The governor also pointed to previous decisions by the Obama and Bush administrations, in 2010 and 2006 respectively, to use National Guard troops to secure the southern border.

The governors of Arizona and New Mexico also have agreed to participate. California, of course, is attempting to become part of Mexico, and most of us are OK with that so long as they actually secede from the union so we don't have to pay for it.

In any event, the National Guard is a source of reserve troops for the U.S. Army. It is usually under the control of the governor of the state in which its members reside. Every state has its own National Guard, which falls under the authority of the governor. The governor can use those troops for disaster relief or pretty much anything the governor wants and the state legislature is willing to pay for. To use those troops outside of their state, the president has to "nationalize" a state's Guard troops.

Once a state's Guard units are nationalized, their expenses are borne by the federal government and the troops can only be used outside the United States. Unless Guard troops are nationalized, they cannot serve outside of their state, and if they are nationalized, they can only serve outside the U.S. Kate Brown might be the commander-in-chief of the Oregon National Guard, but she clearly doesn't have a fucking clue how the National Guard works.