Caution - do not stop on the tracks

My birder friend Beth came in today and said that my recent picture of the Bullock's Oriole was pretty unusual, although common many places, it is apparently not found so much around here.

I hadn't recalled seeing it before in my three plus decades in the Santa Margarita River valley. What makes it doubly, or triply cool is that both kj and R&D saw a bird of the same species the same weekend I saw this little guy and they didn't recall seeing it before either.

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I think that we are entering uncharted levels of antagonism when the new President of the NRA calls the President of our country the fake President. As bad as people got on his predecessor, as many people as were sore at the Supreme Court stopping the Florida vote count, I don't think anybody ever called Bush a fake. Dumbshit, yes.

Of course this is from a man, Jim Porter, who once called the Civil War the "war of northern aggression." Good luck, America. These people are armed and dangerous.

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I am getting some blowback, some blog related and some relating to other matters. You live in a place a long time and have a big mouth, like me - not everybody is going to like you. One of my clients got into my face last night at an opening because I had dissed one of his heroes, Margaret Thatcher, on these very pages. Have noticed a few stink eyes of late, mostly from some of the more reverential folk in town. The word might be out on the curly headed apostate.

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Met a hedgefund billionaire that I hadn't seen in a while at the reception and I tried to make nice, while I like and respect him, I think that I may have scared him a bit at our last meeting. Super smart guy, extremely conservative.

I used one of my more common conversational conventions and asked him what he had been reading lately. He pulled a list off of his phone and I asked him if there was any fiction. Oops. One book, Wait, I can guess. Bingo. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. I may have made a little face and said something about the patron saint of selfish behavior but he was nonplussed and took it in stride.

He told me that the book's antagonist was the carbon copy of Barack Obama and that the book was helping him understand what was happening to our country. Said my problem was that I had a heart or words to that effect.

I gave him the name of a historical book that was not political that I thought he would enjoy and decided not to press anything any farther. But I got to thinking today; I read a lot, being an information processor. I am a regular and daily reader of at least four conservative magazines, Townhall, Weekly Standard, National Review and the Wall Street Journal. I read a lot of things from left, right and center. Because it does none of us any good to feed or reinforce our preconceived notions, narrative and bias. The more intellectually honest approach is take the raw if not the whole feed and then figure out what makes sense or not.

Of course if I had a billion or so in the bank it would be much more convenient to believe that the poor and middle class were merely lazy parasites after something for nothing. My something. Something that I had earned due to my innate brilliance and motivation, not to mention hard work. Dog eat dog world and there is nothing like being top dog. If you manage to remove yourself far enough away from other people's problem, they either become abstract or cease to exist.

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I would like to think that clear thinkers will head towards to the center but it's probably just wishful thinking. We are probably closer to the armed insurrection that the conservatives are getting so giddy about than any real balanced solution.

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I find the recent money morning quarterbacking regarding the FBI concerning the Boston terror suspects troubling. In this great land of ours, until somebody actually does something bad, it is very hard to judge, castigate or imprison them. You can't have it both ways. And I think the g-men do the best job they can under the circumstances.  Unless you would rather have a police state, shit like Boston is going to unfortunately sometimes happen.