All Entries in the "Soft News" Category

Day 17 – Local Man Still on Hillcrest Roundabout

Marvin Alamo left his home on 4988229933551177 Road at 4:15 pm on July 9 to get a bottle of wine. Along with him in the pickup was his dog who is also known as Marvin.

When he approached the roundabout at Hillcrest and Miami it seemed clogged and cumbersome and he entered despite his better judgement and acute survival instincts learned during his 50 plus years working for the gov’ment.

That was 17 days ago and both of the Marvins are still going round and round unable to exit the roundabout, even at night when traffic dies down.

“I could have taken Townsend Avenue but the traffic is backed up to Otter Road,” he said during an interview with KBLA, an oldies station that dabbles in local news. “With all the unbridled growth here, somebody needs to figure out the flow. Highway 550, out of the city’s jurisdiction is a potential disaster.”

On day 11 Marvin’s wife, Evelyn, managed to get close enough to hand him a two ham sandwiches (one for the dog) and a thermos of coffee. 

Marvin blames the incident on his momentarily hesitation to negotiate San Juan Avenue earlier in the day.

“I lost momentum and was swallowed up,” he quipped. “I just kept yielding and yielding.”

He almost made it out on Wednesday but a Dodge Ram with a weasel at the wheel cut him off. Later he barely escaped a collision with an onion truck that had just entered the fray.

Meanwhile round and round he goes on the merry-go-round of asphalt screaming “Cree el grade!” at the top of his lungs to the bewilderment of passersby.

“After 56 years together, I didn’t even know Marvin spoke Spanish,” said Evelyn

Local authorities, concerned that the incident could hurt tourism plan to rescue Marvin tomorrow from above the round-about employing three helicopters and a runaway truck ramp on loan from C-DOT.

-Jack Spratt

“Never interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself.” 

– Napoleon Bonaparte, former French Emperor before his team was destroyed in Russia.

What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?

By Paul Krugman

New York Times Opinion Columnist

As everyone knows, leftists hate America’s military. Recently, a prominent left-wing media figure attacked Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declaring, “He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”

Oh, wait. That was no leftist, that was Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. What set Carlson off was testimony in which Milley told a congressional hearing that he considered it important “for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and widely read.”

The problem is obvious. Closed-mindedness and ignorance have become core conservative values, and those who reject these values are the enemy, no matter what they may have done to serve the country.

The Milley hearing was part of the orchestrated furor over “critical race theory,” which has dominated right-wing media for the past few months, getting close to 2,000 mentions on Fox so far this year. One often sees assertions that those attacking critical race theory have no idea what it’s about, but I disagree; they understand that it has something to do with assertions that America has a history of racism and of policies that explicitly or implicitly widened racial disparities.

And such assertions are unmistakably true. The Tulsa race massacre really happened, and it was only one of many such incidents. The 1938 underwriting manual for the Federal Housing Administration really did declare that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.”

We can argue about the relevance of this history to current policy, but who would argue against acknowledging simple facts?

The modern right, that’s who. The current obsession with critical race theory is a cynical attempt to change the subject away from the Biden administration’s highly popular policy initiatives, while pandering to the white rage that Republicans deny exists. But it’s only one of multiple subjects on which willful ignorance has become a litmus test for anyone hoping to succeed in Republican politics.

Thus, to be a Republican in good standing one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. And don’t even get me started on things like the efficacy of tax cuts.

What underlies this cross-disciplinary commitment to ignorance? On each subject, refusing to acknowledge reality serves special interests. Climate denial caters to the fossil fuel industry; evolution denial caters to religious fundamentalists; tax-cut mysticism caters to billionaire donors.

But there’s also, I’d argue, a spillover effect: Accepting evidence and logic is a sort of universal value, and you can’t take it away in one area of inquiry without degrading it across the board. That is, you can’t declare that honesty about America’s racial history is unacceptable and expect to maintain intellectual standards everywhere else. In the modern right-wing universe of ideas, everything is political; there are no safe subjects.

This politicization of everything inevitably creates huge tension between conservatives and institutions that try to respect reality.

There have been many studies documenting the strong Democratic lean of college professors, which is often treated as prima facie evidence of political bias in hiring. A new law in Florida requires that each state university conduct an annual survey “which considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented,” which doesn’t specifically mandate the hiring of more Republicans but clearly gestures in that direction.

An obvious counterargument to claims of biased hiring is self-selection: How many conservatives choose to pursue careers in, say, sociology? Is hiring bias the reason police officers seem to have disproportionately supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, or is this simply a reflection of the kind of people who choose careers in law enforcement?

But beyond that, the modern G.O.P. is no home for people who believe in objectivity. One striking feature of surveys of academic partisanship is the overwhelming Democratic lean in hard sciences like biology and chemistry; but is that really hard to understand when Republicans reject science on so many fronts?

One recent study marvels that even finance departments are mainly Democratic. Indeed, you might expect finance professors, some of whom do lucrative consulting for Wall Street, to be pretty conservative. But even they are repelled by a party committed to zombie economics.

Which brings me back to General Milley. The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars.

Unfortunately, they are also attributes the modern G.O.P. finds intolerable.

So something like the attack on Milley was inevitable. Right-wingers have gone all in on ignorance, so they were bound to come into conflict with every institution — including the U.S. military — that is trying to cultivate knowledge.

Solar Energy Spill Cripples Pacific Coast

(Waldport, OR) Still sketchy reports describe a massacre of petroleum proportions when a hoard of generally docile windmills, ambivalent as to the black and white of their very existence, revolted against overseers and finally the entire coastal garrison, blowing several pipers and a drummer boy into faraway Utah.

Police have cordoned off parts of the Alsea River and beaches from Yachats to Wakonda in apprehension of followup tremors and possible jerkquakes and sandslides. Tourists are urged to wear lots of sunscreen, and stay in the town’s many bars until the system passes into the interior. Crabs are encouraged to come out of their shells only after dark. Consuming massive quantities of bluegill and crappie has been lauded as the most responsible response at this time.

The spill will take the snap of a finger and no money to clean up.

Area affected by solar spill

“We’ve warned the American people of these kinds of disasters if we fall away from our dependence on fossil fuels, meat and broken promises,” said one former congressman now a lobbyist for two oil conglomerates (or is it three?).

Speaking under the duplicitous veil of anonymity, the source added that he had “three or four Congressmen and one Senator in his back pocket and was expecting a little more action since the bank has “now reopened”. 

“If this keeps up I’m gonna have to get more pockets,” he laughed.

 – Pepper Salte

“We hauled these marmots in here!”

– Melvin Bedwetter Toole, 1977

Horseshoe Denied Flight License

(Blue Creek Canyon) The San Juan Horseshoe will not be offering pilotless glider flights over Blue Creek Canyon according to Gunnison County Commissioners. The summer adventure, prompted by the construction and partial closure of Highway 50 through the scenic canyon, had been scheduled to begin June 5.

Sources at the Horseshoe told reporters that the service was a sure bet and at a reasonable $60 per head beat sitting in traffic or driving an hour out of the way along the North Rim of the Black Canyon.

“We had it all mapped out right down to the landing zones and the parachutes,” said one disappointed neophyte who plans to initiate guided ice fishing trips this winter. “If it would have been C-DOT’s idea it would have been approved.”

The State of Colorado has tentatively okayed a sophisticated system of seasonal bamboo zip lines that run from the top of the Alpine Plateau to the Anthracite Range. Sadly, this route does little to relieve the traffic clogging in the canyon.

Meanwhile many local residents think the construction was a bad idea considering an economy still reeling from Covid-19. Truckers, venders, tourists and many others are already hard pressed to keep agendas straight and products on the move.

Others, who promise “to stand our ground like Leonidas at Thermopylae” plan to boycott Blue Creek Canyon until their demands are met. 

They eventually plan the construction two hotels, on each side of the canyon for people who didn’t read the website. (Pending permit)

“The entire construction project is about as worthless as a tuba in a cowboy quintet,” quipped Earl MacAdoo, a hall-of-fame sheepherder from Sapinero who halt the project by undisclosed means on the Fourth of July.

“If we had the water we could just fold the place,” he laughed. “That’d show them.”

MacAdoo joins a growing chorus of people who feel that Highway 550 from Montrose to Ouray deserved prime attention and that the Blue Creek Canyon Project is just bureaucratic bungling.

– Kashmir Horseshoe

“I’d trip my own mother if she was rounding third to score against us.” – Leo The Lip Durocher, who managed the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs.

Trump Silver Spoon Brings a Paltry $60 on eBay

A local supporter has acquired a silver spoon once belonging to Donald Trump, for the surprising sum of $60. Whether it is the silver spoon is unclear since the former President reputedly had many of the utensils at his disposal during formative years in Manhattan.

The spoon was sold on eBay after early bids failed to reach expectations of the seller, who wished to remain anonymous. Late bids never materialized at all shedding light on the future sales of personal artifacts by the Trump clan.

Daughter Ivanka Trump, named after a relative of Vladimir Putin, is under investigation for attempting to unload 12 gold candle sticks from the Jefferson White House and a set of Nicaraguan wind chimes bequeathed by the Reagans to the nation in 1988. She has denied all wrongdoing. Several of her siblings have allegedly been active in the recreational shoplifting culture but this is the first time the feds have been snooping.

“This is different than selling baseball bats and autographs,” said a federal agency briefing this morning. “Pilfering and outright theft are the same thing. Both are felonies, especially when lifting priceless artifacts and pieces of Americana,” it said.

“We have talked to a menagerie of former White House personnel but at the present time no one has been indicted,” stressed one district attorney overseeing the case.

The spoon, called a pewter pouter by adversaries reminds us that Trump was born rich. “He didn’t earn much of it. He is a narcissistic, dishonest, petty and pitiful businessman and was President of the United States for four long years. During that time, he did irreparable damage to the very people that support him. It’s June and they still don’t get it.

-Tommy Middlefinger

PGA Approves Shock Treatments

The Professional Golfers Association today announced that it would approve the use of controversial and somewhat archaic shock treatment to correct poorly planned chip shots and pathetic, lunging putts.

Stressing that the procedures would be strictly a last resort therapy and only administered in dire situations with prior knowledge of the despondent linkster/patient.

“It’s come to this with some of our clumsier golfers,” whelped one empathetic course pro with a flair for words: “For 18 holes flailing almost swan-like in their hoop-swings they look like crippled, crotchety windmill vanes, missing a blade or two. Their chips mimic fresh, trembling chantarelles in a whirling blender, while hurried putts look like the work of sheep forced over a steep cliff, and that says nothing of follow through.”

The PGA did not return our phone calls.  A recorded message did not undress the shock treatments but did remind all golfers to replace their divots.

– Algernon Birdie-Duffer