Just A Typical Saturday in Michigan

So all morning I was trying to reach the service department at my auto dealership so I could set an appointment for an oil change. The phone rang and rang and rang and nobody answered. I tried again and once, after reaching the main number and pressing #3 to talk to the service department, I got some guy at his house who had no idea what I was talking about. I tried again from scratch, and again got no answer.  I then tried the receptionist at the front desk, who said they only had one guy working at Service today so they must be too busy to get to the phone. She said she would go find him personally.  She never came back. After a while, the dealership's on-hold music became a ringing phone and it went to the receptionist's voice mail. I finally said forget it, the place is a mile away; I'll just drive there. When I arrived, the place was stone silent and they were not busy at all. The phone was not ringing. The guy manning the phones was unaware anyone had been trying to reach him.  I informed him that the dealership's phones were apparently on drugs, told him about my experience with them this morning and he said thank you for the feedback. I set the appointment for the blasted oil change and came home to discover that my red primroses, which only bloom in April, are mysteriously blooming in September. This all happened 2 days after I saw that my Mockorange bush, which only blooms in June, is blooming this week as well.    

Another Embarrassing Terrorist Flop!

SAYS HERE that the latest attempt at jihad, in and around the Big Apple, was an embarrassing clusterfunk on a par with the exploits of the Underwear Bomber.  See this guy?

This is Ahmad Khan Rahami. Thanks to his terroristic behavior over the last week or so, he will hereinafter be known in perpetuity by all three names, like his criminal fellows Dayton Leroy Rogers and Coral Eugene Watts.  I want you to notice that in the news photo above, he has his pants pulled down for the camera.  This is the way I want you to remember him.  Because he was, in fact, caught with his pants down.  Now, see these guys?

They are the deeply flawed HEROES of this sorry story.  Last I heard they were still being sought by the police, but we may have their names by the time I am writing this.  They were captured on this security-cam video around the time they accidentally found a pressure cooker bomb built by Rahani, hidden in plain sight in a suitcase left where anyone might stumble over it.  Which is exactly what these guys did.  They said, hey, a suitcase! and opened it up and found an odd-looking device with a cellphone fastened by a bunch of wires to a pressure cooker.  They sort of shrugged, tossed aside the device -- breaking it as they did so -- and walked away with their prize, the suitcase.  Later, someone apparently came across the pressure cooker, realized what it was, and alerted the police.  The coppers discovered that the cellphone used to make the device was the personal property of Ahmad Khan Rahani, and full of information that led the police straight to him.  Oh, and he left fingerprints.  Which is how he ended up on that gurney in the photo above, riddled with bullets, with his pants down.


This is ultimately going to be one of the great stories of the Golden Age of the Jihaddist.  I just want you all to bear firmly in  mind that for every Beltway Sniper or Anwar al-Awlaki there are DOZENS of guys like the Underwear Bomber and Ahmad Khan Rahani.  These are the true footsoldiers of the global jihad.  You can recognize them by their flaming underwear and by the fact that they are already in police custody.

THE STATE BOYS REBELLION

This intriguing book by Michael D'Antonio, ISBN 978-0743245135, makes clear that despite all the well-meaning statements in the media decrying the violence in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Charlotte, North Carolina, well, sometimes A RIOT IS JUST WHAT YOU NEED.


This book is about a particularly shameful period in this nation's history, when "eugenics" was a perfectly acceptable word to use in polite company. (It mentions in the first few pages that Adolf Hitler considered a book on the subject, published by an American "scientist," to be his Bible.  Wow.)  The State Boys Rebellion is about one of the manifestations of the American eugenics movement. Apparently, in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties in this country, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of children rescued from bad homes -- or just not wanted by their parents for various reasons -- were herded into state-run institutions called "schools" where they were (usually incorrectly) labeled "feebleminded," warehoused, worked like dogs at menial jobs, denied proper schooling (again, because of that incorrect label), beaten, raped and generally exploited.  More than half of these kids were perfectly normal mentally (despite the lousy treatment they were getting!), and they put a lot of energy into against-the-rules learning about the outside world, saving money, and breaking out of the jails their state government put them in with NO HOPE OF PAROLE. 


Now, most of these kids just hunkered down and tolerated what the adults dished out to them, but some of them got really fed up and did what I would count as some very creative RIOTING.  The hijinks they got up to make for great reading, and FILLED ME WITH ADMIRATION.


And here's the thing:  I fully expected the powers to be to react to this by hiring more, meaner turnkeys and making the kids' lives WORSE THAN EVER.  What they did instead was admit that these kids did not really belong here and NEVER HAD.  They starting routing them into a special program to get them ready for the outside world.  Where they SUCCEEDED at living perfectly good lives.


It's an incredible message of hope for people like me, who look at what's going on outside the window and want to SET FIRE TO SOMETHING.  This book shows that sometimes that's the right decision.

THE BLOODY RED BARON -- Or, The Story Of A Discordian Saint

LOOKS PRETTY ORDINARY, DOESN'T HE?  Well, he's not.  Behold Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.  He's an aristocrat of of German and Russian extraction, but with an unexplained Jewish-sounding surname; like Hitler after him, this whiff of Judaism about his ancestry probably helped encourage a lifetime of Jew-baiting, Jew-hating, and -- after he laid his hands upon the axle of his destiny -- extermination of any Jew that crossed his path. He carried a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and apparently believed every word it said.  So right out of the box he's got a good-sized internal contradiction.  One of his many biographers, James Palmer, describes it in The Bloody White Baron as "internal discord."  Many of us have that going for us, but oh, what this man did with his!


It almost goes without saying that he was a decorated soldier of the Great War, the most cataclysmically Discordian event of the previous century.  This was a man who failed at everything until he discovered combat.  He loved it so much that he was known to skip into battle.  (That alone should earn a guy his wings as a Discordian saint!)  And here's a funny thing about him:  he was apparently such a friend of the battlefield that he became bulletproof.  He wasn't a candy-ass like Hitler.  He took bullet after bullet in combat, but like George Washington before him, the story goes that he simply shook the spent shells out of his shirt and kept fighting. This is supported by a variety of eyewitness accounts.  In fact, he was almost the only survivor of the combat unit he belonged to.  Unlike many other battlefield survivors of the Great War, he didn't come away loathing any suggestion of combat; in later years, when he was making war on anyone who crossed his path whether it made sense to or not, he never went home to refresh himself with family and friends.  He never needed to get away from the field of battle; he often needed to get back to it.  He often went for a stroll among the rolling skulls and rotting bones of his victims when there was nothing else going on.  You know, just to get his head together.


He apparently never got a scratch until he decided to, in front of the firing squad that finally ended his career. 


This guy was rumored to be a reincarnation of Genghis Khan, and I'm here to tell you he was a great candidate for the job.  He appeared to love all things Mongolian, and when his chance came he headed over there so he could take over as the next Khan.  Apparently, he has entered the pantheon of Mongolia as a bit of a god himself, whether or not the locals believe he was really the next Genghis.  At the same time he has become a minor deity in the firmament of the Far Right, with the likes of D.C. Stephenson, Heinrich Himmler and Rush Limbaugh.  They would look up to him far more if they were educated enough to find books about him.


He was a fan of pure Chaos, not of red tape, record-keeping, financial planning or any other kind of bureaucracy; he burned ledgers and records and preferred to surround himself with a swirl of mysticism.  Tibetan Buddhism of the Mongol sort, the kid with candles flickering ominously around statues of tusked, bloodstained deities crushing screaming victims underfoot was very much to his taste.


But it seems to me that the only deity this guy really honored was Our Lady of Chaos.  When your own men turn against you because you're so weird and crazy, it's not because you are, as some would have you think, such a great Buddhist.  When people who knew you can't agree on your hair or eye color -- whether or not you had a big scar on your forehead from that duel you fought -- or whether you look like this

or this

or this

...well, it all smells like unadulterated Chaos to me.