Irish Woman, reading the new Kentucky hunting guide:  Says here you can’t bait bears in Kentucky.  Do they sell scents for bears like they do for deer?
DaddyBear:  I suppose so, dear.  Something like Bear in Estrus or something.
Irish Woman:  I don’t know that I’d scent myself up if I were hunting bear.   I wouldn’t want the bear to be able to find me so precisely.
DaddyBear:  Why not?
Irish Woman:  Because a bear is a much better predator than you are.  You cover yourself up in the scent of a female bear in heat, and the best case scenario is he kills you when he figures out you’re not that hot coed he was looking for.  Worst case scenario – he rapes you.
………..
DaddyBear:  Oh God!  My eyes!

Those of you who have read my brain droppings for a while know that we have a bit of a menagerie here.  We have two dogs, Bluegrass and Shadow.  We also have three cats:  Koshka, Annya, and Timmy.  Add to that a pond full of goldfish, numerous chipmunks and squirrels in the yard, and we’ve got quite a collection of non-simian mammals in the household.

This morning, I realized a member of our little group hadn’t been seen in a couple of days.  Koshka’s made a habit of running out whenever she can get us to open the door.  She got past me Thursday morning when I left for work, and that was the last anyone saw her.  Irish Woman and I mentioned it to each other last night, and we realized that neither of had seen her.

I went for a quick walk around the yard to see if she’d come to me, but no luck.  This morning, I searched the neighborhood, but still didn’t see her.  Calls to animal control were less than helpful.  Irish Woman checked with all the neighbors, but they hadn’t seen her.

We were worried about her because it’s been hot as the knobs of hell lately, and she’s basically a house cat.  Add to that our location near several large streets and the propensity of some of our neighbor kids to be cruel to stray cats, and we were concerned.

We had decided that if she didn’t show up by Tuesday morning we’d go to animal control in person and see if she’d been picked up.

As I was doing some maintenance on the weed trimmer this evening, Irish Woman spotted Koshka coming up the street like her hair was on fire.  She came up the driveway when she heard us call her, but hid out under the truck.  I crawled under, got her out, and brought her in the house.  She immediately hid in the basement, where we can hear her giving the other cats and the dogs three rations of hell.

I keep her vaccinations and flea repellent up to date, but I’m going to have to keep her in.  Two nights out is too much.  I’m glad she came home, but I could beat her for making me think of how I was going to tell Girlie Bear her cat had run away.

Here in the U.S., we are preparing for the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.  But we are not alone in remembering savagery against innocents this week.  In Russia, families are remembering the hundreds who died at Beslan.

C.J. Chivers over at Esquire did an excellent write-up of the attack back in 2006.  It goes beyond the dry facts to show the small, heroic acts by ordinary people that saved lives.  Every person who thinks about personal security and the lengths that barbarians will go to in order to incite terror should read it.

As a parent, I cannot imagine the shock and anguish of knowing that no matter what you did, your children were probably going to die.  I also dread the thought that our schools are just as wide open and unprotected.

For my friends in Russia, I remember the innocents of Beslan.  They were not soldiers, they were not politicians, they were school-children, parents, and teachers.  I hope that your leaders have learned from the experience, and I hope that my leaders at least think about the possibility of something similar happening here.

The Pima County, Arizona, Republican Party is holding a raffle to raise money.  That alone is not unusual.  They’re raffling a gun, which isn’t uncommon.  They’re raffling a Glock, which makes sense since it’s one of the best selling brands of handguns in the United States.

They’re raffling off a Glock 23.   For those paying attention, the Tucson based Pima County Republican Party is raffling off a gun in the same model as the one that was used by a nutjob to shoot up a group of people in Tucson, killing 6 and wounding 13, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

OK, I’m socially tone deaf, and I’ve been known to do some really stupid, insensitive things in my life.  I once told an old German man that the reason I didn’t trust him was that he trusted Hitler.  I got thrown out of a Korean restaurant one drunken weekend because I was trying to throw my voice into my bulgogi and bark.  I got my 5 month pregnant wife to be the designated driver when my buddies and I tried to drink a German bierfest dry.  Yeah, I can be a real clod.

This one tops all of those and more.

I think fundraisers are a good idea, and I’d gladly buy a raffle ticket for a gun if one was offered to me by the local Republican party, even a Glock.

But guys, they didn’t auction off a Carcano in Dallas as a Christmas fundraiser in 1963.  The city fathers of Memphis didn’t hold a barbecue contest to win a Remington rifle in the summer of 1968.  The GOP in Tucson shouldn’t be raffling off a Glock 23 while families are still mourning the deaths of their loved ones and some of the casualties of Laughner’s madness are still recovering.

Update – As Sean pointed out in comments, Congresswoman Giffords was shot with a Glock 19, while the gun being raffled off is a Glock 23.  My opinion hasn’t really changed on this.  I still think it’s kind of tasteless.

A man in Louisville is charged with violating an Emergency Protective Order (EPO) and stabbing his estranged wife and her pregnant daughter after breaking into her home.  No details are given about why the order was given to the victim, but since he allegedly tried to gut her and her pregnant daughter like a trout, I’m guessing violent behavior was involved.  Apparently the magical incantation against domestic violence contained in the EPO wasn’t done exactly right.

People, if you feel you need to get a protective order in order to keep someone from hurting you, do one of two things:  Move into a policeman’s house and never leave their side, or get something a little more tangible than a stern warning from a judge to keep them from killing you.  And even if you know a cop who’s willing to let you crash on their couch, get a gun.

Over at Fox News, Dr. Manny Alvarez supports the decision by a hospital organization in Michigan to mandate vaccination against seasonal flu by its staff on pain of termination.  The argument for this is that people who work at hospitals are at a greater risk for contracting and spreading the flu.  The counter-argument is that an employer should respect the rights of employees as to what they inject into their bodies.

Dr. Alvarez makes a good point when he says that a hospital can mandate that a worker must have certain education and credentialing qualifications before being allowed to work, so why shouldn’t they mandate vaccination?

I agree with Dr. Alvarez on this.  The flu kills on average about 6000 people in the United States, with thousands more becoming sick.  These sick people are going to concentrate at doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, and hospital wards.  People who work at these facilities, regardless of their job, are going to be exposed either to the patients or to the things they touch or cough and sneeze on.  For their own health, and the health of the people they will come into contact with, they should be immunized against this highly infectious illness.

Yes, the flu shot is not always effective, and yes there will be people who get sick from the shot itself.  But the risk of spreading flu in an environment where people are seeking health care is too high.  People who have a moral or medical reason to not get the flu shot can get out of it with a note from their doctor or pastor.

The other side of the coin is the rights of the employees.  I don’t like it when my employer comes out with yet another mandatory briefing, background screening, training session, or whatever that I have to do in order to stay employed.  While my company encourages flu shots and immunization in general, they don’t mandate it.  But I’m not working with or around sick people either.

My take on this particular situation is that employees who don’t don’t want to get the flu vaccine and don’t have a religious or medical reason for doing so, can always quit.  When you accept employment, even if you have the strongest union contract in the world, you are agreeing to exchange your labor and adherence to policies set by your employer in exchange for money in one form or another.  If an aspect of the work or one of those policies offends you, leave.  Drop your two weeks notice, start calling business and family contacts looking for your next gig, and polish your resume a bit.  Cashing the paycheck means you agree to the employer’s terms and conditions.

JP over at Eyes Never Closed has proposed that as many people as possible spend time on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks shooting their guns and eating pork.  If he gets pictures of people doing these things, he’ll post them on a website that’s basically a middle finger to murdering cretins wherever they may be.

Since that’s the weekend I have Girlie Bear for September and it’s also Little Bear’s birthday, I think I may take my kids to the range and then have a cookout.  Smoked Boston butt sounds really good after a morning out at Knob Creek shooting firearms from Savage, Ruger, and Smith and Wesson, doesn’t it?

I just read one of the most disgusting and disturbing things I’ve seen in a while.  Big Peace has an article about the open and widespread practice in Afghanistan of men buying teenage boys for use as dancers and sexual partners.  From what I surmise, this practice has been part of the culture in parts of Afghanistan, but it has exploded both in flagrancy and sheer number of boys being sold into sexual slavery since the fall of the Taliban.

We have our own issues with widespread abuse of children in our own culture, but at least we’re trying to clean it up and we curb stomp those who we catch debasing the most innocent of our people.  

Before I go off on a rant here, this has nothing to do with Islam.  The local Islamic scholars and preachers uniformly condemn the practice. This is also not a slam of all Afghani people.  We wouldn’t know how bad this situation is without reporting by Afghani journalists and others.  But something is rotten in Kabul, Kandahar, and the rest of that country and its culture(s).

Since we brought a massive amount of firepower to the side of the Northern Alliance in late 2001 and helped to push the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, we have been regularly treated to stories of massive corruption in the Karzai government, funded of course by the American taxpayer, a huge upswing in the amount of opium grown in Afghanistan, Afghani police and army units that are more a mob of stoners than cohesive groups of armed men with a mission, and now this. 

What exactly are we getting for all of the blood and money we’ve poured into Afghanistan for almost 10 years?  From what I can see, not much.  If the Karzai government isn’t capable of bring the warlords to heel and keeping horrific crimes like this from happening, why are we diddling with him and his family run enterprise in Kabul?

Are American interests protected by empowering men who use young boys as sexual puppets and status symbols?  Are we giving the Taliban and other groups we oppose in the region an example to point at when asked why they fight us when we put and keep such men in power?

We need to send Kabul and the rest of the scum in Afghanistan a very clear message:  Clean up your act or we walk away.  No ‘slow drawdown’ to attenuate the pain, no ‘follow-on force’ to protect them from reality, no massive infusions of cash and guns to keep them parroting democratic platitudes while they overfill their retirement accounts.  Clean up the corruption, the ineptitude, and the outright pederasty at the point of a bayonet if you have to, or we leave you to the Taliban.  We will burn or blow up all of our bases, take home or destroy all of the equipment we brought with us, and crater the runways after the last C-5 goes wheels up.  Piss us off, and we’ll salt the fields of opium and cannabis with ground up nuclear fuel rods while we’re at it.  It would be better for us to sit on the sidelines for a couple of years while Karzai slides down into the cesspool of history than to continue to enable his corrupt, lazy, inept, disgusting regime.

We are making the same mistake we made in Vietnam and other 3rd world crapholes during the Cold War:  Back any tin pot dictator with the blood of children on his hands so long as he keeps saying the right things to the reporters from the United States.  We either need to back someone who won’t stand for the corruption of his country and the cultural and systemic sexual exploitation of its children, or we need to drop Afghanistan like a hot rock while promising to make a desert out of it and call it peace if we’re ever bothered again. 

Boss:  What happened?
DaddyBear:  We had SSH sessions open to two servers, and we put the ‘reboot’ command into the wrong window.  Box was down about 5 minutes, but it doesn’t look like it had any impact to the customers.
Co-Worker:  It was me, I put in the reboot command.
Boss:  Well, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time…. Give me your badges.  You’re out of here.

Shocked silence

Boss: Gotcha!

That is not funny!

Brigid over at Home on the Range has a good write-up of today’s Indy Blogmeet.  Looks like I missed an opportunity to have dinner with a lot of the great people from the blogosphere that I’ve met over the past couple of years. I would pay good money to sit in a room and listen to Og, OldNFO, and BRM swap stories. I definitely need to head up to Indy one of these days.  And I definitely need to get one of those Secret Squirrel velcro patches!

Congratulations to Tam on the sixth anniversary of View From the Porch!  It’s great that her blogiversary coincided with a blogmeet.  Tam’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met at a shooting range, and I wish her luck as she continues to dish out the USDA recommended dose of snark.