Civil Commotion

The past month has distinguished the nimble retailers from the sluggards, No?

Here’s my totally subjective list of winners and losers in the Wake Forest, North Carolina, area.

• Ace Hardware — Totally inept. They are aware that some retailers are offering an online-order and curbside-delivery service, and feel that they have to offer it, too — but have absolutely no idea how to go about it. They’re okay if you’re allright to go indoors, but your blood pressure is going to skyrocket if you try to order a screwdriver online and then go pick it up.

• Home Depot — Can’t get it done, and that’s a surprise. I’ve used their online order and pickup service in the past, and always been satisfied. Go online and place the order, and a few hours later you get an e-mail with a barcode. Show the barcode to a reader at an outside locker, and a door pops open and there’s your stuff.

  Now, the service has broken down. The store’s telephone operator told me they’re running 2-3 days behind right now because they can’t get help to come in.

• Lowe’s — I ordered some air filters a month ago and still don’t have them. Neither will Lowe’s cancel the order and issue a refund. I’ve just cut up my Lowe’s card and won’t ever set foot in one of their goddam stores again. You’ve been warned.

• Wal*Mart — The grocery pickup service knows what it’s doing, and does it well. Things have been a bit slower than usual lately, but the use of the service has been way up, so I don’t think I can fault them. The pharmacy pickup service, on the other hand, really needs to walk over to the grocery department and ask them how it’s done, because they haven’t ironed out all the wrinkles yet.

Online retailers:

• Barnes & Noble is running a bit slow, but remains relatively speedy and reliable.

• Amazon has slowed w-a-a-a-y down, and should be avoided if that’s an option.

• JetPens is not offering free shipping right now, but still ships reliably fast. Definitely, your first choice for office supplies and related.

• Levenger is still shipping quickly.

So, basically, except for Amazon, the online retailers that I deal with routinely are still performing well. The companies that hadn’t already started figuring-out how to do online order servicing were caught flat-footed and haven’t recovered yet.

I’ve spent much of the afternoon idly daydreaming about the next visit to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where I went to college and probably won’t be able to visit this summer because of the pandemic.

Naturally, that means going through the photos. Here are a few of my favorites.

Somewhere along the western edge of the Keweenaw Peninsula,
at the western end of the U.P.

Tahquamenon Falls, no rival to Niagara, no matter the booster’s claims,
but still pretty and you can’t go to the U.P. without a visit.

Somebody’s idea of a joke, but not so implausible as it may seem.

Miner’s Castle, at the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, near Munising.

OK, kind of hokey, but an exemplar for the friendliness of the entire Upper Peninsula.

You-know-who.

My favorite road sign in the universe. Geology still happens.

You knew this was coming, right?

President Donald Trump once again tried to blame his predecessor for not creating a test for the novel coronavirus, which did not exist in humans until mere months ago.

While talking with reporters, Trump again asserted that former President Barack Obama was to blame for the United States’ infamously late scramble to produce quality COVID-19 tests.

“The last administration left us with nothing!” Trump ranted. “We started off with bad, broken tests and obsolete tests!”

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Since everybody in the universe knows that coronavirus is a new disease that Obama couldn’t possible have developed tests for, I bet this will make Trump supporters wonder what other things Trump has unjustly blamed on Obama?”

No. They will not. They will marvel at the wickedness and ineptitude of that wretched nigra moozlim, and double-down on their resolve to work for Trump’s re-election next Fall.

The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue goes off on a riff today about religion as the source of morality.

Society prospers morally when we have more religious persons, not less. This does not mean that all atheists are immoral or that all religious persons are moral. But it does mean that society, as a whole, is better off, generally speaking, when it is populated by people of faith, and not their atheist counterparts.

Y’all will recall that Jehovah, whose justice is perfect and eternal, specifies death for gays and faithless wives, but is satisfied by eternal torture for those who don’t admire Him.

The uncomplicated truth is that morals and ethics are made by man, and then attributed by man to Our Invisible Friend in order to invest them with authority. What strikes me is that this scam persists. After all, Plato laid this question to rest more than 2400-years ago, with the dialogue Euthyphro. Bah.

It is time to recognize reality. The Bible-thumpers, reactionaries, racists, and miscellaneous paranoid morons comprising Red America are not our fellow countrymen. They voted for Trump largely because he would “own the libs” and inflict pain on us. They are our enemies, they hate us, and they are actively waging aggressive war against us. I have nothing in common with this horde of gibbering barbarians.

Infidel753

I dislike “are not our fellow countrymen,” though I can’t say exactly why. Certainly, Albert the Pious et. al. are affirmatively hostile to the Enlightenment ideals that undergird the nation’s founding and have made plain through the years that they don’t much admire Thomas Jefferson. Nor do I really like “They are our enemies,” though I know and have documented that much of the Evangelical Right view people like me as the enemy.

But, though I feel a bit squeamish about some of the language even as I endorse the sense of it, I read in this the same thing I’ve said countless times through the years: There will never be any reasoning-with, or accommodating, the loonies from the fever swamp. They must be defeated — humiliatingly defeated — and pushed out to the margins of our shared public life.

The Birchers and the KKK were once universally understood to be sick fringe characters … sad, screwed-up little men, not to be taken seriously. Famously, William F. Buckley, Jr., spearheaded the effort to drive them from the GOP. They’re back and, thanks to Donald Trump, they are the GOP.