During the State of the Union address this last week, the camera panned into a view of California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, verifying the adage that a picture is worth a thousands words.  For those millions of viewers who were watching last Tuesday and saw Mrs. Pelosi, let me predict, with 99% accuracy what we all collectively screamed at that moment to our respective televisions.

Remember the chants of USA-USA-USA?  Had we all simultaneously muted our TV’s and just slightly opened a window, this is what you would have heard, loud and clear from coast to coast when Pelosi’s scowling face appeared.  No need for a thousand words, only three:  (I’ll give you the beginning letters of each word, you figure it out), chanted just like the USA-USA-USA moment only YFC – YFC – YFC

That’s right, I said it………..  You Failed California…………………………

A recent editorial bemoans the fact that today’s young journalists not only lack the protections of free speech when publishing in school newspapers, but also are devoid of the basic drive to challenge and confront fiction when they find it.

The author finds this incredulous.  I find it predictable.

What should we expect when we teach our 6 year olds that the score in a game doesn’t matter, that there are no “winner” or “losers,” that everyone “deserves” a participation trophy?  What should we expect when school course work is “dumbed down” and grades curved up when outcomes don’t meet expectations?  What should we expect when schools encourage the politically correct agenda of today’s progressive movement, while failing to teach American history or civics?  What should we expect when Washington, Jefferson and Columbus are seldom mentioned, much less taught, with the exception of calling them slaveholders and abusive plunderers?  What should we expect when the least little provocation is translated into an act of bullying, shutting off the opportunity to learn the life-skills of dealing with people, yes even the jerks?

Society has relegated shame, personal accomplishment, dignity and individual  responsibility to the dump of politically correct phrases now out of bounds.  Perhaps some of today’s “snow-flakes” might not melt so fast had they been tempered in the fire of social adversity and been allowed to work out real-life conflicts for themselves, instead of a parent or schoolteacher intervening.

It the quest to shelter and protect our children, we have been too afraid to let them fail.  We have undervalued the concept of “tough-love” and forgotten that we are parents first and not their best friends.  It was easier to say yes than to say no, and many parents thought that somehow, it would all just work out.

Well, it hasn’t.

A bloody nose, either metaphoric or literal isn’t the end of the world, but the beginning of a deeper and realistically based understanding of actual human nature.  A hurt feeling isn’t terminal.  Ironically, while attempting to shield children from everything, we have left them naked to it all, the reality of a world not controlled by parents, teachers or progressive idealism.  While many parents taught their kids to believe and live in a world they wished for, they now have to function in the world as it really is.

Problem-solving, critical thinking and a healthy level of skepticism were sacrificed at the alter of self-righteousness and the smug asuredness that there was only one-way to interpret the world.  They had it all figured out.  But when confronted with opposing viewpoints and notions that conflict with their worldview, that void in their training hammers home the reality that in order to function in the chaotic reality of reality, the absolutes they thought were absolute are not, and to borrow a popular phrase from the 60’s, this simply, “blows their minds.”  Reality is a stern taskmaster.  No points for effort, no atta-boys for attitude, simply rewards based upon outcomes.  What a concept.

Recently, the City of Binghamton decided to install license plate camera readers in every entryway into the city.  This records the plate number, the location, time, date and direction of travel.  Of course, when you cross-reference the plate number with the vehicle registration database, you can learn the vehicles owner, year, make and model, the owners address and date of birth.  If you cross-reference this with Ez-Pass data, you can learn the comings and goings of this same vehicle as it enters and exits certain toll roads.  If you cross-reference this with city installed cameras located all over Binghamton more crime-ridden areas, you have even more data.  And finally, when you cross-reference all of this with privately available, aggregated video feeds from private parking facilities, security cameras etc., well, you begin to see the bigger picture.

The following letter is a response to a conversation I had with a City of Binghamton councilman who thinks the plate readers are great, a truly wonderful crime fighting tool.  He ended our conversation by challenging me with this worn out, threadbare statement.  “If you’ve got nothing to hide, what are you worried about?”

This is what I had to say to that.

Just a follow-up to our conversation a few nights ago about cameras, license plate readers and privacy.

The following statement is a part of the decision in a privacy case in D.C. concerning plate readers:

“In our society, it is a core principle that the government does not invade people’s privacy and collect information about citizens’ innocent activities just in case they do something wrong.

A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups – and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

DC Circuit Court

US v Antoine Jones

Here is just one part of how NYC uses these devises on their police vehicles:

In NYC, unmarked police cars with plate readers have been used to target and encircle mosques in order to gain data of those attending religious services.

And what, if anything, has Binghamton done to insure limited access to this data?

Anyone with access to this system can target individual plate numbers and receive updates based on movements, for example your wife, girlfriend, boss, kids, etc.  How do we know that police personnel are not mis-using this data?  Also of note, the success rate of “hits” involving serious crimes is abysmally tiny.  Using Maryland as an example, only 47 criminal “hits” were obtained in 1 million plate reads.

And it’s not just Binghamton.  Consider the fact that this is going on virtually everywhere, creating a virtual digital dragnet of data on everybody everywhere, most or all of it for sale!  National Vehicle Location Services, a private company, aggregates plate data from multiple sources and has a database of more than 800 million records it sells to over 2,200 police agencies.

As a matter of practice, to insure no abuses, the following should be implemented by Binghamton leadership:

Retention should be short, like 90 days or less

No third-party sales in or out

No third party sharing

FOIL accessibility for transparency to the public

Public announcement of all plate readers public and private

An excerpt from an article by Cyrus Farivar:

But for his research on license plates readers and their effect on privacy and civil liberties, Farivar turned his attention to his own backyard: Oakland, California. He filed a records request for all the license plate reader records that had ever been collected and received 4.3 million records covering roughly four years.  “That was pretty shocking to me,” Farivar says.  He reviewed the records, identified clusters of data points on a map and — by simply matching a license plate to its owner — was able to piece together an astonishing amount of personal information. To make his point about the potential pitfalls of this type of data collection, Farivar evaluated the movements of Oakland City Council member Dan Kalb.  “Knowing nothing else about him, other than his license plate number that he gave me, I showed him on a map, and I said, ‘I bet that you live on this particular block in North Oakland because I can see that your car has been scanned something like 30 times on this one block. He said, ‘Yeah, that is exactly where I live.’ ”

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

JAN 27, 2016

Article in the Atlantic

Vigilant Solutions, is taking photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data on each of those pictures, and sells it.

It’s happening right now in nearly every major American city.

The company has taken roughly 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80 million additional geotagged images. They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored. Vigilant Solutions profits by selling access to this data (and tries to safeguard it against hackers). Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers.

The company counts 3,000 law-enforcement agencies among its clients. Thirty thousand police officers have access to its database. Do your local cops participate?

More abuses seem inevitable as additional communities adopt the technology (some with an attitude expressed with admirable frankness by an official in a small Florida city: “We want to make it impossible for you to enter Riviera Beach without being detected.”)

“During the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Georgia, population 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems,” the Wall Street Journal reports. As one critic, California State Senator Joe Simitian, asked: “Should a cop who thinks you’re cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent? I think the answer to that question should be ‘no.’”

The technology forms part of a larger policing trend toward infringing on the privacy of ordinary citizens. ​“The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people’s everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception,” The Wall Street Journal explains. “Cell phone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored. Data about a typical American is collected in more than 20 different ways during everyday activities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Fifteen years ago, more than half of these surveillance tools were unavailable or not in widespread use.”

Nor are police the only ones buying this data.

Vigilant Solutions is a subsidiary of a company called Digital Recognition Network.

Its website declares:  All roads lead to revenue with DRN’s license plate recognition technology. Fortune 1000 financial institutions rely on DRN solutions to drive decisions about loan origination, servicing, and collections. Insurance providers turn DRN’s solutions and data into insights to mitigate risk and investigate fraud. And, our vehicle location data transforms automotive recovery processes, substantially increasing portfolio returns.

And its general counsel insists that “everyone has a First Amendment right to take these photographs and disseminate this information.” But as the ACLU points out:

A 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police noted that individuals may become “more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation” due to license plate readers. It continues: “Recording driving habits could implicate First Amendment concerns. Specifically, LPR systems have the ability to record vehicles’ attendance at locations or events that, although lawful and public, may be considered private. For example, mobile LPR units could read and collect the license plate numbers of vehicles parked at addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests.”

Many powerful interests are aligned in wanting to know where the cars of individuals are parked. Unable to legally install tracking devices themselves, they pay for the next best alternative—and it’s gradually becoming a functional equivalent. More laws might be passed to stymie this trend if more Americans knew that private corporations and police agencies conspire to keep records of their whereabouts.

Spread the word.

So Mr. Councilman, in closing, the answer to your question a few nights ago, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?”  I would say there is plenty to worry about because the scope and size of this undertaking is a giant over-reach, grossly breaching the rights of millions more innocents than those guilty.  It is too intrusive in an otherwise free society and it fails the simple but tried and true “SNIFF TEST”.  It just plain stinks of BIG BROTHER and the repressive domination of an ever-growing, insatiable political state that wants to control everything.

When reason, thoughtfulness and logic collide with emotion, fear and hysteria, predictably bedlam ensues.  Such are the circumstances that define the sides of conservatism in the first instance, and liberalism in the second.  Reason-based persuasion is a strange foreign language to the emotional mind.

Conservative thought follows a logical path based on the premise that suggests a method, a strategy, or a plan for accomplishing some stated goal or objective.  Liberalism begins with a feeling, a reaction, emotion, and only after starting with that does it consider the thought on whether or not it is even possible to accomplish the goal.  Conservatism discounts the emotional over the rational.  Liberalism insists upon emotional energy even when doing so isn’t logical.  Therefore, it follows that liberals and conservatives find themselves at loggerheads more often than not, simply because they are approaching solutions from such divergent starting points.  To a liberal, conservative thought seems cold, detached, even devoid of emotion.  Conservatives say that even if an idea or solution captures our emotions, it still needs to be possible, or at least practical in the real world of what can actually be.

A perfect example of this is embodied in the office of the President of the United States, via Donald Trump.  The levels of animus are amped up above the ozone when it comes to the conservative/liberal schism.

Donald Trump is wired in a way unlike any other politician in modern history.  While embracing generally conservative theory combined with pragmatism in the absence of political consequence or possible retribution, (because he has no political debts), he also has managed to erupt in emotional ways, hardly a hallmark of your typical Conservative.   This display of emotional outburst, whether it be in a speech or in a Tweet, completely befuddles liberals because they have come to believe that this level of feelings-driven reaction is their exclusive property.  To see a conservative, much less a hated, successful conservative use their own emotion-based tricks against them just pisses them off beyond measure.

Donald Trump has mastered the emotional component of persuasiveness in a way that still allows for conservative thought, preserves and enhances his appeal to the reactionary, edge-elements of his supporters, all while simultaneously enraging his opponents by forcing their reactions to surface for all to see.

It is said that you anger conservatives when you lie to them, while liberals become angry when you tell them the truth.  This Trump inspired era brings us to the intersection of what is possible versus the folly of utopian-based idealism.

Reason and thoughtfulness logically lead to conservatism because the process itself uncovers the realities of what is possible versus what we wish for.  This forces sober reflection about realistic and achievable goals.  Emotion and hysteria gloss over reality in order to envision a utopian idealism best left to the sleepy dreamer.  While these thoughts and the goals may well be noble of origin, reality cannot be ignored in the unrealistic hope that somehow, someway, nobility itself will magically redefine reality.

The path plotted by conservative thought is almost always harder than the way of the idyllic wanderer.  It is the path that insists upon existing in the world of what is as opposed to the world for which some wish.  Accordingly, it is the path most resisted, even when it is right because it is harder and demands more of us as reasoned, thinking people.

Until I read Senator Elizabeth Warren’s comment using this term, I had never heard of the phrase “slut shaming.”  According to Wikipedia, it means …”criticizing women and girls who are perceived to violate expectations of behavior and appearance regarding issues related to sexuality.”  Warren was commenting on a Tweet President Trump’s penned saying that fellow Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would…”do anything” in order to receive campaign support.  Extrapolating from that remark the wherewithal to accuse the President of slut shaming speaks more about the filthy mind of Warren than the intention of the President.

Gillibrand’s own record regarding the use of sexual allegations as a weapon is quite interesting.  In her inaugural political campaign in 2005 seeking office the following year as the US congressional representative from New York’s 20th district, Gillibrand accused her opponent, incumbent Congressman John Sweeney, of spousal abuse, by releasing a 2005 police report detailing a 911 call allegedly from Sweeney’s wife.  The Sweeney campaign stated that the report was false but the damage was done and the accusation was widely credited with tipping the elections outcome to favor Gillibrand in what was a traditional Republican stronghold.

When Gillibrand was appointed to fill Senator Hillary Clinton’s vacancy, created when Clinton was nominated to be the Secretary of State, she had no problem cozying up to the Clintons by taking their mentorship, money and endorsements, yet recently she stated that former President Bill Clinton should have resigned in the face of the sexual allegations he faced during his tenure.  If it weren’t for the Clinton’s, Gillibrand would not be a Senator yet even though she felt he should have resigned, she took whatever he had to offer in spite of her own “convictions.”  Apparently Trump is right.

Senator Gillibrand used the bully pulpit to shame fellow Senator Al Franken out of office.  She has also called on President Trump to step down, yet in her own book, she accuses unnamed fellow lawmakers of inappropriate sexual comments and rude behavior towards her, while refusing to name them.  Doesn’t Gillibrand risk the perpetuation of the actions of these unnamed lawmakers on other women?  Doesn’t Gillibrand turn a blind eye to the potential abuse of others because she steadfastly refuses to out these evil men within her own ranks?

The only plausible reason for her refusal might be the fact that perhaps these accusations are fiction.  Maybe Gillibrand fabricated these stories as a way to make her book more interesting while posing as a hard-charging, strong-willed, take-charge woman who won’t be stopped.  It certainly is conveniently self-serving to portray her colleagues as sexual aggressors as it helps to make her appear to be stronger than she actually is.  Why else would she tacitly condone their continued behaviors when doing so puts other women at risk?  How is she helping other women?  Maybe she can’t out them because it never happened.

By looking carefully at Gillibrand’s record, it appears Trump is right; she will do anything to keep her power.

As a part of the Prospect Mountain interchange project, the roadway on Chenango Street that goes underneath the Route 81/17 highway was renovated into a concrete tunnel.  Recently installed lights in this 150 foot-long structure include 89 separate LED light fixtures connected to 89 separate circuit boxes, 38 on either side of the roadway and 13 down the center of the roof.

After FOILing the NYS Dept of Transportation, I learned that the cost of the lighting portion of the project was $336,914.23.

Inexplicably, all 89 of the lights are on during the day.  Only four of the fixtures are operable at night.  The daytime illumination is so bright; you literally need sunglasses as you drive past.  At night, the four fixtures do a completely adequate job of illuminating the entire structure.

The State did with 89 light boxes what it should have done with just four, wasting over $300,000.00 in the process.

Over $300,000.00 of tax dollars squandered in this single project alone.  Lord only knows how many more examples of boondoggle, waste and over-spending exist in a project of this magnitude when those who do the work also oversee their own accountability.

US Senators being forced from office provide the opportunity to examine the unintended consequences of the 17th amendment to the US Constitution.

The original Constitution called for the office of US Senator to be appointed from within the ranks of the sitting members of the respective statehouses.  The collective membership of these statehouses were tasked with choosing from their own membership, the two Senators that would represent their state.  The genius of this system was that the states had the authority to not only select their Senators, but theoretically, the power to recall them.

In 1913, the Constitution was changed by the 17th amendment, mandating popular election of US Senators.  The change meant that any otherwise eligible, state resident could run in a general, statewide election.

The 17th amendment is the only significant structural change ever made to the original version of our Constitution.  After witnessing over 100 years of federal governmental functionality courtesy of popularly elected US Senators, it seems self-evident that a 28th amendment needs to be passed to repeal the 17th.

The only other repealed US Constitutional amendment was in 1933 when the 21st amendment repealed the 18th. (the nation-wide prohibition of alcohol.)  It took voters only 13 years to see the folly regarding prohibition.  After 104 years of popularly elected US Senators, the wisdom of our founders originally designed notion of senatorial selection via statehouses should be a vision gaining increasing clarity.

Regardless of individual political bent, we all likely have our own personal opinions regarding Senators we might label as buffoons.  With the average senatorial election campaign costing some $10.5 million dollars, what was once a carefully considered mechanism tightly linking states interests and states control over the ever-present threat of a too powerful federal government, has turned into a pay-to-play popularity contest.

The recent resignation of Minnesota Senator Al Franken serves as perfect illustration supporting a 28th amendment.  Franken was a comedian and never held public office until his senatorial election.  Because Franken enjoyed celebrity via national television notoriety, he attracted the horsepower and the financial backing of a hyper-liberal political machine that vaulted him into national office as a complete political neophyte.  It is hard to imagine any statehouse deciding that the best and brightest they had to offer would mirror the Senate we have today.

Clearly, the federal leviathan needs to be weakened and the States need to take back the power that our founders originally intended they preserve.  James Madison made it clear in 1788: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”  Re-linking states interests to federal legislative undertakings insures the superior strength of states and checks what our founders feared most and what we have today: the unbridled growth of a too strong, too over-arching federal government.

While helping addicts to overcome addiction may be noble, using other peoples money to do so is wrong.  It is a moral failing to expect productive taxpayers to underwrite the costs of treatment for those who made bad decisions and became dependent.  If the demand for such services is sufficiently high, private enterprise is the appropriate solution, not the public sector.  Government run anything is always over-priced and inefficient.  The same services in the private sector are always better, faster, more successful and cheaper.

Considering that Broome County taxpayers are already over-taxed, over-regulated and over-burdened by unnecessary layers of government, over-lapping bureaucracies, fees, fines and regulations, the creation of a new and expensive treatment facility is a bad idea.

Government at all levels, should focus on the core duties and responsibilities they were created to provide, not wander off into enterprises and undertakings that compete with private sector providers.  Roads, bridges, police and fire protection, the legal system of adjudication, courts, these are the things to which government is limited.  Over-reach beyond those services is clearly outside the scope of what our founders intended.

Government was envisioned to be severely limited, leaving citizens to pursue their own business, determine their own interests, while being mindful of unnecessarily interfering with the citizenry.  Ideally, governments should be as small and unobtrusive as possible, just large enough to accomplish its the basic services.

While we cannot afford the expense of this program, even if the costs were not an issue, the reality is that government should not be in this business.

Make not mistake, this is not an argument against the treatment of addicts or a dismissal of the anguish, suffering and heartache families endure.  The scourge of drug abuse is real and deserves attention.  The argument is about the morality of expecting productive, successful total strangers to pay for solving a problem they had no role in creating.

Those pushing this agenda have so far relied heavily on emotion and heartache to sell the idea.  When the loved ones and relatives of addicts attend public meetings holding up pictures of those souls lost to their addition, their tears, grief and sorrow are weaponized in order to sway opinion and convince others of the wisdom of this project.  Whenever the chosen primary tool of persuasion is emotionally based, it is at the expense of reason.  When it is likely that logic, reason and thoughtful discussion will prove to be a more powerful persuader to the contrary, the tears of emotion are employed to obscure the vision of the bigger picture.

The thoughtful and reasoned discussion is the question of the legitimacy of government involvement in projects best suited for the private sector.  The unjustified assertion of a moral authority that demands of hard working taxpayers their hard-earned dollars is unconscionable.  It is unreasonable and ironic to think that those who have managed to remain productive and successfully un-addicted are obligated to pay for expensive and often times unsuccessful treatments for those who are.

One of the things that make the United States a glorious country is that no artificial restrictions are placed on the abilities of anyone to attain anything they aspire towards.  Many cultures prevent achievement through a caste system or other social barriers, (classes), that make upward mobility impossible.  In this country we have no “classes” with one hideous exception, that being the “ruling class”.

Love him or hate him, President Trump has proven that any meddling in the status quo of the ruling elite will not be tolerated.  When it comes to a lust for power, there is no difference between parties or people.  Behind closed doors, politicians collude amongst themselves to keep their positions, their power and their fortunes.  When members of both political parties demonstrate equally ample quantities of hate and animus towards this political neophyte Donald Trump, it indicates to me that the President is really on to something.

There were always the indicators of a fix in the system, yet most voters either held their nose and voted for the lesser of evils, or begrudgingly supported candidates who seemed fine, only once in office to be swallowed alive in the swamp.  Broken promises and government gone crazy finally awakened angry voters.  Trump’s mere presence in this corrupt system has unmasked the panic of the power brokers once their fiefdoms were threatened.  Trump voters were right in their suspicions, just look at the reactions of the ruling class as they lose control.

The founding principles of this nation; self-governance and co-equal branches are similar to an orchestra.  The strings, horns and woodwinds blend and compliment one another, each ebbing and then flowing into and out of prominence, depending on the percussion to set the tempo and finally the conductor to manage it all.  Trump marches to his own drummer and this leaves the traditional power-players performing out-of-tune with no predictable beat to follow.

With typical Senate campaigns costing upwards of 30 million dollars, those who underwrite that expense do so to see a return on investment.  That means control over the candidate in exchange for the seat in office.  When this system was bypassed by Trump, it took away that influence.  Whatever you think of the President, thank him for unmasking the scoundrels and proving that those in the ruling class put their own interests in front of their constituents.  Although “follow the money is a long-used cliché, it is nevertheless a truism.  When Trump owes no one anything, he is free to be his own man.

Add to this the direct link to people via Twitter and his unwavering goal of dismantling the regulatory state and rebuilding a judiciary that respects precedent and law without legislating from the bench and you have at least a start in the right direction for the people finally awakening to the reality that for far too long we have failed to pay attention and government has morphed into a beast from the swamp.

Let the drainage continue.

Those who loath cats do so out of ignorance, intimidation and misunderstanding.   Cats pose an interesting and challenging relationship.  Dogs simply fill a lonely soul’s need.  You don’t “choose” a cat.  If on the other hand you decide to possess a dog, you go out and pick one, like apples or a couch.  You can’t do that with a cat, no one actually possesses a cat.  A proper relationship with a feline must begin with the animal seeking you out, not the other way around.  Go looking for a cat and it will forever view you as weak, needy and pathetic, like a dog owner.

During the initial meet-and-greet, when the cat needs you most, it is imperative that you take advantage of the power imbalance.  In that rare moment, you forever and firmly imprint on the animal the fact that it came running to you and not the other way around.  Throughout the life of that newfound relationship, you and the cat will be constantly jockeying for superior position, you in order to keep that power, and the cat, in the never-ending struggle to wrench it from you.

All relationships are like this.  We are perpetually in a state of trade-offs and consolations of either being in control, being controlled, (or God forbid, being out-of-control.)  The healthiest human relationships hover around a ratio of 50-50 in who controls what, but how many relationships are healthy?  And while it might initially feel good to have a 95-5 control advantage over your cat or your lover, neither will tolerate that level of helplessness and imbalance for very long.  While even-steven might make for a happy human relationship, that power imbalance over the cat needs to be comfortably in your favor but not slavish.

Cats are natural born killers, only seemingly domesticated by virtue of their own willingness to play nice.  Google “cat fights” if you need convincing that the line is scarily thin between purring, loving lap warmer and flesh-shredding bloodletting killer of the first order.  While cats try to satisfy their blood lust with birds and rodents, make no mistake, with one hit of acid, exposure to rabies or a brain aneurism, your apartment could become a major crime scene, with you the victim of a thrill killing courtesy of Fluffy-the-Feline Assassin.  Afterwards, the cat would sleep peacefully without a tinge of regret.

As a counter to that possibility, all cats should be out-door cats.

By letting the cat out, you are saying, “Go ahead, go, do as you please, take your chances in traffic, tease the dog or skunk, eat from the garbage, live it up, decide for yourself between water and anti-freeze, have a completely unsupervised free-for-all ball.  When you come back, you’ll tell yourself it is only for the food, but we both know the truth.”

Power established.

Cats have conquered even those who truly hate them.  Think about all of the laws, ordinances, rules and regulations concerning dogs, requiring leashes at all times, a total lack of freedom and hyper supervision.  Dog parks?  Please.  Cats have the run of the planet.  There are no cat-controlling laws because cats don’t play by any rules.  Recognizing this, authorities didn’t even bother to try legislating cat control.

Cats are the Hell’s Angels of the domesticated animal world, true one-percenters flipping off everyone while purring a pretender’s song.  Dog owners carry poop-bags and collect hot feces as their reward for taking Bowser for a walk.  Incredible that “Man’s Best Friend”, demands of his partner the manhandling of his crap.  Some kind of friend.

Cats take a dump in the neighbor’s flowerbed, kick a few claw fulls of dirt in the general direction and calmly move on to return to their neighborhood patrol duties.  By killing a chipmunk and depositing it on your door mat, a feigned sign of submission which every cat fancier mistakenly takes as the highest form of praise, what fluffy is really telling her person is, “This could be you.”

As a mature man with decades of experience, I know that convention today portrays cat fanciers in the exclusive domain of lesbians, crazy old ladies and the homeless.  While Bowser the Buffoon is tangled up in his owner’s legs, leash wrapped around his head and poop-bags flailing, my little cat is doing her own thing while I do mine.  While my macho friends reinforce their tenuous manhood with large dogs, long trucks and loud motorcycles, I sneer at this obvious sign of their sexual “short-comings”, clearly demonstrating an over-compensation mechanism that sadly still has them falling short.

One of my lady friends was telling me how much she detested cats.  For her, it is an instant deal-breaker once she learns of a potential date’s fondness for felines.  Given her record of accomplishment regarding relationships, I’m thinking she ought to veto Danny the dog-lover and experiment with men who are comfortable in their own skin and don’t feel the need to compensate by way of distraction via shiny, loud objects, spray-on tans and fake boobs.

I like pink shirts, cool shoes and cats.  I don’t feel the need to compensate or explain myself, it ought to be self-evident, real men like cats.  The companionship of a cat requires from both human and animal the loving toleration of each other, yet a mutual agreement to keep a respectable distance, both physically and emotionally.  Recognizing and appreciating that balancing act is the essence of understanding ourselves and our abilities to cope in a complex and amazing world.  Cats keep us humble while we suppress the killer hiding inside that purring, loveable ball of fur.

Dogs and their “owners” on the other hand are needy co-dependents.

If this is all odd, confusing and maybe even insulting to you, enjoy a lifetime supply of warm feces, twice daily, a few millimeters of shopping bag plastic the only barrier between your fingers and Fido’s feces, courtesy of Man’s Best Friend.

The cats I know would never demand such demeaning actions from their human companions.  There are rules of common decorum for god’s sake, even amongst killers.