Another Monday. How stupid can someone be?? Snowy Owls in Chicago? Options!!

I am always amazed at how utterly stupid allegedly smart people can be.  This pretty much takes the cake.  And I don't mean the Duck Dynasty flap.  A&E should have known what they were getting.  Robertson didn't hide anything from them.  He is what he is and you can decide for yourself what that is.  I don't watch the program.  It is in a class of pseudo-reality shows that don't appeal at all.  However, the idiot whose utterly, incredibly tweet?  That is a different case.

Hmmmm!  That snowy owl sighted near the lakefront in Chicago wasn't a singular event.  Evidently more have been seen in New Jersey.  And the owls aren't the only animals showing up in odd places or not showing up where they normally do.  I read about the monarch butterflies a month or so ago.  Makes me wonder.  How about you?

Please don't disturb the elves.

Following the Target hack and checking on our own accounts since we did shop at the local Target during the time the hack took place.  So far we are find but in addition we think about options in the face of such attacks.  If we decided that using the debit/credit cards is too dangerous we would simply go back to using cash and checks.  One of the people interviewed for one of the stories this morning remarked on how inconvenient Chase bank's restrictions ($100 per withdrawal per day and $300 per day in purchases) are especially in the few days before Christmas.  Maybe she should relearn how to write checks.  But--let's be honest here.  No system is totally safe.  That is a fact those who are filing that class action suit against Target fail to recognize.  The best we can do is try to recognize the risks and mitigate the harm.  Even then something will pop up to bite us in the nether parts.

The whole Syria and chemical weapons story has the feel (and smell) of the "Iraq has WMDs" story.  Check out this one for some troubling info.

Sometimes you can learn from what people (and governments) do right.  Sometimes from what they do wrong.  I am not just amazed by how much we have done wrong but how persistently we insist on continuing the wrong policies.