Any way the wind blows

I'm just a poor buoy
nobody loves me
I don't like being
called "monstrosity"

An intimidating reminder of 2018’s Hurricane Florence has finally been removed from Cape Lookout National Seashore, and it wasn’t easy to get rid of. It took help from the U.S. Coast Guard to get it done.

The storm’s 100-mph gusts shoved a 1,300-pound buoy up on one of the park’s beaches, and experts have spent 5 years pondering ways to get the monstrosity back in the ocean.

Failure

The role reversal underscores the intelligence failures in advance of Jan. 6, as the FBI was unprepared for the riot despite having inroads into the groups now accused by the Justice Department of plotting the violence. The five Proud Boys leaders on trial are accused of seditious conspiracy, a rarely used political charge, in a trial that has lasted nearly three months.

Hang them all.

But while we procure rope, let's marvel at the Orwellian beauty of the phrase "intelligence failures".

The implication of the phrase is that the intelligence agencies, the warrant-less observers of all that happens, should be able to predict everything that will happen. And when something happens that Big Brother didn't predict, it's a failure that we should all be concerned about. It assumes we want them to know so much about everything that they can actually predict everything.

I'm not sure I want them to know everything.

Spanking Machine

Rep Gerry Connolly is a spanking machine