Returned from a lightning trip to Montana last night bearing warm memories and a freezer full of Highland beef (which my friend L. and I will divvy this morning, with some going to my vet in part payment for excellent dog care).

I also returned with the generously donated raffle rifle. It’s not the Mini-14 we talked about but a rebel rifle that offers even more potential for Customized Claire Camo.

I should be posting photos later today. Also plan to be catching up with both email and deadlines. I had less Internet access on the trip than I anticipated and am behinder than I intended. But so it goes.

Thank you all for your patience. More soon.

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• Pitbull vs kitten. Oooooh, you can only imagine the carnage!
• These people are so cheery and upbeat I want to smack ‘em. But what they’re doing is wonderful. Now there’s the power of creative risk taking! (Sad irony, though, that they felt a need to include a question in their FAQ about whether their children are getting a proper education. How could anybody assume that sitting in a classroom could be a better education than they’re getting in this adventure?)
• “I Was Out to See America.” Riding the rails in the Great Depression. (Via Old Printer who points out that the cops in those days may have been shakedown artists — but they most likely wouldn’t kick your ribs in or beat harmless people to death. In public. With cameras running.)
• Yes, when they do it, it’ll be forrrrr the chilllllldrrrrrrren. So we’re not all mere criminals now in the twisted minds of Our Glorious Leaders. We’re child pornographers. Or will be if this law passes.
• “Gems in the Rough at Quartzsite, Arizona.” Old friend Elias Alias of Oathkeepers gives his unique perspective on cops who rose up against their masters.
• Okay, I know this gag was already hoary when I used a version of it back in 101 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution (that version said the best survival kit was a rifle and a directory of the nearest Mormon ward). But it’s still a classic, not to mention a good reminder. So (via J. and a “rat”):

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Still deadlining this week — on every day but Wednesday when I snuck away with girlfriends for an orgy of junque shopping. So still only “lite” posting. But I’m working on another Big, Heavy Tome of a Thought, which I’ll probably drop onto the blog with a floor-shattering thud next week.

In the meantime …

• It’s so weird how we just take news like this for granted now.
• “Today you were lucky, but you will have to be lucky always. We only have to be lucky once.” Why the IRA was successful and Al Quaeda not, according to a very humble Gary Brecher. (Not often do you hear a pundit admit to having once been a dumb-ass.) A guide to guerrilla warfare. Tip o’ hat to S.
• “There’s no going back. … There is no fear in my heart. I’ve passed the point of no return. I only hope that if I am stopped, the movement continues on the right path without me.” Speaking of guerrilla warfare of a more modern kind …
• You know how people keep saying the SteriPEN is the most amazing water purification device except that it requires batteries? Well, get a load of this: the SteriPEN Sidewinder Hand-Powered UV Water Purifier. Elegant.
• The Orange Jeep Dad is having a contest. Which is also a clever way to get readers to promote his blog for him. Since it involves Facebook, I’m not entering. But the prizes are nice and there’s a charming chutzpah to the notion. BTW, one of the prizes is Patrice Lewis’s The Simplicity Primer. I’m waiting for my own copy now and hope to review it soon. You may know Patrice from her Rural Revolution blog.

Finally, I told a (male) friend about one of my junque-shop purchases from the other day and he double-spotted-dog-dared me to post a picture of it. Here goes:

Yes. It’s a teapot. With a red cap in its mouth (for heaven knows what reason). The head comes off for filling, which the artist didn’t seem to understand is a really gross idea. Gross in a clever sort of way, you know. But gross.

(Perhaps not as gross as this, though.)

You may remember a while back when I posted photos of another … um, uniquely charming dog-themed kitchen item found at a church garage sale. I’ve been intending to send that thing off to the nice Canadian lady whose children would live to use it as a condiment dish for their hot dogs. But I dunno. I just might end up becoming an unintentional collector of dog kitch instead. (Sorry, nice Canadian lady.)

But I haven’t gone overboard yet. I refrained from purchasing the matching salt and pepper shaker set that was on the shelf next to the TeaFido.

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Took me a while, but I said I’d have tales (and tails) from the Mother Earth News Fair. So here are a couple.

The young lady with the radiant smile is — you can tell! — a member of the furry community. She wears her tail happily and presented me with a bushy faux wolf tail of my very own.

Furry folk are much misunderstood and (you won’t be surprised) sometimes discriminated against for their playful self-expression. (The example at the last link happened on private property, so the security guards in question were probably within their rights — which doesn’t make them any less bigoted or stupid.)

This young lady had the guts to wear her tail while flying. Heroically alert TSAgents — who astutely realized that tail-wearing was Suspicious Behavior (exactly the sort of thing a terrorist might do to avoid calling attention to his Nefarious Plans!) — put her through two rounds of extra screening — and made her put her tail into a bin to be checked for traces of explosives. They just knew she had to be Up To Something. But what, they never figured.

She was laughing about it. Not sure I could — although when you’ve got the panache to wear a furry tail, I suppose you’re prepared to smile at the world’s silliness.

She also pulled from her bag the most dog-eared copy of The Freedom Outlaws Handbook I’ve ever seen. Dog-eared is good. Dog-eared is wonderful. It says: well-used and appreciated.

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A sadder tale came from a hospital admissions clerk who stopped by the BHM booth several times and spent a long time talking with us.

Sigh. It seems as if the most discouraging workplace experiences come out of the medical profession these days — though part of hers could have come from any corporatized workplace.

She told me she works in a small hospital known for its excellent customer service. They’ve received many compliments not only on the quality of their care but the friendliness of their staff.

Management, deciding that friendliness is A Good Thing, demanded that everybody in the place attend classes on how to give cheerful, smiling customer service. Then they instituted a policy encouraging employees to report each other for any breach of cheerfulness.

Now, she says, she observes her fellow workers walking across the parking lot looking glum or blank or merely preoccupied, but the moment they cross the threshold — slap! — on goes the artificial smile. And eyes dart here and there in case Big Brother is looking.

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Along with politically correct cheerfulness goes a fading regard for the real individuals. As she talked about one incident, this medical worker (who, like so many, wants desperately to get out of her profession but doesn’t yet know how) started to cry. At the time, I didn’t understand the real reason for the tears, though what she described was awful on several levels.

Her small, rural hospital was overwhelmed one night when victims of a horrific industrial accident were rushed in. Everybody on late-night duty — receptionists, nurses, doctors — performed heroic work, struggling to stabilize gruesomely injured men and women and keep them alive for airlifts to a larger hospital.

Later, her boss showed appreciation by emailing a generic thank you “to all who were on duty that night.” There were only a handful on duty. They have names. The managers knew them. I thought the woman was crying from indignation at the slight.

When she came back to buy more BHM books she told us one of the victims had been her daughter-in-law. Who didn’t survive. Managers knew that, too.

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I may have more cheerful stories from the fair later. There were many of those. The fair itself was great, as Dave and I already mentioned, and it was a chance for several meetings with warm, encouraging “friends I’ve never met.” Dave could tell some tales — about what a hit BHM is on (of all places) Long Island — about the couple who showed up toting a copy of BHM issue #1.

But the stories of these two booth visitors cried out to be shared, while other encounters were more personal.

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A few choice items mined from comments and emails from blog readers:

• Have you thanked the above Wholesome Homeland Security Hero for keeping us safe by groping your children? Turns out TSA agent Thomas Gordon is so dedicated to our welfare that he even studied young girls in his spare time. (From winston; who noted oh-so-correctly that this news was inevitalble. Bet it won’t be the last.)
• From Pat: Turns out you can get paid for trying to inflict a conscience on Obama. Unfortunately, the few bucks these folks might receive doesn’t even begin to offset the thousands they had to pay for tickets to get close enough to sing their song to the Felon-in-Chief.
• Voice of experience: “Stuff To Consider When Planning For SHTF Scenarios.” There’s not so fine a line between the prepared and the unprepared as we who haven’t been there sometimes think. (Salutes to EN for this excellent find!)
• From DrillSgtK (making a temp link more permanent): How most people probably view this week’s revelation about Apple iSpy tracking.
• “We’re all hostages to the dopiest person with a phone.” And don’t you dare be so unpatriotic as to blame this sort of thing on the militarization of police or the relentless campaign to program every Robo-American with the “if you see something, say something” code.

And on a very different note … Oliver offers more reverance than I. Happy Easter and blessings to all.

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• Angry man pours gasoline on himself. Police arrive. One guess: What does a genius cop do? (Tip o’ hat to P.T.)
• Intelligent, up-to-date discussion of the Japanese nuclear plant at The Mental Militia Forums. (Tip o’ hat to S.)
• An era has truly ended. Augustus Owsley Stanley, III is dead. For a brief, shining time, Purple Owsley was the holy grail of psychedelics. Oh yeah, and there was that band he was involved with, too.
• Oh lord. You know I’m for creators’ rights. But the government version is getting crazier and more Draconian by the day. Absurd. Government by and for mega-corps.
• In what sort of country does the government have the authority to order airlines to check luggage for free and grant special privileges to government-certified travelers while the rest of the flying population continues to be subjected to TSA/Rape-o-Scan “math errors”? Oh yes, a country where “free-market capitalism” runs rampant. Snark snark.
• Freekibble. Special reason to go there today. (UPDATE: It’s always worthwhile going to Freekibble. But the day I posted this they were donating all their kibble to animal-rescue work in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami.)

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MS Jordan posted in the comments section yesterday about Phil Mocek, the Seattle man just acquitted of four counts stemming from his polite refusal to show ID at the Albuqueuque, NM, airport. There’ve been a quite a few blips of info on Mocek, but this news story, with its video and links to earlier stories about Mocek, gives the best look I’ve found so far.

Took the jury all of an hour. No surprise. As usual the police/TSA account of Mocek “shouting” and creating a disturbance turns out to be a pack of lies. And as usual, the “authorities” didn’t know the law, either. They were just enforcing their thuggery.

The video Mocek took during the encounter is really something. It shows a perfect performance by a man who knows and asserts his rights. Mocek’s experienced at this — and other forms of activism, as well.

And probably he’s used to being dragged off to jail by thuggish boobs for contempt of cop.

Me, I’d rather stay home. Lorri, the friend I traveled to Panama with last year, is agitating for a trip to Australia. I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand. A natural twofer. Neither of us can afford it now so it’s a moot point, but even if we were rich, it would be too much of a Hobson’s choice. No, more properly a Morton’s fork. “Would you prefer the pube-groping or the nude-o-scanning today, ladies?”

Either way, I find myself feeling sad at a moment I’d like to be rejoicing for Mocek’s victory.

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In the nice, easy, doable privacy realm, Brad at WendyMcElroy.com reports there’s a new privacy-protecting search option. You know about StartPage, the European-based privacy-respecting alternative to Google. Well, now there’s a newcomer with the charmingly odd name DuckDuckGo.

I’m with Brad, I love DuckDuckGo’s sister site, DontTrack.Us. It not only has a simple, pictorial description of what Google and third-party advertisers do with your information, but once you’ve scrolled down to the very bottom they show their seriousness about privacy by listing and linking to a passel of privacy-enhancing browser add-ons.

Good on them. I still admire StartPage, which is represented in the U.S. by the amazing, awesome, fabulous, wonderful Katherine Albrecht. But the appearance of a privacy-loving competitor says maybe there’s a market for the good guys, eh?

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I have a friend — very non-political — who loves to travel. But even she, who basically trusts government to do the right thing, was nervous about the porno-scanners now being deployed for the benefit of the security industry and peeping Toms in the TSA.

Somehow this topic came up while she and I were on a long drive Friday. She said she longed to return to her favorite country in Asia but “didn’t want anybody looking at my boobs hanging halfway down to my waist.” But! Then she recently saw a news item on TV that included video footage of the scans. “Oh. Not so bad!” she thought. “Those don’t show anything too awful. Just vague fuzzy shapes with no details.”

I had to tell her that she was seeing doctored images, and that the real scans were so clear that TSA porno-peepers could, for instance, tell if a man was circumcised. Her face fell as far as the boobs she was so worried about.

On a roll (and having recently written an article on the subject*), I went on about the TSA’s other lies — about the machines not having the capacity to store or transmit images, about possible health problems.I talked about being singled out for extra screening the one and only time I’ve flown in the last 13 years, and how stupid the criteria were. I told her I probably wouldn’t be flying again. Not if I could help it.

Then she asked me one of those put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is questions: “Well, did you speak up when they made you go through extra screening?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think it would do any good.” (All I did was make a flippant remark. They chose me for extra screening because I was wearing loose cotton pants with baggy pockets. Baggy pockets are apparently inherently suspicious, even though in my case the fabric was so light that the single mint I carried visibly weighed one of them down.)

“Well have you written letters to people in charge telling them you object to the scanners?”

Sigh. I replied, “Writing letters to Washington doesn’t do any good. There’s too much money in airport ‘security.’ I definitely blog about the problem, hoping to raise awareness. But you’re living in the nineteenth century. Nobody in DC politics or bureaucracy pays attention to letters from a few disgruntled citizens.” But. Then I told her about this one letter I’d seen on LewRockwell.com, not written to the government but to the the Walt Disney company. It asked, politely, please tell me how I can take my children to Walt Disney World when I can’t possibly put them through porno-scanners or allow strangers to grope their crotches. In other words, this is your problem. It’s going to hit your bottom line. It’s for the children. Solve it.

Maybe, I said, if bloggers started printing the addresses of the bosses of the top 10 tourist destinations in the U.S., and if thousands of people said they’d regretfully have to boycott those places because of the scanners and the “enhanced groping” (reportedly to begin at the end of this month for those who refuse scans) it could make a difference. Then money would talk to money and something might get done.

We talked about what the 10 destinations might be. But it quickly became apparent that you didn’t need 10. The original letter writer, Arthur M.M. Krolman, had it right. All you need to do is get a letter-writing campaign going toward the Walt Disney company. Focus on the one big one. Make it for the children. And if enough people get behind it, the media will pick it up. And you won’t need to write to the other 9 destinations because they’ll get the message, loud and clear without a word being written to them.

Now, I’m not an organizer of campaigns. But I would like to see other, bigger blogs pick up this idea. So I’m going to send this link to a few other bloggers and/or online freedomista news sources. I hope you’ll do the same. In the right hands, it could Start A Movement.

If you have children, or if you yourself love an occasional trip to Disney World or Disneyland, use the contact infomation on Mr. Krolman’s original letter to write one of your own expressing regret that, as long as scanners or crotch gropes are part of travel, sorry but you just aren’t going. Then copy that letter to your local media outlets. And USA Today or CNN. Send it to friendly bloggers or to columnists who’ve shown that they care about privacy and/or the Bill of Rights.

Maybe nothing will come of it. Or maybe the only result will be some rule exempting children under 12 from being scanned or some such. But even at that, the public consciousness-raising could still be tremendous, and the long-term impact powerful. We could give people the knowledge and courage to resist.Possibly some lonely soul who’d been afraid to resist or object will suddenly realize he’s not alone. And every individual who asserts his or her own rights is worth having. Worth a try. Let the Walt Disney Company know that if they don’t want to lose customers, they’d better pressure the fedgov to lose the porno-scanners and the groping.

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* Which appears in both S.W.A.T. magazine and The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship.

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