...on several fronts.
First off, the FAA did finally give me back the Medical Certificate that they denied me last September when I was still taking anti-anxiety medication. However, as I explain here on my aviation blog, they seem to want to me to keep proving my sanity on at least an annual basis. Whether this will last for the rest of my life I do not know. However, I resent being perpetually stigmatized for something that, according to my medical practitioners, was episodic.
Secondly, I was reminded of the collection of arbitrariness, interfering mind-sets and sink of crypto-fascist thinking that seems to populate the Home Owners Association (HOA) landscape when I read this story today about a lady in North Carolina who is being threatened with fines by her HOA because she is trying to save water by not planting grass in her yard. Apparently the HOA regulations mandate grassed yards. Thanks to Ed Cone for surfacing this piece of dysfunctional nonsense. When I moved to a house in Irving with my ex-wife and stepchildren in 1999, one of my decision criteria for the house was that it did not require membership of an HOA. I had already read too many stories of crypto-fascism masquerading as "keeping up property values" (many of them involving illegal restrictions on satellite dish installations) to want to have anything to do with an HOA. I have heard and read about a lot of incidents since that have validated my decisions.
Thirdly, the City of Duncanville has, for the last year, been on a campaign to close down a party house in the City named the Cherry Pit. The allegations made by the city are that the Cherry Pit is a swinger's club operating as a business. In order to build a case, they have raided the house 3 times in the last year, most recently twice in 3 days 2 weeks ago. They have produced an impressive affidavit, until you read the allegations, and look at the video that the city released to the local media. Then suddenly, some of the citations start to look awfully thin. For example, playing an ice-breaker game with play money as evidence of illegal gambling and money-laundering? Puhlease...Massive quantities of alcohol found? Yes, but if you look on the bottles you can see the names of the party guests - this is their own alcohol that they brought to the party and left behind the bar.
My fear is that the city is playing "whack a mole" with the Cherry Pit. There is really no good way to frame this sort of news. Either the city is trying to eliminate an unseemly business (which begs the question of why, 1 year after they started, the Cherry Pit is still there), or the city is engaging in overreach and harrassment because it does not have sufficient evidence. In either case the city collects lots of free, and not uplifting publicity. In the meantime, a central issue of personal property rights remains unexplored in the media, who have been acting as the City's stenographers in the past few weeks, printing press releases as fact and failing to ask even the most obvious questions of city officials. I thought that local media in the USA were bad after they completely mis-reported the tragic death of Tim Crawford when his plane dove into the sea off Martha's Vineyard. After observing the right royal mess of stenography and sensationalism disguised as news being propagated by the media over the Cherry Pit, I am further revising that opinion downwards.
UPDATE - The City of McKinney has apparently run off another swingers club - La Maison Joue. The reporting on Channel 11 is sensationalist drivel, complete with an "informant" in a disguised voice providing revelations about what supposedly went on there, and the usual "OhMiGod leafy conservative suburbia...bicyles...The Children!" overtones in the coverage. I turned the video off after they got to the angry neighbors section. There is a limit to how many people I can listen to, when those people do not understand that in a free country you do NOT have a right to not be offended. I don't like Dominionist religious types in my city, but that does not give me the right to want to expel them.
All of this stuff pisses me off royally, since it makes me start to wonder if the country that I thought I moved to in 1998 actually exists at all. It seems that far too many people here currently wish to live their lives by controlling the lives of others.
UPDATE 2 - Here is a story in the Miami Herald that shows that at least in Florida, a more respectful approach has been adopted. It seems that law enforcement overreach in 1999 led to a rollback of harrassment. Sometimes the little guys can win...and here is the humorous take on the swingers convention from Dave Barry...
UPDATE 3 - The best discussion location about the issues related to the Cherry Pit and other local district moves to regulate and raid swinger clubs is to be found here. It beats hands-down the discussions at other blogs, most of which appear to be dominated by leering, club-waving knuckle-draggers...