The Pirate Way

Today is “Talk Like a Pirate” Day, so I thought I would share wit yinz some tings piratical. Oh, yinz dint mean “Talk Like a picksburg Pirate“. But I couttent find a translator to Somali online…

• Pirates in Washington I. Pirates like to take things that aren’t theirs to take. So why did we send them to Washington. Yes, I’m still incensed about how the GOP is trying to take the nation hostage. I just wanted to share a wonderful quote I saw in the comments in the LA Times: “It’s quite easy to be a libertarian when you already have yours and your liberty? What about the rest of us?” Many of those fighting to defund the ACA already have healthcare, or have the wherewithal to pay for health care. They don’t care about the rest, as demonstrated by the fact that they only think of “repeal”, instead of replacing it with a better solution.
• Pirates in Washington II. The pirates in Washington not only want to take your government hostage, they are taking your name. Well, that is if it is too long. In California, the Social Security Administration is denying a women the ability to put her full name on her social security card because it is too long. The SSA blames the software (“The first and middle name fields allow 16 characters each and the last name allows 21 characters”) and NIST (the SSA noted that the agency is governed by, “Public Law 100-235 when printing characters on SSN cards. This law requires all Federaldatabases to follow standards determined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).”).
• Pirates in Radio. There’s a radio station in Omaha that a continuous loop of Buddy Holly, Petula Clark and Bobby Darin. The problem? Nobody seems to know much about it. The Federal Communications Commission admitted it was stumped in papers filed last month. The airwave regulator said in the filing that it could find neither the owners nor the studio. But the music keeps playing…
• Pirates and Water. Pirates operate on the water as well as the airwaves. So speaking of water… we’ve all been reading about the flooding in Colorado. Now, we’re reading that the floodwaters are likely contaminated. What we’re not reading about is where that water goes when it recedes. The answer is not the Colorado River, as I thought. According to this article, the water will make its way to Nebraska and the Platte River, and then to the Missouri, Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico. I’d say alas, but although this means that the Colorado River won’t be getting more water (which it needs desperately), it also won’t be getting contaminated water.