Comically Inept Spam Scam

I received this email with a subject line of "My Heart Choose You".

Dear friend

I am Mrs Cindy Buker and i have been surffering from ovarian cancer disease and the doctor says that i have just two days to leave. I am from (Mississippi) USA but based in Africa Burkina Faso since Nine years ago as a business woman dealing with gold exportation.

Now that i am about to end the race like this,without any family members and no child.I have 3 Million US DOLLARS in Coris Bank Burkina Faso which i instructed the bank to give St Andrews Missionary Home in Burkina Faso.But my mind is not at rest because i am writting this letter now through the help of my computer beside my sick bed.

I also have 4.5Million US Dollars at Ecobank here in Burkina Faso and i instructed the bank to transfer the money to the first foreigner that will apply to the bank after i have gone that they should release the fund to him/her,but you will assure me that you will take 50% of the money and give 50% to the orphanages home in your country for my heart to rest. You are to contact the bank through this email address (Russian web site address removed)

Thanks.
Mrs Cindy Buker

You read about this sort of stuff all the time, right? Someone with millions of dollars is near death and they shotgun an email to every man, woman and child in the world telling them that the first one who contacts their bank gets the money.

Yeah, that just happened.

Periodic Maintenance And The Medical Amateur

You know how you check tires on your car? Your looking at the tread wear, checking for damage--that sort of thing? As a barefoot runner I check the wear and tear on my feet. During last night's cursory exam I noticed a splinter. I probably picked it up from one of the bridges in Riverfront Park. This conversation took place:

Me (my aged eyes looking down my nose through the bottom of my bifocal lenses at my upturned sole) : "Hmm, I gotta splinter."

Kathy: "Well, get it out."

Me: "Why? It's not bothering me."

Steph (probably remembering her interest in surgery the last time this happened): "Let me have a look." And she proceeds to poke, prod, squeeze, scrape, JAB!

Me: "Now it's bothering me."

Steph (helpfully pointing along the bottom of my foot towards my toes): "It went in that direction."

Good of her to notice. I got myself a safety pin--why would they give it that name if it wasn't okay to use, right?--straightened it out, and began digging into the skin to remove the embedded sample of chemically treated wood that had now moved "in that direction". Thanks to my bifocal-enhanced lousy depth perception I managed to dig a sizable hole right next to the splinter. My eyes kept lying to me. "Almost there. So close. Just a little more. Don't give up yet, you almost got it." Steph got a bright LED flashlight to help me, but that just made the bottom of my foot look whiter.

Steph (in her most encouraging voice) : "Dad, you're next to it. You're not getting it. You're just digging hole."

Maybe feeling a little responsible or maybe looking for an opportunity to see just how interesting the medical field could be, she volunteered her assistance with a "Let me do it." I relinquished the pin to her all-too-eager hands and she started tunneling sideways from the hole I'd already made.

Steph: "Can you feel that?"

Me: "No."

Steph: "Okay, good, 'cause this is a really deep hole."

Then she grabbed the tweezers. Now the ends of eyebrow tweezers are not fine enough to grab an exposed splinter, let alone a splinter that's buried under really thick skin and kind of off to the side of the hole dug in the wrong location, but that wasn't going to stop Steph from trying. She gamely pinched away. I squirmed and complained.

Steph (in a commanding voice): "You need to hold still and be quiet. Okay? Just be quiet."

Well, I don't want to freak her out, now do I? The pin returns to explore some more when suddenly our good doctor jumps back saying, "Ewwwwwwwww. I made your toe twitch."

I was more concerned with getting the splinter out than I was with my icky involuntary reflexive reactions. (As an aside, it wasn't until later that I realized that while this was going on, my loving wife--a nurse for many years--never once volunteered to help. Hmmmmmm.)

After about ten more minutes alternating between the pin and tweezers and me quietly sitting still, Steph triumphantly extracts the tiny sliver.

Steph: "HA! In your face!"

I wonder if surgeons say that to their patients after an appendectomy.

The Path To Prosperity Bamboozlement

I got to reading Representative Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity 2012 (PDF) and noticed some disturbing projections in the charts.

These charts are from the Congressional Budget Office, which is a non-partisan organization, and I thought the numbers were...well...off the charts. That's a very depressing outlook presented there. The red in the charts makes it more so. It's like he's pulling levers to make flames to instill us with fear and awe.

Then I noticed the small print "based on the CBO's alternative fiscal scenario". What the heck is that, I wondered. So I went looking. The CBO does a long term budget outlook report and here's the one from last June (PDF), updated in August.
You'll notice there are two budget scenarios in the outlook report. Plus, the scale in this chart is different than the one presented by Rep Ryan. The one he used is at the back of the outlook report. You! Scarecrow, color in the red and stay between the lines!


So what are the two budget scenarios? There's a note at the beginning of the report that states:

The figure on the cover shows federal debt held by the public under the Congressional Budget Office’s extended-baseline scenario (lower line) and alternative fiscal scenario (upper line). The extended-baseline scenario adheres closely to current law, following CBO’s 10-year base-line budget projections through 2020 (with adjustments for the aforementioned health care legislation) and then extending the baseline concept for the rest of the long-term projection period. The alternative fiscal scenario incorporates several changes to current law that are widely expected to occur or that would modify some provisions of law that might be difficult to sustain for a long period.

Essentially the alternative fiscal scenario is based on conjecture. There's more detail later on in the outlook report.

The budget outlook is much bleaker under the alternative fiscal scenario, which incorporates several changes to current law that are widely expected to occur or that would modify some provisions of law that might be difficult to sustain for a long period. In this scenario, CBO assumed that Medicare’s payment rates for physicians would gradually increase (which would not happen under current law) and that several policies enacted in the recent health care legislation that would restrain growth in health care spending would not continue in effect after 2020. In addition, under the alternative scenario, spending on activities other than the major mandatory health care programs, Social Security, and interest would fall below the average level of the past 40 years relative to GDP, though not as low as under the extended-baseline scenario. More important, CBO assumed for this scenario that most of the provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be extended, that the reach of the alternative minimum tax would be kept close to its historical extent, and that over the longer run, tax law would evolve further so that revenues would remain at about 19 percent of GDP, near their historical average.

Rep Ryan is not only selective in choosing the worst case scenario, but also in the parts of the charts he uses. Careful examination of these charts provides an example. OMG, look at all that red. Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The great and powerful Ryan has spoken. And when it's all over he'll leave us behind while he floats off in his balloon saying, "I can't come back, I don't know how it works! Good-bye, folks!"

*** Update
I just wanted to make clear that the alternative fiscal scenario includes extending the Bush tax cuts into the future, something the Republican party has pushed for and succeeded in doing, in part, last December. So a huge part of the road to ruin Ryan wants to save us from is of their own making.

What Little I Wrote

The Inlander held a 101-word fiction contest and one of my submissions, Nature (of the Beast), was printed so that was cool to have it included with a lot really great stories.

One of my workmates spotted my name on the story and emailed me asking if I wrote it. I replied that I did. They wrote back that they liked the story, at least, what little they read.

I thought "what little I read" was a really good play on the 101-word limit so I answered back, "What little you read. Ha! I get it. LOL."

To which I received the reply, "No, really. It looked really good and I wish they'd printed more of it."

The news that it was a 101-word contest was taken in good humor.

Taking Pride In Her Work

Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers recently posted on her Facebook page how proud she was to receive the Spirit of Enterprise Award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As it happens, this singular award was presented to 238 other pro-business members of Congress. I checked the records on the Chamber of Commerce site and found that McMorris Rodgers has received this award for every session she's been in Congress.

So what does a member of Congress have to do get this award? I don't think it could be put any simpler than what the chamber states on the page where the members of Congress are listed. Here's how the Washington state representatives rated.

Here are the votes the chamber was concerned with. The items correspond, left to right, to the boxes in the above chart.

1. H.R. 5116 – The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (She voted No but they have her down as not recording a vote)
2. H.R. 4853– Middle Class Tax Act of 2010 (She voted Yes)
3. H.R. 6495 – Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act (She abstained, most likely because she had just given birth.)
4. H.R. 3534 – Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act of 2010 (She voted No)
5. H.R. 4173 – Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – conference report (She voted No)
6. H.R. 5175 - Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act (She noted No)
7. H.R. 4872 – Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (second vote) (She voted No)
8. H.R. 4872 – Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Ditto on the No vote)
9. H.R. 3590 – Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (She voted No)

The "+" and "-" symbols mean "correct" and "wrong" votes as per the chamber. Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers voted correctly 100% of the time in 2010 and is currently voting correctly 90% of the time.

She received this award for voting against health care reform, against prohibiting foreign influence in elections and against establishing additional disclosure requirements, against financial regulatory reform, against consolidating various federal management and leasing programs into one, for tax cuts, and against nanotechnology R&D.

And she is so proud.

First One Of My Commuting Season

First one if you don't count the abandoned truck.

Duly reported to carparkedinbikelane@spokanepolice.org and publicly shamed.