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Chigger season

 All winter long, chiggers aren’t a problem.  I can walk anywhere I want and not get any painful itchy bites.  When it’s chigger season though, thick brush and tall grass should be avoided.  Chiggers lurk there and are essentially microscopic.  The nymphs, which are the life-cycle stage that feeds on skin, are less than a quarter of a millimeter in size, small enough to be invisible, even when they’re right on a person.  There is no early detection system either.  The itch doesn’t start until hours after exposure, so if a person is in chigger territory, they don’t even know to stop exposing themselves until it is way too late.  The burning and itching lasts a week to ten days for each bite. Chiggers aren’t a problem during any other part of their annual life-cycle.  It’s easy to forget about them, without paying attention to when it’s time to watch out for them again each year.  Sometime in late spring/early summer, the chigger-risk suddenly goes from zero to “Oh Shit!”  I, of course, have a method.  Every late spring/early summer I employ my foolproof method of determining when exactly I need to start being careful of chiggers. Oh Shit!  
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The Bachelor

 It’s a television show.  We watched it and thought it was awful.  But we watched it again.  Then we got seduced by the romance and intrigue, started calling it the train wreck, and watched it every week.  These poor people get so caught up in the game, you know it’s going to end terribly for almost all of them. Then the reality of what the show was doing sunk in.  Twenty-plus young women groomed to open their hearts, with the guarantee that all of them except maybe one, would be broken.  The girls are constantly coached and coerced into “letting down their guard”, “opening up”, and “being vulnerable”.  The bachelor can’t properly fall in love unless you give yourself fully to him. It is a well-funded, smoothly produced, manipulation of impressionable young women.  They’re flown all over the world to exotic and romantic locations.  They are kept in extravagant isolation with each other, to the point that the only thing that seems real in the world is that season’s show.  Then, one-by-one, we watch them get crushed. This show could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find true love, or it could be a heartless victimization of women for money (ratings).  And every other year, they do the same thing to guys.  I feel worse for the women than I do for the men.  I could make the same case; that the men are young and impressionable too, but we’re just not supposed to abuse women like that. 
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Campaign financing

 What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are doing is revolutionary.  They’re both taking big donors out of the election process.  That’s an admirable thing to do, but it still takes big money to get elected, even if it only comes from one person, or many. It doesn’t have to be like that.  The voters have what the candidates want; Votes.  The special interests have what the candidates need; Money.  Candidates can’t get elected if they can’t spend the money to get noticed.  The candidates have to cater to both the voters and the special interests to get and stay elected.  If we took the money out of the election process, candidates would then only be accountable to the voters.  That could make a difference on how politicians govern.  (Maybe they would even feel a responsibility to govern.) Why should it cost a hundred million dollars to run for president?  Why don’t we eliminate campaign financing, give every candidate equal exposure, and elect the ones we like?  We may not even need term limits.  If we like what candidates say, and they do what they say they’re going to do, let them stay and keep doing what we like.  Eliminate gerrymandering.  Eliminate campaign financing.  Maybe even eliminate the Electoral College, and have a popular vote.  Give every message an equal chance of being heard.  Elect the most popular message.  Why does it have to be more complicated than that?