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My recent posts all seemed to tip toward politics, media-scolding, wonkishness or some mutant combination of the three. It’s time to get out of that rut and instead focus on something important — specifically, the alarming decline of Chinese fortune-cookie fortunes.

It’s been a long time since I cracked open a cookie and found anything resembling an actual fortune inside. Here, for example, is the “fortune” from one of the cookies dropped into my take-out bag of moo shu pork a few weeks ago:

People always know what they are saying, just never listen.

That’s not a fortune, that’s a platitude. It’s something you’d hear from your Aunt Ethel, the aging spinster who pretends to like children but can’t stop herself from offering an endless stream of vaguely disapproving observations every time they visit. Yo, fortune-cookie writers: A fortune is something like, “A financial windfall is in your future,” or maybe “You will find love unexpectedly.” It ain’t “Sit down and be quiet, you little snot.”

Still, that fortune was an improvement over the other one which emerged from the second cookie that night. It said:

The rubber bands are heading in the right direction.

Huh? Rubber bands? Right direction? This doesn’t even make sense. It’s Aunt Ethel after her third martini.

Great. Just freakin’ great. If, when the November election rolls around, I want to register disapproval of the current regime in Washington, I’m left to vote for a guy who speculates that the catastrophic Gulf oil spill might have been engineered by the government.

The mid-term elections are, of course, exactly that: a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the president’s performance — a job review by the people who hired him. But because we can’t vote for the president directly in off-years, the U.S. House of Representatives is his stand-in. A shift in power away from the president’s party in the House is correctly assumed to be a vote of disapproval of his policies.

Here in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District (where I’m on the literal fringe, just eight blocks away from the neighboring district), the representative is Brad Miller, who seems like an affable fellow but one who has, as far as I can recall, never bucked Democratic orthodoxy. In short, he’s a doctrinaire liberal. His opponent is Bill Randall, about whom I know almost nothing except (a) the Tea Party likes him, and (b) he’s prone to say things like this about the oil spill:

Now, I’m not necessarily a conspiracy person, but I don’t think enough investigation has been done on this. Someone needs to be digging into that situation. Personally, and this is purely speculative on my part and not based on any fact, but personally I feel there is a possibility that there was some sort of collusion. I don’t know how or why, but in that situation, if you have someone from a company proposing to violate the safety process and the government signing off on it, excuse me, maybe they wanted it to leak. But then it got beyond what was anticipated, and we had an explosion and loss of life.

This makes Randall close kin to Birthers (the people who are convinced President Obama was born outside the U.S.) and Truthers (those who believe 9/11 was a government plot). What that means, then, is my choice in November is between a liberal and a loon.

Decisions, decisions.

Sometimes, advocacy groups inadvertently reveal more than they mean to. Let us consider, for instance, a pair of press releases sent to me this week by the North Carolina Justice Center, which wants lawmakers to grant collective bargaining rights to public employees.

As the releases note, North Carolina is one of only two states (Virginia being the other) which don’t allow public employees to bargain collectively. We Tar Heels may have the minority view in this matter, but there seems to me to be a sensible reason for that policy: Politicians are notoriously prone to buying affection — which is to say, if they can lock in votes by lavishing certain groups with money, they’ll do it every time. They’re also spending other people’s money (namely, yours and mine) as they do so. Collective bargaining by public employees would only fuel both those bad impulses. Down that road lies California.

But I dutifully scanned the press releases anyway, because it’s wise to consider the contrary judgments of others. That’s when I came across this passage in the first:

Public employees make North Carolina run. But without collective bargaining rights, we do a disservice to hardworking people and justice in our state.

Hmmm. Public employees are “hardworking people.” The rest of us, presumably, are not — or at least not as hardworking as they are, so we therefore need to pile more money on the table for them. After all, who bargains collectively with the aim of getting less money?

Why, that’s exactly what public employees would do, according to this astonishing quote found in the second release:

“Collective bargaining gives employees a way to propose changes that increase efficiency and decrease costs,” said Larsene Taylor, of the N.C. Public Service Workers Union-UE Local 150. “We should use public employees’ unique insights instead of balancing the budget on their backs.”

I’ll cop to being lazy. But it stings to be considered stupid.