The Aryan Nations leadership does not possess an abundance of what you might call intellectual prowess.

Their leadership skills aren’t exactly prodigious, either, come to that.

It’s a bit of a stretch, after all, to call yourself leaders when the vast majority of Americans think you’re hatemongers who rank, on the list of desirable dinner party guests, in the same sub-primate range as pond scum and various infectious bacteria.

It does not surprise me, at any rate, that a branch of the white supremacist group (although “tentacle” paints a more apt word picture in this context than does “branch” ) seems to have misjudged our neighbor to the west, Grant County.

And by misjudged I don’t mean the equivalent of pouring soda too quickly so that a wisp of foam crests the rim and slides down the side of the glass.

I’m talking about a cliff diver who can’t tell an ebb tide from a flood.

The public, which is to say all of us, gained certain legal rights when Oregon became a state on Feb. 14, 1859.

But we sort of forgot about one of those rights.

Certainly the state government, which has the authority to uphold this particular right on the public’s behalf, has done relatively little in that regard in 151 years.

That right entitles the public to travel between the “ordinary” high water line (the normal seasonal line, not the water line during the 100-year flood) along streams and lakes that are deemed “navigable.”

Navigable is a pretty low hurdle, legally speaking.

A waterway qualifies as navigable if, in 1859, it was used, or even if it could have been used, for travel or commerce.

Subsequent court rulings made it clear that a waterway needn’t accommodate the Queen Mary to rank as navigable, either.

Passage by a canoe or rubber raft is sufficient.

February is Bake for Family Fun Month.

Hmm.

I love to bake, and I’m always on the lookout for a new recipe to try — homemade bread, a healthier cake, scrumptious cookies.

But gone are the days of my solitary puttering in the kitchen.

My daughter, Olivia, is 2 1/2, which means she’s quite aware of everything we do.

See if you can picture this: I grab a mixing bowl and set it on the counter. Immediately her eyes light up and she runs (she never walks) to the dining room.

Next I hear the scraping noise of our wooden chairs dragging across the floor — I cringe every time — and then silence as she hoists it in the air to carry it across the carpet.

Back in the kitchen, she pushes the chair to the counter, climbs up and rolls her sleeves to mimic my own preparations.

She cannot be deterred, so I pull out her apron and get out the measuring cups.

And prepare for a mess.

Let’s say a business offers a group of customers a discount.

Then, several years later, the business admits that it fouled up and didn’t give those customers the full discount to which they had agreed.

What would you expect that business to do?

The word “refund” springs to mind, right?

Not to the Bonneville Power Administration, it doesn’t.

The BPA, the regional agency that sells much of the electricity in the Northwest, admitted recently that from 2002 to 2009 it overcharged, by $2 million, utilities including Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative.

I can attest to the prevalence of wind on Steens Mountain.

My contact lenses, in particular, would gladly sign an affidavit.

Or an arrest warrant.

The lenses harbor a real grudge against the mountain.

And I don’t blame them.

I’ve never visited a place that combines wind gusts and desert dust with such gritty, lachrymose consistency.

Neither have my lenses, so far as I know.

I rarely go anywhere, anyway, that I can’t keep an eye on them.

So to speak.

The best way to rate teachers, we’ve always figured, is to watch them teach.

What teachers wear while they’re going about their work is not so much a secondary matter as it is irrelevant.

To mention another profession, we don’t much care whether bridge engineers don white hardhats or yellow ones.

We just want them to build bridges that don’t crumble into the river.

Curiously, Oregon has been concerned enough about public school teachers’ attire that the matter has been enshrined in state law for almost 90 years.

In 1923 the Legislature passed a law prohibiting public school teachers from wearing religious clothing.

Which is a long tenure for a law promoted by the Ku Klux Klan.

(Oregon is also, by the way, one of just three states with such a law on the books. The others are Nebraska and Pennsylvania.)