Pleasantly Uneventful

Didja’ notice? I’ll bet you didn’t! All hell broke loose and none of it mattered. How awesome is that?!?

OK, it’s a trick question. I went off line two weeks ago and so my sense of timing is different than yours. I noticed the ephemeral nature of concerns because I had distance to look. I needed a vacation so I took one… completely. This was followed by an illness… which apparently fate decided I needed… and so I did that… completely. The thing I got from all this ignoring of modern bullshit was a delightful sense of peace. Everything that happened in my absence was both comical and predictable. I consider it an experiment with solid empirical results.

So back to the noticing. Over two weeks all sorts of shit has happened. Most people lived every moment. I’m sure it seemed rather significant. Yet, all of it… every last bit… followed a basic script that wasn’t particularly realistic. I could have typed it all out before I wandered off to play in the woods. I wouldn’t have been perfectly accurate but I could have covered the general situation.

The big event that my hypothetical script (probably with talking squirrels) would have addressed is the ongoing (since 2014 and especially since we bugged out of Afghanistan so haphazardly) Ukrainian situation. The timing was right for something weird to happen… thus it must.

Whatever weird thing I might have imagined is just a McGuffin in the a story. Predictably both sides would use the “weird thing” to proselytize, but in the end nothing would have happened. After the “weird thing” the fog of propaganda would be so thick that nobody really knows what actually happened. The only constant being politicians on both sides will not experience the horror of war actually inflicted on soldiers in what should be boring wheat fields.

So what happened in the real world? Piecing together as best I can brings up these facts in roughly this order. First, somehow – and I’m not clear on how – a little over $6 billion (with a “B”) appeared on the Pentagon’s books. Second, the long awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive continued performing exactly like a nothingburger. You don’t have to be a genius to predict that. But I also predicted a third part. Something weird must happen.

Like clockwork weirdness happened! The Wagner group flaked out and started marching toward Moscow; only to change their mind almost immediately. As far as I can tell, the whole thing lasted less than one day. Start moving at dawn, capitulate by sunset. Is that a real thing? I’ve no idea. It seems less like a real revolt than a colorful flourish. Regardless, it was weird.

Not only is it weird but our impression is probably fake. Sifting through week old news tells me it evaporated fast. It took about eleven minutes for one side to cite it as proof that Putin is Hitler in drag and doomed to failure any millisecond. The other side had kicked the whole thing in the balls by sunset; so chalk it up to a 12 hour delay? Suppose I wrote the story with talking squirrels and extreme greeters? Would it have been any less realistic?

That kerfuffle, which lasted a day but gave talking heads a week’s worth of pontification, blocked out other kerfuffles. In a sane world, we’d have a month of Hunter Biden jokes based on the last few weeks. He got his child support reduced. He got a slap on the wrist for having a pistol and a coke habit simultaneously. Not to mention tax evasion that would land us in Federal pound me in the ass prison. The president’s grandkid won’t get to use the last name “Biden”. A bunch of verified information (including text messages) emerged that both implicate then vice president Biden but look like flat out extortion. Apparently there’s a video of hunter driving very fast… possibly while high. All the things I said actually happened. I didn’t make any of that up.

It was memory holed fast. Actual information was subsumed into the stream of propaganda so quickly you could barely sniff the stench. I don’t know if a Wagner Group flakeout and a Biden covering action were timed that carefully or it was just luck. I guess it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t know Hunter was a snake by now you’re working hard to not know. Also President Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history and he’s got the political prisoners to prove it.

Speaking of Hunter being a snake, cocaine turned up in the Whitehouse… because of course it did. As you’d expect nobody has the slightest idea what it means and it’ll fade with time. Rational people like me assume Hunter is desperate for help. You can’t fuck up that bad without trying. Even JFK had the perception to avoid leaving random bags of drugs lying around. The guy is desperately hoping for a correction that will never come. He’s filmed and documented himself doing every dumb thing possible in a forlorn hope that someone will stop his mess… alas more stupid shit is always allowed to happen. Law enforcement is mystified by this bag of coke because they’re officially ordered to be mystified. They’d be mystified if Hunter showed up naked and high, raped a wombat on live TV, and tattooed a list of Epstein’s underaged victims on Nancy Pelosi’s forehead at gunpoint. At some point there are no more levels of obvious.

In the last few weeks courts said obvious things too. The President doesn’t have a magic wand to “fix” student loans. Rules about “ghost guns” can’t appear out of thin air because a bureaucrat so wishes. Choosing a college applicant solely based on their skin color is just as gross if the racist is Al Sharpton or Archie Bunker. Collusion with social media to do censorship is censorship. All this came down in the last few weeks… some in the last few days. None of it is particularly shocking.

My point is, propaganda can have you sitting on the edge of your seat like it’s life or death but you already know where things are going; at least in the broad strokes. Hunter has been a lawbreaking shithead forever. We saw solid evidence in 2020. Do we really need to freak out if the DOJ covers his ass three years after it’s a known thing? Did we need the distraction of the Wagner group scampering about in Eastern Europe to know picking fights with the Russian Federation is a sketchy plan?

I try to think of something that surprised me in the last two weeks but it’s all knowable in advance. Disney’s latest movie sucks. Inflation persists. Lawfare is waged on Trump. France is on fire. Meh…

On this very site I’ve posted The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling. Anytime you want to know what the next few weeks of news will be, read that instead.

Oh, one thing did surprise me. I stayed in a hotel and watched cable. Holy Fuck! I had no idea how many drug ads people are exposed to! I had no idea AIDS has become a revenue stream. So that’s the thing I was surprised by. Let it never be said I can’t learn new things.

That was a great segue into the second half of my absence. I woke up one day with a scratchy throat. Since I’m not the kind of tool that’s been brainwashed by cable TV ads, I didn’t freak out.

“Ask your doctor if Glaprodorf is right for you. Side effects are severe loss of money and cranial-rectal inversion.”

I assessed a cold as a cold, took some NyQuill, and slept for several days. Did it suck? Yes, being sick sucks.

Did I lose my shit, invert society, crash longstanding institutions, nuke the economy, and threaten to imprison anyone else who didn’t take my illness seriously? No, because I’m not fucking insane. I rode out an unpleasant cold like a normal adult would do in the before times. In a couple more days I’ll be right as rain. Can you imagine how different 2023 would have been if more people had done the same in 2020?

Well that’s enough for now. I did have happy fun times on vacation and as always “pics or it didn’t happen”. I’ll post sometime next week with a happy stories about Honey Badger and yours truly.

Have a good summer.

A.C.

P.S. And for God’s sake if you’re watching cable stop it right now! Set that infernal thing on fire before they’ve got you hooked on shit that even Hunter Biden wouldn’t take!