Adaptive Curmudgeon

Hat tip: Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog.

Ace of Spades points out this quote (via Twitter) from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

“My sense is that we don’t think enough about how much we collectively, yet unwittingly, force politicians to lie to us.”

Wow…

I could go on a rant about “cashless society” and how those damn kids should stay off my lawn. Instead I’ll let Joe Bob Briggs from Taki’s Magazine handle it for me. You should read it all but here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

“There’s some guy at the world headquarters of CVS drugstores screwing with me. I don’t know who he is yet, but he lives in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. This is where CVS Health, the largest drugstore chain in the history of drugstores, has its main offices, and where a designated marketing jerk chews on the nub of a pencil and thinks all day about how many coupons he can string onto the bottom of my sales receipt.”

I think we all can agree that, after small pox, the untimely death of butterflies, and Hillary Clinton, “targeted” marketing is the worst evil on earth. For example, I researched truck batteries a while back and right now there are literally three goddamn ads for car batteries on my screen!

I bought the batteries a month ago! They had a chance to make the sale. They blew it. The seller wins, they lose. It’s proper etiquette for losers to go home and weep quietly. (And yes, I knew the marketing type in college. You knew them too. They were the ones who used Daddy’s trust fund to major in anything that didn’t take work, math, or commitment. This is something they brought upon themselves.)

On to the real threat of credit based transactions:

“The conspiracy theories become even more convincing when we review the recent calls for a “cashless society,” and the proposals to require a “biometric global ID card.” These would sound like fanciful inventions of people who have Buckminster Fuller coffee-table books in their homes were it not for the fact that Indonesia, a nation of 250 million souls, is already introducing it, and India is talking about it as well. I’m sure all the Indonesians are being told, “You’ll enjoy greater security.”

Then there’s the fact that the little miniaturized computer known as the EMV chip is a version of the same chip that the vet puts in your cat’s neck…”

Ye Gods! Now I hate big data and cats both!

“So, in the future, we’ll be told to forget that bankroll. Get rid of that wad of twenties you’re taking to Aqueduct to put down on the second claiming race. ‘We’re gonna force you to carry around a biometric chip, even if we have to cut open your forehead to find a place for it.'”

Obviously things like this need a scapegoat. Whom shall be blamed? If you’re left wing it’s Bush, if you’re a hippie it’s “the man”, if you’re Joe Bob Briggs it’s…

“The whole thing started in France.

So it came from France, it doesn’t work in France, it’s used by marketing girls in Woonsocket who leave early on Friday so they can suntan in Nantucket, and it’s designed to make sure that anyone buying Trojan Magnums is specifically identified as a candidate for jock-itch cream.”

Now that’s some epic writing there folks! Enjoy.

On a more serious note I view a cashless society as almost more threatening than the loss of gun rights for civilians. I won’t go into it in detail but simply say that a cashless society fails the Jews In The Attic Test.

The Washington Post (which apparently is written by people who’ve never been beyond the suburbs) wrote “Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them“. I hate lawns but they serve a purpose and are better than most alternatives (what am I going to do, pave the forest or live in a jungle?). Thus I must fisk:

“A recent essay by an Ohio woman who refuses to mow her lawn has struck a nerve. Thirteen hundred people have weighed in with a comment on Sarah Baker’s tale of flouting a neighborhood mowing ordinance in the face of a $1,000 fine.”

Agreed. Anyone who makes mowing lawns into a law needs to be tarred and feathered and then burned alive while being fed into a wood chipper. Then we should bury the ashes, take a dump on them, and nuke their grave from orbit.

A note to local governments: if you’re not plowing the streets or putting out house fires, shut the hell up and leave us alone. In fact, just stay in the “shut up” mode permanently; you’re not important and nobody likes you.

“As Baker notes in her essay, lawns are a big part of contemporary American life.”

No they’re not. Maybe you should get a life?

“There are somewhere around 40 million acres of lawn in the lower 48, according to a 2005 NASA estimate derived from satellite imaging. “Turf grasses, occupying 1.9% of the surface of the continental United States, would be the single largest irrigated crop in the country,” that study concludes. Conservatively, American lawns take up three times as much space as irrigated corn. The authors mapped the entirety of the nation’s turf grass, below. You’ll notice that it’s basically a population density map of the U.S. — where there are people, there are lawns.”

So? I can use Google too. Did you know some kid in New Zealand found $65,000 worth of whale shit? Is this what they called “research” in journalism school?

“In some states, a significant chunk of the landscape is covered in turf grass — meaning residential lawns, commercial lawns, golf courses, and the like.”

Don’t live in those states. If a state overdoses on “lawn” does that mean I should too? Perhaps I should freebase “subway” because Connecticut gets high on “turf”? If New Jersey jumped off a cliff should Wyoming follow?

“Delaware is 10 percent lawn. Connecticut and Rhode Island are 20 percent.”

Delaware and Rhode Island don’t exist. They’re just ink blots where colonial cartographers spilled their ale. (Probably Sam Adams brand.) I refuse to acknowledge any state smaller than a Texas ranch. (I also think Luxembourg is a brand of car.)

“And over 20 percent of the total land area of Massachusetts and New Jersey is covered in grass, according to that 2005 NASA study.”

Massachusetts and New Jersey? Are you suggesting those two are the “go to” places  for good examples of natural resource policy? Probably 20 percent of those states are Superfund sites or mob burial grounds. Also, I don’t take economic advice from California or friendliness advice from New York.

“Perhaps not surprisingly, the traditional American lawn has come in for some scrutiny in recent years.”

Is anything not under scrutiny in 2016? We Americans are having a “national conversation” over which shitter I should use in Target. Time for a new variant of rule #34; if it exists someone is “scrutinizing” it.

“Some, like Baker, are abandoning regular lawn maintenance out of environmental concerns — lawns require…”

Wait for it… Wait for it….

“fertilizer to grow”

NO. THEY. DON’T!

Unless you’re in a Utah desert the grass knows what to do. Any place that has dirt and rain (see Utah for “no rain”) will grow grass.

Why in God’s name would you bitch about the hassle of managing the growth of something you fertilize? Quit fertilizing it and it’ll grow less. Are you unclear as to what fertilizer is for?

“and gas to mow, and…”

Wait for it…. Wait for it…

“they take up space that could otherwise be used for animal habitat.”

I call bullshit!

Listen up you pansy assed urbanite pontificator… where I live lawns are the buffer zone between my house and wild friggin’ animals who want to kill me and trash my stuff. Only people who haven’t been out of a city think places that aren’t lawns automatically default to pavement. They default to a jungle that’s red of claw and tooth. Woodland creatures won’t stop until they’ve killed your cat, taken a dump in your garage, eaten the tomatoes, sprayed skunk musk on your dog, and chewed the radiator hose off your truck (or in the case of Washington Post hacks, your leased Prius). Nature is not a Sierra Club poster and it’s not your friend. My lawn is an open shooting lane that allows me to pick off furry interlopers before they kill the chickens.

“Other folks are ditching their lawns because of the amount of water they soak up — 9 billion gallons of it per day, according to the EPA. Think of the miracle that is the modern water supply — pristine water pumped hundreds of miles, passed through shiny state-of-the-art filtration systems, treated with miracle chemicals that keep our teeth from falling out of our heads, and available on-demand at the twist of a knob. And then consider that we intentionally dump billions of gallons of that water out on the ground!”

So don’t do that! Quit fertilizing it and quit watering it. If you quit forcing it grow so much you wouldn’t have to bitch about chopping off the extra growth.

Are you freebasing Paul Krugman’s economics again? Explain to me again how spending more money is good because then we’ll have more money? Is that why you fertilize and water the thing you hate trimming?

“These reasons are all well and good enough. But if you’re an average lazy American like me, with kids and a dog and maybe a mortgage and probably a job too, these may seem like valid concerns but they’re probably not worth changing your behavior over.”

Translation: you probably shop at Walmart and I’m better than you. However, I’m going to pretend, temporarily and for the sake of discussion, that Washington Post authors are “average lazy Americans”.

“So consider the most compelling reason to ditch your lawn, or to at least scale it back: time.”

I agree time is a big deal. When possible I mow with a tractor; ostensibly because it’s faster. In reality I like the tractor because it’s awesome. It’s an antique tractor without OSHA approve ROPS system. I’ll probably die wrapped around the PTO someday. As an American I don’t care because awesome is what American is all about.

When shit gets in my way I’ll mow over it. I tell the kids I’m sorry that I “mowed” their Frisbee.. but I’m not. I loved it!

Who’s got time to drive around a Frisbee? I’m a busy man.

Thankfully, I don’t have a HOA to bitch about my lawn when it’s scattered with Frisbee bits. Folks around me know better. If anyone came to bitch about how I should water and fertilizer my scraggly lawn I’d run over their ass with my tractor. Because I value my time! I can’t waste my life sitting through HOA meetings with a bunch of useless nincompoops discussing grass.

For efficiency sake I only mow just enough to keep the lawn from going feral. I never water and fertilize it for any reason at all. If it dies then I’ll have dirt. I can live with dirt. The best part of late summer is when the grass goes semi dormant and I can ignore it. Dirt is just a non hippie way to say “mother earth”.

“The average American spends about 70 hours a year on lawn and garden care, according to the American Time Use Survey. Considering that this is an average figure that also includes people who don’t spend *any* time mowing, the number for people who actually have a lawn, and actually mow it, is going to be considerably higher than that.”

The average Washington Post reader hires an illegal alien at $6 an hour through his Condominium Association fees and then signs a petition demanding a $15 minimum wage at McDonalds which doesn’t serve the gluten free vegan carrots that are his main diet. Juan, the poor bastard who gets paid $6 per hour to mow the fertilized lawn works 70 hours a week. If he complains his employer will break his kneecaps. Remember this while you sip organic guava nectar fruit drinks and Google the percentage of land area in turf by state on your iPad.

“Some people take pride in their lawns,”

I don’t.

“and get a lot of fulfillment by keeping them immaculately-manicured.”

I don’t.

“So for these folks, this is time well-spent.”

The word for that sort of person is ‘retired’.

Ever notice a retired guy in rural America will have a 60″ deck on a brand new diesel powered “garden tractor” that has more horsepower than a semi truck? He uses that to mow an 8 acre square upon which you could land a DC-10. If there’s a dandelion on it, he’ll drop a grenade on the fucker. There’s something about retired men and dandelions. I don’t know why. I suppose when I retire the AARP will explain it to me.

“But for many of the rest of us, mowing a lawn is nothing more than a chore, and a despised one at that. A November 2011 CBS news poll found that for 1 in 5 Americans, mowing the lawn was their least-liked chore — ranked lower than raking leaves and shoveling snow. Interesting aside: Democrats (25 percent) were considerably more likely than Republicans (16 percent) to say mowing the lawn was their least-favorite chore.”

Can you name any “chore” that involves actual, non theoretical, work that is more popular with Democrats than Republicans? Protesting, preening, and pestering doesn’t count.

When I see a Democratic stronghold full of men stacking firewood and raising two acre “kitchen gardens” I’ll revisit this question.

“Again, in some cases the time investment may be worthwhile — some families use their lawns all the time.”

I do. My lawn’s utility is that:

• It’s where I park my cars.
• It’s where I process firewood.
• It’s where I gut deer.
• It’s where I shoot guns.
• It’s where the chickens graze.
• It’s where the dog shits.
• It’s where I watch the stars at night.
• It’s the free fire zone raccoons and skunks must cross to harass my chickens.
• It’s the place I shove snow when I plow.

Something tells me that suburban boy has never done any of these things. That’s why his lawn is soulless. He has an Ansel Adams calendar on his cubicle wall and stares at it wondering why everything is so much more beautiful in black and white. He grows old waiting for the day to end so he can commute home in the carpool minivan. When he was younger he had dreams of being a trumpet player and having sex with supermodels. That’s all gone now. It’s all very tragic.

Also I can see why I don’t live in a suburb. I’d cause a revolution on a 1/10th acre suburban lot with McMansion’s on all sides. My neighbors would be sipping herbal tea and emoting about Guatemalan peasants and looking forward to Hillary Clinton’s vagina being the next president. Meanwhile I’d be shoveling deer intestines into a garbage bag while my diesel truck heats up. They’d have a HOA on speed dial.

I wonder if I can move in next to the author? It would be an eye opener. I like to tune my motorcycle at 3:00 am. I buy fireworks in box lots. When my dog howls I join in. If I don’t wear pants it’s none of your business. I could probably set my HAM radio to the right frequency to explode his tooth fillings. I might take up yodeling. I’d give his kids a bottle of vodka for Christmas. There’s no reason why you can’t make a snowmobile dragstrip out of the driveway. I like it when life is fun!

“But think of your own neighborhood, and of the number of houses where the only time you see somebody out on the lawn is when it’s getting mowed.”

The only time I see my neighbors is when they’re harvesting the fields. The only thing they do that I can hear is chainsaws for firewood and people shooting guns. They’re busy either working or living.

“It doesn’t need to be this way — there are plenty of low-maintenance alternatives to turf grass out there.”

Brushfields and dirt. I can live with those. Sometimes when the lawnmower breaks I consider mounting a 50 gallon tank of Roundup on my ATV and just going for it. Why not?

In fact, I heartily encourage Mr. Washington Post author to give it a shot. Just go nuts and kill all the grass. Quit watering it. Quit fertilizing it. And live in a dustbowl.

I’m certainly not stopping anyone from embracing alternatives to stupid expensive lawns. The author should quit writing whiny articles and nuke his lawn. I’m rooting for ya!

A.C.

Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.

I felt bad about my last post. It had politics. My blog may not be a ray of sunshine but I try to refrain from taking a dump on my readers. If this election cycle isn’t the shit hitting the fan then what is? I did it anyway. I’m only human.

In search of redemption I’d like to discuss something positive. All that brooding sense of silence and calculation in my last post is nothing new and it has yielded far more than malaise. After all, silence and calculation indicates you’re seeking wise choices during difficult times. So here is:

“I have noticed a small but increasing number of Americans who are choosing to vote with their feet and they’re putting freedom front and center in their plans.”

You’ve noticed it too? Surely you’ve seen a few folks choose to move from less free places to more free places. Do you think people move to Texas because they like the weather? Do you think people emote over Montana because they like opera? It’s not a stampede… it’s a trickle, but it’s a steady one and for every person that seeks and attains freedom an eagle shits on a Prius.

Obviously it’s not a choice lightly made. Moving, for any purpose, is a massive pain in the ass. To uproot yourself and your family and then manage the endless logistics is a commitment. It’s a lot bigger commitment than buying another AR-15 to throw in the stack you’ve already got.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Why would you? Instead just check out my blog roll.

On Barking Moonbat Early Warning System you’ll notice a post that describes leaving California and moving to Ohio. He’s clear that he’s doing this in the interest of personal freedom. This is what he had to say (read it all).

“I will be moving halfway across the country. I don’t make it a secret that while I am a man of the right, I have also been a Californian born and raised. And what’s more, someone that has lived on the dread, died-in-the-wool-left Coast itself. My parents came from the Middle of the country decades ago to live here, and I have lived here in this house my entire life.

… the costs of uprooting from the home of 20~ years and moving halfway across the country to a place I scarcely know are less than the costs of staying. Taxes are high, a criminally insane water policy has all but insured drought will strike again, the ‘law’ tried to abolish concealed carry, and I still remember the times when Bernie’s Brownshirts attacked a Trump Rally down the street while two married Jihadists slaughtered a Christmas Party.”

He’s slipped the noose and bugged out. Way to go!

If you click over to Knuckledragging My Life Away you’ll be reading posts from another person who left California’s sinking ship. Earlier this spring he moved to Tennessee. He’s got plenty of posts about the joy of leaving California. Here’s one of his first posts after leaving (escaping!) (read it all):

“I swore I was going to uncase my guns, load my pistol and strap it to my hip the first chance I got after crossing into Arizona for no other reason than I could. But I didn’t. Why? Because I didn’t feel a need to – once I got out of California everybody was genuinely friendly. Seriously – I couldn’t get out of the truck without somebody smiling at me and asking how I was doing – and these were total strangers.”

One part of freedom is “friendly” and indeed California can wear on a man at times. I rejoice at a person who made the choice to find a different, freer home.

I should have put him first because The Ultimate Answer To Kings is a paragon. He leaves most of us in the dust! I’m impressed when someone packs their shit and moves to a different place but Joel went off grid. That takes balls of steel (not to mention patience with batteries and the willingness to shovel shit).

I salute him for going the Full Monty! He makes it clear that living in the desert is not Utopia for all but it suits him and his desire for freedom. Well done sir! May your chickens always evade the coyotes and the sun ever shine on your solar panels.

Claire Wolfe, who is working on her new website, never goes a week without discussing freedom. It’s sorta’ her thing. Obviously her choice of location is based on freedom but so too are most of her other interests.

Fred On Everything is an American who lives in Mexico. He’s written several articles referring to the greater freedom he found in Mexico. Here’s a quote to whet your appetite (read it all):

“They think that just because I went to Mexico, I left the US. They don’t understand. I didn’t leave the United States. It left me. It was a bait-and-switch operation. I signed on to one country, and they slipped another in under me. I want my money back.”

He elaborates…

“In the country I signed on to, things worked on the principle of individual responsibility. If you robbed a bank, which people generally didn’t, everyone figured you did it because you decided to, and you went to jail and everyone was satisfied, except you, which was the idea. Most people knew how to behave, and did. It saved a lot on police departments and you could walk around at night.

In the new country of course everything is somebody else’s fault, unless you are a white male, in which case everything is your fault.”

And it ends with something I’ve felt all too often myself:

“A lot of other countries struck me as fine places. But America was my favorite. It just suited me. I liked the people in their wild variety and the countryside and the music and the brash independence. It wasn’t perfect. Still, given the sorry baseline for comportment in human agglomerations, it was about as good as you could get.

I’m still fond of the United States. I just can’t find it.”

Incidentally when I’ve been in Mexico (which hasn’t been nearly often enough) it has indeed fell freer than most of America. It seemed like a fine place where you could drink a beer without being hassled, tinker with a car without the EPA shitting on you, and go fishing without needing a 200 page rulebook…. and really isn’t that what life’s all about?

If you click over to Captain Capitalism you’ll find thoughts about freedom that revolve around economics and personal choices (which is more important than seeking a magic geographic location). The Captain also spends a fair amount of energy trying to nudge youth away from self destructive decisions that’ll (you guessed it) chew up their future freedoms. I recommend “Worthless” to any person of the age where they’re still in the thrall (through no fault of their own) of school teachers. (I also enjoyed “The Curse Of The High IQ” and have been meaning to write up a review.)

If you click over to Sippican Cottage you’ll hear articles about moving to and living in rural Maine. In his case the source of freedom was outlandishly cheap housing (read it all):

“…Truth be told, it was much worse than a hovel. We aspired to live in a hovel. We thought we might be able to fashion a hovel out of what we’d purchased. We dreamt of wretchedness, and are still doggedly trying to clear away all the debris just to get to the dirty part, so we can live in it and be happy. …

…Why would we move to such a place, you ask? We had become instantly broke, and the house was free. That’s a great combination. OK, not free; but we bought a fairly big, 1901 vintage, Queen Anne house for $24,400. I consider any house for sale for less than a Kia ‘free.’ 

It wasn’t the “Detroit” version of free, either. I know you can buy a crackhouse in the Motor City for a double sawbuck, or trade it for a couple syphilitic chickens or something, but then you’ve got to try to defend its walls against all comers –the walls where the copper pipes used to live before the crackheads gave your new home its crackhouse soubriquet —  but we moved to what’s considered a nice neighborhood in a quiet little town in western Maine. And in addition to a lack of Mogadishu-level crime, the taxes here are comparatively low because there’s a huge, stinking paper mill right in the center of town paying half the town’s freight, so our free house didn’t come with a bent number followed by a vapor trail of zeroes after it for back taxes, or front taxes or sideways taxes.”

Considering how hard it is for me to keep my shithole of a house standing, I salute him for keeping his house standing with far more grace and dignity than I. (Also his kids rock “The Girl From Ipanema“!)

Click over to MArooned to find another prime example. Early on, the whole point of his blog was being trapped in Massachusetts. Ugh! I can’t imagine surviving that! Massachusetts is East Germany administered by Dolores Umbridge but with higher taxes! (At least California has a great climate!) His subtitle was “trapped in Volkspublic of Massachusetts“.

So where does the author of the MArooned blog live now? Northern Virginia and happily so. That’s not an accident. It’s a deliberate planned move on his part.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another fellow who made the move. That would be yours truly. I did time in a snobbish, uptight, urban area and it sucked donkey balls. People were crawling up my ass every day; each dawn was followed by a new regulation, another fee, a different tax, a near miss on the highway, and the general misery of being swarmed by a hyperactive herd of retarded lemmings and their insipid, unceasing, inexplicable desire to drag me down to their level. I tunneled under the wall and set myself free. Where I live now the night sky is dark and I’m mostly left alone. It’s not perfect but it’s a step toward heaven!

It’s never really “game over” until you’re dead. So take heart and protect your soul carefully against the indignities that will be shoved your way. Take a deep breath, keep your eye on the prize and think “just hold on ’cause it’s not over.

Seeking freedom isn’t inherently grim. Lock and load and stacking ammo and watering the tree of liberty and all that shit sounds impressive but the little decisions matter more. Sometimes it’s a job interview, sometimes it’s a long drive, sometimes it’s a paid off debt… whatever. Freedom will flow through the mundane decisions you make throughout your life. With luck, forethought, and hard work those who seek freedom find it.

A.C.

P.S. If you’re on my blogroll and made the break but I missed it; sorry. Enjoy your freedom even if it doesn’t come with a high five from an unimportant blogger who talks to trees.

Forgive me for falling off the “no politics” bandwagon. I’m only human. Tomorrow I’ll go back to home maintenance and firewood. You’re welcome to tune out in the interim. I won’t mind. Have a nice day.

Still here? OK then I’ll start. The Z-Blog posted wise thoughts in On Being Revolting in the Modern Age:

“Certainly voting for Trump sends a message, but messages need a sender and a receiver. If the people on the other end refuse to acknowledge the message being sent, then it’s not really a message. The Olive Branch Petition was the last ditch effort by the Colonist to avoid a breach with the mother country, but the King’s refusal turned it from a message to him into a message from him. That message was clear to the colonials. They could either submit unconditionally or prepare for war. A Trump win followed by a unified refusal by the political class to cooperate would also be clear message.”

You’d be hard pressed to find any living being who likes the 2016 election cycle so one more blogger bitching about it (self included) is irrelevant. But, just for the record, I’ve spent decades observing D.C. and thinking “these people are playing with fire”. I perpetually wish they’d quit trodding upon large groups of people. No good can come of it.

The Z-Blog adds the usual about the media giving up on even the appearance of journalism:

“A little girl skins her knee and there is a news team there to blame Trump in a four hour TV special. Hillary Clinton is caught running a pay-for-play scheme and no one can be bothered to ask her why she went to the trouble of installing an illegal e-mail system in her bathroom.”

While that’s all true I haven’t expected news from the news in decades. Nobody has.

My big observation of the “Hillary’s private server with State secrets affair” wasn’t about the press. It was about the people; or rather roughly half of the people. A moment passed that felt colder and more unsettling than the usual “they’ve fucked us again” situation.

Think about it like this; the FBI infuriated half the electorate and that half… did nothing. Yet it wasn’t a moment of defeat. It wasn’t a wail of despair, not gloom, not anger, not resignation, not desperation. It was a subdued tone of quiet finality. An acceptance that corruption is so deep that no one, nobody at all, can pretend otherwise.

We all know it. Jerks with badges will shut down a child’s lemonade stand, convict your car of a crime, demand a license for your dog, zone your house into oblivion for a salamander, and invade nations you’ve never heard of… but everyone everywhere knows that mishandling State secrets will put anyone in the clink. Or at least it formerly would.

The FBI just demonstrated they’re afraid to enforce the law when Hillary is involved. They did it in front of God. They did it on live TV. Like the moon landing, it’s an event with a clear “before” and a clear “after”. I think it unwise to have fomented such a moment.

The left side of the spectrum didn’t notice. They were busy rioting over cops being too racist, or not protecting them enough, or maybe wanting more cops but only when cops hug them, or maybe they need a safe space or whatever. Cars got burned, screams were uttered, some cops got shot, a person got blown up with a robot bomb defuser. As photogenic and ugly as it was, it also blew off steam.

The silence on the opposite side of the fence didn’t release a damn thing. It held that pressure. Their attachment to rule of law means blocking a road or smashing a Hyundai is not their style. It’s stupid, wasteful, and inefficient. Hillary and her minions might have thought silence demonstrated their total dominion. I doubt that. Americans are a prickly lot. Many will join the herd but many will not. Ever.

When a big bunch of them see something infuriating and then collectively clam up it’s not because they’re afraid. It’s because they’re thinking. Thinking hard. “What will happen next. How will it affect me. What is my best course of action.” The FBIs abdication led to the eerie and deafening silence of a people with a deep focus.

There are two kinds of silence. One is “you’ve beaten me and I shall go nurse my wounds”. The other is a grim “keep your powder dry” mentality. It is without humor and full of malice. It’s the intelligent observation reserved for when there’s wolf on the periphery and you’re not afraid of it but fully aware that it’s a predator and you should react accordingly. It reminds me of Ralf Waldo Emerson’s admonition “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” I’d much rather have seen the right wing burning cars and spray painting American flags on walls… but the quiet ones don’t roll that way. And really, who thinks a riot and a burned car does any good?

I’m not advocating violence. That shit sucks. I want nothing to do with it. I never will. I like my nation. I want it to be peaceful. Violence is the failure to find a more reasonable solution.

Also I’m a little worried. When Americans get motivated they’re not ineffective. They’ll put a man on the moon, build a 1,000 horsepower NASCAR, win every damn gold medal they can, whatever. I worry that should they get violent they’ll be too damn good at it.

And that’s what makes me nervous. It’s not the dog that barks that you need to watch. It’s the one you’ve kicked several times but it didn’t back down. When a beaten dog backs off, shakes out the kinks, and then looks you in the eye without a hint of cowering; that’s when you’ve made the dog into something you ought not have. Anyone sane would have know to not kick the damn dog in the first place… but once it’s done I’m not sure what defuses the moment.

Z-Blog is thinking American Revolution. I’m more worried about the Civil War. I’ve been reading a lot of American history. Something I didn’t understand until recently is that neither side really thought it was going to happen. For eighty odd years everyone had always come to their senses. The general attitude was sanity would prevail at the last minute. But it didn’t. Too many people played with fire and the nation stumbled backwards into horror. Hillary’s endemic corruption unnerves me because it’s a flame seeking a fuse. She’s played with fire so long she can’t imagine life without it. She can’t be boring. She can’t play by the rules. She’s dangerous to everyone, regardless of their opinion, because she can’t let sleeping dogs lie.

The Curmudgeon:

For quite some time our clothes dryer has been on the fritz. It’s supposed to turn off automatically when it’s finished drying, but, like a politician, it keeps droning on well past its usefulness. It only does this once in a while so I employ the classic method of just checking on it a lot when I use it. Recently it added a second issue. Intermittently, and for no reason, it would just turn off with the clothes still wet. As a proper Curmudgeon I went on a rant about how a brand-new dryer should last much longer than this. That’s when I realized it was over 15 years old. I accept that appliances in the past lasted for all eternity but 15 years is definitely not brand-new. Even though no one but the laundry room heard my rant, I formally retract it.

The Wuss:

With no plan in mind I descended upon the laundry room with a random assortment of tools. It’s my customary opinion that when something is broke you can’t make it worse. (I realize this is incorrect but shut the hell up.) I presumed the problem was somewhere in the electronics because that’s where the problem always is. But then I started thinking about integrated circuit boards and how I’d rather be drinking beer and how shit just breaks nowadays and why should I swim against the current? I threw my arms in the air, said “fuck it”, and didn’t even try to fix it. Two days later we bought a new dryer.

The Dumbass:

We wrestled the new dryer into the laundry room and I set out disconnecting the old one. Dryer vents are always filled with lint and it’s gross. Planning ahead I’d bought a new dryer vent hose. When I removed the old dryer vent hose I found a bird’s nest! I’d just solved the mystery of the dryer that wasn’t drying. I also had the fun of chasing a little brown bird all over the room. (I got the bird out of the house without injuring it but the eggs and the nest were trashed.) I tossed out the old dryer hose and had to accept the fact that I’m such a dumbass that I hadn’t checked obvious weaknesses before dropping a few hundred dollars on imported Chinese consumer goods. I suck!

The Survivalist:

In modern times the proper American thing to do is throw shit out. I can’t do it! If two is one and one is none it just seems to make sense to keep both dryers. After all I had already paid for the new one (which is awesome) and own the old one (which is a little creaky but generally works ok). Where’s the benefit in tossing a mostly useful appliance? So I installed them both side-by-side. If there’s ever a zombie attack on clothes dryers I’m gonna’ rock the world!

I also did something pretty cool with the installation. I have regular AC circuits and I have funky hippie high-tech AC circuits that the power company shuts off at times of peak load. The Faustian bargain behind this is that the peak load circuit is cheaper electricity. I love me some warm clothes on a bitter winter day… precisely when the power is likely to be off. So I never put the dryer on that panel. Since I had two dryers, I installed a new 220V outlet on that panel and will run the new slightly more efficient dryer on cheaper power. How cool can you get? One dryer runs on cheap eco-electricity and that will be sufficient for 90% of our needs. The other one is a backup that is guaranteed to operate even at times of peak load (unless I’m attacked by another bird nest). If I go totally mad I suppose I can run both at once.

So there you have it, my Curmudgeonly four stage process to evolve from a broken dryer to a dual redundant system. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go chase birds out of my dryer vents.