Adaptive Curmudgeon

I’ve never heard of Sam Kriss but a bit of his writing emerged from substack and it’s glorious! He’s written a fine article that encompasses the internet and damn near everything else. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and go read it.

You’ve earned an article like that! Consider it a way of giving your poor overclocked brain a nice treat. Its been struggling though what I call the “Bidenverse” that happened following the end of the “Before Times”. Kriss nails all those concepts better than I ever will.

I’m pasting a few quotes to entice you to read the whole thing. We’ve all heard the usual “the internet is dead” screed. It’s pretty obvious to all of us that large swaths of what was once called “cyberspace” have hit the wall creatively. Kriss says it better:

A dying animal still makes its last few spastic kicks: hence the recent flurry of strange and stillborn ideas. Remember the Internet of Things? Your own lightbulbs blinking out ads in seizure-inducing Morse code, your own coffee machine calling the police if you try to feed it some unlicensed beans. Remember the Metaverse? The grisly pink avatar of Mark Zuckerberg, bobbing around like the ghost of someone’s foreskin through the scene of the recent genocides. Wow! It’s so cool to immersively experience these bloodmires in VR! More recent attempts to squeeze some kind of profit out of this carcass are, somehow, worse.

Kriss puts plenty of meat on those tired bones. Optimistically, I think he might be onto something. Plus he’s got a sense of humor:

Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean absolutely nothing.

About his future on substack:

I’m told that the most successful writing on here is friendly, frequent, and fast. Apparently, readers should know exactly what you’re getting at within the first three sentences. I do not plan on doing any of these things.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades (in Tech News).

I’m going to describe a wilderness moment for people who’ve never experienced it. Many of you know what I’m talking about. If so, please forgive the oversimplification.

If you’re walking in the forest with someone who’s in the habit of being alone in the wilderness, watch them. They’ll check their bearings from time to time; especially when off trail or in confusing terrain. This isn’t a formalized Boy Scout / Army Ranger “check the compass and read angles” approach. It’s the subtle moment when a fella takes a break to look around. He’ll check the view the way he just traversed. It always looks a little different when you backtrack. He’ll glance at landscape scale markers. Does that mountain peak look a little different? Is it still to the west? He’ll check finer scale indicators. Is the creek still within earshot? Has the aspen grove given way to lodgepole? He’ll check small things too. Is the ground sandy? Wet? Sloping?

An experienced woodsman will do this in a way that’s easy to miss. I have a natural inclination to disguise the routine checking of bearings. I think other outdoorsmen do the same. It looks like I just paused to sip some water, or tighten up shoelaces, or piss on a fern, or look at an elk trail… and I did. But I was also reorienting himself to my environment and my place in it.

The point is those who travel alone are always paying attention. That’s how they get to travel alone. To fail at “paying attention” will eventually lead to a screw up. From there it’s only a short step to requiring a search party… or a pallbearer. This is probably why most people never walk alone.

If you’ve never seen it, and most people haven’t, you’ve missed a lesson about life.

The Silicon Greybeard just did a repost of something he wrote in 2017; A Repost on Being Worn Out by the Situation We’re in. This somehow fits perfectly with what I tried to describe; except it’s on an intellectual/political scale instead of in relation to nature.

He talked about his disillusionment in 2017 and how that encouraged him to write about more positive and personal things:

That “frustration and disillusionment with a world gone mad” is why I shifted my emphasis from writing about the problems…

…to the technical stuff like the shop things, radio articles, and space stories I’ve been highlighting lately.  They’re the things I’m most interested in.

Interestingly, I’d posted something similar at about about the same time.

Way back in 2017 (which is centuries ago in internet years) Silicon Greybeard noticed the parallels and quoted from my blog:

Some time year ago (with many fits and starts and personal failures en route) I began to steer away from “serious” commentary. The world had enough overwrought hand-wringing. I thought it was good for the soul (in particular my soul) to let most of it go.

With some caveats I think we’ve been drifting toward the same concept. We saw things going to shit but got tired of saying “hey… that’s a bad idea that’ll make things go to shit”.

It’s boring. There’s no point in telling the stampeding herd to turn aside before they go off the cliff. If they lust for death and misery what can we do to stop them? So, we shifted to what interested us and left the herd to go off the cliff without further comment. (I’ve been only partially successful at that.)

That was a decision I originally made during a periodic “bearing check” in late 2016 and early 2017.

Do you remember 2017? That’s the year of Silicon Greybeard’s post (and mine)? I remember. At the time, doom was impending. It had drawn nigh, approached, loomed, and threatened. The more obvious it became the less necessary it seemed to mention it.

Now, even normies and Kool-Aid drinkers sense something is wrong. They never figured it out with logic. Perhaps they lack the will or the mental horsepower? They finally picked up the scent of failure and experienced the pure emotion of collapse. They think shit might get weird if current trends continue.

Except, there’s no “might” or “current trends continue”. It’s a done deal.

I remember other done deals. I remember wondering why TARP during the tail end of Bush Jr.’s circus of a presidency didn’t devalue the dollar. This led to wondering why Obama’s continuing mismanagement didn’t kick it off the cliff.

Now I know… it happened; just as it was always fated to be.

The currency has been devalued. It will decline as long as we treat it like we have been treating it. Perhaps it took a while and perhaps a few extra self-inflicted shocks were needed to get the ball rolling, but it was a done deal long ago. I couldn’t know when the math would take over. But I knew, in the long term, math never loses. That’s a bearing check for ya’.

I used to write about inflation. Now I don’t. Why would I? The anticipation is over. If folks didn’t see it coming or if they’re slow on the uptake…  well that’s not my problem. It got too boring to tell them about it and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

There are other bearing checks. One thing that’s interesting is that I refer to 2019 as “the before times”. At first that brought cynical jeers. Now, it doesn’t. Nobody of any political viewpoint finds it funny. No matter how much Kool-Aid you’ve drank, you can’t make 2022’s reality seem superior to clear memories from 2019.

That’s a bearing check. You have to stop once in a while and look around you. Look forward, look back, look around, smell the air. Where are you in relation to the environment around you?

In 2016, I started my Squirrel stories. The bedlam of the last few months of Hillary Clinton’s campaign had me worn down. The irrefutable guaranteed 95% statistically certain campaign that unquestionably would lead to the complete thrashing of incompetent showman Trump just didn’t match what I saw with my own two eyes. The vast gulf between what I was being told and what I was seeing was almost physically painful.

Meanwhile, people were taking it too seriously. They needed a break. So I tried fiction and it seemed ok. I don’t know if it helped many, but maybe I gave y’all a laugh and that never hurts. It made me feel better. If I were a faster writer, the whole book would be written by now.

By 2017 I was explaining why I’d stopped talking about inflation, or federal debt, and I even quit flogging the stupidly subsidized Chevy Volt. Large (or at least amplified) parts of society were huffing this shit too deeply. They indulged in a psychotic break from which they apparently will never emerge. They went apeshit for at least three years before COVID became a new flavor of the same old apeshit. They never calmed down. They never recovered. I guess they can’t.

I thought people needed a break. I started writing camping stories; I called them “Walkabouts“. Three years of freaked out maniacs launching one attempt after another to slay the dragon of Mar-a-Lago had worn me too hard. I needed a break. I figured everyone else did too.

Do you remember the last events of 2019? Think hard. Covid wasn’t yet a thing and we’d never seen an empty shelf at the store. Right around Christmas came a failed impeachment vote against trump. That’s approximately the moment when “the Before Times” ran out. Before that winter’s snow had melted my dog was dead and a mild virus from Wuhan had induced an already jittery people to bask in their own self-affirming abyss of fear.

So where are we now? We’re one year past the attempted vaccine mandate of 2021. I cannot let that go. Every time I try to mention politics, I lose my cool and start frothing at the mouth about it. Mostly because it happened just one year ago and everyone is already trying to memory hole it. I don’t memory hole things because I don’t wish to wander around lost. Every time I write about it I regret it. I don’t need to mention it. We were all there. If you were there and didn’t see it, then nothing can make your eyes see what your emotions won’t accept.

Look forward, look back, look around, smell the air. Where are you in relation to the environment around you? I took time to reorient late last year. I centered. I let the madness wash over me but not uproot me. I (thankfully) held firm.

But I do need to refocus on the positive. My last post disappointed myself. Squirrels in 2016, walkabouts in 2019. I know the path. Yet sometimes I stray.

The good news is I pay attention, even to myself. And thus course correct as well and as quickly as I can. I have another camping story in the hopper. I have another chapter of Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels just about ready to go. I return to the path.

So long as I focus on the positive it seems to work out. I try to avoid pointing at the stupid and saying “look at that festering pile of steaming moronic self-destructive idiocy… doesn’t it suck?” The people who recognize it as shit already know. The ones that don’t will roll in it now matter what I do.

Also, an experienced woodsman is never lost, but sometimes they’re a little late getting back to camp.

Update: I was wrong and I suck. I tired to read directly from the Danish (translated) but it looks like I missed some nuance. Clearer word is that Denmark has stopped encouraging the vax for adults but it didn’t swing all the way into reverse and ban it for most adults.

As I understand it now, an adult in Denmark can get the vax if they want the vax and can refrain if they want to refrain.

Great news! That’s how it should have been for day one.

So… that means my post is just bullshit. I should stick with motorcycle camping! I feel properly chastised and repent for my dumb post.

Also, I’m happy for the people of Denmark. Huzzah!

I could delete the post but I felt like memory holing my stupidity would smack of “coverup”. I drew a line below. I’ll let my rant remain. You may mock me as needed. Let it never be said that when I’m wrong I try to hide it.

Have a good week.

Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.
Everything which is not compulsory is forbidden.

So, it has come to pass. Denmark, just banned the vax for people under 50 (unless you have certain medical issues). I’m not sure how banned it is. It might be that a sympathetic doc would stretch exceptions to meet the request of a patient? Or it might not.

Most nations went ape over COVID. One mark of civilization is to not panic when faced with a challenge. I think most places failed to react with calm decorum.

Denmark was into electronic vax passports. The COVID pass was required to visit restaurants, sports centers and hairdressers. It remained mandatory until September 2021 when it wasn’t required anymore.

This happened the exact same time America’s government was still bitching at every single American to get the vax. Remember it was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? This led to curtailing the “right” to work for any employer (with over 100 employees). Why the hell not?

Being such a happy guy, Biden followed up in late December telling me I’d suffer “a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated—for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm”.

It was a downer. Most presidents wish me a “Merry Christmas”. That seems like a better way to go.

Experiments in denying employment to half the populace flamed out in January. (It’s still working its way through the courts.)

In the same period of one year, Denmark made an 180 degree switch. Painting with a broad brush, Denmark shifted from requiring proof of the vax to banning the vax.

Wise governance would neither force a person to take an injection nor ban them from one they wanted. Wise people let others make their own choices.

To swing from harassing people without the vax to banning them from getting it is logically inconsistent. Also it forced people to do a thing from which there’s no going back. Like an ill considered tattoo, there’s no way to “unring the bell“. If a treatment is coerced and then some bureaucracy decides it’s a bad idea what exactly can they offer as recompense? “Whoops… we forced our choices on you but now we’re cool with your original plan, sorry it’s to late to go back.”

No single choice is right for all people. Humans ought not be moved about gameboards at the whim of bored rulers.

Nobody knows what you should do with your life more than you.

I don’t know who in Denmark might want the vax in late 2022. They probably have a good reason for that preference. They have my sympathy. It’s just as wrong to deny them as it was to try force it on me.

Hat tip to Vlad Tepes.

I have a wider audience than I thought! I occasionally post about butterflies. I’ve been “raising” one or a few monarchs annually over the last few years. It may sound silly but I heartily recommend “raising” butterflies. It’s just plain a happy thing. Always remember the simple things! There’s childlike joy to be had if you’ve retained the wisdom to appreciate it.

A homeschool kid bumped into my blog and saw my butterfly links. This turned into what I presume to be a school assignment about butterflies: How to Grow your own Butterfly Garden.

Please check it out. I like to encourage students whenever I can.

Incidentally, I failed to post photos of this year’s monarch. Now that it’s a rock star, I should rectify that. I present to you “Constantine” who emerged in late July:

I’m not always organized about posts. If you’re looking for other mention of butterflies here’s a way to start:

2018: Phenology Report: Monarchs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

2020: The Cycle Of Life Births A Monarch.

2021 (reverse chronological order): Critters: Pics Or It Didn’t Happen, Critter Encounters: Outwitted By An Invertebrate, Critter Encounters.

2022: Planets, Butterflies, And Bullshit. (Warning, no photos and I a ramble about Pluto, the definition of “recession”, and how to have breakfast with a butterfly.)

Society is in decline but I’ve been feeling pretty optimistic. Political dipshits want you to feel depressed and hopeless. They need you to hold yourself down. I don’t. I prefer the glory of the real world to the self-defeating gloom of the fake one.

Here’s a horse race where the winner doesn’t just win but absolutely dominates. I’m not an avid sports watcher, but when I see something awesome I cheer for it.

Hat tip to Small Dead Animals.

I remember when presidents gave speeches that didn’t threaten Americans with violence. I remember presidents who didn’t list off which groups are slated for subjugation. I remember presidents that at least tried to be pleasant.

Here’s a clip from Ronald Reagan’s exit. Notice he doesn’t bitch out Democrats? Notice he doesn’t bitch out Congress for thwarting his plans? He doesn’t grouse about people who were a pain in the ass. Dan Rather hounding him for years or Gorbachev being a clueless drunk is just the nature of things and not a reason to go scorched earth. Notice he doesn’t isolate any group of citizens at all. He doesn’t treat any Americans as jerks to be isolated and defeated.

He articulates a vision of aspirational hope and optimism… there’s even a hint of gratitude. Maybe he wasn’t perfect but he’s doing his best as a force of good. He was simply a better man than angry spiteful evil vengeful Biden.

I didn’t watch Biden’s speech last Thursday. Reports indicate he stood at night in front of a dark red background flanked by Marines. From there he angrily explained which 74 million Americans were should be eliminated. Last year he explained which 80 million Americans with whom he’d run out of patience and should therefore be fired from any job they might ever hold. I suppose Biden listed 6 million fewer people in his current list for subjugation and punishment. Is that an improvement?

I case you don’t have time for the entirety of last weeks’s whole speech of Sauron, here’s a shortened version. Enjoy:

I’ve been thinking through cycles of failure in human endeavors. I did a deep dive into the parallels between Cycle #1: Incompetent Carter and Cycle #3 Colossally Incompetent Raging Moron Biden. (I make an occasional reference to Cycle #2: The Craptastic Economics Of Obama… but I have to hand it to Obama, he just couldn’t reach the scale of disaster of the other two.) There’s no two ways about it, Carter and Biden are the true rock stars of fucking up in a way that Obama can’t quite attain.

It’s hard to examine cycles of disaster without sounding glum, but that wasn’t my goal. I was trying to say “I’ve seen this three times and twice we’ve pulled out of the nosedive rather well, I feel ok about the third cycle over time”.

Precisely because Biden is less popular than dogshit on a pieplate and precisely because he doubles down on everything like a gambling addict at a casino, he’s cratering faster and harder than I’ve ever seen. He’s doing so bad that it’s more or less forcing the universe to counteract him. You can be stupid for a long time but you can’t be a flat out fucking walking trainwreck for nearly as long. Who knows when or how things will improve but I have a good feeling about it in the long run.

The future’s so bright I gotta’ wear shades.

Captain Recordvotegetter is giving a speech today. Whatever he says, it’ll be another effort to break your will. That’s how the cycle works. Biden wants you to believe “this is never going to get better”. Once you think there’s no chance of a better future you stop exploring ways to make it happen. Every way to improve things is a way he won’t consider. Losers and morons that created the shit sandwich we’re in want to keep doubling down on their bad ideas over and over. They will keep doing so until an external force stops them.

Luckily, the more stupid and unwilling to adjust they are, the quicker an external force shows up to correct their bad choices. Nature abhors a vacuum. Reality won’t long abide a dipshit.

That’s how the cycle works. Here are fond memories from two notable Bidenverse speeches.

President Popularity tried to force 80 million people to subjugate you to his will exactly 355 days ago.

This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.  And it’s caused by the fact that despite America having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans
who have failed to get the shot.

Pandemic of the unvaccinated. How’s that phrase holding up?

This is not about freedom or personal choice.  It’s about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.

It is absolutely about freedom AND personal choice.

My job as President is to protect all Americans.

Great, then protect my freedom AND personal choice.

So, tonight, I’m announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers

Going after a man’s ability to make a living. Class act. Very kind of you. What’s next, going to throw a kitten in a woodchipper?

We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.

Holy fuck! He said it. No mention of freedom or hope… only submission; because I’d worn out his patience. Well excuse me King Awesome… may I please bend over so you can fuck me harder?

I have never spoken to another man like that. I wouldn’t! I just simply don’t do things like that. I would never ever tell another person to what degree I’ll tolerate their existence. Men never ever ever say things like that.

I go to bars where a sentence like that will get your ass beaten. It’ll get your ass beaten by whomever you said it to. It’ll get your ass beaten by everyone in the bar. It’ll get your ass beaten in the parking lot. It’ll get your ass beaten until you run out of ass to beat. I don’t care if you’re the love child of Chuck Norris and a chainsaw, talk like that and you’re about to get your ass beaten.

I don’t give a shit about tiptoeing around some old man’s patience. Some jackoff I’ve never met who lives in a basement in Delaware can patiently tolerate me or get so angry he shits himself. Not my problem. Fucker comes within range and I’ll take his head off… which is why Biden is as poplar and dogshit in your morning coffee. He said shit that he should have learned is intolerable. No man who speaks that way is actually a man. President or not he was a child having a tantrum.

I’m an adult. I exist on my own. Fuck him!

But maybe that was just a bad day? Nope. Biden makes speeches where he says things that he legitimately believes and they demonstrate how stupid and cruel and vindictive and childish he really is. He should shut his fucking mouth until he grows up… which given his age, might be when they bury his ass.

Remember what Captain Happy said just before Christmas?

“For [the] unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — the unvaccinated, for themselves, their families and the hospitals they will soon overwhelm,”

A sane man, perhaps a kind one, would say “Merry Christmas”. But the week before America’s biggest holiday and all Biden could talk about was “winter of death”?!?

What kind of monster says things like that? Well the kind of monster that needs you to be without hope. When Biden says “everything sucks and it will never get better” what he’s doing is making sure the only path you imagine for the future is the one he’s slammed into the ground and is now beating with a stick. “The only option you have is me, the only future is death”.

Fuck that! If a man offers only misery and death, stop listening to him.

Whatever the doddering creature says this time, remember doom and gloom is never unavoidable. You can exercise agency. Care for yourself as best you can and it might turn out pretty well.

As for Biden, maybe there is nothing good in his future. He only knows to double down on failure after failure, so he’s not going to suddenly start getting different results.

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Barak Obama, 2020

I grew up in the first of what I’ve recognized as three cycles of collapse. I’ve learned by looking for parallels and differences.

As a kid in the 1970’s, I saw society crapping out. Society didn’t recognize its bad trajectory and improve. Instead they doubled down on the same failed ideas. This seems universal. In every cycle where the elite have fucked up, they doubled down.

The elite double down on their mistakes until an external force stops the cycle. The elite hate the force that stops the cycle with the white hot loathing of a thousand suns.

President Carter was as popular as dogshit on a sandwich. The press tried to cover for him but I was there and I remember everyone and their dog hating Carter. The press reported him and Reagan in a close race. Being naïve I assumed it was true. It wasn’t. Reagan curb stomped Carter like a tornado flattening a butterfly.

In what I see now as a pattern, the elites hated Reagan with every cell of their being. They hated not what he did so much as that he was the “wrong kind of people”. Compared to elites, Reagan acted “low class”. He worked in movies. He played opposite a monkey. His money didn’t come from mysterious sources. Reagan was happy cutting brush on a ranch.

I remember being told Reagan was dumber than dirt. Unlike the usual Yale and Harvard crop of zombies, Reagan attended a Christian college in Illinois. The press declared Reagan was a dipshit cowboy almost certain to start World War 3 and never let up the whole time. Meanwhile, America thrived.

More recently the press said Hillary was 99.9% sure to win. That was unquestionable truth until she lost.

As with cowboy Reagan the elites lost their fuckin’ minds over Orange Man Bad because he’s the wrong kind of person. Trump and Reagan were “low class” and elites hate them with unbridled passion. It’s as if rapport with deplorables gives the media a kryptonite enema. Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania like the son of a garbage man instead of Yale like an elite billionaire. The horror!

Everyone in any media situation will tell you that Trump is dumber than dirt… as if any monkey can run a real estate corporate conglomerate. Trump is dumb just like that dipshit cowboy Reagan was dumb. The press will call Trump too dumb to be taken seriously in the same world where I’ve all watched dementia addled Biden have trouble putting on a jacket

Just because I’m tired about hearing about “low class” and “stupid”: here’s a video of New York Representative and Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler shitting his pants at a podium:

(A note about “smart” versus “dumb”. When sober and healthy all of these cats are smarter than the average bear but some have only limited exposure to non-elite America. Ford, Clinton, and the two Bushes went to Yale… as expected of elites. In case you’re wondering Hillary did too. Obama went to Harvard. Yale (8 presidents), Harvard (5), William and Mary (3), and Princeton (2) have “educated” 40% of our presidents since inception and 5 of 9 since Nixon. Nixon was offered a ride to Harvard, turned it down and went to Duke. (The press hated Nixon and after he won with a huge popular sweep just like Reagan would in the 1980s. Nixon was torn apart until he resigned over Watergate, Reagan was under constant attack culminating in hearings about the Iran/Contra Affair, and Trump’s house was raided by the FBI last month. See another pattern there?).)

Trump was never elite in behavior even though he has money such that my life’s savings is a rounding error. He eats junk food, uses small words, and has a clear source for most of his assets. Just like Reagan, the press declared Trump an incompetent nincompoop almost certain to start World War 3 and never let up the whole time. Meanwhile, just like under Reagan, America thrived.

Keep comparing cycles of suck. Foreign policy under Carter was a clusterfuck just like it is now. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan went so badly I’d substitute the word “flee” for “withdraw” and play it to the tune of Yakety Sax  Carter’s foreign policy was to get pantsed by OPEC and the hostage crisis. The hostage crisis was a big fat hairy deal to America! America was weak and so Iran decided to roll the dice. It went like this:

“Dude you took hostages… not cool man.”

“What are you gonna’ do about it you fucking pussy?”

“I’ll call the UN!”

“I’ll call your mom!”

And that was it. What should Carter do? Hard to say. What did he do? Not a fucking thing. He couldn’t have looked more ineffectual if he stood there while Iran hit him with a custard pie.

America hadn’t recovered from a drubbing in Vietnam and it would take four Rambo movies in the 1980’s to even start thinking about it. As a kid, I expected the president to take action. Put some soldiers on planes, go to wherever this shit was happening, and reduce the place to rubble. Any kid in elementary school knows you can’t let bullies get the better of you! If some jackoff can take 52 people hostage and that’s enough to freeze all of America… how the fuck did we even exist?

Carter tried a rescue attempt. Like everything he tired, it was a world class disaster. I watched the report on the news. We tried to fly in under cover of night and the helicopters crapped out in the desert. It looked bad; incompetent. Six stoners trying to get their sober cousin to go get pizza would have looked more organized. Was it worse than Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan? Probably not. Carter’s massive fuck up cost less lives than Biden’s.

Regardless, neither one did well. As a kid watching black and white TV all I could think was; “Sneak in at night? We’re fucking America! Show up at dawn and tear the place apart brick by brick until no stone is left upon another.” Maybe my youthful self lacked elite nuance; I’d have said “the goal is to make taking hostages a very bad idea. Rescue people if you can but lay waste no matter what.” But you know what, my youthful brain’s reasoning had merit. Carter had people tying ribbons to trees. Fat lot of good that did!

When Reagan was elected, nobody wanted American hostages on their soil. The hostage game ended immediately. Foreign policy under Orange Man Bad wasn’t so bad either.

Carter never made anything better. When my house was cold the president told me the solution was to wear a sweater. Gas was scarce so he made laws about driving slow. He applied solutions that even a clueless kid saw as ineffective.

A child starts with the belief that adults are… um… adults. With time, they realize some adults are fucking morons. That was the lesson of growing up when I did. “Welcome to Gen X… the economy sucks and nobody cares about you.” I’m not complaining, it’s simply what it was.

Is that different from now? Has a child in 2022 witnessed intelligent adults managing events intelligently? How many canceled classes or conflicting mask mandates does it take for a kid to realize the people in charge are morons? If there’s a kid in 2022 that still thinks his teacher is pretty smart, that’s because the teacher is his drug dealer.

Eventually I sussed out the end game of the incompetence cycle. It wasn’t just bugs and gasoline and hostages… it was death. The people in charge invited death. They wanted it.

Consider the part about being cold and eating bugs. I lived in a town that had firewood and farms right there. So how the hell was it going to happen there? “Shut up kid, it’s necessary because of overpopulation.” They focused on gloom and doom even while rejecting obvious solutions.

The cycle of bullshit got dark toward the end. The elites drifted from overpopulated people nibbling on crickets to outright starvation. People in Ethiopia were starving. This was presented as if it had nothing to do with anyone in Ethiopia! It was just the beginning. A wave of death was going to sweep the planet. People in lab coats said so! Sad distended children were on our black and white TV every day. Cold, then poverty, then bugs, then death. It always ends in death. They lust for it.

Sometime in the middle of the Reagan era it dawned on the elites that none of us was going to starve as instructed. So inconvenient. Soon there was a new way all the peasants would die. Russkies would nuke us! This was the same thing since the 1950’s but Reagan was “low class”. Therefore, world war 3 was unavoidable. Working class losers voting for the dipshit cowboy Reagan had caused it! We’d voted wrong. We’d all be reduced to glowing radioactive skeletons. We deserved it!

That’s the cycle. You have to live through it and watch with clear eyes to see it. Once you see it you can’t un-see it. I’ve coined the five stage cycle of suck:

1. We made this situation that sucks and now it sucks to be you.
2. It didn’t suck in the past but now it will suck for your whole future.
3. Your fate is to endure the suck. You deserve it.
4. It’s never going to get better. You deserve it.
5. There are too many peasants… most of them will die. They deserve it.

What I heard half a lifetime ago is what’s being taught to kids right now. Total nuclear annihilation faded. New boogeymen are invented to suit the times. It doesn’t matter so long as it’s clear that the people who vote wrong will cause most of the peasants to die. Whether it’s from AIDS or COVID or failed crops or nuclear bombs it’s all just death. Death because you disobeyed.

Kids don’t know the authority figures, media, politicians are full of shit. How can they? They take it to heart and become twitchy. The multiple disheartening failures are always layered thick; starvation, bugs for food, no more cars, and endless death through pandemics… I could find all that in newspapers in 1975 or I could find it in Reddit threads in 2022. Same shit, new cycle.

When eggheads get too much power. They indulge in their fantasies. Their failure to use reason and grounded notions leads to mismanagement. Invariably it starts to collapse but to chance course would require discarding their false notions. Instead they double down and make it worse.

The final stages are when it’s obvious that everything sucks; they declare it’ll always suck. Nobody in the Carter era told me Reagan was going to show up and play the cold war to a no-shots fired stalemate. Nobody in the Obama era told me an Orange weirdo was going to show up and set the economy on fire until unemployment was the lowest in a lifetime. The people who bring failure want to lock you into failure. “We’re all you get and there is no other option.”

Finally comes death; the ultimate thrill for the mismanaging elite. “The peasants need to suffer and eventually die.” The reason can be anything, usually somehow tied to overpopulation. Gaia / peak oil / viral loads / etc… it’s always something. It leaves the elites in charge and the peasants eating crickets.

It’s a lie. Getting lied to sucks. It’s harder on the soul if you haven’t seen it before.

This is the third cycle of the bullshit pipeline I’ve seen in my short life. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Death and misery are not a done deal. Most of the suffering is caused by people who are incompetent and don’t want to accept their limits. When they stop doubling down, the misery ends.

Even as Carter/Obama/Biden ran/run the economy into the ground it doesn’t have to stay that way. They tell you it can’t get better but that’s because they can’t do better.

That’s the most cruel and horrible part of the bullshit pipeline. Statement #4 on the list; this is never going to get better. That’s the deadly one!

The forces that create a bullshit pipeline need you to be depressed. Happy fulfilled people don’t fall into the gravity well of bullshit. They keep on keepin’ on until another sunny day. They have weddings in the middle of wars, celebrate birthdays during a pandemic, and go fishing during a recession.

Hope comes from resilience. This is why elites that can’t manage success go after kids. They went after kids when I was a kid. They’re going after them now. For a while I truly believed by the time I was old enough to own a Chevy I’d be starving or radioactive. Fortunately, it didn’t get me down… not for long. If I’d put a bullet in my head (or let the teachers drag me down further) I’d never have a chance to blog about my two motorcycles and freezer full of bacon! The future didn’t suck!

Of three bullshit pipelines, two of them turned an economic corner and got better amazingly fast. One election and BOOM… new hope and cheaper gas. The third bullshit pipeline is going on right now. It seems to be following the same trajectory as the first two. First it’s a little funky, then it’s flat out berserk, and then we’re all gonna’ die. And then? Well I’m not sure but I’m optimistic.

The future doesn’t have to suck and I’m not listening to liars that say it must.