Adaptive Curmudgeon

I was talking with a fellow about President “Most Votes In American History” Biden’s sanctions. Intended to punish Russia after it entered Ukraine, they’ve been somewhere between an “own goal” and a faceplant. I suppose charitably you could say they haven’t yet bankrupted everyone who’s against Russia… yet.

Is Pyrrhic sanctions a legit phrase?

I used an example from Blazing Saddles but he’d never seen Blazing Saddles! I was shocked; what a nightmare! This is far more important than geopolitics! Everyone needs to see Blazing Saddles!

[My last post had too much politics. I apologize. I was trying to describe how manufactured events continue being manufactured with or without reality based causes. I probably failed. Please cut me some slack, I posted from McDonalds and no deep thoughts have ever emerged from that venue. I offer today a more positive post.]

Ten minutes. No words. No politics. No bullshit. Absolutely gorgeous and poignant.

Do yourself a favor and schedule ten minutes. Turn off the phone. Hide from the kids. Pour yourself a cup of coffee (or bourbon) and enjoy a glimpse of completely positive art.

I’ve been “off grid” and will stay off a little longer. This is for three reasons.

1. I’m in a place with chitty cell service.
2. Even if I had service, I’m super busy and have no time to play emotional grabass amid propaganda.
3. The post collapse reason: I fear the “Schrödinger’s Cat of Stupid”.

Reason #3 is new. Constant serial failed panics have been happening weekly or bi-weekly for a long time, I dread to see the next stupid irrational thing.

I say “failed panics” because they have a purpose. Cretins in DC (of both parties) want the populace perpetually alarmed and therefore easily manipulated. It worked for a while but, like junkies hitting bottom, the people are exhausted and the drug of panic has less pull than it once did.

Americans in general are slowly, gradually, incrementally, pulling their head out of their ass. They’re no longer exhibiting the desired response of knee jerk deference to authorities. Fine grained central control is no longer just assumed to be OK. Cretins in DC are terrified!

The last two years stampeding about in an orgy of “I support the latest thing” has run its course. Free thinkers cut loose ages ago but even the weakest of minds have been overstimulated and two years of dumb shit has shut down their cerebellum. Many are embarrassed by what they did. Post-Covid true believers have the hangover feel. “Did I really do that?” A few hopeless Kool-aid drinkers are still pining for the return of COVID but nobody takes them seriously anymore. DC quakes in fear as the masses settle back to earth.

Objective truth is a thing which exists whether you wish it or not.

The sane, diminished in numbers but still populous, no longer just accepts things. The precursors to cattle cars and trashing the rule of law “just for a few weeks during the current emergency” is a harder sale. Folks are standing on the loading ramp to the Utopian new world order but they’ve stopped stumbling forward. They’re thinking. “Pretty much everything they’ve said for two years has been a lie or blown up their face, why should I do what’s demanded again?”

Those of us who never drank the Kool-aid have also changed. We’re less motivated to try talking the crowd out of their latest faceplant. We shrug and continue doing what we do… independently. “If they haven’t figured it out by now, it’s not our problem.”

I feel like that. Don’t you? After COVID and the 2020 election, I’m more willing to let people experience the fruits of their decisions. Some folks learn from history, but others must piss on the electric fence. Who am I to rob them of the experience?

Karen now has to choose between baby formula that doesn’t exist and $6 gas to get to a job that doesn’t matter but the boss desperately wants her to commute. I don’t care. I no longer wish to talk her out of her next dumb idea. Take on massive debt for an EV car? Sure. A degree in advanced pointlessness? Fine. Fifteen boosters, an all yoghurt diet, and some pyramid crystals you bought online? Sure. Get a face tattoo while you’re at it; it’ll be fun! I feel freed of what formerly was a kind of responsibility. The Gods of the Copybook Headings will sort everything out.

The reduction in overall mad stampeding panic is also a time of risk. People who used fear to get power are desperate to restart panic anew. They’re flipping over rocks and looking for ghosts.

“We gotta’ protect our phony baloney jobs!” They whine. Then they fire up the panic machine: “Have you heard about monkeypox? What about greedy oil companies, Russian bogeymen, scary racist libertarian whackdoodles, people who don’t check in with Facebook, ghost guns, radon, asbestos, hanta virus, gluten, melting glaciers?” They also try random orders, “get another booster shot or white supremacists could hack your Netflix account!” It’s not working.

Reality seeps through the façade. Nobody cares what some douchebag said on Twitter on if gas prices have doubled (tripled?) and you’re out of cash. The Afghanistan retreat of 2021 makes following President Droolcup into Ukraine sound like a bad bet. Nobody who just dropped an extra two bucks on a six pack of beer to wash away the sorrows of an evaporating 401(k) is interested in the nutsack on a faux-oppressed YouTube influencer.

Which brings me to Schrödinger’s Cat. Until you open the box, the cat is both alive and dead. Once you peek, the form is chosen.

As soon as I plug back into the Matrix, the choice will be made. I sense that society will inevitably choose one dumb distraction among many. What will it be?

Here are my guesses:

• Fight Russia until the last Ukrainian is dead? Nah! That’s played out. (When I checked out propaganda was still reporting that plucky glorious Ukrainian freedom fighters were beating Russkie ass like a rented mule. Sure, and I’m a Chinese jet pilot. I don’t know if the press is still sticking to the narrative but sooner or later the real situation will be apparent.)
• A close subset would be a false flag blamed on Russia. It won’t work in 2022. No matter how ugly or photogenic it is, we’re just not in the mood to wrap in the flag and have a parade on behalf of the guy who won more votes than any other candidate in history but went sub-Carter in a year. At this point, if someone nukes Baltimore I won’t believe it until I drive there and wave a Geiger counter myself. Even then I’ll wonder which three letter agency set it off.
• Diesel gets expensive enough that truckers just park their rigs? Even odds on that. Trucks deliver stuff and life without stuff sucks. Biden having a press event where he shrieks at truckers (as if that’ll start a Kenworth’s engine) would fit his pattern.
• Gas breaks $5 by July 4th and “normie the griller” has a fit? Nah! It comes on the heels of an Orange Menace that made American into a net exporter. We all know it could happen again.
• Food shortage; like for real this time? “We’re out of Cool Ranch Doritos but there are Pringles” turns into “I will fight you for this can of beans”. Shortages are more or less baked in the cake now but I don’t buy this one for fat complacent Americans.
• Taiwan? Hard to say but China seems too patient. Why rush things in 2022 when we’re already flaming out? Regardless of when it happens, we won’t be able to do jack shit. Look at a globe. Taiwan will fall unless Taiwan is monumentally bad ass, and that doesn’t appear to be the case. As for us? Nations that can’t reliably make baby formula aren’t equipped to pick fights with China.
• A big power outage? That’s a good possibility! Oft predicted, and seasonally practiced for a decade in California. Would two weeks of no hot water in Newark or no AC in Phoenix work in President Potato’s favor?
• The January 6th commission? Bwa ha ha ha ha… no fuckin way! If Stalinist show trials were going to work, they’ve been unleashed in 2021.
• Riot season? I doubt that one too. Deplorable America is more or less willing to let St. Louis or Portland burn itself to the ground. We just don’t care anymore. If cities want to set their own ass on fire, fuck ’em. Also, we know it won’t spread. Rioters who leave the support of city politics will be instantly roasted by rednecks who’ve been waiting their whole lives for the opportunity to do it.
• Gun control? Nah! It’s a cliché. Rhinos will roll over because they’re gutless pussies but who cares? Someone somewhere will pass something about adjustable drift pins on rifles a particular shade of magazine capacity because 9mm blows lungs through the bayonet lug… blah blah blah. Clinton did in in 1994 and all he did was cost Al Gore his turn at the big chair. That was 28 years ago and they’ve spent every intervening moment convincing us to support the second amendment. We even got a two year refresher course! Government sponsored riots in 2020, Australia going full Nuremberg (along with Europe, New Zealand, and Canada), and one hour response times in a school shootings are why Americans have been buying a million guns a month. Burning Minneapolis and subsequently cheating in an election won’t convince anyone to disarm. Also, people who drop their own coin on a firearm are more serious than dipshits preening on Twitter.

None of those feel right. Returning the people to a mindless froth will require something bigger, dumber, wilder, more dangerous, and more irrational. I draw a blank trying to imagine it. I write about squirrels and talk to trees but I just can go that dumb.

Suppose Godzilla fucks Cthulhu and gets Monkeypox in Detroit while stepping on a gay kitten during a riot about banned, gluten free, student loans on Independence day during a meteor shower? That’s just another Tuesday now.

I feel a weird urge to stay out of it. Let the rest of the world decide the reason for their newest panic. Whatever the form of the destroyer, I want it witnessed first by someone else. So I remain mostly off grid.

As always, watch your six and never go full retard.

A.C.

Light posting for a while. I’m going off grid a few days.

In my last post I noted a minor observation in the night sky:

“there it was… a gleaming silent line of human intelligence wrought among the stars. Maybe 50 dots in a perfect formation. A constellation. Just a hint of the 2,400 already up there and the vast grid that will be there in due time. It wasn’t sad, like a McDonalds billboard on the interstate, it was glorious, like a reminder that humans can fly if they wish.”

One of the most crushing things I’ve witnessed over my lifetime is the slow gradual embrace of what I call “socialist incapacity”. What I mean is that all people are born with endless potential but they’ve been worked over by powerful forces. They’ve been dumbed down, gaslit, and slowly badgered until they’re hollow and weak. They end up thinking of themselves as less than they once were. From hero to peasant. From peasant to supplicant. From supplicant to a means to an end. A cruel fate; to be a game piece on someone else’s chessboard.

I don’t like the degradation of humanity! Humans aren’t meant to be meat slabs in a vote farm. We’re individuals. We’re amazing! We’re not rabbits or buffalo, unaware animals grazing on what is there but not questioning how it got there. Such limited beings are incapable of deeper concepts like time or honor. Nor are we programmable robots; widget consuming production units… or increasingly often not even production units but votes to be purchased.

We are far more. We’re born with the spirit to soar and the intellect to accomplish that which we imagine. To a human, at least one that hasn’t been beaten into submission, the impossible is only that which hasn’t yet been done. This is why large systems dislike humans. Those who would oppress us sand “humans” and “citizens” down until they’re mere “civilians”, “constituents”, or even “clients”.

Our modern universities and declining social capacity are the smoldering ashes of the Library of Alexandria. It isn’t necessary that I know all these things, but it’s crucial that someone know all those things. Without them we are not mankind, but cavemen with iPhones. Yet former repositories of knowledge are subsumed in waves of foolishness.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Just as many as it takes to decide which restroom to use.

I see NASA as the saddest loss of all. NASA’s bureaucratic bumbling consumed most of my lifetime on earth. I was born to a time when “space hotel” was a legitimate concept. A child of the time had a reasonable shot at orbit. That was the trajectory that perished. What replaced it was a four decade committee meeting of the doomed. From this disastrous mess, humanity is just emerging.

Humans went from the Wright Flyer to Apollo 11 in 66 years. (1903 – 1969.) I was born just around when NASA lost heart. It spent a half century stepping on its own dick as I got old and stayed on the ground. NASA isn’t the cause of this. It’s only a reflection of humanity’s failures. We have a super computer in every person’s pocket but use it to spy on law abiding citizens. Who thought that was the best use of all that power and knowledge?

The news today is about airlift of baby formula from Germany. As if we were a people who can’t make baby formula. Of course we can make baby formula. We need only quit shooting ourselves in the foot and do the task.

We lack the progress of a serious people because we are unserious and unaccomplished. Oh sure, NASA did some neat things. They succeeded here and there. It seems sometimes almost by accident they’d cashed so many checks in so many congressional districts that it couldn’t help but make something useful. But overall they spent most of my life as a funds dispersal mechanism with a space hobby. If 66 years went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base I had a reasonable expectation of more in the nearly equal time that has elapsed. They can’t yet repeat what was last accomplished in 1972.

Why? Because NASA is a bureaucracy. Humans have the spirit that wants to go and the mind that makes it possible. Bureaucracies have the opposite, and they’ve the whip hand lately. Masked Karens and cell phone dopamine addicts can’t make the trip. But they can bitch about everything until nobody else has the heart to try.

However, all is not lost. Despair is a sin. It is betted to keep trying than whine like those who never tried.

Watch this:

It’s just a few minutes. What better thing are you doing?

You don’t have to geek out about nerdy tech terms. “Max Q at eleven seconds? Who gives a fuck?” Just bask in what is possible and how hard it was to accomplish. This is the real deal. Every single minute of that video is fraught with risk.

Unlike a society that’s cowering in the basement over COVID or inflation or Monkey Pox or someone who didn’t use the right pronoun, the people that made that rocket fly took on risk. They beat risk. They over came risk. They literally rise above the mundane.

In the video powerful machines are unleashing immense energy. All that massive effort is going through math and software and infinitely delicate machinery; converting thrust and vector to pinpoint accuracy. Smart people worked very hard on this. They lift humanity from the earth’s gravity well, position their machines precisely where they want them, and then direct them to fall back at screaming speeds to earth. At the last minute they pull their machines out of that swan dive to ground and land on a target. A tiny target floating in the ocean.

They do this over and over again. Falcon 9 has has 156 successful flights. What has any politician done to equal that?

SpaceX improves. It learns. SpaceX managed the first vertical landing of stage 1 rocket in 2015. This year they launched and recovered a stage 1 rocket that had been to space 12 times. Their satellite constellation is slowly providing internet service to the entirety of planet earth. I saw it in the skies the night of the lunar eclipse. Nothing said at a podium in DC matters as much as the small but perfect lights I saw in the sky.

Compare that to the bullshit you see in the “news”. Diesel is $6.50 and nobody knows how long truckers will keep delivering stuff. Speaking of stuff, much of it is floating in container ships in the pacific. Maybe farmers can keep producing food like we’re accustomed, or maybe they can’t. The president who got more votes than any other candidate in history took time off funding war in Ukraine to bitch out China about Taiwan. Nothing says “elder statesman” like less than a year between a botched evacuation of Afghanistan and a proxy war of choice against Russia followed maybe by a skirmish or two with China in China’s backyard. You’re free to disagree with me on all my implied opinions, that’s fine. The solution for these is as complex as the causes. But we can probably agree these aren’t good things. Sound, well reasoned people in systems of wise governance aren’t known for fuel shortages, declining food supplies, and war.

Yet through it all. Smart people who actually payed attention in college calculus class are doing what humans are meant to do. They’re launching spacecraft.

You can look up to the sky, or you can look at the shit on your shoes. Right now the shit is talking loudly, using words like disinformation, and spending money so much that the concept of money begins to diminish. It is the skies that show the dream. Idiots cannot reach the sky. Shit cannot build a rocket. Don’t let shit drag you down. In the end, it’s just shit.

Good luck y’all!

A.C.

P.S. Hat tip to Sondrakistan for reminding me how cool it is to be alive right now.

This happened a week ago during the lunar eclipse (which was awesome by the way):

It was very dark. I’d turned off my pole light to see the nigh sky better. I was sitting in a lawn chair watching the heavens when the coyotes started howling.

Coyooooote. Yote yote yote. COYOTE!

Our dog was in the house but she heard it. She wasn’t putting up with that shit!

DOG! DOG, DOG, DOG, DOOOOOOOOG!

There was some back and forth.

Yote, yote, yote… coyoooooooote!

DOG! DOOOOOOOG! DOG DOG!

Then an entirely different sound came from far off in the distance. Faint but clear.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooolf.

The coyotes and our dog shut the hell up! There was a period of dead silence.

I’ve never been particularly impressed or unimpressed with wolves but I’m rethinking that. One single solitary distant howl shut everything else down. It was like a police cruiser rolling past a teenager’s party. Instant silence.

It was a beautiful night. The lunar eclipse was very cool. The wolf never howled again. I guess it had made its point. After about 20 minutes the owls started hooting again.

At one point I caught a gleaming view of several dozen bright satellites in flawless precision. A line, flying west to east in the sky. A piece of the Starlink satellite cluster. I was inspired. NASA could perform a lunar landing when I was a toddler. Science fiction and dreams of spaceflight were at their apex when I was too young to know. NASA has spent most of the ensuing half century crawling up it’s risk averse bureaucratic ass. Meanwhile, America and western society cowers in fear, like coyotes who’ve heard a wolf. Yet there it was… a gleaming silent line of human intelligence wrought among the stars. Maybe 50 dots in a perfect formation. A constellation. Just a hint of the 2,400 already up there and the vast grid that will be there in due time. It wasn’t sad, like a McDonalds billboard on the interstate, it was glorious, like a reminder that humans can fly if they wish.

Between the wolves and the lunar eclipse and Starlink, it was a fabulous evening.

[This post seems like it’s rambling, because it is. Homesteading isn’t always linear. Sometimes it’s not cyclic either. Sometimes it’s just random shit happening when it happens.]

External events forced my hand and I’m in homestead maintenance mode. I’ve gone from my default “make food so if the dipshits in DC starve us all I can smugly eat bacon” to “repair stuff on a budget of not much using whatever scrap materials I can scrounge”. Frankly, I needed a “maintenance year” anyway. I didn’t want to do it while society was mid-flush. I planned to ride it out a bit longer. I guess the universe had other plans.

I knew this was coming. I’ve been coasting a bit and have lost ground with maintenance. The extreme winter consumed my firewood supply, the wet spring did a job on planned tractor work, and “decline” (call it what you want, times ain’t normal) turned the dial to eleven with farm expenses.

This year it was also impossible to get feeder pigs. Well that’s not 100% true. I might, if I put forth extraordinary effort, track down a few rare and hard to find, bigger than normal, feeder pigs. They would cost triple or quadruple the normal price! Or, I could finance a Lamborghini. Both make about the same fiscal sense.

I won’t overpay for livestock! Coupled with “supply chain something something it’s definitely Putin’s fault” effects on the feed supply; I’d lose my shirt. Livestock must make sense. They’re not pets.

So that’s that; no pigs this year. Such a shame. I’d happily raise a bare minimum of family food even if it was at a small loss (just to make sure I’ve got a personal bacon supply) but there’s issues with that that might not be apparent if you haven’t tried it. Homesteading is inefficient anyway so there’s not much wiggle room. If you drop to a scale too small it has huge drawbacks. The labor of one pig (which would be a financial loss but tasty) is super inefficient compared to my usual run of 3-7 of them.

They’re social critters. It’s wise to take that into account. A handful of pigs will amuse themselves like Millennials browsing social media. A group of them under my benevolent care will sit around being happy without causing much fuss right until I promise them free college tuition and put them on a trailer bound for slaughter… also much like what has happened to Millennials.

One pig alone is a very different situation. A solo pig tends to think too much. Some get grumpy. Some become lovable pets that get in your way when you’re trying to mow the lawn. Some turn into Tom Sawyer and go exploring. The point is that one critter becomes a bigger hassle than a handful that will amuse themselves jointly.

Upon reflection I sense the root of modern society’s aversion to people who just want to be left alone. Not to sound too brutal but it’s a thing done in society to humans in recent times. A kid’s schooling now incorporates an endless succession of group projects. Everyone in the group gets a B. A kid’s schooling in the past often had a single kid working through a homework assignment or essay all on their own. One kid gets an A. Another kid gets a C.

Can you sense the kind of human that emerges from both paths? Which upbringing makes a human who’s more likely to get on a cattle car? Is it the same path that makes one human more likely to put another human on the cattle car? Remember 2020! The Government didn’t need to air drop Karen into the grocery store to monitor mask compliance. Karen was already there and trained to enjoy the role. Squawking about “other people’s behavior” filled a void that had been molded into her life. Same goes for the HR department that pushed the vaccine in ways only removed in scale but not direction from Nuremberg. “Get the shot or you’re fired”, that’s oddly construed as “voluntary consent” to a creature raised in a group project world.

Forgive me; one ponders the underbelly of humanity when they pay attention to the cycle of life. Sometimes society has a dark core but you only see after a lonely day of quietly shoveling pig shit.

Enough of that line of thinking. I might get banned for wrongthink!

Back to the subject matter, three pigs isn’t triple the work of one; it’s half. You heard it here first!

That’s just one little factoid in the world of experience that comes from walking the walk. Your average Mother Earth News reading / NPR listening hippie won’t know this truth because they’re more about signaling intent than accomplishing a goal. It’s why you should ignore dipshits fresh out of college that want to instruct about “sustainable living”. The world is filled with fuckers who’ve spent their whole life absorbing ideas from teachers instead of doing things in real life. Never listen to anyone tell you about homesteading unless they drive a truck and it has some rust on it. 

I was uncertain what to do about the pig situation. Fate gave me a nudge. Thanks fate!

A barn collapsed. It collapsed across the pig fence. Mother nature isn’t subtle! I accepted the clue (that had been delivered with a sledge) and planned a year of construction.

Don’t freak out. I had naught but incredibly creaky infrastructure and I knew this day would come. What can I say? You don’t lightly drop big money on new barns just so a critter can shit on a freshly poured slab. Also homesteading is as unglamorous as being a medieval peasant but it works. I’ve been limping along as best I can. This year gravity won and therefore it’s time to fix stuff. Well played physics.

The good news is I’ve already done well. I’ve managed to produce considerable amounts of food over many years using infrastructure somewhere between “shack” and “hovel”. (They’re pigs and chickens, they don’t need a luxury accommodations.) The bad news is I’m out of the game in 2022. Meh, I’ve probably made more food for society than 99.8% of humanity in 2022. That’s not so bad.

I’m a little skittish counting on food from grocery stores but don’t worry, there’s always hunting and I’ll put in a small garden. Plus, I still have some chickens.

Also, I’m told that everything is fine with the food supply because we’ve got top men managing the economy. Any president who got the highest vote count in history surely can keep the grocery stores filled. After all, every single president before him had it well in hand. He can’t be worse than all of them. Right?

In the meantime, I’ve stacked a cord of wood!

Hat tip to Daily Timewaster for the inspiring image. My firewood is in a shitty little shed. It looks nothing like this glorious photo. But it doesn’t matter. It’ll heat my house just as well and I did the stacking myself. That’s what it’s all about!

More posts about ongoing “project daily driver” are below:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
• Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams
• Project Daily Driver: Who Are You Calling An Antique?!?

As part of “project daily driver” I finally changed the oil and did a test ride on Honey Badger, my fun little Yamaha TW200. Poor Honey Badger has been sitting in my shop waiting for that oil change all winter. Around the first snowfall of last year I pushed it in the shop, parked it, perched a quart of fresh oil and a filter on the seat, and ran off hunting.

After that? Nothing.

I get busy. The bike was ignored in a cold shop.

Sometime in March I serviced the battery, which is new-ish but also had been sitting in a frozen shop for months. I topped it off with distilled water and hooked up a battery maintainer I’d bought months earlier. Sheesh… I feel so bad that I didn’t install the maintainer right away.

Battery Maintainers:

I haven’t had the best luck with battery maintainers. Everyone with a motorcycle seems to recommend “Battery Tender” brand. That’s what you’ll see in lots of motorcycle / ATV shops. When I’ve used them they’ve been hit or miss. I experimented on my own to find better gear; which I have.

Warning, I’m about to get pummeled by what I say:

I think Battery Tender is like Stanley, Craftsman, Briggs and Stratton, etc… brands with a history of good quality that have since declined and are coasting on past reputations.

The three brands I mentioned (and others) come with rabidly dedicated followers. They’ll tear you apart if you complain about “their” brand. They don’t just “like” the brand, they joined the cult of the brand!

They’ll tell you all about the thing they bought many years ago which has served them well. I’ll ask something like “It’s great that the Battery Tender you bought in 1998 works great, what about one made in this century?” This never helps. Once someone joins the cult, they’re in the cult forever.

I noticed the same thing when I bought my farm tractor. People would tell me all about Pappy’s awesome 1943 John Deere Model A “Johnny Popper”. Don’t get me wrong, Johnny Poppers were pretty cool for their time. But that was literally almost a century ago! A John Deere in 2022 has nothing to do with a John Deere made in 1934. Is a John Deere in 2022 worth the massive price differential over a Massey Ferguson in 2022? “Well, let me tell ya’ about the Massey Ferguson my cousin’s uncle’s hairdresser’s neighbor bought back in 1973!” Ugh!*

Anyway, I’ve had better luck with NOCO battery maintainers than other brands. My data comes from the real world… in this century… under hard conditions. YMMV. I will revisit my evaluation if something better comes along. You’ll never find me putting NOCO stickers on my truck or wearing a brand loyalty t-shirt.

I bought a NOCO Genius 1 for my Yamaha TW200 just before winter and installed it around Easter… because I suck. Here’s the link to a NOCO Genius 1. It’s a small maintainer but the battery on a motorcycle is tiny. It’s stupid to hook a monster maintainer to a battery the size of a box of poptarts! The maintainer will set you back about $30 which seems a fair price. They work very well.

Note, little batteries for little things (like motorcycles) don’t do as well in cold as bigger batteries for bigger things. Physics y’all. (Actually chemistry but whatever.)

The Yamaha TW200 is so small it’s said that a modern LiOn battery the size of a cigarette pack can be installed and it will do the deed quite well. How cool is that? When the OEM battery kicks off I’ll probably “upgrade”.

One other note, little batteries for little things (like motorcycles) used to have little prices so I didn’t really sweat it. Then Bidenflation kicked in. Batteries easily cost at least 50% to 100%  more than they did a few years ago. A $30 maintainer on a $30 battery may be silly but the same maintainer on a $80 battery is brilliant.

A third note: I hate alligator clips! If I have to pull the seat or a body panel to get at my battery to put on alligator clips I be lazy and not use the maintainer.

Don’t look at me weird. I’m busy and I’m lazy. So what? We’re all like that!

The solution is to use the NOCO’s spiffy (and idiot proof) connection. It allows you to ditch the clips. You just click the maintainer’s cable to a pigtail you’ve permanently installed on the battery terminals. It’s slick and easy.

The “normal” pigtail is too large for motorcycles. I had to order a “motorcycle sized” pigtail. The size you’re looking for is NOCO GC002 X-Connect M6 Eyelet Terminal Accessory. I’ve used the same pigtail on two motorcycles and plan to install a third on an ATV. NOCO evilly charges like $15 for the friggin’ pigtail! This pisses me off. It’s unreasonable for the pigtail’s components. The person who set that price should be thrown into a volcano. However, it works great and life it too short to rail over corporate asshattery. I got over it. I’ve hooked pigtails permanently to each of my motorcycles. They look reasonably professional and work flawlessly.

(Amazon disclosure, I get tiny kickbacks if you buy from any link on my blog that goes to Amazon. It costs you nothing. All hail our marketing overlords!)

With fresh oil and a perfect battery I set out for a test run. The trails are still impassible so I just rode dirt roads. It was too cold to ride far anyway.

I stopped first at a gas station.

Red alert! Gas stations now invoke political rants. Feel free to skip a few paragraphs:

I’ve got old gas slips in my pack. Some are from back when Orange Menace was president. Gas was dirt cheap and lefties complained about all the bad things Trump might theoretically do. Now Biden does the things Trump didn’t do and that’s supposedly OK now.

We were told that Trump was a menace to America but it’s not Trump that jailed American political prisoners!

About when some of the receipts were printed, lefties were pissed off and shrieking at Supreme Court nominees. Trump was in charge and they were livid. Now their party is in power and they’re still livid. They’re pissed off and shrieking at Supreme Court justices. It’s as if all they can do is shriek about the Supreme Court.

It’s exhausting. A child who throws a tantrum to get a cookie will at least shut up while they eat the cookie.

Gas is at the highest price in American history. The man who got more votes than any president in American history caused this. (If I deny Biden got all those record vote counts, I’m guilty of mis-information. That’s how “free speech” works now.)

I compared two gas receipts and it was unreal. It’s almost impossible they’re from the same universe. Luckily, all I needed was a tiny bit; less that a gallon. My motorcycle sips gas like a hummingbird.

I remember people going apeshit at Carter during the OPEC embargo. This round seems more self inflicted. I don’t know if that’s the true or not. Carter was a long time ago so I can’t remember for sure.

There was an “I Did That” sticker on the pump. They amuse me. I never thought any human could be less popular than Carter. I think Biden did it. From record highest vote count in history to least popular president in history, quite the wiplash!

Pay attention folks: the events of this year and the last few should NOT be forgotten. Remember! Spend time to memorize specific facts and figures before they’re thrust down the memory hole of our censored media. Take time to observe. “It’s time period X and situation Y is like this.” Observe what matters to you and watch how it changes. Don’t let your own memory fade. Stick with what you experienced and you’ve seen with your own eyes. Don’t just accept what the TV people say.

They’re trying hard to spin gas prices as Russia’s fault. Russia, Russia, Russia! It’s dumb thing I’ve been hearing all my life. I thought it would go away when the Soviet Union collapsed. That was decades ago! It seems like people got caught in the cold war and they never left. It sticks in people’s cult like brains just like brand names. Buy a John Deere in 2022 because Pappy’s awesome 80 year old tractor was super cool. USSR is long gone. But, I digress…

I rode a lonely dirt road through a protected wildlife area. It’s a shitty lake or awesome duck habitat depending on your opinion. The shore is too muddy and brushy for shore fishing. Last year, in a drought, the waterline was waaaaaaay out there. This spring, it’s closer to shore.

I pissed off a bunch of ducks when I walked to the bank and sat down. I saw some turtles. It was mellow. I sat there and watched the sun lower on the horizon.

A half hour before sunset I turned around to loop back on a second dirt road when I discovered the mystery.

Three dead beavers in a pile! Just sitting there at the boat access area. In the middle of an open space. They were reasonably fresh. No signs the coyotes had gotten to them yet. (I don’t know, maybe coyotes won’t eat a beaver?) They didn’t smell bad… yet.

WTF?

I hopped off the bike and circled the pile. I formed a theory. There’s a trapper around here. He’ll be back for his excellent results soon. Trapping is a legit thing where I hang out. I’ve no idea of seasons but whatever. I spend 99.9% of my time in the woods solo. It might be fun to meet a trapper and shoot the shit. But no trapper leaves his hard earned quarry in a pile in the road.

I also noticed the tails were cut off each beaver. Is it a bounty? Can there be a beaver bounty? “Bring us the tail and we’ll give you ten bucks?” From a wildlife preserve?

Why leave the pile in the middle of everything? It’s like someone gut an elk on a highway! In general, people chuck yucky shit into the adjacent forest. This beaver pile looked like someone was proud of their beaver harvest. Or maybe it was a warning to other beavers?

The missing tails have got to mean something. Maybe there’s a redneck out there that likes beaver tail? Is there such a thing as beaver tail soup? It sounds awful!

The sun started getting low on the horizon and nobody showed. No sound of an ATV. No humans at all. I never did figure out what was going on. I decided I wasn’t going to be there after dark waiting for the beaver tail death cult to show up. I rolled out.

I’m open to theories. Put them in the comments. I haven’t the slightest idea.

A.C.

*I believe if I ever meet a person who owns both a Harley Davidson motorcycle and a John Deere tractor I’ll go bankrupt on the spot. The combined marketing power will form it’s own gravity well and hit me with a public relations tractor beam that remotely drains my bank account. I’ll wake up in debtor’s prison with no money at all but I’ll be wearing a really spiffy hat and a super cool t-shirt.

I have a large generator. I got it because society is desperately trying to collapse.

When I signed for the outlandish price, I accepted future bullshit as a done deal. It wasn’t “if“, it was “when“.

I don’t recommend expensive generators for everyone. Cheaper options come first. Buy some canned goods and stack firewood. A generator is next level.

The timing seemed appropriate. A year too early is better than a day late! I think I timed it right. We haven’t gone completely to shit but we’re trying. We sure haven’t pulled our collective head out of our ass! There’s no sign that America (or several other nations) will return to the state of reasoned and intelligent self governance. In particular, the election of 2020 resolved nothing and the election of 2022 won’t fix anything significant.

I initiated the purchase just as things drifted from conspiracy theory to fact. It went on-line as a vast and irrelevant portion of the populace went on a year long hissy fit over COVID. This had repercussions. Resilient people determined to maintain the civilization they inherited were always rare; now they’re endangered.

Back then there was talk of “return to normal”. That wasn’t going to happen. I expected social breakdown in cities. On cue, several cities devolved into riots and arson, as if it was planned. (I’ll leave that to the reader to assess.)

The riots of 2020 aren’t over. They’re part of the background. They’ll be an “unexpected” feature of life as long as one or both parties benefit from them. Nothing under the sun, Paris has been having riots every summer for as long as I can remember. America had enough riots in the late 1960s that everyone had a hangover that lasted clear to Reagan. Riots continue until people improve. Idiots acting like idiots in places that tolerate idiots will continue so long as they’re encouraged and financed.

What worries me more than riots was the “hunt down the unvaccinated” shitshow. So dark! It was not about vaccines any more than past madness has been about witches or Jews. Find an other and force them to be like us! A monster wired deep in the heart of evil!

I didn’t anticipate the speed of evil. Crowds went full Nuremberg faster than I’d planned! It flamed out for now but still lurks beneath the surface. Self destructive people lust for scapegoats and that way lies horror. Advanced peoples can and have completely lost their shit. Germany in 1938 wasn’t a backwater of clueless rubes, nor was Salem in 1692.

In the meantime, we experience new and improved forms of collapse on a 3-6 week cycle; double digit inflation, record gas prices, supply chains slowly giving out, and that perennial favorite of Boomers in both America and Europe, war with Russia. These things are not a sinking ship so much as society choosing to commit suicide.

Observe things as they are. If you think a generator will ease the transition, so be it.

My guess is the grid won’t “go down” so much as “suck more over time”. I don’t expect an EMP type “power’s off forever beginning some random Tuesday” event. However, there will come a time when “It’s the third outage this week and my beer keeps getting warm” will become a regular topic of conversation. Our power grid fades slowly, like a photograph in the sun. (Or like the rule of law.)

There are mile markers on the path. I remember the first time I saw empty shelves in grocery stores (in America). It was 2020. Less than 2 years have passed. Are you shocked when you see an empty shelf at a grocery store? Of course not. It’s “normal”.

The good news is there’s still food. I might have to go without my favorite flavor of Doritos but I’m not in a knife fight for a can of beans. Yet. Shit could get worse. For a while it will. But I’m not completely pessimistic about the long term.

It’s best to be thankful for what you had than bitch about the loss. The power grid has been surprisingly solid my whole life. What good fortune! Now times have changed and things are different. The grid was built by and for serious people. A grid run in a half assed manner by a half assed society will have longer and more frequent interruptions.

It’s tempting to shrug off incremental grid degradations as “one off” situations. Don’t. There’s a clear trend. California led the way. They’ve been having “rolling blackouts” since the early 2000’s; sometime before Enron croaked. (I’d never heard “rolling blackout” in America before that. I’d heard of “scheduled outages” in Ecuador. Same thing but CA’s grid started out vastly stronger so it can degrade a long time before it’s all that bad.)

Recently, forest fires became a reason to sue electric companies. Predictably, power companies got gun-shy during dry conditions. So CA has “brownouts” most summers. It’s not a “one off” event like a Florida hurricane. Will you be surprised when California (or Arizona) has power supply issues in August 2022? Why?

California isn’t the only sign of decline. In 2003 most of the Northeast went down. A city of eight million (New York) going dark for a few days isn’t Armageddon but it’s not a sign of Pax Romana. In 2021, Texas conked out for a week or two. A week is a very long time.

Deciding to buy a generator was easier than getting one installed. Through a comedy of errors, conflicting contractors, and endless compromises I wound up with “more” than I wanted. I wanted a crude diesel beast that I’d have to turn on myself. I imagined pressing a big green button to manually start it. Later I’d press a big red button to shut the thing down and go back to the restored grid. That was my plan.

Instead I got a sophisticated, LP powered, pain in the ass. It’s supposed to detect an outage, turn on, power the house with ample (actually excess) juice, detect when the grid comes back on, and gracefully shut itself down. The “decide to turn itself on and off” mechanism sucks! There’s just too many ways it can go wrong. Also, it’s installed by folks who are well meaning but probably shouldn’t be messing with things more complex than a lawn sprinkler. Don’t tell me I shoulda’ stuck with the buttons. I know. You can’t always get what you want.

On the other hand, the generator is pretty awesome when it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. The unreliability will be no big deal until it is a big deal.

I’ve spent years pussyfooting around with the genset company. I finally evolved from polite to um… not polite… and that did help. They’ve actually tried to work it out. I don’t doubt their intention. It’s just that they can’t muster the level of support a sophisticated machine needs. Tale of life right there!

It sorta works better now than it sorta worked before. I don’t trust it. My past history with the Acme parachute company isn’t confidence inspiring.

It was a windstorm when the real world test came. The lights flickered. Once, twice, third time. Then they were out. I assume the flickering was the nearest substation trying to decide if it was a temporary issue or the real deal.

It was very windy out. Can’t be too upset if a tree nailed the line. These things happen.

I waited. My desktop computer is on a UPS, it kept running, as did my monitor and some other gadgets. My wifi antenna stayed live, that’s on a UPS too.

It came to my mind. “If the damn generator doesn’t fire up I’m scooping it up in the bucket of my tractor and shoving it through the front door of the assholes who sold it.”

I waited. After about six seconds the generator decided it was “go time”. It turned over and fired.

I waited. The pause from ignition to actually generating power was about 30 seconds. The lights came on.

Nice! I guess I won’t have to killdozer the office that sold the generator; how awesome is that? I’m very happy!

It ran about 45 minutes and then the grid came back. Smoothly, without the slightest flutter in voltage, it switched back to the grid. (I have no way to know when the grid comes back. I have to trust the generator to sense it.) After a short cool down cycle the generator shut itself down. If it was a dog I’d give it a treat!

It was textbook perfect! I couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration. I didn’t lift a finger the whole time. It worked great!

WIN!

More posts about ongoing “project daily driver” are here:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
• Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams

Guy at the desk: “We don’t see a lot of these antiques.”

Me: “Antique?!? Da fuq?”

I took my ATV to the shop for basic repair as part of “project daily driver”. I don’t think of it as an “antique”. I think of it as “completely paid off / fully depreciated”. It’s old and unreliable but still a handy workhorse. It’s a 325 CC Polaris. It’ll haul my fat ass without complaining so it’s plenty useable. It was the biggest baddest thing of its era but time has caught up (and blown past) it. It’s hopelessly slow compared to the amazingly powerful  monstrosities of modern times. I don’t care, it’s still a great little machine.

I was still smarting from the front desk calling it an antique when I met the mechanic. If there are people with fewer fucks to give, I haven’t met them. This mechanic just plain gave not one shit about anything.

The guy at the front desk had written down all my specific issues to get it from “wouldn’t start all winter” to “daily driver to trail ride solo in the mountains right now”. It’s not much. It’s an ok machine, just wore out a bit.

Me: “Here’s the list from the front desk.”

Mechanic: Grunt. Takes the list and tosses it, without looking, on one of a dozen toolboxes and heaps of parts scattered all over the workshop.

Mechanic: Waving at the ATV on my trailer. “Drop it right there.”

Me: “Ok, the battery is shot so I’ll have to jump it with this battery pack.”

Mechanic: Grunt. He pops it into neutral, gives it a shove, and sends it rolling down the trailer ramp. It’s headed in a random direction. It rolls dangerously close to some other ATVs but stops with a few inches to spare.

Me: “Well that’s one way to do it.”

Mechanic: “Whatever.”

The mechanic never made eye contact. He spoke very few words and even his grunts were half hearted. He was as friendly as a kick in the head; as engaged as a zombie on Quaaludes.

The ATV wound up “parked” randomly in a dirt patch. It was now in a “herd” with a dozen other randomly positioned ATVs, all of which look newer and more expensive than mine. The dirt patch was circled by an asteroid belt of dead and dismembered ATVs. If your ATV is in the inner circle it may drive away, if it’s in the outer circle it’s “parts”. I shuddered.

I drove away wondering if I’d ever see it again.

ATVs are super cool but they amaze and frustrate me by getting a little too sophisticated and therefore ridiculously expensive. They’re too close in price to a used 4×4 “farm quality” jeep for me to have one. The last time I got close to buying an ATV I literally had nightmares over the thought of financing. I completely abandoned the idea.

My failed attempt to buy an ATV happened a few years ago. First, I test drove an Argo (nicknamed Battle Duck). The Argo was too much fun! I wound up chased out of some guy’s ditch. (Battle Duck’s story is here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) I’d love an Argo but I’d probably be arrested in a week if I owned one. After the Argo I test drove everything in sight. (The story is The Mr. Bean ATV Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.) I wound up with a Yamaha TW200 dirtbike and have been very happy.

The image below is my vision of financing an ATV. It’s what I see any time I sign any payment plan. (It’s from Mr. Bean ATV part 6.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love a new ATV. I’m just too cheap. (On the other hand, I’ve done pretty well with a dirt bike that costs 1/2 to 1/3 the scratch to buy an ATV; so that’s something.)

I did wind up with a used ATV through inheritance. I’m incredibly grateful to have it. Given my attitude about finances it’s literally irreplaceable. I’ll have to keep it running until the end of time. It’s a bit old (apparently an antique!) and it’s too unreliable for trail riding. (I ride solo in the middle of nowhere.) But I use the hell out of it for hauling firewood and homestead chores (which is why ATVs were originally made!). I work it hard and it makes sense to keep it in useable form.

Last year a friend wanted to go trail riding. In a fit of brilliance I spiffed up the old ATV, parked him on the saddle, and led the way on my dirtbike. It was a strange arrangement but we had fun.

The ATV had a weak battery. I was a bit low on funds so I didn’t replace the battery. Luckily, my dirtbike never goes anywhere without my Noco Boost Sport GB20 battery pack. (I get a kickback from Amazon if you buy shit from that link.) (The “charger” fits perfectly in my bike’s “kit” and it can jump the ATV without breaking a sweat.) It’s not the same as replacing the battery but it was good enough for the moment.

Note, the ATV has a super cool rope pull start. How awesome is that? Unfortunately, it never runs well enough to start before my arm gives out. I need electric start to use it.

Then the poor thing was abandoned. All summer long I was trail riding on my dirt bike. The ATV just didn’t float my boat like the shiny new Yamaha. Then I leaned more on my tractor for firewood than the ATV. I didn’t always have a good tractor but now I do and the front bucket is just too handy to ignore. For various reasons the ATV wasn’t needed during hunting season.

By Christmas it was froze, dead, and lonely in the woodshed.

Last weekend I tried mightily to start it. The battery pack turned it over but no luck on starting. I tried to “resurrect” the battery with my fancy charger but that didn’t happen either.

I assumed the gas was bad. If it’s not stabilized, modern gas has a lifespan like mayonnaise. As a treat to myself I bought a siphon with a hand pump… no more mouthfuls of gas for me! The siphon sucked. I’d be better off with a few feet of tubing. What man hasn’t gotten an occasional bit of unleaded mouthwash?

I siphoned it out but I had no fresh gas on hand. As an experiment I used some from my 1 gallon dirt bike rotopax. Non-oxygenated with Sta-bil refilled maybe in Sept or Oct last year. She fired up well.

So that’s how I got it running enough to get it on a trailer and haul it to a place where she’s been insulted as an “antique” and kicked into ATV repair purgatory.

More “daily driver” tasks will ensue. Wish me luck.