Adaptive Curmudgeon

I haven’t mentioned how much I hate the AMC Gremlin for a while. Does this mean I’ve mellowed? Have I allowed distance and time to soften the edges? Have I changed my mind? Hell no! I still hate ‘em!

I watched this review and was flooded with all the bad memories of AMC cars. It’s easy to forget the complete and utter level of suck that only Detroit and the cars of the oil embargo could produce. If you weren’t there to see it for yourself you simply must witness the fullness of the AMC’s Godawful majesty. Enjoy!

Given the same stimuli, different people will do different things.* Faced with a reduction in the sophistication, resiliency, and efficiency of society, I’m trying to “get my vehicular shit together”.

I came up with a name for it; “project daily driver”. (Not a creative name but I’ve been busy. Throw me a bone.)

A “daily driver” is a machine you can fire up and use right now without drama. If you’ve got a rusty Civic that you drove to work Tuesday and you’re confident it’ll be able to get you to work on Wednesday and thereafter without immediate issues, then it’s a daily driver… even if the radio is broke. For a daily driver, all the important shit is “good enough”, tires, engine, etc…

In 2022 I’m trying to level up so all of my machines are a daily drivers. I’ve never done this before.

Rural redneck cheapskates like me have many non-daily drivers in our lives. One variant is “I can jump start it when the snow melts”. Worse versions are “I’ll fix it someday” and “a tree fell on it but it’s still basically salvageable”. (Note: chainsaws that only start after much swearing or lawnmowers that are always throwing a belt are examples of non-daily drivers.)

Project daily driver isn’t a common reaction to modern times. I take it as a given that inflation, supply chain disruption (either by design or stupidity), and a teetering society drives a moment of action. That which can be done in 2022 is less than can be done in 2019. Will the trend continue in 2023? Who knows? I don’t know. You don’t know. We all have our guesses though. I’m acting on my guesses.

I made the leap from $5 gas and “parts that come from China are routinely stolen from container trains in LA” to “I’d better get my daily driver tuned up”. That’s my opinion. Your choices are yours to make.

The popular alternative is denial; “this inflation is transitory”, “things will get back to ‘normal’ once everyone has a vax”. I suppose another alternative is to freak out; “Musk bought Twitter, free speech is violence!”, “the Supreme court may rule in a way I don’t like, this is the worst thing in the history of all things that suck!” Preppers (at least of the simplest sort) have a steady state. They “stack ammo and gold!” But when does a prepper not stack ammo and metals? Do they stop doing it in good times? In bad? During inflation? During shortages? When do they sell the precious metals they’ve been stacking? What will they buy with it… more ammo?

Me, I want my machines fixed while I still can. I have (limited) access to (almost) competent mechanics, parts are (mostly) in stock, and I can still use greenbacks (of ever decreasing value) to buy both things.

There’s a problem with this. I have never ever managed to have all my machines running reliably at the same time. Most of my life I’ve owned shit. Fixing shit is a way of life. You’re never really done… you’re likely to spend decades treading water.

Also it’s tempting fate to have too many things running at once. Fixing a piece of shit car just means your piece of shit tractor breaks. If you fix the car and the tractor simultaneously, it just means your roto-tiller will catch on fire. There is no winning. In my life I’ve had a certain percentage of my mechanical stuff functioning and it’s always <100%.

Yet that’s my goal right now. I’m tempting fate. I’m burning cash. I’m giving it a shot.

Pray for me!

First step of project daily driver: 

I just got my cruiser running. I have a 20+ year old Honda cruiser that’s (as far as I’m considered) “good as new”. Ok that’s a bit optimistic. It’s not really new and it has 10x the miles that the average bar crawler would have put on one of similar age, but it’s not mechanically fucked either.

It’s a simple machine and I didn’t hot rod it. So it’s been amazingly reliable for me. There’s a lesson in this!

Anyway, when I bought my little Yamaha TW200 stump jumper I got distracted. The cruiser was ignored. It never left the garage in 2021. That’s bad! I have sinned. I must repent and atone for my bad behavior.

I started by shoveling through he wall of ice that blocks my garage. It’s still waist high!

Then I addressed the battery which (as predicted) is deader than a door nail. I’d like to be one of those guys that wisely and carefully maintains all their equipment batteries, but I’m just not that cool. I had a battery maintainer but it broke; I meant to replace it and then… didn’t.

I assumed I’d need a new battery (which is a bitch because this bike takes a weird size) but I put it on my charger and the charger resurrected it. I have a sophisticated charger with all sorts of features. It can’t fix all toasted batteries but it can coax life from some that I’d assumed were long dead. Go charger! (I’ll have the battery tested and replace if needed… it’s a daily driver after all!)

I assumed I’d left the carbs all gummed up but they sounded ok. A wise man runs the carbs dry before shutting down. I didn’t remember doing that but maybe I did. Yay me!

Then came the tank. Any gas that’s been sitting 2 years is shit. Especially the modern witches brew they call gas. But I opened her up and it looks like I topped off to the rim with gas. I think it had Sta-Bil in it!

It took a few cranks but eventually she fired. No tools needed!

Holy shit! I never have that kind of luck!

There’s more! I remembered the rear tire was shot. I planned to buy a new tire. But I looked at it and the tire looks fairly new. It’s fine.

She ran pretty well and I took her to a garage for routine maintenance and to check on the electric fan (which I recall didn’t work). I’m waiting on word about that. If I’m lucky I’ll have it up and running to daily driver level for a couple hundred bucks.

Yahoo!

Gift from past self:

This is a gift from my past self. Back in 2020 I must have swapped in a new tire, topped it off with fresh stabilized gas, and run the carbs dry. How awesome is that? I’d like to go back in time and thank myself. It’s like a magic gift from motorcycle Santa… but it’s really a gift to me / from me!

In case you’re wondering, I plan a 3-5K mile road trip this summer. Not anywhere photogenic or fun, just a place I’ve got to go so I can do a thing that needs doing. But gas is expensive so I’m going on 2 wheels. Why not? There’s no reason to sit at home bitching about fuel prices now that I’ve got a high MPG daily driver! Plus, motorcycles are fun.

Anyway, that’s my lucky day. How’re y’all doing?

A.C.

*This is why socialism, communism, fascism, and totalitarianism always fail. All force “one size fits all” solutions on human beings. Humans aren’t widgets, they’re varied. If you like vanilla ice cream and I like chocolate and the guy across the street likes strawberry, socialists would force us to fight it out. In the end, we’d all get banana flavored ice cream and be forced to pretend we like it. The strawberry guy would get his teeth kicked in as a lesson to the rest of us. Chocolate ice cream would be a black market luxury good. It would be smuggled in from some better place and served to politically powerful people who enjoy it more because I can’t have any. The vanilla guy would be allergic to bananas and break out in hives. Also the banana ice cream would have dogshit mixed in, because the people’s ice cream factory is run by people who are basically serfs. Beaten workers who don’t care about ice cream would get paid the same even if there’s a dog living in the mixing plant.

[Warning, the first few paragraphs went off the rails but I left them anyway. Feel free to fast forward to the horizontal rule below.]

Politics has gone from stupid to cosmically hyper-panicked AND galactically stupid. We all knew it was coming… or that it’s here. But does it have to be so… obviously dumb? Regardless, we shouldn’t let it into our heads.

I’m going to try to avoid bullshit today. I’m going to talk about something totally unrelated; camping gear! It isn’t deep but at least it’s a thing that doesn’t belly flop into the gravity well of impossibility. Seriously, I just have to say this because I can’t hold it in; none of us should be dumb enough to volunteer to get mired in bullshit like what’s happening now. “What is truth”? No sweat Plato, humanity has haggled over this since the first smelly apelike dude drew a mastodon on a cave wall… but we’ll handle it in 2022 as a reaction to Twitter having opposing viewpoints? “It’s all fixed, just fill out a form and the government will tell you what’s true.” Wow!

Who do we hire to know what is true? A lefty Fed of course! The Office of Personnel Management will follow that up by evaluating requests to get into heaven.

It’s a kind of dumb we didn’t used to see. Not long ago, people would be embarrassed to get that flaky. A government bureaucracy to determine which statements are true and which are “disinformation” is dumb on a level with… I don’t know, cutting your dick off or something. Which, now that I think about, has gone from a punchline to a thing schools suggest for children.

What’s next? I suspect the committee to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin has already drawn up plans.

Also, I’m sick of the word “misinformation”! The word is “lie” or “false” and for fuck’s sake, no organization can unerringly recognize truth any more than it can recognize beauty. “Trust us, we can only tell truth.” Really? That sounds like a Philip K. Dick plot device. “Smooth move Deckard, you whacked the replicant and are now twisted up about the meaning of humanity… you’re a fuckin’ cyborg aren’t you?” Modern politics has made Philip K. Dick relevant to daily life! The monsters!

People are struggling with concepts normal adults understood long ago. The Department of Misinformation will be followed by the Bureau of the Easter Bunny. People who never stopped being an eight year old shouldn’t be at the adult’s table.

Damn… fell off the wagon there. Sorry.

Well fuck it, I’m not deleting it.

Anyway, I’m on a kick with gasoline / white gas camping gear lately. I didn’t really organize my thoughts so it became a bunch of posts. In lieu of some clever arrangement, here’s the links in reverse order:

• Camping Discussion: WIN!
• Camping Gear Discussion: Photos & Testing
• Camping Gear Discussion: Restoring Old Friends And Buying Their New Counterparts

I just tested out my new Coleman Powerhouse Dual Fuel lantern. (Link goes to Amazon, if you buy from the link I get a haypenny kickback.) Unlike the dual fuel single burner campstove, which appears to be made of unobtanium, the lanterns seem to exist. Though even that is weird. I searched all over, found two and only two in a single brick and mortar store. I bought one and left one for some other lucky person and thought that I had something rare. Alas, I’d have gotten a better deal on Amazon. Whoops!

So what? I spent an extra five bucks, who cares?

Do I like it? I love it!

Do I recommend it? NO!

Unlike stoves, which must burn something to generate enough heat to make your morning coffee, modern pure-electronic lighting options are just so darned good that a lantern is only worth it if you enjoy it for it’s own sake. For most purposes, something made of batteries and LEDs is better for nearly any situation.

I freely admit I bought the lantern, unlike the stove, for illogical and romantic notions. I wanted a lantern like I used to have because they’re a happy memory to me. I’m Gen X, I wanted a hot, burning, hunk of explosive materials. If you’re Gen Z you’re probably thinking I’m nuts. You also probably harbor happy thoughts about your Nintendo Wii. To each his own!

Anyway, I didn’t get a free carrying case like the Amazon link. It kinda’ sucks I didn’t get a case, but then again I don’t like the Coleman cases that much. I’m already stuffing my stove in a coffee can, I’ll figure out something for the lantern in due time.

Lanterns (of these sort) need mantles. It came with a two pack in the box. I’ve got a few spares hanging around somewhere. Mantles are delicate so always have a spare set.

Burning off mantles is the weirdest process. It’s like voodoo, but it works.

The lantern came with a special funnel. So did the stove. I’ve never had a decent funnel. In all my years back in the old days when I used Coleman lanterns and stoves all the time, I was the third or fifth or tenth owner of a rusty old thing. The funnel was long gone. I’d spill gas on everything. The funnel does make a difference.

Another photo before the mantles are burned off. In case you’re wondering, I was indeed smart enough to tank it up, seal it up and do a leak test, and only then did I dink around with matches burning in the mantles. You just know someone has lit mantles while pouring fuel. They probably burned their eyebrows off.

Fuel lasts longer than it seems to when using propane. I’ve done many pots of coffee on the stove and refueled it a few times as part of the testing process. I wasted half the can trying to revive my old lantern and stove last fall. And now I’ve filled up a bone dry lantern. Yet, I’ve still got plenty left.

If I’d done the same with propane one pound cans I’d have a small pile of them accumulated somewhere. (Actually I do have a pile of 1# propane cans, I use them on my Mr. Heater while hunting or doing other cold weather things.) Anyway this is a genuine “pre-soaring gas prices” can. I’ll mourn it when it’s gone.

And there she is! Once it was lit up like a friggin’ monument to old school camping I just couldn’t stop smiling. For many practical reasons, a battery and LEDs is the far superior way to go. But there’s something more to the universe.

A few people own horses in a world that has the Honda Civic. They don’t think a horse is better than a car, except on a different level it’s vastly superior to sit in a leather saddle on a big smelly animal.

It’s good to enjoy something simply because you like it. I’m sure the Ministry or Truth will declare my statement invalid, but they’re just plain wrong.

My mind has been blown and I blame Sarah Hoyt! First some background. Strap in because I’m going to talk science and history. Sarah may not have phrased it that way but I’m seeing that I fell prey to the Gell-Man Amnesia effect.

Gell-Man Amnesia effect:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
–Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

That’s for other people. I’m a clever dude. I pay attention to my sources of information. I  wouldn’t fall prey to stupid shit like that. Right? Right!?!

The Standard Narrative of Population Explosion:

Mind you, I’m painting with a broad brush here. Even so, my bullet points are about what anyone would tell you is roughly “the truth” about human population growth:

1. Human population grew incrementally about from when we were cavemen through to about 10,000 years ago. The advent of agriculture led to the pleasant effect of more humans surviving despite the accompanying curse of cities and bureaucracy. Populations slowly grew.
2. From the advent of agriculture through ancient Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages things slowly inched along and populations grew slow and steady. There were ups and downs, as one would expect, but at best it was incremental growth or an occasional die off. Occasionally there would be a big die off from something ugly like the Black Death (1347) or Genghis Kahn (1200s). In due time humans recovered from these upsets. Occasionally there would be a boost in population due improvements in farming technology such as the heavy plow (9th century medieval Europe) or good luck such as the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250). Often this paved the way for resource competition or depletion that knocked things back in future decades. (Note that a period of unusually warm weather was good for humans! Warm = good, cold = bad. I’m just sayin’.)
3. Beginning around the Industrial Revolution, the global human population went apeshit. It began to grow exponentially. This was due to mechanized agriculture (more food) and then later due to the advent of decent medicine (less infant mortality).
4. In the 1960s, everyone read The Population Bomb took a bong hit and went full retard.  Paul R. Ehrlich  predicted massive death through starvation. The cause would be overpopulation. Everyone bought it hook line and sinker. They had a group hug, invented earth day, and started bitching at everyone about recycling beer cans. This continues to this day. Meanwhile human starvation went into decline. There was less starvation than ever before in human history. This continues to this day. By now (2022), mass starvation has been virtually eliminated. This is the first time in human existence it has been so! Starvation is now limited to self-inflicted situations; usually socialist paradises (Venezuela, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China) or similar totalitarian hellscapes (North Korea). (Note that Ehrlich was literally the most wrong a human being could possibly get. He was wrong about the direction, timing, and amount of human death through starvation. It is literally impossible to be more wrong on that subject that Ehrlich.)
5. About the same time, Normal Borlaug, a biologist & scientist, was going full bad ass and just rocking the world on rice and grain yields. He ushered in the “green revolution” which vastly increased crop yields. Borlaug probably saved more lives that any other human in history. (As an aside, the Nobel prize used to mean something and now it doesn’t. In 1970, Borlaug got a Nobel prize for saving an estimated one billion human lives. In 2007, Al Gore got a Nobel prize for a PowerPoint presentation. In 2009, Barak Obama got a Nobel prize for breathing.)
6. It is clear that mass starvation was narrowly averted due to higher crop yields  but people have never stopped freaking out about population growth. Hippies, in particular, have never seen a fully stocked grocery store with cheap food without protesting it. Here’s a hint, if a hippie wants to meddle with the food supply, punch them in the head before you wind up starving. (Ask yourself which is more dangerous to your wellbeing: GMOs in your box of cheap plentifully available cornflakes or the Potato Famine of 1847? Hint, even if cornflakes suck, they haven’t killed about a million Irish people.)
7. Because nothing succeeds in academia like being incredibly wrong in a loud and flamboyant way; Professor Ehrlich enjoyed a long and distinguished career. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at Stanford University. I assume he’s the inspiration for Paul Krugman, who also is never right about anything.

The standard narrative produces charts like this:

If you back off a bit on the hysterics and fiddle with the axes you’ll get charts that aren’t so scary. They tend to have a peak and gradual decline from the peak. This one is about 10 years old from Britannia. (They exist, who knew?) It shows the same basic thing as the earlier chart but on different scales.

It never occurred to me to doubt any of this. Clearly the population had grown. I’ve personally seen crops from 1970 and 2022 and the difference is absolutely amazing. Borlaug really did pull our ass out of a bad situation (with help of human ingenuity and possibly capitalism).

I’m forever frustrated by hippies who’ve latched on to death by overpopulation. They flog that shit like a Catholic priest bitching about eternal damnation due to original sin.

But it never occurred to me to doubt the actual measure of global population growth in the last century. Say, 1950 through last Monday. I just sorta’ went with it.

Sara Hoyt asked the question that surprised me in it’s obviousness. She posted EVERY GENERATION A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM MARCH 9, 2020 and now I’m thinking too much!

“The other thing they have believed with credulous certainty is that the population figures from the UN are accurate, instead of being — at BEST — guesstimations, and accurately at worst a steaming pile of bull of excreta completely imaginary.”

Dammit!

“I’m not a hundred percent sure wh[y] people in other countries, like, say, Portugal, think that the population “count” makes any sense.  No, I’m serious. I don’t get it. Unless it is a rock bottom assumption that EVERYONE must be more organized then them. (Bizarrely it doesn’t even begin to be true.)  I know that they tend to believe our federal government has machine-like control over every aspect of civic and cultural life in the US (no.  I’m okay. Really, I’m okay. Let me have some water so I can stop laughing and type again.)

Only this illusion allows people to believe that — what is it now? 8 billion? Yeah. It’s about as accurate as climate modeling into the far future.  Computers and GIGO rule! — population count the UN puts out.”

T-rex on a pogo stick! Why have I never considered this?!?

Furthermore, I live in America. As far as I can tell, my observations fit her theories.

I’ve seen plenty of places with booming population but none where the boom is from birth. It’s is always a boom in population that arrived from somewhere else. If it wasn’t immigration (usually, but not always illegal) it was Californians (often fleeing their State with the inadvertent likelihood of replicating the same failed politics in their new home).

I’ve never personally witnessed a place in America growing in population due to Americans cranking out offspring. Sad but true. One exception: It seems like the Amish have grown a lot in Pennsylvania and Ohio and that’s probably not because of lots of Millennials chucking their cell phone to join the community. So maybe they’re the exception and more power to ’em. Even so, they’re rounding errors compared to Chicago or Miami.

Sara doesn’t give up. She has an answer to the immigration angle too. She twists the knife in my preconceived notions (Note: I added the emphasis.):

“Now, why did the west open their doors?

My guess is because our leaders have some inkling of how bad things are in terms of how many people are in the upcoming generations.  My guess is that they are becoming scared, because — get this — nonexistent people cannot have children.

As much as most people like to pretend I’m crazy when I say I think our world population is already falling (why this would be any more crazy than the UN’s baseless assertion that we’re drowning in babies, I don’t know) that’s what the actions of the government of EVERY developed country are doing.

They are in a desperate fight for resources: the biggest resource of all: PEOPLE.

The west is willing to take welfare cases and illiterate peasants, in the hopes — I would guess — that their children will be productive citizens.”

Holy shitsnacks! Forgetting the wisdom of unlimited illegal immigration, the amount and direction and trends I’ve seen in the several states I’ve lived don’t disagree with Sarah’s theories.

Don’t you just hate it when you had a notion and then realize there’s another completely reasonable theory that explains behavior just as well? I just believed the UN? Why the heck was I doing that?

I had to ask myself. Are the UN / Global population numbers for real? What do I think of my source:

• “How often has the UN been right about anything?”
• “How often are governments correct with statistics like this?”
• “If there was an error in population statistics, would the bias be to overestimate or underestimate? Which one brings more prestige, power, electoral votes, NGO funds?”

To which I answer:

• Almost never.
• Almost never.
• Always overestimate!

She’s got a point. After a lifetime of seeing government statistics and UN statistics and witnessing that they’re incredibly unreliable… just exactly why the hell would I think they’re correct this time and for this particular subject?

I’m pissed off that I hadn’t thought of this before!

I’m not the only one that thinks Sarah is onto something. Dio’s Workshop had a similar reaction to mine.

“What if, and I have no way to verify, no one does, but logic and historical precedents tell me its highly likely, that UN figures are complete bunk and Sarah’s estimate of Less than Half stated figures of world population are correct, then literally every talking point on Gorbalworming/Peak Oil/GreenEnergy will save the planet/we need to reduce the population (why if its already half of what they claim?) etc etc etc,,,  Every! Single! Point! they try to use to keep things in line is bullshit if just that number is off by half.”

Indeed.

I haven’t enough personal experience to form global opinions based exclusively on my own experience but I have traveled extensively in the USA. I know for damn sure our growth is mostly imported and not breeding. I also have been hammered relentlessly to report as much as possible to every census and head counter in creation. I live in a sparse poor farming community and at every census they’re flipping over rocks to find every last person. They sure as hell don’t check to make sure you’re telling the truth. I could claim I’ve got sixty people living in my chicken coop and they’d love it!

They’ve got a clear motivation. They want poor, they want many, they want minorities. They count every molecule that hints at it. If they find Bigfoot’s tracks they’ll count him as an underrepresented minority of large footed hominids in need of funding and next year there will be a project based on Bigfoot outreach.

Also I have a homestead and you’d be amazed how much shit the Dept. of Agriculture generates to try and fluff up farm numbers. (I’m just one guy… super small time. I’m a friggin’ rounding error. Ignoring me would make sense. Yet they’re always poking and prodding to count acres and such. (It feels like this: “Could you conceivably claim to have 100 head of cattle?” “Are you shitting me? I can barely keep up with a flock of chickens and a handful of pigs. I haven’t got time for fucking cows.” “OK, I’ll check the box for ‘under 100’, do you also have less than 100 zebras?” Get the fuck off my land.”)

I haven’t verified the same thing overseas. Maybe I’d think differently if I’d spent some time in Africa… or maybe not. (I did spend some time in Portugal; which is Sarah’s home. I thought Portugal was growing fast fast fast not unlike an American suburb. But I didn’t see lots of children and large families. I have no idea what the immigration of the time was or where the need to build fast food joints and malls was coming from. I’ll defer to Sarah about her home country.)

Here’s the deal. Sarah’s theories, that we’re already past a peak in population and sliding down the backside, wouldn’t differ from my personal observations. It’s also my experience that the UN has been wrong about anything it says since Woodrow Wilson created the damn idea. The US government data is about as reliable as you’d expect. (Does anyone buy US government estimates of inflation anymore?) Nor does the US have a great track record of intellectual competency. Did they predict the collapse of USSR? Did they manage the budget without massive debts? Heck, how often does the presidential election appear squeaky clean?

So, I’ve had a simple basic illusion shattered today. I’m pondering how weird that makes me compared to everyone else who still buys standard narrative and how dumb that made me in the past. How’s your day going.

Elon Musk just bought Twitter. Pending the inevitable legal wrangling the dude will own it, lock, stock, and barrel. Since everyone is apparently required to have an opinion, I’ll offer mine.

Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha….

Now don’t get me wrong, for some people this is a big deal. The thought that Elon Musk will own Twitter is simply terrifying to them. Thus, I offer my sympath… Bwa ha ha ha… I just can’t say it with a straight face. I have absolutely no sympathy. Hate Musk? Build your own media outlet. Can’t do that? Learn to code bitches!

I don’t give a fuck about anything that ever happened on Twitter. It’s the land of woke bullshit and is (as far as I can tell) irredeemable. I don’t care if Elon reforms it, rebuilds it, improves it, or takes a dump on it.

Any forum that cancels a sitting president and not Isis has gone past the batshit event horizon. I’d no more expect reason from its fans than I’d expect a carrot to understand geometry.

Their misery is self-selected, self-inflicted, and pretty much imaginary. Which really means it’s hilarious. “Oh no, I won’t be able to have a social media outlet that carefully eliminates all people with whom I disagree!” Really? What kind of adult thinks like that?

Anyone who’s desperately invested in a particular form of Twitter is a person who’s utterly irrelevant. The silver lining is this; maybe a few of the lost ones will come to their senses. This is their best chance to set down the keyboard, let go of the tactical Twinkie, lever their ass out of their basement, and go for a walk. Walk… outdoors. Rejoin reality. Maybe get a real job, or at least plant a garden. As my grandmother often said; “It’s good for what ails ya!”

The map isn’t the terrain. The finger isn’t the moon. Twitter isn’t even remotely relevant to a life well lived. It’s a place where dumb people say snarky things to manipulate dumber people.

We all knew that years ago. I don’t have a Twitter account. I never did. Most Americans don’t have a Twitter account. Because we’re not fuckin’ idiots.

Twitter started pointless and became destructive. Any concept constrained within Twitter’s specifications and censorship is shallow, oversimplified, without nuance, and… lets be honest here… retarded.

Twitter was built from the ground up to be the home planet of confirmation bias. A small herd of people telling each other the bullshit they wish was true in the hopes that a large thundering mass of dumbasses will follow them off the cliff. The fact that large thundering herds of dumbasses mainlined bullshit straight to their cerebral cortex, like a hive mind of clueless bots, is not news to anyone who’s paying attention. If you’ve read history, experienced college, or interacted with the purple haired harpy at the Karen convention, you already knew all about it.

The Twitterari claim superiority to us unwashed masses but it’s a claim without substance.  A bluff propagated by human marshmallows.

Great swaths of humanity are immune to their crap. They get information in a better form than a pre-digested woke-paste regurgitated by a big blue momma-bird and puked down our neck. We have depth. We have reason. We have experiences, skills, knowledge, and (this is important) humanity. We engage with the actual universe in which we live. Crucially, we observe results rather than getting in a lather about intentions. We know what “unexpected consequences” means because we care about consequences. We build stuff, fix things, manage our own affairs, and many of us even do silly things like read books.

The left is losing its shit as Elon strolls up just one hill in their mountain range of stupid. They’ve a plethora of options to stroke their needy egos. That should be sufficient. Yet they freak out at the challenge to a single one of their treasured pacifiers? The woke control damn near every form of social media in creation, along with just about every institution from the Church to the the Military to the Press to Netflix… all of which degrade under their childish mismanagement. They still flip their shit over a single source of external validation! How brittle can you get? Apparently that brittle.

On a more thoughtful level, the Z-Man weighs in:

“Gab has been up and running since 2016 and it offers what conservatives claim they want in a platform. Even better, it is free from the deranged lunatics that have ruined other platforms. Conservatives dismiss it because they say it is an echo chamber, by which they mean it lacks the people they claim to hate. They avoid alternatives to Twitter because they want to beg lefty for forgiveness and those platforms do not provide it.”

Remember when I said I didn’t have a Twitter account? I do have a Gab account (not in my blog’s name). There’s plenty of bullshit on Gab too but it’s not a relentless crap tornado.  With a little less censorship, I get a lighthearted mix of opinions (kooks and thoughtful alike). Plus a bit of humor. Some good, some bad, as with all human things. It’s better than Twitter which is singularly inhuman. Twitter demands groveling (as Z-Man wisely describes) as part of its experience of miserable joyless Kafkaesque woke bludgeoning.

The other good news is that I’m absolutely loving the spectacle of feces flinging monkeys going into apoplectic fits. They’re raging over the slightest risk to their little kindergarten-level sandbox. There are chihuahuas on meth who are less frantic than Twitter spastics. Who knows, a few might learn from this. They could pull out of the dipshit spiral and become more interesting people? Nah… if they had that level of self awareness, they wouldn’t care about Twitter in the first place.

Of course Babylon Bee is spot on. Plus the ‘net is awash in delightful memes. Enjoy them! Having survived Biden’s winter of death, we could use a good laugh.

Take it away NPC:

Robert Reich had something to say; which is to say Mr. Reich said something stupid. He’s the only man on planet earth with a worse track record of being correct than that galactic dipshit Paul Krugman. If Reich says it, it’s dumb. Lay your wisdom on me Rob:

Now that the bludgeon is in the other hand, the woke are suddenly less happy with bludgeons. Of course, nothing will come of it but Captain Circle Back has mentioned a baby step in the right direction. Tell me about misinformation sweetheart! You know I like it when you talk dirty:

You know… this is just one of dozens of bright signs of life out there. The last 15 months… the last 5 years… the last… whatever unit of time you prefer to call it, has had lots of disappointments. Sometimes it felt unbearably dark. The center cannot hold. The ratchet tightens. The flame smolders and starts to go out. Wisdom ebbs and witch hunters rise. Society re-enacts failures of other eras. Mobs run amok. They persecute the innocent and build pedestals for the demented. They destroy without building and hate without healing. They eat the seed corn and salt the fields.

But the story isn’t over yet. It’s never truly over. And it isn’t all dark. There is hope. Hope feels like it’s growing. Elon doesn’t mean shit, but the woke going into spasms over such a minor tribulation tells us they’re already hollow. Their monster is a construct. It is without substance and lacks persistence. It is a house of cards. The world can’t bow in submission. It’s not made that way. Even if it wished to, the world cannot remake itself in the service of… nullity.

That which cannot continue, won’t. The woke got every fucking thing they want. More or less complete control everywhere; not just nationally but across Western Civilization. And they’re miserable. They seated a meat puppet, the economy corrodes, they can’t even keep Disney from self immolation. We didn’t push them off the ledge, they jumped. We might as well enjoy the show.

Once in a while shit works out!

A couple weeks ago I wrote Camping Gear Discussion: Restoring Old Friends And Buying Their New Counterparts and followed up with Camping Gear Discussion: Photos & Testing. People get into camp stoves. I even induced Filthie to start a poll.

All this because I was overthinking choices about and subsequently pleased as a peach with my new camp stove:

Ain’t she a beauty? (Yes, I use “ain’t” as a legit word… I can do that because I know it makes me sound like an illiterate troglodyte dipshit and am doing so ironically. That’s how I roll! What bothers me is that my spell checker corrects my placement of the apostrophe in a word that’s, in my humble opinion, not a word. My software simply accepts shit like that! This is like correcting my use of irregardless or former President Bush Jr. asking “is our children learning”. What a dumb world in which we live! Don’t you feel it too? Is it any wonder one of the more popular Squirrels characters is deadly grammarian Edna Kampsett? Spoiler alert, Edna is also known as “The Inspector” and will have another role in due time. Alas, I digress.)

The stove works great and I’ve been randomly brewing coffee in the house with it. Note: using a camp stove in a house is officially a thing that no sane person would recommend. I certainly don’t encourage you to play with fire on your kitchen table. I’m just saying I do it. Just for the record, the ensuing coffee is delicious!

I also whipped up one of these: Jiffy Pop! What a blast from the past! I’ve got an air popper like a civilized human being, but sometimes it’s fun to relive old joys. (Warning, the link goes to a case!  Don’t buy a case unless you want a case. I bought mine locally, not via Amazon.)

I had been planning to build a carry case for the camp stove out of sewer pipe. (Calm down, I’d buy new pipe at the hardware store!) Unfortunately, the stove won’t fit into a perfectly cylindrical object like you’d expect. The pressure pump sticks out on one side. I curse the asymmetry of it!

So I went on E-bay looking for a padded bag to hold for the Coleman 533. (I still have the padded bag for my Coleman 400 and it’s in decent shape. Not bad for a device that’s older than the Millennials that are taking over from Boomers as Gen X like me get skipped over… not that I’m bitter. Oh, did that come out in my outside voice? Whoops.) What I’m saying is that I have camping gear that’s older than the median living human and some of it works fine. There’s also a squarish plastic case that Coleman made back in the day but I’ve got one for my old lantern and I’m unimpressed with the design.

I found a padded bag made by Coleman and fitted to the model stove I have. I clicked on it and the price was $33. Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?

$33 for a sewn bag? E-bay can kiss my ass.

I decided to search elsewhere. Somewhere in the bowels of the internet I got a hint. I tested it out and holy shit it’s awesome! I went to a local store and bought one of these. (Warning, the Amazon link goes to a six pack. Unless you have a half dozen camp stoves or really like Folgers, just buy one. Also I get a tiny kickback every time someone buys from an Amazon link on my blog, now you’ve been warned. Up next, blipverts.)

For reasons known only to the intelligence which created the universe, the “grab handle” on a 30.5 ounce plastic Folgers coffee container are the exact right size to counteract the asymmetry of the pressure pump on an otherwise round device. The height is more or less perfect too. The stove fits so incredibly perfectly that I just can’t get over it.

Just look at it!

If I sat down with a micrometer and attempted to 3d print a better container, I doubt I could do it! It’s a snug fit. Not too tight, not too loose.

The lid is (sadly) just friction fit, bit it fits on just right. There’s very little wasted space. With the lid on, it’s more or less waterproof (certainly just fine for a non-sensitive camp stove). Because it fits snugly, the stove doesn’t rattle around loosely. It’s a match made in heaven. Speaking of which, there’ just enough room in there for a small pack of matches or a small ferro rod sparker. Nice!

It’s not backpacking gear. The stove is a smidge portly and heavy, but it’s pretty good. I’d feel comfortable letting the Folgers protected stove roll around in the truck or sit on a shelf in the garage.

I paid under $9. Also, it came with 39 ounces of free… um… coffee. I suppose, if I were the zombie apocalypse, I could get over my coffee snobbery and actually brew Folgers. (Right now the coffee is in a plastic bag in the freezer and looks exactly like I’m trying to hide a package of cocaine from drug sniffing dogs. Is that a thing or did I just see that in a movie once?)

Anyway, if you ever see a big plastic can of Folgers on the tailgate of a Dodge at a campsite (or in the vicinity of a little Yamaha dirt bike), that’s me.

Hat tip to Behind the Black.

I had succeeded! I had a smoky little fire that was just barely keeping the winter chill at bay. I had a barn cat happily purring on my lap and my dog’s grave nearby. I’d started a fire with flint and steel in darned near the worst of conditions. Good for me!

Even so, I felt alone. The sun set and I gathered another armload of firewood. It started getting chilly.

I am not a social person but humans are meant to be together. I began to miss my dog. My jacket began to freeze to the cold bench where I sat.

In general, I think cell phones are evil and addictive but I used mine to take a photo of the fire and text it to an old camping buddy. “Started fire with flint and steel. I’m as smart as and also smell like a Neanderthal!”

The signal went out the aether and the cat fell asleep. I didn’t expect to hear back. Like most men, we talk in intervals of months. I sat in the gloom not 100 yards from my house and relaxed. Slowly the fire did it’s magic and I warmed up. So did my soul. I did indeed feel better.

Then the phone rang. It was my old camping buddy. He was giddy with happiness. Certain things in his life which had been dire (and don’t belong in a blog written by me) had resolved! In fact, he was bubbly. I was aware he’d been slogging through the shit sandwich of hard times but I didn’t know it had worked out so well. I was delighted at the news.

We talked a few minutes and then he hung up. My mood had brightened considerably. His good fortune really made me happy! By now it was dark. The fire had died down and I kicked some snow over the ashes to put it out. Yes, I leave campfire ashes in my lawn. Don’t you? Why not?

The cat lounged near the heat of the fire and I said goodbye to my dead dog. I had a warm house to go to with happy people there too.

That was my Easter. How was yours?

To start a fire with nothing but flint and steel in these conditions might be impossible. Yeah yeah… I know. Y’all watched *Bear Grills or some fucknut on video start a fire inside a waterfall during pouring rain. Just because he did it doesn’t mean you can do it; nor I. (*Full disclosure, I’ve never seen a Bear Grylls show and I had to Google it just to find out I’d spelled his name wrong. Maybe his show is a fine and informative thing. How would I know?)

Conditions were bad. The weather has been not just miserable but almost maliciously so. The deep snowpack has partially melted (much to the relief of big game), but then a blizzard dumped a foot of wet snow on top of the half melted drifts. Then a day’s hard persistent rain turned everything into slurry. Then more snow fell on top. The ground isn’t frozen and it isn’t thawed. The forest is a basket case of mixed layers of wet dripping half-measures.

Perhaps you want to rattle off a thousand bits of tinder and material that could pave the way to success? I was having none of it. Like anyone else, I have a thousand methods of starting a fire. I left them all at the house. I intended to use as little knowledge and preparation as possible.

Having stepped out of the house, my brain instantly listed off some likely tinder locations. “This tree I remember at location X will surely have some…” Nope… I walked in the opposite direction.

As I walked, I chuckled that my “anatomically modern” brain was screaming out memorized locations of various resources. We really are meant to be predators.

It was bone chilling wet. Only about 20 degrees but windy and wet so it felt colder. Snow was lightly falling. I assumed I couldn’t do this. I’d unwisely set out not long before sunset.

I took off my gloves and started touching things. This tree bark? That thin piece of exposed cambium? Was it dry? Was it soft and fibrous? I took out a knife and poked here and prodded there. I found a little chunk of pitch. Score! Pitch won’t light easily but once it’s lit it’ll burn like uranium. I tried to brush ice off my find but that didn’t work. I got my knife all messy cutting the ice off. Now I had a dirty knife and a pea sized glob of potential energy.

Finding pencil sized twigs (and smaller) that were dry wasn’t hard. It almost never is. You just have to know where to look. For a match lit fire, I was set. I wasn’t going to use a match.

When you start a fire with a flint and steel you need very fine tinder. Much finer than branches and twigs. It’s called a “bird’s nest”. Or at least that’s what I’ve read. I’ve never had an in-person discussion of how to start a fire with iron age methods. Have you? If so, where the heck do you guys hang out and can I come? I’ll bring beer!

Anyway, I expected a “bird’s nest” to be the insurmountable challenge. Everything was soaked and thin, fine, materials are usually soaked more than other things.

I stashed my kindling and precious pitch glob back on my lawn. Then I wandered about looking for fine dry tinder. To my surprise it wasn’t too hard to find. You just have to look. Take off your gloves and run this plant or that through your hand. Some plants retain water. Some shed it. If I were a botanist I’d know the species of plant, but I don’t. All I know is that one particular species of plant was pretty dry. Well actually 99% of it was mashed to the ground in a wet mess. But 1% of the stems stood tall. On those stems were leaves. The stems were ice encrusted but the leaves were long dead and surprisingly dry. They were broad-leaved and nothing special. It’s what I’d call “grass”. Who knows the details?

So it came to this, some shit that should have been bailed in a hay field wasn’t. Most material of that sort was mashed into the snowpack, except some that wasn’t. The thick stems were of no use but the leaves were fine. I’d planned on gathering moss but I found grass. Go figure.

By now my fingers were froze. I headed back to my pile of kindling. I’d gathered a much smaller “bird’s nest” than intended. I fluffed it up in my hands, set it down, and the wind blew it away. Shit!

So I repeated the process and glanced at the sky. I was running low on time. The sun was invisible behind snow clouds but it was obviously approaching the horizon. There’s a reason I do these things as “practice” instead of “mission critical”.

I set down my second bird’s nest on a dry spot and fumbled with the flint and steel. My barn cat showed up and pushed the bird’s nest onto the ground… because what else would a cat do? I shooed it away and rescued the tinder which, fortunately, had fallen on ice (which is dry-ish) instead of a mud puddle made by my boots. Then I dropped the steel into the mud puddle.

Getting steel wet is no big deal, I wiped it off and got to work. I got a couple sparks but juggling the flint and steel and the glob of pitch wasn’t working. I think the ignition temperature of pitch is too high. I wimped out and grabbed a speck of char cloth. Char cloth is a sort of flat delicate charcoal made of linen. I plan to experiment with making some out of old denim jeans when I get around to it. It’s delicate stuff and my piece had frayed to a chunk much smaller than a dime. It didn’t work and it wound up blown to the wind. Frustrated with my modern human weakness, I grabbed a bigger piece, about the size of a small postage stamp.

Within three or for attempts I’d… cracked off a piece of my flint. Whoops.

In case you’re wondering, flint is less a geologic term for a certain kind of mineral/rock than a word that means “really hard”. To me, “flint” is “anything hard enough to bang a spark off steel”. I’m sure a geologist would disagree, but there was no geologist to consult. Just me and my pain in the ass barn cat.

This particular hunk of flint was just quartz. I scanned my predator memory and realized there were no quartz rocks within the immediate vicinity. I was in a sedimentary area. But I still had some rock left. I banged it a bit to reshape it and started again.

This time I got a spark to hit the char cloth. Char cloth is impressive stuff, it catches easily… all you need is a single tiny independent spark. No more than a speck will get it to smolder. It won’t burn with flame but when it smolders it’s hot. I wrapped it and the glob of pitch in the bird’s nest and blew. Nothing happened and then the pitch dropped out into the snow. Whoops. But I held the bird’s nest steady. I know better than to give up on lit char cloth. I shuffled the materials a bit and smelled a wisp of smoke. Uncertain where it was coming from I shifted the bird’s nest more and briefly let the snowy breeze blow air into the whole ball. That helped!

Thirty seconds later I had it smoking quite a bit. Then it burst into flame. I’d been undisciplined and hadn’t assembled the fire yet. I scrambled to add twigs, caught it just in time, and built from there.

I have a stone bench near where my dog is buried. I shifted the whole burning mess near the bench and sat down. I had a cat in my lap within seconds. I built the little fire and it was very warm. In the snow and the breeze it had a much bigger influence than it’s true size. I added more fuel and began to relax.

Wrap-up in part 3 is coming soon…